Douce France, Chapter 213

The TV having taken to shutting down every two minutes once warm, was up for replacement.  Shame it lasted maybe three years, whereas the good old Toshiba had worked for close on 20 years in five different dwellings in three countries.  We'll maybe take the back off it and hoover it out, but I suspect planned obsolescence.  I started trying to buy a replacement yesterday on line, and eventually failed when the bank demanded to know my best childhood friend as a condition of authorising the debit card payment.  Having never shared such information with said bank, the transaction wasn't going very far.  So, off to Préfecture city this morning, where we found the set we wanted, but at the shop price, €30 up on the internet price.  I'd taken along a print-out of the description so as to be able to find the set we wanted, and the friendly salesman needed little persuasion to give us the corresponding discount.  He was of the head-shaving persuasion, so perhaps there's a kind of freemasonry at work!  There's a lot to lament about modern-day France, notably in the catering sector, but there's a definite move here and there towards better customer service.  Or is it just that sales people are nicer towards customers old enough to be their grandfathers?

I'd been fretting a little about the fact that soot falls down the chimney every time I open the damper on the fire (not that we've had to use it yet this time.  Or not quite).  So it was good that a chimney sweep knocked on the door this morning on spec just as we were finishing breakfast.  Sweep, sweep, hoover, hoover, job done, cash handed over, affaire classée.  Painless, eh?

I have taken to filtering phone calls because of the incessant cold-calling hereabouts.  Fortunately, builder Pierre decided to leave a message, so I picked up the call.  He has cleared the remaining rubble from the terrace, and will be back next week to tile the shower room window ledge, cut a bit of deck plating to cover the water meter and take a look at the roof terrace: our next major job.  Although he had to do a lot more work than expected on the scabby wall, he would not take more than his estimate for the less complex job he'd expected, and thus gains a large measure of customer loyalty.  Evidently, he and his colleague won over the neighbours to whose workshop he had to have access.  Towards the end of the work, pains au chocolat were delivered daily at 10:00, and Coca-Cola at 16:00.  The remaining work on the end wall shouldn't require as much of the neighbours, and ought to improve the appearance of the village.

Lots of poppies still in flower, and the broom is positively glorious.  The mint is doing well in the little bed at the front of the house, and the dill we planted last time is also flourishing.  I swept out the fire this morning to clear the way for the sweep, and have spread out the ash in the hope that it may nourish the herbs.  No sign of the eschscholzias I sowed last time, but since they need sun, the situation is not good. 

So, as ever, work in progress, but I feel more positive.

Another day, another country

Another 744 miles/1190 km on the clock, including a night in another reasonably competent hotel.  I start to tire of the long journey, but must admit that there’s always something different.  This time we were leaving the UK at the same time as some of the Hooray Henry tendency who take it upon themselves to hurtle across Europe in extravagant motor cars at appalling speeds, glorifying their conspicuous consumption as a ‘Cannonball Run’.  We were alongside a couple of Ford Mustangs at the tunnel péage yesterday morning.  I read that one of the participants was picked up doing 178 km/h on a departmental road (limit: 90 km/h) in his Ferrari.  Good.  I hope it was impounded and forfeited. 

Coming in the other direction were countless fancy sports cars returning far more moderately to UK from the 24 heures du Mans, which finished the previous afternoon.  I have never seen so many Ferraris, Maseratis, Lotus, Aston Martins and Porsches – and of these last, some over 40 years old.  At one point five Bentleys (of the current hairdressers’ and WAGs’ variety) were coming up the opposite carriageway in close formation (honorable mention for the best collective noun received by Friday – a Bouffant of Bentleys?).  The most unusual of the endless cavalcade was a Gordon-Keeble.  Anyone remember them?  Corvette engine and transmission; Italian sports saloon bodywork, precisely 100 built.  One or two other heroic examples, including an Escort Mexico and a rather tired looking Mini-Cooper.  And a Daimler SP250 on a flatbed truck.  For a short while we were behind an empty car transporter, no doubt on its way to collect half a dozen broken down Alfa Romeos.  The exotica thinned out after the A28 junction, and with the exception of the behaviour of some inbred moron in the Allier who seemed to take great exception at finding he was being overtaken just as he decided to veer out unannounced into the outside lane, the journey was largely uneventful.  The VW bumbled along at a regulated speed according to the limit at the time – usually an indicated 85 m/h on its over-reading speedo – and overall did more than 40 miles to each gallon of heavy oil.

Of the Campanile in Issoire, bôf.  Clean and comfortable, and with delightful staff at the reception desk, but the heating and a/c didn’t work, and the free wifie was hopeless.  The adjacent Courtepaille was OK, but got upset when I mentioned that Martyn’s lamb had tasted of kerosene firelighters.  Another one bites the dust.  Fast food joint, granted, but with a bill of €56 for two, non-optional service compris, one might expect better.

Here in Lagrasse, the building work seems good, so far as it goes, but the builder has yet to clear some rubble from the roof terrace and tile the shower room window ledge.  The neighbour has served on me his meter readings for water and electricity, to be settled when the bills come in.  I think the total could amount to as much as €2.50 plus VAT.  If he’d said ‘give us a pony’, I wouldn’t have argued.  As usual we have bumped into a number of friendly neighbours already, and I am working on my ability to adapt to The Way We Do Things Around Here.  It shouldn’t take too long.  Still not quite there, however, after 15 years.

Family

Standing: Chris, Martyn, me, John; seated, Margaret, Pip, Gill

We finally managed to get a few more of the cousins together yesterday for lunch here.  Good co-operative effort: Pip brought the makings of an antipasti starter and served it beautifully on little wooden platters; we made a big casserole of chicken in a sort of ratatouille and Margaret brought a pear, almond and chocolate tart and a fruit salad.  I think poor Gill (seated, right) was a little overwhelmed at meeting another four relatives at one go, but she and Chris soon relaxed and seemed to enjoy themselves.  I was struck by some points of resemblance between Gill and my mother - the line of the jaw, the pale blue eyes and the mobility of the eyebrows!

A photograph of her father Frank, prepared for his local council election leaflet, stopped me in my tracks - it showed once again the striking resemblance between him and Charles, the brother he never knew he had.  And the great dome of forehead is not so dissimilar to mine.  The dome is a bit of a family characteristic: we won't forget my aunt's memorable crack back in 1975: 'you look even more like your mother since you grew that beard!', which had a certain logic about it, however perverse.

We're preparing now for the journey south once again.  Washing 1 is drying (unfortunately not on the line, since it's showery); washing 2 is chuntering away in the machine, and washing 3 - including the fourteen napkins from two big lunch parties - is lined up for the next run.  I shall have a marathon ironing session later.  Meanwhile, I've hooked up the irrigation system for the tomatoes, spuds and herbs.  It will draw on the water butt that has the biggest catchment area of roof, and is solar powered.  Clever stuff, eh?  And the modest initial capital outlay apart, owt for nowt.  We did have to pump water round from another barrel, but the heavy showers forecast for today ought to fill them up and keep our crops in growth for a while.  The eternal dilemma: you can't really have gardens and trips abroad.

I'm a little anxious at not having heard from the builder this past week.  But I'm sure I'd have heard from our neighbour if anything had happened to stop the work being completed by yesterday.  His bill is going to be rather heftier than I'd expected: he's had to render rather than point the wall, since a lot of old openings have been messily blocked up at various stages.  I'm just hoping that the wall visible from the street is in a better state.  We'll see: I don't expect we'll have the whole job completed much before the end of October.  Such fun, owning property.

Fauna

Not the world's sharpest image, but clear enough to show some of our local wildlife.  Martyn was looking out over the garden this morning at around pee o'clock and called me: this magnificent badger was just finishing off the peanuts, and then moved on to the bird seed.  I grabbed the SLR camera and propped it against the window frame, getting this and a couple of other views despite 1-second exposures.  The lamp over the terrace was just strong enough, but lacked the width of beam I'd have needed to catch the foxes that were also in the garden at the time.  Back to more familiar traffic this morning: Arthur Mallard has been in for his breakfast and pushed off again.  We have a number of newts in the pond, and see a frog there from time to time.  We aren't seeing so many of the smaller birds this year for some reason.  I don't think either of our nesting boxes is in use, though there is definitely a family of blue tits somewhere nearby, and we saw a blackbird feeding one of its young yesterday.  Of pigeons, wood and feral, no shortage, and the jays too appreciate the peanuts.   

The flora aren't doing badly either.  We're getting as much as we can planted out in preparation for our travels, and Martyn has ordered an irrigation device, which should help to ensure that we have tomatoes and spuds.  Strong winds and rain have meant that our oriental poppies have lasted even less long than usual.  The aquilegias we planted last year are giving a good show now, and the cistus and their helianthemum cousins are also doing well.  This year's first batch of fuchsia cuttings is now spread across beds and containers: remains to be seen if the next lot will make it.  I set to with a pickaxe and broke up the bed under the front window on Monday, and heaved in a couple of buckets of home-made compost.  The soil was like concrete, the gutter above it having leaked on it for a few months last winter until we could get it sorted.  I've planted out a batch of rudbeckia seedlings and hope they strengthen up before the slugs get them.  Not terribly good plants: the compost I've been using seems prone to mildew.  Well, as we usually say, they'll do one thing or the other.

Technology, Ancient and Modern

Just musing on technology.  The power of this little laptop computer is hugely greater than my first little Compaq LTE which had, back then in 1990, a 286 processor, a mind-blowing 30 Mb of hard disk memory and none of yer Windows nonsense.  It communicated with the office via a dial-up modem connexion, running at a staggering 2.4 kB/sec, using an external modem which was close on the size of the computer itself, plugged into a phone socket for the separate line that I had to have for data traffic.  Yesterday, once this machine had recovered, thanks to 24 hours in the airing cupboard, from my emptying a mug of tea into it, I set to and did a rather belated back-up.  The photos and documents I copied would have taken close to 200 of my old LTE hard disks to store.  Now, they’re all stored on a USB stick that I carry around on my key ring (and I’d better not forget to back it up to my desktop).  The laptop communicates via an internal radio modem to a router that shares the phone line with voice traffic, and does so at tens of Mb/sec, which often, these days, seems maddeningly slow.  And I'm hardly using the dernier cri of technology.

At the heavier end of the world of technology, I’ve been watching the first flight of the Airbus A350.  Not only on TV, but, via the computer and a webcast from the Toulouse TV station.  All one can say at this point is that it flies: we’ll find out later how well.  It’s nice to know, not wishing to seem too jingoistic, that there’s a bit of British technology in it: the engines, the wings and the landing gear are made in the UK.  As I write, I’m following the flight in real time on flightradar24.com which, I warn you, is seriously habit forming.  In a minute or two the aeroplane will be visible from the terrace of the Grand Café in Limoux, where we have often sat and watched a somewhat more prosaic world go by.

I was less enthusiastic about some slightly older technology on Wednesday night.  On arriving home after a more than usually strenuous day at the unmentionable hobby, I went to get the by then necessary wine out of the boot.  It was raining, so I was cowering under the small overhang of the garage door, and caught myself on the forehead with the tailgate, freeing the odd square centimetre of skin.  Scalps bleed profusely, of course, so it seemed quite dramatic for a moment or two.  Healing nicely now, though.

I guess one shouldn't be too surprised at the pace of technological change.  After all, in my father's lifetime, aviation progressed from the Sopwith Camel to the Concorde.  When my mother was young, she wrote with a pen dipped in ink.  When she died, she had a typewriter with an electronic memory, and I was using a Pentium-powered Compaq computer.  At this rate, speech and touch too will have been rendered obsolete by the turn of the century!

9 June, central heating on...

We've had a beautiful few days, granted, but it's still disappointing to have to reach for the fleece jacket before hanging out the washing.  And having to wait for the drizzle to stop.  Of course, wet weather + sun = weeds.  I took three buckets thereof out of the tiny bed at the boundary between us and The Boundary yesterday afternoon, and can once again see the rather unhappy-looking box hedge I planted two months ago.  I think I've lost one plant: the soil is very poor and dry, impoverished by the large leylandii that we got taken down last back end.  Some watering and poultry muck pellets may help.  Quite a few plants have started flowering this week: the iris sibirica (two varieties), the cistus, the helianthemums and the climbing rose Danse du Feu (best pronounced in a Percy Thrower accent).  Andy and Celia came round on Monday bearing courgette and tomato plants, so in places we're looking pretty verdant.  Martyn has done a bit more work on the rockery, and has planted out the donor fuchsia plants.  I've potted up the first lot of cuttings therefrom, and they look good.  The cosmos and dimorphotheca are now mostly planted out, and a few of the rudbeckias are coming up to the point at which they too can go out.  When I sold some for charity a few years ago, I labelled them with a testimonial: 'Delicious!  Joe Slug, Tonbridge'.  I'm a shameless user of metaldehyde pellets, I'm afraid. 

I was just thinking about heading upstairs the other night when Martyn called me: there was a badger at the top of the terrace steps, helping itself to peanuts we'd put out for the birds.  I think it may have been a young 'un: it was quite small compared with some we've met on our travels.  Of the ducks, not much news.  Arthur was evidently on the pond for a little while this morning, but had cleared off by the time I emerged from the shower room.  We hadn't seen him in the couple of weeks we've been back, so it's nice to know he's still around.  We were looking for him at the big pond one day earlier in the week when someone working on one of the houses nearby told us that a duck regularly came to the door asking to be fed.  Sounds like 'im.

Art crowd, 6 June, Forges-l'Evêque

Arthur did not, however, deign to appear while the art group was here on Thursday morning.  We meet here a couple of times a year when there's a project to debrief, since the conservatory has a rather better acoustic than the echoing scout hut where we meet to do our painting.  I really enjoy having the crowd round, and tend to bake something for the occasion.  This time it was garlic and pesto rolls, served with the injunction that, if they had interesting plans for the evening, it might be an idea to feed something garlicky to whomever the plans might also interest...  Someone quipped that it looked more like a WI meeting than an art group gathering, but although we did have tea and cake, we also progressed to glasses of Blanquette.

The project theme this time was Rustlings of Spring.  Joan (second from right, above) turned out a range of experimental pictures of catkins.  She is the most accomplished experimenter among us,  and an inspiration to us all.  Mary (to Joan's right) had done a lovely painting of a hedgehog.  Yr obed servt did a piece from a photo he took 13 years ago up on the Cagalière, when the helianthemums were newly in flower and attracting the bees.  Acrylics on canvas.  I notice from the file title that the photograph was taken on 24 April.  Note that the helianthemums at Forges-L'Evêque have only started into flower today.  To be fair, though, there is a difference of 8° of latitude between the two, and in any case everything here is 2-3 weeks late.  It looks like the next art class project is antiques.  Lots of self-portraits in prospect.

Plans abound for our next trip south in a couple of weeks' time.  (Given that building work on the Lagrasse house starts tomorrow, I may have to dash down before then - but I hope not.)  We've sold the great-nephews and nieces into white slavery and on the proceeds booked a sail home from Santander, with a few nights in Bilbao on the way.  The ghastly rock festival known as something like Abracadaconnasses begins in Lagrasse on 19 July.  Our guests will be with us until the 17th, so we've decided to close the place up that day and deposit them at Blagnac, then head on to the Basque country for a few days.  So I'm having lots of fun researching things to see and how to get there.  Martyn, having survived the Bay of Biscay/Golfe de Gascogne in an unfrocked troop ship, assures me that our ferry will boast roughly twice its displacement.