We’re back from France, and I’m aware that saying so at the moment is a bit like announcing you’ve just returned from a lovely fortnight behind the barbeque at Dante’s Inferno.

The news from the continent all summer has been pretty apocalyptic. The military mobilised outside Bordeaux, a hundred and fifteen thousand hectares of the country burned by late July. They’ve had fires in the Var, fires at Fontainebleau. It’s no joke. Down in our corner of the Pyrénées-Orientales we had two of the best weeks we’ve ever had. Temperatures topped out at thirty five and mostly sat around thirty, which is hot enough to make you seriously downgrade your plans for the middle of the day but not hot enough to be a news item. The kids were in the pool. I was, for large parts of the day, horizontal, trying to remember how to read.

Air conditioning is now non-negotiable on holidays to France in the summer. And we were lucky to have it in the house we exchanged with a lovely French family who were holidaying in Alicante while our house in Dublin had a family from San Francisco minding the cat.

I better explain. The concept is called home exchange, where you pay a modest subscription once a year and swap your house with another family who wants to be where you are. No money changes hands. And a surprising number of continental families are wildly keen to spend a fortnight in our bit of Dublin, which has done wonders for my civic pride and means we get plenty of choice. It also means you need to give the house a seriously good clean and clearout ahead of any visitors. Home exchange also includes a points system which means we earn points from the Americans staying in our house and we can give these points to the French family to pass on to the home owners in Alicante.

We went back to the same village we’ve been going to for years, because my wife’s family are often in the vicinity, and there’s a particular pleasure in having your own pool and a working air conditioner while still being ten minutes from everyone so cousins can play and family dinners can be organised. Proximity without cohabitation. We all love each other, but godammit we all need our own space too.

Dangerous fortnight

Nobody warns you that coming home is when you’re at your most unstable. You’re rested, you’re brown, and you arrive back into your own driveway with a head full of ideas.

This is precisely the moment men my age change jobs or buy convertibles. I have spent this week frantically googling houses in rural France for under a hundred grand, of which there are many, all photographed at a flattering angle, none mentioning the crumbling roof.

It’s a complete fantasy, obviously. A fortnight in someone else’s house is exactly the right amount. Any longer and you’re dealing with the plumbing, French bureaucracy and all the other headaches that come with owning stuff. I get that same feeling when I look at a holiday home bungalow in the middle of rural Ireland. My recurring line to my wife is “can you imagine how much it costs to heat that?”

There was a wobble in it too. Somewhere around day nine I found myself wondering how many more summers this is available to us here. Thirty degrees is grand. Forty is an ordeal.

If the Mediterranean keeps going the way it’s going, the tourist traffic could well reverse during the summers. We may all end up shifting the calendar, taking our fortnight in late September and leaving July to the fire crews.

It’s grim but what other direction will it go, even with our best efforts on climate change?

Which brings me briefly to the campervans at Tralispean. I’ve just spent a fortnight being somebody else’s tourist, so I’m in no position to give out. But there is a line, and it’s using somebody’s driveway as a toilet. Lads, cop on.

Ní Neart Go Cur Le Chéile

Here’s the other thing about France, and I say it with real affection because we keep going back.

You can go to the same village for a decade, buy your bread at the right hour, and be met with perfect courtesy and a firm sense that you are a visitor. But you will not get it. It isn’t coldness, exactly. It’s just the way they are.

So I’ve contented myself with the fact that we can drop in once a year to soak up their sunshine, delight in their food and wine and eavesdrop on their culture. What else do we need?

Forever young

Which brings me to poor Glen Hansard, a guy who knew a thing or two about what community means, how to build it and what gets lost when you don’t.

He was cruelly taken from us last week, well before his time, with lots still to give.

I knew Glen a little over the years and he was a special sort of fellow. Rooted in a communitarian philosophy, generous and always creative, earlier this year he reconvened The Frames to do a small tour of grassroots venues in Ireland including our own De Barras.

He championed these spaces, including Connolly’s of Leap, places that played such a formative part of my youth. I worry about who will champion them now.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.