I remember only after I’ve booked it that trente-deux kilometres seemed trop loin pour nous paddle, last time we came, but it’s too late now - they’ve enquired if I am French, admired my accent, and there’s no way on earth I’m asking for the shorter route.

It is a long way, and we are in a tiny minority in our single kayaks (and thus have half the potential speed as our two-man colleagues), but I am fast, and I am strong, and the paddle feels familiar in my hands, and I do not even want to stop for lunch but I feel it’s not really in the spirit of going on holiday with someone if you just keep leaving them behind.

Towards the end, we pass a naturist beach, and every single canoeist ahead of me is fascinated by one figure on the beach, and as I get closer I see it is an apple-breasted woman, waiting with a buggy just like she’s waiting for a bus, waiting with infinite patience while some of our fully dressed paddlers bicker amongst themselves on the beach where they are not permitted.

July 30, 2014

I have brought all the wrong music. I have brought PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea; an Elton John Best Of which *doesn’t* contain Tiny Dancer; a White Stripes album which is so soaked in New York memories it’s as if I’m insisting on a bagel and lox from the boulangere; and the sole summery album in the car, wedged at the back of the glove box, an old Nelly Furtado CD, made in the era of claggy, spray-on, William-Orbit-esque over-production which renders much late-90s-early-2000s pop unlistenable. I really need some Solange. Or some Sia. Even some Lana del Rey, and we can pretend we’re crossing the blood-lust wasteland of American states.

So we drive in silence.

And it’s *wonderful*.

July 29, 2014

Sometimes clichés are lazy half-truths perpetuated by a handsome-sounding rhyme, and sometimes clichés kick around for so long because that truth just keeps coming around and reminding us with a humble shrug, Nope, still true.

French food, man. French food.

Even the humblest service station serves us tender, spiced ham with a rich Marsala gravy. At the grubby supermarket a few kilometres down the road, the saucisson sec and the fromage du chèvre are enough to make a grown woman keep eating hours after she is sated. And the bread. Oh, the bread. As we sit down to our breakfast each morning, golden crust and airy, tangy, chewy innards fresh from the boulangerie, I think (as best I can) of the final sentence of Jeffrey Steingarten’s essential essay on bread: “And on good days, we eat nothing else.” Jeffrey, I know *exactly* what you mean.

July 28, 2014

Nous allons à la rivière aujourd’hui, en route to which I discover possibly my most annoying habit yet: reading out loud all the French signs. Worse, and more bafflingly, I have to do each one in a different, strange voice. Miel, in a hoarse growl; Les Chevals, in a giddy high-pitched squeal.

At the river, the beautiful Euro-women have pouched, puckered stomachs over their bikinis which match mine, and I feel completely contented, even with the children jumping into the river from 60 feet up the cliff face. When there is a particularly painful sounding water-landing, the whole river bank applauds in that sarcastic French way. The noise I took for distant thunder at first is actually plastic canoes scraping over shingle in the echoing gorge, and when we’re in the water, we must dodge the canoes and paddles, as we have better speed and versatility than many of their pilots.

My lunch is pa amb tomàquet, my mother’s go-to summer lunch, warmed in the sun for a few hours. Its olive, salty smell is the most summery scent I know, more than cut grass, more than sun cream, more than anything. It is my mother making several baguette’s-worth of Catalan goodness for me and my sisters and pushing us back into the garden. One day I might even give you the recipe.

July 27, 2014