Lourmarin and Cucuron

My cousin Matthew lives in Lourmarin, a pleasant small Provencal town, famous for writers such as Albert Camus and Peter Mayle, which has had the misfortune to become something of a tourist spot. They’ve at last done something about the traffic, so it’s possible for it once again to be a small town in which ordinary people live ordinary lives – children playing in the old main street again, people sitting quietly outside the cafes drinking cafe or a ‘pression’ (draught beer’) or an anise or whatever. The Slow Cities movement is important: it’s often hard to see what we’ve lost in a world sliced apart by speeding cars…

For contrast, I cycled – puff puff wheeze wheeze – up the five miles or so to Cucuron, another typical Provencal town that isn’t on a main road to anywhere, and doesn’t have a chateau, and isn’t the birthplace or living-place of someone famous, and hence isn’t on the main tourist drag – with very noticeable differences in energy. It’s notable for its ‘bassin’, the ‘L’Etang de Curcuron’, which is a huge pool in place of a main square, about 20 metres wide by 80 or so long, and octagonal at one end. Film buffs would know it as the set for the ‘first getting together’ scene in the film “A Good Year”, with Russell Crowe and an excellent French actress whose name I’ve embarrassingly forgotten. A great meal at the Cafe de l’Etang – a salmon salad, supposedly a single serve though easily big enough for two, for a paltry 7E50 – a few photographs, and a gentle freewheel back to the tourist hubbub of Lourmarin. Where I discussed academia and French linguistic theory and socio-geography with cousin Matt, who teaches at Universite’ d’Aix-en-Provence: but that’s another story, of course. 🙂

And I’m sitting on the step outside the cafe-bookshop where they’ve kindly left their ‘free-to-customers’ wi-fi running even though they’re closed, and it’s 7pm and it’sjust getting dark, so I’d better stop for now. See y’all later, I trust?