bastille day

To a restaurant in a nearby village to celebrate Bastille Day with a group of French and English friends. We eat moule frites in the garden of the auberge and watch a firework display before the evening ends with un bal populaire - aka an outdoor disco. There are toddlers, teenagers, elderly couples and a few old(ish) men dancing alone in front of the old stone church. It's utterly charming and impossible to resist the temptation to join in. And so it is that I end the evening dancing round my handbag to.......Plastic Bertrand.

It's the second time I've hit the dance floor in two days. The previous evening I went to a party being thrown by my boho-hippy friends Lulu and Eric, who live in a small hamlet 20km from my village. On arrival Lulu thrusts an impressive cocktail menu into my hand and tells me they can make me anything on the list. She points to a cocktail bar that is better stocked than the Dorchester.

Eric and Lulu's house is a work in progress and it seems that over the past year most of their energies have gone into converting part of the barn into a 'party room' complete with chill-out area, dance floor and music decks (Eric is an excellent DJ). The walls are draped with sari fabrics and a curtain of fairy lights. There are strobe lights and dry ice. And so we dance for several hours to nostalgia-inducing techno music in a home made 'nightclub' in the middle of the French countryside. It's quite surreal but after a fairly traumatic 48 hours that - for reasons I won't go into here - have left me something close to devastated, I leave feeling much happier than when I arrived. Thanks Eric, thanks Lulu!