Low life | 1 November 2018

I apologised, was gladly granted an indulgence, and on Sunday I packed a small bag and reached into a drawer for the passport. I was going back to the cave house in the Provençal village. Back to France and the French and to speaking my trousers-on-fire French. Salut! Tu vas bien? Viens m’embrasser, mon petit chou. Back to a country where, as Barbara Cartland put it, you can make love in the afternoon without people hammering on the door.

Back to village bells clanging off the hours of the day, back to early rising and trying to be witty, or at least sentient, in French with the insanely jolly woman in the village bakery at a quarter to seven in the morning. Back to the flaking morning croissant and strong coffee and eating outside — always eating eating eating. When people profess a love of France, I assume they mean a love of eating. Back to the gigantic science-fiction aloes and the mulberry tree, to the pollarded plane trees in the village square and the ornate dribbling fountain and cobbled streets and quaintly old-fashioned street lanterns.

Back to the disappointingly familiar, disappointingly limited wares in the half-dozen shops that close most afternoons and sometimes capriciously all day. Back to the fantastically rude woman in the paper shop. The uncompromising reserve of the woman in the delicatessen. The industrious, cheerful young brothers in the à la page mini-Spar where monks and nuns contemplate the frozen-food cabinet. And in the hairdressers, Elody, always laughing off her incredible sexual magnetism. The last time I was in, she summoned me into her chair with ‘Amour?’ and I almost blacked out. She broke her ankle playing football last year and the heavy plaster cast encumbering that leg turbocharged the fantasy.