Just four days after drinks at the Ritz and bites of ridiculously sublime lobster, avocado, mango salsa cone canapes in Belgravia, I am back in my "now" life.

So, I am standing opposite a cemetery clutching a plastic bag containing a plate and a knife and fork for the annual fete repas. Oh, and paper napkins.

The rain is mournfully slapping my head in intermittent, sad, giant plops. It is 8.30pm and the marquee behind me straddles the crossroads at Puygaillard, the hamlet between my boutique village of Balignac and Lavit.

According to the last census, 62 people live here around the church that is never open. Really? I've seen about 10, and never all at once.

Forty per cent are retired and, unlike my fascist-voting Balignac, most veered to the left at the last election, which, despite all that has followed, had to be a better thing.

They also voted for Sarkozy once, and, if all recent polls are to be believed, would have him back in a second. Me too. (I'm just giving you a little local flavour here, you understand.)

I've arrived half an hour late but still far too early. One never arrives on time in France; it's not done.

My neighbours aren't here, and nobody acknowledges me as they knock back the disgusting apero mix in plastic glasses at what will eventually be the disco end of the tent.

Perversely, and what the hell, I am wearing the same outfit I chose for the very upmarket gastro-pub in London's Motcomb Street. Leather biker-style jacket, jeans and body-con shirt (ie tight-fitting and binding the booze-boobs so the jacket looks as if it could just about zip up. It doesn't any more.)

Sadly, nobody even gives me a second glance as I puff away outside, staring at the mausoleums looming over the graveyard wall, hoping my neighbours will arrive soon and tell me where we are sitting for the meal. I am wearing my instant face-lift look – a deranged smile.

The meal is a menu comprising stuffed confit of cabbage, veal stew, three cheeses and a heavy apple pastry plus wine.

There's not a lobster cone in sight, but basket after basket of compulsory bread. I have missed the thick wodges of cold pizza served with the aperos.

Pierrot had phonetically bludgeoned me on the phone into coming although I had decided not to do so. There was no way out unless I took my car and hid in a lay-by for several hours. It is the nearest soiree to my house and I have to show solidarity with my neighbours.

Sigh. I look around. It is not a dress-up night apart from some odd sequins on T-shirts. Not that I ever really dress up here; I'd just like to see a bit of razzle-dazzle, you know?

It is a Hobbit dinner – small, dark men and women with incipient or full-blown moustaches. Dark day clothes with a frisson of camouflage morphed into party wear; plastic glasses and hunks of bread to wipe plates clean before the next course. I march down the centres of the trestle tables filling the tent.

I am finally claimed by Pierrot and Miriam. The revels begin and I remember my first fete repas here.

All was new and rustically charming; the sense of community and continuity palpable. The sun shone as it should this month and there was an old-fashioned courtesy in the greetings between neighbours and families interlinked through generations on the land.

It was a link going back through time to feasts held on this day, every year, in this same spot.

Like Bambi, I gazed upon this enchanted world and all the newness still to come. I got a glimpse of a life truly lived and not defined by work and ambition, possessions or status.

I danced through other fetes celebrating wine, the harvest, even the hazelnuts, but gradually the very continuity of it all, the very fact of it, all weighed my spirit, even if my soul rejoiced.

Skimming – for skimming is all it can be – the surface of bucolic bliss, one senses or hears of the murkiness underneath – the feuds, the dark rages, the children held back to the land, the built-in fear of change and challenge.

Contentment should be the preserve of infants and those in their last years.

It's the restless, the disaffected, the difficult and the outsiders who create the wonders – and yes, the evils – of the world.

They are the ones who do not accept what is and what always has been; however comforting it may seem at first glance.

No, the ultimate of course isn't a stupid lobster canape in Belgravia, but neither is it a twirl in a marquee in south-west France. Indeed, it's complicated.

All I know at this moment, after my two disparate outings, is that I no longer fit into my old world and yet am not prepared to relinquish myself into this world.

I have become a true exile. I belong nowhere. I fit nowhere.

But then, wasn't that always my ambition? Enough. For the moment, the sun and the wine are calling.

cookfidelma@hotmail.com