“Sometimes just existing is sufficient.”
✨ Henry Miller
Have you had one perfect day in your life? Or perhaps one day which wasn’t perfect at the time, but has lodged as such in your memory? Hopefully you’ve had many.
As I age, I find entire months can very occasionally meld into a memory of a perfect day. Take one housesit I did in SW France in 2019, with this wonderful 12-year-old boxer, Bella, a daft and stinky darling. I was there for about three months from spring into summer, and again for a few months in autumn. (I was supposed to be there all winter, too, but the homeowners decided it was cheaper to pay people to foster the dog and check in on the property occasionally. Or so I assume).
It was in no way an ideal sit, for reasons I won’t fully go into. Some involve run-ins with local wildlife, some the heatwave during my final week there in July. It was well into the 40s, and I had to perfect the house, garden, and pool over those days before heading to an even-hotter Madrid for another sit, while living with one weak air-conditioner, rising by 4 or 5am to walk Bella before the sun came up and it was quickly too hot for her. It’s astonishing to me now that I didn’t get heatstroke or worse.
And yet. My overall memories of those months before the shite really hit the proverbial wind device in 2020 have melted into one long day of perfect pace, flow, company, and air temperature in a glorious landscape. A part-spring-part-autumn day during which I could live life largely on my own terms, have an ideal balance of movement and iPad-based creativity, and feel in flow with the universe itself.
We arise early, but not too early, and pretty much go straight out on a walk along the road-then-path along the ridge on which our home stands. The sun is shining but the air has a refreshing crispness and there’s a hint of morning mist. We walk past the ever-curious cows, a long row of violently purple irises in front of a low stone wall, the vet’s house and her funny little bedraggled dogs. Past houses, barns, fields, sheds of farming equipment, tall trees full of corvids the hunters haven’t aimed at. The tarmac turns into a dirt path, the homes become vineyards to the right, oak woods to the left.
Sometimes we go down a path to the left and visit a cluster of oaks that form a doorway to the faerie world, a small and eerie pine wood across from them, then on down a meandering, brushy path that sometimes follows the railway line from Cordes-Vindrac to Aurillac/Toulouse. But the climb back up from where that path leads is steep, so more often we keep going, around the oak woods at the end of the ridge and back home through them on the other side of the ridge. There are ridges like fingers on a hand before you reach Cordes-sur-Ciel winding up its miniature mountain.
Lichen, fritillaries, pine cones, grapes, amber oak leaves, red vine leaves, green oak leaves, moss, sunflowers, an abandoned and half-swallowed car and cooker covered in rain drops or shining rustily in the early sunshine. Spring and autumn blend together in memory. The walk can last two hours some days. Bella and I turn right as we approach the curving end of the ridge and into our favourite bit.
The path becomes more winding, and passes through a cathedral of oaks, their leaves scattering light and shadow onto our path. One day Bella will disappear into the woods, and reappear chasing a wild boar that’s chasing a giant hare, all passing before me like a child’s shadow toy. The speed of her, at 12, with those dodgy hips!
But not today. Today we walk on, and I breathe in all the green and gold, sending it psychically to my ailing Dad, imagining it leaping lightly through his tired veins. We pass a field of waving barley covered in thousands of ladybirds, and Bella leaps through the blades playfully like a much-younger dog. A tourist hot air balloon from nearby Cordes-sur-Ciel passes low through this meeting place of ridges, startling us with a loud and sudden blart from its burner. Stick figures wave and I wave back; Bella stops gambolling and pants at them.
We carry on around, sometimes sticking to the path, sometimes cutting through stones and trees and rows of gnarled grapevines, until we return home. We stop for a moment, sending love to the light and the day. Today isn’t the day I pry baby hares from Bella’s mouth. We wave to Monsieur et Madame Cantaloupe, the kind neighbours below our oaky queendom. I pick flowers from the orchard-meadow.
It’s time for breakfast. A tin of sardines for Bella’s every meal. I count my days in sardine tins, never-not wincing at the smell. Coulommiers on toast with Bonne Maman confiture figues et violette and strong coffee for me, enjoyed sitting on the doorstep. This isn’t the morning that there’s an adder taking up my perch on the step. I go in and deal with dishes, looking over at the village. This isn’t the morning I hear a louder-than-usual gunshot, and soon learn from the Cantaloupes that an elderly man had accidentally killed his oldest friend while they were hunting in a vineyard I’d been looking over to. I go up to the loft and put on The Love Boat; for some reason I write well with it on. I get close to finishing my first novel, Back in 5, while Bella fools about and tries to be a lap dog. Sardiney drool and you weigh a ton, Bella: sorry, but non.
At lunchtime, Gilles comes up the long driveway in a navette full of elderly French ladies I half understand, and takes us to Cordes to shop. Five Euros return. The last time I housesat around here I had to walk it, hauling my groceries up a steep winding path up a mini-valley for over an hour. I love Gilles. He’s also very nice. On Fridays Fast Eddie drives up in a van he turns into a shop by folding a side panel into a counter, and I have fresh pastries at lunchtime, but not today. I get a weeks’ worth of supplies at Carrefour then enjoy a noisette and a treat at the patisserie before Gilles takes me home. Bella is over the moon I’m back, especially as I bring her a treat, too.
In the afternoon, I make memes for Twitter, and Jon Cryer follows me back, and his being political there makes me political too, and gains me a following, which 2-3 years later sees me writing about politics, and 3-4 years later I’ll be launching a newspaper for Wales as a result. But I don’t know any of that yet. This afternoon I’m creating a poster and programme for a director friend in Chiang Mai, gratis. This will prepare me to have collage in my life as a literal lifeline the following year, and making collage for a Hollywood star and a beloved 80s singer and other paid art commissions that help me through extreme poverty and despair. But I don’t know that then, either.
This is one perfect post, and when I think about your future memoir, oh, how lovely it will be.
Wonderful and evocative. You took me there and I love it. Left me longing for when I’m mobile again and feel the colours and the air and gasp at the beauty of the fritillaries. Let alone the taste of those French pastries 🙏🌟🌟🌟