Butterscotch and string

The vegetable seller gave a great yawn as she placed my exquisite strawberries in the box. Her shoulders were hunched over the till in a way to which I could relate.

“Me too. I have a sort of flu without the flu”
“Oh yes I feel terrible. Hot cold, feverish….No energy. I’ve been like this for a week.”

We agreed that it was the bloody mistral placing blankets of snow on the mountain and promptly melting them; making us get out the bed-covers we’d put away for summer; forcing us to don jumpers one day and spaghetti straps the next, to light a fire and fling all the windows open…..

Anyway the long and short of it is that I feel like crap. And when I feel like crap I need LOTS of gooey support, which I was not getting from my husband this morning. He had three hundred prints to pack and send off, paintings to do, and a gallery in which to get the electrics right before it gets covered with a breathable hemp skin. I had promised to be his assistant all day but instead I lay whimpering and curled round a cat in the bedroom.

So I rose, walked out into the bright sunlight, around the ‘malaxeur’ humming away as it mixed the magic potion and the extra handsome help the boys had bought in, and sought my gooey support elsewhere.

“My husband isn’t being nice to me.” I moaned.

Yves then proceeded in giving Julian the best speech I have ever heard:

“You have to give loads of tenderness to your feverish beloved. Even when you are skin to to skin in the night and you remember some wire which you haven’t pulled through, remember this, that your partner is the MOST important thing and when she is not feeling well giving her caresses is top priority”

Yo. Forget that he went on to tell of when he and Picasso found themselves ‘scotchés’ in a Nice street. A man who reminds my stressed out husband to treat me with care is my kind of builder!

Towards evening, after the shopping, the print packing and the daily painting ,
Julian and I joined in a bit of peaceful trowelling of the hemp mixture (which, I have realised, I love so much because it is like packing the wall full of perfect ice-cream – ‘Butterscotch and String’ or perhaps ‘Vanilla Bean and Fibre’) and that turned out to be good enough therapy for stress and the flu that is not the flu.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Vaucluse, apparently this is happening.