On the Assumption Holiday, a High Wind on the Atlantic Coast, and Time With My Grown-Up Daughter — a writer’s diary entry, 15th of August

Saturday the fifteenth, Assumption, and the whole country has stopped. The boulangerie did a roaring trade until nine and then shuttered itself with a hand-written note, the mairie is shut, half the village is at somebody’s long table under a vine, and there will be fireworks over the river tonight whether anyone can be bothered to walk down for them or not. I have my eldest here, and her husband, which means the fridge has been raided in a way I have not experienced since about 2009. I find I don’t mind at all.

They arrived Thursday, late, with the hire car making a noise it shouldn’t and a bag of duty-free nobody needed. He is good with her. I watch for that, because it is the job and I have stopped apologising for it. He puts her tea down in front of her without being asked and he laughs at her jokes a beat before the punchline because he has heard them all before and still finds them funny. That is most of it, honestly. That is most of what a mother is standing there hoping to see.

We went to the coast yesterday. Two hours down through the Landes with the pines going past in that hypnotic way they do, mile after mile of them standing to attention, and then the ground flattens and goes sandy and you get that first white crack of light at the end of the road. It was blowing a gale. Properly blowing, the sort of wind that takes your breath out sideways and fills the car with sand the second you open a door. The sea was torn up and grey-green and shouting.

And it was glorious. We walked north along the tideline for the best part of an hour, all three of us bent into it, not talking, because you can’t. That is the thing about a wind like that. It takes the conversation off you and what is left is simply walking beside a person. She linked my arm at one point, mainly for balance, which she has not done since she was about nineteen, and I took it anyway and said nothing about it. My hair was a catastrophe. Everyone’s was. Her husband went in up to the knees and came out making a noise I have previously only heard from a spaniel.

We ate chips in the lee of a dune with the sand stinging our ankles and the paper trying to leave. Too salty, too hot, absolutely right. Afterwards she stood off on her own for a while, right down at the waterline with her back to us, doing nothing in particular, and I looked at her from a hundred yards off and thought, well. She is a whole person. She is entirely fine, and not one of the things I lay awake about in 2006 came to anything at all.

We had the solar eclipse on Wednesday, which I will not get another of at my age. Twenty-five past eight in the evening, the sun already low over the maize, and the whole lane out with cardboard and paper glasses and a good deal of shouting between fences. Ninety-seven per cent of it covered here. Spain got the full thing and half of Bayonne went down for it. The light went the colour of weak tea, the swifts lost the plot entirely, and it cooled by a couple of degrees while we stood there. For ten minutes an entire village was looking in the same direction, which you do not see often.

The moon is nothing at the moment, a nail-paring three days old, down before it can make an entrance. Fine. Not everything needs to be at the full. They go back Monday and the house will do what it always does, which is go very quiet at about four in the afternoon, and I will be pleased about that too in a day or so. Both things are true and I have given up pretending otherwise.