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?

The Gascon kitchen

Nadine is slim, almost petite, with smiling eyes that look to you not through you and always giving not asking. Her strappy floral dress hangs comfortably on her almost childlike frame. Narrow shouldered, small breasted, with curling shoulder length sun-streaked hair. I follow her through the the old oak door, out of the glaring full sun and into the cool dark of the kitchen, one of only two habitable rooms in this rambling gascon stone house. She bends to take a beer from the fridge and gives it to me. The short dumpy green glass is cool in my hot hand. We talk, still standing. Nothing much. We go over old conversations, well-worked topics in the way that we all re-instate and re-affirm commonalities. A way of saying 'We are friends. We are on the same side aren't we?' I think we are. At one point, Nadine turns to me, eyes bright, passionately, she says 'I love my kitchen'. I say nothing but smile, embarrassed in the moment by her enthusiasm and exclamation. But the thing is, I love Nadine's kitchen too:

It is a perfect rectangle. The old oak door, bitten and gnarled, is bottom right on a short side. The immediate effect, as you cross the dusty stone and concrete slab from the vast grassy space outside is one of dark. Of walking into a Vermeer painting. The white light that strokes and spots the interior walls and shelves and enormous dark wood table comes through a small squarish window on the same side as the door. So it's ill-lit then. Or maybe well-lit. The room isn't large by french farmhouse standards so the gaping space that burns metre length logs and takes in almost the entire wall opposite is overwhelming. The table, assembled from left-over doors, fills the rest of the kitchen. It leaves only enough room to walk around to your seat with a little extra on one long side where the cooker and fridge and a motley melange of wooden planks and old chests of drawers serve as Nadine's working area.
The sink is original, or at least original enough. Deep white china, it sits under the only window, which is wide open. The window paint has peeled away to nothing. There is only a cold tap, trapped against the failing beige render by it's lead pipework.
Caroline's kitchen isn't like this. Caroline is incredulous. Caroline calls Nadine's kitchen 'primitive'. Nadine has no splash back tiles fixed to the walls, chosen in colours to match the base unit doors. Nadine has no tiles. She has no base units. Nadine's walls are mixed-up red brick, stone, concrete, old plaster, new mortar, who knows, who cares.
Nadine makes dinner for everyone. Everyone who comes in dusty from the vegetable garden, stinking from the horse stables, red and slow from drinking beer under the magnolia tree. Sometimes she lays a cloth first, embroidered, lightly crumpled, before placing bone-handled knives, like crucifixes, carefully, at their settings. Nadine, walking slowly around the table, her lips moving silently as she lays the names of each of her people. Each place laid with love for all the people she will feed. Flowers, weeds, pulled from somewhere below the house wall, pushed into a jug at the centre. Pull up a chair or drag one in from outside. Put your elbows on the table and talk across it. Breath down. Smile. Relax. Nadine will put food on the table. You can depend on it.