France

Considering the subject of compatibility, experienced British expats in France maintain that a French man and an English woman might work, but rarely the other way around. Anecdotal evidence bears this out. The English chap, for example, who came to look at the septic tank has a long-term French partner who once broke his arm during a domestic dispute. This mildest, most liberal-minded of men lives alone in a mountain refuge whenever feasible. He also has a part-time job as a tour guide in the Far East. I am currently transitioning to a woman for urgent medical reasons. Force of habit, however, leads me to consider the French women I meet every day in this Provençal village from the point of view of a man.

There are several cave houses built into the cliff. Ours is the highest and can be reached only by a precipitous footpath with a lot of puffing and panting. The postbox is at the foot of the path, but occasionally the postman carries up something or other that needs to be signed for. When you go to the door to answer his knock, you find him doubled over, his hands on his knees, pouring with sweat, gasping pitifully, unable to speak. Guests likewise. The path up to the house is a public footpath that is part of a tourist trail called ‘Visit the Grottos’. One pays €2 at the tourist information office down in the town and in return you get a map with a dotted line on it showing you where to go.

I regained consciousness on a trolley in a recovery ward. A masked porter wheeled me from there back to my two-bed room on the fifth floor. When I’d left the room earlier, the bed next to the window was vacant. Now it was occupied. Lying on his back under a blanket, his face half covered by a surgical mask, was an old man. On the floor under his bed was a pair of Adidas ‘Superstar’ tennis shoes. The word ‘Superstar’ was in gold lettering. The old man lay rigid, as if bearing pain or discomfort patiently. Through the window the sky above Marseille continued a resolute blue, as though cloud were a meteorological impossibility.

At dawn, starving, I drove to a commercial laboratory in the town centre where five phials of blood were taken from my arm. I was then handed a plastic jar and a refreshing wipe and directed to the nearest unisex lavatory to give a urine sample (mid-stream). Then a nurse stuck a long cotton bud up my nose as far as it would go and twiddled it this way and that. Blood, urine and Covid tests were preparatory to a hospital admission for a procedure involving a general anaesthetic. Then I drove home and ate a kipper for breakfast. While I was eating, Catriona stuck a hypodermic needle in my upper arm and injected me with a flu jab she’d bought at the village pharmacy — the last one in the shop.

We bums find ourselves sought after at this time of year to lend a hand with the olive harvest. So this week I’ve been standing on a tarpaulin in a sunny field combing olives off olive branches. It’s a good year for olives. The trees are laden and the work is pleasantly monotonous. The minimal level of thought needed to accomplish the task shuts down the internal Red Army choir of negative thoughts that normally drowns out the competition, offering the mind a holiday. In the mornings we combed to the sound of birds twittering in the trees; after lunch to Fip music radio, state-financed, eclectic. On Thursday the smoky-voiced French woman DJ gave a big shout-out to all you olive pickers out there.

Monday night’s murderous gunman in Vienna is officially described as ‘Islamist’. Brahim Aioussaoi, the man accused of murdering worshippers in a Nice cathedral last week, arrived (reported the BBC) with ‘three knives, two phones and one Quran’. These would seem to be the basic toolkit required. A friend who lives in southern France tells me that although the latest lockdown measures prevent church services being held, so serious is the terrorist threat to churches that many are guarded by police. So it seems natural that President Macron of France warns of the danger to French Catholics and speaks of ‘Islamist terrorist folly’. Each of his three chosen words rings true, and the link between them cannot be avoided.

The French were asking for it, weren’t they? All that laïcité is the political equivalent of a short skirt. What did Marianne think would happen if she went out like that?The very act of being French, Politico tells us, ‘incites’ Muslims to murderous rage. A New Yorker writer explains that Charlie Hebdo cartoons are ‘effectively hate speech’, which effectively implies that Samuel Paty, the teacher who showed the cartoons to his pupils in a class on free speech, got what he deserved. The New York Times tells us that there are fine people on both sides: the real victims of Islamist terrorism in France are French Muslims, who are left feeling uncomfortable.