The Gruissan Dairies part 3: Cold Turkey / Carpe Diem

I need internet access for an hour or two a day and have to go bars to get it (and before you ask I mostly drink shandy – ‘panaché’ - or milky coffee). I could - when I first got here -have bought have bought a SIM card for my dondle (Dongle? Dingle? Dangle?), but decided to resist the temptation. I thought ‘what will it be like to have to go out of the house to get internet access? ‘Surely it will encourage me to interact more, get to meet more people’. It was and has been hell. Every day I needed to check my e-mails. ‘Are my clients happy with the work I’ve done?’ ‘Have they sent me more?’ ‘Have they paid me yet?’ ‘Are there bills from Brussels or the NL that need paying?’ And then there were travel arrangements and bookings to make and research for my upcoming Pyrenean trip. I realised how thoroughly and utterly I was (and am) an internet addict. More than that, I had to try to fit all these essential communications into a one/ one and half hour slot. That meant being really focused. I tried a once a day schedule. I tried a once every 36 or 48 hour schedule. Either way I became the ‘geek of the village’ : hunched over my laptop doing e mails while other ‘normal’ people were drinking pastis, making bets on the horses or shouting at the rugby players. The ‘rural med’ isn’t Brussels or London or Copenhagen. There’s no Starbucks’ connectivity culture here. Yes the cafés have wi-fi, but I don’t think I have seen anyone all the month I have been here go into a café and turn on their laptop. If they had I would have gravitated towards them like a moth to flame.

I’ve been frequenting a bar down the street for the past two or three weeks but it was closed yesterday afternoon. The bar maid around the corner was taller, prettier and flirted with me a bit: so my allegiances changed. My internet session that evening turned out to be particularly demanding. The gîte (part of an organic farm) that I had tried to book five days ago in the high Pyrenees still hadn’t (and hasn’t) replied. And, as I am supposed to be handing back the keys to my gîte in Gruissan in two days time (now tomorrow), I had to develop a new search strategy - quickly. I left the café feeling emotionally knackered - hoping I have an Air B’n’B bed booked (I do).

Leaving the café there was a gorgeous looking hippy girl hanging around by the ice cream parlour, maybe 30 years old – probably not more than 45 kilo,– clearly on her own and looking in need of company: just the kind of girl that gets my blood racing. I was tempted to ask her back to my place to listen to my Grateful Dead bootlegs - but frankly I was too tired after my internet session to try to instigate a conversation in French. So I hung around for a few minutes hoping we would make eye contact - we didn’t. One minute further down the road an attractive (but much more aged) French woman made eye contact with me – almost saying with her eyes ‘come sit down at my table’. I might well have done in other circumstances - but she was eating at a pizza joint (and I really question the values of people who choose to spend 15 Euro for a piece of half-leavened dough with a smear of tomato, basil and Italian cheese on top of it. That’s not a meal – it’s a quick snack to be eaten on the metro). Moreover, she had one of those horrible little Pekinese dogs between her ankles, so beloved (especially) by French women who ‘like to lunch’. I passed by the unspoken invitation. Guess I’m not going to ‘get lucky’ in Gruissan. I’m either too timid or too selective.

On blogging, Buddhism and ducks

Blogging can be a bit like meditation or going to the gym- you get out of the routine and then it's really difficult to get back into it. I had a 'dip' after coming back from England (partly because I had a big - natural- high from going back to West Wales). And I do try to resist the temptation to make my blog a 'sounding-off box' (that's what my friends are for - that way I can choose what I share with whom). Thank you for being patient over the past weeks.

Then we had a really cold snap - which disrupted travel plans but didn't give enough snow to go cross country skiing (grrrr) - but at least my journeys to work are short enough not to be disrupted by re-routing or traffic jams. And I found that I am not so self preoccupied to forget buying some fat balls to make a contribution to keeping our local bird life from being starvation.

Anyway, for the rest of this month I have determined to chant at least one hours daimoku a day. That's the spring from which fortitude merges. The sowing of seeds. There may well be things in my life that are difficult to change - but chanting is something that I can do irrespective of my circumstances. The funny thing (Buddhists call it the mystic law - the link between cause -in this case chanting- and effect -in this case a 'conspicious' benefit) is that as soon as I made that decision - I mean like five minutes after I started chanting with that determination - someone called me to invite me to a meeting to discuss an interesting project that has been on the back boiler for more than a year - so long that I had thought it was definitely a dead duck.

Dead duck - now there's a prospect. I can't remember seeing duck in the shops here - I get the feeling it's like trying to buy Beef Vindaloo in Southern India. The ducks here are so fearless, crossing as insouciant as holy cows - oblivious to humans. My first memory of Wageningen was seeing a gang of ducks strutting up the High Street on a Sunday morning - knowing it was theirs ("wanna make sumfink of it, Jan?"). A few years later I saw a mallard climb the steps of a cafe entrance - looking intent on going in and ordering a skinny latte. I had the camera shot all set-up and just at that moment someone walked out the cafe and scared him away. Damn. It would have been an iconic Dutch image.

So if I want duck for Christmas dinner I might well have to cross the border (or make the acquaintance of a poacher). Seriously, Lidl stores in Germany sell frozen duck, but their Dutch cousins don't. Maybe I could arrange a clandestine meeting in a forest clearing - five grams of sensimilla for a brace of Campbells (given what's going on in the Netherlands with legislation about foreigners' access to coffee shops this is definitely not a fantasy scenario). And, I wonder what would happen if I got caught at a random border control? I'd probably have my Dutch residency immediately evoked. ***k it I'll take a chance.