At 30 deg C the mind starts to soften

SJdlB 3. Where it’s not just the grasshopper that becomes a burden but the strimmer. Next door started up yesterday after a prolonged bout of horseplay in our pool (we’ve been joined by granddaughter Bella and her boyfriend). This morning, as I hang out the washing, the other neighbour contributes a succession of roaring arias.

I can’t complain. These are not lawns that would be recognised as such in Epsom or Wilmslow. The grass is scrappy and parched, the ground pebbly and the contours random. No place for the stately Qualcast or even the mediaeval scythe.

As I proceed from pegging out the rewarding biggies (a pair of trousers, a bath towel) to the fiddly small stuff (socks, knickers, a bra) yesterday’s droner shouts his thanks for retrieving his wheelie bin and pushing it up the steep track to our two villas. An accidental gesture since I thought it was ours. He shrugs and a butterfly negotiates my washing line. Not a day for architecture – it rarely is here in oven-hot Languedoc. Culture is contained in the wafer confines of the Kindle: 29 titles including Ovid’s Metamorphosis and (more June-like) The Forsyte Saga. Plus much Arnold Bennett.

I return to the balcony to write this: down below the soccer ball is kicked desultorily as Younger Daughter floats backwards and forwards in an inflatable dinghy. We’re off to lunch soon, after which we’ll buy l’Equipe and read about Sunday’s thrilling Canadian GP.

Did you expect intellectuals straining at the leash?

The tenses may suggest otherwise but we're home now.

The above were tagged pêches plats at Clermont l’Hérault street market. Their flavour is unaffected by their flatness. Melons here hit your palate with the strength of chilis.

Sometimes it's wichtig not Ooh, la la

Lucy’s just off a Rilke high and reads Montaigne, Plutarch reads Montaigne and quotes Aurelius and Avus urges Wang Shih Chi. I am reading Elmore Leonard’s Pronto. It features Ezra Pound (jokily), plotting and dialogue are worth plagiarizing, but it’s a comic thriller (an under-subscribed genre) and it’s fun.

I have my moments. Peter Watson’s The German Genius (964 pp, £30, so you’ve got to be serious) was written almost in despair. A prophet of German culture Watson believes that for most Brits Germany is The Third Reich and nothing else. He compensates with this history of German ideas over the past 250 years legitimately sub-titled Europe’s Third Renaissance.

Ideas aren’t just philosophy they’re religion, science, painting, music, education, plays, movies, poetry, and – yes, I fear – war. Thus the cascade: Goethe, Marx, Leibniz, Clausewitz, Heidegger, Wagner, Brecht, Beethoven, Beuys, Nietsche, Biedermann, Boltzmann, Bonhoeffer, Büchner, Kant, Spengler, Dürrenmatt, Engels, Feuchtwanger, Freud, Grass, Hegel, Herzog, Kraft-Ebing, Lang, Mann…plus the companies AEG, BASF, Benz… plus… well you get the idea. Being pro-German isn’t as sexy as being pro-French but it is high protein.

CRISPER I’m surprised about this apfel strudel’s asymmetry; Mrs BB likes to go for decorative touches but here she was discouraged. She believes the filo pastry remained in the freezer too long and “dried out”. It’s crisper than usual but perfectly edible. Any ideas?

THE LOVE PROBLEM Chs 1 – 2, 11,340 words, February 15 2011. Fun for the author doesn’t always mean fun for the reader. But I’m enjoying truffling – eg, How do you switch off the engine of a Cessna 172R? Jana’s tougher than Clare (of Gorgon Times) but we meet at the altar of her love for flying.