Twelve years ago, almost exactly as I write this, I was asking myself the same question. Twelve years ago it rained incessantly, the house was knee-deep in boxes, builders and and barely-concealed bitterness. The roof leaked, the fire smoked like a kipper factory, any scavenged firewood was damp, the electricity supply wasn’t strong enough for the cooker we’d brought from Scotland and blew constantly. An early thunderstorm savaged the computer motherboard, we lurched blindfold with ignorance from one branch of the French adminstration to another, from the Mairie to the Sous-préfecture, from the France Télécom office to the customs, from the health and social security offices to an obscure entity called the Département des Mines necessary for re-registration of the car, always with one document short that somehow they’d failed to tell us about the last time we called in, whole dossiers of papers which had taken weeks to amass mysteriously went missing, my daughter wept with desolation on her 21st the day after our arrival . . .

. . . but I once came across a short story by, I think – if any reader knows better, please tell me – by Emile Zola, about someone, maybe Zola himself, who found himself on a bus sitting next to an elderly woman who started to tell him about her sons, one of whom had been gored to death by a bull: Zola tut-tutted in sympathy. Another had been swept away in a flood, never to be seen again: Zola agreed that it was very sad. A third had fallen to his death from a hot-air balloon: Zola was conscious that the rest of the bus was now listening fascinated to this catalogue of woe, and by the time the fates of a fourth (decapitated by a madman), fifth (swallowed a tarantula in a green salad),sixth (mobbed by weasels) and seventh (accidentally transfixed by a circus knife-thrower) had been described, the other passengers were rolling about helpless with laughter, into which the old woman, at first uncomprehending, eventually joined. Mankind can only take so much tragedy: pile it on and it turns into comedy under its own weight, and there’s nothing as infectious as mirth.

So I’m not going to brighten your day with other things that went wrong. It’s enough to say that the whole business took a great deal of strength of character to see through. Eventually it stopped raining, the builders left, the car acquired French plates, we fell to talking less and less about the best routes to the Channel and the most attractive ferry fares, I found work of a kind, or it found me, which fast-tracked me into the French social security and tax systems, and the most fruitful entrée into local society came through joining a choir in the nearest town.

But why? Here’s the pre-move shortlist, not in any particular order:

1. Need for a complete change of life
2. Well-lubricated lunches, copious but simple, in the sun
3. No further requirement to be in the office every morning at 8.30
4. Slower, more civilised pace of life, more time to stand and stare
5. Unblinkered love of southern France, though not necessarily of the entire French nation.
6. Gardens where more would grow than a few wizened potatoes or gale-deformed cabbages (we lived in North-East Scotland)
7. Warmer climate, no more endless sniffing from November to April
8. No further requirement to wear more than shorts and T-shirt and occasional pullover
9. Closeness of Mediterranean, Spain, Italy, Switzerland etc.
10. Some financial ease after selling dear and buying cheap: interest rates in 1990/91 frolicked about at 14%. You could see why it’s called interest.

And comments, with hindsight: (Sorry if this means flicking the screen up and down.)

1. Well, maybe. More like mid-life crisis and temporary aberration of otherwise sound judgement. You just just have to follow where your less base instincts lead and make the best of the consequences.
2. Oh yes! Let’s hear it for that crusty bread, the olives, the cheese, the succulent tomatoes, the sausage, the peaches, the local rouge, mmm! – but you’d better write off the rest of the day.
3. Yes, fantastic. You always knew you were born for better things. This is true freedom.
4. Twaddle. It’s just as hectic as it ever was. As in most rural areas of southern Europe, there are many elderly people about. We’re joining them, by degrees. Maybe this gives an illusion of slowness, as the tortoise said in the lift.
5. The buzz wears off eventually. Most French people of our acquaintance are charming, neighbourly and helpful. You have to go halfway and maybe a bit more to meet them: they don’t start waving the Union Jack and singing Rule! Britannia as soon as you arrive. It’s two-way traffic.
6. Oh! The strawberries! And the aubergines and the haricot beans and the tomatoes and the peppers and the courgettes and the melons . . .
7. What’s a handkerchief?
8. I wouldn’t mind putting a tie on now and again, if I could remember how to do the knot.
9. Barcelona’s about 3½ hours away. A very sophisticated city. We can go there for lunch and be back in good time for the evening apéritif.
10. Ah, the crunch. 14% was a fool’s paradise. You’re lucky to get 3½% now. In fact everything’s changed: southern French house prices are four or five times what they were back in 1991.

But still the Brits come. I asked our local estate agent, a formidable lady who once won an award from one of the UK francophile magazines for excellence and for the fantastic speed at which she drove round the mountain hairpin bends – I asked her what percentage of her sales this year had been to Brits. She doesn’t always distinguish very easily between Brits, Dutch, Germans, Irish, Scandinavians and the occasional American, but lumped together they accounted for about 90%, she said. The French just can’t afford the prices incomers are prepared to pay.

If I were French I think I’d have something to say about that.

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

I WAS sitting quietly at our village mediaeval banquet discussing philosophy with my friend Jean-Claude when a bread pellet thrown from three or four tables away struck me on the shoulder. Another followed a couple of seconds later, narrowly missing my ear. A clear case of naked, unprovoked aggression.

"C’est le garçon en bleu," Jean-Claude said. "I saw him." Garçon is one of those French words you have to be a bit careful with. As often as means ‘male child’ it means lad, chap, bloke, geezer, dude, old boy, etc. (So you can see it’s probably better not to address your waiter as ‘garçon’.) At that moment the ranks of mediaeval diners, including the village maire, dressed for the occasion as a serf, parted and allowed me a distant glimpse of Gaspard, a blue-shirted lad, chap, bloke, etc. (take your pick) in the very act of rolling his own (ammunition, that is) and looking away, all innocence. A garçon, moreover, at whose grateful table Josephine and I had sat earlier in the week, when he’d shown no sign of aggression and when, sitting opposite him, I would have presented a much easier target.

More bread pellets arrived, some on target. Retaliation called, with a few misgivings: in a school I once worked in, table manners were codified in a manner not far removed from the Ten Commandments. Throwing food, like spinning knives to tell fortunes, was practically a capital offence. On the other hand, a few years ago I’d been to a French 50th birthday party where, to while away one of the often lengthy breaks they have between dinner courses, the entire company of 50 guests had been issued with pea-shooters and generous amounts of papier maché pellets.

So precedent overcame the dreaded table manners rules. Remembering the principles of mediaeval siege catapults, I lodged a pellet in a plastic spoon, took aim, pulled the spoon back . . . and of course the wretched thing snapped. In mediaeval times they’d have been made of horn. Much more supple. Joan of Arc’s troops never had this trouble, surely. Henry V’s archers at Agincourt had a better idea; scatter your shot as thickly a possible, darken the sky with your arrows. So I bided my time until I had a good handful of Gaspard’s pellets and heaved them back in a mighty broadside. Some innocent diners may have been caught in the crossfire too. I don’t know: I was too busy making it seem that the salvo had come from August, a scholarly German two or three places down the table, to follow up the on-target strike rate. In any case Madame Gaspard now called time, before WW3 between Gaspard and August broke out.

I rang Gaspard the next day to inquire after his injuries. He was back on his feet, he said. He’d been anxious to instil a little hearty mediaeval spirit into the proceedings. A breadfight seemed just the thing. What a pity it hadn’t become general . . .

A MEDIAEVAL dinner had beeen dreamed up by Emilie, the energetic and imaginative girl in the village Office de Tourisme. That weekend was designated thoughout France as Les Journées du Patrimoine, Heritage Days, when churches, castles, historic sites and monuments open to the public at little or no charge. In the village the church vestments and treasures were on display, the archaeological site was open, a concert of Renaissance music had been arranged, and I had a small part in demonstrating the church organ, classed officially as an historic instrument. Nothing much of this kind happens in France without substantial refreshment somewhere along the line, so Emilie had put her thinking cap on and had come up with a mediaeval meal to round everything off.

If in doubt, try the internet. Emilie fed ‘repas médiéval’ into the search engine and up it came, a complete menu with recipes, ingredients and all, from Soupe de la Vierge (eyebrows were raised: Virgin Soup?) down to the digestif, Hypocras, at the end. Hypocras is spiced and sweetened wine, supposedly a tonic, taking its name from Hippocrates, the Greek physician.

MENTION OF Hippocrates leads naturally to a curious little episode earlier in the summer. We went to St Martin de Londres, a village north-west of Montpellier, to team up with some friends, one of whom had recently had an ear operation and was having a problem disentangling what people were saying to him from the ambient noise. Where better to meet than St Martin de Londres, a sleepy little place, where the ambient noise should have consisted of the gentle gurgling of the fountain in the village square, the angelus ringing from the village church and the gentle clack of boule on boule in the shade of the plane trees, where cicadas sang through the heat of the day?

I suppose we should have foreseen the shattering ripsnort of teenage motorbikes and scooters, scourge of siestas in the sun, but what we hadn’t anticipated was the arrival of the circus. Violent macho music split the air, a mighty echoing voice announced the delights on offer that evening. Round and round the village the circus truck went with its zillion-decibel loudspeakers, until nobody could possibly have any excuse for not knowing about it. Deafened and defeated on our café terrace, we lapsed into a companionable silence.

But the loudspeaker truck was also towing a large crate on wheels, a solid affair with stout iron bars along the sides. Inside, swaying uncertainly round corners and over the bumps and dips in the village roads, was a hippopotamus, glistening where someone had sprayed it with water against the heat and munching dispiritedly at some hay when it wasn’t vainly biting at the iron bars. One day something really sensible will come out of Brussels, like an order banning this kind of animal abuse and hippos can be left to their own devices wallowing in the great green greasy Limpopo.

But never mind all that. You’ve seen the connection, of course? Hippo? Crates? Hippocrates? Ho ho.

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

SUNDAY MORNING, early. Yawn, stretch, rub eyes, peer at watch in pink dawn light. 7 o’clock. Breathe in fresh morning air, a wonderful daily treat after weeks of stifling summer temperatures. Through the open window the angelus rings faintly, from the church at St Martial two or three kilometres away. 3 strokes, pause. Another 3, another pause. 3 more, a final pause, then 9 strokes, summing up what’s gone before. 3 x 3 = 9. I expect there’s a more than arithmetical significance in all this. (Would any reader care to explain?)

No time for religious ponderings just now. Scramble into summer kit, shorts, T-shirt, leather sandals bought several years ago from a travelling sandal-maker in St Rémy market for £10/$15. Away down the lane to the village. This morning air is something else: it’s like the sinus-teasing bubbles in good champagne, it’s like the scent of crushed mint, it’s like sliding into a bed of crisp new linen, it’s like the tingling all-over rinse of an astringent shower-gel. I suppose I could go on, but I’m sure you’ve got the message, and anyway here we are at our destination, the boulangerie.

THE SHOP’S just open, although Monsieur Gosset the master baker has been working on the premises since 9.30 the previous evening, preparing his trays of baguettes, flûtes, miches, ficelles, épis, fougasses . . . and croissants. It’s M.Gosset’s croissants that bring me here every Sunday morning. I don’t think the art of croissant-making has ever been completely mastered in the Midi: maybe it’s something to do with butter not being a natural ingredient in a land where olive oil reigns supreme. But M.Gosset, an incomer to the village, has brought from his native Belgium the true art, and never did croissants melt in the mouth more seductively than on our Sunday breakfast table.

Argument simmers about the origins of croissants. The word itself means ‘crescent’, I suppose because that’s the general shape croissants have when they come out of the oven. Some say no, no, get a life, everyone knows they’re called croissants because they came back from the crusades, where of course the badge of Islam was – and still is – the crescent moon. I don’t know where M.Gosset stands on this theory. He’s proud that his part of Belgium gave birth to Godefroi de Bouillon, a leader of the First Crusade which captured Jerusalem in 1099 and set up a Christian tenure about as stable as the current US/UK occupation of Iraq. Who cares? I’d rather have butter in my croissants than history any day.

It seems perfectly obvious to me that croissants really couldn’t be any other shape. M.Gosset makes his by wrapping a slab of butter, beaten with a rolling pin to about the size and thickness of a roof tile, in an envelope of a sort of puff pastry dough. He then cuts the wrapped slab into squares, which he rolls up diagonally, fat in the middle and thin at the ends. Before baking he may tweak the ends round a bit to give his croissants their traditional curve, but he doesn’t always bother.

HOW DO I know all this? Well, last Sunday morning Mme Gosset was on duty, I suppose having got out of bed just as M.Gosset was getting into it, in their tiny boulangerie in the village where customers are announced by a stuffed marmot or gopher just inside the door, which wolf-whistles as you come in. Mme Gosset served me our croissants, but also gave me an untitled video cassette. Surprised, I asked what it was about. C’est pas grand’ chose, it’s nothing much, she said: it’s just about us. So I took it home, not expecting to be much edified by the home videos of a family we only really knew across the shop counter.

It turned out to be fascinating, a little slice of France few tourists would ever penetrate. It featured firstly Mme Gosset’s delivery round, threading a tortuous route through all the ancient stone-built hamlets and isolated settlements of this wonderful Languedoc hill country where the concept of daily bread is undiminished. The second part took us into the bakehouse by night to watch the master baker at work. No real secrets betrayed, of course, but sharp insights – as witness the croissants – into a profession at the heart of everyday French life.

Hot Nights with Monsieur Gosset, as you might say, but I was led back to Sunday mornings years ago in Scotland, seated at the organ accompanying hymns, among them one whose seriousness of purpose would surely appeal to M.Gosset: I knead thee, how I knead thee; ev’ry hour I knead thee. Ho ho.

ANOTHER OF M.Gosset’s specialities is his fougasse, a kind of savoury super-bread that’s virtually a meal in itself and is very popular here as a snack or nibble as well as a worthy accompaniment to something more substantial. Hot Nights with Monsieur Gosset showed him seething chopped onions in white wine ("they’re done when they’re the same colour as the wine"), frying up lardons (small strips of thick bacon cut across the grain) in their own fat, and then stirring both onions and lardons into a bound and enriched with olive oil, adding a handful of chopped green olives for good measure.

The flat loaf, about the size of a dinner plate, comes out of the oven golden brown, and scored across for ease of breaking into sections. It’s perfectly delicious. Bon appetit!

SOME YEARS ago friends from Scotland brought us a small home-grown wistaria – glycine in French – in a pot. Seduced by the idea of swags of blue flowers hanging in profusion over the terrasse, we hacked out a hydrangea – hortensia in French: let it not be said you come away from this column empty-handed – and planted our infant Mcwistaria in its place. It began to grow hyper-enthusiastically, like Jack’s beanstalk, so we harried and cajoled local blacksmith Philippe Fontès into building an immediate wrought-iron pergola for it to disport itself in. In no time at all it had wound itself up a string to reach Philippe’s pristine ironwork. Autumn came, the leaves fell, we waited impatiently for spring and breakfasts – croissants, naturally – on the terrasse under the gorgeous canopy of bee-busy wistaria. Who knew, coming from Scotland, the flowers might even be tartan.

"Did the seedling have a flower on it?" asked Corrie, a Dutch friend and keen gardener, when we told her about it. We shook out heads. Future flowers in vast, heady profusion perfumed our imagination, but not a single petal had there been in reality. "Then you’ll have to wait for seven years before it flowers," Corrie said. H’m.

Meanwhile we’re building a new house a little further up the lane. I expect just as we move into it the Mcwistaria will decide to flower. Other men’s flowers . . .

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

THERE DOESN’T seem to have been any lessening of the popularity of beauty contests in France. Maybe this isn’t surprising in a country capable of running The Benny Hill Show as emergency fodder whenever French TV studio technicians go on strike, so it’s entirely possible that millions of French people base their typical image of the UK on Benny Hill. (Did you know that Benny Hill started his working life as a milkman in Southampton? I just thought I’d let you know.) Anyway, ‘Miss France’ is presided over by a patrician chaperone of extreme elegance and rectitude, Madame Geneviève de Fontenay, who wears so large a hat throughout the proceedings that the camera plotting probably has to be scheduled round it. It’s unlikely That Mme G de F has ever watched the BHS.

There are preliminary regional heats, so the winners wear sashes saying Miss Provence, Miss Midi-Pyrénées, Miss Normandie and so on. All this to tell you the extraordinary news that only yesterday, carried away by a touch of Benny Hillitis, I spent a few agreeable moments in the arms and capacious bosom of Marie-Ange, a more than worthy Miss Picardie. No! Did you really? I hear you gasp. Yes, I really did. Every dog has his day.

(Did I hear you murmur Miss Picardie WHEN? All right, all right. Truth will out. Miss Picardie 1958, if you really want to know. Why must you always prick the bubble of these little fantasies?)

Her husband Albert was there, a man much given to composing flowery (everlasting flowers in some cases, I’m afraid) speeches, odes in prose, to grace whatever occasion he might have been invited to. In this case we’d all foregathered at a vin d’honneur to celebrate some friends’ golden wedding. In the village church the bride of 50 years ago had sung the bénédiction, not without a tear or two, and after Mass the family and guests assembled in the shade of a spreading chestnut tree where white-naperied tables groaned under the weight – fast reducing, it has to be said – of bottles of pastis and muscat and a delectable champagne-based punch called, I think, marquisette, while there was the usual selection of nibbles: canapés, nuggets of fougasse (olive oil based bread with pieces of olive and bacon embedded), slices of peppered sausage . . .

After the initial encounter – we hadn’t seen Marie-France nor Albert for at least four days, and they’re extrovert people – she gave us some interesting insights into the world of Miss France. Slices of peppered sausage were not advised, for instance, not simply because they threatened the vital statistics but because bits stuck in your teeth and flavoured your breath with meaty garlic. Not a plus when being interviewed by Madame Geneviève de Fontenay.

Albert had his two-penn’orth to throw in as well, and I suspect there may be quite a story somewhere here. He’d been involved with many Miss France contests. On the celebratory ode side, I wondered? A sort of poet laureate to the contest? Not really, he said: he’d been more into Quality Control. Fascinated, I pressed for details. It was nothing much, he said modestly: he’d had to make sure the contestants were what they claimed to be.

You mean . . . I began, but at this moment a press photographer whisked him away to take his picture with the Golden Oldies as if in mid-ode. Clearly they were good times, the 1950s.

UP THROUGH the vineyards to the paradisal 13th century Prieuré de Fontblanque, where the acoustic is perfect, to prepare for a piano recital. There’s a presbytery next door, closed up for most of the year, but in summer a Vatican theologian, Monsignor Grimaldi, takes up residence.

He’s an interesting man, entirely approachable, a Dominican monk by his white habit. While we’re there the bell in the tower rings out 6 o’clock. It has a slightly muffled sound. There’s no means of stopping it: it will ring during the concert and we’ll just have to put up with it. Moreover, in the Midi fashion it rings the hours twice, in case you missed it the first time.

Mgr Grimaldi tells us the bell has ‘Montserrat’ engraved on it. (Did he climb up there to see, Dominican robes flowing?) It was butin de guerre, he says, war booty: it was ransacked from the great Spanish monastery of Montserrat by Napoleon’s troops under Marshal Nicolas Jean-de Dieu Soult, who gave the bell to the Prieuré. Well, I said, I doubt if it ever rang for any victory of Marshal Soult’s, because he never won a battle in his life; at least not against the British in the Peninsula. Of course, Napoleon left him the Duke of Wellington to contend with.

Mgr Grimaldi looked surprised, as well he might. The French have a curious habit of glossing over battles they might not have won. If you’ve ever been to Waterloo – where Soult was Napoleon’s chief of staff – you’ll understand. You wouldn’t think any British had ever been there.

He died in his bed, at any rate, Mgr Grimaldi said. No soldier could wish for more.

At 10 o’clock the bell struck the hour, twice as usual, and twenty muffled strokes resounded above the barrage of mighty chords the pianist was thundering out of the Steinway. Heady stuff. I imagined them tolling out MA – RÉ – CHAL NI – CO – LAS JEAN-DE-DIEU SOULT (that’s ten syllables – go on, count them). A foolish fancy. But it least it kept my mind off Albert’s Quality Control.

SO THERE we were, all sitting round the terrasse table late into the velvet evening, telling the French equivalent of Irish jokes.

The butt of French daftness jokes are the Belgians, did you know? There were these two Belgians, tu vois, Monique told us, at the end of a days’ hunting, having big problems dragging a sanglier, a wild boar, they’d shot to their car. However much they tugged and heaved at the rope, they couldn’t make much progress. A passing Frenchman saw their difficulty and, anxious as ever to make this world a better place to live in, said "Oh, but it’s no use pulling sangliers against the grain; you have to drag them along the lie of the fur, otherwise you’ll never get anywhere." The Belgians thanked the Frenchman and tied the rope to the other end. At once the carcase slid easily and progress was fast. "Well, this is just fine," the first Belgian said. "What good advice that Frenchman gave and how sensible we were to take it."

"Sure," the other replied, "but have you noticed how far we’re getting from the car?"

Bravo, Monique. Keep them coming.

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

SCENE: Montpellier, super-sophisticate among Mediterranean cities. Only Venice and Barcelona offer any challenge.

OCCASION: La Comédie du Livre, the annual 3-day Book Fair. It’s called ‘Comédie’ because it takes place out of doors, pavilioned in splendour at one end of the immense, traffic-free Place de la Comédie, itself named after the gorgeous Second Empire opera house, the Opéra-Comédie, dominating the other end. The Fair was supposed to have a Chinese flavour this year, but the outbreak of SARS kept Chinese guests at home. All the same, there are about eighty exhibitors.

WEATHER: Desperate. Tramontane – we’re too far west for the more famous mistral to freeze our young blood – coming down from the heights of the Cévennes like the wolf on the fold. Steady rain forming rivulets between stacks of books.

CAST: Winston, proprietor of The English Bookstore in Montpellier; there’s a surprising demand for books in English. Elizabeth, an American faith novelist, signing her books. Yours truly, ditto. Helga, a stunning Icelandic girl. Mousse, a drunken Frenchman (not a common sight, actually, certainly not in the Midi). A crazy Spanish woman. You can’t say we’re not cosmopolitan down here.

Episode 1: Mousse staggers up to our tented stall. What teeth he’s got are like Stonehenge. He has something unappealing, a crab or an eel, in a plastic bag. He loves England, he says. More than anybody else he loves Major . . . Major . . . he searches vainly for the name. Thompson? I suggest, thinking of the pin-striped, bowler-hatted and umbrella’d stereotype Englishman invented by Pierre Daninos. Mousse is disappointed to learn that Daninos was French. He holds the whole French nation in contempt. He makes a rude one-fingered gesture to express his feelings for France. I tell him the same gesture in the UK requires two fingers. He staggers off, laughing uncontrollably. This is yet more evidence that England is far, far superior to France.

Episode 2: Helga appears. She is very, very beautiful. She has just been to the SARS-free Chinese calligrapher in a nearby pavilion. She shows us some sheets of paper with Chinese characters brushed on them. They are her name, she says. How can you tell? Winston asks: for all you know they might say ‘Ugly woman here’ or even ‘Dog turds’. Winston has a way with beautiful Icelandic women, he can get away with this sort of thing. I’m reminded of an ample-bosomed Englishwoman visiting Hong Kong who despite strong discouragement insisted on having some material she found printed with Chinese characters made up into a blouse. Later she discovered the characters said ‘condensed milk’. H’m. Helga buys a copy of Jane Austen’s Emma, an inexplicable best-seller at the Book Fair. Maybe it’s a Montpellier university set text.

Episode 3: Mousse re-appears. His bag is empty. He’s thought of another famous English writer. Sha . . .Sha . . . he gives up. Shakespeare? I suggest. That’s the one, he says: To be or not to be. My god, he loves that man. He shambles off, but it won’t be the last we see of him. What draws drunks to our tent?

Episode 4: An bustling Spanish woman arrives, flourishing a sheet of paper. She wants our autographs. She says she’s going round all the tents collecting the signatures of "all you famous intellectuals". She wants them for her son. They might be worth a lot of money one day. Winston and I look at each other, eyebrows raised. Now’s our chance: which famous intellectuals might we have been, but for the accident of our birth? Noam Chomsky? Raymond Queneau? Terry Eagleton? We reckon you can’t be a famous intellectual until you’re dead, so we chicken out and sign our own names, consigning her son to certain but decent poverty. It was nice to be asked, though.

Episode 5: Elizabeth appears. She’s a pretty, petite, soignée American who lives locally. She takes station behind a stack of her novels, including her latest, The Swan House. Some are in translation: Dutch, German, Norwegian, but none it seems in Spanish or Icelandic. Mousse, moth to the flame, re-appears. Shamefully, I hide behind a display of pulp fiction, pretending to be busy. He won’t go. The more charm and tact Elizabeth shows him, the more he’s fascinated and the longer he stays. He’s putting off other customers too, even French children – and adults – fascinated by piles of Harry Potter books in the original English. He’ll have to go. But how? He can hardly be frog-marched to the other end of the Place de la Comédie and dumped in the fountain until he sobers up.

Winston, ever resourceful, comes to the rescue. Although he’s standing not two metres away from Elizabeth, he rings her on his mobile. She excuses herself from Mousse, carries on a long, meaningless telephone conversation with Winston, during which Mousse drifts off and we never see him again. Phew. Wish I’d thought of that. Maybe I would if I’d been a famous intellectual.

THE Saturday of the Book Fair was further enlivened by a couple of demonstrations, one against the siting of the rubbish dump I was writing about two months ago, the other expressing the local teaching unions’ opposition to certain government reforms, mostly involving pensions. Some, with feet in both camps, had a busy afternoon, belting out chants like "Raffarin, t’es foutu: Tout le monde est dans la rue" (Raffarin – the Prime Minister – you’ve had it: everyone’s taken to the streets) so lustily that they lost their voices: an unfortunate circumstance for some, who were due to sing in a concert that evening and were reduced to mouthing impotently.

AT the time of writing, anyway, it doesn’t look as if Raffarin has had it. On the contrary, his government has stood rock-firm against the now ebbing tide of left-wing protest against pension reform. Bernard Thibault, a major trade union leader, was heard to comment that clearly the spirit of Madame Thatcher roamed the corridors of Matignon, the prime minister’s HQ. So la dame de fer is remembered yet.

But in what terms? At the height of the Iron Lady’s power, in about 1983, I went into a bank in Thiviers in the Dordogne wanting to change some Scottish banknotes into francs. The teller looked suspiciously at my Clydesdale Bank £10 notes, not the commonest currency, which featured an elegantly-coiffed David Livingstone. He took them into the manager’s office for verification. Presently the manager came out, tapping the engraving of the great Scottish explorer and missionary. C’est Madame Thatcher? he asked uncertainly. Oui, I answered, tickled as ever by such zany flights of fancy. OK, c’est bon, he said, and I got my francs. Thank you, Maggie.

 

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

WELL, WHAT would you have done?

You’d have done what I did, wouldn’t you? You’d have fetched the net and rescued the poor . . . but I’d best start at the beginning.

Water’s such a precious commodity round here, especially in high summer when the springs stop flowing, that you find little watercourses, stone-lined wells and cisterns and ponds choked with lush weeds all over the place. These usually belong to a distant age when the land was more intensively cultivated, before mains water was laid on, and before plastic hoses snaked from standpipe to strawberry patch.

So our two mini-wells are the best part of a century old, probably more. We call them bassins. They aren’t deep, half a metre at the most. For nine months of the year water seeps into the upper bassin, and when the level reaches the overflow pipe it decants into the lower bassin with a merry gurgle that reminds me of a record we had when I was a child, a 78rpm shellac creation with Donald Peers singing ‘In a shady nook, by a babbling br. . .’ Short of intelligent guesswork, I never discovered what followed because the record never got beyond line 2, sticking on ‘a babbling br – a babbling br – a babbling br’ over and over again until someone turned the record over and we had instead ‘The Voice in the Old Village Choir’ by a duo called Layton and Johnson. (This, too, has latter-day French echos, as we’ll hear later.)

When the lower bassin is full, a deceptively crystal jet from the overflow discharges into a laneside streamlet where wild cress grows. Sweat-streaked hikers sometimes cool off under it. The other day an unexpected procession of curricles, phaëtons and flies (the carriage, not the insect) from the village Mayday Horse Festival watered its horses there. If only they knew how protein-rich the water is . . .

EVERY AUTUMN some instinct draws dozens of salamanders to the upper bassin to spawn. I don’t think Charles Darwin can have devoted much time to salamanders, a kind of giant black-and-yellow amphibious newt, if you can call growing to 12-15 centimetres giant. They defy natural selection, they seem a race doomed to early extinction, yet the name ‘salamander’ itself was already ancient when classical Greeks took it over from some even more venerable language. Legend gives them a curious symbiosis with fire. The irreverent thought strikes me that maybe they survive because the French don’t eat them. We’d better hurry on . . .

Although quite nippy in the water, they’re very slow on land, and a determined snail might make it to safety before a salamander glanced peckishly towards it. I’m afraid we see them most often as ex-salamanders, nasty black-and-yellow squashed messes on the road.

Their annual Mecca is the upper bassin. There were about 20 last autumn, taking their pleasure in the sludge, among the fallen chestnut leaves. Some expire from the effort of spawning and from trying to get out again: for days on end they tread water ponderously, trying to find the slightest irregularities in the rendered bassin wall to help them climb up and out. By mid-November I couldn’t bear it any longer, so I fetched the swimming-pool net and fished all the survivors out. This is where we came in: you’d have done the same, wouldn’t you?

I put them in the ditch, among the wild cress. I don’t expect they were in the least grateful.

WE GAVE the upper bassin its their annual spring clean the other day. What nightmarish ecosystems teemed beneath the placid waters, all at one another’s throats: slimy mud-lurkers all, grubs, larvae, leeches agape for something juicy to attach themselves to . . . and then, when the water had cleared, the playful flip and twinkle of salamander newtlets. Even as we watched, one or two incautious infants disappeared down the overflow, into the lower bassin. Maybe as a child you had a record of the old music-hall song ‘My baby has slipped down the plughole’?

A day or two earlier, soon-to-be son-in-law Henry mentioned having seen something long and yellow in the lower bassin. We saw a few roots, some faded blades of grass. But later I saw a yellowish water-snake, about 30cm long, nosing about in the weed. I can’t say it looked ill-fed; maybe there’s an old French vaudeville song about a salamander in the salle à manger?

If, like the hikers and horses, you pass our crystal fountain this summer, feel free to cool off under it. But I shouldn’t drink it: crystal it may seem, but it’s still imbued with nature red in tooth and claw.

FROM THE depths to the heights: up and up the path climbed, up steps crudely hacked out of the mountain rock, and this after a pretty stiff hairpin-bended drive up to the car park. Tumbles of building stone, making me envious for the drystone wall I’m building if I’d had a string of mules to bring some down, lay beside the path, witness to a long ruined defensive wall. At the top, with extraordinary views up and down the valley, we reached a tiny stone chapel, the only restored part of what was once a hill-top castle complex about the area of Richmond in Yorkshire or Rochester in Kent.

My small choir, 10 strong, 5 different nationalities, were there as guests of Les Amis de St Michel de Moucairol, the association that looks after the restoration of this magical place. We were due to sing as part of their annual festival of re-dedication. I’m afraid we sat outside during the Mass, ostensibly to leave more room inside for Les Amis, but really because we were enjoying the spring sunshine and the Languedoc mountain air, so rich and heady you could practically cut it up into chunks and send it home to Mother for her bronchitis.

They called us in as Mass was finishing, and by the time we’d arranged ourselves in a candle-lit horseshoe behind the altar the priest had just about cleared away the elements of Communion. Sensitive to the susceptibilities of the faithful, I asked my little flock not to put anything, handbags, sheet music, elbows and so on, on the altar.

So we sang and at the end they gave us a standing ovation. No encores: it’s always best to leave an audience wanting more. We processed out into the sunlight. A little later we were invited back in again, because they’d started serving the apéritif no beano of this kind is complete without. We were handed slices of a delicious tarte aux noix, and were told that drinks, muscat or kir (white wine flavoured to taste with blackcurrant or bramble liqueur), were being served at the far end of the chapel, where we’d been singing.

The altar was now cluttered with bottles and plastic cups, and men stood round drinking as relaxed as if they’d been in the four-ale bar of the Goat and Compasses. So much for those susceptibilities, eh?

JUST NOW France is beset with strikes and demonstrations, mostly about pension reform, but it’s really the left re-asserting itself after crushing electoral defeats a year ago. Old hands recall wistfully the heady days of May 1968, when a combination of trade unions and students eventually brought down De Gaulle. To have been a soixante-huitard, a sixty-eighter, is now a matter of pride, a bit like having been an Old Contemptible or an Aldermaston marcher.

"La rue s’exprime," said Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the embattled Prime Minister, "mais la rue ne gouverne pas." The street makes its views known, but the street does not govern. Wit and Wisdom, or Famous Last Words?

What will they call this year’s crop of marchers and activists? I asked our friend Prisca, herself a soixante-huitard student, for a possible French version of 03-ers: zéro-troisistes, she suggested. Or zéro-troistards. Or zéro-troisons. Take your pick. No bets. Not just yet, anyway . . .

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

THERE’S A first time for everything, of course. Catching measles, eating oysters or spinach, riding a bike without stabilisers, baking an uncollapsed sponge, your first unassisted length of the pool, uttering a virgin merci or bonjour on your first visit to France, not to mention some of life’s richer passionate eyes-closed dynamite experiences. Add to the list, if you want. There’s no charge.

Josephine and I notched up a first the other day, even at our advanced age. Not too much eyes-closed passion about it, I’m afraid: we went on a protest march, something we’d never done before. The nearest we’d ever come to registering public disapproval, apart from putting the world to rights in the pub, was signing the occasional petition.

There’s a big stushie going on along the valley about a proposal to create a giant rubbish dump in a disused quarry up in the hills. It’s supposed to be for dead-end rubbish that can’t be economically recycled, what they call ultimes déchets. In our village we’re asked to sort out our rubbish, separating out the glass, paper, metal and plastic containers into special hoppers ready for recycling. The rest – banana skins, oyster shells, coffee grounds, dust, corks, old shoes, you name it – become ultimes déchets. At the moment this gets carted off to the local dump, high above the village, and no prizes for guessing why even the maire calls this unlovely, stench-ridden, smoke-girt fastness Mont Vésuve.

But Mont Vésuve’s days are numbered. There’s a closure order on it, along with all the other mini-dumps in the area, and quite right too. Hence the need to find a new maxi-dump, to serve all the surrounding area.

But where? This is an area of outstanding natural beauty, so much so that they’ve designated it Le Parc Natural Régional du Haut Languedoc, the High Languedoc – oh, come on, you can translate it yourself. Parks and dumps don’t mix. We’re daily expecting a new franglais term to appear, le nimbyisme. Maybe it already has. So there’s good carrion here for the protesters. Some groups are impressively well organised, others create as much pollution with roadside daubings and fly posting as they fear will ooze out from the new dump.

Anyway, we went along to St Rémy one Saturday afternoon to march in support of the anti-dumpers, an event the French call une manifestation, manif for short. There was a carnival atmosphere, the sun shone, stalls sold home produce in aid of protest funds, little children dressed as ultimes déchets ran about, bands played, eyes-closed passionate speeches in French and Occitan, the ancient language of the Midi, poured from a gaily decorated podium. The march set off, about 2000 strong, banners and placards held aloft, singing, laughing, shouting cheery greetings to friends at upper windows or a few ranks behind. We were somewhere in the middle, sandwiched between the brass band at the head and an accordion duo playing folk dance tunes behind us. Good fun.

The préfet, the President’s man in the département, had banned the march from the Grand’ Rue, so we obediently kept to the back streets. The only hint of the traditional French gift for public disorder appeared in crossing the Grand’ Rue, when ranks seven of eight broad narrowed to a funeral-paced single file, in order to hold the traffic up for as long as possible. If you have anything of a subversive streak in you, this can be quite good fun.

THE MARCH reformed by the hospital and set off back to the cathedral square, led by the children and some floats decorated to show the effects of ill-placed rubbish dumps. A concert followed, with bands and singing, and presently everyone went home, having had a very nice time.

Too nice, really. If you want to make a political point, even for something as local as the siting of the area tip, you have to use all the clout at your disposal. There’s an example close at hand: José Bové, president of body called La Confédération Paysanne, a guild of small farmers, lives not far away, a much respected rural militant on his way to becoming a cult figure. At least, he lives not far away when he isn’t doing time for burning down American-style burger eateries.

A sturdy, moustached man reminiscent – apart from his trademark pipe – of Vercingetorix or other fine Gallic folk-hero, José Bové is clearly a professional of the first water. When ordered to report to Montpellier’s equivalent of Wormwood Scrubs or Sing Sing to start a stretch, he drove down from his farm in the hills on his tractor, followed by sympathisers. Result? Traffic chaos, all the way to the what the French call la taule, i.e. jug, clink, stir, quod, choky or the slammer.

Could José Bové be the man to lead the dump protest?

ONE OR two revealing remarks at the weekly rehearsal of the choir I conduct the other night. We’re learning that classic among negro spirituals, beloved of Southampton football club supporters, When the Saints go marching in. Nobody speaks much English down here, so in learning anything in English we have endless problems.

Jean-Phillippe, one of our basses, was surprised when the music of When the Saints, which I simply refer to as ‘Les Saints’, was handed round and we started the slow and painful process of getting French tongues round English words. He’d known The Saints from childhood, having heard it sung countless times, but he’d always supposed the opening line was ‘O When the Saints Go Martini’.

But this pitfall is minuscule compared with the yawning heffalump trap I fell into. Having spent 75 concentrated minutes on a Schubert Mass we’re learning, I thought it was about time we changed to something lighter. Rangez le Schubert, put the Schubert away, I said with an experienced choirmaster’s authority, and get your ‘Saints’ out, sortez les Saints.

A surge of delight punctuated by some shouts of laughter swept through the sopranos and altos, while the tenors and basses nodded and chattered excitedly. I know The Saints is a popular piece, and the Schubert, although very fine and moving, is undeniably churchy, but I hadn’t expected quite such an enthusiastic response. Presently the entire choir was heaving with uncontrollable laughter. I felt like a teacher who’s lost control of the class.

Light dawned, too late. ‘Saints’ is pronounced virtually the same as ‘seins’. And ‘seins’ means breasts. Get your boobs out, girls. For the lads. Oh, goodness. The toe-curling embarrassment kept me awake long into the nightingale-haunted night, but as for the others, I’m sure they too went home having had a really nice time.

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

I SHOULDN’T have mentioned it, of course. Just tempting providence. Any public hint that I was building a wall carried the seeds of its collapse. In my beginning is my end. I suppose that’s true of any human project, really. But need it have happened quite so quickly?

Barely had last month’s Campbell’s Diary appeared than Rob Quinn, a Canadian correspondent and frequent competition winner, e-mailed me to say that with a drystone wall about 150 metres long by 2 metres high advancing at the rate of about 30 centimetres a day was going to be a long, long project. He didn’t know how long . . .

The weather doesn’t do things by halves down here in the deep south. If it rains, it really rains. And it did, for several days on end, until the ground sprang leaks like a porcupine’s hot water bottle and the river Paresse rose ominously and our riverside neighbours, alto and bass in my big choir (few can live in this neighbourhood without being roped in to sing), below us began to think about building their personal ark.

When it eventually stopped and the scent of dry dog and cats began slowly to replace the dank miasma of wet fur, we went outside to inspect. We weren’t sorry to see that though elsewhere a thousand rills their mazy progress took, the land on which our new house is to be built remained wet but firm, and not a single pebble nor grain of sand had been washed away.

However, at the back of the property, a disused and overgrown public path runs along a terrace about 2 metres above it, a terrace held in place more by gravity and molecular cohesion than by the present decrepit wall I’m striving to replace. There, just at the part which I’d rebuilt so artistically, ensuring a tasteful, varied and balanced pattern of the local schists, marbles and limestones to delight my eye as I looked out from my eventual study window, was a huge and ugly gap where the waters had broken through, carrying all before its mighty flow. Like a missing tooth in the smile of a well-loved friend, like the Möhne dam in 1943, like . . . oh, think up your own similes. I’m sorry, that’s how I feel about the whole wretched business.

Or felt. I expressed my disappointment to a French friend, no stranger to Gallic cynicism. Pas de problème, he said, eyes shining at the prospect of putting one over the local authority, with whom he’s perpetually at war: the disused path and the terrace it runs along belong to the commune, the local council. In France it’s a general principle that landowners are responsible for the upkeep of boundary walls downhill of their property. All I had to do, he said, was to trot along to the local Mairie and complain that one of their walls had fallen down. They’d be along in due course to rebuild it. They had to. It was their duty.

I think there just might be a tiny flaw in this somewhere. Meanwhile Rob Quinn keeps sending me transcripts of political speeches, solid chunks of dense and impenetrable matter. Just the thing for rebuilding walls with. Thanks, Rob. I knew they’d come in useful sometime.

ALONG THE valley of the Paresse, now back to its usual level, over the col at the head of the valley and down into the next département to the little town of Mousse les Grieux. The scenery changes: the terrace walls are still there, as they are in any hill country, but our chestnut woods, cherry orchards, vineyards and olive groves have given way to fields of winter wheat, sheep and cattle. Cattle are a rarity in our Mediterranean département: it’s much too hot in summer and the grass is scorched by early July.

But we didn’t go for the scenery, we went to sing. Every March a charity called Retina France organises an event known as Mille Choeurs pour un Regard, A Thousand Choirs for a Glance, a weekend during which choirs all over France are invited to put on concerts for their benefit. Every year a well-known composer of popular songs is asked to donate a song – choirs aren’t obliged to sing it, though – and the concert proceeds go towards research into eye disease, in particular macular degeneration.

So my big choir, Le Choeur des Hauts Cantons, joined forces with the romantically-named L’Echo des Rochers, The Echo of the Rocks, a choir from the village of Albine. A couple of months before we’d asked for the church to sing in, because the acoustics are usually flattering, at least: but the curé said no, there would possibly be a funeral that afternoon and we’d have to take ourselves elsewhere. Clearly there’s no arguing with this sort of foreknowledge, so we sacrificed acoustics for plush seats and booked the cinema instead.

You’ll be asking, since Le Choeur des Hauts Cantons is known for its spirituals and gospel songs, whether we sang ‘Josh fit de battle ob Jericho, an the walls came tumblin’ down’. Well, thanks for asking, but we didn’t. Much too sensitive a subject, I’m afraid.

I SUPPOSE some people would give their eye teeth to tour round French villages giving concerts. It seemed a remote possibility a dozen years ago, when I first came to live in France. Now it’s an everyday part of life here, running a sort of Rent-a-Choir, no job too big or too small . . .

Monique, the choir president, rang the other day to say we’d been invited to sing in a grotte, to celebrate its 50th anniversary of being open to the public. A grotte? A cave, or system of underground chambers. There’s a very fine one locally, La Grotte de la Dévèze, known for its splendid crystal formations. No problem with acoustics, unless they’re so responsive that the sopranos’ high Gs and As dislodge a few stalactites. Or funerals either, I hope, certainly not as a result.

I accepted at once. We like a challenge, something to get our teeth into. We’ll take them on, hand to the plough, shoulder to the wheel, back to the wall . . .

And that’s where I’m going now, or it’ll never get finished. A bientôt!

SMALL, UNIMPRESSIVE prize to be won!

There’s a grotte in the Dordogne that’s famous for its prehistoric wall-paintings, which are however so sensitive to the moisture and carbon dioxide from human breath that visitors are shown round a replica a short distance away. What’s it called? First correct e-mail answer to me wins a bunch of rosemary from our own herb garden. Just right for roast spring lamb. Mmm, délicieux!

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

IT’S ALL very hilly in this part of France, and any cultivable land has been wrested from the hillside by building up terraces. The terraces are broad or narrow according to the slope, and usually they’re planted with olive or cherry trees, and a local speciality is chestnuts. The terrace walls are built of drystone, and there’s plenty of it just lying about.

The area is very complex geologically. It’s no use looking for neatly squared-off slabs of sandstone and limestone to build your walls with: mostly the rocks lying about are shapeless lumps of schists and marbles. Local people get round the problem of rocks that just won’t fit together neatly and solidly by hoicking stones out of the river Paresse, where thousands of years of river-bed tumbling have knocked off all the rough edges.

The top edge of our new building plot runs just below an old footpath, so overgrown that although it may start at A, if you want to get to B you’d better arm yourself with machete, agent orange and chainsaw because you won’t get through otherwise. We felled an ash tree in the middle of the ‘path’ last year, and counted the rings: 31 years had passed since it first sprouted, 31 years possibly since the last hardy local forced the passage. 31 years, too, since it started putting roots down.

Tree-roots on their own won’t do much damage to a solidly constructed terrace wall, but when the wind blows the trees rock, and it’s then that weaknesses are exposed. Add the mining activities of worms, moles and other burrowers over 31+ years of disuse and neglect and you can understand why the terrace wall, originally 2-3 metres high, supporting the path and separating it from our plot has crumbled away its entire 150-metre length.

So I’m rebuilding it. It’s a point of honour not to use cement. It progresses at about the rate of 30cm a day. Not fast. I expect that by the time I get to the far end, the near end will start to fall down, along the lines of painting the Forth Bridge.

YOU’VE BOOKED your holiday, of course, time off work, ferry or flight, gîte (through French Connections, naturally) and now you’re just waiting for the months to roll by.

Maybe you’re bound for . . . but I daren’t give the name of the hotel, or the spell will be broken. Goodness knows, our French isn’t perfect by any means, and we’ve made some pretty spectacular mistakes in our time, but all the same it takes some finesse of language torture to trot out the pure poetry of their pamphlet:

‘. . . this charming domain whose owners shower you with their personal care, is a paradise for lovers of an untouched nature . . .’

Sounds pretty good, though I’m not too sure about the ‘untouched’ bit. See you there, maybe?

LANGUAGE PITFALLS pitfalls? They’re many and well-hidden. The lady mayor of a village called Mousse lived round the corner from us at one time. Wishing to compliment her one day on her very smart appearance, I searched for the right word: ‘chic’ seemed to fit the bill. Now, as all French Connections clients know, French adjectives have male and female forms, according to the gender of what they’re describing, and the lady mayor was nothing if not feminine. So I plunged into the deep litter of my French for the feminine form of ‘chic’ and came out with ‘chiche’. Well, it seemed logical enough . . .

Comme vous êtes chiche! I beamed, indeed showered, all over her. She barely spoke to me thereafter. I know why, now: ‘chiche’ has no connection with ‘chic’: it means mean, close, stingy. I’d assaulted the mayoral dignity by telling her what a tightwad she was.

THE OTHER half of this same lady was no Adonis, no oil painting, a beefy man of legendary ugliness, although I daresay his heart was of purer gold than many with better looks. The couple went on holiday to Spain once, where they’d been persuaded to sit for photographs which would later be printed on to his ‘n’ hers ashtrays. They were so enchanted with the result that they ordered a dozen dinner plates with the same design.

A reasonable cook, she couldn’t understand why her cooking skills seemed to have gone to pot after their Spanish holiday. Her dishes seemed tasty enough to her, but whenever people came round for supper, servings of whatever she’d prepared came back untouched, or at least swirled around the plate to hide the horrid vision that lay beneath.

We left the village for a warmer house with a bigger garden soon after, so we never found out how she solved the problem. Did she throw the plates out? Hang them on the wall? Did she produce dishes tailored to match the design?

Maybe, but then her guests would never have known when they’d finished eating their cassoulet or canard aux olives, whether that was a haricot bean or a nostril, an olive or an eye you were scraping at with the edge of your fork . . .

WE’VE REALLY enjoyed a recent revival of Jacques Tati films on French TV. Most Francophiles will know Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle (My Uncle), perhaps his best-known film. True aficionados of Tati’s brand of helter-skelter, surreal comedy will know and love Jour de Fête and Parade as well.

With the success of Mon Oncle recently behind him, Jacques Tati was invited to a reception at the Elysée Palace. He took his place in the line of distinguished guests waiting to be received by the then President, Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle moved down the line, accompanied by an aide murmuring the name and achievements of each guest into the presidential ear. As de Gaulle reached Tati, the aide whispered ‘Jacques Tati: Mon Oncle’.

De Gaulle held out his hand. ‘Monsieur Tati,’ he said, ‘I am glad to have this opportunity to congratulate you on your nephew. He is a fine young man with excellent prospects.’ And moved on.

If this story isn’t true, it ought to be.

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

Sunday night is nostalgia night here. Useless to resist. Despite all these years of expat life (Josephine 18, me coming up for 12), all these years of practically going native here in the south of France, despite all those struggles with thorny branches of the French administration to stagger away, bloody but triumphant, waving a shiny new Residence Permit, or Driving Licence, or Voter’s Card, or Carte Vitale, the magic green card which is your ticket to ride the superb French national health service . . .

. . . despite all this, we’re hooked, Josephine particularly: Sunday nights, France 3, about 9pm, just after Lucky Luke, a wacky French cartoon Western; a few commercials, cats and dog settled, and then eyes down, glass at elbow, for Inspecteur Barnaby.

Inspecteur Barnaby? It’s better known north of the Channel as Midsummer Murders. It’s pretty feeble stuff, three parts Agatha Christie, two parts Enid Blyton, one part The Archers, a dash of Thomas Hardy. A strong pinch of salt adds some flavour, but not much. John Nettles, an actor for ever condemned by nameless misdeeds in a previous existence to play curmudgeonly English village super-cops (remember ‘Bergerac’?) strides purposefully amidst assorted English village eccentrics from English village pub to English village store to English village church to English village rose-arboured cottage huffing and puffing his way to the solution of unspeakable English village crimes.

It’s dubbed into French, but we generally turn the sound off. We’re there for the pictures, superb images of mouth-watering English countryside, rural England at its greenest and pleasantest. We drink enormous refreshing quaffs at the heady fount of Albion, and sigh with deep satisfaction, like the first fag of the day before we gave up the weed, like the first G & T after a hard day at t’ mill, like the first kiss on a lover’s return.

Strange. We used to feel like this before we left the UK, ooh-ing and aah-ing over seductive pictures of the Dordogne or Provence. Or like the ones in French Connections. The grass is always greener . . .

THE FRENCH are just as passionate about what they call polars, crime fiction series, as anyone else. You could probably watch them round the clock on French TV if you’d nothing better to do, moving from Inspecteur Barnaby to Inspecteur Derrick (a German import) and on via their very own Inspecteur Maigret to the pride of the Thames Valley police, Inspecteur Morse.

French 2, the second TV channel, bought a job lot of Inspecteur Morses for after-lunch diffusion last summer. July and August weekday afternoons were heavy with the promise of the dreaming spires of Oxford, the torpid middle of the day shimmered with drowsy echos of grand opera and the somnolent purring of Morse’s Jaguar . . . and all this to say I don’t think I saw one of them all the way through. Thinking man’s polar though Morse may be, it’s not a good idea to schedule it just at siesta time.

THE LATEST Inspecteur Barnaby, alias Midsummer Murders, starred Roger Sloman in a supporting role. Another sudden bout of nostalgia: Roger and I were students together, back in the depths of last century. He was one of a clutch of students, which included Patricia Hodge and Christopher Strauli, who trained as teachers but never actually made it as far as the blackboard, to my knowledge.

So if you’re reading this, Rog, Pat, Chris, bonjour from your old friend in the south of France, and if you ever feel that life might have a few more glittering prizes to offer than having your voice dubbed into French in bit parts in Inspecteur Barnaby (or Inspecteur Morse, where I saw Patricia Hodge last summer: Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, which starred Christopher Strauli, is a polar that hasn’t found its way over here yet), how about starting a French Friends Reunited? It doesn’t exist over here.

Now there’s a business opportunity, if ever there was one. Commission? No, my pleasure. If you can shed any light on the following, that’ll be commission enough for me.

I DON’T suppose any of you knows what became of Peter Barker from Scunthorpe? He was another for whom the lure of the staff-room and the filling in of the attendance register was unequal to the siren call of the Mediterranean sun, in the form of chartering dodgy yachts out of Côte d’Azur ports.

A man of chameleon mind, he invented one Caleb Stik, an all-purpose personage serving when required as a sick friend, demanding Peter’s bedside presence like Bunbury in The Importance of Being Earnest whenever something distasteful came up, such as handing an essay in on time. Caleb Stik also doubled as a phantom student, covering Peter’s frequent absence from lectures, as a little-known but quotable educational philosopher, as an extraordinarily supportive referee on application forms, as a guarantor for loans and so on. A useful chap to have about. Pity he didn’t really exist.

Or did he? A flip through the search engine throws up many interesting and distinguished Peter Barkers, but none of them our very own Peter Lawrence Barker, once of 11, Philips Crescent, Scunthorpe. Had his yacht foundered uninsured on the Île du Levant? Had he been obliged for him to slip into a new identity as he swam for the shore? Had he turned into his own phantom?

I fed ‘Caleb Stik’ into Google. After a warning – in French – that I might have got the spelling wrong, there they were: Caleb Stick, a footballer from New Zealand, or Caleb Stick, a United States family pool player. Neither seemed quite right for Peter’s alter ego, but then he never was predictable. Who knows?

SMALL, UNIMPRESSIVE prize to be won!

The last competition was won by Jonathan Lassen, of Edinburgh, the first to identify Marcel Pagnol as the author of L’Eau des Collines, the two-handed novel from which the films Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources were made. A copy of my book ‘French Leaves: Letters from the Languedoc’ goes to him avec félicitations.

OK, here we go for another copy: Inspecteur Maigret, played in his English adaptation by Rupert Davies, had a habit shared with Sherlock Holmes and a sidekick played by an actor with the same as a classical Athenian lawgiver.

1. What was the habit?

2. Who played Lucas, Maigret’s sidekick?

First correct e-mail answer. A vos loupes! To your magnifying glasses!

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

I WAS splitting cherry logs when an unfamiliar car drew up nearer the house. A smartly-dressed woman got out, picked her way across a shallow ditch and peered closely at a rotten tree stump.

Remembering that once during his madness George III had stopped his carriage in Windsor Great Park in order to address an oak tree as the Prussian Ambassador, I resolved to react warily. I left my axe and came down the slope to ask if I could be of any help. You’d have done the same, wouldn’t you?

It was most kind of me, she said in a polished Parisian accent. She happened to be passing and had noticed a really splendid growth of fungi on the tree trunk. Did I happen to know to whom they belonged?

I’d barely noticed them. There was indeed a magnificent cluster of nutbrown trumpetty mushrooms, like a half-buried brass band. I didn’t know what they were. Pig-ignorance, of course, but every fungus under the sun grows round here, especially after a wet warm autumn. Except truffles, which is the one we’d really appreciate. We’ve never got round to sorting out the inedible ones from those we sniff at eagerly when someone else is frying them lightly in a little olive oil.

The upshot of all this was that I cut them away carefully, put them in a plastic bag and gave them to her. Certain now of her supper, she thanked me effusively and in return invited me and Madame – if there was a Madame? I nodded and said bien sûr, certainly, wondering what I was letting Josephine in for – to her next art exhibition. She had English friends in the area, we were bound to know them. She couldn’t remember their names for the moment, but perhaps we could all come together?

WEEKS LATER, just before Christmas, this invitation surfaced unexpectedly, just like the mushrooms that gave rise to it. Some Anglo-Dutch friends from St Florian rang to say they’d been invited to an art exhibition one Sunday. Would we join them? They understood we knew the lady artist too.

It was a strange venue for an exhibition of paintings. After several wrong turns and stoppings to ask the way, we ran it to earth in a Cave Biologique called Domaine de Lotantique. ‘Cave’ in this part of the world means a winery, a wine-producing unit. Usually they’re housed in massive stone-built barns, but this one was in a modern concrete-block shed, all steel beams, insulated aluminium panels and enormous stainless steel wine-vats about the size of moonshot rockets.

The pictures were almost all wine-based: richly coloured, competent and painterly offerings of old Languedoc vintner’s houses, vineyards, gnarled (but fungus-free) vine stumps, all owing much to Van Gogh and Cézanne and rather outshone by the gleaming sanitized pipes and spotless mirror-bright wine vats they were hung from. A couple of blotchy but shapely nudes were the exception, and even they were coloured in tones of rouge, blanc and rosé.

But of Angèle, the lady artist, there was no sign. A fleeting thought: surely the mushrooms I’d given her weren’t poisonous? Ah, the proprietors Jean-Claude Crebassa and Elisa Riggio said, she’d gone to Mass, they’d try her mobile later. Meanwhile, would we like to sample the wines on offer? They were Bio, produced without inorganic fertilisers, weedkillers or pesticides.

WINE-TASTING is the process known as dégustation, a rather unfortunate name for something that ought to be wholly pleasant. They pour a finger, maybe two, into a tall, concave glass. Then it’s over to you. Here’s the drill:

1. If you’re serious about this, make certain that the bottle is freshly (white and rosé) or fairly recently (red) opened for you. It certainly won’t be wasted. If the dégustation leads to a worthwhile order, they’ll sometimes re-cork the sample bottle for you temporarily and include it in your order free of charge.

2. Hold the glass to the light. If the wine is murky, like cabbage-water, it probably tastes like it, too. If it’s aflame with all the glorious clarity and colour of a sun-filtered stained glass window, move on happily to step 3.

3. Cupping the glass in your hand, tilt it from side to side, swirl the wine about gently without sloshing it. Watch the trace it leaves. Is it dribble-free, silky and unbroken? You could be on to a winner. Cruise confidently on to step 4, your nose a-twitch.

4. The warmth of your hand through the glass should help to release the bouquet: test the fragrance firstly in one long, gentle inhalation, and then in a series of delicate, barely perceptible snifflets. When you’ve fully drawn breath, hold it there for a second or two. You should find the upper reaches of your nostrils and sinuses being very agreeably teased, giving you an idea of how you’ll feel when you’ve drunk a glass or two. If you’re a smoker, however, this experience will probably be completely negative.

5. This is it. Take a small mouthful. Let it lie on the tongue for a moment. Then move it about in your mouth. Burgundy wine-tasters filter it to and fro between their lower teeth, an unappealing action called la grumée designed to keep the wine near the tip of the tongue. Don’t feel obliged to do this, but different parts of the tongue will react differently to build up your appreciation of the spectrum of flavours. Finally swallow it. Don’t spit it out in any circumstances. Don’t take another mouthful until the aftertaste has disappeared, like the final glow of a beautiful sunset giving way to night. Ah.

6. Clear your palate before the next sample with water or something neutral like a piece of bread. Good dégustations will provide bread, or perhaps a bland cheese or not too highly flavoured sausage. A really determined dégustateur can turn the experience into a modest lunch.

At midday several really determined local dégustateurs turned up, one in a little 3-wheeler delivery truck with ‘HALLOWINE’ painted along the side, followed by a telephone number. Clever.

We left, the heavier by a dozen or so bottles. The reds were good, but the whites, especially one called Galinette, were particularly impressive. I’m afraid we didn’t buy any paintings. Why look at the pictures when you can drink the wine? On second thoughts, though, those nudes . . .

SMALL, UNIMPRESSIVE prize to be won!

What am I saying? Small? Unimpressive? This column is happy to offer a signed copy of my book ‘French Leaves: Letters from the Languedoc’ for the first correct e-mail answer (send it to the address below) to the following:

‘Lotantique’ and ‘Galinette’ are names taken from a 1963 two-part saga called ‘L’Eau des Collines’ (Water from the Hills) by a French – or rather Provençal – author who married a woman who happened to have the same name as President Kennedy’s wife and who starred in an early film version. The author died in 1974. What was his name?

Bonne chance! Bonne année 2003!

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

We were just watching what they called the ‘enthronement’ of some new Chevaliers on the steps of the mairie – you never know what village life is going to throw up next – when Lazare, a kindly old man from a neighbouring village, came up and asked us if we could tell the difference between a châtaigne and a marron.

Why, yes, we said: but which is which sometimes catches us out. They’re both chestnuts; ordinary chestnuts – châtaignes – grow like weeds on our hillside and indeed all over the valley, so plentifully that they once provided the staple food of the area for both man and beast. Marrons are generally bigger, with a firmer texture and a more refined flavour. Let’s hear it for marrons, we say.

Undeterred, Lazare went on to explain the difference: châtaignes have a tiny beard at the point of the husk and a feathery down round the bald pate of the nut; marrons don’t. Wait, I’ll show you, he said, looking about for examples of each, as though they might be lying about as plentifully on the village square as they do in the local woods. But there’s never a raw chestnut about when you want one, and the only solution was for him to explore the paper cornet Josephine had just bought at the roast chestnut stall.

Lazare helped himself, blowing on his fingers, but the roasting process had charred the husk beyond recognition, leaving no trace of singed beard or feathery down, if there’d been any to start with. He did his best: after a bite out the first, he pronounced it marron. And the second. And the third. And the fourth. All marrons, it seemed.

We were wondering if he was going to scoff the lot – in the interests of correct identification, of course – when everyone’s attention was drawn to a burst of mighty singing from the steps of the mairie: the Chevaliers new and old – and some are very elderly – having made or renewed their promise of undying loyalty to the Brotherhood of St Fogbert and the local mountain that bears his name, filled their glasses with the first wine of the year and broke into a Provençal song called Coupo Santo (‘Hallowed Cup’), greatly magnified over the village loudspeaker system.

The public had been introduced to the new Chevaliers one by one, as they received their regalia from the Seneschal of the Order. There were half-a-dozen of them: a retired school inspector, a local historian, a brace of maires from other villages, the sous-prefet . . .

I’d been conscious of the elder brethren earlier that morning, in the church, out for what they call in Scotland the annual kirking. The village was en fête, putting its best foot forward to celebrate the chestnut harvest and the vin primeur, the first wine from the September grape harvest. No village fête of this kind is complete without a festive Mass in the church, and no festive Mass is complete without a procession of the Chevaliers in their scarlet cloaks, chains of office and wide-brimmed plumed black hats, like so many inmates of the Old Musketeers’ Home out on parole. And no festive procession of the Chevaliers down the aisle is complete without a festive march from the organ.

This is where I came in, up in the organ loft. However, French marches aren’t quite like anybody else’s: they’re a good bit quicker, 140 to the minute if you’re that interested, whereas élite formations like the Foot Guards or the US Marines get from A to B perfectly comfortably at 120 to the minute.

Up in the organ loft you might as well sit in your broom cupboard for all you can see of what’s going on, so Josephine keeps me posted in a series of urgent whispers: ‘They’re assembling outside the church door . . . they’re lining up . . . ready . . . steady . . . WAIT! Something’s gone wrong . . . oh no, the flag’s come off its pole: oh, how awful for them . . . they must have caught it on the door . . .’

I sit back from the keyboard. This could take some time. Occasionally, to while away long inaudible sermons, we take a flask of coffee up to the organ loft, but don’t tell anyone. Could there be time for a fly cup now?

But no, the Chevaliers manage to repair the flag – it simply hooks on, it turns out – Josephine gives me the nod and my fingers scurry over a sprightly Napoleonic march called L’Armée de la Sambre et de la Meuse. But I can sense that Josephine is becoming agitated. Something’s wrong.

‘Slow down!’ she hisses. ‘It’s too fast! They can’t keep up!’ So I put the brakes on to about 100 a minute – which is the pace the Foreign Legion marches at, incidentally: it must be all that desert sand – and eventually the Chevaliers make it to the front pews and the service begins. The Mass is undisturbed apart from someone’s mobile ringing (Mozart’s Rondo alla turca, if you want the full flavour of the interruption) and a passing Demon Accordionist outside giving the street Moonlight Tango in unwitting competition with the Agnus Dei inside.

Back to our chestnuts. A gem of a recipe book, Sarah and Dennis La Touche’s The Les Mimosas Cookbook (ISBN 1-86962-017-8, if you ever feel like ordering it) carries a recipe for confiture de marrons, chestnut preserve. Give it a try, if chestnuts are available where you live. It’s not hard.

Ingredients for 8-10 pots:

2kg (4½lb) peeled chestnuts
12 tablespoons water
Sugar – for quantity, see below
2 split vanilla pods

Method:

Put the peeled chestnuts in a large pan, cover with cold water and bring to the boil. Cook for 40 minutes.

Drain the water and rub the chestnuts through a sieve, or purée them in a food processor. You may have to do this in several batches.

Weigh the purée, put it in a jamming pan, add the same weight of sugar, the 12 tablespoons of water and the vanilla pods. Mix well and heat slowly, stirring continuously. The jam is ready when it comes away from the bottom of the pan as you stir it.

Turn off the heat, remove the vanilla pods and put into sterilised jars. Bon appetit!

If you can’t find peeled chestnuts, you may have to roast fresh ones. If you can’t do it in the embers of the fire, a really hot oven will char the skins off. But remember Lazare: if you want to tell châtaignes from marrons, it’s best to try before roasting.

There’ll be more singing from the mairie steps soon. My small choir, called Les Jeudistes because the ten of us rehearse on Thursdays, will be singing carols from round Europe as part of the Marché de Noël, the Christmas market, held at night. A magical occasion, if all goes well: last year we had to compete with zebra-skins drums from a stall selling African goods, not a happy mix. We’ve cleared an undisturbed slot with Charlotte the stallholder this year, but so far no one’s been able to contact the Demon Accordionist . . .

Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année!

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

A DUTCH friend gave us some Roomboter Waffeltjies, or some such name, the other day. They’re a sort of papal-strength wafer soaked, steeped, clarted in rum butter. I had one with my afternoon tea (a Lapsang Souchong-Russian Caravan mix) and felt the weight of it the rest of the day and well into the night. I had dreams of bitter disappointment involving temporary membership of a fleshpot called El Club Scanty, where beautiful women melted away when I reached out to them. Not good. I should have stuck to McVitie’s Digestives.

I wondered where she got them from. Apparently there’s a Dutch lorry that makes the round trip from Amsterdam, through France and down to Malaga and – for all I know – El Club Scanty in Spain, doshing out the Gouda cheese, Oranjeboom beer and of course Roomboter Waffeltjies wherever the Dutch have set up their expat nests en route.

No Brit lorry shows any such enterprise, at least not in our part of the world. If we want goodies from home we depend on the kindness and spare boot (trunk, if you’re reading this in the USA, and I hope you are) capacity of visiting friends. But it’s a chancy business, and possible dearth of childhood needments like Scott’s Porage Oats or Marmite (Vegemite, if you’re reading this in Australia, etc., etc.) can lead to desperate hoarding. Indeed, I once went to see Ron and Julie, a rotund Yorkshire pair from Goole (with our household instinct for base nicknames they became The Ghoulies) who like us have settled down here in the Deep South.

Ron talked mainly about what would happen when the balloon went up, as if the French Revolution Mk 2 was just around the corner. He’s got no great opinion of the French: it wouldn’t take much, in his opinion, to trigger a popular movement against the rising tide of expats. (Maybe he has a point. Numbers are going up and up: in our département 18,000 northern Europeans per year apply for cartes de séjour, residence permits.) He didn’t actually mention race riots or cattle trucks to the Gulags, but there was a distinct whiff of Dr Guillotin in his discourse, not to mention Mme Defarges, the scaffold-haunting crone in A Tale of Two Cities who added a stitch to her knitting every time an aristo’s head rolled into the basket.

But he was OK, he reckoned. He could withstand any siege latter-day sans culottes could throw round his villa in the sun, at least until Mafeking was relieved and the SAS helicoptered him and Julie back to Blighty: he unlocked a spare bedroom wardrobe to show me floor-to-ceiling stacks of Heinz Baked Beans and Bird’s Custard Powder.

OUR LOCAL supermarket has at least cast a nod in the direction of expat Brit tastes, but they don’t make it easy for you. You have to know where to look. Pity the poor Dutch in search of Roomboter Waffeltjies: they’ll have to go hungry and/or sleep untroubled by seductive visions of El Club Scanty and its sirens. But for Brits in search of HP Sauce, Lemon Puffs, Sharwood’s Spreading Piccalilli, Mrs Globus’ Crumble Mix, etc., etc., all you have to do is locate what they call the rayon exotique and then be guided by the shelf-top country of origin sign: Espagne, Chine, Thaïlande, Tunisie and so on.

Suddenly among the tacos mix, couscous and soy sauce you come across a noble stack of McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits. You look up: does the sign say Angleterre . . . Grande Bretagne . . . Royaume Uni ?

Does it Cadbury’s Cocoa: it says ‘Mexique’.

OUR NEW walnut tree came into its own this year. ‘New’ means new to us: it’s a 30-year-old specimen standing by the foot of the drive of the newly-acquired land we’ll be building a house on next year. Unfortunately its lane-side position means that those unversed in age-old country laws of have and have not, viz. anything belongs to anybody who thinks he can get away with it, help themselves to the fallen nuts.

Earlier in the year several branches had to be removed to allow diggers and lorries up the drive to prepare the site. Age-old country laws reckon that growth follows the knife, and certainly this year’s crop has been enormous, if only because I’ve been reliving a Missing Link childhood mostly spent up trees, shaking the nuts down for Josephine to collect and spread out in the sun to dry in shallow fruit boxes.

A country favourite round here is vin de noix, walnut wine. It’s excellent as a sweetish apéritif, rounder and fuller than medium or sweet sherries, if not as delicately flavoured. Traditionally it’s prepared on St John’s day, June 24th, so you’ve got several months to get ready. But you’ll need green walnuts, i.e. the nuts still tender in their apple-green suits, before they’ve fallen off the tree. More Missing Link stuff.

Ingredients:

14 green walnuts
1 litre eau-de-vie at 45 degrees proof (sounds good so far)
3 litres of red wine (AOC St Chinian is recommended: better and better)
500g granulated sugar.

Method:

1. Crush the nuts. (Better to wear gloves: walnut juice stains horribly.)
2. Macerate the crushed walnuts in the wine and eau-de-vie for 40 days.
3. Strain the mix and add the sugar.
4. When the sugar has dissolved, stir well and put into bottles.

If you don’t want to bother with all this, just drink the wine instead. It comes to the same thing in the long run.

LAST MONTH’S competition asked readers to identify a dizzy crag-perched castle near Perpignan. First correct answer came in from regular prizewinner Robin Quinn of Ottawa, who identified it as Quéribus. Well done, Rob, yet again. You win a handful of sage from our lane-side herb garden, if the passing self-help trade has left any. If not, I can offer you some digestive biscuits. Or maybe you’d prefer some second-hand dreams of El Club Scanty and its denizens, untouched, more’s the pity, by human hand.

 

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

THERE WAS time enough for an apéritif outside before the first distant thumps and rumbles of thunder came too close for comfort. Easy-peasy, relax, stay cool, as Sir Francis Drake might have said, eyeing up the lie of his bowls as he glanced south-west from Plymouth Hoe for the first distant glimpse of Armada sails: time enough to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too.

But the storm was on its way: no evening sun, no swallows wheeling in the upper air, no crickets chirruping into the indigo night, no metallic thwack of boule on boule, none of the hallmarks of serene late summer in the Midi. In the village square windows opened in succession, hands reached out to close the shutters firmly, hurried pinafored figures bobbed out to take the washing in, village cats disappeared to find shelter, cars parked with an urgency to get home, batten down the hatches and ride the tempest storm out.

But not us. I don’t know what particular strain of Brit-ness came out, what determination to eat and drink outside, what folk-memory of rain-lashed barbecues with guests huddling in the garage overcame us, but we stayed outside on the deck sipping kir.

(You don’t know kir? How wonderful to arrive at your age and still have this pleasure in front of you! Pour a little blackcurrant liqueur – no, Ribena won’t do – into the bottom of your glass and top up with white wine. Or raspberry, or blackberry, or strawberry. In a chestnut-producing area like ours, some flavour their kir with marron. You can celebrate a really special occasion with kir royale, champagne lightly flavoured pink. Mmm, délicieux.)

For their greater comfort and maybe to stake their claim to a tiny bit of the square outside their house, or at least to discourage parking right outside their front door, Sarah and John have constructed a cunning deck about 2 metres square, crumb-friendly wooden slats hinged, bracketed and braced so that it can be folded up and stacked away at the summer’s end. Here we sat in stoic state defying the elements, a pale Union Jack echo of dressing for dinner in some tropical colonial outpost a century ago, downing kirs and chatting as the rolling barrage of thunder approached.

Eventually of course we had to move indoors, although the warmth of the day persisted and we sat to table by open French windows. Just as Sarah brought forth a lordly dish of moules marinières, bought fresh that morning from the Mediterranean, the storm broke.

There’s something enormously satisfying about getting outside a plateful of mussels steamed in their own juice (with some white wine, chopped onion, garlic and a knoblet of butter added) while not a metre away the elements battle, the sky is slashed with angry bolts of lightning, the house shivers with the thunderous reverberations and the rain pours with a hissing intensity that would have made Noah raise an eyebrow and wonder if it wasn’t time to be thinking about casting off.

LATE SUMMER storms in the Midi are quite something. The storm we rode out, mussel-bound, was impressive enough: even so, it was right on the edge of the catastrophic cyclone that caused such loss of life and devastation further east, where the south-flowing rivers of the Cevennes, swollen with torrential rain, broke their banks as they neared the flatlands of the Camargue.

They’re still clearing up as I write this, and putting things back to rights will take years rather than months. A catastrophic storm and the resultant flooding seems to be becoming an annual event, explicable in meteorological terms as due to a seasonal imbalance between land and sea temperatures, but older people can’t remember anything like the succession of storms of the last ten years.

There’s always a search for a scapegoat. A former octogenarian neighbour, Thérèse, used to blame a government that had created the Office National des Forêts out of the old department of Eaux et Forêts, eaux in this case signifying a responsibility for watercourses that has lapsed ever since. Why weren’t we warned earlier? demand villagers in the path of the floodwaters. Indeed, one news report featured an apprehensive village priest who took himself through the storm to his church, even as we were enjoying Sarah’s mussels, and heaved on his bell-rope to sound the tocsin.

But seethingly unpopular are the insurance companies and the length of time it takes to have damage at this level assessed by what the French call an expert, when immediate help and support is needed. Our village mairie, like thousands of others throughout France, has become a collecting point for bedding, clothing, basic household goods and and cleaning materials to serve until the insurance companies cough up.

OUR CHOIR will do its bit. We always try to. This time last year it was for those on the receiving end of an extraordinary explosion in Toulouse, then last winter we sang for flood victims in the Somme. We’ll put on a concert. If it makes a few hundred euros it’ll mean life’s just a little bit easier for someone. Worth singing for. We’d better steer clear of any negro spirituals about Noah, floods, arks, or even insurance companies, though.

SMALL, UNIMPRESSIVE prize to be won!

You should be safe enough from floods up here, although the risk of lightning strike must be quite high. As you puff your way up the path from the car-park, you wonder how on earth the mediaeval builders got all this dressed masonry up here. Some of it has crumbled away, but the remains are pretty (and vertiginously) impressive. Not far away, on a neighbouring crag, is the ‘twin’ castle of Peyrepertuse, joint guardian of the route to Spain. Southwards, far beyond the river Maury down there in the valley, the Pyrenees stretch out like dragon’s teeth; eastward the Mediterranean sparkles, north and west lies the Waste Land of the Corbières. A sect exterminated by the grandfather of the man destined to found the first English parliament in 1265 once occupied this and similar castles.

Where are you, and what was the name of the sect? First correct e-mail answer wins some sage from our very own Midi herb garden. How can you resist?

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

3am. What they call the wee sma’ hours in Inverness and les petites heures here in the south of France. It’s been one of those nights. The cats, Pinot and Merlot, won’t settle. It’s not just their nature, it’s not that they’re always on the wrong side of every door, like the Rum Tum Tugger in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. It’s not full moon either, but something’s disturbing them. If they’re in, they want to go out. As soon as they’re out, they yowl to come back in, feigning near-starvation. When they’re in, they disdain their délice au canard and start to play, clawing at carpets and leaping about on the furniture. Finally, about 2am, when Merlot has jumped on the architect’s delicate scale model of the house we’re planning to build and has put a paw through the garage roof we take a firm hand and put them both out and close the window. Too bad. They can like it or lump it.

It had been a late night to start with. Josephine and I had been 40 miles away, myself re-awakening a musical activity dormant since I came to live in France 11 years ago: playing timpani, those big orchestral kettledrums which look like giant copper cauldrons and boom, bump and roll like thunder. A summer orchestra, the Sinfonietta de Bardou, had asked me to play in a couple of concerts with them, a flattering invitation evoking happy memories of bashing out (erm . . . that’s to say sensitively underscoring the rhythm) the Hallelujah Chorus in Inverness in the wee sma’ 70s and 80s. But first catch your timpani . . .

After a marathon phone-round I ran a pair to ground belonging to the Republican Wind Band – L’Harmonie Républicaine if you want it authentically in French – based in Coursan, a village near Narbonne, where the amiable Monsieur Jalabert, vigneron and clarinettist, took time off from tending his ripening grapes to help load the drums into a borrowed pick-up (‘bakkie’ if you’re reading this in South Africa, and I hope you are, or ‘ute’ if you’re sensitively underscoring the rhythm of an Australian winter with a ray of Midi sun).

Anyway, concert over in a packed and damp church – it had rained torrentially earlier in the evening – in Clermont l’Hérault, the last wild notes of Beethoven’s 4th losing themselves high in the medieval vaulting, drums re-loaded with muttered comments from Josephine wondering why I hadn’t learned the flute, wouldn’t need a chain gang and a 3-ton truck every time, might as well heave coals, etc., etc, we got in at about 1am. The rain had stopped, a delectable rain-rinsed freshness released a myriad sweet summer night-scents, the bedroom window stayed deliciously open.

This is where we came in, of course: light out, stars a-twinkle, owl-hoot, roll over (Beethoven?), nose-dive, belly-flop into deep and blessed sleep. For a few seconds, until the cats start to play up. And no sooner had the cats been summarily dealt with than Bellamy the golden retriever took a paw.

Bellamy is pretty ancient now. In human terms, according to a table on the back of the vet’s door in St Rémy, she’s 138. That’s some age. She spends her days sleeping, mostly, and just toddling about from outpost to outpost of her ever-diminishing territory. She’s stone deaf, too.

Yet at 3am there was a heaving and a puffing like a hippopotamus breaking the surface: Bellamy was frantic to go out. Ça urge, as she would have said in French if she’d ever lifted a paw to learn any. That urges. So downstairs she went with a nimble urgency given to few 138-year-olds, out into the star-twinkled night, round the back of the house at a geriatric gallop and there, at the foot of the steps that lead to the strawberry bed, started to bark as furiously as possible for one whose pension book can’t have too many pages left.

Round about 3.30 we got her back in again, unrepentant. Thoroughly awake, I made a peevish cup of tea, after which we might have dropped off for a bit. At any rate the next disturbance was the angelus ringing from the village bell-tower shortly after 7.

Giving the whole night’s rest up as a bad job, I went up to commune with my strawberries, always a source of comfort in troubled times. Come the three corners of the world against us, things can’t be that bad if there’s a picking of strawberries. The earth between the rows – I don’t straw them, it just encourages slugs – was black, freshly turned, as though by a blunt hoe; some of the plants were slightly dishevelled, here and there a shallow hole showed where a slender trotter had sunk into the ground.

Wild boar. That was it. Wild boar, sangliers, always at their most numerous at this time of year, had got into the strawberry bed. That was what had disturbed the animals, though clearly age hasn’t withered stone-deaf Bellamy’s sense of smell, even from behind closed doors.

And the strawberries? Untouched. Clearly they don’t appeal to wild boar, though missing a good night’s sleep seems a heavy price to pay for this uninteresting piece of information.

I CAN hardly sit to tap this out on the keyboard. Too painful. My gluteus maximus is severely inflamed, a discomfort reminiscent of a caning at school, and I’m afraid no amount of strawberries will put it right.

It’s my own fault, I suppose. The railway line that used to run along the valley of the river Paresse was shut down and the rails taken up decades ago, but the old track has been cleared and turned into a cycle and bridle path. You can hire bicycles in the village: a family visit, and the challenge was on, even for one so advanced in age (though not yet 138) that he can remember canings at school, to cycle to St Rémy and back.

When I returned the bicycles, bow-legged, I mentioned the gluteal havoc caused by two or three hours in the saddle. Monsieur Molière raised an eyebrow: why, these saddles were the very latest, they were new this season, they were what the Tour de France cyclists swore by. Swore at, I would have thought: I suspect the incidence of early impotence among French cyclists is painfully high.

 

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

MAJOR SUCKER for pomp and circumstance here, I’m afraid. July 14th – la fête nationale, the anniversary of the 1789 revolutionary mob breaking into the Bastille, the Paris prison/fortress symbolic of royalist rule – July 14th found me as usual in front of the television at 10 o’clock in the morning gawping at the battalions marching down the Champs Elysées to salute President Chirac.

It’s much the same every year, the usual ballet of military parades, endless spruce and spiffed up battalions: sword-swinging cadets from the military academies, platoons from serving units, the jingling harness of the Garde Républicaine, police motor-cycle units, trundling tank transporters and armoured personnel carriers, the Paris Fire Brigade, a fly-past from what the French call l’armée de l’air. There are usually guests: this year, to mark a special September 11th empathy with the United States, some cadets from West Point came at the head of the parade, and among the fire engines was one flown in from New York. A much appreciated gesture.

The climax for spit-and-polish fans comes when the marching units have finished and the armoured car and artillery motorcade is about to start. It’s quite dramatic: the bands stop, a hush falls, and in the distance, several blocks down the Champs Elysées, a different music starts, at a slower pace, 60 to the minute for military march experts: it’s the Foreign Legion in white képis, scarlet epaulettes and immaculately pressed khaki drill, marching ponderously at what they call the pas de sable, the sand-pace, as though they were stomping determinedly across the Sahara to relieve Fort Zinderneuf.

They bring their own music with them, led by staff-twirling bandmasters. No Frenchman can serve in the Legion’s ranks, of course, and we’re told that the band – a very professional one – is made up of musicians from Eastern Europe, where the musical training is exacting but jobs non-existent; signing on with the French Foreign Legion is one way out of this impasse.

CORPORAL CONTACT with the Foreign Legion? The nearest I ever came to this was driving along the narrow Route de Narbonne in Mousse les Grieux some years ago. I edged on to the pavement to let a camouflage-green military bus past. 4me Régiment, Légion Etrangère, the destination board said. The fabled Foreign Legion! My eyes strayed upwards for a glimpse of Beau Geste in sun-bleached, sweat-stained képi and neckcloth, or even ‘Tough’ Luck of the Legion, who with his sidekicks Corporal Trenet and Private Bimberg, noted for expressions like Sacré Bleu! and Nom d’une pipe! at the drop of a képi, enlivened the centre pages of Eagle, that truly great comic from the 50s and 60s.

I look up in vain. No légionnaires. The bus is full of glum women, overdressed and heavily made up. They have the torpid air of the night shift about to clock on. Much to the corporal relief of Fort Zinderneuf, or wherever the 4th Regiment is stationed. Sacré Bleu! There was never anything like this in Eagle.

PRIVATE CONVERSATION between Henry Kissinger and Chairman Mao, I imagine comparing notes on the French and Cultural Revolutions:

Kissinger: Mr Chairman, in 1789 events in France shook the Western world and established new expectations of government and norms of political thought. How would you assess the overall impact of the French Revolution?

Chairman Mao: Mr Secretary of State, I would find that very hard. And premature. Please excuse me: you see, it’s much too soon after the event.

GENERAL UNFOLDING of the July 14th parade included a pageant to celebrate a certain bicentenary not unconnected with the competition below, with young people parading irregular shapes of stretched coloured cloth which, when seen from the Presidential dais, eventually formed themselves into a giant gold medal, clasp and ribbon. To give a sense of history that Chairman Mao would have appreciated, each jigsaw piece was accompanied by a small group in the military or civilian dress of the period.

So among others we had poilus from the First World War, cavalrymen from the Crimea, and dating back to 1802, two fearsomely moustached grenadiers of Napoleon’s Old Guard, blue tunics, white crossed shoulder-straps, bearskin with red cockade.

At Waterloo Napoleon, out of sorts that day – some say through having dosed himself with laudanum, others because of his piles – neglected to deploy his Old Guard, so they stood about doing nothing while their general, Cambronne, fretted and fumed. At the end of the day the victorious British and Prussians called on the Old Guard, standing firm but inactive while the French army melted away, to surrender.

‘Merde!’ was the answer from the ranks, or maybe from Cambronne himself, and to this day ‘merde’ is sometimes referred to as ‘le mot de Cambronne’, Cambronne’s word. To have a swear-word named after you must be almost as great an honour as being awarded the . . . but I mustn’t steal Philip Humphries’ thunder. Read on!

SMALL, UNIMPRESSIVE prize to be won!

Philip Humphries, master Francophile of Bellingham, Wa., USA, has so often won the small, unimpressive prizes offered by this column that in order to give somebody else a look-in he’s been asked to set the competition himself. So here goes:

His name is a military rank. He was awarded the rank of Officer in an order created by Napoleon Bonaparte to honor outstanding service to France, but his accomplishment was in the field of art, not the battlefield. Who was this famous American expatriate and what was his award?

First correct answer e-mailed to Chris at the address below wins. A vos claviers!

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

"YOU’LL BE a man, my son" wrote Kipling at the end of "If", a poem which warms the heart of some as much as it really gets up the nose of others.

After all the hype, puffery and scramble for sponsorship surrounding the French football team’s entry to the World Cup, which didn’t exclude star player Zidane being referred to as the Messiah, Les Bleus’ disastrous exit without a goal to their credit caused panic among the advertising agencies. To this idle French TV watcher, it seemed that only two football-based commercials survived the débâcle: McDonald’s, to whom the news that they’d associated themselves with a pack of no-hopers must have come in a bit late, and Volvic, a mineral water from the Auvergne. A grainy, elemental Zidane continues to stride the high tops of the Massif Central sipping contentedly from a plastic bottle, his Messianic mantle unspotted. Following an injury, he only played in one match, after all, so clearly he’s not to blame.

But one agency wasn’t slow to cash in on disaster. I looked up at the TV screen from lunch the other day to see the French team in soft focus, in attitudes like Napoleon’s Old Guard at Waterloo, bowed and bloodied but dignified in defeat. The voice-over was quoting – in French – something distantly familiar, something out of Kipling:

" . . . if you can lose, and start again at your beginnings, and never breathe a word about your loss . . . tu seras un homme, mon fils". You’ll be a man, my son.

I can’t remember what this was supposed to advertise. Cakes, probably.

"WHAT IS this life, if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?" wrote W.H.Hudson. We had to learn the whole poem at school, not very successfully in my case because I can’t remember any more of it than that.

But who cares? With France out of the World Cup things are certainly more subdued down at the Café Laissac, headquarters of the local football club and the nearest thing we have to a local in the village. Four years ago, when France hosted the World Cup and went on to win it, the place heaved and throbbed with Gallic fervour from dawn till dusk. But now the terrasse is just the place for a no-hurry mid-morning coffee or a peaceful early evening apéritif under the shade of the plane trees, standing – or sitting, rather – and staring at the world going by, or as much of the world as is represented by the village elders playing boules over the road, the anarchic parking outside the Post Office and the lamp-post round of M. Roumégous’ dog Smiler (pronounced ‘smeelair’).

We used to long for this, a café terrasse and the sun on our backs and time to enjoy it, before we came to live in France, but now we’re here full-time we never get round to it. It was on a café terrasse that we first discovered pastis, the famous aniseed-flavoured spirit of the Midi. You never tried it? Oh, come on, this won’t do! Far be it from this column to lead you to the demon drink, but the next time you find yourself at sundown on a café terrasse in the deep South . . .

. . . you know you’ve added enough water – which you have to do, otherwise you’ll be very ill – when the rich gold of the pastis gives way to a milky, silvery white, like the moon taking over where the sun left off. (The same thing happens to Dettol, now I come to think of it, but there the resemblance ends.) One pastis is usually enough unless you’re proposing to make a night of it, but the result is such an experience that people end up buying bottles of Pernod, Ricard or 51 to take home to Aylesbury or Milwaukee or wherever hoping to recapture those velvet Midi evenings with the crickets singing into the indigo night. Ahh.

But it’s never the same out of France. Why is this, do you think? I’d be glad to feature sensible e-mail suggestions (chris_c@frenchconnections.co.ukchris_c@frenchconnections.co.uk) as to why this is next month.

"MUSIC AND women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is" wrote Samuel Pepys, the English 17th century Admiralty administrator in the privacy of his diary, made more private by writing it in a shorthand he’d invented himself. And more unfathomable still by cloaking his scrapes with women in a muddle of languages, English, French, Spanish and Latin.

At the village Festival of Choral Music (also called "La Vallée qui Chante" – The Singing Valley) at Whitsun I put my rehearsal baton down, dismissed the orchestra and singers for a couple of hours before the evening concert and started to put the school canteen – our rehearsal room – back to rights. On a table near the door, where the brass had been sitting, was a cloth-wrapped tart or pie, which certainly wasn’t there when the rehearsal started. It turned to be a clafoutis, a sort of pie with cherries embedded in batter. It must have belonged to one of the musicians. The French horn had a lean and hungry look . . .

I gathered it up with my music stand, batons and scores, locked up and set off up the street towards the church, venue for the concert, not really best pleased that the Directeur Artistique, about to lead choirs, orchestra and public into the glories of some of the most sublime choral music ever written, should be lumbered with a stray clafoutis. The village street was closed to traffic, because they were holding a Foire à la Brocante, a bric-à-brac market, under the plane trees, and many stallholders simply spread their wares on the road.

Among the stallholders was Nicole. Put any thoughts of Nicole, the nubile, deep-cleavaged daughter in the Renault Clio advertisements out of your mind: our Nicole is almost as broad as tall, and doesn’t care, with a smile to match her splendid size, sunny disposition and sovereign appetite. Sniffing appreciatively (mmm! délicieux! J’adore le clafoutis!), she gently pulled folds of the cloth apart, revealing the firm, warm, cherry-studded flesh beneath; she picked out a cherry between plump thumb and forefinger and popped it into her mouth. No man with the slightest interest in his food can resist this sort of seduction for long: I thrust the clafoutis into her hands and legged it for the church.

Later, after the final echoes of Gabriel Fauré’s "Cantique de Jean Racine" had died away, one of the tenors asked me if anyone had found a clafoutis. He’d put it down somewhere, he couldn’t remember where. Oh, I said, guiltily, was it for anyone in particular? No, he answered, it was for anyone who felt hungry. He had more cherries than he knew what to do with. Such a pity to waste them.

I was happy to assure him that it had been very much appreciated.

"Ah, that’s good," he said. "May I have the dish back? It was quite an old one."

Among the many stresses that Klemperer or Toscanini suffered, I don’t expect anguished wondering whether Nicole had eaten an entire clafoutis and had then sold the dish at her bric-à-brac stall was one of them. But I know how Samuel Pepys felt.

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

I sometimes wonder about Frédéric Mistral. You’ve never heard of him? Nor had I, until I came to live in France. I knew the word ‘mistral’ as the name of the icy wind that roars off the Alps down the Rhone valley, chilling many a Provençal holiday-maker to the marrow, but the man himself, apparently named after a wind, remained a closed book despite having a street in practically every southern French town named after him. You know the kind of thing: white lettering on blue enamel plaques at first floor height saying Rue F.Mistral, Boulevard Mistral, Avenue Frédéric Mistral, whatever.

Maybe he was really called Dubois, but called himself ‘Mistral’ to give himself a bit of a lift, an air of something essentially Provençal. Easier than calling yourself ‘Ratatouille’ (a mess of vegetables stewed in olive oil) or ‘Bouillabaisse’ (a stew of coarse fish), no doubt; but you might as well have a poet of the night sky in general, and of shooting stars in particular, calling himself Porkpize because they’re meaty, all right. Meteorite, see? Ho ho.

H’m. Enough of this. Mistral is the poet of Provence just as Robert Burns is of Scotland or William Barnes is of Dorset, and all these languages or dialects come first equal for impenetrability. All I know is that Frédéric Mistral won the Nobel prize for literature in 1904, not only for his poetry but for contriving a consistent system of spelling for Provençal. Until his time Provençal was mostly oral, and when written down was as unfettered by spelling rules as Shakespeare’s English, a period beloved of schoolkids because whatever rubbish you wrote down in spelling tests you were bound to end up with 10 out of 10 and a gold star.

But did Frédéric Mistral ever meet Joseph Pujol? They were both on the go about 100 years ago, as the 19th turned into the 20th century, Mistral turning out Provençal verse and Pujol taking the stage at the Moulin Rouge in Paris for a bizarre, not to say louche, act. Mid-performance photographs exist of Pujol, a baker by trade, in a sort of evening dress consisting of cutaway jacket and knee breeches; he leans slightly forward from the waist, his face taut with the physical effort of breaking wind in the name of art.

Apparently his performance was as musical as mastery of only four notes (C, D, E and the C an octave above, for any musician reading this) would allow, so presumably someone else (someone called Carter, perhaps?) was the hero of the limerick which ends

He could play everything

From ‘God Save The King’

To Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata

- but Pujol’s performance was popular enough with Moulin Rouge punters to earn him the nickname Le Pétomane. Imitators occasionally appear on French TV variety shows, the land of Rabelais being a country where you can get away with this sort of thing, for better or worse. There’s an obscure tribute to Joseph Pujol and his creative flatulence in Mel Brooks’ wonderfully zany film Blazing Saddles, where a posse of cowboys charges along the Governor William J. Le Petomane Thruway. It’s true, thundering hooves on the Autoroute Frédéric Mistral wouldn’t have quite the same ring to them.

If you want to delve further into the lives of both Mistral le Poète and Pujol le Pétomane, the standard French encyclopedia is usually referred to by the publisher’s name, Larousse. (Mistral really was the man’s name, apparently.) The Larousse logo is of a girl blowing a dandelion clock, with the motto Je sème à tout vent, which I suppose you could translate as ‘I sow with every blow’.

We’re not enormously troubled with wind here in our corner of the Languedoc. Even the mistral goes by another name: they call it the tramontane, the north wind that scours the great central plateau of France before sweeping its gusts and eddies into the secret places of our valley. If it isn’t the tramontane gusting our garden furniture off the terrasse and into the road below or scattering ripe cherries into the swimming pool, it’s the marin.

The marin, warm and wet, blows in off the Mediterranean, heavy with rain laced with orange dust. Goodness knows where it comes from. We call it Sahara dust, as though passing cyclones had scooped up sandstorms in distant Timbuktu and deposited the finer débris all over Josephine’s midnight blue Saab. Orange and indigo, very 1960s.

There were alarming images on French TV news a few weeks ago of typhoons in America with waterspouts sucking up cars and depositing them considerable distances away. It couldn’t happen here, could it, reversing the process? We’ve never really wanted to go to Timbuktu, not even as part of a meteorological car-wash package.

Last month’s competition, nothing to do with wind in any sense, drew a big entry, every single one correctly identifying Charles de Gaulle with France’s newest aircraft-carrier, Paris’ number one airport and the village of Colombey les Deux Eglises. Congratulations to early oiseaux Robin Quinn of Ottawa, Canada and Philip Humphries of Bellingham, Wa., USA, both of whom receive a complete mint set of recent French presidential election voting slips.

Philip has won this competition so often that his house must be entirely furnished with small, unimpressive knicknacks he’s picked up from this column. He has an advantage, of course: when Campbell’s Diary comes on stream, presumably at 00.01 on the first of the month (I’ve never stayed up to see), it’s only 3 o’clock in the afternoon in Washington State. Just nice time to rub your eyes after your siesta, see what’s on offer on the French Connections website, a quick shuffle through Larousse, and Bob’s your oncle.

Phil, you’ve won another, cumulative prize: you get to set the next competition. D’accord? Ça va?

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

THERE’S AN unexpected duel going on inside our letter-box. You wouldn’t have thought it, just looking at it from the outside, but inside its placid green exterior there’s goodness knows what Gallic mayhem and brouhaha going on . . .

The spider got there first, maybe over-expectant of fat juicy flies blundering in from the spring sunshine through the letter-flap. Second to arrive was an over-wintering wasp, looking for somewhere quiet and sheltered to build its nest. I should have got rid of them both, of course, but it occurred to me that just as the Romans tried to foretell the future by counting birds in the sky or examining chicken livers, so the denizens of our letter-box, if left to themselves, might foretell the result of the French presidential elections.

Anyway, the inner life of the letter-box was rudely shaken the other day with two massive sheaves of papers thrust inside, one for me and one for Josephine. They were election manifestos, 4-page addresses from each of the 16 candidates. Folded inside were 16 voting slips, each printed with a wannabe-President’s name.

We looked at them closely round the breakfast table. Very curious. As non-French citizens we can’t vote in these elections. Local elections, yes, and European ones too, but the Chambre des Députés and the President have to assume office without our suffrage. Why had they been delivered, then? We could only assume that La Poste in the village had been told to stuff them into every letter-box regardless of spiders, wasps or the electoral status of the householder.

But there they all were. The front-runners (as it seemed), the retiring President Jacques Chirac, the retiring Prime Minister Lionel Jospin: scarred veterans of presidential elections like Robert Hue, the teddy-bear-like communist leader; the untiring candidate for The Workers’ Struggle, simply known as Arlette, and the sinister Jean-Marie Le Pen, accompanied on the National Front campaign trail by shaven-headed heavies, his election rallies always slightly reminiscent of Nuremburg 1936. A fair sprinkling of left-wing hopefuls, including a smiling Trotskyite postman (not ours), and a maverick or two including Jean Saint-Josse, who stands for a party called Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Tradition (CPNT), a deepest-France affiliation of hunters, shooters and fishers who don’t want their rural conservatism mucked about by Brussels.

IF YOU didn’t know already, the presidential elections take place in two stages a fortnight apart. The two front runners from Stage 1 slog it out in Stage 2. It’s not a bad system: everyone has their chance, the mavericks and no-hopers are eliminated, protest votes are registered, two serious candidates emerge.

Or that’s the theory.

We switched on the television in the evening of Stage 1. Chirac and Jospin would emerge, undoubtedly. All the polls forecast it. No other result was possible. Centre left versus centre right. Same old contest. Plus ça change. Yawn, yawn. How about an early night?

But at 8pm the blow fell, and all France rocked. You could probably have heard the gasp of disbelief and consternation. Jospin’s vote had melted away, scattered like birdseed among the other socialist candidates and especially among the 11 million – out of an electorate of 41 million – who hadn’t bothered to vote.

The unthinkable had happened. Le Pen was in the final. His vote had increased slightly, a percentage point or two up on previous presidential elections, enough to draw attention to the problems of law and order, unemployment and immigration that worry so many French people but not enough to suggest that a crushing majority wanted a jackboot régime.

At last, French politics were getting interesting. Impromptu anti-National Front demonstrations materialised in the cities. Heartbroken, tearful Jospin supporters poured on to the streets. Disappointed Communists and Trotskyites urged their followers to block Le Pen at all costs in the second round, which was tantamount to telling them to vote for Chirac. Things had taken a strange turn.

IN THE morning, after a night troubled by thoughts of what might happen if Le Pen got in and really did send all foreigners home, or somewhere else anyway, I went down to the Mairie, where the local results were pinned up on the door. There are only about 400 electors in the village, but the results weren’t wholly typical of the rest of France:

Jospin 67
Saint-Josse 58
Le Pen 48
Chirac 46

- and the rest came in nowhere, unless you count Abstentions and Spoilt Papers 108 as a positive result.

BY THE time you read this you’ll probably know the final result anyway. At this point the auguries aren’t easy. I have to tell you that in our letter-box things have taken a pretty dramatic turn: the wasp is no more. The spider reigns unchallenged. In the land that gave birth to La Fontaine’s adaptations of Aesop, we should maybe pay attention to The Fable of The Wasp and The Spider, but there’s a big problem: is Chirac, a man with at least a question-mark over some financial features of his past – is Chirac the wasp or the spider?

Somebody else hasn’t found the solution, either. At one of the countless anti-National Front demos held all over France, among the many waving placards we read VOTEZ ESCROC, PAS FACHO. Vote Crook, not Fascist. Maybe it’s just as well we don’t have the vote

SMALL, UNIMPRESSIVE prize to be won!

What am I to do with those voting papers? Here’s just the thing: the first person past the e-mail post with the correct answer to the following question wins a genuine primary historical document, viz. a complete set of the French 2002 Presidential Election Ballot Papers. Wow! or Tiens! as they say here.

What name links a Paris airport, the latest French aircraft-carrier and the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises?

Francophile Canadian Robin Quinn won the last competition, correctly identifying St Laurence’s badge or trademark as the gridiron on which the poor bloke was roasted. He wins a bunch of rosemary from our garden, in good time for the Ottawa barbecue season. Bon appetit, Rob!

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle

THERE’S A very pretty church at St Florian, newly decorated, fresh, warm and welcoming, and you can’t ask much more of a church than that. Under a curious French arrangement the building belongs to the state, and the priest is merely the tenant – with all a tenant’s rights, of course, including the right to a makeover every now and again.

At the last makeover there was a general clearout of the clutter that gathers in anybody’s house if you take your eye off it for a moment, and several items of redundant and wormy church furniture found their way to the dump, or, as happened when we had our roof renewed recently, incorporated into someone’s hen-house.

But the devout of St Florian held on to the confessional. Maybe you’ve never seen a confessional? They come in various designs, but the St Florian one is like a sentry box or photo booth, with a door and a seat and ear-level grilles for the priest, and kneeling pads with elbow-rests either side for those needing a general clearout of the clutter that gathers in anybody’s conscience if you take your eye off it, etc., etc.

Anyway, they kept the confessional, not for use, because formal confession seems to have died out as a common practice among the faithful, but for ornament, because it really is a handsome piece of furniture. There it stands, at the back of the church, a reminder to priest and people of the Good Old Days when a night on the binge might cost a few Aves but mon dieu it was cheap at the price. ‘O God, make me good,’ as St Augustine prayed, ‘make me good – but not just yet.’

My choir gave a concert in St Florian church the other day. Between choir items I make them sit at the back, to allow the audience the best seats. Some of the ladies aren’t too keen on this, because it means leaving their handbags unattended when they troop up to sing. Ever resourceful, they’ve taken to bringing their bags with them and depositing them in the bénitier, a sort of font up there by the altar, while they sing.

This pragmatic attitude doesn’t stop there. ‘Where’s Michèle?’ the urgent whisper went round the other day as the sopranos assembled, ready to process down the aisle after the interval.

‘Her tights are a size too small, they’ve ridden down,’ the answer came. ‘She’s just adjusting them. In the confessional.’

Well, any port in a storm.

THERE’S TALK in the St Florian mairie of installing some public toilets behind the church, not specifically for Michèle to adjust her tights in but for the general convenience of the church-going public.

This is political dynamite in a place like St Florian. Anyone who’s read Gabriel Chevalier’s Clochemerle, that wonderful – but sharp-edged – romp through French village life, will recognise the dangers of linking physical and spiritual functions too closely. So we can expect fireworks as the secular mairie digs the drains by day and the faithful fill them back in again by night.

WHO CONFESSES the priests themselves? In Clochemerle the Abbé Ponosse had a splendid system worked out. Every time his housekeeper Honorine accommodated his not entirely spiritual desires he would mount his bicycle, ride to the next village and slake his conscience in his colleague the Abbé Jouffe’s confessional, a practice which, in reverse, suited his colleague equally well.

But with the flush of youth past and the need, precipitated once by a heavy snowfall, for some measure of economy in physical energy, in any question of getting legs over the bicycle saddle lost out, and they found confession by reply-paid telegram much less exhausting than a 25-mile round trip.

So Ponosse might receive: SAME AS USUAL. ABSOLUTION BY RETURN, PLEASE. JOUFFE

- and Ponosse’s reply might be: ‘CONSIDER YOURSELF ABSOLVED: 5 AVES. SAME AS USUAL MY END, PLUS THREE. DEEP REPENTANCE, ABSOLUTION V. URGENT. PONOSSE’

Nowadays, of course, all this would be done by e-mail. Now there’s a thought . .

WELL, I’VE started, so I suppose I’d better finish: a correspondent tells me – but you’d better have it in his own words:

Subject: Euro

In order to meet the conditions for joining the Single European Currency, all citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland must be made aware that the phrase "spending a penny" is not to be used after 31st December 2001.

From this date, the correct terminology will be: "Euronating"

Thank you, John, but why do people send me this sort of thing?

ANOTHER CORRESPONDENT, Jean-Claude, has sent me an old bill for church repairs, possibly not for St Florian, but there’s a certain charm to it . . .

To furnishing a new arm for St Stephen, painting his nose white and covering up the hole in his head . . . . . 10 francs

To washing St Louis front and back . . . . 3 francs

To fitting a new tail to the Holy Spirit . . . . . 4 francs

To removing the eyes of the 12 apostles and replacing them with new ones . . . . 6 francs

To washing down the Virgin and providing her with a new baby and a new arm . . . . . 24 francs.

I DON’T expect it was while the church at St Florian was being decorated that a desperate spinster sidled into the apparently empty church one day, sat at the back and began to pray as hard as she knew for a husband. Her prayers became more and more agitated as the prospect of a husband excited her, until she cried out loud ‘O God, in your great mercy, send me a husband!’

Up in the gallery among his pots and brushes the painter, lonely and celibate, heard this agonised plea and shouted down in a deep, booming voice: ‘Et un artisan peintre, ça vous arrange, Madame? How would a painter and decorator suit you, Madame?’

‘Anyone will do as long as it’s a man, Lord,’ the spinster breathed with relief, and scuttled off home to await events. The painter cleaned his brushes, went home and changed out of his bleus de travail, and that evening tapped on the spinster’s door . . .

SMALL, UNIMPRESSIVE prize to be won!

You’ve probably heard this story before. In fact Laurie Lee, a squirrel for such tales, takes it back across the Channel and re-heats it in his classic Cider With Rosie. But given that many saints have a sort of trade-mark for recognition (keys for St Peter, a cockleshell for St James, a wheel for St Catherine), what trade-mark item would the artisan peintre have had to invoice for if he’d refurbished St Laurence?

First correct e-mail answer past the post wins a bunch of rosemary from our own garden.

Par exemple! as the French say. Wow!

Tagged in: Campbell's Diary, french lifestyle