CHRISTMAS 2007
Goodness gracious me. Another year has shuffled by. I am starting this letter VERY LATE and as we are leaving for British shores at the weekend (it is now Wednesday) I’ll probably be writing it on the ferry if giant waves do not prevent departure.
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Well, the previous paragraph turned out to be the only one I wrote in 2007. It is now 4th January 2008. Still we can pretend it is still 2007 – let’s call it literary license.
So, where were we? Or more to the point where are we? Still in the house, still thinking France is gorgeous, still talking to the neighbours, neighbours still talking to us, still thrilled by the Pyrenees, still unsure how many r’s, n’s and e’s there are in Pyrenees, still amazed and overwhelmed by garden abundance and still doing the house up. The scaffolding has come down off the back of the house after two years, which makes a huge difference and instantly stopped the place looking like a half-finished project. An illusion, in fact, but lifting to the spirits. We have fallen into the category of over-enthusiastic foreigners who buy big old houses in a blur of romantic whimsy and then find that any but the most basic renovations cost a packet because of the size of the thing. The best scenario is that one ends up in debt but at least with something to sell in order to get out of it. The alternative is to give in and live in a permanent building site – not the end of the world but not what most people will have envisaged while still in the romantic whimsy phase. Mind you, quite a few of our friends prefer such a state of suspended renovation to the alternative of going back to Blighty. There is a frequently-heard mantra which goes ‘We may be having a bad time but at least we’re having it in a gorgeous place’. It helps, we find, when something breaks down, falls over or blows up and when the money runs out. Our money is, in fact, fast running out – the bottom of the barrel is nigh - and we have borrowed some from kind relatives to finish off the Great Renovation, if not quite in the way that Marek had visualised, enough to be able to sell the house, thereby freeing ourselves to live in something small and manageable or, if I know Marek, to do it all again. I know my Marek. He pines for the small and simple but every time we pass a tempting ruin his nostrils flare and he can be heard murmuring terms of endearment to the crumbling walls and old timbers in a way that suggests that it’s in his blood and the chances of us ever living in anything small and simple are pretty remote. Unless you count a treehouse, perhaps. He has built one in the woods, and seems intent on living in it. It looks like the Gingerbread House, with a dormer window (a chien assis in French – a sitting dog) and trees sticking out of the roof and has surprised the neighbours who thought it was going to be shed in a tree. I do fancy the idea too, apart from the small question of where to put all the furniture. I met someone once who said that every seven years he started all over again with his life – changed his job, sold everything he owned and found it all very liberating. I don’t know if he went as far as changing his wife/girlfriend/children but something about the idea appeals. Perhaps we should sell all the furniture. When I went on my travels, I remember loving the ease of having my life in a backpack. How then, we wonder, have I managed to acquire enough stuff to fill a large building? To continue the theme, I also read that it is good to shave one’s head every seven years, so next time you meet me I may well be bald and smiling, with nothing but a small bag.
If not the treehouse, then a round straw-bale house in the field. We have applied for planning permission (haven’t heard back yet) and are all excited about the possibility of said straw-bale number. Having seen Grand Designs and met two locals who have built such houses, we’re all set. We might even have a windmill and a grass roof with a goat on it. It would be small and should be simple, so perhaps M’s desire will be fulfilled after all. It’s just what will come along after that that I wonder about. Still, at least he never says he’s bored and can’t think of anything to do. And I can’t complain about someone who likes spending money on building supplies - I could have married a man who spent all his money on silk socks or something. He even looked excited when I mentioned fancying the idea of living in a hobbit hole…somebody pass him a spade.
(I just wrote ‘fencying the odea’ in true ‘Allo ‘Allo style. Just thought I’d mention it.)
On the moggy front (sorry, I think it’s not having any children to go an about…), earlier in the year I thought I would have to officially stick a sign up outside our house declaring it a Cats’ Refuge. They were flooding in. One moment, we had two cats, fatty Poops and feisty Tigs, both jolly chaps who liked lying around their own territory, sharpening their claws on bits of it and thinking how nice it is to have territory, when two small versions of themselves (offspring of the neighbours’ ever-pregnant cat) descended like a furry plague and sent them into a pop-eyed and whisker-bristling tizz, as if they had no idea such things existed. For goodness’ sake, they were kittens, not rhinoceroses. OK, so the small versions didn’t have any idea about territory – they would march right into your food bowl whether or not you were eating out of it, barge up to you and try to suckle you (can’t they see we’re boys?) and were thoroughly unsettling. They didn’t even respond particularly well to the ferocious my-mother-was-a-cheetah face that Tigs does so well. Poops was so disgusted that he moved into the half-built treehouse. Tigs was first terrified-but-blasé, then horrified (but toujours blasé), then very pleased to discover that the kitties could be bowled very satisfactorily along the tiled floor, and flattened from above. Even more satisfying is that they had no hope of flattening him from above or anywhere else, but they understood the principle of humouring the greater and more be-clawed. Whether Tigs remembered being just like them himself not very long before is debatable. He generally seems more interested in showing off and pretending that he has always been a supermodel athlete in tabby.
Then, as if all this wasn’t enough to curl a cat’s whiskers, ANOTHER wee scrap got abandoned in somebody’s barn and the Cats’ Refuge lowered its drawbridge once again. It is now up, and the portcullis is down, and I have thrown the key into the moat, as I can see myself becoming the dotty old dame with the three hundred cats that I am no doubt destined to become, way too soon.
The latest couldn’t have been more than three weeks old – all wobbly and with his ears still folded down a bit and looking like an alien. He was very LOUD and so would I be if Mum had gone off and left me in a barn by myself. He grew up into a delightful-natured lad, spoilt by the other kittens and impervious to the batterings Tigs felt obliged to give him. And now he has gone missing. I hope he’s having the time of his life with the local maidens, as he has not yet been on that fateful visit to the vet and is no doubt full of the joys of spring even if it’s winter. We do hope he’ll come back. Friends keep telling us that their cats disappeared for ten years and then sauntered back in as if they’d just been out for the evening. In fact Poops disappeared for a month when we had a dog to stay recently and came back extremely slender. He has since been making up for lost time at the trough and is now the size of a small suitcase.
FLEAS. Goodness me. The kitties were home to swarms of them. If that’s the right word. Flocks? Shoals? Gaggles? They were too young to douse with chemicals, so there was nothing for it but a dunking in soapy water. As they were still very young, the kitties were not yet fully aware that being dunked in water is not something cats are particularly fond of. The idea of trying to dunk Tigs makes my curls straighten. Shredded is what I would be if I attempted that impertinence. But the wee ones, while not exactly lining up for the pleasure, hung limply by their scruffs and endured. The fleas did not endure. They are not fond of water, especially soapy, and were either washed off or could be picked off with tweezers afterwards. The task is labour intensive and has to be done regularly, but, as the doctor said to my friend who was advised to give up smoking to avoid death, and who found giving up in one go very difficult, ‘Cut down to start with and think of all the ones you’re not smoking.’ I thought of all the fleas I did pick off. Fifty-something off the smallest kitty after his first bath! Then I read some ghastly fact about there being a zillion more fleas in your house than on your cat, so I started uncharacteristically hoovering cushions and laundering cat blankets. Fortunately we don’t have any carpets. Let’s face it though, you can’t live this country life without a few fleas hopping into it now and then. And ticks. And wasps. And hornets. And mosquitoes, flies, woodworms, slugs, snails, beetles – I could go on. In the greater scheme of things, we’re probably all something else’s fleas. As the rhyme goes:
Big fleas have little fleas
Upon their backs to bite ‘em
And little fleas have smaller fleas
And so, ad infinitum
Like those films where, at the end, you find out that it’s all been going on in a cupboard in somebody else’s universe.
We tried so hard not to plant too many vegetables this year but we were still inundated. The weather did its bit to help us by being bizarre in spring and early summer. The beetroot, parsnips and spinach, which are pretty hard to fail with, got so soaked/fried/ soaked/boiled that they were few and far and sorry for themselves. The spinach and the beetroot came up in little clumps that looked as though they were huddling together for reassurance that they had come up in the right universe. I spread them out, but only a few of them got over the trauma. Neighbour Max’s broad beans were mostly devoid of beans and quite a lot of maize didn’t get planted until the last second. Tractors with their lights on worked till midnight. Then at the other end of the season they were working till midnight to get it all in. The hay was cut, turned, piled and rolled into boules in and amongst the weather’s fickleness. The suspense was quite thrilling. I think if I tried to be a farmer, I’d have a nervous breakdown after a month of the weather thumbing its nose at me and playing all sorts of cheap tricks. Enormous black clouds gather overhead in a lovely blue sky, thunder rumbles, curtains of rain can be seen falling three valleys away, and then it all goes away just as you’re putting the tractor back in the shed for the third time that day. I’d be on the pastis and riffling through the paper in search of a new career before you could say Jacques Dupont. It’s bad enough having sleepless nights over the beetroot and spinach.
We did manage to be more blasé about not eating/preserving everything, especially the courgettes that turned into enormous marrows the moment our backs were turned and the three enormous pumpkins that were definitely left there by alien visitors. If the tomatoes hadn’t got some ghastly lurgy (how do you spell that word?) and dropped off in great scarlet squelches we would have been unable to eat a quarter of them. This was partly because we couldn’t resist all the self-seeded plants that popped up all over the place like weeds. We even made a flowerbed especially for flowers, which ended up so full of self-seeded tomatoes that the flowers were smothered.
One thing that had me weeping into my vin rouge was that we had not one single cherry on our four trees. They were so laden last year that we could go out and eat breakfast off the tree. A combination of cold and rain at the wrong time meant that the bees went on strike and then the blossom took umbrage and fell off. In contrast an ancient tree had an enormous crop of pears on that sadly tasted like cardboard and had to be left to the hornets.
I made some strangely pink apple chutney from our one apple tree (also ancient and practically lying down) but it lacks the zip of chutney made with Bramleys. The French don’t seem to do Bramleys. Or chutney, for that matter.
The camels have been retired to Bordeaux. We miss looking out and seeing their unlikely forms adorning the opposite hillside and their occasional forays into our garden. But Pierre is retirement age and all his bookings for the camels were along the south coast/Cote d’Azur, which is at least five hours drive away, so Bechamel, Camelo and Bossanova have gone to join a big herd where they are apparently very happy, presumably holding all the other camels spellbound with their tales of opening fancy restaurants in Monaco and hobnobbing with the rich and famous. They live on here, though, as the bend by their field has been named Camel Corner and where we used to guide people to our house by saying, ‘Do you know where the camels are?’ we now say, ‘Do you know where the camels used to be?’ I’m very happy to have had the unexpected pleasure of their company – they were some of the gentlest creatures I have ever offered a bit of stale bread to.
The saddest thing that has happened this year is the death of our lovely part-time Dutch neighbour Sietse. He collapsed and died outside their house one evening in November and we will miss him very much. He was 76 and such a delight – full of stories and wonderfully irreverent. He had never owned a suit and told us never to grow up. His funeral in Holland was apparently a joyous celebration, full of people whose lives he had shone his light over. He was a teacher of the deaf and lots of his ex-pupils were there, even though he had had to give up work twenty-five years ago because of four major heart attacks. That didn’t stop him overseeing the building of the house in France and living in an old Volvo while he did it. His wonderful wife Ank will be coming back here in February, which will be hard for her but lovely for us. She is a very strong person and has lots of friends here, as they have been coming for nearly twenty years, so we hope she will still feel like spending time here.
I’m still teaching French two days a week to fifteen or so hapless souls. I’m not quite sure how it works, but my French has got much better as a result. Even when I spend most of my time saying things like ‘The hole is in the roof’ and ‘The wine is on the table’. Actually, people do ask me things I’ve never heard of, so I do do a bit of research on the Internet (O useful tool!) and then of course get side tracked and discover all sorts of things I didn’t know, like a dunce’s cap being a donkey’s bonnet in French. Also, the French have a cat in their throat where we have a frog, chicken skin instead of gooseflesh and ants instead of pins and needles.
Partly to remind myself what it is like to learn a language from scratch and partly because I’m mad, I have decided to tackle Polish. Apart from not being able to pronounce it, read it, remember it or make head nor tail of it, I’m doing very well. I have a CD, which is supposed to teach you as a child learns – lots of pictures - and as I am only on Lesson 1, I must not despair yet. At least I will feel empathy for my beginner students. If things don’t go well, I may even advise them to give up the struggle. Marek can speak Polish if he puts his mind to it so we have a rose-tinted picture of ourselves chatting away to each other in French and Polish as he has the same CD for French. Our attempts so far for me to teach him French have got no further that him feeling like falling on his saw and me wanting to bash him over the head with a French grammar. His French is actually getting much better in spite of me and he often comes out with astonishing phrases that I know I’ve never mentioned. We’re still trying to come up with a method of learning by osmosis, or perhaps hypnosis. If it’s true that we only use 3-5% of our brain power, I’m sure that somewhere in the other 95-97% there lurks the ability to learn a language in three nano-seconds, wouldn’t you think?
I have been asked by Max and Addi if I would consider being on the village council – eek. We have a mayor and nine counsellors and Addi feels that as there are eight British Islanders in our commune of 38 people, perhaps we should have a representative. I’ve said I’ll do it. Of course, it may be that nobody votes for me. I don’t think there is anything more onerous to do than going to a monthly meeting and deciding whether or not to tarmac Madame Dupont’s lane so that the postman doesn’t break his back axle delivering her letters. If I do become a member of the gang I shall be pushing for live music at the annual fete, which at the moment is an occasion of singular dullness, brightened only by (I hear) the juiciness of Max’s home-grown lamb and the fact that such large quantities of alcohol are imbibed that anything looks fun. We may be a tiny and scattered commune, but I think we deserve better than a dire and dreadful disco when I hear that other communes have groups of Pyreneans singing in close part harmony and bands of accordion players beguiling the revellers with stirring gypsy melodies late into the night. ‘Tis not fair, methinks, so I shall be out with my placard. Which I’m sure the cows will enjoy.
One bit of excitement was having our huge dead ash tree taken down. It was struck by lightening the year before we bought the house, which basically boiled its sap and blew most of its bark off. It has slowly been giving up the ghost ever since. First only a few leaves, then no leaves at all and finally a warning from Max that it might blow over in a storm and squash us in our beds. In the backs of our minds, I think we had been procrastinating because we thought it would be very expensive, but we got Alain the Tree-Feller round and he ‘ummed and ‘aahed’ a bit with a French accent and said that it would probably take him a ‘fat afternoon’, as dead trees could be very unpredictable. As it turned out, it took two hours and cost us the grand sum of 30 euros. Can you imagine what it would have cost in Grand Bretagne? The lead-up to the fall was very exciting, with all the neighbours round for the fun. We watched Alain cutting wedges out of the huge trunk while brave Sietse set up a chair in line with the trunk and sat down to watch the show. He ended up being the only person to see it, as there was a crack, we all turned away to rush round to watch it go and it fell so fast that we missed it. It was as dry as dust inside, shattered by the lightening, eaten by insects and gnawed by beasties. It had a round hole burnt through it where the lightening went and we were amazed that it had stood up for so long. All its twigs and smaller branches smashed into perfect stove-sized lengths and it will probably heat us for the whole winter. Actually, it could never have fallen on the house, but the greenhouse and the compost loo might have suffered. It was a beautiful tree, even when dead, and stood so high that we used it as a landmark from miles away to pinpoint our house.
So there we are.
We hope you had a great Christmas and have a jolly 2008.
Lots of love, plaster dust and paint splashes from us both.
