‘A day without laughter is a day wasted.’
Charlie Chaplin
 
There is a German woman staying in the chalet just across the way from mine.
We waved to each other in a cheery way as I moved in. She is alone it turns out, and we chatted briefly as I unloaded the bike, both of us clothed. She told me she is a regular here, that this place is her sanctuary from a busy life as a teacher in Dresden, and that she likes to meditate in the evenings. I told her about the ants and I think she understood, with a little ant acting on my part. Then we waved good evening and that was that. Which I think is kind of how it is here, live and let live. Naturism might be still a little silly to me in some ways, but it does seem to engender a kind of mutual respect, and I have to say I like that aspect very much. It’s as if one has stepped back to a point in time where discretion and politesse were the way of the world. Where how one looks, or is seen by others, is far from being the most important thing about a person, and clothes, or the lack of them doesn’t count at all. Which makes it much harder to judge by appearances. The human body comes in all shapes and sizes, and with so many on view, a sort of democracy emerges from the mix.
That at least is my impression, and as I settle in to my own little chalet and prepare breakfast for myself, I celebrate with music playing on the mini speaker I have hardly used on this journey. Right now, it’s country classics, don’t ask me why, and I’m singing along to The Gambler with Kenny Rogers on lead vocals, and online. Lilly bought a family membership and allowed her father to take a share. It would have been churlish to say no, and if I am a hypocrite, I plead guilty as charged.
I’ve had earbuds with me all along, but I haven’t wanted to block out the sounds of trees and sea. At home, I have music on all the time, from morning to night and especially when I’m cooking a Sunday lunch. Though I have to admit my record collection, mostly scratched Blue Note compilations I wore out in my twenties but can’t part with, hasn’t been played, or even dusted down in recent times. I bought a record player from the charity shop that sits forlorn by my desk, a reminder of fluff and needles and counterweights and the crackle and hiss of vinyl. Les temps perdu, but time now to head to the pool in a sarong and little else, bar my straw hat. Courage mon brave.
Michel wrote a whole essai, albeit a very short one, with the title, ‘On the Custom of Wearing Clothes’, in which he says:
‘I was disputing with myself in this shivering season, whether the fashion of going naked in those nations lately discovered is imposed upon them by the hot temperature of the air, as we say of the Indians and Moors, or whether it be the original fashion of mankind.’
But it’s another of his essais that interests me today and that I’m reading again as I lie here enjoying a lazy day after a cool and deeply refreshing swim. Many people about the pool are are about my age – probably retired with no need to rush home. There are also young families with small children who presumably have not had to return for school, entirely absorbed in each other, in playing and changing nappies and doing what parents and their offspring do all around the world. My sarong is laid out beneath me and my towel makes a decent pillow. I am comfortable and happy.
The essai is called On Presumption, and it’s from Book II, situated close to the end where, like On Experience, it acts as a kind of summation of Montaigne’s assessment of himself, at the point in time he wrote it, anyway.
The reason I’m re-reading it is that I remember thinking how candid he is about his failings in particular, something that impressed me as bold and truthful when I first encountered him.