Rules for a deconfinement dinner party

The most visible local landmark is a solitary two-headed Jurassic mountain called Le Bessillon, six miles long and 800 metres tall at the highest peak. These are unimpressive vital statistics for a mountain perhaps, but the Bessillon exerts a tremendous, almost uncanny presence on us all. The foreign correspondent and his wife have bought an 800-tree olive farm on a nearby hillside. From their outside dining table this great primeval slab and its forested sides can be seen in profile, like a finely drawn illustration in a Victorian encyclopedia. Between the dining table and the mountain is nothing but oak forest and pylons, and beyond it more oak forest until a distant village on a plateau. (The elegance of French electricity pylons and barbed wire makes me laugh.)

For our deconfinement dinner party, in order to conform to the still relevant social distancing rules, the place settings were almost as widely spaced as the local geography. We were seven, with the mountain and its immense presence at the head of the table. As well as the foreign correspondent and his wife, there was the cosmologist and his wife and ten-year-old son and Catriona and myself. We were shaded from the late afternoon sun by a gigantic walnut tree.

When the frontiers closed two months ago, the cosmologist and his family were among the last across. Until this evening their only contact with the outside world had been the tip of the cosmologist’s little finger, with which he pressed a village doorbell, upon which a shopkeeper would turn out and place the cosmologist’s weekly groceries in the boot of his car, then close the tailgate. Then the cosmologist would drive back to his house in the woods, disinfect the tip of his little finger, and put gloves on to bring the groceries indoors.