It All Felt a Bit Like Call Me By Your Name
A week of salads, swimming and dancing in the South of France
For the past few years in July, a handful of school friends and I have headed to Sète in the South of France for Worldwide festival. It’s one of my favourite weeks of the year.
It’s one of my favourite weeks not necessarily for the music (even though they are always very fun), but because it means I get to spend some proper quality time with some of my oldest and closest friends.
Now that we have all grown up and live in different parts of the country, big chunks of time together are few and far between. Ten days hanging out on the french coast is the perfect way to properly catch up on all life’s happenings over the past year without all the usual distractions.
I drove down from the little island of Jersey this year in my Skoda Fabia, with a crate full of bubbling ferments to keep me company in the car. After the festival I was due to start a 2 month road trip round France and I didn’t want to leave my ferment babies at home to die.
What makes Worldwide especially fun is that it’s a holiday as well as a festival; hours are spent on the beach and swimming in the blue mediterranean sea; lunches are made together as a family and can last all afternoon.
In the evening everyone knows where they’re going - on a cycle ride from the house along the coast to Theatre de la Mer to see the music.
There’s one stage, which means there’s no arguments about who to see. And it’s small enough that can’t really lose each other and it’s easy to spot each other in the crowd if you do.
At the end of the holiday this year I was debating perhaps trying a new festival in 2025, but as I write this I am reminded just how sweet that week is and how it can’t be beat on so many levels.
This year we got especially lucky with our airbnb and booked a big rustic house for the five of us. A stand alone cream maison with juliette balconies, blue wooden shutters; a patio with an awning; a walled garden filled with trees and a pig pong table in the middle.
It made everyday feel a bit like call me by your name.
Numerous salads were made; bowls of butter beans with peeled strips of lemon zest were tossed; grated carrot and ginger towers were erected; juicy tomatoes of all shapes and sizes were drizzled in olive oil, sprinkled with salt and then devoured; a garlic-y tzatziki kefir dip was thrown together; bowls of lentils were tossed with sliced spring onions; homemade kombucha was sipped on (thankfully all the ferments survived the drive and the hot car); fish was perfectly grilled on the barbecue to be served with a herby green pesto sauce and sourdough pancakes with fried eggs were consumed in the early hours of the morning.
Coincidentally, on the first day everyone bought a whole bag of lemons each and so we lived with a big stack of them on the big wooden dining table. There was a running joke if anyone went to the shop not to forget the lemons.
Watermelon was chopped into fat cubes and taken down to the beach for everyone to suck and hydrate on in-between dips into the ocean.
I would wake late, do some yoga in my bedroom and come downstairs to find the boys having already gone on a bakery run. Every morning fresh baguettes and madeleines would appear in the kitchen to enjoy with our morning coffee, fruit and kefir (it was at this house I experimented making kefir with a weaker store bought kefir instead of milk and it was an all round crowd pleaser - double the ferment and double tang).
Lots of iced matchas with hazelnut milk were made ~ slowly getting stronger more matcha-y throughout the week as we became a little extra happy-tired day by day from all the swimming, cycling and dancing until the early hours.
On our penultimate day we took a trip to Le Mistral to sit out on the street and eat my favourite grilled tuna steak with roasted figs and mozzarella, followed by swim in the ocean and a long afternoon nap on the beach. There was that bittersweet feeling you get at the end of a holiday when all the excitement and anxiety of having to do everything has gone and all that is left to do is relax as you know it’s soon coming to an end.
Weeks like this are always a sweet reminder of how the simple things really do bring the most joy and how good food and proper time spent with best friends just can’t be beat.
No elaborate recipes were made at the house; most dishes let just one or two ingredients shine and had no more than a handful of flavours in each bowl. When the produce is good and ripe and local not much else is needed really.
The simplest delicious salad dressings were made from extra virgin olive oil, Sel de Guérande (which I was so happy to learn is the same as celtic salt and a quarter of the price - I brought 2kg home in the car), apple cider vinegar and lots of lemon juice. Thank god we had so many lemons.
Luckily, the house had many, many plates to choose from and we made the most of all of them. Everything was served individually in separate bowls ~ one for olives; one for lentils; one for chickpeas; one for carrots etc. This meant the table was always full of crockery and we had lots of dishes to pass round to one another. It added the conversation and the communal, sharing vibe of the week.
It was a lesson in slowing down, soaking up the music and sunshine and appreciating the good things in life.
On the last day, as me and my friends departed and went our separate ways, I started the car ready to drive up to the Pyrenees for the next stop on my road trip feeling sad to leave everyone and beautiful Sète behind but with a very full and grateful heart.
Until next year x
