Desert Bloom

It was a week ago today that we left the Pacific coast and headed east into the desert.

It is a dramatic drive through some of the most scorched and arid wastes on the planet. But we were fortunate. It is spring, and the desert was in bloom - albeit temporarily. Carpets of yellow, and green and pink covered this normally barren landscape. Until, as we wound our way towards the valley that cuts a swathe through the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto mountain ranges, we found ourselves driving through a forest of windmills.

Not the Don Quixote sort. Those tall, elegant, white wind turbines, whose blades turn with deceptive languor in the winds that scour their way between the mountains. Thousands of them. Filling the eyes, like a mirage, vanishing into the fibrillating distance.

We stopped overnight at the home of friends Mike and Barbara Monachino, at Rancho Mirage, a settlement of gated communities somewhere between Palm Springs and Indian Wells. This was an area of extraordinary beauty. A veritable oasis. Rich in blooming flowers and fragrant blossoms, fed from the waters of an underground lake. In the distance, the San Jacinto mountains burn red in the sunset, and in the morning glow gold, cut with deep-veined blue shadows.

And then on again in the morning, leaving California behind, and entering the parched plains of Arizona, the horizon broken only by those bizarrely shaped mountains that used to pepper every cowboy movie. Laid down in strata at the very creation of the earth itself , then fashioned by time and wind. There is something quite primal about this landscape.

At last, almost incongruously, we reach the vast, sprawling conurbation of Phoenix laid out in the desert valley, and our home for the next month in the adjoining city of Scottsdale. This is the home of my American publishers, who have taken a route much further east, across the Atlantic to France, to live in our house during our absence.

Their house comes with a pool, unlimited sunshine, and a dog called Odin. Odin, a lively, intelligent, wire-haired fox terrier, greeted us with initial suspicion. But, as you will see from the photos, he and I quickly bonded, and he takes me out walking for at least an hour every day - which I am sure is good exercise for him, too.

And, so, settled now in this desert oasis, we said our goodbyes to Susie, who headed back to Northern California, and we set up computers to get down to work. For although there may be a pause in the tour, there is no pause in the work schedule. A book to revise, another to research, and a screenplay to write.

Oh, well...