Avignon Almanac I - The Mistral
The train from Montpellier arrives at 14:13, Friday the 13th February, which feels ceremonial in its precision, as if time itself has tightened its tie for my entrance, and when the doors open and I step down onto the platform at Avignon Centre, I am aware that I am not simply arriving in a city but crossing a private threshold I have been circling for years, the slow, stubborn decision to uproot in the middle of a life rather than at its beginning or end.
The sky is a luminous grey, thin rain suspended in the air like a held breath, fourteen degrees and undecided, and we walk north from the station toward the walled city, suitcases rattling and rebelling against stone that predates our passports, the walls rising ahead of us with thick shouldered indifference, having seen popes and plagues and pilgrimages and now, casually, two damp men with foreign accents and a long stay visa.
Inside the gates the streets narrow into slick corridors of cobblestone and quiet commerce, French folding around us in murmured intimacy, and I feel that familiar hum of risk and release, the knowledge that something irreversible has already occurred and cannot be politely undone. Passed the tourism office and the church surrounded by a plethora of homeless, some conspicuously follow us.
We turn onto Rue de Mons and I stop.
The sign is small, enamel and grey, unremarkable to anyone else, but Mons is the name of the street where I grew up, where a boy with too much imagination and too much fear rehearsed versions of himself in suburban shadows, and now here I am in Provence, middle aged and migratory, dragging a suitcase toward an apartment on a street that bears the same name, as if origin has followed me across hemispheres to witness what I make of it.
Ash laughs softly, rain clinging to his collar.
“You cannot script this.”
No, you cannot. And I would not want to.
The apartment is up a narrow stairwell that smells of mice and pigeons, and inside the walls are cool and cavernous, holding cold the way some families hold grudges, and I press my palm against the stone as if greeting a stubborn elder, aware that I am not here for a weekend but for a month of immersion, of observation, of stripping back the scaffolding of routine to see what stands without it.
This is not golden Provence. There is no obliging sunset, no cinematic glow. There is damp denim clinging to thighs, jet lag dulling the edges of desire, and the low domestic choreography of unpacking chargers and hanging coats while rain traces slow lines down ancient glass.
By Saturday the air tightens.
You feel it first in the agitation of awnings, in the way shutters shiver as if remembering old arguments, and by Sunday the mistral arrives with muscular authority, seven degrees of unfiltered force tearing down the Rhône valley with the confidence of something that has survived empires and will survive me.
On the forecourt of the Palais des Papes it strikes my chest with such insistence that I instinctively lean forward, laughing into the gale, Ash’s voice torn from his mouth and flung behind us, coats snapping like sails, and there is an electric thrill in being physically rearranged by weather, in having posture corrected by something that does not care about your plans.
You do not walk in a mistral. You negotiate. You brace. You learn quickly that rigidity is theatre and flexibility is survival.
And here is the part that polite travel writing never admits.
Relocation is not romantic. It is bodily. It is waking in a stone cold bedroom at three in the morning, disoriented and aching, aware of your own ageing joints, of the small stubborn injuries you carry from decades of moving through rooms that were not built for you. It is wanting sex and sleep in the same breath and getting neither because the wind is rattling the windows and your nervous system has not yet recalibrated. It is feeling desire in a new country and recognising that even lust has an accent, that the way you touch and are touched carries the geography of where you learned to be a man.
There is nothing tidy about this.
I did not come here to sip wine and write pretty sentences about papal architecture. I came because I could feel my life beginning to ossify around competence, around expectation, around the steady drumbeat of responsibility, and I wanted weather that would argue with me, air that would enter my lungs like a reprimand.
The mistral does not flatter. It exposes. It rips through neat narratives and leaves you standing in your own weather, hair wild, eyes watering, forced to admit that you are softer and stronger than you imagined.
There is something deeply queer about wind in a walled city, about a force that slips through cracks and refuses containment, and I recognise in it the draft I have been in straight spaces all my life, the subtle and not so subtle disturbance that says you will not seal me out, you will not silence me into stillness.
On Rue des Teinturiers a woman strides forward with her scarf horizontal, a dog flattening its ears and persisting, and the city does not dramatise its discomfort. It absorbs and adapts. Life continues under pressure. The wheels, dilapidated pigeons refuges that have seen better days.
That night on Rue de Mons the windows hum through Place de l’Horloge with residual wind and I lie awake listening to the stone settle around me, thinking of the boy who once stood on a street with the same name in another country, thinking of the man who has brought him here, thinking of the long corridor of choices that led to this bed, this wind, this month of writing.
This Almanac will not perform Provence. It will not curate charm. It will attend to the rain that lingers and the wind that insists and the small humiliations of language learned imperfectly. It will hold space for the friction between who I was and who I am becoming.
By Sunday evening the mistral softens into something almost companionable, the sky cut clean and blue, and I stand at the window above Rue de Mons watching light fracture across stone, feeling the strange symmetry of past and present stitched together across continents.
I am here, not reborn, not redeemed, but deliberately displaced, leaning where I must, bracing where I can, willing to be weathered.
And that, for now, is enough.