“Do you know your way back to the apartment?”   “Of course we do.”

The correct answer to the above question should have been, in fact, an emphatic no.  But now it is too late, and Andy and I are wandering the freezing streets of Bordeaux with no idea where we are going.

The streets do have names, despite the title of this post, but when they’re in another language and all look exactly like something from the movie Amelie, they do tend to run together slightly.

Andy is miserable because he has a severe cold.  He’s been the guiding hand for me on this trip, with his grasp of French being much more confident than mine, and possessing a familiarity with the culture that I don’t have.  Now he is as lost as I am.

We are only two minutes from L’Ours Marin, the bear bar where Christophe’s exhibition is being held tonight.

The apartment where we are staying belongs to one of the co-owners, Jean-Pierre, in a beautiful 19^th-century building set back from the street.  It’s accessed by a worn stone staircase with a narrow, tall atrium that is open to the sky.

It also has a red door.  This is one of the things I can remember.  I can also remember a bistro called Christophe’s, and a fashion store called OK Daddy.  Unfortunately, I cannot remember in which order any of these landmarks occur.

We find a main street with large tram tracks.  “We didn’t cross tram tracks last night,” says Andy, his face morphing into Hurricane Katrina with every step.  We cross the tracks anyway and keep looking for more red doors and narrow streets that might possibly house Jean-Pierre’s apartment.

Andy trails behind me in a daze as I start trying keys in every red door we come across, and it occurs to me as we pass a branch of the national police that someone might arrest me for attempted breaking and entering.  And what would I say?  Bonjour?  Tres mignon, followed by a wink?  I might be in luck with the second one if the policeman happens to be a bender.

At this point, we decide to head back to L’Ours Marin to ask for some proper directions.  Unfortunately, by the time we get there, everyone has gone somewhere else for dinner.  We don’t have phones.  We don’t have phone numbers.  We are typical men.  We have confidently declared that we don’t need help and know exactly what we are doing when in fact we are stuffed.

It’s like being stuck inside a giant metaphor for depression, I think, but decide not to share my thinking with Andy, who looks about an inch away from crushing a small child.

We know that Christophe will be back at L’Ours Marin by 3pm, and it is now 1pm.  So we have two alternatives: wander the streets for two hours continuing our futile struggle to find the apartment, or go have coffee somewhere and try to enjoy ourselves.

Again, being typical men, we opt to go have coffee somewhere but in actual fact continue looking for the apartment.

Why do we do this?  Possessed by an overwhelming need to curb strong negative emotions, we continue searching for the exit, even when we know that waiting it out is the best solution.

A few hours later, following a brief spell in a café, we return to L’Ours Marin and confess our stupidity to Christophe.  He is mortified that we’ve been bereft in the frozen city and is full of apologies, but it is not his fault.

Sometimes we need to have confidence that things will pass and swallow our natural tendency to bash our heads against a wall in the hope that it will move.

Christophe directs us back to the apartment which was, of course, mere metres from where we had been at the start of our journey.  We had literally been in spitting distance from it, but we couldn’t see it.

Lesson learned: ask for help.  It’s easier.  Because being a man is sometimes just a synonym for being a twat.