My happiness has given way to a paralysing melancholy

From our hypothetical drone-mounted camera let us look down into a secluded valley in the same series of valleys as Brad and Angelina’s celebrated Provençal vineyard. Cultivated olives and vines on ancient terraces descend to an English lawn encompassing a pretty stone cottage, formerly a beekeeper’s. The lawn is wide and green and must take an enormous and perhaps illegal amount of water to keep it alive through the scorching summer. Moreover, the smallish blades of grass and the mosses suggest an English species of lawn. There has been no compromising here with a broader-leafed, hardier, uglier, tropical variety. To see an English lawn here, in this harsh climate, coterminous with bushy vines and silver-grey olive trees, is an extraordinary sight.

Zooming our drone camera on the pantiled roof and the rough, sun-baked stone walls, we can see that the front of the cottage is shaded by a bamboo cane awning. Beneath the awning is a long glass-topped table. And seated at the table in the sunshine is a bald, shirtless old man. When he first saw the English lawn he felt faint with nostalgia.

Now he sits very still. If he moves at all it is with the economy of effort of the invalid or depressive. Without the early warning system of his formerly luxurious barnet, his bald head is decorated with wounds where he has frequently bashed it. From his propped iPad comes the tiny sound of a football chant. The away team supporters, as it happens. His team. He listens anxiously to the commentary.

The day is bright, still, cloudless; now hot after a chilly start. This is the tenth day in a row that the weather has been still, bright and cloudless. The marvellous lawn glistens with what looks like a heavy dew, but is more prosaically the result of an overnight soaking by sprinklers fed by underground pipes.