Hello again

I’ve abandoned my blog for many months, finding myself repetitive, but yesterday I felt like posting again. Why? Don’t really know, perhaps it has something to do with reading a collection of journal entries and letters by Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish fiction writer and her friend and lover, Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat. Ritchie’s work is less well-known and harder to find, but he is also, from what I’ve read so far, an extraordinary writer. He won the prestigious Canadian Governor General’s Award for his non-fiction, I think his war journals. The collection is edited by Victoria Glendinning, the author of a greatly recommended Bowen biography.

A week or two before Christmas, and we are in California but have just reserved our tickets, Covid-permitting, to return to Paris in early January. In the meantime we will head to St. Juan Island, Washington, for a family reunion of sorts: us and the far-flung children. It is raining but I haven’t yet set foot outside to see if the creek below our apartment windows, which has been dry for x years, except briefly in November, is running. It rained all night, but now the sky has patches of blue, and we might take our chances on a bike ride into the hills if the rain holds off for a few hours. And now I am going to heat up a slice of last night’s (home-made) pizza.