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.

I know for sure that I will never forget the intelligence and survival instincts of that mother cat. What she had been trying to tell us, for the previous half hour, was not just that she was thirsty and ravenous, but that she was eating and drinking for three. When she’d attempted to explain it to us as eloquently as she could, with no success, she’d resorted to desperate measures, returning to her base of operations in the outbuilding, grabbing the kitten from under an old sofa, climbing to an open window with the kitten in her mouth and running all those yards to where we stood. “Look!” she might have said. “NOW do you see the full extent of the situation we are looking at here?” It had been a big risk, she must have known, with the dog there, but she must have also decided it was worthwhile, in the desperate predicament she found herself in.

After that, I did finally manage to locate some cat food in a cupboard and, as the estate agent and I watched the cat devour bowl after bowl of it - food that would enable her to once again produce the milk that would keep the tortoiseshell kitten, and its sibling, alive - I realised for the first time on the trip, to my surprise, that I wasn’t actually going to move to France after all. At least, not in the near future.

How had I ended up here, two days from home, strung out from too much driving and hot nights in the cheapest of cheap hotels? My partner and I have been talking about the idea of moving to France for months, years even. Gradually, romantically shading in the next us, the French us: more laid-back, thin, tanned and sophisticated than the current us, and with a better collection of table lamps. The artist visa that, if we were accepted for it, would allow us to sidestep some of the obstacles Brexit has put in the way of such a move. The affordable housing that looked like a way out of the UK rental trap we’d been in for so long. The landscape, the history, the people, the architecture, and all the potential artistic inspiration which would naturally spring from all of it. We went for a holiday there in late April and fell deeply in love with it all, especially the area around the Lot river, but we had our tinted holiday specs on, and we knew we needed to go back and find out if the idea was rooted in a viable reality. In the end, as a matter of financial, automotive and feline-related practicality, I went alone, driving the 809 miles from Devon to Cahors in my small, rattling car, with Ellie as my virtual companion for much of it. On the way, I listened to a fabulous song called ‘Looking At The Rose Through World-Coloured Glasses’ by The Split Level. Yep, I thought, that’s what we need to do.

French estate agents are different to UK estate agents. They’ll text bomb you like an obsessive ex, call you at 10.30pm without thinking twice about it. You’ll arrange with them to be shown a house then turn up at the stipulated time, only to not be shown that house at all but be kidnapped and taken to five other houses which fit none of the criteria you originally gave. At moments like this, in the company of an employee from a village immobilier who speaks virtually no English, the eighty or so hours you have recently devoted to your Learn French With Paul Noble audiobook aren’t going to amount to a hill of green beans. Swaying from side to side, in a stranger’s 27 year-old Peugeot, as it hugged the bends on country lanes, I was back on the exchange trip I went on to Portugal in 1991, in some random guy’s moaning shell of a car, not knowing who he was or where I was going, but figuring that I might as well roll with it and, heck, at least the weather’s nice. I felt, as I had done so much in middle France, and non-coastal South West France, like someone had attached a rope to my neck and yanked me not unpleasantly down a tunnel into the past. Except, no, that wasn’t quite it. What it was more like was being transplanted into an alternative version of the future, as imagined from the 20th Century: one where things weren’t quite so irrevocably fucked in quite so many ways. A future with emptier roads and more resistance to planned obsolescence where red squirrels still mostly managed to thrive and giant clocks on living room walls and Starbucks mostly didn’t and adults without generational wealth or a lengthy period on the housing ladder could still purchase quiet, comfortable, tasteful homes. As I drove, I admired the giant champagne glasses and golf balls on stalks on the hills in the distance - the ones responsible for France’s legendarily thunderous water pressure - and the old Renaults and Citroens refusing to give up the ghost, parked up the road from rigorously organised recycling bins. “I do like this bonkers yet weirdly smooth and functional sci-fi world I have somehow woken up inside,” I thought.

I saw great houses. So, so many. One of them I couldn’t get a viewing for on the day I wanted to, and when I told the agent I would have a look at the exterior of it from a nearby lane, she told me that wasn’t permitted, so instead I swam along the river at the back of the house, slowly raising myself above the water line like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, and carried out my viewing that way instead. I suspect that wasn’t allowed either, but since the only people there were me and about four hundred dragonflies, I got away with it. I won’t buy that house, even though it’s more beautiful than any house I’ve ever looked at to buy in the UK, just as I won’t buy any of the others, including the part-finished barn in the woods with the kittens, and the massive £200,000-ish ghost house hanging precariously off a hill (only two bedrooms, but MASSIVE billiard room/cocktail bar) which still hadn’t sold after three years on the market, where, when I went into the basement, lonely bats swirled around my head in an attempt to hypnotise me into living there and keeping them company. I genuinely did think I was going to France to find a house for us to rent or buy, but what I gradually realised was that was not the real reason I was on this crazy, ambitious, tiring journey. I had taken it to try to gauge how we might feel about living in France. How we might react to being in a place whose language we were still in the early stages of learning, far away from our friends. How I might feel about being a thousand miles away from parents in their mid-70s. What it might be like to live somewhere where, while hungry and on the road, c’est largely impossible to locate un sandwich végétarien.

I often do too much. It’s in my nature, as the descendant of other people who do too much, and as someone who was often warned, when young, about many of the potential long-term life consequences of doing the opposite of too much. Doing too much, to an often exhausting extent, has meant I’ve been able to somehow earn a living through my writing for 29 years. I feel sure, had I not done too much, I wouldn’t have managed it. The long habit of that has placed me deep in a groove which means I am prone to do too much in other situations too, believing that no other approach can possibly work. I did too much in France: drove too far, saw too many houses, spoke to too many people, kept too many appointments, spent too many hours forgetting to drink or eat. By the time I prised the kitten from the starving dog’s jaws, I was feeling more than a little fragile. But I didn’t crack. That came a day later, in an Ibis Budget hotel on the south side of Rouen, when Ellie sent me a photo of our ridiculously affectionate and needy ginger cat Jim, who looks like a massive version of the brother of the kitten whose life I saved, plus a video of our black and white cat Roscoe, who, when not long out of kittenhood, narrowly survived a horrific dog attack. The tears were faltering and sporadic, but they were the first I’ve shed for a long time. It wasn’t about the kitten by then. I had convinced myself it was ok: the estate agent and I had checked on it and seen it staggering around, much like a normal healthy kitten of three or four weeks old. I missed home, and missing home felt like a taste in my mouth of what might be to come. I told myself I was nearly there, geographically. It was useful that I couldn’t see into the near future: could not see myself boarding the ferry the next morning and realising I’d dropped my wallet in the toilets in the port or, ninety minutes later, being pulled over for a search and lengthy questioning by UK Border Control (I'm going to take the forgiving view and believe the reason I was singled out was entirely random and absolutely nothing to do with my tan, big beard, wild hair, and extremely unslick car).

Only a minute or two before the dog tried to kill the kitten, I’d heard a lovely, gentle story about another dog: a St Bernard, belonging to one of the estate agent’s friends, who’d gone wandering in the woods near where it lived and returned with a baby wild boar, which it proceeded to befriend, play ball with, and cuddle up to in its bed in the family house. I imagine that if you lived in South West France, barely a day would go by without you hearing an anecdote like this or experiencing an animal-based incident that was either heartwarming or horrific or comical or perhaps a bit of all three. On my route home, I stayed for a night in the Dordogne with Jenny who writes

A French Table 1

. One of the first things she told me when I arrived is that she’d had to have her swimming pool rebuilt after a cow fell into it.

So here I am, making what might look to many people like a terrible creative decision: turning away, at least for the time being, from all those potential stories, all that hot mysterious landscape, all that new territory to explore, all the books which would no doubt emerge from it. France has looked, for a long time, like an escape route for us: from busy roads, crazy bills, the whole workaholic tussle that the UK now is, especially for creative people trying to survive within it. Inevitably, after months of dreaming, there’s going to be an anticlimax to our decision, but we are finding that such anticlimax is blotted out by relief. “What? You mean we don’t have to fill out all those forms, apply for a foreign mortgage, pay well over £6000 in moving fees, and somehow find some way to transport three unhappy cats over 800 miles in a small, ailing car? We can just decide nobody is forcing us to do it and, like, stay in this country? Wow! And I can actually spend the next few months writing, instead of focussing full-time on the admin of relocation?” Yep, the stuff with the kitten, the border patrol and the wallet put me off a bit, but if none of that had happened, I’m sure we’d have arrived at the same conclusion. It’s not the right time. Maybe it will be the right time, one day. Maybe it won’t. You can control only what you can control. I can’t save all the animals, particularly those on a separate land mass. But I can choose to not put our own through a gargantuan amount of stress this August. You can wake up to a French sunset, at the beginning of a crazy week-long adventure, as the mist rolls out of the woods, with a scary feeling of freedom and not knowing what’s around the corner that makes you feel, in an extremely specific way, glad to be alive. But sometimes you can choose to stay still, and take a proper look at everyone and everything around you that is wonderful, everything you already had that you are fortunate to still have, and take in the startling information that you are still here, in one piece, and feel significantly gladder.

You can pre-order a signed first edition hardback of my new novel Everything Will Swallow You, via Blackwells, with free international delivery, here.