Thursday
A 6am start. Elderly father, unaffected by a late night of fierce political debate and light hearted squabbling, got up to give us a lift 400 yards to the station. On arrival in London, we walked from Portland Place to St Pancras, trailing suitcases through a beautiful cloudless late summer morning. Surrounded by London accents, we enjoyed a brief re-engagement with our roots.
The Eurostar terminal was quiet. I bought breakfast at the coffee outlet, but I was a bit slow getting the right money together. A Polish waitress in her early thirties counted out the change for me. I hoped that she thought that I was foreign rather than cognitively impaired.
At security, a pleasant woman searched Terry’s suitcase. She found our lethally sharp knife, which we got free with saucisson sec in France about 20 years ago. She took it to the supervisor, brought it back and repacked Terry’s luggage with the knife in the same place as before. I did not like to ask what the purpose of this was, or how it had been decided that Terry was not going to stab the other passengers.
Four trains and six hours later we were in Provence, in a nice, unpretentious hotel over looking a canal basin. We had a good meal on the waterfront and fell asleep to the sound of ducks quacking (they had developed a nocturnal lifestyle because people fed them with bread from their dining tables).
Friday
We awoke to the sound of recycling men smashing bottles into the back of their van. This happens to us everywhere we go. It happens at home and it happened in Brighton in May.
This was technically speaking a Walking Holiday, but Friday was warm-up day. We ended up doing 10 miles in sandals around Isle De Sorgue, looking at the town’s main attractions, which are waterwheels, ‘antique’ shops and art dealers. The highlight was a place that sold parts of old rockets, including a whole one, 15 feet tall. I thought it would look great in our garden, but we could not work out how to get it home.
We had fretted about the weather as the holiday approached. It is pointless, but everybody does it. It is extremely difficult to influence the weather by worrying about it. There seemed to be no doubt that we faced strong winds, rain and orages (which are the same as thunderstorms, only more so). The timing, however, was uncertain. At the beginning we had unbroken sunshine.
I had Steak Tartare for dinner (‘delicious but potentially lethal’ has always been my father’s advice), then to bed. Constant quacking was beginning to grate. We were both awoken at 2 am by a noise that put me in mind of the Paul Simon lyric “The couple in the next room are bound to win a prize”. In the morning, we decided it was probably a loose shutter in the wind.