10 years ago (in 2014) I went to France twice, both times to the South. Once on my own in the spring to Nice and Eze, and then to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin (and Eze again) in August with my American family.
In Roquebrune-Cap-Martin I shared a hotel room with a member of my family who snored like a motorboat and I was unable to sleep. This was unfortunate as no one can really control snoring, and they claimed it was my snoring that was keeping them awake, so neither of us were very happy with each other in that regard (though I will say that I had spent two weeks in Japan earlier that year sharing rooms with friends who made no complaints about me as a nocturnal room mate).
We couldn’t reach an “entente snordiale”, but I discovered I could just about get some rest if I put the radio on my MP3 player on, on super-low volume. Being a radio nerd, I set it to record the radio too. I didn’t have great sleep even then, but I did at least have the French voices and music of the radio to cling to amidst the stormy seas of snoring.
Thus the music and speech would drift in and out and I would snooze and dream and so on and it would all smear together and in the morning I would be wondering what was a dream and what might have been the radio…
On one of these nights I dreamt that I was listening to Dire Straits and they were singing a really great upbeat song about “settling for the last bus”.
I woke feeling really weird about that as I couldn’t for the life of me think of any Dire Straits songs that mentioned such a theme. But I felt very strongly about it and it stayed with me throughout the following days in that strange “did I dream that or did it really happen?” kind of way.
From Roquebrune we had a few days in Eze where I had my own room (and much better sleep), and then the following week we came back to England and I had to cut the hedge at the cottage I was living in. It was a very big hedge and I put my MP3 player on and listened to the recordings from those nights-trying-to-sleep. Hours into the hedge-cutting…the Dire Straits song appeared!
Only, it was not Dire Straits.
It was instead a totally French song by Francis Cabrel called “Encore et Encore”…full of French lyrics.
BUT!
Francis sings one line…
“T’es toute seule au fond de l’espace”
…which translates as “You’re all alone in the depths of space” but which sounds like “to settle for the last bus” if you listen to it with English ears on!
Musically it does have a definite guitar-heavy theme in it, but there are none of the trademark Knopfler solos to make it a Dire Straits track, and Francis’s vocalics don’t have that husky northeastern croon either. But I was overjoyed how my sleeping mind had pulled that song in, and parsed it through my entire musical vocabulary, and made me dream down there in the South of France, “all alone in the depths of space” of a Strat-wielding headbanded groover singing about settling for the last bus.
Fascinatingly too it has a video featuring a woman who cannot sleep (the vid may tell you it cannot be played or something but just click and you should go to YouTube in the end).
Anyway I thought I had written all of that down, but there is no record of the story in any of my digital diaries. But I did find I had made a note of the lyrics, and I found those earlier whilst I was actually still searching for something else, also French related.
If I find that
I will let you know
But for now
Seulement à bientôt…