We were laughing today telling our French friends about the stand off my friend and I had at the narrow bridge on the way to Najac called St. Blaise.
We had spent a lovely afternoon and were on the way home from Schippers the market gardener at La Fouillade and we were seriously two thirds over this little one way bridge when a huge motorbike and a young man in black leathers came belting down the road opposite and stopped right in front of us on the bridge. He must have seen us there, it was impossible not to. He began shouting ''recule, recule'' so my friend who was driving did the same back to him. [ she is a very brave lady] This went on for many minutes whilst we sat discussing what we should do. If you know the bridge once you are half way over it is probably impossible to go backwards as it has a couple of turns in a very narrow space. We decided we definitely had the right of way so my friend turned to the back of the car and got out her newspaper and pretended to start reading. As you can imagine this infuriated the ''demon driver in black''. After a while cars began coming up at both sides of the river and eventually a man came and told the ''demon driver'' it would be gentlemanly to back up. He refused, so the man came to us and said even though we were in the right he would help us back up to solve the situation, my friend refused. So we sat there another ten minutes with more cars on either side waiting. I was beginning to get a bit fed up so persauded against her will my friend to move in to one of the people passing places giving the motor bike driver a chance to squeeze through. I said that would totally give us the morale high ground. So eventually we did that, but as we drove off my friend was furious and quite honestly if I could go back to that same situation I would ask her for a bit of the newspaper and sit reading it with her and stuff the morale high ground.
Malc thought it a very amusing tale on our return.
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