There's the old wooden bench. How often we sat there. You with your leaded line tensed and your rod flexing with the swell. I, with eyes slit against the western sun, waiting for your little bell to tinkle a bite.

At the first touch of the evening chill you rose, silently reeled in your line, shouldered your creel and trudged with me, rubber boots thudding on the boards of the long jetty, to L'Etoile de l' Ouest and Jeanette.

Blue eyed and smiling Jeanette, wishing she was young enough to flirt with us. Setting her pichet and her two boards with black bread thickly buttered and topped with garlic, before us. The warm room filled with the Croisicais talking, like the waves on the shingle beach.

The dark wine, almost black in squat tumblers, the bone handled knives, the never-empty pitcher and Jeanette telling us quietly about those long ago evenings when she sat young with the guests on the quayside in the setting sun. A place of remembrance and reminiscence, where the past is today and the future will be the same.