Pret

1 July, 2012, Gatwick – Ready. Bleary-tongued with that pit in the stomach which is carved out by missing a proper breakfast. Ready with hair cut especially, albeit quickly, cheaply, shoddily. Looking like Tufty an alpine donkey, I will fit in.

Ready to be on my haunches marvelling at tiny strawberries rather than hunched over a laptop. Ready for the glare of the sun and the stare of introspection that comes with being abroad, alone. Ready to be around people who lather more butter on baguette than me. Ready for the sun despite yesterday having flushed my designer sunglasses down the toilet. Infuriating, but quickly rationalised as a sign that I am ready to be unbranded, ready for brinded cows and skies of couple-colour.

Ready after a final top-deck London bus ride at first light past ‘Chicken Delight’ signs in Kilburn and expansive windows of organic shops in Warwick Avenue. Neither is for me this summer. Not the artisan-overpriced, and certainly not bargain basement buckets of factory-reared chicken. Ready, rather, for a summer given over to eating as a prince while a pauper.

Not just ready but ironically primed by the recitative in last night’s opera: “We don’t like the French. Don’t like their Frenchified ways. Don’t like their hopity skippity ways.”

Ready. Hungry. Hungry for what? A leap, but where? This summer is the sequel. Last year’s farm found me. I emailed many. One replied. The one which had been most coy. On the website for volunteers their description said least. There was no gloss and I was almost scared off. (An internet search proved only more unsettling, generating a single image – an unprepossessing barn wall labelled a gîte.)

But it was unimaginably wonderful. In ten days I didn’t eat one thing which wasn’t absolutely delicious. Each night I slept though solid.

Ready now to be again taught the lesson that sometimes it is best not to connive. Ready to not ask too many questions, which right now means not asking any questions. Just going, going, going. Ready for a leap into the unknown; for a series of hoppity, skippity mini-leaps. Ready not only for the sequel, but a series. A mini-series. A tour de France crossed with Heidi.

Ready to be disconnected. Ready to be unhurried. Working in the fields, the tan will take care of itself. Ready for swelteringly real manual labour – and for lazy afternoons as reward. Rev up the Kindle, it will be a summer of debauched, glutinous reading. Though this year will be different too in that I will not just disappear off to charge through books, but learn French and French cooking in French provincial kitchens. Ready, doubtless, to infuriate French housewives with my chaotic cooking; but also equally, hopefully, to delight too.

Ready for a summer of snuggly fitting shutters. Gnarled, sturdy wooden crates. Ready to be around beautiful-aged things. Ready for enforced dawns and for the hidden, shrouded parts of morning never normally seen. Ready for rides on rickety, borrowed, little-too-small bicycles, up mountains and down without a helmet.

Ready to slow things down; to experience and taste in freeze frame. Feeling that the vast summer stretches before me, that it will last forever as it once always promised on the last day of school and we would picnic in the country park among the rhododendrons.

Ready to get a language licked, not have it lick me. Even if that means being clueless, catching barely the gist of what’s happening around me. Ready to be immersed – but not drown (that seems to be the linguist’s stage trick and which I’ll try my best to emulate).

Ready for the romance of a long train journey, but that will have to wait. Again ready to get on this airplane just to fly. Ready after just now having been propelled along a moving walkway with piped birdsong which agitated rather than calmed for real bird song. Onwards. Sunwards. To calmer pastures. For the love, for the love of cheese.

Ready, above all, having discovered that I do taste. That I taste well. That I enjoy food, and relish as much as much as anyone else. That I can write. Ready to enjoy writing and tasting, but with only coffee and toothpaste having crossed my lips, ready right now for breakfast. If it is a parcelled sandwich, so be it. Handmade, they say. The last mass-produced thing which I intend to eat for a good while. A slight sandwich of pink crayfish and rocket. Bread not quite buttered to the edges. Unctuous mayo, the flesh of the bread teeth-coating. Slightly aggressive, strong malted grainy crust. I do love it too. Pret.