How I Won the Yellow Jumper by Ned Boulting

Citroën belonging to France Télévisions) will pull out of the queue and start to hurtle down the wrong side of the road at breakneck speed. Instantly, it will be joined by a dozen others. The trick is not to be the first car in the illegal convoy speeding down the wrong side of the road. It’s best to be in second place. That way, they, not you, take the impact of any head-on collision.
    This terrifying practice has been severely curbed over recent years by the police, which is not altogether unreasonable. But some of the irresponsible thrill of touring has gone with it.
    If Woody drives most of the time, I tend to sit in the front passenger seat. I normally have a little left-over scripting and thinking to do as we race towards the finish line. With my laptop perched on my knees, I fight a growing urge to vomit. As soon as I have finished whatever it is I have to type, a Pavlovian response to French motorways kicks in, and within seconds I am asleep, dribbling gently down my collar.
    This is when someone, usually Liam, will lean over with their camera phone and film me snoring as my head bobs up and down. I have almost a dozen clips of me on various motorways in France sleeping in this manner down the years. They document a soft decline into narcoleptic middle age.

    When he’s not filming me, Liam is either ranting about the uselessness of Glasgow Rangers’ latest signing, sleeping or tuning his ukelele. If he is feeling chipper enough, we will then be treated to a burst of inappropriate music in the style of George Formby. ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ by Bonnie Tyler, for example. It works well sung at high speed in a cod-Wigan accent.
    Each stop off for refuelling can be a source of tensions as we mimic the dysfunctional emotional dynamics of a family on holiday with their teenage kids. We take turns to play the Sulking Teen, although I normally favour the part of Strict Dad.
    I have a mania for efficiency in these stops, resenting each and every second spent in the queues and aisles of a French motorway service station. So it is that I have taken recently to manning the petrol pump, while Woody, who keeps the float, goes in to pay. In this way, I get to send the other two ahead to sort out/acquire/indulge themselves in whatever way they feel is appropriate. Then, when I have cascaded sixty-odd litres of stinking diesel into the bottomless well of the Renault Espace, I can join them in the shop, safe in the knowledge that they have already had time to peruse the shelves and make up their minds about what it is that they crave.
    Woody normally panics. Sensitive to my impatient streak, he has already queued to pay for the fuel, trousered the receipt, and loaded himself up with comfort food. And that’s when the panic sets in. He will always come back with at least one item that betrays a rush of blood at the till. This may take the form of an awful yoghurt-based French drink. Strawberry Yop is oftenthe weakness of choice, or a random confectionery with a vaguely insulting name, like Pimp. Or Plop.
    The two of us will be back in the car then, and ready to go, before Liam has come back. Occasionally we will catch a glimpse of him moving from aisle to aisle behind the glass of the shopfront, shimmying between rows of querulous school kids. We know perfectly well that he is looking for coffee. We know, also, since nothing much surprises us any more about each other, that he will return eventually with a brew that in no way matches his exacting standards.
    And so, in the end, he will reappear cradling a small plastic cup full of something dark and forbidding, which matches his scowl. That face he pulls, with its distinctive jutting out of the lower lip and sinking of the angle of the head to sixty-five degrees is known as ‘
faire la tête
’. It takes its name from a chef in a restaurant in a village in the Pyrenees who didn’t want us to sit down for dinner because it was nine