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The maid in the well
Monique pokes at the stone well with a stick. No buckets have been cranked down and back up its round walls for years. But boarded up it has proved a useful shelf on which she keeps a collection of cactus plants, a large glass jar, some blue string and a thermometer.
Le petit déjeuner
Jean-Yves shares his memories of childhood breakfasts. “My father would take four or five snails and throw them on a grill with salt and pepper, ” he winced. ” I have to say I much preferred my bowl of coffee.”
Spotted II
Benoit and Loic arrive in an old post office van. Their buckets stacked with tools, they’re ready to pick up where I was forced to leave off; cut off in my pointing prime by a merciless plague of nasty, red, itching spots.
Spotted
The first bump appeared on the way to St Emilion. By midday it had been joined by several more; a numb, lumpy landscape that reached from my chin to my temples. Maybe it was the new moisturiser.
A contented man
He stopped searching for happiness many years ago – when he realised he was content. He looks across the huge flat fields that surround us. He is still mesmerised by each autumn’s soft-glowing calm, by the towers of straw bales that are stacked like churches and smell of summer; by the stretching, brushed-gold shadows.
The (almost) lesser-spotted Englishwoman
So, I’m still scratching. Though not quite so much. Doctor Marianne looked at me – not the computer. Unwavering. Right in the eye. An efficient smile, then a seamless, artful transformation into just enough concern – but not enough to make me panic.
Welcome
For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to live in France. Maybe it was the appeal of the unknown; the customs and traditions of a country physically so close, but culturally worlds apart from the UK. I was raised and educated in England. I worked there for over 20 years. But despite so many summers, winters, autumns and springs, I never felt I could really be comfortable in a country too entrenched in its own ‘small island’ ways to ever be anything other than a reluctant part of Europe.
Season’s end
Out into the lanes, crossing the paths between the fields. Clouds of ivory flecks, mists of midges, fly out of the ditches and up into our eyes in a dusty, day’s-end, sun-down smudge. Past brittle, puckered, hollowed-out hedges and their dying, clinging, crowns of old man’s beard.
Out of place
Several times every day Edouard would console himself with the same thought: Sometimes decisions are made for us and, for a while, we lose our sense of self. But it’s only transitory. A chance meeting; a date and an address written on a crumpled till receipt.
Observation
So, you have ‘the Brits’ and you have ‘the Brits who don’t like the other Brits’ who only hang out with other ‘Brits who don’t like the other Brits’ and the French.