A Sunday in Corvel
We weren't passing through Corvel. We had no reason to be there. That turned out to be exactly the right reason.
We had stopped the car because Soren wanted coffee and I wanted to stretch. Corvel appeared on a road sign at the right moment. It was eleven in the morning on a Sunday in early autumn, and we had nowhere specific to be until the following Tuesday.
We stayed until Monday evening.
Corvel is not small enough to feel remote and not large enough to feel demanding. There is a market on Sunday mornings, a cinema that shows old films on Monday and Thursday evenings, and a covered arcade of small shops that closes between one and three without apology.
We did the market — Soren bought things, I photographed things. We walked the long way around the old quarter. We sat in the square and read for an hour and watched the town go about its Sunday. We ate lunch at a place with a chalkboard outside and good light inside. We saw the Monday film — something black and white from a decade neither of us could quite place.
It was one of those days that nothing happens in, and which you find yourself talking about for months afterwards.
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We got back in the car on Monday evening with the easy, unhurried feeling of people who have spent a day and a half doing nothing in particular and have nothing to apologise for.
"We should come back," Soren said, pulling out of the car park.
"We say that everywhere," I said.
"We're right everywhere."