more Montpellier

I'm about to depart for the next stage - Isabel Huggan's writing retreat, which she is in the process of setting up, and I'm to help her with, as guinea pig and blogging and landlady consultant. Her farm is in the country about 45 k. north of here, I gather, with a separate space for her writer guests. Sounds like heaven.

Speaking of heaven - it was supposed to rain all day yesterday and again today, and instead, beautiful clear sun, with a spring breeze. I walked and walked again, and then met a friend of a friend for a drink - Peter is a painter, lived for years in Cabbagetown, now lives in a village near here and goes back and forth. So, lots to talk about. Last night Lynn and I met her friend and mine, Julie, Lynn's fellow linguist, for supper at L'Entrecote, which does the best steak/frites in the most affordable way - mmm. I may not eat another French fry for months.

And then we went on for a drink at a wine bar in the centre of town, us and the thousands of twentysomethings on the prowl on a Friday night. Montpellier is a very youthful town, and its youths were all downtown last night. Fun to watch; more fun not to be that age any more, and just watch.

Today, Madame and I went to an exhibit of the photographer W. Eugene Smith, an American who worked for Life magazine and who eventually set as his life's task to shoot a complete portrait of life in Pittsburg from 1955 to 1958. He took some 17,000 shots and was eventually swallowed by the work, which never appeared during his lifetime. And now, nearly sixty years later, here we were in the south of France, admiring these mid-century American masterpieces. He had an extraordinary gift, capturing faces, light, buildings, abstracts, movement, emotion, and social underpinnings, setting very clearly the Fifties world of black and white. Stunning. How sad that his labour of love was never recognized as a masterpiece during his lifetime.

We wandered, came home for a simple lunch, and now Madame and I have to stop talking, briefly, so I can go off and work and not talk for a few days. I don't know what the internet situation is at Isabel's, so I may write to all of you soon, or I may not. But it's sure I will be talking to my old friend in my head, if not in actuality, while I'm away. I'm back here next Wednesday for a day, and then, off again.

The journey continues.