Love at first sight and other sports

It's a common enough story: Middle-aged man visits foreign country, falls madly but inappropriately in love and suddenly the life he's been living ever since he can remember seems pointless, empty and impossible to bear any longer. You've read it in novels, seen it in theaters and heard it discussed on daytime TV, but I assure you it really happens. It happened to me.





Yesterday we visited La Roque d'Antheron, a smallish village north of here on the banks (or almost) of the Durance, a village seemingly identical to dozens of others we've visited with no noticeable after-effects, but this time I lost my heart! Maybe it was the charming town square, the Place de la Republique (most communities regardless of size have one), the renowned classical music festival which runs for several months each year, the imposing chateau which seems to have been ingeniously converted into a Clinique Dietetique (what used to be called a fat farm), or the adolescent pizza-eating bacteria (see below). Anyway, it seemed to epitomize everything I'd want in a place to call home (did I mention the fishing in the Durance) if for some reason I was cruelly exiled from Portland and cast out onto foreign shores, there to eke out a meaningless existence far from friends and family. (But not, thank god, from Italian food)





The virtues of La Roque had been extolled to us by the mother of one of Mike's classmates at a wine and cheese party which was held at the school on Friday night. We had been somewhat apprehensive about attending but it was great fun. Many of the people there had moved frequently about the world due to their own jobs or, in childhood, the work of their parents, or both, so it was a very cosmopolitan gathering. Many of the couples were bi-cultural, the woman from one country (Malaysia, for example) and the man from another (say, Scotland). The english-speakers gradually ended up clustered together near one of the outdoor heaters (it was held outside under pollarded plane, or sycamore, trees) and got delightfully silly, conversing raucously in variously-accented English, the new lingua franca of the age. A good time was had by all, in part, I'm sure, because we all left the kids at home! We were free, freed from the shackles of parental respectability for one glorious evening! And what a relief to meet some kindred spirits because we know some of the parents at this school are, well, clearly suffering, and not in silence, from terminal affluenza, poor things!





Lois has been actively integrating herself into the local scene, finding and joining activities that interest her. As I write this on Monday evening, she's at her first choir practice with an amateur choir composed of residents of our village, Eguilles. They are beginning preparation of Carmina Burana for presentation later in the season. She attends yoga class on Tuesdays in Aix and just signed up for Intermediate French for Parents offered by Mike's school. Vous allez, Grrl!





We're planning our first family trip to Paris at end of October during the first of Mike's two-week school breaks. We think we'll take the high-speed TGV train and spend 4 days in Paris, after which we have the pleasure of welcoming some friends and our niece Heidi for a visit with us.





And now the important stuff: The French rugby team, Les Bleus, have advanced to the quarter-finals of the World Cup!!! That's the good news. The bad news is that they have to play the fearsome New Zealand All-Blacks, who are overwhelmingly favored to win it all. However, there's more good news: the All-Blacks have been overwhelmingly favored to win it all every time the World Cup has been held (every 4 years since 1987) and they've only won it once, in its inaugural year. But then there's more bad news: the match is being held in Cardiff, which I think is in Wales, despite France being the host. Inscrutable are the ways of the International Rugby Federation. The round-robin, or pool, stage is over and the matches from now on are sudden-death, so the drama is heightened to an almost Euripidean pitch. (Pitch? Is that a pun?) There are 8 teams remaining so there will be 2 matches on Saturday and 2 on Sunday, all broadcast on free TV, available even out here in the sticks, so Mike and I and most of France are agog with anticipation.



It's been a quiet week for our favorite continental chief of state, Nicolas Sarkozy. True, he did address the 6 billion inhabitants of Planet Earth via the United Nations, lectured the world's leaders on their economic and environmental responsibilities, visibly lost his patience with some interviewers (hey, they're only journalists, y'know) and threatened Iran with nuclear annihilation, but that left a couple days free, so he went to the country to promote his reforms. The old campaigner hasn't lost his touch, as the photograph below, an Unudderable Gaul exclusive, demonstrates. He had the audience eating out of his hand. Alfalfa, maybe. C'est comme ca! Tom







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