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PAT'S JANE'S LETTER IS FURTHER DOWN THIS PAGE....
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Friday, December 22, 2006
Christmas 2006 letter from Pat's Jane to the Family
CHRISTMAS 2006 - LETTER FROM JANE, DAUGHTER OF PAT.
Hello everybody.
Well, I’m not calling this a Round Robin this time, because a relation (who shall remain nameless) refused to read the other one on the grounds that it was a R.R and, because a relation of his sends such things brimming over with tedious details of how marvellously well all her offspring are doing and how much brighter and more successful they are than everyone else’s offspring. He therefore dug his toes in and refused, on principle, to peruse mine. Despite the fact that not a sniff of offspring, marvellous, bright or successful (or indeed, dreadful, dim or hopeless) was to be found on any of the pages. Oh well, perhaps he can be tempted if I call it a Rond Ruban, which, according to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (I’ve just looked) is the original French (how appropriate) term, meaning round ribbon. Something to do with sailors signing petitions or protests in a circular form, so that none of them had to put their name at the top of the list and presumably be made to walk the plank for their pains.)
Anyway, be that as it may, off we go.
I had quite intended this to be a Summer edition, until I realised it was December, and although the weather is still marvellously mild, I can hardly pretend it’s July. I’m pleased to say that all sorts of exciting things have happened over the last year - exciting, that is, in a living-in-the-French-countryside sort of a way, where the highlight of the week is driving five miles to the market and buying smelly cheese.
I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that we are still here and not in Basingstoke or Bali; that the neighbours are still delightful, the Pyrenees are still there (as yet untrod by any foot of mine, stoutly shod or otherwise, but I’m planning on tackling them on skis this winter…) and the house is now re-roofed and leak-free. What is more, the roof still looks delightfully old and wiggly. (There are a few frights round here - lovely old houses with upsettingly straight and new-tiled roofs - shame on them.)
There are various new additions to our household - in the alive and therefore most noticeable category, two cats, one v. large, one v. small. The v. small one (Mr Tigs) is currently trying to help me to write this letter by squeezing round the side of the computer and pressing the keys with his cute-but-pain-in-the-posterior-little-paw. He has just managed to write something along the lines of p=997‘#~]-==09]-7=04=000=70=8=0=#‘= which is probably the Meaning of the Universe or something but he has had to be shut firmly in the back kitchen with nothing but a tin of sardines for company. While I’m on the subject, I might as well get him out of the way. He will tell you that he is allowed to do as he pleases because a. he is a cat and b. he was abandoned by his mother when he was a wee nothing of three weeks and just imagine, he might not have survived and then wouldn’t I be sorry? OK he did have a dodgy start but he has been so lavished with love, care and two-hourly feeds that I’m surprised that he isn’t buying me flowers and chocolates and handing them to me with a tear in his little green eye. Still, that’s being a parent for you, isn’t it? He’s now all full of teenage testosterone (not for long) and thinks that hurtling round the room at waist level, muddying up the chairs, smashing jars and lying on the kitchen table is acceptable behaviour. If in doubt, he bites things. He has been found head-down in the toilet, down Marek’s trousers (with Marek still in them), on one of the ceiling beams in the kitchen, in the fridge, in my handbag, and in other people’s cars. If he was a company he would be called Havoc, Bedlam and Chaos. I can’t decide whether he is a sandwich short of a picnic or whether I was like that at his age. In his favour, he has the most gorgeous tabby coat (we sometimes threaten to make him into a hat) and he is lovely when he’s asleep. Oh, and he is a whizz at mousing - he caught his first mouse at two months (it was already dead and very smelly) and has never looked back. Like most hyper-active children, he gets all the attention and our other cat is lucky if he gets the odd ear tickle. Not that he minds - he is a charming blob that likes sleeping in unlikely places, such as on a narrow beam suspended 20 feet over the void that will at some point be our sitting room. His name is Ficelle (he came with it) which means ‘string’ in French, and which is a misnomer if ever there was one, he being more like a piece of thick rope with a knot in the middle.
Anyway, enough of the felines or I’ll be falling into the same category as the cousin’s relative.
Other less cuddly (and, quite frankly, easier to manage) acquisitions include a tractor (ancient John Deere with fetching canvas rain hood) and a digger (the prospect of putting in a new septic tank looms large); a lawn mower that should be certified or at least muzzled, and the kind of hedge trimmer that would probably reduce the maze at Hampton Court to a pile of trimmings in five seconds flat if let loose upon it. Marek believes in buying sturdy tools, having had his fair share of the DIY-fall-to-pieces-after-putting-in-two-screws kind of thing. I braved a lesson in how to chop up logs with a chainsaw, which was rather terrifying but quite satisfying and very quick, and I have become very handy with the lawn mower once I have curbed its enthusiasm for going through the vegetable beds rather than round them. (Yes, we thought that leaving grass round the beds would be nice, which it is until it grows two feet in a week and we have to scramble to keep it from reclaiming all the ground that we so bone-rattlingly rotavated (another beast-machine). I’m sure gardening used to be a quiet pastime, whereas now we seem to be constantly doing
battle with some loud and ferocious machine. I suppose the idea is that once the groundwork is done and all (ha ha) that needs doing is a little light hoeing and weeding, calm will return. The thing is, I don‘t think our garden has read the same books as we have. It has not heard of light hoeing and weeding. I have never seen such rampant and overwhelming growth in a garden, except in Australia. We literally lost a bed of beetroot and lettuces in weeds when we went away for a week, and the now ex-tomato/aubergine/ pepper bed looks as though it was never anything but grass, even though Marek and pal Karim actually ploughed it up with an old ox plough rigged up behind the tractor. The poor plough’s wood-wormy shaft fell to pieces immediately afterwards, but it certainly went out in a blaze of glory.
Of course it might help not to plant enough vegetables to feed the entire commune, but to those souls used to short northern summers and the danger of frosts in June and October, the thrill of things growing with such lush abundance induces a kind of intoxication, which overcomes the more practical problem of What To Do With It All. You can’t give it away - people laugh wryly and wave a hand at their own burgeoning plot. Marek, ever practical (if 100% responsible for planting fifty tomato plants, twenty lettuces at a time and enough onions to have the whole of Gascony in tears) says that even if some of it ends up on the compost heap, it will all go to fuel next year’s excesses, which it certainly will. However, a serious re-planning meeting will have to be called before the spring to avoid us ending up in a home for dotty English people who forget that the south of France is not Huddersfield.
As you may imagine, it is not unheard of for Marek and me to ask each other wistfully why we didn’t buy a little house with a little garden, already done, so that we could then just prod it occasionally with a fork or whisk a paintbrush round it, rather that this semi-lunatic way we seem to be doing it. Don’t get me wrong - it is a lot of fun, but after dreams of being pursued by hordes of mad vegetables and fruit all shouting, ‘Pick us!’ ’Eat us!’ ‘Pickle us!’ ‘Bottle us!’ ‘Freeze us!’ ‘Jam us!’ I start to worry about my sanity. And indeed, if I will ever find time to do anything else.
One of the jolliest garden happenings is the transformation of the chicken shed into a green-cum-Wendy-house. The ghosts of all the chickens that ever perched in its dingy interior will be fluffing up their feathers with pride and elbowing their neighbours. ‘Sacré poulet!’, they will cluck. ’ Regardez notre pauvre petite maison! Quelle diffé rence! Quelle é lé gance! C’est exactement comme Le Palais de Buckingham!’ Well, you know how chickens exaggerate. But they are not far wrong. Gone are the dinge, the perches and the old tin roof. Now we have windows all round, vegetable beds and even a tiny York stone square with two chairs where we can sit with a cup of tea and watch it all grow, even in the rain. There is paved bit outside with a sort of overhead affair made of branches, some of which are still attached to their parent trees, so half the structure may be up in the air in a few years. This is where we can eat outside or lie in a hammock - trè s blissful.
I painted the shed green outside and planted a few climbing plants up its corners. Going by the rate of growth of the few c.p’s this year, it will be a green heap next year. Must sharpen the pruning shears (happily non-motorised).
Whilst I have been squaring up to the garden, Marek has been working wonders inside. The attic now has three dormers in its sunset-facing roof and one corner of it is now a lovely bathroom. The fact that you have to traipse through a bit of barn and a building site (stairs straight from the hallway au premier é tage are a thing of the future) to get to it is a minor inconvenience - it is all made out of old bits of wood (M’s forte) and there is a view of the Pyrenees if you climb on top of the shower cubicle. Marek hoped to have a view of the P’s while lying in the bath, but sadly, that would involve slicing a chunk of Gers countryside off the top of the field opposite which is a bit beyond us, although Marek was considering it at one point. ‘Du calme’, as our neighbour Max would say - French for ‘calm down‘.
(Mr Tigs has just whizzed across the computer and added another equation to his Meaning of the Universe theory which I have deleted. Honestly - he’s impossible. I hope he’s not Einstein reincarnated, and is trying to tell me something… He is now attempting to get inside the bank statements file.)
At the opposite end of the house, some extraordinary goings-on in what used to be un hangar (a kind of three-sided shed) have resulted in a kind of two-storey conservatory. Or at least will result in one once some glass has gone in and some stairs have been added pour monter en haut. Marek has actually chopped down a small tree to make into a spiral staircase, which should be fairly whacky - he’s full of bright ideas that lad. When first he said that he was thinking of lifting the hipped roof of the hangar a bit to make more head room and putting in a triangular window looking down the field, I envisaged a pretty little kind of dormer that one could sit in in an armchair with a book… It was only when he came back from the wood yard with two seven-metre beams that I began wondering. No pretty little dormer this, but an amazing huge triangular gable end, all glass (north facing, so not too frazzling in summer), which Marek has erected with the help of one or two friends. I am impressed. It will have a lovely view down the fields, although at the moment, it looks straight into our huge, over-enthusiastic bamboo clump. Honestly, you’d think you were in Malaysia. There’s even a small swamp next to it, when it rains, where a crocodile or two would not be out of place. Very jungly and exotic but it will have to be moved or I think we might be engulfed and never seen again. Whatever did happen to Marek and Jane..?
One unexpected thing is that we seem to be surrounded by tall, drop-dead gorgeous Dutch women. One turned up with her husband to buy our first little old tractor, driving an extraordinary little open car that looked as though its top had simply been sawn off its bottom. The most amazing thing about this chariot, apart from the heavenly six-foot being who alighted from it, was that it exactly matched my skirt - bright yellow and blue.
Another d-d. g. D. w. lives very locally and has been nicknamed La Sirè ne by a French neighbour, and I have to say that she deserves the title, being willowy and film-starish and guaranteed to turn every head in la rue. She is also very funny and jolly and has explained a thing or two to us about the lesser-known vagaries of French electrical circuits. Obviously not one who spends all her time sitting on a rock combing her golden hair. The term for d-d. g. in French seems to be ‘un canon’. I must let slip here that I have apparently been described thus by one of our bachelor neighbours although (without putting myself down of course) this may be his term for ‘female of the species under the age of sixty’, as he is rather odd and may be blind in one eye.
Earlier in the year, Marek and I discovered Su Do Ku. Uh oh. We were addicted. Having said that, it was the first thing we had found that would get M to sit in a chair and relax rather than boggle his brain working out which bit of the house to put where next, and as he has one of those logical mathematical brains, he could do the very hard ones and help me with the easy ones. There is a whole shelf of Su Do Ku books in the local tabac and according to the bumf, it is sending the whole of France nuts! It certainly sent us nuts for a bit (we are happily over the worst) but if you haven’t come across it I recommend giving it a whirl - the feeling after finishing a tricky one is a bit like I imagine the feeling of finishing the Times crossword would be, or possibly coming up with the Theory of Relativity. Not ever having finished a Times crossword myself nor come up with a Theory of owt.
Imagine my amazement whilst sitting with my hair in bits of cling film, being ‘blonded’, at a friend’s house when another woman there, whom I knew a bit, turned out to have lived in Northampton and been at Notre Dame Convent, just like me! The squeals of astonishment were quite something, as neither of us has ever, in the thirty-something years since leaving that establishment, met anyone else who went there. And we live a mile from each other in the middle of nowhere in France. She is extremely nice and delightfully dotty and has a gite and a B&B should anyone be planning their hols in this area.
Talking of hols, various visitors found their way to chez nous during the summer and very jolly and often hilarious it was too.
Marek’s mum and dad won the prize for being the first and discovered the joys of lying in hammocks.
Kim and Ali, two old university pals, came for four days and insisted on lugging roof tiles around the place, so they can come again. The World Cup was on and, having discovered that Ali is a secret footie fan (well, I didn’t know), the proprietor of our local restaurant brought a table outside on which he set up a TV, turned our table (and particularly Ali’s chair) round to face it and there we were with ringside seats.
Mark, Mo and Molly from the frozen north of Scotland came for a week and Mo practically cried when she compared our rampant basil to her tiny, carefully-nurtured specimen back home. Has anyone else ever grown waist-high basil before? Molly, being a water babe, improved the look of our enormous and very ugly plastic blow-up swimming pool which was threatening to roll off its sand base and down the field and also the local pool in the village, which was rather more sturdily anchored. We all went to the same restaurant for the World Cup Final where the proprietor had excelled himself and set up no less that six TV screens outside, so that all the tables could see the game. There must have been a hundred people, shouting ‘Allez les Bleus!’’ spilling out into the street and generally getting over-excited. And then of course, they lost. Oh woe! Many sorrows were drowned in red wine that night, methinks. Not ours, of course, as England was already out and we could happily support whoever we fancied.
Wee Molly also showed an uncanny knack of spotting mushrooms. We went looking in the woods and while the adults were all peering into the undergrowth, M’s little voice would ring out -’ There’s one here!’, ‘Here’s one!’, ‘Oh, here’s an enormous one!’. OK, they weren’t edible ones but I was impressed. Perhaps you could be trained as a truffle-sniffer, Molly? We were sad to see them go and are hoping that Scotland strikes them as so grey and chill that they come and live here.
At the end of August my brother Richard and his wife Lorna and their three little boys, Tim, Joseph and Patrick came for a week. Having discovered that even the cheapest flights were going to cost them a couple of limbs (chez Ryanair, you are an adult if you are over two, and so what if you‘re a family?), they came on the train, which was considerably cheaper, with none of the airport ghastliness. The excitement of a sixteen-hour journey and the thrill of the Metro in Paris shone in the little boys’ eyes as they were met at midnight at Tarbes station by Aunty Jane and Uncle Marek.
Marek, ever the boy scout and a bit nervous about having three lively boys, 2,4 and 6 suddenly in and amongst him, built them a camp in the garden, with kitchen, shower, hot (black plastic pipe in the sun) and cold water, a cooker, table and chairs, big tent and as the piè ce de ré sistance, three scoops of the digger bucket and hey presto - a toilet, with wooden walls, tin roof and sanded seat. There may even have been piped music… Electric light throughout, too, including fairy lights up a tree. R and family made excellent use of it all and, as may be imagined, if you have ever met them, many laughs were had.
The only fly which might have got into the ointment, but fortunately buzzed off just in time, was that I miscalculated how long it took to get to Tarbes, and on their way home, I deposited them at the station two minutes before the train left. The train was one of those big snorting French monsters that sets off exactly on time, and the look of disbelief on the faces of the guard and chap-with-the-flag was quite something. R and crew and baggage were bundled ignominiously on board seconds before the train moved off, without even a hug goodbye! Marek and I were then subjected to a small lecture by the SNCF staff about being in time for trains. We took it meekly. I was extremely impressed by T, J and P, who, on being told that we had to hurry, all leapt out of the car, clutching their bags and toys, and legged it for the train. No dropped teddy bears or ‘Oh Mummy, my shoe’s come off’ or ’But its stuck under the seat, Daddy’. Long may such conduct continue .
No llamas yet, but Pierre and Hé lè ne’s three camels are now in a field next to us. They are taken along to pageants, film premiers, fetes and the like, just as decoration, or for children to ride on. They are sometimes used in films and people even hire them for weddings, for the bride and groom to arrive on! They are very friendly (not the usual camel reputation - although Pierre says that it is usually harsh treatment that makes them bad tempered) but fond of escaping and finding their way into our garden. The first time it happened, a friend who was staying said casually, ’Are the camels usually just the other side of the hedge?’ and there they were, looming enormously and helping themselves to whatever was in reach, which is quite a lot when you have a six-foot and very bendy neck. Pierre and Hé lè ne live five miles away, so while we waited for them, we had to sort of herd the camels to stop them going on the road. Not something I had expected to be doing in the French countryside! They live in neighbour Max’s old wild-boar park, ten acres of it, which has quite a high wire mesh fence, but they like leaning on it to nibble the grass on the other side, and then, oh look, we can step over the squashed wire and go round to Marek and Jane’s house. Pierre is about to fit an electric wire to stop their little tricks. When they first moved into the park, the normal sound of cars passing - a sort of whoosh down the hill, and slight revving up the other side, became a whoosh down the hill, a sudden screech of brakes, the whine of a reversing engine and then silence. Followed sometimes by the car then setting off again, and sometimes by car doors slamming and exclamations of astonishment. It doesn’t happen any more, which just goes to show that it’s always the same people going along that road!
As for our plans - well, as the pile of money is going down, as piles of money have a
tendency to do, we will have to start to bring in some cash soon. There’s a lot of work still to be done on the house before we could ask people to pay to stay in it, but that is still a longer-term plan.
Marek can always turn his hand to converting people’s lofts (of which there are many) and he has an idea to build a few tree houses in our woods - B&B with a difference. I gave a him two books on tree houses for his birthday, which have fired his imagination and reminded him of things he and his brothers used to build when they were kids. The books contain the most amazing range of possibilities, from airy tribal perches in the forests of Papua New Guinea to a multi-million- pound conference centre on an estate in Scotland. Oh, and a eco-reserve hotel in India where you are winched up to your tree house pad by means of a bag-of-water-counterweight-lift! Marek went to India earlier this year and thought he would visit this wonder, until he discovered that it was ten hours’ bumpy bus journey from where he was and cost £160 per night! He was paying an average of £2 a night in guest houses and it seemed faintly against the grain that you had to be well-off to stay in a tree house in a nature reserve in India.
I, for my part, have put my teacher hat back on, my French having brushed itself up so much that I was persuaded to start running a class to help fellow British incomers to master more than how to buy a baguette and order a glass of pastis. It has now blossomed into a regular weekly slot, with a dozen ’students’ of varying degrees of proficiency, I think the word is. I gave up the group lesson, as we laughed a lot and learned little, so everyone comes singly now and I’ve surprised myself by really loving it. It brings in some cash and as long as I can speak French a bit better than my students, we’ll all be all right. My French has, in fact, improved no end - people ask me awkward questions and all the old stuff at the bottom of the pond gets stirred up and floats to the surface. I must be careful though - I caught myself studying my Grammar as bedtime reading the other night - now I think that is going a bit far… I don’t want to get carried away. I’ve told Marek to keep an eye on me - I’ve had visions of getting a blackboard and a mortar board and I found myself threatening order marks for bad behaviour last week. Once again, ’Du calme’, as our neighbour Max would say.
I have re-discovered the joys of trotting about the countryside on horseback, and I swap French lessons with our friend Francis for being allowed to ride Jess - half ex-hunter from Ireland, half Porsche turbo engine. She is lovely, although I haven’t found the stop button yet and she won’t tell me where it is. The countryside round here is great for riding - lots of what we would call bridle paths, and even part of the St John of Compostella pilgrim route within spitting distance. We never see anyone else out riding - in fact we hardly ever meet anyone at all, although we do have to be careful not to get shot on Sunday mornings by droves of hunters who obviously prefer this jolly little pursuit to going to church and, I suppose, could mistake us for a deer or a wild boar. They all wear fluorescent orange baseball caps and their dogs wear matching collars. Fourteen such brightly-attired dogs bounded through our field last week, and we later saw four or five hapless deer with their tongues hanging out being shoved into the back of a Renault 5. The hunting is all very regulated round here, but it is a bit of a shock to the system to hear rifle shots echoing through such peaceful surroundings.
Well, that’s about it without writing a novel. Must dash and give myself a lesson on the Euro. I’m embarrassed to say that I still have to peer at the coins when paying for things. The French must laugh behind their hands, as however much you may have polished your bonne journé e and au revoir it really shows you up as being British!
Lots of love and happiness to you all.
MERRY CHRISTMAS and A WONDERFUL 2007
(eek, can you believe it’s 7 years since all those millennium shenanigans?)
Hello everybody.
Well, I’m not calling this a Round Robin this time, because a relation (who shall remain nameless) refused to read the other one on the grounds that it was a R.R and, because a relation of his sends such things brimming over with tedious details of how marvellously well all her offspring are doing and how much brighter and more successful they are than everyone else’s offspring. He therefore dug his toes in and refused, on principle, to peruse mine. Despite the fact that not a sniff of offspring, marvellous, bright or successful (or indeed, dreadful, dim or hopeless) was to be found on any of the pages. Oh well, perhaps he can be tempted if I call it a Rond Ruban, which, according to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (I’ve just looked) is the original French (how appropriate) term, meaning round ribbon. Something to do with sailors signing petitions or protests in a circular form, so that none of them had to put their name at the top of the list and presumably be made to walk the plank for their pains.)
Anyway, be that as it may, off we go.
I had quite intended this to be a Summer edition, until I realised it was December, and although the weather is still marvellously mild, I can hardly pretend it’s July. I’m pleased to say that all sorts of exciting things have happened over the last year - exciting, that is, in a living-in-the-French-countryside sort of a way, where the highlight of the week is driving five miles to the market and buying smelly cheese.
I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that we are still here and not in Basingstoke or Bali; that the neighbours are still delightful, the Pyrenees are still there (as yet untrod by any foot of mine, stoutly shod or otherwise, but I’m planning on tackling them on skis this winter…) and the house is now re-roofed and leak-free. What is more, the roof still looks delightfully old and wiggly. (There are a few frights round here - lovely old houses with upsettingly straight and new-tiled roofs - shame on them.)
There are various new additions to our household - in the alive and therefore most noticeable category, two cats, one v. large, one v. small. The v. small one (Mr Tigs) is currently trying to help me to write this letter by squeezing round the side of the computer and pressing the keys with his cute-but-pain-in-the-posterior-little-paw. He has just managed to write something along the lines of p=997‘#~]-==09]-7=04=000=70=8=0=#‘= which is probably the Meaning of the Universe or something but he has had to be shut firmly in the back kitchen with nothing but a tin of sardines for company. While I’m on the subject, I might as well get him out of the way. He will tell you that he is allowed to do as he pleases because a. he is a cat and b. he was abandoned by his mother when he was a wee nothing of three weeks and just imagine, he might not have survived and then wouldn’t I be sorry? OK he did have a dodgy start but he has been so lavished with love, care and two-hourly feeds that I’m surprised that he isn’t buying me flowers and chocolates and handing them to me with a tear in his little green eye. Still, that’s being a parent for you, isn’t it? He’s now all full of teenage testosterone (not for long) and thinks that hurtling round the room at waist level, muddying up the chairs, smashing jars and lying on the kitchen table is acceptable behaviour. If in doubt, he bites things. He has been found head-down in the toilet, down Marek’s trousers (with Marek still in them), on one of the ceiling beams in the kitchen, in the fridge, in my handbag, and in other people’s cars. If he was a company he would be called Havoc, Bedlam and Chaos. I can’t decide whether he is a sandwich short of a picnic or whether I was like that at his age. In his favour, he has the most gorgeous tabby coat (we sometimes threaten to make him into a hat) and he is lovely when he’s asleep. Oh, and he is a whizz at mousing - he caught his first mouse at two months (it was already dead and very smelly) and has never looked back. Like most hyper-active children, he gets all the attention and our other cat is lucky if he gets the odd ear tickle. Not that he minds - he is a charming blob that likes sleeping in unlikely places, such as on a narrow beam suspended 20 feet over the void that will at some point be our sitting room. His name is Ficelle (he came with it) which means ‘string’ in French, and which is a misnomer if ever there was one, he being more like a piece of thick rope with a knot in the middle.
Anyway, enough of the felines or I’ll be falling into the same category as the cousin’s relative.
Other less cuddly (and, quite frankly, easier to manage) acquisitions include a tractor (ancient John Deere with fetching canvas rain hood) and a digger (the prospect of putting in a new septic tank looms large); a lawn mower that should be certified or at least muzzled, and the kind of hedge trimmer that would probably reduce the maze at Hampton Court to a pile of trimmings in five seconds flat if let loose upon it. Marek believes in buying sturdy tools, having had his fair share of the DIY-fall-to-pieces-after-putting-in-two-screws kind of thing. I braved a lesson in how to chop up logs with a chainsaw, which was rather terrifying but quite satisfying and very quick, and I have become very handy with the lawn mower once I have curbed its enthusiasm for going through the vegetable beds rather than round them. (Yes, we thought that leaving grass round the beds would be nice, which it is until it grows two feet in a week and we have to scramble to keep it from reclaiming all the ground that we so bone-rattlingly rotavated (another beast-machine). I’m sure gardening used to be a quiet pastime, whereas now we seem to be constantly doing
battle with some loud and ferocious machine. I suppose the idea is that once the groundwork is done and all (ha ha) that needs doing is a little light hoeing and weeding, calm will return. The thing is, I don‘t think our garden has read the same books as we have. It has not heard of light hoeing and weeding. I have never seen such rampant and overwhelming growth in a garden, except in Australia. We literally lost a bed of beetroot and lettuces in weeds when we went away for a week, and the now ex-tomato/aubergine/ pepper bed looks as though it was never anything but grass, even though Marek and pal Karim actually ploughed it up with an old ox plough rigged up behind the tractor. The poor plough’s wood-wormy shaft fell to pieces immediately afterwards, but it certainly went out in a blaze of glory.
Of course it might help not to plant enough vegetables to feed the entire commune, but to those souls used to short northern summers and the danger of frosts in June and October, the thrill of things growing with such lush abundance induces a kind of intoxication, which overcomes the more practical problem of What To Do With It All. You can’t give it away - people laugh wryly and wave a hand at their own burgeoning plot. Marek, ever practical (if 100% responsible for planting fifty tomato plants, twenty lettuces at a time and enough onions to have the whole of Gascony in tears) says that even if some of it ends up on the compost heap, it will all go to fuel next year’s excesses, which it certainly will. However, a serious re-planning meeting will have to be called before the spring to avoid us ending up in a home for dotty English people who forget that the south of France is not Huddersfield.
As you may imagine, it is not unheard of for Marek and me to ask each other wistfully why we didn’t buy a little house with a little garden, already done, so that we could then just prod it occasionally with a fork or whisk a paintbrush round it, rather that this semi-lunatic way we seem to be doing it. Don’t get me wrong - it is a lot of fun, but after dreams of being pursued by hordes of mad vegetables and fruit all shouting, ‘Pick us!’ ’Eat us!’ ‘Pickle us!’ ‘Bottle us!’ ‘Freeze us!’ ‘Jam us!’ I start to worry about my sanity. And indeed, if I will ever find time to do anything else.
One of the jolliest garden happenings is the transformation of the chicken shed into a green-cum-Wendy-house. The ghosts of all the chickens that ever perched in its dingy interior will be fluffing up their feathers with pride and elbowing their neighbours. ‘Sacré poulet!’, they will cluck. ’ Regardez notre pauvre petite maison! Quelle diffé rence! Quelle é lé gance! C’est exactement comme Le Palais de Buckingham!’ Well, you know how chickens exaggerate. But they are not far wrong. Gone are the dinge, the perches and the old tin roof. Now we have windows all round, vegetable beds and even a tiny York stone square with two chairs where we can sit with a cup of tea and watch it all grow, even in the rain. There is paved bit outside with a sort of overhead affair made of branches, some of which are still attached to their parent trees, so half the structure may be up in the air in a few years. This is where we can eat outside or lie in a hammock - trè s blissful.
I painted the shed green outside and planted a few climbing plants up its corners. Going by the rate of growth of the few c.p’s this year, it will be a green heap next year. Must sharpen the pruning shears (happily non-motorised).
Whilst I have been squaring up to the garden, Marek has been working wonders inside. The attic now has three dormers in its sunset-facing roof and one corner of it is now a lovely bathroom. The fact that you have to traipse through a bit of barn and a building site (stairs straight from the hallway au premier é tage are a thing of the future) to get to it is a minor inconvenience - it is all made out of old bits of wood (M’s forte) and there is a view of the Pyrenees if you climb on top of the shower cubicle. Marek hoped to have a view of the P’s while lying in the bath, but sadly, that would involve slicing a chunk of Gers countryside off the top of the field opposite which is a bit beyond us, although Marek was considering it at one point. ‘Du calme’, as our neighbour Max would say - French for ‘calm down‘.
(Mr Tigs has just whizzed across the computer and added another equation to his Meaning of the Universe theory which I have deleted. Honestly - he’s impossible. I hope he’s not Einstein reincarnated, and is trying to tell me something… He is now attempting to get inside the bank statements file.)
At the opposite end of the house, some extraordinary goings-on in what used to be un hangar (a kind of three-sided shed) have resulted in a kind of two-storey conservatory. Or at least will result in one once some glass has gone in and some stairs have been added pour monter en haut. Marek has actually chopped down a small tree to make into a spiral staircase, which should be fairly whacky - he’s full of bright ideas that lad. When first he said that he was thinking of lifting the hipped roof of the hangar a bit to make more head room and putting in a triangular window looking down the field, I envisaged a pretty little kind of dormer that one could sit in in an armchair with a book… It was only when he came back from the wood yard with two seven-metre beams that I began wondering. No pretty little dormer this, but an amazing huge triangular gable end, all glass (north facing, so not too frazzling in summer), which Marek has erected with the help of one or two friends. I am impressed. It will have a lovely view down the fields, although at the moment, it looks straight into our huge, over-enthusiastic bamboo clump. Honestly, you’d think you were in Malaysia. There’s even a small swamp next to it, when it rains, where a crocodile or two would not be out of place. Very jungly and exotic but it will have to be moved or I think we might be engulfed and never seen again. Whatever did happen to Marek and Jane..?
One unexpected thing is that we seem to be surrounded by tall, drop-dead gorgeous Dutch women. One turned up with her husband to buy our first little old tractor, driving an extraordinary little open car that looked as though its top had simply been sawn off its bottom. The most amazing thing about this chariot, apart from the heavenly six-foot being who alighted from it, was that it exactly matched my skirt - bright yellow and blue.
Another d-d. g. D. w. lives very locally and has been nicknamed La Sirè ne by a French neighbour, and I have to say that she deserves the title, being willowy and film-starish and guaranteed to turn every head in la rue. She is also very funny and jolly and has explained a thing or two to us about the lesser-known vagaries of French electrical circuits. Obviously not one who spends all her time sitting on a rock combing her golden hair. The term for d-d. g. in French seems to be ‘un canon’. I must let slip here that I have apparently been described thus by one of our bachelor neighbours although (without putting myself down of course) this may be his term for ‘female of the species under the age of sixty’, as he is rather odd and may be blind in one eye.
Earlier in the year, Marek and I discovered Su Do Ku. Uh oh. We were addicted. Having said that, it was the first thing we had found that would get M to sit in a chair and relax rather than boggle his brain working out which bit of the house to put where next, and as he has one of those logical mathematical brains, he could do the very hard ones and help me with the easy ones. There is a whole shelf of Su Do Ku books in the local tabac and according to the bumf, it is sending the whole of France nuts! It certainly sent us nuts for a bit (we are happily over the worst) but if you haven’t come across it I recommend giving it a whirl - the feeling after finishing a tricky one is a bit like I imagine the feeling of finishing the Times crossword would be, or possibly coming up with the Theory of Relativity. Not ever having finished a Times crossword myself nor come up with a Theory of owt.
Imagine my amazement whilst sitting with my hair in bits of cling film, being ‘blonded’, at a friend’s house when another woman there, whom I knew a bit, turned out to have lived in Northampton and been at Notre Dame Convent, just like me! The squeals of astonishment were quite something, as neither of us has ever, in the thirty-something years since leaving that establishment, met anyone else who went there. And we live a mile from each other in the middle of nowhere in France. She is extremely nice and delightfully dotty and has a gite and a B&B should anyone be planning their hols in this area.
Talking of hols, various visitors found their way to chez nous during the summer and very jolly and often hilarious it was too.
Marek’s mum and dad won the prize for being the first and discovered the joys of lying in hammocks.
Kim and Ali, two old university pals, came for four days and insisted on lugging roof tiles around the place, so they can come again. The World Cup was on and, having discovered that Ali is a secret footie fan (well, I didn’t know), the proprietor of our local restaurant brought a table outside on which he set up a TV, turned our table (and particularly Ali’s chair) round to face it and there we were with ringside seats.
Mark, Mo and Molly from the frozen north of Scotland came for a week and Mo practically cried when she compared our rampant basil to her tiny, carefully-nurtured specimen back home. Has anyone else ever grown waist-high basil before? Molly, being a water babe, improved the look of our enormous and very ugly plastic blow-up swimming pool which was threatening to roll off its sand base and down the field and also the local pool in the village, which was rather more sturdily anchored. We all went to the same restaurant for the World Cup Final where the proprietor had excelled himself and set up no less that six TV screens outside, so that all the tables could see the game. There must have been a hundred people, shouting ‘Allez les Bleus!’’ spilling out into the street and generally getting over-excited. And then of course, they lost. Oh woe! Many sorrows were drowned in red wine that night, methinks. Not ours, of course, as England was already out and we could happily support whoever we fancied.
Wee Molly also showed an uncanny knack of spotting mushrooms. We went looking in the woods and while the adults were all peering into the undergrowth, M’s little voice would ring out -’ There’s one here!’, ‘Here’s one!’, ‘Oh, here’s an enormous one!’. OK, they weren’t edible ones but I was impressed. Perhaps you could be trained as a truffle-sniffer, Molly? We were sad to see them go and are hoping that Scotland strikes them as so grey and chill that they come and live here.
At the end of August my brother Richard and his wife Lorna and their three little boys, Tim, Joseph and Patrick came for a week. Having discovered that even the cheapest flights were going to cost them a couple of limbs (chez Ryanair, you are an adult if you are over two, and so what if you‘re a family?), they came on the train, which was considerably cheaper, with none of the airport ghastliness. The excitement of a sixteen-hour journey and the thrill of the Metro in Paris shone in the little boys’ eyes as they were met at midnight at Tarbes station by Aunty Jane and Uncle Marek.
Marek, ever the boy scout and a bit nervous about having three lively boys, 2,4 and 6 suddenly in and amongst him, built them a camp in the garden, with kitchen, shower, hot (black plastic pipe in the sun) and cold water, a cooker, table and chairs, big tent and as the piè ce de ré sistance, three scoops of the digger bucket and hey presto - a toilet, with wooden walls, tin roof and sanded seat. There may even have been piped music… Electric light throughout, too, including fairy lights up a tree. R and family made excellent use of it all and, as may be imagined, if you have ever met them, many laughs were had.
The only fly which might have got into the ointment, but fortunately buzzed off just in time, was that I miscalculated how long it took to get to Tarbes, and on their way home, I deposited them at the station two minutes before the train left. The train was one of those big snorting French monsters that sets off exactly on time, and the look of disbelief on the faces of the guard and chap-with-the-flag was quite something. R and crew and baggage were bundled ignominiously on board seconds before the train moved off, without even a hug goodbye! Marek and I were then subjected to a small lecture by the SNCF staff about being in time for trains. We took it meekly. I was extremely impressed by T, J and P, who, on being told that we had to hurry, all leapt out of the car, clutching their bags and toys, and legged it for the train. No dropped teddy bears or ‘Oh Mummy, my shoe’s come off’ or ’But its stuck under the seat, Daddy’. Long may such conduct continue .
No llamas yet, but Pierre and Hé lè ne’s three camels are now in a field next to us. They are taken along to pageants, film premiers, fetes and the like, just as decoration, or for children to ride on. They are sometimes used in films and people even hire them for weddings, for the bride and groom to arrive on! They are very friendly (not the usual camel reputation - although Pierre says that it is usually harsh treatment that makes them bad tempered) but fond of escaping and finding their way into our garden. The first time it happened, a friend who was staying said casually, ’Are the camels usually just the other side of the hedge?’ and there they were, looming enormously and helping themselves to whatever was in reach, which is quite a lot when you have a six-foot and very bendy neck. Pierre and Hé lè ne live five miles away, so while we waited for them, we had to sort of herd the camels to stop them going on the road. Not something I had expected to be doing in the French countryside! They live in neighbour Max’s old wild-boar park, ten acres of it, which has quite a high wire mesh fence, but they like leaning on it to nibble the grass on the other side, and then, oh look, we can step over the squashed wire and go round to Marek and Jane’s house. Pierre is about to fit an electric wire to stop their little tricks. When they first moved into the park, the normal sound of cars passing - a sort of whoosh down the hill, and slight revving up the other side, became a whoosh down the hill, a sudden screech of brakes, the whine of a reversing engine and then silence. Followed sometimes by the car then setting off again, and sometimes by car doors slamming and exclamations of astonishment. It doesn’t happen any more, which just goes to show that it’s always the same people going along that road!
As for our plans - well, as the pile of money is going down, as piles of money have a
tendency to do, we will have to start to bring in some cash soon. There’s a lot of work still to be done on the house before we could ask people to pay to stay in it, but that is still a longer-term plan.
Marek can always turn his hand to converting people’s lofts (of which there are many) and he has an idea to build a few tree houses in our woods - B&B with a difference. I gave a him two books on tree houses for his birthday, which have fired his imagination and reminded him of things he and his brothers used to build when they were kids. The books contain the most amazing range of possibilities, from airy tribal perches in the forests of Papua New Guinea to a multi-million- pound conference centre on an estate in Scotland. Oh, and a eco-reserve hotel in India where you are winched up to your tree house pad by means of a bag-of-water-counterweight-lift! Marek went to India earlier this year and thought he would visit this wonder, until he discovered that it was ten hours’ bumpy bus journey from where he was and cost £160 per night! He was paying an average of £2 a night in guest houses and it seemed faintly against the grain that you had to be well-off to stay in a tree house in a nature reserve in India.
I, for my part, have put my teacher hat back on, my French having brushed itself up so much that I was persuaded to start running a class to help fellow British incomers to master more than how to buy a baguette and order a glass of pastis. It has now blossomed into a regular weekly slot, with a dozen ’students’ of varying degrees of proficiency, I think the word is. I gave up the group lesson, as we laughed a lot and learned little, so everyone comes singly now and I’ve surprised myself by really loving it. It brings in some cash and as long as I can speak French a bit better than my students, we’ll all be all right. My French has, in fact, improved no end - people ask me awkward questions and all the old stuff at the bottom of the pond gets stirred up and floats to the surface. I must be careful though - I caught myself studying my Grammar as bedtime reading the other night - now I think that is going a bit far… I don’t want to get carried away. I’ve told Marek to keep an eye on me - I’ve had visions of getting a blackboard and a mortar board and I found myself threatening order marks for bad behaviour last week. Once again, ’Du calme’, as our neighbour Max would say.
I have re-discovered the joys of trotting about the countryside on horseback, and I swap French lessons with our friend Francis for being allowed to ride Jess - half ex-hunter from Ireland, half Porsche turbo engine. She is lovely, although I haven’t found the stop button yet and she won’t tell me where it is. The countryside round here is great for riding - lots of what we would call bridle paths, and even part of the St John of Compostella pilgrim route within spitting distance. We never see anyone else out riding - in fact we hardly ever meet anyone at all, although we do have to be careful not to get shot on Sunday mornings by droves of hunters who obviously prefer this jolly little pursuit to going to church and, I suppose, could mistake us for a deer or a wild boar. They all wear fluorescent orange baseball caps and their dogs wear matching collars. Fourteen such brightly-attired dogs bounded through our field last week, and we later saw four or five hapless deer with their tongues hanging out being shoved into the back of a Renault 5. The hunting is all very regulated round here, but it is a bit of a shock to the system to hear rifle shots echoing through such peaceful surroundings.
Well, that’s about it without writing a novel. Must dash and give myself a lesson on the Euro. I’m embarrassed to say that I still have to peer at the coins when paying for things. The French must laugh behind their hands, as however much you may have polished your bonne journé e and au revoir it really shows you up as being British!
Lots of love and happiness to you all.
MERRY CHRISTMAS and A WONDERFUL 2007
(eek, can you believe it’s 7 years since all those millennium shenanigans?)
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