Dan Daiquiri

Dundee was grey again. As it always was.

Every morning I woke to the same sagging sky, the same smell of damp pavements and chip oil clinging to the streets like a second skin. Jute, jam and journalism- aye, right.

The buildings looked bored of standing. Crooked, scattered, like a jakey’s teeth. People shuffled through town like they were stuck in glue, peeling themselves out of a depressive episode or the tail-end of a four-day binge. I was no different. Caught in the loop. Rattling weekends. Shame that never dried. Promises I never kept to myself.

The town pulsed with repetition, a low electric hum of sadness and damp. You could almost hear it. Like tinnitus in the soul. The streets stank of nostalgia, memories that poisoned more than they healed. Everyone reaching for a past that never existed, trying to claw back something imagined.

So when the offer came through from college- three months in rural northern France, working front of house at a Michelin-starred hotel- I said yes before I could talk myself out of it. I thought about Albert Roux giving that talk that hooked me in, told me about this life, this world of food and service and something more. Now he was offering me a way into it.

Didn’t matter that I was still off my face half the week or that I couldn’t fold a napkin sober. It was a way out. Maybe even a way forward.

Nik and I had been together a while by then. We said we loved each other and maybe we did. But what we really loved was the numb. The float. The escape.

We didn’t do domestic. There were no Sunday roasts or clean sheets. No quiet nights on the couch. Just now. Just chaos. Just trying to survive each other. The only heat we shared came from the arguments, the ones that made your chest burn like spirits on a wound. We couldn’t sit in silence without twitching. We didn’t hold each other- we clung on for dear life.

But something shifted just before I left. The chaos slowed for a second. She looked at me longer. I kissed her like I already missed her. Maybe we were both trying to grab hold of something that had already slipped between us.

The Megabus south felt like punishment. Ten hours of fidgeting knees and recycled air, hunched beside strangers who coughed like they’d been at it for years. I stared out the window at a sky that seemed to be leaking grief. Chewed nicotine gum like it held answers. Wondered what starting again even meant. Was this it? My big moment? My clean slate?

By the time I reached the ferry terminal, I felt like a ghost dressed in someone else’s clothes.

Montreuil-sur-Mer hit different. The whole town felt like a painting someone had taken too seriously. Fortress walls, cobbled lanes, windows shuttered just-so. Silence, but not the hollow kind. The intentional kind. It smelled like bread and warmed stone. Boulangeries lined the streets and it all looked too perfect to be real, like the postcards hadn’t lied.

The hotel was just outside the centre. Regal, traditional, standing proud in its own little bubble of carved wood and expensive silence. Inside, it felt like a museum. Gold-rimmed plates, chandeliers that didn’t laugh, and carpets too lush to stand on. I walked through it like I’d snuck in. Smiling like my life depended on it. Forgetting phrases. Shaking hands that felt colder than they should.

The days were long. Split shifts that bled into one another, six days a week, lungs filled with French I couldn’t catch and eyes barely open. Everyone acted like they were in a play I’d never seen. It was all over my head. Amuse Bouché? I was lucky if I could remember how to pronounce “merci.” I stuck out like a sore thumb, and not even in an interesting way. More like a rash.

I was earning about £1.50 an hour, if that. But this was supposed to be about experience, wasn’t it?

Then there was Jean-Paul.

Head sommelier. Quiet. Watchful. His waistcoats smelled like damp cellars and old corks. He moved like someone with secrets in his spine. Stiff in the knees. Eyes that had already seen how this story ends.

He didn’t speak much at first. Just watched me stumble through place settings and misunderstandings, nodding like he’d seen it all before. He showed me a Kir Royale one night, an Americano cocktail the next. Gave broken instructions and walked away.

But over time, he let me in. Brought me bits of bread in the bin alley. Shared cheese without words. Smoked silently beside me. His voice was low, gravelled, always half in French and half in patience.

“Everything here… slow,” he told me once, tapping his chest. “You must move like the place. Inside too.”

He wasn’t trying to be funny, but there was something about him- his bone-dry delivery, as if humour had to sneak past his defences.

“Wine is like people,” he muttered one day. “Some are bitter. Some go off. Some…” He pointed to me. “Need time to smooth.”

He became a kind of anchor. Quiet. Steady. He didn’t ask about Dundee. Or Nik. Or why I drank like I was trying to disappear from the inside out. He just let me exist.

Sundays were mine. My day off. My ritual.

A 5L keg of Desperado on the balcony. Sitting in my boxers, letting the sun cook whatever damage the week had done. France had its own sun. It didn’t shout- it seeped. I’d Skype my family and mates back home, flick through photos I wasn’t part of anymore. That ritual made me feel still, if only for a few hours.

The weeks slipped by. Then Nik came out to visit, second month in. We met in Montreuil-sur-Mer and had a nice couple of days outwith my split shifts. Paris was on the cards, I managed to snag two days off and we travelled over France. Halfway between memory and habit.

She’d brought me three bottles of Bucky, my favourite. Mostly because of the caffeine injection and how utterly crazy it made me.

We drank Buckfast by the Eiffel Tower like teenagers playing at romance. Laughed at things we didn’t find funny. Took pictures we’d never print. For a moment, it felt like something might shift. Like the poison had been drained out by distance, instead I poisoned myself with the thick dark liquid.

But it crept back. Quietly. The wrong look. The wrong silence. The tension returned like it never left. The kind of weight you don’t need to name. And the day took a turn.

We argued walking back to the hotel. No shouting. No scenes. Just tired words said under breath. Worn-down versions of ourselves trying to sound new. The arguing went on for most of the night and I knew it was the drink that done it. Deep down I did love her, but my warped perception of my life and the isolation I felt in Montreuil drew out a demon within me filled with spite and anger.

The next morning, I walked her to Gare du Nord, we were in silence. She kissed my cheek. I told her to take care. She stepped onto the train like she’d rehearsed it.

I stood on the platform long after the train had gone, staring at the tracks like they might give her back.

That Sunday, I didn’t move from the balcony.

The Desperado was flat. The sun burned instead of warmed. The silence didn’t soothe anymore- it doubled down creating a hollow internalised sadness.

Jean-Paul found me out the front of the hotel, slouched on the lone bench, a hollowed-out shape. He handed me a plate of cheese, sat beside me, lit a cigarette.

He didn’t speak for a long time. Just breathed slow and steady, like it mattered.

Eventually he said, “Love does not always grow. Sometimes it… expires.”

He offered the cigarette. I took it. We sat in silence, the smoke curling upwards like something between confession and prayer.

Montreuil-sur-Mer was beautiful. So was she. And I didn’t know how to hold either.

Even beauty can’t save you when the rot is inside. When the ache is already burrowing. Deep, stubborn, and real.

She was gone. I knew it. That quiet knowing you get in your stomach, the kind that makes everything else irrelevant.

Dundee was waiting. The mess. The numbness. The loop. It hadn’t left me. I was just on a partial pause. What hadn’t paused was everyone else back home, and neither had part of me- the isolated side. The dark depression which further fuelled my internal fury.

For one French summer, I saw myself. And it wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t clean.

But it was honest.