Agnès lives at the top of a small hill at the first house on the outskirts of the suburbs. I sit on the hot peach patio halfway in and out of the sun thinking about stealing euros off the counter top in holiday villas as a kid to go and buy squeezy farm animals from à toy dispenser at the side of the road. A wicker basket ripens apricots in the sun.
The truck boot unlatched and the cigales are laughing in chorus.
Rosemary, thyme, basil and bay. Theres a strong wind this month, the lady of the house says. Half of the evergreens burned along the mountainside. You’d never know they’d been there. I peep at her behind blue shutters to the blue car from a dark bedroom. To her gesticulations explaining something mute through the driver side window to the woman over the fence. Little welly boots and a white dressing gown.
Later we walk through Arles and I get caught by a Todd Hido - it’s a blue lit, snow covered driveway of a house in Canada at night.
A woman wearing a sort of babbo bolero follows suit, drawn to the photo. She loves it. She takes no less than five photos on her iPhone 16.
I wonder if I’ve got ‘bad taste’ - judgmental bitch am I. Its just a bolero - it’s just a good photo.
I wonder what it is that takes her by it. I could have asked, should have. Does it also remind her of driving at night through Toronto with her mother?
--
In Sete we eat lunch at a long table on the end of a short pontoon at a quiet restaurant by the oyster farm. It feels like a local spot, theres one other table of five eating lots of mussels.
The man at the end of the table introduces himself as Christmas Tree - he’s got bleach blonde, thin hair and blue sunglasses. He’s wearing a short sleeve shirt covered in palm trees and says he moved to France to host techno festivals in the 90s. A few days later he’ll tell me he changed his name because he wanted to be a rockstar like Elton Hercules John.
The wind is powerful, it knocks a big silver bowl for the used crustacean shells from the side of the wooden ledge into the water and sends it drifting into the lake. Too far adrift to be pulled back with a long pole. Nobody fancies much getting their trousers wet, though the water is fairly shallow.
A lot of French at the table, I go into my underwater world. Kicking around below surface level, dulcet mumbles, far away. The light glimmers above the face of the water and ambles down. La gloire.
In Micky’s bathroom I lean over the basin and wash my hands with a bar of white soap. It smells familiar. My face is oddly close to the sink - i don’t know why Im hunching over so much. Im about 20cm away from her soap dish, which Im admiring. À very close inspection. It’s terracotta and indigo, flash of purple, square and pinched at the corners. It’s a great soap dish.
Lots of little tubes of cream in a pot. We use the same brand of foundation. It’s erborian or something, I don’t remember. It makes me feel a little closer to her - I barely know her. She doesn’t like this weather, Ghis says. Shes sleeping it off.
The wind howls through the balcony door standing ajar.
—
Lying on hot stones at the creek. Im eating a pizza with anchovies on the top, burning my shoulders. I buy a coffee in a paper cup from a man with a thermos painted with flowers, they say he holds the world record for walking backwards. Lulu.
Later I arrange to take photos of Christmas Tree and he asks,
why him?
Tu es solaire, I say.
Mickys flat has a view right across the lake. Theres à big plume of smoke creeping slowly to the east on the other side. It’s a forest fire, they say. The wind gives it legs and it can jump across the air.
We four watch it, grey and prowling, in silence for a few minutes.
—
It’s golden hour in Seb’s garden and there’s three girls counting un, deux, trois and laughing for their photo to be taken.
A long table.
Im stood in wild flowers on my way to my tent, the sun catches me for a moment. I remember to remember this feeling -
Oh yeah -
what is it, exactly?
Facing forward and looking back all at once.
I spent some really beautiful time in Lincolnshire on the farm with Ruby & Mathilda. This one’s of Mathilda leaning out her kitchen window, smoking.
Lots of community + love in this place. The week before I left for this trip I had written in my journal “somewhere where golden hour hits through the kitchen window, listening to the birds”.
And I found it here. :)
Claire for MIRROR MIRROR
Styling by Krystel Robinson
Hair and Make Up by Sergio Esche
Assisted by Anna Mala & Ghislain Amar
RELENTLESS, Nasty Magazine Publication 2025
View the full story hereherehereherehere
- Styled and modelled by Anna Mala
- Hair and Make up by Anita Jolles