22 August 2015 Update

We  managed to drive from the Midi to Erfurt, Germany in two days despite the summer traffic and road construction delays – spending one night in Belfort, a German-looking Alsacian city but all in French. Found the hotel in Erfurt, checked in, had two negroni each and collapsed in bed – foregoing dinner. The IAHR conference does not begin until the following day (Sunday) as I write this.

It has been a very brief and quickly passing time in France – first with Carlo & Jean-Christophe visiting and overlapping with my cousin-twice-removed Conway, and towards the end with Marie-Laure coming down from Paris to prepare her class for the fall on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. There have been more deaths that I cannot now even remember. The constant revelations of American deceit and ineptitude are also continually depressing, but the Midi magic and its inviolate cocoon of paradise soothes at the same time. And I have been enjoying very much the reading of Matthew Stewart’s Nature’ God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic that Barbara sent as a gift.

And there have been lovely dinners with Penny and Hamish, Jim and Joanne, Adele and Pascal and the ‘gang’, Pierre and Catherine, and Becky with her lovely children and nieces.  A lunch as well at Cresson with Marguerite and Jean-Pierre. We also enjoyed the aioli in Fox-Amphoux with Jim, Joanne and Marie-Laure, snatches of the Aups fête, and attending the anti-éolien manifestation. We also got to have some time with Micheline and Nicolas. Beyond all this, we had a day in Marseilles with Penny and Marie-Laure at the MuCem: lunch at La Table and then the temporary exhibitions ‘Migrations Divines’ and ‘Lieux Saints Partagé’ – both of which I found superb. Dinner chez nous included Marie-Laure, Jean-Pierre, Marguerite, her son Christophe, Penny and Hamish, and Pierre and Catherine.

It has been in all no less the whirlwind it seems usually to be. On the purely personal level, I cannot complain at all, remain deeply in love and thrilled with the bounty in which I find myself surrounded. I am looking forward to a more sedate existence once we get to and settle in London next month.