Winter melancholy

The time since New Year has gone past very quickly, but I haven’t done very much, and I've lost track of time. Despite Zoë and her wonderful car, our outings have mostly been slightly melancholy. We drive for hours, getting carsick on the mountain roads, and get out at villages which are always deserted. We take packed lunches, because it is rare to find a café or restaurant open anywhere other than the biggest towns, and it is too cold for long walks or trips to the beach to be much fun. One day we reached Porto, apparently the second busiest town on the whole west coast in summer, and it was deserted except for a dog that was attracted by the smell of our paté sandwiches seeping through the car windows. It was too cold and windy to do anything more than climb the hill past the old gunpowder store, which is now an aquarium, and walk up to the Genoese tower, where the wind almost knocked us over. We drove south a little way and reached the Calanches, beautiful orange-pink cliffs that sometimes look like Mars, and sometimes like melting coral-coloured wax. The sun had come out and we walked out the ‘chateau fort’, a chunk of granite rising out of the forest like a ruined castle.


I think that I’m feeling down because this time feels like a sort of limbo, waiting for replies from masters courses I’m not sure I even want to do, waiting for things to open up here again, waiting for people to visit. My failure to find local friends also gets me down, although it is hardly surprising given how quiet it is here and how difficult I find socialising even under ideal circumstances. Anyway, despite the fact that Corsica is a ghost island in winter, I can’t really complain - it has been lovely to visit the surroundings after being confined to stops on the rickety train network, and the landscape is breathtaking on a sunny day.

Katie J came to visit, which was lovely, and not only because I haven’t seen a ginger person for months. We drove around the mountain villages in atypical chilly rain, and visited an 11th Century Pisan church in Aregno’s cemetery. It was built in black and white stone with Romanesque sculptures that could have been moulded in plasticine by a child: there were men and women, baboons with large penises, and a pair of peacocks. The garish white tombs built around it were very new, and all had framed photographs of the dead screwed into the stone. One of them was garlanded with oranges from the festival of St. Anthony. The next day, after an evening of moules frites and Just Dance, and a morning of pancakes, we drove to Corte to show Mr. Hoggington, Katie’s new wild boar friend, his natural mountainous habitat. It was very nice, although strange, to have an old friend from my English life to visit.