Created 15.viii.21, tweaked 16.viii.21.
It’s August, it’s summer. Up here at a bit over 2,000m that can be pretty capricious but we’ve had a run of gloriously sunny days with lovely sunrises. These mornings I take my first coffee out onto the terrace and squat down with it. It’ll be somewhere between 07.00 and 08.30 I guess depending on what I’ve got done by the time the first coffee takes me and the amount of sun will be very different depending on that timing. The flagstones under the bum are cold as they are in the mornings all year round but the dark brown painted, wooden clad, wall behind my back will was already too hot to lean on without a t-shirt or something between me and it.
I was squatting there this morning, soaking up some sun, with my eyes closed against it. I was oscillating between pondering my day, task list etc. and something rather more “mindful” I supposed (it’s not my forte). Opening my eyes at some point I was squinting against the sun, still very low but awesome in its relatively little filtered intensity and for a moment or two I just soaked in the silhouettes of the brutalist concrete of Aime 2000 as it rises the other side of the terrace as it does behind me, and the mountains in the distance. I thought I should try to share!
I wondered about the word “squatting”: we own the apartment so I’m not technically squatting in that sense of the word. Perhaps more importantly, this coming Friday I hope a trip to the préfecture will clinch my acquisition of my “Carte de séjour” (or “Permis de séjour”, I’m not sure which is the official term), i.e. my initial, but renewable, right to remain. That feels even more important than ownership: being granted permission to stay as long as I want, whenever I can and want, despite Brexit, despite anything that might make the French state reluctant to have me!
So here I am. And here are more views from squatting, from bum on the flagstones level. I think my photography might improve if I got down and dirty more often! I think you should be able to click on the images and that should open them in “lightbox” mode enabling you to click through the full size images one by one (tiny right and left arrows to right and left of each image to select next or previous image).
