Giens Peninsula, Hyères, Côte d’Azur. 18.42.
Rafe’s playing his guitar downstairs. It’s been a while in the making, as it was with a luthier in Toulon for most of the holiday. Our driver has done a wonderful job in getting us to Hyères and Toulon, but we haven’t gone any further as he has been finding driving in France a rather stressful experience. It’s a reminder of both how little I cared for driving way back when, but also how much more in control I could be when faced with a setback, which was encouraging – in a round-about sort of way.
Anyway, we’ve been to Toulon and back and recovered the guitar. It cost him a lot more than he planned, but given that it involved refitting all of the frets, restringing the body and fitting a brand new set of tuning pins, it’s not all that surprising.
I just enjoyed stepping into the luthier’s workshop. It felt like walking into an older world, into a time when things were fixed or remade by craftsmen… before Amazon’s buy-it-again culture drove so much of it underground.
For the second day in a row, we settled on a seafood lunch. Traveling solo makes it easy to forget how complicated catering for a group can be, and there have been reminders of those Camino days out here. Fortunately, that’s not been an impediment to securing my favourite French dish of all out here: moules au Roquefort. I grew up on the more popular moules marinières – a memorable and delicious excuse for day trips to Calais from my childhood home by the sea – but one taste of the powerful combination of fresh mussels and the tanginess of Roquefort cheese in Brittany two years ago has made me a convert. If it is on the menu, I will accept no substitute.
We took a jaunt into Toulon’s maritime museum. It wasn’t quite as interesting as Barcelona’s drassanes, but then, I have a major preference for pre-1900 history, so I tend to switch off in the presence of most modern history exhibits (the fault of a heavily 20th century-skewed history curriculum at school, I think). It does have a nice collection of nautical paintings, though, which are always beautiful to observe.
Rafe is making a bouillabaisse for supper tonight, so we stopped off at E. Leclerc on the way home to pick up some supplies. I shall miss Rafe’s superb cooking when this holiday is over, but it is a reminder of how much I enjoy my solitude. Living on my own for seven years has only honed my reclusive tendencies, I think, and the absence of stillness gets to me sometimes. It’s a helpful reminder that, while I’d like to find Her and settle down and all, I have to balance my ambitions with my very human nature.
On another note, the moon was so bright last night that it was almost as bright as daylight outside. I wish we had nights like that in the UK. BB x
