August 2023 Newsletter
Toulouse at its best (and at its worst too), my monthly watching and reading recommendations, and a simply magnifique fig tarte tatin
To watch:
Au revoir là-haut (English title: See You Up There)
After months of film and TV recommendations that come with a warning (the weed-selling, serial-murdering, human-eating suggestions are all here should you be in a more reckless mood), Au revoir là-haut is a great mish-mash of elation and loss that is simply fizzing like a bottle of champagne.
On the last day of the First World War, as the minutes tick down to the armistice, revenge-crazed French generals order their men back into the fight. Our main character Edouard is caught in a blast and loses his jaw. Unable to communicate, after the war, he constructs beautiful, bejewelled, expressive masks, and he and his war comrade (comedian Albert Dupontel who also directed the film) scam the war-hungry elite.
The film could be mistaken for an epic musical for its operatic, slapstick performances, the sweeping panoramas of the early 1920s, the childlike comedy, and its fabulous, glittering costumes and make up. This film is electric and I can feel my skin fizz just thinking about it.
To read:
Nikita is my new friend here in Toulouse and not only does she provide me with excellent chats and discussions on literature and movies as we share a picnic blanket during a lunch break, but she also writes a fantastic newsletter - a 2 in 1 deal for me! Snail Mail Sweethearts is a blissful read, a cute and genuine reminder that sending actual mail full of touching messages for your loved ones is a lost art, and must and can be recaptured. Although I can’t remember the last time I bought a stamp, I love her creativity - one week she made her own envelopes! - and her dry wit and chatty voice reads just like how she sounds in person.
Emily’s newsletter was one of the first I subscribed to here on Substack as I love the comradery of finding someone else out there in the ether who has moved to France and whose daily actions are dictated by an uncontrollable need to eat. Emily’s heart is quite possibly a wheel of cheese, and this love is passed on to her readers with Cheese of The Week recommendations - I’ve learned so much - her tour guide explorations through the maze of Parisian streets, and I’m this close to signing up to one her TERRE/MER retreats (ceramic-making combined with joyous eating) in the south of France.
To check out:
Zoë Ellison
With just a few bold colours and food packages, Zoë has whisked me away to the Mediterranean coast. There is a wonderful blend of familiarity meets originality in Zoë’s illustrations - I can visualise the Maldon salt or Odysea Feta Cheese packets in their significant aisles in my local supermarket, yet the unique angles, the wonky straight lines play with our sense of perception, transforming everyday foods into picture book characters.
Also, her series 52 Recipes in 52 Weeks was inspired by all our lacklustre attempts to keep up with our new year’s resolutions - Zoë’s own (trying more recipes, creating more art) were combined and bump along very easily together. If my cookbook fantasies ever get off the ground, I know I will be straight into her DMs to implore her to be my illustrator.
Check out her shop here, and her Instagram here!
And so, here’s to August in Toulouse! The summer of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, of beer gardens and mosquitoes, of blue skies and turgid heat waves.
Here’s to what I love about this city, and what I like a whole lot less… plus there’s the Pastry of the Month, another ‘Only in France’ phenomenon unique to them Frenchies, and the most perfect sticky fig tarte tatin, that was eaten in its entirety by me.
I write this from my parents’ living room in bleary England, the trees and sky blending in a hazy mist and the fields impossibly green to my jaded eyes after a summer of watching my own garden in Toulouse gently crisp and darken like bacon in a pan. The clouds are gloomy. The ravens’ squawks echo as they fly overhead. The summer chapter has come to a close. Winter is coming.
Maybe it’s thanks to social media, although I also think teen movies and chick lit have a lot to answer for, but we seem to expect summer to be an impossibly romantic time, brimming with so much sun and possibility that you could practically taste it. Summer is the time to wear shorts and a fedora with a straight face, and it’s not much to ask to have a picnic in a wild-flower-strewn meadow, is it? Or to host sun-drenched dinner parties on a terrace and, as the light fades, to arrange lanterns and fairy lights everywhere, or dance in the rain with a gorgeous man, on heat from the summer sun?
I seem to have revealed a touch too much about myself there.
I won’t deny that there certainly is a flavour to summer, but that is of sun lotion, a cloying film over your tongue that will last hours, or my personal favourite, DEET.
The romantic fantasies have a habit of gently erasing those sharp awkward corners of reality, those factors that we give the side-eye to and bury under a picnic blanket. The practicalities of working for a living are never shown on summer Pinterest boards, or worst, mon dieu, what if you have a wet, sun-free summer? Where’s the Instagram love for that?
Year in, year out, as the days get longer, I forget that there is a lot more to summer than we give it credit for, and while we all emerge at the other end, a little woozy and pink, punch-drunk from the sun and heat, it’s not like we’ve spent the two months off school and capered around on our bikes or in paddling pools all season (no matter how much I wished for one last week, which I will get to below).
So here is my list of those summery romantic moments and that undercurrent of real life - Toulouse at its best and its worst! With these two sides of the same coin, hopefully September looks a little less daunting…
What I love about summer in Toulouse
Toulouse is the perfect city for drinking wine by the river on a balmy night and letting the hours slip by, visiting bars with creeper hanging over the awning, and sitting in the sunshine and knocking back Moscow Mules without even wincing at the price. With glowing periwinkle blue skies, the city’s buildings, the colour of blushing apricots, look a whole lot better for it - la ville rose suits summer.
Work was exceptionally slow at the beginning of the season, so I took the opportunity and ran outside without looking back. Here are some of the wonderful activities I couldn’t resist.
Open Air Candlelit Concert: A Homage to Abba
I wouldn’t know these candlelit concerts even existed it wasn’t for my friend Nadia who lived here during the hot spring to study with me at Alliance Française. It’s easy to miss the highlights when you know you have eternity to find them. As Nadia was here for just six weeks, she did her research and found the most gorgeous classical candlelit concert in the depths of a chapel.
This summer, the concerts were performed under the stars, and as soon as I spotted an ABBA tribute, I parted with my money without a second thought. Hidden in the courtyard of Toulouse’s fine art and design college, flickering (battery-powered) candles glowed and the audience was treated to an hour of ABBA’s top hits played by a string quartet. It was ABBA meets Bridgerton on a soft summer’s night. And everyone sang along to Mamma Mia.
Guinguettes: A return to Le Gros Arbre
As soon as summer starts, pop up bars appear like daisies. These bars and restaurants are called guinguettes and my favourite is Le Gros Arbre which I returned to this summer because it looks like a fairy tale. Just swap Jack’s beanstalk for a eye-wateringly massive tree that would do a whole lot of damage if it fell over. Le Gros Arbre is a tavern hidden in the marshland of Toulouse. It’s quite astoundingly in the middle of nowhere, with a highway on one side, a river on the other, and absolutely nothing else nearby. This makes it quite complicated to get to, various modes of public transport are required, but I implore you to persevere on your quest, because beauty and tranquillity await.
My friend Sarah and I sat at a table under fairy lights, drank wine and beer, ate demi magret de canard and an enormous vegetable platter, and fanned ourselves with my 5 euro paper fan which was my best purchase of the year. A kitten chased around our feet (Gaylord, who went to Le Gros Arbre the other day, learned the kitten is needing a home and looked at me with big imploring eyes), and we sat in the peace, removed from city life.
The Garonne
Toulouse is a fairly small city all things considered (for the fifth most populated city in France at least), and thanks to its mild summer evenings and the distance from the sea, the river Garonne is a meeting hub late into the night. I’ve spent many evenings and sunsets lounging by the riverside or watching those jaw-dropping fireworks back in July. One morning after a yoga class, I sat by the river to eat my breakfast and watched the summer Ferris wheel make its appearance, ungainly climbing onto long structured limbs like a baby foal. By mid-summer, it was part of the skyline, glittering and glowing on the opposite bank. Although watching it be assembled kind of dampened my desire to actually ride it - if I needed a construction worker, I don’t think my first thought would be calling the French, they have too many lunch breaks and don’t seem to possess a hard hat between them.
Picnics and soirees
While that picnic in a meadow never actually happened, there were many along the riverbank and in parks on scarves or blankets (including one in Jardin des Plantes which houses a flock of roosters, and one puffed-up macho cockerel felt it was his duty to rather imperiously eyeball Nikita and me throughout our lunch). At these picnics, there will usually be a spread of food - dips, crisps, baby carrots in packaging that is - for some reason - impossible to open, and Meredith’s homemade gluten-free peach crumble hopefully, or a take-away from Wok to Walk to eat along the river’s edge (then a jet-skier will come careering past and completely drench us).
Picnics can morph into soirees at friends’ houses, the balcony windows thrown open for the smokers. Inside, depending on the overall mood and quantity of alcohol, there will be beer pong and dancing, or there will be raucous card games that make us all look stupid, or it will be incredibly dignified with a heaving charcuterie board of cheeses and meats and baguette, and icy cold drinks to sip, as the night thrums with the sound cicadas.
A Bonus Benefit of Summer: The Fruit
My relationship with fruit has reached new territory this summer. Singers and poets have written about less. My blog posts recently have been incredibly revealing about my feelings (forget Gaylord, it’s all about the peaches, blackberries, figs, apricots and plums).
At this end of summer, it’s stone fruit central. The supermarket is teeming with crates of traffic-light coloured plums, peaches in soft pastel yellows, creams and pinks, smooth-skinned nectarines and their cousins, the nectavigne.
Looking at this fruit, it would be easy to mistake it for a red apple with those wine-red cheeks. A nectavigne is, from what I gather, a cross between a blood peach and a nectarine, with deep velvety red skin the shade of beetroot. So sweet and juicy, it’s sacrilege to do anything further than eat them off the stone.