On Sunday, we went fishing. Yvette and Eugene picked me up in the morning, only an hour late, and off we roared in their big, air-conditioned car, nose to tail with all the other French families zooming towards the coast. Don't ask me about the scenery: I kept my eyes shut the entire way.
We got to St Martin de Brehal, on the Cotentin coast in the department of the Manche, at midday. Yvette had packed a picnic. I expected, having parked, that we would load up with rugs and baskets and make for a shady spot down on the beach. Not a bit of it. We ate by the side of the road, next to the car, just like all those French people who, as a child, I used to mock, eating bolt upright at table and chairs on the grass verges of main roads. Yvette got into trouble because she'd forgotten the furniture. We had to construct a makeshift arrangement for the unhappy Eugene: upturned moules-bucket as chair, cool box as table. Yvette had just a bucket. I demonstrated how you could sit comfortably on the ground. In England, we call it dejeuner sur l'herbe, I explained. They shook their heads pityingly at me.
We had a light lunch: tomato salad, hard-boiled eggs, rillettes, pate and roast chicken, then white cheese. Everything, except the bread, came from the farm. To drink, we had the wine that Yvette, selecting from the cellar rack without donning her glasses, had mistakenly picked: not the vin ordinaire she had intended, but a St-Emilion 1998 called "la Belle Eleonore".
At the beginning of low tide, after a sweltering afternoon on the beach, we set off eastwards. The sea, very calm, hardly any waves at all, ran away rapidly over the gleaming brown sands dotted with stones and clumps of seaweed. Yvette wanted to collect palourdes, the small black clams. You have to dig for them, watch for bubbles. All around us were other French people hunting for their suppers. We stooped, bent over, and I started laughing, remembering all the hunter-gatherer hours I've spent thus with my darling Yvette, nose to the ground, bottom in the air, collecting ceps, or walnuts, or chestnuts, or snails. I couldn't see any palourdes, so I switched to searching for moules. They were hard to spot, perfectly camouflaged to look exactly like shiny black pebbles (galets). But creeping along, swivelling my eyes from side to side, I got the knack of recognising their tips, half buried in the sludgy sand. You gripped them, prised them off the stone or weed they clung to. Very satisfying. I harvested a kilo or so and felt rather pleased with myself. "Bonne Normande," I boasted to Yvette, whose haul of palourdes was small.
When we got home again, I gave Yvette all my moules, but then on Monday morning she turned up, having cooked them a la mariniere, and insisted I take my share. So I had a feast.
