Mary Fleming's Blog, page 6

February: A Reappraisal

Friday, 11 February

February has a bad reputation, at least in my book. A short but nasty month. Dark and cold and only fun if you spend part of it in the mountains or at the beach. Since I don’t ski, the former offers no relief, and it’s been years since we sipped rum punches and buried our toes in the sands of the Caribbean. Even the hope of a light snow providing a frisson of winter joy here in northern France is vanishing as the planet warms.

But this year—and maybe partly because of climate change—it’s seemed a month of awakening.

London calling

I spent the first days on a last-minute, mini-emergency trip to London. With grand-daughter Mira ill and unable to attend nursery in the afternoon, there were gaps in the child-care and panic in the parents’ hearts. It was my first call to action as a grandmother, one that I answered eagerly, especially after being gypped at Christmas by Covid.  

Poor Mira was a victim of an already overstretched NHS, brought to breaking point by the pandemic. It took almost two weeks to correctly diagnose a succession of 40°C/104°F fevers and symptoms that indicated first tonsillitis, then bronchiolitis, then an intestinal flu. In fact, an adenovirus, they finally learned, was travelling from region to region of her tiny body.

By the time I arrived, she was beginning to feel better, and the little person that Mira is becoming emerged from a feverish fog: a budding book and music lover...

Frère Jacques or Alouette? 

...who's no one's fool.

I saw that

Back in Paris on my Saturday morning run, I remarked that day is breaking earlier and in a distinct hue.

No filter necessary

On Sunday in the Perche, I marvelled at how a February morning puts nature’s architecture in an inspirational light too.

Vegetal latticework

But even before that, the first thing I noticed walking out the door with Tasha at 7.30am was the birdsong. A chorus of chirps from the hedgerows and forest surrounded me, and I wondered if I've been deaf all these years or whether such cheery sounds in February are another manifestation of climate change.  

After a grey and foggy January (and a rainy December, for that matter, November too) the sun has appeared frequently this last week. Its rays are way too warm, more like March, but after all the gloom, the sunlight does raise the spirits, soothe the soul.

You got the sun cream?

As the works on the inside of our house limp to the finish line, things are stirring outside too. It's tree planting season, and Claire has just provided new homes for three American hornbeams that will help block ever fiercer winds and nicely mirror the two giant cypresses that tower over Deux Champs.

Support systems

After a long stretch in hiding, deer have convened in our field every day this last week. Yesterday morning I counted seven enjoying the breakfast special of organic alfalfa and clover. Maybe they are partly attracted by the two ponds at the edge of the forest that Estéban had dug last summer to encourage wetland flora and fauna and that, thanks to lots of rain, are now full of water.

If this means deer, I'm on it

It's nearing 7pm, and I've just gone outside to get some air. The birds were chirping sleepily. If the sun is rising earlier, it's also setting later, and the evening light rivals the morning in its quiet beauty.

All this and we're not even half way through the month.

February, I apologise.

______________

maryfleming.co & @flemingm6

Fogged In

Friday, 21 January

I wrote too soon.

Two weeks ago on this screen, I declared the works on our house in the Perche almost finished. I showed off renovation photos.

More emphasis should have been placed on the ‘almost’. Just two days later, the house was once again under siege.

Oh-my-God. Not again.

Carpenters worked on missing cabinets and painters sealed off the front door and entry passage to paint the ceiling and staircase. Which means that for two weeks, in order to reach the kitchen, we must go outside, walk the length of the house and enter via the furnace area. Perhaps okay in summer but not during cold, dark, wet winter.

Upon arrival last weekend, there was no heat, thick dust covered everything, and it smelled of dead mouse. Monday morning came more painters…

Can you promise me this is the last room that needs repainting?

...more carpenters and the masons joined the party...

[image error]At least Christophe gives treats

Close to finished we may be, but five days ago our bedroom was the only unoccupied, semi-quiet room in the whole house, and all three of us—David, Tasha and I—huddled therein before fleeing back to Paris.

In my last blog, I also wrote about the progress of the dog. Yet no sooner had we returned last Saturday than Tasha darted into the woods after a deer. It was dusk. I called and called. There were gunshots. Other strange noises emanated from the misty forest. An hour passed. I thought: This is it. Something terrible has happened. Thankfully she returned, gilet jaune torn but otherwise intact. My recent pride in her progress, however, seemed misplaced, almost hubristic.  

Today I am wondering if, generally speaking, I don’t write too soon.

You may recall that last May, while applying for the resident’s card I need to live here post-Brexit, I penned a blog on memory and the surprising efficiency of the French state. Well, Proustian moment has turned into a Kafka-esque nightmare. This afternoon I will make my sixth (6th) trip to the Préfecture de Paris in the hopes that by the time I press the send button on this blog, a valid card will be in my possession.  

All those months ago (Visit 1), the nice man behind the desk told me I’d receive my carte de séjour in the mail within two months. It did not come in the mail.

Instead, four months later, I got an email saying my card had arrived, that I needed to pick it up and please arrange a rendez-vous on our site. I was led to a page with guichets (counters) numbered from 1, 2, 3 (grouped for some reason), then separately, up to 11.  

It reminded me of the game show I watched as a child, Let’s Make a Deal, where contestants had to guess behind which of three curtains the jackpot was hidden. I'd pick a counter, any counter, and wait. The circular internet arrow would turn and turn, as if the cumbersome cogs of The State were actually churning. Many times I was told the guichet had no more available appointments; try another. So on I clicked (this time, let's try Guichet...8), waited, hoped.

Finally successful, I arrived at the Préfecture (Visit 2), waited in a long line of fellow applicants, only to be told at the reception counter...

State security

...that my card wasn’t there. But I received an email, I protested, waving my phone at the woman. You should have received a text message, she said, with a reference number. It will come.

I was sent away. I waited; it did not come. After a month, I resorted to the telephone, where response time was even slower than on the website. Finally, a man answered. He said my card was there, gave me the number, then physically left his desk (he was gone forever) to check.

[image error]Bike parked at its résidence secondaire

Visit 3 proved him right—the official behind Guichet 6 pulled the card out of a small, battered cardboard box with “Brixit” hand-written in black marker—but it had the wrong surname (Morrison, as in David). In France, the official told me, a woman is always known to the authorities by her husband’s patronymic. (bristle, went my usually tractable feminist hackles). But it’s useless to me, I said. Fleming is on every other official document I have. His shoulders gave several Gallic shrugs, until I told him that when I divorced, the court gave me written permission to continue using the name.

I was directed to another room, given an email address on a chit of paper so small I almost lost it, and sent home, only to receive a phone message that I needed to return the faulty card I'd been told to keep (Visit 4).

It was with a heavy heart that I presented my case to PP-DPG-SDAE PP-DPG-SDAE-11EB-SEJOUR. A month, I said to myself. That's how long I'll give them to answer before I start pestering.

Lo and behold I had a friendly reply, apologising for the error, within 24 hours, and thus began a long correspondence with “M P”. On November 4th I was back to square one, i.e, Salle 4, presenting my dossier all over again (Visit 5).

On 26 November I received the magic text message with the magic number. But it took until December 21 and as many attempts on the lumbering website, plus encouragement from M P (we wished one another bonnes fêtes de fin d'année), to obtain my rendez-vous for this afternoon.  

[image error]

Recently there's been a lot of fog, weather befitting the beginning of Year III, CE (Covid Era). Time has become just that, one long foggy day. Plans, if one dares make them, often dissolve, as Omicron strikes all around. To give myself a bit of slack: it's an apposite act, writing too soon.

But, finger approaching the send button, the new carte de séjour is tucked in my wallet. Here's hoping for clearer, brighter days ahead.

The sunnier side of winter

Restoration

Friday, 7 January

The 6th of January seems a date destined to mark important moments in our lives. Fortunately, in the private sphere, it has more positive connotations than in the public, where it may yet go down in the history books as the day democracy in America received a blow from which it did not recover.

Chez nous, it is Tasha the dog's birthday, or the day thus designated upon her arrival at the SPA animal shelter in Tilloy-les-Mofflaines five years ago. Yesterday she turned seven, the age of reason. Or so they say of people, though one can wonder these days if the ability to think rationally doesn't elude some at any age.

Tasha's seven dog years would make her 49 on the human scale, but the maxim still fits. Only recently has she decided to come when called most of the time. When the call of the wild does still lead her astray (like on her birthday morning walk), she returns to the house after 45 minutes, rather than the three to six hours of agonised waiting she used to put us through. From my angle, it makes our perambulations much more pleasant, even relaxing.

At home she remains vociferous but much less fierce with visitors.

[image error]Claire talks gardening, while Tasha sings Happy Birthday to herself

Now, January 6th also marks the day we reclaimed our house.  

You may recall that the renovation works in the Perche were way behind schedule in December. Fortunately, we’d planned to celebrate Christmas in Paris. The whole family, my sister too, was supposed to come; Omicron caused almost everyone to cancel. We nevertheless managed to become Covid contact cases and thus spent seven days of the holiday period self-isolating, fortunately at Deux Champs, where the architects had assured us that although some painting, woodwork and ironmongery still needed to be done, the old house was now habitable.  

They were correct, but the house still seemed to belong to someone else. Someone - and I know this sounds odd coming from a 64-year old - who was very grown-up and fancy. The elegant beauty appeared too cool and aloof for the likes of me.

Despite my feelings of unsuitability, we put our self-isolation to good use and started moving back everything we could carry. The schlepping also helped keep Covid fears at bay.

Some carpets and small chairs in the living room...

...some basics for my office, so it could begin to develop its feng shui…

We spent a lot of time transferring kitchen-dining room stuff, everything from plates and glasses to pasta and breakfast cereal, chairs and a small table...

Bed? Where's my bed? 

...and since the temporary space was at the diametric opposite of the house (not just the other end but also upstairs), our exercise was cut out for us.

We began to use the rooms, but there was still a feeling of perching rather than settling.

Angst management

Yesterday the movers came to relocate the big stuff. FYI, even this mini-move put us - yes, also my unflappable husband - in a tense, almost paralysed, state. Displacement of possessions, however near or far, must trigger some primordial distress signal deep in our core.

Sofas, chairs, the dining room table, the refrigerator, the washing machine were moved. David directed and I cleaned in their wake.

Carl unhinged

It was when Carl the piano was unscrewed and upended, wrapped in plastic and rolled back to the old house that I felt a tug at my heart strings. I'd always sensed he wasn't happy in the former barn, squeezed in between the stairs and the bookshelves. He didn't like the floor heating under his belly or David's Zoom calls right over his head (it's fair to say the old barn was just as happy to see him go):

Breathing room

Once Carl was back on his pegs in his old corner, it was as if he had come home. When I sat down to play, his notes resonated roundly, contentedly on the new stone floor.

Carl's place

Filled up with our belongings, the house appeared to emerge from a coma. By evening, in front of our first fire since last February, you could practically feel the heartbeat growing stronger.  

Home fires

By renovating this old place, we wanted to restore some of its life force, and I hope the above photos convince you too that we have succeeded. In any case, yesterday was a big birthday for Tasha and a (Covid-free, thank you booster!) milestone for us.

Happy 2022.      

Told You So

Friday, 17 December

“Stop being such a pessimist.”

“I’m not being a pessimist. I’m being a realist.”

This exchange occurred between my husband David and me on several occasions last summer, i.e., every time someone asked us when the renovation project on our house in the Perche would be completed. He maintained it would be mid-October; I predicted Christmas.

Turns out we were both wrong, that we perhaps should have listened to our dog Tasha who declared in a recent blog post: "I'm telling you, this is never going to be finished." I do think she's being overly pessimistic, but Christmas is next week and finished we are not.

Since readers continue to express confusion about what we’re actually doing and how on earth it could be taking so long, here's a recap.

In April 2019, we bought this:

On the left is the 16th century seigneurie; in the middle a 19th century barn; to the right a 20th century wooden farm building.

Step one of our project was turning the barn into living space for humans...

Sticking with Christophe who gives treats

The starting date was delayed by our first Covid lockdown. But once we were freed early June 2020, work began promptly. Despite supply chain delays and artisans being stretched to the max by the many homebound people wanting to spruce up their houses and by the Covid-inspired rush of other Parisiens to the Perche, the project inched forward. We considered ourselves lucky to have bought just before prices skyrocketed, to have got our renovation underway before the surge of newer arrivals.

By December 2020, the 500-year wall had been breached, thus connecting barn and house...

This is so far from being finished

After several more months and a fair amount of inconvenience...

Food? Water? This is supposed to be my kitchen

...the barn was finished enough for us to move all our furniture and ourselves mid-March.

This is too much for me

Meanwhile, after lengthy, existentially fraught discussions, we decided to transform the farm building from a shelter for tractors and farm animals to a covered swimming pool for humans...

My beautiful backdrop? A pool? How dare you

Work on the main house began in earnest this last April.

Will it ever end?

In stripping away cement, some wonderful discoveries were made...

Selfie with shelves

...which boosted our work-weary souls.

By early August, the cathédrale à la natation was finished, at least enough for a chilly swim. Late November, it was blessed with a floor...

I hate to tell you but the courtyard's a real mess

And the house at this mid-December point? See top photo.

To be fair, my news is four days old. Tasha and I took the train into Paris on Tuesday to start Christmas preparations. David, who remained to manage deliveries and various surprises like the furnace having a melt down, assures me much has happened since our departure...but not enough to even near completion.

When the project will actually be finished-finished, who's to say. This is our third renovation in eight years, and to quote myself from an earlier blog: "If there’s one thing we’ve learned from experience, it's pay no attention to predicted time frames."

The job will get done. In the meantime, we are happy to be spending Christmas in fully finished comfort.

Aah

Wishing you all bonnes fêtes too. And stay well (away from Omicron).

Long Live Duality

Friday, 3 December

I've been going to the dentist a lot lately, thus giving me occasion to consider a particularity of the French medical world. Doctors here are highly professional, but their context is often quite personal.

Rather than being situated in sterile, neon-lit anonymity, the cabinets médicaux I visit are nestled in otherwise residential buildings. You enter a courtyard…

[image error]

…go up carpeted stairs…

…pass softly-lit, curvaceous windows…

[image error]

…into what still bears traces of an apartment...

What sometimes still is an apartment, since traditionally members of professions libérales – doctors, lawyers and such – set up their practices chez eux, with the family salon doubling as the waiting room. “It was the avatar of WFH*,” says my former lawyer husband David.

I don’t think my dentist still lives in his cabinet (top photo), but he may have grown up there; he took the practice over from his father. At any rate, as you can see, style trumps function, and the room looks more like it's awaiting an intimate, amicable gathering of le Cercle d'Amis de Marcel Proust than a host of implant patients.

Over the years I have sat in many waiting rooms that definitely were still private salons. Tell-tale signs include furniture being arranged for social interaction or viewing of the television that stands in the corner, and family photos adorning the mantle. On the coffee table, underneath the copies of  Paris Match and Point de Vue, are stacks of travel books and sailing magazines. Next to the table lamps are objects that communicate an interest in contemporary sculpture. Plush curtains frame the tall windows.

But even after 40 years, this fungibility can still strike me as odd. It seems almost voyeuristic to be sitting in the midst of a doctor’s private life, to imagine the kids lounging around at night, where by day strangers like me perch apprehensively, waiting to find out if they have high blood pressure, cataracts or cavities.

On the other hand, such homey, often beautiful places, remove the clinical and sterile side of medicine, relieve stress. The concierge in me is all too happy getting a peek at how other people live, and as a patient, it can be reassuring to see the person who is about to kill my tooth in a broader light. The doctor is, almost, my friend.  

Prepped as I have been by the duality of medical offices in France, nothing had prepared me for what David and I experienced last week, getting our third Covid jabs. Our generalist, who administered one and two (in his cheery ground-floor office on a bamboo-filled courtyard in a residential building, with his wife’s art on the walls - he actually is a friend), wouldn’t have any doses until well into December, so I got onto the Doctolib website in search of other possibilities. With nothing immediately available anywhere near us in Paris, I switched to the Orne, our département in the country, and got two appointments for last Monday at the Centre Hospitalier in Mortagne au Perche.

Not, as you can see, your standard medical institution, even if the vaccination room within had been stripped of all charm. Flimsy tables squared off an area behind which sat the administrators, who looked more like volunteers than paid professionals. They asked us questions and filled out paper forms by hand. A couple of laptop computers appeared to be connected to the internet. We waited on haphazardly arranged folding chairs and were given our jabs by a student nurse behind the flimsy partitions that separate hospital beds. But appearances can be deceiving. Just as the domestic demeanour of physicians' waiting rooms does not detract from medical proficiency, so the amateurish look of the Centre was misleading. We were in and out of there in 15 minutes, our new passes sanitaires in hand.  

With our immune systems so efficiently boosted, we had time to follow a sign outside pointing to a Cloître. The door we assumed would be locked opened on to this…

The full name of the establishment is the Centre Hospitalier de Marguerite de Lorraine because, we learned, this noble lady had founded the St-François Convent here in 1506. The vaccination room may have been sanitised, but the cloisters had clearly been left in peace since the Poor Clare nuns glided reverently under its wooden arcs.

And they were open to anyone.  

Stunned by such accessible splendour, we almost missed the door at the side leading to the chapel...

...and its art...

We left the medical centre on a physical and aesthetic high. French health care had delivered, and thrown into the mix was a serendipitous moment of transcendent beauty. Long live duality.

_____________________

*For the less acronymically inclined among you: Covid Era-speak  for 'Working From Home'

Paris Poubelle

Friday, 19 November

“Paris is a rubbish bin.” Thus spoke Stéphane Bern in a recent front-page interview in the daily newspaper, Le Parisien.

Calling Paris une poubelle made a splash not just because he’s a media personality and President Macron’s guru for France’s cultural heritage. A lot of Parisiens agree with him. In fact, according to a recent poll, 84% of us do. A movement, #SaccageParis, is all a-Twitter. It has over 2 million posts and devotees have have held two demonstrations over the last six months demanding that the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, take measures against the detritus and disfigurement, that she focus on something other than her maniacal building of bicycle lanes (okay, I added that last bit).

Monsieur Bern’s cri de coeur certainly resonates; I've already written about several of his gripes.  

He doesn't blame the mayor for everything - he claims that they are "almost friends". If Paris is full of crud, he says, the main culprits are the citizens themselves. But the stuff that collects lingers. And what gets chucked into the Seine, for example, by lawless Parisiens is not fished out by the municipality but by a residents association called Guppy.

Even beyond the litter, Paris is looking ragged around the edges, what Mr Bern calls a general laisser-aller. I can attest to the multiple potholes he complains about because I navigate them every day on my bicycle. And sights such as this tape job are not infrequent:  

"Where has the City of Light gone?" he asks plaintively. Don't ask EDF, the electricity company.

A lot of what is making Paris look so tatty are the ubiquitous work sites, both public and private, such as the one I've written about in our courtyard. Crossing it now requires tiptoeing and dodging to avoid cement, mud, vehicles, building material and barriers.

On a good day

Meanwhile streets are being dug up and barricaded everywhere. You don't need to look far...like right out our front door...

Close to home

The municipality digs and runs. I haven't seen a worker there in weeks. Other streets are unceremoniously blocked off.

New opportunities for protest posters

And pedestrians are forced to zigzag their way to their destination.

"Pedestrians - CROSSING OBLIGATORY"

After a while, it attacks the nervous system.

Which brings us to another of Mr Bern's points: the “War of the Wheels” where bicycles, trottinettes, scooters, cars and other wheeled vehicles fight for space, with no respect for The Other and certainly not for their fellow humans on foot. It creates an atmosphere of aggression, anarchy and imminent danger.

Along with the frenzy of construction and traffic, Mr Bern laments a degradation in aesthetics. Many of the urban "improvements" are ugly, from the new park benches and news kiosks to the fountains at the bottom of the Champs-Elysées, about which he demurs: "C'est quand-même affreux." I have to agree. They are ghastly.

Though they don't hold a tulip to a work he does not mention. Nothing exhibits the creeping ugliness better than the statue Jeff Koons created and gave to the city a few years ago. This vulgar, infantile monster (12m/41ft) is meant to commemorate the Paris terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015. I find its bubble-gum cheeriness an insult to the victims and a blight on the horizon of the otherwise elegant Jardins des Champs over which it towers. Honestly it's not worth the pixels on my phone, so here's a photo from the the public domain:

No-return policy

Finally Mr Bern points out that while Madame Hidalgo claims to be greening the city, all the construction means more concrete than ever and thus more trees being cut down. The talk of planting new ones remains mostly that, talk.  

It's not all doom and gloom. Mr Bern can still be émerveillé by Paris, and as you know, dear Readers, so can I.

[image error]Overlooking the love locks

But he's had enough and like so many others in the Covid Era (not us, don't worry!), he is leaving Paris and moving full-time to the country. More precisely, to his house in - where else - the Perche, our beloved region and the place another daily newspaper, Le Monde, recently called the 21st arrondissement of Paris. But that is another story.  

Plant Me

Friday, 5 November

Maybe it was the travel, an activity that now seems almost unnatural to me. Maybe it was just the contrast between the two destinations, Arles one weekend and Vienna the next, the first city intimate, winding and narrow, the other outsized and of Habsburg imperial design.

[image error]Long reign, long shadow

My friend Victoria, at least, provided a link. Arles brought back our time in Provence together 40 plus years ago, and Vienna was our first physical meeting since carefree pre-Covid days.

Remember?

Or maybe it was the Tasha-free week in between and the disruption that caused to my daily routine.

[image error]Missing you

But I don’t think so. There is something about this late stage of our renovation project in the Perche that is making me feel detached and our house seem foreign, as if it belonged to someone else.  

Certainly the workers spend more time there than we do at the moment. Except for the weekly réunions de chantier with architects and artisans, there’s not much encouraging us to redress the balance. The part of the house in which we are now living, with its cheerful big windows and glass doors, can feel like a fishbowl when workers are walking around outside all day. Or, with excess furniture, carpets and boxes piled everywhere, like a warehouse. We have also become a preferred destination for the local rodent population. Last summer it was a pair of dormice who ate into absolutely every foodstuff that wasn’t kept under lock and key or in the oven. At least they were nocturnal and cute...

I was just doing what dormice do

...and their voracity made for easy trapping. After David released them in the Forêt de Bellême, a good home at a distance from which they couldn’t find their way back, we almost missed them.

Now we have mice tout court (as a point of taxonomic interest, the two species are not related*). Though less gluttonous, they scurry around day and night and do eat the strangest stuff.

Yummy lip balm

Like the dormice, they poop everywhere, and in addition make nests in our bedding and once handsome Berlin sofas while we're away.

I fear this murine family has been in residence since the house was built 500 years ago, meaning they may be ineradicable (this is not their first apparition during our tenancy, and with the previous owners, they nibbled at the wiring and almost caused an electrical fire). In any case they are too numerous for gentle displacement and are thus suffering a less humane fate than the dormice (no, we are not, as many have suggested, getting a cat; Tasha would never forgive us). Accompanying the persistent dust is a pernicious stench in the living room that discourages lounging.

Meanwhile in the old house, kitchen and bathrooms are still fixture-less. The new floors have been laid, but everything’s covered up while the old paint is stripped...

Beam art

...and the new applied.

I'm telling you, this is never going to be finished

Even getting to the front door is an ordeal.

[image error]Obstacle course

If the renovated barn where we are now camped is encumbered, the old house and courtyard feel oddly weightless. As if the place were in purgatory, its old soul having been hollowed out and scraped away, and the new one as yet to emerge. The mice might not mind, but I do. For us humans, home/chez soi/zu Hause means more than a roof over our head. It is also a feeling, a mental state, and therein lies my disarray these past weeks.

Fortunately, out back the landscape is taking shape. Following our green guru Claire's instructions, the terrain has been gently sculpted. Topsoil has been laid and after buckets of rain, some tender grass is growing, even before seeding.

Replanted field maples have taken root and appear to be flourishing.

And everywhere crates of Claire's new flowers, shrubs and grasses have been positioned for planting in the coming weeks.

By spring, a few months after the inside work (we hope!) is finished, they'll have taken root. The ensemble will be glorious. I can't wait.

_____________

*The dormouse derives its English name not from 'mouse' but from the French dormeuse (sleeper), a reference to the animal's nocturnal lifestyle. In French you don't sleep like a baby or a rock but comme un loir.

Full Circle

Friday, 22 October

Late last year our son William joined the Covid-inspired urban exodus and moved from Paris to Arles, where his girlfriend Margaux was already living and where he'd spent the various lockdowns during the pandemic.

We visited for the first time last weekend. As the high-speed TGV train hurtled its way south, I watched the terrain change - flat, hilly, flat, hilly - until the cypresses began to appear on the horizon, and it was the visual equivalent of an electric jolt. It had been a long time since I was last in Provence.

Margaux moved to Arles three years ago to attend a masters course at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie. She graduated in June and now, like William, is a freelance photographer. The two commute often to Paris for work but return here, to a little house on a courtyard in the middle of the old city on the banks of the Rhône River.  

[image error]Feeling groovy at the Hôtel l'Arlatan

We stayed at a hotel five minutes away, but nothing in Arles is very far. In fact, you can only lose your way for a few minutes before coming out to the main square or the Roman Arènes.

The town is pretty as a postcard and it's not surprising that Van Gogh found inspiration here, even in the psychiatric hospital where he was intermittently a patient.

The old town could have a Venice feel to it, if not for its vibrant real-life web of activity. Besides the school, there is the French photo festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles, every summer. There is a video school and a nurse’s training college. Recently the Luma Foundation, conceived and presided by the pharmaceutical heiress Maja Hoffmann, opened. In fact, according to Margaux, she owns much of the town, including our hotel. The new temple to contemporary art was built by, who else, Frank Gehry, and his tower now dominates the skyline like a bucking armadillo, after being injured by random windows.

Old and new in Arles

The minute you arrive in Arles, your pulse slows and your dopamine levels soar. The languid pace allows you to appreciate the narrow streets and old stone, encourages the flâneuse in you.  

On the outside I may have been strolling, but inside my neurotransmitters were in a frenzy. Arles reminded me so much of nearby Aix-en-Provence, where I lived for several months on a post-college adventure.

Even the air at this time of year, warm days and cool nights, brought back arriving in Aix early September with my friend Victoria. Towering plane trees shaded us from the sun during our first café lunch on the cours Mirabeau. We were drawn to the terrace by the bottle of olive oil on the table and were not disappointed. The tomatoes were the pulpiest and tastiest I’d ever put in my mouth. Unlike the watery, horizontally sectioned specimens of my youth, they were sliced vertically. I’ve been cutting mine top to bottom ever since.

A trip to the Saturday Arles market with William and Margaux triggered other memories of gustative epiphany, including the day Victoria and I bought our first fresh figs. Unable to wait until we got back to our one-room eyrie overlooking the statue of a wild boar on the place Richelme, we scurried behind the stand like Eve with the apple. Pulling out the squishy fruit from the paper bag, skins bursting at the seams, we thought the merchant had cheated us, taken advantage of foreign ingénues - until we bit into the sweet flesh, licked the syrupy juice from our fingers. The world was a different place when we returned to the market alleys and resumed our shopping.

The shadow of my past

The people we met, too, left their mark. There was the friend-of-a-friend cabinet maker Stephen, whose English father had decamped before he could learn the language. He invited us to supper our first evening. We ate ratatouille and drank red wine out of Pyrex glasses under the eaves next to his atelier with a group of his arty friends. They talked without interruption and laughed a lot. I understood almost nothing, felt stupid and hopelessly uncool, almost humiliated.

There was the high-minded couple, English Emma and French Nicolas. Over a lentil salad, he held forth on the superior French view of sex. After all, he said, we call an orgasm la petite mort, consider it a near-death experience.

Another English woman, Jane, a cousin of my oldest friend Helen, was an artist and the widow of a French painter of some renown. Though Jane was the age of my parents, her bohemian life mesmerised me, showed me a whole new way of being a grown-up. During the tour of her house on the hills outside Aix, she pointed out the beauty of the old roof tiles. They were irregularly sized, she said, because the roofers used to shape them on their thighs.  

After the market, William and Margaux made us a delicious seafood lunch of Camargue oysters, then shrimp with locally grown olives and tomatoes, that we ate under the awning of the small terrace at the top of their house.  

[image error]Local basil

That afternoon we squeezed into their 20-year old Panda and drove to la Camargue, the marshy, salty Rhône River delta area just south of Arles. It's a large nature reserve where Camargue horses roam and pink flamingos flourish. Maja's father Luc Hoffmann, an environmentalist and ornithologist, put his fortune to good use here (some also has gone to one of David's foundations, PONT). On a calm day, it is almost eerily peaceful.

Over three days - where they fed us again, guided us to the most charming corners, introduced us to their favourite restaurants - William and Margaux offered us a privileged slice of their Arles life.

When we left on Sunday, I was thinking how my four months in Aix had come to form the building blocks, the foundation of what a couple years later would become my life in France. And how here I was now visiting my son, just as cool as those people I’d admired decades ago. The full-circle feel of it was very gratifying.

A Room of My Own

Friday, 8 October

Something wonderful has occurred the last couple of weeks: for the first time in years—since we started living half-time in Berlin in 2013—I’ve got my old Paris rhythm back.

The beat is not complicated: reasonably uninterrupted days where I work mornings, and in the afternoon play piano, read and work a bit more. Somewhere along the line exercise is thrown into the mix.

I’ve complained before about the difficulties of finding the mental wide open spaces I need to write fiction. Returning full-time to France, i.e., no longer ferrying across the Rhine with Charon-like frequency, has helped. So has the pandemic; successive confinements allowed me to finish a long-languishing novel.

But that was in the Perche. Every time I’ve been in Paris for the last nine years, the pace has been too frantic. Or life events—the death of my mother and our dog Elsa (the inspiration for the original Paris-Berlin Diary), my own illness, the consuming project that is Tasha and a long renovation of our apartment here—have crowded the creative landscape. Plus, as David points out often, the writing of this blog, satisfying though it may be to produce, is another fortnightly impediment to fictional progress (he thus argues for a triweekly publication).  

When I first started writing fiction, I was stationed in the office I'd used for my salaried job with a foundation, a small room in the middle of our apartment. But after a year of constant interruptions—a phone call here, a load of laundry there, frequent requests that couldn't wait from one of our five children—it was clear I should have read Virginia Woolf with greater care. I needed a space that was physically separate from the family nerve centre, a room of my own.

Fortunately, many old Paris apartments come with chambres de service, rooms on the top floor of the building where the domestic help once lived. So we repainted and rewired ours and henceforth, every morning after walking the dog and getting the kids off to school, I would climb the back stairs to the white walls of this 10m2/100ft2 room.

Coming up here always feels like passing from one world to another, partly because the service stairs, according to Madame H, have not been repainted once in at least the 82 years since she was born here. To some the peeling paint and cracking walls might appear sinister...

...but to me, who is drawn to relics of the past, it is inspirational. I love, for example, the ancient sink and water heater that date from the room's former iteration.

[image error]

At first furnished exclusively with rejects from the apartment, including two jarring carpets placed side by side and a child’s mattress I used as an armchair, the room gained some dignity following a stint as storage space during the renovation of the flat. Being in home-improvement mode, I replaced the carpets and bought a real chair when the chambre was reinstated as my office.

It’s still a hodgepodge, but it’s a jumble that makes up me. There are my reference tomes and Paris books, including many about the city during the War, an era easy to evoke in my retro perch. On the wall over my desk are a couple of paintings by my friend Nathaële and the Nepalese prayer flags from Tala. There are photos and postcards, quotes related to writing (“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth,” for example, from Kurt Vonnegut) or the human condition ("The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster," David Hume).  

On the other side of the room is my collection of blue bottles, tellingly not enhanced for at least a decade, and the stack of Paris phone books, archeological artefacts that I consult when in need of a fictional name.

Returning here regularly and for unhurried hours these last weeks has felt like finding myself again. I have been reminded, too, how the room acts as an extended compartment of my brain, meaning that when I leave, thoughts linger, and the next day it's easier to pick up the thread, get beyond my self-imposed minimum of 500 words by lunch.

The room would undoubtedly have the same effect on anyone. The view from its window is a story in itself, a study in character and mood.

[image error]

And there's a feature right out of my recurrent dream in which a door is opened and a magical space revealed, in this case the building's rooftop...

...and a 380° view of the city. From here I watched Notre Dame burn...

...and the Eiffel Tower get swirled in smoke...

Has the fall-out from our moves and renovations finally settled? Will this re-found rhythm endure?

Maybe not, but I'll bask in it while it lasts.

Birthdays

Friday, 24 September

My birthday is in April, but I got my present late this year. Daughter Georgina and son Christopher, born on the 19th and 15th of September respectively, decided that they wanted to spend theirs together and chez nous. With brother William, plus partners, plus newly minted grand-daughter Mira thrown into the mix, it seemed I was the real beneficiary.

Partly due to Covid, it was the first time since Christmas 2018 (which included stepsons Nick and Alex, plus Maike, Victor and Fanny) that this configuration of our sprawling family had congregated in France, the country of their birth.

Christopher and Kerry, who married in June and moved from London to Bangor, Northern Ireland (one of those Covid-inspired moves you read about), arrived first. They were eager to see how things were going in the Perche. Touched by their interest, we agreed to a couple of days out there, even if that week the windows on one side of the house were boarded up while the masons deafeningly drilled off the old plaster...

No mufflers for our ears

...and if the other side was under assault by the landscapers with their diggers. It was like having Godzilla right outside our door...

To round out the noise, the carpenters were sawing window sills in the old part of the house.

Kerry, an architect, sketched our neglected boulangerie...

...and will help us figure out what to do with it, though I already know it will not be a pizza oven for rave parties, as William has suggested. Both C and K like to swim and made good use of the pool that I still have trouble believing is ours. We did a tour with Claire of the garden in progress.  

Haven't we talked enough about the garden?

Back in Paris, the others arrived. First Georgina, Amal and Mira from London. Mira met Tasha.

William, sadly sans Margaux, came up from Arles, where he moved a year ago from Paris (another one of those Covid-inspired moves you read about).

And we settled into four days of togetherness. I cooked a lot, doing my best to accommodate ever more diverging diets (vegan to vegetarian to pescatarian to omnivore).

I greedily babysat six-month old Mira so Georgina could work. Last time I saw my grand-child was in June, and though she was more sentient then than the post-partum first encounter in March, she was still a bit of a blob, albeit a smiling one.  

But a blob no more. She is now constantly moving, riveted by everything and everyone around her. On the verge of crawling, she gets up on all fours and rocks, moves one knee forward, before falling back down and rolling to her destination.

There was of course competition for her time. Christopher and Kerry gave her her first French lesson.

Her musical mother was keen to get instruction underway.

And David wanted to introduce her to the streets of Paris.

Les flâneurs

Our pantry sink came in handy after a messy dégustation of my purée de carottes.

As you can see, much of the long weekend revolved around the new member of the family, even if that was not to everyone's liking.

Grandpa Charles will protect me

It's now Saturday morning. I went to bed last night and got up today at 5, still unable to find the thread, any fabric of meaning to our happy family weekend, the every-day's-an-adventure world of my grand-daughter.

A few increasingly desperate hours later I set off with Tasha for our Saturday morning jog in the Tuileries and still nothing more than a few amorphous, disjointed thoughts sloshed around in my head.

Running up the ramp on the Jeu de Paume side, I made the detour I always make around Louise Bourgeois' series of bronze hands on granite plinths. I put my own hand on each of them, as I always do, but stopped midway.  

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), a French sculptor who settled in New York and an artist I much admire, had three sons. Motherhood was an obsessive theme; many of her works depict woman and child still linked by the umbilical cord because, she would say, the cord is never cut, between you and your mother, between you and your children. The hands are joined, superimposed, intermingled, down the generations. For better or for worse: the arms, after all, are stumps, cut off below the elbow, even at the wrist.

When Georgina and Christopher said they wanted to come 'home' for their birthdays, it was expressed with a certain hesitancy. All three of my grown children are perfectly aware that they have moved on to other 'homes', even if they continue to move house. But the stuff of childhood sticks. What they wanted, I think, was a return to the place of memory, the common history that is family. And that now, with Mira, includes handing some it down to her, the next generation.

As she was leaving, Georgina pronounced this the best birthday ever. I'm inclined to agree.  

Kerry's vegan bit of birthday crumble (photo by Christopher)