There is a thing they say here when there is a chance of blue, and it is “Regardez, la culotte de gendarme.” Look, they say, pointing at the patch of blue in the sky, a policeman’s underpants. The other day Claire, who keeps an eye out for a promise of gorgeousness, tried to convince us the clouds would clear. “Y’a la culotte de gendarme, là,” she said, and, following the line of her finger, we squinted into the sky. “Là,” Olive said, “c’est plutôt le string de gendarme.”

This weekend, however, the weather has been bliss for city visitors. There were jams and ciders and piggy bits to be had at the Saturday market in Penvénan, and then, back home, lunch at the blue table in the garden. We had a full house this weekend, sisters, cousins, all; Marie in a striped shirt, Laurence with her blond hair held in place with a pencil, Christophe who carried the baby on his shoulders, Samia laughing and pretty, Maïa reaching for the dandelions.



We took rue des Dunes down to the beach, we lounged on great flat rocks, we were sea lions in roses and stripes, the sun seeped into our skin and made us lazy. Claire had brought chocolate. Olive found a prawn, and then a one-armed crab. I lay till a cramp settled in my arm, and then I went to the water’s edge. The rocks there are raggier, craggier. The tide was coming in.

Sunday the picnic on the beach, by the bay of pebbles. We climbed the slippery slope to the top of the cordon of smooth stones. From the wrong side of the wall, the cordon looks like a cordon. From the top of the cordon, the stones slope down again on the other side to a white beach, to water blue and calm and clear. “Oh,” I said, and I said: “Wow.”

The picnic unfurled, from an old Picard surgelés bag: rillettes d’oie, pâté au poivre vert, oeufs dur et mayonnaise, machin de légumes, on and on, the baguettes, the pots of crème au chocolat, the yoghurts, the selection of Lindt. We cast no shadows; the sun was on our heads.



I was peering into a rock pool later, while Georges pointed out the shrimp, the skittering crabs, the shy fish. Georges knows things, he wears his glasses halfway down his nose, he fixes model boats on a rainy afternoon. He pried berniques off the rocks with a Swiss army knife to show me the gloopy, sucking beings inside. He overturned a large rock to find a delicate, many-armed anemone, green with purple points on the end. With a small stone, he gently cracked open the shell of a hermit crab (le bernard ermite, they call them, imagine!, Hermit Bernard) and then presented Bernard with a new home. “Regarde,” he said, and I squatted to watch the crab move in. One pincer, two, and the creature popped his head in, tight. He was probably already preparing afternoon tea for a hearty housewarming.