My favourite place

Lauren Child reminisces about Loire Valley holidays

Almost every year, we go to the Loire Valley to stay with our friends who have an old farmhouse there, which they bought years ago. We’re both selfemployed and not very good at planning ahead, so it’s quite spontaneous – we’ll think, ‘Oh, let’s go on Friday.’ Adrian [Darbishire, Child’s boyfriend] likes to drive through the night and we usually arrive at about eight in the morning, and go straight to the local bakery in the village of Montrésor. It’s quite hilly with lots of very pale stone, a bit like Bath stone but even paler. It’s very pretty with a rather special-looking church and lots of higgledypiggledy houses all butting into each other.

Our friends’ house backs on to fields so you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere. What I particularly like about their home is it’s very simple; everything they own comes from a flea market and there are a lot of insects and the odd lizard living in it. There is no use being prissy about it – spiders, centipedes and earwigs own the place.

We have always found it a very friendly area, attracting longtime residents from all over

the world. This year we met three delightful Mongolian ladies. In 1849, a Polish count bought the local château so there is a large Polish community here, too.

There’s a shop, a hairdresser’s, plus little crêperies and places to eat – nothing fancy at all. There’s château after château to visit if you should crave a bit of culture, but usually we are content to just cycle to the river and swim all day. We’re addicted to going to

brocantes [vintage fairs]. I’ve always liked junk shops and car boot sales and I’ve passed the addiction on to Adrian – he used to roll his eyes about it. My daughter Tuesday [who’s nine] likes buying old jewellery. You can buy endless glasses for nearly nothing (I have a great many) and beautiful old linen sheets. I love picking through other people’s discarded things, trying to find treasure.

I stop worrying about everything when I’m here – my friends don’t have Wi-fi, so you lose that habit of checking your email all the time and I don’t listen to the news. We play cards and Yahtzee, and this year we bought our friends a projector to screen films on the wall – I like watching with other people around. Tuesday loves Tootsie, and she is learning to play poker (she’s getting pretty good), so we watched The Sting, which has a great poker scene. The local villagers often put up their own makeshift cinema screen in the middle of a field too, which is so much more exciting than watching indoors, and very sociable.

These kinds of places feel as if they’re changing at a much slower pace. I find this reassuring somehow, and I’m certain this is why I feel so much better when I am here.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Clarice Bean, That’s Me, by Lauren Child, a special edition, with a CD featuring three stories, is published in November (Hachette Children’s Group, £7.99)

The narrow streets of Montrésor in the Loire Valley. Above right: Child with her daughter, Tuesday

There are châteaux aplenty if you fancy some culture, although Child (left) is happy to cycle to the river to swim