This time last year, as I bravely confronted the first deadline for 2004, my insatiable desire for distraction was being well served by the view. Through the window to my left I could see high, leafy hills under a cold, cloud-scudding sky. And straight ahead, over the top of the monitor and perfectly positioned to capture my errant attention, regiments of vines, grey and knuckled in their winter uniforms, stood to attention in the gusty wind.
If that wasn’t enough, I could let my imagination follow the machine-gun crackle of a chainsaw echoing along the valley below the village as the always-smiling Monsieur Dufours tackled that morning’s pile of green wood which his customers, wreathed in smoke and shivering with cold, would soon be trying to coax into ignition in their fireplaces. Or, I could give up on the muse and stroll down to the village in the freezing air, along those narrow streets named after victims of the Nazis in April 1944, and chat to Louis the butcher about his great passion, ‘le Roogby’, and then have a coffee at the Café le Progrès before tackling the vertiginous hill that was my way home.
When February dawned last year, I had been living in that small Provençal village for about a month. I’d emerged from the terminal at Marseille airport on New Year’s Day 2004 into a temperature of minus eight, having 30 or so hours earlier walked gratefully into the air conditioning at Tullamarine to escape Melbourne’s nearly 40 degrees. The shocks—cultural, chronological, linguistic, meteorological, psychological and, for all I knew, biological—were queuing up to shake and stir me, and they duly did. But by the beginning of February I reckoned that, despite the inexhaustible capacity of life in a foreign country to produce alarm and confusion, I was well ensconced.
As I write, it is roughly one year on—4 February 2005. Framed in the window on my left are the dry hills and eucalypt scrub that circle the Clare Valley, while straight ahead—vines again, swathed in thick, camouflage green, marching up and down the hot summer slopes and across the ridges. Just to top off the military imagery, loud gunshot reports drift up from the vineyards at random intervals. They are ‘scaring off’ birds that have long since become used to them.
In place of Louis and Monsieur Dufours and Carmen behind the bar in the Café le Progrès