VAUCLUSE DIARY

Friday 10 April

Settling into a routine here, as many are, if they are lucky enough not to be in hospital: reading the news, mostly via Le Monde, which we buy every morning, along with a baguette and sundry other groceries, such as rice, at the village grocery store (and, in happier days, café). Maybe once a week we take the car to the next town to go to the pharmacy or the superette. Today we will pick up our own order from the butcher, and the fruit and vegetable shop.

We now have internet in the house, which does make life easier—easier than sitting in the car in the hotspot in the next town to the north. I hope I can keep away from checking the news every couple of hours; in any case, whether you are reading the Guardian, Le Monde, or the NYTimes at the moment, it’s the same news, and clearly most of the main stories have been written and rewritten to the point where checking the headlines is enough.

I have two strangely soothing and enjoyable activities: pulling weeds out of the gravel in the garden. Three weeks in, I have done 2/3 of the job. Most days, I take a flower pot, a couple of cushions and I aim to full the pot with weeds. I sit down in the gravel and pinch them up, mostly managing to get the roots along with the tops.Probably by the time I finish it will be time to start over in the part I started with.

The other project is improving my handwriting, for which, as I think I mentioned, I have a workbook purchased in Paris a couple of months ago, the sort of workbook parents buy for children who require remedial work. I do a couple of pages, diligently, like a child who wants to please the teacher, every now and then straightening my back and loosening my grip on the pencil, the tension of the diligent child. Yesterday I reached the page where you learn to do round letters, how to make a lower-case, cursive, a and a d, when these are joined to other letters in a word. I requires a certain amount of concentration, and there’s no room left for any kind of other thoughts; it’s a good bedtime activity: empty words, no thinking, rote-learning.