Sneeze, cough, grizzle

Like any self-respecting bloke, I sink into a swamp of self-pity, paracetamol and liquor when I get a cold.  Annie having acquired one from a fellow Ryanair sufferer en route to France passed it on to Marion, who passed it on to us during the couple of days we spent with them at Le Roc.  I'm just hoping we didn't give it to Celia and Andy, who braved vile weather to come and collect us from Gatwick.  I'm ashamed of myself for making a fuss: we learned during our recent visit to France that one of our village builders, Erhard,  finally succumbed to cancer on 26 July.  He looked hale and hearty when we saw him last summer a few years post-surgery, sporting a spectacular scar down his chest and abdomen (it was a very hot day...).  He was looking pretty rough in the spring, however, and that was the last time we saw him.  Our current builder, Pierre, tells me that Erhard, once a big strapping lad, had shrunk to about 50kg.  Nice fellow: he did a good and extremely reasonable job of waterproofing the valley between the roof and the stairwell.  He tolerated my poor German when I felt the need to wheel it creakily out, but we generally met on the neutral ground of our second language, French. 

We closed up the house last Monday, having done the worst of the laundry the day before, and got it dry.  That just left the cleaning, and this time I adopted the slightly novel approach of doing my bit dressed in boxers and slippers.  The job, like any physical work in the summer, always brings me out in a sweat, so this time I arrived at a means of avoiding leaving a shirt in the laundry basket until we return. 

A couple of days before we left, we took our usual ride into the hills and down to Limoux.  The sky was clear, so we got fine views of the Corbières and the Pyrenees.  Our friendly donkeys, one black and one white, were in evidence, and yet again I'd forgotten to bring them a handful of carrots.  We just don't tire of the view from up there, and this time we were rewarded with a remarkable display of lenticular clouds.  Evidently glider pilots seek them out because of the strong updraught associated with them, whereas commercial and private pilots try to give them a wide berth for the same reason.  They are certainly spectacular, and this has been a good year for them.  Down  in Limoux we ordered our usual pizzas, and though the service was polite and prompt, my pizza left me feeling queasy for the rest of the day.  We really desperately need some better addresses. 

A positive customer experience to report, by the way.  We got to Toulouse Airport a little early.  At that point our flight was still on the ground at Gatwick, which it left an hour and a half late.  (I hope that whoever decided to build the airport in a fog and frost hollow is now sitting on an uncomfortably damp cloud.)  It's an ill wind, and the delay gave us a chance to catch up on email thanks to a good free WiFi service, and to have an early supper - in my case, chicken breast stuffed with chopped hazelnuts, wrapped in jambon cru and served with a good gratin.  Martin's choice of a faux-filet was no longer available, but the helpful waitress said they'd do a 200g entrecôte for the same price.  A couple of glasses of good rosé and a friendly smile from waitress Martine completed the good impression.

Back here it's back to the usual.  We are heartily grateful to be reunited with our comfortable, tall cars and their automatic gearboxes.  Art class for me on Thursday, weekly free taxi duty for Martyn.  I'm playing with some sketches based on photos I took while we were away, and hope they'll come to something.  The garden is pretty: some of the roses are into a new flush, the cosmos are flowering well and we have been cropping apples and tomatoes.  Martyn has made an apple crumble for tonight, plus. I notice, a second batch of stewed apple for the freezer.  I've prepared a Delia sow belly recipe, which is ready to go in the oven a little later.  Nothing like a dose of the sniffles to send one rushing for comfort food.

Seaside sun and scenery

We spent a pleasant day at the seaside yesterday - or the lagoonside, if you're pedantic, like me.  We used the old N9 for much of the way, and as with our trip to Perpignan last week, we noticed that there has been something of a crackdown on roadside prostitution.  We saw only one woman. sitting in her 4x4 at the roadside at right angles to the traffic, and for all we know, she might have been waiting for the repairers.  (Though I doubt it.)  For part of the way we were stuck behind a beat-up white van that was fluctuating between 60 and 90 km/h, and weaving all over the road.  Damned if I didn't meet exactly the same vehicle this morning on the way to the market town, performing very similarly.  When I pulled out to pass him, he was, of course, gassing away on his mobile phone. 

The car is thoroughly beastly.  Unrefined, skittish, inflexible and uncomfortable.  But it has rubber on its front wheels, and it doesn't use much fuel, so we'll thole it for our last week.

Sète, seen from Mèze

Mèze and Bouzigues are attractive ports on the Bassin de Thau, and are altogether more pleasant on a fine day at this time of year.  We had a good wander round, and even in late September I was wishing I'd brought a hat.  It was a bit too breezy for the restaurant to wind out its awning.  Not much French to be heard in the restaurant, but at least three Anglophone tables, one Danish and one Dutch around us.  The service seemed to be suffering from the sun too: it was exceptionally slow, and the top-up quart de rosé we ordered just didn't appear.  Anyway, I came home with a few ideas that may occupy some of my Thursday mornings at art class. 

Just when I thought things were getting better...

I thought I'd been detecting some improvements in customer service hereabouts, but time after time lately we've been disappointed. I grizzled the other day about the service at our regular haunt by the canal.

No-show by builder for his appointment here on Saturday morning.  He has had the good grace to apologise, and says he'll be here today at 16:30.  We'll see.

Today we went to change the bald-tyred rental car.  The fellow looked at the tyres and said there was plenty left: they weren't quite worn down to the 1mm warning strips.  'If you want to change it, I'll change it', and he proceeded to offer us a similar car with even higher mileage and more dings and scrapes.  It wouldn't be ready for another ten minutes.  So off we went to have lunch in the airport, where the waitress was as miserable as sin, took down the order incorrectly and then brought us the mats, napkins and cutlery and told us to set the table ourselves.  Lunch was foul.  Martyn's salmon was over-cooked.  How can you bugger up a croque-monsieur?  Well, the airport caff managed it with flying colours - most of them black.

Back to the snotty clerk at the car rental shop after about 45 minutes.  Car still not available.  What have you got?  So we have a smaller car, wholly lacking in refinement, but at least with only 5 gears (which, however, need even more rowing than on the last car) but at least with fewer gimmicks, better visibility and rubber on the front wheels.  The replacement Focus swept in as we teetered out in our diminutive Peugeot - fair enough: I'd almost certainly have rejected it anyway.  Last time I deal with that company: name on request, but it isn't unrelated to a certain boldly-going Starship.

Grumpy old men?

On the Canal du Midi: photo by Martin Cooper

We had a delightful time yesterday meeting friends for lunch followed by a little boat trip on the canal.  Lunch was OK.  The restaurant served us a familiar menu, but with less than its usual charm and slickness, mistakes in orders and a district tepidness to some of the main courses.  To cap it, I got locked in the chiottes after lunch, just when we were rushing to get the 3:00 pm departure of the pleasure boat.  One of the staff applied a knife to the door lock from the outside, acting with no more urgency than they did in serving our meal.  This was obviously not the first time the lock had misbehaved: when I tried to force the pace, the whole of the sliding door frame shifted, opening up a number of old cracks.  Maybe they've had a long, hard season, and at least the experience fuelled the repartee for the rest of the afternoon.  My Tripadvisor enthusiasm for the place has now cooled a bit.

It's very sad to see so many huge gaps now in the ranks of plane trees that have lined the canal for centuries, their roots stabilising the banks and their canopies cutting the losses through evaporation.  To minimise the spread of the fungus responsible, they are felling each affected tree and its two neighbours on each side, so there are now some radical changes to the landscape, and huge pits have been dug in which to burn the infected trees on site.  (See also under foot and mouth.)  It will probably be necessary to fell the rest of the 42'000 trees, each felling and replacement costing €3'000.  Don't think I can hope to sponsor a whole tree, but I've sent off a cheque that will just about buy a twig or two.  Take a look at the web site.

We're not having much luck with airport restaurants.  Having found Perpignan's closed the other day, Carcassonne's today had a mile-long queue of young people.  We finished off lunching at the good old Buffalo Grill on the N113 as was.  Quick friendly service, good cheap food.  Phew.

And as for the oh-so-clever hire car, it shuts down when you put it in neutral and release the clutch pedal.  Startling until you find that it starts up again when you depress the clutch.  Too clever for its own good, I say.  Still, it can't be persuaded to use more than 5.6l/%km, or return less than 51mpg, so it has its virtues.

Systematic idleness

We've been doing a fair bit of sitting and reading of late.  Well, there's nothing we can do from here about the tomatoes, the grass or the badger diggings, so it's maybe time to catch up on reading and relaxing.  I've read a J K Rowling (The Casual Vacancy), a Lee Child or two, and an Ian McEwan, and have started into a third from the Booker Shortlist.  One of the few consolations of insomnia.  J K Rowling's piece puzzles me.  The subject matter is essentially depressing - sudden death, suicide, squalor, bigotry, bullying, self-harm, addiction, paedophilia, rape and worse - even Parish politics.  Yet the narrative is bouncy, breezy, and I'm tempted to think, a bit 'look at these amusing examples of The Lower Orders and pompous provincials!'.   Lee Child is Lee Child: he should live and be well.  At least his plots are gloriously over-the-top, and the good guys win.  Of the Bookers, I'll mostly keep my own counsel till they pronounce.  So far I prefer the Japanese and Zimbabwean narrators to the Palestinian one, though I suspect the last is the best piece of writing, with a nod in the direction of Ms Mantel as to the obscurity of the central character until a chapter or so in - or maybe I'm just too dim to catch on.  Lit Crit was my utter downfall at finishing school, it must be remembered.

We've had a fair mix of weather - still and warm, stormy with torrential rain, hot washing days, breezy washing days.  A trip to the seaside, and today an amble down through the Corbières to Perpignan and back.  The restaurant at the airport was closed, so rather than sit and look out over the apron, we had indifferent bought sandwiches beneath the memorial to the soldiers of the First Republic who fought the Kingdom of Spain at Peyrestortes in 1793.  It is doubtless sacrilege to remark that the memorial came in handy to file down a nail I broke on the door of our beastly hire car.  While we were there, one of the Orly flights came in, so we ambled down to watch it from the perimeter fence, next to the taxiway.  I was taken right back to my train-watching childhood when we got and returned (in that order) a friendly wave from the flight deck.  Nice to know that simple pleasures never lose their appeal.  Likewise the deep blue of the Med was fabulous today, and the wind- and kitesurfers on the Etang were having a spectacularly good time of it.  And the washing is dry, in and - ce qui n'est pas toujours le cas given the strong winds around here - all present and correct.

Of the car, hmmm.  It has all sorts of clever gizmos, and the one that annoys me most is the light that prompts you to change to a higher gear.  I caught myself shouting at it today 'if you're so [expletive deleted] smart, why don't you bloody do it yourself?'.  That said, the vehicle is 'chuckable' like an old Hillman Imp: you can throw it fast at corners and it whips round them as if on rails.  In normal driving, at the steering wheel, it's like with a Russian condom: if you can feel anything, you must be hallucinating.

Back to civilisation, Chapter 29

They seem to have sorted their queuing problems at the security desks at Gatwick, so we were through in good time for cups of tea overlooking the field.  (I'd removed shoes, change, watch, door key and belt, but the buzzer still went off - must be the teeth.)  The flight was smooth and comfortable apart from the scraiching bairns nearby, but we ain't complainin' too much.  We arrived just as a BA A380 was taking off, still wearing its F-WWxx registration.  (Interesting - well, up to a point... - that they use the same WW as temporary car registrations.  The letter 'W' rarely occurs in French, or not outside Flanders, at least.)  The car hire outfit couldn't produce an automatic, and adding insult to injury, have provided us with a Ford Focus with no fewer than six gears, well over 40'000k on the clock since December, and a barely legal amount of tread on the fronts.  As for the gears, I tend to use 1, 2, 4 and 6 out of sheer cussedness, since the biggish diesel motor is torquey.  It is a low-slung contraption, so getting in and out is something of a grunt and groan experience.  I'm starting to get the hang of the minor controls, and have managed to switch off the infuriating device that shakes the steering wheel when you move back into the right-hand lane after overtaking, the amber light in the door mirror having told you it's safe to do so....  But there remain a legion of buttons and knobs, the functions of which I can't even guess at.  Wonder if it makes a decent pot of tea?  Must RTFM (Read The Manual).

The weather is ideal: still, cloudless and warm, so we spent a while up on the terrace last night watching the bats until the bugs started getting interested.  Today we have been shopping: important stuff like rosé, rouge, gin (friends coming for drinks tomorrow) and Armagnac.  The freezer is now stocked up for a good week's meals, and Martyn has made up a big vat of fruit salad, not without a squirt of Muscat de Rivesaltes, one hastens to add.  He has also made a ratatouille to go with some salmon this evening.

The air is pretty clear today, so we had good views of the Canigou on the way home from the market town - similar yesterday, now I remember: we had decent views of the Pyrenees as we came down.  What's missing, however, is the riot of colour we had in June and July: everything looks rather scorched.  The pale blue of the copper sulphate they're spraying on the vines at Camplong isn't quite the same.