We are home by 7.30, almost exactly eight hours after I left.

  Saint-Tropez

  Cherchez les nudistes! It is open season for nature-lovers, and there is likely to be a sharp increase in the number of applicants wishing to join the Saint-Tropez police force.

  The mayor, Monsieur Spada, has decreed that in the name of safety and hygiene there will be no more naked sunbathing on the public beaches. ‘Le nudisme intégral est interdit,’ says Monsieur Spada, and he has empowered the police to seize and arrest any offenders. Well, perhaps not to seize them, but to track them down and fine them 75 francs, or as much as 1,500 francs if they have been guilty of creating a public outrage. Exactly where a nudist might keep 1,500 francs is a question that is puzzling local residents.

  Meanwhile, a defiant group of nudists has set up headquarters in some rocks behind la plage de la Moutte. A spokeswoman for the group has said that under no circumstances would bathing suits be worn. Wish you were here.

  The melon field

  Faustin's brother Jacky, a wiry little man of sixty or so, grows melons in the field opposite the house. It's a large field, but he does all the work himself, and by hand. In the spring I have often seen him out there for six or seven hours, back bent like a hinge, his hoe chopping at the weeds that threaten to strangle his crop. He doesn't spray – who would eat a melon tasting of chemicals? – and I think he must enjoy looking after his land in the traditional way.

  Now that the melons are ripening, he comes to the field at six every morning to pick the ones that are ready. He takes them up to Ménerbes to be packed in shallow wooden crates. From Ménerbes they go to Cavaillon, and from Cavaillon to Avignon, to Paris, everywhere. It amuses Jacky to think of people in smart restaurants paying une petite fortune for a simple thing like a melon.

  If I get up early enough I can catch him before he goes to Ménerbes. He always has a couple of melons that are too ripe to travel, and he sells them to me for a few francs.

  As I walk back to the house, the sun clears the top of the mountain and it is suddenly hot on my face. The melons, heavy and satisfying in my hands, are still cool from the night air. We have them for breakfast, fresh and sweet, less than ten minutes after they have been picked.

  Behind the bar

  There is a point at which a swimming pool ceases to be a luxury and becomes very close to a necessity, and that point is when the temperature hits 100 degrees. Whenever people ask us about renting a house for the summer, we always tell them this, and some of them listen.

  Others don't, and within two days of arriving they are on the phone telling us what we told them months before. It's so hot, they say. Too hot for tennis, too hot for cycling, too hot for sightseeing, too hot, too hot. Oh for a pool. You're so lucky.

  There is a hopeful pause. Is it my imagination, or can I actually hear the drops of perspiration falling like summer rain on the pages of the telephone directory?

  I suppose the answer is to be callous but helpful. There is a public swimming pool near Apt, if you don't mind sharing the water with a few hundred small brown dervishes on their school holidays. There is the Mediterranean, only an hour's drive away; no, with traffic it could take two hours. Make sure you have some bottles of Évian in the car. It wouldn't do to get dehydrated.

  Or you could close the shutters against the sun, spend the day in the house and spring forth refreshed into the evening air. It would be difficult to acquire the souvenir suntan, but at least there would be no chance of heatstroke.

  These brutal and unworthy suggestions barely have time to cross my mind before the voice of despair turns into the voice of relief. Of course! We could come over in the morning for a quick dip without disturbing you. Just a splash. You won't even know we've been.

  They come at noon, with friends. They swim. They take the sun. Thirst creeps up on them, much to their surprise, and that's why I'm behind the bar. My wife is in the kitchen, making lunch for six. Vivent les vacances.

  The night walk

  The dogs cope with the heat by sleeping through it, stretched out in the courtyard or curled in the shade of the rosemary hedge. They come to life as the pink in the sky is turning to darkness, sniffing the breeze, jostling each other around our feet in their anticipation of a walk. We take the torch and follow them into the forest.

  It smells of warm pine needles and baked earth, dry and spicy when we step on a patch of thyme. Small, invisible creatures slither away from us and rustle through the leaves of the wild box that grows like a weed.

  Sounds carry: cigales and frogs, the muffled thump of music through the open window of a faraway house, the clinks and murmurs of dinner drifting up from Faustin's terrace. The hills on the other side of the valley, uninhabited for ten months a year, are pricked with lights that will be switched off at the end of August.

  We get back to the house and take off our shoes, and the warmth of the flagstones is an invitation to swim. A dive into dark water, and then a last glass of wine. The sky is clear except for a jumble of stars; it will be hot again tomorrow. Hot and slow, just like today.

  A slight mechanical problem

  Our friend had decided to trade in her old car for a new one, and the young car salesman was determined to give her the benefit of his sales pitch. Dapper in a suit despite the heat, he pranced around the new car, pointing out its various attractions with elaborate flourishes, shooting his cuffs and rattling his jewellery.

  Our friend endured this with as much patience as she could summon up, and then suggested that a test drive might be a practical way of judging the car's many virtues.

  Of course, said the salesman, mais attention! He removed his sunglasses for emphasis. This model is very much more nerveuse than yours. When I drove it here today, even I was impressed. One touch on the accelerator and you are flying. You will see.

  After much meticulous adjustment of the driving position and a final warning about the incredible velocity that was waiting to be unleashed, our friend was presented with the ignition key.

  The engine coughed once, and died. Second and third attempts were no more successful. The smile on the salesman's face faded. The car obviously needed a man's touch. He took over in the driving seat and failed to start the car. Incroyable! What can be the problem? He opened the bonnet and looked at the engine. He burrowed under the dashboard searching for a loose connection.

  Was it at all possible, our friend asked, that the car needed petrol? The salesman tried to hide the scorn he felt for empty-headed women who ask such ridiculous questions, but to humour her turned the key again and inspected the fuel gauge. Drier than dry. He flounced out of the car. Unfortunately, as this was a small showroom and not a garage, petrol was not available on the premises. Another rendezvous would have to be arranged for the test drive. Could Madame come back this afternoon? No? Merde.

  The desire to conclude the sale overcame the heat and the loss of face, and the young man in the dapper suit had to walk half a mile up the N100 to borrow a jerrycan of petrol from the nearest garage, leaving our friend in charge of the showroom. She made a joke about bringing her own petrol next time she wanted to buy a car, which was not well received.

  Knee-deep in lavender

  I had been cutting lavender with a pair of secateurs and I was making a slow, amateurish job of it, nearly an hour to do fewer than a dozen clumps. When Henriette arrived at the house with a basket of aubergines, I was pleased to have the chance to stop.

  Henriette looked at the lavender, looked at the secateurs and shook her head at the ignorance of her neighbour. Didn't I know how to cut lavender? What was I doing with those secateurs? Where was my faucille?

  She went to her van and came back with a blackened sickle, its needle tip embedded in an old wine cork for safety. It was surprisingly light, and felt sharp enough to shave with. I made a few passes with it in the air, and Henriette shook her head again. Obviously, I needed a lesson.

  She hitched up her skirt and attacked the nearest row of lavender, gathering the long stems into a tight bunch with one arm and slicing them off at the bottom with a single smooth pull of the sickle. In five minutes she had cut more than I had in an hour. It looked easy; bend, gather, pull. Nothing to it.

  ‘Voilà!’ said Henriette. ‘When I was a little girl in the Basses Alpes, we had hectares of lavender, and no machines. Everyone used the faucille.’

  She passed it back to me, told me to mind my legs and went off to join Faustin in the vines.

  It wasn't as easy as it looked, and my first effort produced a ragged, uneven clump, more chewed than sliced. I realized that the sickle was made for right-handed lavender cutters, and had to compensate for being left-handed by slicing away from me. My wife came out to tell me to mind my legs. She doesn't trust me with sharp implements, and so she was reassured to see me cutting away from the body. Even with my genius for self-inflicted wounds there seemed to be little risk of amputation.

  I had just come to the final clump when Henriette came back. I looked up, hoping for praise, and sliced my index finger nearly through to the bone. There was a great deal of blood, and Henriette asked me if I was giving myself a manicure. I sometimes wonder about her sense of humour. Two days later, she gave me a sickle of my very own, and told me that I was forbidden to use it unless I was wearing gloves.

  The alcoholic tendencies of wasps

  The Provençal wasp, although small, has an evil sting. He also has an ungallant, hit-and-run method of attack in the swimming pool. He paddles up behind his unsuspecting victim, waits until an arm is raised and – tok! – strikes deep into the armpit. It hurts for several hours, and often causes people who have been stung to dress in protective clothing before they go swimming. This is the local version of the Miss Wet T-shirt contest.

  I don't know whether all wasps like water, but here they love it – floating in the shallow end, dozing in the puddles on the flagstones, keeping an eye out for the unguarded armpit and the tender extremity – and after one disastrous day during which not only armpits but inner thighs received direct hits (obviously, some wasps can hold their breath and operate under water), I was sent off to look for wasp traps.

  When I found them, in a droguerie in the back alleys of Cavaillon, I was lucky enough to find a wasp expert behind the counter. He demonstrated for me the latest model in traps, a plastic descendant of the old glass hanging traps that can sometimes be found in flea markets. It had been specially designed, he said, for use around swimming pools, and could be made irresistible to wasps.

  It was in two parts. The base was a round bowl, raised off the ground by three flat supports, with a funnel leading up from the bottom. The top fitted over the lower bowl and prevented wasps who had made their way up the funnel from escaping.

  But that, said the wasp expert, was the simple part. More difficult, more subtle, more artistic, was the bait. How does one persuade the wasp to abandon the pleasures of the flesh and climb up the funnel into the trap? What could tempt him away from the pool?

  After spending some time in Provence, you learn to expect a brief lecture with every purchase, from an organically grown cabbage (two minutes) to a bed (half an hour or more, depending on the state of your back). For wasp traps, you should allow between ten and fifteen minutes. I sat back on the stool in front of the counter and listened.

  Wasps, it turned out, like alcohol. Some wasps like it sucré, others like it fruity, and there are even those who will crawl anywhere for a drop of anis. It is, said the expert, a matter of experimentation, a balancing of flavours and consistencies until one finds the blend that suits the palate of the local wasp population.

  He suggested a few basic recipes: sweet vermouth with honey and water, diluted crème de cassis, dark beer spiked with marc, neat pastis. As an added inducement, the funnel can be lightly coated with honey, and a small puddle of water should always be left immediately beneath the funnel.

  The expert set up a trap on the counter, and with two fingers imitated a wasp out for a stroll.

  He stops, attracted by the puddle of water. The fingers stopped. He approaches the water, and then he becomes aware of something delicious above him. He climbs up the funnel to investigate, he jumps into his cocktail, et voilà! – he is unable to get out, being too drunk to crawl back down the funnel. He dies, but he dies happy.

  I bought two traps, and tried out the recipes. All of them worked, which leads me to believe that the wasp has a serious drinking problem. And now, if ever a guest is overcome by strong waters, he is described as being as pissed as a wasp.

  Maladie du Lubéron

  Most of the seasonal ailments of summer, while they may be uncomfortable or painful or merely embarrassing, are at least regarded with some sympathy. A man convalescing after an explosive encounter with one merguez sausage too many is not expected to venture back into polite society until his constitution has recovered. The same is true of third-degree sunburn, rosé poisoning, scorpion bites, a surfeit of garlic or the giddiness and nausea caused by prolonged exposure to French bureaucracy. One suffers, but one is allowed to suffer alone and in peace.

  There is another affliction, worse than scorpions or rogue sausages, which we have experienced ourselves and seen many times in other permanent residents of this quiet corner of France. Symptoms usually appear some time around mid-July and persist until early September: glazed and bloodshot eyes, yawning, loss of appetite, shortness of temper, lethargy and a mild form of paranoia which manifests itself in sudden urges to join a monastery.

  This is the maladie du Lubéron, or creeping social fatigue, and it provokes about the same degree of sympathy as a millionaire's servant problems.

  If we examine the patients – the permanent residents – we can see why it happens. Permanent residents have their work, their local friends, their unhurried routines. They made a deliberate choice to live in the Lubéron instead of one of the cocktail capitals of the world because they wanted if not to get away from it all, to get away from most of it. This eccentricity is understood and tolerated for ten months a year.

  Try to explain that in July and August. Here come the visitors, fresh from the plane or hot off the autoroute, panting for social action. Let's meet some of the locals! To hell with the book in the hammock and the walk in the woods. To hell with solitude; they want people – people for lunch, people for drinks, people for dinner – and so invitations and counter-invitations fly back and forth until every day for weeks has its own social highlight.

  As the holiday comes to an end with one final multi-bottle dinner, it is possible to see even on the visitors' faces some traces of weariness. They had no idea it was so lively down here. They are only half-joking when they say they're going to need a rest to get over the whirl of the past few days. Is it always like this? How do you keep it up?

  It isn't, and we don't. Like many of our friends, we collapse in between visitations, guarding empty days and free evenings, eating little and drinking less, going to bed early. And every year, when the dust has settled, we talk to other members of the distressed residents' association about ways of making summer less of an endurance test.

  We all agree that firmness is the answer. Say no more often than yes. Harden the heart against the surprise visitor who cannot find an hotel room, the deprived child who has no swimming pool, the desperate traveller who has lost his wallet. Be firm; be helpful, be kind, be rude, but above all be firm.

  And yet I know – I think we all know – that next summer will be the same. I suppose we must enjoy it. Or we would, if we weren't exhausted.

  Place du village

  Cars have been banned from the village square, and stalls or trestle tables have been set up on three sides. On the fourth, a framework of scaffolding, blinking with coloured lights, supports a raised platform made from wooden planks. Outside the café, the usual single row of tables and chairs has been multiplied by ten, and an extra waiter has been taken on to serve the sprawl of customers stretching from the butcher's down to the post office. Children and dogs chase each other through the crowd, stealing lumps of sugar from the tables and dodging the old men's sticks that are waved in mock anger. Nobody will go to bed early tonight, not even the children, because this is the village's annual party, the fête votive.

  It begins in the late afternoon with a pot d'amitié in the square and the official opening of the stalls. Local artisans, the men's faces shining from an afternoon shave, stand behind their tables, glass in hand, or make final adjustments to their displays. There is pottery and jewellery, honey and lavender essence, hand-woven fabrics, iron and stone artefacts, paintings and wood carvings, books, postcards, tooled leatherwork, corkscrews with twisted olive-wood handles, patterned sachets of dried herbs. The woman selling pizza does brisk business as the first glass of wine begins to make the crowd hungry.

  People drift off, eat, drift back. The night comes down, warm and still, the mountains in the distance just visible as deep black humps against the sky. The three-man accordion band tunes up on the platform and launches into the first of many paso dobles while the rock group from Avignon that will follow later rehearses on beer and pastis in the café.

  The first dancers appear – an old man and his granddaughter, her nose pressed into his belt buckle, her feet balanced precariously on his feet. They are joined by a mother, father and daughter dancing à trois, and then by several elderly couples, holding each other with stiff formality,