It has taken me until today to realize that J and I are on vacation; four consecutive weeks of holiday seems—in these early days—to be the height of luxury. I type this on a laptop computer in the shade of a Japanese maple tree, listening to the waves lap at the shore of an unnamed Gulf Island. We are in our third day here. It is mid-afternoon. A float plane has just passed by high overhead. Yesterday we picked sixteen liters of ripe blackberries; a form of work, but who can let such bounty rot on the vine? Today, J and my mother baked four blackberry and apple pies before noon, setting them out on wire racks to cool. During their construction I (wisely) avoided the kitchen and helped my father reassemble several mechanical devices which had, obedient to the demands of entropy, fallen apart.

These activities were evidently exhausting since sloth now generally abounds; books are being read (J halfway through Map of Another Town, MFK Fisher’s memoir of her time in Aix en Provence; me in the early stages of Waugh’s The End of the Battle, the final volume in his Sword of Honour trilogy); there has been some discursory discussion of the larger issues:

• to swim or not to swim? (correct answer: to swim)

• to lunch or not to lunch? (correct answer: to lunch)

• ice- or whipped cream with that plum and blackberry cobbler? (correct answer: ice-cream)

• just where did the phrase “kitty corner” originate? (correct answer: here; the researching of which led to me to catawumpus, a lovely word which I hereby vow to insert into my sentences whenever possible…)

The best part is that this is just the beginning; in five days J and I fly to Paris where a rental car awaits. Four days have been booked in a rental home in a village north-east of Aix en Provence (hence the MFK Fisher). We have a guidebook, some maps, and rough ideas of places we’d like to see; except for a few days in Paris at the end, the rest of our time is uncommitted.

At the moment I’m trying to assemble a small stack of suitable books to take and read in cafés; weight and size are factors, but the candidate books must also go well with pastis. I’ve got a selection of the old orange-spined Penguins which will likely make the cut: Nancy Mitford’s pair (The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate); Belloc’s Selected Essays; a P. G. Wodehouse; Waugh’s Black Mischief. I’m not sure that these will be enough to last me but they’re a start, and there are still a few more days to scan the shelves for supplements; all suggestions and recommendations are welcome.