*The view from where we have breakfast, down a scorched mountain, looks unfinished and lumpen, like it was left too long in the kiln. I’m with three generations of Wisemen in a French Airbnb where they have Apple TV but no towels, and the rooms are monkish with beds half-propped cheerily on unexplainable steps. Crucifixes surprise us in wardrobes and cutlery cupboards, and give the sense that we are being watched, if not quite watched over.
We, in turn, are watching my parents’ house back in London, as their doorbell? Is now? An app? And every time it rings we spy with wonder on, for instance, a locked out neighbour, then look out again at the pine trees and wonder how it’s possible to be both here and there, in a hundred ways, many to do with our relentless triviality and domestic anxiety. The itchy ethics of these casual security systems, which mean we are monitoring strangers unawares, and my mum can have a jolly conversation with the postman about where to hide her shoes from 1,000km away, are unwieldy in this heat.
We move extremely slowly, because you wear the weather on your shoulders here like a sodden towel. From home, we read texts from friends who’ve seen mirages of ice-cream vans, and my sister tuts at BBC alerts advising she drink water, and the news says the Arctic is on fire, which can’t be good. Here the crickets are more tinnitus than flesh. I can’t be the only person, can I, who hears their chitter and thinks immediately of the Big Brother live feed, where they used to blast cricket song over conversation late at night, and us faithful viewers would try and lip-read their libellous gossip?
The sky is huge and round – body positive, I think we say. It ripples with cloud, its stretchmarks mirroring our own proud thighs, blinking painfully in the sunlight. The pool is made in its image, a tablecloth of sky, Hockneyed to death but still inviting. We are not the kind of family that leaps in after a run-up, instead approaching step by step, quivering palely. Once immersed, we stay in the shallow end and remain respectful to the bathing wasps, for they were there first. The baby floats past in its inflatable seat like a fancy cocktail, and my five-year-old, still discombobulated by the holiday’s lack of routine, forcefully imposes games of “school” that go on too long and end in tears and no ice cream tomorrow.
Nature remains exhausting, its raw and endless beauty reaching upwards. The supermarket is a relief, each flaccid refrigerated vegetable a self-portrait. Every aisle is like a whole new holiday, the cereal selection postcard-worthy – I drink in a display of fake rocks one can hide a key in as if a long glass of milk. Each cheese has its own personality, and they call to you mournfully like Battersea dogs. There are 8,000 types of mayonnaise.
Hence, a lot of washing up. Through the kitchen window the landscape adjusts itself every hour, fig leaves unfurling, an unseen road roaring intermittently, and trees closing down for the summer. The glamorous washing-up liquid crawls with ants, and to follow the A-road of their path is to find yourself crunching through a shag pile of brown pine needles to a smug surfboard, awash with insects. When the rain comes, the stench of pine, bay and something curried and warm rises quickly to the patio, where the books of those that don’t value reading enough to get a Kindle are quickly pulped. The weather here is as dramatic as a grounded teenager, flipping from extremes of unbearability in the time it takes to shake out a ponytail.
Sitting inside a house built for summer is an opportunity to psychoanalyse the owner of the Airbnb, focusing on their four-year-old Nesquik, rudimentary bin solutions and omnipotent view. At night we eat meat and go over how we’d each spend a lottery win. If you sit with the question long enough, working past the world-peace rescue-politics save-the-rainforest niceties, the details reveal each of our terriblenesses in turn, as if peeling off bandages. My mum would invest in eradicating the health risks from smoking. “Like, vaping?” somebody dared suggest, and she hissed a bitter no across the citronella candle. My brother-in-law, four steps ahead, plans to give his parents a limitless credit card rather than a cheque, “for tax reasons”. Clever.
I would buy each of my friends a very nice house. The catch being they would all be situated within five minutes’ walk of my own very nice house. “Like, in its… grounds?” says the same petty chancer, who I shush, because I haven’t finished listing my clauses. Yes, they would own these houses, but no, they wouldn’t be able to sell them. “Like, you’d be… trapping them?” I shush her again, vigorously, while behind us the sun slides drunkenly below the horizon creating a strange red light.
What I’m trying to say is that you can go on holiday, but unfortunately, you take yourself with you. And yet, both of us are having a lovely time.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
