8th August 2010 – Happy birthday to me

I woke up on the Sunday and quietly wished myself happy birthday. Sitting cross-legged on my jiggley bed, I ceremoniously unwrapped my book of poetry and bar of chocolate from their paper bags. I had never really considered how I would spend my 21^st birthday, but I would never have imagined it would be on a farm with a group of strangers. Downstairs there was post for me; apparently my family’s birthday card had arrived bang on time and had been found with the Reblechon the previous day. It had spent the night defumigating in the kitchen. I opened it, and stared back at an image of my newborn self printed on the folded paper. There was another surprise. I had been planning to take myself off down to the river for the day; it was a Sunday, so we weren’t expected to work. But Hannah had let slip that it was my birthday and that 21 was a big one in the UK, and Nathalie and Joao had taken pity on me and decided that they would take me out for the day with Francis while they explored the area. So, unexpectedly, I was swept up in the excitement of picnic-packing and climbed into their car.

I wasn’t entirely sure where it was that we ended up, but it was somewhere along the Loire. It was a glorious day: the sun was shining through a pleasant breeze, and wispy little clouds of pure white scudded across the sky. We got out of the car to walk along the river through an old village built from stone. The village school was obviously still used as such, the modern wooden benches and plastic bins in the playground at odds with the wrought-iron gates and the signs engraved into the stone above the two front doors, designating one door for use by the girls and one for the boys. The gardens of the surrounding houses were well tended and beautiful in their planned array of colours. A rusting bicycle was leaning against a wall in a street devoid of cars. It was as if we had taken a brief step backwards in time. 

On the other side of the village we stopped and set up our picnic blanket. My birthday lunch tumbled out onto the chequered wool: ham and cucumber sandwiches with apricots to follow, and nectarines so ripe that juice dribbled down our chins despite our best attempts to be civilised. There was no way they could have known that for me, cucumber sandwiches formed an integral part of any birthday picnic. And yet there they were. A period of rest ensued as we lapsed into contented and sun-drenched silence. I brought out my pocket knife that I had taken to carrying as the farmers did, and began to whittle away at the kernel of one of the apricots. After a while, the heart of the fruit was transformed into an eye, smooth and lidded. I felt it would become a reminder of everything I had experienced on my farming journey.

A little overheated from the intense midday rays, we walked to the river. We passed tall dried teasels that I couldn’t help but reach out to feel, the delicately brittle spines soft to stroke upwards but hazardous downwards, rattling gently at my touch like autumnal leaves in a gust of wind. Our shoes were left on the pebbles of the riverbank as we dabbled our feet with the darting silver fish. We jumped from one stepping stone to the next, out into the middle of the meandering flow, our arms outstretched for balance, wobbling occasionally and dangerously waterwards.

There was a display at a nearby ruined castle that afternoon, so we drove up a dusty track to the strategically built strongholding. It had long since crumbled into indistinct beginnings of walls, from where we could see all around the region. We perched on what might once have been the window sills of a banqueting hall and settled down to the strange spectacle, which turned out to be a group of locals dressed in medieval costume, performing a series of songs and sketches. My bottom grew slowly more numb with every act. It wasn’t the best piece of theatre I had ever seen – and the most dramatic part of the afternoon was watching a car being pushed out of a ditch by audience members once the display was over – but it was undeniably very sweet. 

So, it turned out, were the farmers. Going out for the day with the family had been only part of their

birthday plans for me. They weren’t people to miss out on the opportunity for a party. I arrived home to blue balloons growing from the trees as if they were apples, hanging above the long wooden trestle tables that had been pushed together outside the house. Soon everybody from the other farm descended on us, and Marta’s homemade guacamole and tortilla chips were brought out from the kitchen along with wine which flowed as freely as the conversation. At thirteen guests, this was without a doubt the biggest party I had had since I was in junior school.

The birthday meal was a lamb curry made by Evelyn, because they knew that I liked to cook with spices and she was confident using them. As the birthday girl I was banned from going into the kitchen, but it was agreed that it was my responsibility to dish up. The meat was wonderfully tender, and had obviously been cooked long and slowly. She had been a little overzealous with the chilli and while my palette could cope with the fire, Francis found it too hot and had to run indoors, eyes streaming, to find some milk to calm the burn. My cake, once it was brought forth from the kitchen, was a chocolate banana cake, crisp on the outside and moist in its spongy centre. 21 candles burned in hedgehog formation from the top while everybody sang to me – joyeux anniversaire – and as I blew them out, I accidentally extinguished the table’s tealights at the same time, plunging my end of the table into momentary obscurity and giggles. It was a little difficult to cut the cake into thirteen equal-sized slices, so I plumped for ease and cut fourteen. It was a prudent decision, because everybody agreed that I should have the slice that was left over.

A party game followed, given to me as a present. It was a trivia game and I was elected the quiz master, and the questions were impossibly difficult. As the rest of the table struggled to name Charlemagne´s nine wives, collapsing periodically into contagious laughter, I all but forgot the difficulties of the previous days. I relaxed into the midnight happiness at the end of my birthday, feeling that perhaps these were the most welcoming people in the world.