Tales from a French heatwave: the Boris who came to tea

It’s morning and the sun is streaming through the windows. It’s early but it’s light as anything out there and in here. And cool, at least for for the moment.

We both wake at the same time, the disturbed look on Mr Grigg's face reflecting exactly how I am feeling at this moment. I’ve just had a very strange dream.

Remember, we are in south west France in the middle of a heatwave.

Oddly and as if on cue, he says: “I had a really funny dream last night. We were hosting a dinner party. But it was a disaster.”

“That’s odd,” say I, barely able to lift my head from the pillow it was so hot last night. “So did I.”

 “Really? Well, I dreamt I’d invited someone you really didn’t want there as a guest.”

“An ex-wife?”

“No, worse than that.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Give me a clue.”

And he tousles his hair and makes an idiot face.

“Not Boorish Johnson?” I am intrigued.

“Exactly him.”

I sigh with affront and turn over to look at Mr Grigg as he goes into great detail.

“It was terrible” he says. “It was obvious you were really angry I’d asked him to dinner, because you were refusing to serve him.”

Actually, I’m steaming just thinking about it.

“What about your dream?” Mr Grigg asks.

“Well, I was catering for lots of people, almost feeding the five thousand. And I had so many helpers dishing up the food, we were getting in each other’s way. And  I'd overcooked the roast pork so much it was carved up into thin sheets of steel accompanied by metallic gravy.

“And then I brushed past one of the diners with my backpack as I presented his with his meal, cutting off some of the fronds of his broccoli. He was furious.

“It was someone from the public health department who in real life a year or so ago interviewed me for that job I didn’t get because. well, you know I interview so badly.

“In the dream, the nightmare dinner was so awful I flounced off out into an adjoining atrium where I sat on the floor and had a nervous breakdown.”

“That’s dreadful,” Mr Grigg says. “Do you know what Boris did in my dream?”

I imagine Boris Johnson lifting the lid off a silver dish to see the disembodied head of the United Kingdom in map form with a poisoned apple in its mouth.

Or hurdling over huge Irish borders placed between the place settings.

Mr Grigg is clearly upset about what Boris did next.

“He got up on the table. He got up on the table.”

“Not the lovely walnut table we picked up for a song at the auction and then paid rather more to have expertly restored?”

“The same one entirely.”

“He didn’t dance on it, did he?” I can feel myself sweating, and it wasn’t even my dream. “You're telling me that Boris Johnson danced on our antique table?”

If I’d been angry at hosting a dinner party to which the country’s prime minister-in-waiting had been invited without my knowledge, I’m incandescent at the thought of Boris Johnson’s trotters plonking up and down on our beautiful piece of furniture.

“No, he didn’t dance on it,” Mr Grigg says. “He got up on it and prayed.”

“Prayed?”

“I asked him what he thought he was doing and he said he just wanted to say a few prayers at the table.”

At that point, a bird in the garden cries out “cuckoo, cuckoo” in French. Which is rather appropriate, really.

That’s about it.

Love Maddie x