The Vaucluse, Saturday 2 March

Sunny morning, no wind. Smoke drifting into the open window, someone burning olive branches, which is illegal, law says take them to the dump. Complain? and sound like a city person griping about the pig farm

they married into? No way. I started rereading a much-dog-eared copy of Czeslaw Milosz’s A Book of Luminous Things: an International Anthology of Poetry, which I can open (as with Hughes and Heaney’s Rattlebag) anywhere and find something to inspire me, especially if I am in a be-inspired mood. I read one verse of a poem in the ‘Women’s Skin’ chapter and laid the book down and started typing on my laptop.

Smoky air improving.