Easter Saturday

Coming to the end of our stay in France. Annie joined us at Lagrasse on Monday last, and we’ve had a restful, sociable time together. We went over the hills to Limoux again on Tuesday, and the wild flowers were, if anything, better than last week, so we had long pauses for photography, and just listening to the countryside quietly getting on with its job. Cuckoos, green woodpeckers, wood pigeons calling, the wind in the trees. Now and then a stream chuckling over the limestone rocks. All in all, a treat for several senses.

Of pizzas in Limoux, nothing to add, save that they were up to scratch, and that the ducks in the river were as vociferous as ever, the more so in marshalling their trains of ducklings.

Wednesday’s market in Lézignan was quite busy in the spring sunshine. Isabelle, who has few vegetables to sell at this time of year, was selling vegetable plants. I guess her reasoning is that customers who grow their own veggies rather than buying hers might at least pay her for the plants, and keep the cash flow running in the lean months. And if her experience is like ours, she’ll germinate more seeds than she can possibly grow on herself, so for the cost of some pots and medium, she has owt for next to nowt to sell on. The irrepressible Madame Donnet was also there, so we stocked up on her lovely ewes’ milk cheese and yoghourt. We also found some dirt-cheap ADSL filters - €2 a pop compared with the €13 we were charged last time by Frogtel.

Reasonable ride up to Le Roc on Thursday. Good news: the house wasn’t knee-deep in mouse droppings like last time (mild hyperbole). Bad news: Grandma Colette from the farm up the hill is in hospital after a severe stroke, and it seems unlikely that she’ll come out. We found a note to this effect from her daughter-in-law, also saying that the electricity was off, and that she had reported it to the Régie. Good news: by the time we got here, they’d been out and fixed it. Back to bad news – no dialling tone on the telephone, and busy tone when we tried calling from mobiles. We hopped up to the neighbours’ farm again and I rang Frogtel. Much listening to ‘Bong, bong, boing, boiiing’ later, I encountered a human being, who, to her credit, has got things moving. I’d to come back down and disconnect all the phones so she could do a remote test, but as she was about to knock off for the day, she asked me to go up and receive a call from her next morning at 08:30 (they can’t call foreign mobile phones). Well, up I went yesterday morning in good time, met by the neighbour’s douce old Labrador cross and an unlocked door to the kitchen. True to her word, the Frogtel woman rang back a decent two minutes after the appointment, ran the test, excluded terminal equipment problems, and fixed an appointment for this morning.

So, back down the hill for breakfast, then off to the delightful Jardins de Beauchamp in Marmande. They have some lovely subjects there, and I’d have paid greater attention had I not been feeling rather unwell. From there, we headed along to La Réole for lunch, booked by Annie at a rather nice restaurant. Excellent meal, not wholly matched by the robustness of the furniture: both Martyn’s chair and mine yielded in uncomplimentary fashion as we planted our best features on them, and part-way through the meal, his collapsed altogether. When Annie knocked over a glass of wine a little later, I was left wondering what the third calamity - my turn - was going to be. I didn’t have too long to wait. As we headed over to Bergerac to collect her hire car, I started getting violent abdominal cramps, and wondered whether I’d have to head for the woods. Well, we got to the airport and I hurtled to the chiottes, only to find the gents’ first-class engaged. Well, any port in a storm: I admit that the better of the available options was to head for the ladies’. No known prosecution pending.

In the evening we went for an aperitif at the home of delightful friends, Christine and Jacques, finding both in excellent spirits, despite the fact that the latter is off to a Bordeaux hospital on Tuesday for an MRI scan. He has a prostate cancer, the diagnosing of which laid him up for quite a while with septicaemia. But, characteristically for dear Jacques, he was cheerful and welcoming as always.

Today, the Frogtel subcontractor arrived mid-morning, but went away again, saying they’d return on Tuesday with a cherry picker to replace the drop wire from the end of the lane to the house. Shortly after Annie left to visit some neighbours, our man returned, saying that, since the weather hadn’t deteriorated as forecast, he could do the job from ladders, and proceeded to do so. He has also installed a test socket at the point where the Frogtel line joins the house wiring, so they’ll be able to tell whether any future fault is inside or outside the house. Reason for the fault? A shotgun pellet in the telephone wire. Yet another of the joys of rural France.