So, shaking my customary conspiratorial thoughts from my insinuating skull I began to whistle an off key tune and headed for the sanctity of the sea.

My stomach had begun to communicate to my brain in a rather alarming series of rumbles and growls so I made the resolution to ward off further obsessive episodes by immersing and indulging myself in an initial foray into the world of continental convenience food.

And upon reflection, what a monumental mistake that was.

I had a vague memory of being here once before, as a chubby child and my one over-riding memory of the place was of the gut bursting delights and sugar fuelled frenzies of the consumption of a veritable army of sweet crepes.

Crepes were the memory, so crepes it was to be and with the glucose dripping from my thoughts I ambled up to a brightly coloured crepe stand and took my place in the queue behind a large, coloured chap with quite possibly the most highly oiled and glistening hair in the Northern hemisphere. If this guy had jumped bodily into the sea there would have been a serious ecological disaster which would have had repercussions upon the local wildlife from now until the day the sun grew cold and fell from the skies.

There was something, however, vaguely familiar about the back of his enormous head. Something that I just couldn't put my finger on, something that stirred recollections inside me apart from warm memories of days gone by when as a child I would sit and stare with wide eyes at the family Christmas tree, gleaming with a plethora of twinkling fairy lights.

No, it was more than that. The set of his mile wide shoulders, the generally impressive girth, the finely tailored 'Miami Vice' type slacks, the crisp white leather loafers, each little clue spoke tantalizingly to my sub-conscious. I just couldn't shake the feeling that I knew this guy from somewhere.

I was just about to tap him on the shoulder when he spoke to the crepe-man and the deep timbre of his booming baritone voice gave the game away. His husky tone was so low and powerful that it created a sonic boom that shattered windows as far away as the Fijian Islands but at least I had him now, yet actually believing his identity was a little more difficult than discovering it in the first place.

There was no doubt in my mind now that sleep deprivation and a past history of drug abuse had fried my mind to melting point and I could literally feel my various cortexes and nerve centres begin to pour from my disbelieving ears.

"No, surely not," my sore brain thought, "It can't be. No fucking way."

I was trembling with a certainty borne of confusion and then he half turned and my over-excited suspicions were indubitably confirmed. The heavy jowls, the furrowed and sweating brow, the strangely alluring double chin, the knuckle dusters of thick golden rings, each piece of evidence pointed to only one name.

Here, in an almost suicidally dangerous state of exhaustion, beside the sea in a foreign town, many miles from the safety of my home or a suitable establishment for the psychologically impaired, I stood, in a queue to buy crepes behind the one and only, Barry fucking White.

It was the Walrus of Love. I couldn't be more certain. It was the 'cogito ergo sum' of peculiar truths.

Before my very eyes stood the vastly overweight, gravel voiced, oily haired songmeister who, for some unfathomable reason, had the ability to make women (from pensioners to respectable housewives) go weak at the knees, drool lustful saliva and then send him their soiled underwear via an already overworked postal service.

I would have liked to have said something funny, something cool and suave to make this enormous hunk of eroticism admit me to the unspoken 'League of Good Lovers' but instead I think I muttered something about gophers, gave a nervous chuckle and swallowed repeatedly in order to make the world stop spinning around in peculiar arcs.

I began to feel dizzy, suddenly it was very hot and very cold at the same time. I had really lost it this time. I was so disturbed that my cursed eyes were conjuring images of American crooners, so literally unhinged that the world had become a place not to be trusted in the slightest.

Then, then I became very aware of eyes upon me. Large, deep and powerful hazel brown eyes, burrowing deep into my imploding head.

This paragon of sexual virility, this mountainous slab of female fantasy was looking very seriously at me and it felt as though the world had come to a standstill.

The sea froze, the clouds became still, birds hung lifeless in the air and slowly, in a moment that seemed to last for aeons, the big man winked and spoke.

"I RECOMMEND THE CHOCOLATE."

The voice echoed around the empty caverns of my skull, ricocheting off my psychological icicles like a bullet in a John Wayne movie. The dull roar of the sea rushed back into my ears, the clouds once more began their carefree path, the birds began to wheel and spin again and the sun fired splinters of light into my eyes. And I was all alone, somewhat unhinged, with Barry's booming bassline reverberating around my very soul.

"I RECOMMEND THE CHOCOLATE."
"I RECOMMEND THE CHOCOLATE."
"I RECOMMEND THE CHOCOLATE."

Chocolate? Eh? Where was I?

"I RECOMMEND THE CHOCOLATE."
Ah, crepes, yes, I remember.

"I RECOMMEND THE CHOCOLATE."
"Well, quite naturally Barry, what else would you recommend, my phantom friend?"

Moments later I was scuttling off to a nearby bench with a chocolate crepe in my hand, as territorially protective as a lioness over a recent kill. I had just bought a crepe, in France, from a French person, using French coinage.

I was no longer in England, no longer slowly dying behind a big f**king desk, in a big f**king office, next to my big f**king window with it's view of lots of big f**king trees, no telephone would shake me from my peace, no secretary would disturb me.

"I'm alive again!" I thought suddenly.
Alive, I tell you, alive.
"ALIVE. I AM ALIVE!"
Alive and free to roam at will around Europe for the next four months of my life.

It was all so very clear. This, this moment of realisation, this unshackling of the social handcuffs, this liberation was what it was all about. All the drudgery and misery, all the pain of life's seemingly endless slog through the quicksand of conformity, all of it crumbled and fell from my mind.

All the choices I had ever made, every single action my body and soul had ever undertaken had suddenly been made sense of by an obese American barrel of love and a sweet Gallic pancake.

"Sweet Jesus!" I cried in euphoria, "I have seen the fucking light. I am your servant, High Lord of Freedom, I am your loyal child."

No more would I weep and wail. No more would I live in fear and regret. My heart and spirit were clean once more and I was free.

"FREE. FREE. FFFRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

Anxious to begin the unashamed gratification of my mortal body, in a moment of shining exultation, with the power of an unleashed tornado, I bit into the 'holy bread' and promptly squirted a jet of molten-hot chocolate lava across my cheek and my chin.

At this point, my choices regarding the more colourful points of my extensive vocabularic range became just a little too fruity for even me to relate. Let's just say that the air around me turned blue and we'll leave it at that.

To any onlookers, my next few actions must have appeared somewhat similar to a man doing a very passable impression of a demented Irishman dancing a cocaine fuelled jig upon a carpet of six inch nails.

A primal roar of rage issued from my half full mouth as the offending crepe flew into the air in a graceless arc only to be savagely stamped on upon its return to terra firma.

I descended, in the blink of an eye, from the ecstasy of spiritual epiphany to the worship of any number of black hearted demons. Curses flowed freely from my mouth (I think a few of them were actually cried in Satanic tongues) and I launched into verbal volleys of abuse on every possible theme. From the good Lord himself, to the state of the economy in the Ivory Coast, from the size and shape of watermelons to the very colour of my trainers, nothing living or innate was spared.

Arrows of pain flashed across my face as I continued in my apoplectic breakdancing. My arms and legs worked independently and flailed wildly like a clockwork frog being driven by nuclear fusion and it was some time before the pain and anger began to recede. But eventually they did and I, as a broken man, bowed by the power of the crepe, began to sob like a small child. I doubled up and wept until my face became a ghastly mask of chocolate and snot.

"Oh cruel, cruel world," I wailed and shook an impotent fist at nothing in particular. "Why must you test me so?"

I screamed out loud and began to pound the ground with my forehead, a maniacal smile beginning to grow at the corners of my mouth. The smile morphed into a wide grin, the grin to a chuckle and eventually to hysterical laughter. The hysterical laughter became uncontrollable spasming and it began to dawn upon me that I really had gone quite mad. Well, it was bound to happen sometime, wasn't it?

With this in mind, I picked myself up, wiped my face on my sleeve and went in search of something less perilous to eat, like a nice cabbage or a lump of soft bread.

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