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Things that go bump in the night (9)

• Tom Fordyce
• 22 Sep 07, 10:49 AM

Aix-en-Provence, early on Saturday morning - I’m not sure which was the louder noise - the yells of joy in the cobbled streets last night as the celebrating citizens of Aix watched , or the two hours of hacking coughs that Dirsy produced around the 3am mark.

There's nothing like campervan life for getting to know someone's squelches and rumbles, but so Bloggernaut-shaking were Ben's chest excavations that I feared I would open my eyes to find his lungs bouncing off the ceiling like nicotine-stained beach balls.

It can't have been the pain of being surrounded by hooting French fans that brought on the bodily spasms - Dirsy, after all, had been cheering for our hosts, on the basis that the World Cup atmos in France could evaporate entirely should Laporte's men fail to reach the quarter-finals.

Neither was it the cheap and easy availability of cigarettes in this proudly-puffing city. Like an experienced Olympic athlete, Ben has been gradually acclimatising to local conditions by upping his quota at the steady rate of two tabs a day.

Could it have been nightmares that brought on the brutal bronchial barrage? Possibly. Close-ups of the Neanderthal visage of were flashed up on the giant screen in with such frequency last night that grown men were sobbing in each other's arms by the time he was mercifully substituted.

Was it mental torment? Maybe. The culture shock of watching a vital rugby match in a jaw-dropping 400-year-old square, rather than the fetid belly of a back-street boozer in Romford, cannot be underestimated.

But yet…I fear it is something simpler, more primitive.

To put it starkly, it is now over three weeks since either of us felt the touch of a woman.

I don't mean that in some sense, either. I mean, quite literally, that neither of us has touched a woman since we arrived in this fair land.

If we were in the mountains of Bulgaria, or Tajikistan, it might not be so bad. Instead, we’re in a country where, to quote an unnamed acquaintance, "even the ugly ones are fit."

On Friday afternoon, while strolling through the aisles of an in search of the mythical wholemeal baguette, we took a wrong turning and suddenly found ourselves slap-bang in the middle of the lingerie section.

Like slack-jawed statues we stood frozen for several minutes, struck dumb by the mere sight of material that might one day be worn next to a woman's skin.

As we stood there, I heard the sound of tearing metal, and looked down to see Ben crushing a tin of haricot verts with the claw-like fingers of his left hand.

After half an hour we were able to drag our lead-like feet out of the shop - only for Ben to instantly fall in love with a poster of a woman named Chantelle on the bus-stop opposite.

Seeking refuge from the torment, I staggered into a nearby outdoor pursuits store, and within seconds found myself on the brink of proposing marriage to a shop assistant in the fishing section.

The final straw came minutes after the final whistle in last night's game. With doe-eyed beauties all around, and Ben reduced to mutely shaking his head in disbelief, I received a call from a pal back home who had just viewed .

"You know your mate Dirs?" she said. "Don’t you think he looks like Joe Mangel?"

Tom Fordyce is a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Sport journalist travelling around France in a camper van with Ben Dirs.

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