VAUCLUSE DIARY

Friday 17 April

Yesterday evening coming up the short lane to our back gate, it was overhung with lilacs coming into bloom.

Our 90-year-old neighbour, in the house adjoining ours, spent his day ‘curing’ (deep-cleaning) the stone basin in his kitchen garden, which he hadn’t done for 2 years and which brings water from a spring in the hills to his house and vegetable plot. The artichokes are producing small violet fruit that are, of course, delicious, much more so than the store-bought variety. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten artichokes straight from the garden before. And he has managed, through a friend, to obtain lettuce seedlings, enough he hopes to see him through the next few months. Today he will start to prepare the earth in the potager so he can plant the seedlings. In the meantime he has run out of fresh lettuce, but another neighbour brought him an enormous head of escarole from the village shop.

He says that if he sits down during the day he falls asleep.