PARIS DIARY

Sunday 28th June

Sunday morning and the church across the street is bleating out hymns. They need to up the tempo. On the other hand it may be suited to the world at the moment. 

Street noise most of the night: car doors slamming, people screaming. I listened to an audio production of Medea yesterday and some of the screams sounded like the climax of the play. But I couldn’t bring myself to close the window: the cool air after three days of 90/30+ heat was soothing.

Cool air and breezes. One knocked my insect—bird?—kite off the window where it does double duty as ornament and curtain (there are neighbours right across the courtyard). I lay it on the bed, then I stepped on the pushpin that held the kite and had popped off. Tried to push it back into the wood with my thumb, too hard; the hammer was in a cupboard in a toolbox and I was feeling lazy. My eye fell on the long, smooth, black, flat-on-one-side stone I beachcombed somewhere (Vancouver? Brittany?) that I use as a paperweight I thought of my stone age forebears and used the stone. Bang, bang. Perfect! The kite is back up.

PARIS DIARY

Tuesday 23 June 2020

Life seems to return to normal. Yesterday all kindergarten, primary and middle school pupils went back to school for the last two weeks of the school year; social distancing, from what I read, has been somewhat relaxed in the classroom, and it is expected that 90% of pupils will be present. Families around us returned from the country, and when I asked two pre-teens in our building how school was today late this afternoon, they said, ‘Très bien, merci Madame.’

I ran grocery errands in the covered market, then we took today’s Le Monde to the park and read it. The usual boulles, chess and checker players; the children’s playground newly open and full of small children and their parents or grandparents or minders. Everything looked very green with out fresh eyes, the chestnut trees taller, the delphinium bluer…

It is hotter tonight. We ordered a mobile AC unit, but it isn’t being delivered till next Monday, when perhaps we won’t need it any more. Tomorrow I’m doing a shift at the Soupe. We were said to be one of the few soup kitchens open, and had almost twice the usual number of eaters, but perhaps the city’s other kitchens are also reopening?

PARIS DIARY

Sunday 21 June 2020

Paris begins to feel like life as usual. Aperitif with neighbours last night; we all (four) arrived with masks, which no one wore. I window-shopped the sales. On the other hand, there was a long line on the sidewalk to gain access to the Bon Marché department store, which may or may not have started its sales; the hotel around the corner, behind the church, is apparently on the verge of bankruptcy, perhaps helped by a small encampment of homeless people nearby; I had a package delivered from India via DHL by a young man on a bicycle who could have been my son--not the usual delivery profile--maybe a student with a summer job--but not your usual middle class (whatever that means) student summer job; the number of bag lunches being handed out at the Soupe Populaire, where I worked a shift on Thursday, is almost double the number of lunches the Soupe was serving before the lockdown.

PARIS DIARY

Saturday 20 June 2020

We have been back in Paris for a week now, shocked at first by the crowds in the streets after seeing perhaps half a dozen people for 2-3 months, gradually adapting to the new normal: masks, few people in the shops where entry is restricted, gel waiting to be used. In the open air fewer masks are being worn—perhaps about 50% of the time, and not so much on people under, say, the age of 30. No tourists, or extremely few: I heard a family speaking Italian on the Ile de la Cité where I went to buy plants and detoured around Notre Dame. If there are out-of-towners they are French speakers. Still, café terraces (no eating inside yet) are packed and tables overflow onto the street or, where sidewalks are wide, onto the areas outside neighbouring shops.

We have taken buses in the middle of the day. That’s ok. Haven’t ventured into the Metro yet. Lots of walking, in parks and along the Seine.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Thursday 11 June 2020

I had to look up the date and day. They all flow into one, without distinguishing features. I note in my agenda the passage of a plumber or fridge repairperson, and our biking destinations. A few days ago we did the Gorge de la Nesque; we dream of climbing the Mont Ventoux on the gradual (Sault) side.

Tomorrow we drive back to Paris, but expect to return here in July. Last night I began reading Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year. A few years ago I picked it up, but it wasn’t the moment. Now, as I discovered reading the first 30 pages, it definitely is. Not much has changed since 1664, only conspiracy theories and internet myths updating superstition in the form of annunciatory comets.

The June 6th Economist has an essay on Pushkin’s cholera quarantine in the autumn of 1830: ‘My dark thoughts have dissipated: I am now in the country and enjoying myself. You [Pletnev, Pushkin’s correspondent] cannot imagine how joyous it is to run away from a fiancée and to sit here and write poetry…You can ride horses as much as you want, write at home as much as you please, and be disturbed by no one.’

Shops have reopened, however. Also (except in the Paris region) cafés and restaurants. Not a lot of people wearing masks. Our next door neighbour put a mask in his pocket to attend a funeral yesterday but no one else was wearing one, so it stayed in his pocket. Looking at the Hopkins’ stats online this morning, however, the situation is not all that rosy.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Sunday 24 May 2020

What I have done so far today: binge-read news first thing in the morning and again after lunch. Only the headlines, mostly, because I can write the stories myself, so little is new. Have sworn not to click on any article with Trump in the headline. Discovered Politico’s European Edition and was annoyed that most of the cartoons in their weekly roundup were sourced in the US. Does Politico not take to non-English language humour? Or is it just the difficulty of translating the captions? Website too anglo-centered. Opened the Atlantic and discovered I hadn’t read it in a while.

What is new in the news is that the focus is shifting from the virus to the economy. What is heartening, in Europe, is how unanimous public and political opinion has been about putting lives before the economy, how many jobs have been saved, and why not? Isn’t it better in every way to subsidize salaries than resort to unemployment?

Raging mistral (north wind) blowing outside. The entry and stairs down to the main house are littered with petals from little dying roses, once pink now beige. My Marseille mother-in-law would take to her bed when the mistral blew, sending grit and leaves into the house. Paul, our next door neighbour, yesterday afternoon promised “mistral le samedi ne va pas jusqu’à lundi” (mistral on Saturday, gone by Monday). Here’s hoping.

I have been to the dry cleaner twice in 3 weeks and again next week, with the duvets. I have rinsed cushions and strewn them across the terrace in the sun, hoping 60 years of strains will disappear in the (bright) sun. My husband, not normally an enthusiastic handyman, finds all kinds of little jobs to do. Yet I don’t think our life would be very different without the virus, so we can count ourselves lucky. Nothing new there. Oh, there would be more possible distractions, especially in Paris. On the whole I like being forced to stay home, no excuses to be made for my unsociability. I think this life is just fine, except that I would like to see my babies in the flesh.

‘What do you want to do this afternoon?’ asks my husband. ‘Go for a bike ride,’ I say. Even not looking at him I feel his nod as he disappears downstairs to practice the flute.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Saturday 23 May 2020

I have been wearing my black jogging pants for 3 months. I do wash them now and then, and there have been a few days when it was too hot for fleece, but basically they’re my quarantine uniform. They aren’t black any more but grey, and they have holes, but the holes are tiny. For comfort they’re hard to beat; for summer I want to buy a dress that doesn’t touch my body anywhere below the shoulders. This assumes I will conquer my fear of entering a shop and trying on a dress.

Quarantine regime in France update: for the past two weeks we have been able to leave home for any length of time, without an on-your-honour permission slip; but no farther than 100 km. Which excludes Paris. Without a good excuse. It is pretty amazing how disciplined the French are. So far.

Anything becomes routine pretty fast. Our daily: stroll, masked, to the village to buy our baguette and Le Monde. Lunch. Read (reread) the news, which fills the time available; shop for food (once a week). Bike. Hike. Facetime with kids in their time zones. Dinner. Read. Bed. Repeat.

Reading this week (in case I ever come back to this and wonder): Graham Green, Trollope, Mary Norris, the comma queen, David Sedaris. Books borrowed from Libby, which has the guilting function of watching how fast you are reading them, and putting up nudges like “are you finished?'“ and “one person waiting.”

The photo is the village last week from a hill above. Broom is everywhere flowering, and I’m translating Leopardi’s poem “Broom.”

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Wednesday 6 May 2020

Note to myself: order fruit and veg tomorrow to pick up Friday.

I’m back weeding the gravel. I had a couple of weeks off, but now the weeds are coming up again on the side I first began weeding—what? 6 weeks ago? We’re hoping for a gravel delivery next week, which will hide them for a while. It’s a satisfactory sort of task. My husband is vacuuming, a chore I hate, too much noise.

‘To make a dirty surface clean—a very simple, very human matter.’ Says Saul Bellow in Dangling Man (1944), which I am reading. I’m not sure I ever read it to the end before, but it’s an orange-spined Penguin, reprinted in 1966. I was working as a CUSO teacher in Akrokerri Teacher Training College in Ghana, and a fellow volunteer and Canadian was discovering Bellow and made me want to read him too, but, as I say, I’m not sure I finished the book, not then, at least. That’s probably where I bought the book, maybe in Kumasi, though I don’t remember a/the bookshop in Kumasi. Or maybe someone gave it to me, my English flatmate, a lifelong friend and anthropologist? I turn the book over to see if there’s a price tag, with a bookshop name. This was before bar codes. All I find is 3’6 printed in the top right corner. And at the bottom: ‘not for sale in the USA or Canada.’

In Dangling Man, set in 1942, the protagonist is waiting to be called up; he’s been waiting seven months, it’s hard to settle down to anything when you’re waiting. It’s a kind of freedom… yesterday the plumber came to look at some work to be done in the house. How long are you going to be here, he wanted to know. We shrugged, who can say? And we laughed. The building trades go back to work officially next week. He’ll do the work next week, if it rains. If it doesn’t rain he has a job outside to finish, but it it rains, as forecast, he’ll come. No problem, we say, we’ll be here. Anytime is good.

Last night we had a message from the airline: Your flight (mid-June to California) has been cancelled. Too much uncertainty, the message said. Please go online to rebook. Sure, but for when?

Thousands are reading War and Peace, it seems. I borrow Bleak House from the San Francisco online public library and notice that many Dickens’s novels have waiting lists. I put a hold on the audio version and check out the print. Over a thousand pages. I’m discovering audio books. Maybe a throwback to mummy reading books at bedtime? The problem is you fall asleep and the story continues all by itself in the dark.