Mark 
“Medicated Moments – A Dérive at the Edge of Care”
In the dérive, the profound often hides in the mundane. Wandering through Ouistreham, I turned a corner and arrived at this: Pharmacie de la Plage. A name that promises healing by the sea.
There’s something beautifully contradictory here. On one side, the promise of order and remedy, opening hours etched with bureaucratic certainty. On the other hand, a vending machine offering late-night intimacy beneath a sign urging you to wear compression socks on the sand. This is the poetry of the dérive: the absurd realism of lived life.
Outside, a bike leans against a post. No owner in sight. A bakery scent wafts from the café across the street. Life buzzes, but quietly. I stand still in the current.
This street corner is not extraordinary. But isn’t that the point? The dérive invites us to consider that even here, outside a pharmacy, you find the architecture of human need: the need to be well, to be safe, to be loved, to be held. The vending machine hums with pragmatism, the pharmacy sign promises continuity, and the poster smiles with an awkward optimism that says, “You’re allowed to feel good.”
This town, marked by the scars of conflict and tides of memory, also makes room for care. For a moment, I feel gently held by the banal kindness of it all.
This is the real medicine.
Join me on my Next trip to Ouistreham
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Image Details
A corner pharmacy in Ouistreham stands quietly under a digital green cross, brick-lined and neatly maintained. A condom vending machine is affixed to the wall beside a cheerful summer poster advertising medical-grade compression stockings. The signboard lists opening hours with clinical precision. Behind the scene, the striped awnings of a seafood takeaway and the frame of a bicycle hint at everyday life continuing, unhurried, under a clear sky.
© Mark Stothard MA ARPS
