Holiday time

This year has seen one long string of cancellations.  Some of our family who had planned to come and see us have had to call it off - things are just too uncertain.  Best to think of all these setbacks as pleasures postponed - after all we had been able to travel around France even if our big foreign trip has been cancelled, or rather postponed till next year.  Some friends have made it back from the UK to their French home after several months, and we still hope others will get over to see us later this summer.  But there is still a rather frantic air to the 'normality' everyone wants back.  And with vaccines and cures still a way off, there is always the anxiety that the pandemic may return. We are getting used to stuffy masks in hot weather, even if some idiots say 'they don't believe in them' as if it were some kind of optional religion.

One effect of the lockdown seems to have been to intensify many experiences.  Some of this is the result of less pollution, or fewer crowds of people.  Maybe we have more time to stop and look.  There seem to be more flowers, brighter colours.  A lot is of course psychological, but I've never enjoyed my photography more, and also sharing others' - here for example is the website of Régis Domergue, a gifted photographer who lives near the Pic Saint Loup.  But listening, watching and reading seem to have taken on a greater intensity too.  We have started to watch the series of Talking Heads, monologues written by Alan Bennett.  The latest series of 12 contains several new scripts, and older ones re-produced with different actors.  He is a superb and often unexpected observer of human situations, and each of these is a masterpiece.  The newer plots are perhaps more shocking, the later ones more gentle, but the acting in these new versions is very good throughout.

We have had an oriental flavour in our films recently - a marvellous Japanese one found on the recommendation of someone we met during our summer music trip who, knowing Mary played the cello, suggested Deprtures directed by Yasuhhiro Mase.  It deals with the taboos over death and dying, and the protagonist is a young man who loses his work as an orchestral cellist and becomes an 'encoffiner'.  We have also started to explore a little more the films of Ang Lee.  We'd known his marvellous  Sense & Sensibility among others for a long time, then having recently rewatched Eat, drink, man, woman (must rewatch it - quite complex) we looked for the others in his 'Father knows best' trilogy and watched his first film Pushing hands this week.  The trilogy all star Sihung Lung as the father.  

And before those, a Danish slant on French cooking in Babette's feast, an old favourite of ours in which a celebrated woman, Parisian chef ends up in a tiny and very primitive almost puritan community in Jutland and, having won the lottery, cooks her hosts an extraordinary meal in which great food and wine lead to healing of long-simmering feuds and discords between neighbours.