Rewind

When in Provence a few weeks ago, I wasn't quite as good about blog posting as I had envisaged. So here, without any attending thoughts (probably for tomorrow), is a pic taken in a little church in Oppède-le-Vieux in Provence.

A beautiful little place, with an unassuming exterior - in fact quite austere, built of grey stone in a mineral environment, and an interior made all the more charming by the fact that time had taken its toll on the walls, colours and fittings, which were being restored only very slowly. This was a church that was bright and inviting rather than imposing or intimidating. Apparently this had rubbed off on the church warden, who had put a on a record neither of standard packaged church music (would have been truly inconceivable in such a wonderful location), nor even of Bach sacred music, but of the Brahms violin concerto, whose chords poured out of the church door and into the little yard in front.

Each time I'm in Provence I think of the Johnny Depp film The Ninth Gate, where Depp plays an antiquarian book dealer sent by a wealthy, shady and ominous collector to locate two other exemplars of a book puportedly written by the Devil himself. I won't spoil it too much for you as this is a great movie, but the closing scenes take place in Provence, with the very last set in a ruined castle in that same, rocky, mineral nature.