Pat's Jane's Annual Letter to the Family - 2011

HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Some kind and diplomatic person referred to last year's letter as a New Year Letter rather than a Christmas Letter, so it being nearly the end of January doesn't seem TOO bad.
Still, I really must finish before 11th Feb, as I'm off on a yoga course in, of all places, the Moroccan desert. We fly to the wonderfully-named Ouarzazate (anywhere with two z's in it has to be visited, I reckon) and then drive in a jeep about a million kilometres into the desert to where there is nothing. But sand. My yoga teacher comes from Morocco and every year takes 16 intrepid (ahem) students on this adventure, dwelling for a week in camel-hair tents with no water or electricity, surrounded by nothing but the sand (obviously) and under the most fabulously starry skies. I have never spent even five minutes in a desert and apparently the perspective or lack of it does funny things to your brain, but you can sleep quite happily outside under the fabulously starry skies, in a sleeping bag and a possibly transcendental state of mind. I suspect that the hot shower that we can have once back in town at the end of the week will also produce a tr. st. of m. Which reminds me of a friend who went up the Himalayas 'to see God' and when asked whether he did see God, he said that he did indeed, when he returned to Kathmandu and sat on a normal toilet!
I intend to continue last year's resolution to only tell you new things that have happened, rather than drone drearily on about neighbours, cats and local government (blimey, is that my life?), so I shall be discussing the following thrilling subjects: the advent of baby pigs, the transporting of sofas, becoming a criminal, the madness of the jazz, strange forms of exercise, pianos, second hand car parts and the death of My Boy Cocky. Also the continued failure to take a camel to Santiago. In fact, I will not mention the latter again unless I have done it. Suffice it to say that one of us left the country, one of us got divorced, one of us lives 3000 miles away, one of us is me and the other is Sarah who has the camels and the enthusiasm but not enough months in the year to earn a living and go off on mad treks leaving her family and other animals to forage for themselves. She's the one who had the idea originally and seeing as the camels are hers, it does all depend a wee bit on her, so I pat her hand encouragingly when I see her and try not to put pressure on her.
My typing action is being severely hampered by Skips (Siamese-type-mother-of-4-should-be-sitting-in-a-wine-bar-in-Chelsea) who wants to sit right in my lap even though it already has a cushion and a laptop in it. Being cross-legged on the sofa already presents its own challenges but I find sitting at the table for too long squashes the backs of my legs in a peculiarly uncomfortable way. I then end up sitting cross-legged on an ordinary chair, which really doesn't work that well. There is overspill at the sides. I don't know where I get this propensity to sit cross-legged from but my legs tuck themselves in off their own bat. It must be all the yoga. Skips sees the resulting hollow as the perfect place to spend the morning/afternoon/ evening and plops herself there tout de suite. She is passive resistance and non-violent direct action personified. She purrs continuously, never complains, and her reaction to me moving her to the side just now to accommodate the laptop is to accept her new position tucked between me and the arm of the sofa but to extend an elegant back leg and type triple kkk's in the middle of my words. Remove her completely and she merely waits a moment and politely reinstates herself. I always bow to her feline persistence - having seen her waiting motionless by a mouse hole for hours, I know what I'm up against and prefer to give in early in the game and save some face. At times like these I think it is a good thing I haven't got any children.
Talking of mice, Skips today managed to catch the fattest mouse in the world who has been living in the kitchen behind a cupboard, thumbing its little nose at EIGHT cats, strolling brazenly along the back of the worktop and helping itself to goodies during the night. Once it practically hollowed out an overgrown courgette I had left out on the side for a week. When I picked it up it felt oddly light and all its insides had gone. The mouse, including its insides, has now gone. As I said, there is no point resisting Skips. She will always get her mouse. Sometimes she gangs up with her son Tedders who looks like the sort of blob who could hardly get off a sofa, and targets the mice who live in a drainage pipe in the front flowerbed. They wait and wait and wait and wait – the mice, whose memories must be similar to a goldfish's, come out, and BAM. Works every time.
Now, is time flying for everyone or is it just me? Unnerving realisations dawn on me rather too often, like the fact that I will be an OAP in 7 years. (Actually, I've just checked on that and seeing as the state pension age is now 65, I won't be an OAP for 12 years. Should that make me feel younger? ). Also, Dad would be 103 were he still alive. It only feels like a year or two since he died. It was actually 2003. NINE years ago. A car registered in 2000 still feels pretty new to me but, er, it's 12 years old. Friends' children who were being pushed round the park in plastic cars a couple of years ago are now 22 and writing clever blogs with delightful illustrations or becoming ballet dancers. They become cleverer than their elders. Should this be allowed? Is this the point at which we have crises and rush about trying to do all the things we think we should have done by now? I do actually feel very strongly drawn to selling everything I own and trotting off with a stick and a red spotty
handkerchief. Oh the bliss of not having stuff.
While waiting to not have stuff, I am acquiring more. Call it living in the moment. I'm getting a piano from someone whose mother had six and has just gone to that great concert hall in the sky, leaving her offspring with a mountain of enormous gloomy furniture that won't go into anyone's house and the said six pianos. I play the piano in a way that impresses people who can't play and horrifies people who can. Fortunately, I don't care. I try not to inflict my efforts on sensitive souls but bashing about on a piano is really good fun and I class it as therapy.
The little darling Renault 4 now goes but still has to pass the equivalent of an MOT so I don't go further in her than the dustbins and to get bales of straw from the neighbours. Someone told me that if a car like that can actually get to the MOT centre, it will pass, so I live in hope. She's still a bit of a heap and very noisy as her door seals have rotted and I could probably have bought a better one for less than she will cost by the time she's had a mint-green re-spray (police-blue is so dull) and is covered in flowers but wotthehell everyone loves her and she'll be a princess by the time she's finished and there's no rush. A very gorgeous Dutch girl gasped with excitement when she laid eyes on her the other day and leapt into the back for a ride down to the treehouse. There isn't even a back seat at the moment and the g. D. girl was covered in straw when she got out but you don't get thrills like that in Amsterdam.

Talking of police, or more accurately, gendarmes, who are different from police in some way I can never remember, although I think the gendarmes are actually part of the army – whatever - one of them came round to the house clutching a piece of paper to tell us that we had built the treehouse without planning permission and that I (being technically the owner of the treehouse, as the house is in my name) would have to go and give a statement. It was true, so I did, even though someone had told us once that you didn't need p. p. if the building has no foundations. This used indeed to be the case, but typically, the money-grabbing powers-that-be have written themselves a new planning dictate that includes yurts, tipis and treehouses. Crazy – you'll need planning for a cardboard box under a bridge next. I spent a fairly jolly but ridiculous two hours at the gendarmerie dictating the obvious and having my fingerprints taken and being photographed from the classic front and side criminal angles. Gendarme and I both got covered in fingerprint ink and he apologised to Marek for having to hold my hands during the process. The whole thing was absurd and hard to take seriously and I'm fairly sure he'd never taken anyone's finger prints before – not a lot happens round here. Apparently, since the beginning of 2011, people have their fingerprints taken even if their offence is to refuse to let their divorced partner see the kids. Or to build a treehouse without planning permission. Oi, that treehouse has got your fingerprints all over it! Oh the joys of bureaucracy. (Wow, I've just spelt that word a few different ways before pressing Spellcheck to find the right one! What does that tell us? Never get involved with anything with a silly spelling.)
Now you're probably wondering what on earth the gendarmes have to do with planning permission, but in France it comes under their many-spoked umbrella and as some sour-grapes person in our commune (who has failed, quite unfairly, to get planning permission for a house he wants to build) pointed out the treehouse, they were obliged to follow it up. What a waste of time and money, as it will probably go to court, Marek being unwilling to take it down (yes, take it down) without a fight. The really daft thing is that we can't apply in retrospect because planning would never have been given in the first place (there is a bit of a one-rule-for-everywhere here now - middle of Paris or middle of nowhere – all the same) and yet we could apply to be a camp site and it would almost certainly be allowed. We don't want to be a camp site though. The gendarme fell in love with the treehouse and was horrified at the idea of it having to come down and kept trying to think of ways round it. He'd quite like to live in it. Having experienced the dullness of his gendarmerie abode, I'm not surprised. A quite decent building that has been completely sterilized with suspended ceilings, partition walls and strip lighting that would bore most people into being law-abiding citizens while they were waiting to be charged with being drunk in charge of a string of onions.
Anyway, we have had nothing in writing yet, so who knows what will transpire. We are refusing to feel intimidated and all our friends are ready to chain themselves to the trees if necessary. I think the gendarme might be too. He could use his handcuffs.
I did NOT do the grape harvest this year – once was quite enough. In fact I was proud of myself for standing up to Fred (head of the grape-picking squad) when I bumped into him at a plant sale and he asked if I would be on the team again. I could feel myself weakening but managed to get the sentence out in the negative in the nick of time. Phew. He did look a bit deflated, as Maryse and Helene (fellow co-sufferers last year) had also declined, but I had to be firm.
I have transmogrified, if that's the word, from Builder's Moll into Used Car Part Dealer. They both sound fairly dodgy and I never expected to be either but there you go. La vie is full of surprises. We have de-constructed two old Mitsubishi Shoguns into their many parts and sold the bits on Le Bon Coin, France's equivalent of Loot and on which you can buy and sell everything from a Peugeot to a parrot. Marek rolled one Shogun in the field and squashed it (not himself, fortunately) and the other one was starting to fall to bits. My vocabulary has expanded unexpectedly in both English and French and I can now tell you that a wheel hub is a moyeu and a glow plug is a bougie de préchauffage and even point to them. I can also tell my cylinder head from my cv boot. The first is a culasse, which sounds like something you might yell after someone if they cut you up and the second is a soufflet de cardan, which sounds as though you should serve it quickly with a sprig of parsley. So French.
A kind friend offered us three sofas, which we accepted on the principle that you can never have too many sofas, even if you have to pile them on top of each other. There are now sofas all over the house in completely unnecessary places. Unnecessary that is, unless you are a cat. I have gone up in the cats' estimation since the sofas arrived. Having strapped all three onto a trailer and stashed most of the cushions on the back seat, we trundled home. It was a couple of days before we unloaded them and horrors! there was one cushion missing. Back we trailed but there was no sign of it and although it's annoying because it's an end one with a bit cut out for the arm, which means I am very unlikely to tackle making another one the same, I do like to think that perhaps some farmer is bouncing along on his tractor with his bum protected by a plump bit of ivory jacquard upholstery. With piping.
If I ever actually see him, however, things could get feisty.
Now, visitors have been a bit thin on the ground this year. We are taking it entirely personally and you may all find yourselves struck off this Christmas Letter list and then where will you be? Or maybe we smell or are far more boring than we thought. If any of you are thinking of using your advancing age as an excuse, you may blush when you hear that my Aunt Frances, may-she-live-forever, came TWICE and she's 91. She might have come thrice had she not decided to skip off to Boston for Christmas. She really should be beatified.
The Jazz Festival was as mad as ever – lovely people to stay for the B&B side of it – a few who had been before came back (one guy for the third year running with the third girlfriend running). One woman said it was the best holiday she had ever had and another asked if she could make blackberry jam – how can you refuse a request like that? A Dutch couple returned with their gorgeous little girl of three, who entertained everyone by marching around in Marek's wellies, which came up to her crotch. Avatar, who was best friends with her last year when he was still a kitten and didn't mind being picked up by his fur regarded her with faint alarm (his demonstrations of alarm are never more than faint) and legged it. She took it well and spent the extra time filling Marek's wellies with gravel. What a resourceful child.
The treehouse was also full of jolly people throughout July and August, who basically looked after themselves, with only the change-overs sending me into a bit of a twizzle. I'm not really built for full-on madness – I get through it but usually burst into tears at some point and swear I will never ever EVER do it again. Our village fete is always on the first Saturday of August which makes it all even madder. T'would be nice to have our excitement spread out over the year a bit, as the rest of the time there is nowt going on at all. At least we had braved Ikea in Toulouse and bought enough bed linen and towels to have two sets for every bed we own. Which of course means that there is a huge pile of the stuff sitting unused for most of the year. It gives me a calm feeling though, if I look in the cupboard.
Pause while I go out and congratulate Marek and friend Paul who have just returned from the next village where M broke down pulling a trailer of sand with the jeep. A friend gave him a lift home and he and Paul took the tractor and dragged the whole lot back here (5 tonnes). As I have said before, I dream of a simple life where you don't need a jeep to pull the trailer, a tractor to pull the jeep and a digger to pull the tractor. The red spotty hanky on a stick, the open road and possibly a cat really are starting to appeal rather alarmingly. Maybe forget the cat though - Tedders has just opened an eye for long enough to give me a look that says 'Don't try any of that Dick Whittington stuff on me, mate'. Pathetic, the lot of them.
Now what is the one thing that everyone really needs? Yes, you got it in one – a pig. Especially a very small, unutterably sweet black one that needs a home and has an unbeatable sob story: mother didn't have any milk; brothers and sisters all died; she herself technically died THREE times but fortunately came to after death number 3 BEFORE being buried in the grave that Dan had tearfully dug for her; rallied after spending a few days inside Dan's shirt and a few nights in his bed (who wouldn't) and finally decided to stay on the planet and be the Cutest Pig Ever. Which is when she came to us, anything but dead, and fat. I went to give a kitten to Sarah (Santiago camel-trip Sarah) and came back with the 10-week-old Pigalo in the cat basket. A week later I went to get her a friend, whom she now loves, having initially put up some half-hearted resistance to sharing her princess cushion by the stove. The friend is also small, black and cute but very streetwise and pushy (the princess cushion), having had a mummy with milk and twelve siblings to contend with. She failed to be called something charming like Peggy or Pigwig on account of her honky foghorn grunt. Her name is Honky Foghorn. She follows fatty Pigalo about, honking, and they spend their days rootling in the compost pile and playing with the chickens. Oh, and emitting outraged squeals outside the front door, as they have now been banished from the house. Pigalo had to be in the kitchen for a week but one little pig sleeping sweetly under the stove and peeing in a cat tray (yes!) is very different from two frisky piggies arguing over the princess cushion and gambolling about the kitchen spilling the cats' water and peeing in corners. Honks was a Bad Influence. They now sleep in the old pigsty, which I cleared out and filled with straw. They gather all the straw into a big pile and then burrow in. It looks deliciously cosy. They come rushing out in the morning and fall on, or rather into, their food and I have to feed the cats on a shelf, as their food would also be hoovered up in a trice. They won't grow very big, but they will have to be fenced in somewhere fairly soon, as even a smallish pig is not great in the veggie patch. The cats are disgusted, of course.
One of the things I have got unexpectedly excited about this year is silicone cake tins. Or cake moulds I suppose we have to call them as the whole point is that they are NOT tin. The marvellous aunt provided them and even though the rectangular one sags at the sides the bliss of not having things sticking and not having to line them with paper to avoid a taste of tin outweighs the saggage and the smell of hot-water-bottle when they come out of the oven.
Marek is currently tackling the barn, which is in a fairly dodgy state of repair. As we will be putting our house on the market this year (seven years here (unbelievable) and time to move on, probably not very far) the barn needs to be not too frightening for people considering buying the place. Rotten beams and walls leaning out at unseemly angles can put people off, strangely, so Marek has been re-roofing and chopping up our own trees to make beams and hoisting walls back into place and making his own mix of lime and straw to put between the timbers and laying planks that he's cut up on his sawmill and generally wowing the more faint-hearted of us, who, as usual, make tea. He does have hefty help from various friends and the digger (mechanical elephant) but we are still impressed as he is the devilishly clever mastermind behind it all. The house may take years to sell, in which case the barn will probably have sprouted three towers and a moat as M finds it very hard to leave a project alone.
I'm still going to my singing group, so my vocal chords are shaping up, and my other chords should be soon, as, for the past two weeks, I have been going to a class doing that strange form of exercise – Step. What an odd thing to do – gambol about up and down a plastic step to bouncy music. My springy friend Maryse suggested it and as I try to hold to my maxim of doing something new at least once a year, I went. I am absolutely useless, having never done it before and being dyslexic about any sort of routine. Corinne the instructor assures me that I will get the hang of it eventually and I have complete faith in her – might as well. In the meantime I am a source of amusement for the others as I cavort and scramble three and a half beats behind and on the wrong side of the step. Still, I use up a lot of energy and end up red in the face, so something aerobic must be going on. It is also quite addictive.
It is minus 2 and snowing today, which has taken everyone by surprise, the weather having been very kind up until now, to the point where my camellia was flowering at Christmas under a cloudless blue sky. Our enormous artichoke plant has collapsed in one go – it seems to be able to withstand anything but a hard frost, and the chickens are skating about their yard.
Talking of chickens, some of you may know that I had a very large and friendly cockerel whose genes had probably been messed with, as he was a girl until he was six months and then developed terrible abscesses on his feet, which I insisted on treating. They healed eventually and he became very tame as a result of lying across my lap every few days for months, being squeezed and poked and bandaged. He also ended up very lame, which didn't seem to bother him – he lumbered about rather but seemed happy enough. Not a healthy chap really, though, so that the thought of dispatching him did cross our minds. But I loved My Boy, and when I looked him squarely in the eye I realised that I could never do it unless he was obviously in pain. This established, I went out one afternoon and there he was, on his side with his legs out, stiff as a board. How considerate. He weighed 15lbs, which was noticeable as I lugged him down to lay him in the bushes, where some happy creature would transpose him into lunch.
I could go on, as usual, and I have no idea whether I have given you an accurate view of what we get up to here – reading what I've written, it all looks rather odd and disjointed like one of those de-constructed novels. I do feel a bit de-constructed fairly often but that can be quite fun. I'm never bored and I'm very thankful that I don't have to go to work on the tube or sit in an office all day. Howeve, all the basic stuff is pretty much the same here and there, I suspect, apart from the Pyrenees in the background and the pigs and the French accent. Oh, and the fingerprinting.

Much love, lightness and lunacy to all for 2012 and beyond,

Jane and Marek xxxxxxxxxxx