Me + Ground = Brakes

It’s funny, I think the last time I felt this useless was when I was still at school. As you grow-up you tend to shy away from things that you aren’t naturally good at and concentrate on your talents. Thus you feel like a competent and skilful person. This is why I have spent my life acting, writing, telling jokes and playing with computers. Now, for reasons that momentarily escape me, I have plunged myself into an environment where everything I am required to do is something that I have no facility for. Building, destroying, speaking French, tidying … the list goes on and on and today came to include skiing. The surprising thing about all this is that, bar the odd moment of introversion, I’m loving it. I rejoiced as I struck the icy ground again and again with my face, I marvelled at my speed and my inability to even begin to control it. I sailed through the air with a big grin plastered across my face, a tiny patch of red against all that majestic, heart-stopping, tumbling whiteness. For four hours I was a mass of legs, skis, snow, poles and blind faith, parts of me flying off in all directions, jubilant and terrified and alive. Later on I drilled holes, bent my protesting body into complex pieces of origami to access stubborn screws and cut ragged lines through various pieces of wood with a jig saw. I’m not perfect, I’m not even close to competent but I’m beginning to suspect that may be okay.

Local Herbs

Strange how one day can bring so many highs and lows. Yesterday’s delights ranged from wine tasting at a beautiful vineyard to smashing a hole through the floor of the house. Adrian was not in the best of moods and a serious water leakage did nothing to lighten his mood. Today we put our dinner on at 8am and slow cooked it above the fire – beef, mushrooms, tomatoes, local herbs and fromage blanc. As I sat eating it on the common land outside the house I was overcome by a intense feeling of well being. Either life is good or Adrian isn’t telling me precisely what the ‘local herbs’ are. Either way I missed Laura and had to text her immediately.

Ugh!

Ugh!

Taillet

Since I arrived in Taillet I’ve had this feeling that I’m going to do something incredibly stupid or harmful. Something that’s going to irreversibly damage a precious object. I had no idea whether that object would be something of sentimental value, something of financial value or indeed Adrian and me. Well I can stop worrying now because it turned out to be an antique shelf that Adrian had been saving to put in the bathroom. One swift smack from a mallet later and it was la poubelle bound with no hope of repair. This moment of horror was compounded by Adrian going mental in the corridor with a string of expletives and, perhaps only in my mind’s eye, a little dance of frustration. I can understand his irritation, don’t send a writer to do a man’s job.

Our situation is wonderfully volatile, constantly surprising and extremely interesting. In some ways we are such different people and in many others, so similar. I have extremely vivid memories of the past few days and record them here, in no particular order, so they will stay with me.

• An early morning monologue that neatly encapsulated all our immediate neighbours, village gossip and local topography. This while I was still tucked up in bed and two thirds asleep. Half-remembered banter (ADRIAN) You shouldn’t worry about scorpions, a sudden, loud movement and they’ll just scuttle off … (ME) Does that work with Adrians too?
• My insistence we call ourselves Team Chris and the subsequent adoption of an entire ethos. Team Chris means embracing diversity. Team Chris means eating a different animal every day.
• Eating at Jean-Paul’s house, a French chef who looks like he stepped out of the pages of Asterix the Gaul. He had a cute little girl called Adele who kept sticking her tongue out at me when no-one else was looking. I guess I was the only other person in the room with a comparable grasp of the French language.
• Slow cooking a great steaming pot of Sausage Casserole on top of the fire and filling it with turnips and carrots and celery and tomatoes. Feeling proud and happy as we sat and chatted- like I’d achieved something worthwhile.
• Listening to Adrian playing his guitar with a skill bourn of experience and passion.
• The view from the front of the house. Breathtaking in a literal sense, it pushes the air out of your lungs in an appreciative sigh.

The region has been an inspiration to so many great artists and innovators, I don’t feel worthy somehow of the gifts it bestows on my imagination. There are subtle humours in the air, I tune into them and am lost, useless for long moments. Standing there smiling amidst the dust and the banging and Adrian’s frustrated cries. I enjoy the work and I enjoy these quiet times, the precious seconds between hammer blows where something clicks and the world lights up like a solar flare. I think of the books I’m going to write, I think of the stories I’m going to tell. I think of her, knowing this place effects her in exactly the same way.

We tear through this world, we splinter and break through structures and modes of behaviour that have stood for hundreds of years. Sometimes to make them better, sometimes to destroy them forever. Stone walls, shattered porcelain, a kiss on the cheek, wood spitting and cracking open in the flames. I wonder what tomorrow will bring?

Teapot

I regret not being able to speak French. The idea of shutting people out, of never getting to know them because of a minor linguistic technicality is irritating to say the least. The village is a world spun from history and isolation. There is magic here, as real and potent as the shifting indigo horizons.

The work has begun and, as predicted, I am as useful as a chocolate teapot. Today we cleared the kitchen and screeded the floor with a rubbery cement substance that I couldn’t pronounce properly. I was mostly in charge of mixing said substance and we’d been going no more than ten minutes before my hand fell off and dropped into the bucket. Not literally of course.

The Francophile and the Poet

There was a sense of detachment. A feeling of letting go as we slipped off the beaten track and were swallowed by the foothills of the mountains. It was an evening wreathed in mist and something of the cold otherness caught in the back of my throat. Adrian was firing on all cylinders, rattling out stories like one of those stock reader machines you see in old movies. Colourful tales of village life tripped out of him like ticker-tape, he would pause for a moment, frown and then suddenly launch into another story without even bothering to finish the last one. All delivered with the kind of wild eyed enthusiasm that picks you up and sweeps you along with it. He reminds me of her, I hear her in the turn of phrase, the passion for language and living. Both of them, they don’t feel the need to insulate themselves from any of it, life, they throw themselves headlong into the chaos and grab great handfuls of the raw, precious stuff of existence. Outside the landscape was glorious and ancient and impassive. I thought about all the devices I use to stand once removed from it all – the camera obscurer of my mind that picks up images and turns them inside out and upside down. Sometimes I’m too busy turning beautiful moments into works of art to really live in them. The window felt cold against my fingertips, Adrian pointed out a deer as it darted across the road. In the distance I saw a bell tower and it was exactly how I imagined it would be.

Later, lying within the crumbling stone walls of the house, trying to stretch myself thinly enough to fill the room with my presence, I feel such potential in my fingertips. The very same fingers that pressed at the indifference of the car window now feel alive with power. This house is a battery, it stores up potential, it hums with echoes of things to come. It changes and grows unrecognisable. Like a child. I feel safe, I feel exposed, I feel lost, I feel inspired. I feel far from her and close to her heart. I am expectant. I can’t wait to feel at home.