By this time 45 years ago, four days married, my bride was safely home with maman and papa in Le Mans. Far from honeymooning in an exotic location, I was back to covering north-west Durham for The Northern Echo.
Joelle hadn't left me in the sense you might think. It was just that in provincial, Catholic France, we weren't considered wed. There was the church blessing to come on November 16 and this, while holding no legal status, was what mattered.
It was, all the same, the beginning of a life journey that, while probably no more eventful than those taken by countless others, seems remarkable to us.
As weddings go, the events of Saturday October 30 at Bishop Auckland Register Office were nothing to write home about.
My dad had a Shildon AFC match to get away to (he was a club official), I'd put only a fiver behind the bar of the Aclet pub - Joelle always complains she married a man with a £12 overdraft, holes in his socks and limited prospects - and if any photographs were taken, I haven't seen them in years and have forgotten what they looked like.
In mitigation, I can say that the French attach no importance to civil union if they also plan the church blessing.
They may not be especially devout or devout at all (I remember a priest complaining about les chrétiens à quatre roues - driving to church and only for baptisms, weddings, communions and funerals). They just pop into the town hall during a lunch break and complete the civic formalities we call Register Office weddings.
Our story, the story of Colin and Joelle, starts at the Golden Cock pub in Tubwell Row, Darlington. I ran a Saturday night folk club there; some misguided soul had told Joelle, newly arrived as an au pair, it was the place to go.
I happened to be taking entrance fees just as Joelle - stunningly pretty, long-haired and wearing a yellow Shetland jumper - appeared with her sister Martine and one other French girl, possibly Nicole. I kissed her hand (before taking her money) and she, clearly, was smitten. As was I, later dismissing an impertinent friend's warning that I had fallen for a "real flirt". In fact, she wasn't a flirt at all, just a young woman who acted Frenchly.
Joelle had resolved to spend some time in the UK before going on to Madrid to perfect her Spanish. Darlington as the name of a town translated more compellingly to French eyes than the alternative she was offered, Cockfosters. And she arrived at Lakeside, in the posh part of town, to take charge not of small children but a 90-year-old battleaxe, a retired teacher of English. Battleaxe's cat dined on salmon, Joelle on gruel, with interludes for grammar instruction.
Soon, Battleaxe tired of the arrangement. She tried sending Joelle to interviews for unsuitable jobs and then telegrammed her during a visit home to France dispensing with her services.
Joelle said nothing to her parents, returned to England anyway and presented herself at the presbytery doorstep of the priest at St Mary's RC church in Bishop Auckland. She was allowed to stay, did his household chores for a fortnight, then hid in the garret of a friend who was also an au pair before finding a a place with a young family in the drab new town of Newton Aycliffe.
Meanwhile our little romance flourished, stumbled and was resurrected. She says I begged her to come back to me after we stopped seeing each other; I suggest she trailed me across County Durham folk venues in the hope of "bumping into" me again. But we were back together when Joelle took off to work in London. We kept the flame burning, thanks mainly to cheap coach travel from the North East to the Smoke, and in time, in her little flat in Victoria, I proposed. No bended knee, but a viably soppy Shildon alternative. She never made it to Spain, except as a tourist.
I remember my great friend Bill Taylor, well known at this site, and Beth Carr writing amusing tales for the Echo and the Stanley News about the bride who was beetling off home to mum straight after her wedding. I didn't sue, but then journalists traditionally have no reputation to lose so cannot be defamed.
At the "real" wedding, at l'Eglise de Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc in Le Mans on November 16, I was a new man. Joelle's dad, a barber, had taken one look at the long-haired northern scruff who'd arrived to marry his daughter and given me a short, back and sides.
Next morning, after a sumptuous wedding banquet, friends and in-laws pursued us to our hotel to make the kind of racket outside that tradition demands. We had a frugal and very brief honeymoon in Paris before returning by coach and train to our marital home, half a miner's cottage in the hamlet of Hobson (choice didn't come into it).
The journey to 23 Prospect Terrace, Hobson seemed to cross climatic zones. Freezing in Paris, misty by Calais, rain in Kent, snow at Doncaster and a blizzard in Newcastle. Hobson is one of the highest points of County Durham and we had next to no money as we joined a long queue outside the Central Station. "Let's keep quiet about where we're going and how we'll pay him," I whispered to my bride.
Into the cab we climbed. I waited as long as possible, probably no more than a few seconds, before admitting where we wanted to go. "I'll give it try," the driver said. I waited even longer, until we had crossed the Tyne, before saying we were skint newlyweds and would a cheque be OK. An obvious romantic, he suppressed any feeling of disappointment and proceeded through the drifts to Hobson. I tipped him with a few remaining French coins.
Forty-five years on, we have lived - after Hobson - back with my parents in Shildon, in a housing association maisonette in Newton Aycliffe, and - when I joined the Harrow Observer - in rented accommodation in Kenton, then a company flat in Uxbridge. From there, it was on to the home ownership ladder, starting with a first-floor Harrow flat bought using the sale of our car as deposit before moving to a semi in Rayners Lane.
Our own homes in Bristol and Ealing, and rented accommodation in Paris and Abu Dhabi, have followed and we now divide our time roughly equally between Ealing and the south of France. Britain remains our place of residence but our hearts lie in Le Lavandou.
It has been quite a ride. Last weekend, on a footballing weekend back in the North East, we revisited with Christelle, one of our two daughters, and our eight-year-old granddaughter Maya (Christelle's niece), the Golden Cock, the Register Office and Lakeside.
Perhaps only a few hours before Joelle posed outside the house where she had unhappily been au pair to a difficult old lady, the adorable neighbour - Dot Briggs - who had befriended and comforted her had passed away at 95. They'd kept in touch. We had no idea what had happened, though the unlit emptiness of Dot's home had made me wonder.
"I hardly knew her, but she seemed a lovely woman," someone next door told us when we returned two mornings later. "I have four girls and she used to sit at a window - it was her habit - and throw sweets to them."
Joelle has always been tremendously supportive and it will not always have seemed, to her, an equal partnership. Her job was demanding enough, but that was not all she did; there was also the lion's share of child care as I wandered the length and breadth of Britain, with frequent forays abroad and relentlessly unsocial hours even when not away. Without that unfailing support, I could not have done it.
Ours has been what might be called a lively marriage, loyal and loving but at times turbulent. But maybe a little turbulence makes for good marriages. I remember feeling reassured when a young friend, from what I had imagined to be a close, loving family, once told me "there's lots of shouting".
Shouting should never conquer love. This article - written because so many people responded warmly when I posted a few photographs at Facebook - is dedicated loads to the love of my life, a lot to Christelle, Nathalie and Maya and whatever's left to Dot Briggs.
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