Thirty Years, One Baby, and a Belt I Couldn’t Find

In which our correspondent drives two and a half hours to celebrate a marriage that has outlasted several monarchies, meets a granddaughter who has been on the premises for considerably less time, and discovers that losing weight is its own form of administrative paperwork.

Some weekends require elaborate logistics — connecting flights, currency conversions, the quiet dread of a rental car with a manual gearbox you haven’t touched since the Mitterrand era. This one required none of that. Carcassonne to Avignon is two and a half hours of motorway so uneventful it borders on meditation, the kind of drive where the only decision of consequence is whether to take the péage exit for a coffee that will taste exactly like every other péage coffee in the Republic.

The occasion: my brother-in-law’s thirty years of marriage, plus the very recent and considerably louder arrival of a new granddaughter — two milestones that, when celebrated together, produce the unique sensation of toasting both the beginning and the very long middle of a love story in the same breath.

Thirty years of marriage is, statistically speaking, longer than most empires last.

Avignon and I have history that predates this particular celebration. My father spent his last decade here, which means I arrive each time less like a tourist and more like a man checking whether the furniture has been moved. This trip came with the added comfort of staying in one of my brother-in-law’s four Airbnbs — the man apparently collects Avignon property the way other people collect stamps, or regrets — a fifteen-minute stroll from the party itself, which is precisely the correct distance for an evening that may, at some point, require a wobbly walk home.

And the party delivered exactly what family gatherings of this sort are contractually obligated to deliver: warmth, catching-up, and the gentle reacquaintance with a branch of the family I see roughly as often as a solar eclipse. Did I mention they’re all English? It matters less for the conversation — which manages perfectly well in either language — than for the sheer comedy of watching an English wedding-anniversary-cum-christening party unfold under a Provençal sky, somewhere between a vicarage fête and a Pagnol set piece.

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Saturday morning, as all proper Provençal mornings should, began at the market — ostensibly for a look around, but in truth on a mission: I needed a new belt. Not as a fashion statement, but as a matter of structural engineering. I’ve lost enough weight recently that several items of clothing have entered a kind of negotiated retirement, trousers included, and a man cannot hold up his dignity — or his trousers — on willpower alone.

The market, magnificent as it was in every other respect, failed me on the belt front. No matter. What the stalls of Avignon would not provide, a proper shop down the road happily did, and by early afternoon I was, structurally speaking, sorted. A small victory, but in a weekend built entirely around milestones — thirty years, one new granddaughter, one significantly smaller waistline — I’ll take it.

Late morning found us pointing the car towards Châteauneuf-du-Pape, with the vague and frankly optimistic intention that I might purchase some wine. As it turned out, the only purchase made — by my better half, naturally — was a dress. And lunch, of course. There is always lunch.

From there we set our sights on the looming presence of Mont Ventoux, which we ascended in considerable comfort, air conditioning humming, while dozens of cyclists toiled past us each convinced he was riding the final stage of the Tour de France. With temperatures north of 35 degrees and a gradient hovering around nine percent over twenty punishing kilometres, I can only call this an act of madness.

Madness, too, is the cyclist who overtook me on the descent at well over 80 km/h. I never caught him.

We rolled back into town with just enough time for a short rest before heading out again for the evening — the main event, the real reason for the weekend

After an hour’s nap back at base — a restorative, medically necessary nap, you understand, not a sign of advancing years — it was time to get into the car again and make the short drive to Carpentras, where my brother-in-law and his wife have their main residence, although they seem to spend rather more time in Avignon than in the house they actually own. Each to their own; I’m not one to judge a man’s relationship with his postcode.

Now, let me set the scene, and if some of you have seen the brilliant film A Good Year, it will help enormously, possibly more than anything I’m about to write. It’s a strikingly similar setting to the one in the film, which is understandable since the village of Gordes, where it was partly filmed, is only some 30km away as the crow flies (the crow, presumably, having had rather less trouble with French road signage than I did getting there). The newly renovated house sits in the middle of vineyards looking every bit the part, the old outbuildings are mid-resurrection, and the pool is fully finished and very much in use, mostly by people holding a glass of something in one hand.

Next to the house, under a large old tree doing its best impression of a postcard, a table for up to 40 had been set — the kind of table that makes you instinctively check you’re dressed well enough. Aperitif started around 19:30, followed by an excellent dinner prepared by a hired chef in the kitchen and served by two hired waiters, which is a sentence I do not get to write often enough. The food was good, the wine was excellent (more on that shortly, patience), and the champagne flowed with a generosity that suggested nobody present was driving home anytime soon, which, as it turned out, was optimistic of me. A couple of speeches were made, none of which I shall attempt to reconstruct here, partly out of discretion and partly because by that point the Clos Mirage had done its work.

I hadn’t seen my stepsister-in-law who was part of the celebrations for years, and although we have very little contact — the kind of family relationship best described as “fond but theoretical” — it was a genuine pleasure to see her. As it happens, she and her husband are the proud owners of the Clos Mirage vineyard in the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, and naturally the wine for this celebration came from there, which is either a lovely touch of family pride or the single best argument for owning a vineyard I’ve ever encountered.

We drove back at midnight, first bumping through the fields to reach the highway, which then whisked us swiftly back to Avignon some 30km away — far too swiftly for a car carrying that much champagne, in spirit if not in fact. I went straight to bed.

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