Strange and lost horses for missing courses

On the second day of Christmas my true love sent to me . . . well, this pair actually.

It has to be said that in turtle-dove terms they're distinctly solid and, er, horse-like. Anyway here they are, penned up at the side of the church at Fa and nobody knows who they belong to.

I first discovered them in the deepening gloom last night while trying to take out the ash from the wood burner, and realised that in rather hostile horse language they weren't going to let me get to the wheelie-bins.

Seeing, in the cold light of day just how much I would have trodden in, maybe they were doing me a favour and one should be grateful for small mercies.

So perhaps they were sent here by the raging Furies and fickle winds of mischance and twisted fortune. It's also possible that they were sent by the Anti Smoking Police, because every time girlfriend Claire goes out for a fag, they either make strange and scary ghostly horse noises in the dark or by day they just stare at her intently, pointedly and balefully.

It all has an agreeably seasonal symmetry: No room at inn, hapless gees chucked out to make room in stable, gees fetch up sheltering under wall of church. Alternatively some silly sod somewhere hasn't learned how to shut the gate, though this explanation tends to lack charm, Christmas romanticism or indeed any class and style at all.

Still, it seems to have been a Christmas of minor mishaps all round: Down at the ever-genial Cafédefa, Dave the Underdog (formerly known as Barman) regaled us with the tale of how all his grandchildren's presents ended up in the dustbin.

While making an overnight flying visit to Fa, He Who Was Responsible became over-zealous in tidying up his accommodation and assumed that the handily positioned bin-liner contained crap . . . which all ended up in an SOS phone call, a rescue mission by Dave in suitably seasonal silly Santa hat and a huge dry-cleaning bill from the Christmas fairy, who is apparently also suing for false imprisonment in someone's manky old dustbin.

Actually Dave was still wearing his silly hat while spilling the beans but I think this was only a ruse to look cute and charming while trying to get a Christmas kiss off Claire (he succeeded).

By the way, we succeeded in having another turkey-free Christmas, thanks to Claire's fab saumon en papillotte (salmon steaks with carrots, leeks and mushrooms fried in butter and crème fraîche, deeply yum) for the Réveillon (Christmas Eve) and my own offering of Morroccan-style lamb with coriander, prunes and mushrooms with veg on Christmas Day.

If this latter dish seems perversely multi-faith on my part, well (a) I prefer lamb to turkey and (b) if they had had Crimbo dinner in Palestine in Zero A.D. it's odds-on that they would have eaten lamb rather than a huge, dry, flightless thing from America which would not be discovered for another 1,500 years . . .

Stringing up Santa: the perilous art of social climbing

I see it's "String up a Santa" time in SW France again. Already there is a hint of winter in the air and the nascent feeling that the Old Year will peg out on us quite soon.

These particular Crimbo decorations, very popular round here, have always intrigued me. Actually this example (courtesy of my normally dour and taciturn next door neighbour, surprisingly enough) is fairly well made, which spoils the joke a bit.

Here you can clearly see that the old gent is climbing a ladder; with the numerous el cheapo ones, it looks just like Santa has been hanged by the neck in this place of execution until he be good and dead.

Still the art of social climbing was ever perilous; which brings me round (or my round?) to my mate Dave the Barman and the rich, seasoned and seasonal life at the Café de Fa.

For a start it's the Cafédefa these days, because Marie l'adorable chef thinks it looks cool and I have to admit that it does in the cute and exotic typeface that she's found to use on the posters. I hunted around in the crypt-like bowels of my computer and found something quite close, though I'm not convinced that it's a dead ringer.

And while in the spirit of correction, journalistic ethics* and, indeed, right of reply; I am forced to report that Dave the Barman has visited the blog, and whilst in general enthusiastic, expressed himself as disappointed to be known as only Dave the Barman.

This has worried me for some time, because Dave is an all-round bon oeuf and frequent source of inspiration and thus a character of no inconsiderable honour in this humble chronicle (of love, passion, astonishing courgettes, turn-the-handle, village, waffle, blah blah, idiot, etc etc).

I have racked my brains for long and sweaty hours over this conundrum and could get no further than The Dave Formerly Known as Barman, with its slight nuance of a well-known small, moist and eccentric but undeniably talented musician.

However it's been officially decided that he's Dave the Underdog. To explain this title, perhaps I should introduce you to the hierarchy at the Cafédefa.For a start it consists of at least four women, even if one of them is an ancient and cantankerous dog . . . and Dave.

The boss is, of course, Marie l'adorable chef, (française) who owns the place. Dave (anglais) is actually her chap, but don't imagine that this counts for anything in the cut-and-thrust of female world domination.

Then there's Nanou (française) the barmaid and very possibly Of The North as her agreeable chap Eric could well be the Viking and stands to make a lucrative career as stunt double to Hagar the Horrible.

Julia, the chef as in cooking, (anglaise) is a shy and retiring flower who rarely leaves the kitchen, though it was discovered that she's a mean Celtic harp player during an exceptional foray into the public eye. Her occasional substitute is a large and deeply formidable française who I have never risked trying to identify more closely than as Valérie's mum.

Lastly there's Mollie the ancient dog (française) who barks at everything and everyone, especially in situations of zero-risk. The one time they had an actual burglar down in the bar, Mollie remained utterly silent, safely hidden under the bed upstairs . . .

Mollie, having been Marie's exclusive compadre these many years, remains deeply ambivalent about the incomer Dave's place in the scheme of things. I suspect she regards him with the utmost distrust; a fiendish usurper no less of the affections of her mistress.

Thus we have Mollie the Dog so Dave must be the Underdog. QED: C'est la vie.


*English county to the west of London

A study in epic grandeur or rivers of turnip blood?

I'm great lover of idiom, be it French, English or anybody else's language. Now and again the French come up with a good one like: "Il a du sang de navet", which literally translates as "he has turnip blood" and means someone who always feels the cold.

I couldn't immediately think of an English equivalent. If, like me, you come from Staffordshire, you would of course say "nesh" but it's definitely a dialect word. I don't know how widely it's used but I doubt it ranges far outside the frozen, desolate and possibly turnip-ridden wastes of northern England.

Of course, in speaking of turnips, the prophet may have merely been making a general reference to the producers of all root vegetables, and possibly even onions, but I know exactly what he meant, when the first really cold, dank bone-chilling rain of winter set in this week.

To capture the feeling of the moment, I offer this imposing view of the sun forcing a passage through the late-afternoon mountain murk, hurriedly snatched from the hallowed slopes of Anorakville-le-sacré, alias Rennes-le-château.

I have to admit that I am a devout unbeliever with regard to our local centre for sword/sorcery/hidden treasure/runes/codes/Mary Magdalen/the Holy Grail/and possibly our old friends the Giant Green Lizards who will take over the world in 2012 or sometime definitely, maybe, possibly, never or at least after our teabreak with chocolate digestives.

But if you insist on being gnostic about it, the one Great Truth that I do recognise about our little shrine for the intelligent enthusiast/hyper anorak/casual sightseer/terminally bonkers is that on a wet afternoon in December, it's bloody cold there. Holy Grail? I'd prefer a nice cup of tea.

Shock holly - the demise of a fluffy animal story

There are sprigs of freshly-cut holly among the tubs of winter-flowering pansies in Fa. Early seasonal cheer perhaps? L'esprit de Charles Dickens et son Chant de Noël? Monsieur Scrooge, Timothée Miniscule et cetera?

Not a bit of it: Bah! Humbug! C'est la vengeance des gratte-culs, or as they say in anglais; The Revenge of the Arse-Scratchers.

I must admit that I (usually . . .) have a weakness for the old-fashioned tabby. The French evidently don't, because here they're called chats de gouttière, or gutter cats.

Obviously this little horror lived right up to his stereotype, prompting swift retribution from the nice old dears who care for the flowerpots of Fa.

Up to this point I'd been going to spin you a sweet little yarn about the kitsch kitten that's been trying to adopt us; me and girlfriend Claire, that is.

It's probably our fault for habitually sitting on the wall outside 5 Boulevard de la Pinouse, whilst ungluing our tongues from the roofs of our mouths with the first large coffee of the day.

Alternatively it's Claire's fault for having to have the first fag of the day and my fault for taking up passive smoking; lest the air of the sort-of-quite-near-the-Pyrenees become too heady in its pure form.

Anyway said tabby kept coming to make itself at home in our laps, rolling dough and squirting hyper-toxic levels of charm at us from its cute glands. It also sometimes accompanied us on a stroll down the boulevard in the general direction of the Café de Fa.

Incidentally, inhabitants of larger but less perfectly-formed settlements have been known to doubt that so small a place as Fa possesses its own boulevard. But we do, even if the title is a shade prétentieux for a little street of ordinary lumpy and stony maisons du village.

And it's true that, about half way up, our super-chic boulevard abandons all pretence of grandeur and becomes the deeply basic chemin de la Découverte; a brownish study in decrepit hardcore.

But back to the tabby terror, caught in the act by a bit of smart camera work. It has to be said it's a definite lapse in pussy PR: Sorry sunshine, you've been dumped.

Small kid, large dog and last house naked

Winter is coming in the Pyrenees. You can tell this because all the leaves obligingly dropped off the conker trees outside The last house before Spain, leaving this normally chaste and discreet edifice delectably undraped in all its eccentric glory. Revealed for the first time are the perky little dormer windows, the full extent of the bizarre iron tat on the roof and the two ends of the wonderful gallery on stilts affair that goes all the way around the back of the house as well.

I suppose it's not surprising that the place is snoozing a bit these days compared to its adventures in the past. Back in the Franco era, there were customs officers at the border and even the vague little track outside the last house possessed its own checkpoint.

However it was sufficiently off the beaten track to get quite lively deep in the night when the officers of les douanes were all safely tucked up in beddy-byes. Girlfriend Claire, whose mum's house this is, tells me that when she was a child, you quite often heard knocked-off cars and lorries loaded with whatever contraband making a run for it in the dark. And it wasn't unknown for the last house itself to harbour the odd refugee from time to time.

It all reminds of that children's TV classic Belle & Sébastien, a prog so indelibly stamped on my generation that there's still a Scottish indie rock band named after it. I borrowed a French DVD of it and the whole thing comes back like it was yesterday.

For a start the BBC put an English narration straight over the top of the original French soundtrack so you recognise all the voices. We used to get a lot of Euro kid's TV like that. Either the Beeb hadn't invented dubbing yet or was too tight to bother.

Curiously we also watched, without fail every holidays, a French version of Robinson Crusoe, complete with similar el cheapo narration. Presumably the Beeb was again too tight to make their own stab at this most English of stories, but it still seems a bit strange on reflection.

B&S, you may remember, concerns the adventures of the orphan Sébastien, and Belle, a Pyrenean mountain dog big enough to flatten him with a single lick.

The boy is adopted by the somewhat stern homme de montagne César, who is quite a bon oeuf really and brought up with his own older grandchildren, the deeply fit Angelina and her own adolescent kid brother (a bit of a prong). It all sort of goes on from there with lots of mountains, snow, suspicious villagers and customs officers.

I don't suppose English kids would be allowed to watch it these days. For a start Nasty Norbert, the villain of the piece, tries it on with Angelina and gets the kid brother paralytic down at the village bar. But worse, much much worse. They ALL smoke; even César with his wise, reflective, manly old homme de montagne pipe.

I'm happy to say that the gorgeous but sensible Angelina has les hots only for the handsome young village doctor and rebuffs Nasty Norbert in no uncertain terms, and actually I don't think that she smokes either, but I don't think even that would be enough to save B&S from the PC police.

I have to admit I'm a sucker for kid's TV from when I was a kid. It's a good job The Clangers weren't French, I can bore for England on the genius of Oliver Postgate. I even named our coffee-maker after the Soup Dragon.

A bridge too Fa, going too Fa, sweet Fa

Dear me, a triple crap gag headline, I must be weakening. Or sickening for something. Mind you, I did used to get paid for writing this sort of thing, quand j'étais rédacteur sur les journaux . . .

It has to be said that a village with a name like Fa has to be a bit of a gift for a blog-artist and source of enough dreadful puns to impress Ronnie Barker. Certainly it's a great way to confuse online mail order firms in England.

They always think I've forgotten to put in the name of the town and that FA (all capitals for a French address) must be part of the post code. No: I REALLY DO LIVE IN A VILLAGE CALLED FA!!!!!

Still I also do wonder if the winds of change haven't been getting a bit gale-force lately in Fa. Reality and modern life seem to be catching up with this unlikely-sounding little corner of the world.

Time was when our Mairie was just a handy place to buy school meal tickets, grumble about your water bill and file the odd planning app to turn some shambolic pile of amorphous rock back into a cute little village house again.

It also published useful little gems of info, such as when you could torch the entire surrounding countryside without being prosecuted and the precise dates of the underwater sanglier strangling season.

Just lately though, the Mairie seems to be have been getting keen and positively enthusiastic, which is only a short step away from modern or . . . downright dangerous. They seem to have employed more people, which is not really a bad idea, given that they're all good lads. The trouble is that they keep finding things for them to do.

On the face of it, this is right out of character for local government within spitting distance of the Med, where the whole point of employing people is for them to do nothing at all whatsoever: rien, nil, nada, nyet, nicht, pas du tout. In Fa however Monsieur le Maire, reasonably enough, is clearly out to get value for money.

I had my first doubts when a yellow line began to appear under my kitchen window. I normally find British Expat Syndrome a total turn-off but curiously, any Englishman reverts to type home/castle-wise if some prong threatens to ban him from parking outside his own house.

I nipped outside for a sharp word with Gerard-from-the-Mairie's-assistant-whose-name-escapes-me and withdrew magnanimously after ascertaining that the line wasn't going so far as to stop me parking my notoriously obtuse and maneating Kangoo by the front door.

Matters seem to have rested there but I still regard said yellow line suspiciously from time to time to make quite sure that it hasn't grown in the night.

Nonetheless it still seems to be the thin end of the wedge. I was talking to Bab, one of the Café de Fa's more notable characters, an amiable French Scotsman or a Scots Frenchman with a trilby, a beard and lots of tattoos.

Apparently the boys from the Mairie keep strimming the banks of the mighty River/pathetic trickle Faby and flattening his back garden, complete with expensive young plants, in the process. This is despite the fact that he keeps telling them not to . . . where will it end? one asks oneself.

Otherwise the dear old place rambles on in its own inimitable fashion: Josette the champion village eccentric (as previously chronicled) has a face on with me because I keep driving past when she's out thumbing a lift.

I don't do this on purpose; I just know perfectly well that she can't get in the Kangoo because the seats are too high and I can't lift her in without a co-pilot. Perhaps I could give one of the Mairie boys the job?

A moan for all seasons

I suspect the English love talking about the weather largely because they hate it, in all its hues, shades and flavours.

After all, when it comes to a profound state of auto-whinge, we're nothing if not versatile on the subject of weather: It's too cold, it's too wet, it's too grey, it's too sticky, it's too foggy/rainy/snowy/cloudy/sleaty/bleaty/draughty/windy/dank/mank or in the worst case scenario, sunk.

In the remote event of anywhere in Britain being made glorious summer by this sun of York: It's too hot . . .

I suppose the English are happiest, if that be possible, in September, a month often remarkable for having less of everything and thus being quite pleasant, in a character-building, cold-baths-before-breakfast sort of a way.

Here in the languid Languedoc, pretty much everything is late, and fortunately this usually includes autumn and winter, so early November is the new late September.

I suppose I might wax lyrical, or just drivel on a bit about the delicate melancholy that is forever autumn hereabouts but being terminally bone-idle, I shall simply whang a couple more logs into the old faithful black iron woodburner and refer you instead to the pic as taken once again by my visiting old friend Barbara on the Visigoth Tower hill above Fa.

Just to wind up tree-lovers everywhere and eco-persons generally, most of us burn shedloads of oak every winter in the largely vain attempt to keep some semblance of heat under our age-old and frankly eco-useless historic roofs.

Fortunately most of these trees grow on steep slopes and would simply fall down the mountainside long before they stood any chance of becoming mature. So all us would-be lumberjacks and the hired assassins of the firewood trade are only saving them from a nasty tumble. At least that's our story and we're sticking to it.

But the last word should go (as so often in this torrid chronicle of love, death and prize courgettes in a small but perfectly-formed French village) to the immortal Café de Fa, AKA the true centre of the universe.

I was just absorbing a genial bière or two with my mate Dave the barman, when mushroom-hunter extraordinaire Alain comes in with his spoils of the season, a selection of cepes de Bordeaux. The size of these things is incredible. Should you be rendered homeless, you could probably apply to live underneath one.

Dave, of course, was on form with the gossip, including a touching tale about one of our more mature bachelors, perhaps arriving in the autumn of his years, who was making moves over someone called Juliet.

"So, do we get to call you Romeo?" asks Dave in a how-did-it-go? sort of way next day. Total blank.

"You know, Romeo, Juliet, good old WS, balcony, poison, love, Immortal Bard", prods Dave helpfully. Deep, complete and total blankness. It's good to know that the age of romance is not dead . . .