Regular Cabanon Days

Like true joy: giving out of propane for the stove, going down in my little Twingo, Boyce driving, to change the propane pot (box? thing) and picking up "festive" baguette for lunch -- had one last night with "cereale" -- all sorts of seeds, and some Breton butter from the one remaining grocery store (the 11 there used to be disappeared when the madder ("garance") on which the little village lived was no longer used for soldiers' pants, because Germany had fabricated a chemical that did the job more simply. Crash went our little village back in the 19th century.

Now sitting peacefully under the overhanging vines are Matthew and Theodore, each with their computers, Boyce under the overhang we had to put up to have the rooms -- old and  newer -- touch, regulations, with the paper, me figuring out what to say to the forthcoming piece about Picasso and Jacqueline Roque (at the Pace, while our Picasso and the camera will be at the Gagosian) -- you set up a phone interview, this for next tuesday after we get back from Les Florets for Matthew's birthday, or wednesday after we take them to Avignon, alas, but we leave only a day later, doubly alas.

The sun is glancing hrough the vines, I have cut up yellow courgettes to try to imitate the superb yellow courgette soup we were served way up the mountain beyond Sault, cut up cucumbers to delight the table, and will serve the gorgeous vegetable dish Connie Higginson left when she and Leon Selig (whom I've known both of for ages) came with their friends 2 days ago .

We swiim in the lake at 3-ish, and then bring back the Twingo for Matthew and Theodore to swim in the Bedoin pool (you have to have regulation French bathing suits), then to Villes to try out a new restaurant. Utopia indeed.

Tomorrow to neighbors for lunch, next day big anniversay party for provencal neighbors -- Matthew will take his guitar -- and the next day some journalist friends and Arabic specialist friends will come for drinks, etc. The way it is. I wouldn't change a thing. 

the chapel

So now today early, Matthew and Theodore have set out, armed with a baguette and a bar of chocolate and a water bottle, up the road and up the hill  to the chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Anges, the chapel, to ring the bell so all can hear the arrival, armed also with a little hammer to knock of pieces of rock in case they are interesting-- they will perhaps come down by the Roman Road, very grown over in places, but all the same, historic -- our cabanon has a roman wall, and everywhere feels laden with tradition. Even our meals under the trees downstairs, and even our drinks upstairs overlooking the field -- all of it. And there's a lot of it!

tacking up

Right now, my son Mathew and his son Theodore are tacking up moustiquaire (you know, against the mostquitos) in the old window openings and it is very familial and usefully grand and grandly useful.
At our large party,  two nights ago, when it was pouring and we huddled inside, Matthew sang, and it was glorious. So  forgot we had lots of wine downstairs, rose from Aix in honor of Cezanne and white from Cassis in honor of all the Bloomsbury folk who stayed there: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Quentin Bell and the others -- in Cassis, staying once in the summer  at the Camargo Foundation,  I found, under an oilcloth table mat, a table painted by someone in the Omega workshop, all very delightful, and now it is in a bank somewhere. Discoveries are of all sorts, over, under, around...

Today, under the sun, glinting off the leaves, i am glad to have finished my piece for the Guardian on Matisse and Picasso and Montmartre and modernism, about Sue Roe's smashing book

Back to Pascal, whom I think I really never left, after Yale, where I loved 2 faces: that of Andre Breton (tbecause of which  I went "into" surrealism), and Pascal's death mask -- like that of Artaud, said my friend Lee Hallman..

off to meet a bunch of Scottish-British friends from , it would seem, always. Always is nice.