Rambling Man

Dessert

 FRENCH WEDDING. Red wine out of tumblers while sitting on my parents' bed. The best hangover-cure home-made yogurt for breakfast with a rainbow of such jammy conserves at our B&B with window shutters. Visiting marshlands that weren't 'marshy' enough, and a cathedral with a shrine of tiny shoes, and a market made up of rotisseries - turning, browning, mini-chickens. A charmingly drunk 80 year old maitre d' who was an expert on chicory (endives) and pushed champagne like it was going out of fashion. A woman named the little-girl-romantic Delphine. Pungent goats cheese piped into plastic shot glasses. Feather wedding dresses, marshmallow kisses between men, desserts in a dozen flavours of delicious eaten crosslegged on the lawn so I flashed my pants, perfect figs - 'the food of the gods'. Nine hour party of feasting, drinking, dancing and the macarena. French sweets, a different kind for each table, Carambar nostalgia and filling his pockets with pear-flavoured lozenges as we left. I kept my freshblood-red high-heels on ALL NIGHT, the blooms of rose clusters hiding my blooming, swelling, red toes. Kicked them off and slept like a log at four in the morning.

WELCOME to the beginning of the End of the Road

We travelled to the END OF THE ROAD. Four days of sleeping on slopes and mulching grass. Such good song-writing - Laura Marling, Emmy the Great, Allo Darlin'. The enigma that is Bob Log III: a man in a helmet, wearing a blue velour jumpsuit, using stolen telephones as microphones, getting people pregnant with his guitar tracks, requesting girls to sit on his knee, and making fun infectious, so joyously pleased with himself. Jessica Larrabee of She Keeps Bees playing as if she really was playing for herself, for the exhileration of it, so like Patti Smith. The Growlers taking me to Californian beaches and into a Hunter S Thompson novel. Frozen yogurt infused with elderflower and honey, burritos, nachos, potato wedges, soup heated on the stove between tents, GIN, wine-bag babies, so much warm flat beer from cans we drank all day everyday. Rolling tobacco, zipping sleeping bags, putting up tents in the dark and being prickled by stinging nettles. Fainting in the sun while listening to tUnE-YarDs, hitting my head, being carried by two boys either side who entered my dreams as if they were men I didn't know, feeling so heavy I thought I really best wake up and help them carry my dead-weight body. Sitting in warm hay as we all talked and talked and drank hot brandy cider. Fairy-lights and lanterns and paper birds strewn in woods, discovering a dreamland at night with Midsummer Night's Dream people-visions hanging and lying and sitting in every bower and nook and glade. An Oxfam stall on site - it was that kind of festival. A sunburnt/blushed face and patches of peeling skin now I'm home. And Bloody Marys for vitamins in the pub where Virginia Woolf used to drink to celebrate the end of my dissertation.

BEST WEEKENDS OF MY LIFE.