Paris, 13 January 2023

Just back from food shopping. I walked across the Luxembourg Garden. The day was mildish, grey, the trees leafless, which was nice in a way: the starkness of bare branches, birds’ nests perched in their crooks, squawks of, probably, the parakeet population. I stopped to watch the petanque players for a few minutes, then out the southern side where school had just let out, and crowds of adolescents jammed the sidewalks. Friday afternoon. Coming back, a group of middle school boys and girls were play soccer in a patch of dirt between the tennis courts and the merry-go-round. Now home, I have started reading a book I bought last year, by T.J. Clark and Anne Wagner about the northern English painter, Lowry. I saw some of his work when I visited the Manchester Art Gallery a few years ago, and liked it very much, so when I saw this book in a secondhand book catalogue last year I ordered it. It is bleak, but intense and somehow beautiful like a mild, grey day.