‘Got my Covid jab, €7,90,” I texted my best mate last week, repulsively smug, plus some obnoxious photos of local oysters, knobbly picturesque squashes and ceps at the market. I’m in France, évidemment. “Remind me,” she replied, back home in England. “Why do we live here?”
Last year, this conversation was prompted by French melons – so fragrantly delicious and treated so reverently – and we often have it about environmental matters. France is no green wonderland – as the recent shutting down of climate activists Les Soulèvements de la Terre (Earth Uprising) demonstrates – but there’s more appetite for radical change: a new 50-point plan to reduce emissions; €2bn on promoting bike use. Car ads urge you to use public transport where possible, and TV weather has become the “weather and climate forecast”, hammering home nightly how extreme temperatures, drought, floods and fires are the consequence of anthropogenic climate change.
I got French nationality (by marriage) this year to make the big leap, and not a day passes without my husband showing me some charming château (yes, derelict and in a rural desert, miles from the nearest baguette) for the price of a repurposed kennel in Croydon. So why not? I’ve stopped drinking proper tea, so that’s the main obstacle – the ubiquity of Lipton Yellow teabags – out of the way. There are bedbugs, but there’s no way they aren’t already crossing the Channel tunnel, surely?
It would be hard to leave family and friends again – I’ve only been back home for five years after 12 in Brussels. There are my chickens, choir and work (in that order). But I think the real sticking point for me is food, despite the markets and melons. Beyond big cities, eating vegan means pilgrimages to buy vacuum-packed seitan from the only health food shop in a small town, run by a leathery anti-vaxxer who will definitely advocate homeopathy and energy healing and might also vote Le Pen. If I bow to pressure from Big Cheese and downgrade to vegetarianism, I would still need to reengage with the perennial struggle to convince rural France that ham isn’t a vegetable. Can I go through that again? Increasingly, I’m wondering if maybe I could.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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