BESIDES THE IDES...

Well now we have March after the Ides, and we've all mainly survived in one way or another. Visitors coming to France earlier last week were rudely surprised by rough weather around Paris, a snowfall that caused havoc at both major airports not to mention highways and train travel... At this moment of writing, I learn there are still 9000 bags unclaimed at Charles de Gaulle airport, a result of the delayed and cancelled flights. All the while snow was falling in the north of the country, here in the south it was all sunshine and light... and here at Mas Blanc there were all sorts of flowers blooming, narcissus, daffodils, and these violet by the barn....



Doesn't this just say "spring is here"?

Now, however, as I write this, there has been a downpour of rain, so thick it is almost like snow, for more than 24 hours, and the stream beside Mas Blanc has risen at least a metre... it's a wonderfully turbulent torrent of rushing brown water, and there's something rather beautiful about its force, as well as slightly daunting... I am glad not to be outside, and am staying in by the fire.
Yesterday, however, when the rain was still light, I ventured out to the teashop, TEAPOTES (www.tea-potes.com/) in Anduze, to give a poetry reading with my good friend Sharon Black, a Scottish poet I've mentioned here in an earlier posting. She and her husband Alex and their daughters live in the Cevennes, and during the last few years we've become such good friends that Sharon and I work together on polishing our poems, giving and accepting advice from each other. It's a system that's working well, and yesterday, with an audience of friends and poetry-lovers in the upstairs room of TEAPOTES, we dealt with the question "What makes a poem?"  For more about Sharon, you can google her name directly or go to the site www.gardoussel.com which is the retreat she and Alex have been running for some years now. A truly wonderful place.

Here we are, Sharon and I, yesterday, having just finished our reading, and feeling mighty pleased... neither of us threw up or fainted, always a concern for writers before a public event...


Poetry, after all, is meant to be heard as well as read.....

Are we happy, or what? We survived! and it was FUN!