When size does matter

The Bad Red-Eyed Woman sensed it was time to get me out of Paris after I took to walking around her flat in nothing but a tattered kikoi and drinking beer at 10am, alarming the neighbours who asked her to at least keep the curtains drawn.

That’s rich, coming from the French, a nation that invented a device for cutting off people’s heads without having to break a sweat.

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After three weeks, cabin fever began setting in. Her place is tiny. By our standards anyway. Not that South Africans have standards, but when it comes to property, we generally prefer something big enough to swing a cat.

Of course, there are those among us who care little for cat-swinging and they make their own arrangements.

This flat, in the 11th arrondissement, whatever that means, is barely big enough to twirl a kitten.

The bedroom is below ground and accessed via an ancient spiral staircase forged from heavy black steel that doesn’t hesitate to punish even the slightly inebriated.

For this, she paid the equivalent of R12 million. I don’t know her well enough yet to suggest she cashes in and buys us a mansion near the sea. Pick up something nice in Umhlanga for that price.

Being 1.94m tall, it was only a matter of time before I started pacing and growling.

This only served to reinforce her perception of me as some kind of African curiosity. Like Sarah Baartman, only bigger. And white. Also with a smaller butt. And male.

Okay, nothing like Sarah. But still.

She worries that she is going to have to fend off her Parisian girlfriends once word gets out that she is harbouring a reallife Tarzan in her petite abode.

So, to get me out of Paris for a bit, she took me to her family cottage in Lynton, an impossibly picturesque village in Devon.

We flew to Bristol on a hideous low-cost airline called easyJet. After being delayed on the runway for an hour while a shrunken Gallic tiffy wired the rear door shut, we landed in Bristol in the usual British weather that roils back and forth across this benighted isle, briefly pausing for three days in July to allow summer in.

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A suspiciously enthusiastic Chinese lad at the car hire counter did his best to encourage me to take out a host of insurance. Being a gambling man at heart, I refused it all.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” I said. He began reciting a list of things that would cost me a minimum of £2 000 without insurance.

“Money means nothing to me,” I said, which is true, but probably not in the way he imagined.

I was, however, interested in the upgrade to a much bigger SUV. After the Paris flat, I needed to be surrounded by lashings of space.

The Bad Red-Eyed Woman assured me there was plenty of space where we were going and that a bigger vehicle would almost certainly see me regretting the lack of insurance.

I thought she was questioning my driving ability – something that South African men link directly to their masculinity – but she talked me off the ledge after claiming that the roads around Lynton hadn’t been upgraded since the time when horse-drawn carts proceeded in single file in one direction only.

She wasn’t wrong. Earlier this year, she spent a month with me in Costa Rica being driven around in an absolute deathtrap of a car on some of the most dangerous roads in the world and didn’t flinch once.

In Devon, though, there was regular screaming and covering of the eyes. She later said it wasn’t her life flashing before her eyes, but rather £2 000.

The family cottage shares a stone wall with a graveyard and 300-year-old church where she got married years ago.

So, no shortage of ghosts there, then. Just what one needs for a relaxing few days in the English countryside.

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When I asked for a glass of Sauvignon at the Blue Ball Inn, the barman said, “New Zealand or French?”

I nodded appreciatively. Not everyone is interested in accents. I smiled and shook my head. “South African.” He looked perplexed.

“We don’t have South African.” I didn’t understand. Was he saying South Africans weren’t allowed in the pub? It wouldn’t be the first time.

I looked at the Bad Red-Eyed Woman for help but she was incapacitated with laughter. This is why I don’t drink wine. Anyway.

Despite some very close calls with tractors, I returned the car unhurt and am now in London in a shoebox of a hotel room.

It makes the Paris flat look like a penthouse. I’m not even sure this is a hotel. The window is bolted shut to stop guests from hurling themselves into the street when they see the size of the room.

It costs the equivalent of 60 Windhoek draughts a night. Or, in local parlance, one small glass of wine and half a pint of so-called beer that tastes like it came out of a sheepdog marking his turf.

Yesterday, I got caught in a cloudburst while looking for magic mushrooms in Hyde Park and a stranger gave me a plastic raincoat.

I got shouted at by a policeman for trying to pat his horse and a gypsy offered to tell my fortune for a small fortune.

When I told her where I was from, she cackled and said I was cursed. At R23 to the pound, she may well be right.