Help! I’m a prisoner in a French cliché! They’re slowing my internal clock and force-feeding me leisure the way they fatten local geese for foie gras. I didn’t plan it this way. Normally, the minute my suitcase hits hotel-room soil I achieve wi-fi and get to work. But they seem to have hijacked my brain and marinated it in herbs de Provençe. I’ve lost all interest in the story I was doing on the French wine market-share crisis, because, well, there’s dinner to plan.
I’m lodged in the sort of moss-paved stone farmhouse whose perfect balance of breathtaking views and broken-down plumbing makes travel writers salivate. As French houseguests begin drifting in, I imagine a nice, grisly murder, after which we all gather in the parlor and banter wittily until the future convict among us (perhaps Monsieur Moutard with le candelabra?) is forced to confess.
But that would be England. In France, you gather only to go on strike or to eat. Their protest muscles exhausted from last week’s vote against the EU constitution, my copains have opted for the latter. Each morning we huddle over pressed coffee and fresh croissants to plan the day’s attack on the nearest outdoor market. (Except Monday, when everything is closed and Wednesday, when the butcher won’t have the cut of meat you need, and from noon to four on other days, when everything folds up for lunch but no matter because a restaurant could be persuaded to sell you mushrooms.) On site, we deploy our special-forces units, experts in sausage reconnaissance and tomato-ry. An untrained civilian would be lost amidst copious local specialties made mostly from the wrong parts of animals; snouts, bladders and bone scrapings, for instance, bound together in lard.
Supplies secured, we return and commandeer the kitchen, chopping, sautéing, moving a table out under the trees and uncorking bottles. Domestic KP may still be woman’s province in America, but the French kitchen is genderless. Peeling cucumbers and stuffing truffle slices under the skin of a pigeon are performed with equal zest and expertise by both sexes. Women also eat and drink wine with gusto, but then must smoke like chimneys to stay thin, as going all sportif would be simply too crass for words.
Lunch proceeds at an escargot’s pace. Everything is eaten with knife and fork, including the sort of food God built for the hand, such as pickles, peaches and pizza. I, trained to eat behind the wheel and at the computer - as crumbs wedged between these keys can attest – probably look like a monkey, especially since a magnum of ADD medication could not keep me at table as long as they sit talking. When at last they rise, bien-sur, there is still coffee to be made and sipped.
By then, the planned-on afternoon excursion – canoeing on the Dordogne - seems a terrible effort to contemplate, although it would have required little more than steering and watching castles float by. But we need to digest, no? People drift off to the pool, or under a tree with a book. Wasn’t I going to work this afternoon? Go for a run? I’m sooo sleepy. Perhaps just a little nap. I drift off, wondering lazily how “mañana” managed not to be a French word.
A few hours pass and then, mon dieu, it’s time to plan dinner. Another trip to town for cheeses and perhaps a little Muscadet as aperitif with the local blubber. One night my pulse quickens as I sense a possible story. At the table are owners of chateaus in both Napa and Bordeaux and their wines are dueling it out in front of us. There’s some talk of this constituting a sort of summit, a step towards world peace, but the idea dies away with the far more deeply interesting appearance of custard and poached pears for dessert.
My son, who worked at Club Med, used to describe guests arriving work-obsessed, argumentative and too cool to join the nightly line-dances. Part of his job was to help them mellow out, turn off the palm pilot and start volunteering for skits; in short: to “Achieve Med.” I’ve certainly achieved something here. I’ll think of a clever name for it but first there’s a thing I’ve got to do with potatoes and olives. After my nap.
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