Bartering and blowouts

Excuse me for the delay with this week’s blog but I’ve been out peddling my wares on main street all day. Yup today was Rouffiac d’Aude’s annual vide grenier which translates as emptying the attic or in another way, a car boot sale. Okay, so we didn’t rake in the dough but Denis made a decent dent in his tool collection including two pool pumps (he doesn’t have a pool) and I sold one of three microwaves, a few trinkets, a very nice child’s cot, a couple of bits of clothing and a hamster cage. For some reason the promenading ladies weren’t sold on my 4plus inch high shoe collection (they are English shoes hence the Imperial measurement) but frankly, I couldn’t blame them. Trying to walk down the local rues without breaking an ankle is hard enough in flats before you’ve had a drink – cobbles and all. Still, it was a thoroughly enjoyable day spent chatting with the other stall holders, most of which Denis and I know well even if they were clearly better experts at pulling in the punters. There was a brief scare when a group of kids thought a house was being broken into so the manly men, including D, shot off round the corner only to find the proprietor stuck in his window – he’d lost his keys and was a little larger than said aperture.

Considering the weather over the past week, it has actually been a pretty decent weekend which was just as well as Denis and I have spent most of it wining and dining with friends. Put it this way, I haven’t needed to drag the hose out once and what remains of water in the pool is now a nice shade of army green. And we’ve managed to finish the potager extension thanks to the heavens above – digging out three gazillion rocks is much easier when the temperature sits well below 30 and the soil doesn’t resemble concrete. But it is weird. Normally we’d still be sweltering for at least another month but right now I’m delving through my sock drawer, pulling out woolies and porting a parapluie. However, according to the daily gossip down at the epicerie, there’s another blast of heat coming our way before Autumn sets in and local folks are rarely wrong. Mind you, such a brief taste of next season might be good for my other half as I’ve just booked our plane tickets – we’re off to the UK at the end of October and it’s his first visit. Actually, it’s his first visit anywhere on a plane holding his first ever passport.

Speaking of flying visits, I got to introduce D to a couple of friends of mine earlier in the week as we joined them for dinner at a pizzeria in St-Hilaire. Only it hadn’t got any pizza so we had duck instead. Some of you may remember the wedding I set up for Joshua and Jacey from Colorado in the vineyard up the road last year. They have a house yet to be lived in permanently a few minutes from Rouffiac so were shooting through to do a few repairs before whizzing off again. An all too brief reunion but they’ll be back in a few months and we’ve promised to take them out on town Rouffiac style. Which is exactly what Denis and I have been up to the past few days.

Friday started with a traditional Paella lunch over at amis Adolphe and Sarah’s home and wow, what a feast. The dish was huge, spilling over with aromatic rice, fresh seafood and chunks of pork – as the Catalans do I was emphatically informed. All groaningly gorgeous. Thankfully, considering the size of my belly after that, the evening was all about the last night of Le Bistrot which also marked the end of summer as the kids have all gone back at school. I bopped and bounced along to the sounds of an Indie/punk band – flippin’ brilliant although I think the music may not have been to everyone’s taste. Hah, I rocked the clubs back in the early 90’s and Callum keeps me up to date with all the latest tunes so I am somewhat an aficionado of the genre groove . And I got rid of enough calories to inhale down the most delicious, beautifully designed canapés made by our pal Michel for his wife’s birthday do the next day, served on Michel’s hand-made platters before D and I finished our Saturday groaning over brother Simon’s barbecued lamb. As much as I miss the warmth of September sunshine, my body is telling me otherwise – now might be a good time to get back up those hills and run before I end up buying back the wardrobe I sold because it was too big for me…

“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.” (Orson Welles)

September supplements

There’s nothing quite like a decent drenching to welcome in a new month so hello September. Okay, I know it’s not technically the end of summer and experience has taught me that we are more than likely to have another heatwave or two before the winter but I am looking forward to seeing the back of this season gone. A statement I shall no doubt regret when the woolies get dragged out from under my bed and muddy paw prints embed themselves over the tiled floors once more. As I write this, Denis is stuck between here and the South Coast having spent the weekend celebrating his great-niece’s baptism, he’s somewhere in the lanes of traffic trying to get home after the long school holiday – I was invited to the celebration but with no-one to mind the dogs or D’s animals, I got out of it. Mercifully judging by the pictures of stagnant autoroutes.

Speaking of D’s brood, there’s been an addition to his non-human family. Gaya the dog, Dolly the cat, Caesar the canary and Gypsy the semi-feral hedgehog have been joined by a tortoise. Denis found him wandering around the front garden and with no-one posting reward posters for the safe return of their roaming reptile, decided to adopt the little creature. The male tortue is as yet still without a name although I have suggested Captain Hilts due to the number of escape attempts. Who knew an animal fabled for its slowness could scale his fenced enclosure so fast? I have to admit I have grown rather fond of Denis’ new companion although having one of my own is out of the question – Arry’s obsession with rocks for starters and Sherman’s penchant for getting into mischief when it comes to anything not canine related for seconds. I accidentally stood on the remains of a hedgehog skin the other day and boy, do those prickles hurt. However it must be said that this one was not a victim of my youngest woofer, these adorable looking spiny mammals regularly murder each other I’m reliably informed.

It’s not that Sherman is a natural born killer, unlike his mum who can rid several hectares of rats in seconds but he is a big lad. A recent trip to the vets with both for their annual jabs had him tipping the scales at a whopping 12 kilos, 4 kilos heavier than Mama Alice. Mind you, as the vet pointed out, my gorgeous lump of a Border terrier is pure muscle – hardly surprising considering he’s best mates with my idiotic German Shepherd.

With Denis being away, I’ve had to do a bit of bicep-flexing myself to hoist the re-conditioned petanque bench into its new home court side. The once tired looking wooden seat is now stripped and varnished and the iron work painted green, typical for the style. It’s a shame all the family have left now that the holidays are over so there’s no-one to enjoy its luxury but I’m sure we’ll have a few more fêtes with friends before the winter comes. And now that almost all the summer jobs have been completed, I can look forward to a new list of ‘to-dos’ – there’s the new extended potager to plant out, the saga of my life needs a second drafting, the outside staircase needs re-painting, the walnuts and almond trees to be harvested, the village map to finish mapping and the old pool liner to replace. Summer’s over kids…

“The end-of-summer winds make people restless.” (Sebastian Faulks)

Heat and healing

It’s hot out there folks. The woofers have retreated under cover or in Mo’s case, under the pool deck and I’m spending far too much time rescuing bees from the water above – Titanic style. Poor things are desperate to have a drink but I do wish they would use the bowls available in the garden and not try and kill themselves with chlorine. Mind you, with the outside temperatures nearing 40 degrees, any idea of cooling off with a nice swim can be forgotten, it’s like warm soup in there. And even if you did want to lounge under the parasols on the deck, you’d have to take breathing apparatus with you – the blisteringly dry air burns down your throat. Denis and I are desperately trying to keep the young plantings hydrated which would be so much easier if the man with the drill pipe had been and gone, unfortunately he’s broken his compressor bit so we have to wait until it’s fixed. To make matters worse, my hopeful harvest of the grapevine has been dashed as all the grapes have reduced to black bullets. According to a local vigneron pal, I’m not the only one suffering the loss – there’s a new fungus about that loves destroying the white variety which could be devastating for next year’s wine.

Tending to nature has been the least of my stress over the last week, my sanity only saved by having the most accommodating guests in Phil and Rosie. Sadly they left on Wednesday but not before having the chance to dine out under the stars chez Abraham and join in on a bongo drum session the night before they departed. As much as I wanted the two of them to experience a little bit of what I’ve come to love down here, chilling out with a few of my close amis, after the day I’d had the evening couldn’t have been better prescribed. Mumo really wasn’t well so thanks to our next-door neighbour, Louise aka La Contessa, we got an ‘in’ with the gastroenterology department at Clinique Montréal in Carcassonne which resulted in an 8 hour stay in the hospital’s emergency. There’s not a whole lot to do whilst plugged into a drip in a room bereft of interest but I did my best to keep her amused. To respect Mumo’s privacy, I’ll not say what the problem was but I will say she is feeling much better especially since the diagnosis turned out not to be serious and she was released the same day.

Laughter may be said to be the best medicine but for Mumo (and myself), the arrival of her eldest grandson and his new girlfriend probably tops that. Louis and Lenaya (spelling of which I do not yet know) have been brilliant company for her and the fact that his cherie is as as passionate about the environment as I am and can talk as long as I can is the best anti-stress tonic. And she understands the need to use the basins in the sink rather than letting the water run straight down the plughole unlike most of my family so the remains of the washing up can soak a bit of flora and fauna. And Lenaya is the only new face to my family either. Yesterday I finally got to meet and hold Denis’ latest grand-daughter Ana who really is quite a star, never crying once as she was handed around like pass the parcel. For all the ups and downs and aggravation this summer has so far thrown at me, there’s nothing like meeting the future to bring a breath of fresh air into your life…

“We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.” (Letty Cottin Pogrebin)

It’s the little things in life

You could be forgiven for thinking that spending every afternoon for the past week in the bloody pool whilst the sun turned your back into mahogany brown was peachy perfect – it wasn’t. But fingers crossed, I think I have finally found and plugged the teeny weeny hole in the liner. At the bottom of the pool. After God-knows how many tubes of glue bought and smeared around every seam along the walls and floor, the flippin’ fissure ended up being in one of the corners. Trust me, there is nothing fun about shoving mountains of goo underwater and for some reason unknown to man or woman, standing still in water whilst holding down a patch makes you need the loo every five minutes.

As mentioned above, the sun has come out for mid-July in full force with the thermometer barely dropping below 30 even at night. With the poor woofers flopped out in any available shade, I’ve taken to leaving the balcony doors open after sundown so they can sleep out on the terrace which of course they don’t do and instead choose to pant incessantly in the heat of my bedroom. And before anyone gets any funny ideas about a woman sleeping alone with her terrace vitres wide open, Neo may be getting older but he still has his full set of well-used teeth and Arry likes to spread himself out over the right hand side of my sheets.

At least now I can actually get on with finishing all the other half-done projects. Denis and I have begun putting the fixtures and fittings into the outdoor kitchen below my balcony although we still need to buy a fridge. We did try to find a second-hand one but a) they were all too big and b) all extremely expensive. Might as well buy a new one at that price and a guarantee to go with it. I did however purchase the perfect top for the piece of palm we found down by the river, a bargain at 15 euros. All that’s need is more gluing and it’ll be ready for morning coffee. Or relaxing by with a nice ice-cold beer at the end of a sweaty day.

Speaking of chilling out with a glass on a warm summer evening, the last couple of nights have been spent raising them in a toast to Denis who became a grandfather for the second time. Baby Ana was born in the wee hours of Thursday morning, healthily weighing in at 3.3 kilos. I haven’t had a chance to go and see her yet but parents Yoan and Inaya have been sending daily photos of their second daughter who I’m told looks much like her mother but Denis says looks like a newborn at the moment. I’m sure she’s absolutely gorgeous and will stay that way if I avoid holding her – babies tend to start screaming as soon as I pick them up. Must be the witch in me.

With all the pool plugging and baby gushing, I’m hoping next week will be a quiet one although with my sister and her girls arriving on Tuesday, I expect not. Mind you, I adore my nieces and so do the woofers so a little disturbance of my Zen would not be unwelcome. After the last couple of months of swearing and sighing over all things water-related, the sound of swimming and splashing around will be just what the doctor ordered and speaking of orders, the man with the drill pipe is coming on Saturday. I mean he did say he was coming at the beginning of the month which was two weeks ago but better late than never. Now, with luck and fingers permanently crossed, summer can finally begin…

“Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.” (Sam Keen)

Ducking curveballs

Over a conversation with friends the other night, the subject of planning or not planning the future came up. Saba and Roy were on the ‘always good to plan ahead’ side whereas Denis and I were on the ‘live for today’ one. Apart from deciding what needs to be done garden-wise, we rarely make plans although I do keep a diary for things like medical appointments, weddings and such-like. Other people’s weddings, don’t get excited – we like our life just how it is.

And even if you could predict the future, life has a habit of throwing curveballs when you least expect them and forget to duck. Take last week’s weather for example – one day scorching hot and in the 30’s, the next thunderstorms and near flood conditions with temperatures 10 degrees lower. I had to dig out a winter jumper last night. And then there was what was supposed to be the grand pool refill but D got the wrong Saturday (it’s this coming one) so we wasted a whole day waiting for the man to show up which put me in a very grumpy mood but actually, even that worked out for the best. There’s still a small leak somewhere and I need to vacuum up all the sand the rain has dumped on the pool bed which is easier when it’s half empty. Such hiccups also gave me time to finish the petanque tent accessories although we are missing one cushion as the sewing machine decided to pack up.

My attempts at fixing the above contraption left me in a worse temper than that which comes as standard with the bloody pool so much so that I really didn’t want to go out last night to the annual fête in neighbouring Preixan – something I’d been looking forward to for months. However, not wanting to let Denis or our friends down, I reluctantly put on a happy face and my dancing shoes before popping over to my man’s place for a pre-boogie dinner. Well, it was bucketing down and as we sat on his terrace watching the black clouds sit overhead, the phone rang. Did we want to go over to Le Jardin instead? Apparently the crowds in Preixan had made parking near impossible and there had been a bit of trouble, fisticuff style the night before. So we did and what a fabulous night it turned out to be. Sometimes, what you don’t think you want turns out to be just what you needed.

And what do you know? It’s turned out nice again today. Bikini and shorts are back on and the woofers spread out under the trees instead of my feet. Time to do my best Esther Williams impression and find the pesky hole in the liner. I could leave it until tomorrow and have the help of D but tomorrow is another day and another curve ball to watch out for. Where’s my baseball mitt?…

“Forever is composed of nows.” (Emily Dickinson)