Bank Holiday Monday

No rain yet, oddly enough, but it's cool, with a sharp breeze out of the north. After the last week or so of hot weather in the Languedoc, it came as a bit of a shock to find Calais wet and windswept yesterday. A shame therefore that our hopes of getting away early (we got there soon after 2:00 pm) were dashed. Maybe we've been lucky in previous years: I guess one shouldn't count on jumping queues at a Bank holiday weekend that coincides with the grande rentrée. That aside, the journey was really not too bad, and the cooler weather was handy in view of our dodgy air-conditioner fan.

To our surprise, the A75 is still not complete: we'd to come down to single file over an unfinished section south of Lodève, and as the stretch south of the Pas d'Escalette was already pretty busy, it made for pretty slow going. Still, by the time we reached our overnight stop in Blois, the average speed wasn't far short of 60 mph (during actual driving time - a fair bit less when you take account of the occasional pause-pipi). We'd advance notice that the motorway was pretty clogged around Vierzon, so we took a bit of a detour through the very pretty Loire valley countryside, looking briefly from a distance at my favourite little Château of Cheverny. Visitor numbers have plainly grown since I was last there forty-four years ago: the village looks pretty and well looked after, despite having to make provision for huge visitor car parks. Before we left Blois, we took a ride round the centre to see the château through the car windows. Like Cheverny, the place looks much more cared for than it did in 1966.

Martyn found an excellent minor road that took us pretty well in a straight line to Le Mans, give or take the occasional zigzag down into a river valley and up the other side. Advance warning of bouchons on the A16 after Boulogne seemed to be false alarms so far as we could see, but it used up some of what turned out to be our copious free time. A thing that has struck us all over France is the effort communities are putting into their floral displays. Lagrasse is a bit of an exception, I fear, though the baker has put out some very pretty tubs of bedding plants - probably to stop people parking across his frontage. In Calais, the square in front of the Town Hall looks somewhat incongruously cheerful, with tall bedding plants cheerfully masking Rodin's evocative statue depicting the sufferings of the Bourgeois de Calais. But since the Town Hall tower is shrouded in scaffolding and tarpaulins, a bit of distraction is welcome, I guess.

We've left John and Margaret in charge at Château Smith following a really enjoyable week with them. Apart from the day in Sète and a trip into Carcassonne for a tour of the citadel followed by lunch, we did a whole lot of not very much, which is as good a way to spend a holiday in good company as I can think of. The bug screens John and I put up have pretty well cured the problem of flies in the house. One design flaw, however: when we were at a very late stage of stapling the screen to the window aperture, Martyn emerged from a small place that encourages peaceful contemplation of the problems of the world and said: 'what happens when you come to close the shutters?'. Temporary solution, then: one corner of the screen is held back with a lightly-affixed staple that will have to be removed and replaced every time we open the shutters. So much for the combined design skills of a Chartered Engineer and a Master of Arts. BA Hons Business to the rescue.

All seems well back at Forges-l'Evêque, thanks to Celia's ministrations to the garden and the eponymous Mr Waterman's work on the central heating (which we needed last night!). I shall get out and do some hay-making later. Or maybe tomorrow. Two days' travelling followed by a trip to the supermarket take it out of an old geezer, you know!

Fifteen seconds of fame, maybe...

We went to the joutes along at Sète yesterday, since it's a lot of fun, and Margaret and John hadn't been there before. Yesterday's jousting was the championship of the lourds, and as the name implies there were some pretty big splashes when they hit the water. Parking was a swine of a job, though, and the town's mediocre restaurants were struggling to cope with demand. For the uninitiated, the joute consists of teams of blokes rowing big heavy ten-oar boats at each other along the canal, with jousters armed with shields and lances standing on a raised platform at the blunt end, each trying to project his opponent into the water. Of course, what the crowd wants to see is both of them going in, and the cheer that goes up when this happens is something to be experienced.

I love it. It's the second time we've been, and this ancient spectacle (18th century, I was told), about the origins of which I'd love to know more, is great fun. We don't have it in the UK - the water's too cold! Such was more or less the text of my national TV interview on the subject. Don't know if it was screened: afraid to say we haven't got French TV here in France...

Somewhat more mundane pursuits today: we went in search of double-walled planters with water reservoirs, like wot M&J had when they lived in Guérande (Loire Atlantique). The lady at Les Jardins de Jean knew the product, but said they were out of business now. Thence to the routine food shopping, and to Brico d'Oc to get some bits and pieces. The brackets fastening our clothes rail to the shelf in the wardrobe fell to bits yesterday morning. Surprisingly enough, I found the self-same brackets in the shop, so for once I had a DIY job for which I had the right spare parts, the right tools and pre-drilled pilot holes. And I could see why the old brackets had failed, so stand a chance of having a longer lasting solution. We also got some fly screen netting to hang over the small window in the living room. Handy to have an engineer on the premises - he had the project planned and implemented in short order, and we have designs on the bigger window for tomorrow. Or maybe Thursday. Or maybe next time we're down...

douce France...

The peculiar noise from the fan in Egg 2's air conditioning did not respond as one might have hoped to a thump on the dashboard this morning while we were in Carcassonne. If allowed to spool up to max, it sounds like a Dakota taking off. The Carcassonne Egg-fettlers have moved, so I'd to try ringing them when we got home. 'Impossible avant la semaine du 30 août', when we shall, if it be the will of Egg 2, be back in England. Tries Narbonne. 'We're on holiday: please call again on Monday'. Thanks to the wonders of email, it is now booked into our UK chaps on 31 Aug. I love France. I adore France! But when I have to interact with Frogtel or the motor trade, please stand by with intravenous vin rosé.

A bearable existence

We went to the market yesterday, returning with a basket of veggies from Isabelle and her rather gorgeous son (whom Kate saw first...), fruit from some Occitan or Catalan speakers, various little brown paper bags from the glorious smelling spice stall, but not much cheese! Madame Donnay, supplier of ewes' milk cheese to the discerning, had none on view save a bit of fromage blanc. The colourful Jean-Baptiste was stationed at his usual pitch by the contraceptive vending machine, and has supplied us with eggs and goats' milk cheese. En route we replenished supplies of essential fluids: red, white, rosé, diesel and propane.

Today we've been a bit more energetic, and legged it up to the Roc de la Cagalière, from which the brave can get 360° panoramas. At one point on the walk Martyn spotted a deer in the woods, and we met a lot of butterflies: at one point we had a sort of escort of a dozen or so small ones, some pale blue, some reddish brown. The Cagalière is probably the best of our local walks. The first bit is quite strenuous, rising through a steep lotissement known hereabouts as Beverly Hills, and doesn't really let up much until you reach the viewpoint. After that it's a very civilised little walk, including a 'parcours botanique' set up by our local nature guru, Patrick, from the Office National des Forêts. (His much-deserved promotion means we shall be losing him, and I hope the good citizens of Foix, to which he's transferring, appreciate their good fortune.) The steep descent into the village makes one feel quite virtuous, knowing that one scrambled up it earlier. And the panaché in the Café de la Promenade didn't touch the sides.

to the hills

It being a fine clear day, we took to the hills. Initially to take our favourite view of the high Corbières and Pyrenees from above Arques, and then, on impulse, to enjoy the views from the col at Pailhères. In between, we tried a road over the Col du Pradel, finding a 'route barrée' sign at the summit. Helpful, we thought. Well, when we got to the col, the dreadlocked and dentally-impaired chap who had passed us on the way up was losing a bit of weight by the roadside, and came to ask us if we knew anything about the supposed closure. Establishing that we were close neighbours, he from the Pas de Calais and we from the other end of the tunnel, we entered into a pact to try it and see. The road seemed to have disappeared at one point, so the cows were treating it as an extension of their territory. Further down, there were some eroded edges that I wouldn't want to have met after dark and after dinner. That aside, nae bather, and a breathtaking road we shall drive again. We parted company with our old hippy friend at the foot of the hill with a couple of hoots on the horn, and headed off up to Pailhères. Amazing. We couldn't quite see the sea, but we could certainly see as far as the valley of the Garonne.

...and back again

It was nice to see how the garden has been behaving in our absence, largely thanks to Celia and Andy, who have been dropping in to do some watering. We ate our runner bean crop at one sitting, and ditto this year's 4 apples. What producer wouldn't rejoice in a 33% year-on-year increase in the apple crop? But a big disappointment on arriving home was the absence of a bus pass. It seems (not that the toon cooncil told me unprompted) that my birthday falls two weeks too late for me to have a bus pass at 60: my application won't be processed until November, as part of a process of aligning bus pass entitlement to the changing female retirement age. Poor show, what! And of course when we left yesterday, before the sparrow had felt the mildest abdominal twinge, my senior rail pass was ineffective. So it's still a case of all the penalties of age with none of the benefits.

It seems that the new car is in the UK. Whether I take delivery will depend on the extent to which the dealer stops quibbling over the trade-in value of Egg 1. I have drawn a line in the sand, and the outcome could be that we cancel the order and spend a few hundred quid to get Egg 1 back into top condition, rather than spending thousands on a new car. I think I've said before that all dealings with motor car salesmen leave me feeling rather soiled.

The ride back was altogether easier than last Saturday's experience, even if the weather was less lovely than on the way north. It was almost as much of a struggle to get out of Montpellier as it was to get in, so if ever we do the journey home by train again, we'll try to do it from Narbonne.

Nice ritual this morning: if we can, we go each year for a walk with Kate and John over the Fesses de Charlemagne to pick lavender and blue thistles. We came home with a well-filled back-pack, which I shall now go and distribute round the house.

Another day, another country.

Loooong day yesterday. The drive to Montpellier was OK for a summer Saturday, though we were glad we weren’t heading the other way: from where we joined the motorway near Béziers, the traffic on the other side was at a crawl for miles and miles on end. Then when we saw a warning of ‘ralentissement’ ahead on our side, we took off to pick up what we used to know and love as the N113. That proved to be slow as well, since the villages along the way are a mass of traffic lights, and we weren’t the only ones to decamp from the motorway. Montpellier is a mass of road works and diversions: the city is extending its admirable tram network, and the consequent traffic chaos is a wonder to observe.

The TGV ride to Lille was fine, despite backward-facing seats – there’s something faintly surreal about hurtling backwards at 300 kph, sipping chilled rosé! At one point, Martyn discovered that although our (lower) deck was quite full, there was only one person in the upper deck, so we promoted ourselves, and enjoyed fine views of the countryside, seeing where we were going, rather than where we’d been. I had forgotten how lovely the landscape is for the hour or so north of Lyon – beautiful rolling terrain, well wooded with pretty villages and mixed farming, including a lot of fine charolais beef on the hoof. We were about 10 minutes late into Lille, the same margin as when we left Montpellier five and a bit hours earlier. The train had obviously clawed back a bit of time, but we were held up for a while outside Marne-la-Vallée-Chessy (escaped Bambis and Baloos from the adjacent Disneyland, perhaps?). We had an hour or so to kill in Lille. Fine city, but the area around the railway station of any large city is rarely the most refined, and I fear Lille is no exception. The adjacent shopping mall is somewhere we wanted out of quickly, and the new station itself is grubby, noisy and unwelcoming. Had the UK signed up for the Schengen Accords, the experience would be better. But the need to queue up for two lots of passport checks and baggage security erodes the margin that the train enjoys over the aeroplane. Once on the busy Eurostar, civilisation reigned, however briefly. Friendly, helpful staff and an efficient hurtle to London. The journey home was the worst part – no Northern Line trains at King’s Cross, so we’d to walk miles underground and change trains, arriving just in time to see the Hastings train pull out of Charing Cross. The clickety-clack local train home was a hell of a come-down after high-speed travel, as was the surround of inane chatter and mobile phone conversations from giggly girlies on their drunken way home. So I was firmly in grumpy-old-git mode by the time we got home.

A glance at the garden shows the fruits of a bench colleague’s labour: she has been doing some watering while we’ve been out and about, and it all looks pretty good – except for the long grass, to which I shall apply myself a bit later. Once I’ve worked through the mountain of mail.

Beverly's party +1

Delightful bash last night, a few days before Beverly hits a decade fewer than I celebrated last month. She celebrated in style at a local chai. Jazz, dancing, some nibbles, vast amounts of wine. It could just have done with being 5° warmer.

Back to earth with a thud this morning: the first coat of thinned paint left the front door looking even worse. Fortunately, a second coat looks more promising, so a third tomorrow should do the trick.

Maintenance

The front door at Château Smith wasn't exactly improved by the 1999 floods, and the coat of paint I slapped on it five years ago has not really stood the test of time. I made a start yesterday on burning off the paint, but on discovering a bit more rot at the foot of the door, decided that another palliative coat is probably the best approach. I've done a bit of digging out and filling with putty and polyfilla, and have been over the good paint with the ponceuse, taking a bit of sandpaper on a block to the bevelled edges of the tongue-and groove. It's not only the door, of course: the door itself takes up half the width of a big vault, all of it filled with woodwork. I guess it would be worse if it spent its life exposed to the Mediterranean sun, but it's not as if the north abstains from throwing weather at it either. We'll get the excellent Mr Sedki to come in and replace it in a few years' time. Meanwhile, another half-ton of polyfilla should get us through the winter. We'll save the re-sealing of the roof terrace until Part 2, I think.

Rain!

After a nice lunch Chez Hervé in Sallèles yesterday, we spent a pleasant hour recovering gently by the canal, watching the occasional duck or Noddy boat float by. The duck looked faintly disgruntled, perhaps because I'd devoured a substantial amount of a relative at Hervé's table a little earlier. From there we ambled gently down to where the Canal de la Jonction, a branch of the Canal du Midi, joins the Aude, and watched a Noddy boat struggling to navigate into the canal from the river. Thence to the sea, over the Massif de la Clape, and into the clouds. Not a day for paddling, in our book, but I guess it was better from the point of view of the hordes on the beach than staying in the waterfront dwellings thereabouts. We got home shortly before the thunderstorms began. Good news: the piss-streaked post-festival streets have been well washed down. Bad news: some rainwater was coming in under the roof terrace door and dripping down into the stairwell. We already have a couple of maintenance projects on our list for this visit, but are trying our best to ignore the fact.

It seems to be a good year for oleanders. I've had to prune one by the front door, and our two newish plants are in flower, though straggling a bit. Up by that essential element of French village life, the Caserne des Sapeurs-Pompiers, the hedge they planted around the time the new fire station was built is well settled, bushed out and flowering vigorously. Our mint is doing pretty well, but our only other culinary achievement is a pot of basil, bought this morning at Carrefour...

August again, already, yet!

Martyn's celebrated baby plum tomato bruschettas found another appreciative audience yesterday. Old friends Immy and Jon and their five daughters have been camping along at Vias Plage, so came here for lunch, laundry and a swim in the river. They are heading for Spain this morning so I hope that, as I write at 08:30, they are well on their way. France goes on holiday in August, and in consequence the main roads are chokka throughout the first and last weekends, as well as around the 15 August holiday. I remember returning from somewhere close to the border on the first Sunday in August a few years ago, and the traffic was at a standstill as far north as Narbonne. With tens of thousands of cars full of tired parents and hot, cross bairns, there are minor shunts and breakdowns everywhere, and a few more serious pile-ups. If we go out today, we'll stay clear of any roads beginning with A or N - and following the baffling and utterly wasteful reclassification of the old routes nationales - a lot of the bigger D roads as well.