A Train Journey – Return

We are travelling in the comfort of the TGV once more across some of the most beautiful of parts of France. The sun is shining, we have just left Avignon and the train conductor has begun making announcements in English as well as French. Now we know we are on the way home!

Lunch taken between here and Marseilles with the bounty of Intermarchē. Rosē de Provence, salade Niçoise, baguette, Ile Flottante, on gold plates from Intermarchē’s kitchen paperware department: probably truer to say it was a paperware shelf.

Jacques Dechentinnes arrived punctually, as Frenchmen do, to see us on our way, having organised a taxi to take us to the station and to prepare for the next visitors. I cannot say I know him well, but on the few occasions we have met during our holiday I feel I he is a person worth knowing. A pleasant and helpful acquaintance.

Visitors here write flowery comments in a leather-bound book. One complained he couldn’t access the internet. All he had to do was go round the corner to the Cybercafē. I repeat a few words I wrote in the book.

“No need to write much: just look around you, it says all you need to know. If you are lost for something to do, make a list of ten objects you don’t think you will find in this apartment – they will be here somewhere – or just outside the front door! If they are not, your perfect host Jacques Dechentinnes will tell you where they can be found.

I don’t believe Rolf and Waltraud Schumacher really exist. No-one can be this perfect.”

As I said the Jacques, they probably don’t. I am sure it his apartment.

Good holidays often fly by. This one has gone by faster than any I can remember.

What shall I miss?

Sunshine every day without fail.

Good food and wine.

Style and class in almost everything - from buildings to dress, to cars, to buses, to trains, to shops and their contents, to restaurants, to the upright way people walk and a noticeable absence of obesity.

Sitting at pavement cafēs, with a beer, watching the world go by, which includes slim, long-legged beautiful girls in hot pants, mini skirts and cleavage revealing blouses. It is a clichē that at my age they all look beautiful. Here they really are.

Now we are gliding across the well kept farmland, vineyards, lakes, rivers and deciduous wooded hills of middle France that protect neat villages and prosperous looking farms with their white cattle and winding traffic free roads.. So perfect you almost want to alight and live here. You can understand what makes people do just that.

And it is now you understand why most things cost so much here.

There is a price to pay for perfection.