I was very careful, ahead of my hiking weekend with Seth in France, to avoid doing anything that might cause me injury. I took it easy in the gym, I skipped leg day (hiking’s no fun with sore thighs), I ate well, I rested. Acutely aware of my luck with such things, I took every precaution to preserve my bodily health; I didn’t want anything to spoil my big, restorative weekend away in the Occitanie countryside – and god, I needed it after so many months of solid work in London’s great metropolitan marsh. God must have a wicked sense of humour, however, because the evening before my flight, my phone rang. It was Seth.

“Mate, you’re not gonna believe this. I’ve smashed my feet up at work.”

I was in the garden in London at the time, hanging laundry with one hand while clutching my phone to my ear with the other. I let out an involuntary bark of laughter.

“Smashed? What do you mean smashed? Are you winding me up?”

“No mate! I was up this scaffold for work and the whole thing started to collapse. I jumped off just in time but I landed flat footed. My feet are killing me.”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish, man. We can still camp, but I’m not gonna be able to do a forty kilometre hike.”

I laughed a bit more, before remembering my manners and asking as sincerely as I could muster if he was actually okay.

“Alright, alright, that’s enough,” he said, indicating I’d failed to hit the right tone.

*****

France makes me emotional. I can’t step foot in the country without being engulfed by a sense of yearning – for what was, for what might have been, for choices I might have made differently if I knew several years ago what I know now. There’s a poetry to the country that England lacks – or, probably more accurately, that England has but I can’t see because I was born here and I’m used to it. The French culture is strong. They like their routines. They’re proud. They’re modern people, yet they retain – fiercely and deliberately – all manner of antiquations.

The French have a reputation in the media for being arrogant and impolite. That’s the stereotype – if you try to speak French, and speak it less than perfectly, they will tut and roll their eyes with disdain. But I’ve never found this to be true. After taking a shuttle bus into Carcassonne centre, I entered a shop to buy cigarettes (an indulgence I allow myself whenever I visit the country, for nostalgia’s sake). The key to getting along in France is to greet people whenever you enter a shop; it’s the height of bad manners to step into a patisserie or tobacconist without acknowledging the owner with a hearty ‘bonjour’ (or ‘bonsoir’ after 6pm). If you don’t do it first, they’ll do it for you – but if they have to initiate the pleasantries, the atmosphere sours just a little. If you do say it, however, you’ll get all the help you could wish for.

My French isn’t elegant – I make a lot of mistakes and take long pauses – but it’s pretty functional, and I enjoy any chance I get to use it. I bust out my merriest ‘bonjour’, then asked for cigarettes and for directions to the train station and the city’s castle (real GCSE stuff), and to my delight the lady in the shop came around the counter and took me into the street to direct me where to go. I felt lucky and just a little bit smug watching the other tourists who’d got off the airport shuttle drifting to and fro looking confusedly at maps – here I was, just half an hour off the plane, and already having lovely twee interactions with local people!

Admittedly, she didn’t use standard textbook phrasing (she said something about ‘following the road to completion’, rather than ‘go straight’) so I got a bit lost, but I understood the basics of ‘left, right, Bob’s your uncle’. I said thank you and ‘bonne journee’, and the lady said it back to me with a warm smile that made me feel I’d done a good job with the language.

I crossed a long medieval bridge towards the castle. I’d have been at Seth’s a lot quicker if I’d gone straight to the station to get my train to Albi (via Toulouse), but I’d seen photos of Carcassonne’s castle on the internet and I’m absolutely not the sort of person who skips the chance to gawp at a massive piece of medieval architecture. The thing is enormous; the woman in the shop referred to it not as a ‘chateau’, as I had done, but as ‘la Cité’. And it really was a city: dozens of spires and steeples soar skywards from within an imposing ring of solid, sheer walls that merge with the cliffside far below before cascading away into grassland. Birds wheeled overhead, miniscule against the grand and humourless battlements. It was a scorching hot day without a cloud in the sky, and every last brick in the walls was the size of my entire torso – tens of millions of them. Not for the first time, I found myself staring and wondering how the fuck humans ever built such a thing – and then, a new thought: why would they build such a thing? All the castles I’ve seen, I’ve always stood agape and imagined the long lines of peasants and mules a thousand years ago, decade after decade, heaving stones from quarries and up precarious mountainsides to build these structures. If you came across any such creation on another planet, you’d be horrified at the thought of who such defences were meant to keep out – because what possible foe could warrant so many years of excruciating exertion? How dangerous was life back then, I wondered, if this insane amount of sweat, toil, and mind-melting logistics was required to keep the average person safe? 

But I didn’t have time to ponder any deeper. After only a few minutes in the midday sun I could feel myself burning up. Thanks to Ryanair’s only-one-tiny-bag-free policy I’d had to wear my hiking boots and long jeans on the plane, and I’d not yet had a chance to change them; it was unfathomably hot and I’d already caught a couple of funny looks from people in the street. I ducked down an alleyway, checked nobody was around, checked again, and took my shoes, socks and trousers off. Immediately, of course, a large barn door behind me opened to reveal three young women climbing into their car and reversing into the street. I was holding my cigarette lighter in my mouth at the time, which I hoped at least made me look a bit more like a don’t-give-a-shit bohemian and less like Rowan Atkinson at the seaside.

Newly clad in shorts and trainers, I trekked up to the castle and spent about twenty minutes exploring the inner city, with cobbled streets and restaurants and drinking wells and endless shops selling medieval tat – plastic swords, viking drinking horns, that sort of thing – before I decided that I should probably get out of the sun and crack on with the long journey to Albi. It’s not that I wasn’t impressed – I was, remarkably so – it’s just that France contains so much of this kind of thing that you don’t really have to worry about skimming bits of it. Throw a stone in the south of France and you’ll hit a castle fit for a Mediterranean Dracula.

I walked to the train station, feeling my energy draining by the minute as the white heat throbbed through my cap and into the crown of my head. I bought my train ticket from the counter with sweat dripping from my brow (I spoke decent French, but panicked visibly when she asked for my date of birth – she laughed and gave me a pen to write it down), and while waiting for my train, I checked my phone: thirty six degrees. Thirty six! Prior to that I’d been feeling annoyed at myself for my lack of hardiness in warmer climes, but I felt suddenly validated; I wasn’t merely a delicate English flower unaccustomed to European heat – it was thirty six fucking degrees. I was allowed to feel a bit queasy.

I took the train to Toulouse, then I changed and took the train to Albi. It was largely uneventful; I read a few chapters of Stephen King’s Misery, which is very good so far, then I got off in slightly-less-hot-but-still-too-hot Albi. A French girl spoke to me on the train as we were getting off:

“Excusez-moi, est-ce Albi?”

“Uh, oui,” I said.

Feeling very useful, I walked to the front of the station to await Seth. There, another lady spoke to me:

“Excusez-moi, vous attendez le bus?”

“Uh, non,” I said.

And then a man:

“Excusez-moi, avez-vous une cigarette?”

“Uh, oui,” I said, giving him one.

Fucking hell, I thought. My French skills are incredible.

Seth met me outside the station; I’ve started to dress a bit more like him in recent years (he dresses like a climber and I like the way climbers dress) and my first thought as I saw him get out of the car was a strange nonsensical panic that he would notice this and think I was copying him. He didn’t notice this, obviously, because that’s an insane thing to worry about, and we hugged round the back of his car as he opened the boot.

“You look well mate!” I said – and he did. Seeing your friends only once a year, you can’t help but do a quick assessment of each other when you reunite. Seth was tanned and lean and well-kept; I immediately envied him his carpentry course and his high-mobility workdays. I strive to stay lean too, but it takes rather a lot more conscious effort when your job involves sitting down all day.

In the car on the way through Albi I told Seth about the various people I’d met during my day, though I noticed within about eleven seconds that he wasn’t paying attention, only doling out generic ‘oh rights’ and ‘no ways’ when I paused for breath. It’s just a Seth thing – his mind wanders far and quickly. I’ve never minded it because I do the same thing half the time, and I could never get annoyed at him without acknowledging that several thousand people I’ve met in my lifetime have a very good right to be annoyed with me, too. We’ve talked about the likelihood that he has ADHD in the past, and he agrees it’s probable. All my best buds seem to have it – birds of feather and all that.

We parked up outside his apartment, grabbed my bags, and headed up the wooden stairs inside. I had a vague idea of what he might have been preoccupied by. I felt oddly nervous too, in fact, although we hadn’t discussed it. The fact that Seth hadn’t said anything assured he was feeling the same way, and when I took my shoes off and followed Seth into the apartment, I rounded the corner to see Blanche, smiling from the kitchen table, and sitting on the floor beside her, plucking walnuts from a wooden bowl and clacking them happily against the woodwork, was a tiny baby girl.

“Wooow,” I beamed, immediately dropping into a crouch as baby Aurelle looked at me with big brown eyes.

“Who’s this then?” said Seth, as his one-year-old daughter yet out a little squeal and threw a walnut on the floor. “Aurelle, say hi to Dan.”

“Hello,” I waved, in a quiet, smiling voice.

Many people my age have had babies by now, but I’d never before felt the privilege of meeting the baby of one of my best friends. Walking up the stairs to the apartment I’d felt a pang of fear – of doing something wrong, of not knowing how to act, of getting in the way or somehow disrupting the familial atmosphere – but suddenly, seeing Seth and Blanche beside their new baby girl, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. I’d expected it to feel surreal, Seth as a father – but it felt, almost immediately, as though it had always been this way.

“Oh my goodness,” I said, as Aurelle offered me a walnut.

“Bo,” she said, throwing it on the floor, then pointing to it.

I picked it up and placed it back in the bowl. She took another one out, waved it around, then bounced it away under the table.

“She has your eyes,” I said to Blanche. “Like, exactly your eyes.”

I don’t know at what rate babies grow; in my mind’s eye, sixteen-month-old Aurelle had been a tiny swaddled baby in a crib. But as I sat cross legged in front of her, she pushed herself up onto her feet and toddled over to me. I took a walnut and swapped it from palm to palm, hiding it from her – kiddy magic – then held out both fists and opened them, one at a time. She frowned, then smiled, then yelped and took the walnut to bounce it away across the floor.

“She likes you,” said Blanche, smiling. “She’s not always like this with new people.”

Seth stood up with a stretch and breathed a sigh of relief to Blanche.

“Aw, I’m glad that’s— yeah.”

Bless him. Seth’s an overthinker like me. Knowing him, it’ll have been on his mind all afternoon. 

I joined my friends at the table, where Blanche had prepared a wholesome dinner for us – potatoes, omelette, tomato salad with mozzarella, baguette – but I’d only been sat a moment when a little person appeared beside my chair, looking up at me and holding her arms in the air.

“I don’t – uh – what does she –”

“Pick her up!” laughed Seth. “It’s alright mate!”

I did as instructed, fearfully, grasping Aurelle under her arms and hoisting her onto my lap. She sat serenely, looking around the table, and pointed at the salad bowl. Seth took a piece of cheese and she clasped it in her tiny, chubby palm, then pressed it approximately to her mouth. We ate this way slowly – Aurelle nibbling at intervals while we did our best to scoff down some bread while she was distracted – and soon it was bedtime. Blanche picked up her little one to whisk her to bed.

I looked at Seth and Blanche, tired new parents, and I watched their faces glow with fascination and love for their child. They watched her enraptured and proud, mirroring her expressions subconsciously.  I couldn’t believe how far they’d come – I still remember them on the blueberry farm, at the very beginning of their relationship; how shy they were with one another, back when they barely shared a common language to communicate in. I felt immensely proud of them – and, as always, a pang of quiet, distant yearning that my own story should have gone in such a direction.

Seth and Blanche – they make two beautiful, young, free-spirited parents. I thought of photos of my own parents when they were young; how I always wondered what they were like back then, in a period of time that is forever unknowable to me. And I thought of my relatives who held me as a tiny baby and now speak to me as an adult , and how I’ve only known them as mature adults, but they’ve known me since I was tottering around in a nappy – and now such a thing was beginning again, only the roles were changed. Now there was a small person in the world who I would know from the very beginning – who I could see whenever I came to visit Seth and Blanche, and watch grow, and maybe teach some things to – the child of two of my favourite people in the world. It was a beauty I’d never experienced before, and an inarticulable privilege to witness. I felt almost unworthy of it – as though I was somehow impeding on their secret joy by being there.

“Say goodnight to Uncle Dan,” said Seth, as Blanche carried Aurelle to her bedroom.

“Bye bye,” I waved, melting quietly inside.