A convivial evening

"Come over for aperos, around 8pm." 

What an odd thing to suggest. An aperitif is a drink you have before your dinner, a disgestif one that you have afterwards – much needed, because if you dine late, you are going to need some help with the digesting before you can even hope to go to sleep. 

So you are being invited to come and have a drink and a few nibbles, and a spot of amiable chat, in the unwritten acceptance that you will then push off and let your hosts have their meal in peace. You will be sipping your Pineau de Charentes and munching on salty nuts with the aroma of the Bourgignon or the chicken Chasseur wafting around you, especially as, in the country, aperos are served in the kitchen. 

The etiquette of aperos is that you do not linger for more than an hour, maybe an hour and a half at the outside, in order to facilitate the eating of said dinner by your hosts, but also so that you can go home and eat yours. You do not outstay your welcome. 

Armed with this knowledge, we decided we should hold such an event, though we took the English wimp’s way out and ate first. We set the bottles on the table, laid out the nibbles, and waited for our guests to arrive. 

These were our neighbour and his uncle, a retired doctor who came to stay for six months of the year, and spent the rest of the time on the south coast, in one of his many properties. The neighbour was a lovely man who spoke several languages; his uncle robustly refused to understand a single word of anything but French, and if you couldn’t follow him, he repeated things in increasing volume until you did. His nephew would translate, up to the point where he refused, for the sake of the entente cordiale. 

The English say that on such occasions (not that we have aperos: we have, perhaps cocktails, but not this pre-dinner, have a glass and get lost, ritual) you should not discuss religion, sex, or politics. Uncle launched into all three with gusto. 

The die had been cast when we first met, and he asked whether I were a philosopher. I replied, philosophically, that one must be. And that was that. I was a whole new audience for his long-held, rigid, tenets on anything and everything. 

No sooner had he sat down than he asked, “Are the English young people still sleeping together before marriage?” in a tone that implied, “and what are you doing about it?” That was the opening salvo in what can only be constituted a battle of wits that couldn’t be won.  Whenever he sensed that he was losing the upper hand, he changed the subject. “Do animals have souls?” “The English aristocracy are all gay because of the Public School system.”  “Margaret Thatcher was a great Prime Minister even though she was a woman.” 

I didn’t drink much – I was on medication that disagreed with alcohol. “Give up the medication,” said the former doctor. “You can’t live without wine.” To underline this, he helped himself to the drink. A finger of whiskey became two: that was rinsed out with red wine, pastis, more whiskey. He was knocking back the nibbles too. The little individually-wrapped cheeses went down a treat, and the wrappers went straight on the floor. 

Before the evening was over – and it went on, and on, for nearly three hours – I was actually banging my head on the table in sheer frustration. Eventually, when he who does everything around here and I were totally exhausted, the old reprobate heaved himself to his feet, and I got to mine, ready to find his coat. He then shot off down the hall to examine the staircase, and to comment on its sturdy and useful construction. It did just what a staircase should do, which apparently is exactly what you want in one. 

I then shoe-horned him into his coat (they had walked fifty yards to our house, but it was a formal occasion), and he turned to the man of the house. “It’s good when a woman helps you on with your clothes, but it’s even better when she helps you take them off!” he said, with a leer. I held the front door wide, and he, well-pleased, and his nephew, long inured to his ways, left the premises. We bolted the door, stood in the middle of the floor, and laughed hysterically for a good five minutes in total shock. 

The next day we saw that all their lace curtains were now knotted in the way I had done ours. I chose to see this as a mark of respect for a worthy adversary, rather than a case of, to the victor, the spoils. 

We eat our main meal at lunchtimes now. If you don’t eat dinner, there can be no need for aperitifs.

Cocktails, anyone?

© lms2012

Not Casting a Clout

It’s hailing today. A couple of weeks ago we had warmth, sunshine, and spring leaping out at us from all directions. We were all cutting the grass, getting the overwintering plants out, and chasing cobwebs that we hadn’t seen in the gloom and which suddenly seemed to have draped themselves like dusty swags from every corner. Cattle which had been kept indoors all winter were allowed into the fields, and the calves were kicking up their heels for the sheer joy of space and air and hope. 

People were a close second. 

The beaches were heaving, the summer clothes were being shaken out, and all that bare flesh that usually lurks up sleeves and trouser legs was being waved frantically in the direction of the sun in a kind of dire thirst. 

In England, of course, the older generation looked on, and frowned and tutted. “Ne’er cast a clout till May’s out,” they said, wagging a knowing finger. Few listened. 

In France, there is one group of people who never cast a clout. At all. Ever. They are the farmers.

In the height of summer, when the sun is so hot it’s trying to squash you into the ground, there will be the farmer on his tractor, in his vest, and tee shirt, and shirt buttoned up to the neck, and a cardigan (albeit with impromptu air holes), and possibly a jacket, and most definitely a cap of some sort. His tractor may not possess a cab (his tractor may not possess a seat, but just a makeshift affair involving sacks and the cardigans whose holes have made actually dressing in them too much of a puzzle) so he has to keep the sun off any way he can. 

He doesn’t look up at the sky and think,  "I’ve got to have some of that!" and rip off his layers. He may have done that once, in his madcap youth, and learned the hard way. A sunburned farmer with a crashing headache is still a farmer, and the stock still have to be dealt with; so, as with age comes wisdom, so it brings with it the many-layered approach to skin conservation. 

We knew a very elderly man down south whose wife knitted his vests for him, and had done since they got married. He had only ever been away from home for the time it took to do his National Service in North Africa in the 60s, and one assumes that she knitted enough for him to take with him.

For social affairs he would dress up rather finely in his smart trousers and one of those soft, supple leather jackets that only Frenchmen can wear. He was a tiny chap who always conversed with a lady’s bosom and rarely anything further north; but that was only fair, as it was impossible to enter into conversation with him without your eye being inexorably drawn to the triangle of yellow knitted cotton peeping from the top of his shirt (the neck being unbuttoned indoors – no risk of any sunshine getting at him there, though obviously just the one or two buttons could be allowed off duty).

It was unknown whether the vests started out yellow, or just naturally took on a jaundiced look over time, but every single day of his life there it would be, under all the layers, protecting him from the elements. 

The oldest man in France is about 117, and has a son of 81. He’s a farmer. (There are 26 women older than him. The relationship with their undergarments is not known at this date). He’s not a banker or a magnate or a millionaire - the sort who might get their undies from specialist suppliers in the silk trade: no, he’s of the string vest wearing fraternity. 

If asked, these venerable people always claim that their longevity is down to a simple life, a tot of whiskey a day (or no alcohol at all), and going at the pace nature intended. This is of course nonsense. It’s a national secret, but I can reveal it to you  here: it's all in the vest. 

So if you want to live a long and healthy life, the answer does not lie in stretching yourself out on a lounger with a bottle of lotion and not much else on, frying gently. It involves keeping your clout about you at all times, whether May’s out or not.

© lms2012

A Lightbulb Moment

One of the advantages of having a steeply sloping south-facing roof is that it is just the right place to install some sort of solar powered apparatus. In this house, we have solar-heated hot water, to replace an old, inefficient electric tank. 

We had great fun removing that, as over the years it had accumulated a lot of sediment, and weighed far more than anyone could possibly imagine. He who does everything around here (aka the man with the bad back) got the thing out of the door, but we then had to lift it into the trailer. We roped in a neighbour to help, while I sat on the other end of the trailer as a counterbalance. This was not a fair contest, and I was nearly catapulted across the courtyard. DIY is so exciting.

That was late last summer; now we have had the first non-estimated electricity bill, covering the winter, and we have had our monthly payments almost halved. 

The electricity bill in France will tell you where your power comes from, and in what percentage. In Brittany last year, 87% of the electricity produced came from renewable sources.  There are 95 wind farms already, and 30 new ones are planned. These will increase production from the current 665 megawatts to 950MW. 

Brittany only produces 10% of the energy it consumes. The hope is that this will rise to 35%. It’s a windy place – I’m sure it can meet the challenge. Of course there are days when the wind dies away, and nothing can be produced; but on all the other days, there are the giants turning on the hilltops, doing their thing. 

But times are tight, and electricity is expensive, so there are all sorts of ideas as to how to cut down its use. One national initiative is that from July, shops and offices have to turn off their signs and their interior lights, between 1am and 6am. This will save enough energy to power 260,000 households – just by turning off some lights. 

On a smaller scale, there is a place by the sea where, in the winter months when the Parisians are tucked up in their arondissements, and the streets and seafront are quiet, the locals have opted for a novel approach to lighting: they call up the lamps via their mobile phones as they go along. 

Many people have discovered that actually, without streetlights, there is plenty of visibility to be had from the moon and stars, and that their own outside house lights can guide their way to the roadside with their wheelie bins. 

I read a story in the local paper this week, about an initiative in Rwanda, which does not, in general, have what you might call a National Grid. In the depths of the country they rely on torches to go out at night, or petrol lights indoors; but batteries are expensive and take up half of any earnings they may make, and petrol lamps are dangerous and fumy. So some bright spark has come up with a pedal-driven generator to charge LED bulbs. A minute’s pedalling gets you 375 minutes of light. 

Here in the Breton countryside our village lights go off at 10pm, and reappear at some early hour of the morning when I don’t. There’s no-one about in between, so why waste the power? Well, there is the odd occasion when there has been a Do on at the Salle des Fêtes, and you have to walk home in the dark, but it’s rare. 

Green initiatives don’t have to be handed down to us from the Top. We can do our bit. A spot of daylight, and you have hot water. Natural light lasts a lot longer than we think. And a bit of cycling will get you some lamplight and keep you fit at the same time. 

It’s Earth Hour tonight at 8.30pm, when we are being encouraged to turn off our lights for one hour, for the sake of the planet. Start small: if everyone does it, it soon becomes something big. A lightbulb is nothing, until you have to pedal to charge it up. A million lightbulbs turned off, and you might just be able to hear the planet sigh its thanks.

© lms2012

The Top of the House

In the old fairy story, when Rapunzel let down her hair, her would-be lover didn’t say, hang on, love, I’ve just got to get this past Health and Safety. (There’s a reason why no-one writes Fairy Tales any more.) He was probably a French roofer in his day job.   
 
We have a little house in our garden, whose roof has failed under the weight of ivy and snow. It will need to be replaced completely, wood and all. Of all the jobs we have to do, that’s the romantic thing that we’d like to tackle first. Forget the septic tank; and who needs a kitchen? We’ve got a ruin, and it’s calling to us. 

Roofs. Most of your life, you don’t think about them. They are up there, doing their roofly thing, and you rarely raise your eyes above the parapet, as it were. 

When we were thinking of moving over here, we had to choose an area in which to look for a house. France is a huge country, so where do you start? It seemed worthwhile to come up with a limiting factor, so we decided to go for west and south enough for rounded red tiles to take over from black state. 

Never having lived with a clay roof before, we had things to learn. For instance, they aren’t attached to anything: they just curl onto each other. You have unders and overs, and they slot together in a sleepy fashion and lie there, being a roof. After a high wind (of which we had a lot) you might have to resettle a few. And bees can get in amongst them, and did – but that’s what happens when you have acacia trees right next to the house. 

Clay tile roofs are low, shallow of slope, and accessible. 

Slates are different; they are attached with nails, and lend themselves to a different sort of architecture. The fairy-tale Chateau of Josselin, for instance, has a tremendous slate roof. It has round turrets with conical pointed hats, a miracle of workmanship; but the point is that the castle is built on a rock overlooking a river, and the roof is a long way up, and the ground therefore a very long way down. 

I watched some men re-laying slates on a lesser building recently, but not for long – I had the sudden urge to sit down on terra firma and stay low. The roof was on a Medieval house, high and tall and very steep. The men were not attached in any way, but strolling about up there with trainers on their feet, tossing slates about, directly above the pavement just as it has always been done. 

When our neighbour needed a couple of tiles replacing after a storm the local man came to do the job. He’s over seventy, and has various metal plates inserted where, in the course of a long working life, he has fallen off and hurt himself. He parked his van, and got out the tools of his trade: two wooden ladders. He climbed up to the roof in a pair of old wellies, did the repair, climbed back down, and was off again. 

Where is the scaffolding tower, the English metal roofing ladder with the curved end to hook over the apex, and the full harness? Well, they built Josselin without them. There’s no apex on a conical roof to hang a ladder over. 

Our little house is nothing in comparison: a mere speed hump compared to a mountain. But it is a roof, and therefore up there. It will involve – well, anyone but me – climbing about with slates and nails and hammers a long way from the ground. 

So I was just thinking: isn’t it more romantic to have a ruin? 

There’s a lot to be said for a septic tank, after all; maybe we should do that first, and think about it. Sitting down.

© lms 2012

A La Recherche du Veg. Perdu

There is a tiny, quiet, stealthy revolution taking place in France’s markets. At first you wouldn’t really notice it – after all, there is nothing remarkable about the thing itself. You see it everywhere in England, you’re used to it being there in winter, it’s normal. 

But to the Frenchwoman, it’s bizarre, alien, even dangerous. It threatens kitchen life as she knows it. 

It is the appearance of that most subversive of vegetables, the parsnip. 

If you were to look turnip up in the Larousse Gastronomique, you will find several recipes. Let’s face it, there would have to be – the turnip, alone and undressed, tastes of stale water. 

Look up parsnip, and you will get a few paragraphs, and the conclusion that the English eat it roasted with their rosbif. End of story. 

When we first came over, it was impossible to get parsnips anywhere. I found out why when I bought a magazine devoted to Medieval life, and found it there under Foods of the Past. The parsnip was eaten in the Middle Ages when everything was boiled into submission and therefore safe to eat. It made a brief resurgence in the 19^th Century, but it didn’t catch on. 

The ex-pat English bemoan the loss of many things – bacon, Marmite, marmalade – but if you mention the golden-skinned, pointy vegetable, they will suddenly remember it, and miss it terribly. 

So little by little, supermarkets began to stock them – English grown, of course. No Frenchman worth his salt would give turnip land over to parsnip production. The word went round – ‘you can get them in Leclerc’, ‘SuperU have a few’ – and off we went to buy them whilst stocks lasted. 

But recently they have begun to appear on the market stalls: never in huge numbers, and frequently grown well past the point where you can actually cut through the things with anything less than a chainsaw. The market is quintessentially French – it’s where the housewife of note and standing goes to make her savvy purchases from her chosen stallholders. She will squeeze the radis noirs, glare at the endives, turn her nose up at the chicory; it’s her right to flex her marketing muscles to her own satisfaction. 

And there, amidst all the usual produce, is the parsnip. And next to the parsnip is an Englishwoman (or man), cooing and sighing and dreaming of soup, mash, puree with cream and a sprinkling of paprika, chunks in beefy stews. The Frenchwoman will sidle away, sensing madness. 

I was once asked by a French lady, in the middle of a hypermarket, what to do with a parsnip. Several others stopped to hover, whilst pretending not to listen. It’s food, therefore it’s of interest: but it’s foreign food, therefore it is viewed with suspicion. 

But it’s there, not just on the stalls of the organic growers, or the sustainable farming types, who could be excused on the grounds of incipient hippiedom; it’s crept onto the ordinary veggie stalls too. 

This is, of course, delightful for us. But there will be revenge to be extracted somehow, and I fear that you are going to suffer for our victory. English supermarket shelves will groan under the weight of radis noir, chicory, and endive: but far, far worse – there will be an attempted Turnip Takeover. 

Run for your gastronomic lives – run to France: we’ve got the parsnips!

© lms 2012

Hedging Your Bets

Who’d have thought that there is a fashion for hedges? Not the impeccably manicured privet type, nor the laurel that ran amok at our old house, but the hedges that line the fields and roads.

Our outer boundaries were wild country hedges, with hawthorn, blackthorn, bramble, hazel – all the things you needed to keep your stock in and your vegetables safe. By and large the sheep stayed on their side and we stayed on ours.

A sheep with its mind not set on anything will spend twelve hours with its head stuck in a wide metal link fence, until you get so fed up of the plaintive bleating that the farmer is ignoring, that you march out to save its worthless life, and it takes one look at you and unhooks its ears with no difficulty at all and bolts for home. A sheep with its mind set on a lunch of your finest Brussels sprouts, however, is not going to be deterred by a bit of overgrown hawthorn. 

I once spent a warm afternoon patrolling the veggie patch, fending off a mother and her three lambs, until the farmer could be brought to remove them. His daughter tried - she led them away by rattling stones in a bucket; but when the promised treat didn’t appear, they opted for the sprouts again, and no amount of bucket-waving would shift them.

Cattle, however, are different. For these, the farmer stretches a thin electrified wire across his sparse, treeless boundaries, and they stay safely inside, munching happily. So convinced are they of the dangers of the wire that it can sometimes be seen replaced with a piece of string.

I’m not sure about cattle. I once had a bad experience involving a herd of cows, a narrow path along a river, and some farmers who didn’t think to tell anyone just where they were intending to drive their large, blundering, panicking beasts. Had there been an Olympic medal for running in wellies, I’d have been up there on the podium.

It doesn’t help that, whilst taking a stroll along the lanes here in cattle country, a herd of bullocks assume that I am their farmer, the bringer of good things (they don’t know about the Really Bad Thing), and inevitably come belting towards that flimsy bit of wire that is the only defence I’ve got. I don’t like it.

So the current initiative to put back hedgerows is a very welcome thing. After years of determined clearance, we now have an active plan to restore the verges of road and field, divide up the parcels of farmland, and slow down water run-off and soil erosion.

The cost is divided between the EU, water management companies, local regions, and the commune. It’s important that the farmers get on board with this; they are going to have to wait a good twenty years for the trees they plant to grow to adulthood - trees which are natural to the area, and which ten years ago they were cutting up for firewood.

And no doubt, at some time in the future, the circle will turn again, and the cattle will all have to re-learn the knowledge of their forefathers with regard to the dangers inherent in touching a flimsy piece of wire (or string). 

The Olympics committee should consider adding wellie-running to their programme, because when that happens it’s going to need to be revived, and I’m going to be too old to teach it. In the meantime, the spring is here, the cattle are back in the fields, and the walking season is upon us. I’m off to practise my hurdling.

©lms 2012

A Light in the Darkness

There are no rural bus services here. Once you pass beyond a certain perimeter of a town, that’s it – you’re on your own.

In the past, that didn’t matter: people worked where they lived, or lived where they worked. There were people who never travelled more than 20kms in any direction in their entire lives. Markets came to them, and the travelling grocer, butcher and baker still make the rounds of the villages.

But with mechanisation in farming, and with the loss of the traditional country industries, if the young, in particular, want to find work, they have to go to town, or to the meat processing plants. 

So at 6.30 this morning the fractious hornet buzz of a scooter broke the silence, transporting someone from their warm home through the dark, cold lanes to their place of employment. It’s the only transport available. There is no money for a car, and driving lessons, and insurance: even the sans-permis vehicle, which only requires a chat with the salesman by way of instruction, is way out of their price range. Inch for inch, those things are expensive. 

There are no lights on the roads at that time of day. In our village they go off at 10pm, and come back on again at 7.30am. In between the countryside is dark. Really dark. If you live in a town, you don’t know what darkness is. Some of our visitors have found that they are actually frightened by the intense reality of it, and have to leave a light on somewhere in the house overnight.

There are more stars here than you will ever see in the land of streetlights: the Campaign for Dark Skies does have a point. And I wonder whether, if we saw only the real black sky each night, we would feel so powerful as we think we are. Fear of night is very atavistic, and very humbling.

We met a lady in our last village who was a retired teacher. She had done her training in the late 40s, and seeing that there used to be a station in the village, we assumed that she had taken the train to Poitiers every day to study. However, apart from the fact that she couldn’t have afforded it, there were no passenger trains running after the war. She had gone to college by bicycle.

The distance from the village to Poitiers is 25kms. It takes 30 minutes in a car. The road passes through open countryside and forest, and two or three small villages. She told us she used to set off before 6am to get there for lectures, whatever the weather, whatever the season. She would spend a whole day there, then get back on her bike and cycle home.

Some evenings there were parties, and she wasn’t going to be left out, so on the odd occasion, she would travel cross-country in the small hours of the morning, get home for 3 or 4am, get changed, have something to eat, and cycle back again. 

She told us that she never questioned it. If she was to be a teacher, she had to study; and if she had to study, she had to go to Poitiers by whatever means was available. 

That bike, and her unflinching determination, got her to where she wanted to be, in more ways than one.

Hearing that scooter in the still-dark hours, it was easy to turn over and pull the duvet closer, and listen to the ticking of the central heating. Maybe I should have been out there cheering them on instead. They may be motorised now, but the old spirit is still there: if you want something, you have to find a way to help yourself towards it.

One tiny headlight doesn’t make the vast darkness any less complete, at 6.30 on a rainy winter’s morning; but it does open up the immediate road ahead.

©lms 2012