French village moments

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

William Faulkner

I was wondering what to write about, so decided to look in a folder I have on my desktop of this and that kind of ideas. A sub folder is 'moments in time' where I found this. So I stared at it for a while, and noted that although it is not a very wonderful photograph there are details in this that mean a lot to me, and hopefully they will help you too to observe, and remember similar moments in your own life.

If you look at it more carefully (click on the photo to enlarge it) - you might see a man in the window above the shop, the shop itself and it's higgledy-piggeldy display of fruit and vegetables, the restaurant table in the foreground ... So much can be said about these tiny little moments that occur in our lives and so I thought YES.

For my opening quote is so perfect and relevant. The clock stopped and focussed on one tiny moment in my life, showed me things I had not noticed at the time, and brought back a flood of memories, as well as thoughts about a variety of things, that could perhaps be turned into a blog post.

"The years go by. The time, it does fly. Every single second is a moment in time that passes. And it seems like nothing - but when you're looking back ... well, it amounts to everything." Ray Bradbury

Everything? Well maybe not everything. My children and grandchildren have very littel relevance to this photograph. But yes, it encompasses my love of France and almost all things French, it reminds me of a beautiful stop on the way to see much loved and missed old English friends, and perhaps, most importantly it reminds me of a calm and happy time with David. For not all of our moments are happy and calm. We have been married too long. The moments I am featuring here, however, are some of our happiest moments I think. And calm - yes. Even serene.

Maybe the first thing that struck me about 'my starter' photograph is how very French it is. The France that I know anyway - the small villages dotted around the country with their one main street, lined with small shops, mostly somewhat unkempt. The wires and pipes strung any old where across the fronts of the buildings, the scuffed and random nature of the containers for the fruit and vegetables, and the shutters too - although the ones in this photograph are in pretty good shape.

And yet this is the village of La Garde-Freinet, one-time home of Johnny Depp and his French then wife, situated just around half an hour above the expensive resorts of Saint Tropez, Sainte Maxime, Saint Raphaël and so on. It cannot be a poor village, but even here there is no attempt to gussy things up. In Saint Tropez et al. yes, but not here, behind the scenes as it were. This is the view of the village from our gorgeous B&B, which I shall come to. The village was just a few minutes away, and St. Tropez lay just beyond that dip of the far hill.

And yet there were very few tourists. Here is David walking down the main street, not a person in sight. It was early tourist season but Saint Tropez itself was busy and the majority of the people you saw strolling around were tourists. The excuse is not that it is La France Profonde either - the little known wilder regions of France where nobody thinks to go. No this is the heart of the expensive Mediterranean coast west of the Rhône. Although I suspect it was that early afternood 'dead' time of day you often encounter all over southern Europe.

My 'starter' photograph was taken as we were sitting in the restaurant you see David walking past, sipping a glass of rosé which I glimpsed in another photo. There was nothing special about it really. The food was not outstanding, just deliciously French, but we were there in the early evening and the locals were out and about, having emerged from their afternoon siesta and downtime. This is an evening shot from the same place, at the same time. And none of those people look like tourists - they are all locals and they all seem to know each other. They walk, they chat, they have a drink before dinner. They might even do some shopping in the local Spar - mini supermarkets you will find in many villages. It's owned by Casino who also operate the Géant hypermarkets - one of the big French four. And so we too, sat and watched the world go by before returning to our hilltop eyrie.

The next day we dined a little further down the street at a popular spot and were witness to one of those magic little moments one sometimes encounters on holidays abroad. It was world cup soccer time, and again, as we waited for dinner, it seemed that the whole village, led by a man on a tractor, paraded down the street, in their best gear, waving at everyone. No floats, no fancy costumes, just a happy, happy, crowd of people, celebrating the world cup.

Let's go back to my original photograph and the man in the window. I took that photo because I wanted to capture the essential Frenchness of those little village supermarkets. I did not notice the man in the window. I'm not sure I even noticed him at first when I chose the photograph. And, even when I did notice him, at first glance I thought he was drinking a cup of coffee. But no that's a phone in his hand and he is looking intently at it. As people do. There is nothing unusual, exceptional or exciting about it, but it's a glimpse into another life. An unexceptional moment in a man's life, frozen forever on a computer screen far far away on the other side of the world. Who is he? Does he still live there? Was this just an everyday call or search, or was it something earth-shatteringly important? If one had a marvellous imagination I suspect you could write a novel about him.

Ditto for every tiny moment and every person that exists in those photographs. Like the man sitting alone at the table beyond us.

For me, of course, these photographs evoked a flood of nostalgia for that particular place and the two nights that we spent there, on our journey from the centre of Italy to the south of France. I cannot remember the name of the place, which is very sad as I would highly recommend it.

I am talking about the year 2014, so it may not exist any more. This was the mini terrace just outside our bedroom on the ground floor, a few steps away from the gorgeous swimming pool. Upstairs lived the owners, and downstairs there were two or three rooms. Whilst we were there, there was one other occupant who apparently was a regular visitor. The house was magnificent and hidden away down a fairly straightforward unmade road, that some American visitors had complained about. The Americans are very good at complaining about things that really don't matter.

I mean look at the two photos above. Idyllic is not the word to describe the place. David even got to sit with a dog - a favourite and treasured thing for him to do I think. It was the perfect setting and a breakfast to die for. That bread, those croissants, the little cubes of melon in a glass, the table, the chairs ... And the view. My photos are not that great. They generally get better when I get them on to my computer where I can crop and straighten and enhance them. I rarely do anything more although I know I could. But I am actually quite proud of this little set of photographs from this place as they do indeed capture a number of precious but fleeting moments in my life.

"My pictures are about a search for a moment—a perfect moment. To me the most powerful moment in the whole process is when everything comes together and there is that perfect, beautiful, still moment. And for that instant, my life makes sense." Gregory Crewdson

What did people do before there were photographs I wonder, to freeze those moments? I guess they had to just keep them in their memories and return to them now and then. The memories in one's head and the memories in a photograph are different however, are they not? In the head, they are potentially not even real - entirely fabricated. They are at the very least either blurry or altered to suit what one is searching for. With a photograph what you see is what it was, although even then, the way the picture is framed has an effect. You can cut out the ugly and the mundane. And what happened before and after becomes one of those more imaginative memories. Not to mention that the imagination can throw enhance or destroy what you see.

Beside, today, we have so many of them. So many that we just flick through them and do not really look. Do not see the man in the window or this couple who seem to be in love or did he just say something temporarily loving, that made her smile?

"We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory." Georges Duhamel

Maybe we should look at our old photographs more often to cheer us up in unhappy, or even ordinary times.

MORE YEARS GONE BY of the foodie kind

March 19

2024 - The perils of lunch in the city

2023 - Bostock

2022 - A ladies lunch in the city - another one, now there's a coincidence

2021 - Scotch eggs are not Scottish

2020 - Deleted

2019 - Is sliced bread the greatest thing?

2018 - Basmati rice - simple, yet not

2017 - Nut roast suprise