Random Acts of Kindness Part 2

Those of you who know me, and know the random adventures I spent my youth getting into won’t be surprised to know that I have had several bizarre experiences during which I’ve been the lucky recipient of amazing help from other people, which have both made enormous differences to my life at the time, and also served to confirm my overwhelming faith in the basic goodness of other people.

I like thinking well of other people, it makes me smile, and often makes them smile too when they realise that it’s absolutely heartfelt.

I’ve already told the story about one amazingly kind lady I met on a long train ride in the US. The second example that springs to mind is during a weekend trip with one of my oldest friends Caroline to the Champagne region of northern France. With visions of shopping, tasting the eponymous drink and catching up on the gossip, we planned to drive to Dover, catch the mid afternoon ferry to Calais, drive the 2.5 hours to Rheims and be in our room by the evening, ready for a hard day of fizz tasting the next day.

We were pretty confident things would go smoothly as I can speak conversational French pretty well, I’d booked a hotel in the centre of Rheims and told them about our arrival time, I’d done plenty of driving on the right hand side of the road on previous holidays, and it was basically one motorway, the A26, from Calais to Rheims – so the most serious consideration to worry about were the ratings of the dozens of Champagne houses within a few miles of our hotel, and how we were going to decide which ones to visit.

So off we drove, and for the sharper readers amongst you, the only clue to the later farce would be this part of the constant conversation between myself and Caroline not long after we set off;

Me: “We’ve got about a quarter of a tank of petrol, but we can fill up in France, it’s cheaper on the other side of the channel.”

If this was a B movie at this point you’d expect an ominous musical interlude and a close up of the offending petrol gauge to ensure you hadn’t missed it.

Needless to say, for the first and only time in my life, I forgot to stop for petrol, and we carried merrily on, chatting away.

It was late autumn, as I remember, so it was getting dark by the time I finally had a stroke of memory and checked the petrol gauge.

Already practically running on fumes, the only thing for it seemed to be to come off the motorway at the very next exit, to see if there was a town/village we could fill up in. Sadly the next exit turned out to be a filter onto the A29 west to Amiens, with no more exits to be seen, huge pine forests pressing in from both sides and deer crossing signs at regular intervals. Hardly encouraging when we were looking for signs of nearby civilisation.

Yes, we ran out of petrol. It was dark. There were barely any other cars and we were more than a little worried about the next steps. Without many options on offer, we thought we may as well walk to see what we could find. Some rummaging in the boot revealed my trusty camping torch, and we wrapped ourselves up for a trudge to the nearest emergency phone, presuming we’d be able to call *someone* to come and bring us petrol, or if it was closer, find a petrol station where we could buy a canister and enough petrol to get us back there to fill up properly. This was, I may add, before the days of iPhones and 3G and the instant ability to see the closest place that sold marmite or wedding hats or whatever necessity of which you suddenly found yourself in urgent need.

Spookily within about 30 seconds of starting to walk, a lone car passed us, slowed down and pulled up not far ahead of us. Looking at each other we figured it was either a rapist or a saviour, and we’d just have to be careful to not get in the car and trust our instincts. A solo male driver, looking like he was aged about 50,, with a big smile on his face didn’t seem like a safe option, until he explained that he was having a conversation on the handsfree mobile phone to his wife at the same time, and it had been her who had insisted that he stopped to see if we needed help. She was still on the line as we got into the car, and we haltingly explained what had happened, and they described their teenage daughter who they had nightmares of the same thing happening to one day.

He drove us to the next service station, about 15km away, where we thanked him effusively, bought him a coffee, offered him petrol money (which he refused, insulted). We thanked our lucky stars too, bought a canister and filled it with petrol.

The poor chap had almost made a clean getaway when he heard our conversation with the petrol station staff.

Us: Can we order a cab please to take us back to our car

Them: You won’t get a cab out here, we’re miles from anywhere

He turned around, slowly, came back to us, smiled and offered to take us back to our car. We couldn’t quite believe our luck. Up until this point he had done us a massive favour by picking us up, but as the service station was still at least another 15 km from the next junction west where we could turn east again; he was offering to drive us a further 15km towards his own destination, then turn around, double back 30km to the junction where we had originally joined the A29 at St Quentin, and then back to our car.

A 60km detour for people he had never met before, who had got into this situation by sheer stupidity, not bad fortune.

He was true to his word – sure enough he took us all the way back to car, wished us well and carried on his original journey back from a working visit selling double insulated cardboard boxes for use in Champagne houses. They needed stronger walls due to the extra pressure from the second fermentation, he explained – so we even got a bit of early inside knowledge about the places we were to visit. We stayed in a hotel in Amiens that night instead – shattered and relieved, and had a wonderful weekend after all, courtesy of Tattinger et al.

Our route (north to south) with minor detour

Trying to explain the concept of a Knight in Shining Armour to him was quite difficult without specific French vocabulary, but I think he got the message. I sent flowers to the work address on his business card after we got back, but I don’t think we went even part of the way to repaying such an enormous favour.