14th July

On the terrace, after breakfast

Sun warming my left side, skylark, coffee cooling,

buzz of insects, sparrows chirrup, a sow thistle flowering neatly in the wall.

I examine my legs, in detail, with acceptance.

A burst of scolding in Thai from next door,

in which I catch the word 'mama'; its object cries

in frustration, soon stops.

Sky hydrangea blue, paws plod on gravel.

Why do I think I should be doing something else,

or making more of this than this?

~~~

Abram Darby's looking very lovely.

~~~

They're making a film of 'The Vintner's Luck', which I'm looking forward to. It can't be as good as the book, which is a must if you like wine, history and angels, or all three, or even if you don't, and far better to my mind than anything I've read by Joanne Harris, whose work's far better known and more marketed, but it's by the director of 'Whale Rider', and shot by someone who did 'Lord of the Rings', and they've apparently roped off huge tracts of Burgundy to do it, so it should be fairly luscious.

~~~

We've been stopped in our tracks in a concreting project; we mixed and mixed on Saturday until we ran out of cement, then couldn't go and get any more today when we remembered it was Fête nationale. I suggested we go and storm the gates of Gamm Vert and liberate the sole bag of cement on the premises, but we decided against, and have spent the day so far reading, writing, painting(or watching DVDs about painting anyway), wandering round the garden with a camera, listening to Handel and generally slobbing about. I'm supposed to be making lemon cake to take to our friends' who have a nearly front row seat in their garden to watch the fireworks so we tend to invite ourselves there. The swallows who have decided to nest in our garage since Tom took the door off are perhaps happier. They'd built about three inches of nest, but our noisy concreting activities and coming and going seemed to have put them off, but they were back this morning. They don't have to worry about public holidays disrupting their supply of mud, they sow not neither do they reap...

"What's Africa like then?" "Dunno, never been."

Happy Bastille Day.