Less splattered

Life is often what you make it. A month ago, faced with no home to move to, we decided to go camping in France and the small van behind where we sit drinking coffee will be our dwelling for the foreseeable future, not that friends across Europe haven’t offered us a variety of places. Eating croissants fresh from the village five minutes cycle away, life, which yesterday felt crazy, feels good.

We are vaguely occupied by the lazy machinations of our fellow campers, a band of summer Gypsies settling in for the long hot weeks ahead. It is July, La France is emptying, a myriad of campsites up and down the land are filling up. The French are a faithful lot, people return to their roots, to campsites in towns from which their ancestors left to build the palaces and cathedrals of the bloated ruling classes. And those ancients stayed on, in Paris there are urban villages for each region and today in this campsite people from here centuries ago are sat by their tin tables drinking coffee. Others are packing up, desperate to get on the roads before the July crowds swell, others have just driven here and are erecting awnings or inflating maîtresses.

And we who in a fit of madness when daunted by homelessness romantically chose this camping life, arrived exhausted last evening, wondering what we’d let ourselves in for. Selling a perfect cottage in a perfect village for what? For shared toilets and a busy campsite. But the buttery croissants make our home Cloud Cottage, Brexit and its idiotic politicians seem like a dream.

It is evening, we are being slowly healed by the warmth, the constant outdoor light and the easy life. Today we cycled to the beach, swum in Morbihan’s warm lagoon and we want to canoe out amongst its fifty tiny islands. I already feel this is helping my health, which is the reason we sold up. Life certainly is what you make it.