July 14 2026
Dear All,
It’s very nearly two months since we began our retreat in Arles, France, called “Coming To Our Senses.” Two months, for me, of travel and family connections; of selling our Paris apartment; of visiting my children and old friends. It’s also been a time of extreme and unusual heat in Europe: we emptied the apartment in three days in 35 degree heat (95 F) and London sizzled when we arrived there. In Oxford the parks were brown and the nights hot. I’ve been swimming in the cool brown depths of the Ladies Bathing Pond in Hampstead and sitting in the shade of vast old trees on the Heath – and this last week, swimming in the warm sea off the south coast. It all feels very strange, even to someone who lives in the Tropics. We have changed the benign and balanced climate of our world, and live with the consequences.
So, what did we take from our retreat? I’ve been reading the comments of the people who came to join us, their handwritten notes feeling more personal and immediate than anything written online. We came together, we had some lovely experiences, we spent a week focusing on our senses and what they told us, and what we could learn from the natural world, and writing about it. Has it lasted, has it made a difference? Are we more sensitive both to our surroundings and to our own impressions, our own selves? I hope so. Getting busy, getting back into the world – traveling, working, selling property, dealing with family issues, I find I can still take myself back to that inner courtyard at the secret house with the so-ordinary door on to the street, in Arles, and see my friends and colleagues there, sitting around the pool, writing, talking, being silent. It became, even for that short time, a hub – a place we could travel from, yet keep inside us, I believe. It’s certainly been so for me. And while the outer world gets ever more hectic and chaotic, the news ever more disturbing and demanding, I am glad that I can transport myself back there – there – to a quiet room with women sitting on sofas, writing, while the sun and shadow moved across the courtyard, the pool glittered, the house-martins circled, and the days were ours.
Now, I’m working on the proofs of my new novel, “Indigo Sky at Noon,” due out from Regal House Press next May. It’s one of the last stages in a long process; I can hardly remember when I began thinking about this book, or wrote the first scene that was to lead – somehow, I didn’t know how – to all the rest. I can’t now imagine how I worked out the plot-line, and how the characters began to form, during the last days of the Covid pandemic when nothing around me seemed to make sense and a murder mystery was an unusual but somehow necessary challenge to take on. But here it is, now in print form, beginning to look like a real book. Somebody else – my enthusiastic editor – has decided to make it real, give it existence in the world, and that’s always an amazing thing. As the embodiment of a dream, an idea, a sketch of reality, always must be. As the reality of what we’d imagined took shape and life in Arles, in May. As real people came together in a real place and made it all happen.
Be well, be safe – affectionately, Ros