I REMEMBER thinking, at the height of the pandemic, how glad and thankful I would be if I ever got to return to the village in the south of France where we have been lucky enough to enjoy some lovely holidays over the last seventeen years.
And suddenly, here we are, back again for the first time since restrictions lifted and I’m trying to put myself back in that emotional place where all this had been taken away, and we were stuck within our 2km radius, but I can’t quite muster it up.
We’re funny old creatures, us humans – we swear we’ll never take something for granted again and yet ...
As I write, I’m sitting here in the Place de la Republique, a beautiful weathered, historic old town centre built around a flag pole donned with French and Catalan flags, all at the foot of an imposing mountain range.
The flags nod to the complex history here, half Republican France but very much culturally Catalan, the Spanish border is only half an hour away across the mountains so it’s very much a blended region. It has all the hallmarks of every tiny French village – a few bakeries, a butcher shop, hairdresser’s, a vineyard ‘cave’ and a few small bars and restaurants doing their best to stay afloat between the holiday seasons.
As a recurring visitor here, we’ve found it more or less impossible to breach the local French bubble, where you are kept very much at arm’s length from the locals. Everyone is very friendly, but they will never adopt you in the way we might in rural Ireland.
I suppose it doesn’t help that my French has got steadily worse over the years, and has been in a state of perpetual decline since the day I put my pen down at the end of my Leaving Cert exam. It is particularly brutal now after three years away but Google Translate has stepped in when my brief flirtation with Duolingo didn’t take.
On the surface, things seem to have changed very little here. The village looks the same as it did when we first came, and probably not that different to one hundred years ago.
But of course, there are huge changes happening subtly all around us. The town seems to have sprouted suburbs, with lots of new estates popping up. I wonder how they are managing to hold onto their young people and if remote working has marked a return to better times, just as it has marked a new beginning for many parts of rural Ireland.
Of course, the technology has changed since we first arrived too. Back then, you didn’t have a hope of getting an internet connection on your phone and you had the added stress of trying to locate an Internet café to print out boarding passes for every journey.
With France’s frankly bizarre, impenetrable rules on opening hours and timetables, this was always far more difficult than it needed to be.
I’m now tethered to my mobile phone on a 5G connection that’s pulling down around 30 MB. This makes everything easier in many ways – for making reservations or doing a spot of work, and it helps to have Disney Plus on tap for when the kids need a bit of downtime.
On the other hand, I miss the ability to be able to escape work and the news from home entirely.
When I first lived in France as a student back in the 90s I had a phone card and would ring home once a week, at best, from a phone box. How worried my parents must have been – they literally wouldn’t have a clue what I was up to from week to week. And it’s definitely for the best that they didn’t.
Nowadays, the kids are never out of our sight, digitally anyway. This is a good thing from a security perspective for sure, but have we lost our sense of independence and adventure too?
Being always on and always reachable isn’t necessarily a good thing. And isn’t it ironic that this super-connectedness has seemed to make us all more hyperalert and vigilant? It’s turned us all into anxious control freaks somehow.
You’ll all be glad to hear that food prices here are just as bananas as they have been at home. I paid €3 for three oranges the other day and the restaurant prices here would rival what we pay in Dublin, or dare I say it, West Cork.
There was a time when we could get a meal and a bottle of wine for two here for fifty quid. Not any more.
And then there’s the weather, which has always been glorious down here. I’m thankful we’re here now, in June, with the temperatures in or around 27 degrees, where there are coolish evenings and a consistent sea breeze. It’s heaven.
The heat has become more and more of an issue here in recent years, though. Our neighbours had bought the house next door and retired here from Paris but have since upped sticks and moved north to Britanny again.
They couldn’t stand the heat in recent summers it seems, a dire warning of what might be ahead for regions like this.
In a new measure to combat global warming, the French have recently decided to ban some internal flights. Any journeys that are possible in less than two-and-a-half hours by train cannot be taken by plane. This makes complete sense, given how brilliant the train service is here.
This makes the current headlines about reinstating the Cork to Dublin short-haul flights at home sound particularly retrogressive. Even Michael O’Leary is ruling this out, pointing to the massive new motorway that has solved the Cork-Dublin interconnectivity problem.
It’s disappointing to see the likes of Michael Collins, Michael Ring and Michael Healy Rae supporting the reintroduction of these routes which they claim will enhance connectivity with rural Ireland. What a load of nonsense.
Of course, it’s easy for me to be pontificating here in my sandals from the south of France, having flown over with the family to visit a place that is struggling on the coal face of climate change.
How long will we be allowed to take these kinds of flights, I wonder, given the recent warnings about climate change and the breaches of safety levels? Will my grandkids look back on these words and wonder what the hell we were up to? Or perhaps, like the village square here, the change will be more incremental and we’ll find new ways to adapt, to still find ways to travel and broaden our horizons while also taking care of the plane?
Sitting here now, I very much hope that my kids get to enjoy this country more as they grow up and enjoy the privilege we’ve enjoyed over the last twenty years. But I say it more out of hope than confidence.
