VAUCLUSE DIARY

Wednesday 29 April 2020

A nail-biting storm of hail and rain two nights ago—nail-biting because, is the roof going to leak again?—and an overnight solid downpour yesterday, clearing up in the afternoon in time for our usual walk: down to the cemetery, up the trail along the stream, cross the stream, follow the path that rises gradually to the valley called ‘L’aube’, which used to be full of vegetable plots, because there are numerous natural springs up there, but is now mostly going wild, with remnants of quince trees, cherries, a persimmon we haven’t found yet, but know it’s there—and lots of broom taking over, also some beehives up at the road, where we mostly turn back, since we’ve been out for half an hour, probably gone further than the allowed 1 km, and it will take us half an hour to retrace our footsteps, through field and wood again. Occasionally we cross the road, continue up another trail to the top of the mountain called Pied Porcher, but a little warily, because 1) the gendarmes, we are told, patrol the village and its surroundings 3 times a day; and 2) my sneakers’ treads are smooth, and if I twist something sliding downhill in scree and need to be rescued it would be very embarrassing. Clearly I need new shoes, but where would I find those right now?

However, our PM announced new measures, easing confinement after May 11th, including the possibility in regions without too many cases of the virus of going 100 km without a permission slip (one writes this ‘attestation’ oneself, and one is supposed to write a new one every time one leaves one’s house). This region doesn’t have a lot of cases, and so, if we are good, hopefully we will be among the fortunate. But it does eliminate the possibility of returning to Paris, should we want to (to return the car we rented for a month two months ago?), and as for returning to the Bay Area (our tickets are for mid-June) that is looking improbable. I see today on the Stanford University Covid update that the university is going to try to get researchers back to work, but still hasn’t made plans for Fall Quarter. How oh how will they get the students safely back on campus?

One day melts into the next and changes little. It’s time for lunch: homemade potato puree with cream and butter, some meat/spinach thingies the local butcher makes, a salad, cheese, fruit, wine…I know, I know, this doesn’t sound like a bad life, and it isn’t. I have a friend in Paris who would give anything to get out of the city and walk in the woods or fields for a few days, and yesterday I heard from a friend in Turkey, who went from a fellowship to work in the poetry archives in Dublin home to Turkey where he is confined in a house in a city with five other people, including a grandparent.

VAUCLUSE DIARY: Café Zoom

Sunday 26 April 2020

In this privileged confinement it is really quite lovely to have one day melt into the next until one has to look up the day and the date, should one need it—for example to order provisions the day before we go to collect them, from the sidewalk in front of the produce shop, where the butcher and the baker will also deposit our orders, making a single transaction (3 cheques), a single outing a week. Last week I thought it was Wednesday when it was Thursday and I almost forgot to order the food. I feel relieved of most obligations—to visit museums, say, or see the film everyone is talking about, utterly guiltless about my unsociability…bliss is an empty calendar?

Last evening, however, for the second week, I went to a Café Zoom, by invitation of a UK friend, who seems to have an endless supply of fascinating friends and friends of friends, who write, compose music, sing, play giant music boxes, harmoniums, translate, send messages in bottles from (a sampling) Mexico City, New Zealand, and closer to home, Brittany. Next Saturday night will be moderated by Charles Boyle, the one-of-a-kind editor and publisher of CB Editions (and himself a poet and author of un-pin-downable books, available via the London-based CBeditions, where readers can order from a Confinement selection.

Charles has invited his authors to appear, read, juggle at next week’s edition of David Collard’s Zoom café, which is how I (a proud CBe author) first turned up at the café last weekend. I may be becoming addicted…first it was the fun of trying something new, after listening to children talk about their staff meetings on Zoom, now I wonder whether this is a small part of coming transformations, whether as participant or ‘audience’ member, discreetly waving to friends from around the world whose faces (and kitchens and bookshelves) pop up on your screen at 8pm, Greenwich time, on Saturday night.

Yesterday we climbed a mountain, one that is right next door, on foot. But my ‘baskets’ (tennis shoes), which didn’t expect such intense use and no shoe shops open, have smooth treads, and coming down I kept slipping on scree. I was afraid I’d twist a leg and have to be rescued, by—horrors—a helicopter or a team of firefighters who, obviously, have better things to do at the moment, not to mention the expense to public services whose pockets are worse than empty. I saw a front-page story in the local papers about this unlocal person who took it upon herself to take a forbidden hike and…Oi!

Wigtown Poetry Prize Pamphlet 'Catch and Release' available to read online

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.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

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.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

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?

Baudelaire Review

I’ve just come across a nice review of my new Baudelaire translation on The Bookbinder’s Daughter.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

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.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

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.