My heroes used to be poets, great actors, scientists. Now, they are the people walking smartly across the square in front of my house at 9am, baguettes tucked under their arms, like extras in a Truffaut film. There they go, hair brushed, neatly dressed, relaxed, cheerful, thrumming with art de vivre, their lives quietly under control. I often feel a little late for things, just a step behind. “Jesus Christ,” my husband says, “did we miss the rhythm of the day again?”
After decades of living in London, where I was used to being able to buy anything at any time of the day or night, this is a cultural change almost as profound as trying to go about my business in a second language. How do you plan your days around what look like the most heroically casual opening hours of nine to noon-ish, then two- or three-ish to seven-ish? I am constantly waiting for some crucial shop to reopen at two or three or four o’clock, or forgetting that the supermarket is closed on Sunday, then remembering that one of the Lidls might possibly be open on Sunday morning, merci à Dieu. I am constantly looking up what times things open, like a twitcher looking up a rare breed of bird. My pulse quickens if I see a neon NON STOP in the window of a pharmacy or tabac. And at the same time, I feel sorry for those staff who don’t get to have a nice long lunch…
And while we’re talking about the rhythm of the day, can we discuss bins for a minute? This is not something I ever thought I would write, as TAB (talks about bins) was always my appalling shorthand for a dullard. But in my new life, the detailed and excruciatingly correct letters from the council are my new confiture. This week, one arrived to tell us that our bin collection (“le rythme de collecte de votre bac gris ‘ordures ménagères’”) in the winter will be limited to once a week. The letter also advises that, because of the end-of-year celebrations, special collection points have been placed in all of the local dumps for our coquilles d’huîtres. This is very helpful, as in Hackney I never did know what to do with my surfeit of oyster shells.
I am quite resistant to change, but in the middle of our lives, in the middle of a pandemic, we threw everything up in the air and moved to a new country, almost on a whim. Superficially, it’s easy to buy into the idea that a Mediterranean life is all sunshine and less structure than our previous life in the city. In fact, life here comes with different structures, gentler but more complex ones that I’m not quite used to yet. I’ll get there.
In the meantime I may just start buying two loaves at once and stashing one in the freezer for those times when I miss the rhythm of the day: no panic, no regrets; just the deep, deep peace of the double bread.
