It's Me, Sara Louise

It’s been one year since The Parisian arrived in Le Petit Village to grace us with his unreliable presence and take over Le Petit Bar.
When he first arrived, I had high hopes for him. See, the previous owner, a strange little man from up north somewhere, wasn’t very local friendly, and would tell The Husband and me that he was too busy to serve us ice cream as he rushed from tourist to tourist. That’s plain poppycock so we all stayed away, and let him close up the shutters at the end of the tourist season. If he was too busy to serve us ice cream in the summer, well then we didn’t want anything in the winter.

So when The Parisian arrived with a smile and promises of cocktails we were all so excited (the cocktail promises were for me and I was really the only one who was excited about that). But then it wasn’t long before he began to let us (me) down, like never having the ingredients on hand to make a Mojito. F A I L, especially since it was chalked on the menu. Eventually he erased it along with my cocktail dreams.

And of course there’s all the times he forgets whether or not you’ve paid your tab and then he runs out of stuff;

“I’d like a whisky and coke please”

“Sure, but I don’t have any coke”

“Whisky please”

(This was an actual exchange between The Husband and The Parisian. Once again… F A I L)

Add white wine, Leffe, Heineken, and Rosé to the list and you get the picture (a bar in Provence not having Rosé is like a pub in Dublin not having Guinness, it’s poppycock).

But we’ve grown used to our unreliable bar man and enjoy his company when he’s actually there, with the bar open (more rare than it should be). And I guess he’s grown used to us to, and might like us as well because a couple of weeks ago (it was a Wednesday) he declared that on the Friday he would be throwing a BBQ at Le Petit Bar to celebrate his first anniversary. I smiled and looked outside at the heavy rain (this was the week that it rained buckets… fellow South of Francers… you know what I’m talking about) and wondered if he had bothered to check a weather forecast. He hadn’t. F A I L.

So the BBQ was changed to crêpes and we all had a fantastic time…

And at the end of the night, stuffed full of crêpes and beer, The Husband asked for our tab… The Parisian’s response; a deep huff and puff, with a hand ruffled through the hair… “oh, I don’t know, it’s been very busy, what did you have?”