Vieux-Boucau-les-Bains

 Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port Day 1 and no more

I've worked out what's so different about these mountains. In England all our hills are scoured clear. They are heather moorland and bracken. They are bare and stark and they have been worked to death by loggers and farmers for millennia, de-wilded and burned. The hills and mountains at the base of the Pyrenees are a rich, verdant green. The roll of the topography isn't sharp but fuzzy, rippling slightly in the wind. It reminds me of watching Jurassic Park, which was filmed in Costa Rica. Massive walls of trees, clinging on at improbable angles, trailing creepers, a verdant fog hanging above them. The hills are alive.

St-Jean-Pied-de-Port is beautiful. I visit it for a day and a night to fulfil my obligation to the hostel, and because I don’t know what else to do. Climbing the cobbled street to the accommodation I feel my achilles start to strain again. A dull ache travels up my calf. I am no longer walking the Camino de Santiago. 

I get my pilgrim passport stamped. I eat a pilgrim menu at a restaurant. I buy some Crocs at a pilgrim shop. I go to sleep in a dormitory full of pilgrims. And then as they all set off into fog so thick that I can look directly into the sun, I head the opposite way, back to the train station. Back to Bayonne, and then another train, and then a bus, and then a bus. I have booked a full week in which I will do nothing until I am healed. If that doesn’t work, perhaps I’ll learn to fly. 

Vieux-Boucau-les-Bains

Poor, suffering traveller. I have come to paradise to recuperate. I fork out slightly extra for a maisonette with a terrace and a shared swimming pool, because if I am to do nothing then I want to do it somewhere which won’t depress me. The sky is cloudless blue and baking hot. The road is fringed with conifers and the buildings are white plaster. The wine goes in the fridge.

Nothing happens. Time passes. I sit on the beach and watch the sunset, drink more wine in the sun, eat crusty bread. For the final few minutes of sunlight you can see it sink below the horizon in real time. Why have I never noticed this before? Blink and it's gone. Everywhere there are surfers and beach types. You could say they look like they’ve been chiselled from marble, but that wouldn’t be quite right. They have been chiselled from rich, dark clay. Possibly cast in bronze. They seem to be having a good time and I have a good time watching them. The world is in balance. 

I am having what you’d have to call a very Instagram time. But what tends to be missing from the beautifully curated still images of sunsets and cold beer with condensation on the glass is the background sound. Here, in Vieux-Boucau-les-Bains, as in pretty much anywhere in Europe you choose to go, it’s the worst fucking music you’ve ever heard in your life. There are several subtypes, but they inevitably seem to involve covers or remixes of anglophone songs. 

Here’s what I’m listening to right now: a reggae cover of Hey Ho by the Lumineers. And then The Scientist by Coldplay. And then Get Lucky by Daft Punk. At least when it’s ghastly EDM there might be instrumental sections where you can tune it out. It is a deep European sickness. They’re ill. Now it's Jolene. I don’t think Dolly Parton is dead but they’d better get the axles on her coffin pre-greased. 

The days blur together without much happening. None of the neighbouring properties are occupied so I have the pool to myself. One day I rescue a lizard from the water. It regards me coolly from the side of the pool while it warms up. It doesn’t run away: I give it a little pat on the head. Finally, a few seconds later, this delayed indignity catches up with it and it launches off into a bow-legged sprint into the undergrowth. A day later (or was it a day earlier?) I try leaving the outside light on to see if I can attract any interesting moths, but all that turns up is a humming fog of mosquitoes. Several times there is thunder and heavy rain, but the wind blows in from behind so I keep the windows open and let the sound of it tumble in. 

Some hours later I realise the bathroom skylight was open, and the room is partially flooded. 

On about day five of seven, I decide to do a little more research into my injury and chat to some friends. It turns out that resting it is completely the wrong decision. I should have been doing practice walks, keeping it mobile, strengthening the tendon. I reassure myself that at least I used the time fruitfully to get some writing done, and then I remember that I didn’t do that either. 

I burn one of my arms.

A bird flies into my bedroom through an open window and briefly lands on the doorframe. “Oi,” I say, pointing firmly outside. It leaves as directed. Friends with the lizard, I assume. 

A lizard - surely the same one - wants to get past me while I work at the table. It inches out, becomes afraid, goes back under the BBQ. It comes out a little further, thinks about dashing again, retreats again. Every time I look at it, it goes back. Wanting to let it pass, I deliberately don’t look at it, though I watch out of the corner of my eye. This time it emerges, creeps forwards, and then comes out of cover entirely. It passes the halfway point. I turn to look at it. It breaks into that same silly, bandy-legged, panicked sprint. I burst out laughing. This is the highlight of my day. 

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A fat sparrow lands on the edge of my bread basket. I'm happy to share but I don't want the restaurant to think I'm uncouth or inattentive and I don't want to have to explain in French. J’aime les oiseau!

A falcon of some sort patrols the bay too. It is hard to resist the charms of the sparrows. They are utterly unafraid. They sit on every table and chair cheeping. How would you stop them? They are too fast and too small and too fearless. And the falcon won't come in here, under the sunshades. I wish it would. All birds are welcome. 

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There's something different about the oceanic. I want to stand on the edge of a fathomless gulf. See the blue taper away into nothing. Next stop America. That's the good stuff. The North Sea and the English Channel feel almost homely in retrospect. Look, on a clear day: you can see France! I don’t want to see France. I want to see big blue nothing. 

Something about the hydromechanics of this beach means that the water doesn't just come forwards but seems to circle around, tracking sideways parallel to the beach. Where is it going? It's not quite a whirlpool but an elegant dogleg, swinging around a sandbank. Does this make it good for surfing? Another day, another sunset on the beach, watching the water spin. 

In places the sand is stippled from the rain. In others soft and clean, from where feet have disturbed and then settled it. It is impossibly fine. What astonishing effort it took to make this. Rocks against rocks for millennia so that we can feel it between our toes.

Nothing happens, but slightly more quickly than before. 

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I find some live music for the final night. A punk band in full regalia - leathers, studs, mohawks, posturing - hovering in the audience during the support act, doing no moshing at all. In fact they are agonisingly polite. I am the only one even moving. 

I have developed this awful habit in my 30s of taking it upon myself to model Good Crowd Behaviour. If the band wants you to step forwards, I will step forwards. I will dance if there’s no dancers and I’ll start a pit if there’s no pit (as long as a pit is required: there are no pits at Joanna Newsom). I suppose from the outside this might look like attention seeking but for me it’s actually agonising and embarrassing. I don’t enjoy doing it, but I feel a kind of profound duty to the spirit of music and someone has to help others cast off their self-consciousness. And I suppose I also feel acute second-hand embarrassment from a struggling band - a band who has worked for this for weeks, months, perhaps even years - that I want them to have a nice time and for myself not to feel the splashback of disappointment, the gritted teeth, the rehearsed lines falling leaden into an indifferent room. So in that sense it’s a selfish move: I’ll have a good time if they’re having a good time. 

This is the duty of the 33 year old, who has far less shame (because there is already such a teetering stack of shame that new shamelets being added to the foothills scarcely register). Obviously when I try to articulate this to anyone they think I’m mental. But I’ve filled dancefloors before and I’ll do it again. And that is a threat. 

There is no natural end to this. I could have been here for a hundred years and I’m not sure I’d notice any different. I am 40% baguette. There is sand between my toes and lizards in my dreams. 

Tomorrow San Sebastian.