June was a heck of a month.

Apart from being the month of my birth, the month of the solstice and the month with the longest daylight hours in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the month that’s supposed to be the best time to buy a laptop and the worst time to buy a barbecue. Father’s Day happens in June, which is great if you love your father, or if you are one, but not so great if you’re bombarded by adverts telling you not to forget your dad this year when, although you’ll never forget him, sending a card isn’t possible any more.

It was also the month where my eldest filial unit got married, his wife had a bat mitzvah and we enjoyed a long weekend partying in London, meeting our new American family. And catching up with my own small family. I had a blast.

This year has been a hectic one for me, so I decided that we’d take a break and drive our newly married children to France. I rented a house on the beach on the Crozon peninsula and we all went back to the place that was my inspiration for The Golden Gals’ French Adventure.

Manu’s house on the cliff top, Rose Falaise, is not dissimilar to a house that looks out onto the sea at Telgruc Sur Mer. There is a beach shack there, just like Joël’s Le Shack. There are markets too; the one in Plomodiern and Chateaulin are the inspiration for the night market and the Fest Noz. Chateaulin is a great place for canoeing down the river and there are a few choice clothes shops, so Fliss and Shirl stepped straight from that town onto the page for their French adventures.

The food on the Peninsula is wonderful: fresh produce, locally produced fruits and vegetables, so cooking each night was a shared joy. Artichokes, tomatoes, melon, girolles, topinambour….

But things are changing fast on the peninsula. Shops and cafés have gone. A Vietnamese restaurant that I’ve been taking my kids to since they were babies, run by a lovely woman who made the best tofu dishes, has closed permanently. The weekly markets are half the size they used to be. The crêpe van lady has moved away.

My French is pretty reasonable – I’m often asked which part of France I’m from – so I spoke to some guys handing out political leaflets near the market and they blamed the demise of businesses in the local towns on the rise of the political far right and Marine Le Pen. I spoke to a really bubbly woman in the tourist office who said that the pandemic had devastated local businesses and many had closed down. Even the Super U supermarket I used to go in is now just a U, and they’ve taken away the public loos. So much has changed in just a few years.

Nevertheless, I had a great time in France. The Crozon peninsula has friendly people, fascinating history and folk lore, water sports, coastal paths, hills and pretty villages. It has superb beaches that you can walk on for miles and only see a lone fisherman and a woman running with a dog. The house I stayed in was perched right at the end of the beach and I was up at six each morning walking the length, then watching the sun set each evening while I dreamed up another novel. And I did dream one up– I have it roughly sketched out.

I love France. I love the wild open beaches. I love the way the sea whispers to your soul and you feel quiet inside. Maybe I needed this break more than I knew.

But it’s also a privilege to be there, to make memories and share time with loved ones, to meet new people, to have fun. I’m blessed.

And guess what -? I even won the pub quiz and the musical bingo game on the ferry on the way home. So now I’m back here again, ready to enjoy the summer and to launch myself into work.

But maybe I’ve left something on L’Estrevet beach: the stirrings of ideas for new novels and a cast of many more exciting characters.

And maybe a little bit of my heart’s still there too. It felt like home for a while and it’s made me remember how much joyfulness and calm there is to experience in the open air.

I’ll go back when I can.But then other places are calling too. Can I help it if I need to move on…?