Date: 2007-05-19 11:52 Subject: nam alii oc, alii si, alii vero dicunt oil Security: Public

some say oc, others say si, others say oïl  ( I say pot-ay-toes - and some still say french fries ...)


The tidal flow of our summer season has crept up on me and time at the pixel-face has ebbed to an all-time low. (Excuse for not posting No. 1)
My Mary has just had her first show in a serious gallery in France (Excuse No.2)
'Eet eez  ze laziness'. (Default excuse)

But I just have to break radio-silence for this one!
   
 valupak   has une petite problème ( or, una petita problema) :-

pardon my french...

so... I'm learning french from a cd rom, and it's got a man and woman demonstrating each word, term or phrase.

I've noticed the male often prounounces the "e" at the end of a word, while the woman usually doesn't.

 
Explanation for the sounded 'e' at the ends of words is regional. The woman is probably from the north of France and is using a Parisian standard 'received pronunciation'. We Brits call ours RP (or BBC English). It is clipped and fairly fast. He, au contraire, could well be from down here in the south (le Midi) where the pace of life is slower and the words get time to stretch out for a siesta. 

There were in fact two versions of French - the southern langue d'oc (the language that used 'oc' as its 'yes' word) and the northern langue d'oïl  (note the double dot over the i -  pronounced [wil] or [wi], as in modern French oui  -  which asserted the use of 'oui' as yes). 

The North suppressed the Oc lot  by force - consequently down here they hate Parisians even more than the Brits, which is a relief after living in Ireland ...
Occitan is still spoken around here, and is a cousin to mediaeval Provençal (la lenga d'o) and modern Catalan. 

Europe - like MonstroMart - is a Baffling Ordeal. 
But to return to the language CD : the man naturally sounds more 'span-ish' (that is, a bit span - and also a bit spic, his Mexican relative.) The sub-text of course runs : she's proper and modern and Parisian and slim and chic - while he is an unreconstructed slob from the mediaeval south.

Oddly in Corsica and in  Ile de France yes is said:  ié - try saying it : yay!

le pays de langue d'ok  Okay, c'est le pays de Mickey.



  This, à propos nothing in particular, is Cork where I lived for half my life, while never learning a word of it ...

And by the way, Valupac, thanks for nudging  me back on line. 

I may be more absent than present over the next few months - but as the brilliantly economical occitan word has it - Rai - What does it matter.

Date: 2007-03-20 13:30 Subject: Love, Madness and Salt Security: Public Tags: beatrice dalle, betty blue, film, gruissan, manu chao, salt, winds

movicon? : images I put together with a Manu Chao song

I realised - with a jolt - that nearly three weeks have gone by without a journal entry. However, I also note that others within my ken have been equally lax. So : no guilt, and no gloat. Eet ees jus' ze laziness.
The weather has been praeternaturally fine all this while, and there's been more outside activity (than internal). Now this week France is having snow and we're getting some Siberean winds too : gusts of 100 kph means time at the keyboard.
We have winds here, and they have names : le Autan blanc and le Autan noir (one dry, one wet blowing up from Spain); le Nord; le Grec; le Marin (a mild,damp and depressing wind from the Med), le Ponant (from the west); and lastly our predominant wind (that used to blow for 230 days a year) la Tramontane - in occitan: lo tramontanto alto (N.N-W),lo tramontano basso (W.N-W) and which is related to le Mistral and has the even more local name, le Cers.
But what's all this got to do with the price of fish? Very little at all.
Except I saw the following flight of fancy on the label attached to a pretty (pretty expensive) embossed glass tub of sea-salt at the supermarché today.


I have been wilfully literal in my translation :-

The Tramontane wind, predominant element of the Aude coast, influences our culture and our passions. It is its force which in summer overwhelms (makes fecund??) the expanses of water over our salt pans.
Come the dawn, when as if by magic the tempest abates, a salt is born - so light it is reluctant to sink.
The Flakes of Salt of the the Aude Country, fruit of the duality of the winds, will bewitch your palate with its typical flavours, for the greatest benefit to your health.
 
And what has this collage got to do with the price of chips, you may ask:-



Well - Gruissan is where the salt is born. It's a pretty little old village with a pretty large and ugly salt works, and a pretty amazing collection of fisherman's chalets-on-stilts that stand clear of the sea when it's running high up the beach. And it's where a pretty steamy film was made back in the mid-80's that got quite a cult following in Europe. It's a passionate-but-doomed love affair between Betty, a waitress and Zorg her writer boyfriend (the torrid Béatrice Dalle & the tortured Jean-Hugues Anglade). It doesn't end well. It's how the French like it. 
It's still hot after all these years - and is in fact called '37°2 le matin' or (99 F. in the morning) - the English version : Betty Blue.

Date: 2007-03-05 09:52 Subject: Romance on the cheap Security: Public

 
collage of Barcelona scraps 

I pass the autoroute sign for Barcelona as we do our local shopping - it still comes as something of a surprise to be living so far south and so near such a fabled city. Which is why we've just been there for our 29th. wedding anniverary.

Date: 2007-02-25 16:08 Subject: The train pulls in to Moux Security: Public

Vendangeuses - Paul Sibra. Text J. Lebrau 'Ceux du Languedoc' 1946

Moux looks north out over the valley between two ranges of mountains : the Montagnes Noires which are the last slopes of the great raised upland of France's Massif Central - and the Corbières range which run south until they form the foothills of the Pyrenées.

Date: 2007-02-20 18:43 Subject: une soirée musicale-apéro-dinatoire/early drinking with music and food Security: Public

Something of the spirit of ' 68 inhabits Domaine Isabelle. When we first came to the village we'd pass Charles & Isabelle's house on the main street and wonder who might be the owners of the stacked bookshelves and the sculptures, who was it within who liked their jazz to flow, of a warm evening, out through the open window. We didn't have to wait long.
A small group had been meeting through the winter with the aim of awakening the village from its slumber of decades by organising a celebration of the poets that Moux had produced over the centuries (eh oui - more than any other village in France - nous ne sommes pas des sauvages ici, tu sais!). At the fore were Charles and Isabelle.
As mosaic designers and a painter we were invited to take part in this Portes-Ouvertes weekend. Readings and plays, music and dance were performed in courtyards and parcs that had been closed to the general eye. Our own Maison de Maitre, closed up and empty for 30 years, was an ideal venue with its pillared barn - le hangar or auprès - and closed courtyard - to host musicians and actors and flamenco dancers.

Charles & Isabelle are well-known in the small community of  vignerons des Corbières for the warmth of welcome at their house and the gaiety of the evenings during le vendange. They are among the few now who cook and eat with their grapepicking team. They make room for all at the long table in le petit caveau, where the music and stories and wine flows freely late into the night. And not just at harvest-time.
Evenings chez Charles et Isabelle start at the door of what to most would seem a shabby lock-up. On the corner of a dismal street in the middle of a dull village in le Midi. But inside -



This particular evening was something of a one-off. André, an adult-education teacher friend of Charles' from the nearby market town had been working on some compositions with his friend Serge, a small farmer from Indre-et-Loire many hours north. Was there a possibility that a few people could be rounded-up to lend a critical ear? There was. And there was food with it, and wine on tap - literally : from a spigot right behind where they set up their amps.



André brought a collection of instruments : guitar, flute and an alto sax, which proved too loud for the occasion - the songs were from Serge : a surprisingly eclectic mix with a core of sadness in all of them. The longest ( twenty strophes or verses) was a valediction to his daughter leaving the farm to work abroad - an affective drama with Marco Polo showing her a world of wonders and dangers.
The song I recorded has all their weaknesses and their strengths : I still can't follow all of it, but it concerns the pain of the small farmer in a land less recognisable, where a simple man with sensibilities is increasingly at odds with the world around him - and the way wine can drown these woes.
He hasn't got a voice, it's plainly true - but he has a song that after a couple of plays will stay with you. It's plaintive without being mawkish, and hard without bitterness. Never going to make the charts - but then I'm never going to make the best-seller list. These were intense pieces of his life - his journal. There were only as many listening to him as are reading this. 

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-8525333460299953144&hl=en

Noyé dans le vin

Date: 2007-02-17 14:28 Subject: a safe mix Security: Public

A wet & windy weekend ahead, but I'm happy to be here still to experience it. Appreciative also of the concern shown online - the sheer disbelief at my utter ineptitude was well concealed in most of the notes.
The dangerous part of the work is over - now it's two days of slopping about with french mortar à l'ancienne méthode in the cement-mixer.  I'm pretty sure I've got the mix right : 10 parts sand + 5 parts chaux blanche/ lime + 5 parts water + 1 part electricity.

Then it's off up the village to Charles & Isabelle's petit caveau - their wine-making barn - for une soirée musicale-apéro-dinatoire. This means 5 parts wine + 2 parts food + 1 part avante-garde sax + 1 part poetry. I'm keen on anything jazz, won't say no to the wine, and will get some of the poetry - but  to Mary this will be another evening of atonal awefulness and linguistic difficulty that she'd rather not live through.

I, however, must drink moderately and leave early : we have guests coming round for a hot curry - something simply beyond the tolerance of our french friends. C'est la vie. 
Et la vie est belle!

Date: 2007-02-16 22:34 Subject: god-like incompetence Security: Public

Strictly speaking, I shouldn't really be here writing this. Technically speaking I should be dead. Metallurgically speaking I should be fused with the aluminium ladder I was standing on when I severed the main power line into the house yesterday. 450 volts is what we asked for from Electricité de France ( air-day-eff ) to feed 9 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, two kitchens, a poolhouse and a pottery kiln. And that's what I got yesterday - plus its cousins the Watts, and its in-laws, the Amperes.
The bang was enough to cause Mary to quit her painting and come and investigate : an annoying break in her BBCRadio 4 program on Turkmenistan bridal customs that might mean a) missing the last verse of their nuptial chants or b) having to deal with her husband's charred remains. She was thus in a doubly crabby state (remember : 2 crabs = lots of sharp remarks) because she had expressly reminded me, before I started stripping all the old piping and tubing and wiring from the garage, not - and I do remember her emphasising this - not to cut through any live wires.
Well of course I must have been tired or distacted or I missed the ironic content or perhaps I thought she only meant the warning metaphorically, but anyway I went ahead and cut the wire.

And didn't feel a damn thing.

Imagine how god-like I feel now.

Inexplicably, while nobody acknowledges my divine indestructibility everybody is impressed by my sublime stupidity.
Mary of course was not amazed (see previous post, and other medical and psychiatric reports) but the EDF guy who came as dusk fell to patch us up temporarily, certainly was. He wouldn't go near the wire 'til a specialist was called up from the nearby town, with full rubber protection.
His attitude was exemplary : now that he didn't have to deal with any smoldering remains he was pragmatism personified : What did I say to the office when I phoned in ? Did I say I had cut the wire ? No ? Good ! He'd report that yes the wire in from the street was elderly. That it broke of its own accord. That the State would replace the entire line. And that it would all be free. Otherwise - it could have cost hundreds ...!
This is french socialism at work. He has a job for life (he is literally unsackable) so he can go about dispensing the richesse of France (however indebted it actually is) to the ordinary man-on-a-ladder.
Anyway.
So.
If I'm not strictly speaking supposed to be telling you this . . .
Who is?
What's the netiquette for when someone pops their clogs in the middle of a posting? What happens when you've left hundreds, or possibly three people waiting for the next installment of the Claire Escourrou/De Longueval family story, because you've inconsiderately fried yourself while trying to fulfil your wife's request that you do something to smarten up the garage, or somehow brained yourself with a cricket-bat while trying to save your team from certain ignomony, or simply fallen out of a canoe?
Do You wait for weeks, wondering what on earth is the man doing that takes so long between posts? Do You write in, pestering the widow for a few more facts, because it was just at the point where it might begin to be interesting and surely she could put aside her veil and look at his notes and fill in the rest of the story?
Or - after weeks of suspense when you've begun to suspect that he has succumbed to the siren lure of Vox and is posting lurid stories of Love-Life in the Languedoc - you receive a black-bordered notice, regretting, with sadness, the passing of a much loved but tragically uninsulated husband?

Date: 2007-02-11 12:42 Subject: the artist and the dilettante Security: Public Tags: art, canoe, cricket, motorcycling, painting, seakayak

We're just back from having an evening out - in Andorra. We were invited by Sue & Steve the only other English - well, Yorkshire, which is nearly the same thing, I can understand most of what they're saying - people who live in the village. He's setting up a broadband consultancy there - which means an appartment & an office & visits from us & huge meals & lots of cheap drink - and Skiing.
Now, I haven't skied since I was a youth, but that hasn't stopped me from getting a pair of skis and getting all the clothes and getting all excited. All we didn't get was the snow. Global warming. Bugger bugger bugger.

Mary laughs at my hobbies. She makes fun of my all-consuming, and all-too-soon-spent enthusiasms. But only afterwards. And only in the general and aimiable way of women at work in their ceaseless struggle to keep man from monomania. While reserving to herself the right to be singleminded.
So she has seen Cricket come and go - watching uncritically from the sidelines as I displayed my unerringly accurate talent as Fixtures Secretary, for sending our hapless pub team (The All Nations, Clapham Common) across London every weekend to certain slaughter at the hands of teams so talented they should have been trashing Australia. And unironically applauding my conspicuous skill-less-ness (there is such a word now, for it alone describes my way with a cricket bat. And ball.) 



She has witnessed them all come and go : rollerblading (hurtling across concrete on narrow wheels into hard fixed objects) then canoeing (as in poleing upstream while standing, as in sailing a 24-inch-wide craft while lying down, as in - well you get the picture : doing something stupid in a narrow tippy boat) , sea-kayaking (more silly stuff in something even skinnier and less stable), and off-road motorcycling (think: amateurish suicide-attempts halfway up mountains where the crows will have time to pick your bones clean before the rescue services can find you). I salute her stalwartness in watching me head off at weekends not knowing if I would return in a bag, or bags, or ever. Perhaps that was her plan - if so she concealed her hopes (I prefer fears) behind a remarkably uncynical and supportive front.
She, meanwhile, was engaged on more serious business. All she ever wanted to do was paint. With her father away in Africa or the Far East on some telecommunications contract, she signed up, with her mother's support and encouragement, for four years at Cork College of Art. After just one year her father pulled the plug. She had just come joint top of year (with her best friend Maud Cotter - now an acclaimed Irish sculptor). If she wanted to continue her third-level education it would have to be something serious, some profession - and at university.
To spite him she chose philosophy. She went on to get her masters, and an offer of doctorate study at a college in the States. She chose instead to stick with me and my plans, and to have a baby.
She did return to painting - which had by then become a sad and outmoded occupation for an artist - Art having become a matter of silly piles of bricks, specious statements of intent, and serious money. She has painted steadily through those years, staging a few shows in Cork and Dublin, selling privately. And now after a gap, another solo show in Carcassonne, this May : two floors in a delightful gallery - La Maison du Chevallier, a mediaeval knight's house.
You are all cordially invited : to meet a dedicated painter and her dilettante partner.

Date: 2007-02-08 11:28 Subject: leisured enebriation Security: Public Tags: camera, fire, winter, work, writing

There are some who ask themselves : what does he do all day? Apart, that is, from wandering around his decrepid village - drink in one hand, camera in the other - accosting senile villagers in an attempt to get the latest gossip about people dead a century before.
And there are others who persist in their phantasy that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, have never done a honest day's work and generally lead a life of leisured enebriation.
The fact is that we pack a year's work into six summer months : weeks on end of back-to-back 16-hour-days. It wasn't really planned that way : there was supposed to be more mosaic commission-work, more paintings sold, less cooking and cleaning toilets. As it is we can cope with the frantically exciting and alarming summer schedule - balanced by the dull-as-ditchwater, living-like-church-mice winter regime.
There is still a great deal to do when our Summer People finally depart : I am gardener, groundsman, poolboy, carpenter, roofer, raker of leaves, professional composter and amateur pyromaniac.



There is still a great deal to do to the actual fabric of the place : the stables are full of rubble from a roof-collapse a few years ago - something has to be done with it before it kills some over-curious artist with a fatal interest in Rural Ruin.

But this has been my first winter not grimly working on a building site, here or for someone else. I have slowed down. I've started looking back. Enough to start writing, and to imagine another future. This venture has been the biggest I've ever undertaken : the largest house we've ever renovated, the most overgrown garden we've ever designed and planted - and the greatest business gamble. There won't be anything bigger, in its sheer mass, in my life. But that doesn't mean that there will be nothing greater, nothing more exciting. We are beginning to picture a leaner and greener and more streamlined existence, with less belongings - less bulk to encumber the life of the mind.
That's why I'm carrying the camera. And the wine, I'll have you know, is never uncorked before six.

Date: 2007-02-05 16:35 Subject: alcohol and research Security: Public

Since I started on this research into the families of those who lived in the Big House, I've unearthed a great deal - often stuff I wasn't even looking for. And I've discovered one underlying principle: alcohol and research go together most effectively. Particularly in France. Especially in this village. Specifically with me.
I visit la Mairie quite frequently these days : the secretary - subject to the approval of Monsieur Le Maire who somewhat resembles a benign Joe Stalin with a reputation for being un animal for 'pastis' (no surer way to curry favour than to offer him some unusual bottle of aniseed-flavoured booze) - has given me the run of the archives: boxes of photos and yet more postcards from before WW1 plus dozens of leather-bound registers of Births, Marriages & Deaths, known collectively as Etat Civil : the civil status of each citizen.
So when I am not here ...


... I am out visiting some elder of the village who has tales to tell.
Now if the arrangement is for, say, 11am I arrive with a notebook and an expectation of un p'tit café. Three hours later I've just about managed to keep pace with his 'petit peu plus de whiskee' and have covered several pages with illegible scrawl that will take hours to decypher.
But the thing is - or are - the tangents. The way one is led down them. The way the way back becomes harder and harder to find. The way one stops caring about french grammar or pronunciation or vocabulary - or where we had got to in the reminiscence.
Meeting an old fellow who loves his history and his 'aperitifs' is wonderful - we are both gambolling wildly down the byeways of time and memory: he, delighted to be given an opportunity to revisit - me enthralled at the immediacy of all this new information.
The trick is to keep writing - as you drink, as you ramble. And never mind the spelling. There's time enough to be sober. 

And as I heard one neighbour say of another - with such utter absence of sentimentality I mistook it for malice - as her coffin was being slid into the family vault : 'Elle ne parle plus.' 

Date: 2007-02-04 14:50 Subject: Claire's family - and taxis to the trenches Security: Public

Every town and village in France has its 'monument aux enfants morts pour la France'. Moux too paid its price for the failures of politicians and princes.
Claire Escourrou had already begun to learn the meaning of loss. 

Claire's mother, Marie Hospitalot of Serviès-en-Val, married Paul Escourrou in 1885 when she was 19. She gave birth to Jacques a year later. She returned to her parents in Serviès for the birth of Claire in 1890. 
But before Claire had reached 16 she had lost both of her Moux grandparents - old Hippolyte and Anne - and her mother. She was left with the men of her family: father Paul and brother Jacques, and the cook/housekeeper Maria Oulieu. There were maids and servants, ostlers and gardeners. 
She was sent to boarding-school in Carcassonne - less than an hour away with the newly-arrived railway service stopping at Moux station. She received many invitations from family & friends, and travelled a good deal. Girl friends of her age and social class came to stay for religious Fete-days, and the more frivolous Fair-days. She was the young lady of a large mansion with her own maid and a car and chauffeur at her disposal. After the early losses in her life one hopes that the half-dozen years before the war, before she turned twenty, were happy and unclouded.
Within a month of the outbreak of war - it is indeed like an eruption of disease, or madness - her beloved cousin Philippe Hostalot was killed in the first battle of the Marne. Together with his wife Marthe and their children he had given young motherless Claire holidays in the elegant spa towns of the Pyrennees and by the sea in Brittany.



The war cemetery for the French regiments of this battle - so near Paris that an emergency battalion of troops was driven to the front in a fleet of 300 taxis, has only a few hundred graves. Outnumbering them by far are the plaques commemorating the lost men. Philippe Hostalot was a professional soldier, a captain. He led his men into a hail of machinegun fire: there were not enough remains to allow a burial. The Legion d'Honneur award was sent to his widow in the little hamlet of Seviès-en-Val. Claire's visits there to see her Hospitalot grandparents would no longer have the carefree joys of those years, before the War to End All Wars began.

Date: 2007-02-03 09:27 Subject: two things you are not allowed to do in our village Security: Public

For a while there I thought I was going to have to stop lying: it seems however that I am only required to cease begging. And walk my horse through the village in future.

Date: 2007-01-28 21:09 Subject: Postcards from the past - letters from the Front Security: Public

When we first came to the village, almost the first people we got to know were Charles & Isabelle Simpere.

Date: 2007-01-21 15:07 Subject: The population of Moux Security: Public Tags: escourrou, glas, knell, population

These are the same three church bells, ringing the carillon known in French as 'le glas'  The knell rang out this week  for Huguette Durand, 'vieille-fille' or spinster of 86 on an extaordinarily dark, still evening.  Or the lens cap was left on.

'Ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.'



Mons - on the beautiful hand-drawn Cassini map of France. 1660

Earliest recorded mention of Moux (mooks, ok)  also Mous, Mons.
1110. "villa de Murso"
1215 In an ownership arbitration the village known as "Mozie" was signed to the infamous count Simon de Monfort (he of the Cathar cult burnings.)
1246 In the reign of Louis IX, Mossio is assigned in favour of Raymond de Capendu .
1303 Guillelmus de Mossio is named on an inscription in Narbonne.
1309 P. de Mossio, a knight templar of the Diocèse de Narbonne was called for questioning, to Paris.
1377 Mossio is reduced to '10 feux d'imposition' (feu = fire) that is, to be taxed on ten hearths, or houses (with 60 inhabitants i.e. av. 6 people per house)
1709 Mous imposé pour 46 feux (170 habitants, or av. 4 per household)
1818 Moux had 440 habitants
1830 435
1831 504
1851 676
1882 933
1900 1200
1906 1093
1910 1210
1928 1034
1962 771
1998 545

In 1906 the village had six épiceries (general grocer) one selling Spanish produce, and once a week two épiciers ambulants came to the village: Antoine of Lézignan and Caiffa from Carcassonne.There were three bakeries who delivered bread to your door,and two butchers. The charcutier (cooked/prepared meats) of Capendu came once a week.
The village needed many skilled artisans: two bourreliers (harness-makers), three maréchaux-ferrants (blacksmiths, who were also horse-vets by necessity.) One charron(cart or wagon-maker). Two cordonniers (cordwainers' or boot/shoemakers). One shoe shop. Three barrel-makers and one foudrier, a big barrel-maker, plus one serrurier, a locksmith. For kitchenware there were two ferblantiers - tinsmiths capable of making and re-tinning copper pans, and working with zinc (fer = iron/metal + blanc.)
There were four cafés : le Grand café which was also the state-controlled tobacconist 'bureau de Tabac', the Café du Commerce which for a time was a small dancehall and a cinema, before becoming a cabinet-maker's workshop,ébéniste, and now an artist's studio. The one on the place St Régis is gone leaving no trace; and lastly the Café du Midi: it's the only one remaining and is now run by a Harley Davidson fan and decorated with Cowboy & Injun gear, his other passion. He decided last week to hang out a load of American flags - but managed inadvertently to get the stars and the stripes upside down (no disrespect ...)
There were three cammionneurs, lorry-men or truckers - quite a modern breed of driver in a rural scene where horses were still in use fifty years on.Two négociants de vin, wine wholesalers: one of whom, Marcaillou, had his own branch-line or siding and a loading-bay at the station. The other, Hippolyte Clément, left behind one of his barrels in our cellar. It's still sound after a century, and I rolled it out today for use as a rain-butt this summer.



Then there were two animal-feed merchants. And two doctors and a dispensing chemist. Two mason-builders and three plasterers. Gastaud, the carpenter, Balestre the horloger, clockmaker. One sage-femme, mid-wife, Catherine Médus. But the four coiffeurs hairdressers were all men! And one shop selling cloth, ribbon, and fancy items - confections.
Two postmen and one priest l'abbé Sénégre. There were hundreds of children - so: four lay schools - two for boys and two for girls - and a small school run by an order of nuns. These kind souls owned a piece of land, a large walled garden just next to our house, where the children were set to work growing vegetables and fruit for the order. An elderly neighbour recalls them having to whistle while they worked - so the nuns could be sure they were not eating any of the produce.
Opposite the station was a tuilerie, tile-factory - which would have been a large building with a tall chimney: but not a trace remains. There was also a four à chaux, lime-kiln for hydrating chalk into lime suitable for plaster, built near a small quarry on the slopes of Mont Alaric behind the village. Still standing at the edge of the village on a rise, is the base of one of two windmills, for flour and other grains. In mediaeval times, the miller would also have baked the bread for the village - and also produced 'Fuller's Earth' for removing the grease from wool and other hides.
The slopes of Alaric and the plain below were home to numerous flocks of sheep and goats - there were two creameries. The staging-post of former times had become a simple Post Office La Poste, its inn becoming a private house. The horse-drawn mail-coach was replaced in 1857 by the chemin de fer, and new hotels were needed, one at the station, and another, the Hôtel Montagne, at the edge of the village. This has been pulled down and is now a small park. The station was very busy in the first decades of the new century, full of passengers and merchandise - there was even a refreshments stall, and a library - but few of these buildings remain.
Not mentioned in the above list, are the 'grandes familles' - the landowners and wine barons. And among these dozen are the two names that interest me: the Escourrou family who in 1863 built this Maison de Maitre - and the De Longueval family who married into it, and from whom we bought it.
There is another list of names, much shorter, on the monument erected to the memory of those who lost their lives in the Great War. There were 37 who did not return to the village alive. One of the humblest was Sylvain Roquefort, one of the four coiffeurs.  And one of the grandest was Jacques Escourrou - the son of the house.  He was 37 when he died in 1917 - and the war was soon to bring another tragedy into the life of Claire, his sister. She had met, and fallen in love with one of two brothers, a young nobleman from the North - Francois de Longueval.

Date: 2007-01-15 20:24 Subject: The Fate of the Pig Security: Public

Our region has nothing to do with pigs.
There are no pig-farms for a hundred miles around.

When you see the word Fete, think Wine.



and Brass Bands (the name Pacochers plays with 'pas cout cher' or 'cheapskate')



Modeste is the name of the guy who caters for the 100 people you see here.
This was the second sitting.
What he pays his English girlfriend for working on this all week is overstated by the word 'modeste'. His 'Freginat' was delicious.



This is as much of the Pig Race as could be seen. Unless you were one of the children racing around with the pigs.



No Fete is complete without its group of actors. Hamming is part of the tradition.
Getting wired for sound is an innovation (we could do without.)



Some might be curious - so here are Mary, and Pete.

Date: 2007-01-14 19:15 Subject: back from the past Security: Public

Remember: the past won't fit into memory without something left over; it must have a future. Joseph Brodsky

If there was a thread that ran through my reading last year, it was mediaeval history - specifically the transition from feudal life and the emergence of early Europe. It was sparked I think, by the chance finding of a big book in English, by an American, on the local French history shelves of the bookshop in Narbonne. It was 'Ermengard. Countess of Narbonne' by Frederic L. Cheyette. And it caught me, as well as the rest of the region, by surprise - the French had completely forgotten her (or utterly ignored her: she wasn't a Count so she didn't count. Ahem.No further play on words.) It was a super piece of detective-work, with masses of source material relating to everyday village life. Some of those 13th century family names are there in the local phonebook.

Intriguing as this unexpected treasure-trove of gossip might be, my over-arching curiosity concerned the interaction of the muslim world with the christian: the Saracen and the Crusader. The Believer and the Infidel. It was a search for some understanding of why the world is in this particular mess. However, one can only spend so long in that tangled web before succumbing to sadness, and ultimately, madness. So it was with some relief, late last year, that I found myself strolling through the Enlightenment of the 17th century. in the excellent company of Neil Stephenson and his Baroque Trilogy. These are also 1000-pagers (as is his wonderful Cryptonomicon) - so that kept me happy and sane for the rest of 2006.

Now a 1300-pager has come into my life - a mid-winter present from our Jessica - and it's back to those murdering Religionists: the Christianists and the Islamists. The book is The Great War for Civilisation, by Robert Fisk. It encompasses his writings for the Times and the Independent: thirty years in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Palestine, Israel and other beauty-spots become hell-holes in the name of all that is Unholy. The title comes from the inscription on the reverse side of the World War 1 Victory Medal, and is not to be taken at face value: quite the reverse.

I gave up after the Algerian bloodbath. Half the book remains. I passed it with relief to Mary who has been eying it hungrily. She'll regret it soon enough. For while she has a seemingly bottomless appetite for philosophy, science, peak oil, sudokus, and murder-mysteries - she may find Fisk's account of our inhumanity too much to stomache.

And so - what have I found to keep me happy and sane? Well it would have to be history of course - but now it's very much more personal. During the mid-winter holiday I came across a old box of 'papers' in the attic. Scraps of stuff that in some way were related to the family that built the house in 1860. I had already found and read some old letters and inconsequential everyday items, and had presumed these were more of the same: old bills, childen's notes, invitations to mariages in the area etc.

But there was more in this box: a small envelope with photo negatives. A letter from a captain near the Western Front in 1917. I soon found myself plunged into the world of the village a hundred years in the past. And looking again at the aftermath of the War to End all Wars, when the Great Powers divided up the spoils: carving up Mesopotamia and creating Iraq and Iran, colonising Algeria, mandating Palestine. Slaying one vast old monster only to produce the smaller complex monsters we live with now.

And now the problem is finding a way to begin. I don't want to make a history lecture of it - because at the heart of it all is a love-story. Not one of the happy-ever kind - one of the unrequited-passion sort, with bitterness and disillusionment, a dead lover and a dead brother, a false gentleman and an impoverished poet, fast cars and mistresses, private religion and public fame.                                                                                                                                                                          It's going to take up most of the next few posts - so abandon all hope all ye you enter here ( if what you're looking for is a quick racy fix.)

However, today is the 13th 'Fete du Cochon' in Puichéric, a couple of villages away, and I must get dressed for a day among the French People. We shall be meeting Pam & Pete who live there, and together we will be watching pigs race, pigs breed, pigs get cut up, pigs cook, and then we will all sit down, the whole village and its visitors - and we will eat one of them. A pig, not a villager - though there might be some difficulty distinguishing them, and we could get short-changed. We will drink village wine, but not as seriously as the French, who are heroic in this respect, if not in every other field of endeavour - and then we will listen to them compete for Best Pig Squeal. Not all of which will be captured in words, pictures - but probably more than you'd care for.

But no complaints: this next will be the last upbeat posting for a while. History is coming (if it isn't already in our midst.)

Date: 2007-01-01 17:17 Subject: New Year's Solutions - versus Resolutions Security: Public

You think the south of France means endless wine beneath a perennially hot sun?
And those are indeed my boot-prints next to the bottle.

Meanwhile I have fallen behind with work - there are letters and bills gathering dust.