A triple positive

Avignon, 3.44pm, 7 September, 2011 – I arrived in Avignon thinking that I would take in the sights of the city and enjoy what could only, surely, be a magnificent, consoling lunch. There were no floods of tears leaving the farm, not this time, but it was a wrench. A departure with the same sad sense that I remember from twenty years ago: the magic over, the usual end-of-holiday glumness magnified by knowing that – unlike any other holiday – the fairytale could come real, the wish that the holiday would last forever could be made reality. All I’d do is up sticks.

My bus contorted around the narrow corners of tiny pretty villages, wound through rippling hills, and my melancholy evanesced. Hazy sadness faded and sentiments settled – the experiences gone. Not forgotten, just another layer to build upon.

On the move again, the tonic that trumps the blues. Kinetic energy kindling new dreams. There would be a lunch. It would be flawlessly delicious, homely French restaurant food. After the week-long rural feast, I would chance upon a meal that would be the perfect re-induction to city life and capital bourgeois eating.

****

Shortly after stepping off the bus, a woman with a child rummages in a bin, pulls out a McDonalds’ carton, then proffers it towards me. I don’t have change; I haven’t used cash for ten days. Within the city walls the French equivalent of Special Brew is swigged. In historic squares, there are handbag hawkers, there are tourists.

A city then, in all its bustle. My overcast prickliness a rash I know that bristles from within. Lumbered with a rucksack full of books, some of them read, encumbered by thoughts of the farm, the sky and the meal I could be sitting down to.

Wearing a tailored shirt for the first time in days, and it pinches. Love-vegetables-handles, squash-heaving muscles? In sandals but not flip flopping around sunburnt fields. Pounding the hard streets, ducking and diving from Christina Aguilara compilations blaring. Tarmac and glinting mica. The city mucky, but in a far from wholesome way. Sweltering but without the breeze and a blue sky or the promise of a long farm lunch.

Rattling past the sights. Avignon clearly has its glories, its squares and its bridge to nowhere. Faced with ramparts, however, and my mind’s eye sees frizzy, crenulated lettuce in stacked wooden crates. There is a delightful courtyard with an octagonal fountain that, as I approach it, becomes chlorinated and off-putting.

The last thing I want to do is sit down for an expensive, multi-course disappointment. The steaks are high, and the eateries seem wilfully determined to do everything not to entice me in. One restaurant boasts mussels from Mont Saint-Michel. The molluscs surely out of season and certainly collected from closer to London than here. There is a place called Flunch! I stomp onwards. Window after window of sandwiches, unappetising baguettes with undersides displaying mass produced pimples.

Then, in the back streets, away from the vendors and crowds, of all Avignon’s sights there is one which captivates me, makes me stop, set down my rucksack and gape.

A shop window boarded up. ‘Fruits Legumes La Qualite dans votre Panier’. Blemished white lettering emblazoned over a massive photo of impossibly glossy fruit and veg, all weirdly disproportionate. A kiwi whole and kiwis sliced membrane thin. A huge airbrushed strawberry, cut open with a hollow core. An assemblage of a single orange, blackberries and blueberries bisected by a grit-free, pristine leak. There are garish, glazed, tomatoes. Broccoli and radicchio thrown in good measure, all pretending to be thrown together. A harvest festival as imagined by an airfreight executive with a penchant for high-angled photography. It is the most lifeless still-life.

Bedraggled but real, the store’s actual fruit and veg is tucked around the corner. At this point I would like to write that I bought what proved to be the most sublime melon, but no.

Another corner. Another window. Another photo. Lettering which says, ‘This is not photoshopped’. An image that is as striking, as peachy, as callipygous: an advert for an anti-cellulite cream.

****

I give up on food and go into an air-conditioned bar. I’ll have a Pastis. The aperitif route, a way guaranteed not to be disappointed. Dependably aniseedy, it will be a token gesture to dreams cultivated on the farm for the tufty ranks of fennel that I saw double in size in a week.

Bewitching mirrors and glass bottles, the thrum of the city outside. Standing against the bar I realise that I have stumbled upon the very opposite of what I thought I was searching for. Back home, for a long time, in that way that some ideas become snared, I had been trying to engineer a dish of something that would enable me to write that “a certain turbidity is lifting”. A meal that involved clarifying, perhaps. (Take stock. Taking stock and seeing clearly through to the other side.) Anything which would allow me to say that the clouds are parting, that where there had been darkness, there was now savoury sweetness and light.

From transparent, the liquid in the podgy glass has clouded over: a delightful turbidity has fallen. The Pastis wriggles and jiggles and tickles inside. One sip of Ricard 45 and thoughts spool as I realise that I have reached the vantage point from where I can see that have looked at both sides now. Been distracted from distraction by distraction, glowered at melodramatic frets and stared at, and stared down, the worry that I don’t know taste at all. (This side, I see, has taken on a tarnished patina through neglect. I hadn’t noticed.) And seen the other side too, recognised the exuberant certainty that I do know life and tastes after all, and seen reflected back the sparkling side of the love that loves to love.

*******

I almost didn’t go in. Cheered after the Pastis and saying to myself that I should get on the train, the train. I almost kept on, past the cloisters and the chapel.

It was the words on the poster that caught my eye: “Entrée libre et gratuite.” An exhibition free and free. How? Why? What trick am I missing which would explain this double positive? Then I decide that while ignorant of the linguistic subtleties, I am not going to miss out on this, a Richard Long installation, an ephemeral creation especially for the space within.

Pewless and decommissioned, the Chapel St Charles is faded, high-barrel vaulted baroque. Marmoreal cool and still. Striated sunlight from high windows fletching down to where, on the floor, in a rectangle five metres by fifteen, using some ten tonnes of sand, there is, as the title of the exhibit forewarned but which could not dampen the exultation when actually setting eyes upon it, a Field of Ochre.

Made from the materials of the Luberon, red sand scattered and haphazardly raked by Long. I stand transfixed and elated and bemused. Feelings that I have never before felt in church. Captivated by the beauty, and by the sheer coincidence.

‘Don’t touch!’, says a sign. I have no need to get my hands on this earth. I will forever have another image indelibly forged, to go with the many others painted not in ochre but in the burnt umber of the farm.

***

The right art, extraordinarily at the right time. Emerging from chapel the only right word is sanguine, in every sense: I am confident, full of hope and ruddy with delight. I have not found a meal, but with the Pastis and the Long I have found two astonishing born-again-baptisms back into civilisation. And, with eyes opened, I see an unmistakeably proper bakery. It has an Agriculture Biologique logo to boot.

Waddling into the shop with my rucksack, pivoting around the tiny store to take everything in, visions of fine patisserie flying. Inevitably, I buy a feast.

I eat in a nearby churchyard on a bench under a horse chestnut tree. Each delight comes in a thick, riveted brown paper bag. I am watched by amused gaggle of giggly teenage girls on an opposite bench and by proud, but clearly secretly imploring, cat.

It a feast which no amount of music played though mobile phone speakers could possibly detract from. First a tomato and aubergine quiche with an earthy crust, neither greasy nor dry. Then a savoury flaky pastry tarte tatin with frosted almonds. Followed by a deep custard tart with a toping of waifer-thin dark chocolate in a very thin salty crust, soft and cool. Finally, and the very best of all, a square wholemeal tart of sweet, candified green tomatoes.

Hard conkers periodically shower down, cracking open about me. Absorbed by the food, I eat, sit on the bench, and replay the crazy twists and infatuations that brought me here. Before – enough philosophising! – under the pretext of asking a few questions about the food, I go back to the bakery and buy a canale.