Good Friday

Good morning campers! Not only is it Good Friday today, but it is also a good Friday: I have booked myself and Mlle B (no longer 'Little" Mlle B; she is taller than I am and often can't get on the bus for free because the drivers don't believe she's under 16) into just about the only bed and breakfast room free tonight in all of St Ives. And oh, it is lovely. Two brass beds, one double and one single, with gorgeous bedding and an antique oak wardrobe and commode set. We also love the landlady, Lydia. We gave her all the food left over from our little house (which we wept - in a virtual way - to leave). She says she can do me a no-fat breakfast - roasting my tomatoes with the rosemary I have given her - and she had palpitations, poor thing, when she found out Mlle B was only 13! "Oooh," she said, "I don't think I could cope with girls..."

Yesterday we lay in the grass on a rocky hilltop which is an island, on which stands a centuries-old chapel, with turquoise sea on three sides and seagulls squawking all around, reading. Proust: perfect. Not far away is another tiny island, on which stands a lighthouse, and it is Virginia Woolf's lighthouse.

Did her characters ever reach the lighthouse? I've tried five times to read that book and never succeeded beyond the first two chapters; but I have a fondness for the book born of, perhaps, sheer endeavour.

Now, Ms B has never read Proust before. But somehow there was the glimmer of an idea of doing so in 2007, I think because someone said something that made me think I'd like him, or maybe something was gravitating to me through the ether. So when I saw a secondhand copy of The Way by Swann's - the title of Vol I in the new Penguin translation - I snapped it up. I brought it with me on a whim and it has proved to be the best-ever holiday reading, especially as most of it describes the village of Combray at Eastertime, and it is essentially descriptions of a boy's holiday leisure, and his internal life, and country walks and flowers. Not sure the Victoria Line would be the best place to introduce myself to this material, but in St Ives it is flying into my brain whole. This is simply the best description I have ever read of what it's like being an introspective child. It feels like a discovery - as if no one had ever found it before me, as if it had been waiting all these years just for me to come along and read it. It's essentially, of course, poetry. It is poetic in its structure and in its attention to language (this is something the translator has respected, and written at length about in the introduction) - and, which I hadn't been expecting particularly, it's also funny.

Proust! My nbf!

I was going to write something here about the wonderful parish church in St Ives - built in 1410, consecrated in 1426, and absolutely magical, with painted carvings of the saints, in gold robes, around the base of the carved wooden ribbing of the ceiling - especially as it is Holy Week. But I don't have time now. I will try soon to do this, maybe on Easter itself.

In the mean time, happy weekend all!