Le Chat Noir

I’ve mentioned a clever little writing competition before – you have to write exactly fifty words on a given subject. Tricky but enjoyable. The idea for October is  to write about a black cat. So many ideas spring straight into my mind with this topic especially as we are approaching Hallowe’en. I’ve been letting it simmer, and nothing seemed forthcoming, so I began to jot some notes, which ended up far away from a black cat, and with far more words!

This is what I jotted:

Thinking about writing about  ‘The Black Cat’ and trying to be original, I imagined a pub called that… Only to realise there actually is The Black Cat micro-pub, here in Weston-super-Mare which I’ve visited several times.
So not a pub, maybe a café and suddenly, unbidden a memory from many,  many years ago springs vividly to life. It was a small single storey, double fronted rather nondescript place, maybe in France. seeing it in my minds eye, at night, yellow light spilling across the pavement and into the gutter. Unprepossessing but it became our regular bar while we were there – which adds to my thoughts that it was in France. I can’t ask the friends who I would have been with, one estranged himself from us many years ago, the other is dead. I’m sure it wasn’t even called The Black Cat, or if it was in France, Le Chat Noir. My memory – like a still photo, is of us approaching it and seeing it brightly lit among the surrounding darkened buildings, maybe a row of small shops.
It glitters in my memory, the very yellow light reflected off the pavement, gutter and road, so maybe it had been raining, maybe it was raining. I think there were tables outside, the chairs tipped against them, presumably because it was night and all the customers would sit inside.

Re-reading it now it is just as vivid and I’ve had a thought. Maybe it was on the Île d’Oléron, or maybe the smaller Île de Ré. These two islands are off the west coast of France, on the Bay of Biscay. At the end of my first year at the Polytechnic in Manchester, a gang of us went to France. The degree we were doing had two main subjects and a subsidiary; mine were English and History with French subsid – my friends were doing French as a main and as part of it had to attend a French college for six weeks in the summer. The college was in La Rochelle so we stayed nearby on a campsite just outside the town. Arriving a few days early we camped on one of the two islands. Maybe one evening we wandered out to find a bar, and there was the bar of my memory. I am almost positive it wasn’t called The Black Cat, Le Chat Noir.

Here is a link to the 50 word comp: https://www.scottishbooktrust.com/50-word-fiction

Here is a link to The Black Cat in Weston-super-Mare: https://whatpub.com/pubs/WSM/1088/black-cat-weston-super-mare