Mary Fleming's Blog

Friday, 30 August

A few minutes ago I woke up and didn’t know where I was. Or more precisely, I thought I was still in the Perche and stretched my arm right to check the time (thus hitting my husband) instead of left, the direction of my Paris night table and clock.

Five weeks of summer can make you lose your bearings, turn you into a hay head.

Fortunately looking back at the photos has set me straight, reminded me of the thread.

The Olympics were watched by this agoraphobe anyway from...

...just the right distance...

…but with much delight. There were sweeping views of the beautiful city and close-up shots of all those super-human athletes. I was happy to see my doom and gloom predictions proved wrong; the joy the Games inspired could even be felt over the tv waves. I laughed out loud when I read in Le Parisien: "Since the 26 July, a fascinating phenomenon has occurred in the streets of Paris. The smiles of the visitors have provoked...smiles in return." The article goes on to say how normally cantankerous Parisiens have suddenly become city-proud, not just smiling but also engaging in conversation, offering advice to enquiring tourists. I don't put much hope in it lasting beyond the Paralympics, which started on Wednesday, but hey, why be negative when the vibe is good.

The weather in the Perche was perfect, a word you don't hear me use often, particularly in a meteorological context. Tasha and I had one glorious morning walk after another, the cool, windless air aglow in sublime light.

Heaven beams down

Even when the sun wasn't shining...

Mood-provoking

And at just the right moment, rain would roll in for an afternoon.

"Water us!"

My novel that came out on July 16th made its appearance in the Perche for a combination book-summer party that we hosted for friends. (Besides being available at The Red Wheelbarrow in Paris*, there are also copies for sale at Du côté de Bellême). Reactions by readers so far have been encouraging.

Civilisation Française, fore and aft

Family and friends came to stay...

"Can't you see that this is a private conversation?"

Otherwise the garden was the main focus of attention this summer.

Tiptoeing through the tomatoes

My newly-built, belatedly-planted veg patch (more on that another day) has not been as bountiful as it looks, but the nano harvest is nevertheless gratifying.

Basket case

What was planted in the main garden almost two years ago has settled in, begun to feel organic.

Ta-da!

But la rentrée is now upon us. The days are noticeably shorter, and there's often a sharp hint of autumn in the air.

Light in August

The bigger picture in France creeps back into view as the summer truce in the political wars that followed snap legislative elections in July comes to an end. President Emmanuel Macron is looking for a new prime minister like a spoiled, finicky child poking at his vegetables. My prediction is his oversized ego will lead him to choose the smallest potato on the plate, but let's hope I'm proved wrong on that front too.

It's now Saturday morning (and I did not hit my husband upon waking!). Running in the Tuileries, I caught my first glimpse en vrai of the Olympic flame, glowing like a dream of summer on the grey horizon.

Through the trees

Wishing you all a luminous rentrée.

*I will be doing a reading/signing at The Red Wheelbarrow on Thursday 26 September, 7pm (not the 19th as previously announced). Venez nombreux, Parisiennes et Parisiens !!!

Friday, 26 July

After much drum-rolling on social media, publication day finally came last week for my new novel Civilisation Française. Neil and Nancy J, Paris friends who now live in central London and have the perfect open-spaced apartment for a large party, offered to host the launch. Maybe they have the space because they are so good at entertaining, but whichever came first, the hosting skills or the perfect venue, they gracefully and effortlessly offered my book its first public airing (thank you again).

It was especially appreciated given how nervous I was about receiving guests, starting with Will people show up, via Will they have a good time, to Will they buy a book?

My computer Oxford Dictionary of English defines critical mass of the non-nuclear sort as “the minimum size or number of resources required to start or maintain a venture”. As such, my first event gave hopeful signs. About 25 people attended (thank you, those of you who are reading this!). I introduced the novel and read a short passage. Those who bought books that I signed promised to pass on the good word to reading groups and friends. The atmosphere was positive.

Beginning of a chain reaction?

Unlike the ambiance in the French capital in the days preceding the opening of the Olympic Games. The city's heart was so devoid of Parisiens, not to mention a sudden drop in the tourist population, there was nowhere near the minimum number of bodies needed to maintain the urban venture that is Paris. It was downright eerie.

No place for a book launching

The spookiness was heightened by the growing carceral nature of the streets near the Seine. Barriers were put up everywhere (185kms/115 miles in one night last week), and police officers replaced la bourgeoisie as the largest riparian group.

Life as a blue dot in a red sea

It was a relief to get out to the Perche. The harvest was in full swing, with a multitude of hay bales to keep one company.

Life as a black dog in a tawny sea

But today I return to Paris. My stepson Alex flies back to California tomorrow morning, and a family from Berlin who is using our apartment during the Olympics arrives by train in the evening.

Or so I hope. It's now Saturday morning. Our train was 90 minutes late and the Gare Montparnasse in Paris full of people whose locomotives weren't leaving at all, due to coordinated arson attacks on French rail lines Thursday night.

A wicked web

Theories on the responsible party abound. It was the ultra-right. No, the methods are more indicative of the ultra-left, maybe le black bloc. But why would they want to prevent workers going on holiday? The perpetrators must have been proxies for a foreign agent.

The identity of the criminals remains a mystery, but the attacks were an inauspicious prologue to the opening ceremony of the Games, where it poured throughout the kitschy extravaganza that I watched in dry comfort on TV.

Was this another one of Macron's good ideas?

But a curious critical human mass has returned to the streets and one that is considerably less grumpy than the usual Paris variety. It's heartening to see people from all over our divided world rubbing wet shoulders and clapping together. I'm pleased to have had a tiny taste of the city during the Games and hope the critics will be massively positive about the 2024 Paris Olympics. And of course about my 2024 book too.

I'll be enjoying some quiet time in the peace of the Perche next month and will be back to you in September.

You can visit my website here and follow me on Instagram here

Friday, 12 July

It’s become an obstacle course, my morning walk. All-natural impediments but the path is overrun with competing plant life.

Daucus carota that I wrote about recently still meanders across my way. Though the flower of the wild carrot has mostly turned to seed, she is no less striking in her dotage.

How to age gracefully

And a new cast of characters is grabbing the limelight.

Sowing party

Lithesome grasses and wild oats now bow over the path. Nettles, with their deceptively frothy flowers, lean in, causing me at times to raise my hands away from their sting as if a gun were at my back.

Don't trust me

Brambles come at me from every angle, causing the occasional stumble or – worse – they grab me by the hair and yank me backwards. Still, I've been lucky. Wet mornings mean Wellington boots safeguard me to the knees and cool temperatures have my arms covered. As I discovered yesterday afternoon, when I went for a run more lightly clad and came home with gouged ankles and tingling forearms.

Don't touch me

Birds now share the airwaves with bees who buzz around the blackberry flowers at face level, while underfoot the thick, tall grass, still being watered regularly by rain, conceals ruts and bumps left from the passage of tractors, quads (scourge of the countryside) and horse hoofs. It would be easy to sprain an ankle.

Sometimes I have to remind myself to look up and take in the bigger picture.

On the home stretch, in our very own field, orchard and garden, a host of this distinctive plant has come into flower:

Enemy in disguise

Should you be thinking the russet flora might pleasingly offset the surrounding green in your life, think again. Rumex obtusifolius , otherwise known as dock weed, is an obstinate pest (rumex was the name that the Roman naturalist Pliny gave to sorrel and obtusifolius means obtuse-leaves, for their shape rather than their level of intelligence). Though the leaves are sorrel-like and edible, this invasive interloper has a taproot that descends all the way to Middle Earth. Each plant produces a gazillion seeds that can survive in the soil for up to 50 years. Before you know it, you've gone from nuclear family to metropolis.

Dock City

They are a plague to organic farmers, who often comb the fields with a special tool to uproot them.

You missed me!

Alerted to this mischief-maker by our green guru Claire, we have been practising dock control for the last few months. Since we don't have the tool and there were too many to uproot anyway, we cut them at the base, thereby weakening next year's growth and limiting seed redistribution.

Dock appointment

We certainly haven't got them all, but our population control measures have yielded some results...

Out, out red spots

...and yesterday garden maestro Florie, afraid the cut dock would start to seed our driveway, took the definitive step...

Burn baby-dock burn

Last Sunday was the second round of the French legislative elections. The barrage républicain, whereby centrist and left-wing candidates in three-way races joined forces against the extreme right-wing Rassemblement National, was effective. Much to the relief of many of us, the RN did not win the majority that had been predicted.

Now the real chaos begins. Everyone is saying they've won and in a sense everyone has. The left got the biggest bloc in the National Assembly, but the right got a higher percentage of the vote. The RN is still the most solid party on the political landscape. Who should be anointed to form a government?

Watching politicians jockey for position reminds me of the plants crowding my morning walk. The path ahead looks just as prickly; the Rumex obtusifolius has only been partially and temporarily tamed.

Brambles arise

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Friday, 28 June

After travels to Northern Ireland, return to a stifling city. Not the 50°C/122°F in India end of May or in Mecca last week that killed 1300 pilgrims, but too hot for comfort in the stone oven that Paris becomes in the summer heat.

It was a good getaway, Bangor, NI. There were serendipitous moments...

Bubbles in blue

...and vistas of coastal living on this northern isle.

Seagull on a Saturday night

The change of scenery energised me, and I was hoping to make the most of my few days in Paris when I got back. I thought of heading to the new Aquatic Centre, the only new significant sports structure that has been built for the Summer Olympics which start in a month's time. The building sounds like a model of common sense and good green practice, a place that will be an important hub to a disadvantaged community after the Games. Not surprisingly the architects are women. After fretting about its readiness last year, I also considered revisiting the Olympic Village in St Ouen.

In the end I did nothing but make my way to the Monoprix in Neuilly-sur-Seine, meeting point to retrieve the dog. Usually Madame P brings Tasha to our door, but who wants to navigate a car through the Paris streets in these pre-Olympic times? With more public spaces and métro stations closing every day, I had to plan my route amid the barriers to the nearest convenient train to Neuilly.

Threading the no-entry needle

My inertia was partly due to the heat, partly to a bad sore throat caught in Northern Ireland, but it was also because going anywhere, especially on the other side of the river as I did to pick up Tasha, seems such an effort.

Olympic hurdles. What's a dog to do?

The dog does have to be walked, however, so I still venture to the Right Bank in the morning, weave my way through the runners who can no longer huff and puff along the quayside of the Left Bank. Given the reduced space, my Tuileries dog walking group has splintered, making the experience feel even stranger. Occasionally someone I know will emerge from behind a bush on the lawns, but people have mostly found new routes.

You can't get there from here

Of course one cannot host 15 million people and the Olympic Games without disrupting the life of the residents. And an effort is clearly being made to put up the barriers as late as possible. But that doesn't make the whole business any less destabilising and stifling.

"I can't breathe," said the obelisk

Where I live in the 7th arrondissement it has been eerily quiet. As you can see from the above photo, the place de la Concorde is otherwise occupied and is no longer feeding traffic over the bridge and into the boulevard St Germain. Human circulation has subsided too. With the dissolution of the National Assembly following President Macron's arrogant, foolish, misguided, etc call for snap legislative elections (first of two rounds this Sunday) that is proving to be a gift to extremist parties, the parliamentarians and their staff have gone home, meaning there are 500 fewer souls rushing to meetings, buying lunch or having a drink at the cafés in the evenings.

Indeed, it has often seemed during my limited wanderings this last week that at least 90% of Parisians have already left the city. The real-life urban buzz is on mute. One rare bird, spotted striding through the tourists and the barriers under the eyes of Charles de Gaulle...

What must he be thinking?

...on my way home with Tasha, fumed: "Quel bordel." (Literally what a bordello, ie mess). "What a time to be spending 3 billion euros. C'est n'importe quoi."

And there is something senseless, out of whack about these Games, given what's happening in France politically, not to mention in the wider world. Maybe inertia is the natural reaction when you see a train wreck (the elections) and a deluge (the 15 millions Game attendants) coming straight at you at the same time. You freeze, like a rabbit in the headlights.

The 10%

But lucky me. Yesterday I escaped to the broader horizons of the Perche. At Deux Champs, the tawny round hay bales were still scattered over the fields and are now set off dramatically against the new, bright green crop of clover and alfalfa that has already started growing. The life cycle begins again, a reminder that this too shall pass.

Regeneration

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Friday, 14 June

The disadvantage of a life split between two places is that you are not in sync with the alterations that inevitably occur over time. The advantage, beyond the good fortune of having two chez soi, is that you notice the differences. We had only been gone a week when we drove from Paris to the Perche last Saturday, but in the meantime the trees had turned a mature green. The wheat had tanned, and the air had taken on a sun-soaked smell. Thanks to eight days of good weather, the season had slipped from spring to summer during our short absence.

Sunday afternoon when I looked from my office window (you can't hear anything outside, even tractors, through the thick walls of our house), I saw Patrice and his son Vincent, our friends and farmers, baling the hay that they’d cut while we were away. Rain was expected the next day, and the mown fodder would rot if not rolled into tight balls beforehand.

Even participating vicariously in the harvest kindles excitement. A growth cycle is coming to fruition. Food for the winter will be gathered and stored, in this case only indirectly for us: the hay will feed the cows who will produce the milk that will make the organic cheese that I buy every Thursday at the Bellême market. There's the bustle of activity itself. One tractor pulls a beautiful machine that lines up the grass – I could watch its spiky whorls bounce along the field all day...

Circular pleasure

...and another follows to scoop up the lines and poop them out in round bales...

Plop goes another one

The farmers work fast and in harmony. Vincent’s 18-month old son sits on his lap in the tractor, as he would have sat on Patrice’s.

Virtuous generational circles

Before long the fields were strewn with the round bales, so much more elegant and spiritual than their rectangular cousins.

While the harvest continued, we watched the results of the European Parliament elections on the 8 o'clock news. The extreme-right wing Rassemblement National (RN, formerly the Front National) had left rivals in the dust with 33% of the vote, just as the polls had been consistently predicting. Oddly, the talking heads seemed astonished by the outcome. Perhaps they had trouble shifting from the abstract to the concrete. It's only when concept becomes reality that a truth really hits home. Maybe they hadn't fully believed in a breach between those who live in Paris and those who don't, the 'elites' versus the 'people'.

Who'd you vote for?

As if that weren’t enough emotion for one evening, President Macron then came on TV and announced snap elections at the end of this month, only three weeks away.

Dissolution of parliament

At first glance, the decision could appear courageous and some called it so: a responsible act in the face of a clear change in the political winds.

Very quickly, however, the move looked like pure folly. Since the narcissistic Mr Macron has done everything he can not to build up his centrist party, it's a field day for the extremes - both left and right - but particularly the RN, which is the only relatively cohesive political bloc in the country right now. Furthermore, France, or Paris anyway, is having enough trouble preparing for the Olympic games that will start a mere 19 days after the second round. With the political chaos that is likely to follow the vote, how will the host country look to its 15 million visitors? As for the French themselves, minds will be drifting to the upcoming month at the beach. Couldn't the impulsive President have consulted a few more people? At least have waited until September before creating havoc?

Where will you spend the holidays?

As if the skies were listening, the weather turned completely fickle and most un-summery. Whilst the stock market tanked and politicians made a spectacle of themselves with infighting and insults, it was rainy one minute, sunny the next. A couple of evenings, we almost made a fire. As I finish this essay, bundled up on Saturday morning, I can see the trees flailing about in the strong, cold wind outside my window.

It's enough to make me feel, at moments, physically ill. Maybe I have an overly sensitive stomach, but the queasiness is rooted in the fact that it's not just France but the whole world who is angry and radicalising.

So I look to those tightly bound circles of hay - symbols of bounty and balance - and feel a crumb of comfort in these dividing times.

Deux Champs Gothic

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Friday, 31 May

Say it out loud: press the L hard against your front teeth, release your tongue for the U, push your lips forward, then let them linger on the Sssshhhhh, and you’ve got it, lush, the word that plays over and over again in my ears during my morning dog walks these days.

On the rain falls, and nature is unbound.

On it goes

In the previous five years of our Perche life, plant growth has been stunted by a drought or two between January and June, but this late spring, it’s a jungle out there. Thick, wet grass has grown up well above the protective rubber of my Wellington boots. Bowered hedgerows crowd together, enveloping me in varied shades of green. The verges, bulging with foliage, narrow my passage. I don't know if it's physiological, psychological or some combination of the two, but being surrounded by all that chlorophyll is a balm to body and soul.

Threading the needle

One plant in particular, clearly thriving in this weather, has grabbed the attention of my eye and camera morning after morning: Daucus carota, the wild carrot. Though these common field flowers presage summer every year, I've never seen them in such voluptuous abundance. Their sturdy, hairy stalks topped with delicate white flowers have shot up everywhere, often towering above my head on a raised bank...

Celestial

... or sneaking horizontally across my path...

Who's getting in whose way?

The force of their presence prodded me to look them up. It turns out the wild carrot has more to it than its humble status might imply. The vocabulary to describe it - the pinnate pattern of its leaves, the inflorescence of its umbels - is rich.

Inner light

It is an intrepid traveller. Native to Europe and southwestern Asia (perhaps originating in Persia), Daucus carota spread to North America and Australia with the colonisers. In the New World, it became known as Queen Anne's lace after the early 18th century Queen of Great Britain and the flower's resemblance to that delicate cloth. Legend had it that the queen pricked her finger while sewing it, thus explaining the rosy hue of young flowers and the red dot that sometimes remains in the middle.

Royal blood

All but the stalk of the wild carrot is edible. You can cover the flowers in batter and deep-fry them, eat the seeds, use the leaves for pesto. As I know from experience, the root, the carrot part, won't kill you, but it's too tough and reedy to chew much less to swallow. The carrots we do eat are a subspecies of the Daucus carota that was first cultivated in Afghanistan. Though they come in many colours, it is said that the orange variety prevailed when the Dutch grew them on a large scale in a salute to the royal family belonging to the House of Orange - cute or creepy, take your pick. In any case, it was a mistake. The purple ones are more beautiful and have an intenser taste.

The harmless wild carrot can easily be confused with the deadly poisonous hemlock, famously (but perhaps apocryphally) administered to Socrates after he was found guilty of religious impiety and subverting children.

Church and state (of nature)

It must be noted that not all plant-life in the Perche is happy with the current sodden state of affairs. Parts of our Mediterranean garden, for example, planted as such to survive the relentless heat and sun of recent summers, is drowning in Deux Champs' dense clay soil that adamantly refuses to drain.

Patchy growth

In the fields, grassy blades of wheat and barley may be fighting for space, thus cramping the style of The Indefatigable One...

Not ideal hunting conditions

...but their grains will not ripen without a bit more help from the sun.

For the moment, however, I'm keeping my eye on the wild carrots. Their solid legs and fine faces are a reminder of nature's resilience and grace. They are well worth looking up to.

I am the Queen

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Friday, 17 May

Either my ears have been elsewhere the last five years, or something wondrous has happened to our bird community in the Perche.

In the past I have heard light singing early spring on the morning walk with Tasha. I have sat in the garden on a warm evening and listened to birds lazily chirping themselves to sleep.

But for the last couple months, the cheerful chorus has been nothing short of symphonic pretty much pre-dawn to dusk.

Dove love

And I’m not talking about the visible bird life, though it too has also been particularly active this year (and still too small to photograph with my limited equipment, so I picture bird habitats for you here). The gentle wood pigeons and doves who flap in and out of the giant cypress trees, the pair of buzzards who live in the wood and have loud private conversations for all the world to overhear. The pheasants who strut and squawk fatuously at the edge of the garden. The pair of kestrels who moved into a nook at the side of the house and started a family when the worst of the renovation noise was over. Or the few swallows that still have nests in the former stable (most of them having been evicted from their barn home when we expanded our living space).

This year a pair of ducks has settled next to the pond on the lane. They occasionally alight in the garden, at their peril.

Scram, feathered ones, this is my turf

Two tiny tits have made their nest behind some rocks in a hole in the wall of the house where a garden tap used to be.

A pair of tits

But it’s the chorus of birds I can’t see in the treetops that has particularly caught my attention recently, the ones that are singing their hearts out for much of the day and evening.

Their joyous recital finally pushed me to download the app our friend Antony W told us about over two years ago, Merlin Cornell Lab. The free app registers which bird is singing what. When you begin a recording, one name pops up, then another and another. Those on the list that are singing the loudest pulse yellow. It’s a like an orchestra, now the string section, now the winds.

Converts are always the worst, and these days I'm hardly out the door for the morning walk when out comes my phone and on goes the app. Breathlessly I await as blackbird, blackcap, chaffinch, robin, chiffchaff, even a green woodpecker, appear and pulse on the screen.

Hidden treasure

In the chemin creux, add wren, skylark, golden oriole and nightingale to the list. Then I traverse the barren stretch where the farmer savagely razed the hedgerow and wantonly destroyed bird homes. It still pains me at every single passage, but let’s not linger in that bad place today. Let’s move along, to the path between the meadow and the apple orchard, with the common whitethroat, song thrush, dunnock, linnet, long-tailed tit and oystercatcher.

Concert hall

And on to the wood above our house, where a short-toed treecreeper is to be detected.

Could it be?

So have my ears been elsewhere or has something changed?

When in doubt, go to green-guru Claire for the answer. Generally in the winter months, she told me, freezing temperatures severely reduce the birds’ food supply. By March, it’s slim pickings, and many birds die. The last few years winter droughts haven’t helped. But this year, all but gel-free temperatures and buckets of rain meant the bug banquet never stopped serving. And lots of food means lots more birds and lots more joyous song to warm the human heart (finally, an uplifting by-product of climate change).

Natural wisdom

According to the Parc Naturel Régional du Perche, there are 123 bird species in our region (plus seven migrators), so clearly the work on my app has just begun. I also learned that the bird populations here in the last decade have been helped by the rehabilitation of ponds and wetlands, making me even happier about the one we have restored and the three new ones we have created.

Here's to you, dear birds. You make my day.

Pond reflections

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Friday, 3 May

Maybe because of its deep historical roots and multiple associations, May Day in France is a national holiday celebrated in earnest. Spring, the original reason the Romans then the early Christians observed it, is really here, which makes people happy, encourages them to offer sweet lily-of-the-valley to a friend as a token of good luck, as they have been doing since the 16th century. Since the 19th, it has also been the moment to honour workers, who take part in parades or, more accurately these days, demonstrations.

Spring has sprung

On the eve of this May Day, another association came to mind as I was walking Tasha to the vet. With less than three months to go until the Olympic Games open in Paris, the city does not seem remotely ready to receive the 15 million people who are expected to descend upon her streets. On the contrary and as I mentioned more than once last year, I'm not sure I've ever seen her looking more dishevelled. There are still road works or building renovations or both almost everywhere you look, and it occurred to me that instead of celebrating workers' rights and exchanging flowers, we might consider shouting the international signal of distress. Mayday! Mayday!

"Shouldn't we be worried about this?" asked a concerned citizen.

Fun fact: the expression 'mayday' was cooked up in the 1920s by Frederick Stanley Mockford. As the radio officer at the Croydon Airport in England, he was tasked with finding an oral equivalent to the sibilant and hard to hear Morse Code SOS signal. Since much of the Croydon air traffic at the time was with the Paris airport Le Bourget, he came up with 'mayday', aurally easy to distinguish in English but also in French, as it is a perfect homonym for m'aider (to help me)...and in this case help...

Street in distress

...if not a full-blown miracle, is wanted.

I was taking Tasha to the vet for a crusty thing on the inside of her ear that olive oil was not curing. It's usually a lovely walk across the Seine to the right bank, where we stroll along either the quayside or the edge of the place de la Concorde, through the Jardins des Champs-Elysées and a stretch of streets in the 8th arrondissement to the rue Monceau.

But not this time.

Along with road works and building renovations, preparations for the games are further blighting the urban landscape. They are also significantly limiting our freedom of movement. Getting to vet this last day of April, I felt like a mouse in a maze, with many other mice, since the tourists are back in force. The quayside, both river and road level, was closed. We could not walk along the edge of the place de la Concorde because the stands are going up for BMX freestyle, break dancing, skateboarding and 3X3 basketball (might be quicker to list what is not now considered an Olympic sport).

"Let me out of here!" cried the horse.

Most of the Jardins des Champs-Elysées are off limits. There are barricades absolutely everywhere.

You can't get there from here

Having successfully navigated the labyrinth, I collapsed in the chair of the waiting room at the vet, thinking I'd probably endured this trial for nothing, since the crusty ear suddenly seemed better. But the vet got very serious while examining the dog, listening long and hard to her heart, feeling for ganglions in her lymph nodes. He asked in that measured tone doctors have which makes you really nervous if I'd been to the south of France. Yes, I answered, last November we were in Arles...

Turns out there's now leishmaniose (leishmaniasis) to add to the list of mosquito-borne tropical diseases (along with dengue and West Nile fever for humans and heart worm for dogs) that have landed in climately-changed metropolitan France. He'd seen three dogs recently where the affliction had manifested itself with a crusty ear. The prognosis is dire. Furthermore, it's a zoonosis, ie transmissible to humans.

He prescribed some cortisone cream and organic coconut oil ("without any of those harmful chemicals") and reassuringly said she was unlikely to have caught the disease in cold November, that Tasha's crusty ear didn't quite look like the others, but I made my way home through the maze and the barricades and the throngs of tourists, trying but failing to imagine 14 million more of them, feeling spooked. With the mess of the broader world never far from my conscience, the city felt dystopian.

Running away from the light at the end of the tunnel

Of course, as of mid-June, moving around the middle of Paris will become close to impossible. Metro stations and many bridges will be closed. During the Games, you will need to show a QR code to get near the Seine, where I live.

But hey, it's May. Besides Wednesday's holiday, we have two more, bizarrely back to back, next week: the 8th (end of World War II in Europe) and the 9th (Ascension). Just in case we still feel short-changed, there's Pentecost Monday on the 20th. And the French are too fashion-conscious to let Paris be shown in such a scruffy light - unless the workers strike, which they are threatening to do.

Best of all, however, is that Tasha has dodged the mosquito's bullet; her ear has healed. And we will have the good fortune to be far away from the crazy, crowded city this summer.

Safely away

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Friday, 19 April

Five years and one week ago today, we took possession of a house and garden and the surrounding fields in the Perche.

After a summer-long search for a place in the country within a two-three hour radius from Paris that needed no renovation work, we circled back here, one of the first houses we'd visited and had initially rejected because justement it needed work. But so did every other house we'd seen since. And the Perche, protected from development by its Regional Natural Park status, with its rolling hills, hedgerows, forests and ponds, was my idea of heaven. Ditto the prospect of a house at the end of a lane with no visible neighbours but a historic town and even a golf course for David within a 10-minute drive.

A jewel in the Perche

Anniversaries are a moment to take stock, and since we signed for the property on April 12th, which is also my birthday, it seems doubly appropriate to consider how the last five years measure up.

Between Covid and our top-to-bottom renovation of both house and garden, this hasn't been just any five years. Our new-old house provided an ideal shelter from pandemic germs and lockdown rules - we could walk for hours and never run into a police officer or anyone else for that matter. And the renovation consumed us to distraction. Time got lost in a yesterday-forever cloud.

Social distancing

But beyond those singular circumstances, the best description of our life in the Perche these last five years is generosity.

First and foremost and especially at this time of year, the nature here is munificent.

Under the spreading oak tree

As are its skies...

Boom

And the light...

Rain and shine at one time

And the stone...

Close up

But all of this was apparent to the naked eye and added up to why we bought this property in the first place, even if at first glance we only sensed the aesthetic richness. What we didn't see or expect was the human generosity of the place. Starting with the artisans who carried out the renovation work. Their skills were a wonder to behold, but they also often went beyond the call of duty, helping us out of many a mini-emergency, including a fire breaking out in the field, when they literally used the shirts off their back to put it out.

(Saint) Christophe

Then green-guru Claire entered our life. She not only took the garden in hand...

... she also introduced us to a seemingly endless number of people, including Estéban, who created three ponds and plaited some hedges (plessage)...

Woven wonder

...Samuel and his son, who do the heavy gardening, and finally the entire Weber family, from Patrice who, with the help of his sons, turned our fields organic...

...to daughter Florie who is our talented gardener and tree trimmer. Patrice and his wife Dominique have become friends, as of course has Claire herself, along with others in her large circle. We've also had extraordinary luck with friends of friends (a well-meaning introduction that often goes nowhere).

Then there are those invisible neighbours, whom I sheepishly approached one by one that first summer when The Indefatigable One (aka la Princesse, aka Tasha) was regularly scampering across their land in brazen disregard of property limits.

My kingdom

I expected if not harsh words at least a certain froideur from those that our dog had trespassed against, but instead we got invitations for drinks or dinner.

Pascale is my friend

The fifth anniversary is traditionally celebrated with wood, an apt material in this case, given all the trees in our life at Deux Champs. It is meant to symbolise the strength and sturdiness of a relationship that is maturing. It also implies roots taking hold. I'm looking forward to the next five years.

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Friday, 5 April

A few weeks ago I visited the place des Vosges. I wanted to see the recently renovated Victor Hugo Museum and the exhibition of his grandson Georges Hugo’s art. But I also like to check in occasionally on this 17th century square, the oldest in Paris, because Civilisation Française, my novel that will be published this summer, is set there.

The museum is housed in an apartment where the great French writer lived from 1832 and 1848. Even before the facelift, its L shape and the view…

Inside out

…helped me imagine the perspective of my characters. The apartment looked unchanged to me, but the café on the ground floor-courtyard and the exhibition space upstairs are new. Georges Hugo had a fluid touch…

Cruising, 1894 style

…but it must not have been easy being the grandson of such a towering figure in French life.

In the grips of Grandpa

Poor Georges burned through his inheritance and whatever he earned from his art and died penniless at 57.

Like the Hugo family, the place des Vosges has been through boom and bust times. The area started as a swamp (thus the quartier's name, le Marais). In the 12th century, religious orders settled the land; in the 17th, the nobility nosed them out to be near the king, who was constructing the distinctive stone and brick, arcaded buildings of the place Royale, as the place des Vosges was called pre-Revolution. Begun in 1605 by Henri IV, it was finished by his son Louis XIII in 1612, two years after the father's assassination.

Getting too crowded here (1709)

In the 18th century a bored nobility, looking for new sodden pastures to seize, decamped to another former swamp, thus displacing more nuns and monks, in what is now the 7th arrondissement (and that I have also written about). In 1792, the place Royale was renamed Vosges, after the eastern Department of France that was the first to pay its taxes and to send soldiers to defend the new Revolutionary state.

Though illustrious people like Hugo continued to reside on the square through the first half of the 19th century, the Marais then came to be known as the Jewish ghetto. It was a focal point for the notorious Rafle of July 1942, when Jews in the German-occupied city were rounded up by the French police and sent to concentration camps, most never to return. Post-War, the quartier was so old and decrepit there were plans to raze it completely. It was saved at the last minute by the 1962 André Malraux Law, which preserved this area and others of historical significance. Today the Marais is ultra-chic again, though the place des Vosges still bears traces of its long interlude of neglect.

Age spots

In fact, until recently one building, the Hôtel des Coulanges, birthplace of the femme de lettres Madame de Sévigny, had been standing empty for over 50 years, except for short periods when its many square metres (the exact number is contested - but at least 1500, or 16,145 square feet) attracted squatters. The last occupation, and the one that caught my attention, was by the Jeudi Noir group in 2009-10.

We're not coming out

The story of a large, old house inhabited by ghosts piqued my interest, began to grow and metamorphose in my head. I plopped three women into the otherwise empty rooms of my imaginary rendering and moved the action back in time, to the early 1980s, the years I was first in Paris and France was in transition. The Second World War still lingered in the air, tugged at people's consciences. Many lives, such as that of my elderly American expat owner of the house, Amenia Quinon, had been marked if not ruined by it. Ditto for her Jewish housekeeper Germaine. But that era was also the beginning of gentrification, a time of moving beyond the War. Enter our young heroine Lily Owens, hired to live upstairs and provide extra help for Madame Quinon who is losing her sight. Enrolled in the Civilisation Française course at the Sorbonne, Lily sees Paris as the future, a possible path to putting a burdensome childhood behind her.

Without giving away too much of the plot, suffice it to say that the three co-exist, until squatters do come and disrupt their living space, both physically and mentally. Ultimately, the intrusion proves salutary, a catalyst that opens psychological doors and brings the women closer together.

In 2016, the Hôtel des Coulanges was bought by Xavier Niel, one of the richest men in France. He is married to Delphine Arnault, daughter of Bernard Arnault, currently the richest man tout court. The reported price tag for the property was €33 million ($39 million).

Renovation work began a while ago. When I visited the other day, the building was covered in scaffolding that was wrapped in a painted reproduction of the façade and this disquieting photo of a giant, wrinkled brat. Just as bizarrely, the ad is for SFR, a rival telecom company to Monsieur Niel's Free.

The future?

I'm not sure where this particular boom time is taking us, but my thanks to the old hôtel and the place des Vosges for being such a rich source of novel ideas.

Read all about it, July 16th

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