Fidelma Cook passed away on June 26. We are running a series of our favourite columns in tribute. This one is from 2008

At this moment I’d happily pack my bags and leave France. The days stretch ahead with no joy in them and I’m starting to feel I’m in God’s waiting room and far too young to be occupying the bench. Of course, rationally I know that if the sun ever shines again, all will be well overnight. Irrationally – or are these my real feelings? – I wonder more and more just what the hell I’m doing here.

It must be the weather, because many of the others here in Happy Valley admit they’re having the same thoughts. However, they look at me oddly when I add that, actually, I’m bored rigid.

I know this is not what you want to hear, particularly those who dream of the day you’ll have your own place in France. But (and I’m trying not to obsess again about the worst weather in living memory here), there really is no point in being here without sunshine.

Who in their right mind would choose to live in the depths of the countryside, mixing with the same handful of people week after week, hearing the same conversations?

READ MORE: Fidelma Cook may be gone but her words will live on

Who in their right mind would live in a house with rising damp, now infested with woodworm, with acres of grass, snakes, weeds and a half- filled trench around them? And with no money to do anything about it all? A former colleague of mine once quit with the words, “Man, I’m in the wrong movie.”

Well, so am I. At this precise moment you can have what I’ve got for a bag of fish, chips and mushy peas – heavy on the vinegar, light on the salt.

Stuff the baguettes, the foie gras, the bloody fetes, the lousy television and the cheap red wine. I want life – real life with mayhem and madness; wide dirty pavements; nasty, vicious office gossip; fights and fallouts. I want Chinese food, Indian food, Italian food, anything but French food, followed by a stumble around the west end of Glasgow.

I want to call on friends who’ve known me more than six months and share memories of bad and good times. I want to walk along Byres Road breathing deeply of the petrol fumes tottering on a pair of high – very high – heels.

I want to sit in the back of a black cab, head into town and run up a huge credit-card bill on pure fripperies knowing that I have a monthly pay cheque coming in. I want a monthly pay cheque.

I want to go to the cinema and not mentally translate every sentence. I want to … I want to … live.

I don’t want to garden, don’t want to learn how to paint watercolours and, let’s be brutally honest here, don’t want to cook either. It was all a fantasy which I should have left at that.

READ MORE: Catriona Stewart: Cutting overseas aid shows the moral bankruptcy of Johnson and Patel

Now that I’m living the fantasy I realise I have neither the temperament nor the stomach for it. Actually, I haven’t the liver for it either.

Take last Saturday night. Wearing a coat, trousers and a wrap, swaddled

in a blanket, I

was listening to jazz in the open air on the old battlements in Auvillar.

Jazz. I hate jazz, and this jazz was pure dirgey, discordant, slityour-wrists jazzy jazz. And I was there simply to get out of the house and maybe see some smart people under the age of 70.

When we got home and I slumped at the kitchen table staring out into the bleak, black night, Pierce just looked at me and said, “You’re bored bloody rigid here, aren’t you?” Suddenly the elephant was visible in the room.

“You’re right,” I said in dawning realisation that therein lies the problem. “I wouldn’t be if there were sun, though.” “Yes, you would,” he persisted.

READ MORE: Natasha Radmehr: Has the pandemic changed how we view work forever?

“All you’ve ever really loved doing is working, isn’t it? You said you never had time to do all the other things but it was just an excuse because you didn’t want to do them in the first place.

“Now you’ve no excuse but you’re still doing nothing real like gardening or cooking and you’re bored to death. And the less you do the less you want to do.

“Look at you.You haven’t painted your nails for weeks.”

I looked at their nakedness and suddenly all of my present life lay in those now horrifically short, once pampered nails.

Let’s face it – what is the point of sticking the slap on and painting the nails just to go to the village for my cartouche of fags? What is the point of doing all that to go to Toulouse, where I can’t afford to buy anything? And that is the root of all of this. No money for “extras”.

Money makes everywhere bearable, even the storm-lashed, insect-ridden south-west of France. Money means I could hire a house-sitter, kiss Portia goodbye, get on a plane and get out of here.

And then maybe, just maybe, when I’m there – wherever – I might just miss here.

Meanwhile it’s time to stop whining and go pull up a few weeds.

Hell, is this it?