On an Afternoon With the Writers’ Group, Collecting Permanent French Residency in Agen, and Four Years of Doing It Alone — a writer’s diary entry, 16th of September

Two good days, and the weather has been showing off. That particular September light here, still hot at four in the afternoon and gone soft by seven, everything the colour of the inside of a pear.

Yesterday was the writers’ group, at one of the members’ houses in the next village along, all ten of us round a long table outside under the canopy with the vine going over it and far too much coffee. Somebody had made a tarte aux prunes. We sat there the whole afternoon and talked about how the work is going, which mostly means how the work is not going. One of us has been stuck on the same forty pages since March and said so out loud, and the relief in the rest of us was almost audible. Another has just finished a first draft at seventy-one, having started at sixty-nine. Nobody competes. That is the thing about that table. Everybody there knows exactly how hard the other people have had to work for whatever they have got.

Nobody mentioned my chapter, which is the etiquette, and I did not raise it, and it sat there in the middle of the afternoon like a dish nobody is allowed to touch until Sunday.

Then today I drove into Agen to collect my ten-year card. Permanent residency. A queue, a number on a screen, a woman who checked my name twice against the paperwork, a piece of plastic in a paper wallet, five minutes altogether after four years of appointments and photocopies and translated documents and turning up with the right forms. I sat in the car park afterwards and had a very quiet moment about it.

Driving home on the ring road I was thinking about the ten years, because that is what a ten-year card makes you do. Ten years ago I would not have driven into Agen by myself. I want to be accurate about that. Not could not, would not. My husband drove. We would have made a day of it, the shops and a long lunch, and I would have sat in the passenger seat and looked out of the window, and I would not have been able to tell you how you get from the bridge to the préfecture. Today I did it without thinking about it once, and parked, and dealt with the office in French, and came home and put the shopping away.

Four years on my own now. The card is a formality really, a bit of admin, and I know that. But it is also a foreign country agreeing in writing that I live here, in a life I built by myself, in a language I taught myself at fifty-three, and I have not asked a single person for help with any of it. I am grateful to myself, which is a sentence I would have found deeply embarrassing to write a few years ago and which I am leaving in.

And it is the same thing as the tea on the step last Monday, really. This is what all that small noticing was quietly for. You do not get from there to here in one go, you get there by making yourself see one decent thing at a time until you can see well enough to drive.

The moon is back, a proper crescent low in the west over the barn after supper. Everything is going the right way at the moment and I am superstitious enough not to say any more than that.