I suppose Christmas must be approaching because there was an advert on French TV featuring singing reindeer. Sometimes I leave the TV playing without watching it, in the hope that I will perfect my french and expand my vocabulary through a process of osmosis, or rather that all the confused sentences blaring out will sink into my subconscious somewhere for future use.
It's monday afternoon and i have to hurry a little because I have a class to teach in less than an hour. Just time for an update though.
I have made a new friend here. We met in french class. She is a twenty five year old spanish girl full of enthusiasm to meet people and make connections. I instantly recognised that she was new to the town, and was still hopeful that this place might have something bright and interesting to offer her.
After class one day, she took my number and offered to drive me home in her beat up old car. A few days later she got in touch, and we had a lovely trip to the local cinema- a small cinema, slightly reeking of damp, with three auditoriums and tacky blue neon lights framing the archways on the exterior of the building. We had to sit on the front row because the auditorium was full up- the first time i have seen it so packed- and peer up at the screen.
The next morning, she came to pick me up in her car. It was great to have a rendez-vous, to be in demand, to have someone in a ramshackle old car parked outside my house honking the horn for my attention. She had brought along an Italian girl- both of them are working as au pairs for the same family, looking after one badly-behaved four year old girl.
I was quite stressed in the back of their car, because i was late to meet the geeky but quirky english assistant Grace. Spanish girl- Marta- had the radio blaring out flavourless French pop music, and at the same time kept trying to make conversation with me. I could hear a jumble of words over the noise, and see her warm-brown kohl-rimmed eyes peering at me through the rear view mirror, but could not join the words i was hearing up to make a coherent dialogue.
They had been half an hour late to meet me, and now were making up for that by powering full speed on the motorway. The fourteen year old car could barely take it, and was making unhealthy noises, like a aeroplane about to take off. Eventually, after struggling to find somewhere to park, we arrived well in Lorient, and met curly-haired cheerful Grace, who took us to her favourite crepe restaurant.
How lovely to have female company- to have a lunch date with three lovely women- I was very content eating my shallots, tomato and egg crepe- the only issue was knowing which language to speak. During lunch we settled on English, as this was the easiest way for Grace and i to fluently catch up, but afterwards switched back to French.
Grace- I feel slightly bad using peoples real first names without their permission, but if I don't it will become too confusing- told me she was meeting a man after our lunch-date, someone she had met at church, and seemed somewhat nervous about this rendez-vous with an almost unknown person.
"Just follow your intuition" I advised "Don't go and walk in any isolated woods, or go to his house if you have a bad gut feeling about it" I suppose it doesn't hurt to be over precautious- not that i ever am.
She laughed at my advice and said that she had infact thrown such advice to the wind before, when she was living in Germany. Despite having the air of a little girl sometimes, she has had a lot of experience living abroad, and is perhaps not as naive as initial impressions suggest.
She told me how she used to take the train along the same line every day- perhaps to get to work- and would see a woman on the same train each day- travelling without a ticket, and dressed in a manner to perhaps suggest that she was homeless, or indeed very much a down-and-out.
Grace told me how she started chatting this woman, making small talk, and one day they decided to arrange a rendez-vous to get to know each other better. Nervously she took the train to the next small town, which was where the woman lived. When invited to go to the woman's place, she declined, taking heed of all the advice one is given as a child- don't got to strangers' houses. The woman confessed that where she lived was "pretty much outside" and led Grace to a cluster of caravans huddled in a green field.
From then on they formed an unlikely friendship- the unkempt middleaged German woman, and neat, perfectionist, cautious Grace. She would go to see her every week and drink tea and chat in the caravan, until they became quite relaxed in each others' company.
I asked what sort of things they had to talk about, and she said they didn't really have anything in common- but she was content to just listen to the woman ranting on about her failed romances with other women in the caravan-dwelling community. The last news Grace heard of her was that she had decided to pack up and leave for the bright lights of Berlin.
I think sometimes friendships are unlikely, but they are very important. I think without them people wither and curl in on themselves like sick plants with no sunlight.
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