The aperitif dispatch

There will be no weekly recap this week. The blank page can wait; Brittany, as it turns out, cannot. When the weather in this most stoically damp of French regions decides to behave — genuinely behave, blue skies, the works, as if it had read a travel brochure and decided to finally make an effort — one does not sit indoors wrestling with one’s prose. One sits outdoors wrestling with one’s aperitif instead, which is considerably more productive.

I have installed myself at the terrace of one of the port’s surviving bars — and there are fewer of those each year, so one patronises them with something approaching civic duty — with an unobstructed view of the marina. What is in the marina, I hear you ask? Boats. Excellent boats. An unreasonable quantity of boats. Immaculately maintained sailing vessels of every tonnage, their hulls gleaming with the kind of dedication that speaks either of great love or very bored retirement. The port of Vannes on a fine April afternoon is, in short, a floating argument against pessimism.

“The misery is out there somewhere, presumably. The television assures me it exists. But the television, I notice, is not here.”

And yet. If one were to construct one’s worldview solely from the output of the twenty-four-hour news cycle — that great industrial complex for the manufacture of dread — one would conclude that civilisation is approximately three bad Mondays from collapse. The populist doom merchants, particularly of the left-wing variety who have discovered that catastrophe is rather good for fundraising, would have us believe that the people walking past this terrace are secretly suffering, that the smiles are false consciousness, that the boats are ill-gotten. I have been watching these people for the better part of an hour. They do not appear to have received the memo.

What I observe, from my admittedly comfortable position between an ice bucket and a dish of olives, is this: relative prosperity, apparent contentment, children being dragged away from pigeons, couples arguing gently about where to have dinner — which is, if you think about it, the most civilised argument available to the human species. Myself included in the general tableau of okayness, perhaps even better than okayness, which I am reluctant to admit publicly lest the universe take note and course-correct.

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So: the aperitif shall be finished. The dinner location shall be decided through the time-honoured method of wandering vaguely and stopping when something smells right. Tomorrow, a series of trains will return me to Carcassonne, which is itself not an unreasonable place to be returned to. And this, instead of a proper weekly recap, will have to serve as this week’s proof of life — evidence that the author exists, is in reasonable spirits, and has not succumbed to the general gloom. Santé.