The 2020 Wigtown Book Festival (Scotland) has a page about the Alistair Reid Pamphlet Prize, with my winning pamphlet, Catch and Release from 2019 free to look at and read. While nothing can compare with holding Gerry Cambridge’s beautiful pamphlet in one’s own hands, this is the next best thing. AND the pamphlet may be ordered for the very modest price of 6 pounds from this link, from anne@wigtownbookfestival.com.
Saturday 25 April
As I sit rocking on the two back legs of the white plastic garden chair, feet propped on a stone bench, looking west past the since-WW2-unfinished cinderbrick wall of my neighbour’s garage at the patchwork of fields, orchards, olive groves, vineyards on the Rhone Valley Plain, my eyes stop, over towards Avignon, on a layer of brownish black cloud, which is smog over the Rhone corridor of autoroutes up towards Lyon, points east—the Alps, Switzerland, Italy, Germany…and north towards Paris. There is virtually no automobile traffic, but I assume that trucks are still rolling with food for Europe from Spain, Portugal, France. That’s nice, even essential, but it makes me think that the only way air pollution is going to disappear is if the world returns to some idyllic (I say this ironically) pre-industrial time—or perhaps fast forwards into a future of virtual everything.
Still, to end, for now, on a positive note, it is a beautiful sunny day, not too hot, not too cold, as Goldilocks exclaimed over Baby Bear’s bowl of porridge, trees are fully leafed, but the leaves still look tender and new and hopeful, and if a few weeks the cherries will be ripe.
Thursday 23 April
It seems that only 3+% of the Provence Cote d’Azur Region has virus antibodies, as opposed to much higher percentages in the Paris Region. Knowing this tends to give one a false sense of security, and cabin fever yields to the desire to go shopping. Not a good idea. I know.
Commerce! The lifeblood of societies? Even the Haida had their gift-giving economies, their exchanges, and writing, didn’t writing begin in Mesopotamia with cuneiform lists of cows and other livestock on cylinder seals? The drycleaner is open in Carpentras! I can take the wool blanket upon which I spilled a cup of coffee ten days ago, and while I’m open, why not take down the curtains my lovely mother-in-law sewed, how many years ago and drop them off? I still like the fabric, so maybe I can ask the seamstress in Caromb, the seamstress who is sewing masks for the whole region, to make new mattress covers (on the model of a fitted sheet) for the mattresses on the 60s hippie platform beds in the small loft? When she has time?
And if we make a trip to Carpentras (10 minute drive) why not pop into the good patisserie and stock up on—well, chocolates to begin with, but also maybe a tart, a cake or cakes. And maybe on the way home we can drive through Caromb and stop at the big hardware DYU store , and after that the plant nursery is right on our way, and Paul, our neighbour, wants some lettuce plants for his vegetable plot, up to 60 or so, depending, he hinted, on how long we are going to be here.
How long are we going to be here? Who knows? We could, obviously, be worse off, much, much worse off.
Maybe we should just stay home?
I’ve just come across a nice review of my new Baudelaire translation on The Bookbinder’s Daughter.
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.
Wednesday 15 April
Today our masks, ordered from a small seamstress in the next village, are ready to pick up, one female-sized, one male-sized, mine plain black with a red lining—like a cardinal. She’d stitched some cushion covers for me a couple of years ago, and I thought maybe she’d make the masks, but she was way ahead of the game. ‘I can do them for Wednesday week,’ she said. ‘We have a lot of orders; we’re going to be working all Easter weekend.’
We do have a couple of aging surgical masks that we wear to collect our daily baguette and Le Monde from the village shop, but it will be good to have something that’s more-reusable. Not that we use them that much, since we don’t often go to a supermarket, and most of our groceries we are now phone-ordering and picking up from the sidewalk in front of the small produce market (which also delivers): fruit and vegetables, cheese, meat, pasta…
Yesterday we did a superette run to Malaucène, then on the way back stopped at the goat farm, which makes cheese, and was open, and hiked to the top of the ridge above the farm, where there are some Roman ruins. hadn’t been there since mid-February when we had a couple of picnics up there.
Birds chirping in the eaves outside my attic window and in the plane tree across the street, now leafing. Small signs of more work perhaps happening—vans on the road. After Macron’s speech on Monday evening, we are now confined till 11 May. It is going to be interesting to watch ‘deconfinement’ happening in Austria, Italy and Denmark, see whether cases start to rise again.
Saturday 11 April
In the space between first and second sleep, to quiet my anxious mind and the fear that I wouldn’t fall asleep again, I was trying the remember the beginning of Coleridge’s poem ‘Frost at Midnight’. A line was bothering me: ‘The [something] of this cottage, all asleep / have left me to that solitude that suits/ [suits what? I’d tried ‘meditation,’ which was the idea but somehow didn’t work, anyway I knew it was wrong, and that’s when it came to me: ‘suits/abstruser musing.’ It was the 3 ‘oo’ sounds that were needed. That recovery made me very happy, and I went back to sleep.’
Pacques au feu ou au jeux? as the saying goes. Paul, our 90 year old neighbour, is no longer so sure about the weather. It is again like summer, probably 80 degrees F, yesterday and again today. The forecast is for rain on Monday.
Chocolate Easter eggs? We’re too scared to go shopping for other than the basics.
Friday 10 April
Settling into a routine here, as many are, if they are lucky enough not to be in hospital: reading the news, mostly via Le Monde, which we buy every morning, along with a baguette and sundry other groceries, such as rice, at the village grocery store (and, in happier days, café). Maybe once a week we take the car to the next town to go to the pharmacy or the superette. Today we will pick up our own order from the butcher, and the fruit and vegetable shop.
We now have internet in the house, which does make life easier—easier than sitting in the car in the hotspot in the next town to the north. I hope I can keep away from checking the news every couple of hours; in any case, whether you are reading the Guardian, Le Monde, or the NYTimes at the moment, it’s the same news, and clearly most of the main stories have been written and rewritten to the point where checking the headlines is enough.
I have two strangely soothing and enjoyable activities: pulling weeds out of the gravel in the garden. Three weeks in, I have done 2/3 of the job. Most days, I take a flower pot, a couple of cushions and I aim to full the pot with weeds. I sit down in the gravel and pinch them up, mostly managing to get the roots along with the tops.Probably by the time I finish it will be time to start over in the part I started with.
The other project is improving my handwriting, for which, as I think I mentioned, I have a workbook purchased in Paris a couple of months ago, the sort of workbook parents buy for children who require remedial work. I do a couple of pages, diligently, like a child who wants to please the teacher, every now and then straightening my back and loosening my grip on the pencil, the tension of the diligent child. Yesterday I reached the page where you learn to do round letters, how to make a lower-case, cursive, a and a d, when these are joined to other letters in a word. I requires a certain amount of concentration, and there’s no room left for any kind of other thoughts; it’s a good bedtime activity: empty words, no thinking, rote-learning.