You know those dreams where you realize you’re naked in a classroom or you’re outside the door to the exam room, realizing that you don’t know a thing?

Or my new pre-flight favourite, where I dream of sleeping through the alarm and missing my flight.

They’re classic anxiousness tarted up in Freudian sleepwear but they all point to the same fear of not being prepared, smart enough, ready enough…

But in our defense, let me first tell you about our house here in Beauvoisin. There is a note in the bathroom not to let the water sit on the tiles because the supporting beams are 300-years old.

Fair enough.

At night, when we reach out the window, past the two-foot walls to close the squeaky lock on the wooden shutters, the silence is fairly thrumming with the thickness of centuries. It’s almost a woolly presence. As a result, we have been sleeping like the dead here.

Then again.

It could be that our bodies, trying to deal with all that lardon and butter, have kickstarted some evolutionary gene to sink us into an odd sort of hibernation. Perhaps one sleeps deeper when covered in a new layer of subcutaneous fat?

We’d only been here two days (and sleeping like bears) when market day arrived in Beauvoisin.

I’ve mentioned this is a small town? Yes, well, imagine the two big Huns striding purposefully toward the market area, plasticized Intermarche bag folded firmly under large arms. Did I simply imagine that I heard the local people humming that old Sesame Street classic, “Which two of these things just doesn’t belong here?”

Or maybe that was just the noise from the stacking and scraping of the tables, as the market was taken down, finished for another week.

This just might be my new nightmare; arriving at market day to find nothing but a few onion skins rolling down the empty street like cowboy tumbleweeds.

We set an alarm the next morning and still barely made the next day’s market in nearby Generac. But we were successful to get enough to produce our first French cooking video.

And then we had family visiting and did lots of touring about, dinners out and ruins and temples and the markets were left until yesterday. Which is when we hit the motherlode of all markets thus far.

Calvisson is about twenty minutes from here, past fields of horses, poppies, vineyards and olive trees, then down the long plane-tree lined road into town, and voila, a market that is going strong even though we’ve arrived late, at just before 10 a.m.

In fact, when we leave two hours later, staggering under the weight of our over-stuffed bags, the place is still hopping. Clearly, the Calvisson Sunday market is for people like us.

I found myself humming, “Do you know the way to Sesame Street?”