Sunday 7th June

And now that we are into June and a mini-heatwave, both here and to a lesser extent in Britain, a strange mood of ennui seems to have descended.  Not that I am unhappy, if anything I am blissfully contented, walking around town with a big smile on my face.  It is more that I feel almost as if it is a dream, that one day I will wake and have had a Bobby-in-the-shower (or Dirty Den in the canal more like) moment, and none of this will have happened.  No house in France, no marriage, no house in Walton even and certainly no retirement.  But sure enough every morning I wake up and it is still all here, the white and grey stone walls, the river still sluggishly flowing past the mill and my new life here in France as much a reality as slogging every day on the tube and sitting for hours at a desk and dealing with mountains of paperwork and hundreds of e-mails.

I still do get e-mails, but they are dealt with once a day.  I still have some work to do, but it seems so much easier now I am physically removed from the actual workplace.  And there is the café too of course where I am actually sitting today.  Very few customers today, but maybe that is down to the extraordinary hot weather, very few people around at all.  Everyone tells us it will be far busier in July and August – we’ll see,  My former interests, or obsessions really, with the news and politics seem to have receded too.  After all the fuss and bother, the millions of words written and calculations and projections again here a strange sense of ennui seems to have settled over the body politic.  The LibDems are shattered, who of the remaining eight will bear the poisoned chalice of being their new leader; Labour are likewise seeking a new leader, and hardly anyone seems particularly excited about the potential candidates.  2020 seems an awful long way in the future.  Even the Tories seem a bit dazed and are girding their loins for the internal fights to come about Europe.  And more and more I feel, who cares?

And meanwhile the sun is shining and it is hot and all you can do is smile.