There is always sun, you wake and there is sun. There is sun through the branches of the fig tree, there is sun on the terracotta roofs descending toward the beach, there is sun on the terrace, on the mustard-yellow railing with its metalwork like waves. You watch the sun make its way left to right across the sky, you learn to tell the time of day based on how much sun is left on the wide wooden planks.



Monday we took the train from Paris to the coast. “En direction d’Hyères,” the conductor said at every stop, and I kept thinking he was saying “En direction d’hier” – towards yesterday. Truly we are timeless here, in these hills that are populated only halfway up, the rest of the space rocky and wild. The plants are tenacious, the trees scratchy-barked. Butter-yellow flowers with pointy petals grow straight out of stone. “C’est là où on a vu un sanglier, une fois,” Olive said, pointing to the curve in the road, and I peered up the scrubby slopes for a boar pawing the ground, snorting fire.

I never know what time it is, what day. “On est vendredi aujourd’hui ?” I ask, and the response is a general “Oui, euh, ben, je sais pas, oui.” We wake late, we make a small coffee, we make another small coffee, we stretch. We are summer inside and out, the sun is in us and around us, and there is the water, the sea, the big blue; there is the Mediterranean, deep blue, cobalt, azure, marine – of course – on and on till it turns into sky.



Down at the beach – and it is curious: you have to go uphill to go downhill – but it is worth it, because the walk downhill takes you through the village, with its one restaurant, its one newsagent, its one little boulangerie-pâtisserie, its one littler butcher – and downhill through the village means stopping, on the way, at Filigheddu the boulangerie-pâtisserie for an eggplant fougasse or an almond croissant, or a small paper sack of Smurf-flavoured Haribo –

– and this reminds me that I was talking to Mowmy this morning and she said, “Oh! So it is a really small village.” “Yah,” I said, “small.” “So every morning you go down to the beach and buy fish from the fishermen?” she said, because she is curious in so many ways. “Mmm,” I said, and I liked her very much, “no.” “There is a supermarket,” I said, “a small one.” “Cheh,” she said, “so boring.” –

down, I was saying, at the beach, one of us has a blue towel and the other a red one, we scream and laugh in the waves, and the sea, for all its rich, rippling blueness from up in the hills, drips off our skin, glistening, transparent. There is a painter in Alessandro Baricco’s Océan Mer who paints with sea water. His paintbrush sweeps across the canvas, the wind dries the surface, nothing remains that can be seen.