Walking through a painting...
It was one of those really beautiful days—the clouds hung low and heavy in the sky, obscuring the view of Montmatre from my window, but yielded only a thin rain. In the street people moved about huddled under umbrellas, dodging the puddles with their collars turned up around their ears. Others might have found the scene depressing, but it reminded me of the beautiful painting by Gustave Caillebotte ‘Paris Street; Rainy Day’ (1877). That painting is in Chicago, but I had the real thing, so I took a walk over the Pont au Change, passing by the Tour Saint Jacques to the Sunday bird market on the Ille de la Cité and then on over the raging waters of the Seine via the Pont St Louis, where, ludicrously, a man was fishing with a rod and line—in vain. I bought some cheese from the beautiful fromagerie ‘La Ferme Saint-Aubin’ on the Ille Saint Louis and headed home.
I was soaked to the skin by the time I got back. But the flat was warm and I made a cup of tea (Oolong that I had bought in Berlin from a man that sells it by the gram in little sachets, in the manner of an incredibly middle class drug transaction) and settled down to sow the seeds from the garden centre that I had bought yesterday. My hope is to have fresh herbs to use in my cooking in a few weeks time: tarragon, coriander, mint, rosemary, basil, thyme and sage. It is perhaps a little early in the year to start cultivating seedlings but hopefully in the flat I can get them started, before potting them out into larger containers and moving them to the vestibule, which is cold but has a skylight that I can hang them under.
Dinner: sautéed plum and pecan salad (click for recipe), followed by a cheat's lemon meringue pie (recipe forthcoming).