Lost in France

Sometimes you read 'The morning dawned bright and clear'. But it was luminous, yellow-tinted, sweet-smelling. Silent and still. It promised a day as glorious yet unbearable in it's heat as all those we had known in the previous two months. But now at just after seven in the morning, it was golden light, soft shadows, bird song, deer on the stubble fields. A white sky fading into blue. The swell of the crop fields, their washed out greens, greys, golds, passed us slowly as we drove through the lanes. We sliced through hamlets with honey-stone walls, the houses and churches hiding behind sentinels of green cyprus, pine, oak, walnut. Dark green or sky blue shutters, open now, sucking in the cooler air of the night and the dawn, but soon to be closed until evening returned. Silence. No-one but ourselves on the lanes. Rural France playing it's clever trick. Pretending no-one lives here.

Go into the cities. Go on. Tarbes, Toulouse, Pau. Leave the lamplight for the neon light for the sodium light. You'll find people there. People to befriend, talk with, laugh with, drink with. People who will help you to believe in yourself. Who will laugh at your jokes. A slap on the back. Have another drink. You look nice today. Is that a new shirt? You know Nick don't you? Interplay. Intercourse. Back in the herd again. Safety in numbers. And you can tell me I'm great and I'll tell you and we'll smile and laugh. Same time tomorrow?

Now come out into the country if you think you're hard enough. No lights. No shops. No people.....no people. Real aloneness. Now, stare it in the face. In the sky. In the field. Stare at the closed-shuttered no-farmered farmhouse. Stare at the empty road as it snakes over the empty hill, around the empty bend. And then another. And another. And as you stand there staring, feel yourself absorbed, dissolved, disappearing into this bucolic. Becoming part of the story, a saga that plays itself out year after year, century after century, oblivious of your presence, mindless of you and your bit-part.

The red kites soar, the buzzards mew, the wind whispers in the cyprus or howls round the crumbling stone walls of the abandoned chapel and pushes the scudding clouds away from the pyrenees. You barely have a speaking part and then you're gone. Off-stage. You weren't the starring role after all. How hard are you now?