Cancer

After weeks of living in the 18th century, going everywhere on foot and encountering few other souls, I drove to Marseille for a hospital appointment and got stuck in a crazy traffic jam. As a reintroduction to the human race, it was a brutal shock. Hooting, shouting, sirens, blue lights, motorcyclists doing wheelies, cars mounting pavements and grass verges, cars forcing a path through the stationary traffic using their bumpers as buffers: utter chaos. In an hour and a half the three-lane queue moved forward 80 yards. The chaos reminded me of a taxi ride I once took from Palermo airport. On the half-hour drive into the city we had two minor collisions and clipped a pedestrian. It was a middle-aged chap, fortunately agile.

The Moulinards had inhabited the old stone hilltop house for centuries, ekeing out a hard living among the sun-baked boulders. They were peasants. In the winter of 1962 there was one Moulinard left. Henri: old, alcoholic, feeding the furniture into the fire for warmth. A delegation of relations came up the hill to persuade him to go into an old people’s home. When they’d left, old Henri took himself off to a large oak tree and hanged himself from a branch, dangling there for several days before being found. The house passed to a Marseille butcher who sold it on to an English couple who asked us to house-sit last week while they went on holiday to Austria. We were three: Catriona, me and my ten-year-old grandson, whom I hadn’t seen since Christmas.

Conservative radio host and longtime political commentator Rush Limbaugh announced on his program Monday that he has advanced lung cancer and will be taking time off to receive treatment.Shortly after Limbaugh revealed his diagnosis, prominent leftists rushed to Twitter to celebrate the fact that someone they opposed politically may soon meet an untimely — and likely painful — demise.Former CNN host Reza Aslan, whose show Believer was canceled by CNN after he called the president a 'piece of shit' on Twitter, did a shoddy job of downplaying his joy at the Limbaugh news.‘Ask yourself this simple question: is the world a better place or a worse place with Rush Limbaugh in it?’ Aslan tweeted Monday evening.