In fact at lunch there were sardines grilled on the grill outside, while the rain fell and fell and fell today. Mowmy rang this afternoon, I took the phone into the study so I could lie on the covered bench, and she said, “What have you been doing?” “Eating,” I said, and I could smell they were making coffee in the kitchen. I don’t remember now if I also told her there is dessert at every meal. Sometimes dessert is a square of Lindt, but sometimes dessert is a big blue bowl of sweet red fruits served with fresh cream from the Tuesday market at Tréguier. The other day, after dinner, there was the Breton delicacy called a kouign amann, which was layers of sweet crunchy business. “This is butter cooked in butter,” Georges said, “and then dusted with sugar.” I believe I said: “On y va.”

The butter, OH.

It is salty and somehow sweet at the same time. You put it on a bit of crusty baguette and you find you’ve forgotten the jam but it doesn’t matter. Claire, the other day, serving up a bowl of cauliflower and sliced potatoes, was telling us about cooking cauliflower in the microwave oven. Put the cauliflower in a plastic bag, she said, and poke holes in the bag. La la la, (I forget what exactly she said, because I have a mind like a sieve, a mind like a plastic bag with holes poked in it, anyway the point is), she said, and the cauliflower’s done. “And then you toss it in a pan with butter,” Georges said. “Well,” she said, “et puis je le rechauffe avec du beurre.”

So:

“Eating,” I said to Momwy, and she seemed to expect more. “Sometimes we walk,” I said, magnanimously, and she said, “You go jogging?” Clearly something wrong with the line. “It is raining anyway, Mowmy,” I said, reasonably, “we are not going to go walking anytime today.” “You are telling me it is going to rain all afternoon?” she said, and I said, “Yup.” “Eh,” she said, “it is just like London.”



Truly, it is just like London here, except not at all, and I don’t wake at half-past seven, alarm or no. It is quiet at night here, and dark so that the first night I opened my eyes to the nothing, and thought I had gone blind. There are no clocks anywhere. That first morning I slept till Claire put the music on, very loud, downstairs. We stumbled down to coffees, to juices, to fresh crêpes from the local boulangerie. It was just after one in the afternoon.



Just like not in London, we take the boat out onto the open blue on a nice day. Days like that, when the blue stretches out and out to kiss the horizon, you wonder how the raindrops fell all day from the leaves in the garden, nonstop, the day before. We sat, me and Claire, half-in, half-out of the sun on the flat rocks, there, through the pine trees, while the boys cut through the water with haughty sails.



Meanwhile, I’d brought all these books, of course, these heavy tomes I figured I’d otherwise fall asleep reading on the Tube, but instead I am working my way through the collection of Tintins at the house. Tonnerre ! I am learning to say, when something dastardly happens, or, if the something is more dastardly than normal, Tonnerre de tonnerre ! I have learned Sapristi ! From Le Lotus Bleu I have learned Mille milliards de samouraïs !