France. Day 2: Hiding.

We have a fear of silence: that was agreed. We would prefer twenty-four hours of daylight to twenty-four hours of night: that, too, was agreed. We would make rubbish Inuits; we could understand the absurd fears of the woman who hid her missing teeth with her hand when she spoke to you; we had no opinion (unlike our new friends) about whether we preferred very short grass or slightly longer grass; we heard nightingales for the first time: each of these was agreed. What wasn't quite agreed was whether we would ever have moved towards the horizon, to Bugarach, to the upside-down mountain, to avoid the apocalypse that the New Agers said would come in 2012. And we couldn't agree whether we would have then willingly gone with the aliens (oh yes) to their planet, their time.

There's something about the air here that's thick with craziness and something about the land that grows hope. (France has, apparently, a cult watchdog - The Interministerial Mission for Monitoring and Combating Cultic Deviances - to keep an eye on the vulnerable, the hopeful, the unleashed. If I learn nothing more this month, I'm pleased I've learned that.)