Wild cherries

When the wild cherries had dried on the trees, too small to pick, too hard for the birds but chewy and delicious and left as treats for us children, we knew it must be close to the fourteenth of July.

                                                         from The Lantern

The unexpectedly foul weather in Provence last week lifted for long enough for me to run out into the garden to the wild cherry trees on the old orchard terrace. The cherries on these are tiny scarlet globules that taste of sour cherry candy, tart yet sweet on the tongue. The boughs were weighed down by fruit, all dancing in the wind.

When the sun came out, it was hot – but torrential rain lashed down only about an hour after these pictures were taken, accompanied by another epic thunderstorm. So much rain fell that day that fields of the region’s famous orange-fleshed Cavaillon melons were decimated and the crops lost. It just goes to show that it’s not only in the past that farming was a precarious livelihood, even in this place of glorious plenty where sunshine is usually taken for granted.

Again, I’m sorry this is such a short post and for my absence from comments on all my favourite blogs. I travelled back to England yesterday in readiness for the UK publication of The Lantern. The publication date has been moved forward – for reasons I still can’t reveal! - and it should be available in the shops in the week beginning June 20.

Meanwhile, the house here in Kent is like the Marie Celeste, abandoned in a state of chaos as we’ve run in and run out again in between travels over the last three weeks or so. For the next few days, this writer’s life will be occupied by the more prosaic mountains of dirty washing, domestic admin, and fixing all the things in this house that have broken down and have had to stay that way - as well as the inevitable fretting as to how my novel, in which so much time and work has been invested, will be received when it finally appears…