1991

‘If things work out as planned we shall move to France on April 1st – an appropriate day’

28/09

[Having tired of Italy, a move is being planned to France for April 1992]

Photocopies of house enclosed… You will see on the map that we are well and artistically placed, Cézanne [having been] at Aix, Picasso at Vauvenargues and overlooking Mt. Ste. Victoire (something significant about that!), and poor old Vincent Van Gogh in the asylum at St. Rémy. All dead, it’s true but the spirits linger on. The notorious Peter Mayle is well away to the right as you can see, and Marseille is down at the bottom and off the map. Mont Ventoux on the right of the map is over 6,000 feet high and is the last gasp of the Alps, also the first mountain to be climbed by man (Petrarch) solely for pleasure… (I forgot to say that our house is at Montaren on Route 961 from Uzès).

17/11

Many thanks for the books… Weary Dunlop’s diaries interested me, not only because I am an inveterate arm-chair soldier, but because the prison-camp drawings were by Jack Chalker, who was head of the art school at Bristol with me, and because Robert Brazil (who also has a bad caricature in the book), was a fellow student with me at Goldsmith’s. There was another ex-Changi Gaol and jungle prison-camp inmate in the school, Derek Cooper, but I have rather lost touch with him. One wonders how Weary Dunlop now feels about the Japs, and is this book his counter-attack against a too easy acceptance of the [unprintable], as Ernest Pascoe used to call them? He always maintained that when Chalker had one of his “turns”, which he did from time to time, and raved and raged against someone, that he suddenly saw them, with [unprintable] face and peaked cap with the rising sun on it.

24/12

The [Ben] Nicholson book was just what I needed, to give me encouragement. Had no idea it had been published, and since the only other (early) Nicholson books cost £600 and £1,500, it is an invaluable stop-gap until I win a fortune on the French horses! Mr. Mayle’s paperback edition on where NOT to go to and buy a house, contains, I see, in the foreword or preface, the following: “By 1992 our friends say that Provence will be firmly established as the California of Europe”, the result of “un boum” in property prices, fuelled by Mr. Mayle. Well, luckily, we are not actually going to be in PROVENCE, but in Languedoc-Roussillon (if one is to believe the 1:250,000 map), or on the extreme westerly borders of Provence, an area which, strictly speaking, finishes on the Rhône. However, for those we wish to upset, we are indeed situated in Provence…

We go to France, 16th, 17th or 18th of January, to complete the house purchase… If things work out as planned, we shall move to France on April 1st (an appropriate day for our enterprise)…

[Michael Canney pictured at their new home in France, below, with Cin-Cin, the Siamese attack cat acquired in Italy].