Just back from a
villa holiday at Aniane, half an hour west of Montpellier. That’s in France. Often the temperature
reached 38.5 deg C and, since the telly received UK programmes, we congratulated
ourselves on a fortnight away from our desolate homeland.
When we weren’t
engaging in Schadenfreude we behaved like Jane Austen characters. Mrs LdP
painted:
LdP himself wrote
a 4000-word short story with a horticultural theme:
We linked up our
MP3 player to the hi-fi and listened to Elly Ameling singing Exsultate Jubilate
among other things:
Grandchild Zach,
now a veritable merman, monopolised the pool:
The villa cost an
arm and leg but was fitted with every luxury (eg, two fridges and a separate
freezer). Thus we never drank tepid rosé:
Occasionally we
got into the car (which felt like the corrugated iron shed in which they
incarcerated Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai) and took shortish drives
that sought to be improving. This village, alas, lacked a suitable restaurant
and so we didn’t stay:
Bouzigues, on the
Mediterranean coast, was more promising which was just as well since Zach
claimed to have lost the will to live (or walk) as a result of extreme hunger:
LdP kicked off
lunch with six oysters eaten looking out over the oyster beds where they’d
lately resided:
Then ordered a
daurade (sea bream) which was so fresh it could reasonably be described as
presque vivant. Granted this encomium the restaurateur merely shrugged his
shoulders.
We did nothing that could possibly be described
as worthwhile or that bettered our lot. In retrospect the days probably passed
in continuous hedonism except that nobody had the energy to use such words. We
returned yesterday feeling pleasingly guilty about what we’d done.