French Letter: Another hectic week in Retirement Central

Monday: Arrived back from Paris on the Ouigo Express at the beginning of the week, a sleek double-decker that whisks us from the Gare Montparnasse to Guingamp in central Brittany in little more than three hours. I have shelled out for First Class on our return trip so that we find ourselves perched high above the passing countryside in seats more comfortable than those from Ikea in Brest that currently do duty in our new extension. 

In the row immediately in front, two strangers, both I would say in their early forties, have bonded in a remarkably quick time. They had boarded separately and, having nodded their bonjours, immediately set up their offices, laptops and smartphones, in anticipation of a working journey.

But by the time we reach Rennes, they are laughing and joking, and twenty minutes after that, with Saint-Brieuc the next stop, they are leaning into each other, exchanging confidences. My guess is that a dinner date is on the cards, but they could, of course, both be married and merely contemplating an affair. 

Tuesday: Our friends Mike and Trina, from Wiltshire, are moving house in France. They have exchanged their two-bedroom cottage in Plusquellec, not far from us, for a larger property in Verteuil-sur-Charente, 300 miles south, dominated by the Chateau de Verteuil, home since the twelfth century to the La Rochefoucauld family. 

You will recall, I am sure, that the most famous of les Rochefoucaulds was Francis VI, the seventeenth-century Prince de Marcillac, author of a famous volume of moral maxims. The Prince’s observations, such as that below, could usefully be absorbed not only by Emmanuel Macron as he seeks to rekindle the regard once briefly shown to him by French voters, but by the remaining candidates for the Tory leadership. 

I have virtuous sentiments, good inclinations, and so strong a desire to be a wholly good man that my friend cannot afford me a greater pleasure than candidly to show me my faults. Those who know me most intimately, and those who have the goodness sometimes to give me the above advice, know that I always receive it with all the joy that could be expected, and with all reverence of mind that could be desired. 

Well … quite. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

More immediately pressing, Mike and Trina are doing the move themselves, which requires my wife and me to help them load up their ten-tonne truck. Exhausting work carried out beneath a pitiless sun. But we manage it, somehow. Our reward? Trips in future to the Charente, where the temperature next week could hit as high as 40 degrees. 

Wednesday. Market Day in Callac, our nearest “big” town, is sweltering. According to Méteo France, the heat in the afternoon will be intense, though less Hellish than in Gascony and Provence, where wildfires are burning out of control.

The Café de la Place is en fete, with umbrellas shading every table. We buy butter, yoghurt and crème fraiche from the young chap who runs a bio – organic – farm somewhere close-by; Italian ham and cheese from Florence (who I notice is pregnant again); and poultry from an always cheerful fellow who tells us in his intermittent, but insistent English that he has sold out of chickens and – désolé – can only offer us a guinea fowl. 

It turns out, though, that the guinea fowl is excellent. 

Thursday. It’s Bastille Day, which means the big military parade in Paris on the telly, complete with detachments from the former East Bloc, giving Macron a chance to strut his stuff as President and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. It goes off without a hitch. Even the pompiers, whose job is to put out fires, turn up for the occasion carrying automatic weapons, unlike the Regiment of Engineers, who march past with axes over their shoulders. 

I am tasked by Mike and Trina to check if they have left a cool bag full of food for their journey to the Charente sitting in the sun outside their old front door. I get in the car to rescue the cool bag but am stymied for more than half an hour by a set of roads blocked off to enable a cycle race to go by.

In any case, when I finally make it, it is to discover that the bag is inside the house, which is, of course, locked. We don’t attend the feu d’artifice next to the lake at midnight because we have forgotten it was on, and anyway our feet are sore from working in the garden. 

Friday. We awaken to another glorious day, grateful not to have been disturbed by the music from the Vieilles Charrues rock festival taking place ten miles or so down the road. The festival, which can attract as many as 200,000 revellers, many of them dressed in mud, is recovering from Covid and this year’s 30th-anniversary edition is muted – though not literally. Tonight’s lineup includes a band called Catastrophe and another with the unappealing name, Dirtyphonics Live.

I realise too late that today is my wife’s birthday. But I recover and promise her lunch or dinner to remember at a venue yet to be determined. Neither of us is big on birthdays, so my dereliction of duty is forgiven, if not forgotten. I resolve, as always, to do better next year.