Nine Lives

All this snow we've been having recently has brought to mind a time when I nearly died in a snowstorm. I'd been out for lunch with my long-term travelling companion (my Great-Aunt Dolores – she who was run over by a lorry but survived, and who later took up playing the xylophone). We'd been lunching with the painter Salvador Dali and his charming (but mad) wife Gala at their picturesque villa in Barcelona. My Great-Aunt had decided that we should motor immediately to Perpignan in Southern France – apparently it was imperative that we visit the railway station there, because Dali had commented over lunch that he considered it to be the "centre of the universe" (or more accurately, "centre du monde").

So we set off in her decrepit old Citroën with nothing more than a smoked salmon sandwich and a bottle of Dali's vintage Dom Perignon champagne on the back seat. The journey should only have taken about two-and-a-half hours (it's about 200 km), and indeed it would have done had Dolores – with another of her Camel cigarettes clamped firmly between her teeth in its ivory holder - not insisted on taking a wrong turning and heading up towards the foothills of the Pyrenees. It was winter time and as we climbed higher, the snow clouds were slowly being lowered on unseen cords to meet us. Like burst down pillows, they soon began to spew their load all about us, and the normally easy mountain-pass road became impassable. Our tyres began to spin and scream in protest and despite her determination to press on regardless, even Dolores had to admit that we might not make it. The car was almost completely covered by a drift at this point. We were stranded.

"We've been in some scrapes boy," she said, as she popped the cork of the Dom Perignon and reminded me of the time we were kidnapped by Yasser Arafat, "but Mother Nature is a relentless old bitch and this time, I think she might have us beat. How do you feel about drinking your own piss? It could come to that when this bottle is finished." I was getting nervous . I'd always relied on my Great-Aunt to see me through any (and all) of our uncannily recurring adventures, but this time she seemed less than certain that we might survive.

Darkness draped its lonely curtain around us and we had to huddle together underneath her sable coat just to prevent ourselves from freezing. Normally I don't smoke, but Dolores encouraged me to spark up because she insisted that it was another way to keep warm. It didn't work, and the inside of the car began to feel clammy and unpleasant. Before long, Dolores became delirious and started rambling about how she wished she'd died that time she'd thrown herself over Niagara Falls in a barrel. I tried telling her some jokes in an attempt to lift her spirits, but she simply hit me over the head with the empty champagne bottle and told me to grow up. I passed out.

I wasn't even dreaming (I was unconscious) when I suddenly came to – being violently shaken by my Great-Aunt. "Lights, boy! There are lights!" she yelled. We were rescued, eventually, by an Arab Prince who was driving to Andorra in his yellow Rolls-Royce and had realized that he would get no further on that road. British engineering saved us when he had his chauffeur hitch a rope to our battered old car and tow us back down the mountain. "I thought we were goners there, boy," she mused. "I never thought I'd say this, but how do you fancy Bournemouth for our next outing? You could get a blue rinse. What do you say?" She could be droll, at times, could Dolores.

If only we'd done that (gone to Bournemouth, I mean). I'll tell you next time about the subsequent life-threatening adventure that she talked me into only the following month. The thing about my Great-Aunt was that she never seemed to have any consideration for my personal safety. I do miss her though.