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Some time in between
Neither mid winter nor its end. But some time in between. The almost-turn of the seasons when the chalk tracks thaw; when the lichens bloom their pallid crusts in broken trails down beaten asphalt roads. But for a coat of shrill morning frost the land lies raked and naked; empty and waiting. And brittle sunshine.
Agnèse Dorléac’s butcher
Frail lemon sunshine slips through a gap in the morning grey; steals a chance to rehearse its shine after the storm of dirty February rain. And Agnès Dorléac in the sitting room above the butcher’s shop – the one with the margarine-coloured wall tiles She often calls the room shabby; forgets how Agnès Briard had hoped it could be, and had seen it for one night. But with kind thoughts and a shoebox of dear photographs, Mme Dorléac remembers the magic, the post-war, cellophane shimmer that wrapped the little room in scarlet, gold and emerald shades of hope; she remembers excited hands as they smoothed the shiny toffee paper layers, covering the old year with the expectation of someone new.
For bikenut
So, you gave me Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys and in return you got Genesis (sorry about that). But then you’ve always made the right choices. I went to art college. Your university terms were punctuated by another one of my scrapes… While my world was a little bit wavy, yours was always straight down the line: the natural-born pragmatist who could never be – would ever be – anything other than true to himself.
The walnut tree
Alone, strong and vulnerable, like a loving father, in a landscape of wide fields and long lanes. The walnut tree on the right, just before the crossroads, on the road to Bonneuil. He takes me for a walk…
Kat Lightfoot - Painter
Two years ago we sold our Devon house. The cob and brick double-fronted terrace with the tiny courtyard was home for five years. When we moved in we lived, slept, worked and cooked in the attic; we could cook whole meals on two electric rings and we did the washing-up in the bath. The builders took over the downstairs, lighting fires on the bare dining room floor to cook their Friday-morning fry-up. Ceilings were ripped down, damp, ancient walls scraped back to dark, muddy stone. I came home from work one day to find they had demolished the kitchen.
The reclamation man
Claude is incensed. He can’t believe the electricity engineers have tried to run a cable through the oak tree. “Hundreds of years that tree’s been there. It’s beautiful. Why couldn’t they just go around it? “Quel bordel. Quel bordel.”
'Tak-Tak'
Posters glued to lampposts, telegraph poles and the commune notice board have been advertising tonight’s performance for weeks. A string of coloured lights has been looped across the street, wooden fences bar the traffic and children run between two rows of orange plastic chairs reserved for the village’s elderly.
Cognac cafe society
Four large glasses of Stella are lined up on the bar at the pavement cafe in Cognac. Opposite each one sits an ashen-faced, charcoal-eyed Englishmen in a union flag T-shirt. Each of them is perched on a stool; each has one knee pulsing up and down as if on auto-pilot.
Fighting lizards
The spring heat is making the lizards aggressive. The sun is turning the normally placid little creatures into frantic little fighters. Once the Charentes’ rays start beaming down, they cautiously crawl from under their cool hiding places; gingerly pop their nervous heads between the cracks in the stone walls.
Portrait of a country woman
Monique looks at us over the top of her trendy red glasses. “Saler avec abondamment, ” she advises loudly, wagging a finger at us as we stand in her dark, stone-floored kitchen. “A-BON-DA-MMENT’.” Carefully writing out an address and phone number from the local Yellow Pages, she gives us loud and explicit directions for the ‘taxidermist’, a man who, she confides, has never let her down.