Vaucluse, Monday 23rd March

The bookworm in me is happy to be locked in the house with nothing to do but read. My mother would shoo me outside ‘to play,’ or, as a teenager, ‘to have fun’. But my idea of fun was reading, with my feet up (essential, says Calvino—in, I believe, the first or last chapter of If on a winter’s night a traveler). Caught reading after lights out, under the covers with a flashlight, too engrossed to hear footsteps on the stairs? Me again.

But our next door neighbour, who turned 90 last year, who is a farmer, a paysan, doesn’t agree. Hearing him down below, returning from his olive field at the end of the afternoon, I put my head out (a safe distance from the attic window to the street. ‘C’est triste,’ he said, with a look of dejection I’m not sure I’ve ever seen on his face before.