And so the fourth day aboard Ruru begins. Waking at 5am, to three hours of darkness before the October dawn.
What is that all about, you may ask.
Jetlag, my friend.
That sentence reads weirdly, so just be clear, jetlag is not my friend.
But it’s as legitimate as death and taxes: the human body needs time to adjust after 45 hours of air travel, time zones, airline food and layovers, and arriving at your destination 12 hours out of whack.
I can think of at least five recurring symptoms.
Sleep. For me, this means waking at 4.30-5.30am each day. Thankfully I’m not required to follow standard office hours in my daily routine. So I just settle for waking and sleeping early throughout the duration.
Ablutions. I’m being polite. What I really mean is morning poos. Long flights leave me constipated hby. This time round it was fine after a day. That was a bonus.
Tiredness. Not to be confused with general overall ageing. Coffee helps - if you partake. Takes a few days to sort itself out.
Aching joints. See above. It also doesn’t help that I jumped straight into boat renovations on arrival, squeezing into confined spaces to do plumbing jobs for the holding tank project. From experience this one can only be solved by laying about doing nothing for a couple of day. Fat chance.
Spending a lot of time contorting in narrow walkways Feelings of ‘wtf am I doing here???’. Part of my normal inner monologue, but heightened during jetlag. Applying yourself to the task-at-hand helps. As does seeing results from your labour. Hoping to hit this spot today with the completion of the wastewater-sump-under-the-floor-by-the-kitchen stage of the holding tank project. We’ll see.
The weather’s been great. It usually is in south west France in the first half of October. Coolish single-figure nights, 20s in the afternoons, falling golden leaves, golden sun.
Today I was reminded the little town of Castelsarrasin, which as been here for ever (12th century to be a bit more specific) is not immune to the slings and arrows of economic change.
I found out the boatyard’s closest boulangerie closed the day I arrived. Literally. Forever. Or as the handwritten window sign expressed it, “fermeture définitive!”
Macro-economically, the closure is part of a multi decade trend of provincial town-centre traders being slaughtered in the face of newer big box businesses setting up shop on town fringes. Castelsarrasin has no fewer than four newish big box boulangeries (along with a myriad of every type of retail imaginable).
The big box boulangeries bake in volume, have plenty of parking, double as cafe lunch bars and offer volume deals (“buy 2 baguettes, get one free!”). And in an odd twist that could only happen in France, the baked goods at the new places are actually well priced & consistently excellent.
The smaller operators simply can’t match.
Sad socio-economically.
Walking from the bakers with a baguette under your arm is fast becoming a past-tense activity.
On the other hand the new retail reality provides an excellent an excuse for a 7km there-and-back cycle ride along the picturesque towpath to the nearest big box boulangerie.
On y va.