Le Couvent - www.roujan.com
My blogs
| Location | Roujan, Herault, France |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Take me somewhere warm and friendly where I can stop - stop and stay for a while in a big, pumpkin-coloured room, a chambre d'hote where I don't have to wake up until noon. Does it exist? Come on, of course they do, hotels, houses to rent, chambres d'hotes in the south of France where I can check in for bed and breakfast and stay a few days and it's alright and I can get up at noon and smell the lavender and walk through the vineyards and dip my toes in the Mediterranean and, and I could lie on the beach and read. I could read French books, I know my French is rubbish but even I could read Agatha Christie in French, Something old-fashioned. Sort of Deauville or Provence. The tube jerks off. Outside the windows are dark curved walls with thickly-coated horizontal tube maps of wires moving by. Passing by slowly, I give you that, but definitely moving. "Thank God, not today then. Yes. No. Oh God. We've stopped again. Why don't they tell us what's happening. They do quite a lot now about all sorts of things. Not really important things of course. If they don't say anything it means it's bad. Or they're too busy I suppose. How busy? How bad? Okay, don't go there. Go back. |
| Interests | Imagine this. You're on the London Underground, or the Paris Metro or the New York subway. It's rush hour and you're ground up against a shoulder in a wet raincoat and a Safeway bag is hanging from your wrist. It's cutting off the circulation from the two fingers (only space available) crabbed around a high handrail slippery with sweat. Your other hand is holding your bag because there's nowhere to put it down and anyway if there was it might get nicked. Of course it won't but every poster tells you it will. Somewhere too, too close a rough suede jacket smells bad - of wet wool on a school radiator or cat pee or something we're barely able to bear in this tiny space we're trying to exist in - now, right now, for the eternity of this journey. You try and find a pocket of air in which you can't smell it, can't smell a thing, don't breathe in anything beyond the next breath you need to survive on until the next moment until you need to breathe out and in again. This is how and what and where life is all about right now. The train jerks to a brake-screech of a stop. "I can't bear this, I can't do this, I can bear this, I have to do this. Please. I want this all to stop. What will work? There's something that will work, I know there is. Get outside it. Think. Move brain, this could be the nightmare tube thing. Think it better. Think me safe. Think me able. We can't panic. Panic is fatal. Do it, do it right now. Be somewhere else. Try. Make it happen. Make it stop. Where do I need to be? Somewhere safe, sunny, blue skies. Somewhere not taking me from a to b & b to c & c to d & b & b & b & c & b & a. Somewhere south, south, south west, south east, I don't care. South to the sun and warmth, a swimming pool with a sky, Brighton's not far enough, further, much further, the South of France? That's better. |
| Favorite movies | Right, well I could go and stay, where? Perpignan or Pezenas or Roujan or Beziers or Faugères where I buy the Languedoc wine from in the supermarket. But maybe they're too small. Montpellier or Toulouse perhaps - they're big enough aren't they. Maybe I could even work from there - do they have internet access in France? Good trains, true, but, but, it's not really technologically cool France. Is it? Do they have broadband, ADSL? Do I really need it? I mean I don't actually have it at home and I survive fine. I don't know. I just don't know. I don't know enough really apart from Molière and Sartre and Gerard Depardieu and Binoche and Catherine Deneuve and French films which are sort of meaningful and profound and all those gorgeous men and women looking soulful as if they know something. Do they? I just want what they've got - culture, beaches, sand, sun, hammocks to lie in and salons to lounge in and look gorgeous, great eyebrows, faces that have lived, yoga-toned stomachs. Do they do yoga in France or is it just genetic? |
| Favorite music | I mean they like their food don't they? All that seafood and olive oil and cheese and wine and art and salad and haute cuisine and chocolates wrapped in ribbons and tomatoes. God they do great tomatoes. I mean how difficult can it be? I could talk to an estate agent, stay in a gite or a b&b. Find out if there's a property I could rent for a holiday or a month or whatever. |
| Favorite books | There must be someone's home I could rent. Please move train. Please. How many wishes have I got left in my life that I have to give up one that says, please get me home? I'll do anything, even though I know I'm going to have to use up another one tomorrow, or the day after, or the next day, every day, if you'll just get me home. OK, then here's the bargain. If you don't move, within the next minute, I'm going to move to Brighton or the Languedoc or Spain or Bali and I'm going to take up computer graphics, gay train-spotting, gestalt therapy, climbing in the Pyrenees, slide guitar and pot-holing. I'm going to be banned from every restaurant, bar and café and I'm……...going to be at Le Couvent, Roujan, where life is just heaven. |