Tent thoughts: Summer 2k24
de Beauvoir, Marseille, Luna the dog, the Michelin man, queer love and grief (of course)
02/09/2024
Yesterday our 7 person family trip to France was cut down to 2 people. Mum and I are currently sipping pastis looking down at the sea from a balcony in a sweet hotel in Endoume; the quieter, chicer, calmer, more instagrammable part of Marseille. The place where bronzed Europeans are sprawled across fag-ash covered rocks like incredibly attractive lizards. Breasts on show in all shapes and sizes - but mostly youthful, small and perky ones with strategically minimal tan lines. There is a general rule at the Marseille swimming spots that the only sounds to be heard is french chit chat (although the UK hipsters have begun the gentrifying process*), the opening of beer bottles and the warm Mediterranean waves tickling and slapping the rocks. I enthusiastically support the banning of portable speakers on public beaches [when other people are around]. This is completely the opposite of how I lived my summers in my 20s on Brighton beach but we change, we grow, we learn.
** The tik tok-ification of travel - or ‘Touristification"‘ that’s been happening around the world has had some yucky gentrifying effects in some places and people are not happy about it. Barcelona and Bali, for example, have both told tourists to go home. Rent prices are unafforadable and half the apartments in the cities are empty for Air Bnb (BOYCOTT ANYWAY, free palestine). Or the places that have gone viral just can’t handle the crowds that flock to get *the shot* to upload to instagram. There are lots of articles written on this and definitely something to think about when travelling.
Mum and I went to lunch at ‘Kennedy’s’ today - a trendy, blue tiled fish restaurant that felt like the French equivalent of Dory’s in Margate or any natural wine selling - small plate serving - probably located in East London somewhere - eatery. We had a tomato, orange and hazelnut salad and a bbq’d sea bream that I am still thinking about now. My kind of food. Fresh and light and tasty. The kind of food you can eat over hours while slowly sipping a carafe of vin blanc. A carafe - they had not - at Kennedy’s today and the maitre d got mum giggling when he gave mum, me and everyone around us extra big glasses to compensate for the ‘verre or bouteille’ situation. There is a very specific kind of silly ‘n charming man that gets mum a bit fizzy. Someone who does everything with a sort of charming performance. This particular geez felt like the glue that held the restaurant together - it’s his gaff probably. He kissed the people who came in and took the piss out of the old guy who sat on the end of the bar (in a nice way - maybe he was his dad). He pretended to spray mum with a water gun (that tickled her). A hub of the community - with the added bonus of tasty food and wine. It got mum and I talking about the type of place dad should have run if he were alive.
It was dad’s calling to run a joint for people to come and have a bloody good time at - with food, wine and gd gd vibes. He was a Christian so he probably thought this path was God given but I think it might have been built into his DNA. Bistrot Martin would have a menu of daily changing delights - seasonal and satisfactory to any and all tasty cravings. A packet of sweeties - a jelly bean or some palma violets - wouldn’t be amiss sitting on the end of the bar. Growing up, Martin - the house hubby and head chef - would create lots of beautiful build your own dishes. He was always considerate that everyone likes a different spice and nice. Tacos and kofte kebabs loaded with cheese, sour cream and crunchy ribbons of lettuce, or yogurt and cucumbers and decorated with little coriander leaves. There were also family classics from my half French/ half Indian maternal grandmother who taught my dad to cook over the phone while my Mum was out at work. Chicken lime and lemon turmeric chicken, Goan prawn curry and Moroccan meatballs. There was ALWAYS a pot of soup on the stove - for us and for the housewives who came to gossip with him while we were at school. His deep need to entertain people was almost essential to his existence - never would a trip to the supermarket not end with a NBF (new best friend) at the checkout queue. On more than one occasion I came home from school to find him around the kitchen table telling inappropriate jokes to the local Mormon missionaries.
I’m 15 years old, sat on the sofa watching Friends reruns after school with Ella. It’s a grey October Wednesday afternoon. We’re both still in our uniforms. Our blue and black striped ties lie discarded on the arm of the sofa. The top four buttons of our school shirts are undone, and our brightly coloured band t-shirts (or maybe I’m cooler in my memories than I was in real life … it was probably a primark vest worn under my school uniform) poke out from under our stiff but stained collars. Dad’s been sitting in the kitchen all day - on the phone to various people - insurance, bills, my grandma, doodling all over to do lists. The house smells like a medley of tomatoes and cumin and fresh herbs. That post-school bowl of cinnamon grahams hasn’t really touched the sides. “I’ll be thereeee for youuuu” blasts out as we sink into another episode. Ross is convincing himself he’s fine with Rachel and Joey dating in this one… the decline of Friends storylines have well and truly begun but we hold on because we’ve been hanging out with these 6 characters for probably about 8 years now. We know no better and there's nothing better to do. Dad pops his head round the door “are you girls hungry?” “ummmmm ye”. Two minutes later we hear him shuffling down the tiled hall in his wide boat-like birkenstocks. He places a wooden tray in front of us on the carpet. On that tray sit two 10cm in diameter terracotta ramekins. The ramekins are piled high with tiny bitesize meatballs (I love it when they’re extra small - like polly pocket food). Disgustingly I like to pop them in my mouth and suck the juice out of them. The sauce is full of strips of onions and chunks of garlic. Coriander, mint, parsley, olive oil, cumin seeds, ground coriander and cinnamon. With two tiny silver teaspoons to eat them with, we devour the sample of his culinary treats quickly. It leaves us satiated but eager for meatballs round 2 at dinner. It might have to be on my death row dinner menu.
At Bistrot Martin gi-gronis would be flowing (these are double negronis he would serve at the bar he ran). These are obviously a clear indicator of his extreme alcoholism at the time but they still go down in history with those that knew him. Sometimes, for those without an extreme alcohol problem (just a normal one), one is a welcome treat after a long day.
To make a gi-groni you need:
50ml gin
30ml sweet vermouth
30ml campari
Ice
Twist of orange
As I’ve suggested, Dad’s need to have a giggle was a kind of compulsion. Daily he needed to get his funny ego juiced up and feeling nice. I definitely have elements of that in my blood - if I haven’t had a little giggling interaction with someone all day I'll come home and chew Maia’s ear off with some silly nonsense. Mum told me a story about being in Norway with a colleague / friend a couple years ago. It was about a week into the trip and she realised her face was feeling odd. After an afternoon of pondering whether a lifetime of resisting lotions and potions had finally taken its revenge on her face - she realised the reason for her face feeling bizarre. It wasn’t her feminist rejection of the beauty industry [see Naomi Kleins ‘The Beauty Myth’] but instead, the fact that she hadn’t laughed in a week. The muscles in her face had started to freeze up. As she looked around, a room full of earnest Norwegian faces, she began to crack a smile.
Maybe Dad would get his guitar out for any stragglers at the end of service at Bistrot Martin. But only in a nice and cute way. Definitely not in an arsehole - beam me up softboi - way. It’s a shame that the place he ended up running was a bar - with booze being the rescue remedy that he didn’t know when to stop taking. The bar ended up being the place where his bad behaviour was amplified and his sanity slipped away - and then eventually the actual site where he killed himself. Every day I walk past this bar to get to the tube station or head to the shops. It’s now got a different name above the door but the bar is still the same bar. The same exposed brick wall (lol), the same disabled toilet, the same garden, the same shutters I knocked my head out running out of the bar that day, the same cellar hatch I went through to find him. One day I’ll write about that properly but not while i’m on holiday…
We always end up by the sea. Mum feels at home here. She grew up by the sea (in Brighton) where she met dad when she was 16/17. I feel connected to the sea too. We trebuchet-ed my dad’s ashes into it - albeit the English Channel not the Mediterranean - but every time I swim in a sea I have a wee chat with dad. As if the chunky grains of his ashes have travelled far and wide to every coastline that I swim in. Perhaps he’s become a Poseidon-like maitre d. That’s a nice thought - Dad at his under the sea restaurant schmoozing the turtles and fishes and whales - in more of a chic ancient Greek tiled depiction of the sea gods than a Shark’s Tale situation. Maybe an element of both.
So we’ve been camping last week with my sister (Anya), her babies (the boy-bies), my brother (Noah), his girlfriend (Georgie) and her mama (Lorraine). Georgie’s dad died a year ago and ours almost 10 years now. Our funny little higgledy-piggledy DIY family with a notable lack of fathers have returned to the campsite we spent many years at in the early 2000s.
We came to Perylade from around 2001/ 2002 when I was 8/9 till maybe around 2005? Our summers were a haze of us three kids in the back, two (sometimes arguing, sometimes laughing) parents in the front, a boot full of camping gear, boxes of wine under our feet, ONE small bag of toys each, a box of cheese ponging out the whole car and a scratched up CD of Californication. Pretty much your standard middle class family holiday from the London I grew up in. At the campsite, Noah and I would catch lizards and jump off rocks with Dad. Mum would float down the river in a rubber ring, her skin turning a deep leathery bronze, with her nose stuck in a book. Dad’s use of the rubber rings would be to enact “Monsieur Michelin” while he did silly skits by the river. I just googled the Michelin man to get a picture of the tyre company mascot and found some insane pictures of the original Michelin Man. He travelled across France, promoting regional restaurants and wines in a bid to make people use there cars more, therefore needing to buy new tyres. The original mascot's catchphrase “Nunc est Bibendum” - Latin for ‘Now is the time to drink’ is a catchphrase that would have suited Martin. I think if that specific bloke with a cigar below offered me a drink I would be anxious it was laced with some hallucinogenic.
One evening, at Camping Perylade, mum came back from the washing up block with a slight rage on as one of the dads had accosted her at the sink —-
“Do you not know the rules?? The mums do the cooking and the dads do the washing up!”
This sandal-clad, gorpcore (but not in the fashion way) het nuclear family man had tried to make a joke but distastefully neglected to remember the fact that families come in many shapes and sizes and often men are not around for whatever reason - in my experience they are killing themselves or just generally dying from some horrible disease (self induced or not) or generally being a bit shit and not around.
Finding a clam on the beach in France - circa 2000?
DISCLAIMER Obviously I know a couple of dads and also soon-to-be dads who I know are amazing and will be the best dads around. I feel so gassed to have 2 nephews and friends about to birth baby boys so we can raise the boybies to be as great as the only straight man I hang out with regularly and love dearly (my brother lol).
Anya is 6 years older than me and 8 years older than my brother so her experience of le Camping Perylade was very different. Anya would be off flirting with french boys at the campsite - one year an ex-boyfriend and his family were there (juicy). Noah and I would follow her as she went to snog boys in the haunted house up the river - but we never actually made it up there because we got too sca-wed [scared]. Still to this day I’ve not set eyes on the haunted house.
This year we took Anya’s two kids. Arlo is 5 and Oski is 2. It was really beautiful having them there. It did make me realise how much it takes a literal village to raise children. They are e x h a u s t i n g.
Me and Noah one year on a Souf of France holiday.
As I sit here and ponder queering the family dynamics and the actual possibility of raising a wee baby with the motley crew that is my family (ps love them and so grateful for them) I’m also struck with the fact that last night I bled all over my skirt because I thought my period was over and I had to sit on some tissue and mum had to escort me out of the posh restaurant by walking behind me (am I a 30 year old baby???) And also the fact that getting pregnant feels like the most impossible thing as I grow increasingly less attracted to men.
While I’ve been here I've blitz my way through a couple books, none quite gripping me as much as The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir - a novella about the friendship between her and her friend Zaza who died tragically when she was 22 years old. They met when they were 9 years old, in a strict catholic school that the upper echelons of Parisian society sent their daughters to. So strict were their finishing formalities, that Zaza and Simone called each other vous (the formal ‘you’ in French) and never kissed each other on the cheek, or were tactile in any way. This seems especially bizarre given French cultures kissy kisses greetings.
Simone, or Sylvie in the story, describes the feelings of meeting and becoming close to ‘Andrée’ - the new girl at school - similarly to depictions you would find in a teenage girl’s diary about her first love. This is the story of a queer woman’s first encounter of falling in love with her best friend, which, for me and a lot queer women, is incredibly relatable. The line between loving someone as a friend or as something more. The unreciprocated adoration of the popular girl at school as a teenager. The changing of relationships once the romantic line has been crossed between two female friends. The beauty in falling in love with each other's minds. The long conversations about love and politics, equality and justice, and silliness and friendship.
Simone de Beauvoir and Zaza (Elisabeth Lacoin)
The Inseperables made me weepy in a combination of my big queer love break up and the grief of my father. The exceptional Zaza died when she was 22 and my dad died when I was 21 (is it synchronicity or just me finding meaning or connections in everything and anything). Deborah Levy (my favourite writer along with Annie Ernaux) wrote a beautiful introduction to the version I had. She wrote that de Beauvoir felt that Zaza “was ‘the hostage’ taken in exchange for her escape” from the society that raised and constrained them. The series of events laid out in this novella ultimately lead to her death which de Beauvoir grieved for the rest of her life. She was able, however, to bring her alive through her writing, maybe just like I’m trying to do with dad.
One night me and Arlo (my sister’s 5 year old) decided to go back to the tent early from the campsite restaurant to tell stories and go to bed. We walked past a little pooch so I suggested we make up a story about a little doggy “like ‘the adventures of Luna and Arlo!’ or something like that??” Luna was my sister’s dog who died 2 years ago. As I looked to him for a sign that this was the right direction for our collaborative story-time to go in, his eyes filled with tears and his tiny little chin started to wobble. I hadn’t realised that the death of our beautiful regal gentle blue skinned sad eyed girl was such a trigger for him. She’d died when he was about 3 years old but I guess they were best friends. In that tiny flat in Chelsea, Luna was Arlo’s giant friend, his big sister, his protector as he found his feet in the world. His cries were deep and from the belly. The proper sounds of the wailing grief that I am all too familiar with. As we lay in the bed and I held him, I tried to comfort him but also distract him with other stories. But through his tears and breathlessness he kept protesting - “no tell ‘The Adventures of Arlo and Luna’”. So I made up a little story about my gorgeous sensitive nephew and the doggy that saved our family when the world fell apart. Each time I mentioned her name the tears got stronger, but he wanted me to carry on. He was really feeling his feelings and also able to relive his time with his long lost best friend. Arlo needed what I need to do with my writing and what de Beauvoir did with hers.
The last words in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir:
‘Zaza’, raconterais [would tell], ‘mort’ [death], and ‘sa mort’ [her death].
Recommendations for reading:
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir.
Listening to:
Arlo kissing a little clay model I made of Luna
<3 LUNA <3 The best girl who always held your hand and the best manners sat round the dinner table.
FOR ALL MY SUBSTACK READERS PLEASE ENJOY A 15% DISCOUNT CODE “SUBSTACKHUNNY15” IS THE CODE COS I LUV YA XOXOXO