VAUCLUSE DIARY

Wednesday 6 May 2020

Note to myself: order fruit and veg tomorrow to pick up Friday.

I’m back weeding the gravel. I had a couple of weeks off, but now the weeds are coming up again on the side I first began weeding—what? 6 weeks ago? We’re hoping for a gravel delivery next week, which will hide them for a while. It’s a satisfactory sort of task. My husband is vacuuming, a chore I hate, too much noise.

‘To make a dirty surface clean—a very simple, very human matter.’ Says Saul Bellow in Dangling Man (1944), which I am reading. I’m not sure I ever read it to the end before, but it’s an orange-spined Penguin, reprinted in 1966. I was working as a CUSO teacher in Akrokerri Teacher Training College in Ghana, and a fellow volunteer and Canadian was discovering Bellow and made me want to read him too, but, as I say, I’m not sure I finished the book, not then, at least. That’s probably where I bought the book, maybe in Kumasi, though I don’t remember a/the bookshop in Kumasi. Or maybe someone gave it to me, my English flatmate, a lifelong friend and anthropologist? I turn the book over to see if there’s a price tag, with a bookshop name. This was before bar codes. All I find is 3’6 printed in the top right corner. And at the bottom: ‘not for sale in the USA or Canada.’

In Dangling Man, set in 1942, the protagonist is waiting to be called up; he’s been waiting seven months, it’s hard to settle down to anything when you’re waiting. It’s a kind of freedom… yesterday the plumber came to look at some work to be done in the house. How long are you going to be here, he wanted to know. We shrugged, who can say? And we laughed. The building trades go back to work officially next week. He’ll do the work next week, if it rains. If it doesn’t rain he has a job outside to finish, but it it rains, as forecast, he’ll come. No problem, we say, we’ll be here. Anytime is good.

Last night we had a message from the airline: Your flight (mid-June to California) has been cancelled. Too much uncertainty, the message said. Please go online to rebook. Sure, but for when?

Thousands are reading War and Peace, it seems. I borrow Bleak House from the San Francisco online public library and notice that many Dickens’s novels have waiting lists. I put a hold on the audio version and check out the print. Over a thousand pages. I’m discovering audio books. Maybe a throwback to mummy reading books at bedtime? The problem is you fall asleep and the story continues all by itself in the dark.