With the pine-needle carpet. Twenty feet away there was a twenty foot drop to the sea.
I heard seagulls only once.
There was a shop round the corner, a church down the hill, sunrise to the left, sunset to the right. I ate salami, drank water, started reading Moby Dick. I wanted something putdownable.
It was a different bush every night, plenty to choose from and no need to get complacent.
Joggers went back and forth on the cliffs. Cruise ships came out of Marseille, went to the right, turned into shoeboxes.
One night after the sun'd gone but the light remained someone played acoustic guitar for an hour.
A woman said be very careful with your papers.
To describe someone traveling alone they say arsehole. A seul. It's something to think about.
I phoned a farm. They said when can you get here. I said about a week. I went to Aix-en-Provence.
Architecture was everywhere. It was unstoppable. Cobblestones and fountains too, exploding. Most of the walls were a shade of yellow.
Art history used to live there. If you were a fan of Cézanne you'd be bouncing. I went to the Matisse exhibition.
Perpignan was giddy and had hot wafts of bin-stink creeping round it. Plenty of narrow roads uphill with tall houses either side and white litter circling. Palm trees on the main roads, men on the corners. It's Catalonia. Signs in two languages. The paper said someone's set fire to an apartment block again.
I stayed in a hotel that would've been dilapidated but they'd painted flowers and leaves all over the walls and furniture. They'd painted a cat halfway up the stairs and painted tiles around the bathroom mirror.
Near the uni were two men, one with an acoustic guitar and one with a keyboard set to piano and turned up to distortion. He used all the keys, it was a rushing ascending noise, it followed me round corners, you couldn't hear what the guitarist was doing.
