Sunday Blog 200 – 14th September 2025
Around about this time last week, I was forming a desperate resolve. Just 48 hours into my French writing retreat, I realised I couldn’t manage another seven days. There was a slim window of escape around 3pm when they were picking up the next retreat attendee from the nearest train station, which was a 45-minute drive away. This was a no taxi, no uber situation.
I’ve looked back through the messages to see if there were red flags I missed. But everything I’d read sounded good. Attention paid to writing desks. Tick. Possibility of standing desks. Tick. While the retreat was nowhere near the ocean it had a pool. Tick. Meals delivered to you was perhaps a detail I bleeped over. I liked the sound of 24 hour self-service snack and beverages. The photos looked wonderful.
“It reminds me of the writing retreat in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life”, I’d confidently asserted to family and friends. But that writing retreat was in Bath, England, not countryside France.
I’d arrived exhilarated by the memory of my five-day Italian writing retreat in Verona. Author Catherine McNamara hosted me in her family home. We were both reading Helen Garner books by the end of my stay. We negotiated meal times and menus and when it was time I would come into the kitchen and we’d talk books furiously and cook side by side. I taught her to poach eggs and that was our breakfast every day. There were books, books, books in the house.
The French retreat was an hour’s drive from the airport, and it had been a day-long journey from Italy. But the person who was supposed to meet me at the airport wasn’t there. I had to wait in the cafe for about half an hour and was told to look out for someone with flowers. Like a deformed date, where neither the date nor flowers were real. The plastic posy wasn’t for me but I instinctively reached out to it, he clutched it back to himself and we awkwardly made our way to his car.
After my one-on-one retreat in Italy I was looking forward to meeting other attendees. Only when I arrived and was shown to my room I was advised I was the only attendee. So much for the peer feedback I thought might be coming my way that week.
First up I was given ten minutes alone in the room “to arrive” I think emotionally (during which I unpacked) and was then offered a glass of wine on a silver platter for our first tete a tete.
I didn’t really want the wine but couldn’t quite see how to refuse. I sipped at it while the complicated menu system was explained. It seemed to require endless daily decision-making. I quite like a kitchen forage, and at first, I thought that might be a possibility, due to the advertised 24/7 self-service snack situation. When I was shown the kitchen I looked in some dismay at the messy cutting board, the sink full of refuse. This is one of the perpetual wars I wage at home with my husband. I itched to clean up the retreat kitchen, but it was like there was a repulsive forcefield half-way into the kitchen where I was not allowed to enter.
I had a couple of goes trying to forage for snacks as advertised, but each time, I committed a new infringement of her complicated, opaque kitchen system. Perhaps the main problem was having to share her house and kitchen as she was, well, asking good money for it. I also hadn’t quite realised that meals in my room weren’t so much an option as a compulsion. Guest out of sight and out of mind?
Looking back, I never recovered from her telling me she doesn’t read. So spoiled from my Italian retreat, where we talked books back and forward across the decades and genres, it was hard to be content with the “library” outside my door consisting of ten books, one of which was hers.
So, locked in my room, starved of reading materials and only able to receive the meals that I ordered through What’s App, the final straw was a lunch on a silver tray, but with capsicum. I had completed the form advising of any dietary requirements. It is the only dietary requirement I actually have. I was the only guest. And yet, here we were. The seven days stretched out ahead of me in a long conga line of confusing interactions and unwanted gestures of service. Instead of feeling spoiled, I felt cornered and stripped of my autonomy.
So on Sunday I took a long, countryside walk to make sure I wasn’t being too impulsive. I knew it would play havoc with the writing goals, but I knew the Greek writing retreat was a full two weeks yet to come. So before I finished my walk, I invented an opaque family crisis and messaged it to her, and asked for a lift to the train station.
Normally I am garrulous and a huge over-sharer. But all of a sudden I became circumspect about the details of this family crisis.
“Can you pack in ten minutes?” she said, after trying but failing to elicit any information from me as to why I was leaving. Then, she seemed to understand. Perhaps she has had this experience before?
I could pack in ten minutes. I did. Got the train back to the city and stayed in an airport hotel, hired a car the next day and hit the open road to Biarritz.
Freedom! It was so good to hone my right-hand sided driving skills and pass by fields similar to those which had rolled past while I was trapped with the man with the plastic posy.
I met up with a colleague from the 1990s in Bayonne. I got to see Biarritz. Actually, I saw it four times in the first hour of arriving when I got caught in the one way road system while looking for a park. I got a bit of writing done. But it was an adventure that came knocking, and I hurled open the door in welcome.