The old French house is a real place, an eighteenth century farmhouse with thick stone walls the colour of chalk. Come summer, its doors and shutters are open from sunrise to sundown, its quiet sunlit rooms hanging with generous sheaves of drying lavender and fresh green bunches of bay. Herbs and citrus scent the kitchen, and mint, long since escaped from cracked terracotta pots, threads its way across the ramshackle terrace. Come September, when the mornings are crisp and the evenings cool, the logs warming around the wood-burning stove perfume the farmhouse with evergreen and smoke.
