Saint-Valery-sur-Somme

The father-in-law & Marine's sort-of-step-mom have decided to split, so a bit of house cleaning was required this weekend. I don't know if I've ever mentioned the step-mom, before. Where to start? She once told me the story of how she lost her virginity; she was 15 and an older gentleman bought her a lemonade. He then took her up to his hotel room where he nailed her. I guess that sums up a lot about her, actually. The French, even. Often while drunk she would force me to dance with her to Talk Talk's "It's My Life" or other 80's hits, an attempt to relive her youth where she was young and blond and drank lemonade and got fucked.

People don't like to move on, it's natural. Last winter I actually spent a couple of months in the house with her because I had no where else to go. She drank a lot of wine and watched a lot of Bewitched. I think she wished she was Samantha so she could wiggle her nose and make everything in her life OK again, back to when they might have even looked a bit alike. But not any more. Now, she talks a lot about her rich Dutch ex-husband, a suspected pederast, who absconded to Japan. According to her, that left her a shell of her former self. I won't argue, it's all pretty depressing.

It wasn't all bad this time. I think she was happy to have the house cleaned out. We even got some free stuff. Some Village People vinyls were salvaged and I snagged a Mickey Mouse phone that nobody wanted. I don't know if I want it either, but there was something sad about that mouse just sitting up there in the attic, waiting so patiently for someone to answer the phone.

After that, we ended up staying in Saint-Valery since Marine's grandma owns a summer house there.

Saint-Valery-sur-Somme looks like your average little port town. It's a place for old French people to use as a summer home and basecamp to gossip from, and a place for families to spend a bit of their vacation. The tourists are from other parts of France, or Spain or Britain -- lots of British -- who come with cameras hanging around their necks, waiting for the perfect sunset so that they can capture it and take it home to bore the shit out of their friends and family. A lot of the old houses have maritime motifs just like you might find somewhere in Florida. An old fishing net hangs from a rafter in our attic-bedroom, picture frames are lined with seashells and doors have the anchor or boat wheels decor. I can't tell if it's a caricature of itself or if it's just so fucking genuine that I can't swallow it. That's what I get for growing up in a country dotted with Red Lobsters. Cynicism and suspicion.

But there are old and winding streets that weave up and down hills, and an inlet where you can watch rich people take their boats out to sea. Across the inlet is another town and when the tide goes out, you can practically walk across to it. It's when the tide comes in that people drown, the currents sucking them out to sea. Down the road is putt-putt golf and occasionally during the summer they'll have musicians come around to play the usual family-friendly blues crap. In the restaurants stretched along the waterfront you'll find people eating the seafood you'd find anywhere. Mussels, shrimp, fish. Whatever the French can find buried in the sand. If you can manage to forget the other people, it's nice to take a walk along the water or through the town -- I like the old architecture and the sides of buildings that have been painted with now-faded liquor advertisements.

Aside from the aesthetic beauty, though, it's pretty damn boring. Like most cities or towns in the north of France, it's small. Very small. OF course, that doesn't stop people from coming and it never has.

My wife's people, the Guals, were here well before ol' J.C. was born, and so were the Romans, who came in to conquer them. And then William the Conqueror sailed off from here in 1066 to, well, conquer the absolute shit out of the British. The house we stay in was built in something like 1860. The cellar was built in 1231. Much like the small and winding roads that barely accomodate cars, the architecture in a lot of the houses seem to barely accomodate people; I've managed to hit my head in both the attic and the cellar now -- both, painful souvenirs. But it does have a cozy feel and there are layers of history everywhere, which is a little overwhelming to me. I mean, Joan of Arc passed through this place, maybe even had a tinkle down the road.

How old is that wall? When was this built? Why, and by whom? Lots of questions no one can answer, because nobody really cares. I love history and I know I'm lucky to be over here, but for someone like me, European towns like this are just frustrating. There's nothing tangible. Some times it just feels like a lived-in old house. You put up with the wear the others put on it and then you move on. Sure, it's neat to see "Jacques X, 1644" etched into a wall, it's nice to sit and imagine the story of the person and what times were like back then, but that's all your doing because it's all in your head. There's no story to be told. The artifact to find here is the town itself, the only problem is sharing it with everyone else.

I keep having to tell myself, "This is France, man. People have lived here for a long time and they're going to continue to live here. That's it."

Me, I want to get out there and discover it all each time I come here. I want to explore and get dirty and find things nobody has seen in years, mysterious things that have secret stories that can never be told, because their owners are long since dead. All that silly, romantic crap.

It's too bad I can't just be happy where I'm at. Maybe someday when I'm old, too.