Petanque, anyone?

For the last time before Stephanie returns I will be filling in with another update from Quillan. This week: pétanque! That’s right. I’ve joined the old guys throwing their metal boules around.

I first became aware of pétanque (it is known simply as boules in some other places) on a long ago five-week trip to Holland. You couldn’t help but notice the men gathered here and there on small gravel courts, playing a game; to my untrained eye they were not doing much else but standing around, laughing, occasionally doing something that (sort of) resembled bowling. (Except no pins.) No one seemed to much care about the outcome of their throws. In fact, it reminded me then of what my father used to say about fishing: “It’s just an excuse to sit around and drink beer.” (Make no mistake, his comment was not intended as an insult. My dad really liked to fish.) And those Dutch players definitely drank while they watched.

I saw the same sport in action the many times we visited Arles (technically, the neighboring village of Raphèlè-les-Arles) over the years. There was a pétanque court right off the street we walked every day to get our bread. Those guys were indomitable. They went at it several times a week, and perhaps it was then I started to notice a certain quiet seriousness toward the game to accompany the laughter. Still, coming from an American context, it didn’t seem like a sport I could ever see myself doing.

Then June 2025 arrives. Our kind next-door neighbors inform me there is a regular English speakers game at the court here, and, even better, they could hook me up with the administrator of the WhatsApp group list.

Voilà! Just like that I am playing pétanque, meeting all sorts of people I’d never known, Anglais all of us (to the French any non-native French speaker seems to be Anglais). Many of the players are in fact English, but you will also find among them Irish, Scottish, Dutch, and, yes, Americans. All of them, for their own reasons, have found their way to living in Quillan, sometimes only in the summers; for others, most or all of the year.

I was just telling someone that other day that except for our next door neighbors I’d met no Americans yet in Quillan. Well, what do you know but last week me and my assigned partner were playing against a Dutch woman and her partner: an American named Dave Giles, who not only has decided to live here but has a thriving art practice in France and a blog to go with it. A very friendly guy, a native of New Jersey, he has a show coming up in July in the nearby town of Axat. Fantastic.

Just to name a few, I’ve also talked with a Scottish woman who lives here ten months out of the year; a gentle, soft-spoken older man who lives primarily in Manchester (England) but summers in Quillan; a cheerful, energetic Irishman who splits time between Belgium and France; and a British woman who owns (and rents out) a house on the Isle of Wight but who has happily made her permanent life in Quillan. That’s only a small slice of this large group, believe me.

As you can tell, pétanque is primarily a social gathering—that’s certainly what it is for me— which is not to say that the players don’t try to do well, or aren’t playing close attention. As it turns out, you have to pay attention in pétanque because whose ball is closest to the “jack”— a little rubber ball that gets tossed out at the beginning of each game—can be mighty hard to judge if you’re not watching with an eagle eye. Unless you are standing right over the balls, in fact, it’s remarkably easy to make a mistake.

So while my long ago self was right about the standing around and drinking (beer consumption is almost, but not quite, required) what I didn’t understand is how such a gathering can seem necessary to a person for reasons that go well beyond the game. Just like those devoted dart players in the U.S. who compete in bars every week, the pétanque players, both the French and the Anglais, are committed in their attendance. It matters to them.

And that’s good, because if there’s anything I’ve discovered in my first seven weeks here, it’s that one needs to make connections and friendships where one can. Moving to a whole new country is difficult enough without also being isolated. Isolation kills. Last year, when we we first started looking at property online, I opined to our buyer’s agent Dennelle—we were Zooming with her at the time—that I didn’t much care if we lived in a town with a big Anglo community. I wasn’t going to France to meet English speakers! She leveled a concerned look at me and after a long pause recounted that when she moved to Paris more than twenty years ago she didn’t know a soul, and it was “the loneliest year of [her] life.” In other words, careful what you ask for, Bub.

All I can say now is Bravo, Dennelle. She was right. We only thrive to the extent we can connect, and thanks to pétanque of all things, I am in the process of thriving.

Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash