I left our house in Brittany, a place I love, on a February Sunday evening with the nearly new moon in a sharp sky. I left it with the stove alight, the glass doors closed, the ventilator shut so it would go more slowly, a wood fire burning for no-one in a locked house, lasting a few more hours into the time between now and when we come back. And took my melancholy away with me. This is going to be off-duty writing. The rest of the writing I do, at work or when I get round to producing a poem, is above all careful.
I want to turn it out quickly, with concentration, yes, but without the constant self-monitoring of the other writing. I planted three trees in the wood this afternoon with Albert, my friend and gardener: an oak, a beech and a fir. There is a four-month-old ceasefire in Northern Ireland. There has been a similar but briefer and much bloodier slaughter in Rwanda.
Boris Yeltsin has stupidly been killing people whom he claims to be Russian, in Chechnya, because some of them want to be independent. The most fragile and flawed peace treaty is just holding together in Israel and Palestine. There is peace between Israel and Jordan. The political system in the USA has been seen at its most ineffective and wasteful; two years ago the people voted for a president offering more interventionist government, proposing to reduce inequality, to have a national health service, to restrict the sale of guns to private citizens, and now they vote for a majority in Congress who are against all of these things.
In Italy, a nightmare of Orwellian proportions almost became reality. This is written in the car park on the French side of the Channel Tunnel. We came over in the tunnel last week, five days after the car service had opened for business. My appreciation of the technical magnificence of the achievement was diminished by the persistent, noisy efforts of the operators to make you leave your car and buy duty-free goods before boarding the train, which was delayed by an hour with no explanation given.
No French translation of this information was attempted. A long way, but not too much of a strain, with so many big, well-engineered, dual-carriageway roads in France now. What a distance France has come since , when I first drove here, when the routes nationales , roads of romance and expectation, straight, lined with poplars, had nonetheless a murderous effect on springs and shock absorbers, and signs reminded you every few kilometres of the danger of nids de poule.
