Strawberry Fields Forever

Corsica may be the birthplace of Napoleon, but this island is a land apart from France. Closer to Rome than to Paris, Corsicans insist that the French colonised the island. The Corsican flag is ubiquitous – printed on t-shirts, flapping in the sun, tattooed on forearms, stuck onto windows – whereas the tricolore only flies before official buildings. This distance from metropolitan France perhaps accounts for the fact that it is quite easy to get online. I’m wwoofing chez Myriam and Felipe, a Corsican-Colombian couple, until around the 27th in the high and searing mountains smack bang in the middle of Corsica – the nearest town is Ponte Leccia – and should be able to provide updates if not of the minute, then surely of the prolonged moment, on the reality of the frontline of organic strawberry production. Fifteen varieties of organic strawberry. Chèvre du maison. More chooks.

I’ve just finished reading the extraordinary first installment of Javier Marias’ Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Fever and Spear, a book which has given me more than enough to think upon as I pick strawberries, weed strawberries, prune strawberries in the Corsican sun. There’s a copy of the Slow Food manifesto and companion on my desktop following some interesting conversation on the matter in Aix-en-Provence; the most recent issue of a triennial organ devoted to Ecology, Civil Disobedience and Peasant Solidarity in Corsica is within reach, as are many Corsican cookbooks. I’m also in possession of a book about life on the other side of the Mediterranean that I’ve been wanting to read for years, Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. After that, I’ll have only one more hot weather, Mediterranean-appropriate book left, William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain. In order to avoid the absurdity of Reading Thomas Mann in Corsica, I’m learning to incorporate Slow Reading into my Slow Living.