Christmas Letter 2010 from Cousin Jane (daughter of Pat and Margaret Heron)

Greetings Earthlings,

Well, there's no point pretending that I've broken the mould and that I am starting this in Plenty of Time because I'm not. I'm not even in France, but holed up in Staffordshire, under a blanket of very perfect snow at the fortunately well-heated house of my Aunt Frances (an utter marvel of spritely old age whose genes I hope I have inherited), from whence we will set out intrepidly tomorrow to train it to the thrills of Weybridge for Christmas itself. Skis might be quicker but we are all set with woolly knickers, egg sandwiches, Thornton's toffee and the hope that we will not spend too many hours freezing in a siding and having to eat the Guardian. I am good at being blissfully ignorant in such circumstances - no telly and an aversion to mass-media-induced panic (The Swine Flu!! The Terrorists!! The Crisis!! The Weather!!) meant that until the night before I set off for Toulouse airport to get my BMI Baby flight to Manchester, I was only vaguely aware of the frozen waste that Northern Europe had apparently become and my neighbour's assertion that the ice-age had reached the Loire Valley failed to put me off. My cavalier attitude could have landed me in the proverbial but as it was, the only inconvenience I suffered was when I insisted on sloshing through the slush at Manchester Piccadilly to go to a Big Shop (too long in the sticks - the sight of Debenhams or Primark can induce palpitations). I do not recommend dragging an over-packed wheelie-suitcase through slush - the little wheels are not up to it and create a drag that has left me with weird muscle pains in odd places.

(Momentary break to go and get piece of Thornton's toffee from tomorrow's stash. T's t can also induce palpitations). Talking of Thornton's toffee, I recently found a toffee recipe on the Internet that swore to taste just like Thornton's and it did. Absolutely. So much for their secret recipe.

Now, before I go on, I am aware that there is a certain sameness in these letters - one or two cats or chickens more or less but essentially the same old stuff, so this year, apart from the occasional follow-on chapter, I will attempt to thrill you with only New Experiences.

The most recent and therefore still new and exciting experience was splashing out €300 on a Renault 4, circa 1986. My dream car. My over-excitement at actually owning one of these little dears has glossed over the fact that it doesn't actually go and is in serious need of a paint job, but wotthehell, under the bonnet is a sewing machine and a couple of rubber bands, as far as I can see, and our local garage man practically cheered when we rolled it off the trailer into his yard. 'Yes!' he exclaimed, 'I will tweak its carburettor and twang its rubber bands and then you can go and 'faire la minette' with it.' I understand that this means I can cruise slowly round the village square in it making eyes at the locals. Très saucy.

In October, I found myself doing les vendanges, as the French call the grape harvest. This will teach me to only half listen when people ask me things, especially in foreign languages. I was under the impression that my friend Maryse had asked if I would like to do a day's vendanging in the Pyrenees as a favour to a friend of hers. How, you may ask, did I understand this when the question was actually whether I wanted to do be employed to do the real thing, all 4 weeks of it, for the local cooperative? Thus it was that I found myself being laughed at (unnecessarily loudly) by quite a few people and having to turn up at 7.30am on some pretty chilly mornings and snip bunches of variously white, red, firm, squashy, easy, awkward grapes into buckets, in the company of a motley vendanges crew, some seriously professional, for a ludicrously small hourly rate. Our boss, Fred, was a bit of a whip-cracker although a decent bloke and we worked bloomin' 'ard. The chilly mornings frequently became scorching daytimes, so we were alternately frozen and boiled and ended up with some strange sunburn patterns caused by t-shirts, bra-straps, hair and hat/no hat arrangements. All jolly, though and I brushed up on essential vocabulary such as 'sceau/bucket', 'raisin/grape', 'grappe/bunch', 'fait gaffe/watch out', 'doigts/fingers', 'sécateurs/secateurs', and a few choice oaths, which I will leave to your imaginations.
The money did add up to about €500 by dint of doing many many hours, and I think vendanging must be like childbirth - you quickly forget the really painful bits. I fully intend to report next year that I did NOT do the vendanges but I can't guarantee it. No sympathy will be expected. I really appreciate not having to be a professional vendangeuse and that I can earn three times the hourly rate sitting in a comfy chair drip-feeding people irregular verbs.

One thing that I have NOT done this year, which I expected to have done and be able to go on about was the camel trip to Santiago that I so cavalierly announced I would be doing in September. We have come up against a few stumbling blocks, the main one being ourselves, who are not the most organised bunch and we were somewhat naive to think that we could do all the necessaries in time. I suspect this sort of thing usually takes five years and a team of professionals to prepare, but we are not going to let a detail like that get in our way. Ever the optimists, we have put it off for a year, which may simply mean that we once again fail to go, but watch this space.

Chapter 2 (of only 2 chapters) of the Naughty Tractor Monsieur is that he never came up with the log book, the previous ancient-monsieur-garage-owner did not magically produce one, although his secretary did her best to browbeat the Prefecture into producing one and failed. We resisted going round to Naughty Monsieur's house and pushing him in the horse trough, cursed a lot, discussed it with the neighbours, practised some French shrugging, said ' Bof' a few times and let it go. We sold the tractor to someone who didn't need a log book and lost €500 overall. (Just about covered by my vendanging wages). The End.
A very jolly way to earn a few bucks, I have discovered, is to have French students to stay who want to learn English without actually leaving France. None of them is under the illusion that it would not be better to go and be immersed in the language in Angleterre, but as most of them are swotting for an exam or needing to boost their confidence, it works really well. Jennifer, a delightfully mad and entrepreneurial (French) teacher from near Montauban organises it - finds and checks out host families and sends suitable young uns into our midst. We have had three so far, who have all been delightful. The most notable was 16-year-old Juliette. Jennifer latched on to the fact that I had done Drama in the dim and distant and sent me Juliette, daughter of the boss of some hotshot theatre and wanting to be an actress the minute she has finished her 'sensible' studies. She arrived with a suitcase the size of the Ark and may have been a bit disappointed at the lack of opportunity to wear some of her outfits, but rallied well. We decided to put on a little play and then thought let's go for the big one, and did the shortest ever version of A Midsummer Night's Dream complete with woodland, courtesy of Marek, props, music and far too many costume changes. We enticed a selection of British neighbours in as an audience with promises of wine and a laugh. Apart from getting a fit of the giggles (in French une crise de fou rire – a crisis of mad laughing) that nearly prevented us from going on, good old Juliette had worked really hard to create a functional script (Shakespeare would not have recognised it as one of his) and although I suspect most people lost the plot fairly early on, what with the two of us having to play all the characters and whipping bits of significant costume on and off, they were kind and enthusiastic and we blamed any lack of clarity on Marek, who was holding up the scene numbers as we got to them and still had two scenes left when we taking our final bow. You just can't get the stage hands these days.

My Life Drawing class, which had digressed into a painting class (during which I had got no further than reducing a fabulous and sensitive Our Lady to a suspicious-looking Mexican peasant), has gone on hold while the teacher moved house and helped his wife have another baby. He now spends a lot of time digging drainage trenches and washing in cold water, which gets in the way of having time to spend on explaining to us lot where to splosh the paint. In a way that may seem fickle to the more dedicated amongst you, I have switched my allegiance to a singing class, run by the the very talented and long-suffering Abdelak, who shows surprising enthusiasm for our efforts with the songs that he collects from around the world, writes down phonetically and teaches to us with, I must say, some success. It's quite odd and strangely liberating singing words with no idea of what they mean - for all we know we may be singing a Mongolian shopping list and a Vietnamese recipe for fish stew. We won't be signing a record deal just yet, but we amuse ourselves and may occasionally be called upon to take the stage at small events. Possibly for the local branch of the Association for the Profoundly Deaf.

I and a group of 'girls' have started a book club, which means that I have read a selection of books that I would never have chosen myself but that I have generally enjoyed. I can be such a snob about books. Reviews by the wrong sort of publication or embossed gold on the cover have me sneering and holding the unfortunate volume up between two fingers within moments. So, I undertook to read whatever we threw at each other and was duly pleasantly surprised, particularly by We Need to Talk about Kevin, by Lionel Shriver (seriously grim subject but very well done) and Clear, by Nicola Barker, which is wonderfully mad but so full of swear words that one or two of the more genteel 'girls' refused to read it. Tut tut. I suggested that we could agree to read whatever was chosen but I was overruled, as it was felt that reasons for not reading a book could be as interesting as opinions about it. Fair enough, I suppose, but the point of a book club becomes a bit hazy. Incidentally, and ironically, the first book I chose, having read and been captivated by another by the same author proved to be so infernally dull that half the group fell asleep and failed to finish it. I had to agree that 'twas not her best but I struggled stoutly through it.
The treehouse is now finished and even has its own website www.treehousefrance.com which will show you some pictures if you feel so inclined. I have to say that it is delightful and that Marek is a very clever boy. It has been rented out to a selection of people, both British and French, all very nice and enthusiastic about the compost toilet, and with any luck it will be full this summer and earning its keep. Nobody has fallen out of it or set it on fire, which is very kind of them. By next year, we may have a whole village of treehouses, as Marek has just purchased, with two other pals, a portable sawmill. Now I'm sure you all know what one of those is, but just in case, it's a hefty bandsaw on a trailer that you can take here and there to slice up trees wherever they may be. It means that Marek can turn his own trees into beams/ rafters/planks/floorboards at the drop of a handle, thus saving the major cost of building anything out of wood. He is very excited about it all – ten 3-metre rafters cut up in as many minutes and saving him €400 – hence the possible treehouse village by this time next week. Even I cut a plank – yippee.
To bring you up to date on the assorted fowls, they are more numerous and assorted than before due mainly to the eggs+broody hen+21 days = baby chicks equation and partly to other people donating their unwanted birds (rescue chickens?). The guineafowl are sadly no more. They were both male, so an egg no-no and, as I think I mentioned, made the most infernal noise. They were quietly dispatched by neighbour Max, who was rewarded for his executioner services with either Pinkfoot or The Other One, while either Pinkfoot or The Other One went in our freezer. He has since been served up with a sauce and pronounced delicious. I still feel a bit sad when I see the bunch of beautiful feathers that I saved. Two of the cockerels have also been knocked on the head (by Marek this time) and eaten and there are another five young ones that will have to go the same way, as too much testosterone causes fighting and the hens will be ravaged. At the moment the young ones are just brash youths, sidling cockily (sorry) up to the hens and attempting to get a leg over, only to be repelled in no uncertain terms with a screech and a hefty peck. They are often found hanging out together like teenagers at the bus stop, eying up the girls and jumping at each other and showing off their wattles. Chickens generally never cease to amaze me. How can creatures with brains the size of an atom spot a cheese rind at 100 paces? Since when do cheese rinds appear in nature? And how do they know they like butter? Or bread? They'll kill for a bit of ham sandwich and have started chasing the cats off their kittie-biscuits which are seriously unnatural. Even the cats know that. I think maybe chickens are like the white mice in The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and are quietly running the universe.

The cats are also fine - eight of them now, which is quite enough, as I said when there were seven and just before we found No 8 sitting in the middle of the road with her eyes glued shut trying to get run over. Ho hum, we said, scooping her up and adding her to the tribe. She is now six months old and tiny but she is also a force of nature and moves like the squirrel in the film Over the Hedge, if you have ever stumbled upon that bit of animated silliness. Just short of the speed of light. Entertainment with a tail. She is a thief par excellence and cannot be left alone in the presence of even a humble crust of bread. She can hold all the chickens off a cheese rind with a look, which is saying something.
Right, I'm going to stop so that I can get this on two pieces of paper.
As you are not going to get this before Christmas it's a bit late to wish you a merry one, but I hope yours was as jolly as mine and that 2011 is marvellous in every way.
Love, light and laughter from Jane and Marek xxxxxx