The last house before Spain

adieu to molesworth kartoonisst ronald searle, 91

2012-01-04T09:35:00.000-08:00

it is indeed a sad moment as the last hous marks the parsing of one of its finest sorces of inspriation eg the joly d. kartoonisst ronald seale who brort to life the imortal nigel molesworth.

Tenacious adherents to the dear old chron will recall that nothing delights me better than to quote molesworth at the slightest provocation.

It turns out to be more appropriate than I previously realised, as Searle had lived in France since 1961, working regularly for Le Figaro Littéraire and Le Monde. Searle launched the curse of st custard's on an unsuspecting world, together with author Geoffrey Willans, in 1954.

Earlier he created the even more notorious girls of St Trinian's. He drew the second published cartoon whilst a PoW in Singapore during the Second World War. Less well-known are his drawings of emaciated fellow prisoners, a poignant record of the cruelty inflicted by the Japanese on their captives.

Given such an ordeal, Searle richly deserved the massive success that soon followed after the war. But the celebrity treadmill became too much of a burden, and he threw it all up to start again in France, where he spent most of the rest of his life.

Me, I've loved molesworth since I first encountered him, appropriately enough, in an English boarding skool at the age of ten. His wisdom immediately became an indispensable guide to everyday life, and to this day, remains so.

* my learned correspondent eg basil fotherington-tomas (hullo clouds, hullo sky etc) refers me to the guardian's appreciashun

Man, we've just got to have the Stuff . . .

2011-12-22T01:29:00.006-08:00

Glancing over the online Grauniad, I am immediately reminded of one of my enduring reasons for quitting the ever-viridescent shores of Ongleterry - endemic and rampant addiction to Stuff.

The aforementioned Grundina reports that some shops opened as early as 6am on Boxing Day to satisfy the cravings of thousand of unfortunates, deep in the grip of Stuff withdrawal. Cold turkey indeed. And the right day for it too.

Now this is not usually an F-blog but this time I'm going to indulge: Who are these sad F*@k%rs????????????

Back in dear old Keef's outlaw heyday, Stuff meant 'Erroin. It was hip, it was cool. OK, it usually killed you sooner or later, so millions of rock'n'roll fans are eternally grateful that our beloved Stoner eventually kicked the Stuff, and lived to tell the tale.

Today Stuff is just . . . Stuff. Cartons, packets, encapsulated unopenable plastic units, boxes, pallets, lorries, warehouses and inevitably homes; all packed to bursting with yet more consumer Stuff.

No-one can escape Stuff. We have car boot sales, e-Bay, bring and buy, charity shops, incinerators, skip hire, landfill, and possible termination of the planet. But we keep on heading inexorably towards Terminal Inundation by Stuff.

We cannot cease from buying Stuff. Even if we try to quit, it just arrives. It is given to us or thrust upon us. I have a new conspiracy theory that if the world does end, as predicted, in 2012, all the Stuff will be left floating in space. Poor old Mars - it doesn't want our crap either.

Perhaps I should be less harsh on all those pitiful addicts, who have hocked themselves to the eyeballs to buy Stuff. Every year, Santa preys on millions of innocent children, luring yet another generation into Stuff addiction.

Stuff-peddlers are getting ever more cunning. Nobody wants cars, telephones, or TVs that are ludicrously over-complicated and fall to bits in five minutes. Nor do they want an over-priced "choice" of 9 billion different mobile chargers or printer cartridges. But THEY force us to buy them. You will buy what we want you to buy.

Soon you won't be able to buy nice simple drugs like 'Erroin. It'll be replaced by Tri-methyl-dioxy-trypto-phospo-penta-hyper-gunge-amide, which gets you high for about 3 milli-seconds and costs 14 times as much. Sometimes it's even worse. There are dealers in the banks who steal your money . . . and then don't even give you any Stuff.

But we're all criminals really. Even those of us who have kicked buying the Stuff, still have to make the Stuff. Until someone comes up with a way of enabling several billion people to survive without having to make yet more mega-tonnes of Stuff, nothing is likely to change.

I suspect the world is more likely to end because we have successfully excavated every last gramme of anything vaguely worth having. Answers on a postcard please.

Yup, I reckon it's that time of year again already

2011-12-22T01:29:00.001-08:00

Oui, c'est le saison festeeve. Encore?? Déjà?! It seems but a few fleeting moments since 'ere we had last Tinsel Time. I'm sure it comes quicker every year.

Whether that's due to the ever more speedy passing of unrecorded time, or because Christmas now starts in November even in l'haute vallée de l'Aude, I don't know.

The good ladies of Fa, who faithfully decorate everything whether it likes it or not, have truly excelled themselves this year. What with the café doing its bit as always, Fa has become a three-tree village. Quite impressively kitsch.

I've only pictured one of them, partly because I don't like these things to get out of hand (Bah! Humbug!), and partly because, with the other two trees being at the far end of the bridge, I couldn't get them all in at once.

The weather too was not co-operating; all matters the other side of le pont being largely lost in the dim and driving greyness. My notoriously obtuse Kangoo also felt mysteriously compelled to join in with the general festive denial, by spending three days refusing to start.

I must congratulate Renault on producing a vehicle so incredibly difficult to service. It was only by combining parts of two comprehensively gigantic socket sets, that my mate Graham and I were finally able to extract and replace the duff glow plugs, essential for adopting Go-Mode.

Once upon a time, there were two sorts of spark plugs: Big and small. There are now about 12. Why? I ask myself, if not to make sure that you CAN'T possess the right spanner. I'm not naturally paranoid but sometimes I can't help feeling that THEY are out to get us all.

It was with some relief that Claire and I repaired chez sa mère at The Last House Before Spain, where all is bathed in brilliant sunshine. Bonnes fêtes à tous!

Round 'em up boy! C'est le collie de Collioure

2011-12-22T01:28:00.000-08:00

One man and his geese. I didn't know Phil Drabble Syndrome had penetrated so far into our beloved South of France, but evidently they have their own take on it.

As a long-ago trainee hack, I was once deputed to telephone the late Monsieur Drivel; a distinctly abrupt man to put it tactfully, so I don't mind cracking the odd franglais gag at his expense. The geese-herding collie was nonetheless rather the star of this Christmas market, which Claire and I visited in Collioure.

Your bill, Sir? That'll be €15 and a Matisse . . .

2011-12-22T01:27:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning for a long time to drop into le café des Templiers. You'll find it at Collioure, a seaside town near Perpignan, closely with Les Fauves - that's to say Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck etc.

Being penniless and unknown back in those hopeful days before the First World War, the young artists were in the habit of bartering paintings to pay their hotel and bar bills.

Thus the bar eventually ended up with a remarkably valuable set of pictures. I'm not sure how much of the original collection survives, as some of the current paintings are of distinctly later period, but it's still a great place for a beer.

Woodn't it be luvverly? Mais non, Monsieur . . .

2011-11-23T06:54:00.001-08:00

It's nearly the end of November and weird world continues. Even the most venerable denizens of l'haute vallée de l'Aude, people in their 80s, can't remember anything like it.

Tonnes of driftwood litter the windswept beaches

2011-11-23T06:53:00.000-08:00

These pix show the beach at Canet, près de chez Claire. We get whole weeks of beautiful, warm sunshine, then Pow! Stonking great storms, complete with cataclysm and full quad sound.

Any excuse to use an arty shot while we're about it

2011-11-23T06:52:00.000-08:00

Normally Canet's vista of virgin sand continues uninterrupted as far as the eye can see; ideal for a traditional little seaside resort.

But over the last few weeks, masses of timber have been storm-swept down the Rhone and the valleys of the Gard in to the sea.

It's been blown along the coast and fetched up at Canet; whole fallen trees strewn along several kilometres of beach.

Only a few hours after I took these shots, torrential rain was hammering down on the roof of chez Claire. Today it's all sunny again. Very strange.

* Having made the main point with a couple of pure news shots, I couldn't resist having a twiddle with my picture editor, so I knocked up this arty black and white to finish with.

Lest we forget, a village moment of remembrance

2011-11-11T10:49:00.000-08:00

Here we have a rare Maire sighting. I should make it clear right away that I mean no disrespect: Monsieur Serge Jammy, le Maire de Fa, is, by repute, an able and diligent administrator.

However he does tend to be a rather more shy and retiring bird than you might expect from the village's leading citizen.

Which may explain why this is his first appearance in our well-belovéd chronicle of sundry and obscure doings here in extreme Sticksville, SW France.

The occasion is, of course, le jour férié d'Armistice which always takes place on November 11 in France, rather than on the nearest Sunday.

It's a bank holiday and principally commemorates the fallen of the First World War. The end of the Second World War is marked separately on May 8.

As in Angleterre, the French are reflecting on whether the nature of the remembrance should evolve, now that the last veterans of The Great War have died.

Personally, I don't see the need for any profound change. Whilst it was always important to honour the survivors, the primary purpose has always been to remember those who died in a carnage that remains almost without parallel, in its waste of human lives.

I think many English people are quite unaware of the scale of the French losses. But all over France, you can go into villages that seem to consist of two houses, a church and no pub, and find a list of 40 or 50 names on the war memorial.

Our little ceremony here in Fa was also notable as a serious suit sighting. Full marks to Monsieur le Maire for his neat, dark two-piece with tie. We are distinctly informal in Languedoc-Rousillon. Maires of even quite large towns are wont to officiate in T-shirt, jeans and sash, especially in summer.

Ties are almost unheard of. The only person I know who wears one is our local chief Jehovah's Witness; a very neat dresser, and exceedingly formal. The only time I met him, I thought he'd come to read my will . . .

All these Kings and Queens . . . mais pas très anglais

2011-11-05T13:34:00.000-07:00

When I first came to France, my new French friends and acquaintances frequently asked my opinion of the Royal Family. To which, I was wont to reply: Why do you think I decided to live in a republic?

Despite having spurned their own monarchy some hundreds of years ago, the French often seem strangely fascinated by ours.

They're particularly fond of someone called Leddeedee and not at all impressed by Preentz Sharl, thanks to his somewhat ungentlemanly behaviour with regard to her.

The fact that the late Lady Di, Princess of Wales met her untimely demise on French soil seems to count for a lot, and many French people are enthusiastic supporters of the various conspiracy theories.

The whole business of Henry VIII, the monarchy and the Catholic church baffles them completely. And the fact that the English had two perfectly good revolutions, purely on religious grounds long before the French had theirs, also comes as a surprise.

However it crossed my mind the other day: When were the kings of England actually English?

The official list seems to start with King Offa of Mercia (see myths and legends-style pic) in the 8th century but it's debatable whether he ruled the whole of England.

Pre-1066 and all that, there's a motley collection of Saxons and Vikings with unappetising names like Ethelfilth and Dogbreth. I exaggerate, but only slightly. Alfred the Great seems a good solid English choice but while Sweyn Forkbeard is a damn good name for a king, he was definitely Danish.

William the Conqueror and the Normans walked in, deeply uninvited, from France, followed by the Plantagenets - French again. Then we had the Wars of the Roses crowd, Lancastrians and Yorkists, who were really quite English, even if they were mostly either wet and crap like Henry VI or rabid psychopaths e.g. Richard III.

They were chucked out by the Tudors - Welsh. Being slightly less fertile than the average Panda, the Tudor dynasty soon expired, landing us with the Stuarts - at first Scottish and ultimately - Dutch.

I suppose you shouldn't quit while you're on a roll, so the Hanoverians - German - came next, followed by that Saxe-Coburg and Gotha lot. They changed their name to Windsor at the height of World War One on account of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha sounding just a teeny bit Teutonic.

I suppose the whole thing came to its thoroughly English and thus illogical conclusion when QE2 married Philip of Greece. I can't help concluding that our most English head of state was Oliver Cromwell and I'm not sure that's any great recommendation . . . Thank heavens for St George and the rather agreeable Kate.

OTT Sevilla - Over the top and off down the other side

2011-11-01T12:36:00.001-07:00

Being well overdue for a spotta kulcher, girlfriend Claire and I whizzed off to sunny Sevilla down in deepest Spain.

This was thanks to my old mate and former garage band confederate Glenn, who has established a gaff there, a casa even, with his partner Tracey. They were kind enough to invite us and we had a great time.

We came, we saw and were duly thrilled, charmed, interested, entertained and even genuinely gobsmacked: So a very sound plan.

Sevilla: the sweet smell of excess. This is the city of Velasquez and Carmen, and never does by halves what it can do by el shedload.

Textbook example No1 is the cathedral, as illustrated by one of my better pix. It is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Apparently you measure godspace by volume: Sevilla comes top, beating both St Peter's Rome and St Paul's London, though the fastidious will be quick to point out that Wren's masterpiece isn't Gothic.

Sevilla, like several other Spanish cathedrals, was built on the foundations of a previous mosque after the Moors were gradually expelled from Spain. First flatten your mosque . . . the cathedral builders wanted to create an edifice "so magnificent that posterity would think us mad". I can't say that they failed.

One bit of mosque that survived is the gorgeous Giralda, formerly the minaret and now the bell tower. The Moors actually wanted to knock it down rather than leave it to the infidels. But that notable extreme conservationist King Alphonse X declared he would put the lot of them to the sword if they touched a single brick of it. Who said town planning was boring?

Walking up the Giralda is also a great way to look out over the rooftops. I have a notoriously bad head for heights, but my tough babe girlfriend would have called me a wuss if I'd copped out. Actually it wasn't the biggest of deals compared to the 10,500ft Col du Galibier (See Blog maximum ruined underpants ratings, previous). So I did it.

Don't look down, it's El Patio de Los Naranjos

2011-11-01T12:35:00.000-07:00

And here we are, admiring the view from the Giralda, and taking in another bit of mosque that got away - El Patio de Los Naranjos.

Actually it sounds a bit prosaic in English, meaning as it does, Court of the Orange Trees. However it's a good moment to mention Los Naranjos, another hallmark of Sevilla.

There are orange trees planted everywhere for a bit of shade. The oranges are green at the moment. They will be ripe in December.

Obviously they're something of a shrine for marmalade nuts like me. Dear old Cooper's Oxford Bung Full Of Sevilla Orange Chunks Marmalade is one of the few choses anglais that I do rather pine for in deepest Fa.

The pic is the first of several by Claire in this sequence on Sevilla.

A wander through the gardens of Pedro the Cruel

2011-11-01T12:34:00.000-07:00

Next stop from the cathedral is the Alcazar palace, where Sevilla's rulers have lived it up since Roman times.

The resulting complex of buildings and gardens is one of the best examples of Mudejar architecture, a style created by Moorish craftsmen working under Christian rule.

The place has been codged about on various occasions over the centuries, but it owes most of its present form to one King Pedro the Cruel (1350-69) and his hot babe mistress Maria de Padilla.

Pedro was also known as The Just, but apparently that depended on whether he (a) liked you or (b) also had your other foot nailed to the floor.

NB Maria was obviously smart as well as hot, managing to stay on the right side of Pedro, despite attracting an enormous army of admirers who drank her bath water . . .

It's an amazing building but I also found the gardens quite wonderful, hence Claire's pic.

The world according to carp - extreme feeshness

2011-11-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

You may recall that The Last House has an abiding sense of feeshness.

Not quite a fish fetish, but certainly a deep appreciation, a profound awareness of matters piscatorial . . .

I was thus thrilled by the discovery of this amazing collection of gigantic mirror carp in the Alcazar gardens. So we shall halt, briefly, the conventional travelogue for a moment of intense feeshness.

All compleat anglers, of course, know that the wily carp is revered among fishermen as the most intelligent and challenging of fish. If you caught a carp the size of these monsters, you would probably quit while you're ahead.

But actually these feesh seemed a bit theek . . . or at the very least, lacking in subtlety. Obviously this magnificent shoal would not grow naturally in waters the size of a modest swimming pool.

They have to be fed, and expect to be fed. In fact they come right up to you and open their great fishy gobs in anticipation. It was never like that on the Trent and Mersey Canal . . .

The Mezquita - the Moors' finest hour in Spain

2011-11-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

Deciding on a day out from Sevilla, we headed for Cordoba, to visit the Mezquita - the finest mosque the Moors ever built in Spain, and fortunately the one that's still standing.

It's intriguing as to why the advancing Catholics didn't go in for mosque-flattening here as elsewhere.

Possibly the extraordinary beauty of the building with its endless double arches and columns was acknowledged.

Probably Cordoba could not have afforded a replacement cathedral on anywhere near the same scale as at Sevilla.

Anyway for three centuries, the Catholics left the building well alone, converting it to a cathedral with the lightest of modifications. Even the most sacred part of the mosque, the prayer niche or mihrab remains intact to this day.

But inevitably they succumbed to temptation: They carved a chunk out of the middle of the Mezquita, and inserted a Renaissance cathedral choir with gigantic high altar. It has to be the most bizarre religious fusion ever. Somehow I (purposely, I think) omitted to photograph it.

Still, we're amazingly lucky that no-one ever smashed this astonishing building. We still have about 85% of the original. They could have flattened the lot.

How could we possibly finish without flamenco?

2011-11-01T12:30:00.000-07:00

All good things come to an end. And our last night in Sevilla? It had to be flamenco.

You can find all sorts of flamenco in the city: Seriously good and seriously expensive; bloody awful tourist tat and seriously expensive . . . and probably lots of other options.

And then there's roots flamenco. Effectively it's folk club stuff, except that no-one sticks their finger in their ear . . .

Full marks to Glenn for spotting the gig and to Claire for getting a remarkably good pic under zero light conditions.

I loved the guitar work, amusingly imaginative and eclectic in its occasional blue notes and cunningly jazzy passing chords. I also loved the way the band encouraged young singers and dancers to join in from the audience, still in their jeans and T-shirts.

Perhaps not virtuoso performers, but great live music. My kind of music in my kind of city. Adios Sevilla . . .

On a touchy subject of deep-seated discontentment

2011-10-20T14:21:00.000-07:00

I have decided to award myself a rant. Now rants should always be applied sparingly, as too many can be boring. But it's a good long time since I had a proper one.

As you will see, I have selected the humble lavatory seat as the subject for my whinge, ahem, I mean to say learned discourse.

Wot I want to know is this: Why can't you buy toilet seat hinges in France that don't fall to bits?

This is an important matter if you are of the Wooden Seat Persuasion. I have just fitted my third seat in four years to the upstairs lav.

As you can see from the pic, the woodwork is great; close-grained, splinter-free and very comfortable . . . when you're not living in fear of it sliding out from underneath you.

The problem is always the hinges. I wouldn't mind the screw threads being totally crap, if I could glue them up with Loctite (a particularly effective metal glue, end of free plug). But I can't buy the blasted stuff in la belle France.

Whilst the bits holding the seat and the lid to the pan fell apart in about ten minutes, the remains of the hinges turned green and corroded solid.

In fact I had to cut them off with a disc grinder. How is it possible to engineer something so badly, with all the strength in the wrong place?!

Now don't get me wrong. French engineering has achieved many fine things that simply would never have happened in Britain: The Eiffel Tower, umpteen high-speed railway lines, the Millau Viaduct, a new international football stadium.

It's a little-known fact that a Victorian megalomaniac railway magnate called Sir Edward Watkin tried to build an Eiffel Tower anglais, but gave up before he'd even finished the first bit with the four legs.

I suppose it illustrates a fundamental difference between our two nations. Les français are so good at giant projects, but can't produce a handful of decent plumbing fittings. Why this should be so entirely baffles me.

Mind you, as a member of the mighty race that couldn't rebuild an existing football pitch, maybe I ought to fermer la bouche. Rant fini.

And already the first snow up in the high country

2011-10-19T09:38:00.000-07:00

I was driving up to the famed Last House itself, chez la mère de Claire; a doughty old lady, who would give She Who Must Be Obeyed (à la Rumpole) a run for her money. With ever-increasing difficulty, I regarded the bedraggled and tortuous cart-track which passes for a road in the uppermost vallée de l'Aude.

At least the icy downpour kept the lard wagons at bay. Camper vans are tragically endemic to this steep, narrow and motley pass onto the great plateau of the southern Pyrenees.

Allegro, Rapido: their names are legion, and a blatant offence under any form of Trades Descriptions Act. Incidentally France doesn't seem to possess any such thing, but I'll save that for a rant another day.

I couldn't help feeling that it might snow. But it seemed far too early. However, the next morning, there it was, fresh snow gleaming on the high peaks. Admittedly that's up at about 9,000 feet so probably no need to send for the Red Cross parcels just yet.

Of course, being anglais, I'm used to the panic aspect of snowfall: "White hell as lone flake falls on London Weather Centre". You know the sort of thing . . .

Sloe, sloe,hip, hip, sloe . . . seasonal fruits Part Two

2011-10-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

But despite snow on high ground, the weather gods continued to favour us, as they have all this autumn.

Walking under incredibly blue skies, the latest batch of free gifts from nature were all around us; the rose-hips and the sloes.

I think I must get back into making sloe gin. No other drink has that amazing purple colour.

It's tedious having to prick each berry with a needle to let the juices out, but not so bad if you get yourself comfortable in front of one of your favourite old films.

Naturally there was a price to pay for such riches. Back in the uppermost vallée de l'Aude, swarms of lard wagons crawled out from under sundry dank stones, blinking and toad-like in the sunshine. It took bloody forever to get home.

Bien sûr c'est l'eau de vie . . . but it don't half stink!

2011-10-07T08:57:00.001-07:00

If you're going to squash all those lovely grapes to make all that lovely wine, then it's logical that you'll end up with a whole load of crud, especially at this time of year. And here it is; great purple mountains of all the skins, pips and stalks, dwarfing the giant earthmover used to shift them about.

So what to do with them? Actually it's all remarkably Eco, a lot more so than most of the Eco rip-offs that I just love to rant about, given the chance.

Why is it, for example, that anything Eco costs twice as much as the ordinary item? Someone coining it again, methinks . . .

That's enough rant, back to the matter in hand. In fact, the best 20 per cent of the gunge is converted into a rather up-market spirit: eau de vie de marc. The rest is converted into industrial alcohol or bio-fuel.

Very little is wasted, so I'm quite impressed. Ordinary hairy blokes from Limoux outsmart militant beardy-weirdies.

There's just one problem. It don't half pong. When you pass the little factory sur le main drag à Carcassonne, it's enough to make your eyes water.

When they're doing all that squodging, mashing, boiling and distilling, I can't help thinking that there's a coven of redundant crones from Macbeth doing all the 'Bubble, bubble' . . .

I shouldn't let that put you off trying a quick snort of the eau de vie, I'm sure it's very good. It's just that, ahem, I haven't managed it yet. Santé!

With a certain hesitation, the mood is autumnal

2011-10-07T08:56:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of weeks, we've been basking, sweating even, dans l'été indien. Given the lack of cultural ties between the two countries, I'm mildly intrigued to find that France has Indian summers, but it does.

However something in the morning haze, snapped from my bedroom window at Fa, suggests that l'autonne n'est pas loin.

Even if it's not cold yet, I'm already getting up in the dark, which always instils a certain grimness in the depths of the bones . . .

Actually I was more than relieved when Monsieur Lolo, Fa's amiably flamboyant village woodman, finally dropped my first couple of stères de bois, (that's to say two cubic metres of firewood) at the back of the house.

I don't suppose that we'll need it just yet, but there always comes a point in the year when I don't feel quite comfortable without it . . .

Michelle, ma belle, these are things that go together

2011-10-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

The Last House never discusses politics, French or otherwise. But there's no need to blah on at length when the image says it all. I believe it's what journalists refer to as a stand-alone pic.

Now this could be seen as taking the pee . . .

2011-10-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

I am indebted both to the unknown graffiti artist and the photographer with the presence of mind to snap this one.

It's another little French connection, recalling dear old Marcel Duchamp's Fountain of 1917, in fact simply a porcelain urinal, signed and dated under a pseudonym.

He submitted it as a joke to a New York art show, whose organisers proclaimed that they would accept any exhibit. Actually they didn't display the piss de resistance, thus creating more of a story by bottling out.

The original Fountain was lost, probably thrown away (can't think why . . .) so eventually Duchamp authorised 11 official replicas, which you may see in the world's great art museums, and possibly various antique Gents' toilets.

An official Fountain was sold at Sotheby's in 1999 for $1.7 million. I expect you can get a new one at Bricodepot for about €20 . . .

In 2004, Duchamp's Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British art world professionals. You couldn't make it up. Must go and let some out.

Never mind the broccoli, just keep taking the tablets

2011-10-01T10:34:00.000-07:00

Now and again I try to dream up that miracle product which going to make my fortune: The one that's going to let me to spend the rest of my life writing, playing music etc . . .

And I think I've finally cracked it - E Number Pills. After all, if you're one of those militant, hyper-vegans, how can your diet possibly be balanced when you don't take enough E-Numbers?

Obviously I'm exaggerating because this is my sales bullshit. In fact there are many naturally occurring E-Numbers. Vitamin C, for example, has no less than five E-numbers all to itself, Nos E300-E304, because there are several chemical variants of vitamin C.

Well, that's triggered a cataclysmic veggie crisis already: How are you going to take all those toxic E-Numbers out of the humble orange?

And some E-Numbers may not be good for us, but would we willingly give them up? E1510 is alcohol. Even the finest organic wines, dammit, are bung full of E1510. And E1503 is castor oil. You wouldn't go far without that . . .

And what about E948? Er, that's oxygen. Life on Earth etc . . . And as a devout foodie, I can't help noticing that E100 is turmeric. Curry crisis? No thank you. And E407a is processed eucheuma seaweed, which sounds ideal for a militant veggie food fad, though really it's an emulsifier. Show some emulsion . . .

Admittedly some E-Numbers are much more scary - E385 is Calcium disodium ethylene diamine tetra-acetate. It's supposed to be a sequestrant, whatever that is. Perhaps it makes you go bankrupt? E537 is ferrous hexacyanomanganate. It's an anti-caking agent. Let them eat ferrous hexacyanomanganate? I'm not surprised they had a revolution . . .

Now you may think that I'm winding you up. But no; my learned dissertation is firmly based on true facts. I've just twisted them a bit. But to show there's no hard veggie feelings, here's the recipe for Progressive Salad.

It's so-called because my mate Mark, a deeply-skilled vegetarian cook, came up with:

Lettuce, tomatoes and apples, chopped together.

I added: A vigorous chopping of fresh parsley.

And Claire added: A dressing of walnut oil and walnut vinegar with a dash of salt.

Together, it's E-licious.

End Of The World? The suspense is killing me . . .

2011-09-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

I've been feeling that it's time for an update on the putative End Of The World 12/21 Dec 2012 cataclysm thingy.

Now you may think that this is just a cynical attempt at manipulating the Space-Time Continuum to increase my blog ratings. And you'd be right. Every time I bring you another in-depth report on the forthcoming catastrophe, it puts a lovely big spike in my stats.

Evidently there are watchers all over the world; the doomsayers, the paranoids and even the plain curious. This one's a real crowd-pleaser: Whatever your personal disaster rating, it's got something for everybody.

Right now, my spies tell me, there's a deathly calm in the vicinity of Pic Bugarach. Absolutely nothing is happening. And of course that's sinister in itself. We could all be caught out.

Up to now, all predictions of TEOTW have been a tad, ahem, premature . . . but what if the 2012 date is too late? Now that's really got you worried. It could all go bang tomorrow and the only witnesses would be a couple of farmers and that mad old duck in rue Saint-Jean le Divin.

Still, I'm told that there's an article on Top Tips For Better Cataclysms in this month's Cosmo, so maybe all is not lost. Incidentally, I only used the word "spies" to keep all you conspiracy theorists on the ball. Actually it was just my mate Richard saying that the local B&Bs hadn't done much business this summer.

The 2012 date for TEOTW is all to do with the ancient Mayan calendar. That's to say it Mayan it may not happen . . . Said calendar runs in 5,125-year cycles and 2012 is indeed the end of such a time period.

If you buy all this stuff, The End Of The Cycle =TEOTW. There again, if you're an academic Mayan historian, their classical texts don't actually say that. We're on the fourth cycle, and there's no reason to suggest that there won't be a fifth.

However there is apparently an inscription about a correctly-timed "Happening", from Tortuguero in Mexico, concerning the god Bolon Yokte' K'uh. He looks a pretty cool dude to judge by his portrait on The Vase of The Seven Gods.

Unfortunately, we know bugger all else about him. Which isn't terribly helpful if you're into predicting cataclysms . . . That's him in the pic by the way, together with a quick reminder of Pic Bugarach, as taken from behind.

The top tip for TEOTW appears to be a planet, black hole or asteroid called Nibiru which is going to collide with the Earth. I've a suspicion that this may be the giant, horned planet (with real horns) whose possible existence I reported on in the blog two years ago, but I'm not sure.

I've checked with NASA who say that nothing's going to happen (a secret plot to visit their website . . .) Mind you, these are the same somewhat blasé guys who recently announced that they were about to dump a clapped-out satellite on us.

Whilst not of the Loon Persuasion myself, I'm never averse to healthy scepticism regarding statements by Them, alias Persons in Authority. Remember those Home Office porkies over Chernobyl being nothing to worry about . . .

Bearing this in mind, I thought I'd better keep in with my old mates the Zargatrons of Planet Thargs, proprietors of the Giant Lizard Spaceship, allegedly parked for a quick getaway under Pic Bugarach. Just by way of an insurance policy, you understand . . . Thus I preach unto you the hitherto unknown Gospel according to Thargs.

It's completely practical and not particularly bonkers. Mind you, by the standards of round here, that's not saying a lot . . . Those of a gnostic* bent need not worry: Thargism is completely non-sectarian and compatible with almost any other -ism belief system of your choice.

Thargism is deeply rooted in the sacred tenets of 1950s TV sci-fi: The world may be totally overwhelmed by catastrophe . . . but we've all got to be back on the show next week . . .

Foolproof, eh? How can we not survive?

*I was deeply thrilled to find that "gnostic", the positive of "agnostic", actually exists. It always vaguely upsets me that no-one is ever gruntled or comknockerated or combobulated. Gnostic? My gruntles have rarely been so un-dissed.

One of those moments when history reaches out to us

2011-09-18T06:10:00.000-07:00

It's a wet, grey afternoon and undeniably streaked with autumn. And perhaps a suitably melancholic moment to remember that I've been meaning to write a line or two about Wilfred Owen.

This all started when someone called Pam contacted me about a new memorial to Britain's finest First World War poet, who famously was killed only a week before the end of the war.

Owen spent his last nights and wrote his final letters, notably to his mother, in the cellar of la Maison Forestière or Forester's House in the village of Ors, 35km from Cambrai, in the département du Nord, which borders with Belgium. Owen is buried in the village.The house has been radically rebuilt by the architect Simon Patterson as a major audio-visual tribute and memorial to Owen. It's being opened on October 1 and you can find out all about it at the website of Association Wilfred Owen France www.wilfredowen.fr

At an admittedly cursory glance, Owen's death seems to have been more than simple bad luck. He resumed active service during 1918, after previous treatment for shell shock and seems to have been under no obligation to do so.

His subsequent mental state and attitude, both towards the war and his own part in it, seem to have made his death to some degree inevitable.

There's some serious top brass invited for the official opening, including the French culture minister. Pam jokingly remarked that the speechifying was likely to go on a bit, and wondered if anyone could come up with a few personal stories to lighten things up.

Which prompted me to recall that I probably only exist because my grandfather was accidently shot up the backside, the night before the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

He was helping General Sir Hyphen-Hyphen-Somebody off with his overcoat, when said general's revolver fell out of its holster, bounced on the stone floor and went off . . .

But for this almost comic episode, my grandfather who was a young officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers, would almost certainly have been one of the 60,000 who did not survive the next day.

The twist in the tale came when I discovered that as Owen led his Second Manchesters in his final action to cross the Sambre and Oise Canal, they were fighting together with men of the same Lancashire Fusiliers. I think it's only fitting to leave the last words to the poet:

Apologia Pro Poemate Meo

I, too, saw God through mud—
The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.
War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,
And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

Merry it was to laugh there—
Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

I, too, have dropped off fear—
Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,
And sailed my spirit surging, light and clear,
Past the entanglement where hopes lie strewn;

And witnessed exultation—
Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl,
Shine and lift up with passion of oblation,
Seraphic for an hour, though they were foul.

I have made fellowships—
Untold of happy lovers in old song.
For love is not the binding of fair lips
With the soft silk of eyes that look and long.

By joy, whose ribbon slips,—
But wound with war's hard wire whose stakes are strong;
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;
Knit in the welding of the rifle-thong.

I have perceived much beauty
In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;
Heard music in the silentness of duty;
Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

Nevertheless, except you share
With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,
Whose world is but a trembling of a flare
And heaven but a highway for a shell,

You shall not hear their mirth:
You shall not come to think them well content
By any jest of mine. These men are worth
Your tears: You are not worth their merriment.

Just one more for the rail-road? I don't mind if I do

2011-09-18T05:11:00.000-07:00

I always like a good label and I haven't seen a really choice one since the Last House's celebrated bottle of Arse back in 2010.

Of course, my francophone readers will already realise that some vandal with a sense of humour has "improved" this advertising slogan on the celebrated Train Jaune way up in the Pyrenees.

I'm indebted to Claire's best mate Lydie for the pic of this wording which, of course, originally read Vivre en Languedoc Roussillon . . .

And why not? It's a very nice place to live. But while there may be moments when it's hard to spot the difference, Ivre, of course, means pissed . . .

On the other hand, if it's good enough for Brigitte . . .

2011-09-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

Well, if you wanted to make a blog piece about cabbage look interesting, I figure you'd use a bit of ingenuity too . . .

I was looking for a snappy intro for my pet choucroute recipe, and promptly discovered that BB was at one time famous for a kind of beehive hairdo, randomly piled up on the top of her head.

It was known as la choucroute, due to its supposed resemblance to a pile of finely-chopped cabbage à la mode Alsacienne.

That's not, on the face of it, terribly complimentary so I figure that any cabbage patch doll gags are seriously out . . . particularly as Madame Bardot remains to this day a pretty tough cookie.

The more observant among you will have noticed that I cunningly selected a pic of BB not wearing la choucroute. This is purely because it was free . . .

Choucroute is, of course, the French take on sauerkraut, which doubtless stems from the German habit of wandering into Alsace-Lorraine and staying there for 70 years or so.

The region remains to a large extent bilingual; though it's an old joke that if you ever receive a letter from that part of the world, it will be full of mistakes, because everyone there can speak both French and German but can't spell either of them.

Being as the snappy intro has now rambled on long enough to be in danger of becoming floppy, I'd better get on with the recipe . . .

Strictly-speaking you ought to make choucroute using proper fermented and preserved cabbage. The problem is that they don't stock it all the year round in deepest SW France so my version is a dodge to solve the problem.

*Select your favourite bits of pork: I use chunks of shoulder ham and two smoked sausages, together with a couple of pork chops or the same weight of belly pork. It's another good way to reduce the French pork chop mountain, but belly pork is tastier, though you should remove the bones. Thick bacon would be great if you can get it.

*Peel about eight small potatoes and cut into two or three pieces. I love red potatoes for this because they stay firm without being hard.

*Fry an onion and three cloves of garlic in oil, in a cast-iron casserole. I like to use huile de noix (walnut oil), but olive or sunflower is fine.

*Add your meat and continue to fry until the pork is white. Chop up or pierce the smoked sausage, because that lets the fat and juices out into the whole dish.

*Chop as finely as possible half a cabbage. Add this together with a vegetable stock and a mug of water. Add a couple of good sloshes of vinagre du vin aromatisé de noix (walnut vinegar).

*Add a teaspoonful of paprika, a third of a teaspoonful of nutmeg, several sprigs of marjoram leaves, fresh if possible, flourish of freshly-ground black pepper and salt to taste.

*Cover and bring to boil, reduce heat to a simmer. You can simmer vigorously until potatoes and cabbage are cooked, say 20-25 minutes. Serves 3-4.

*But . . .

I think it's better to leave the casserole on a low flame, add a touch more water and leave it to cook for about an hour while you nip down to the CafédeFa for a couple of beers before dinner.

That's what we did, naturally . . .

And yea verily: There could not be life without cheese

2011-09-12T13:13:00.000-07:00

Let us taste No.2 in an occasional series of blindingly obvious subjects for a blog supposedly about France - le fromage.

I've always been a bit of a cheese monster myself, hence the almost biblical pearl of philosophy in today's text . . . I mean headline.

But perhaps I'm guilty of taking one of life's essential pleasures for granted. As with wine and castles, we're unlikely to suffer a cheese shortage round here during any foreseeable circumstances.

I am, of course, putting aside such remote possibilities as the Third Inter-Galactic Cheese War, predicted to take place after the Zargatrons of Planet Thargs invade our famed manic mountain, Pic Bugarach, for The End of The World. Brie will fight them on the beaches . . .

But as the French say: il n'y a pas de quoi en faire un fromage, literally: there isn't anything to make a cheese out of . . . a handy idiom which means: it's nothing to make a big deal about. I am indebted as always to girlfriend Claire for her knowledge of the finer points of la belle langue.

Of course, the truly great have never underestimated the importance of cheese. It goes without saying that both De Gaulle and Churchill had their two-pennorth on the subject.

De Gaulle's was the more despairing of his compatriots: "How can you govern a country which has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?" Churchill was altogether more generous: "A country producing almost 360 different types of cheese cannot die," he said of France in 1940.

But the last word really has to go to the noted gastronome Monsieur Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: "A meal without cheese is a beautiful woman with an eye missing." Passionate stuff, eh? Almost blood-curdling.

In terms of sheer unadulterated cheesiness, one does come across the odd British attempt to beat the French at their own game: The British Cheese Board claims that there are 700 registered cheeses in the UK, while there are generally reckoned to be 350-400 of the French species.

Whilst I don't like dear old Blighty to sink without trace in culinary contests of this nature, I can't help being a bit sceptical. I strongly suspect that many of the 700 are esoterica of the Old Scruttock's Spotted Jockstrap variety. They may well exist but you're unlikely to find them down at Tesco's.

On running my eye down the rival lists, about 25 fromages français passed the Ones You've Actually Heard Of Test, as a pose to a mere 14 for Royaume Uni. Not actually nul point, but a bit scanty nonetheless.

I suppose we're lucky that even this many British cheeses survived the 1960s government/big business conspiracy to wean us all onto plastic cheddar, with an occasional seasoning of that other mighty Britannic masterpiece . . . Edam.

But even les français have their moments plastiques: A coach party from round here once went to visit the famed roquefort caves. Ah! Roquefort: le roi des fromages, à mon avis . . .

They duly took the tour with great pleasure. Except for one wily old Monsieur, a man most nasally gifted. Why? he asked, do the great caves (cellars) not smell of cheese?

The problem is that roquefort is a ewe's milk cheese. Ewes only come into season twice a year. So sometimes there is no real roquefort maturing. But visitors do not want to tour an empty cave.

Thus it is someone's job to put 10,000 decoy plastic cheeses on the shelves. And then in due season, as the le roquefort nouveau is once again enthroned, to take them all away again. You might say it's a bit of a con: Mais il n'y a pas de quoi en faire un fromage . . .

Shock sighting of 'The Real World' quite near Fa

2011-09-11T12:18:00.000-07:00

Delightful as life is in the leafy idyll that is deepest Fa, I do suffer the periodic need to avert brain death, even if that is, in my case, something of a lost cause.

This probably explains why Claire and I like to drop in on the International Festival of Photojournalism at Perpignan, or Visa Pour L'Image as it's known in these parts.

Ironically, I forgot my own camera and have had to make do with this lash-up of the prog cover. I hope one Issouf Sanogo of Agence France-Presse won't mind me lifting his pic, as after all it is a plug for the event.

The show is held in a dazzling multiplicity of crumbly old buildings all over Perpignan. The pix are world class and it's all free to look around, so v. good value.

The biggest snag is that the city centre has been developed over many centuries, using nothing more complicated than Chaos Theory, a Ouija board and some pieces of string.

This means you can do a lot of walking in the wrong direction on a very hot day. Fortunately, it was our second visit so Claire and I achieved maximum images for minimum trudge, and retired for a pleasant lunch before overkill set in.

I must admit that I have a fairly low threshold for the traditional staples of hard news; war, drug crime and poverty, when exhibited in bulk. In the days when I used to lay out news pages, it was always a case of identifying the handful of images that best summed up a situation.

When a photographer displays maybe a hundred unremittingly gruesome images at once, it can lead to an unpleasant sense of voyeurism, even if life and limb were risked to take them.

But the show had its sublime moments like Brian Skerry's Ocean Soul; stunningly beautiful photos of marine life, brilliantly calculated to appeal to The Last House's notoriously devout sense of feeshness. More importantly, Skerry alerts us to how many of the pictured species are at risk.

And then there was Peter Dench's hilarious England, the Uncensored Version; wonderful images of the English in plonker and slapper mode, their unrivalled dress sense and legendary ability to hold their booze without throwing up and looking stupid (not). This set was a massive hit with French viewers . . .

Why am I not surprised about this?

How could I possibly have forgotten the wine ??

2011-09-08T05:33:00.001-07:00

Comes the turning of the season, and the luscious grape is yet burgeoning upon the groaning vine . . . blah, blah, etc, etc and other such likewise pseudo-poetic arty bollocks.

It's no good; I shall have to come clean. Somehow in more than two years of Le Blog Normalement Persistente, I have never yet managed to mention les vendanges, or grape harvest.

Not only is this France, but it is my self-imposed mission to chronicle, both exhaustively and exhaustingly, the mélange of minor details that constitute the calendar hereabouts. Oops . . .

What's even more puzzling is that girlfriend Claire and I are normally pretty switched on to the pre-autumnal Season of Plenty which has just started.

Claire's last act before departing back to work at the lycée in Canet, was to compose some deeply fab blackberry jam, which is already disappearing at a rate of knots. In but a few weeks, I shall be persuading her to make some more crème de marron from our usually gigantic sweet chestnut harvest.

It has to be said that it is a thoroughly balls-aching job to peel umpteen chestnuts, when you can buy the finished item for a mere €1 a pot down at le supermarché. But Claire's crème de la crème de marron is a sheer delight, and not to be mentioned even on the same planet as some contemptible commercial item.

And only yesterday I selected the first of the purple figs, our own dear couilles du Pape (alias the Pope's bollocks; see expositions, previous). Thus it is strange, as well as a major clanger, to have somehow omitted the grape harvest.

Matters came to a head when Niffy Louis, Fa's Undisputed Champion Layabout announced down at le café that he was going to work for a couple of weeks. When we'd picked ourselves off the floor and the walls had stopped cracking with shock, all became clear: He was going to help with les vendanges . . .

It should be explained that les vendanges is just about the only paid work you can do in France without it affecting your dole money . . . evidently there is one sacred place where even l'administration* fears to tread . . . imagine the row if there were no-one to pick the grapes. There again, there is no need for self-inflicted mental cruelty.

Thus forcibly reminded, I selected a suitable quill with a view to recalling a few vendanges moments: I must admit that I never done it myself. Back in 2002, the first year we were here, my old mate Andrew did les vendanges.

He told me that he'd never worked harder in his life than for those nine days. Being as Andrew was no stranger to 18-hour days during his tougher moments in business, I regarded this information rather as a warning . . . and thereafter kept my distance. As a nifty-fingered guitarist, I also have a natural aversion to le secateur.

You can always tell that the harvest has started, because as soon as all the camper van drivers are locked up back in their coven (or wherever it is that they lurk out of season), they are immediately replaced by Postman Pat tractors.

These vehicles, towing trailers full of grapes, always look as though they've been put in a vice and squashed, just like PP's van in the aforementioned kid's prog. I figure they have to be narrow to get between the vines.

Being not very stable, they have a top speed of about 20km/hour. However, most of us do want wine, even as we don't want camper vans, so this is a time to be calm and zen when you are late for an appointment and stuck behind a PP tractor.

Just a short while after les vendanges, we will have la fête du vin nouveau. This is when we all get together for a discreet tincture, or preview of the new wine.

I'd strongly advise you not to get pissed on it: New wine possesses all sorts of deeply interesting molecules, most of them not yet mellowed by maturity. Now you may not believe in all that End of the World tosh, which I am prone to ridicule periodically. But faced with le hangover du vin nouveau, you may well be moved to reconsider. Patience is a virtue: You have been warned . . .

* I have been forbidden by Claire to make further excessively satirical comment on French bureaucracy. This is because les magnifiques fonctionnaires à la prefecture changed my driving licence in a stunningly efficient nine days. Considering that both the photo and the address on my old English one were deeply out of date, they were remarkably obliging. Merci!

Once in cooking mode, I might just as well continue

2011-08-21T12:29:00.000-07:00

I admit it: I am a devout foodie. Which probably explains why I have chosen to live in France. Few things cheer me so much as when I come up with another recipe that works.

This is important because I almost never use cook books. When I first started to cook, I couldn't make head or tail of them. It seemed so much easier to make it up as I went along. These days I do occasionally try to make someone else's stuff, and I'm not averse to flicking through a tome or two for good ideas.

But I remain, essentially, an improv cook. Give me a few oddments lurking in the bowels of a disreputable fridge, and I love the challenge of seeing what I can come up with. I seem to be on a roll today. Having already scored with the Coquilles St Jacques with basil and pasta, I then turned my attention to some pork.

For some reason, we get periodic gluts of pork chops here in France. You get to buy boxes of 12 at about 2€/kilo. I kid you not; it's ridiculous. I just bag them up and freeze them. However, given so great a surfeit of terminated pig, you really do have to ring the changes to avoid boredom.

Thus I have been toying with the idea of Chillied pork with figs and cider. This intriguing concoction came to mind after some munificent guest presented girlfriend Claire and myself with a couple of bottles of organic cider.

Now it might seem dangerous to stage a head-on crash between the cuisines of northern France and the Mediterranean, but the essential principle is sound: Pork just loves it hot and sweet. So here goes:

Chillied pork with figs and cider

Slash up an onion and three cloves of garlic, fry in olive oil in an iron casserole on the top of the stove.

Add one or two pork chops per person, according to size of chop and known appetites and fry until meat is all white.

Add a mug-full of dry cider, six chopped up dried figs, vegetable stock cube, two bay leaves, chopped fresh basil and oregano, teaspoon of paprika, ground black pepper and chopped hot, fresh red chillies to taste.

I'd say basically the hotter the better, but make sure you can still enjoy it. This is, after all, the point of the exercise . . .

Bring to boil, cut heat to simmer, and add a bit more cider if needed. You don't want the meat to be swimming, but you do need enough liquid for the meat to cook in.

Adjust heat to low flame, put the top on the casserole and cook for about an hour. If necessary, remove lid and simmer to reduce sauce.

You could equally do all the frying in a frying pan, transfer the mixture to a ceramic casserole and cook it in the oven. The choice is yours. Personally I don't, because I've got a crap oven.

We served ours with boiled red potatoes in their skins with chives and fresh butter, plus garden peas. It seemed to work.

Holy Grail? It must be the secret disappearing abbey

2011-08-21T05:40:00.000-07:00

You may have gathered that our surrounding countryside is positively packed with serious source material for anything barmy that you care to mention: the Holy Grail, the End of the World, the Life of Brian, etc . . .

Montségur, most famous of the Cathar castles, is usually top tip for the Grail castle, but I have a brand new theory that l'Abbaye de Villelongue, St Martin le Vieil, somewhere vaguely near Carcassonne, is swiftly rising up the charts as a hot rival.

For a start, I'm convinced that the bloody place is a mirage. Every time we try to visit it, something goes wrong. The first time, girlfriend Claire tried to go there with a visiting mate of mine and the car broke down.

Then Claire, the said mate and I tried to include it in another day out, and we ran out of time. Some weeks later, Claire and I finally got there to discover that it closes early on Saturday afternoons.

The staff tried to tell us that we couldn't go round because they were preparing for somebody's wedding, but I think that's all just a front. They've got the Holy Grail; they just don't want to show it to us.

Of course, that could just be my latest conspiracy theory. After all it's stupid enough to hold its own amongst all the other ludicrous theories already circulating in deepest Loonsville, SW France.

Having wasted an hour and a quarter, desperately seeking the elusive Abbaye (12th century Cistercian and quite cute, should you ever have the extreme good fortune to prevent it absconding occultly over the horizon . . .), it's good to know that there's other things you can do nearby to save the day from total disaster.

The pic with fab sky is the village church at Montolieu, a kind of French Hay-on-Wye, and thus replete with an abundance of bookshops. Obviously most of the books are in French, but the
ambiance of secondhand bookshops is always agreeable if you like that sort of thing.

It is indeed a very pleasant village to wander round. We found a decent restaurant and didn't hurry over lunch. There's also La Coopérative, a very classy art gallery in the village's converted wine cave. I'm told that this risks losing its grant aid, so get there quick. Firstly you won't miss out, and secondly, increased visitor numbers will help make the case to keep it going.

Also within shouting distance is le château de Saissac; another tick in your Observer's Book of Castles and definitely worth a visit. France may have its privations, but lack of castles in Languedoc-Roussillon isn't one of them.

Changing subject completely, I couldn't resist the temptation to inflict another recipe on you. This one's for coquilles St Jacques (alias scallops) and it's a complete doddle to make:

Coquilles St Jacques with basil and pasta

Chop fine and fry an onion and two cloves of garlic in olive oil, in a non-stick wok or frying pan.

Add 500g coquilles St Jacques, a vegetable stock cube, chopped basil, teaspoon of paprika, flourish of freshly-ground black pepper and a slosh of white wine.

Bring to a simmer and keep it there for five minutes.

Add three tablespoons of crème fraîche, bring back to simmer for another five minutes.

Whilst sauce is being cooked, prepare enough spaghetti for four people, adding salt, black pepper, a dash of olive oil and chopped basil.

Serve coquilles in sauce on top of spaghetti.

Bon appetit!

PS: To get to Montolieu, take the RN113 towards Toulouse from Carcassonne, and turn right onto the D624 after Pezens.

Cro-Magnon - an epic saga of Early Modern Humans

2011-07-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

I've always rather liked the name Cro-Magnon. It's got that epic feel; a worthy adversary to Conan the Librarian, as my mate Dave le Philosophe deftly malaprops it.

I have to admit that it came as a surprise to me, when I finally figured out some years ago that Cro-Magnon was not actually the hero of some Planet Tharg-worthy sci-fi caper (as denoted by the rather fanciful pic).

It is, of course, the name of the site in the Dordogne, where the remains of these guys were first dug up. They date from about 28,000 years ago. The French seem to do seriously well at all this very, very old stuff. They also have plenty of real dinosaurs, just down the road from me at Espéraza.

And, of course, there are the world-famous cave paintings at Lascaux, which Monsieur C-M seems to have doodled while taking a break from beating the crap out of sabre-toothed tigers.

But, no matter, Cro-Magnon is actually an Occitan word meaning "big cave", which still has the right macho feel: You can just imagine some great, hairy Cro-Magnon come barging in at dinnertime.

He hurls the sabre-toothed tiger at the good lady wife by way of affectionate greeting. Then he dumps himself down on the yak skin sofa and roars for his Double Mammoth Burgers With Extra Entrails.

Now you may feel that this is all a bit sexist, but apparently it was just what those Paleolithic women liked. Pre-historians believe that in the Hunter-Gatherer era, Gathering actually produced more food than Hunting.

But given the choice of a hunting hunk (Hey babe, look at the size of my sabre-toothed etc . . .) and some wimp with a bowl of elderberries, which one do you think the girls went for? Yup, you guessed it.

Of course, our impression might just be in the names. Cro-Magnon sounds tough and so does Neanderthal. But it's a matter of total chance, the places where they were dug up. I mean to say, Frinton Man or Chantilly Man might seem distinctly more effete. Limp even.

But PC gets everywhere: Cro-Magnon is no more. Scientists have decided that these guys really weren't that much different from ourselves. They have changed the name to Early Modern Humans.

What a letdown. Is this the sort of man to start a riot at the World Underwater Yak-Strangling Championships? I bet they stayed at home, counted lentils and did the washing up. That's what progress does for you.

For the man who has everything - the inflatable 2CV

2011-07-17T12:02:00.001-07:00

Well there you have it, a full-size, blow-up, Citroën Deux Chevaux. Definitely a must for the dedicated gadget man, or even one in a sad and slightly strange love affair with the automobile.

Obviously the dear old 2CV is still now, as always, iconically French. My mate Dave le Philosophe has a deliciously decrepit example called Fifi, in which he clatters unsonorously around the neighbourhood.

I spotted the pneumatic version in the foyer of LeClerc, obviously advertising something. Not recognising the brand name, I thought and rather hoped, that this would be one of those wonderful ad stunts where the actual product is quite irrelevant, and may only be mentioned later, should the advert pick up an award.

Actually, the reality was far more fun. I asked girlfriend Claire if she'd ever heard of Cochonou. I was promptly castigated for ignorance and duly took my bollocking like a man.

Cochonou is apparently an exceedingly well-known brand of sausage . . . thus destroying the 2CV's credibility with the Lentil Brigade. When I was a kid, back in the 70s, it was la voiture absolument obligatoire for eco-veggie beardy types. Latterly, the car only stayed in production thanks to this niche market.

I suppose the red-checkered livery did rather suggest charcuterie and, come to think of it, the name Cochonou is somewhat suggestive of pork . . . Durrrh. Poor old 2CV. How are the tinny fallen.

We at The Last House wish to register a complaint

2011-07-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

I was idly searching through my stats the other day to see who, if anybody, actually peruses the dear old chron.

I found that in response to some hapless reader's search for The Last House before Spain, bloody Google had strung up an advert for El Cheapo Repossessed Spanish Villas.

I ask you, is this either right or decent? As any fule kno (molesworth), the real Last House belongs to Claire's mum and is deeply classy.

Quite apart from the fantastical assortment of wrought iron decorating the roof, it was actually the elegant mountain hideaway of a very posh opera singer.

If I've got the story vaguely right, the legendary diva (whose name escapes me) sang at La Scala c.1900, escaped to her house in the Pyrenees when her lovers got over-excited, and expired, rather young and possibly romantically, c.1940.

Repossessed Spanish Villas indeed. I could complain to Google mais je pisse dans un violon. This appropriately musical idiom translates as I'd be pissing in a violin.

It's the best one I've heard from Claire in a while, and is the French equivalent of flogging a dead horse. Hence the two bone idle gees sunning themselves under some more of the diva's elegant ironwork.

Voilà Madame Fred, France's Queen of Crime

2011-07-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

I've always liked a good detective yarn, especially PD James or Dorothy L Sayers, so I'm grateful to girlfriend Claire for turning me on to France's own Queen of Crime, Fred Vargas.

Actually, Claire is steadily working her way through my complete PD James, which makes it a bit of a return match.

Apart from the fact that doing lots more reading in French is exceedingly character-building and generally good for me, Madame Fred can spin a enjoyable yarn with the best of them.

You will gather that in real life, Fred is a she, and also a professional medieval historian. Her pen name, of course, comes from the Humphrey Bogart character in that rather stodgy Hollywood saga, The Barefoot Countess.

I suppose Fred is about the equivalent of our own Ruth Rendell, being neither as venerable as PD James or as dead as Dorothy L Sayers.

Her suitably eccentric top flic is one Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, nondescript scruffy prong and all-round male slapper, but clearly a super-talented 'tec. He spends a fair amount of time out with the fairies, vaguely following even vaguer thoughts that no can make head or tail of, including himself. But naturally he nearly always gets his man.

The intermittent love of his life is the hapless Camille, to whom he is chronically unfaithful, without actually ever giving much thought as to why he inevitably behaves this way. Understandably, she then disappears for the next couple of books or so, causing him to pine in between murders. Latterly he seems to have acquired a couple of children, whilst remaining equally clueless as to how this might have come about.

Women-wise, he is usually on much safer ground with hyper-competent colleague Lieutenant Violette Retancourt, an exceptionally intelligent woman with a hidden heart of gold and the figure of an all-in wrestler.

Adamsberg also relies on loyal support from his deputy, Commandant Adrien Dangland, a single father of five, a formidable intellect and consummate sinker of white wine.

There's the usual cast of off-beat supporting characters, notably Les Evangelistes: Matthieu, Marc et Luc; three penniless historians who live in an old wreck of a house, la baraque pourrie, that they're supposed to be restoring in lieu of rent. The boys are usually up for helping with a bit of undercover work, always resourceful and generally all-round good value.

Just now, I'm head down in Fred's latest, L'Armée Furieuse. So far, a couple of people have apparently been struck down by supernatural horsemen in Normandy.

Meanwhile back in Paris a petty arsonist has been fitted up for the murder of a top industrialist, and Adamsberg has been threatened with the sack (as seems to be usual chez Madame Fred), if he doesn't solve the case in a week or so. The plot thickens. It's all rattling good fun.

Bloody summer ate my hanging baskets . . .

2011-07-04T13:58:00.001-07:00

It has to be said that so far this year, summer is, and continues to be, totally unreliable.

We spent most of June in a miserable gris anglais au château Thames Embankment, as dear old Rumpole might conceivably have put it.

Then the minute I nip off to Canet chez Claire, the sand is so hot that it burns my feet, and I come home of a Sunday evening to discover that the unforeseen heatwave has fried the hanging baskets.

There is no avoiding the fact that this pisses me off more than somewhat. The entire pocket paradise which is mon petit jardin chez Boulevard de La Pinouse, only consists of three jardinières and two hanging baskets.

Or to be strictly accurate, said baskets plus as many pots of assorted 'erbs as I can perch on the mini decking outside the front door, without precipitating mass destruction of earthenware.

The crap temps (putain de merde!!!?@**!! and other naughty mots français) has seriously distressed the 'erbs as well. Normally je me régale, I thoroughly revel even, in a fresh and vigorous supply of the wonderful herbes du sud.

That is to say, all that lovely, sunny, fresh stuff, alien to beleaguered Ongleterry unless you're a gardening genius: Basil, tarragon, marjoram, oregano . . . and . . . and . . . etc. You get the point.

This year, the 'erbs have merely sulked, while perversely you can't move for marauding armies of weeds, steadily strangling the surrounding countryside.

To date, I have just about managed to accomplish this year's modest goal of making a fresh version of that classic French combination, fines herbes. To prove my point, we see chervil, chives, parsley and tarragon, photogenically disposed about ye venerable chopping board.

I lobbed them into a chicken dish, and am still somewhat undecided about the outcome. The distinctive tang of tarragon seemed to kick the others into touch. I don't yet know quite what to make of chervil, which I've never had the opportunity to use before. It seems to taste rather like a feeble version of tarragon, whilst having certain coriandrical visual tendencies.

In fact the whole mix seemed merely to be a way to bulk out tarragon when you haven't got enough of it. Which was apt enough, given that only tonight (le 4 juillet, Mon bleeding Dieu . . .) did I finally have enough of the real thing to make my much belovéd chicken and mushroom à l'estragon.

I think I may have sketched out this recipe before, but quickly to recap:

If you fry up onions, garlic and chunks of chicken thigh in olive oil in an iron casserole . . .

Add tarragon, paprika, black pepper, veg stock cube, a dash of nutmeg and salt . . .

Chopped mushrooms, some water, and a generous slosh of white wine . . .

Bring to boil, cover then leave it to play with itself on a low heat for a couple of hours . . .

Uncover and simmer until sauce reduces to an agreeable thickness . . .

It tastes divine served with new potatoes, which you can dunk in the tarragon sauce during the final moments of culinary orgasm.

I often think that nutmeg, or muscade as they call it hereabouts, is a greatly underrated spice. You can bounce all sorts of other flavours off it. Not only against tarragon but against basil, with paprika and maybe a touch of chili for a classy ratatouille.

Or to broaden the flavour of a chili con carne, when mixed with paprika, especially when you're stuck for fresh chilis and have to make do with dried. Or against fresh thyme and marjoram in a good beef stew.

Talking of marjoram, it seems to be the one 'erb which has held its own this year; it's even given the weeds a run for their money.

Playing with toys? It's got to be a boy thing . . .

2011-06-24T06:32:00.000-07:00

Having recently paused to ponder on Silly Hat Syndrome, I was heard to opine that this was rather a Girl Thing.

Being a reasonably fair-minded person (except when ranting on about dogs, camper vans, eco light bulbs, and . . . and . . .), I thought I ought to redress the balance. Also I don't want Claire to hit me.

The pic bears witness to what is clearly a Boy Thing and a very serious business to boot: The Playing With of Toys. I was in the process of constructing a record player (See previous post on favourite vinyl) for mine and Claire's joint 50th birthday birthday party.

Persons of a house proud nature will be deeply shocked by the deck and LPs strewn all over the table, the sound desk on the chair and miles of cable all over the floor.

The resulting hi-fi was good for about 200 watts per channel, well enough to ensure permanent excommunication by the neighbours and a 9/10 Serious Toy Rating.

There is not the slightest doubt that this is an essential male need: I must increase my collection of Very Useful Musical Things, just as the golfer needs more bats and sticks or the camper van driver his Bolt-On Hyper Snail-Drive Transmission.

This is the only thing I have in common with either set of individuals. I wish I could deny it, but unfortunately I can't. We are all blokes and the logic is the same, even if our tastes are different.

And I'm afraid that when it comes to justifying the expense, us guys are far more hypocritical than the girls. When a woman buys that 80 quid hair-do she merely says it's worth it. She is of course wrong, but it' s her honestly-held belief.

Men usually apply their classic sense of economic priorities when the household is in dire need of essential but boringly non-toy items, such as car tyres or a new roof. In fact they buy the toy and then try in all dishonest seriousness to justify it.

For example, I just treated myself to a very classy little pre-amp for my oud (arab lute) and 12-string acoustic guitar. And why not? I do, in fact, earn some money as a guitarist, so it's not a toy, it's an investment. The one flaw in this argument is that on paying gigs, I'm invariably playing electric.

Yours unfaithfully, Ed

Revealed at last: The power behind the throne . . .

2011-06-24T05:13:00.002-07:00

Regular indulgers cannot fail to have noticed that the legendary Cafédefa plays an indispensable role in this erratic series of chronicles.

I have to say that in all my years in Ongleterry, I never happened upon another watering hole so rich in character, local intelligence, and the warm and generous spirit of human thingummy doo-dah etc, etc . . .

Thus I am thrilled after a mere two years' delay to introduce you to proprietor Marie, la reine de Fa and Dave le Philosophe, loyal consort to the same.

The rather fab pic is thanks to my mate Ian Harvey of Rocktastic Pix, who not only knows what he's doing, but also possesses a lens (Serious Toy Rating: 9.5/10) capable of penetrating the somewhat subterranean lighting.

He snapped Marie and Dave down at the café during mine and Claire's joint 50th birthday bash. We were both very grateful for their help in making it happen, so all credit where it is due.

I must admit Dave's title has caused me some soul-searching of late. Obviously he has to have one, it's that sort of blog. Who could imagine Dennis Sans Menace? It wouldn't be right.

He's been Dave the Underdog for a good long while, thanks to a conversation between me, him and Claire in which he was suffering from an overdose of all-female hierarchy, which included Mollie the grumpy and stinky pub dog. The trouble is that it's ages ago and he may not remember it.

Being as he was clearly born to ponder over a pint, on whichever side of the bar he may find himself, I've decided on Dave le Philosophe . . .

Talking 'bout my generation . . . and a couple of others

2011-06-24T05:13:00.001-07:00

You will have gathered that Claire and I have devoted much time lately to becoming officially decrepit.

In between waiting for bits to fall off, Claire also found a moment for a family party marking her 50th birthday.

This spotlights an essential difference between us. My family is small; hers is gigantic. I used to find this a bit overwhelming, but I think I've pretty much got it figured who's who these days.

There's a nice generational theme to this pic of Claire with her mum Francette and daughter Charlène. They're in the process of doling out slabs of the official cream cake; each naughty slice containing enough cholesterol to kill a horse.

In praise of the silly hat: A marriage made in le Midi

2011-06-17T06:30:00.000-07:00

One reason that some people come to the South of France is to get married.

I think this is mainly to avoid Soggy Bride Syndrome; this and the associated wind/rain/ snow/sleet/flood/fog/storm scenarios common in northern latitudes, especially Angleterre . . .

I was at just such a do last week, where the people were very sweet and it really was a whole lot of fun. Actually they were exceedingly lucky not to get frozen and drenched; we've had a very off and on summer so far. But in the end all was well.

Now there are those who argue that marriage is an outdated institution but I couldn't help noticing, whilst people-watching, that a wedding is a rare opportunity for pure display between the sexes.

We live in a very confused age regarding the signals given out by dress. We have endless arguments as to whether a sexy outfit means sexual invitation or intent.

A wedding seems to hark back to a simpler, almost primeval age: If you've got it, flaunt it. Because you can bet that the girl with the great legs is also the one with the highest heels and the shortest skirt, and so on accordingly for the spray-on trousers and the jaw-droppingly low-cut dress.

Now call me a sexist old twat (as you already have), but I think this is a bit of a girl thing. In fact any decent bloke should be content to shake the moths out of his BMD* suit, wash behind the ears and generally not try to steal any of the thunder.

OK, you could titivate things a bit with a flash tie or a neat buttonhole, but there definitely are limits. It's great to see the girls looking their best, and frankly it would be pretty damn dull if they didn't.

But the crowning glories are the silly hat and the eye-wateringly expensive hair-do: You know the sort of thing; eighty quid for a couple of snips and a dash of hair lacquer.

I always reckon it's a poor sort of world if a girl can't treat herself to a silly hat for a wedding. A head for hats is a talent just like for the skirts and the heels. It seems to run in our family. My sis always looks good in one.

And of course, hats are also a particularly satisfying form of self-expression for senior members of the party. I was best man for my mate Andrew a few years back and his dear old mum (well into her 80s) duly turned out in a magnificently OTT cloche affair. Noël Coward would have been gobsmacked.

*Births, Marriages and Deaths

Don't you just love it when a plan comes together?

2011-06-06T06:14:00.000-07:00

As you'll have gathered, I don't go round painting things (apart from fences, kitchens, the spare bedroom . . .) but there was also plenty of music pencilled in for Artistes à Suivre.

After months of rehearsals, and a series of frustrating setbacks, Les Malfonctionnaires finally got out to play the entire 40 songs-plus in our set.

Thanks are indeed due to all the lovely people (lots of them much younger than us . . .) who filled Les Prés en Bulles à Quillan and bopped until they dropped.

Lots of short, sharp songs and keep firing them off. That was our strategy from the moment we first started rehearsing the band. And it works . . .

More thanks are due to photographer Martin Castellan. The upper photos show Mark, Kate, Debs and Stan, with close-ups of Debs and Stan.

Personally, I was deeply thrilled not to be standing in the entrance to the toilets this time, (see previous ace rock report) and thus eligible to be in the pictures.

Actually I think it's a fab pic but I put that down to the photographer . . . perhaps one day I will be a guitar hero . . . if I can just stop dropping bum notes all the way through those nifty little four-bar George Harrison guitar breaks . . . we can all dream . . .

There are people who think that the much-missed George wasn't much of a lead guitarist. As it happens they are all wrong, a fact which hits me forcibly every time I make a mistake.

The main reason for this misunderstanding is that The Beatles were a vocal band with guitars unlike The Stones who were, and still are, a guitar band with singer. The truth of the matter is that George was underrated, understated and a damn good player, bless what may remain of his cotton socks . . .

*All photos copyright Martin Castellan 2011

As our Dave told Magritte: Ceci n'est pas un ashtray

2011-06-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

As Artistes à Suivre prolongs its weekend of unadulterated sogginess, I feel it necessary to fall back on Fa's own philosopher Dave the Underdog.

I should explain that Artistes à Suivre is an annual shindig in which 40 or so artists prop up their bits and pieces in halls, homes, gardens and any other suitable space in la haute vallée de l'Aude.

Un-artists like me get to trog around the hinterland, dutifully admiring and hopefully coughing up. This time we've got a super four-day faire le pont bank holiday weekend. Except it keeps pissing down.

Not wishing to un-jaunty this account, I thought I'd start with a quick re-cap of recent progress at the Cafédefa which cunningly took place avant le deluge.

Long-time followers of this most indefatigable of chronicles will remember that Dave is (normally . . .) the belovéd of Marie, proprietress and reine de Fa. Always a handy fellow, he's been working away at the art concréte himself, except this bit's mostly made of wood; to whit, the fab new terrace in the (nice and sunny) pic.

The observant will note that the aforementioned construction is delightfully set about with wooden troughs for plants, the only drawback being that the happy band of regulars at the CDF between them smoke about three million fags a day.

Hence the erudite legend applied to the planters in big red letters:

Ce n'est pas une pipe - Réne Magritte
Ce n'est pas un cendrier* - Dave et Marie

Well I thought it was great but, of course, had to point out that that the quote is "Ceci" and not "Ce". Obviously I only mentioned it because I'm a real clever dick pain in the butt sometimes . . .

*Cendrier = ashtray

A super scone and a cup of tea, but is it art darling?

2011-06-03T07:49:00.002-07:00

In this case, it is. I was, in fact, sorely tempted to abandon the pursuit of artistic perfection (all that Suiving of Artistes etc. . .), batten down the hatches, and curl up with a good book and imaginary crumpets or real hot buttered toast.

I was close to lighting a fire. In June? I cannot be serious, though actually I was. But in the end, I dragged myself out of the door and hied me unto Couiza where artist and fellow Malfonctionnaire Kate Hardy was exhibiting.

Under the circs, I'd be justified in cutting straight to the hot tea and deeply decadent scones with lashings of jam and cream, but really I ought to mention the paintings first.

I'm a big fan of Kate's current From A Train Window series. Her technique is to sketch rapidly the passing scene from a moving train, collecting her impressions into a composite image.

This painting is taken from a trip on our own haute vallée branch line from Carcassonne to Quillan, so it fills the bill rather well from the local point of view. Dear me, I am getting parochial . . .

Nonetheless, providing nosh was a smart move; thus preventing bedraggled art-lovers from expiring damply on the floor. We see Kate (right) and Sue, poised to dish out the cake, scones, quiche, tea and more tea. If a thing's worth doing . . .

Is it a bird? Depends on what you mean by . . .

2011-06-03T07:49:00.001-07:00

Still bursting at the seams with tea and scones, I nipped across the road to where another friend Vanilla Beer was showing at the Mairie in Couiza.

Nilz is exploring a completely new style at the moment so she had a very varied collection. I was particularly intrigued by the birdman image.

The multiple arm movements are modelled on my mate Stan playing the cello, though the instrument has become in thought only or even never existent. Does anyone play air cello? Sorry, I can't keep this pretentious art crit stuff going for more than a line or two . . .

It's our party and the judge's decision is vinyl

2011-05-31T08:29:00.000-07:00

On a hot (hopefully) Saturday night lurking ominously somewhere in the middle of next month, girlfriend Claire and I are throwing a bash at our well-belovéd Cafédefa.

This is because, by then, we will both be 50. In a sudden and possibly catastrophic burst of nostalgia, we decided to dig out our old vinyl albums, with a view to giving them an airing.

Actually, it was with some trepidation that I started to flick through a large pile of vintage record sleeves. Not only have my listening tastes moved on, but musically we all reached a state of arrested development when They abolished vinyl. Mind you, I understand it's been making a comeback ever since everyone decided that all digital recordings sound half dead and wholly similar.

I've dug out my copy of Deep Purple's Machine Head on account of it being the earliest album that I still possess. On the back of it is a small figure 5, marked in an early burst of teeny collecto-mania. I think I grew out of that by about number 11, which was probably something by Bob Dylan.

I still remember the disappeared other six of the first seven:

1) The Beatles: Oldies But Goldies
. . . flogged to my mate Andrew because he adored the Fabs.

2) Status Quo: On The Level
. . . flogged for being disgracefully unhip, also played to death when I only possessed two LPs. Being as the dear old Quo are still with us, I suppose today they'd be replacement hip.

3) Queen: A Night At The Opera
. . . flogged for being disgracefully pretentious. Also not enough Brian May in full rock mode; he's a great player.

4) Led Zeppelin: Physical Graffiti
. . . scratched the blasted thing when it was only two days old (five quid was a bloody fortune when I was 14 . . .). Replaced on CD as it remains a great album.

5) The Purps as previously mentioned. Being as I've pinched their cover for the pic, I ought to add that it's still brilliant . . . hope that's OK with you guys.

6) The Who: Tommy
. . . stolen. Can't imagine why as everyone I knew already had a copy. Perhaps I once knew a kleptomaniac who now has 23,684,525 vinyl copies of Tommy stacked up in his back bedroom? Did they sell that many? We did have a kid at school nicknamed Kleppie but he was more into laundering stolen pushbikes.

7) Wishbone Ash: There's The Rub
. . . disappeared. Still a mystery, and a shame because it's a lovely album and had to be replaced on CD. Fortunately I've still got the same band's immortal Argus, complete with wonderfully furry and gungey lo-fi mix.

I was worried that it was all going to be a bit samey as I was indeed an unrepentant bluesrocker in those days. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The first AC/DC Live? Turn it up to 11 and let's party . . .

Fortunately even back then I was showing vaguely danceable tendencies. There's the Motown 20th Anniversary Album, a double with loads of real blinders on it and (Thank you, Lord . . .) The Best of James Brown. So we will be able to bop after all.

Then there's my first reggae: Steel Pulse's Handsworth Revolution and Tribute to The Martyrs, also Ijahman's Haile I Hymn Chapter 1. This is not only notable for its gorgeous melodies. It was the only time I ever impressed anyone in a record shop by being cool enough to have heard of it. Being as I've only ever been cool about once in my life, I figure this must have been the moment . . .

These are classic furry and gungey albums. I never had the heart to buy them on CD; it wouldn't be right somehow. The same goes for live albums like Dr Feelgood: Stupidity and The Parkerilla by Graham Parker and The Rumour. This is ultimate furry and gungey. If your copy's too clean, place the naked vinyl on a gravel drive and run the car over it a few times until it sounds . . . just right. This will save you decades of spilt drinks and fag ash.

I'd also place the first Clash album in this category if some bastard hadn't nicked my copy. I bought it virtually new from a kid at school for two quid, thus marking another moment when I was accidently almost hip.

Like most skint kids of my generation, I was saved from buying too many duffers by sheer lack of cash. Thus I only have one archetype prog rock album, Genesis: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, because it was two quid brand new at a car boot sale, just after vinyl albums were ruthlessly stripped from the unhallowed shelves of WH Smith in Stafford.

Trying to make the pennies go further is how we all discovered market stalls. It's also how I discovered Joan Armatrading. I was never much into the girlie singer-songwriter thing but I've always adored JA.

I note that my copy of her live is marked Promotional copy: Not for sale. Some corrupt journo flogging off his review copies down the market? Surely not . . . mind you, I was a trainee hack once and the pay was crap.

There are traces of a youth never as mis-spent as I would have liked: The Best of The Faces and Bad Company's Straight Shooter . . . the first Rolling Stones LP which I bought for $7 in Chicago . . . 10cc's Sheet Music, still a class pop album . . .

Best of Slade and T Rex . . . perhaps just mementos of a glam rock childhood but still great bouncing-off-the-walls music . . . as is The Pogues: Rum, Sodomy and the Lash . . . there's hope for the party yet.

Clochemerle: an everyday story of amour et pissoir

2011-05-30T07:17:00.000-07:00

I have at last managed to get one of my all-time favourite progs on DVD: The Beeb's wonderful 1972 version of Clochemerle.

The original screening was naturally way past my bedtime but I caught up with it in the 1990s and read the book too. I even went in search of the locations, thus prompting my first visit to France.

Considering that I ended up living here, you might say that Gabriel Chevallier's genial saga of sex, wine, scandal, satire, hypocrisy and more sex has a lot to answer for.

Curiously Clochemerle seems to be better known to English francophiles these days than it does to the French. Girlfriend Claire enjoyed my English copy, having never read the original.

Obvious les anglais are always going to love a comic row about a toilet: we can never resist lavatory humour. The story starts when the left-wing Monsieur le Maire of Clochemerle-en-Beaujolais decides to further his political career by erecting a cast-iron urinal directly in front of the church, to the fury of the opposition.

I have to admit that the series has dated a little. The film is distinctly scratched and there are some strange accents. But it's still an ensemble piece containing many delightful things.

There's an impressive roll-call of English character actors including Cyril Cusack, Kenneth Griffith, Wendy Hillier and Hugh Griffith, who must have adored shooting on location, being, as he was, a legendary piss-artist.

However the producers made a wise decision in casting the Gallic and gorgeous Catherine Louvel (pictured) as Judith Toumignon, belle de Clochemerle. Male Beeb viewers probably didn't know what had hit them back in 1972, though I don't suppose they minded it coming back to hit them again for another eight episodes.

It has to be said that Mademoiselle Louvel's English sounds distinctly strange, but given that her unbelievably stupid and cuckolded husband François sounds like he comes from Glasgow, I think we can give her the benefit of the doubt.

Peter Ustinov's narration remains a joy; that wonderful mixture of apology, melancholy and aristocracy, at once rich but engagingly acerbic when a point has to be made. A bit like the wine really . . .

*I ought to drop in a plug for Messrs Stojo who coughed up the double DVD promptly for a mere eight quid.

In fact we're all going to be run over by a bus . . .

2011-05-25T07:00:00.000-07:00

I had barely finished the previous episode when I learned that dear old Harold, 89, had put the date of Rupture back to October 21.

There was a loose bead on his abacus apparently, or possibly a loose screw . . .

This is his new date for The End Of The World. Of course, I thought, he might get run over by a bus. That was when it hit me (the thought, I mean). This IS how it will End. We're all going to get run over by a bus.

It's as good a theory as any, even if I do normally support L'Equipe Bugarach. I was hoping to find a funky French bus to support my theory but the net let me down badly. The only pics I could find were a few manky old scrappers, parked in a field near Marseilles.

So I fell back on that legendary Beelzebus: The London Transport Routemaster. Actually it's a magnificent creature, and even the Zargatron spacecraft couldn't look more weirdly out of place, should you happen to find it prowling the slopes of Bugarach.

I hope the Press Association won't mind me borrowing their very nice pic, but it's not as if I'm getting paid for this and they did leave it lying around on the net.

Their Routemaster is a particularly voracious one and absolutely ideal for the job. It has already eaten Big Ben, apart from the indigestible spiky bit and may well be limbering up to do a Thelma and Louise straight into the long-suffering River T.

Normally I can't abide conspiracy theories but I thought I'd have to work this one up a bit if I'm going to get you to swallow it. I discovered that on 21 October 2010, students from Lock Haven University, Pennsylvania, ran a bus to attend the Rally To Restore Sanity in Washington DC. Getting warm, eh?

Then I noticed the Routemaster's number: 159. That's almost exactly the same as Harold Camping's age, except . . . more. Then I found out that the last Routemaster in regular service was a Number 159 when it made its Final Journey. It was 26 minutes late, which only adds to the sense of impending death. The Final Journey took place on 9 December 2005, which is just like 12/21 December 2011, except . . . earlier.

That has to be the clincher. I rest my case.

End of the world? Another load of anonymous bosh

2011-05-23T04:43:00.000-07:00

Another one bites the dust, eh? That's to say the latest predicted date for the End of the World.

Mr Harold Camping, 89-year-old doomraker, must be feeling sick as a parrot: It is not dead, nor has it ceased to be . . .

I have to say that I'm glad about this, not only for the undoubted pleasure of continued existence, but also because I'm backing our local team on this highly contentious issue (see previous post).

You may recall that our own outstandingly talented local loons, have already staked prior claim with a widely predicted almighty conflagration on top of our highest mountain Pic Bugarach on 12/12/2012. Or is it 21/12/2012?

Actually, I think it's hedging your bets and rather unfair not to make your mind up on the precise date, however local loyalty is a strong point with me. I'm not a big footie fan either, but I was nonetheless saddened when the dear old Potters, AKA Stoke City, from my native Staffordshire didn't win the FA Cup.

I'm keeping the flag flying and adding in the period atmosphere with a little help from Hell by Hieronymus Bosch. That's mostly because he's one of my favourite artists and it's a damned good excuse to use a decent pic.

Apart the benefits of another 18 months of reasonably certain existence here in France, an American End of the World would be too glitzy and commercial. It would all be sponsored and I have no desire to be Kentucky Fried in Hell (KFH), nor is the prospect of super-large extra fries appealing.

Armageddon would be wasted on Britain as well. For a start it would all have to be done on the cheap and we'd probably end up only lightly kippered rather than properly incinerated, in order to save money. Then it would have to be privatised so that all the saved money could given to the bankers, who would also have to be pampered with free share options for Eternal Damnation. There again, that bit might just work . . .

No, France is the place. Not only do we have a wonderful freaky mountain where the famed Zargatrons of Planet Thargs have hidden their spaceship, all ready to escape at the crucial moment, we also have French bureaucracy: l'administration française in all its glory.

This is, of course, all part of my cunning survival plan: Do you any conception whatever of how much paperwork that Total Global Oblivion would generate in France? Or how long that it would take to process?

By my reckoning, the whole event could be delayed not only beyond our lifetimes, but also those of our children, and our children's children, and our children's children's children. By that time, the fonctionnaire (or uncivil servant) who originally compiled Le dossier de la Fin du Monde would be long dead, buried and chewing the roots of the dandelions, as they say here.

Now we all know that, no fonctionnaire can ever deal with any matter which is the job of another. It's more than either of their jobs are worth. Le dossier would never be completed, approval would never be given. QED: La Fin du Monde would never happen. Saved!

Sceptical as I may be, I still like to spare a thought for our valiant loons eagerly waiting near Pic Bugarach. This is because I invented our pet aliens the Zargatrons of Planet Thargs; just my own little dash of colour on the Epic Canvas of Legend. Actually I'm rather proud of them.

The fascination of contemplation of deterioration

2011-05-21T10:31:00.001-07:00

Here we are back in Fa, the village ever content at the centre of the universe, the world spinning about its axis, so no change there . . .

The usual signs of summer are all present and correct. The bonking frogs are back in the Faby, their nightly crescendos more deafening than ever. A cool beer may once again be enjoyed on the sunny terrace of the Cafédefa.

Tomorrow we will be overwhelmed by hordes of bargain-hunters at the village vide grénier. I'm always vaguely alarmed at the prospect of people depositing huge piles of tat down at la batteuse (sort of big tin shed for outdoor events) and trying to fob it off on each other for hard cash. Still it's a harmless way to pass a pleasant Sunday so I'm being ludicrously over-critical. I may just succumb to a few "treasures" myself . . .

Once again there are fresh herbs outside my front door. Basil, tarragon, chervil, marjoram, thyme, oregano, chives . . . straight off the plant and into the dinner; you can't beat it. I'm trying to grow as many as possible this year, and I'm rapidly running out of room on le wooden decking très rustique which props up my pots.

Suddenly nothing happened again. I can never quite decide whether this a good thing or not. I suppose I've got all contemplative and philosophical having just passed the alleged milestone age of 50.

I'm not in bad nick apart from eyes, knees, shoulder, back, arthritis, amnesia . . . sorry, what was I on about just then? Here in our hot, happening band Les Malfonctionnaires, we had to cancel a gig due to a hernia op, though it's business as usual now. Cool, eh? Just how rock'n'roll is that!! Meanwhile I realised I was missing notes owing to the fretboard going blurred. Hey man, amazing drugs . . . er no, crap eyesight actually. NB Prospective bookers of the band should not worry: Once unleashed from our Nanny State-sponsored wheelchairs, we still rip it up like there's no tomorrow.

It seems to have taken me a couple of weeks to jot down a few thoughts about the afore-mentioned semi-century. I should really have reported it on the day, as your ace correspondent for this part of the world. But then again, what's the hurry?

Just to make the situation completely Claire . . .

2011-05-21T10:11:00.000-07:00

Never being one for a complicated life, I've always thought that one woman is quite enough so just now I'm feeling outvoted. If you actually wish to clone the girl or bloke of your dreams, then I suggest you visit the Salvador Dali museum in Figueras. Girlfriend Claire (pictured-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d) and I felt like a change of scene, so we legged it over the border to Spain. Being as it's only about half an hour away, I can't think why we don't go there more often.

I'm always in two minds about yer man Dali. The man's a total charlatan but an undeniably talented one. Whilst I doubt that there's a single sincere brush stroke in his entire oeuvre, he's also a virtuoso technician, unlike other charlatans that one might mention . . .

And all were lost in the path of the Mighty Finngrund

2011-02-13T13:09:00.000-08:00

Finngrund. Now there's a name to conjure with, to roll around the palate and savour even.

Here be the battle colours of the Mighty Finngrund, he who is said to have discovered America in 900AD, accompanied by 20 Viking longships and an undecided dog.

Actually I was kidding. Really it's a multi-coloured spotty shower curtain from Ikea, designed by somebody called Emma Jones.

However, I've long had the idea that you could dream up a super soap opera, based entirely on the wonderfully eccentric product names listed in the Ikea catalogue.

It would probably turn out to be a cross between South Park, Changing Rooms and Noggin the Nog. Now there's a relief; however gloomy the Nordic Saga, it couldn't possibly be as miserable as EastbloodyEnders.

The idea returned to me when girlfriend Claire expressed the desire to visit Ikea in Montpellier. Now this is a periodic girl thang so all decent chaps should be prepared to surrender gracefully to such a request on an occasional basis.

Have you ever tried to find Ikea in Montpellier? How can you possibly lose a giant blue and yellow thing, indelibly imposed on the skyline? Believe it or not, you can. It's just a case of whizzing interminably round a labyrinthine retail park, entirely devoid of useful signposts.

Frankly, I'd had have preferred to follow the Mighty Finngrund, because discovering America is, by comparison, a piece of piss. It stretches from pole to pole. Keep sailing west and you can't really miss it.

Beneath an unsuspected sun, moments of reflection

2011-02-13T13:08:00.000-08:00

You may well feel that this humdrum pic serves no useful purpose, apart from to celebrate a bright, sunny blue sky in February, still sometimes an astonishing state of affairs for anyone raised within the dim, dank shores of Ongleterry. Actually it makes a very important point; it shows nothing happening in Fa.

Nothing happens most days, save brief outbursts of traffic pandemonium at school time, and the enjoyable exchange of minor local intelligence and mellowed philosophy with Dave the Underdog at our well-beloved Cafédefa.

Thus I find myself with a quiet moment to reflect that I have lived nine full years in France and in Fa. How time has passed, at once infinitesimally slow and simultaneously with the speed of a demented tornado. Can it be nine years already?

It seems a very long time since I lived in England and I don't think that I could readily do so again. Just because you feel English in France, doesn't mean that you still do in England . . . at least not in the way you used to. Really there's no going back.

Somehow I've survived, still the right way up, despite a few ups and downs along the way. Mainly this is due to the many good friends about me, so I pause to make thoughtful if silent tribute.

I suspect that the calm will not last. There is a warning in the limpid pools of the languid Faby, practically stationary beneath the deliberate concrete of Le Pont de Fa. If it doesn't start bunging it down soon and hard, we're going to have a full-scale drought this summer.

Then there's a first class row brewing over the future of the dinosauric Fêtes de Fa; a four-day binge of booze, noise and various bands that we have seen too many times before, which inflicts itself upon us every August.

I don't wish to take sides myself. I like a good bop with the rest of them but the people who run these fêtes (largely holiday residents, though most of them claim an ancient ancestry in the village) seem determined to run the event whilst totally ignoring the views of those of us who actually live here. I can't help thinking that it's all going to end in tears sooner or later, but if you like a good scrap, then watch this space . . .

Still, at least we've got the End of the World to look forward to next year. Look on the bright side, it may not happen. Of course, it's a bit of a bore if you really want to be in on the big event and nothing does happen.

I've got a couple of updates in mind for the set-list. I always meant to include That'll Be The Day by Buddy Holly and The Crickets, whilst my old mate and one-time fellow garage band member Glenn proposes The End of the World As We Know It by REM.

Must admit that I'm really not an REM fan and it actually would be the end of the world if Les Malfonctionnaires had to play their songs, even if one of them would make a very nice car hire advert. Think about it . . .

Apocalypse now? Actually I'm free next Thursday

2011-02-01T10:25:00.000-08:00

Apparently the world is going to end on 12 December 2012. Or it may be 21 December 2012, presumably making the whole event a nine days' wonder. Assuming that total global catastrophe is indeed imminent, you may ask yourself what, if anything, you can do about it.

I am momentarily reminded of that legendary Home Office publication Protect and Survive, which advised what to do in the event of a nuclear holocaust. As I recall, you had to hide under the kitchen table, shut your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and count to 23,752,232,671,459 . . . by which time it was safe to come out.

However, in this case it seems you have to head for Pic Bugarach (see pic), our friendly neighbourhood highest mountain. According to an increasing number of esoteric types (or, if you prefer it, loons . . .), there are oodles of arguably amiable aliens living in a special chamber under the peak, who will leg it in their spaceship at the first sign of Armageddon.

Now, if you are very good, and mummy and daddy let you stay up late to watch the End of the World Show, there is a just a chance that the legendary Zargatrons of Planet Thargs will whisk you off to safety, somewhere the other side of Alpha Centauri.

Personally, I can't help feeling that there is rather a rash assumption here; that we are talking about a partial Armageddon, involving the mere termination of Planet Earth, rather than a total Armageddon, which would wipe out the entire Universe, including Planet Thargs.

How can we tell? Sometimes this worries me. Be that as it may, Pic Bugarach has a lot of cred in the Suitably Weird Places To Escape Armageddon Stakes. For a start its rocks are upside-down, with the new ones underneath the old ones - definitely a geological curved ball, as I understand it.

It looks strange too, as if some passing Zargatron had emptied a large bowl of grey custard over it, and let all the drips set solid. Seemingly, Jules Verne gained inspiration there for Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Steven Spielberg for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Nostradamus himself is reputed to have experienced cosmic thrills on Pic Bugarach.

Monsieur le Maire de Bugarach, the nearby modest village of 189 peaceable and relatively normal souls, is understandably peest erf at the prospect of being overrun by anything up to up 10,000 loons. Usually, the only genuinely bizarre thing about Bugarach is the way that all on-coming drivers whiz round the many blind bends, on the wrong side of the road. Too much waccy baccy, methinks.

However, ringside seats for Dec 2012 are already being sold on the net. Monsieur le Maire wants the army on the alert to deal with any such inundation by crétins cosmiques, and I can't say that I blame him.

We of Les Malfonctionnaires take a more robust, dare I say commercial, view: We'd just love to play the End of the World gig, and the resulting album, Almost Live, could be a massive hit. All real rock stars make shedloads more money when they're dead. It would be nicer to be a live millionaire than a dead legend but you can't have everything. I suppose you just have to lie back and think of posterity.

I've just run through some possibilities for the set list:

*Ain't No Mountain High Enough - Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell

* Don't Believe A Word - Thin Lizzy

* We Gotta Get Out of This Place - The Animals

*Fly Me To The Moon - Frank Sinatra

*Fireball, Space Truckin' - Deep Purple

* Gimme Shelter, Get Off My Cloud - The Rolling Stones

* Life on Mars - David Bowie

* Close to the Edge - Yes

* My Apocalypse - Metallica

* Armageddon It - Def Leppard

* Fool on the Hill, The End - The Beatles

* The End - The Doors

* Until the End of the World - U2

* End of the World - The Carpenters

Should the show unfortunately Keep On Running (Spencer Davis), then it has to be The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again

Taking a leafy look at Fa as boy snaps with new toy

2011-01-23T12:57:00.000-08:00

I have to say it's not often that I get a really posh new toy to play with. Fa is hardly the doyen of manic consumer society. To be honest, if you want to survive long-term in deepest rural France, the best advice is: Don't spend any money you haven't got . . . and don't spend any you have got either . . .

However the moment has arrived when I, a mere ten years behind everyone else, finally own a digital camera. In pic terms, this hallowed chron has only dragged itself to a computer screen near you thanks to a generous loan by Martin Castellan of Sud Media Images. But really the old lead slug had to be bitten. I had to get one of my own.

Thus it was that, in a state of rabid excitement, I lay in wait for Monsieur le Facteur, alias the postie, in fervent hope that he would be in toy-bringing mode. Actually Le Facteur de Fa is a bit of a star. It's always been the same guy in the nearly nine years I've lived here. He knows exactly who everyone is and where they live. Such is unprogress and long may it continue.

Actually it's also a good idea to be in when he's delivering anything bigger than will fit in the letterbox. Because if you're not there, he will take it away again . . . If that happens, frankly it's a disaster. This other bit of unprogress is not fun. At all.

Your longed-for cadeau will get lost in the Couiza-Espéraza trou noir de la poste and may never be seen again. It gets taken back to Couiza, then sometime the next day, it gets taken back to Espéraza. Which is where it started out from before le facteur tried to deliver it in the first place. After it had previously been delivered from Couiza, also the first time round, whence it had been delivered from the outside world.

Confused? They are. One time the woman on the counter at Espéraza hunted high and low for a parcel of mine, which I eventually noticed sitting in full view on the shelf directly behind her . . .

They only have a post office in Espéraza so that they can shut it. The last time the worthy fonctionnaires de la Poste went on a national one-day strike, Espéraza stayed shut for two, just to be on the safe side.

However Monsieur le Facteur did indeed have my new camera, delivered in the magnificent January sunshine. By the time I'd eyed the package suspiciously, prodded it with a pointed stick, charged the batteries and driven 20 miles to Limoux and back for a memory card . . . il pleuvait comme une vache qui pisse, that is to say, it was persistenting down.

So I couldn't take any fab new pix for three days. But eventually Claire and I got out for a walk up on the hills around Fa. It was still hazy but did yield this agreeably dreamy tapestry of rooftops spied between the winter bronzéd leaves . . .

It's John, Paul, George, Ringo and Kevin

2011-01-18T11:38:00.000-08:00

Thanks to being a member of the Fab Five (see previous post), I can actually play about half a dozen Beatles songs. It's only taken me about 35 years to learn A Hard Day's Night. Still you get there in the end. My career as a rock star started humbly. Then it carried on like that. Aged 14, I bought my first acoustic guitar off a couple of girls who lived a few streets away. It cost a fiver and was bloody awful.

I persevered. About a year later I met a rather attractive woman at a party who was miles too old for me. I longed to get off with her and didn't, but she did sell me my first electric guitar, a Jedson (never heard of them since . . .) Telecaster copy for twenty quid. It was slightly better.

Being flat-broke but moderately enterprising, I nicked the home-made transistor amplifier and speaker that originally constituted the left-hand channel of my father's exceedingly eccentric hi-fi outfit (Sixties-speak for home music centre). My dad was always one of those people who spent hours building reams of electronic spaghetti and occasionally had to buy a record to see if it worked.

Incidentally, the right-hand channel was a valve amp, partially working at 400 volts or so, with no case so that small children could shove their fingers into it. It sat in the middle of the lounge floor. The speakers were beautifully matched. One was two feet high, the other four feet high.

Thus armed, I was ready to rock and joined a couple of garage bands, one at home and one at school. Usually I had no transport so I pushed the ensemble to rehearsals, anything up to two miles in a wheelbarrow. I must have been fit in those days.

At school there was my mate Andrew on piano and my mate Glenn also on guitar. Sometimes there was our mate Benny who made an awful lot of random noise so I figure he must have been the drummer.

Andrew was a Beatles nut so this is how I first met that dreadful tome, The Complete Beatles Songbook. Using it, we struggled through A Hard Day's Night and various others. They sounded nothing whatsoever like The Beatles.

I think I did eventually manage a passable version of Yellow Submarine, which is a really hip song if you're aged about six. We couldn't understand why it was so difficult and decided that it must be our fault for being crap.

Thus I gave up on the Fab Four and learned a load of Stones songs instead. This was much easier; you just had to listen to their live album and play each song about 500 times to write the lyrics out. We always had to do that back then.

It's so incredibly easy today. For Les Malfonctionnaires, it took about five minutes to find the words and chords to A Hard Day's Night on the internet. It took about another moment to put the song in its proper key of G, and not C as it said in the book. Add in the modified but simple enough chords, also cunningly not mentioned in the book, and Hey Presto! it sounds just like A Hard Day's Night. Not really rocket science.

As it happens, girlfriend Claire wanted a sing-along during our French family Crimbo and, for the first time in 35 years, I found myself gazing at The Complete Beatles Songbook, her brother in law's copy. And it's still a bloody nightmare: The words aren't lined up with the music. And neither are all the great streams of chords, with nothing to mark where the verses, choruses and middle eights begin and end. Not to mention songs put into the wrong keys for no good reason.

It's hard to know so long after the event whether the book was laid out like this to make The Beatles look incomprehensibly clever or whether the typographer was just unbelieveably incompetent. But even though we were young and crap, it's nice to know that it wasn't all our fault.

Band's debut triumph despite recurring feesh motif

2011-01-02T09:46:00.000-08:00

Yup, they're back: it's The Return of the Feesh. Here you see most of the members of the newly-formed Les Malfonctionnaires valiantly avoiding death by guppies.

I would imagine that the normal purpose of the feesh is to entertain the customers of Café de la Gare, Quillan, by looking cute and slightly stupid.

Their secondary mission, which they chose to accept, is to occupy 85% of the band's playing space, the other 15% being taken up by four giant fridges, the dismembered debris of an internet café and the entrance to the toilets.

Thanks to photo correspondent Martin Castellan of Sud Media Images, you can see singer Kate seemingly hypnotised by malignant neon tetra, bassist Stan and drummer Mark suavely unaffected by marine interference and singer Deb blatantly defying the Lure of the Feeshness. Unconspicuous by his absence is the guitarist. C'est à dire, moi.

This is partly because I always look crap on photos and partly because I spent the whole of New Year's Eve standing in the access to the lavatories.

It's a previously little-known fact that playing rock'n'roll causes the entire audience to be dying for a pee; especially during guitar breaks and other twiddly bits where you don't want some hopeless incontinent barging into you every ten seconds.

Thus it was that I saw in 2011 as Rhythm Toilet Attendant. But I won't let this worry me. We had a great night belting out The Beatles, The Stones, Eddie Cochran, Etta James and many more. And so did those who were listening and bopping to us, even if I do say it myself.

Our old mate Rod joined us on guitar, Kate and Mark's son Ezra made his public debut on drums and girlfriend Claire added une jolie touche française with her version of Claude Nougaro's Jazz et le Java.

The band played, the wine flowed and the nosh was noshed, even if ours was stone cold at 1am . . . As it happens, I' ve never previously had someone try to serve me dinner while I've got a guitar in one hand and, erm, a bit more of the guitar in the other, somewhere in the third verse of Can't Buy Me Love. Still it's all part of life's rich thingummy doo-dah.

Actually this was the band's first gig after two months of serious rehearsal, so now we're up and running. If you've got the party, we've got the sounds. Bonne année à tous!

It's un-Canet: Gales that wail on a sub-zero shore

2011-01-02T04:06:00.000-08:00

Actually that headline's a complete lie, there's nothing uncanny about storm-force winds in Canet.

What the slightly reedy billiard table which is greater Perpignan may fortunately lack in snow, it more than makes up for in wind-speed.

The dear old Kangoo practically capsized every couple of minutes or so during my return home from the festivities. We all stayed firmly indoors over the holiday weekend, apart from Claire nipping out for a fag now and then; such is the lunatic power of nicotine . . .

Canet beach always manages to bluff it on these occasions. Apart from the fact that there is only one person out having his dog sand-blasted, you'd never know from the pic that there was anything amiss. Mind you, if the dog is doing what I think it's doing, it bloody deserves it.

Ca suffit à geler les couilles d'un singe en laiton . . . Work it out, singe means monkey. Must remember to ask Claire for a real French idiom.

All this overdose of weather has got me back in cooking mode: I got a bit of a bargain on some neck cuts of lamb so what better moment to rediscover Lancashire Hotpot. Or should that be Ragout à la Lancashire?

Actually the true inspiration for this dish was Claire finding me a cast-iron casserole in a brocante for a wonderfully bugger-all €15: These things usually cost a fortune and this one's brilliant, especially if your oven's crap, like mine. I just use it on the hob.

Ragout à la Lancashire

* Peel and slice up three or four potatoes. I believe that strictly-speaking Lancashire Hotpot should have just spuds, but I also use peeled and chopped carrots or cabbage etc, according to what's available on the market.

* Slash up a couple of onions and two or three cloves of garlic and fry in a splash of olive oil in the casserole.

* Add your neck cuts of lamb and fry for a minute or two until the meat browns over.

* We still seem to have fresh thyme and marjoram in the pots outside my house. Add several springs of each, plus a stock cube and a mug of water. Substitute dried herbs if you have to, but using fresh really is worth the effort.

* Add a teaspoonful of paprika, quarter of a teaspoonful of nutmeg and a sprinkle of freshly-ground black pepper.

* Add all the chopped veg and enough water just to cover, stir the lot together.

* Replace the casserole lid. Bring to boil and allow to simmer vigorously for about ten minutes, then reduce to a low flame or low setting on an electric hob and cook for about an hour and a quarter, or until meat and veg are tender. Adjust salt to taste. Add a little water from time to time if needed. If your oven actually works, you could always use a ceramic casserole and bung it in at the equivalent temperature.

* Serve with slices of your favourite good quality bread.

Crusty old cynic hoist on his own Bah! Humbug!

2010-12-26T02:37:00.000-08:00

It has to be admitted that I was recently heard to speak slightingly of sprouts, to denigrate the fragrancy of parsnips, even to disregard them in a cavalier, nay contemptuous manner, as they lay comatose within the hallowed crib which is Canet market. The fact is that I have just passed a Crimbo more traditional than for many a year chez la famille de girlfriend Claire.

There were serial tournaments of pool, invasions by giant jigsaws and a hotly-fought contest of Monopoly. Much to my surprise, I almost won, despite having last played in about 1969, when I was aged eight and totally crap at it.

For readers suffering mental ossification, it should be noted that Monopoly has gained all sorts of new rules to make it hip, up to date, à la mode etc. They were all explained to me very quickly and in French. I can never get my head round the written rules of games in any language so I didn't understand a single word . . . You have been warned. Passing Go and copping the 200 spons is not the simple matter it used to be.

The French don't go in for turkeys but our table of 14 dined handsomely on a couple of capons. As I understand it, to make a capon, you take a male hen and do strange things to its bits, which cause it to be become very large, much as when you perform similar perverse rituals on a tom cat.

Be that as it may, it's a effective enough strategy producing plenty of meat, a lot tastier than yer average supermarket turkey. By dint of adding masterful touches of foie gras, champagne and in particular a truly awesome boudin noir (AKA black pudding), various fine repasts were composed. Monsieur Pickwick, le réformé Monsieur Scrooge et tout les autres charactères de Monsieur Sharl Deeckeen would have been proud of us.

Thanks to my dear sis, for whom the eternal thrill of trad Christmas has never dimmed, the Liquorice Allsorts, the choccy money and the inevitable poodeeng plus Bird's Custard were all in place.

I've never quite worked out why but le Christmas poodeeng anglais seems to enjoy a quite extraordinary mystique among les français. They're never quite sure what it is, but seem convinced that the poodeeng sacré must be a solitary astounding example of English culinary genius. This is all the more difficult to understand, given that they still tend to think of us anglytypes as complete barbarians in matters even remotely culinary.

Evidently while there is still poodeeng de Nöel, there may be some faint hope for us.

The great paper mystery explodes: Chronic bag failure

2010-12-19T08:03:00.000-08:00

Paperwork? Vraiment, ce n'est pas mon truc. I am the first to admit that filing isn't my forte.

Here you see the ultimate in desk-top filing systems: The Mark One Intermarche Two-Bag. Well, it actually is on a desk-top or at least my dining table pretending to be a desk-top. It does however have one overriding virtue. Everything is in one or other of the bags. I know it must be in there because it can't be anywhere else . . .

Naturally I, like everyone else who lives in France, never dare throw any paper away. This is in case officials dealing with such matters as money/tax/rates/cars/the mairie/national insurance/planning/insurance/family allowance/travel tickets/BMDs/your late great grandmother's inside leg measurement lose your dossier and insist that you send it them all again . . . so that they can lose it all again.

Without wishing to be unkind to l'adorable belle France, why is a country that so truly adores paperwork so bad at doing it? We've had a small blitz of such occult but perfectly normal and par for the course happenings in Fa lately:

Victim A was sent two completely different bills for the tax foncière (rates) for a house she no longer lives in, and thus didn't owe any tax on in the first place.

Victim B wondered why a decision was so slow over her home loan application. The bank eventually admitted that nothing had been done on her dossier because . . . they had lost it.

Victim C (me, actually) received a demand for a series of documents that I had omitted to send (translation: that we have lost but we want to cover our arses by pretending you forgot to send them). Actually they're talking about those bits at the bottom of the form that you're supposed to send back. Well you must have 'em because I sent 'em . Curiously the same office didn't manage to fail to cash the cheques that accompanied the documents. Odd isn't it?

It was whilst telling myself firmly that I must graduate to something more efficient than The Mark One Intermarche Two-Bag, that the truth came to me, in a blinding moment of revelation: All over France, all these offices keep everybody's paperwork in supermarket bags.

Imagine those wonderful national insurance people and their Mark Five Carrefour Sixty Million Bags and Counting, with chronic Intermarche floppy bag drive failure. It has to be the answer.

NB: I reflected further on this matter and decided that in fact each office has only one gigantic supermarket bag, the size of a black hole and with similar characteristics. And all the pieces of paper have to be in there. Somewhere . . .

French left gueule-frappé by wave of Sprout Attacks

2010-12-19T08:02:00.000-08:00

What the French is for gob-smacked, I have no idea, so it might as well be gueule-frappé.

Only a day after bona fide parsnip sightings (alias les panais) on Canet market, I personally witnessed this conspiracy of sprouts blatantly lurking with intent to baffle passing personnes françaises.

I'm not sure quite what it is about either of these vegetables that sends a certain type of anglais into a weeping frenzy of nostalgia, especially during the festulent season.

I suppose there may be a valid reason why dear old Crimbo should be irretrievably ruined by the absence of pointy white things and little green balls. Must admit, I can't see it myself.

To be honest, the English take on the biggest fest of the year has always puzzled me: Shut all the pubs, exclude your friends, lock yourself up with your relatives and do strange things to sprouts.

Obviously it's legal within the privacy of your own home . . . but it's not surprising that les français often think we're peculiar. They might just have a point.

Of course, you do get genuine moments of cross-cultural misunderstanding, such as when a local Monsieur related to me his first experience of English heavy-duty Christmas cake. "How is it possible to eat such a cake all during one day?" he demanded incredulously.

I gently explained, that said cake would already have been festering to itself for at least one month, and could easily be eaten gradually over the next two or three . . .

'Tis the season for amnesia, dah-di dah-di dah, etc

2010-12-09T02:33:00.000-08:00

Over the nearly nine years that I have lived in Fa, mes comrades français have become distinctly more enthusiastic about Christmas.

When I first came here, things didn't seem to get going until well into injury time on Déc 23, just about in time for le Réveillon on the night of Déc 24, which is, of course, the official French big one.

Being of the antique persuasion that believes the whole Yule thang should start not before Advent, I was really quite happy with rediscovering traditional and non-commercial attitudes toward the great feast.

Personally, I think the right moment is when the first little door of the calendar has been opened, and the cassocks at your friendly neighbourhood cathedral have turned the appropriate shade of purple. This is possibly austere by modern standards.

However, being also irretrievably anglais, and therefore used to Christmas starting in July, French total pre-Crimbo secrecy used to throw me a bit.

Seeing not a trace of fevered preparation, I'd totally forget the whole business until: Oh buggeur! Panique! C'est la semaine prochaine! and I'd already missed all the last posting dates to Ongleterry.

Over the years however, mes amis have caught up with Crimbo while I just can't seem to shake off Seasonal Amnesia. This year it came as a shock to see a String up a Santa (see The Blog of Christmas past), hanged in customary gibbet-like manner as early as Novembre 29. Just when I thought it couldn't get worse on the noxious D118 to Perpignan . . .

Only two days ago when I'd still done bugger all, I suddenly had to swerve to avoid the aerial deco wagon sur le main drag into Espéraza (top pic), and was forcibly reminded of the festivities inexorably bearing down on me.

In this heightened state of consciousness, I quickly noticed that the good ladies of Fa had put aside their plant pots and were busily adorning le pont de Fa (AKA: A bridge too Fa) with tinsel and sundry other baubles.

Not to be outdone, nor to fail in doing their bit, Dave the Underdog has strapped a gigantic pine tree to the wall of the legendary CafédeFa. He collected this magnificent free-range specimen from his ancestral estate, hidden deep in the hills above deepest, darkest curmudgeonly Rouvenac (neighbouring village, see blogs and sériales insultes, previous).

The tree is nearly three metres tall and Dave's only method of transport is his long-suffering 2CV, affectionately known as Mimi. He brought le sapin de Nöel back to Fa, projecting an unfeasibly long way out of the sunshine roof. I deeply regret not having been there to see him do it . . .

Here's one I prepared earlier - The DIY Pollack

2010-12-09T01:59:00.000-08:00

Regular readers of this well-belovèd chron will have twigged that gawping at seriously good pictures is one of my favourite spectator sports.

I find it deeply satisfying that I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to be an artist myself and am content merely to appreciate. After all, if people can be bothered to do the paintings etc then someone else has to do the looking at them; it's only fair.

I have a lot of time for dear old Jackson, much as he may have been completely off his trolley. This gives me certain logistical problems in that all the real Pollacks live some hundreds of miles away and I am about €20 million short of the funds to buy one.

However I couldn't help remarking on the fact that, when you get up close, nature doesn't do a bad job of imitating an action painting. Knowledgeable botanists will have noticed that the Pyrenean silver birch involved decided to lie down for a rest during picture-editing.

I suppose it's one way to solve the parking problem

2010-12-01T13:25:00.000-08:00

After all, if you can't find anywhere to stick the old jalopy, why not just lob it on the deck of your boat?

The vehicle in question is fun too, the kind of clockwork car you'd find in a fleek comique par Jacques Tati. Must admit that I haven't a clue what make it is, though obviously a classic in its own eccentric way.

I think it's obligatory to be mildly odd or at the very least a tad bohemian to qualify as a houseboat owner on the Seine. Perhaps you have to fill in a form claiming to come from a long line of loons, tracing your lineage back to Louis XIV? Then you send in the form, they lose it and you send in again two or three times. All water under the bridge, I suppose . . .

There is an enduring tradition of strangeness relating to water-borne transport and Paris. Take the Canal de Nivernais. They built it as an emergency measure after the capital ran out of firewood during an exceptionally bad winter in 17 something. Responding brilliantly to the crisis, the canal opened bang on time . . . 60 years later.

It makes a wonderful walk of a sunny autumn Sunday to stroll up the river, maybe starting opposite the Eiffel Tower and wandering until your feet give out; in our case just past Notre Dame.

Shock as Président Pompidou admits Pöang fetish

2010-12-01T13:01:00.000-08:00

Keeping the old hawk-like optic mercilessly trained on the world around me, I've previously observed that homesick anglaises just love to seek refuge and solace in IKEA at Toulouse. OK, so IKEA's Swedish which makes it a bit of a non-sequitur logically speaking, but it's nonetheless true that a good wallow among the Ektorps and Grundtals does seem to blow away the blues.

Me, I've always had a bit of a thing about Pöang armchairs. They're a seriously elegant and effective design. IKEA always claim it's a modern classic and, lo and behold, I've discovered that it's true.

Wandering happily through the permanent collection of modern art at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, I practically tripped over the daddy of all Pöangs: An original by the Scandinavian designer Bruno Mathsson from 1943. A true moment of anorakismo.

Celebrating la belle vie des huîtres : A cautionary tale

2010-12-01T12:10:00.000-08:00

I like to dwell from time to time on those little details which colour our life here in la belle France and make it what it is. As the calendar goes round each year, I'm trying to catch up with them all.

This time it's la saison des huîtres so naturally the pic shows a dozen of Leucate's finest plus accompanying chilled white wine and segments of lemon. Actually there are eleven of the finest and one rogue . . . but more of that later.

There are extensive oyster beds on the coastal lagoons along the coast east of Perpignan right over to Montpellier. You can get a dozen from about €4.50 compared to about £12 on the net in England. And that's the way it should be. Oysters have been a cheap and valuable food source since Roman times. It's only in the last 70 years or so that pollution and over-fishing have made them a luxury item.

I can never suppress the admittedly smug bastard sense of unholy glee that anyone can afford them here. It must be the old égalité et fraternité coming out in me. Unfortunately this time I got my comeuppance, or to be precise, throwuppance.

There are certain rules for the avoidance of a duff oyster; notably you should always throw away any with a loose or open shell. Now all of these seemed even tighter than usual while digging them apart with the special oyster knife or spike.

Incidentally, the spike itself is well worth buying. There are few better ways to run a sharp kitchen knife straight through your hand than to slip whilst trying to prise open a particularly recalcitrant marine bivalve.

Actually there was one duff one in the dozen. Of course, you only need one . . . and guess who got it. Being unwell à cause des huîtres is rightly notable as an experience of extreme violence; a 10.5 on the Hughie and Ralph scale.

Much as I enjoy them, I think I shall be taking a modest sabbatical. But don't let me put you off. Les huîtres are a great tradition here and you have to be unlucky to get a bad one. Bon appetît!

Just when you thought it was safe to come out . . .

2010-11-29T04:30:00.000-08:00

I've previously hinted that my principal excuse for unblogness of late is that I was writing a novel. Matters have reached the point where I've decided to unleash a couple of chapters on unsuspecting readers of this time-honoured and distinguished chronicle. The story starts with a bloke who wakes up every day in a different time and place and kind of rambles on from there for 70,000 words or so, each of them lovingly hand-crafted and personally selected by individually-etched virgins, blah, blah, etc, etc, hem-hem.

I'm not being so rash as to clog up le blog space sacré with the aforementioned masterpiece but if you like to follow the link, you can check out a couple of chapters of The Reluctant Trilogy. Any fervent praise, blistering brickbats or even constructive crit gratefully received as it would be extremely helpful to know what anyone makes of it.

Ta in advance, Eddie

Let's get moody and evocative dans les rues de Paris

2010-11-08T08:22:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that there are moments when even living in the Centre of the Known Universe, AKA Fa, does induce a certain stir-craziness. Moments when I need to seek yer actual kulcher, the zest and pace of city life etc etc.

This is when it's good to spend quelques jours à Paris, a city I am fast coming to love and actually to know rather better than I know London. So thanks to kind invitations from some very nice friends of girlfriend Claire, we braved the slings and permanent grèves of the outrageous SNCF and wizzed off up there.

They adore grèves on the SNCF, think how frustrating life must have been for them before the invention of the railway. Actually strikes in France are not all bad; they tell you that all is as it should be in the world. If they ever stopped, there really would be something wrong . . . Still we got there and back.

Particularly intriguing on the way up was the presence of no less than six guards, not one of whom checked any of the tickets. On the way back one lonely valiant operative faithfully carried out his appointed task, though his compadre on the drinks trolley was deeply unmotivated, prompting severe caffeine deprivation on the slow bendy bit, just this side of Limoges.

I seem to be lucky with Paris. The weather was good again and all the Parisians we met were friendly and polite, in complete contravention of their notorious stereotype. We managed to wander straight into Notre Dame without queuing at all so the pic is, I hope, a reasonably unobvious one of said famous landmark.

It's years since I did any moody, evocative black-and-white photography so it was rather fun to discover that I can fake it on my picture editor. As it's only a couple of buttons, I can only conclude that I must be terminally thick not to have noticed the facility before. I also love cropping pix dramatically deep and narrow. So that's what I did with this one.

It Came From Somewhere Else 2: The Tin Dinosaur

2010-11-08T07:39:00.000-08:00

In straightened times, both of pockets and jackets, it never ceases to amaze me what the powers-that-be can find to spend money on. I have remarked on this before and now I am provoked to do so again.

It has to be said that rival Quillan set the pace some months ago with its instant classic, the kitsch tin feesh complete with pretend waterfall on the roundabout outside Carrefour (see blog entry, previous).

Not to be outdone, Espéraza has hit back with an absolute masterstroke, a fabulous fabrication in polished steel, Dolores the Amazing Tin Dinosaur. Shopping trips to Intermarche will never be the same again.

Actually I suspect that this lovingly-crafted waste of money was partly put there to paper over another more yawning gap in somebody else's financial sanity. Only a few years back they spent a huge amount of time and money hacking a mountain to bits to provide room for a roundabout serving Intermarche, various other businesses and the local EDF leccy depot.

The EDF received a magnificently extravagant slip-road for their exclusive use. Now one end of the slip-road has been blocked off and a stout chunk of crash barrier installed, together with delightful Dolores and some landscaping, presumably to pretend that none of this ever really happened. Well, I believe them . . .

Actually, as local readers will know, the dinosaur theme is not entirely spurious. They do dig real dinosaur bits and pieces out of the hillside up the road at Campagne-sur-Aude, and bung them in the dino museum in Espéraza. Some species are even exclusive to l'haute vallée. I'm quite a fan of said museum, largely because its dinosaurs are genuine. Which of course begs the question of why you have to waste money on a fake one, especially as I've just noticed that it looks like it's on crutches . . .

C'est la saison des things that grow on trees

2010-10-24T08:50:00.000-07:00

At last, the return of the blog; Once again I must tender certain apologies for a debatably irksome lapse in the dear old chronicle.

This is not because I've been terminally bone idle, I may add, though that's a convincing enough reason.

Actually I've been trying to write a novel, hence the shortage of time to beat the keyboard to death for other reasons, however pressing.

But I cannot help noticing how full autumn delivers so richly on its promise. The suitably delightful pic shows girlfriend Claire jamming in the fig factory. The fact is that nature doesn't half come up with the cadeaux at this time of year.

We've had hundreds of figs, buckshee, gratis and for nothing; both the luminously ripe, purple couilles de pape (alias the Pope's bollocks as they're irreverently known here), and also the tangy green figs; firmer, a little less liquid but equally sweet and delicious.

For some reason no-one seems to want them but us which, given that the dried ones are a princely €6 a packet down at Intermarche, is just a tad bizarre. The bowlful here ended up as half a dozen pots of confiture de figues, and dashed good it is too. Obviously there's a limit to how many you can eat fresh in a day, figs being notably good for the system and all that. Alimentary, my dear Watson.

We also couldn't resist a foray in search of les chataîgnes, or sweet chestnuts. These grow in their billions but a few kilometres away. In days gone by it was difficult to grow cereals en haute vallée de l'Aude so they used to make chestnut flour. This is how we ended up with great woods full of chestnut trees. Nuts for flour, wood for fires and building.

Wander through the woods, and the sense of fertility is amazing, there are ripe chestnuts everywhere. They're even falling on your head; round spiky husks, raining down from the trees, bursting open to reveal three nuts, usually two good big ones and a little thin one like a packing piece.

If you're feeling flush and lazy, you can buy them at €5 a kilo on the markets, but when you can collect half a bucket for the modest expenditure of half an hour and a pleasant potter in the leaf litter; why waste your money?

A man must have his shed (with apologies to Arthur)

2010-08-25T13:01:00.000-07:00

In these gory days of ever more gross and degenerate lard wagons, I could not help being delighted, thrilled and even entranced by the man who decided to take his garden shed on holiday.

What more perfect antidote could there be to huge, white horrible camper things than this transport of delight hailing from the département du Cher in northern central France?

Just imagine the conversation: "Chèrie, I cannot bear to leave mes bégonias adorables, they must come with us en vacances!"

Being anglais, I had to empathise with this beleaguered creature, who could not, even for one day be deprived of his precious refuge, far from the madding female crowd, from tea, from doilies, and fêtes de Ware de Tupper . . .

I actually went to the trouble of trailing the shed for several kilometres down the detested D118 to Perpignan in the hope of girlfriend Claire getting a decent snap.

As you can just about see, the wooden body is roped down onto the trailer with tension straps, so I figure it really was uprooted from its quiet little spot près de la compost heap au fond du jardin and whizzed off to double as a beach hut au bord de la mer. C'est le retour d'Arthur Jackson des deux abris!

* Désole à Monty Python . . .

In talking of castles, lentils and lard wagons . . .

2010-08-22T03:12:00.000-07:00

So castles made of sand/fall into the sea/ eventually . . . by James Marshall Hendrix, if I'm not mistaken. It's good to remember that our beloved Jimi was also a wonderfully laconic singer and a very poetic lyricist. Many rock fans tend to be dazzled by all the geetar pyro and forget the rest.

It has to be said that my mate Stan and I are not of their number; we've always had a vague plot-ette to do Hendrix: The Poetry one of these days. However I digress (cf Dai Gresser, the well-known tedious Welshman . . .). Actually I've just brought my own appallingly developed talent for digression to its perfectly-honed conclusion: Being Dai Gresser's only slightly smarter brother, I've digressed even before stating any valid point from which one might wilfully perform the act of digression . . .

Or not quite: I did manage to mention the word castle, which is where our story really starts. As you may recall, I live in God's Own Village, Fa, Centre of Known (and Unknown) Universe, en haute vallée de l'Aude, département de l'Aude, somewhere rather vague in southwest France.

Unbelievers (normally Anglytypes from Ongleterry, I must admit), have been known to suggest that France is ten years behind England. There again, the French say that the Aude (a sort of French county thing) is 20 years behind the rest of France, and the decidedly po-faced denizens of Carcassonne reckon l'haute vallée de l'Aude is 30 years behind the rest of the département.

Mind you, we of l'haute vallée consider any true son of Quillan to be positively Neanderthal so évidemment bigger fleas still have smaller micro-irritants to bite them on their minuscule bots . . .

But however deprived we may putatively be in other respects, we positively excel, gleam, exceed, optimise, maximise, or even profusely overflow in the matter of castles. That's to say, we've got a lot of them.

For this you have to blame the Cathars. Who they? you may ask. Basically they're a bunch of C12/13ish back to basics religious guys who took a dim view of the excessively deep Catholic cashtasticness of the period.

Unlike the Lutherans, up in Dutch-land, who had broadly the same point of view and lived to invent the Protestant Work Ethic and even inspire the dear old C of E in the image of William Blake etc; the Cathars were given a good kicking on the orders of His Holiness until they obligingly expired and became extinct. Today we're not even entirely sure what they did believe in, except that it was uncontaminated by used brown ones.

As any fule kno, matters came to a head in a last stand at the most famous of the Cathar castles, Montsegur. The remaining faithful were given the choice of (1) Jump off the notably impressive cliff on which Montsegur stands (2) Be burned at the stake. Apparently they all chose Option 1. Well I suppose you would, wouldn't you?

However these guys and guy-ettes didn't give up without a serious scrap or two, which is why we have a positive connoisseurness of castles to choose from here in the Aude. They all tend to be small, rough and architecturally basique.

But equally they're all perched up on some vicious spike of rock with an awesome view, well up on the ruined underware vertigo rating (see cols previous). It has to be said however that one may select a visit to them as from an extraordinarily rich and detailed wine list.

In choosing an itinerary for a visit by my esteemed son and heir Rhys and my mate Ian, I decided on Peyrepertuse, partly because it's close to the famed Gorges de Galamus and partly because I hadn't been there before either.

It provided the obligatory gnarled and craggy old ruin, steeped in copious sagas of blood, and possessing a suitable very long way down on most aspects. It also had a stunning display of falconry, as you can see in the photo by Ian Harvey of Rocktastic Pix.

Being as it is now les grandes vacances, we fought our way up the road to the summit in the face of a truly fearsome onslaught of lard wagons, as my astute fellow blogger Kate Hardy recently put it. As a term of abuse for camper vans, I thought it was unbeatable so for camper van read lard wagon from now on.

But to sum up, I really ought to justify my own headline and mention the lentils. My mate Ian is a devout veggie so it really was the moment for a quick improv lentil dish. So here we go:

Experimental Lentils

* Chop up a shallot or two, crush a couple of cloves of garlic and fry them in olive oil.

* Add a tin of lentils and don't forget to use all the gunge out of the bottom of the tin; it makes wonderful stock

* Add a veggie stock cube, paprika and black pepper

* For the herbs I wanted to try a bit of fresh tarragon in a purely veggie dish. I thought about fines herbes which ought to contain tarragon, parsley, chives and chervil. I hadn't got any chervil but I chopped in a sprig or two of the other three.

* Add a little water if the mixture seems a bit dry, bring to boil and simmer for five minutes

* Mix in two or three tablespoons of crème fraiche and simmer until it's all back up to temperature

* Add extra salt to taste if you like it that way. I always think that getting the salt right is vital to the success of any dish

* You could bung in a chopped mushroom or two but I can't remember whether I did or not.

Bon appétit!

* You can see more of Ian's pictures by clicking on Rocktastic Pix by Ian Harvey in Other Fun Links

Confessions of a trainspotter - It's anoraks are go!

2010-08-07T10:55:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, this kind of trainspotting doesn't involve the mass consumption of exotic and illegal dangerous drugs.

We'll have none of those rough-hewn Edinburgh tones, as in those so impenetrable that you can't actually tell whether the narrator is wasted or not. This is McSwitzerland for Hols 4 anyway and thus, whoops, wrong country.

But the fact is that if you have any trace of anorakismo; either latent, blatant or carefully concealed from a previous existence, then Switzerland will bring it out in you.

For a start, you can't walk 200 yards in the place without tripping over some narrow gauge railway, tramway, cable car, funicular or vintage steam boat.

It's no good, you're back in the dream world of your first Hornby train set, as smashed to atoms on your bedroom floor at the age of three, and there's not a thing you can do about it.

Actually it's all remarkably sensible stuff, as you would expect of the Swiss. They have cunningly failed to smash up, close down or otherwise destroy these charming and useful forms of public transport.

This is partly because lots of people come to Switzerland to fall off mountains; normally either by climbing or skiing. Curiously they are willing to pay lots of money to do this, and a delectable selection of cantons (Swiss counties, various) offer a unrivalled choice of enormous pieces of rock, each one especially equipped to break your neck.

Come the age of the train, they realised that building lots of lines into the mountains meant that lots more people could go there, and that to this day it's a better of getting around in snow than using cars. Breaking your neck before you actually reach the designated zone is really not very sporting and not quite the idea.

The Swiss also have lots of hydroelectric power so you can use nice clean, cheap leccy to run the trains and reduce the number of cars. Amazing how many other countries think this is rocket science, especially Britain.

The top pic shows assorted grockels rushing for the 15.30 from Bretaye. They all want seats in the open turquoise carriage because that's another great way to take ace mountain pix without causing a car crash.

It's a great day out. You take the cable car up to 8,000 feet or so, wander about in the breathtaking scenery, then come back on the rack railway (line equipped with handy system of cogwheels and giant hacksaw blades nailed to ground that stops train from hurtling down very steep gradient to oblivion).

The vintage paddle steamer (lower pic) is a lovely way to voyage on Lake Geneva or Lac Léman as it's known in this, the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Eight of these remarkably swift and elegant craft are still in service, though two are due for heavy overhaul and a shake-up in the local transport quango has raised a question mark over just when and if they will be rebuilt.

Pictured is the Montreux dating from the early 1900s. This has already been renovated, not, it has to be said, without a couple of cock-ups, as some prong abolished the second class refreshment room in the process, leaving not so much as a vending machine in its place. This means the crew can be paid to do nothing, while not serving the hordes of non-existent first class passengers.

The boat you really want is La Suisse, built in 1910; a lovely vessel still equipped with its original twin-cylinder steam engine, which you can see whizzing round in highly-polished splendour in the middle of the boat; another key moment of anorakismo.

For normal people there are great views, weather permitting, lots of little ports to visit, polished brass, wood panelling, decent coffee and that whole general air of being undeniably classy.

Strange boy not just obvious choice for cheesy wotsits

2010-08-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

One of the great joys of headline-writing is the fitting together of completely unrelated subjects in a handful of words.

Curiously, hyper-bizarre artist H.R.Giger of Alien fame and gruyère cheese are intimately related: The Swiss Herr Giger owns the medieval Château St. Germain in the 400-year-old historic, walled village of Gruyères. And that is where in Hols 3 - Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, we found the H.R. Giger Museum. It's as odd a juxtaposition as you're likely to find anywhere but perhaps it does say something quite perceptive about Switzerland.

There is a huge paradox between the impossibly green and fertile uplands where the cute cows and perfect pine trees all queue up to audition for a Heidi movie, and the mountains themselves which are as dizzyingly spectacular and dangerous as any in the world.

While this leaves me still puzzled by what makes Switzerland tick, it makes sense of how a country that during its 200 hundred years of peace invented the cuckoo clock, also produced the nightmare world of H.R.Giger.

I can't pretend that the guy's really my cup of tea but I can't go to any country without wanting to see its top class pictures. The other hot contender in Switzerland is the huge Paul Klee museum in Bern but it was too far to go in the time we had available.

Apparently yer man Giger has suffered night terrors all his life and obviously it shows. His work seems to be at once futuristic and sci-fi while also being a throwback to the medieval art of gargoyles and gothic horror. His official label is bio-mechanical, which covers a great deal of violence and deeply peculiar sexuality; a very strange boy indeed.

The man is undeniably a highly skilled draftsman; he could certainly teach the pickled shark types a trick or two. He obviously has the means to say something even if you wouldn't give the result to your auntie for Christmas. Or maybe you would, if you've ever been arrested for possession of an offensive aunt. Your relatives, you're stuck with . . .

Girlfriend Claire is pictured in the distinctly vertebral atmosphere of the official Giger bar next to the museum. The coffee's safe enough but I'm not so sure about the local talent. Reminds me of that old gag about Brains S.A., beloved beer of Cardiff: They don't call it Skull Attack for nothing.

The modern gruyère cheese creamery is at a reassuringly safe distance from the old village. This is just as well. Imagine all those Alien exploding guts getting mixed up with their adverts for cheesy wotsits? Not exactly comfort food. I must admit that I never got any further with any of the Alien films than the famous John Hurt scene. I couldn't stomach it . . .

*The author would like to apologise for the use of gut-wrenchingly awful puns in the creation of this Oscar-winning blog entry.

We shall fight them sur les plages . . . and all that

2010-08-02T22:41:00.000-07:00

I spent a good bit of last week listening to a gigantic documentary about Winston Churchill. The intriguing thing is that I heard it on French radio; to be precise chez nos amis de France Culture, who devoted no less than 15 hours over five mornings to the subject.

While I haven't suddenly become Alf Garnett's stunt double, I couldn't help being both touched and impressed by this French take on the 70th anniversary of the battles of France and Britain; all served up with extreme lashings of Elgar at every slightest break, pause or excuse. I'm a great fan of top class cowpat music myself but Dash it, sir! There are limits . . .

It's not the first time that I've found FC making a better job of English history than we do it ourselves. When you compare this with the bigoted and childish rubbish that the Sunday Times put out a couple of weeks back about De Gaulle's wartime broadcasts from London under a headline about "General Bignose", it's positively embarrassing. If Harold Evans had a grave, he'd be doing about 10,000 rpm right now.

The French would seem still to have a lot of time for Churchill, possibly more than we do . . . This may have something to do with the fact that he apparently visited France more than 300 times, even before 1939, and thus has a fair reputation as a francophile.

It may also be because he made a good few broadcasts to the beleaguered French, actually in French; fascinating archive material which I didn't previously know existed. And possibly because Churchill seems to have got on fairly well with De Gaulle, until he was forced to side with Roosevelt who, for whatever reason, couldn't stand Le Général at any price.

After all, Churchill couldn't exactly afford to fall out with the guys who were going to pay for the invasion of Europe. And it has to be said that even the French seem to have found Le Général a bit of a pain at times in his latter day capacity as Le Président.

Actually possession of a sense of humour seems to have been the biggest obvious difference between our heroic wartime twosome. As far as I can make out, De Gaulle had none whatever whilst any number of reasonably well-informed English people can still roll out a brace of Churchill's best gags 45 years after his death.

Ever in the spirit of fair play, FC even used the one about Churchill's state funeral arrangements, which somewhat macabrely, were allegedly discussed with him while he was still alive.

It had been decided that the funeral train should arrive at Paddington. Officials then discussed whether De Gaulle, who had presumably got up various nez anglais as usual, should be invited.

"Of course he should be invited," said Churchill: "But the train should come to Waterloo!" Like all the best apocryphal stories, if it isn't true, then it ought to be . . .

We all came down to Montreux, On the Lake Geneva

2010-07-19T12:43:00.000-07:00

shoreline, all right . . . which as any fule kno, especially if he's an ageing headbanger like me, is the first line of Smoke on the Water. For Hols 2, I have decided, possibly in an orgy of pure self-indulgence, to go for a bit of unashamed anorakismo. The town in the pic is indeed Montreux and the pinky building on the left is the present day casino, built to replace the gambling house that burned down in the song.

The pic was actually taken from the top floor of Château Chillon, which is a very nice proper castle with a roof and furnishings, some epic prisoner tales and graffiti by Lord Byron. Yer actual mad, bad and dangerous-to-know George thought the place really rocked, even to the extent of penning a walloping great epic about it that I can't pretend to have read.

It's well worth visiting, especially if your partner is humming that Durh, Durh, Durhhh! riff and has just subsided into his second childhood. Anything to take your mind off all that bluesrock-assisted dementia.

But it has to be said that Deep Purple's Machine Head album remains a very classy piece of work to this day and it was all made in Montreux. It was totally essential vinyl (that sort of round, black, warpable, scratchable, nickable, extremely expensive, plastic stuff) for any self-respecting 13-year-old in 1974.

This meant that you had grown out of teenybopperdom and when you consider that this included bands like The Wombles it all brings a whole new meaning to words like exorcism, deliverance and lucky escape. Shaving, spots, fags, booze and possibly sex were only just around the corner.

Of course, this was only boys' stuff. The girls all listened to soul and later on disco. Remember all that dancing in a circle with all the handbags in the middle? In terms of asking for a bop, it would have been slightly easier to torpedo the Graf Spee . . .

Later on, in the decades that music forgot, plenished with the horrors of the New Romantics, Boy Bands and other nameless serial drivel, I too came deeply to love classic soul music. I just don't know whether that many of the girls ever really came round to the idea of The Purps.

Imagine though, our distress back in 1976 when Deep Purple broke up. Wot? No more Purple? You have to remember that this was a musically dire year; slightly less interesting than a vow of silence. On reflection, I'd have gone for the silence. Then punk broke out. It had no choice.

But it all has a happy ending. Thirty-four years later The Purps are still in business. They've played in SW France every year for at least the last four and I even finally got to see them in Carcassonne. They're still pretty damn good.

And what of Claude Nobs, the somewhat eccentrically-named hero of Montreux, whose lone mugshot lurks among the plethora of pix of our five beloved hairy English musos inside the original Machine Head gatefold sleeve?

Funky Claude, of course, is the guy in the song who rescued various kids from the burning casino and then spent the next two weeks trying to find other places for the band to record, amid a hale of complaints from conservative Swiss persons who weren't quite ready to enter the wonderful world of very loud rock music.

Perhaps for Claude, the water still smokes . . .

It had to happen - Death by Push-bikers - Hols 1

2010-07-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

You may have gathered from the headline that girlfriend Claire and I have departed Fa for a day or two in pastures new beyond the bumpish and grindette abnormality of Languid Oc Roussillon.

Having lightly lampooned our velo-istic colleagues of Le Tour de France in my last missive, I suppose it is only rough or poetic justice that I should have been plagued by cyclists ever since; much as one might be lightly hassled by a rogue school of kamikaze killer whales.

This has caused me to consider what might be the collective noun for cyclists and concluded that it ought to be a deathwishness.

Skipping the first day of our adventure because motorways are boring, I take up the tale in the Vaucluse, western Provence, somewhere the other side of Avignon.

The day started benignly enough in the agreeable chambre d'hote we'd found sleeping quietly at the end of a tree-tunnelled chemin outside the village of Bedoin.

I had been driving but a few minutes when it struck me that there seemed to be an awful lot of push-bikers about. Have you ever noticed while driving that you always meet a P-biker at some divinely-ordained moment of maximum danger and inconvenience?

Even if you're driving on one of those infinitely long, straight vanishing point-type roads, you will always pass the cyclist at the unexpected chicane with bonus demon potholes, exactly as the apocalyptic posse of 38-tonne wagons comes winging its way to hell in the opposite direction.

This will always happen even if the lorries have been in sight for the last two miles, and whether you speed up, slow down or even stop to lurk knowingly beneath your Harry Potter-type Invisibility Cloak.

Our general intention was to wander through the Vaucluse into the French Alps eventually ending up in Switzerland. If you are not conversant with the word col, then I had better explain right now as it's geographically impossible to follow this route without going over a remarkably large number of them.

I seem to remember that there was some mythical Scots geezer called Col of The Cows, but in this case col means a mountain pass. There are a few twee things near Fa called cols . . . that go up to a thousand feet or so, but these are for drivers still in possession of a nappy.

The ones we're talking about here have multiple precipices, awesome hairpin bends and positive orgies of suicidal cyclists. While actually trying quite hard not to kill any of them, I missed our turning towards Briançon and ended up right on the top of Mont Ventoux (top pic). As you can see, it looks like a desert the wrong way up, and at an impressive 6,200 feet is way over my vertigo limit . . .

Having thus been reduced to a gibbering wreck, I gallantly let girlfriend Claire drive the even bigger cols, being a Pyrenean mountain girl and all that. Just as well, because ironically we ended up a day or so later on the very same Col du Galibier that features in the vintage Tour de France pic (see last post).

This gentle slope, ha-ha, weighs in at a mere 8,586 feet while Le Grand Galibier itself manages 10,491 feet, or a maximum 5 Sets of Ruined Underwear Rating. I was already, shall we say apprehensive, when I took pic 2 though Claire still seems cheerful enough.

Probably the most entertaining aspect of vertigo is approaching a hairpin bend where the only visible scenery on the outside edge is a large quantity of unaccompanied sky, unspoilt by crash barriers. It's then that the absolute certainty cuts in that the dear old Kangoo is going to take off into several thousand feet of not a lot.

The fact that the old girl's shockers and anti-roll bars are a bit shot at the mo adds most effectively to the feeling of Designer Sadism by Renault . . . You do this about a dozen times going up Col du Galibier and repeat the exercise, lest we should forget, on the way down.

There's about a one in two chance of extra fun meeting a cyclist at each of the really hairy bits. Thanks to the route's legendary status as a Tour de France stage, every wannabee TDF hero just has to give it a go. I have pictured an uphill nutcase; these are probably more of a nuisance when you're desperately trying to jockey your vehicle, slipping the clutch in first gear, though the really crazy ones zooming down are probably more alarming.

Mind you, looking back to the vintage pic, I see that the road was merely a flattish pile of rock in those days so I suppose we had it soft. If the last pic doesn't look especially exciting it's probably because I had the camera upside down or something . . .

Wheels within wheels - Tour de France comes to Fa

2010-07-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

Well there you have it; Le Tour de France, even as I write, is somewhere on its way to Fa. This, of course, is the way it should be.

The race will inevitably end on Les Champs Elysées à Paris, but this is a small and insignificant event compared to the honour of being allowed to cycle through the Centre of the Known Universe, AKA Fa.

On Sunday July 18, all will start bright and early in readiness for the Great Day. The attendants of La Reine Marie du Cafédefa each have their part to play; there will be feasting, music and much rejoicing.

We thought of inviting La Reine Margot, as played by the delectable Isabelle Adjani, but such vast quantities of blood and guts would be unseemly on so gracious an occasion.

Dave the Underdog is already polishing his wittiest and most apposite syllogisms, Mollie the Dog is practising sulking and an enthusiastic relay team is on hand to track down all the Neefy Eepees and insert them in the dish-washer.

So you can teach an old dog new tricks. Incidentally girlfriend Claire tells me that the French for the usual version of this idiom is Ce n'est pas à un vieux singe qu'on apprend à faire des grimaces. Or: You can't teach an old monkey to make faces, which all adds to the colour of the moment.

Fa, in fact, has a long and distinguished association with the Tour. I draw your attention to the picture of Fa's own Tour de France hero Vincente Jean-Baptiste Fauré, helping to tow one of the official cars, somewhere in the Alps in 1934. A deeply modest man, Fauré won the Tour several times, led an important Résistance group during the war and retired to Fa to chop wood and look after his dear old mum, expiring with elaborate civic honours in 1971.

Fauré, one should note in passing, is a common surname in these parts; celebrated French composer, Gabriel Fauré, came from Pamiers only a couple of hours away in the neighbouring Ariège. It's mildly disconcerting to see businesses over there with names like Kevin Fauré Fruit Mart (Get yor luvly requiems 'ere . . .) or Barry Fauré Voitures d'Occasion (secondhand motors).

I must admit that I'm having to bluff this piece, as my sole technical knowledge of cycling is the chapter of Paddington Bear where he wins a fastest downhill prize in the TDF owing to his tricycle having no brakes.

Sadly I don't suppose that you could imagine such a story today, even for children, with it all being so professional. I did look up a bit of early TDF history; the second tour in 1904 or thereabouts seems to have been the best one. They tried having night stages and everyone cheated like mad in the dark when the judges couldn't see them. One guy even put his bike on the train. Great fun.

That of course was in the era when the Tour actually went all the way round France. At some stage the organisers realised that this was physically impossible even by using unfeasibly large quantities of dangerous drugs. So they toned the whole thing down a bit; which is a pity. As a profoundly unsporty person, I nonetheless do love the magnificence of the world's great sporting spectacles; especially the fundamentally barmy ones.

Fa, of course, is not without its sense of occasion. In the second picture, you will see what may seem to you like a perfectly ordinary gutter. It is, of course the Fa 2010 Tour de France Memorial Gutter, laid with the utmost care and despatch, only in the last few days.

Said gutter used to be one of those traditional French death traps, much too deep and carefully covered with amorphous fragments of cast-iron grating, so that you could trip and break certainly a leg and possibly your neck without even trying. The prospect of hundreds of the world's top cyclists all going arse over tip in the middle of Fa was presumably too much for Monsieur le Maire to bear . . .

It's a pleasant spin-off of the Tour that we always get a nice piece of new road out of it. The Tour always has to come out of the bottom end of the Pyrenees somewhere so it usually passes quite close by. This year they've resurfaced a goodly chunk of tarmac down by Intermarché.

I suppose this is the moment to own up to a certain quantity of lies and deception. It is with the utmost embarrassment that your faithful correspondent has to admit that, due to a truly gross cock-up on the forward planning front, he can't actually be here on Sunday thus dipping out on the biggest story of the year . . .

PS: I also invented Vincente Jean-Baptiste Fauré in the interests of local colour. The real cyclist is Spain's Federico Ezquerra pictured between Le Télégraphe et Le Galibier in the Alps and it actually was 1934. Of course, he ought to have come from Fa and it's not my fault that he didn't.

Heard 'em through the grapevine, sultry snores of Fa

2010-07-11T12:48:00.000-07:00

Ah! A timeless scene that is forever rural France. A 2CV van lurks beneath the spreading limes and vines; geriatric masonry crumbles gently to itself, and not a soul stirs of a Sunday afternoon in sleepy Fa.

This is not entirely surprising as the summer heat finally hit us this last week with all the refinement and elegance of a well-aimed sledge hammer.

Summer has been a remarkably long time coming this year and even now it tends to sulk; sultry and stormy as a stroppy teenager.

It's odd really, we don't usually get this super (not) overcast and slimy heat, so redolent of a moderately crap August in Ongle-terry. What has happened to our lovely blue skies, we ask ourselves.

It has not been a weekend for action; it's the most we can do to struggle over to the Cafédefa, sink a few beers or cokes or coffees, read the paper, and swap a few lines of languid gossip, before wandering gently back home to collapse under the ventilator fans, like extras pegged out to die in a Sam Peckinpah gore-fest.

At least the bloody Guardian turned up for a change. Lately I've taken to reading Le Monde as my official weekend Grauniad stunt double. It's very good for my French and saves me the need to prod the newsagent with pointed sticks and other instruments of violence and destruction.

I don't suppose he understands any better than I do, how or why the less-than-mercurial conduit of information from Farringdon Road suffers such acute periodic bouts of constipation, especially here in deepest Languedoc.

But probably it's a small matter in the general scheme of things. Les grandes vacances sont enfin arrivées: The schools are out. Days to sleep and nights to party (in between thunderstorms and unaccustomed bouts of belting rain).

Unfamiliar faces arrive in our village, French, English and any number of other nationalities; 'Tis the grockel season, moi deare . . . Very pleasant but all a bit strange: We'll get over it.

Vide grenier trauma - Poubelle turns in own grave

2010-06-27T14:12:00.001-07:00

Got your poubelles at the ready? No? Well it's your own fault that your home is about to be inundated with total crap (ref dear old G. Ratner). This because it's the vide grenier season, when all and sundry in virtually every village en l'haute vallée and far beyond, both in kilometres and all reason, "empty their attics". Or as they say en Angleterre: 'Ave a car boot sale.

You may become arrested by trop de veng, trop de soleil and great overloadings of general picture-skewness as in this leafy, tranquil scene at agreeable Arques of a peaceful Sunday morning. Actually it's trop de vin but I'm rashly trying to imitate our local impenetrable brogue (veng demeng peng etcetera). In all such words, the non-existent G at the end, for non-existentialists, is sounded out fully.

Be afraid, be very afraid. All those innocent faces of the young, not so young and the positively antediluvian, lined up behind their cute assortments of artefacts are mad, bad and dangerous to know.

If you succumb to these sirens, you will return home, wiser, sadder, much skinter and driving an exhausted vehicle in dire need of new springs, clutch and back axle. Such will be its burden. In total crap terms, the average VG can definitely give Ratner, G. a run for his argent. The Chief Anti-tat Meister, Monsieur Eugène Poubelle himself would be struck dumb by horror, could he but see us now.

There are ways to avoid buying overwhelming quantities of other people's rubbish. One of them is to try selling it instead. Personally I'm not convinced by this, observing that most merde de VG remains unsold at the end of the day. My own grenier is two floors up and the last thing I would ever want to have to do is to cart all my tat back up there again.

I sometimes give stuff to the stand for the village school. They get the sous if they sell it but under no circumstances will any of my merde come back to me again . . . I have disowned it forever. More beguiling is the idea of perception: They're not trash, they're . . . treasures. Don't believe a word of it, I say.

It's certainly more effective to specialise in some particular form of tat. I have personally narrowed myself down to Tintin hardbacks in French and in pristine condition; large blue plates and cast iron trivets because new ones cost a fortune and I've got a glass dining room table top.

Actually wanting these items means that you will never see them at a vide grenier ever again and you will become totally tat-proof. Except . . . just now and then you do find a genuine and irresistible bargain: Aside from a copy of Waiting for Godot in the original French for a mere 50 centimes, I found four decent matching pint beer glasses for €3 the lot at Arques.

So why pint glasses? I always try to avoid virulent English ex-pat syndrome as I find it a real pain, but none of us can ever completely deny where we come from, and nor should we try to: You can't change the fact of who you are.

And we all have little things that remind us of our roots. For me it's PG Tips, Cooper's Oxford Marmalade, Branston pickle and an unshakeable gut feeling that beer always tastes nicer in pints. After all, I believe that the Danes still drink beer in a measure that has been illegal since 1695 so I figure these little things must matter somehow.

But here we are, always still in SW France, so let us remind ourselves with the choicest idiom that has come my way in a long time via girlfriend Claire: Il a le cul bordé de nouilles, which literally means: His arse is edged in noodles. No-one has a clue where it comes from but the French say it as we would say: He lives a charmed life. Perhaps we do . . .

A gentle discourse on the recurring subject of feesh

2010-06-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

I can't help noticing a certain piscatorial repetition amid these musings - a feesh-motif, you might say.

Thinking that this might be like a leitmotif only with scales, I even bothered to check the dictionary and was alarmed to find that it had something to do Wagner. Screeching fat birds with added cod? Scary . . .

Moving hurriedly on, it is indeed true that I nicked the feesh from Terry Darlington's highly enjoyable Narrow Dog to Carcassonne sometime last year to reflect on two intriguingly black specimens by Braque.

Then there was Cantona with his sardines, not to mention my mate Stan and a hard man punk he knew in New York who wanted Poison tattooed on his arm. Unfortunately it came out Poisson . . .

I used to enjoy a spot of fishing myself and have been known to dip into that fine English classic The Compleat Angler. Which could all have kept for another time, had I not paused to consider what the great poet-philosopher Isaac Walton would have made of the magnificently tacky feesh en plastique which has just appeared on a brand new rond-point (roundabout) near us. I can only think that he would have been compleatly gobsmacked.

This actually used to be the carrefour (crossroads) outside the Champion supermarket at Quillan. Then Champion changed to Carrefour. I assume that the carrefour outside Carrefour was too confusing and positively lethal in the camper van season, so they built the rond-point instead. In a way it's a masterpiece; the great feesh en plastique suspended in mid air above its rocks, turf and deliciously fake mountain stream.

In times of economic crisis, one never fails to be amazed, thrilled and comforted by the absolute necessities on which local authorities still manage to spend money . . . Given that it hasn't properly stopped raining since about last November and even rivers as humble as the un-mighty Faby are teeming with enough real feesh to give the bonking frogs a run for their money, one might possibly just question which financial genius authorised this one.

Or you could just give up the unequal struggle and try lieu noir with tarragon, tomatoes and mushrooms. I dreamed this one up the other night and was rather chuffed with the way it came out.

*Chop up an onion and three cloves of garlic and fry in olive oil.

*Chop up three good, ripe and juicy tomatoes, three large mushrooms and four 10cm sprigs of fresh tarragon and add to the pan. Add a veg stock cube, a teaspoonful of paprika, a slosh of white wine, a sprinkling of freshly-ground black pepper and about half a mug of water.

*Bring to the boil and simmer until the onions and tomatoes soften into a sauce, reducing the fluid until the sauce thickens.

*Cut a large fillet of lieu noir (coley) into bite-sized pieces, add to the pan and simmer for about five minutes or until the pieces of fish whiten and the whole pan is bubbling again.

*Serves three. We had ours with mixed rice and peas.

Frozen idols or the noble art of fridge worship

2010-06-07T10:11:00.000-07:00

I suppose the classic definition or crossword clue for a fridge should be low temperature space which is always too small.

My own example is somewhat on the diminutive side and duly suffers from periodic crises of volume, especially when girlfriend Claire arrives for the weekend from Canet, laden with sundry samples of cheese, asparagus and other rogue projectiles.

I should make it clear that I'm not at all complaining about her generosity, just a bit buggered sometimes as to where to put everything. And it's not all bad either: We've discovered that the world is overly obsessed with refrigeration and many things, strawberries and tomatoes especially, have a lot more taste and do not go rotten instantly if merely kept somewhere cool and shady.

Probably it's my own fault for having a passionate aversion to those gigantic and disturbing American stainless steel monoliths erupting out of kitchen worktops in an ever increasing number of homes, rather like the horrible squid creature that gives John Hurt a severe stomach ache in Alien.

I'm not generally a conspiracy theorist, indeed I have been known to be deeply satirical par rapport those who are. But I am completely convinced that giant fridges will take over the world and appear in lots of Tim Burton films opposite Johnny Depp, who is possibly less all-powerful on the Degrees Kelvin Front but nonetheless a great hit with the girls, as I understand it.

There are a number of recognised solutions to this problem: Your faithful correspondent is pictured firstly Praying For Space. This never works so you immediately proceed (lower pic) to the full humiliating and unadulterated Fridge Grovel, in which all products of dubious age, condition or identity are either sought and destroyed or whizzed straight into a passing improv dinner.

The other really good thing you can do is to avoid buying a fridge with one of those useless cool box affairs. These really do defy the laws of physics; they make vast piles of ice but anything you put in them, melts . . . How can this be possible? one asks oneself.

I find that it's therapeutic to take it out on the cool box with my pet method of fridge defrosting. Being far too impatient to wait for the defrost function (which never seems to work), I always take a large hammer and cold chisel to mine. Very fast, effective and lots of fun though you have to be careful not to whang the chisel straight through all that pipework containing freon and other chemicals not lightly to be inflicted on an unsuspecting world, if you fear for the future of dear old Planet Earth.

You won't believe this . . . but I wrote about football

2010-06-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

I always like to try and ring the changes on this blog; after all, there are only so many rants that you can write about camper vans in l'haute vallée de l'Aude.

(Actually, I could damn camper vans and barking, crapping French dogs to hell on a daily basis, without stopping to draw breath, but you, loyal reader, would get bored.)

It is nonetheless rather taking my life into my hands to write about soccer, as there are almost no other subjects about which I know less, apart possibly from brain surgery. Fancy a quick trepanning before dinner, cherie?

I have a very clear memory of experiencing a reverse epiphany (an unepiphany, a disepiphany?) about soccer at the age of five.

There I was, all togged up in my brand new primary school soccer strip: green shirt and socks with white trim, plus black shorts. This was one of the very few occasions on which our headmaster managed to raise sufficient steam to trek us down to the proper pitch on Brereton Rec.

I could see his point. There were only 29 kids in the school, half of whom were girls, and thus not allowed to play footy in those unenlightened days. So I suppose we could only raise about a team and a half to spread over that gigantic pitch, even with the skool dog doubling as inside right and sweeper, and Sir playing too.

Within five minutes of kick-off, I knew with the utmost clarity that I would never ever be any good at soccer. I suppose it was all down hill from there really, though I did manage to collect a full set of Esso coins commemorating the FA Cup Centenary in 1972.

These had a display board with a hole for the special large brass coin denoting the eventual 100th winner (Leeds Utd). The hole was cunningly made just too small to insert the coin into the board without wrecking it so I suspect that mint condition sets are rare.

Esso coins apart, I have been resolutely bored by soccer for more than 40 years. Except for Eric Cantona. The man who put the oxy into that notable oxymoron: intelligent footballer. He also happens to be French, which of course is useful for French blogging purposes.

Early Cantona sightings were not promising: The sound of massed crétins chanting Ooh! Aah! Cantona! But I have to say that yer man, uniquely for a soccer player, won me over. Here was a genuinely interesting and intelligent character, not to mention the huge force of personality, formidable talent and periodic propensity for duffing people.

I loved all the stuff about the feesh, trawlers, seagulls etc. All much too deep and meaningful for The Sun. So I couldn't resist getting a copy of Ken Loach's Looking for Eric, in which Cantona plays himself; managing to remain as charismatic, philosophical and downright elusive on screen as off it.

Girlfriend Claire and I really enjoyed Looking for Eric; she being another Cantona fan with an ignorance of soccer almost as complete and profound as my own. Mind you, it still comes as a shock to realise that I actually own a DVD with quite a lot of football in it . . .

Further adventures of talking pork and little dragons

2010-05-30T10:47:00.000-07:00

I suppose you'd say that I've always been an improvising cook. Probably it all started because I was chronically crap at following other people's recipes and found it easier to make it up as I went along. To be honest the results were just as dire at first but over the years you get to learn a thing or two.

For instance, pork tends to like it hot or with fruit or with beans. So here's Belly pork with pineapple, red peppers and kidney beans as dreamed up today for Sunday lunch.

The joy of improv cookery is making something good out of whatever you happen to have. I'd got the pork, Claire lobbed me the pineapple on the grounds that it needed eating and by astonishing good fortune I'd got a fresh green chili.

This is no mean feat in our part of SW France where hot chillies are not easy to come by; the French in general don't seem to like their food trop piquant. Sometimes you find things labeled piment fort or strong pepper but 99 times out 100 piment fort = dwarf green pepper absolument sans chili and about as hot as Pingu the Penguin.

However I got one or two proper chillies from our favourite veg lady on Canet market and they were just the biz. Actually she gave them to me as she couldn't guarantee them being hot, which I thought was pretty damn good of her.

I like belly pork. It's cheap but flavoursome, though persons like me with fat old git tendencies are well advised to cut off the majority of the rind and fat. The bones too are small, sharp and best excluded. After trimming, there was about 600g of meat. So:

*Fry up a chopped onion, three crushed cloves of garlic, 2-3cm grated ginger root and the chopped up pork.

*Add a chopped green chili, plus a small diced red pepper, about 1/3 of a chopped, fresh pineapple and 250g of pre-cooked, washed red kidney beans.

*Chop up and add a handful of fresh parsley and two or three sprigs of fresh basil, a teaspoon of good red paprika, a bouquet garni stock cube and a sprinkle of freshly ground black pepper. Bouquet garni cubes are exceeding useful as you can use them for practically anything, rather than having to keep a range of cubes.

*I might well have added a slosh of white wine if I'd had any but I didn't.

* Add about a mug and a half of water, bring to boil and reduce heat to simmer.

*Simmer for maybe 15-20 minutes, stirring and reducing the fluid until the sauce thickens. I always finish sauces this way. I never add flour or similar and think that getting the fluid content of any dish right is one of the keys to success.

* Serve with rice or pasta. We had pasta. Serves between 2 and 4 depending on the size of your gannets.

I've also been having a go with fresh tarragon. One of the bonuses of living here is that I have l'estragon growing in a pot outside No.5. I'm told that it's not so easy to source in the UK where it tends to be found dried (which I never liked much) or Waiting for Godot. The etymology of the word is related to dragon; hence the title of this piece.

Poulet à l'estragon avec des champignons went a bit like this:

*Chop up two chicken legs into bite-sized pieces, dice an onion and crush three cloves of garlic.

*Fry the onions and garlic, then add the chicken and fry until the meat is browned over.

*Cut up and add three large mushrooms

*Add a bouquet garni stock, cube, a teaspoonful of paprika, a sprinkle of freshly-ground black pepper, a slosh of white wine, and three or four chopped up sprigs of fresh tarragon about 10cm long.

*Add about a mug and half of water, bring to boil then simmer for about 20 minutes, reducing the fluid until the sauce thickens.

Serves two with mashed potato and other veg of your choice. Why not asparagus? There's plenty of it about just now.

Salut Team Ireland! A tale of hot curry peppers

2010-05-29T12:02:00.000-07:00

Those of you accustomed to wading through the vaguely literary blather wot constitutes this 'ere blog, may recall une crise des legumes*some months back.

Girlfriend Claire was preparing for a exchange visit by a party of Irish schoolgirls, one of whom had described herself as strict vegan.

This caused much head-scratching at the time as the French are pretty hazy about, if not totally baffled by veggie-ism in general, let alone the strict and puritanical precepts of higher veganism (hem-hem).

Anyhow the party duly arrived. It turns out that this particular teenager's definition of "strict vegan" apparently included cream cakes, and indeed any of the other myriad naughty but nice things to be found dans les boulangeries de la France, and for which they are justly famous. So small crisis, not many dead. I figure that some strict vegans must just be stricter than others . . .

Well, it could have been worse: Imagine if half the class had turned out to be garlic-phobes? I say this with feeling because I have lived long enough in France to consider la cuisine sans ail to be frankly impossible. I haven't quite got around to putting it on cornflakes but I definitely panic if I've forgotten to buy any.

Realising that starvation of the uncarnivorous kind was no longer imminent, our top team, that's to say Claire and her oppo Jo from Trim, Co Meath, found that a pleasant day off was possible while the Irish pupils spent time with their French host families.

And so it was that we spent a Sunday morning in Canet market while the sun shone, boats sailed and holidaymakers at last got a sizzling under their bottles of slap (Factors Various).

L-R, Maria from Ireland, Claire, Jo and her husband Damien are caught copping lots of intense info from an organic cheese producer who didn't quite make it onto the pic and thence to superstardom. Jo and Damien are often in Fa, and naturally the whole exchange was dreamed up, as is the way of Fa, over a beer at the café.

But it's not quite the end for meatlessness as Jo is in fact a veggie and we dreamed up a handy little dish for le grillade, alias the barbie.

I will admit to a particular loathing of veggie-burgers, veggie sausages and anything else filed under pretend-meat made out of veg. Taken to its illogical conclusion, you might as well squodge old sprouts into vegetarian fillet steak but when there are entire major world cuisines devoted to making great food out of assorted plant matter, why even try to go there?

If you'd like to try barbecued peppers stuffed with curried mushrooms, it goes like this:

*Cut the tops off a couple of decent-sized peppers (any colour) and excavate the white gubbins as usual.

*Chop up an onion, several cloves of garlic, and say four or five big mushrooms.

*Fry the lot together with a teaspoon or two of curry powder, strength to your taste, plus a dash of freshly-ground black pepper, some chopped fresh coriander or parsley if you're stuck and a slosh of soy sauce.

*Fry until the onion softens or it looks and smells done.

*Fill the peppers with the mushroom mix and stopper them with pieces of scrumpled-up tin foil.

*Place on a hot barbecue and keep turning until the peppers soften.

* Take from barbecue and remove tin foil.

*Eat.

As they may possibly say on Galway Bay: Bon appetit!

*See Alors c'est Begin le Beguine aux legumes, 9 février 2010

Une question d'étiquette, an occasional series: No.2

2010-05-24T10:23:00.000-07:00

Etiquette, of course, is usually held to describe the subject, process, science or ritual even of correct manners.

It is also the French for a label, so let us act with all due decorum in drawing your attention to this fruity little number; a veritable corker even.

I ought to begin by assuring you that this particular bottle contained a very decent Fitou, as I can, myself, bear witness. So no slur intended on the expertise of its makers; absolutely not.

It is, in fact, a gold medal-winning bottle of Seigneurie d'Arse. Perish those thoughts of drink, feck, gurrlls, Father Jack . . .

To be precise, it's a Seigneurie d'Arse 2004 which gained the Macon medaille d'or in the Concours des Grands Vins de France 2006.

So titter ye not: Good things sometimes come in unexpected packets. Evidemment . . .

'Tis the season for 'erbs and other bits of planty-most

2010-05-18T09:11:00.000-07:00

A sudden, sly appearance by the elusive luminous thing sent me dashing for the digital: I've been meaning to ponder a moment on our new herb garden outside No.5 for a while now.

However we've lately been too busy trying to save the basil from hypothermia and wondering whether coriander really gets a thrill out of 24/7 Force Ten shot-blasting by aerial water-cannon.

I've been growing basil in those pots on the wall for a few years now as nothing beats whizzing the jolly old green stuff straight off the plant and into the pasta. But in response to a constructive prod from girlfriend Claire, it seemed a good idea to go a little further so I at last got around to installing the cute little old bench that someone gave me, reinstating the hanging baskets and building le truc en bois to make room for lots more pots.

So now we have basil, coriander, mint, rosemary, verveine and tarragon. I'm particularly intrigued by the tarragon as I shall have to dream up some new dishes to make with it; this of course will be fun as it doesn't take much to get me haring off down le chemin de nosh, adroitly dodging the steely ricochet of Branston pickle decoys to Oblivion and beyond (Wot?).

I suppose I could add chives but I'm not entirely sure what one might do to a chive, and I draw the line at parsley because I generally slash it up by the tonne and the resulting bloodshed outside the front door would be too much to bear.

So what of all this new-found enthusiasm? Perhaps it comes of living in so a fragrant village as Fa: Round here, you can find thyme, rosemary, sage and bay leaves merely by wandering up certain suspicious footpaths.

BEWARE: In times of rain these are the same footpaths that teem with savage, mud-tastic Eepees camping savagely. NB: Eepees cannot be grown in pots.

Don't put yer muck in our Poubelle, Monsieur!

2010-05-17T09:14:00.000-07:00

One of the many joys of girlfriend Claire is the way that she continues to educate moi, l'anglais in the lesser byways of La Belle France and all things français.

Take the humble word, poubelle, which, as any fule kno, means dustbin. As it happens, poubelle was one of the first words I learned in French at the tender age of about ten under the psychopathic supervision of our inspirational, if astonishingly violent, teacher. We all learned lots of French as it was a good way to stay alive.

I was most intrigued to learn from Claire that in fact, the illustrious-looking gent in the picture is none other than Monsieur Eugène Poubelle, after whom all modern French dustbins are named.

Monsieur Poubelle was le préfet de la Seine from 1883-1896 and the author of a determined effort to clean up Paris; evidently by the most literal means. He ordered that all apartment block proprietors should provide three different bins with lids for different grades of refuse. All these new-fangled and wondrous receptacles became known as poubelles. Careful with that trashcan, Eugène! Which is pretty trippy, even by the exalted standards of Syd Barrett . . .

Monsieur le préfet was thus one of the great, early unsung heroes of modern hygiene and recycling, on a par with our own English giant, Mr Thomas Crapper. When I first wrote this piece I was under the impression both that Crapper invented the flushing WC and that he also lent his (abbreviated) name to that most universal and democratic act of going for a crap.

Actually he did neither: He invented various improvements, notably the ball valve, and pulled off a remarkable marketing coup in being born with such an apt name. However crap has apparently been around since at least the age of Middle English (early C15). What a relief . . .

Unfortunately Poubelle remained largely unappreciated in his own lifetime. The proprietors did their best to avoid the expense of nice new poubelles, hand in glove with the tenants who feared rises in rents and service charges. They continued to use any garbage container that came to hand until after the Second World War, when at last the battle to beat the pong was won.

Fascinating, eh? Il n'y a pas beaucoup du monde qui le connâit . . .

Shock as River Faby loses Squonk-Quark Factor

2010-05-16T13:31:00.001-07:00

All this year we having been suffering a prolonged overdose of weather: Helas, il pleut; helas, il neige; helas, il pleut some more; helas il fait pretty much anything except beau or du soleil.

What we've all been looking for is the sort of blue thing with passing white bits, as visualised in the top picture. It has vamoosed, been sunk without trace or possibly dematerialised by rogue Klingons.

During April, we thought we'd finally got rid of the never-ending winter when a deafening outburst of squonking and quarking in the Faby heralded the traditional return of the Legendary Pyrenean Bonking Frog.

Basking on the terraces of the Cafédefa, we listened with deep joy to this welcome and much-loved cacophony, redolent as it is of the heady dreams of coming summer. Steadily it rose to a pre-orgasmic chorus of glurks with squelch dream topping.

Elsewhere too, the natural world was awakening. The Scops owls of Fa resumed that characteristic plonque! noise which is their trademark. Not exactly a complex or rousing song, it has to be admitted,but sonorous, reliable . . . thick.

All night long, middle-aged couples who had given up sex, were kept awake by the passionate screaming of nightingales who hadn't.

And suddenly . . . sploosh, then silence. The Faby rose to a mighty and abominable torrent, (middle pic) as it rained, snowed, rained some more, and continued to be generally wet and bloody miserable for about a fortnight; the river only regaining its normal somnolent sense of self (bottom pic) a few days ago.

The bonking frogs were all swept away in the maelstrom. They probably got to the post-coital fag somewhere round about Narbonne.

Chez moi, we actually lit a fire on May 15 (Wot??); a record by a more than handsome margin. In again a few days, we might spot the odd squonk, a lone and teasing quark. I just wouldn't bet on it.

It's Eepees, 'Arpies, RIPs and The Men in Black

2010-05-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

I ought to start with an apology to any long-suffering readers that I may still possess, given that any traces of intermittent scratching on parchment, papyrus, or back of fag packet have been distinctly thin of late.

Really in this modern age, we're talking about the absent exercise of The Well-Tempered Clavier or even the rabid gnawings of Mouse on assorted fugitive pixels but I expect you get the idea.

It would seem that I have been deprived of the chance to communicate by successive deluges of too much to do, or to put it bluntly, buried under crap. Still there is news of Planet Fa, AKA The True Centre of the Universe so here you have it.

Fa has been invaded by swarms of new and very official-looking signposts (très pukka). Broadly-speaking one lot says: No Wild Camping or possibly and quite plausibly: No Camping by Savages and the others say: Don't Knacker Our Footpaths by Using Them When They're Wet And Muddy.

Well, all very public-spirited and all that. However the main reason for mentioning them is that I couldn't help a smile when girlfriend Claire told me that she'd seen an unofficial extra bit tacked on to one of the signs, asking: So how are we to get to the wild camps when we can't use the muddy footpaths? The Mairie was deeply not amused so unfortunately the addendum was abruptly binned before your forlorn snapper and Beater of the Clavier managed to nail it with the hawk-like optic.

So wot's it all about? Why has the Mairie got its culottes quite so desperately tordues?

The problem is Les Eepees. Lots of Eepees in campements sauvages dotted all around les environs de Fa. Now an Eepee used to be a four-track 7" vinyl job, ideal for show-casing an up and coming band or for buying a 12-track Beatles album in bite-sized pieces if you hadn't the spons to shell out on all 12 inches at once.

Unfortunately in these post-vinyl times (woe, shellac, shel-lack-a-day . . .), it means a hairy layabout (unsoaped). The naïve among us thought that the purpose of New Age Travellers was to travel. However these ones seem to like staying put. They've also come up with a cunning plan . . . instead of squatting on other people's land, they quietly buy bits of their own . . . and it's very difficult to get someone off his own land . . . hence the Mairie's tendency to rip out its own few surviving collective follicles. You may wish to watch this space but I suspect that it won't be a pretty sight.

Of course it's quite different up the road at unsunny Rouvenac where they don't have Eepees, just 'Arpies. To be honest, I can quite understand even the Eepees not wanting to go there, apart from any solitary eccentrics wishing to take up lycanthropy or to participate in the Annual Village Best-Kept Broomstick Award.

Anyone caught loitering with intent to go about their legitimate business or even breathing without permission is likely to get some ancient, venomous, fire-breathing Madame Troll (usually right off her troll-ette) threatening to report them to the Gendarmes.

There are a couple of ways around this. Now and again they cheer themselves up with a nice funeral; being as the average age of the populace is about 302, this happens agreeably often.

It's also quite pleasant when even Les 'Arpies have to hide from Les Temoins de Jehovah. I must admit I got quite caught out myself because the old Temoins have a very slick operation around here.

Their Top Homme is an exceedingly impressive geezère in a black suit. I should explain that this is a very rare sight indeed in L'haute vallée de l'Aude. The only time I have worn a suit and tie in eight years here was to go to a funeral myself and I have to admit that I felt distinctly overdressed.

Les autres temoins are also exceedingly plausible; they come up to you and talk pleasantly and intelligently about the job you have in hand, only delivering le coup de grâce avec Le Watchtower when it's too late to appear stark naked at the door accompanied by an enormous dog, or to claim that you don't speak French. Which wouldn't work anyway because they have cunningly learned to speak English. You've got to give them full marks for l'effort.

Kentucky fried lap-tops and other springy thingies

2010-03-28T13:07:00.000-07:00

You may of course wonder what a hot lap-top has to do with a pic of a pot of winter-flowering pansies.

Well it's all to do with the spring thing, which is happening intermittently outside my window even as I write.

One minute it's bright sunshine, the next it's belting it down with persistent glee and bloomin' freezing.

The lap-top in question belongs to dear old Mick, AKA the crownéd King of Fa and it really was hot, not nick-tastically but thermally.

Being a bit full of the joys of the aforementioned and lightly alleged spring, Mick decided to nip off for a couple of nights burgeoning with romantic intent.

Being somewhat anxious as to the security of Casa Mick during his absence, our hero concluded that the last place burglars would look for a computer was in the oven. Unfortunately it was also the last place that he looked for it after switching on the oven to make dinner when he got back from his hols.

The plastic case was just curling up and turning nice and crispy as Mick tore open the oven to rescue his lap-top. Amazingly it still works, which says a lot for the power of modern electronics . . .

Elsewhere Fa continues in its own particular rich and idiosyncratic dialect, as best beknown only unto itself. Well, obviouslyment, as Dave the Underdog (formerly known as barman) put it this week in a flourish of newly-coined and particularly fragrant or possibly flagrant franglais.

Me, I'm sticking with the winter-flowering pansies. I've become most intrigued by these simple et pas du tout prétentieuses fleurs, which have been cheering up the view outside my front door for the last six months.

I couldn't help thinking that winter-flowering was just a touch of an exaggeration after watching one tiny bud take about a month actually to flower.

Rather more interesting is the way these plants had of faking death during each of the three snow, storm and tempest cold-snaps that we had last winter.

As soon as it freezes, they turn into a slimy heap of wet spinach apparently not long for this world. The first time this happened, the only reason that the pansies escaped bung-ment dans la poubelle was because I was too lazy to bung them.

Then I was amazed to find that with every thaw they magically stand up straight again and carry on pansying. And now when I thought they would be completely past it, they've suddenly burst into a blaze of flowers. Absolutely brill, except that I've no idea where to put them when eviction becomes necessary for my customary summer cultivation of basil.

Serious moral dilemma Batman . . . because you can't beat basil straight off the plant and into the pasta.

And it really is White Hell III, the director's cut . . .

2010-03-09T12:45:00.001-08:00

I suppose it was all my fault for musing with the Met; that's to say the sunny/rainy/foggy/freezing/Michael of the Fish People-type Met rather than the Pavarotti starving in his garret (wot, no enticing snackettes in New York?) variety.

Probably I shouldn't have lightly reflected on the possible return of rampant white-out, just on the strength of a couple of rogue flakes observed by girlfriend Claire on the top of Col de Saint Louis.

Because we promptly had White Hell III. This is the scene where the aliens, disguised as meringues géantes, capture a Ford Fiesta, in order to sacrifice it to the Evil Thargs of Groink.

Actually I'm not sure why a Fiesta with knackered valves and suspected piston ring failure would be deemed to have Sacrificial Virgin Status on Planet Groink, but this is a B Movie.

I really wanted girlfriend Claire to be chased in her bikini and fall over just at the point where mega tonnes of white Merovingian digestive slime pour all over the Fiesta, wiping out all life forms within range.

But Claire famously feels the cold at anything much below incineration temperature so I had to settle for a Hell-Hound of Fa being brutally vaporised in mid-piddle on the rear wheel.

This was probably just as well because Warp Drive failed on the Rescue Ship Kangoo (interstellar handbrake cable frozen solid again) and my beloved girlfriend would indeed have been abducted by Giant Green Lizard Aliens (disguised as meringues, anything to stay in budget). It was bad enough having to walk to work as it was.

*The producer would like to reassure readers that no real hell-hounds, giant green lizards, girlfriends or dodgy Ford Fiestas were harmed during the making of this blog.

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious . . .

2010-03-07T12:02:00.000-08:00

. . . summer. We bloomin' well 'ope. Beware l'hiver: Winter dans ce petit coin de la belle France, like Henry IV, tends to come in two parts; though if global-warming has its way, it may start to come like Henry VI, in three.

It's fairly normal to have a break in the winter around here in early February. This leads recently-arrived and naive English persons to believe that winter is over and that's it's time for shorts already.

No sooner have they imagined this than it's blow winds and crack your cheeks (well, if you will wear shorts) and March gives you a good 'iding; a prolonged part two of meteorological vileness, even into the darling floods of May.

Actually I thought this pic was going to be a bit of con. It was taken by my old schoolmate and photo correspondent David Moore, during the outstandingly heatless weekend of February 13/14 but took longer than expected to arrive due to murky obscurities (technical).

I loved this delicious filigree of ice and snow in the at-any-time spectacular Gorges de Galamus and was just scraping the bottom of the barrel for an excuse to use the pic, when girlfriend Claire rang up to report that there had been snow on the neighbouring Col de Saint Louis on her way home and that yet more of the tedious white stuff was forecast for Perpignan tomorrow. Sometimes you can win 'em all . . .

You never know from one minute to another what we're going to get next. At lunchtime we at last basked again on the sun-drenched and limpid terrasse du Cafédefa, at tea-time it was persistenting down with great dampness and tomorrow, who knows, maybe White Hell III, the director's cut?

Talking of our beloved café, alert readers may have vaguely noticed that Fa itself hasn't had much of a mention in recent despatches. This is probably because the café has been shut for repairs to both building and proprietor, thus depriving me of news and gossip. Marie, l'adorable chef, has had to recover from hospital treatment while Dave the Underdog (formerly known as barman) took the opportunity to wreak the Revenge of the Killer Piano.

Departure of the piarnofor-te, as Max Wall would have put it, offered Dave such an inviting expanse of virgin wallpaper that he couldn't resist banging a brand-new doorway through it into the old bar on the other side, a room long concealed in the dim mists of, well, dim mist really; though evidently poised for a triumphant comeback.

However the village trundles on in its accustomed cycle of ducks, old, young and roasted; the daily mantra of bread runs, school runs and men from the mairie doing things with lorries, strimmers and instruments of destruction.

Just to remind us that we are indeed a pulsing and vibrant community, hotly seething beneath the vigorous shadow of our legendary Tour Visigoth, one of the village sweet young things held her 18th birthday bash on Saturday.

The ponderous thud of techno beat against the doughty shutters of 5 Boulevard de La Pinouse, reducing them to metaphorical splinters, just as girlfriend Claire and I were thinking of going to sleep, ha-ha.

I have often admitted in this very tome that I am not averse to making a bloody racket, which I ingeniously attempt to pass off as music. Now is the moment to admit that I am a total bloody hypocrite when it comes to putting up with other people's racket.

It's not so much the noise but that techno is such crap dance music. What possible rhythmic pleasure could there be in bonk, bonk, bonk with not so much as a thirteigh, fourteigh? Bugger, I am officially old, I have finally admitted it: They don't write tunes like they used to . . .

Spring awakening . . . do as you would be Donne by

2010-03-01T11:07:00.000-08:00

I thinke that sprinnge doeth bee sprunnge. I know this possibly from an unaccountable desire finally to go out and discover John Donne, and more probably from finding myself stuck behind my first camper van of the year.

As you may recall, the mere glimpse of a camper van dawdling criminally in the middle distance is enough to have me reaching for the crucifix and garlic.

On reflection, a stake in the back tyre would be more effective, or even a silver bullet . . . May potent poodles piddle on all their wheels. Naturally this loathsome wraith and apparition occurred on that Golden Road to Samarkand otherwise known as the D117 to Perpignan. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately crétin doing 30km par heure in the middle of la rue decree . . .

It's possible that this is one of the lines famously missing from Kubla Khan because the postman or similar alternative plonqueur turned up and broke the dear old stoner's train of thought while he was writing it.

Or perhaps not, though of course the camper van driver certainly acted like he'd been rifling Samuel Taylor's stash. Some things never change; as Prévert would put it: "Je suis qui je suis . . ." though I'd like to think that exotic, leggy slappeuses from Paris bars would never dream of doing something as profoundly uncool as driving a camper van. Incidentally that's yer man Coleridge pictured, in a moment less smashed.

It has to be said that girlfriend Claire and I are pretty much united in our deep hatred of the D117. One or other of us has to trog up and down it most weekends and it rates high on our Top Ten Linear World Enema Sites. End of rant.

Spring started unconvincingly enough near Canet-en-Roussillon (chez Claire) on Saturday with a howling gale. One became acutely aware of the gathering typhoon while driving Renault's hot contender for the America's Cup. You may not know this but Kangoo is an old French word which means Four-Wheeled Spinnaker. One of these days I may fit it with lifebelts in case I run out of road.

But somehow on Sunday the wild and gleefully thrashing wind died to a still and distant shadow. The seaside morning market filled and swirled with the unbearably-appetising smell of tagine and paella. That cheery Arab guy was again selling great green bunches of fresh coriander for only €1.50 a shot so I nabbed one quick.

With all this food on offer, the traders were clearly expecting someone to turn up. And turn they duly did, even unto the shoe-horning of the car parks for the first time since last October.

And all was no longer frozen even in Fa (40km north of Canet crow flies; if you use the D117, it's another 397). I cautiously shed a layer or two of superannuated jumpers, thus recalling surprising quantities of long-concealed and dimly-remembered flesh.

We're at last getting to that weird time of year when you accidentally open a window and are amazed to discover that it's actually warmer outside; one of our more beloved phenomena here in SW France.

If this goes on much longer, I shall be forced to out out with the disc-grinder and remove the Lloyds'-certificated welding that keeps the kitchen door compulsively, nay even compulsorily, shut . . .

Batten down the tea-cups, here comes Edith

2010-02-23T11:53:00.000-08:00

As is often my wont, I fell to musing about music this morning. Or rather, I was pushed; someone at France Culture unchained Edith Piaf. So there is a role on radio for the hard-of-hearing, or merely those with a fetish for pink leather bulletproof ear-muffs.

Far be it from me to mock the afflicted; I get the odd touch of tinnitus myself, either from playing electric guitar or driving a circular saw, should you be able to tell the difference.

There's certainly no mistaking that compulsive vibrato like an express train on steroids with the DTs; a sure sign that The Little Sparrow Has Landed. Ella Fitzgerald could shatter a wineglass with the sheer purity of her voice. In dear old Edith's case, large plate glass windows simply surrender before the commencement of hostilities; citing name, rank and number in accordance with the Geneva Convention.

I suppose it must be high treason to talk about one of France's finest like this. But I have to admit that I just don't get what Edith Piaf is about. It's all so full-on. I once listened to her greatest hits CD. Twenty whole tracks - home James, and beat the horses into two submissions and a knockout before we start. What I really enjoyed was the wonderful, ethereal, deliciously dead silence when at last she stopped . . .

But we all have music that we don't get. Take Prog Rock, bands like Yes and Genesis; some bloke in a funny hat going on about Hogweeds and Epping Forest. I mean to say, have you ever seen a forest epping? What does it do when it epps? Probably it's just a question of mulch.

Needless to say, I never got Prog Rock either. But what about French Prog Rock? Le cerveau vraiment bogule . . . Congratulations, you have just won a copy of the dreaded Gong Double Live; my official The Most Boring Album Ever In The World Ever for the last 27 years, and counting.

And even now, there's no escape. The French absolutely adore some English guy called Feel Coleen. Most pop stations only possess about four records, three of which are always by Feel Coleen. I have come to the unavoidable conclusion that this must in fact be the bald guy who used to play drums for Genesis . . .

But don't get the idea that I've got a downer on French music. I adore Debussy and Ravel and it was well worth catching Stephane Grappelli live, even if he was about 106 at the time. And then there's our local boy Claude Nougaro, whose best songs I'm gradually learning to play so that girlfriend Claire can sing them. He's got a lovely touch with the lyrics, like in his signature tune Toulouse, talking about the rather dodgy quartier that he grew up in, "where even the grannies love a punch-up". Funny, poignant; great words.

It's a shame as well that Renaud's Miss Maggie isn't better known to us anglais. It is, of course, about La Femme en Fer. It goes on for four verses or so, explaining how the singer loves all the women in the world, even fat, ugly, old slappeuses, because they're not either warmongers or idiot football fans like men. It's just that each verse ends "except Madame Thatcher", or words to that effect . . .

Mind you, I was discussing this with Claire the other day; we simply never got to hear any French bands in England. The only French records I could recall were Vanessa Paradis's first hit Joe Le Taxi and Plastique Bertrand's Ca plane pour moi. Of course, yer man Bertrand (or do you call him Plastique?) turns out to be Belgian, rather like Johnny Hallyday when he's having a row with the taxman.

Well, it could be worse; France's most famous singers may be Belgian, but all the most famous Belgians are fictitious; Hercules Poirot and Tintin. Tonnerre de Brest! C'est un coup de Trafalgar!*

*Usually translated, very loosely indeed, as Blistering barnacles! etc. (See Haddock, Captain, swearing, for the use of). Un coup de Trafalgar dates from the battle naturally, and to this day denotes a cunning or sneaky trick, the French obviously having felt that it was unfair that they lost.

Out on the piste with the Dancing Men

2010-02-21T05:09:00.000-08:00

I hope you'll excuse a bit of Proud Daddery with this pic of my son and heir Rhys, aged 13, receiving his first lesson in skiing from girlfriend Claire. At this point, the lad was still a tad wobbly on his pins, hence the somewhat bowed right leg. But we were thrilled to find that after about half an hour he stopped falling over, and zoomed off madly in all directions while remaining largely vertical.

It didn't greatly surprise me because the S&H is remarkably good at sports; a slightly bizarre state of affairs considering that he's related to me, but there you have it. I was deeply grateful to Claire for getting him started. It's wonderful when you can introduce your kids to something they can really enjoy and never had the chance to do before. Besides, it's unfair to inflict too many hours of adult boredom on the young-and-still-alive, during a week's holiday.

I strongly suspect that ma jolie femme de la montagne is a real whizz on the slerps. After all, she lived right up in the Pyrenees for the better part of 48 years. Unfortunately, Claire is recovering from a knee injury so it will probably be next winter before Dangerwoman is once again unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

It does at least save my blushes, as I've never tried skiing, being outstandingly bad at sport. But I must admit to having felt the odd regret that I'd never given it a go in the eight years that I've lived here. I think I must try it sometime when no-one is looking (except the mountain rescue team). Well, as they say: Break a leg. I probably will.

Anyway, The S&H had such a whale of a time the first day, that I couldn't resist offering him another go, so the first pic is taken at Formiguères and the second at Camurac, two of our nearby skiing stations.

I rather liked the row of bods waiting for the ski-lift. Despite some impressive lies on the part of the camera, it was actually so eye-piercingly bright that the queue was reduced to a line of blackened silhouettes; just like Sherlock Holmes's Dancing Men or maybe Captain Flint's secret message in Arthur Ransome's Missee Lee.

Perhaps childhood is different these days. I didn't get to do things like skiing, I didn't even get out of the UK until I was 20, though you could say that I made up for lost time later by emigrating . . . It doesn't bother me, I think it's great that kids can do these things. But I seem to recall a lot via favourite books; as Ransome said: Nothing ever happens in winter holidays.

I admit that I'm rambling on about all this kids' stuff to give me the excuse to mourn the passing of Lionel Jeffries, director of the all-time classic The Railway Children. I first saw the film at the flicks in Cannock, aged nine, when it came out in 1970. It remains that very rare animal, a true family film which also improves on the book.

Edith Nesbit's original is a rather scruffy affair, written quickly for cash, and containing a couple of chapters' worth of padding to swell the always perilously-low Nesbit coffers. Jeffries's script is a gem, cutting out the rubbish, adding in all those great one-liners and lovely, poignant throwaway lines, suggesting various intriguing possibilities that are never explained.

And 40 years on, that bit where Jenny Agutter says "Daddy, my daddy!" still has the power to make grown men cry. Makes me bite the old lip a bit just thinking about it. Who says les anglais are always ze cold feesh?

I wonder if this most English of stories could translate into French. Girlfriend Claire's unfondest memoires of train travel involve spending six deeply tedious hours per weekend coming home from boarding school on the delightfully antique but fearsomely slow Train Jaune, bump and grinding its way, as near as dammit vertically, back into the Pyrenees. Bit of a nul point there, I think.

Mind you, we are supposed to be getting a steam-hauled special, visiting Limoux for the famous carnival in a week or two. The loco should be a 141R, a serious piece of kit by British standards; a vast green and gleaming monster. It is a dragon, I always knew it was . . .

Alors, c'est Begin the Beguine aux legumes

2010-02-09T13:15:00.000-08:00

Cole Porter, isn't it? Though I don't think that he mentioned carrots. Mes amis français too can be ambivalent on the subject of vegetables, or to be precise, vegetarians.

The French have no particular dislike for veggies; they just find it very difficult to fathom why anyone would want to be one. It isn't really something they do.

This is all causing a bit of head-scratching chez girlfriend Claire just at the mo. Her school is expecting an exchange party of Irish girls in a month or two, and a couple of them are listed as vegetarians (strict).

For a start, they're all a bit hazy at this end as to what strict vegetarian means. Said girls are going to be staying with French families and it's a bit worrying wondering what they're going to be able to eat.

I must admit that any pauvre maman française faced with having to cook up a solid week's worth of pure veganism, without previous experience on the frontline, has my deepest sympathy. I'm no anti-veggie myself (I came up with a chickpea, lemon and fresh coriander salad at the weekend that was profoundly wicked), but anyone giving me chapter and verse over the rights and wrongs of lesser-spotted rennet while I'm trying to cook, is likely to end up wearing their dinner . . .

Actually there's nothing really to worry about. We have all the right vegetables here; just not necessarily, as Eric Morecambe famously said, in the right order. Girlfriend Claire wouldn't dream of making a meal without a good salad and some choice spuds. But equally she wouldn't do it without the meat. It is meet and right so to do. Yea verily.

Coincidentally les têtes d'oeuf chez France Culture were having a good go on animal rights this very morning. They were deeply clever and philosophical, throwing in all manner of cultural allusions for good measure. They also opined that it was fairly safe, medically speaking, to be a veggie.

But in the end, they continued to be frankly baffled, deciding that the best big, hairy, macho blerk français way of keeping animals in their place was still . . . to eat them.

Evidently the Glorious Path of Meatness is where your Frenchman feels most at home. And it has to be said that les français would have made a much better job of tackling The Great Ruddy Duck Menace than the massed hapless plonks of the British Government.

The Ruddy Duck, apparently, is a great swaggering, bonktastic, American slappeur of a duck. It is steadily wiping out the native British White-headed Duck, which is uterly wet and a weed (molesworth), crap in a scrap and positively panda-esque in its relative prissiness.

Deciding that the only effective way to put a Ruddy Duck off its stroke is to shoot it, ever-efficient Whitehall employed a team of highly professional marksmen. This has so far, saith The Observer, cost a magnificent £4.6million, c'est à dire, £742 per duck . . .

Les français would simply have let the valiant pastis-swilling members of la chasse loose on les Yanquis volants and probably made more than a few bob charging for licences. You can bet that they would have converted the lot into magret de canard quicker than you can say Donald.

Probably they would also have shot one or two of each other in the process, mais tant pis, it's all par for the course and you can solve most things over a glass of Ricard.

Peer Gynt? Do it on the radio . . .

2010-02-03T11:33:00.000-08:00

I didn't have a pic to hand so I thought I'd write something about the radio, just to make you think that I planned it that way . . .

Actually I've discovered that Radio 4 is alive and kicking in France. Yes, I know you can get all those nice Beeb chaps and chapettes on the net. What I really meant to say is that France has its own version of Bay Bay Say Raddio Quatre, called France Culture.

It really is a dead ringer for Radio 4 or as Larousse online puts it; un sosie. So there you have it, your new French word for today: dead ringer = un sosie. I had to write it into the blog to avoid forgetting the blasted word instantly.

Do you find yourself staring at French words that you know damn well you've looked up; you just can't remember what they mean? I do. I suppose it's what comes of trying to build up a gigantic French vocab at a time when my brain cells are expiring quicker than my ability to put things in them.

As usual I digress. The important thing about France Culture is that you have a regular collection of exactly the kind terribly clever people talking about terribly clever subjects in a terribly refined and civilised manner that you would find on Radio 4.

But this means that you already know what they're talking about, which of course is sometimes more than they do. And thus, already being familiar with the subjects, you can understand a lot of very clever French and feel thoroughly pleased with yourself. Especially as it all gets easier with practice.

Of course, FC does have a few touches of its own. To be a regular broadcaster, it seems that you have to be a fifty-something blerk with a fruity voice de bon timbre, rather like Rumpole armed with a bottle of Château Thames Embankment, and defending Asterix for carrying sanglier-breaking implements.

This obviously involves smoking about 50,000 fags because the taut and intelo discourse does break down remarkably often for the All-France Coughing Championships.

And being radical intellectuals doesn't stop them going in for the odd bout of old-fashioned reactionary macho stuff. They couldn't wait to rip into a particularly ardent young feminist the other morning.

She did rather dig herself into un trou (noun masc) while trying to argue inherent sexism in the French language. This is a viable argument in English where we assign masculine, feminine and neuter genders according to some semblance of reality. But in a language where boats are masculine and tables feminine on some entirely arbitrary grammatical basis, the idea really doesn't hold water.

I note that my online dictionary has a list of thirteen words for various girly bits, twelve of which are masculine, and one for "balls" which is feminine, so maybe the French are just plain confused . . .

Mind you, FC also ran a nice piece on how the Stuart kings managed to get themselves deposed twice, which is a lot more real English history than you get to hear in England these days, so it doesn't do to get on the old grands chevaux too often.

Apparently "high horse" translates directly, which brings me back to my favourite subject of idiom. I heard a lovely one the other day: "Et mon cul est un poulet?" Or "And my arse is a chicken?" It really does mean "Are you kidding me?" so no, I'm not.

STOP PRESS: le piano préhistorique du café est parti.That's to say, it's gorn: A nation mourns, or to be accurate, it doesn't.