Monthly Archives

September 2016

A countryside breakfast: Mon petit déjeuner avec du lait

Milk from French dairy cows

I drank coffee with milk at breakfast.

Perhaps, this seems like a small and unimportant fact to you. But for me it was a big deal.

I’m lactose intolerant. This isn’t a disaster, but means that if I want to drink coffee with milk I need to first take a lactase tablet. Lactase is the enzyme which my body no longer naturally produces. On a typical morning, I drink my coffee black and eat my toast without butter. I save my lactase tablets for occasionally eating bread and cheese, which, as this is France, accompanies both lunch and supper, or for eating any other food involving milk, such as a creamy coffee éclair from the bakery. For me, drinking coffee with milk for breakfast is a special treat.

Just before dinner, the night before, we went to the dairy farm. I said ‘hello’ to the cows and ‘bonjour’ to the dairy farmer, a friendly young man with a dark green apron. It was milking hour so the farmer was already quite busy. He took our milk pails and tapped off the fresh milk which was coming straight from the cows.

I was as excited as the three year old grandson who saw a red tractor. He really likes tractors.

When we arrived home, Grand-mère poured the milk into a huge saucepan and slowly heated it to the point where it expands to fill the pan. Very nervously, I watched over it. My instruction to shout when something happened. Just as it hit boiling, Grand-mère switched off the heat, put on the lid, and left it overnight to cool – this was my brief lesson in pasteurisation. By morning, the cream had risen to the top, ready to be scooped off into a separate jug.

And so I chose to drink milk with my coffee for breakfast, and it was heavenly.

The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

dawn dordogne

Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s’pose you’d done a right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad – I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Sometime in the Spring I downloaded a selection of out of copyright books onto my e-reader. A few of these books I have started but got no further than a few pages. They have a foreboding stodginess. They’re weighted down with words that my e-reader’s inbuilt dictionary can’t handle. Others have shocked me. Who knew Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis would be readable but boring? I was expecting difficult but profound. And who expected that Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, would actually turn out to be My Fair Lady and have an extensive but entertaining afterword that was mostly about the relationship between Professor Higgins and his mother, Mrs Higgins. I think I may well have been more delighted by the afterword than by the play itself.

Which just goes to show how many ideas I have about books before I’ve read them. I know names of authors and titles of books and think I know whether or not I’m going to like them before I begin reading. Quite often, I am wrong.

I liked The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn more than I’d imagined. I assume The Adventures of Tom Sawyer comes first, and I’m sure when I’m next doing a binge download of the classics I shall take it, but what I had downloaded was dear Huckleberry Finn.

At first, the language caught me as a little coarse. Wading through the dialogue slowed down my reading. Finn’s speech soon showed its rhythm, but throughout the book I found his friend, Jim, to have a more challenging dialect. This didn’t stop me enjoying the story. If anything it added the flavour that made Finn’s character. His philosophising had a clarity to it that I couldn’t help but adore, even if I found myself shaking my head at some of his conclusions. And Finn’s arguments with Jim reminded me of Simba, Timon and Pumbaa discussing the composition of the stars.

In the story, each mini adventure unfolds and then concludes with Finn narrowly avoiding both great fortune and misfortune. Whilst I found the curious characters and mannerisms of Finn’s America entertaining, it is the the moment after the mayhem that I love the most. This is when Finn arrives back on his raft, breathes a sigh of relief and reflects on how good it feels to be free. A gift he knows to appreciate. I love how Mark Twain managed to give this emotion, in Finn’s voice, a beautiful honest elegance .

Each morning I open my bedroom door and look across the vegetable garden. Beyond are fields and woodland. The sun lays low in the sky, pale and wrapped in mist. Here, before I join the chaos of the family breakfast, Finn’s quiet moments on the riverside seem close by.

Like Elizabeth Bennet, walking through the gates of Pemberley for the first time

Dordogne grape vine

18/09/2016

The room I live in was once an outbuilding, but is now my bedroom and en-suite. You can sit on the windowsill and look beyond the warped wooden shutters out over the vegetable garden. Usually you’ll find a kitten climbing a washing line pole, a chicken scratching at the dirt, or the dog wagging his tail. Small arched holes remain in the thick stone walls where birds entered, before they were sealed with clear plastic. They let the morning light in. I wake at dawn and step out of bed onto a floor of hard, cold tiles.

There’s something reassuring about the room. I’m surprisingly comfortable, despite the lack of curtains or decoration. It’s a plain room, but practical. It’s not overstated, which matters because the house to which this outbuilding/farmhouse belongs is a statement – the sort of elegant house that one might slow down as one passed to take a better look. Un Chateau.

It’s not the size of the house which makes me so much in awe of it. There are larger and more elaborate properties in the world, but this one is temporarily part of my life. Amazingly, right now, it’s where I call home.

There’s an unexpected joy to finding myself with such a privilege. It reminds me being invited for lunch in a converted monastery in Italy. A tipsy gentleman pointed out the original Napoleonic frescos with great pride as he poured me a drink. I ate the dinner, drank the prosecco, and temporarily touched that pride. Later, when I thought about it, I struggled to integrate the experience with the normal day to day of my life – which often, at that time, involved sleeping in a tent and driving down bumpy Italian lanes in an old green Rover. There was something beautiful about the experience, but at the same time, it was like peeping through the window into someone else’s life. I can’t help contrasting the rich food of the monastery dinner to the simple cuisine of its previous inhabitants.

Twice this weekend have I ‘dropped in’ on relations of my French family. The first was a castle. The sort with spiral staircases, turrets and holes in the walls through which an archer could shoot down the enemy. It had a trampoline upstairs in one of the barns and a big view from the terrace of the French countryside. The second was a chateau. A huge house. I strolled through the vegetable gardens, along the walkway where the grapes hung and counted the swimming pools. The children played with a go-kart, but in the yard which was so far away I could rarely hear them. I felt like Elizabeth Bennet, walking through the gates of Pemberley for the first time. Une bière?

Until, sitting beside the sink in the kitchen, I saw a plastic bottle of LIDL washing-up liquid. The twin of the one which sat by the sink in my hovel.

A rainy Friday afternoon in France

A mystical foggy morning, France, October 2016.
A mystical foggy morning, France, October 2016.

Grand-père: Do you want to take…

Me (thinking): a shower

Grand-père: …an aperitif?

It’s raining. The afternoons here – at least for me – tend to be an easier affair than the mornings. It’s what comes of having wine at lunchtime (and today an aperitif as well because in Grand-mere’s words ‘TGIF’), before taking a break for a siesta. After sleeping, I read a children’s book on giant vehicles.

Slowly.

I’m turning the page only every half an hour because it’s in French and there are flaps to lift. I’m also learning new words in English, like ‘hopper wagon’. It’s an informative book. The author and illustrator is Stephen Biesty who also created a wonderful children’s book on Ancient Egypt which I have at home, in English.

Anyway. While I try to understand the structure of an A380, Grand-père repairs a violin. He goes about his work with an air of calm focus, occasionally whistling in tune with his classical music playing to the room with which is playing with some gusto. With his magnifying glasses, his bright desk lamp and the sound of careful sanding, he reminds me a little of Geppetto.

The house might have double glazing and electric lights, but its wooden beams, tiled floors and thick rugs make it feel like we’ve stepped back in time. A big wooden dresser stands at one end of the dining room, and decorative plates and copper pans gleam on the walls. Grand-mère insists you need a proper copper pan for making jam. A brass candle stick holder sits at either end of the long wooden table. Fresh white candles stand in place ready for dinner. A chandelier hangs above.

I write from an armchair in the living-room. The natural focal point here is the large stone fireplace and cluttered mantelpiece. People pass though on their way to the kitchen, the bedrooms, or out the side door towards the swimming pool. In an ordinary house, I would typically call such a room the main room, but this is the first time I’ve really paid it any attention. A portrait of a lady smiling demurely, a smaller picture of Jesus dying and a tapestry of a child unimpressed by a swan decorate the walls. A neglected television peers out from the corner.

I’m secretly mesmerised by the part of the room hidden behind a floor to ceiling curtain. This is Grand-père’s workshop. Pieces of cello lay on the workbench. The shelves above are stacked with violins. Beneath them is a shelf of old cake tins with peeling handwritten labels which I guess contain spare parts. My French vocabulary is not so broad as to include such technical terms. Bows rest on the windowsill, hair loose.

I think I’m learning more than just French.

The morning dawns in rural France

A four-month old lamb in rural France
A four-month old lamb.
France, September 2016.

We start with a bowl of coffee. Mine’s black. The children, even the littlest, have milk with just a splash of coffee, it’s off-white but sweet. The grand-parents* drink theirs with milk and sugar.  I spread the jam on my bread with a teaspoon and balance it precariously on my saucer. This is apparently how things happen here. Grand-mère dips her toast in her coffee, I don’t.

Once breakfast is cleared up, I let the chickens out the hen coop and check for eggs

Only one today. Grand-père checks his emails and then we start on clearing up the land after last night’s terrific storm. I drag the leaves from the swimming pool and we stash the ping pong table in one of the barns before going to tend to the vegetables. The tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and courgettes need watering and those that are ripe need picking. I conduct a taste test as I go along.

We drive out to go check on the sheep

Giving them a couple of buckets of grain and moving branches that have fallen in the storm on the way. In the field, one sheep stands separate from the herd, and in the charge for dinner, she falls down. Grand-père is quick to pounce and pull her aside. He’s worried.

I drive back in the little electric vehicle we use for getting around the estate, Grand-père sits beside me clutching the sheep. I try and fail to avoid the worst of the bumps in the ever so bumpy road.

Back near the house, I take hold of the sheep whilst Grand-père prepares some antibiotics

She’s only four months old. I hold her upright whilst he injects her with the medicine, hoping we’ve been quick enough. Her head lolls against my knee. Sheep, Grand-père says, die easily. He’s known them to catch fevers, to drown, and almost impossibly, to hang themselves by getting one of the pieces of string that tie up the hay bales stuck around their throat and then jumping off a rock.

We take her down to the woodland, where the male sheep are living, and guide her into an enclosure beside the boys. We want her to be safe from them, but not alone. She needs keeping close to the house so that we can keep an eye on her, but she still needs the company of other sheep. Loneliness and depression kill.

Back at the barn, we collect more grain and a bucket of water to take to the lamb

This done we go in search of a suitable shelter in case there’s rain, finding, at last, a plastic wendy-house that the children have deserted. It’s the perfect size and fits on the back of the little electric car. I shove hay inside to make the lamb a cosy bed.

And then we pick figs for dinner before taking another drive to go check on the donkeys and the goats. Perhaps goats aren’t fussy eaters, but these goats have no chance at getting the stale bread. Watching the donkeys chasing away the goats I realise I have significantly underestimated their ferocity.

And only then is it lunchtime.

*Not mine.


Wondering what happenened next?

On relocating the edge of my comfort zone

Haworth moor

Last week I had a moment when I wondered if I were perhaps crazy.

I’m an introspective sort. If you’re like me, then when you face change, you spend some time reflecting on what you’ve just done. This time it got me feeling a bit nostalgic. These last two months have been very different. For the first time in a while, I was back in Yorkshire for a while, with my family.

Whilst the Mother does drive me a little crazy (although, perhaps I drive her crazier), she’s nowhere near so difficult as I remember. And yes the Midget and I managed to clash over the most innocuous of things, but this didn’t happen as nearly as often as I had expected. The Father went to work 5 days a week. Apart from having a peculiar desire to watch a TV program about a bus, he failed to spring on us too many insane ideas. Which was a surprise.

Worryingly, the whole set-up felt rather comfortable. I saw friends, ate good food and took great delight in the sunshine when it was around. The beautiful Yorkshire moors surrounded me. Here I ran and walked, on the way up cramming my mouth full of juicy blackberries. I actually began to worry it was too comfortable. Nobody was saying anything that vexed me and my emotions which have this year hit all sorts of highs and lows seemed to suddenly settle quite contentedly. I wasn’t even angry.

Such ease is dangerous. Any discomfort begins to look bigger than it actually is. Work feels like it must be difficult rather than inspiring.

So last week, for a short moment where I felt the pull of the attachment, I wondered if by leaving it all behind again I was mad.

But curiosity and a desire for a smidgen more discomfort than I had, just so I keep growing and learning, kept me on my path. I hugged my parents at the train station. Gave final hugs to some of my friends who I’d managed to see at the last minute. And then I boarded a plane to fly away from all those people I love.