Oh to be in France. When? Now! Yes, any time. And, of course we know that it's not always sunshine and warmth there. Wasn't there a devastating hurricane last Christmas when forests across the middle of the country were flattened. Don't they, too, get floods and traffic dislocation? Yes. But today's (Saturday's) weather map in Le Monde shows sun and maybe a bit of cloud over most of the country.
You'd risk it. And the reason why is that just now you have reread an article in a serious French magazine called Geo - something like the National Geographic Magazine - which tells you that there are 420 pays in France. (Call them districts), and perhaps even up to 450. Let's just nibble at a few of the 420.
They, in the magazine, detail some score or so, and the article opens with a double-page picture of, dammit, a very long thatched cottage - the thatch being of reeds, and the while walls as white as you could get them here. This opens what the magazine calls "a stunning kaleidoscope of countryside and architecture". All together they make up, says GEO a more coherent ensemble than the over-centralised France of one capital, 21 regions and 96 departments. Further broken down into 3,877 cantons, 36,564 (yes, thirty six thousand five hundred and sixty four) communes "which rule our territory".
Well, after that you can, if you like just thumb through pages of brilliant photographs of, mostly, human habitations in their natural surroundings - completely circular villages; massive pigeon-lofts - not as an appendage to a farm: most unusual church towers which twist almost in corkscrew fashion: houses in Brittany where the outside is largely of upright slabs of a brownish granite, about a foot and a half wide each, with only small white gaps in between. Then beehive stone huts with pointy roofs (shades of our own past) - nearly 50 pages of it, pictures and script. Who wouldn't want to go after reading this in the September number of the journal - to celebrate Heritage Day Mid-September.
But everyone has his or her own France. Each to his or her own. Hard to beat Languedoc - Roussillon or any part of it you may choose. Collioure and other towns and villages backing on to the Pyrenees Orientales. The beaches, the high mountain air, the astounding castles of the Cathars, heretic Christians of the 12th or 13th century, perched, teetering on top of high peaks; the rivers, the woods, the garrigues . . . maybe more another day.
GEO: In French; Prisma Press, 6 rue Daru, 75379, Paris Cedex 08