Friday 6th February

It is a really strange feeling, and one I am still slightly confused by and still cannot quite believe.  One spends a couple of hours getting to the airport and then quite a bit of waiting around, your plane is called, you walk to the gate and board the plane.  A bit of organized chaos as everyone finds their seat then you are off.  For an hour and a half you fight the tedium, reading, listening to MP3 player and trying to ignore the frantic selling of the Ryanair Stewardesses.  Then you land and within minutes you are out and in the car and then home.  A different country no less, but a strange familiarity descends as you realise that while you were away in London, busy working or rushing around, nothing much had happened here.  The shops are the same, the French street names are unchanged, even the river Dropt keeps slowly chugging along, green and murky as ever.  It is only you that have been away, everything else has remained the same.  Plus ca change, plus ca meme – I suppose.  But no matter how many time I do the journey I always feel the same; a sort of amazement that everything is still here I suppose.  It all still does seem like a dream in many ways.  I first visited Europe in 1966 with my parents as Dad drove the old Ford Zodiac through France to Spain, camping along the way.  And every time I love the place, Paris, Brussels, Barcelona or Greece – wherever and whenever I am here I am enthused by it, as if England is not really my home – but Europe is.

And here in Eymet is especially wonderful, with its run down houses and the beautiful square and all the streets of the old Bastide still intact, many like ours over four hundred years old.  The river and the church and the Café de Paris.  It is so good to be back, if only for a few days.