Over the last week Sile and I have been trying to book some hotel rooms in Provence during the summer.
We were looking for a small pretty hotel anywhere between Marseille and the Gard. What was making it difficult was that we needed five rooms and the two days we were looking for were the 13th and 14th of July, right on top of Bastille day.
The Michelin Guide was well thumbed, and we had been told that there was no room in the Inn many times before I spotted a Michelin “Blue Pillow” awarded hotel in the town of Sommières.

We were in luck, they had the space and Madam kindly took our booking.
Now Sommières is a small town , just north of Ales, of just three and a half thousand inhabitants and one which I had never heard of before.

In the meantime I was devouring with much joy Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons, so much so that I decided to order his book on Corfu which was published in the forties; Prospero’s Cell.
Prospero’s Cell arrived this morning, the brief biography which prefaces this edition of the book ends with these words:
Durrell died in 1990 in Provence in the village of Sommières.