April and other amusements

Yes, wild horses have been keeping us away! The crazy season is upon us and April went by in a blur of visitors, travelling, ripening fruit trees, seedings, and deadlines. Somehow in the midst of all these preoccupations, we are working, and April was a Brick month and one of various deadlines for Anne as well. But that’s not what April was about. As March rains gave way to many mixed weathers (some of it desireable!) we prepared ourselves for a veritable embarassment of riches in the form of visitors. As I write, we are delighting in the company of Nick and Sarah, who came all the way from Australia a couple of days ago and have braved some significant jetlag (who eats dinner wearing sunglasses?) But one month ago, it was Buby and Elaine who came and spent nine days with us, but especially with the boys, who have not been properly spoiled since Nanny and Grandpapa visited in November.

Some nice ladies we met in Arles

There was a lot of cuddling to be done, but we did manage some adventures as well, such as finally having lunch at that farmhouse above St. Pons, in St. Chinian. This was a place Anne and I discovered in our perigrinations last fall, a little spot at roadside where—if you make a reservation—you can have a lunch made entirely of things grown or raised on the farm. I have to say, the food wasn’t amazing (think food the way granny used to make it, that is, if granny wasn’t a great cook) but it was lovely to be in this old roadside farmhouse being served what you can be sure the folks who worked there were also going to eat today.

A fine farmhouse lunch

We also visited the entirely stunning marvel of a town called Minerve, a cliffside village carved out by ancient rivers, and wandered around in the sunshine. A couple of days later, the sun still cooperating, we took a two-day feast of a driving trip and went to Montpellier and Arles. This was my second time in Arles, and I have to say, even without a van Gogh obsession, this is one terrific town. We stayed in a hotel on the square that van Gogh painted his famous café on (although everyone in the hotel warned us—vociferously—not to eat in that café … a gesture of aid, or was there, perhaps, some enmity between these two establishments!?) We had a great dinner on our night in Arles, at a tiny, hidden spot called Le 16. The next day, we wandered around Arles, taking in its ancient sites (how I love the thought of that poor, syphyllitic van Gogh wandering around those same streets in a fog of depression and inspiration) and I finally went and found the bombed-out grassy place where the maison jaune existed prior to WWII. On that spot, at the cost of an important bit of history, as well as a number of lives, some American GIs and members of the French resistance held their ground against Axis forces and reclaimed Arles for the “free world”. But in the fracas, the house van Gogh and Gaugin lived in was bombed to splinters.

Buby being repaired after a fall by Nurse Anne

Minerve Jews


Ben and Elaine


Dinner in Arles (will a kiss excuse Max from having to eat his supper? Stay tuned.)


Everyone in Arles

Charlot overlooking van Gogh's Night Café



A night-time tectonik show in Arles

Buby "singing" to a couple of "lucky" boys in Montpellier

We had lunch at Le Cilantro that afternoon, a truly great local spot, and went to Chateau Beck again to stock up on the 2001 rouge. These bottles, representing what is the best affordable red within 150 km of Narbonne, are on their last legs, I’ve discovered, and must be drunk up right away. Some rotten and damp corks have soured the purchase, and we are bidding adieu to what was a remarkable vintage, a genuine grand vin hidden among the pricier bottles and bigger names of the bas Rhone terroir. I imagine, for ten times the money, you could have a Chateau-neuf-des-papes not nearly as good as this Chateau Beck 2001 ….

It was so nice to have a week to yak and wander and eat good food with Mum and Elaine, and we were sorry to put them on the train to Paris at the end. This is where Anne was, having left a few days earlier to visit with her old pal Katya for a few days. It will be up to Anne to report on that trip, but judging from the pictures, they had a great time. Mum and Elaine splurged and stayed in the Luxemburg Parc where Anne and I stayed for her birthday last fall.

Happy girls in Paris ...

After a brief interlude for gardening, report-writing and -reading, novel-dabbling, and school, we had a short but great visit with Alana Wilcox, who’d come to England for the London Book Fair and dodged down to see us and hang out at 44 Beaumarchais for a few days on her own. On her own, because after filling her with red wine and duck, the Redhill-Simards were off to a much-anticipated visit to Italy. Maybe not anticipated enough, though, because we slept through our 4:30 am alarm the next morning and missed our plane. I think Alana was surprised to find me in her bedroom at 8am that morning, printing out new flight information in a panic. It involved (at an expense not to be quantified and never to be spoken of again) driving at a breakneck speed to Barcelona to hop what turned out to be one of the all-time terrifying flights (a storm over the Mediterranean had stirred the air up pretty badly).

A one-way flight to Rome costs what?

But then Rome rewarded us with bright sun, 22-degree air, and its considerable treasures. We saw many of the things one must see in Rome, with two boys who eagerly devoured it (as well as the gelato that, naturally, comes with it) including the Sistine Chapel on our last morning. We got to see our friends Jeannie and James, and their shockingly blond and unspeakably cute son, Nico.

Welcome to Rome (at last): the much-longed-for Tazzo D'Oro receives its cappucino-starved admirer



A nice pied a terre in Rome

Nico. Yum.


St. Peter's (I actually took this photo, so fuck off Getty Images)



Gelato!!


Anne and boys at the Roman forum (now eleven euros to get in)


Ben outside the Teatro Marcellus (hands off, girls)


The Pantheon at night


Making a wish at the Trevi Fountain

We also had a harrowing and wildly fun morning in the Villa Borghese, on a quasi-motorized bicycle for four that should probably be illegal to operate ...

Yes, we survived.


On the lake at the Villa Borghese

And we had the best pizza of our lives in a little sidestreet pizzeria in Trastevere called Dar Poeta. Feast your eyes!

***

I have a special place in my heart for Italy, and especially for Rome. There is something about the carelessness, joy, and cunning of the Italian soul that speaks to me. People seemingly this laissez faire, who have been resting on their laurels for 1800 years, as if they’ve got nothing else to prove: such an attitude amuses and delights me. Their signature gesture seems to be that up-pointing, steepled hand beside the ear that explodes into an open palm like a flower blossoming. As if to say do you understand NOW?

I love the contingent quality of life in Italy, the catch-as-catch-can-ness of it all. But there is also a downside to it, which we encountered on the Amalfi coast, and especially on the outskirts of Naples, which is dotted with depressed towns completely in the thrall of a long-standing battle between local governments and the Camorra, the region’s mafia. There, a years-long garbage strike has already gone past the point of no return, and the people live among mounds of shocking, sick-making trash that is collected no more than once a month, probably in acknowledgement of the fact that there will be no more pockets to pick if the populace dies of cholera. In Campania, there is this contrast between the profound natural beauty and the difficulty of daily life. This is not only true in the grey, crippled towns surrounding Naples today, we also witnessed it in Pompeii and Herculanum, where Vesuvius, over a single day in 79 AD, wiped out every living thing for leagues around. But nowhere was the value of taking what you wanted more accentuated than in the behaviour of drivers. We knew we were in for challenging driving around Amalfi, but nothing could have prepared us for the cliffside hairpinning roads stocked with insanely speeding drivers, weaving motorcycles, tour buses, amateur peletons, crooked old biddies walking their dogs, the occasional fisherman standing by the concrete guardrail, and the general sense of important, irreversible decisions being made moment-to-moment. But the coast road was nothing compared to the highway, where two lanes were routinely used as if four existed, and we spent, one afternoon, two hours driving five kilometres. The beauty of the coast itself is not enough to motivate me ever to go back.

Which is not to say that we didn’t have a great time when we weren’t in the car: we did. Visits to Pompeii, Herculanum, and Vesuvius were days well-spent, and Herculanum, with its silent witnessing to terrible natural tragedy, especially moved us. We were staying just outside of Amalfi in a little house perched high up on a hillside, surrounded by dogs (which the boys adored) and a very kind family, including Rosa, who carried all of our bags up the sixty steps to the front door, grunting like a bull. Rosa turned out to be one of the roadside lemon- and orange-sellers, and we passed her numerous times and stopped to buy (when she would let us pay for them) some of the juiciest, sweetest oranges on the planet. We visited most of the towns on the Positano side of the coast, and Positano and Ravello were the highlights. Ravello, one of the highest towns on the coast, was a hidden gem, a small town with a big cultural agenda, and a garden Gore Vidal called the most beautiful in the world: Villa Cimbrone. Here, Greta Garbo stole away to marry Leopold Stokowski in the thirties, and the villa and the gardens certainly gave you a reason to linger and perhaps even to marry in secret … (we’ll never tell!)

On a wall at a Roman brothel ...

A stunning floor mosaic

One of Pompeii's many restaurants



The lovely Rosa ...





Pictures from the really very lovely Villa Cimbrone

Positano, also, was a stunning place to visit, its houses ranging up the steep hillsides like barnacles stuck to the rock. But the town itself, packed with businesses and restaurants and art galleries, felt like a real place, unlike some of the other towns, which have become full-blown tourist traps with shops that should have vacuum hoses sticking out the front doors to advertise their intent.

Positano

And so, after a week in Italy and a safe return, we are here with our Australians, and soon Nanny, Grandpapa, and Jacob will be here to drink up the late-May sun, and then June is upon us, a month that has been renamed Party Party Party. Right now, I’m spending a lot of my time surveilling the fruit trees, which have needed thinning, fungus treatments, and much worry. And as of yesterday, when the first of the cherries went deep red (you did know that was a cherry tree, right? We didn’t …) and I discovered the birds are faster off the draw than I am, I have a new challenge: Save Our Cherries! Here is Nick and me covering the tree with anti-bird netting; proof that girly-men like him and me can rise to certain agricultural challenges.



We’re sorry to all of you for the way this blog has fallen apart, but hopefully this makes up for a quiet month online, and the below should keep you full of Ben, Max, and Charlot. A final note is to tell you all, officially, that we have decided to stay on in France until the middle of the summer, 2009. We hope you’ll forgive us for that too. (Well, I hope at least you won’t be dancing in the streets.) Also, since the blog has become somewhat less frequent, if you would like to get on a mailing list that will alert you to new entries, please send me an email to say so. If you are not an immediate member of the Redhill-Simard universe (ie, you lack our email addresses!) you can leave a comment with your coordinates and we’ll put you on.

***

I haven’t got our pics of Herculanum into the computer yet, but better (I hope you agree) is a poem about the place, only the third I’ve written while in France …

Herculanum

Its wall still encircles it, that dead city. They use
its sewers as wine cellars, at least one
basilica stores collectable
LPs. From the hill, in the private city,
there is less than silence. The locals fished,
rich Romans came in the summer.
Water at the gate and the mountain behind
and there was no back, forward, or down, no
retreat from the ever moment
they were about to enter. Sixteen metres
of mud walled them into the sea
or stilled them in their houses, perfect
simulacra of themselves. They found
an ivory comb in the pocket
of a little girl. Her mother’s earthpacked
mouth still forms
one of the sounds of her name.

(At last alone, I stood
in one of the back rooms of the stripped villa
above the baths and touched a yellow line
of paint, laid down two millennia ago.
For two hours, someone waited for the blue
to dry and with a fingernail
I scraped the yellow and saw
those hours. Incontrovertibly
alive at that moment, all of them, in their
summer home. Seen in a window, the men
in their wood-and-iron boats on the blue
August sea, and it was lunch time, olives
and bread and grilled fish on platters. The girl
pulling the white comb through her hair. Still
alive as they had been, I’d
gone missing and one of my sons
called my name. The sound of time
is roaring at our backs.)

(Obligatory cheesecake photo.)

Charlot with namesake