France

Much has happened to me over this past week, but perhaps the place to begin is that last Thursday afternoon I saved a French kitten’s life by grabbing it from between the jaws of a ravenous dog. That’s the part of the trip I just took to France that my mind keeps coming back to most frequently, anyway. “Listen, brain,” I’ll say to myself, during the early hours of the morning. “Can you maybe just give it a rest now? You’re not going to change history by repeatedly rerunning footage of this incident.” But my brain will not hear such logic. “Ok, but what if we just go over it one more time, from the top?” it will ask. “Perhaps we can obtain some useful information, somehow, or find 100% proof that the kitten was not seriously injured?”

I was outside a barn in a remote and wild part of the countryside of South West France when I saw the kitten’s mother coming towards me with the kitten in her mouth. An estate agent from the nearest village had been showing me the barn, which had been partly converted into a living space by the divorcing couple who were selling it. It was the hottest part of the hottest day of the hottest week I’ve ever experienced: 39 degrees, according to the estate agent, or 37 if you believed my car thermometer, which I don’t, since I know by now that my car is a liar about all sorts of things. As we’d arrived at the barn we’d been immediately greeted by a forlorn, thirsty-looking dog badly in need of a brush and a wash, and a scrawny tortoiseshell cat. After we’d found water for the dog and cat, the cat had followed us around, meowing at the top of her lungs, and I’d searched the building, thus far fruitlessly, for food to give her. Meanwhile, I climbed ladders, rapped my knuckles against part-rendered walls and tried to take in what the estate agent was telling me about all the complex structural procedures required to complete the ambitious project the barn’s owners had begun. The part of me that’s reluctant to add any more stress to my life entered a small war room in my head to debate with the part that imagined the pure romance of writing books here as wild boar and deer and foxes wandered around directly outside the living room. And it’s perhaps because I was sleep-deprived, and hot, and thirsty and was playing referee to these two parts of me (“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”) that, as we stood outside the front door of the barn beside the mangy dog, and the mother cat ran towards us from an outbuilding fifty yards away, with the kitten in her mouth, I took just a moment longer than I otherwise might have to realise that what she had in her mouth was a kitten, and not a smaller scale, toy replica of her. And because of that moment, when the dog growled and lunged at both cat and kitten I was just a little later than I might have been in, with a yell of “NOOOO!”, diving on the dog and pulling the kitten out of its jaws.