Crossing the Channel
Twenty-one miles of water and the small terror of driving on the wrong side.
There’s a moment, rolling off the ferry ramp into France, where every instinct you own about which side of the road to be on quietly files for divorce. We crept out of Roscoff at a stately fifteen miles an hour, both of us saying “right, stay right, right” like a mantra, and somehow didn’t hit anything.
A different kind of quiet
Brittany welcomed us with grey skies and the smell of salt and butter, which is to say it welcomed us perfectly. We found a spot above a cove that the map hadn’t bothered to name, made crêpes badly, and watched the tide come in.
The cooking changes the moment you cross a border. Suddenly the markets are full of things we half-recognised and didn’t know how to use, and the whole project of Stove got a good deal more interesting. There’s a recipe coming out of this stretch involving an embarrassing quantity of salted butter. No apologies.
The rhythm settles
A week in and the strangeness has worn into routine. Wake with the light, make coffee, drive somewhere or don’t, cook, photograph, sleep. The work still gets done, there’s a surprisingly good signal on most of this coast, which keeps the day job happy and the diesel paid for.
We thought the hard part would be the leaving. Turns out the hard part was just the cupboard door. Everything since has felt like the reward.