They send you info about preparing for your fast. 5 days pre-arrival you cut out meat, dairy and sugar, 3 days before you just eat vegetables and fruit, and the evening before you are supposed to stay home and relax and 'purge' with prune juice and Epsom salts and various other vile things. I do pretty much none of this. Apart from the prune juice. Note to self : drinking a litre of prune juice then going to Carrefour is NOT a good idea.
Just in case my preparation wasn't lacking enough, I went out the night before to 2 yacht show parties, consumed vast quantities of champagne and wine before eating spaghetti with meatballs at midnight. As a consequence, my drive to the retreat, which should have involved nothing but juice, involved ibuprofen, a cheesy baguette and a Bounty.
I arrive at 5ish, it's a cute villa in the hills above Aix-en-Provence. It is somewhat lacking in comfort but peaceful and homely. Stéphane, the owner of the fasting company (I don't think he owns the villa) greets me and takes me to meet the others. We are 5 people fasting. All middle aged and plump apart from Stéphane who looks like he has fasted most of his life.
Ania is 61, spent a couple of years living in China and talks about it the whole time. When she's not talking about China, the Chinese, and her life in China, she talks about anything and everything else on the planet.
Jean Jacques is 68 (I think). A pot bellied French man who loves pastis, tête de veau and the beach. He also firmly believes in fasting and has just arrived for a 2 week stay.
X is a 58 year old woman who is so quiet and shy that I haven't even captured her name yet. When she does talk (quietly), she talks about her sinuses and the myriad of essential oils and herbal remedies that she takes that don't seem to have any effet at all on her sinus problem.
France is a 37 yr old woman who is also here for 2 weeks. She also speaks loudly and about what a great singer she is, how she did stage school but never managed to become an actress, how the Keto diet is the best thing ever invented and how she is addicted to facebook spending up to 19 hours a day chatting to her 2000 'friends'.
I join them for a cup of herbal tea and the conversation turns to wine and how a meal isn't a meal without a glass of wine etc. France then launches into a 15 minute speech on how the French are positively teetotal compared to the Brits who are all massive alcoholics, especially the women who binge till they are legless as soon as they walk out of the office at 5pm. She knows this for a fact as she lived in the UK for years trying (and failing) to work in the West End.
I wait till the conversation simmers down and look straight at France. 'By the way, I'm English.' I let that simmer. 'Ohhhh, ohhhhh, moi j'adore les anglais' - they all start to coo, apart from Jean Jacques who probably hates anything Anglo-Saxon. I give one of those tight half smiles with a head tilt. 'Oui bien sûr'. I reply. I am enjoying them squirming, it distracts from the fact that I'm about to starve for a week.
Stéphane serves us some watery soup that smells lovely but tastes of boiled cabbage water. It probably is boiled cabbage water. He asks us all if we all purged. Two have, three of us haven't, so he offers to give us Epsom salts now. I decline because I know that my sluggish intestines will probably stay dormant until half way through the 3 hour hike in the morning. I slink off to bed with a cup of camomile tea.
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