The new pattern for living seems to go like this. Emerge from a lockdown and shake off the careful life you built inside the restrictions imposed on you. Take a few halting steps out to your friend’s house, to the pub garden, walk the streets more and more carelessly. Soon you can forget the bread baking cycle and the little routines you imposed on yourself so you didn’t bang your head off your own four walls. Live more energetically and spontaneously (while you still can). Soon, travel is back on. Head out of the city and see your parents. Dare to book a plane ticket.

I shot out of the gates myself, determined that I wouldn’t pass up opportunities any more. I went to Switzerland, then France with my girlfriend. In Paris we squeezed it all in with no slack days. We met more cousins than I knew a family tree could accommodate for drinks and dinners and those French lunches where everybody manages to have a couple of glasses of red in the middle of the day.

We spent a week in a manner somewhere between tourists and locals. The apartment in Montparnasse was borrowed from a friend who was out of town, and we went for morning runs. We bought fresh bread some mornings to have with breakfast, which like all meals seemed to involve primarily bread and cheese that had no business being so good. The allowances for being tourists were as follows: the running route inevitably led to the middle of the city (the somethingth arrondisement, I really struggle to get native with those) and some great landmark, we visited the Musée d’Orsay on my urging, and we dawdled around when the path to an appointment led us somewhere nice.

I like the Musée d’Orsay because:

• It’s much smaller than the Louvre
• It’s a little bit quieter than the Louvre
• You spend way less time walking past hall after hall of Christian devotional art (sorry basically everything from 1000-1600) to get to the good stuff
• They have a great collection of Rodin busts
• The restaurant is inside of a clock

After Paris, we headed south to stay with Sarah’s parents in their mid-renovation farm building in the Loiret. There things slowed down a lot. For a while I worked remotely from an adjoining building before I came to my senses and booked the rest of the week off to just be with everybody else. A crucial part of everybody else was Pip, the little kitten rescued from a drainpipe. It is quite amazing how much time you can spend watching the kitten, or talking about the kitten to others who are also watching the kitten.

For the most part we holed up while Sarah got as much quality time with her parents as could be had in the respite from pandemic-induced estrangement. Her family are spread far and wide geographically, but they’re very close in the important ways, and frankly I don’t know how they cope for long stretches apart in the current climate. On a rare outing from the hamlet we saw a chateau and climbed a watch tower in the middle of a huge forest to see the view. The autumn foliage made it pretty spectacular.