Update

Update

Spring is supposed to be a time when life starts anew and things are certainly happening here. One thing I've noticed when buying bread in the morning is that the bakers' shops are full of chocolate rabbits. Chocolate rabbits (Easter bunnies) are traditional in the UK too which makes me wonder exactly what the connection is between Easter and rabbits. Maybe rabbits start breeding again at Easter, if they ever stopped, but so too do sheep for instance and no doubt many other animals and there is no tradition of chocolate Easter lambs. I'll have to do a Google search. It also makes me wonder whether Christ's alleged resurrection at Easter is at the origin of the idea of life restarting then or vice versa; anyway, I'm not sure there is a spring season in Jerusalem.

It was Steve and Jo's 48^th wedding anniversary today and they invited me to have lunch with them, I having been an usher at their wedding all those years ago. We went to a restaurant just outside Vaison, L'Epicurien, and had a superbly cooked and presented three-course meal for well under 20 euros a head. It made me realise how lucky we are here to have a number of very good and very reasonably priced restaurants.

We now have about 15 potential candidates for our English conversation courses and, given that an initial 4 or 5 would make them viable, it looks as though we will be going ahead. Steve and I have each completed a script for half of the first session and Steve has a script for the second so we are well on the way. Today we set a date and time for the start, 22nd April at 18.15, so we will inform all the enquirers and see what drop-out rate we get. Initially we had a problem with deciding what to call the sessions as we didn't want them to appear at all formal and want to make each session independent so that participants could miss one without falling behind. We eventually came up with “rencontres” rather than “cours”. In our search for dialogues I discovered that I had a book of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's down-and-out dialogues from the TV programmes of the 1970s. I doubt we'll be able to use them but I'm making a point of rereading them as I found them hilarious at the time (“I could have been a judge, you know, but I didn't have the Latin”).

And it's all happening on the gardening front. I had originally hoped that the bulbs out front might all bloom at the same time but what has happened is probably better. After the initial very early couple of blooms they have bloomed in waves of a couple of dozen at a time over succeeding weeks and are still going strong. They've made a good display with the pansies and rosemary to complement them so that has turned out as I had hoped. At the back I've cut out the dead wood and tied the jasmine, climbing roses and clematises to the high wall and one of the early clematises is showing some buds. About half the coronilla bush is in bloom, complemented by aubretia and a scrambling plant, also with blue flowers, that friend June gave me a root of last year and whose name I can't remember. I'll have to ask June. I also found some dipladenia in the local supermarket which I bought to replace the ones on my bedroom windowsill that haven't survived the winter; they looked good climbing around my bedroom window last year. The birds that feed on my balcony have dropped the usual lot of sunflower seeds so I have a crop of sunflower seedlings in various pots that I'll have to transplant somewhere. A couple at least will go in the large pots on my balcony and, if they don't grow too tall, will bloom under the grapevine that forms a canopy. And the valerian at the back, which I'm severely curtailing, has produced seedlings that I'll give to Steve and Jo to plant down their drive. Also I've decided that now that we are in April we won't have any more severe frosts (fingers crossed) so the small lemon tree and geraniums that have over-wintered in my terrace room can go outside on the terrace. Finally, I've bought packets of climbing nasturtium and morning glory seeds that will go in various pots or wherever I can find a space later.

It's all looking good for the early summer.