I am socially isolating in a cave in France

This Provençal village clusters around the base of a cliff 300 feet high and a kilometre wide surmounted by two crumbling look-out towers. The cliff is riddled with dry caves, used since time immemorial by troglodytes and fugitives. In the early 19th century a section of the rock face was walled and the caves used as a convalescent hospital for Napoleon’s wounded soldiers. An earth tremor largely destroyed the village’s medieval quartier in 1905. The stoutly built military hospice survived, as well as a few other ancient cave dwellings higher up the cliff.

Catriona and I live in one of these. House and garden sit on a high ledge accessible via a steep and rocky footpath. In normal times tourists pay €2 a head to visit the Napoleonic hospice, the old village ruins, and a sorry-looking reconstruction of a humble peasant interior of 100 years ago, consisting of a few sticks of old furniture and a collection of outmoded kitchen utensils displayed behind bars. Fitter and more intrepid visitors wishing to get their full €2-worth of local history explore the cliff path that leads them up finally to our dusty perch. Those peering in at the lowest window, half-expecting to see another reconstructed peasant interior, usually see instead your Low Life correspondent lying unshaven in bed looking at his iPad.

An unexpected benefit of France’s stringent social-distancing measures has been that this intrusive trickle of Gore-tex-wearing, camera-wielding sightseers has dried up and we are presently enjoying splendid isolation among the ravens. Each morning I can now sit with impunity in my pyjamas in the garden. I sit at a round metal table in a small, embowered, gravel-floored space just off the footpath, drinking coffee, listening to the radio and typing my journal of a plague year on a 1965 Hermes typewriter.