31st July 2010 – The Party

It was all that we could talk about all day. We got dressed up, even putting on a little make-up around our eyes. I donned a cream and pink dress of many different layers of floating lace and rose-printed chiffon, a new acquisition from Lamastre’s Tuesday market. I even shaved my legs for the first time in six weeks. Whilst I had experienced a certain sense of emancipation with each added millimetre of fuzz, the sense of smoothness that followed the razor exceeded it in satisfaction. It frustrated me that my own sense of feminine attractiveness was so closely linked to the elimination of something so natural, not to mention so trivial. As we left the house, I plucked a small rose for my hair, and clipped it in. I felt beautiful. 

As we arrived at the vast gardens, we met Anne-Marie. She laughed gently at us in our get-up, telling us that it was always possible to pick out the WWOOFers because they were always young and well-dressed. She introduced us to her two current WWOOFers: a young and well-dressed couple from Bristol called Emily and Ben. We spoke in French to them, but it was a struggle. Emily’s French was reasonable, but Ben spoke very little. We were so adamant that we weren’t going to give in and speak English that they assumed that we were French. Anne-Marie clearly hadn’t told them that their predecessor would be there, or if she had then they hadn’t put two and two together. It was quite funny. We lapsed into English for a couple of minutes, but it felt too odd not to speak French to Kira and Josefien. As we wandered over to the barn they split away from us, and we didn’t see them again.

At the entrance to the barn, under a tall, wooden-roofed structure, there were casks of locally

brewed beer tended by an impressive – if somewhat sozzled – set of dreadlocks. Under his instruction, I poured my first beer from the tap: success! A perfectly clear deep amber with a small smooth head of dark cream. Josefien and Kira took lessons in beer-serving too. That half went down very easily, and after not very long we were back in the queue for more. Disaster struck as Kira and Josefien walked away with their second drinks and I took my place at the barrel: complete and utter failure. With a glass full of froth and a lightheaded feeling of hilarity, I joined the other two at the barn door.

Inside there were villagers dancing. Michelle was one of the dancers, resplendent in a long burnt-orange skirt and a red shawl. In the soft lighting of the barn, the colours had been pulled straight from India. At least, they had been when the lanterns were actually on, but somebody kept on leaning on the light-switch and plunging us all into the dark. The colours of her clothes were of little consequence in the blankness of the night! Xavier was on the sidelines looking a little uncomfortable in the crowd. I wondered if he was a man with two left feet, or if secretly, when he was alone with Michelle, he was a soulful dancer. In spite of his corporeal awkwardness, I suspected the latter. Anne-Marie was sitting a little further off on the other side of the barn, watching the revellers with a touch of wistfulness. I knew that she would have been at the centre of the gambolling had it not been for her still-injured knee. Behind them a folk band of musical locals played the accordion, the washboard, the guitar and the tambourine. The room was buzzing with the vigour of a ceilidh; the energy was infectious. 

Carla invited me to dance, and so I did, leaving my companions and joining in with an easy folk dance in a round, and moving on to more complex steps as the music changed. It was intimidating at first; everybody but me seemed to know the dances, and I ended up paired with a five-year old at one point. This stalled my progress in learning the paces, but eventually I got there, and I whirled around and around, dress flying, hair whooshing, eyes shining, head spinning with beer and movement and happiness.

The onlookers began to flock away from the barn, and dancers and musicians alike quickly realised that we were missing out on something. As that something was the announcement of the imminent arrival of food, my feet skittered swiftly in the direction of the long trestle tables, where Kira and Josefien were already sitting, a seat saved for me. There were lots of good looking men. All three of us were impressed by the testosterone that wandered around us, mostly long-haired or dreadlocked in hippy or laid-back but clean farmers´ clothing. There was one particularly striking African man sitting on the table behind us, and my eyes kept sneaking back for just one more peek. We developed a ridiculously obvious secret way of pointing out handsome faces: sexy mec à trois heures, sexy mec à trois heures! It seemed so much funnier and so much more clandestine to say that there was a sexy guy at three o’clock in French rather than in English, even though English would have been a much safer language for the purposes of secrecy. It was an oversight that I blamed on the beer. 

The dishes were finally brought out from the house, and the food tables were soon not to be seen for the jostling revellers. There was a huge range of salads as well as about a million dishes using quinoa, which appeared to be the fashionable gourmet food of the moment. There were bowls of pesto hummus, an entire wheel of Pierre´ comté, a curry of aubergine and tomato, slow-cooked and combined with lime pickle and bunches of fresh coriander. The three of us, though we indulged in the savoury offerings, were waiting for our berried tiramisu to make an appearance. Amazingly, despite having already made three of them, we still hadn’t had our fill of the creamy coffee-impregnated magic, and we fully intended to get to it before it was discovered by anybody else. We knew that it would disappear with revolting speed. Anne-Marie was on the lookout for some chocolate walnut cake or other; we learned from her that we’d be able to see the puddings coming out of the house before they reached the table. Still, we made frequent reconnaissance trips, just in case. While we were waiting, in-jokes prevailed, completely absorbed as we were in the atmosphere and in our week’s worth of friendship and laughter. 

Tiramisu! We fought off the locals for the first spoonfuls, and we never regretted it for a moment. Other puddings up for the tasting included a loud American woman’s cherry pie; an amazingly succulent and sweet apricot upside down cake; banana bread; inexhaustible supplies of fresh apricots and raspberries; bowls of the decidedly odd combination of cottage cheese and alcoholic cherries, and of course the chocolate walnut cake. I had never seen a woman with a gammy knee move as fast as Anne-Marie did when that cake finally made its entrance.

The empty plates were swept away as soon as the banquet had disappeared. The tables, too, were dragged to one side, and before we knew it a jazz band was in full swing. People began to dance with unbridled joy under the tent, fuelled by good food and shared excitement. Soon the air beneath the tarpaulin was thick with swirls of tobacco and cannabis smoke, although it was impossible to tell who was smoking what. Like a drugged apparition, a trombone player popped up amidst the dancers, somehow taller above the bouncing mass of bodies. He started up a tune, and suddenly everybody was singing in raucous unison, a strange Cajun song that everybody else seemed to know that involved plenty of stamping and clapping. We left at just before 1a.m. –we had a fair to attend the following day –but the party was still going strong. Unusually, I didn’t want to leave. I could have danced there all night; I could have stayed into the dawn, spinning and swirling and twirling and living.