Sunday 12 March

I’ve been sitting in the garden in a collapsible deck chair for hours. First I was reading a very good book by Jhumpa Lahiri. Full of lovely clutter, but shaped, like the top of a chest of drawers scattered with things, but all of them held in a wide but shallow bowl. The sun was out, I dragged my chair to the back of the garden under the wall, protected from the mistral, which was blowing quite hard. After a while I got tired of reading, or rather I didn’t want to finish the whole book in one afternoon, I wanted some chapters in reserve. Not eat all the cookies at once. So I looked into the gravel around my chair and saw a weed, then another, and pretty soon I was down in the gravel pulling weeds, one of those mindless tasks that keep your hands busy and your head empty. My husband had put a vinegar weedkiller they said at the Co-op in Beaumes de Venise wouldn’t poison the ground and I didn’t need to weed. It was hard to stop.Yesterday we hiked with friends to the top of a lowish local mountain and I felt like spending a day in a deck chair and scooting across gravel pulling weeds, most of them just one or two blades of grass, hardly hatched. And now that the sun is lower in the sky I can see I missed a lot.