Life this week - Travels to France edition

Published on March 23, 2025

This text was written as I learn to live with Long Covid and attempt to regain my creativity. All the posts and some more info can be found here.

A horizontal colour photograph of a train station with a train waiting at a platform in the background.

My partner and I board a train.

A horizontal colour photograph a train station hall. A person is playing a piano in the middle of the scene. Folks pass by with colourful suitcases, other folks stand around looking at a display screen in the background.

And another.

A vertical colour photograph of a bald man in a brown and black jacket walking towards me. He is pulling a black trolley. He is on a train platform. The train, green and blue, is stationary at the platform. Other folks with suitcases are hanging around. The image is a little blurred.

And another.

The landscape brightens and darkens as the sun dances with the clouds. A herd of deer watches the Eurostar hurtle past sprouting fields at 269km/h towards Paris. Later, in the last train of the day, a boar, thick with muscles and bristles, stands in a clearing, their shape outlined in the fading blue of dusk like a spirit of the woods at the edge of the city where my friend lives.

A vertical colour photograph of a white and ginger cat smelling my hand. The cat is on an unmade bed with red bedsheets and blue and yellow pillows and duvet cover.

horizontal colour photograph of a group of nuns on winter coats and wearing large backpacks waiting for a bus.

We wait for the coach that is late to cross a region of fields and copses. We follow the line of the main road that dissect the landscape in a straight grey line dotted with lorries and cars. This is the land of my family, full of rolling emptiness, shrinking wild places, and germinating wind turbines. Bird of preys circle over the fields. I suspect buzzards but cannot see them well enough from the rumbling haze of the coach window.

vertical colour photograph of a black and white border collie sitting in grass. In front of them is a black plastic coil they use as a toy. In the background is a concrete wall and then roof of houses.

At my mom's, in her house built just before the pandemic, trinkets and memories of my grandmother' home litter every corner. A lot has already been sold or disposed of since her death in October but a lot remains too. I shuffle through old photographs marked for the bin. They are full of first names no one alive remembers. They bear the same last name as my mother and I feel drawn to these stories scribbled on old postcards. I follow Gabrielle in particular, a heavy writer that reveals a little of herself to me, a person she could have never imagined.

A horizontal colour photograph of a motorway viewed from inside a car. There isn't much traffic.

We settle into my step father's car and drive south to my sister's home near Switzerland. We veer onto the motorway and I watch a kestrel hover in the wind, the yellow pop of gorse decorates the still wintry verges of the road. I ask my mom for the French words but she does not know them. I am struck by the gap in our nature vocabulary. Hers is routed in the fields of her childhood and the gardens of her adulthood. That vocabulary was never patiently shared with me. Instead I learned different words from a different place, a vocabulary routed in the hills and forests along the lanes of a different country.

A horizontal colour photograph of a football game under a heavy white clouds. The field is bordered by bare trees. The players are in orange or green jerseys.

Later, when we are full of food and our eyes prickle with sleep, I collapse into the too soft bed of my nephew. It is past one in the morning and I am content. My body has not yet fallen apart and no tensions have arisen within my family. My brother, the eternal black sheep in the eyes of some, has been embraced. He laughed as we laughed. He fixed our brother in law indoor bike. He hugged and was hugged. Outside a steady mizzle persisted, banished by the roaring fire of the chimneys.

A vertical colour photograph of a train station. The photo shows some of the rails and part of a covered platform.

Everyone returns to work and we board another train.

A horizontal colour photograph of a statue of three ladies. Below the statue, the ground is covered in tulips. Beyond, there are some magnolia just starting to bloom and distant evergreen trees. The sky is blue with a few small white clouds.

A vertical colour photograph of a glasshouse with tropical plants in dappled light and the curve of a footpath.

Lyon is full of buds and blossoms and young leaves. The air at the Parc de la Tête d'Or smells of nectar and sugar and spring thanks for the camellias, the daffodils, the tulips, the crocuses, and the violas. We rest and explore as we wait for our AirBnB to be available. I am soothed by the gentle greenery and the damp warmth of the glasshouses. I forget the growing pinch in my leg and the slurring of my brain.

That night I collapse in a heap of pain and fatigue in a foreign bed.

A vertical colour photograph of a funicular railway line viewed through the glass of a train.

A panoramic horizontal colour photograph of a view of Lyon from a hill with a cloudy sky like silk.

A vertical colour photograph of an old roman amphitheatre viewed through the branches of an evergreen needle tree.

We take buses, and subways, and almost trams. We walk around and sit long on benches and churches' steps. We follow the tourist lines through the city and sample the food on offer. Fallow deer graze in the park, a red squirrel hops around and delight us with surprise. The Alps take my breath away as they rise seemingly at the edge of the city. Old ruins and new modern buildings catch our eyes and we vow to return to this enchanting place I didn't think I'd care for.

We board a train.

A vertical colour photograph of two people with large backpacks and a suitcase walk on a sunny train platform. Behind them a train and the top of an Ibis hotel.

And another.

A vertical colour photograph of a railway station at sunset viewed through a train window. There are reflections of lights and people inside the train.

And another.

Until finally we make it home, exhausted, replete, and content.

Robins and magpies and tits have eaten almost all of the fat balls, the seeds holder still resolutely ignored. Primroses have invaded the far edge of the garden at the limit of where the tree trunks grow. Tulips have risen and swollen and some offer a hint of colour to come. The forsythia has exploded into yellow, the red currant tree has unfurled a series of leaves, and the hazels and the oak are showing timid buds to the artificial light of night.