My nights with the eagle owls

Provence

Summer has arrived. The evenings are warm enough to sit out on the balcony terrace and watch the lights come on in the village below. Each night at ten, the great limestone cliff, into which my little house was built, is floodlit for a couple of hours. On cue two huge baby eagle owls (fully grown wingspan 170cm) begin rehearsing for adulthood and flap clumsily, then majestically, around the rock, calling for their parents and terrorising the smaller nesting birds hidden deep within the crags and crevices.

English women wearing broderie anglaise dresses, straw hats and anxious smiles drift about

The annual migration of tourists has begun too. On market day the car parks are full by 9.30 a.m. and the queue for Patricia’s cheese stall is 12 deep. English women wearing white broderie anglaise dresses, straw hats and thin-lipped anxious smiles drift about the stalls while their husbands, red-faced and sweating under Panama hats, look for a table in one of the cafés.

If you want the best goat’s cheese or eggs you have to be there before 8 a.m. While you’re down there, have a pastis and a coffee with the old men in the hunters’ bar, where 20 years ago a man was, in true operatic style, shot and killed (or wounded, depending on which version you hear), over a love affair.

Second-home owners are here for a few weeks before the school holidays, when they rent out their properties. I manage a few houses and the other day got a message from the son of an owner who was staying, asking if I could visit and investigate a bad smell in one of the bathrooms.