In the South of France, about 45 minutes' drive northeast of Avignon, past Carpentras with its medieval walls and its giant superstore its town-consuming market on Fridays, there's a picturesque little village called Le Barroux, piled up on a hill on the edge of the Rhône plain and topped with a chunky, sand-coloured castle, all in classic Provençal style. Behind the village, looming moodily over the scrubby hills and the silent plateaux and the vast apron of busy, fertile flatland, is the solitary, lunar peak of the Mont Ventoux: feared Tour de France stage, géant de Provence, lonely harbinger of the massed ranks of the Alps to the east.
In the village there's a house with an orchard of olive and apricot trees. It was converted from a barn in the late 60s by my grandfather, an architect from Geneva. It's still owned by my mum and her sisters. I've been holidaying there since I was born (I was named after the olive trees); I've made a visit in more than half of the last fortysomething years. But not since 2018, because I had a baby and then you-know-what happened. Maybe next year. But my mum and my aunts aren't getting any younger, and the diaspora of cousins is far-flung and thinly spread, and the place is getting harder to use and maintain with every passing season. I can feel time running out on it.
So when, inspired by Bertie's question, I finally fired up Microsoft Flight Simulator for the first time this week, I knew there was only one place I wanted to see.
