France

Three years ago we were given a bag of skunk, Catriona and I, provenance Glasgow. It was one gigantic dried bud wrapped in polythene. Cannabis in any shape or form usually renders me paranoid, especially if I smoke it in company and there is conversation. I’ve come to hate it. The delusion is always the same: I become unconvinced by my persona, which seems to have been chosen at random from a number of equally eligible candidates, and now feels like a flimsy, hackneyed mask. If the paranoia intensifies, I fall under the further illusion that everyone in the room’s personas except mine are as ingrained as oak rings, and that the ludicrousness of my papier-mâché one is transparent to all. The last time I smoked cannabis was three years ago.

I apologised, was gladly granted an indulgence, and on Sunday I packed a small bag and reached into a drawer for the passport. I was going back to the cave house in the Provençal village. Back to France and the French and to speaking my trousers-on-fire French. Salut! Tu vas bien? Viens m’embrasser, mon petit chou. Back to a country where, as Barbara Cartland put it, you can make love in the afternoon without people hammering on the door. Back to village bells clanging off the hours of the day, back to early rising and trying to be witty, or at least sentient, in French with the insanely jolly woman in the village bakery at a quarter to seven in the morning. Back to the flaking morning croissant and strong coffee and eating outside — always eating eating eating.

I have a friend here in this French village to which we moved just over a week ago. He is a veteran foreign correspondent, still working but also spending time tending his beloved garden, olive grove and small vineyard, from which he bottles and labels about 450 bottles of red each year. He is a proud journalist of the old school, which is to say that he is sober and serious when in pursuit of his story, and neither when not. With his fund of unprintable stories, his undiminished zest for current affairs, and his 450 bottles cooling under the stone stairs of his 18th-century house, he is the best possible company.

Moving day. The contents of a hillside shack to be moved four miles to a cave house perched high on a cliff above the village. The cave house’s only access from the road below is a steep, narrow and stony footpath. Three removal men for the job: me plus two French day-labourers. The elder of the Frenchmen, Philippe, was 67. I called him Philippe Phillop because that’s what he wore. He is a patriotic Parisian and his character, I would say, is the Parisian equivalent of a chirpy cockney. The same ready wit, the same cynicism born of urban poverty. He did not, however, find my nickname for him as amusing as I did, not even after a laborious explanation. The first time I met Philippe, in a bar, he told me his life story.

On Sunday, I reached the summit of the col de Riou in the Pyrénées to find a shepherd tending his flock. He asked if I'd seen a bear on my way up through the forest. One of his sheep was missing and he suspected a bear was responsible. I'd seen no sign of one but that got us talking, and I asked what he thought about the government repopulating the Pyrénées with bears. He shrugged and said the time for protesting was past. The bears are here to stay and that was that. One could say the same about Salafists, I reflected that evening, as I read Le Journal du Dimanche. Spread across two pages of the newspaper was an interview with Hakim El Karoui, the author of a report published last week by the Institut Montaigne entitled 'The Fabric of Islamism".

The long table was set out under four beautifully pollarded plane trees festooned with coloured lanterns and red balloons. Twenty party guests. Above us the clear night sky was brightly peppered with stars. Three and a half years ago, Catriona fled to France with a broken heart and shattered confidence. She returned to the village where she had spent family holidays in happier years; an expat family friend had offered his empty villa as a refuge. In that lonely time she used to stand at the bedroom window and look out at those pollarded planes, bare and dripping in the rain, and wonder what was going to become of her. It was winter and as wet, cold and miserable as Provence can be. One day the housekeeper paid a visit. Ruth had done the same once — fled with nothing.

All good things must come to an end, including summer holidays and bull markets. The bull run in US shares that began in the aftermath of the financial crisis in March 2009 has now officially passed the previous record of 3,452 more-up-than-down days from October 1990 to March 2000. This time round, the S&P500 index of US stocks has risen by more than 300 per cent — and that rise has continued throughout Donald Trump’s reign, despite his trade war threats and other follies. But it has not been reflected in major European markets, which have drifted sideways, and has been increasingly sustained by a small number of top tech stocks that have outperformed everything else on the planet.