It’s the end of lockdown – and the village has gone wild

The village square is a long and pedestrianised oblong shaded along its length by massive pollarded plane trees. It’s known as ‘le Cours’. There’s a Tabac and a Spar and an ancient fountain that children play on and a shop selling Panama hats. Otherwise le Cours is dominated by the tables and chairs of a dozen or so bars, cafés and restaurants. Viewed from one end at the height of summer, it looks like one great dining hall under the trees. In July and August chic families drive up here from the Mediterranean coast to eat. One recognises the clothes and that forbidding, peculiar aura of new wealth.

Until last week you could have fired a shotgun up the Cours and not hit anyone. The pollarded plane trees wore their usual green summer magnificence but on the ground only the Spar and Tabac were open and the tables and chairs were piled into great dismal stacks.

But last Friday I rose from my sick bed, strapped on my medical support, and was shepherded like a wayward toddler down the hill to the Cours. It was like walking into a fairy tale. The malign spell was overturned and the village was wildly celebrating the reinstatement of their freedom. Or at any rate the version of freedom famously and rather nit-pickingly defined in their constitution as an inalienable right to liberty, fraternity and egality. No masks, no curfew, no early closing, no signed attestations, no social distancing, no pathetic elbow bumping, no hand gel: the world was revolving once again as its recognisable, giddy, noisy, crowded, happy, bourgeois self.

And live televised football in the fascist bar! The hard old faces were upturned avidly towards the giant telly strung by a chain from a tree trunk and some fanatic had dusted off an air horn.