Spring and Summer
I last left you as Spring began to shake its leaves, my heater appeared to be working and expectation was generally in the air.
I should mention that in that last missive I skirted lightly over the arrival of all my boxes from Oz. In fact, it was not as smooth as all that. Of course not. It took more that half a day, mostly because the Polish (I think) removalists got lost, trusting too much in the postcode. This might have been fine had this number not been shared by a couple of villages. They, of course, went to the other one. After a half-hour’s frantic fixing up of my pay-as-you-go … by phone itself which, as I have said, can be deeply, deeply frustrating as a method of communication when in another language … we settled into a series of calls where the guys insisted they had arrived and I was equally insistent that they hadn’t. ‘We’re by the church!’ They’d say, and I would run out of my door and up the hill to the church for a block or so to see, before answering, ‘No you’re not!.’ Never mind, it all worked out in the end and my stuff arrived with everything in one piece.
By now, having established itself after Easter, my local bar/café/restaurant ‘Wanagaine’ was up and running and remains my favourite spot for lunch. The couple is young – Morgan is French and the chef, and Jessie is English but grew up in France. Suddenly E (the village 1.5 kms from me) has a social life, encouraged by its grateful mairie, which insists the restaurant uses the place du marché over the other side of the narrow road, for an extended lunch-terrace during summer and for its monthly musical events. Jessie claims ‘Wanagaine’ is named for Joan of Arc’s supposed response to her various victories against the English – “I won again” – though I have my doubts about this tale. The restaurant is a real fillip for the village, though, and the local makers and purveyors of artisan beer now have another outlet and are often to be seen en masse – there are three of them and all almost perfectly spherical – at the restaurant having a chat.
Spring proceeded, and the vineyards grew greener and greener. There are many walks around my village, which is one of the ancient circulade-types. Consequently, walks go up and they go down. At some points along the way they also reveal some really lovely scenery from the top of the hill: ages-old patchwork of ancient vines, some fruit groves, the Domaines dotted here and there, the roads lined with trees – planted, I’m told, to keep the sun off the animals as they were driven to market up to a hundred years or so ago, before trucks. And the countryside is dotted with hills such as ours, many of which bear ancient villages. In the distance, truly, the spires of the chateau at Pouzolles look like something out of Disney. And not a billboard in sight. All in all, rural France here shows its beauty in the partnership over the ages between working the land and nature itself, and the old, old houses that reflect the stone that lies beneath the ground. Spring brings wildflowers – red poppies foremost – which are joined by new varieties every few weeks or so. One day, as I walked down the road past the horses, a bird with a round body and very long legs dashed from a bush and panicked in all directions, thus showing where the inspiration for many Loony Tunes characters came from.
This area floods frequently, I understand, though for most of the year it is very dry. Yet the vines grow green, as do many trees, with no help from the farmers. I suspect the reason for this is all linked with the fact that water is calcium laden and will leave a calcified layer over everything. Everyone filters their water, of course. The calcium is due to the limestone that is prevalent around here, and I am making a wild guess that this lies close to the surface so that, firstly, the water table is high enough to feed the vines, and secondly, it doesn’t take very much to cause a flood, since the water can’t go anywhere.
I am justly proud of myself for having bought a house on a hill, given the propensity for flooding. And was reminded of it once or twice when, after some heavy rains, the water came down my narrow (you have no idea) street in waves. Having whispered all night, I swear – a phenomenon odd to me because in Oz there are so many corrugated roofs that rain thunders. Here, it whispers and then, lo, morning comes and everything is magically wet.
As Spring segues into Summer, so the French become frantically festive. If you know where to look and where to go, you will be very busy indeed. Unfortunately, a trait that is a mystery to all the expats resident here is that the French do not tell you where or when an event will be. You have to learn it from the breeze. Nor will they put the details on the internet. At least, not where you might automatically look. My researches in this area continues. I have yet to attend a Feria, which has to do with bulls and drunkenness (as far as I can gather), but I did see some indication that A was to have one over several days. So, yes, the small notice by the side of the road did tell us the days it would be on. But not the times and certainly not where you would find the event or series of events.
Luckily for me, N told me of the Australian Film Festival in Pezenas, which is an annual event now and run by an Australian. Yes, I was surprised. It goes by the title of ‘Le Bout du Monde’ – the End of the Earth – which I suppose puts us in our place. It is run on the smell of an oily rag and features films that are a few years old, both full length and shorts, with an occasional intro or two from one or two of the actual film-makers. You can have a small something to eat and buy wine, of course, while sitting about the picturesque garden of the L’Illustre Theatre.
The French are not inherently into promotion and touting, as I have said. In Sète, where there is much festivity for July 14 (Bastille Day), there are water joustings between long boats filled with men in stripy shirts, followed by fireworks and much jollity. You can, I’m told, saunter up to a little hotel by the river and get yourself a room for the night for 40 Euros or so, from whose balcony next morning you can enjoy several croissants and joustings. This I plan to do next year.
My little hamlet C’s own celebration of Bastille Day began with a feast on July 13, held on the tennis court. One of the local Councillors from the Marie was perhaps unnecessarily considerate and put all the non-French on one table. The French tend to think that’s what non-French people want, and often that actually is the case. For mine, however, I came to France at least partly to meet French people. Interestingly, among those at the table were a number of Belgians, and these were in two groups – French-speaking and Flemish-speaking. Anyway, a band with the speakers turned up to 11 shouted at us and we all danced, of course.
Next day a small crowd attended the procession, led by a small brass band from S, to the cemetery, where the Marseillaise was played and our very shy Maire, in his tricolor sash, whispered his speech to us.
What I did discover was the ‘brasucade’ at nearby Alignan-du-Vent (which is not, apparently, as windy as it sounds). An acquaintance has a house in the town and urged me to come along, so I came bearing visiting cousins, and some cutlery.
The brasucade celebrates the myth of King Louis’s mare, who gave birth to a foal in Alignan-du-Vent rather a long time ago. Strangely, Pezenas claims this happened in its own fair environs, and so holds its own brasucade. A team of villagers cooks furiously – quail, sausages, mussels, steak – and everyone buys a set of tickets (each for around three Euros) to be presented for food, when it’s ready. Long, long trestle tables are set up and several hundred villagers and friends set themselves down, with their glasses, cutlery and tablecloths, and begin to eat. Bottles of wine may be bought for one Euro, returnable if you bring back the bottle. Later, the foal comes out and does a dance. It’s enormous – a great big barrel covered in cloth, with a tail at one end and a head at the other. We know it to be a horse only because that’s what they say it is. On top lurch two papier mâché figures, a boy and a girl. The dance is enacted (much lurching and swaying involved), the foal lumbers back into its stable and then the music begins. Blaring out at the usual 11 on the dial, tis not dulcet exactly, but what the hell. I did a great imitation of Spanish dancing to the Gypsy Kings with a woman in a bolero with whom, I think, I fell in love.
What a feat, you might say! Indeed! I riposte, for this happens every Friday throughout Summer, for around three months.
C itself occasionally throws a bit of an event, and we all turned out to the concert played by the S orchestra, all of us on benches on the Place du Marché, while the woman from the little mairie insisted all English-speakers must meet each other again, and M le Maire read out his speech to us in his usual confidential tones.
In the meantime, Beziers holds its own Feria which I will attend – when I work out how best to do this – next year. It involves a lot of drinking, music and bullfights, I understand. I am told it’s best to go accompanied by a man, perhaps to dissuade all the other men. As you know, old age is no protection.
Still, more refined delight will be found elsewhere, for Pézenas and Beziers both are full of music and events throughout the Summer. Pézenas makes the most of the fact that Mollière spent a few years there once. The town holds a Mollière Festival over a few weeks every year, notably at the L’Illustre Theatre. Mollière plays are enacted outdoors where a convincingly sixteenth century set is constructed, and things proceeded at a great and confusing pace while my friend B translated into my ear. Just as well, really. There I was thinking I had got the gist, when I really , really hadn’t. We attended a couple of comedies and of course ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’.
Sadly, one of the things that does not happen in Summer are the jazz and blues nights at the Café Melrose in Agde – about half an hour from me – because they are told in no uncertain terms by the authorities to turn off the music tap while the locality puts on its own shows up and down the coast. Jazz festivals abound, not just in Agde, but also in Sète and elsewhere.
Summer itself was long and very hot. And when I say long… for around two months it did not rain at all, literally, and the thermometer barely dipped below 35 degrees during the day or the high 20s at night. I discovered that the heat pump was unable any more to be the air-conditioner it claimed itself to be as well as a heater. I bought fans, of course, and also a supposedly portable air-conditioner which I discovered did not suit my house at all. The out-pipe just didn’t go with my swing-opening windows, so I took the monster upstairs to the attic, where my cousins would be sleeping, stuffed the outlet pipe out the tiny window there and tucked the whole thing around with a spare doona. Worked a treat, at least for my cousins.
Summer was so long and so hot that I did entirely the wrong thing – I had hardly any exercise and drank quite a lot of wine. This, I was told by my doctor, led to high blood pressure for the first time in my life. Let this be a lesson to you. So, in the interests of health and entertainment, one day I realised I was bored off my scone and betook myself to the Abbaye Valmagne, around forty or so minutes away, where a very thin guide told us in French of a great velocity all of its history (several centuries old and suffered a lot during the 100 years’ war and during the Revolution). This expedition was vastly preferable to lying around bored and wilting.
Abbayes abound and are austerely beautiful, and mostly still standing despite the Revolution. They date back, sometimes, to the 12th century, still-potable fountains occasionally trickle under arches with climbing roses, and always the stone flags on the floors and the stone arches show the wear of those other feet and hands.
Summer moved on and so did the wine crop. And true to all promises, the shed down the road began to grumble and the smell of squashed grapes began to waft sourly on the air. I took myself down to have a look and a young man explained at length in a strong and difficult regional accident all about the process. No, I didn’t understand much, though I could see the huge mass of pulp that had been spewed out of the giant pipe and into the back of a container.
I have another friend who has developed a passion for all things to do with grape-production, especially with ‘bio’ production. He can tell you a lot more than I can: xxxxxxx
Throughout the area, machinery and very narrow tractors slowed traffic on all the roads. Much of the crop is picked by machinery nowadays, I understand, where once itinerant pickers would come and end each working day with a drink and a song in the local places du marché.
In late September, there is much busyness over a couple of days as all the buildings and gardens that were closed to the public most of the year are suddenly open for a brief viewing. Time to beg for information (in this case, there was a woman from the Mairie of E at my local café/restaurant) and hurtle off around the countryside. At last I got to see our local Romanesque Church, which has a great curved entranceway and massive stone walls, but needs so much work it is unsafe and therefore unused most of the time. We then pelted off to see the Romanesque (with Tuscan influences) tower in Puissalicon. There was a local historian giving the background to this – we gathered from him and photographs that this was what was left of an ancient church, and incorporated stone portraiture of some souls who had been involved in its building. Also, it so impressed an American in the 80s that, when he couldn’t actually buy the Puissalicon tower and take it away, he had a bigger and better one built back home.
You’d guessed that, hadn’t you!
Around about now, my friend Jo travelled to Europe from Australia. We’d decided that it would probably be easier and possibly cheaper in general for her to fly to Barcelona, where we could spend a couple of days together in exploration and then catch the train for the two hours to Béziers. And that kind of thing is a large part of my reason for moving to France!
Anyway, the adventure in Barcelona was organised and added to with a visit beforehand to the holiday house my cousins have in Spain, in the extremely hilly and wealthy town of Begur, which is about an hour from Girona, which itself is about an hour and a half from Béziers. I think there is a bit on the train-ride where we go through the Pyrenees, but I blinked so I couldn’t swear to it. Begur really is the kind of place you hang around if you have the money, which I really don’t, so I did feel a lot like the country cousin that I am. It has, being made up of precipitous rises, mostly spectacular views across blindingly blue sea and sky, and roads that scare me to death, given my enduring trauma after my first car died (years ago) while valiantly attempting to climb a giddy height in Melbourne’s Heidelberg. Melbournites will know what I mean. But I digress.
Begur also has a series of bewitching little half-moon coves (pebbled), which are, I suspect, a good deal more comfortable at the September-October end of the season. Traditional fishing continues despite the tourists. Up the vertical slopes various housing ranges from modest and whitewashed to monstrous, such as the one rumoured to be being built by an obscenely-wealthy Russian. The cranes swing languidly across that bit of the horizon. You can eat a leisurely and almost affordable lunch while gazing at the sea from behind your shades, then go see the medieval chapel and the remains of pre-Roman dwellings.
It’s not an enormously-long drive to the Dali Theatre-Museum at Figueres, which is immediately evident from the street by the strange eggs leaning at angles on its parapet.
Inside, it is of course all a presentation of the outpourings of Dali’s strange mind, from the tiny to the enormous, from the meticulous sketch to the great trompe-l’oeil constructions. When you consider Gaudi and various feverish artists over time, you do begin to wonder about the Spanish, or should I say the Catalans. There’s a very wild fire burning there. It’s wonderful.
Eventually, my cousins very kindly drove me to Barcelona (courageous in itself, as I really don’t advocate foreigners trying to find their way around this city), where Jo and I met up and spent three nights in an AirBnb overlooking a small and very busy square in the old part of the city. Quiet? Not at all, but fascinating and our hosts were lovely. She is Hungarian and he is from Brazil, and I think it’s serious. Awww. We tramped about the town, looking at the evidence of all that wild and eclectic Catalonian fire (speaking metaphorically, see above). From the monumental, tempestuously decorative medieval cathedral full of astonishing art and home to the Holy Geese (my friend Jo suggested this proved there had been a misprint in the Bible. Work it out for yourselves) to the dream-nightmares of Gaudi’s creations of unlimited passion. What Barcelonans will do when his cathedral is finally completed, I can’t think. They’ll be at a loss. Then there was the Art Nouveau flight of fancy that is the Opera… and I hunted down a flamenco dance night held in a venue decorated in a fin-de-siecle indolent style of sweeping staircases, chaise-longues and huge portraits of signors and signoras. At last, I made Jo fall in love with women dancers who make the air crackle with their stamping, hair-tossing power. O god. The only glitch to the proceedings was when I went to take money out of an ATM and hadn’t realised that for some reason Spanish number keyboards are laid out differently from everyone else’s. And that we remember our passwords as much by their shape on the keyboard as anything else. So I thought I couldn’t take any money out. Luckily for me, there doesn’t seem to be a rule of three-attempts-and–you’re-blocked and eventually I managed to conjure up the number and some money.
We said farewell to Barcelona and hopped on the train. Two hours to Béziers, picked up at the station by a friend and driven home. That’s the sort of thing you can do in Europe.
The end of Summer and the season brings, as ever, another series of celebrations – the first taste of the new drop and rather a lot of roasted chestnuts. Apropos of this, an English friend told me how he had been waiting for the chestnut festival to start, but couldn’t see anything to tell him where or when (of course). Eventually, he saw a sign by the side of the road, which announced the forthcoming festival – same time, same place as last year!
In any case, I think the various chestnut festivals are nice, but the wine is perhaps best kept for later. An amusing little wine, but barely five minutes old ….
And so we moved quietly into Autumn and the colours changing in the vineyards. Each variety of grape brings a different shade, and sometimes fields hold several varieties. At its peak, the show glows for miles around, and sunsets bring fire and gold to everything. We took a trip up to the gorges in Autumn, up to the ancient village of Minerve, the Cathars’ last holdout before the Catholics and Simon de Montford wiped them out altogether in 1210. The village itself has a certain sadness to it – the stones of the houses merging with the rocks they sit on, perched high above the gorge where winter rains bring a roaring flood, I assume. In medieval terms, it is very well protected, and the Catholic hordes fulminated for some time until they hit on the ploy of erecting a catapult and hurling stones at the village well. Thus were the Cathars (or ‘Parfaits’) brought low, the villagers having then to give them up to the victors. They were forced down a narrow street, the Avenue des Martyrs now named after them, and burned at the stake.
There is a small range of places to eat in Minerve, and we ended up at the ritziest, all three of us, and Jo was shouted a birthday lunch of the usual three courses, exquisite and well-presented, with excellent wine and, truly, very reasonable price.
Further from Minerve we stopped many times to look at cliffs, rocky gorges full of jagged limestone, and those blazing vineyards glimmering everywhere. It was a great way for Jo to remember lovely Hérault.
Winter was taking a long time to set in now, was very mild and for this I was grateful. The heat pump had to be rescued again a while before it set in properly, with a couple of intrepid electricians trying everything to find parts for it. At last, once more it seemed fine and I was assured it should work for several years despite its great age, and I gratefully handed over several hundred Euros. However, this new lease on life lasted for around two months only before it gave up and blew cool air, which exertion actually made the lights dim. I gave up and fell to using the feeble wall units and a range of heating borrowed from friends, and gearing up to a large expenditure on a replacement which, I was assured, would not be anything like as expensive as it could have been since the new machine will come from elsewhere else in Europe. That is, it would cost perhaps one arm as opposed to two arms and both legs. This while the Australian dollar diminished gracefully toward nothing. Ah well.
And of course, there were before this the attacks on Paris, which alarmed friends and family. Understandably, of course, though I was quite safe the whole time and on the other side, quite literally, of the country. There was a tale a couple of days later that the Béziers police had found and destroyed a van full of guns, but the whisper is that it was actually empty and alarmed the cops mostly by being without a driver and having Belgian number plates. I’m not in a great position to find out more from the local French, who mostly just stoically go about their business.
One neighbour informs me that this extended Autumn means it will be bitter at Easter. We say hello quite often, but it does puzzle me that, no matter how often I mention my own name, she has never told me hers. She even gave me some onions and a lettuce once, and introduced her mother. But I still don’t know her name, or her mother’s. This may stem from her own sense of privacy, or it may come from the same place as the local habit of giving a complicated set of directions rather than a simple address, despite pleading. Even people from Paris have remarked on this oddity.
The hunters are out, now that it’s winter, and will keep on hunting for months. The country stillness is broken not just by the clock chiming the hour and the rooster crowing every two minutes or so (‘It’s a dwarf rooster’, my neighbour told me. ‘We are looking for someone to buy it.’ We laughed ruefully, though I don’t know if that means the dwarf variety crows more often), but also by explosions not so distant. Occasionally, an angry scene is played out between high-viz-clad hunters and a motorist gone red in the face, and one can only guess. They are hunting wild boar (there is a theory that evolution will thus produce a very canny, tough breed of boar indeed) and, well, anything that moves. Occasionally, this may include joggers or even, once, a couple driving along who were startled as a shot went through one window and out the other, side to side. I hold fears for the Loony Tunes bird I saw a while back, and for the pheasant I saw dashing into a bush the other day on my way back from the supermarket. As you do.
A friend said that he once saw a family of wild boar – mum and the kids – coming out of the door of his local church. We can only assume they had been claiming asylum.
A side-story. On country drives you often see signs warning of leaping deer. I am reliably informed that there are probably no deer, but there had been not enough signs in stock about boars. So when you see the leaping deer, be prepared for boar.
Over the way, Monsieur G put on a spurt of energy on his house and it now had a concrete floor and a new window. Personally, I would have fixed the roof first, but what would I know. This meant he could not go north to his wife and actual home in Savoy, and was anxious to find a restaurant that served Christmas lunch. I asked around for some information on this, and came up with one in nearby Roujan, at which I have eaten before. Nice place. Monsieur G invited a friend and made a booking, and now I feel like a good neighbour. He told me he enjoyed it.
I had gone through the annual rigmarole now of renewing my visa, and the final stage had happened, when I presented my passport for the stamp, and give them money. At the same time, I began to sort out the ‘licence exchange’ and hopefully end up with a proper French licence – luckily Australia is one of the countries that has an agreement with France on the subject of licences.
The licence exchange looked to be fairly straight-forward, which was suspicious in itself. I almost felt relieved when a complication cropped up. The French licence is awarded (I think) for life and they place great stress on the date on which it was first given. Whereas Australian licences are renewed every ten years, so it’s the dates of renewal, past and future, which are important. I was therefore missing the date I first received my licence, and had to wait up late one night to phone VicRoads. I had a lovely chat with the person there and carefully spelled out my address, and then she read out the document she was to send me. Very oddly, she misquoted my licence began wrong, by ten years. And even more oddly, I found myself disputing this with her as she insisted I must myself be in error. Oh well, I thought – don’t suppose anyone really cares. I awaited patiently for my document to arrive – by winged snail, since they wouldn’t send by email, and discovered that my friendly person had discovered my correct dates. Well, good.
In the meantime, while winter crept up to us it was still possible to go sight-seeing relatively comfortably. There is a ‘Roman villa’ at Loupian – also roughly 40 minutes away – where an astonishing array of mosaics were found a few decades ago, unearthed and set up in a large shed. The foundations of the villa were also found, so it was possible to indicate where the walls of the house had been. The mosaics have been filled out a bit in monochrome so that you can see more of their shape yet be aware of the originals. Our guide said that the owner would have lived in Béziers and visited his country estate once in a while to see how the vineyards and workers were going, to entertain, to reports and complains and to adjudicate in local disputes. He had a special room for that, with a raised floor.
A friend also offered me a flying visit to Nice, since she was dropping her brother off at the railway there as he went on his travels. ‘Flying’ is perhaps a misnomer, as it takes four hours to drive there. It was raining too, with clouds acting as drapery around the local hills. The Côte was not very Azur. When we got to Nice, her brother safely stowed, Jill suggested we go to Monte Carlo for lunch, which of course we did, taking the tunnel to Monaco rather than the one to Italy. I just wanted to say that. Monte Carlo is, of course, very conscious of its wealth, but is nevertheless very beautiful with mansions that were built before the taste for chrome and glass, set on top of one another all the way up the hill … overlooking the yachts. Naturally. Then back to Nice, where narrow streets have been lovingly restored to a jewel-like state and the beach is of pebbles. For some reason. I suspect it is not an easy matter to go swimming in summer. Nice is so used to visitors, of course, that restaurants actually stay open way beyond 2.30 pm. Honestly! We proved it by having coffee.
Home again, home again, through wind and rain. Jill intends to set off from Nice for home for a weekend in February, and offered to drive me to Nice and pick me up for home. I will augment my wardrobe of woollies.
* * *