Exploring the Area Wednesday 16th July

Vineyards at Pic St Loup

Jean’s mother is now living in a care home for the aged about forty minutes north of St Jean du Moulin, and we decided to give her a surprise visit. She is clearly delighted to hear news of the house and to know that it is being brought back to life. She insists that we carry her greetings to all and sundry in the village and we leave her, more interested in the evening menu than in prolonging the conversation regarding matters of the outside world about which she is no longer aware.

Let’s go for a trundle” said Jean at about 8.00pm. Usually by that time in Florida, he would be deep in concentration on his laptop while I would be settling into a movie on TV or buried in a book. With the evening sun still high, we drove out through the old part of the village and in less than a minute we were in the depths of the surrounding vineyards. The season has been good so far and the rich green of the foliage bodes well for a bumper harvest this year. The road wound along under the old Roman aqueduct near Castries, and we turned northwards until the towering angle of Pic St Loup could be seen. Previously this area had been nothing much more than wild scrubland, given over to the hunters with their guns and dogs. Now there is acre after acre of profitable vines and a large number of new wine producers have come into the area. The wonderful George Frêche who was the mayor of Montpellier and who is responsible for the new “Agglomeration de Montpellier” has brought all these wine makers into the fold and the “Route des Vines” extends far and wide taking tourists and wine aficionados deep into the countryside.

Climbing up over the ridge of the mountain, we could see various encouraging messages painted on the steeper inclines of the road. “Keep going, big kisses” and such-like, presumably served to urge on the entrants of the Tour De France who had raced over the surrounding peaks at some time. The Tour is on at present and we were exiting Castries one day last week when all traffic came to a standstill and a huge convoy of support vehicles, promotional trucks and strange three wheeler motorbikes carrying large advertising panels roared past us. We didn’t see anyone on a bike and gathered that the actual race was a few miles away, but it was fun to witness just a small part of the race which each year grips France and keeps the French glued to their TV sets.

Moving into someone else’s house always holds a few mysteries, and last night I viewed the gruesome contents of the bathroom basin in which I had been soaking my gardening shirt. The plug had got stuck and there was no way that I could see of removing the thing.
“Bring me something long and sharp” demanded my resident plumber and having shuffled through a drawer of extraordinary implements in the kitchen, I produced a long evil looking darning needle that had clearly been used to sew up a pig after major surgery.
“Will this do?” I queried, handing it over carefully, ever mindful of the fact that on occasions, my resident plumber could go pale and grey at the sight of such objects.
“Just the job” he said, and gouged out the offending plug, thus releasing half a ton of soil into the drain.
It just goes to show that our farming roots back in Africa are already coming in handy. For the whole of the five years that we lived in our seventeeth floor luxury condo in Florida, I was never once asked for an eight inch long thick needle to loosen a recalcitrant plug.


Instead of beginning to think that our existence in America wasn’t worth a hill of beans, we went out into the cool of the evening yesterday and planted two rows of beans. We then leaned on the ancient wall of the garden and ogled the piles of dried horse manure in the paddock next door, and made plans to climb over under cover of darkness and retrieve enough to dig in around the newly trimmed rambling rose. We don’t want to upset the neighbours before we have even had the chance to shake their hand, and the sight of their new voisins scaling a garden wall in darkness might get us off on the wrong footing. We have already done the waving and smiling, and had our respective dustbins emptied, so any day now, we will clean ourselves up and go and ring the bell on their large electric gate and present our credentials. Apparently they were well known to Jean’s Mum who is known to all and sundry as Mamy, and she acted as Grandmother and did fun things like hiding Easter eggs in the long grass and produced special treats for the children. Mamy was married to Papy who was Jean’s step father, and there were only a few people who actually knew or used his real name.


We have passed muster at The Mairie and the Bureau de Poste, and on Friday, we have a Femme de Ménage coming along who used to put a shine on the old furniture and buff up the expanses of tiled floors throughout the house. We are well aware that our arrival is probably being discussed at length in various quarters, but for now, we nod and smile and shake hands and wish everyone “Bonjour” and will wait to see how the chips fall. With an ex-wife in the next village and a single daughter expecting a planned and much anticipated baby, I daresay we are fairly high on the discussion list, but the prodigal son has returned to the old home, and we are greeted with kindness and warmth, thanks to the good associations that Mamy had with the village for so many years. I was worried about coming into a community where not only would I be viewed as a foreigner, but also be unable to speak the language. Then I realized that for most of my adult life, I had lived in similar conditions in Africa, and had felt completely at home in Lesotho, pointing and smiling in broken Sesotho and doing the same in fractured Afrikaans while living in a South African farming community. A smile is an international word that needs very little translation, and thanks to the instant polite greeting of the French, the ice is broken and communication can commence.