This week I want to start with gardens and allotments. Some of our good friends and family in England have or had allotments, and many more are keen gardeners. Our own garden in France is large and surrounded by trees and hedges, but it is an open green space (brown during hot summers), not a place where we grow things. Some fruit works well (citrus, kakis or persimmons) while other trees - cherry and apricot - had to be cut down because they were diseased. We do at least have some herbs, rosemary and bay (the latter a magnificent hedge), and we even kept some mint alive this summer by parking it under the lemon tree which we often remember to water, but for the most part we rely on and help support the wonderful local growers who supply our greengrocer. He knows personally where a lot of his produce grows and when it was picked.
Our friend Luc (pictured here with Mary and the dogs) on the other hand has a garden on old family land near the canal at Aigues Mortes, a place that became accessible when our lockdown radius was extended from 1 to 20 km. We went to see him on Monday (as if by chance, since our legitimate purpose had to be to walk the dogs), and admired his marvellous vegetable beds on the sandy soil with a good water supply laid on. Not a bad place to go on a bright December morning, meeting a good friend whose company at wine tastings and elsewhere we've missed!
As I write, two women who shared (as I expect they would agree) certain attributes (!) are in our thoughts. One, Dame Barbara Windsor has just died at the age of 83, a funny lady always onn a cinema or tv screen near me when I was young. The other, Dolly Parton, is almost exactly my age and (we can hope) seemingly everlasting, and has hit the headlines for a million dollar donation to vaccine research. She is in my mind an extraordinary musician. Washington Post article here.
Otherwise it has been a serious and sober time. Brexit seems again to be heading for the buffers, a tragedy with no redeeming features unless you like queues of lorries in Kent. The Covid pandemic rumbles on, giving regular kicks in the teeth to optimistic politicians everywhere who hope hope is round the corner. The terrible triangle of a resistant infection, awful economic consequences of repeated lockdowns and the obstinate mild stupidity of people who prefer not to be tied down make for a long slow period of recovery, despite excellent news on vaccines. But solutions take time, and neither politicians nor Joe Public are really prepared to wait long enough, so the virus will have more chance to spread. Here is a useful link to a set of charts which is published through a European site for expats. This is complex stuff.
So the upshot for us is a very quiet Christmas and new year. We are safer than most because we don't have to go out a lot, and we see few people except occasional and welcome contacts with friends like Luc, our Aigues Mortes gardener, or Christiane (one of our longest-standing choral friends) who came to pick most of our persimmons/kakis last week - we don't eat them, but several friends love them and so do the birds.
In my quiet moments I muse about transport - cars are the safest bubbles just now but not only do fossil fuels have obvious faults, but the lithium needed to make the batteries for the electric vehicles supposed to replace them is itself itself in short supply and causes immense damage as it is mined. Air travel is both very uncertain and obviously environmentally damaging, but how shall we see family and friends in other countries? and the public transport always seen as responsible is built on economic models involving lots of people crammed together, so risky in spreading disease at busy times and hopelessly uneconomic at quieter ones - trains and planes lose money hand over fist at present and normally reliable companies look fragile, bookings not at all certain to be honoured.
I still love my photography, and always find beautiful subjects whatever the weather, so I'll end with a couple more recent photos and get back to writing Christmas cards!
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