Joie de vivre

 

Walked through the village to give French lessons to the farmer’s wife confined to her bed after an accident. There are irises out in the gardens, dark blue and royal purple and a lovely dirty apricot. My friend Beppa’s house is very neat and orderly but somehow lifeless and unenjoyed. On the other hand my home looks as if we celebrate Christmas every other day, so I am not one to talk.

 

‘I feel depressed,’ said Beppa. ‘How do you say that in French?’

‘You can’t say that,’ I said vaguely. ‘Depression is not a feeling, it is a symptom of repressed feelings.’

So we listened to Edith Piaf singing  husky songs about doomed love affairs and practised a clapping counting game. Then we had a peppy conversation about la condition humaine and  unlimited potential and  how sometimes it helps to make a note of three small things each day  we feel grateful for. In the present tense and not the conditional.

* I am so grateful that I finally realised the importance of the word PROMPTLY in Step 10. It only took two years for me to notice that. What a difference a teeny little adverb can make!

Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

* I love hearing my housemate sing All Things  Bright  and Beautiful in the bath, tunelessly but with feeling

* I am grateful to have people in my life who love and need me. Sappy, but true –

My friend Beppa  hummed and hawed over her three reasons for gratitude and we talked about  the nuisance of French nouns all being masculine or feminine. She said she is grateful to have extra painkillers hidden in the armoire in  the salle de bain. She is grateful she doesn’t have to have sex with her husband because he has wrenched his back. Le pauvre homme! She is grateful she isn’t as overweight as her sister.

For some reason, I can’t help feeling Beppa may be more in touch with her feelings than many of us but we need to talk a little more about la gratitude and  the importance of some joie de vivre.

When I got home my puppies had shredded a copy of the London Review of Books and my house looked more lived in than usual. Quel dommage! And I have nearly finished my rewrite of the rejected chapter but it reads awkwardly in places so I have to revise the last section again. Nevertheless, life is good.

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