One year now

Today marks exactly one year since we arrived in France.

When I came here, I brought with me romantic images, captured in my early 20’s and half-forgotten, like photos in an old trunk. 

Images such as ...

- men in berets playing petanque under plane trees

      or driving Citroen 2CVs or Renault 4s through

      medieval stone villages whose church belltowers

      rang out on Sunday mornings.

- signposts like quaint little gravestones by the road.

- seafood markets in coastal towns

      where exotic shellfish sat on beds of kelp

      at 20 francs a kilo.

- art galleries and atmospheric bookshops.

- patisseries and boulangeries where women in aprons,

     unfailingly polite, served baguettes and

     mouth-watering pastries.

- cafés on grand squares where

      travellers sat at outdoor tables dreaming of Fes or Marrakech

      and writers sat ruminating with pen and cigarettes.

   

Some of these images may be quixotic, some anachronistic.

Of course, expectations have not all been met.

The pace of life here is not as slow as I thought it would be.

The French drive fast and reckless on narrow country roads, as if fleeing an outbreak of plague. There are some exceptions.

Real estate agents are lazy and unprofessional, with some exceptions.

The bureaucracy is not as bad as I’d been led to believe, with some exceptions.

And while, after 12 months, we still have not found permanent digs, I remain confident of finding the dream house. I envisage a place in the country built of stone, with exposed oak beams throughout and a large poële in the lounge-room.

The kitchen will be big and warm and have space for my dear Aunt Viv’s farmhouse table and my cedar chiffonier meatsafe. It will have a big range and copper pots will hang down from long metal hooks. 

Outside, there’ll be chooks and a veggie patch and fruit trees and, if I may indulge, a pool.

It will be both a house for winter and a house for summer.

I hope to be able to report, in 12 months’ time, that we are there. 

The fugitive pheasant

This afternoon we saw a pheasant in our back yard.

It was skulking about, under the fir tree, where the shade-cloth covered fence makes a corner, by the road.

Every now and again, it would bend its neck and peck in the ground for an insect. Then it would stand stock-still, its head and body rigid, for minutes at a time.

Then it moved again, craning its neck forward in little thrusting movements. It was a large, majestic bird, with coppery feathers and a tail that stuck out straight behind it. A cream beak and scarlet eyes were set in an iridescent green head and at the neck it wore a white collar.

The bird continued to strut nervously along the fence that ran down to the river, between our lawn and the wild grey-brown undergrowth of our neighbour’s unkept property.

We left our new friend in the yard and went for an afternoon constitutional. That’s when we discovered the reason for its furtive presence.

A hunter and his dog were across the road in the tall, dry, scrappy weeds of a winter paddock.

The dog was small and brown and it dashed about excitedly, hither and thither, its neck bell ringing loudly. The young hunter’s shotgun was propped skyward on his right shoulder.

In the distance, we heard the crack of a rifle and the baying of hounds.

Along the Lot, hunters are given access to tracts of wild vegetation sheltering game such as deer and pheasant. 

When we got back from our walk, an hour and a half later, the pheasant was still pacing cautiously in the garden.

Under the fir tree by the log pile, it froze again, behind the green shade-cloth of the fence, out of sight of the hunter and his dog. 

Cuisine Bourgeois

Intrigued by Charles Henry's reaction to my "In Mary's footsteps" post, I googled upon this wonderful image and explanation ...

French cuisine is much more than the haute cuisine inherited from the nobility. It is also the tasty, inexpensive cuisine that French families eat every day, called cuisine bourgeoise, or “bourgeois cuisine.

In Mary's footsteps

We finally got to have lunch at Chez Jeanne, the restaurant in the Perigord Noir hamlet of La Pomarède made famous by Australian author Mary Moody.

Chez Jeanne has been in the same family since the early 1900s. Mary put it on the map in 2005 with a documentary film and book, "Lunch with Madam Murat", celebrating the establishment's 100th anniversary.

The restaurant is plainly decorated, with marble-look vinyl flooring, pale-yellow walls above a timber dado, cream-painted beams and a white ceiling. Around the dining room hang framed photos of La Pomarède taken at the turn of the century.

And there were posters advertising the just-released 2017 Beaujolais Nouveau.

Wednesday's lunch was alphabet soup, followed by a thin slice of quiche with a side of dressed cabbage, a main of rotisserie chicken, cheese and creme brulee for dessert.

The chicken was served with a garlic/olive sauce, crisp, golden fries (cooked in duck fat) and peas. The petits pois came in a delicious sauce made with their own sweet juice, to which was added tiny pearl onions, bacon dice and a drizzle of duck fat.

A 750ml bottle of local red wine (for four) and a jug of water were on the table and a basket of bread came out with the soup.

Our lunch was a delicious, home cooked meal that could not be faulted.

The place had only one or two empty tables. Most of the diners were retired people, there were some workmen, a young family with twins celebrating a birthday and an octogenarian couple whose walking sticks were propped against the wall. There was a middle-aged man with protruding eyes and a sagging face, like Toad from Toad Hall. He looked around lugubriously as he slowly ate his lunch.

At the end of our repas, we met Sylvie, who has succeeded her mother as the driving force in the kitchen. And then we met the matriarch herself, who featured prominently in Mary Moody's film.

Stooped and worn, she smiled sweetly beneath tired eyes and said, "We adore Australians."
"I am honoured to meet you," I said.

Chez Jeanne is that type of French restaurant now on the critically endangered list.

To eat here is to glimpse a bygone France, where rural and regional communities were serviced by value-for-money, family-run restaurants. It is to experience a France whose simplicity and ease of living now seem to belong to another era.

Our five course meal and wine cost 14 euros a head.

The River House

Part 3

Pictures

The River House

Part 2

When the autumn mornings are fine and mild, we breakfast at the long table under the veranda. The rising sun angles in through the leafless and truncated branches of a 100-year-old chestnut, growing just metres from where we sit. A stack of firewood in the centre of the garden attests to its heavy spring pruning.

Beside the firewood, a walnut tree stands majestically in full, yellowing foliage. It’s home to two chocolate-brown squirrels who, when the coast is clear, scurry down the trunk to gather nuts lying about on the ground. They scamper across the yard with a playful, hopping run, occasionally stopping to lift their heads.

On the river, two pure-white swans move over the glassy surface, silently and effortlessly as if powered by an underwater force. They hold their necks perfectly straight, like aristocrats.

Late afternoon finds us on the timber landing where the barque is moored.  A squadron of egrets flies in V formation into the setting sun. A breeze springs up, crinkling the inky surface of the river. In the garden, a child’s swing moves, leaves rustle, causing some to fall.

On the other side of the Lot, an arched grey-stone bridge spans a tiny tributary, beyond which we can see the rooves of houses in the town and the pyramid-shaped cap of a pigeonniere (dovecote) rising above its neighbours.

In the first and last light of day, the river is a sheet of mercury, a vast, flat mirror reflecting the church spire of Temple sur Lot and the willows that grow on the water’s edge.

We know young rowers are out training. We hear the rhythmic slap and grind of their oars before their boats come into view. The rowers' movements seem lazy, but are actually quite measured and fluid, with a slight jerk of elbows as they complete their stroke.

Their coaches follow in inflatables, barking instructions.

   

The odd fishing boat hums past. Near us, close to shore, air bubbles betray the presence of underwater life, concentric circles meet other concentric circles to make chaotic patterns that quickly disappear.

We are thinking about buying a fishing line. But I fear we might land a monster, one of those huge catfish that lurk, according to local legend, in the depths of the Lot.

One late afternoon, noisy activity draws me away from the river to the front fence. 

The brown forest of corn across the road is disappearing. A harvester with huge teeth like giant hair clippers is cutting swathes through the dry, leafy stalks, leaving tracts of stubble.

By some mechanical magic taking place inside its massive frame, the harvester strips the cobs and exudes the waste. After three or four passes through the field, it stops to shoot a golden stream of kernels into massive trailers attached to tractors.

Dust rises and drifts over our neighbour’s property. He is an old man who lives alone in a hobbit house buried under a jungle of blackberry. Only the roof of its pigeonniere is visible above the vegetation.

We have seen him drive past La Maiterie in his vintage, tan-coloured 2CV, before braking to turn left into his driveway.

As the corn harvest progresses, he emerges to inspect the goings-on, then crosses the road to talk to the man sitting in the cabin of his tractor, waiting for his trailer to fill.