Footloose in France

Footloose in France (2023) is a travel book by the British authors John Adamson and Clive Jackson. They recall with humour their separate experiences of living in France in the mid-to-late sixties and early seventies: Jackson worked in the western Pyrenees and Adamson in Paris.
The book, whose prologue and epilogue are set in West Mersea, recounts Jackson and Adamson's French adventures, the recollection of which is sparked by the unexpected brightness of a late summer's afternoon at the Essex seaside resort, as if they were back in France.
Description
The alternate tales the authors tell are true reminiscences of a France of decades ago. There are insights into the worlds of wine-making, art and film, the challenges of language teaching, translating, banking, balloon-selling and much more. Encounters with Alain Delon, Piem, the cartoonist, Louis Derbré, the sculptor, Toru Iwaya, the Japanese mezzotint artist, Modigliani's daughter, and across the tables in a Provençal restaurant, Noël Coward, are mingled with interactions with the locals in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and exchanges with workers, among them waiters, barbers and business executives, in Paris. Falling in love at a château in the Pomerol, putting on an exhibition of Franco-British humorous art in the Marais are among the highlights of the book.
Through the memories of those they meet the reader is transported back to the Algerian War; to the occupation of Paris in the Second World War; to the quandary of a young French doctor working at Buchenwald in the aftermath of the War; and more recently to the behaviour of the CRS in the Paris riots of May 1968.
The book's frontispiece reproduces Tuileries Gardens, Paris, a painting by George Adamson, father of one of the authors.
Reception
The Cambridge Critique hailed Footloose in France as having "all the quirky fun of an authentic adventure, a trove of fascinating real-life tales - whilst it reveals the real France in all its remarkable differentness". Sir Quentin Blake found the incidents and experiences sympathetic to him and induced "a measure of nostalgia". The booksellers Hatchards on Piccadilly, London, dubbed the book, "A beautiful portrayal of the country from an outsider's perspective".

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