Christopher Campbell-Howes gets the wind up . . .

I CAN’T ever remember living anywhere in the UK where the wind had a name. When we lived in Scotland, for instance, the winter north-east wind used sometimes to come roaring in across the sea from Norway laden with snow and longing for the fireside, but it was never called anything. Nothing polite, anyway. Nothing that passed as a name.

Maybe it’s a Mediterranean thing, giving names to the various winds? The ancient Greeks and Romans had names for them, and personalities too. Early on in his ten-year journey from Troy to to his home in Ithaca, Odysseus, or Ulysses, whichever you prefer, was given them in a leather bag by Aeolus, master of the winds, according to Homer. All except the west wind, the one that would blow him home. His crew, convinced there was more in the bag than just wind, opened it while he slept. All the winds escaped, there was an almighty tempest, Odysseus and his ships were scattered back to square one and beyond.

Everyone has heard of the Mistral, an uncomfortable wind that blows down the Rhone valley and fans out into Provence, penetrating every chink of house or clothing in winter, driving uncontrollable forest fires before it in summer, but who knows the Tramontane?

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SEVERAL WEEKS ago Josephine and I took ourselves down into Roussillon, that little corner of Mediterranean France that shelters in the lee of the Pyrenees, where the next stop is Spain. Ninety minutes from where we live, it’s one of those regions of France where there’s a secondary language: just as you have Breton spoken alongside standard French in Brittany, or Basque round Biarritz, so you sometimes hear Catalan spoken here, where the Pyrenees dive into the Mediterranean. And one of the curiosities to be found in the Roussillon souvenir shops – and often in peoples’ houses – are plates decorated with a wind-rose showing the names of the winds in Catalan. There’s one at the top of this piece.

You can probably decipher some of it: Tramuntana is obviously Tramontane, the north wind that blows from across the mountains, Mestral is Mistral, Xaloc is the Catalan version of Sirocco, the sweltering, sultry, headache-y wind out of Africa across the Mediterranean. Garbi is a curiosity: it’s a corruption of the Arabic for south-west, which we know – even though it’s hundreds of miles away – from the Algarve in Portugal. And so on.

We had an appointment with some people we hadn’t seen for a long time, in fact the august and kindly proprietors of this website. We arranged to meet at a little place called La Franqui, an old-fashioned seaside resort tucked in between the Mediterranean, one of the many coastal lagoons in that area and a range of low hills culminating in steep seaside cliffs. Because of these physical limits La Franqui has never been able to expand, so there aren’t any of the sea-front hotels and high-rise seaview flats, not to mention all the other Costa razzamatazz, you get elsewhere along the western Med.

There was a brisk hold-on-to-your-hat Tramuntana blowing, the sea a perfect cavalry charge of white horses, definitely a day for windcheaters and shorts only for the hardiest. However much we felt cheated of a lazy lunch in the sun, clearly this boisterous weather was exactly what a certain sector of the local sporting populace wanted: as we wandered along the sea-front looking for somewhere to eat, we were intrigued by the frantic surf-sports activities. There are broad sands at La Franqui, and of course the Mediterranean has no tides to speak of, the water’s shallow and although there are some unpredictable currents where the lagoon meets the sea it’s a perfect venue for surfing, especially when the Tramuntana whips the sea up into a bit of a frenzy. The surfboarding looked pretty impressive, but what made us gasp was the kite-surfing, a daredevil activity I’d never seen before.

(This involves equipping yourself with a mini-surfboard and a parasail, a cross between a kite and a parachute, and of course the necessary wetsuit and harness. The wind takes your parasail and you with it. You skim the wave-tips at high speed and, if you’re specially adept, you can contrive to allow the parasail to lift you high into the air. Not for me, I’m afraid. How about you?)

At one point an adept took advantage of a particularly strong gust and rose 20 feet and more out of the sea, dangling like a spider on the end of its thread. As the gust ran out of puff he managed his parasail very adroitly to guide himself back down on to the surface with only a tiny splash, but I was left wondering what happens if an unpredictable gust threatens to carry you miles into the air: what do you do?

‘You just let go, I suppose,’ said Michael, next to me, shoulders hunched against the wind. But it seemed a pretty terrifying idea.

Some weeks later the headlines in the local press – and it rated a mention on the national TV news – told the fate of a kite-surfer, from elsewhere, not La Franqui, who hadn’t let go. He’d been carried far, far aloft by a capricious gust which then dropped him on to some rocks. Fatally. Commissions of enquiry into safety, training, monitoring and reliability of equipment were set up at once, and no doubt improvements will follow. But it seems a ridiculous thing to die for.

None of this troubled us at the excellent lunch we enjoyed at a small family restaurant called, very suitably in every sense except as regards our digestion, Au Gré du Vent, which I’d translate as something like ‘At the Will of the Wind’ or ‘According to the Wind’ or ‘As the Wind Blows’. Very poetic.

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LATER ON I discovered that La Franqui was well enough recognised in kite-surfing and other extreme surf and sand sports circles to host world championships. If you’re interested you can find a brief guide to the conditions at La Franqui at www.tram-riders.com

‘Tram-riders’ made me raise my eyebrows. What was this supposed to mean? La Franqui’s much too small to have a tram system . . . then the centime dropped: ‘tram’ is short for tramuntana or tramontane. Those who ride the wind. Very apt. But I doubt if Odysseus’ sailors felt that way about it.

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, kite surfing, La Franqui, languedoc, weather