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.