Towards the end of a bleak, mid-February Friday, the wind started to groan through the narrow, village streets. Shutters creaked and in the valley below a filmy curtain materialised over the vines and blurred the outlines of the farmhouses.
Through this gathering tumult, and with flicks of rain on the breeze, I was hurrying home, collar up, resolutely plunging past the Café Le Progrès into whose warm, smoky bar I was profoundly tempted to detour. As I’d emerged from the edge of the forest, I had felt something indefinably different in the shift of the air above me and the heave of the branches. I felt like a spy who had noticed a subtle change in the enemies’ routines but couldn’t quite pin down what it was. Something was going on …
From what the patronne calls the terrace bar of the Café le Progrès, you can see in the middle distance, across regiments of knuckley vines, fallow fields and stone houses, whose earthy walls and faded tiles seem to hold on to the last light, the snow covered heights of Mont Ventoux. It’s the highest point around here, but it has another notoriety. The summit is, reputedly, the windiest place on earth, because the dominant winds in this region—the mistral, the tramontane and the sirocco—all at certain times meet across the top of Mont Ventoux. It must be hell up there.
The mistral is a northerly, and in these winter months, when it gets down to serious business, feels as if it is surgically removing all sensation below the knees, let alone what it’s doing to the bits of your face that are left exposed by the tedious necessity to keep breathing and to see where you’re going. The tramontane comes across the Pyrenees overflying vast amounts of snow, so it’s a chilly little blast but, hereabouts, reasonably rare. The sirocco blows in from Africa, and this, as the Monty Pythons used to say, is where the story really begins.
When I returned home, I heard new noises everywhere through the house. Boards creaked, a distant door banged, several shutters flapped loose from their locks. And when I lit the fire, billows of smoke erupted from what had been till then the highly efficient chimney as strange winds barrelled down it and rolled like gatecrashers at a party into the living room. All night the wind, driving intermittent rainstorms before it,