It's all abouta toucha culcha for the vulchas

You may very well wonder what we manage to get up to during deepest winter in profoundest Sticksville SW France.

Perhaps, you may think, we spend six dark months arranging our collections of toenail clippings and lifting up the carpets to watch the floorboards warping.

Of course, a lot of the houses here have tiled floors, which meant that not so many moons ago, many of us were left only with the admittedly unappetising toenail option.

Forced to do something to combat rampant cumulative insanity, we have learned peu à peu to create our own entertainment.

For which reason, we shall be off this evening to the Cafédefa for the monthly Jazz Jam Session. This is, of course, why I have chosen to illustrate this piece with a pic (by Martin Castellan) of my mate Stan, in full flight with voice and fretless Fender Jazz bass.

I should make it clear that Stan is a real musician, which is why it's his not altogether straightforward task to extract something resembling music from people like me, who merely turn up to twang things hopefully.

It reminds me of the eternally-droll Sir Thomas Beecham who famously remarked that: "The English all hate music but they quite like the noise it makes."

I'm not sure quite how we ended up having a classy American bassist (and brill electric cello player) from Chicago living in the Haute Vallée de l'Aude but this sort of thing seems to happen dans ce petit coin de la belle France. It's as good a reason as any for living here.

Not being content with making a bloody racket by means of musical instruments, we've also tried our hand at poetry recently.

As I'm a poet, obviously this was all my fault, so I had to organise the Café Poésie evening. Serves me right for having the idea. Actually you can't go that far wrong doing poetry in France because the French love a bit of the old verse and worse, Rimbaud - First Blood etc.

It does however mean talking all your French mates into performing the stuff or no-one will have a clue what you're on about.

Alternatively you can intentionally make no sense at all like my mate Debs (la femme de Stan) did with her wonderful performance of the Loch Ness Monster's Song by Edwin Morgan; an inspired, nay audacious sequence, of barmy, meaningless and thus totally international and EU-approved noises. Great stuff.