Continental Drift

I’d taken the car in for its annual service and with a couple of hours to fill I strolled up to the café in the square. Elbowing its way through the wispy clouds, the mid-morning sun was ricocheting off the roof of the little cinema and bathing the street in a polaroid effect of deepened colours. It was a scene laid out for the artist’s eye. I sat down at a pavement table, ordered a coffee, and opened the book I’d brought to pass the time. But something made me stop. I took a breath and just looked around. I closed my book.

“Stop and smell the roses,” goes the saying (or in this case the coffee). It's so easy, I find, to slip into life becoming a continual ‘To do’ list, each daily task mentally ticked off followed by “OK, what’s next?” If unchecked it can become absurdly regimented, “Drop car at garage; walk to café; read book”. But hitting ‘pause’ for a moment brought awareness of what I would have entirely missed if I’d been reading.

Directly opposite, for example, a chap was painting the front of his shop from a set of stepladders he must have bought around the time Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest. Nearby was a delivery driver simultaneously smoking, holding a phone conversation and unloading boxes with one hand; best of all, sauntering along on my side of the street - a reward, I felt, for paying attention – was an exotically dressed lady with a (real) parrot on her shoulder.

Settling into this new awareness, I examined an elaborate balcony with its intricate curlicues of wrought iron; I saw how the paved area in front of the cinema had been designed to accommodate a lone tree (possibly a catalpa but I’m no expert) – how many times had I walked or driven past this grand specimen, oblivious to its presence? I noted the fancy shutters on an adjacent house crying out for repainting, the vibrant geraniums in a window box on the floor below, and now the ancient bicycle leaning against a railing close to my table – how had I not noticed this as I sat down? When my second coffee arrived I still hadn’t opened my book.

Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars since Mrs W and I made the move to live here. Of the thirteen addresses I have occupied in my life, only two of which I have held longer than this one, nowhere has felt more like home.

The immediate sense of connection we felt on the first of our countless holidays over the years still holds true; we would be nowhere else. Of course there are the eccentricities like restaurants inexplicably closed when you turn up for lunch, speed bumps the same height as our car and (oh, the horror) andouillette sausages. Plus the constantly marauding moles, of which there are said to be 50 million in France, many of them not in our garden. But at times like this, ensconced at my table next to the old bike with my coffee and the aroma of fresh croissants wafting from somewhere (possibly my imagination – I was winging it now), I could almost feel a little bit French. Call me Monsieur Blanc. There is an additional bonus to living here in that I love the feeling of being more European; I am - one could say, if one were so inclined - happily in continent. Don’t panic, this isn’t yet another antiBrexit rant, (although I do have a large selection in stock if you’re interested). It’s just that the defiant insularity apparently ingrained in our British DNA somehow passed me by (I never got the flag-waving gene either). In its place I harbour an inclination towards community and cooperation, not to mention a fear of the alternative.

Of the thirteen addresses I have occupied in my life, only two of which I have held longer than this one, nowhere has felt more like home

Living in a beautiful part of France with kind neighbours and pretty much everything we need is as good as it gets. In a world defined by gaping inequality, we are truly the luckiest of the lucky.

Adopting this mantle of detached observer while feeling quietly pleased to be a part of a quintessentially French scene, I felt distinctly - brace yourself, I’m going to throw in the word ‘insouciant’. However, such aloofness encourages introspection. I mentally lit a Gauloises and with a shrug as Gallic as I could manage, reflected on the eight years which have now passed

Thus, even without the sensory prompts of the artist’s ambience and the allure of croissants in the café sunshine, I vow to regularly pause my daily tasks and step away from the ‘To do’ list. Just to slow down and breathe. “Look around. Smell the roses, taste the coffee”, I will admonish myself. “But don’t ever order the andouillette.”