Bayonne Festival

At the Bayonne everybody wears red and white, drinks, sings and dances around the vibrant streets.People wear scarves and tug the scarves of other people they find attractive. Robin and I ask for a mojito; we get given a suspicious bottle that looks like it has been fished out of the sea; gravel and seaweed are still stuck to its sides. It reeks of alcohol.
I am wearing a spangly red dress , the colour of shimmering children's arts and crafts paper, too ridiculously fluorescent to actually be worn. It is beautifully cut, but still somehow looks childish - Shaz tells me that it looks like I made it in a Design Tec lesson with a sewing machine. Simple it may be, but it is crimson - both the colour of the festival and the colour of desire - and it is fun, and I feel very nineteen walking down the streets of Bayonne in a spangly red dress, hips swaying to the music, smiling like a maniac - very young and very free and euphoric - full of possibility...