Swallows and Amazons

October 26th

Me and Lija are off for a jaunt around the other assistants’ floors with the magical gonflable mattress, because we inexplicably have two weeks of holiday for Toussaint. On Saturday night, I was invited to an end of term party in Corte by Victoria, the only person I have managed to make friends with in Ile Rousse so far. She’s 19, a pagan, and working at my school as a classroom assistant to save money for her psychology degree. I went along with trepidation, but her friends were much more like my friends than the guys we met in Ajaccio with Audrey. They were very friendly and mostly quite geeky, and I had a really nice evening sampling various bizarre concoctions that people had brought along and trying to understand conversations over the music. There was a man in a top hat, smoking a Gandalf style pipe - we started talking about Lord of the Rings and I got to display my geek cred by remembering Tom Bombadil’s name (and his wife’s…I am just too cool…). There was a guy called Kévin, who got increasingly hammered on cannabis-flavoured absinthe and spoke hilarious English. His friends were all pretty agitated because he apparently has stomach ulcers and really shouldn’t drink, but he maintained that he could keep his food down better while pissed. I had a great evening, despite the fact that Victoria fell completely in love and left quite early on, wrapped round a man.

For the next two days we indulged in childish swallows and amazons pleasures with Emily, the English assistant in Corte, who is really lovely and down to earth. Corte is surrounded by mountains, and two rivers join in the town, so you can walk out of town upstream along the gorges. We spent idyllic afternoons eating our sandwiches by the river Restonica, paddling in the freezing water and sunbathing on boulders. The stream was limpid and sunlit and I spent ages watching the shadows of water skippers, where each indentation in the water, made by a foot or proboscis, leaves a round shadow the size of the insect itself so that a whole shoal of them looks like a shifting Rorschach test. While the others were off on another walk I set off along the bank and found myself all alone with the slick green stream, the beech leaves turning golden orange with the sun behind them. Pissing out in the open, balancing rocks one on top of the other in the river, falling asleep in the sun…it was so wholesome, timeless and relaxing.