France - For Better or Worse

All Good Gifts Around Us......

2010-09-13T05:49:00.000-07:00

As I think I’ve said before (ad infinitum probably) September and October are the best months to be here in the Haute Garonne. There are three main reasons: the tourists have gone home (sorry tourists... love to see you come, love to see you go), the weather is absolutely, gloriously warm and mellow and we are awash with nature’s bounty.

I’ve been on the receiving end of ‘all good gifts around us’ this week and while they may have been ‘sent from heaven above’ they have been delivered by my lovely friends and neighbours.

It’s amazing what a few straggly cabbage plants can bring forth. Capt. Sensible had some left over in the spring, and rather than throw them away he gave them to Serge, who keeps chickens and has a ‘potager’ close to our garden. Serge speaks no English, Capt Sensible speaks no French, but so far we have had in return, an abundance of ‘salade’, some melons, haricot vert and just this weekend enough tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and courgettes to make ratatouille for the entire village… or so it seemed.

I’ve also been on the receiving end of some delicious plums. The only problem was my small freezer was jam packed with a whole load of apricots which were going cheap on the market …9 kilo trays for €5. Well, that was too good for Capt Sensible to turn down, despite my weak protests that the freezer was full of home- grown raspberries.

If the plums can’t be frozen they can be turned into plum brandy…. you can see the way my mind works, can’t you?

I worked out that if I got going sharpish we could have some plum liqueur in time for Christmas.

I’d got the vital ingredients – plums (d’accord) sugar and brandy (purloined from Capt Sensible’s personal supply). Not his best French of course (I value my life) but the Terres Spanish stuff he has for ordinary consumption. I needed vodka - pas de problem and a container large enough to hold a couple of pounds of plums plus the sugar and alcohol. That was a bit of a problem, but then I remembered a rumtopf pot which I hadn’t used for years. I’d had a bit of a disaster on the only occasion I’d attempted preserve plums, apricots and peaches in the manner described in the recipe that came with it. The fruit went mouldy, the alcohol had secondary and ‘thirdary’ fermentation and the rumtopf became a breeding ground for botulism. It spent the next few years gathering dust as a kitchen ornament until, for some unexplained reason, I paid good money to transport it to France with all the other bits of junk that I foolishly thought might come in useful one day.

And so it has, but I don’t intend to leave the plums in any longer than necessary.

If you have an over-abundance of plums there’s just time to turn them into a Christmas liqueur. This recipe is very simple, and just the thing to warm you up after a chilly day in the mountains.

You’ll need a large macerating container with a lid ... a 1 litre kilner jar is ideal if you haven’t got a rumptopf crock,
and :
a kilo of plums
450 gms white sugar
500 ml. vodka
125 ml. brandy.

Wash, dry, halve and de-stone the plums. Place in the jar, layering with the sugar, then add the alcohol. Stir gently to mix the liquid and fruit, put on the lid and leave in a cool dark place for 2 months. Strain the liquid through a muslin cloth into a large jug, cover and leave to settle in a cool place overnight and then strain again. Bottle and leave for another 4 weeks. The liqueur should be port wine coloured and crystal clear, if it’s not, leave another week or two.

On Friday when Serge’s wife Martine turned up with the peppers, aubergines etc. the timing couldn’t have been better, as I had a roast shoulder of lamb planned for the weekend. I love ratatouille with lamb, and Serge had come up with all the ingredients.

This is my haphazard recipe for ratatouille:

I cut the courgettes,peppers and aubergines in half, leaving the tomatoes whole, and pour over a little olive oil. This time I used lemon flavoured oil(just because I had some in the cupboard), but you could use chilli oil for a bit of spicy heat.

I put all the veg in a big roasting tin, throw on some unpeeled garlic cloves (I like lots, but it’s a personal choice) some sprigs of thyme, a few roughly torn basil leaves and roast for about 20 mins in a hot oven.

When the veggies are nicely brown and beginning to go soft I take them out of the oven, leave to cool, then cut the peppers, courgettes and aubergines into cubes(large or small as you like) and skin the tomatoes. I squidge the garlic, which should be soft and squidgeable, onto the peeled tomatoes and mash them up a bit with a little more oil. This is then poured over the cubed vegetable, given a quick stir and spooned into a serving dish. You can serve it straight away at room temperature as part of a vegetarian lunch or, as I do, leave overnight in the fridge and re-heat in the oven and serve with the lamb. I think roasting the vegetables first, and leaving overnight increases the flavour. And beats the tinned ‘rat’ into a cocked hat.

The World comes to Montrejeau

2010-08-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

Every August our local market town sees an invasion. It has been going on for over 50 years, fortunately for the townspeople, the invaders are friendly. They arrive in coaches, rather than tanks, and they fill the streets with colour and a wide variety of languages.

It's the annual folklore festival of music and dance, and it happens in many a French town during the summer.

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It began for Montrejeau in 1959, and many of the countries taking part came from parts of Europe that were still firmly behind the Iron Curtain. I suppose it was one way of getting out and seeing what was going on in the rest of Europe - cultural visits being allowed, but I wonder if all the dance groups went home with as many as they came with?

Today's dancers and musicians come from all over the world as well as Europe. Most of the African or Caribbean performers come from former French colonies, and they certainly give the town an exotic air for a day or two. South America gets in on the act too, I remember one year a large Puerto Rican group brought traffic to a standstill, and almost took the whole show over in their wild enthusiasm.

One year, to our amazement, we heard what sounded like a Scots pipe band coming into the square... and it was. They went down a storm. Last year there were some Morris Men from Plymouth complete with fool ... they were greeted with bewilderment. Pipes, the French can do, a lot of French departments have a history of bagpipes... in fact the Breton group that came a couple of years ago had 'baguettes' that were almost identical to the Scots variety. Not so sure about their understanding of men with flowers in their hats and bells on their legs, waving coloured ribbons in the air.

It's nice to know that this wonderful cultural exchange is still going on after 50 years, and with no sign of the enthusiasm waning, certainly not on the part of the performers. On the last day they are here it's market day, and with summer tourists,plus 400 dancers, musicians and back-up teams (mostly still in national dress) the town is absolutely jammed packed. When it co-incides with a public holiday(The Feast of the Assumption)it's even worse. Thank goodness it's a good-will invasion.

The Harvest Home

2010-08-01T06:53:00.000-07:00

In the Christian church the first Sunday in August marks (or marked) the start of Lammas-tide (one never knows with modern liturgy these days- it could be totally obliterated from the list of Anglican festivals ) Anyway Lammas runs from now until Michaelmas(Sept 29th), in other words through the harvest season. It derides its name from the medieval English word ‘lam’ meaning bread, and traditionally a loaf was baked using grain from the first sheaves brought in from the field.

Living where we do the seasons are as marked as they were in medieval England, just that bit earlier. Our hay harvest is all but over. The hay has been cut, left to dry (unfortunately we’ve had the wettest July since we’ve lived in France ) and for the past three or four weeks we have become accustomed to the rattle of tractors and over-loaded trailers roaring up and down the road in a frantic attempt to get it all in and under cover. It would seem an awful lot of hard work – they’re still at it at 11 o’clock at night – but there are beef cattle to be fed all through the winter so hay is money. The more you can store the less you’ll have to fork out for commercial feed, and the better fed the cattle will be.

Being a secular country, whilst hiding under the pretence of being a Catholic country (or should that be the other way round? One never knows with the French) old religious ceremonies seem to have been forgotten, but from a non religious aspect the bucolic celebrations associated with the harvest and the land are still observed here.

From the middle of July the rural community is gearing up for old time markets and harvest fetes.

The Marche L’Ancienne in Montrejeau acts as a good advertising platform for the August harvest celebrations. Out come the ancient tractors that rarely see the light of day, puffing, coughing and burning a small hole in the ozone layer immediately over the town.

There are teams of oxen, shepherds on horseback with their dogs riding side saddle, decorated farm trailers and the ubiquitous majorettes, the tinys looking vaguely worried as they try to keep up with the ‘big girls’, and not drop their batons.

The old copper still, that to this day pitches up in the local villages to distil the fruit harvest into something very alcoholic and inflammable, is brought out and joins the parade. It’s the same-old, same-old every year and although there is a smattering of tourists in the main the crowd is the same. You know that by the leg-pulling, joking and laughing going on as the older generation recognise old friends and neighbours.

The first weekend in August (which coincides with Lammas Sunday) sees the first of two Fetes de Moissan held in Le Cuing and Lecussan. The old farm machinery that’s been in the barn all year is dusted down and brought out, the threshing machines are checked out and a huge meal consisting of multiple versions of chicken is served in vast airless marquees.

All the old skills are on display, oxen grinding grain on a giant millstone, hand reaping, and threshing.
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The air is oppressively hot, and the smell of steam and oil mingles with the aroma of roast chicken.

The stubble scratches unprotected toes, and nothing runs to the published timetable …. but what the hell ? It’s fun, and like the Marche L’Ancienne it’s the same every year which is how our rural neighbours like it.

Racing Bikes and Fireworks

2010-07-17T06:04:00.000-07:00

July and August are the months when it all kicks off here. Well, ‘here’ is no different to the rest of the country. For 10 months of the year the Haute Garonne jogs along at a fairly even pace – a ‘vide grenier’ every other Sunday somewhere, a ‘fete locale’ a repas de chasseurs, a Feu de St Jean (which is a good excuse for a meal and a bonfire) – nothing exceptional. But in the next eight weeks the department will go stark raving mad.

The celebrations commence with the commemoration of the Revolution. July 14th used to be known as Bastille Day, but now it seems to be known by the more PC title of the Fête Nationale. All the blood letting which followed the storming of the Bastille has been diplomatically shelved in favour of a public holiday culminating in firework displays. Nowhere in France can compete with the Paris display – well the Eiffel Tower and the Champs de Mar are pretty impressive in daylight, but at night, with the sky exploding in a thousand stars, the city becomes magical.

The second best display must be the Feu d’Artifice mounted on the walls of La Cité in Carcassonne There the surrounding vineyards are illuminated by a cavalcade of fireworks which soar up from the city ramparts and roll down the rows of vines in an ever-expanding explosion of colour. The event draws in thousands who park up anywhere they can, unpack a picnic and sit it out till the night sky darkens and a lone rocket signals the start of the spectacle. The tourists prefer to cram into the old city to soak up the atmosphere, all they actually do is pay over the odds for a drink, and miss the best of the display because they can’t actually see it. But they’ll get plenty of ‘atmosphere’ – the smell of burgers and chips, pizzas and several thousand sweaty bodies struggling to navigate the crowded cobbled alleyways. Not to mention a crick in the neck, and temporary deafness when the fireworks go off from the city walls.
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Old hands find a grassy knoll outside the city and bring their own food and wine. A few years ago the police had to close the Toulouse/Narbonne motorway due to the huge number of cars which had stopped on the hard shoulder to watch. Now it’s slightly more controlled, well, as far as the French ‘en fête’ can be controlled.

In the face of that sort of competition our nearest town had its firework celebrations the night before. On a suitably balmy evening after a very hot day, we joined friends at the lakeside restaurant, along with half the town, and several million flying things (ants, small flies? ) and watched the municipal fireworks, which like the Carcassonne ones are entirely free. The French government may have warned the nation that we must tighten our belts and not spend public money, but what the hell…. let’s all fiddle while Rome burns, except, being in France, we’ll replace the violin with fireworks.

In the week following the Fête Nationale the Tour de France descends on us for the Pyrenean stage of the endurance race. It usually passes within 10 miles of our village, and depending on the weather (it’s usually unbearably hot), how early they close the roads and if we have a ‘window’ in our non- existent social diary (life is one long party for retirees in rural France!) we sometimes endure a couple of hot sticky hours waiting for the pelaton to whiz past.

What am I complaining about? I’m not clad in sweaty lycra, bent over the handlebars of an instrument of torture otherwise known as a racing bike. I’ve yet to understand why they choose the hottest month of the year to stage the thing. I’m obviously missing the point, as I usually do where physical activity is concerned.

Now I have a small grandson I probably should be out there with all the other grannies and granddads scooping up the rubbishy freebies that the ‘caravan’ throws out to the eager masses. I sometimes wonder if the crowds are there to watch the race, or collect free samples of coffee, coloured pencils, packs of kids card games and cheap hats that rain down from the vans, cars and lorries. The riders speed by in a matter of seconds so I guess the freebies are the major draw.

The last time I watched Le Tour one of the riders lost a water bottle and two blokes nearly fell into the Garonne to get it. It was probably for sale on Ebay by six o’clock that night…. ‘as used by Lance Armstrong’.

As well as the major events we’ve the usual crop of August music festivals, everything from organ recitals, to hot jazz. And in case thoughts are turning to Christmas, there’s the annual exhibition and sale of Provencal santons in Saint Bertrand de Comminges. What better time to choose your Christmas crib than August?

Look Out Carla's About!

2010-06-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

Last Friday saw the 70th anniversary of General de Gaulle’s first speech via the BBC to the newly occupied French people urging Frenchmen to join him in resistance to Hitler and the Vichy government. It is quite ironic that very few French people actually heard the broadcast, and those that did, hadn’t a clue who he was. Indeed some cynics thought, with a name like de Gaulle, he was a pseudo Frenchman invented by the British government in an attempt to stir up French national fervour. As if we would! Well, not for nothing did the French refer to us as ‘perfidious Albion’.

Strangely, for no-one having heard him, and the BBC not having thought it important enough to save the original broadcast, every word of it can be recalled. So much so, the opening paragraph is engraved on the war memorial of our nearest market town. Oh well, it’s always said a prophet is never recognized in his own country!

Anyway the old boy got plenty of mileage last week. Nicolas arrived in London with medals to award to veterans now in their nineties (better late than never one might say) plenty of kepi-wearing military attachés, and of course Carla.

Oh dear, Mlle. Bruni should really come with a health warning – to other leader’s wives. They should be briefed on the multitude of tricks the French First Lady has up her model’s sleeve, and make sure they never stand next to her for a photo shoot.

Pity poor old Samantha Cameron. Being five months pregnant is tricky. The bump is too big not to be noticed and too small to be in the beautiful full bloom of late pregnancy. She’s sort of at that lumpy stage, and she hasn’t a clue what to do with her hands. There’s not enough there to rest her arms on top of the bump, so she clasps them underneath it, like she’s afraid it’s going to fall off. Someone give her a handbag, for heavens sake. But you have to have some sympathy for her Anyone who’s five months pregnant, and new to the job of consort to the Prime Minister, would rather die than be photographed beside someone as media-savvy as Carla Bruni.

World leader’s spouses must dread the words ‘The French President is making an official visit and he’s bringing his wife with him.’ Except Michelle Obama. As she’s about 8 feet tall, and built like an Olympic sprinter, she can well hold her own with Carla, as is proved in the photo taken on a visit to the White House; in fact Mrs. Obama makes Carla look quite washed out. Anyone but the American First Lady might as well abandon all hope of looking chic

I’ve noticed Carla is nowhere to be seen when hubby is meeting Angela Merkel …. is this a coincidence, or some smart maneuvering on the part of the German Chancellor? Maybe she arranges for her to be accidentally locked in the loo when the official photographer arrives. She’s no fool, is Angela. She’s also, bless her, incredibly dumpy so she knows the score.

Mrs. S was up to all her old tricks in London. She, like the late Princess of Wales, can hear the click of a camera shutter at 300 yards and that’s when ‘model’ mode kicks in, well old habits die hard. So there she was, tossing her mane and skittering about like the winner of the 2.30 at Epsom. The pout, the flick of the hair, the flutter of the eyelashes, I’d have loved to have seen her and Lady Diana sharing the same platform. Wonder who would have won? I think my money might have been on Lady Di. Prince Charles, minus Camilla (had she been forewarned?) seemed to be reduced to a pink-flushed jelly when faced with Carla’s performance, but the Boy David, to his credit, ignored La Bruni’s shenanigans, preferring to put an protective arm round Samantha, who looked as if she would rather have been having an enema in the delivery room than posing in the doorway of number 10.

What Madame de Gaulle would have made of it all I’ve no idea, but I’ll bet it had the old general spinning in his grave.

A Lively, Lovely Weekend

2010-05-24T10:19:00.000-07:00

Well it would seem we have survived yet another Pentecostal ‘Féte Locale’. Fortunately it only happens once a year, because it can amount to a good deal of sleep deprivation … if you happen to live in the centre of the village, as we do.

The féte, as in most French villages lasts over the weekend, and usually kicks off on Friday evening. For the past week lorries and big caravans have arrived, parked up on the salle de féte car park, and pitched camp. Like Boer ‘vortrekkers’ the caravans corral the dodgems, the floating ducks, the tombola, and the candy floss stall into a cosy circle. At the far end is the stage, from whence all the noise comes, with lights and amplifiers brooding silently over the fairground until the hour comes for it to spring into life. Round about 10.30 a deep, but persistent beat will erupt and it will continue until dawn breaks. We‘ve got used to it now, and thankfully, due to our thick walls and heavy shutters, when we go to bed we seem to be able to shut it out and get a reasonably good night’s sleep.

Friday and Saturday are given over to ‘les jeunes’. The proceedings kick off with a village ‘repas’ on Friday evening arranged by the salle de féte committee. The committee are all young people, which is in direct contrast to village committees in the UK, where the average age is about seventy. The food isn’t exactly ‘gourmet’ but the wine and digestifs flow, a good crowd turns up and before long someone will murder ‘La vie en Rose’, or ‘Mon Legionnaire’, before the oldies stagger home and les jeunes arrive for some unadulterated house music … or is it garage? Whatever it is it sure ain’t Piaf.

This year Saturday night was somewhat ‘livelier’ than normal. Around four in the morning some over-excited revellers decided to let off a barrage of thunder flashes. Not the great big ‘simulated- battleground- trainee- squaddies- for the use-of’ sort of thunder flashes, these were the domestic variety, but in the confined area of a narrow main street and village square they might just as well have . World War 3 (according to Steven Speilburg) was in imminent danger of breaking out, and even when the ammunition was exhausted the troops still had plenty of energy to return to the music, which after a brief breather, resumed with gusto.

Sunday was altogether quieter, with families pouring in from the surrounding villages around mid afternoon to sample the delights of the dodgems and the ‘barbe á pappa ‘ or granddad’s beard .. known to the rest of us as candy floss. Later in the afternoon the artillery arrived again and resumed their bombardment. Fortunately the bangs didn’t resonate quite as loudly in daylight. The music resumed but it ended earlier, about 2 am, perhaps the late night on the Saturday was catching up with them.

Today was essentially for the village. As is the custom with French fétes the celebrations start with a short service at the war memorial to honour the dead from the two World Wars. Shortly before 11 twenty or thirty villagers assemble at the church and walk the few metres to the memorial, lead by a side drummer and a bugler. The drummer adopts a funereal tone, reminiscent of the Revolution. I half expect to see a tumbrel, packed with condemned aristos, rumbling across the bridge en route to the guillotine. I think I’ve watched ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ too often, due to a schoolgirl crush on Dirk Bogarde, now totally demolished by reading John Coldstream’s 2004 biography on my teenage heartthrob.

The service is short; a bouquet is placed at the foot of the monument and the bugler launches into the ‘Marseillaise’. After this everyone retires to the bar for free drinks. An accordionist appears, the side drummer (suitably refreshed) shows off his supreme ability to perform single paradiddles and embarks on a musical duel with the accordionist. The battle seems to end in a draw.

Some considerable time later the bugler and the side drummer depart in their car. I wonder if they advertise themselves in the local free newspaper … ‘ Side drummer and bugler available for fétes locale, Bastille Day celebrations, VE day anniversaries and bah mitzvahs. Competitive rates’.

After this, the afternoon has been remarkably quiet. The boules tournament was well supported by players (all male) and spectators, and played under the shade of the trees, strangely boule is not a sport that’s played at any other time in the village; I think it needs a drowsy, hot afternoon and a plane tree-lined square, the sort you find in the south. It seems to go perfectly with pernod and water, and black olives.

We have had a perfect weekend, with the garden thermometer hitting the high 30’s, but it doesn’t always work out like that. The weather here can sometimes be as capricious as Britain just when you really want it to be nice. The week’s forecast looks gloomy, with rain and falling temperatures, but at least no-one rained on our féte.

There have been half-hearted attempts by the French government to abolish Whit Monday as a public holiday, due to the fact that some years (this one for example) the month of May sees 4 separate public holidays. Up to now it’s been blithely ignored, and judging by the fun everyone has had today, I can see little Sarky and his government in that tumbrel if they persist in enforcing it.

Problems in Paradise.

2010-04-27T06:22:00.000-07:00

For anyone living in France and relying on an income from the UK these have been hard times. Sterling has taken a real bashing over the past eighteen months and even though France has been relatively lucky in avoiding the worst effects of recession it has not been immune to inflation. Add these two facts together, and you have some pretty unhappy expats.

Judging by recent postings on expat forums it would seem that there is a steady stream of disillusioned Brits selling up and heading home. Every day, it seems there are small ads. offering left hand drive cars with low mileage, nearly-new white goods, and of course houses, some renovated, some in the process of.

There are as I see it three main reasons for abandoning the dream.
For the under-fifties who have relocated here and need to earn a living the sheer practicalities of the idea are a nightmare. One of the big dreams has been running a B&B (chambre d’hôte)or renovating tumble-down barns into gites, two enterprises that are reasonably easy to set up in Britain. Not so in France.

Many expats come with a trade - electricians, builders, and plumbers – again a pretty straight forward occupation to persue in the UK. But to start any sort of business in France is an obstacle course in which (especially if your French is a bit basic) the participants are blindfolded and handcuffed.

And it doesn’t matter how small your enterprise is going to be. I met a young couple last year who had jumped through every hoop the Chambre de Metiers could produce in an attempt to sell Asian food and spices on a few local markets. It was hardly on a global scale and after a few months of struggling they felt defeated and deflated. They were regretfully returning to the UK, but with the vow, like General Macarthur, to return, albeit when they were closer to retirement. The rules and regs. have been loosened a little in the last couple of years, with the creation of the Auto-entrepreneur scheme specifically for small, one- man businesses. But its still a little shop of horrors.Some returning expats can become a bit paranoid and actually believe that the French have it in for Brits wanting to earn a living in their country, but they forget that French entrepreneurs have to go through the same struggle.

The over-fifties may not have the this problem, as by and large they tend to be early-retired with a good pension pot, or investments, or older retirees with a state pension and perhaps a small private pension. But it’s this latter group that have been suffering from the strength of the euro, so this is one of the major reasons for returning to the UK.

Another common thread for the over-fifties is family ties, and in particular grandchildren.Even with technology such as Skype, and webcams, many retirees (I have to say it’s usually grandmas) genuinely miss seeing their grandchildren on a regular basis. Those cheap air-fares that convinced us that friends and relatives could pop over for long weekends don’t seem that cheap when you come to the ‘pay now’ bit the online booking form. How did a 99p one-way ticket suddenly turn into the £130 debited to your bank card for a return for two adults? With mortgages to pay, rising prices and limited holiday allowance, sons and daughters just can’t afford to hop over with the grandchildren more than once a year.

Well, you might say, what’s wrong with older grand-kids coming over for a few weeks in the summer holidays? Brilliant idea. The brutal truth is that the lovely old farmhouse you bought in the middle of no-where, which you fell in love with for its peace and tranquillity is ‘Boresville Central ’ for teenagers. Four weeks with Granny and Grandad down a country track miles away from the nearest town seems like a prison sentence.

So with regret many retirees put their idyllic hideaway on the market, and pack up their retirement dream along with their dogs, cats and memories and move back. Often they disguise their loneliness by convincing themselves that their grown up children need them for child care duties. This may seem a selfless act of parental loyalty, but I wonder how many sons and daughters may actually dread the idea of Mum and Dad moving back to a house down the road?

A harsh reality of life in rural France for many expats is loneliness. And that affects all ages. I met a charming girl a few weeks ago, who moved here about a year ago to live with her partner in the house he was renovating. The views from the garden were spectacular, a pretty little village was less than half a mile away – I would have died for the location- but they were selling the house, and everything in it, and moving back. Lack of a regular income was the main reason, but she seem to be quite relieved as she’d been so bored and lonely when her partner was out at work. He spoke good French - she didn’t - so she was completely isolated. There was no-one around that was vaguely her age even if she had been fluent in the language, and in rural areas friendships are hard to establish. In this France is no different to any British village, xenophobia flourishes in backwaters.

Sometimes we need a good listener, either to help solve a problem, or just to have a moan to, and being so many miles away from close family can turn minor niggle into a full blown crisis. Fortunately help is at hand. There’s an excellent English speaking organisation, run by volunteers who understand the problems of life in a different country and culture. It’s similar to the Samaritans in that there is a dedicated phone line with listeners on hand to do just that … listen. They are specially trained and entirely non-judgemental, so in fact for some it’s much better than talking a problem over with a friend. How many of our friends can really be relied upon not to criticise or offer well-meaning, but wrong advise?

Their website is www.soshelpline.org (there's a link in the right hand column of this blog) and the phones are manned from 3pm to 11pm. And if you’ve time on your hands you can volunteer to train as a listener. If you don’t feel you could do that, there’s lots of other ways to help – from distributing publicity, to organising a fund raising event like a book sale or a coffee morning.

Au Revoir Cup Cakes, Bonjour Macarons

2010-04-19T11:33:00.000-07:00

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of cup cakes. I guess I’m too old.

In my day cupcakes were known as fairy cakes, the staple of childhood birthday parties (together with those disgusting rice krispie/chocolate things). My dear old Mum, she of the culinary disasters, never really got the hang of cake decorating, and anything involving icing was sure to end in tears. So my birthday offerings were neither tasty nor artistic. From memory, the cake bit was dry and the topping was a drizzle of icing with a scattering of hundreds and thousands which had been applied before the icing had started to set, so consequently the hundreds and thousands either dissolved into a lurid splodge of purple, yellow, pink and blue, or they slid gently off the top of the cake and collected in a pool around the rim of the paper case. Needless to say, there were always dozens of them left over at the end of the party, even though Mum had shovelled as many as decently possible into goodie bags for the departing guests. I guess most of them finished up in the dustbin or on the bird table. There were quite a lot of bird mortalities in our street just after my birthday.

The modern day ones, on which small fortunes have been made, are almost as bad. Mum’s lack of decoration was distinctly minimalist compared to these overblown works of confectionary. I regard any highly decorated cake with suspicion as they rarely live up to their promise, and those who were falling over themselves to be seen as cupcake connoisseurs are now admitting that most of them were dry and flavourless, and horror of horrors – laden with empty calories. If you’re going to be reckless with the calories at least get some satisfaction from it, I say. I’d opt for some Belgian chocolate, a slice of ‘Death by Chocolate’ cake, or a ‘proper’ dry martini (as made by a barman in Zaragossa in Northern Spain, but that’s another story)

Now it’s macarons that are the latest trendy confection. Not macaroons, they’re those big, flat almondy things which come with their own rice paper liner. Macarons are much more subtle.

So if cupcakes are passé, here come the macarons, little jewel-like delights of pastel coloured meringue sandwiched together with a rich butter cream filling.

Macarons have been around for years in France, although the word is derived from the Italian word maccarone. It’s reputed that they were introduced to France by Catherine de Medici following her marriage to the French king, Henri II in 1553. Mind you, so much in France has been attributed to Catherine de Medici it’s probably yet another myth.

Unlike macaroons, the macaron is small, neat and incredibly difficult to make at home. The finished result must be uniform, as they are going to be sandwiched together, and have a smooth shallow-domed top ( no peaky bits) It all sounds too tricky, unless you’re really skilled in the art of meringue making.

The fillings are divine. Anything from the traditional chocolate, coffee and raspberry (appropriately coloured meringue to match he flavouring) to pistachio, chestnut, orange blossom, mango, bergamot – new flavours seem to be added every day.

If you’d like to know more, visit the website of one of the best macaron makers in France .. www.laduree.fr. They have shops in Paris and many other French cities, as well as Dublin and London (Harrods). The website should really come with a warning: ‘Macarons can become addictive’.

Is It Really Here?

2010-03-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

I think it’s safe to say that Spring might have arrived at last. Of course that could be a bit premature; the last time I thought that winter had finally pushed off was about a month ago, when the temperature rose, the sun shone and on a day out, we actually managed to eat our sandwiches in a picnic area without coats.

February is usually a great month for Spring-like weather in the Haute Garonne. We’re blessed with short winters which, even though they might be cold, are at least bearable. The knowledge that by the middle of February we could be sitting out in the sun gives us something to look forward too.

When I say ‘sitting in the sun’ I don’t mean I’m stretched out on a sun lounger in shorts and a strappy top ( a sight which should not be inflicted on those of a delicate disposition), it’s more like light sweater and jeans and sitting in a south-facing position.

This is what rattles me about those grumbling crumblies in the UK who have an annual chip at expat OAP’s who receive the government winter fuel allowance. For a start not every retiree gets it … it’s only paid if you were already getting it before you left the UK; everyone in receipt of a retirement pension has paid in to the system over a period of at least forty years so it’s not a charitable freebie, and lastly (and hilariously) there is a certain section of UK pensioners who actually think that south of Calais the temperature never drops below 20c. I heard an old girl on the Jeremy Kyle show rabitting on about this very subject when I was in the UK last year. Bless her heart, she actually seem to think that we were all spending the money on cheap booze and fags. I suspect she regarded anyone who left Britain to retire to pastures new as traitors and as such certainly didn’t deserve government hand-outs.

Well I can tell her that we had it cold enough to freeze the thingies off a brass monkey this year, and every winter it’s cold enough for a 15 tog duvet, so there! 150€ worth of wood keeps one room warm for about three months, providing we don’t light the fire until 6’clock in the evening and additional heating by way of radiators probably puts the electricity bill up by 75% on the summer quarters.

Not that I’m grumbling – the winters here are dry, crisp and bright even on the worst days. My recollections of East Anglian winters are dominated by memories of days that never seemed to get light. And an awful lot of mud. The roads around my village are nearly always clean, dry and mudless, but then this is cattle country, devoid of sugar beet lorries en route to the processing plant.

The garden has suddenly put a spurt on, as we knew it would once the temperatures rose, The daffodils were open enough to provide me with a Mother’s Day bouquet ( I live with a cheap skate who prefers to grow me flowers rather than buy them, but it’s the thought that counts). The crocus are always a hardy bunch, they keep coming through whatever the weather, as do the primulas which have self-sown themselves from the communal open ground at the rear of the garden. The trees have developed a delicate green haze and even our gorgeous Aubrac cows are looking happy. Yes, I’m going to stick my neck out and say “ Printemps est arrive. ”

Keeping Out the Cold

2010-02-17T09:52:00.000-08:00

I really shouldn't have mentioned the fact that the snow had gone, because last week it came back again. Not in great amounts, but enough to make everything look pretty, and to send the temperatures plunging. I think this has to be the coldest winter we have experienced since we have been here; either that or it's just that I'm nine years older, so perhaps I'm feeling the cold more than I used to. I remember a few years ago some brainless Government minister suggested old people who were suffering in cold, badly heated, even more badly insulated houses, should wear a woolly hat indoors to prevent heat escaping from their heads. Well, what a brilliant idea - thousands of OAPs wearing bobble hats whilst watching 'Corrie' wrapped in a blanket ,sipping a Cup-a-Soup. Is there any wonder we escaped to France?

I do get a bit annoyed when I hear of attempts to stop ex-pats, living within the EU, receiving the British Winter Fuel Payments. There seems to be a general misconception, mostly amongst non- expat pensioners that those of us who have chosen to retire abroad are all basking in 365 days of warm sunshine, stretched out in January on the beach or the patio quaffing treble G& T's. Well, I've got news for them - nowhere in Europe has the sort of climate where you can do that, even Spain can get pretty nippy on a winter's night. And when the temperature sinks to - 12c as it does here, a G&T is the last thing you want. A cup of hot chocolate is much more attractive.

The French departments who have the Pyrénean chain as their backdrop are well versed in cold- prevention. They have plenty of warm, comfort food to off-set the effects of winter. Home- made soups are cheap, uncomplicated and nourishing, and unless we're out in the morning, and I haven't got any in the fridge from a previous lunch, we have some variety of soup every day.

In SW France, roughly within the Haute Pyrénees/ Aquitaine/Landes triangle the cold- buster is garbure, a cross between a soup and a stew - a 'stoup'as an old friend used to call it.

Garbure is such a highly regarded speciality that there are garbure festivals devoted to the dish. Argelés Gazost, near Lourdes, and Anglet, on the Atlantic coast between Biarritz and Bayonne, both have colourful festivals with traditional songs, dances and of course plates of garbure.

If you aren't within striking distance of either of these towns you can always make it yourself, and the good part about it is that it can be served as a lunch time soup or a main evening meal, with chunks of crusty bread. Garbure contains white beans, root vegetables, cabbage and a changing variety of meats. These can be pork, Bayonne ham, (or any jambon de campagne) confit of duck, or chicken thighs. Like all good soups it’s very much a case of throwing in whatever meat is available. Whatever is added to the basic recipe, it must be thick enough to stand a spoon up in.

I’m going to give you the Sunday-Best, High-Days-and-Holidays recipe so you can omit some of the meat if you wish, but keep a bacon flavour by still using some pieces of jambon de campagne or a ham bone. If all else fails, some bacon lardons will do …at a push!

For a traditional Garbure to serve 6 you will need:

1 large onion

4 celery stalks

1 large leek

4 medium potatoes, peeled

1 medium turnip or 2 good sized carrots, peeled

4 or 5 cloves of garlic, crushed

250 g white haricot beans (soaked overnight)

150 g jambon de campagne (or the bone if you can scrounge one from your friendly neighbourhood deli)

200 g salt pork belly

2 confit de cuisses de canard (confit of duck legs)

2 litres water

bouquet garni and salt and pepper.

Half a savoy type cabbage, finely shredded.

A large saucepan with a lid

Scrape some of the fat from the confit de canard ( if using) into the saucepan. Otherwise cover the bottom of the pan with a light vegetable oil. Heat gently.

Roughly chop the first 5 ingredients and add to the saucepan. Sauté lightly adding the crushed garlic after a few moments. Then add the pork and ham (or the lardons) cut into smallish cubes. Don’t brown the vegetables off too much, they just want to soften and absorb the duck fat or oil. Add the drained and rinsed haricots, the water, bouquet garni and seasoning (go easy on the salt until the final tasting). Bring to the boil, then cover and simmer for a couple of hours

Test the beans are soft, then add the shredded cabbage and the duck legs, with most (but not all) of the fat removed. A little fat will improve the flavour and texture of the soup. Do not throw the rest of the duck fat away on pain of death! Scrape it into a bowl, and use for roast potatoes later. It makes ‘roasties’ to die for! It will keep in the fridge for several weeks

Cook the soup for a further half hour.

The traditional way of serving is to pour portions into a soup bowl lined with slices of day-old rustic bread, but this is not obligatory and can be messy! In more impoverished times the meat would have been removed and kept warm to be served as the main course with salad. Today the whole dish, which should by now be really rib-sticking, is usually eaten as a lunchtime treat on a chilly day with lots of freshly baked ‘pain de campagne.’ Another tradition was to pour half a glass of red wine into the last few spoonfuls of soup to ‘aid the digestion.Chacun à son goût! It's certainly á mon goût.

What's in a name ?

2010-01-24T03:21:00.001-08:00

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In case anyone should think I am permanently attached to a laptop (heaven forbid) my other overriding interest is food – in particular, the sourcing, preparation and consuming of it.

In the winter I dream of warming soups and stews; in the summer I plan meals grilled over a barbecue and served with adventurous salads. By adventurous salads, I mean something more than lettuce, tomato and cucumber, with side orders of radish and spring onions - my mother’s standard summer fare. My mum’s enterprising attempts at livening up the tea time salad might occasionally involve grating a carrot, or reincarnating the lunch time left over potatoes by covering them in a dollop of salad cream (mayonnaise was virtually unheard of). This was as adventurous as it got.

If she could see the wild assortment of ingredients that are melanged into a salad now, she would declare that “folk are better fed than taught”. It was an expression she used liberally, and to this day I can’t work out the literal sense of it, except I think she would have applied the same comment to the avid consumerism that we see in the 21st century. She would have been very contemptuous of such culinary novelties as bean and pea sprouts (Brussels were the only sort she knew, and you didn’t serve them raw, they needed boiling for at least ¾ of an hour)) awabi radish (what was the matter with French Breakfast?) and olive oil ( well that came from Boots in a small bottle and you warmed it up and dripped it into your ears to soften the wax). Our French doctor nearly fell off his chair when I told him that one.

We Brits were quite accustomed to being the butt of our continental neighbours' jokes when it came to food, and I think it gave us an unwarranted sense of inferiority. We can cook just as well as the French, and our classic regional recipes are equally as good as theirs, in fact sometimes they can be better. Where we go wrong is in the name. We are just not inventive enough.

Take the potato. Being half Irish, I adore potatoes. Were the human race to be left with nothing else but potatoes to eat, it wouldn’t bother me a bit. That’s one reason I can’t be doing with low carb weight loss plans like the Hay Diet. I’m sure it’s great, and I know people who swear by it, but I can’t face eating protein without some form of carbohydrate; I love pasta, I like rice, but I worship at the altar of the humble spud. I have yet to find a French potato that comes anywhere near a British one for texture and flavour, but we’ll skate over that.

A natural companion to potato is cheese. Both the British and the French have cottoned on to this , so we both have perfected comforting, warming dishes using these two basic ingredients.

What do we call ours? Interestingly, cheese and potato pie. And the French version? Tartiflette.

The former is mashed potato and grated cheese, beaten together with butter and milk, spread in a pie dish, topped with more grated cheese and browned in the oven. The French variant uses sliced potato, a slug of white wine (comme d’habitude)and a topping of reblochon cheese. But it isn’t common old cheese and potato pie, it’s tartiflette.

It’s a name to conjure with. It elevates cheese and potato to realms far above their station. It’s a cheeky, pert little word …. it deserves to be up in lights - Mimi Tartiflette the Parisian burlesque dancer. Or in the pages of a crime novel – Alfonse Tartiflette, the unorthodox detective from the Quai D’Orsay.

You never see ‘Cheese and Potato Pie’ on a restaurant menu in the UK and yet ‘Tartiflette’ is all over the place in France. You can even buy it in tins, or frozen, in 4- portion bags, if it’s too much effort to peel all those potatoes.

Here in Southwest France we have another cheese and potato speciality that is almost sacramental. It has to be made with a certain type of cheese – laguiole -which is produced in the Aubrac region of the Midi Pyrenees.It involves creaming mashed potato and garlic over a low heat and beating the laguiole cheese into it. This cheese and potato puree has almost mystical qualities and is known as aligot (pronounced al-ee- go) It’s also ridiculously expensive to make because of the cheese that must (on pain of death) be used … emmenthal or simlar melting cheese is a complete anathema to purists - a cantal of a certain age may be acceptable in some regions, but the whole thing is fraught with argument, as is so much in France. Like tartiflette this traditional recipe has been brought into the supermarkets in easy- cook packets; ready to warm up in plastic sachets, or dehydrated (just add warm milk) Surely that’s cheesey Smash? No, it’s aligot.

I have a theory that if we renamed our simple dishes, gave them pretty, or exotic names instead of boring titles like fish pie, or bizarre names like toad in the hole, we might get a bit more international recognition.

Tartiflette is a great lunchtime dish on a chilly day, so here’s the recipe:

I should really say ‘Here is one of many recipes for tartiflette.

For six to eight people you will need:

About 750 gs of potatoes (peeled)
A large onion (chopped)
A 250 pkt lardoons
A glass of dry white wine
A round of reblochon cheese
Salt and pepper to taste

The ingredients are universally accepted as being correct. The method differs from cook to cook, so here’s how I do it.

Cook the potatoes whole, in lightly salted water, for about ten minutes. They should still be quite firm as they are going to be cooked again. Drain and when they are cool enough to handle, slice into not-too- thin slices.

Melt some butter into a frying pan, and fry the onion and potatoes together until lightly browned, add the lardons and enough wine to simmer the potatoes for a few minutes without boiling dry. Drink the rest of the wine… ...no point in trying to put it back into the bottle. That's one of my rules of life.

Gently spoon the onion- potato- lardon- mixture into a large gratin dish. Cut the reblochon in half through the middle, and (this is where there is some dispute) either place the two halves of cheese rind side up or down on top of the potatoes.

Cover with some baking foil and cook in a hot oven (200c) for half an hour or so. It’s an easy-going dish, so timing isn’t crucial.

Next blog ..... France's deep and lasting relationship with cheese and potatoes.

Procrastination is the Thief of Time

2010-01-18T05:16:00.000-08:00

Well the snow has gone, from the towns and villages at least, although there is still enough on the mountains to keep the skiers happy.

I’ve a touch of the January- post- Christmas blues. January has to be the worst month of the year, although when the sun does put in an appearance it’s got quite a lot of power in it. Unfortunately when you live in an old house, the walls are thick, which is fine for keeping the worst of the cold out, but it also means that sometimes it’s warmer in the garden than in the kitchen.

The kitchen is my writing/cooking/web-surfing sanctuary, consequently I spend many daylight hours wandering from computer to cooker, to coffee pot, but last week it was so cold in there (despite the radiator devouring electricity units at an alarming rate) that writing became a real chore. Cold rooms and writing seem to go together; the most successful writers have all shivered in bed sits, writing in a top coat and mittens. JK Rowling apparently wrote a lot of the first Harry Potter book sitting in a coffee shop because it saved on the fuel bills… she must have made a cup of coffee last an awfully long time. The delightful Marion Keynes writes on her laptop, snuggled up under the duvet. I’ve tried that and it’s almost impossible - the laptop keeps sliding all over the bed.

Not only do my fingers freeze up, so does my brain. I can’t concentrate on serious writing. In an effort to make it look as if I was actually working last week, I decided to spend the time by doing some earnest Googling in the name of research. I’d got several writing requests sitting in my inbox which were going to require some dedicated exploration, and web page clicking wasn’t going to be as bone -chilling as having to relentlessly type on a cold keyboard.

As those of you who try to earn a crust by writing will know, anything that distracts us from actually having to sit down and face a blank Word document is a gift from God. Search engines are both a blessing and a curse, and I really ought to have a parental block installed on my laptop to prevent me accessing internet auction sites, and other people’s blogs.

I decided to have a browse around the camera category of Ebay. I have talked myself into the notion that I really need a camera of my very own, rather than having to struggle with the all- singing- all dancing one belonging to Captain Sensible. There are times when even he can’t make it behave, so what chance have I got?

Anyway I had a lovely afternoon surfing comparison sites, reading camera reviews, most of which went right over my head, and the next afternoon deciding which one I was going to bid on, and the next afternoon clicking back and forth to the Ebay site, to make sure I hadn’t been outbid.

So I actually wasted three afternoons, bought myself a camera, and discovered nothing about black truffles which had been the point of all that Googling.

I’m going to google ‘Perigord Truffles’ when I finish this blog. That will be a disaster, because the devilish Google will lead me off down the path of foodie sites, French truffle producers sites, and any blogs that happen to have the words Perigord truffles buried in their pages.

I’m putting some of Captain S’s photos on this page, just to cheer everyone up and prove that his bells- and-whistles camera can be persuaded to take good pictures when it’s in the mood. We had an autumn break in Pau last year. Pau is a lovely city right on the edge of the Pyrenees. It’s only 50 miles from us- we get less adventurous as we get older! Lots of people only know Pau as a destination on the Ryanair website, which is a shame as it’s well worth a visit, with great views, an elegant castle and some smart shops.

Snowed In

2010-01-10T06:27:00.000-08:00

Well, at last we have snow. You have no idea the guilt that is experienced down here when we see weather forecasts and news reports from the UK showing snowdrifts and chaos.

Ours arrived on Thursday, we were expecting family but we got snow instead. Gatwick wasn't going anywhere so all the food I had in the fridge is either in the freezer or us.

The village has been a fairy-tale for three days, but somehow snow is wasted on the over- thirties. It looks lovely (from the window), especially this afternoon as the sun is shining and the sky is blue, but I'm so pleased the road is thawing, and the pavements almost clear. The up-side is that all the runs on the ski stations must be open by now, and that's got to be good for the tourist trade.

The forecast is for warmer weather on the way, so I guess by next weekend our snow will be nothing more than a memory and some photos. Which is fine by me. It's not an age thing - I was a complete wimp when I was kid. I hated going to school in the snow. The boys would have always made the most deadly slide in the playground (rivalling the Cresta Run)and it always seemed to be across the school entrance, so impossible to avoid; I hated being hit by snowballs and I hated wet gloves so much I never made any ammunition to fire back. I was terrified of slipping over on the ice on the way home in case someone saw me and laughed ... all in all I was a proper party pooper in the snow.

The saving grace was frozen milk. Free school milk (pre Thatcher) was delivered in crates containing glass bottles of,I guess, a quarter of a pint, with a cardboard top which you normally pierced with your thumb to enable you to stick a straw into the bottle. In a hard winter the cream which rose to the top conveniently froze and often half-pushed the top off ...dead hygienic! To us simple, post-war kids it was just like ice cream(Mr Whippy had yet to arrive). Of course, conversely the milk in summer was either warm, or in a very hot summer,going off. There is an upside and a downside to everything in life.

Strangely I don't ever recall the school closing during a particularly hard spell. I'm sure if it had I would have remembered it. It would have been the answer to a prayer for a snowaphobic like me.

A British Invasion

2010-01-05T07:28:00.001-08:00

When it comes to gastronomy, we Brits have done ourselves down for generations. We seem to have been quite happy to smile wryly and admit to boiling vegetables to death and making lumpy gravy.

On the other hand, the French have shouted their culinary prowess from the rooftops. Well, in the rarefied atmosphere of Michelin- starred kitchens, that is. Privately, some French food-watchers have been having doubts about France’s hallowed position as the gastronomic leaders of the world.

Tradition is all in France, and when French chefs are invited to share their culinary secrets to the outside world via the tv, to those of us raised on the antipodean madness of the Galloping Gourmet, the dearly missed and totally unpredictable Keith Floyd, or the globe-trotting Rick Stein, French cookery programmes are… well, boring.

The biggest French tv channel, TF1, has realised this, and it’s bought the rights to the Beebs 20 year- old ‘MasterChef.’ And they’re not slotting it into the whiling-away- an- afternoon OAP schedules, it’s going out on prime time. TF1 have, with typical Gallic modesty, described it as the most important amateur cookery competition in France and they’re backing up their claim with a cool €100,00 for the winner.

TF1 aren’t the first French channel to recognise the pulling-power of cookery as popular entertainment. Channel 4’s Come Dine with Me ( or Un Diner Presque Parfait) - which has to be the biggest exercise in culinary one-up-manship even seen on tv - has been a huge success for the French channel M6 - attracting two million viewers for each programme. Believe me, for French tv this is mega audience numbers.

Previously, French cookery programmes, such as Bon Appétit Bien Sûr, have been deadly serious - a cross between Phillip Harben and Fanny Craddock. Fanny would have gone down well with the French, dressed as for a night at the opera, and with just the right amount of contemptuous froideur to traumatise amateur cooks for life.

Now, even a would-be Jamie Oliver has burst onto the French culinary stage. Cyril Lignac presents a show called ‘Oui Chef’, which is loosely modelled on ‘Jamie’s Kitchen’ and the cutely named ‘Vive la Cantine’ which somehow sounds much sexier than ‘Jamie’s School Dinners’.

Francois Simon, restaurant crtic for the iconic Le Figaro has to admit that British cookery progammes are tapping into the need for the French, particularly the younger amateur cooks, to try something more cosmopitan, adventurous and above all simple.

French food, thanks to Britain’s proliference of inovative cooks is being de-mystified.

M. Simon has reservations about one of our chefs going down that well in France, however. Gordon Ramsey, for some reason, would be unlikely to have a fan base in France. I wonder why?

HAS ANYONE SEEN THE LAST SIX MONTHS?

2009-12-27T09:18:00.000-08:00

I see that the last time I posted a blog was in June. IN JUNE! Where has the other half of the year gone?

It’s said that when one reaches a certain age, the 24 hours in the 365 days that make up a calendar year somehow accelerate and therefore the years actually pass more quickly. There must be something in this. When I was little, the twelve months between Christmas Day seemed more like twelve years, and as for the summer holidays…well, when they actually arrived, the six weeks went on for ever. They were also permanently hot, with cloudless blue skies. What tricks our memories play on us!

But this is even worse. I haven’t just lost a few weeks… I’ve lost half of a whole year.

I do have an excuse …. a limp one, I have to say. I’ve been busy. That’s another memory recall. My Mum was always ‘busy’. Unlike modern mums she didn’t have to multi-task. She wasn’t running a major corporation, and then coming home to a partner (who was running another major corporation), six children, two dogs, several ponies and a housekeeper with a drink problem. No, my Mum didn’t seem to have much to do - except to run a home, with no modern conveniences apart from a Ewbank carpet sweeper. Maybe her annual hour allowance was accelerating too. So that accounted for her ‘busy-ness’.

My being ‘busy’ takes a different form. Being busy for me means several weeks-worth of dust piling quietly up on the furniture; cobwebs strung across the beams and radiating from the picture frames (conveniently disguised for the next twelve days by sprigs of holly and swathes of ivy) and un-ironed clothes spilling from the wash basket. Being busy for me, takes the form of several hours a day staring at a laptop screen, trawling websites for obscure information, and translating it into something worth reading.

Another old adage, like time speeding up with every increasing year, is that it never rains, but it pours. And writing wise I’ve had a bit of a deluge. Not that I’m complaining. Far from it, the extra income is very welcome in this present climate and the kudos is even better. I’ve even managed to crack the elusive UK magazine market, and in job satisfaction, that is worth a hundred web articles.

My Opus Magnum has been writing the content for a new property website which will be on line soon. So I’ve spent the last three months travelling the highways and byways of Portugal (via the flying Googlemobile ). I thought I knew the country pretty well, but I’ve un-earthed some fascinatingly obscure information in my searches.

For instance … did you know there is a town in Central Portugal renowned for leitão assado or roast suckling pig? So renown, that the streets are lined with restaurants serving nothing else? If you’re a vegetarian, or of a squeamish disposition, I would urge you to take a detour around Mealhada.

And did you know that the Casa das Obras, in nearby Seia was the headquarters of the Duke of Wellington during the Peninsular War? Seia is also home to Portugal’s National Bread Museum. Remember that one; it may crop up in a pub quiz one night.

Heading for Pastures New.

2009-06-10T02:00:00.000-07:00

The end of May, beginning of June, sees the annual transhumance of the sheep up to the higher pastures of the Pyrenees. And as with most old customs in France it’s a bit of an event. The word ‘transhumance’ is the same in English and French, although here it’s pronounced ‘trons-oo- monz ‘and according to my English dictionary is ‘the moving of animals to fresh grazing.’

Anyone can join in, and as long as you don’t get in the way, followers-on are very welcome.

Once you have tracked down your local transhumance (they’re not advertised much, the date and venue is more or less spread by word amongst the community) an early start and a fair amount of stamina is required. A stout stick, walking boots, plenty of bottled water and some sandwiches are advisable too. It will be a long day.

The shepherds gather up their flocks and set off for the foothills, trekking all day until they reach the lush upper pastures. It’s a long journey for the sheep, but these days the event is carefully monitored by vets, and unfit animals are left back in the lower meadows for the summer.

A combined mass evacuation can mean anything up to 15,000 sheep and several hundred followers. Coloured tassels identify the sheep and the initials of the shepherd are stencilled onto the rumps of each animal. Otherwise, how do you recognise your own flock out of all that lot? The flock leaders are fitted with big bells that are removed when they reach the final grazing areas, so as the huge flocks move off, the peaceful valleys echo to tinkling bells and the bleating of several hundred sheep.

Sometimes the muster commences with a mass, and a blessing, a sort of spiritual farewell to the flocks for the summer. Quad bikes and 4x4’s have improved the shepherd’s life, but in the old days, the men would disappear up the mountain with them, to spend the summer in small groups living in isolated, primitive shelters. There are sly winks and nudges when this old custom is mentioned, and one suspects it was all a bit ‘Brokeback Mountain ‘up there with no female company and not a lot to do except make cheese.

Nowadays the milk is brought down from the meadows and produced commercially in high-tech, soulless factories in accordance with EU rules and regulations. Fortunately, for the ‘real’ cheese lover, farmhouse cheeses are still produced locally by tiny producers though, and they are an ever-present sight on the weekly markets. These cheeses are expensive, often over 20€ a kilo, but ‘proper’ cheese production can’t be hurried and the best, such as the famous’ Napoleon’ is matured for 10 months at least. It is a beautiful, hard cheese, similar in texture to Cheddar, but made from 100% sheep’s milk, and it’s almost entirely confined to the markets around the Upper Garonne . It’s a great favourite with the French, who are extremely discerning when it comes to cheeses, and think nothing of spending 15 or 20€ a week on local specialities.

Occasionally, very, very , occasionally the larger cheese stalls will actually have a wheel of Stilton, or Shropshire Blue. When the vendor hears our English accents he, or she, gets very animated and draws our attention to it... as if we hadn’t already noticed it. We smile obligingly and agree that . yes ‘le fromage Anglais ‘ is ‘magnifique’, but, no we really don’t want any today, thank you. Especially at 24€ a kilo. I don’t actually say that of course, although I was brave enough to comment once that the Stilton was a bit ‘tres cher. This was met with …’ Eh oui , mais il est le roi de fromage anglais.’ So it’s obviously worth a king’s ransom to the French. Nice to know we can get something right!

Many thanks to my neighbour John ,who took these photos, and dozens more, when he joined in with a transhumance not far from here last week.

Nuts in May, or Early June

2009-06-05T04:54:00.000-07:00

The old walniut tree in our garden is beginning to burst forth with embryonic walnuts. We harvested tons in 2007, and were giving them away to anyone who would cart them away. We like walnuts but not in such vast quantities. I was using the mature ones in cakes and salads and pickling the young ones. Such is our passion for pickled walnuts both 1 litre kilner jars remain unopened in the store cupboard.

If you 're not a pickled walnut fan the French have a very nice liquer (quelle surprise !) which they bring out with other sweet drinks for aperos.

Obviously you need your own walnut tree, or access to ripening nuts because they mustn’t be too big. By the end of June the shells will be set and this recipe calls for them to be still bright green and easily crushed. So here, in SW France there’s no time to be lost.

There’s no need for expensive equipment or ingredients (except for the alcohol)
Before you start you will need:

A few Kilner- type jars,some paper coffee filters, or a muslin jelly bag if you have one, and some empty wine bottles.

For the liqueuer you will need
20-30 green walnuts about the size of a small apricot
575 ml/ 1pint 40% fruit alcohol. (vodka can be substituted without any noticeable loss of flavour.)
1 clove and 1 small piece of cinnamon…..don’t overdo the spices as even these amounts add quite a lot of flavour.
A vanilla pod
125g/ 4oz sugar
100ml/ 3 fl ozs water.

Before starting to process the walnuts it’s advisable to use rubber gloves unless you don’t mind your hands being an unusually dark brown!

Lay the nuts on a non-porous surface (they WILL stain your work-top given the chance.)
Crush with a mallet into small pieces, and tip into a large, sterilised kilner, or other suitable screw top jar. Add the alcohol, the spices and the vanilla pod.
Close the jar tightly and leave on a sunny window sill for at least two weeks, but anything up to 6 or 8 weeks is preferable…..the longer the better. Try to remember to shake the jar every few days.
When your patience runs out, or the sun disappears, strain the liquid (which probably resembles sump oil in colour by now!) into a clean jug using a funnel and a filter.
Dissolve the sugar and water over a gentle heat, making sure there are no sugar crystals left in the bottom of the saucepan and leave to cool.
When it has cooled add to the strained walnut liquid.
Pour into sterilised bottles, cork and store until Christmas, or even better the Christmas after that!
The finished liqueur has herbal overtones with just a hint of cinnamon and clove. The addition of a vanilla pod is not authentic to the traditional recipe but it imparts a mellow tone to the drink.
It will be very dark green, almost like dark Chartreuse, and is delightfully warming on a chilly winter evening.

It will be drinkable by Christmas, but if you can forget about it until the next Christmas it will be superb. So they say - I never manage to keep anything in a bottle for as long as that!

Bread and Cheese

2009-05-08T05:14:00.000-07:00

Whenever the subject of holidays in France comes up in a conversation you can guarantee that someone will ask what it is about the country that keeps you coming back. The resulting list usually includes French markets, the wine and the bread.

The big difference between the holidaymaker and the ‘immigrant’ resident (people like us) is that when you live here you are experiencing these 'magical 'things on a daily basis

French markets? Well, they still do what it says on the box. They are a great place to observe the ‘Frenchness’ of the French, to buy fresh fruit and great cheeses, to sit outside a café in the sun and watch the endless round of kissing and handshaking that accompanies every chance encounter, and to try and fathom the unfathomable: how, in a European alliance obsessed with health and safety rules and regulations, do the French get away with it? Live chickens stuffed into plastic carrier bags and taken home on a bus. Cubes of cheese, saussison, jambon cru for free tastings sweating in the sunshine on deli counters, having been delved into by fingers that have could been anywhere (don’t even think about it). Stillyards (you know the old spring weight thingy grandma used to weigh the baby with) dragged out from under a table when you ask for ‘livre’ (500 gms) of scabrous, but organic tomatoes from the old crone selling a handful of veggies from her allotment. And on the subject of these ‘dames anciennes’ …. Why,when you ask for a ‘livre’ which strangely turns out to be a kilo, do they suddenly develop a complete incapacity to understand your French when you protest? Apart from that, and a few other things, markets are pretty much as they have always been, which I suppose is why they still figure large on the holiday ‘lurve’ list .

No 2 on the What- I -Love- About- A -Holiday -In -France agenda is the wine. Hmm…well that’s thorny subject. There’ s been a lot of hot air spouted about French wine in the past, some rather difficult publicity about chemical nasties being added to some supposedly high quality wines, and the famous French obstinacy when it comes to modernising their production techniques. Perhaps if they stopped sneering at New World Wines they might learn something useful. And the day of the pichet of lovely cheap plonk in a cosy bistro are long gone, if they ever existed. Cheap French wine can taste like battery acid – or maybe it’s just the effect it now has on my poor old stomach and serially abused liver.

Ah, but what about the bread? Rack upon rack of golden, ramrod straight baguettes, little flutes, huge couronnes, grey pain de siegle….. surely the mysticism of the boulangerie still remains? Well, within a few months of our permanent arrival we were….dare I say it?....totally fed-up with bread that staled as you looked at it, a village bread shop that sold out before you were out of bed, and the sheer immoral waste of several yards of day-old bread being consigned to the bin. I had been given a bread machine as my new French house –warming present . I am now on my second and they don’t owe me a penny.I can make the sort of bread I like, using ingredients such as whole grains and nuts that are never seen in village boulangerie. True, the supermarkets now sell a bigger range but they are so stuffed with chemicals I'm loath to buy them .

Now Steven Kaplan, a professor of European history at Cornell University in New York has fired a broadside at the traditional baguette on the eve of La Fête du Pain (National Bread Week) in France The Times reports today that after a lifetime of studying — and eating — le pain francais, Professor Kaplan says that he has witnessed with despair the slow death of the crust.
“This is a significant and catastrophic trend,” he says “The crust is what stands between France and the Armageddon of soft, mushy, repugnant loaves that we get in the US and you get in Britain, too. A baguette de tradition should be a “voluptuous pleasure and an exulting moment” that speaks to all our senses, but I am getting hacked off because the basic quality is essentially being thrown away.”
The baker’s response is predictable : they are responding to customer demand, who don’t want a well cooked crust. Well that isn’t the case down here in the Haute Pyrenees. The traditional baguette sold in both high class town boulangeries and village depots de pain is a torpedo shaped loaf which tapers to twisted ends and is as hard as hell.The points on the ends could be classes as lethal weapons. Some even more traditional bakers pull the dough up into little spikes before baking them at nuclear heat for as long as possible, removing the loaves from the oven just before they actually combust. Those you could use as a knuckle duster. It could also be used as a hammer. What you can’t do with it, is actually eat it, without losing several teeth that is.
Mr Kaplan poses an interesting question…’Do the French care any more, do they care about taste? When you eat their tomatoes, their carrots and their merlotised wine, you start to wonder. Are they not collaborating in their own cultural demise?”

Hmm ….Answers on a postcard, please.

Sometimes.....!

2009-05-05T05:26:00.000-07:00

A Vide Grenier in the Village

Most of the time I love my life in France, especially today when the sun is shining, the cows are manfully (or should that be 'cowfully'?)chomping their way through lush, knee high, buttercup- spattered meadows, and the snow is creeping away from the mountain sides.

But into each life a little rain must fall....and we've just had the wettest month since we came to the village five years ago. That I can put up with, as long as it's another five years before we get an April as wet as this last one.

No, its the dark cloud of customer service that really rattles my cage. We've got used to the two hour lock-down experienced in every French town from 12 to 2 pm, so we adjust our retail expeditions accordingly. We've got so used to it that the speeding cars, and log-jams outside the bakeries are a subject of jokes:-

'Oh that car's just shot the lights, it must be five to twelve.'

'Why are those cars parked all over the road? Has there been an accident ? Oh no, there's a boulangerie over there.'

I'm also accustomed to asking for something in a shop to be told they've sold out, and recieving a shrug of the shoulders when I ask when they will be getting it in again. Four or five months ago Captain Sensible wanted two small replacement wheel for his mower . They had them in just the right size...he was overjoyed, small things please him no end,but there was only one in the display unit. After what seemed like hours I found an assistant. I enquired if they would be having more.

'Mais oui, madame.'

' Ah, bon' (standard reply) 'Quand?'

'N' sais pas .'...shrug

Every time we go past the shop, he insists on stopping to see if the wheels are in. I stay in the car....the shop's a cross between a garden centre and a farmers supplies, it smells of fertiliser and rubber wellies and bores me stiff. I watch him go in, and I watch him come out, still no wheels. The grass is almost high enough to graze those cows on.

Today was a totally new customer service failure. As we walked past the tourist board we thought we'd see what was coming up in the next few weeks. Now, if there's one thing we like to do on a sunny Sunday it's to find a car boot sale, or vide grenier'.... 'attic emptying' is the French term for it. We don't buy much, if anything, but it's fun to see some of the ancient French farm implements, and pointless bric-a-brac. It's also a great way to see more of the area we live in. We've found some beautiful little villages we would never have seen if it hadn't been for the lure of a vide genier.

So, I was really pleased to see a calender of forthcoming car boots displayed on the wall in the entrance to the tourist office. Vide greneirs aren't regular events as they are in Britain, a village is only permitted to have one a year (I think this is the rule, but as with all things in France there is conflicting information on this). This makes it difficult to keep track of them.

The list was photocopied onto a sheet of A4, just the thing to stick next to the kitchen calendar.

I go in to the office..

'Avez une calendreir de vide greniers?'

'Oui madame, sur le mur, a l'entree.'

'Je sais,mais je voudrais un à emporter.'

Désolé'

'Vous n'avez plus?'

'Désolé'

The long and short of it was.. ..yes, they had a list, it was on the wall as I came in, no, they couldn't let me have one as that was the only one they had.

If I'd been in England I would have said;-

'It's a photocopy, for God's sake. How much effort is it going to take to run me one off?'

Sometimes, for the sake of international relations it's a good job my sarcasm doesn't kick in so quickly in a foreign language.

Love Thy Neighbour

2009-05-02T06:27:00.000-07:00

A French Refugee Camp for Spanish Refugees

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Spanish Refugees entering France February 1939

A couple of days after my last blog, on the death of the trades union stalwart Jack Jones, I read a long article in a local journal on the plight of the Spanish Civil War Refugees who flooded into France in February 1939. After a four year struggle Spanish Republican forces had been overcome, and General Franco declared himself El Caudillo, a position he held for nearly 40 years.

It is the 70th anniversary of that great flood of humanity that poured over the Pyrenees into South West France, known as la Retirada. There have been a crop of books and newspaper articles produced in honour of this anniversary, and as most of them are written for French consumption they are slightly skewed (to say the least) in their analysis of the event. I suppose the expression ‘distance lends enchantment’ can be applied to this reportage. After all, seventy years is a long time, and those, like Jack Jones, who were eyewitnesses to the events of the Civil War are becoming scarcer as these old combatants die off.

In too many cases the warm welcome that the Spanish soldiers and civilians had anticipated from their neighbour was sadly lacking. Instead , the soldiers were immediately marched off to concentration camps on arrival , and those unfortunate civilians who had no friends or family to offer them shelter found themselves in miserable tented camps in the back-end of a bitter winter.

From the last few months of 1938 to February 1939, something like half a million Republican refugees crossed the border into the Basque region of France, where 17,000 were herded into the concentration camp at Gurs; and into the Pyrenees Oriental on the Mediterranean coast where the camp at Prat de Mollo, just inland from the fashionable town of Collioure, was a sea of displaced humanity.

In the months that followed this exodus more than 20,000 emigrated, by various means to America,but when Hitler invaded France thousands were sent to German concentration camps. Many of those that managed to evade the Nazi round-ups joined the French Resistance and continued their struggle against fascism.

The Civil War itself drew sympathisers from all over the world. One of the many women who volunteered to join the International Brigades as nurses was a girl from. England. - Lillian Urmston.

Born in 1914, Lillian lived in Stalybridge and attended St. Paul's Elementary School. She trained as a nurse at Lake Hospital in Ashton-under-Lyne and at the age of 22, in 1936 Lillian applied to the Spanish Medical Aid Unit after reading how Government troops were short of doctors and nurses. In June 1937 she left for the Spanish Medical Aid in London where she and another nurse left for Paris and journeyed through France to the Aragon front in Spain, where they rendered medical assistance to injured government troops and civilians.
In September 1938, Lillian returned to England to raise funds for medical supplies and food for the wounded in Spain. She was sent with an ambulance, from which she addressed many groups in surrounding towns. Some were very sceptical, even when they saw the ambulance, but she had deliberately left it as it was; blood stained inside.
In response, the people of Stalybridge started the ‘Nurse Urmston Fund’ in support of the Spanish Medical Aid Unit. There were house to house collections and money was donated at various meetings; the fund itself raised approximately £700.
Lillian accompanied some of the refugees into France where she herself was interned and she recorded her thoughts in a collection of writings from women who served at the front in the Civil War:

The things seen during the last days of our retreat from Spain, and the experiences undergone in the concentration camp of St Cyprian, near Perpignan, I shall never forget... The last few days spent in Spain, working close to the front, yet within sight of the Pyrenees, were utterly ghastly. Operating work was done, and efficiently, just inside houses by the roadside. In innumerable instances, we came upon families of refugees wounded whilst fleeing to safety. We cared for them and kept them with us if they were seriously wounded... On the late evening of the 8th we received orders to go into France. Although sad at leaving our Spain, we all realised that this had to be and looked forward to a rapid reorganisation in France which would result in our going back to another sector of Spain to carry on the struggle against Fascist aggression.
But we were soon disillusioned... We were led to believe that France had opened her frontiers to receive our soldier refugees and wounded, thus preventing a complete massacre. We expected sympathy and humane treatment. We had neither. The vigilance of hundreds of armed guards made sure that all people entering France entered the concentration camp. Ours was a stretch of sandy desert land, surrounded by the usual formidable barbed wire. Wounded men were even without treatment for about six days. We were not allowed to tend our sick comrades. One small spring supplied water for about 15,000 to 20,000people. Food was not supplied until the fifth day... Men attempting to dodge out to buy bread and send letters were treated brutally by the guards. Our comrades received bayonet wounds at the hands of these soldiers of the French army.
My friends turned to me and said: 'Would we be treated like this in England?' And I wonder, would they? Spanish soldiers told our men to return to Franco Spain and then they would get away from all this. Our soldiers felt deeply about this, and called out to those men who were collected to be sent to Barcelona, deploring their conduct. Then the camp resounded with 'Viva la Republica! Viva nuestra Independencia!'

Extract from Lillian Urmston from the book ‘Voice of Women’

Hero, or Dinosaur ?

2009-04-23T05:21:00.000-07:00

The Valley of the Fallen The Escorial

Do you ever hear on a news item that someone has died who you imagined had died some time ago? That happened to me this week when I heard of the death of Jack Jones.
Born on the eve of the Great War of 1914-18 Jack was one of the last ‘old style’ union leaders; some would say a political dinosaur, but I would prefer to call him a true Socialist, a vanishing breed in the UK perhaps, but unlike the dinosaur, not quite extinct.

Whatever one’s own politics Jack Jones’ solidarity to a cause was something you just had to admire. He doggedly resisted the lure of champagne socialism, the chattering classes of Hampstead Heath, and trendy wine bars so beloved of New Labour. Instead, at trade unions conferences in particular, he shunned the four and five star accommodation of his fellow delegates and stuck to his favourite B&Bs in Eastbourne, Blackpool or wherever, travelling back and forth to the conference hall by bus. His familiar cloth cap wasn’t something invented by spin doctors, it was Jack being Jack,

When he retired from the hurly-burly of the trades union world he still couldn’t leave it entirely, and he became the senior citizens champion, riding into battle for pensioners rights and becoming the first president of the National Pensioners Convention.

In the mid 1930’s Jack’s left wing politics were to take him far from his Liverpool roots, across the Pyrenees to Catalonia where he joined the International Brigade and fought for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. He was eventually wounded in the battle of Ebro, repatriated and spent the rest of the war organising aid for the Republicans.

His loathing of Franco and the Nationalist government was to endure until the General’s death in 1975, and he was vociferous in his condemnation of Labour and TUC leaders who took holidays to Spain while the Franco regime was in power.

I have long had a sort of morbid fascination with the Spanish Civil War, ever since my first visits to the country in the early 70’s. In the centre of the country, not far from Madrid, is the Valley of the Fallen, or the Valle de los Caidos. It’s difficult to describe the effect this monolithic monstrosity has on the unwary visitor. You really have to know the background to this bloody episode in Spanish history to appreciate just how unwittingly this piece of grandiose mawkishness illustrates the oppressiveness of the Franco regime

You can see the building miles away; it’s difficult to miss a 500 ft concrete cross. It stands atop a huge crypt carved out from granite cliffs by the losing side (the Republicans) after the Civil War, and is the final resting place of El Caudillo …Francisco Franco. Some tomb!

It is now classed as a national monument, and it can be combined with an excursion to the Escorial, the huge palace built by Philip II of Spain, as the two places are only a few miles from each other. It is worth a visit if only to provide time for reflection on the futility of war, and the complete madness of civil war.
Jack Jones’ journey from the International Brigade to the National Pensioners’ Convention was a long and momentous one, and the next time you use your free bus pass, or receive your winter fuel payment remember who it was who pushed the government to make life a bit easier for senior citizens, and say …’Thanks, Jack’

Something to Make Your Mouth Water

2009-04-17T05:38:00.000-07:00

Last week we had a flyer in our mailbox advertising the annual hunter’s lunch next Saturday. These lunches occur all over rural France at the end of the hunting season, and, in our case they are long, multi-coursed and alcohol driven.

Like everything else in France the price has crept up, this year to 20€ ,but for that you get six courses and as much to drink as can be considered polite. And entertainment.

It’s mostly of the impromptu variety, fuelled by several glasses of wine and a fire-water digestif and it can go on a bit. There are hunting songs, and mountain choruses that I quite enjoy. In fact, the shepherd songs can be beautiful, especially when sung by our local male voice choir, the Chanteurs de Mont Royal. A ancient old boy always totters to the microphone and sings an obscure ditty with at least ten verses, and choruses to which everyone (except us) joins in - con brio !

It’s when one of the local ladies decides (as she always does) to give us her tribute to Edith Piaf that it all begins to soar into the realms of farce. We try not to wince as she renders (murders) ‘La Vie en Rose,’ and then find ourselves heading for the door as, to tumultuous cheers, she launches into ‘Mon Legionnaire’.
We are usually amongst the first to leave, at about four o’clock, but, as we live close to the Salle de Fete we are still seeing people drifting home at six.
This year’s menu, which is always included on the flyer is as mouth-watering as ever .:

Salade Gasconne
Panache de salads,tomates, gésiers,lardons et magrets fumés
Salad of duck gizzards, bacon pieces and smoked duck breast.
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Pavé de Saumon sauce paprika et estragon
Fillet of salmon with tarragon and paprika
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Civet de Sanglier et pomme de terre vapeur
Wild boar casserole with mashed potatoes
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Cuisse de canard confit et ses legumes
Duck leg confit and vegetables (usually the ubiquitous haricot vert)

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Fromage de pays
Local cheeses
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Tarte aux Pommes tiède et sa glace vanille

Warm Apple pie with vanilla icecream
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Café
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Digestif

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Vin rouge et rosé
Vin mousseaux
Aperitif tout inclusive.

I mustn’t forget to stock up on the indigestion tablets.

Where Does the Time Go?

2009-04-10T05:21:00.000-07:00

All though I have three calenders in the kitchen time still seems to run away with me. I've only to look at the date of my last blog to prove that to myself. I haven't been idle though.

After 25-30,000 words I seem to have driven the plot of my thriller into a cul de sac and at the moment I can't seem to back it out, so I'm going to have to let it sit there until I can start the engine again - or I'll have to call the breakdown vehicle and get it towed away to the scrap yard. Fellow writers will know what I mean!

To relieve the tension I started to to jot down some humorous recollections of my adolescence... a teenager in the late fifties and early sixties. I had been listening to Emma Kennedy's new book, 'The Tent, The Bucket and Me'. on Radio 4's Book of the Week. It was hilariously funny, and for once, very popular with the listeners....just lately some of the choices have been panned on the R4 message board and not without justification.

Ms. Kennedy's book had a very simple premise which could be a bit of a turn-off for readers, including me.Family holidays!

'Oh, another self-indulgent ramble', I thought. We'd had a few of those in the past few months as BOTW....usually upper class somebodies who could take six months off and wander around Europe, India, Outer Mongolia with 6 kids, a backpack, and a desire to 'find themselves'. Oh, and sell the resulting book to a publisher who happens to be a friend/ close relative, when they get back. ( I'm just jealous really)

But it was the way in which 'The Tent' was written that made it stand out from the rest. It was just so funny, and self deprecating. I do like people who 'self-deprecate' rather than write some precious book about how wonderful it all was, and how enlightened all their children had become from the whole life-changing experience. When we all know the kids had spent most of the time plugged into their MP3 players, bemoaning the fact that they couldn't keep in touch with their friends on Facebook, and why isn't there a Macdonalds in the Hindu Kush? Well I'm sure that's what most of them do...kids are kids after all.

Some of Ms. Kennedy's mishaps had happened to me....her parents were avid campers ( that scenario's got plenty of mileage in it for a writer )...mine were of the caravanning variety but we shared similar toilet incidents.

And this set me off on a journey of my own. When I started, I thought it would be hopeless as I grew up in probably the most boring town in Britain, and I seemed, on the face of it, to have a fairly averagely boring childhood, but the further I've got into it the more I've discovered that, written as a comedy, it actually works.
Far from being stuck for what to write next, the incidents just keep coming.

The fact that I had a mother who was to cooking as Les Dawson was to piano playing, gives me quite a lot of material to work on. She was also one of those delightful working class snobs who considered herself to be 'upper working class' to lower middle. Oh, it's all wonderful grist to the mill.

I've no time for the current thirst for 'misery memoirs' Ms. Kennedy could be starting a trend for 'merry memoirs' so I'm going to join the crowd. And it's pretty good therapy as well as going back fifty years and recalling incidents one had thought forgotten is a great exercise for the brain. So even if it all comes to nought(as it probably will) at least it can be filed under 'Self Improvement' so all is not lost.

Winter Visitors

2009-02-26T04:21:00.000-08:00

At this time of year, even a shopping trip can be an ornithologist’s delight. The French have long been accused of eating all their small birds, and to a certain extent this has been the case. Nevertheless, France has come into line with general thinking and small songbirds are not slaughtered in the numbers that they were thirty years ago. Old habits (or cuisines) die hard however. As recently as 1996, a dying Francois Mitterand (the former French President) ordered a dish of ortalon as a final treat.

This lovely little songbird, a member of the bunting family, was considered the 'hautest' of haute cuisine, and as such its capture and cooking was shrouded in tradition and myth. I'll not sicken you with the details of the preparation, but for some bizarre reason, which seems to have no sensible explanation, the dish is eaten whilst the diner covers his head with a white cloth. Legend has it that a gluttonous priest, who was anxious that God should not recognise him, first practiced this. He must have missed the vital piece of information in his theological teaching that nothing can be hidden from God.

Fortunately, these barbarically arcane traditions only survive now amongst the very oldest French gourmands. In nearly ten years, I have never come across thrush pate or lark's tongues on a village meal menu. Thank God!

But to return to our shopping trips. We are almost guaranteed to see a couple of heron, usually in the same place...a field bounded by a swift running water channel that takes the snow melt from the mountains, and for the last two winters our cattle have been joined in their pastures by an influx of cattle egrets. They spend a few weeks with us every winter now, and the cows seem very unfazed by them. I wonder why they choose to share accommodation with such big animals? They're never seen with the sheep, or in a field of horses, cattle are obviously their soul mates. Very strange.

The colder, snowy foothills of the Pyrenees bring down the birds of prey at this time of year. There really does seem to be a buzzard on every telegraph pole. The red and black kites circle endlessly round, as they do in the summer, but in winter, they seem to be higher in the sky.

There's quite a few small birds around too, fieldfares swooping and swarming, and of course the starlings who seem able to survive anywhere. We were lucky enough to see a swarm one day as we were driving towards Narbonne. What I thought was someone burning old tyres was in fact a cloud of starlings performing an aerial ballet over the flat terrain of the Minervois vineyards.

We never see any gulls as we're too far from the coast. For this reason, we never see wild duck or geese. I do miss the geese. The eerie sound of a skein of pinkfoot heading inland on the North Norfolk coast (to drive farmers ballistic!)is one of those experiences you never forget however far away you travel.

Another visitor in the skies over us isn't a bird, but nearly as exciting, well to Captain Sensible of course. It's rather larger than a bird; in fact, the Airbus 380 is rather larger than any other plane. So frequently does it appear that I hardly bother to look up now when I hear it droning over en route to the mountains, where the crew test the cockpit instruments for magnetic interference. We actually saw it on its maiden test flight. Well, I saw it ... in the distance. The Captain didn't because he was driving at the time. I said nothing for fear of looking stupid (I have been known to confuse large birds with planes and vice versa due to my short-sightedness) so it wasn't until I saw it on the telly that night that I realised what I had been looking at.
"I saw that this morning on the road from Le Cuing" I said. I was not popular.

Snow, Floods,Fires, What Next?

2009-02-11T06:41:00.000-08:00

What a strange start to 2009 we are having. Right now I'm writing up my blog as large snow flakes drift down from the skies like white confetti. When I was little, I was told that somewhere up in the heavens an old lady was plucking a goose. What a load of old cobblers kids were told in my day. Parents would never get away with it these days. Kids are far too smart to be fooled by daft stories like that.

But back to the present century. Only 6 weeks into 2009 and what have we got? The most severe winter conditions in the UK for 20 years, (or 10, or 50 depending on what newspaper you're reading), horrendous fires in Australia, and here, three weeks ago, the most violent winds for years, the effects of which we are still discovering as we drive around, with hardly a wood without fallen trees somewhere in it, either flat on the ground or leaning at crazy angles on neighboring trees. Strangely most of our old houses still have their roofs on; they must be a lot tougher than they look. Like their inhabitants I guess.

And today, the snow is not only settling but piling up ...well it has snowed all day. The lights are flickering ominously as well, and although The Captain has bought new wicks for our emergency oil lamps, he hasn't tracked down the oil for them yet. When the electricity went off in the storms, like the foolish virgins that we were, our lamps hadn't been maintained properly, so we were caught out, and had to resort to candles.

I can't begin to imagine the full horror of the bush fires in Victoria. My own experience of wildfire was on a minute scale compared to the Australian disaster, and that was scary enough.

We were living just outside Carcassonne in the heat wave summer of 2003, and we had become accustomed to the daily patrols of the Canadair fire fighting planes droning over, and even when we noticed a puff of smoke on the other side of the hill we weren't unduly worried. We still didn’t worry too much when twenty or so fire engines were seen up on the main road, and smuts began to flutter down in the courtyard. We maintained our British sang-froid and took tea on the terrace, as usual, and watched the planes ‘water- bombing’ the woods on the other side of the hill. The Captain, who takes on the characteristics of a ten year-old when confronted by planes doing exciting things (well, things he considers exciting, anyway) enjoyed it all immensely. It wasn’t until I went into the kitchen at about ten o’clock for ice for my bedtime drink (well, it was stiflingly hot so a good excuse for a G&T) that I noticed the sky had turned red and the hilltop was flickering with flames. Simultaneously two battle-weary pompiers appeared at the front gate and announced we were to evacuate the cottage. Then it got scary. We grabbed our passports, the dog and prayed the cats, out on their evening hunt would be alright.
An hour later the wind changed direction and our little house and the cats were saved.
It was alarming at the time, but nothing to what the inhabitants of Victoria have had to deal with.

I wonder what the elements have in store for us all this year. And what the global warming-in-denial lobby will have to say about it.

Everybody Out!

2009-01-29T04:42:00.000-08:00

Once again we're in the grip of a strike. It something of a national hobby, a good grève. In the UK the citizens tend to moan loudly about something they don't agree with; here in France they take to the streets to express their displeasure.
So hundreds of thousands of workers are protesting, 'comme d'habitude about a multitude of grievances.From wages,to working conditions,to redundancies, to lack of spending on education - but the bottom line is that the populace are fed-up with poor little Nicholas' handling of the econmic down-turn.
It's the first one he's had since he became president so that's pretty good by French standards.But public sector workers are letting him and his government know that they 'ain't going to stand for it! Like many countries in Europe right now they are feeling the pinch as unenployment and prices rise in unison.
So thousands are gathering at The Bastille in Paris today to send a sharp message to the Elysèes Palace.There's a feeling of anger mixed with malaise in France right now, so I fear this could be the first of many strikes this year.

I haven't been on strike. I've spent a fairly frustrating couple of days trying to set up a small website on which to showcase some of my writing. I think I've finally cracked it. I've set one up with google and I've downloaded a short story. I hope to put on excerpts from my other writings, but it's early days yet, both for me and the new Google service.
The link to the site is on the right hand side of this blog, entitled 'Jo's Writing Corner'.
If anyone would like to leave a comment please do so via this blogsite.
The website is a bit basic at the moment as I'm still finding my way round, and I think Google are adding features. I hope it improves...I've wasted quite enough serious writing time on the darned thing already!

Ourages,Vents et Lumières des Etoiles

2009-01-26T05:25:00.000-08:00

Ourages,Vents et Lumières des Etoiles

I’m pleased to announce that after 28 hours we are connected to the national grid again.

The storms that swept across, from the Atlantic to the Med rampaged over us on Friday night. As strong winds are virtually unheard of here (one of the primary attractions to us when house-hunting) the sound of a gale howling down the village street late on Friday evening was a rare event.

Thank goodness our wooden shutters were firmly closed, due to The Captain’s near-obsession with ‘closing up for the night’. It’s the one thing about life in France ‘profond’ that I haven’t whole-heartedly embraced. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but I just hate being shut in at night. Maybe I’m simply nosey but I like to be able to see ‘what’s occurin’ as Nesta says in that delightful tv sitcom, Gavin and Stacey. On Friday though, it was a good job we were well shut up, otherwise our banging shutters would have kept us, and our neighbours awake all night.

When I got up on Saturday morning it was blowing a hooley, but we had power. Until I switched on the kettle, that was. Off it went and was to stay off until Sunday afternoon.

We were lucky; we don’t rely entirely on electricity. We’ve a wood burner in the sitting room, and I cook on a bottled gas stove, so during the daylight we were doing okay.

For me, it was quite a welcome relief to be missing the usual Saturday sports schedules that clutter up the tv stations, and as for Saturday evening tv entertainment, well the less said about that the better.

As the daylight faded I was curled up in a chair with two rarely used items, a pencil and writing pad, plotting out a few characters to populate a fictitious village I’m planning for my present work-in-progress. The imagination seems to work so much better by candlelight. It was a productive evening, and we had a cosy evening meal which, had we been a lot younger might have the precursor of a night of romance. As it was The Captain, who has a low boredom threshold, sighed deeply at about 9.30. and suggested I look out the hot water bottle, used only for airing a guest bed in the past.

We’ve never used one in the 40- odd years we’ve been together, so this took some preparation, especially as I was having to boil water on the gas hob.
When I eventually got to the bedroom I decided to have a peek out of the window…the gale had blown itself out hours before….and I was intrigued to see what the village looked like without a single light. The main street is normally lit for about a quarter of a mile by rather attractive ‘old-style’ lantern lights, one of which is attached to the front of our house. The Captain actually leaves the shutters on the landing window open so the light illuminates the landing a bit. It sheds quite a nice mellow light onto the wooden floor, and saves us having to leave a light on when we have visitors. But now it was completely dark.

When I looked out of the bedroom window the sky was amazing. Although we live in a very rural village, it’s almost impossible to look at the night sky without some light pollution, but there was no artificial light anywhere, not even on the horizon. The stars were like sharp, blue diamonds and there just seemed to be trillions of them. I’m a bit of a numpty when it comes to the constellations, but I do know what some of the major ones look like, and Orion’s Belt was the clearest I’ve seen it for years. It made me realize just what we miss in the rush and bustle of our lives. For all our technology, nature has by far the most miraculous thing to show us. You can keep the Ex Facture, Strictly Come Dancing, Match of the Day (groan!), they’ve nothing on The Sky at Night, and you don’t need a tv license to watch that.

I'm expecting our local sage- femme or midwife to have a full appointments book at the end of October/beginning of November.The village hasn't been in bed so early since the days of oil lamps. She wan't have me om her list. Age does have it's compensations!

Nil Desperandum

2009-01-22T05:57:00.000-08:00

I should be depressed today. Last night I received a very nice email from Legend Press, saying how much they enjoyed reading my submission for the 2009 Anthology of Short Stories (blah, blah, blah)and they had hundreds of excellent entries...etc...etc...etc. In short, they weren't taking mine !

I never expect success (one of my major failings) so I accepted it without a flinch. Well I've got used to it by now.

But they were nice about, which always takes the sting out of the wound, and said they'd be happy to look at any other submissions, but I suspect they say that to all the girls (and boys).

So, I've dusted myself,and the manuscript off, and sent it winging away to another publisher.Thank God for companies who accept electronic submissions. It would cost a fortune otherwise....I never cease to grumble at the price of ink cartridges, let alone the postage. It must have been a very costly and time-consuming business back in the snail-mail days,typing out your work,constantly buying correcting fluid,carbon paper, stamps for returns, stamps for posting it....thank you, thank you, thank you Bill Gates!

On re-reading my oh-so-polished MS today, three months after I sent it off, I still had to correct four spelling mistakes (did you miss them Microsoft Word, or did I?) and a little word missed out altogether. And I was so sure it was word perfect!
It's almost impossible to proof-read you own work, isn't it?

So now I'll be hovering over my writing inbox longing for, but dreading at the same time the reply.( I've set up two different email addresses, so my so-called work doesn't get muddled up with my social life) What social life, I ask myself. This is January in the Haute Pyrenees !

Time for Tea, The Epiphany Cake Recipe

2009-01-21T05:48:00.000-08:00

In case the previous article aroused your taste buds, here’s one of the many recipes around for the Epiphany Cake I wrote about.You'll have missed Epiphany but it's a nice cake to eat at any time of year.
Perhaps in the interests of safety the feves should be left out, after all who wants to spend what should have been a happy occasion in the local A&E?

Recipe for Gateau (or Galette de Rois)
Preparation time 20 mins
Cooking time 20 mins
Serves 8

INGREDIENTS :
2 Pkts ready-made flaky pastry, sufficient to cut into two 20cm diameter circles.
125 gms ground almonds
125 gms castor sugar
125 gms softened butter
2 whole eggs + the yolk of a third (separately reserved)
2tsps of Rum (or to taste)

Method
Pre-heat the oven to gas mk.7, 220 C or 425 F

Work the softened butter with the sugar until you have a fluffy white mixture.

Add the ground almond, the 2 whole eggs and the rum and beat all together until the mixture is smooth and lump-free.

Cut two 20cm circles from the 2 sheets of flaky pastry and place one circle on a large baking sheet.

Carefully pour the almond mixture onto the pastry circle, leaving a 2cm space all around the edge of the base. At this point you can add one or more traditional feves (see previous article) but if you’re serving it to young children or elderly parents, on your own head be it!

Brush a little water, milk or some of the retained egg yolk, around the edge of the second circle of pastry, and place, egged side down on top of the almond mixture. Press the edges of the two pastry circles together firmly, and flute the edges with either a knife, the back of a spoon or your fingers.

Brush more egg yolk over the entire surface, and lightly prick with the point of a very sharp knife to release air as the galette cooks.

Bake in the centre of the pre-heated oven for twenty minutes until its golden brown all over. Resist the temptation to eat it straight from the oven or the almond paste filling will give your tongue 1st degree burns. Best served cold.

Bon Appetit !

Crowns,Crêpes and Chopsticks

2009-01-21T02:43:00.000-08:00

You’d really think after the excesses of Christmas that French digestions would need a bit of a rest, Well don’t you believe it.
January has gastronomic delights which can brighten a dull month, starting with ‘Revilllons’, the Feast of Saint Sylvestre, or as we know it - New Year’s Eve. Unless you happen to come from East Anglia, where many still perversely refer to it as Old Year’s Night.
Revillon dinners can consist of seven or eight courses with copious amounts of champagne and surprisingly, they are very pricey in a country where good meals are generally less expensive than the equivalent meals in the UK. But a ‘Repas de Saint Sylvestre is to be enjoyed regardless of cost.

In the UK Twelfth Night, or Epiphany, is the cut-off date for taking down the Christmas decorations, but that means nothing over here, indeed village Christmas lights often stay strung across the street all year. Not lit up, of course…well that would be really daft, but the Feast of Epiphany in France means….yes, you got it! Food .Cakes, to be precise.

Gateaux de Rois are on sale in every supermarket and patisserie throughout January. There are two sorts, one is made of brioche dough, fashioned into a ring and decorated with coarse sugar and coloured candies or crystallised fruits. The other is a pastry based cake….crème patisserie or an almond paste mixture sandwiched between two layers of buttery flaky pastry, plus (and this is the Health and Safety bit) half a dozen fêves (French for beans). I expect dried beans used to be put in the cake, but for the last hundred years or so beans have been replaced by little porcelain figurines which are now highly collectable and turn up regularly on the French eBay site or car boot sales. Recently plastic ones have taken over; such is the march of time. The person who gets the ‘king’ (or in the case of the cheap modern ones, ‘The Lion King’) is crowned with a gold paper crown and gets to kiss all the girls in the room! That’s the loose connection with Epiphany I suppose.

As well as Gateau de Rois the supermarkets are getting stocked up for the second January blow-out. Large displays of bags of flour, eggs, vanilla sugar, chocolate spread and jam are artistically arranged around crêpe pans, large and small. Yes, it will soon be pancake time. Not for Shrove Tuesday, as is the case in the UK, but for Chandeleur, which is known in English as Candlemass, a religious festival which has rather gone out of fashion. It’s observed six weeks after Christmas, and I think (though someone may correct me on this) it commemorates the Infant Christ being taken to the temple to be blessed in the Jewish tradition. In true French style packets of ready made pancakes are on sale as well, just in case making them from scratch is too taxing, or time consuming. The French love anything sweet and served with chocolate so crêpes are consumed par tout le monde

There’s another gourmet treat in store for January and as if cakes, crowns, and pancakes weren’t enough there’s the Chinese New Year. Now for a country that assiduously ignores anything vaguely foreign, the enthusiasm with which the French embrace this Eastern celebration is quite astounding. Lidl, that last retreat of the cash-strapped expats and suddenly wildly trendy epicerie of those expats who are pretending they’re not cash-strapped, is going to resemble a Chinese take-away next week, if their promotional leaflets are anything to go by.

I love the French take on standard Chinese labelling: Petals de Crevette…..prawn crackers to us. Sauce aigre- douce …sweet and sour sauce And a drink called Shunji which is a new one on me….a wine based drink flavoured with passion flower, plum, orange, or ginger. 10% alcohol and €1.40…..might give it a whirl! There’s also a serious outbreak of woks, chopsticks and dinky little bowls to accompany all the bottles and cans of ‘Saveurs d’Asie’.
Once through this calorie laden- month we have a bit of a rest until Easter, for which my stomach will be very grateful.

A French Dream

2009-01-17T06:34:00.000-08:00

On Gardener’s Question time last week I heard someone enquiring about the possibility of growing a grape vine on a west-facing wall in Gloucestershire - I don’t think it was the Duchess of Cornwall, they’ve probably got a special orangery or something at Highgrove special built for producing dessert grapes- but the GQT enquiry was met with a bit of negativity amongst some of the panellists. Except dear old Bob Flowerdew, who is up for any horticultural challenge, of course. (I love that man. Who else could recycle old tyres and carpets to grow things in, and on?) Anyway, the general consensus (excluding Bob) was that it probably wasn’t a brilliant idea as dessert grapes rarely come to much in an English summer. Going down to Tescos and buying a pound or two seemed less effort, and would be more rewarding.

I rather endorsed their opinions. I can remember as a child a grape vine my father had in his greenhouse. I suspect it was already in situ when we moved in, but he was so taken with it that it remained, despite taking over the entire roof, and thus blocking valuable light off the tomatoes. The grapes amounted to diddly squit. In a normal Lincolnshire summer by September all we had harvested were pea-sized green things resembling bullets. In a heatwave summer we harvested pea-sized green things resembling rubber bullets. Sometimes my mother bottled them…..God knows why, but she was prone to a certain amount of bizarre behaviour when confronted by a gastronomic challenge. Needless to say, the bottled grapes were consigned to a dusty shelf in the cellar and there they probably still reside, fifty years and numerous house purchasers later.

But I’d forgotten all these childhood experiences until we first moved to France, eight years ago this month.

Our first little house was a delight. It was small and quaint and attached to a much larger house, and above all…it was free! We lived there for 2 happy years in return for ‘gardianage’ of the ‘big ‘house next door. We were surrounded by vineyards. An olive grove was planted right up to our terrace. It was ‘La Vie en Rose’.
Even more delightful was the wrought iron canopy which was constructed at the front of the cottage. Twisting in and out of the metalwork was an ancient grapevine. It had been trained up the wall and over the top of the canopy, and even in it’s winter bareness I could visualise it in the summer, spreading it’s luscious green leaves to form a shady bower, where we could partake of a long ‘dejourner’, and in the drowsy,hot afternoons while others ‘siesta-ed’ I could sit and write my block-busting novel!

Well, it certainly worked like that at the start… apart from the writing bit, that is. But as August smouldered into a beautiful mellow September the curse of the grape struck. Unlike my experience in England, there were more grapes than we could possibly eat, unless I bottled them, and we weren’t going down that road again, thanks.

Consequently as they ripened, and over-ripened they fell off, all over our little eating area, and worse, all over the door step, from whence they were trodden into the living room, where they stained the unglazed tiles unless we pounced on the offending objects before they could soak in. They also collected every wasp and hornet in the district. And France has some pretty evil hornets, I can tell you.
On a brighter note they did also attract the most beautiful butterfly, a Large Pasha, something which monetarily stumped the Captain until he found his ‘Butterflies of Southern Europe’. But even the glory of this bird-like butterfly couldn’t totally make up for the mess and the wasps.

It just goes to prove that some things are best viewed from afar, like on a birthday card, or a jigsaw puzzle, entitled French Cottage or similar.

Resolving to Behave Badly

2009-01-10T07:25:00.000-08:00

We’re at the start of a new year. If we’d just landed from Mars how would we know?
Well there are 2 good indications that clutter up the media, and I get pretty fed-up reading about either of them.

New Year Resolutions.
That’s the first worn out headline. Usually a whole posse of journalist,‘celebs’ and assorted self -publicists are lined up by the press to tell us what their resolutions for the coming year are going to be. Are we really interested in the navel –gazing of someone who we have never met, and are unlikely to ever be in the same room as?

This year I’m not going to commit myself to any sanctimonious hair shirt- wearing. I’ve never ever been able to stick to any of my high flown ambitions further than the middle of January so after all this time I’ve decided to call it a day and from now on I’m going to spend 2009 behaving badly.

Therefore I resolve to….
Increase my daily alcohol units
Eat more chocolate
Take less exercise
Throw away the bathroom scales in view of the first three resolutions. (Well, I may just hide them for the time being)
Suffer fools less gladly than I did before – if that’s possible.
Spend more time surfing the internet
Spend less time doing the housework
(the last two items are almost impossible to achieve but I will give them my best shot.)

On a more responsible note I do intend to actually complete a novel. By which I mean to work on something that will be presentable enough to send to a publisher and not be chucked onto the slush pile without a second glance. Therefore I will be concentrating on that vitally important introductory letter, and my bête noire, the jaw-dropping-interest-arousing-must-read synopsis.

This is going to make me even more reclusive and anti-social. Hooray! I’m going to be selfish, self obsessed and who knows, successful? Well I’ll settle for a bit of success, like a short story appearing in a magazine, or, joy of joys, a publisher taking a slight interest in one of my novels. It’s not too much to ask. I’m not looking for a five figure deal, a burning desire to make the best seller list, or even the Booker Prize ( although I have just about got my acceptance speech word perfect now), so Joanna Trollope can sleep easy in her bed.

The New Year Health Regime
The other indicator of a new year is the endless references to de-toxing. What? Am I expected to seriously believe that 40 years of internal organ abuse can be resolved in a month by purchasing an expensive detox plan? Would that it were so. In four weeks, according to the advertisers, my liver, kidneys, pancreas, heart (sounds like an abattoir, doesn’t it?) will be cleansed, re-vitalised and restored to those of a teenager. (Well not one who hangs around on street corners smoking spliffs and drinking cans of Iced Diamond one hopes). They’re about as reliable as the miracle claims put out by face cream manufacturers to get rid of wrinkles in seven days.

So I shall not be resolving, detoxing or doing anything remotely good for my health.

And to all my fellow scribes and would- be- published authors I will raise a glass of something at least 12% proof and say ‘May all your hopes and dreams, however large or small, be fulfilled this year, and above all, live your lives exactly as you wish!’

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE.

Home at Last

2009-01-06T05:52:00.000-08:00

So I'm back. It was always going to be a conundrum as to where my heart really was. I lived in England for close on sixty years, and unlike many of my fellow compatriots who have set off for greener grass I have only returned to my native East Anglia once in eight years. My thinking on this subject is to commit yourself whole-heartedly to a new life and don't waste time dwelling on what you've left behind.
Every country, every new life, has’ fors ‘and ‘againsts’ and the more you compare, the worse your situation may appear. Especially now, when we who have retired on meagre pensions paid in sterling are beginning to feel the pinch. Well, its swings and roundabouts, so for the next few months it's a case of 'batten down the hatches and ride out the storm' And the storm will abate, that's for sure.
Meanwhile I had only to step off the plane at Toulouse (thanks, easyJet for another stress-free flight) to know that I was home.
The air was almost balmy, the light at 4.30 pm (3.30 GMT) just as I knew it would be, soft, golden, welcoming. The pace of life just that much slower....although once we hit the city ‘rocade’ (ring road) I was well aware that the French habit of tail-gating, and their total incomprehension of that funny little thing attached to the steering wheel known to UK drivers as an indicator, is still firmly in place. Yes, welcome back to the land that has produced the worst drivers in Europe.
Sometimes, rarely, one will encounter a driver indicating as he/she circumnavigates a roundabout. Don’t automatically assume they are informing you which exit they intend to take .It will probably mean that they've just discovered the indicator, and to their utter astonishment not only does it work but is quite good fun to play with. The fundamental trouble is that for years the French couldn’t be trusted with the gentle art of polite traffic filtering. Traffic lights were the only way to control junctions, so most drivers over the age of forty have their own individual way of attacking a roundabout. Combine that with a mental block regarding the use of an indicator and you’ve got an accident waiting to happen..
But its things like that which makes France so special. And it's one of the many idiosyncrasies that I've missed during the last month.
England is still a nice place to visit, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those expats who slag off everything about the UK. And this year the shopping was great! I spent a happy half hour in Wilkinson’s, stocking up on continental conversion plugs, cookie cutters and eco light bulbs (so much cheaper than here in France).Yes, I know. I'm a deeply sad person!
And numero uno on my shopping list was spices. In particular, Thai spices. I stocked up in a West Indian shop in Letchworth as if they were about to be rationed the next day. I explained my manic behavior to the charming Asian girl on the check-out.....why was some-one buying industrial amounts of garam masala, lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, cardamom, and fresh tamarind? 'Cos in my neck of the woods it's unheard of. She understood, and even sympathised. Hadn’t her own aunt done exactly the same thing a few weeks before?
Yes, I love duck, goose and all their by-products but sometimes I yearn for something spicy. And that, in French eyes, is close to treason. They’ve no time for foreign ‘muck’.

So, despite that, I’m still pleased to be home, and back writing my blog which I’ve sadly neglected.

All I have to do now is to wish you all a Happy New Year, and start reviewing my New Year Resolutions.

Reporting from the Eastern Front (of England)

2008-12-18T06:41:00.000-08:00

For the past two weeks I have been experiencing the full blast of UK pre Christmas blitz. For the first time in many years we are spending the month of December in England.
We had been warned to prepare for a culture shock, and boy, did we have one. From the moment we arrived at Gatwick, to find no trolleys and a ten mile hike to passport control, to the unmitigated horrors of the M25 at 11 pm. And can anyone tell me why as members of the EU we had to queue for so long to get into the country anyway? I thought being in that elite club brought privileges like speedy entry into fellow EU countries. Apparently not. And why are the passport checkers such a surly lot?
'This is my home country' I feel like saying.'I might have been away for a few years, but I have as much right as as anyone to come in. I promise I won't linger. I'll leave, thankfully, as soon as Christmas is over.'
But England still does have a few things to offer that France doesn't. Ignore the frantic shopping mania, the every man for himself obsession there is still a vestige of Christmas spirit lurking about, particularly in the more rural areas of the country.
Ever since the 1930s France has had a strict policy of non-intervention between church and state. In the multi-cultural world we inhabit today this is probably a sound decision, but it makes for a very quiet Christmas. No nativity plays in the schools, no village carol services.
In the primary school days of my own children there were times when I felt I couldn't face yet another rendition of the nativity story. With the village school striving for something a bit different I've sat through the most bizarre variations of the journey to Bethlehem, but somehow ever since we've lived in France I've had a yearning to see assorted children wearing dressing gowns and Mum's tea cloth on their heads intoning monotonously ...'Lo, we have seen the star in the East...etc.'
Our little French village is as quiet as the grave on Christmas Eve. No merry drinkers pile out of the bar and reel into the church to finish off a jolly evening singing Once in Royal David's City lustily (and incoherently). Everyone is merry-making behind the shutters with their families, settling down to a gargantuan supper which will stretch across many courses and several hours. Presents will be opened, toasts drunk and the next day...Christmas Day...will be like our Boxing Day. Very hung-over. And after that on the 26th it's straight back to work for a few days until the whole thing starts again for the Revellions de St Sylvestre (New Years Eve, to the non-French.)
So, on Frday we will gather in the local church for an evening of Christmas carols, there is a crib service on Christmas Eve that I might go to if I'm well ahead with the next day's catering,and on Christmas morning we will be going into full-on Olde- English-Charles Dickens-Yo-Ho-Ho Merry Yuletide.

Keep out the Cold with a Warming Stew.

2008-11-21T04:29:00.000-08:00

I promised I'd write some more about our local speciality, the famous cassoulet. Much has been written about this rustic stew, and it has become something of a must- try on the tourist circuit. So, one witnesses the comical sight of coach-loads of heavily perspiring tourists packing out the restaurants of la Citié,the Unesco Heritage Site in Carcassonne, manfully ploughing their way through steaming plates of bean stew in the 30c heat of July. Because 'it's what you do when you take in the sites of Carcassonne'. You bring a copy of the DaVinci Code to study in an ostentatious manner as well.

Every European country has a winter stew written into its gastronomic history, if only to use up all those hearty winter vegetables in an effort to keep warm, from Lancashire hotpot to Tuscan white bean stew. And in the chill of a Southwest France winter, cassoulet was just as much of an alternative to central heating as all the rest. Basically it's a white bean stew, very much like the Tuscan one, with sausages,tomatoes, garlic and meat. It's in the choice of meat that the cassoulet displays its regional characteristics.
As I mentioned before, the town of Castelnaudery lays claim to producing 'le vrai' cassoulet. And a village just north of the town was famous for producing the traditional red clay pot that the stew should be served in. This is a deep bowl, with the sides narrowing towards the base. This gives plenty of space for the bread-crumb crust that some regions insist on for the finished dish.
Depending on where you eat your cassoulet will determine what meat is likely to be in it, but as a rough guide it's:
Castelnaudery : all pork...any cuts together with sausages and pork rind
Toulouse : pork, but confit duck or goose as well, and Toulouse sausage (naturellment)
Carcassonne : pork, and sausage with lamb, or if its's in the autumn, you may be lucky enough to find a piece or two of partridge
The Perigord : lamb, Toulouse sausage and cou farci d'oie...stuffed goose neck.

There are so many variations that really, anything goes as long as you stick to the main ingredients which must include dried haricot beans. They should be lingots produced around Tarbes but they are hideously expensive and probably not that easy to find in the UK.

There are three processes to the making of a cassoulet: the soaked beans are cooked separately, and the meats as well, then the whole thing is brought together with confit duck or goose for the final cooking....the duck/goose will have been previously cooked when it was confit'd so doesn't require the long cooking that the rest of the ingredients do ( I'm beginning to sound like Delia Smith)

This recipe will serve 8 -10 and just requires some crusty bread to accompany it. Nothing else, oh - apart from a few bottles of a gutsy red wine. It's a rib-sticking piece of gastronomy, so no other vegetables or side dishes are neeed. Some indigestion tablets might be a good idea for those with less than robust digestions.

For the bean part you will need:

1 kg dried white haricot beans.
a carrot, an onion and 2 cloves of garlic( well, as many as you like really...this is where I stop sounding like Delia.) These should be roughly chopped
Bouquet garni
350 gms (more or less) salt belly of pork
a ham bone...if you can scrounge one from your local deli, a Bayonne, or Serrano ham bone is ideal, but an ordinary one is OK.
salt (go easy on it as you've got salt in the pork, so taste as you go) and peppercorns.

To cook:
Soak the beans in cold water overnight. Then drain, rinse, and place in a large saucepan with enough water to well cover, and bring to a fast boil. Cook for 10 mins. Then add the rest of the ingredients and simmer gently for about 1 hour. Test the beans - they should be soft, but not mushy.

While the beans cook prepare the meat part of the dish.

For this you will need:

350 gms lean pork shoulder
700 grms good quality pork sausages, preferably Toulouse, but any sort with a high meat content
250 grms peeled tomatoes - I strongly recommend a large tin of Italian plum toms - it's easier and they have a richer taste, but let's not tell the French !
yet another carrot and onion and plenty of garlic
1 generous litre of meat or vegetable stock
Salt and pepper to taste.

Cut the pork into chunks, and fry off gently (in duck fat if possible) with the chopped onion, sliced carrot and crushed garlic. Add the sausages ....if you're using the Toulouse variety you'll need to cut it up into chunks, if not you can leave the sausages whole.Then sauté everything off until is a nice gold colour. Add the hot stock and the tomatoes. Season well and cook at a gentle simmer for about an hour. All being well the beans and meat will be ready at the same time.

Whilst both are simmering away you can prepare the confit'd duck or goose.
For this you will need:

1 850 gm -1kg tin of confit de canard or d'ioe

Place the tin in a pan of hot water and warm up in a moderate oven for 10-15 minutes. Remove from the oven and carefully open the tin. A cloth over the tin at this point is a good idea, as there will be a lot of hot fat sloshing around.
Lift out the pieces of duck or goose and drain well. Tear the pieces into easily eaten chunks, being careful to remove any bones. Pour the liquid fat into a kilner type jar and refrigerate. Stored like this, the fat will solidify and keep for months. It makes the best-ever roast potatoes and is one of the few fats that are actually acceptable health-wise.

Now you're ready to assemble the cassoulet.
Drain off the beans, discarding the vegetables and herbs. Remove the rind from the salt pork (the French don't, so keep it on if you wish)and cut into chunks.
Take a very large casserole dish - terracotta if possible,for authenticity - and layer in the beans and the meats - the salt pork, the shoulder of pork, the sausages and the duck or goose meat - plus the vegetables from the pork and sausage stew, then top up with the cooking stock until everything is well covered. At this point you could refrigerate the dish until and hour before you need it. It will sit quite happily for a couple of days, thus saving a lot preparation time if you're entertaining on a tight time scale.

Just before placing in a moderate oven sprinkle a thick layer of fresh breadcrumbs over the top of the cassoulet and cook for an hour. As long as you check that it hasn't absorbed all the liquid it will sit quite contentedly in the oven for a lot longer while you chat with your guests. It's a perfect dish for solo entertaining as all the hard work can be done beforehand.

So, making sure you have all the required ingredients, or adapting the recipe to make use of what's available, just wait for the first sprinkling of snow and spend a cosy afternoon in the kitchen assembling your version of a French winter stew.

November- The Month for Remembering.

2008-11-10T05:32:00.000-08:00

From the middle of October the supermarkets and flower shops have been filled with huge pots of chrysanthenums,and to a lesser extent scarlet cyclamen. These are in readiness for Toussaints,or the feast of All Saints on November 1st. Cemeteries all over France will be ablaze with gold, copper or deep maroon balls of tightly packed chrysanthenums. On the actual day of Toussaints masses for the dead are said; in the case of our village an 11 a.m mass was celebrated in the ancient chapel of St. Jean which adjoins the cemetery As is customary in France, the graveyard is several hundred meters outside the village itself. If cemeteries can be pleasant places, ours is. It has magnificent views - south to the mountains, north to the flatter, more arable land of the Gers, and in front, the peaceful valley of the Save. The family plots are quietly impressive, with their collections of memorium plaques..for an uncle, a god-parent, an old comrade. Reading the names it soon becomes apparent that there are four or five main famillies in the village whose roots go back generations, and their heirs are still running local life..as councillors, bar owners,local tradesmen. Modern life has made it's presence felt in France, as everywhere else, and new famillies move in, but it's reassuring to know that the old-established names are still here, contributing to village life.

November 11th sees the 'Armistice 1918' as it's called on my French calender.

This afternoon the young man who works for the mairie, and keeps the village looking nice, will put out the four small tricolour at each corner of the memorial opposite the post office. The four corners are marked by upright WW1 shells, now unarmed and painted black. As in the UK the monumant itself bears the names of the village men who died in both conflicts, and in the Algerian debacle as well.

Tommorrow, at 10.55 a small crowd of villagers will gather and the mayor will solemly read out each individual name, each one followed by a murmured 'Mort pour France' from the congregation. There will be a one minute silence, and then everyone will retire to the bar for an aperitif.

The French don't wear poppies as they do the UK, instead they opt for blue cornflowers. Unfortunately in this day and age the cornflower is now reduced to a paper sticker for coats and lapels. The British Legion still produce a 'proper' poppy, thank goodness.

Toussaints and Armistice Day provides the French with two more public holidays, but that will be their lot this year until Christmas Day.

A Home-made Treat

2008-11-08T02:31:00.001-08:00

Just in case I've stirred anyone's interest in marron glacé they are quite easy to make at home.I found this recipe in the Daily Telegraph. I wouldn't imagine they would keep very long, unlike the commercially produced ones but if anyone has a spare five minutes in between baking the mince pies and preparing the stuffing on Christmas Eve (I can hear the howls of anguish even now !) here's the recipe

You will need

150g (5oz) chestnuts
Half cup of caster sugar
Half cup fresh orange juice
113g (4oz) icing sugar, sifted
1 tbsp ground cinnamon (or more, to taste)

1. Peel chestnuts and steam for 7-8 minutes over a pan of simmering water.
2. Put the orange juice and caster sugar together in a pan. Bring to boiling point on the hob and reduce to a syrupy (like light caramel) consistency ( 3-4 minutes). Quickly tip the chestnuts in, stir very gently to coat them. Drain off the syrup, and spoon the chestnuts individually onto a wire rack to cool. Tip chestnuts into a bowl and coat lightly in icing sugar and cinnamon (to taste).
3. On greaseproof paper, dry chestnuts in the oven (40C) for 10 minutes. Garnish with orange peel.

recipe and photo curtesy of the Daily Telegraph.
-------------------------

Home-made marron glacé would make a lovely Christmas present for friends in these cash-strapped times. Arranged in a pretty box, with a bow, or hand crafted gift tag...one swanky-looking present for not much cost, just a bit of effort.

I don't know how good the chestnut harvest is going to be this year. We have masses of sweet chestnut trees all around us, but the real chestnut territory is in central France, and the Perigord in particular.

I do like them with Brussell sprouts, but I have to admit all that peeling ruins one's Christmas nails! So I'm ashamed to say I buy them ready-to-go. The tin ones are OK but I think the vacuum packs are better as the chestnuts are drier and seem to break up less easily.

Tinned chestnut purée is a great store cupboard stand-by. Whipped up with a little cream to 'slacken' the mixture,(adding caster sugar to taste if the purée is unsweetened) then tipped into bought meringue cases, and topped with a drizzle of melted chocolate to which a little rum has been added.... disgustingly delicious!

The Unbearable Enthusiasm of New Grannies.

2008-11-07T06:15:00.000-08:00

Just in case any of you didn't know why I had a pile of baby clothes on the spare bed I shall inflict yet another baby photo on you.

Ain't 'e 'ansome? Two weeks-going-on-six-months. He'll be walking and talking at Christmas by this rate !

French Treats

2008-11-07T04:37:00.000-08:00

The bed in our spare room is beginning to resemble the village epicerie.In anticipation of our trip back to the UK I'm starting a collection of French specialities to enliven our Christmas celebrations. I've even gone to the lengths of paying for hold luggage to transport them all. As Daughter-Turned-New-Mum said when I told her of yet another gourmet item I'd added to the list, 'Are you actually bringing any clothes?'

Eldest-and-Wisest-Daughter kicked off the campaign by reminding me that she was very partial to marrons glacés and would I be bringing any? As that was early October there were none in the shops then, but lo, like the Star in the East, they appeared in the supermarket last week. One box went in the shopping trolley along with a vacuum pack of smoked duck breast. Now I'm dithering as to whether I should buy another packet of smoked duck...how many will there be for Christmas lunch? I intend to prepare a 'Gascon' starter of paper-thin slices of duck and foie gras with caramelised apple or fresh figs if I can lay my hands on any fairly easily. I know foie gras is an emotive subject, but it is delicious, a statement which won't win me any brownie points with those who are dead against the production of it.

Proper Gascon salad should have gesiers in it as well, but they're an acquired taste, one which I haven't acquired but The Captain is very enamoured of them. Gesiers are basically gizzards which have been slow cooked (or confit-ed) in duck or goose fat. They're then sliced and together with the smoked duck scattered over a bed of mixed salad leaves. Sometimes lightly fried chicken livers are added as well.I try to avoid the genuine Salade de Gascogne when I see it on a menu.They are served at many of our village lunches (where there's no menu) and are very popular with everyone except me, who tries to flick the (to me) unappetising offal over to The Captains plate without anyone seeing. I can't imagine gizzard salad going down very well at our family lunch, and I may have to go easy on the foie gras so's not to offend any Christmas guests who might be a little more sensitive than my lot.

Confit of duck is always welcome in our family, so tins of that have already been sent back via friends. As the tins usually weigh around a kilo each I'm not dragging them back in a suitcase. Gascony and the Haute Garonne is the spiritual home of the duck and the goose so the shops are bursting with all things duck/goose orientated all year round, but its in November that it really comes into it's own, with supermarket offers on legs, breasts, livers, gizzards and even carcasses, to confit for the winter. Both daughters would like some jars of goose fat, but they'll have to wait until someone comes down with a car. I'm not paying for excess baggage just so they can have crispy roast potatoes, although spuds roasted in duck or goose fat are to die for!

If I had the weight to spare I'd rather take some tins of cassoulet. That's a real winter warmer and a signature dish of Southwest France. The inhabitants of Castelnaudery (between Toulouse and Carcassonne) lay claim to the vrai cassoulet. Anything else is a pale imitation, they say. There are many variations to the dish but the undeniable essential is dried haricot beans...purists would say they must be lingots and hail from Tarbes, but again there's argument about that. But then, the French love a good argument, especially if it concerns food.

Castelnaudery is a pleasant but unremarkable little town on the Canal de Midi notable for being the headquarters of the French Foreign Legion (a trivial piece of information, but one that might stand you in good stead at the next pub quiz night )as well as producing a stonking good cassoulet. Castlnaudery insist on having masses of pork in theirs...no duck, just big chunks of belly and /or loin, couennes (thin strips of pork rind)and sausage of course. No self -respecting cassoulet can be served without really thick porky sausage. In Toulouse they add some neck of lamb and a piece or two of duck confit, and the sausage has to be the Toulouse variety...packed with pure,lean pork and capable of withstanding several hours of cooking. Carcassonne prefers to use leg of lamb - just to get one up on Toulouse probably!
The recipe for cassoulet is not complicated, it's only a bean casserole after all, but the list of ingredients is endless so I'll devote a separate blog to that later.

But back to the spare bed. I'd like to take some glacé fruits, oh.... and I'll be taking some Agen prunes as a joke 'pressie' for a friend. If you need to eat prunes at least make the experience enjoyable by eating the king of dried plums from the Agen orchards. They're big, fat and totally scrumptious. To be consumed in moderation, as they say on bottles of wine...which no-one takes any notice of.

There is also a small, but growing pile of baby clothes on the bed as well. What ever can they be for ?

photo of marrons by curtesy of : passamanrie/htlp.flickr.com

A Damp Weekend in the Haute Garonne

2008-11-04T05:38:00.000-08:00

Well, the chocolate biscuits are still languishing in the hall. The rain, which is not a frequent visitor here, decided it would arrive last Tuesday and has stayed with us for seven whole days. This is what undoubtedly dampened the enthusiasm of our village 'trick or treaters'.

The Captain thought he heard a kerfuffle at the front door halfway through the evening, but on going to investigate found only a copy of the Watchtower lying on the doormat. No, I'm not making it up. Perhaps there is some simmering battle going on between Jehovah's Witnesses and small children representing the forces of evil. It seemed a strange night to be out evangelising. I shall be on my guard next year as to who will be knocking on the door to save or damn my soul. Whoo...scary !

The rain continued to drizzle down for the rest of the weekend, completely ruining the national holiday that comes with All Saints Day, or Toussaint as it's known in France. As it fell on a Saturday this year the country was in rather a state of confusion. Saturdays are one day of the week when shopkeepers can rely on some decent takings and to have to close up on that particular day can mean the difference between a weeks profit or loss for small business. Especially in the present economic climate. So, as so often in France, one didn't really know which shops were liable to be closed.

I would have liked to have been in Paris,rather than watching the mountains disappearing behind grey clouds this weekend. The 14th annual chocolate fair was being held there and it must have been heaven on earth. I'd have willingly swapped the drizzly Haute Garonne for a few hours of calorific hedonism. 400 exhibitors and 140 of the best chocolatiers showing off their craft. I ask you !

There was an enormous sculpture of the Eiffel Tower, and even a chocolate fashion show. ( Type in the URL below to see a short video, if you've the strength of will not to rush to the corner shop for a Mars Bar afterwards)
Apparently chocolate was introduced to France by Anne of Austria in 1615. In fact she only agreed to marry Louis XIII on the condition that she be allowed to bring her chocolate allowance with her. Perhaps chocolate allowances should be built into a pre.nup. contract. 'You can have custody of the dog - I keep the chocolate.'

I wonder if Heaven is entirely made of chocolate? It would certainly make dying a lot more attractive.As only Jehovah's Witnesses are to be admitted to the Heavenly Heights come the Day of Judgement perhaps I should sign up the next time they come to call, just to be on the safe side

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france.3280095/Paris-chocolate-fair.html

Halloween Horrors

2008-10-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

It's getting to be that time of year again.
October 31st, All Hallows Eve when ghosts, ghouls and small children in fright masks stalk the streets.

The French throw themselves into it with gusto Considering their natural abhorrence of anything that might have blown in from the direction of the New World it's quite surprising. The gift shops are full of witches hats, Edward Scissor hands finger nails, and inflatable pumpkins. The fancy dress shops are doing a brisk trade as well. And come Friday evening the village trick or treaters will be out. Probably.In our village nothing follows a particular pattern.

The first year we arrived we were still in the process of unpacking when Halloween was unleashed on us.There was a timid knock on the door, and there stood one small boy with a sheet over his head emitting half-hearted wailing noises. I reacted splendidly, uttering multitudinous 'ooh-la-las' whilst racking my brains as to what to offer a pint-sized ghoul.

No sweets are consciously kept in our house,for reasons which will be revealed later, but I remembered that eldest and wisest daughter had driven down from the UK to help us move and had cleared out her drive-time sugar ration before the journey home. Somewhere in the wreckage of our move was a bag of jettisoned sweets.

When I eventually located them, during which time Captain Sensible was entertaining our young spectre on the doorstep, I discovered, in amongst the scruffy-looking sticks of chewing gum and half-empty boxes of Tic-Tacs, a five finger bar of KitKat.That would do splendidly.

Our little visitor looked suitably impressed and with many 'mercis' he scuttled off as fast as the sheet would allow.

'I bet that's the best treat he'll get all night' the Captain remarked. 'he's probably gone roaring off to tell all his friends to get off down to the new Anglaises. They're giving away English chocolate bars,'

Horrified, I realised I hadn't anything else to give anyone, apart from the manky looking Wrigleys and a few TicTacs. I spent the rest of the evening twitching like a startled rabbit every time I heard anyone walk past But all was well. Either our little ghost was Billy-no-mates' or what friends he had were too scared to knock on the door of Les Anglaises.

Next year I was better prepared. I bought a 'geant' sized bag of mixed chocolate bars.Individually wrapped I could dole them out to whoever came (as come they would) without fear of running out. After all we had been in residence for a year, people called out 'Bonjour. Ca va?' wherever we went, and unknown,unrecognisable hands waved from passing cars and vans.We were on the village calender.

I saw a large group from my kitchen window as they scampered down the back lane to my neighbours. I opened the bag of bars in eager anticipation and rehearsed my lines. The French equivalent of ...Goodness, what have we here? ...and other suitable expressions. I heard the click of Madame's gate and 'au'voirs' and 'bon nuits' being exchanged and then...silence. The 'Maison Anglais' was too terrifying a place on a night like this. We had been missed out. Quelle dommage!

So - I had a large bag of bite sized choccy bars to dispose of. What a problem. Now, put me in a room with Dawn French and a chocolate fountain and I promise you there will be blood on the carpet. I decided that if the bag was out of sight I would forget about them . Eventually. And anyway, I reasoned, they were probably quite revolting. I like the dark, sensuous, Belgian stuff...for grown-ups. Unfortunately a few weeks later I was struggling to complete an article on Antonio Gaudi and the Sagrada Famillia. It was destined to be like the building itself...unfinished. A deadline was approaching... desperate measures were called for. Like a chocolate rush.

The fact that the bars were bite sized may have been the problem. And the fact that one wasn't enough.I don't know how many I munched my way through before the article was completed, I just know I felt extremely queasy, spent the rest of the day haunted by Puritan guilt, and three years later I reckon I'm still wearing every last damned bar on my hips.

The next year a minuscule pumpkin and a equally tiny Spider Man materialised on the door step, and were suitably rewarded for outstanding bravery when confronted by foreigners. I bought a bag of Haribos on this occasion. I was pretty well guaranteed not to touch those should there be any left over.

So, recalling the indecision's of previous years I have bought a packet of individually wrapped 'Petit Sacripants' which is a very exotic title for what is basically a plain biscuit with a layer of sweetened cream,and a covering of milk chocolate on top of that. I notice that the calorie count is 519 per 100 grms, which I have worked out is 103.8 calories per sacripant. I shall bear that in mind, should they still be hovering about after the weekend.

On Being a First Time Granny

2008-10-25T05:30:00.000-07:00

I've been a bit inactive with my blogging of late, but I have a really good excuse.

Last week, well Monday to be precise, my very first grandchild made his grand entrance into the world.

Was it because we knew he was on the way from last January, or was it because we knew from May onwards that the embryonic blob was actually a boy? Either way the waiting seemed endless, and as the expected date grew nearer my patience was on the point of running out. What it was like for his poor parents I can't imagine. Then of course he decided to keep us all waiting that little bit longer, although it was only a few days it seemed like a whole extra month to me. Then I had to wait to find out how much he weighed (always a vital piece of information for the waiting public), then I had to wait for the photos, but at least we have email these days.If I'd had to have waited for snail mail I'd have gone mad.

Now I can't wait to see him in real life, but it'll be another five weeks before that happens. By which time he will have 'fluffed-up' nicely, will have grown into his first-size baby-grows and will hopefully be adopting a sociable sleeping pattern. Visiting grannies expect no less.

I remember when his mother was born, an elderly friend took a look at her, agreed she was a lovely baby but remarked gloomily that he despaired for the world she had been born into. I find myself echoing his words, but I suppose that's something everyone has thought about a new life and the state of the world since time began.
Recessions, credit crunches,redundancies, repossessions - I'm quite sure my daughter will be worrying about just the same things in twenty or so years when she takes a first look at a new grandchild.

History has a strange habit of repeating itself, like an endless loop. The new baby's grandfather was born on the verge of the last big Wall Street crash in the late twenties of the last century, and he's survived a world war, a three day week, boom and bust... the full works !

So welcome to the world, with all it's faults, William .

Food for Thought

2008-10-10T04:34:00.000-07:00

Like thousands of others I'm following the fortunes of the 'Restaurant' wannabees. I watch the programme with a mixture of disbelief and embarrassment. Why, in God's name aren't they better prepared and better organised? And above all what on earth drives them to submit themselves to the scrutiny of several thousand viewers, their poor, starving customers, two of the most humourless adjudicators and the eagle eye of the great Raymond Blanc ? Are they mad?

It must be the lure of the prize, their own restaurant. The idea that they will be running their own restaurant is somewhat fanciful, as the prize winners will still be working for someone other than themselves ....Raymond himself. And sweet, kind, charmingly Gallic as he may seem, he'll be like every other successful entrepreneur when you actually work for him. A very, very hard taskmaster. How do the hopeful contestants think he got to be where he is today?

Observing the shenanigans of the contestants from a distance is quite enlightening. I've been away from the UK for so long, I've actually forgotten that a decent bottle of wine can cost twenty quid from an off-licence.And I've also forgotten that British restaurants 'turn tables'.

What a philistine habit that is. It's almost unheard of here, certainly in rural eating places. When we first came to France I would ring up to book a table, and then wonder why they didn't ask me what time I wanted it for. They weren't interested in my carefully rehearsed time-telling. If I wanted a table for lunch, well they opened at 12...why should I stipulate a time? No-one else would be taking our table...it was ours for as long as we wanted.

Being asked to vacate your table would be tantamount to committing catering hari-kari. No-one would ever patronise the place again. That's one of the joys of eating out in France. There's no whisking away of plates, or suggestions that you take coffee in 'the lounge'. Ninety-nine percent of restaurants don't possess a sitting area anyway. And that's something I really like. In the UK nothing would annoy me more than being 'stacked' in a restaurant bar for half an hour or so, while waiters try to chivvy on the diners occupying our booked table. Being shovelled into the same bar for coffee afterwards was even worse. In France meals are to be enjoyed, lingered over, chatted over...even at times argued over.

Whilst on this epicurean subject,I thought an A -Z to some of the more obscure items you might find on a French restaurant menu. might be useful.
So here's:

PART ONE - A to J

A
abats : offal

agrumes : citrus fruit

aïgo bouido : Provençal garlic soup served over pieces of bread

aigre : sour

aigre-doux : sweet-and-sour

à aigrir : soured - wine or milk

ail : garlic :

gousse d'ail = clove of garlic

ail semoule : garlic salt

aïoli : a Provencal garlic mayonaise sauce,

airelle : cranberry
alevin : white bait

amuse-gueule , amuse-bouche : cocktail snack

anchoyade : Provençal purée made with anchovy, garlic and olive oil

B
babeurre buttermilk :

barbouillade : stuffed eggplant or eggplant stew (Provençal)

bavette (steak) : minute steak; the top or skirt of beef

bécasse woodcock

becassine snipe

beignet : doughnut : (beignet, doughnut, fritter)

betterave : beetroot

blé : wheat (useful if anyone has a wheat allergy) :

- germe de blé = wheatgerm

blé noir : buckwheat

blette: Swiss chard

bouchonné : corked = wine that's gone off, with the taste of its cork

bourride : Provençal fish soup, prepared with tomatoes, garlic, onions, herbs and olive oil, and served with aïoli sauce.

brebis : ewe as in fromage de brebis

brouillade : a Provençal type of scrambled eggs

broyé : crushed

C

cabillaud fesh cod ..... salt cod : morue

cacahouète : peanut

calmar : squid

câpres : capers

capucine : nasturtium

cardoon: an edible thistle, related to the artichoke, with edible root and leafstalks which resemble overgrown celery.

carvi : caraway

cassis :blackcurrant

cassis, creme de : blackcurrant liqueur

chapelure : bread crumbs

chapon : crust rubbed with garlic

chapon : capon a young castrated and fattened chicken

chevreau de lait : milk goat (kid)

chicorée frisée : chicory lettuce

ciboule : spring onion

ciboulette : chives

citrouille : pumpkin

coco rose : small bean, white with pink veins

coing: quince

confit : preserved, confit de canard is duck joints cooked and preserved in its own fat

confit de [fruit] : candied, jellied or crystallized fruit.

confiture : jam

counne : rind, skin : example: "couenne de porc" is porc rind

courge : squash

crème chantilly : whipped cream

crème èpaisse : thick cream

crème fleurette : light cream : a low-fat cream used in cooking, in place of crème fraîche; also "crème liquide"

crème fraîche : cream, full-fat : used for making butter, sauces, etc.

cuire au four : bake in the oven

D

daube beef stew

dinde : turkey :

dindonneau: young turkey

dorade : sea-bream

doux mild or sweet

E

ecorce : rind

écrasé: crushed or flattened

écrevisse : crayfish, crawfish

en poudre : powder

encornet : squid

endive : chicory.

entrecôte (steak) : ribsteak

entremets : sweet desserts and sweet side dishes.
épicé : hot, spicy

épinard : spinach

à éplucher : to peel

F

farci : stuffed = légumes farcis

farine : flour :

farine de sarrasin :buckwheat flour

faux-filet (steak) : sirloin steak

fenouil : fennel

fève : broad bean

filet (steak) : tenderloin steak

filet mignon : small tender end of tenderloin of beef (or of veal or pork)

fondu : melted

fougasse : a type of flattened Provencal bread often stuffed with olives

four : oven

fourré : filled ,stuffed, creamed

fromage blanc : a soft white cheese like a thick yogurt

fromage de chèvre : goat cheese

fromage rapé : grated cheese

G

germe de blé : wheatgerm (Again useful for those with a wheat allergy)

gibier : game - pheasant, boar, etc.

gigot: : Leg of lamb or leg of mutton, or kid usually roasted

girofle clove : "clous de girofle" are whole cloves, and "girofle moulu" or "girofle en poudre" are powdered cloves. ).

gousse clove, pod : clove (of garlic); pod (of bean or pea)

goût taste : (arôme = aroma; goût = taste; parfum = flavor of ice cream;

à goûter : to taste

grenade : pomegranate

grondin : gurnard,

gros sel: rock, or coarse salt

H
haricot : bean

haricot blanc : white beans

haricot coco rose d'Eyragues : small white bean with pink veins

haricot rouge : kidney beans

haricot vert : green beans

Next Time : I to P

An Explosive Way to Celebrate a Birthday

2008-10-09T04:59:00.000-07:00
It was my birthday on Tuesday. As one gets older birthdays tend to be less celebratory. And past a certain age one wishes one could ignore them altogether.

So there would be no popping of champagne corks, and in these belt-tightening times, dinner 'a deux' in a local restaurant wasn't even mooted. A trip to the shops would have to provide my birthday treat. I could hardly wait. A mooch around Aldi and then to Lidls on the way home. But first we would call in on the doctor for our drug fix(atenolol, not amphetamines I hasten to add) So I was in for an action-packed day.

It began well. We had our usual banter with the doctor, and asked him to sign our forms for our free flu jabs. He was in a chatty mood as we were the only ones in the surgery and I reflected again on how fortunate we are to be in the French health system. I was even more cheered when I went into the pharmacy in Lannemezan and the lady who was serving me wished me (in nervous English) an 'Appy Birthday.

At Aldi Captain Sensible reversed the car carefully to take advantage of some shade (it has been really warm these last few days). We had already been across the road at another cheapo supermarket and although we had a cool box he's paranoid about food going off if the boot gets warm.

So we did our shopping, went out to the car and I stood at the back, with the trolley, ready to load it all in the boot. The Captain decides it's going to be better to move the car a foot or so forward to make it easier for me to get to the tailgate. So far, so good.

So he gets half in the car...ie he gets his left cheek on the seat and as his right leg is still outside he attempts to engage the clutch with his left. Unfortunately he hits the accelerator instead and covers me, the shopping trolley, and the tree under which we're parked,with a layer of oily soot as he accidentally performs what is known in some circles as an 'Italian Service.' When I could eventually see, and had stopped coughing, I attempted to see the funny side of it. It was difficult. As is the way with some men, Captain Sensible thought it was hilarious.

As the groceries were also covered in fine soot I managed to get it all over my hands as I packed them away. I had bought some cheap perfume in Aldi, and like a child I couldn't wait to try it, so I'd just sprayed my neck liberally with it seconds before the volcano erupted. So my neck was wet, and acted like a soot magnet.

Most people would have gone home at this point, but we still had another supermarket to blitz so if anyone saw a black and white minstrel shopping in the Lannemezan Lidls it was me.

Autunm Has Arrived

2008-09-28T03:44:00.000-07:00

Well, autumn has arrived. I'm not that downhearted because this has to be the most spectacular time of the year here in the Haute Pyrenees. On a good year we can cock a snoot at New England, tho' we don't have coach loads of 'leaf-peepers' . We're pretty laid back about it here so it doesn't occur to us to advertise just how beautiful the countryside looks. I just wish the season would last longer. But, fingers crossed, we should enjoy the blaze of colour until the middle of November.
Depending on the dryness of the summer we have so many bramble hedges in the lanes around here that we can pick several kilos of wild blackberries to freeze for winter blackberry and apple puds. We've four fairly prolific apple trees in our garden, but we just lack the suet to make a really traditional steamed pudding. It's probably just as well, because steamed suet pudding has to be the most unhealthy dessert on the planet. But it is good !
Here's an article I wrote for ww.suite101.com last year.
There's some advice on harvesting your autumn bounty, together with a recipe for sloe gin and autumn fruit jellies.

The autumn hedgerows are full of wild fruits which can be made into jams, jellies and homemade wines to use during the winter.
Nature saves the best of her free gifts until the autumn, when the hedgerows become a treasure trove of edible goodies.
Walking in the countryside can be a pleasurable and rewarding experience in the autumn. After a warm summer the hedgerows are an abundant source of berries, many of which can be gathered to make jams, wines, jellies and liqueurs.
Before venturing out though, there are a few things to bear in mind.
Don’t pick anything from hedgerows at the side of busy roads. There are too many petrol and diesel fumes hanging about in the air which may settle on the fruit.
Make sure the trees or shrubs don’t obviously belong to anyone. Those juicy plums might be hanging temptingly over the public highway but if the tree or bush is on someone’s private property the fruit rightly belongs to them.
Take a longish walking stick with a curved handle, or something similar. Many of the best fruits are out of reach (the easily reached ones having been picked before you got there) so a stick comes in useful to pull the branches down.
Don’t damage the trees or bushes in your eagerness. They’ve probably been on the planet longer than you, so show them some respect.
Thick gloves are a useful addition to your equipment. Many hedgerows are full of thorny bushes.
Always check the lie of the land. In your enthusiasm for spotting a bush covered in fruit make sure there isn't a hidden ditch in your way before you launch yourself into the hedge. Getting a soaking can take the fun off the afternoon.
If your hunting takes you into a field, check for grazing cattle and remember to close all gates behind you …..and if you notice a bull in with a herd of cows, don’t go in the field at all.
Black berries and elderberries are the first fruits to ripen in the Northrn Hemisphere.

Autumn is the time to be watching the hedgerows for the arrival of the first sloes which, when soaked in gin for a few weeks, will provide a delicious Christmas liqueur.
Sloe gin is favourite winter warmer for colder climates
Its ruby-red colour and sweet flavour make it an ideal drink after a brisk walk in the depth of winter.
If you are not a gin lover it can be made with vodka, but gin imparts a richer flavour, and is undetectable in the finished product.
Sloes are the small purple-black fruit of the blackthorn. They are generally found in hedgerows from late August onwards, and can be a bit inaccessible as the bushes are thorny and the berries often high on the branch. A long walking stick with a curved handle is a useful aid to picking, and the resulting liqueur is well worth the effort.
Do not be tempted to pick the fruits too early as they will be bitter. September is a good time, although traditionally they are at their best after the first frost. In a mild winter this can mean leaving it too late for the finished product to be ready for Christmas drinking, so the ‘frosting’ can be faked by placing the picked fruit in the freezer for a day or two before preparing the liqueur. Some experienced sloe gin makers believe the freezing releases the juice and makes for an improved flavour
For 1 ltr. of sloe gin you will need:
· 450g sloes
· 225g castor sugar
· 1ltr. gin
Wash and dry the sloes and prick all over with a sharp needle. Place in a large screw top jar which will hold 1 ltr of liquid comfortably.
Add the castor sugar and top up with the gin. Seal tightly. Leave in a cool, dark environment for at least two months Try to give the jar a good shake every day if possible.
As with all homemade alcoholic drinks, the longer they’re left to soak the better the flavour will be.
At this point ideas differ. Some people prefer to leave the sloes in the gin; indeed many aficionados actually macerate the mixture in an empty gin bottle and serve the drink straight from there. Others strain the gin into bottles, or a decanter.
Whichever method you choose the dark ruby-red liqueur is an absolute winner on a chilly evening.
A dash of sloe gin in a glass of champagne also makes an elegant cocktail drink.
The sloes themselves are frequently thrown away, having served their purpose. But a delicious sweet can be made by coating the fruit in bitter chocolate.
Spread the used sloes in a single layer on a thick piece of absorbent kitchen paper. When they have dried dip each one in melted chocolate and place carefully on waxed paper to cool and become firm. Store in an air-tight container.
These rich chocolates are a perfect accompaniment to a glass of sloe gin, preferably enjoyed with good friends and a roaring log fire.
Traditionally elderberries have been used for country wine making, but together with sloes, crab apples, and rose hips they can also be used to make jellies.

A rule-of-thumb recipe for fruit jellies:
Clean the fruit thoroughly, checking for hidden insects
Whatever quantity of fruit you have, cover with water and bring to the boil.
Simmer until the fruit has softened.
Allow to cool and strain through a clean tea cloth or muslin jelly bag.
Measure cooled liquid and place in a thick bottomed saucepan.
Add 1 lb(500g) white sugar for each pint(550ml) of liquid.
Boil briskly until the setting point is reached
Skim off any scum that may have formed on the surface, allow to cool, then ladle into sterilised jars and seal tightly.
Rose hip jelly is delicious with pork or poultry as the flavour is similar to cranberries and the fruit is high in vitamin C. Rose hip syrup, a healthy drink for children, can be made by following the recipe for fruit jelly, but remove from the heat as soon as the liquid has achieved a syrupy appearance. Pour into sterilised bottles when the syrup has cooled and keep in the fridge.

This is just one of many recipes that can be made from hedgerow fruit.
The copyright of the article Mother Nature’s Autumn Bounty in Fall Recipes is owned by permission of the author.To republish Mother Nature’s Autumn Bounty in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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When the Rose-Tinted Glasses Fall Off

2008-09-25T05:57:00.000-07:00
The other day I happened to come across a forum posting from an expat who was clearly having a bad day. The trouble was she had allowed a smallish matter to blow itself up into something that had completely sent her off on a rant. Against everything French.

The rose tinted glasses had well and truly come off, and de-railed her in the process.

I can understand how this could have come about. And it's not unusual. Especially in the present economic climate.

The pound sterling and the dollar are being squeezed to within an inch of their lives, belts are having to be tightened all round and M'sieu Sarkozy is not exactly making life easy for immigrants. And that is what we are, we Brits, Americans, Dutch, Germans Like it,or not.

So often we think the word applies just to Moroccans, or the Algerians we see on the markets selling cheap jewellery. But it's us too. So Sarko's ruling last year on health cover didn't go down well with those expats who had recently arrived, often with young families, to find they were not entitled to the same health cover as French nationals. Full private health cover came as a nasty shock to many, and that together with the general rises in the cost of living has brought on some severe cases of disillusionment.
When the dream looks like turning into a nightmare, something else coming along to hit them full in the face, or the wallet, is the very last straw.

For many women there's the added stress of being separated from their close family. Yes, you can explode, or whimper (depending on your personality) down the phone to mum, but it can never take the place of a good old-fashioned bawl on a sympathetic shoulder. And for men, in France there isn't the option of going down the pub for a pint and a moan to your mates. French bars may appear havens of warmth and friendliness ( an idea put about by the likes of Peter Mayle with a good dollop of literary license) but in actual fact your average Pierre propping up the bar with his pastis is not in the least interested in any one's marital or financial problems. Political discussion....ah that''s another matter. He'll talk politics all day.

Right now expat internet forums seem full of sob stories, but I wonder how many of them would resort to the cold anonymity of the web if they had a near neighbour who spoke the same language and who was probably in the same boat? Maybe someone should start up local support groups for those who think their dream has turned sour. I say 'think 'because I reckon if only some of these families who seem at the end of their tether could have a good old moan, over a glass or two of something, maybe they'd look at life in France in a more balanced way.

Yes, life here has got tougher over the past few months, but what are the alternatives? The grass isn't any greener anywhere else, especially right now.

So to those who are really fed-up and contemplating a move back I'd say..."Hang on in there. Don't make any hasty decisions you might regret later."

August is a Dangerous Month for the Liver

2008-08-17T05:47:00.000-07:00

There just doesn't seem enough days in August to accommodate it all.

By 'all' I mean the fètes, 'animations' and foires that crop up in every village and town in France during August.

There just aren't enough weekends in the month to do them all, so it's a case of pick and choose.

The big one in our neck of the woods is the Folk Festival in Montrejeau.It's now in it's 49 th year which means it's been going since the days of the Cold War, which probably explains why it has been such a popular event with Eastern European countries.For decades the only way to get out of Eastern Bloc countries was to be part of a cultural visit. And folk music and dancing certainly fitted the bill. How many of the participants actually went home after such events is still a matter of conjecture!

We've also had the 'battages'...difficult to actually pin down with a title. They are a celebration of le moisson', or the harvest. Ancient tractors are greased and polished to within an inch of their lives, oxen are yoked to ploughs, steam engines puff away and burn yet another hole in the ozone layer ( bless them) and the Comminges Classsic Car Club chuff and putter up to the stubble field, all gleaming paintwork and shiny brass,and park up for the afternoon to await the admiration of we less fortunate souls who are stuck(through economic circumstances ) with a bog standard Peugeot 306, or similar. The French pronounce it as trois-cent-six and why not? They produced it. It's only us mono-lingual Brits who use the 'oh' instead of 100 ( three-oh-six etc..)

We have two annual battage within a 10 kilometre radius and both involve a very(and I do mean a very )large lunch which involves an inordinate amount of chicken, in various guises - starter ,soup, entree, main, you name it- the chuk is in there somewhere. All washed down with copious quantities of vin de pays of all colours, and a fire-water digestif. Well, chicken can be a bit on the dry side, so you need something to wash it down.And if you set three hours or four hours aside the alcohol consumption will have burnt off before one takes the road home, or so one imagines (erroneously!) I have formed instant and lasting friendships with my neighbours at battage lunches...the problem is I can't remember who they were with.
And there's always the entertainment to follow. This normally involves an accordionists, a comedian who goes down storm with everyone, and a singer who's songs are known and loved by the audience who join in with gusto.
It's at this point I feel like a rank outsider. As your average Frenchman(or woman would) in a Yorkshire social club on a Friday night.

France en Vacance

2008-08-01T05:35:00.000-07:00

So, July has come and gone and we're now entering the home straight of the long summer holidays. There are more camper vans on the roads than lorries, and in this part of the country they are fighting the combine harvesters for road-space. At the moment it's forty - thirty to the combines. Add on the tractors and trailers teetering dangerously along over loaded with straw bales, and the wannabee 'Tour de France' candidates wobbling from side to side as they push up the one- in -eight gradients and it's the Highway to Hell on some routes.

Ah! 'Le Tour'. It has a strange effect on the French. They are by nature in love with the velo. It seems to be inherent in the male of the species. An urge to purchase a multi-geared monster, a flash helmet and appallingly fluorescent Lycra and take to the open road. Every week-end they flash by my window in a streak of yellow, orange or lime green come rain. hail or heatwave. A pelaton of cyclists have a peculiar sound as they swoop past. It's an eerie hum of skinny wheels on tarmac, and perhaps the muted chatter of conversation. Quite weird, like a ghostly daylight apparition. In technicolour.
This year Le Tour made an overnight stop in Lannemezan. I like Lannamezan. It's got a good range of shops, some cut-price supermarkets, and a big Wednesday market, so it's my kind of town. Each year towns all over France vie with each other to 'win' an overnight stop on one of the stages. It's quite a coup, and a financial boost into the bargain.
Thank goodness Lannemezan has a good selection of bars. I guess they'd all have been full of journos, and assorted Tour followers. Not the cyclists though . They're all too exhausted to do anything other than lie on the physio's couch and then turn in for the night, ready for the next day's punishment.
The Tour organisers must have a soft spot for Lannemezan, because they stopped there a couple of years ago, so cycling and the accompanying tourism seems to have replaced the production of mutton for which the town was famous in the last century.
This year the tour organisers declared there would be zero-tolerance towards drugs and their words must have been heeded, as there were only four disqualifications, which may be four too many, but it's an improvement on previous years. Performance enhancing drugs have always bedevilled the tour, and it had become so blatant that there was a danger that France's most famous contribution to the sporting summer was beginning to loose some of it's public support.
But this year the crowds along the route were a thick as ever with old-hands arriving four or five hours before the start, and pitching camp in the best places for seeing their heroes. You can always see which roads the tour has used over the years, as the names of previous overnight leaders are stencil-sprayed onto the tarmac, and sometimes on the walls of tunnel and bridges. There they remain long after the 'name' itself has retired - a reminder of past glories.
There was a bit of a niggle in the press that the whole carnival of Le Tour was becoming too much of a strain on local services. Certainly, the roads do seemed to be closed off for an inordinately long time before the race actually starts, and the route uses up an awful lot of policemen who could be otherwise occupied with speed cameras, but I can't imagine there will be any change in the plans. It's a festive occasion and too much a part of summer to be cut back.

We've watched a couple of stages over the years. The first time we were inadvertent spectators as we unwittingly strayed onto the route and were informed the road we wanted to take had been closed and would remain so until the whole shooting match had gone through. So there we were, in this little village, squashed against the wall in the narrowest of streets in a midday temperature of 30c + for over two hours.
But we weren't without entertainment. Long before the peleton appears we have the spectacle of the caravan of sponsors and back-up cars . This is the warm-up act and goes on for ages, a endless procession of trucks, trailers and pretty girls throwing out freebies to an eager crowd who risk death by hurling themselves into the road to retrieve a free sachet of coffee, a cheap baseball cap you wouldn't be seen dead in,a ballpoint pen that lasts all of five minutes or a keyring. Being British I refrained from such displays of avarice and contented myself watching grown men race to beat their neighbour to a children's puzzle book. As for the cyclist themselves they were there and gone in a rush of air which actually created a sort of wind-tunnel in the narrow street, leaving me to wonder what all the fuss was about.
The next time we watched it we were better prepared, with bottles of water and a camera for a start. We positioned ourselves on a wide bridge over the Garonne, where the crowds were thin which meant we had a ringside view ( and some where to sit as an added bonus). I surmised from the lack of spectators we weren't in the most exciting place, but we were quite happy. It was a distinct improvement on the previous occasion.So we waited...and waited. The freebie part of the morning arrived and drove slowly through, throwing out the booty to eager arms. The police, stationed on the roundabout at the junction were well up on the give-aways...they could spot a mineral water promo- van before it even arrived on the bridge and would be prominently positioned in readiness for half a dozen bottles to be handed over. They didn't bother with the pens, they'd probably got a whole storeful back at the station.

After about an hour and a half the clatter of helicopter blades announced the arrival of the media pack sent a frisson of excitement through the crowd. The peleton were on their way, and could be spotted on the other side of the river, flashing silver, green, blue through the trees lining the road.
David Bailey(on less exciting days, The Significant Other) made final adjustments to his camera and leaned expectantly into the road. I was watching his maneuverings with mounting alarm. The lens cap was swinging from the camera, he was precariously balanced with one foot on the road, and one on the verge and I could just visualise the carnage if he got himself tangled up with the lead riders. A couple of years before a woman with an uncontrollable handbag had a close encounter with Lance Armstrong's handlebars and he finished up in the gutter with several other riders on top of him. And only the year before I had seen a hilarious video of a golden retriever wandering across the road straight into one of the cyclists who crashed to the ground with a front wheel bent beyond redemption. The dog continued his amble across the road as if nothing had happened.
My squeak of "For God's sake get back" was lost in the crescendo of excitement as the riders, preceded by police outriders, wheeled right to the bridge and powered down towards us - a tsunami of alloy,lycra, bronzed thighs, and grim expressions. They sped down to the roundabout, then off and up, to the Col Ares for another masochistic day in the mountains.
And that was it, until next year when the route would be slightly different but the spectacle unchanging.The crowds drifted away and began the long walk back to their cars, the police cleared the barriers away and opened up the road and the Significant Other took a quick look at his photos. He was well satisfied and I was relieved. Man and camera had come through unscathed.

My Personal Battle with Francophobia

2008-07-13T06:41:00.000-07:00
OK, so I'm biased. I'm a bit of a Francophile. For all her faults ,France is a bit like an elderly relative - prickly, impoverished( but in denial,) and definitely living in the past, but ancient aunts can be strangely lovable. And when some little ill-informed twit comes along and criticises her it really annoys me. If there's going to be any criticism I will be the one doing it.

Today's' Sunday 'Wail' really got me going. " British motorists face £100 fine for failing to wear fluorescent vests when driving in France".

What? Of course you don't have to wear a flourescent vest while driving ! You put the bloody thing on if you breakdown, for God's sake!

It's at times like this I wonder why on earth I bother to read British newspapers online. And as for buying one at the grossly inflated price that they're on sale for in French newsagents - forget it. I can buy a bottle of wine for less than that and get a good deal more satisfaction from it.

So. back to the article. What a load of Europhobic, badly researched journalism!

This quite acceptable law came in on July 1st, having been enforced in Spain for 2 years already. It's now law to carry a fluorescent vest together with a red triangle (which has been a legal requirement since God-knows-how-long). It's been widely discussed on ex-pat forums, and advertised on French telly for months. And I'm quite sure it's all out there in the UK via the AA or travel insurance sites...so where's the problem ?

Fluorescent vests are as cheap as chips (unless you're going to get Stella McCartney or Donatella Versace to design one for you) Go down to Halfords, or even cheaper probably, a garage forecourt, invest a couple of quid in a polyurethane vest in day-glo yellow and if you do have a breakdown and you happen to be on the Autoroute de Sud in driving rain you stand a chance of being seen by that artic that is thundering along a couple of yards from the hard shoulder that you're parked on. The law only requires you to have one per vehicle at the moment (as far as I understand it - but the jury appears to be out on that bit.)

The best way to avoid being stopped by 'le flic' is to display the vest in a prominent position in the car... hanging it from the back of the driver's seat seems to be the most popular choice . After all that's where it needs to be if you do have an accident or a breakdown. Not in the boot where you may have to risk life and limb to access it. If the gendarmes can see it, they're less likely to pull you over. I mean...we all know what that means (in any country). Full check of all your documents and maybe a look in the boot, a keen look at the tyre treads, and and a good deal of teeth sucking before they eventually wave you off. So unless you actually enjoy a bit of a run-in with the traffic police. and find it adds to the holiday excitement, buy a vest, keep it in the car and above all ,drive as if every other driver is a lunatic. Remember, France holds the dubious honour of being rated as having the worst drivers in Europe.

As long as you bear that in mind that lovely, stubbornly cantankerous old auntie can still provide you with a great holiday.

Pets Gallery

2008-07-02T05:53:00.000-07:00
Just Lazin' Around

Sheba & Friend

Well, in Sheba's opinion more like an alien invader. She reluctantly shares her bed with a feline refugee, one of 3 kittens we found abandoned in a cardboard box whilst out walking. They were 'adopted' on the understanding they lived in the barn and kept the mice at bay. Unfortunately they didn't keep their side of the bargain, wormed their way into the house and took over. Sheba was not amused.

Rooney the Loony

In his best 'pharaoh dog' pose he looks as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. It does, as has been proved when he nicks a packet from the work top.
photos of Rooney:http://www.katelevesleyphotography.co.uk

The End of an Era

2008-07-02T04:15:00.000-07:00

Adieu Sheba

For the first time for decades I have a hair, dust and pet-free house. Our lazy, dimwitted, eating-machine, other wise known to us all as Sheba, our ancient labrador has finally lost the battle with mortallity. Thus ended a long family history of labrador owning stretching back nearly 40 years.

I began to think she would out-live us all . She survived a change of country, three removals and three cats with her usual mixture of stoicism and resignation, and outlived her far more active brother.

One never knew exactly what was going on in her head, except that five o'clock in the evening was the highlight of her day. The hour at which the refrigerator door miraculously opened and her food bowl was transferred from floor to work-top. In the last few years she'd become very deaf and her eyesight was deteriorating but she never missed the sound of a tin opener attacking a tin of dogfood, or the the rattle of a dog lead which preceded an afternoon ramble.

She never was a happy car traveller. I can remember one nightmare journey when she was only a few months old. One of my daughters was desperate for us to bring Sheba when we picked her up from boarding school for half term. Her friends had all heard about Sheba-the-wonder-dog but apart from a photo which was displayed on her bedside locker no one had seen the actual animal. I should have been stronger. Instead I gave in, and lost count of the number of times we had to stop to clean out the car. Having disposed of her own body weight in waste matter on the outward journey, she whimpered piteously all the way home.Who had ever heard of a labrador that didn't like cars? With typically female perverseness, years later she calmly accompanied us to our new life in France, enduring a 700 mile journey crammed into the back of the car alongside all the extra junk we couldn't get into the removal van. And all accomplished without so much as a hiccup. There was a fair amount of flatulence around though!

She wasn't too keen on retrieving either. Throw her a stick and she might consent to run after it. Might even, on a good day, bring it halfway back, but after that it was : 'Oh, forget it ! Who wants to play that boring game anyway?' It has to be said, as a working dog she was a bit of a non-event.

But we miss her presence around the place, particularly when we come in after having gone shopping. She was always at the door, tail wagging, happy to see us back. We are giving ourselves a break from pets for a while. They are a comforting addition to the household, someone to enjoy a walk with, a ever -listening ear when you've had a bad day, but it has to be admitted they are a responsibility(or should be) and as such they are a tie. So regretfully we'll be dog-less for the immediate future, but it means we can take off on a whim without having to find holiday accommodation that accepts pets , and we can return to the UK without the hassle of pet passports, or forking out for boarding kennels.

Our links with labradors are still in place, however, as my aforementioned daughter has had her lab, Archie, for five years, and he has now been joined by a friend. Rooney(yes it is a 'chav' name but he was already saddled with it) was dumped outside a local vets with a front leg so badly mangled that it had to be amputated. A coursing dog with three legs is no use to anyone so poor old Rooney languished in a boarding kennels acting as an overspill for the RSPCA until the owner, who was a friend of my daughter's, recognised in her a sucker when it came to lame dogs(literally!) So Rooney landed on his three legs and is now housed in a new family, has a half share in a second hand settee and a brand new pal. And a beautiful dog he is too. Trouble is he knows it !

After such a bad start in life (he was probably less than a year old at the time) he is remarkably well behaved. Apart from his habit of self -service eating. Archie, like most labs. was an easy dog to train and despite having the legendary hoover-like appetite he has never pinched anything off work surfaces. Not so Rooney. With his long neck and body any edible article left on a kitchen worktop is almost certain to finish up in his stomach. Daughter came home from work the other day to find a box of eggs, un-opened, and miraculously un-broken nestling cosily in his bed. Maybe he had hopes of hatching them out.

An Uncomfortable Truth, or Wartime Propaganda?

2008-05-01T04:17:00.000-07:00
The Paris metro 1940 (photo Andre Zucca)

left :The Swastikas Fly in Paris.(photo Andre Zucca)

A new exhibition, running until the end of July, has created something of a stir in France, and let more than one uncomfortable skeleton out of the cupboard.

The German occupation of France is a period in the county's history that many, particularly the older generation, would rather forget, and this public airing of nearly 300 images of life in Paris under a Nazi regime has divided opinion in the city.

The photographer, Andre Zucca, was employed for propaganda purposes by the Third Reich, of that there is no doubt. He was commissioned to take pictures which showed how well the occupying forces were integrating into Parisian life, and he was certainly an accomplished professional with an eye for a good photo-opportunity. But the photographs that are on show have been obtained from family archives and in fact were never published. So the argument continues...are they posed, or did Paris, and France as a whole, buckle down to life with the enemy and appear to be socialising, shopping and generally behaving as normal while the rest of Europe, and the UK in particular were being rationed and bombed out of their homes?
The answer to this is very complex. In this part of France my neighbours seem reluctant to discuss what they did in the war. In fact I've only heard the war referred to twice. Once, when I offered my 'opposite' neighbour some artichokes (the Jerusalem variety) she shuddered and said - " Mais Non" very vociferously. Apparently they were dished up on a daily basis in the war. The second time was when another neighbour was telling me her aged mother was gravely ill in our village old people's home. "She is praying to die" I was informed gravely. When I muttered "Qu'elle dommage" for something to say she, she shook her head and said, "Oh Maman had such a hard life...a loveless marriage, the War ..." I wasn't too interested in the loveless marriage, I would have liked to have continued the conversation about the war, but somehow the subject was changed and I never got the opportunity again. As for maman, she recovered and three years on is about to celebrate her 98th birthday!
It's incredible that this important (to me) piece of recent history is either hidden under the bed or ignored. After all, the 2nd Panzer Division was stationed at Toulouse, not 70 miles away. And it was the der Fuhrer Regiment of the 2nd Waffen SS Das Reich that were hot-footing (or hot-crawling perhaps) up to Northern France in 1944 to reinforce thier comrades who were trying to repel the Allied Invasion. On the way up they passed Oradour sur Glane, and the rest is history.
The catastrophic fall out from the massacre of the citizens of Oradour has never been fully measured. The French themselves were in denial for many years after the war, mainly because of the ghastly realisation that the troops who actually carried out the massacre, under orders from the Das Reich command were in fact from Alsace. Officially the Alsace was German but before the First World War it had been French. As there was less than a quarter of a century between the two wars the soldiers were mostly, by birth French. The collective guilt was immense.
The story of Oradour is steeped in mystery, and contradiction. The site is now a national monument, with the village left exactly as it was when the soldiers withdrew to Limoges and continued their journey north. I have never been there, but we often passed the sign-post to the village on our journeys to and from the UK as it's on the most direct route from the southwest. I don't know if I want to visit it or not. I suppose I ought to, as I refer to this period of history quite a lot in the book I'm still working on so it would help in my writing, but I know it won't be a pleasant experience.
There is an excellent website complied by Michael Williams http://www.oradour.info/ which I have used extensively for research. Do take a look if you want to know more about the shocking happenings that day in June 1944. For me, his is the most definitive account I have read, and the website is very comprehensive. His gallery of 190 photographs are so compelling I have almost convinced myself it isn't necessary for me to actually go to Oradour in person. Yes, I know that's the coward's way out!

It's Supposed to be Spring

2008-04-23T04:16:00.000-07:00

I'm having a 'Victor Meldrew' moment...."I don't bee-leeve it!" Spring is supposed to be here, we're officially into summer time and the snow has come back on the mountains.

The violets are shivering on the roadside banks, the wild orchids are looking sad and soggy, and a glance towards the Pyrenees shows even the lower slopes sprinkled with snow. 'C'est bizarre!' as the French are wont to say.

You have to feel a smidgen of sympathy for the ski stations and the ski hire shops, the chalet owners and the bar keepers. Only a scraping of snow over Christmas, not much for half term. The stations officially closed on the 31st March and then hey presto! The biggest dump of snow all winter. Sod's Law I suppose.

Still, the weather forecast for the weekend looks a bit better, sunnier and up to 26c. Maybe it's time to dust of the barbecue and reach for the pernod. Or not...it could all go pear shaped again. So I'm not putting the thermal vests away yet.

Global warming....global freezing more like! Bah Humbug!

Another Bout of Procrastination

2008-04-13T07:47:00.001-07:00
Gosh ! Is it really that long since I last posted ? I must be the worst blogger in the world.

So, what's my excuse ? Well I've been doing a lot of writing (honestly!) I've been putting quite a few articles on Constant Content just lately. I was spurred on by selling a few articles really quickly which gave me a real boost so I have been researching like mad, trying to come up with some 'hot'topics. Green issues are certainly hot right now, so I'm becoming very well informed on green travel, green babies, green fabrics. I was really surprised to find out that cotton production isn't as 'green' and ecological as one might think and can actually contribute to the global warming problem.

There's only one downside to writing for American sites and that's the state of the pound sterling and the dollar against the euro.

Oh, don't start me on that !! As soon as one or two ex-pat Brits are gathered together you can bet within three seconds the subject of UK pensions and the euro comes up. I even had two Brit Jehovah's Witnesses turn up on the door step last week, and what do you thing we talked about?....no, not the end of the world, or even blood transfusions....but , you've guessed it!! The falling value of the pound! Well, you have to admit you wouldn't get that in the UK.

It's certainly belt-tightening time at the moment, and we are working our way down the supermarket chains as I write. When we used to come here on holiday the highlight was shopping on the markets.. .well isn't that every one's raison d'etre for a holiday in France? But shopping at the Carrefour hypermarket just before the journey home came pretty far up the list of 'must-dos'.

When we came to live here...well it was a different matter. We weren't on holiday anymore. We were (ouch) on a tight budget. So our supermarket shopping was pitched with this in mind. We moved down the ladder...like going from Waitrose to Tescos, and shopped at Le Clerc...something I had turned my nose up at when we were 'en vacance'. That was fine for a while, then we had the change from francs to euros, and all those prophets of doom who had moaned on about prices going up were right it seems. I must confess I didn't notice it much at the time. I was just too grovellingly grateful to be free of having to translate " trois cent, quincante huit franc" as three hundred and fiftyeight francs, meaning £35.58 in familiar money. "Trente euro cinquante huit" is just so much easier when you're trying to write a cheque in a supermarket queue.

After a couple of years Le Clerc seemed a bit pricey so we transfered our loyalty to Atac, a sort of small Asda which has weekly offers and are very good for some surprising things. For example I bought a great computer screen there last autumn for 130 euros, so they are always worth a look- see when checking out prices.

Now we seem to have fetched up at Liddl and Aldi for our weekly shop. How much lower (price- wise) can we sink? Never mind, we console ourselves with the fact that we couldn't afford to live in the UK at all.

Which brings me back to all my hard work selling articles on the US market. What seems to be a 'nice little earner' in dollars looks decidedly pathetic by the time PayPal has paid it into my account. Thanks goodness we don't have to rely on it for a living.

So that's one reason I've been lax on postings. I've also been re-submitting a revised version of my opening chapters of 'New Wine ' on to the You Writeon' website, but the reviews have been so slow it's like watching paint dry!

But after a wet spring so far, summer must be just around the corner now so I may just be lured outside instead of sitting at the computer, but as far as this blog is concerned it's a case of ' can do better if she applies herself' as my old school reports always used to say, so will apply myself better in future.

Watch this space.....but not for too long!

The Changing Face of France.

2008-02-15T04:49:00.000-08:00
It's less than two months since the French nation stubbed out their cigarettes in accordance with the new laws on smoking in public. The last bastion of smoking freedom, the bar/tabac is now a smoke free zone. It's truly ironic , bizarre even, that you can buy your ciggies, a coffee or a cognac at any time of day, drink the coffee or the brandy(or as is usually the case with Frenchmen, both together) but if you want a smoke with it you'll have to head for the door. I never thought to see the day... the French obeying the law, and puffing away outside. Come the summer it's going to be difficult for us non-smokers to find a seat outside the café. All the tables will have been taken by the smokers. We will have to find seats inside...at least it will be a smoke-free zone. But will French bars and cafés ever be quite the same without that distinctive smell of stale Gauloise ?

Now it looks as if the French Government is hell-bent on attacking that other great French occupation... drinking. Petrol stations are to be forbidden to sell alcohol in their shops, or on the forecourts. Already there are rumblings of mutiny from wine producers who often have concessions from petrol stations to sell their locally produced wines. I can slightly see their point. Their sales come almost totally from travelling tourists, and they aren't offering wine tastings, they'll point the visitor in the direction of their 'caves de degustation' for a full blown tasting, and hopefully the sale of a few cases rather than a spur-of-the-moment bottle.

But the road accident fatalities speak for themselves. Last year road deaths in France accounted for 4,500 lives. Admittedly that figure is half of what it was in the year 2000, but most of that success can be attributed to a relentless campaign to improve driving standards ( amongst the worst in Europe) and the introduction of speed cameras. I can remember the mirth that surrounded the Chirac government's minister for transport when he urged the French to drive more like the British. We did think of having a rear window sticker in the car which read...'Drive like me....I'm a Brit,' but then we had an accident so we thought better of it.

Apparently it's the youth of France that are having the accidents. Elderly French drivers can merrily down a bottle of wine at lunch time and their driving isn't any worse than it was before lunch. (Did I mention France is bottom of the league when it comes to good driving ?) A recent report says that every day 2% of all drivers on French roads are over the recommended limit for alcohol ... yipes ! In actual fact I think in rural areas such as ours it's well over 2%. Kiss a Frenchman after lunch and alongside the overpowering smell of garlic there will nearly always be the underlying aroma of a glass or two of wine.

On the subject of grim percentages Prime Minister Fallon (he of the Welsh wife) has said that 46% of all road fatalities involving drivers under 24 are alcohol related. So a tightening of the alcohol laws are perhaps long overdue. The image of the Gauloise-smoking, lunch-time brandy imbiber should perhaps rightly be a thing of the past.

The dreaded words 'Health and Safety' seem to be making inroads into French life. Things may never be the same again !

Keeping in Training

2008-02-01T04:18:00.000-08:00
When I was marooned in the real world, and unable to blog, edit or email I realised I was going to have to return to the ancient form of communication and recording...pen and paper. What a chore! But the enforced absence from my computer did mean I caught up with some long overdue housework ... oh joy!

I also had a great idea (well I though it was a great idea) for a new novel. It's so much nicer to start a new one instead of having to keep editing the old one...a bit like buying a new car instead of taking the old one in for a service. Trouble is you then finish up with several novels floating around waiting for your attention..or a garage full of second-hand cars.
So the new book had to be transcribed out of my head onto paper via my usual scrawl. All well and good, but I'm now trying to decipher the hieroglyphics and get it into some sort of readable text. And I want to do more work on my very first novel 'New Wine, Old Enemies' before I recommence the soul- destroying task of finding an agent. And I have some unfinished articles that I must upload to a website. And I must try and keep my blog going.

Well that's 2008 sorted then!

The poem 'Winter Fun' was an exercise with words which I composed whilst doing the washing up. Dull chores are a great producer of ideas, some good, some just plain daft, as in the case of my poetry. I don't usually write anything other than prose, and judging by my first excursion away from it I can see why. I deliberately tried to rhyme the first three lines of each verse with the same sounding words just to make it even sillier. I don't think Andrew Motion need worry that I'm going to be a rival for Poet Laureate. I think my verse owes more to the Great Macgonagel !

New Wine Old Enemies was downloaded in an abridged version onto ww.lettersfromfrance.com where the first few chapters can be seen, should anyone be interested.

My Poem

2008-01-31T03:34:00.000-08:00

WINTER FUN
Snow has come to the Pyrenees
On the nursery slopes, behind the trees
Beginners are learning to 'bend zee knees'
The winter sports season is here.

Out of the cupboard come goggles and skis.
The sun is up, there's a day to seize.
Dust off the snowboards, grab the car keys,
We're off to the ski slopes today.

Up on the chairlift our cheeks start to freeze,
The sun in our eyes is making us sneeze.
It's down with the goggles and jump off the trapeze,
Hooray to be skiing again!

Zooming down to the bottom...we've found it a breeze,
But our unfit muscles are needing some ease.
So it's off to the bar for a toastie and cheese,
And hot chocolate to keep out the cold.

Back in Bloggerland.

2008-01-30T05:47:00.000-08:00
Well, Alleluia...praise the Lord, and pass the biscuits! I'm back online. I have a serious problem with computers. I think it's something to do with my aura (goes into hippy mode here!). Either that or I should just stop fiddling with technology and stick to basics.
So were were we when I took my enforced sabbatical from cyber-world?
Ah...the Rugby World Cup. Well the less said about that the better. It was just a pity France and England weren't able to be up against each other in the final,but hey.....the Six Nations is about to start( or should that be are...the absence of daily writing has sent my grammar awol!)

Christmas has come and gone. Apart from the shops being full to bursting with foie gras, chocolate, sea food and champagne the festive season is nowhere near as festive as in the UK. The official holiday is just Christmas Day, and as the French indulge in their eating orgy on Christmas Eve (traditionally after Mass, but how many of them actually go to Mass in the 21st century?) Christmas Day is as hung-over as Boxing Day in the UK. All very hushed and with an overwhelming feeling of bloatedness.

I do really miss the Christmas build-up. OK I can, and do, thankfully give up the mass hysteria that overtakes the average UK High Street but I would like just a smidgen more atmosphere. The local Christmas markets are quite a good source of pressies, but oh how I yearn for a brass band or even some buskers playing carols while I'm there.

But there was some snow on the mountains, and if we had ventured into Tarbes or Toulouse there would have been ice rinks and chestnut sellers. I guess we don't want to travel for our festive fix. A sign of old age, no doubt !

France, being a republic I suppose, has definite lines of de-markation between church and state, therefore priests are not allowed in state -run schools. This is fine as far as it goes...no sinister infiltration of young and susceptible minds...faith coming only from the family etc...all very upright and worthy but it also means that there are no nativity plays in the village church, no Carol services (candle lit or otherwise), no Christingle (well, not here at any rate) e.g ...no community feel about Christmas.

Oh well, moan over! It's 2008 so time to look on the positive side.
Umm...let's think...
a) we haven't had any snow down here in the village, but a nice lot fell early in the Pyrenees, so that will cheer up the ski stations no end. They had such a bad year last winter they deserve some luck.
b) the french government has re-thought it's position in health care for immigrants. Not too sure what the new measures are but there was such an outcry from the Brit expats in particular that
people power seems to have had some clout. It was all very complicated and involved immigrants having to provide their own top-up care under the national health scheme, where as previously they were able to claim various benefits after their initial cover by the British Government expired (after 2 years I think) Anyone thinking of re-locating to France should go onto www.totalfrance.com . It's all discussed at length there on the forum, and they know a lot more about it than me.
c) the daffodils John planted in the lawn are coming up a treat, as are the miniature tulips and the crocus. the primula have been out since early January, and the nights are really pulling out...sunset 6.02 pm I see from the Meteo.Can spring be far behind? Well maybe...we've still got February to come, and although lots of friends down here have said February is their favourite month I've yet to actually witness it. I'll stick with October as my favourite.

Yes, all in all,positivity has returned.....roll on the Spring

A Really Great Weekend

2007-10-14T07:01:00.000-07:00
I woke up this morning with a slight hangover which soon disappeared. Why? Because the sun was shining (yes it was that late!), and I discovered ,when I came downstairs to make myself a cup of green tea, that my laptop,which I feared was gone to that great 'puter' never-never-land had returned from that place and was actually working, That would normally be enough to put me on cloud nine for the rest of the week,but the real buzz was the fact that England was through to the final of the Rugby World Cup. It really doesn't get much better than that.
The only downside was that England were playing France.
Hmmm....could have been a better draw. Well, for me anyway. Who should I be cheering for? The country of my birth, or the adopted country that I've committed myself to?
Last weekend it was smiles all round. After all, Les Bleues and Les Blancs had sent the antipodeans back to where they belonged with their tails firmly between their legs! How the mighty were fallen! Yip a dee doo!
But now it was going to be a battle with "the Old Enemy"
Oh dear, there was going to have to be a victor and a vanquished. Law of logic......50% of the players were going to be elated, 50% deflated.
We had some friends round(English, of course) to watch the match. They came armed and ready with beers and wine.
At nine o'clock you could have heard a pin drop in the village. Even the dogs were silent.
And then an hour and a half later it was all over......the neanderthal Chabal was crouching on the pitch in tears, the rest of the blues had got a distinct attack of them ! England was generous in victory, the old rivals parted friends, even though the nation was numb with disappointment. And in Paris the party had only just begun. The proprietor of the Frog and Rosbif bar which had become the unofficial HQ of the England supporters must have thought he'd won the lottery...and he'll be serving up full English breakfasts and pints all over again next weekend.
A few cars drove quietly back from town, having watched the match on big screens in the two cafes in the main square.
A week is a long time in world cup matches......there were no honking horns, no 'Marseilles' being sung from open car windows this Saturday night.......just a sad acceptance that once again France had failed to win the 'Tournament Mondial'.
They had been warned though. There had been a midday interview with the French mascot....the noble cockerel who had witnessed 48 French matches. Well, the interview was actually with the chook's owner...chickens aren't good subjects for profound pre-match statements. So M'sieu Le Coq stared balefully at the camera whilst his owner mournfully confessed that if 'Le coq chant( sings) ' France always won. Unfortunately he hadn't obliged so far !
I have a feeling he might have been the main ingredient for a Sunday coq au vin today. I just hope they started the casserole in good time. Looking at him I think he might have needed several hours on a low simmer.
So England (to pinch a word from the 'Marseilles') marchon to the final...and meet either Argentina or South Africa. By 10.30 tonight we shall know........Swing low, sweet chariot. But win or loose next week they can't take away this great Sunday in SW France.

2007-10-01T05:56:00.000-07:00

I found these postcards at the annual cattle show in Boulogne sur Gesse last weekend. They have been printed by the Chambre d'Agriculture of the Haute Garonne.
I thought they were rather nice and are a good advert for the Haute Garonne producers.
The cattle show was awesome. There were rather a lot of bulls about for me, I still don't really trust being that close to a tonne or more of grumpy testosterone on the hoof.
But it was a great day out for the producers who treat it all very seriously. And the cows and calves looked nice. The sight of a whole cow being roasted in a wood fired spit was a bit off-putting, and what it's friends and relatives though I really don 't know, but I seemed to be the only one who thought it strange.

Snow! I don't believe it!

2007-09-29T07:12:00.000-07:00
Arrrgh! When we woke up yesterday morning there was snow on the Pic de Midi. And when we went into town and could see more of the other mountains it was even worse! It must have been down to 1,000 feet, and it's only the end of September. What is it with the weather this year? After Christmas, which is the best time for skiing in the Pyrenees there was hardly anything to even toboggan on. The saving grace for the ski stations was a good covering for the February half term holidays, but that only amounted to about a month of serious skiing. And now this !
Well I just hope it goes away and comes back when it should.....the middle of November. I want a nice warm, golden autumn like we always have, or I'm going to demand my money back !

Figs and things

2007-09-26T04:23:00.000-07:00

This week on the market: figs, quinces,a few mushrooms.

Yes, looks like Autumn is here.
So with all these lovely purple figs overflowing from the stalls, what's to be done with them besides just putting them in the fruit bowl for a quick snack?

How about Fig Tart with Orange Custard?

you will need:
1 packet ready-made short crust pastry large enough to line a 9inch flan tin (unless you’re a domestic goddess with legendary pastry making skills.)
12 to 16 figs as perfect as possible.
1 large egg yolk
1 tablesp light brown sugar
150ml crème fraiche
Juice and zest of 1 large orange.
Line a 9 inch flan case with the pastry, prick the base all over with a fork, and bake blind at 220C for 20 mins. De-stalk figs, wipe over with a damp cloth and slice in half. Make a custard by whisking the egg yolk, crème fraiche, sugar, orange juice and zest until a smooth emulsion has been obtained. Remove case from the oven, allow to cool, then layer ¾ of the figs on the bottom and pour the custard over gently. Add the remaining figs and bake, on a large baking sheet to avoid spillage disasters, for 30 mins at 200C or until the custard has set. Serve slightly warm, with single cream.

Figs are just made for savoury use too. Sliced, and arranged attractively on a platter of thinly sliced Bayonne ham, saucisson sec, and smoked duck breast, you have a quick and easy starter for a supper party. And a nice change from the ubiquitous melon with Parma ham.
For an unusual warm starter, try slitting 2 figs per person crossways about ¾ of the way down, stuff with your favourite blue cheese, and wrap each fig in a thin slice of streaky bacon and bake at 200C for 5 to 10 mins. Serve warm on a bed of mixed salad leaves
A soft juicy fig, eaten with blue cheese, is a marriage made in heaven. Particularly with Roquefort, the slight saltiness of the cheese is tempered by the sweetness of the fruit. Lining the cheese platter beforehand with well washed fig leaves really shows cheeses off. Use a good combination of soft and hard to suit your own personal preferences. Toss some salad leaves in mild vinaigrette, hurl into a big salad bowl, add some crusty bread and your cheese course is ready to be served…… before the pudding à la Francaise

Our House

2007-09-23T07:01:00.000-07:00
"Our house......in the middle of our street" Well,I hope it's not quite the same house as Suggs sang about but its a nice house all the same, and yes it is in the middle of our street.
Its a distinguished looking house, taller than its neighbours, with a balcony on the top floor which gives you a great view of the Pic de Midi. Its' not for those who suffer from vertigo but for the rest of us its like being in an eerie.......looking over the surrounding roof tops, up and down the road, over to the river and the weir. There's the church spire one street over to the left, and if you lean out far enough(heaven forbid) you can just see the 'Vival' sign outside Stephan's epicerie to your right, and the tabac sign of the little bar and depot de pain is a few yards to your left. The boucherie of Paul Fontan is ten yards away in the Place Julien Olie, where the mairie has its home. So life in 'Le Village' is compact.
We have neighbours on a come- and- go basis. Because the village is so scenically attractive there are quite a few holiday homes right in the centre. The French laws of succession ( otherwise known as the Code Napoleonic) make it highly unattractive to sell the family home when parents have finally made the short, steep journey up to the village cemetery. The proceeds of the parental home must be equally divided between all the siblings....a recipe for family feuding if you ask me.
And then of course there is the thorny question of inheritance tax. So....the end result is either houses which fall into decay, or on a more positive side they are retained and used as holiday homes for all the family.
This isn 't a bad option. Especially here. There is trout fishing in the river, designated walks in the surrounding hills, and the ski stations of Super Bagneres, and Le Mongie when the winter snows arrive.
In August all the previously empty houses open up and the village population expands by at least a third.
Now they've left us, to return with the half term holidays, Christmas and the ski season....which is at it's best from January onwards. The Pyrenees may be slower to accumulate a good covering of snow but when it does arrive the ski staions are family friendly with good runs for all abilities and you don't get ripped off for a 'vin chaud' and a croque monsieur.

This Month's Village Event

2007-09-23T06:24:00.000-07:00
September is a delightfully mellow time in the Haute Garonne. School's back...otherwise known as L'rentree and the Pyrenees are looking their best. No snow as yet and not expected until late November.

Now's the time for the villages and towns to chill out and organise events an smaller scale.

Classic and vintage cars are a bit of a passion down here. There' s a very active club in St Gaudens and there's nothing they like better than a warm weekend and a few quiet roads to let the old girls out for a run.

Our village is a regular watering hole for lunch, and last Sunday they arrived with a cacophonous tooting of horns and a fair bit of smoke. They parked on the mairie square and let the elderly vehicles cool of. The less sleepy inhabitants ( the French are late risers on Sunday mornings) wandered up to have a look, some in dressing gowns, but without a trace of embarrassment.More cars coughed and spluttered up during the course of the morning, then retired to the butchers who had obviously been expecting them, and partook of aperos and a long lunch.

They departed three hours later with an even louder tooting of horns.

What perfect day out.

A Battage to Remenber

2007-08-30T04:19:00.000-07:00
This year the weather has been less predictable than in previous years. June and July saw a mixture of temperatures but it was dry so the corn ripened, the rain obligingly fell after five in the evening and irrigated throughout the evening, thus ensuring fat ears of corn and clean, juicy stalks for the cattle. Rain, in manageable quantities, is greeted with pleasure by farmer and gardener alike. Everyone that is except the organisers of the ‘fete locales’ whose programmes of ninety decibel rock music held in the open air were somewhat dampened.
Our own, held in early May was a soggy affair.
Spirits however weren’t dampened , so as usual the thump, thump thump of Le Rock (as only the French can do it) continued unabated until three in the morning. I am continually amazed that the street looks so untouched in the morning. Only a odd plastic cup perched on a window sill gives any indication that anything took place the night before.
But August in the French Pyrenees brings about a sea- change. In the weather, and the mood. Like a switch being thrown the mornings have an almost autumnal note to them…..Cool (verging on the chilly when you open the shutters in a thin nightie) and mellowly sunny in contrast to the brash brightness of July mornings. And there’s a calmer feel to the countryside. The endless churn of combine harvesters, the clatter of tractor and trailers as the harvest is gathered in is replaced by a gentler, less urgent pace.
Time, then, to celebrate. And what better way than with a ‘battage’? Something that in the UK might be referred to as a steam rally.
From eight a.m onwards, the ancient machinery begins to arrive, under its own power, or less frighteningly, on the back of a low loader. By ten o’clock a small hole is being made in the ozone layer as the engines begin to steam up for a day of undiluted nostalgia. The kitchens are steaming up too. Vast cauldrons of ‘boullion de poulet’ and mounjetade are adding their own aroma to the mixture of steam, oil and burning wood.
An enormous barn is the venue for the ‘repas de midi’(4 courses, aperitif, wine and digestif for the bargain price of 12 euros). The barn can easily accommodate thirty trestle tables, and the tables are laid for thirty people. Thirty times thirty? It doesn’t bear thinking about. There should be an air of panic, but no, apart from a dog resembling a hearth rug which has made a bolt for freedom from the back of a pickup and is chasing Madame Louge’s in- season spaniel everything seems to be under control.
People begin to drift in. Those who like a quiet wander, and a nostalgic wallow with plenty of time and space to take in the great Ruston steam engine, the seed drills, the ploughs, the threshing machines, which are silent now but at three o’clock…give or take an hour or two…… they will be chattering and rattling in a cloud of chaff, straw and dust. Accompanied by chattering and coughing from the spectators.
The gentle peace of the ‘chaum’ or stubble field is about to be shattered by the arrival of the ‘bandas….. this year, a group of young players from the Gers. Their enthusiasm knows no bounds as they hurl themselves in at the deep end with a frantic medley of Abba hits. The ‘ole boys in their black ‘pancake’ berets have to shout to make themselves heard.
Looking forward to a peaceful Sunday?…..no chance!
By twelve noon a long queue has begun to form outside M.Puzol’s barn, like souls awaiting admission for Heaven at the Pearly Gates. Despite the fact that no-one will be admitted before 12.30 it’s all very good humoured, with plenty of banter and an overkill of kissing.
At 12.45 the doors are flung open, not by St Peter, but the burly form of Bernard the butcher, now re-incarnated as ‘Security’. Those with the foresight to reserve ahead are wearing the smug expressions of the ‘haves and have nots’. They are already seated at their tables while the rest of us ‘Johnny-Come-Latelys have to mill about like anxious chickens trying to find seats next to each other. I resolve to be more organised next year.
An army of helpers in their red Basque berets descend on the tables with bottles of sweet ‘Muscat de Rivesalt’, the favourite aperitif of the South West and all points east. Those in the know give the bottle a nudge with the rim of their glass and are rewarded with a bigger measure. We’re frightfully British so we wouldn’t dream of doing anything other than murmur ‘merci beaucoup’ as we are poured half a small glass. Jean-Luc, our friendly neighbourhood plumber, notices the measly measure of My Significant Other and demands a top-up for him.
My own need has been lost in the general mayhem. Oh well, I’ll make up for it later.
The bandas troop in rarin’ to go. It’s ear drum-bursting time again. The volunteer waiters duck and dive between them with bottles and plates. They’ve obviously taken a crash course in avoiding trombone slide injury. The ‘aperos’ are drained to the dregs and the bottles refilled with wine. There are bottles of mineral water too, of course, but in a ratio of six to one…..in favour of the wine. There’s a choice…Red or rose. I opt for the rose….it’s a hot afternoon and there’s a long way to go before we reach the coffee stage. My neighbour takes a slurp of his red and pulls a face.
‘Pas bien?’ I enquire. Surely not!
‘Espagnol’ he replies in some disgust. What a crime! I quite like it but decide that discretion will be the better part of valour.
Soup trolleys appear to huge applause and the battle commences.
There is too much for everyone even though the grannies and granddads have pulled above their weight in trying to sop up every last drop. More bread would seem to be required, and lo, more appears; chunks cut from loaves the size of car tyres. It’s all vaguely reminiscent of the ‘Feeding of the Five Thousand’. Seeing the rate at which the wine’s disappearing some-one capable of turning water into wine might be needed soon, as well.
The band play enthusiastically between courses, but by the time we have reached the entrée it’s all getting a bit out of hand. But the waiters are still smiling and their dodging techniques are improving rapidly.
Outside the temperature is rising and the afternoon crowd are beginning to drift in. The threshing machines are cranked up and the ‘working’ part of the day is taking off. But in the barn we’ve still got two more courses to go, and the diners are getting cranked (and tanked) up as well. The entrance of the band for yet another ‘recital’ heralds the moment for ‘table dancing.’ Not the London night club variety I hasten to add but one or two of the younger ladies could probably audition for a job. I vaguely worry that the table will collapse but after three glasses of this ‘criminal’ Spanish wine I am becoming quite unconcerned.
With everyone happily sipping coffee and high octane brandy the waiters decide to celebrate the end of their labours with a boisterous display of high spirits. Half a dozen of them lie on their backs while the rest take it in turns to launch themselves over them and are passed hand to hand. Halfway across they are rocked backwards and forwards like a human rocking horse. All goes well until some joker (it looks like Tibaud Leger but all the boys look the same lying flat on the floor) decides to grab the trousers of one of the flyers The underpants come off simultaneously. Whoops!..…it’s inevitable I suppose…..the day’s stress has to be released somehow and a bit of ‘deshabille’ is as good a stress-buster as any. The previously respectable matrons on my table can’t get enough of it……it sounds as if several dozen parrots have been released and are all screeching together. It’s probably a long time since they’ve seen young, male buttocks unfettered. In an effort to recover his dignity the young ‘flyer’ leaps up and the grannies are treated to a front view. Mass hysteria seems about to break out.
We decide it’s time to go home. We haven’t the stamina of these sturdy Pyreneans. As we leave order has been restored, the young man has retrieved his trousers, and the tables are being cleared in readiness for the evening session. Another (thankfully smaller) ‘repas’ is to be laid out and the ‘bal musette’ will kick off at 22.00 …or there abouts. And the popular, ‘encroyable’ Nadua who are hot from the Zenith in Toulouse will relieve the hyper-active bandsmen who are still belting out ‘Guatanamera’ at full throttle. The battage is winding down for another year, leaving us with vivid memories of yet another date in the mountain calendar ticked off, and the grannies dreaming of the next one and another glimpse of a well toned ‘derrier’.

This article first appeared in www.lettersfromfrance.com

Market Day

2007-08-27T07:22:00.000-07:00
It was market day today. We are lucky enough to have three market days a week…..Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. All in different towns and all about the same distance from our village.
The Thursday one is a slightly smarter, less rural affair than the other two. The clothes stalls are more expensive, for a start. Not as trendy, but the sensible skirts and ‘Aunt Maud’ twin sets are probably all made in the EU. As opposed to the younger, flashier stuff on the Monday market which has almost certainly arrived in a huge container ship from the Far East.
So on the Monday market you can buy cheap stuff at cheap prices, and look pretty cheap in it .
Today was even more cut-price as we’re nearing the end of the season. The lowest price I saw for a pair of shorts was €3. Tee shirts were going for €2.
There was a whole stall selling Che Guevara tee shirts. Dear old Che….. the face that launched a thousand business opportunities.. Think of all the royalties he could be clawing in if he hadn’t been killed. But after all this time even if he had lived no-one would be in the least interested in a geriatric guerrilla. No, dying when he did, as with Elvis Presley, was a brilliant career move.
There was a stall selling a nice line in big girl’s bras and knickers. A complete ensemble for €8 in garish shades from sizzling orange to passionate purple. I would have bought a set but they were all too large (I lie!)
It was a hot as hell on the market today. The indoor market (which is actually a covered car park for the rest of the week) was even more crowded and pungent than usual. Live fur and fowl, raw meat and sweaty bodies aren’t exactly a happy mix.
I scurried past the ‘bucherie de cheval’. After all this time in France I’m still terribly English and ‘woosie’ when it comes to horsemeat. I was relieved to see there weren’t many live chickens and ducks being sold in this heat. I never like to see their sad faces as they perch uncomfortably on long wooden benches waiting for someone to buy them. They always remind me of village ‘wallflowers’ at a weekly ‘hop’ in the ‘50’s. Desperately hoping someone will ask them for a dance. But the poor old chucks will be bound for the oven, not the dance floor.
A small boy was cuddling a baby rabbit that his father had just bought. I hope he was going as a pet, not a future casserole of ‘lapin aux pruneaux.’
I’m not a tree hugging veggie, but there’s part of me that doesn’t actually want to look my dinner in the eye. It’s sheer cowardice, I know.
After the claustrophobia of the indoor market I was pleased to be out in the fresh air. The aroma had changed for the better too. Freshly roast coffee, peaches, melons and bread baked in wood-fired ovens.
I bought some ‘jardin’ tomatoes and two melons from a local producer. That was all he sold. I’m very ‘anti’ food that has travelled hundreds of miles to reach the customer. The melons and tomatoes had only come from the Gers…..our neighbouring department, no more than 30 km away.
I bought a locally grown lettuce and some cheese, and that was it. The cheese was produced in the mountain pastures by sheep that are born and die in the Haute Pyrenees, or the Pyrenees Atlantique.
So my carbon footprint was very small today. I felt very civically responsible …saintly almost !At the end of the week the great homeward trek begins. The schools open again at the beginning of September, so the market should be a little less crowded next Monday. And in three or four weeks it will be back to normal. Ho

2007-08-26T06:15:00.000-07:00
This may sound a strange title for a Blog. I suppose it does appear to be bit negative. But whenever there’s a gathering of expat Brits this seems to be the opening topic of conversation.
Not in so many words of course. The phraseology may be different, but it all amounts to much the same thing: Is living in France all its cracked up to be?
Well that depends on what sort of day you’ve just had.
Take today for example. It’s a yahoo, definitely bang-on day ! The sun is streaming in through the kitchen window, the temperature is hitting the mid thirties and there’s a free range chicken, stuffed with a whole lemon and a bunch of tarragon, roasting in the oven.
There will be a bottle of good wine as well, it being a Sunday. Not the daily ration of ‘vrac’wine, bought straight from the barrel and decanted into your own personal plastic jerry can. No, this will be a bottle of merlot, or a sauvignon costing a mighty 3 euros. If we’ve had a foray across the mountains into Spain it could be a tempranillo, or hopefully a rioja, for even less.
Life doesn’t get much better.
But if someone had asked me how I was enjoying ‘la vie en rose’ on the day my cat was splattered on the road outside my house I would have treated them to a long and vitriolic diatribe against not only French drivers but the nation as a whole.
So, as in everything, it’s all relative.
Uprooting yourself from family, friends, and your native soil takes a bit of doing. The fact that you may have spent God knows how many years dreaming, hoping, and planning the whole daft venture amounts to nothing. When the last of your earthly possessions have been loaded on the removal van, and the rose-coloured spectacles are firmly in place you take on the persona of a pioneer.
Exactly why is a mystery. Thousands have made the journey before you, but as far as you, and your incredulous friends are concerned you are the only ones. Others may fail, sell up after a couple of years, but you are different. You know exactly what you’re doing.
After all haven’t you got an O level in French? And that dates you, for a start!
You’ve also got a small pension. Too small to live decently on in the UK but it’ll be a fortune in France. Well, it's true it will go a bit further than in the uk, and if you're in receipt of a state pension despite M. Sarkowzy's new legislation on immigration you'll be okay as far as the health service is cincerned. You'll need top -up private insurance, but the two thirds that the French CPAM pays towards medication is paid by the UK Health service as part of a reciprical service.And if you are unfortunate enough to develop a serious illness which is life- threatening like cancer or heart disease your treatment is 100% covered by CPAM. At least, that's how I read it but as in all things Fench there are dozens of interpritations!
Moving to France is a a lot like marriage. The honeymoon period is idyllic. Then the cracks begin to appear. It all depends on how you view the cracks. Are they endangering the foundations, or just a minor inconvenience?
At the moment our new president M. Sarkowzy is enjoying just such a honeymoon. I know how he feels.
When France comes back from the summer hols it’s all going to sink in. But as for today, well it’s still August. The country is still ‘away’, summer has finally arrived this year (almost too late but let’s hope for a brilliant autumn)
And France are hosting the Rugby World Cup. God’s in His heaven and for a while all seems right with the world.