Low life | 28 July 2016

We returned to the house early the next morning, on the way pleading special permission to pass through the police roadblocks. A strip of blackened hillside about one kilometre away showed the extent of the blaze before it was extinguished. The online local newspaper said that 500 firemen had tackled a blaze that had destroyed 400 hectares of forest — roughly speaking the two round Provençal hills between the house and the nearest village. It seemed a small result for so much smoke. And I wondered why the French state should have gone to so much trouble and expense to protect perhaps a dozen properties, including our breezeblock shack. (A French friend reassured me that in this green-minded age, the state is as anxious to protect forest as it is private property.) Because the fire began 3km from Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s £19 million château, the casualty-free forest fire made it into the Daily Mail online news.