Two weeks since we arrived Saturday 19th July

Painting the house sign

It has just occurred to me that two weeks ago today, I was meeting Jean at Heathrow airport and handing him a jacket to put on. His luggage was tagged with Miami labels and he shivered slightly in the light drizzle that was falling from a grey sky. Our past was becoming a memory and the road ahead was fairly obscure. Now two weeks later, we have beans in the ground, geraniums in the windows and horse manure around the roses. The postman delivers our mail and calls out “Bonjour Madame” if he sees me busy in the kitchen making the morning coffee, and the sun bounces off the courtyard wall and reflects through the huge bedroom windows enticing us out into another day filled with new experiences. For the time being, we have no television and very little contact with the outside world of current events and we haven’t missed it one bit. All too soon our internet line will be opened and the world will come tumbling in through our computer screens, but until then, we will water our beans, talk to our flowers and maybe take a walk through the village this evening.

We have made another delicious if somewhat dangerous discovery. Fougasse is the local speciality and is a mixture between bread and flaky pastry formed into a peculiar trellis shape. It is neither sweet nor savoury but a marvellous combination of the two, and intermingled with the dough are either pieces of olives, small slices of roasted red peppers or occasional dried fruit depending on what your personal favourite is. We found a little bakery in Sommieres and at one end they were forming the dough and thrusting the fougasse into the oven, and at the other end, they were literally selling them like hot cakes. A patient queue formed around the inside of the shop and down the steps outside into the narrow street, and people were drawn to the front door like German Pointers sniffing the aromatic saliva producing fragrance of freshly baked bread. I daresay that somewhere in Brussels a committee has been formed in order to ban French bakeries from emitting such incredible smells, but like anything else in this wonderful country, anything to do with food and the preparation thereof is a jealously guarded undertaking, and despite the European Union, no high handed bureaucrat from a foreign country is going to tell the citizens of France that they can’t inhale the mouth-watering smell of fresh bread.

The Femme de Menage arrived on Friday together with her little granddaughter Fiona who I reckoned to be around 10 years old. She gave me a shy smile and as I returned it, I realised that there was something odd about this child. She didn’t have an ipod and a set of headphones attached to her head and neither was she jabbering into a cell phone. She was devoid of any spandex clothing and glittering hair adornments and her loose shiny hair wasn’t wound into Rastafarian plaits. The real shock came when five minutes later, I went to check on the progress of Grandmother, only to find little Fiona up on a chair cleaning the kitchen windows. This was definitely a change from a great number of young ladies her age that we had seen in our previous surroundings, and I took a great shine to Fiona as she proceeded to put a great shine onto the top of the dining room table. If she comes along on the next trip, maybe we can try out a little bit of household English/French.

“What do you mean, you have no TV?” asked the rather bewildered man that we had just met during the course of our tour of the countryside yesterday.
“What about movies and sport and the news broadcasts and the weather?” he went on, determined that we should confess the error of our ways and do something about it.
“We haven’t bothered to get one since we arrived” we confessed, feeling partly proud of ourselves and partly guilty for not wanting to stay in touch with the never ending wall to wall coverage of the perils of the planet.

To be absolutely honest, it’s been rather nice to be without any form of telephone or internet connection for a couple of weeks. Of course we can nip into the nearby town of Castries and avail ourselves of the excellent “Mediatheque” system at the library, and spend an hour sorting through and answering any vital mail, but the usual ease of “ask Uncle Google” or looking up some filed away piece of information is not possible at present. This leaves us in the happy position of being able to take the day off and be tourists until such time as we lift the telephone receiver to our ears and hear that all too familiar buzzing sound and we are forced to rejoin the world.