In Gascony Dreaming

Some months ago, when the financial crisis was just kicking off in the USA, I remember a journalist turned to an investor and asked what should we all do in this situation. The reply came back ‘Take to the hills and buy land’. I expect the Investor was talking about buying up thousands of hectares of prosperous farmland somewhere in East Anglia actually, but, just for a moment, I thought about my home here in the rolling hills of the Gers and the 22 acres of meadow that surround it and felt a mellow glow.

I don’t know how our lives will pan out during the next few years. Will people stop coming on holiday? Will my french students have to stay in Paris and take lessons down the road instead of having a week of pony riding and complete immersion in an English speaking family? Will I, at the very least, have to extend my ‘playing at it’ vegetable garden and start planting rows and rows of cabbages and potatoes to see us through the ensueing recession/depression?

These are not pleasant days for any of us on the financial front, but I am simply glad that we can heat our home with inexpensive oak logs and eat food from the garden and markets and the horses can survive on the grass and hay from the fields. It’s certainly looking better for us than the recession in the early 1990’s which took a great deal of recovering from. Many of the people who have moved to France from the UK had already accepted, before their arrival, that living here would be a world away from M & S food halls, new clothes every weekend (or every year, come to that) and dinner party chat about house prices, holidays in exotic places and school fees. France just doesn’t do that, or if it does, it is limited to the Paris suburbs.

Life here won’t change too much now there is less money to throw about, and if any of us had grown complacent about the good weather, fabulous countryside and easy way of life here, now is as good a time as any to get back on track and appreciate the really important things in life.

Once a year the French village of Marciac gets shaken to it’s medieval stones. For two weeks every August this little twelfth century Bastide lifts its dusty eyes, slaps on a smile and welcomes, genuinely welcomes, ten thousand people every day.

They come for the jazz. Bizarrely, over thirty years ago a sleepy and inconsequential spot in south west France started a music festival which now features on the international scene for all jazz musicians and their devotees. How can a village of no more than one thousand people play host to ten times that number every day for two weeks and never get overwhelmed? Always a seat at one of the many restaurants that spring up, always a chair in the square to listen to the free jazz and sip a beer, always a space to park the car in the fields that open up on the edges of the village (and always for free).

And the stars that turn up - Joe Cocker, Jamie Cullen, Taj Mahal, Blind Boys of Alabama who play sell out performances in the marquee.

Whether you’re a lover of jazz or not, this is a fabulous place to be if only for a day or two. Laid back, no trouble or mess, music playing from morning to night and more bars and restaurants than you could possibly visit in two weeks.

The only consideration is where to stay. Local people open their houses and take B&B guests just for those two weeks but all hotels and Chambres d’Hotes are booked up way in advance. If you don’t get booked in somewhere, bring a tent as they’ll always squeeze an extra one onto the camp site down by the lake.

Where to eat? Anywhere is good but if you’re a real meat eater, sidle down the passageway next to the butchers and eat with the locals in a courtyard - ask for an entrecote and take your time over it!

Saint Sylvester was the 33rd pope of Rome who maybe did a few things worth remembering but none, I’ll wager, as great as arranging to die on 31st December. Combine the celebration of a Saints Day with the old Roman tradition of eating as much as possible just before the beginning of a New Year (to bring good fortune in the coming year) and you have as good a reason as any as to why, for the fourth year running, we were to be found in the Salle de Fetes with 200 other revellers this New Year’s Eve.

If there is a commune in France that knows how to enjoy an evening with quite as much esprit de corps, savoir-faire and joie de vivre then lead me to it. Aperitifs are served between 8 and 9. Dinner’s eight courses begin around 9.30 and the last course is served somewhere between midnight and 1am. This year, after foie gras we ate scallops, wild boar, duck breast with morelles and flambeed fruit kebabs. Dancing continues until the morning with soup brought out for those still standing at about 4.30am.

This year the theme was Asterix and the hall was suitably decorated with trees, woodland scenes and gauls with a huge pot of magic potion (that would be Pousse Rapier, the local aperitif) on the stage and allcomers from three years of age to the very elderly took part together in a great evening of jollity, dancing, singing, eating, drinking and the obligatory hugging and kissing as the hour struck. You are left wondering how it is possible for so many people to have such a great time without any signs of drunkeness, fighting, vomiting, falling asleep or gendarme appearances. But you have my word on it, it is possible as we have seen for the fourth time running. There is always plenty of alcoholic drink on the table; they are topped up with wine during dinner, a seriously alcoholic ‘eau de vie’ appears with a little lemon sorbet plopped inside, then there is ‘fizz’ of a good type and armagnac to finish.

The French here don’t seem to have learnt yet that the only way to have a really good time is to get blindingly paralytic, fall under the table and forget everything that had happened by the next morning.
Long may it last.

Last Saturday our village walking group had their annual ‘jolly’. Some fifty of us climbed aboard the coach in the Place d’Eglise in the dark at 7 in the morning as the church bells struck. It had been a warm clear night with every possible star shining so getting up to make sandwiches at 6am had been no chore.

Dawn came up as we travelled west. Conversations on the coach were lively and humourous but the local accent and speed with which it is spoken left me unable to make out much except that there was something about mushroom picking and the gendarmes and hiding the mushrooms and the name of a local farmer in a neighbouring commune. I would have liked to understand more. The sun got stronger through the windows and the roads got straighter and wider and by the time we reached the coast, just south of Biarritz, we had reason to anticipate a beautiful day.

We walked south to St Jean de Luz along the coastal path with the blue Atlantic to our right and white terracotta-topped houses and hotels to our left. The clifftop path was still quite busy, this being only the first week of September, and joggers and runners zipped past us as we stood obligingly to one side, briefly interupting our lazy conversations until the path was clear again.

As usual, the warm air became heavy as we dropped down to the sweeping sandy bay in which nestles the chic but welcoming town of St Jean. To continue further along the coast would bring you to the Spanish border, where the gentler slopes of the Pyrenees trail out to meet the sea, but stopping in St Jean leaves these green hills and mountains as a lovely backdrop against the 19th century hotels of the town. It was lunchtime and the restaurants were doing a lively trade, serving fish dishes and moules and frites to allcomers but the beach was quieter now August was gone. Yet the sun still shone hot and harsh enough to need sunglasses and make a dip in the bay look tempting.

We ate our picnic lunch in a nearby park with the village ‘community chest’ of aperatifs being shared round the walking party and then we went on to a Basque village in the hills to take a beer or two outside a local bar and to buy a string of hot red peppers to take home and hang up in the kitchen.

Unsurprisingly, most of us slept on the coach ride home, but the day would not be finished that easily. No sooner had we tumbled out of the coach back in the Church square than trestle tables were being brought out of the Salle de Fete and arranged under the plane trees for supper. Jacques, it was, who had been mushrooming and we all sat down to finish off the aperatifs before feasting on homegrown tomatoes and meat preserves followed by delicious soft mushroom omelettes containing the girolles he had found. Coffee was made in the Salle de Fete and followed ice cream and eventually we made our way home in time for bed. Paper plates and plastic beakers had meant that there was little in the way of washing up. We wiped and put away the tables and chairs and quietly left the village square as we had found it a few hours before.

Over thirty years ago, I remember at about this time of year, I stood in a lush green paddock looking at racehorse mares and foals. I was somewhere in Berkshire. The weather was sunny and the grass long and along one side of the paddock was an immense hedgerow. Unflailed, with the trees in blossom some forty feet high maybe and in all it’s Spring glory, I promised myself that one day I would own one. I hoped that an adjoining field might be mine as well but it was the hedge I wanted most. To be in that lucky position of being able to own real land without having to make every square yard pay for itself with crops or stock. To let things really grow. I knew, even then, what a privileged position that would be.

This afternoon I walked down, slowly pushing through 3 and a half hectares of meadow, dogs racing ahead and grass up to my waist, toward my hedgerow. The lower shrubs and trees of hawthorn, sloe and bramble give way to an alder hedge. Planted alongside a small stream that dries up in high summer, the alder goes for maybe 500metres along the boundary of our land. Its roots help keep the stream banks from falling in, quite able as they are to stay exposed and wet for much of the year. It would have been coppiced at one point many years ago but now sends perfectly straight trunks skyward from it’s stock, maybe seven or eight from each tree, and reaching up some fifty feet or more. The leaf canopy offers shade and cool and secret hiding places to the deer and foxes and boar.

Turn your back on the hedgerow and you walk back into the meadow which is a farmer’s nightmare but a dream to the rest of us. I make sure it’s left ungrazed for much of the year so the variety of wildflowers is legion. Or so it seems to me. The usual suspects are there of course. Daisy and buttercup, white and red clover, vetches, meadow sweet, the magenta fluff of sorrel flowers, bedstraw, ajuga and at least three species of orchid. The bee-orchid still making me stop and wonder. But there are many others I don’t recognize and then there’s the butterflies and insects and snakes and skylarks… Right now, in the middle of May, it is heaven on earth.

In about three weeks Jean-Claude will come to cut the meadow for hay. He will start, as usual, with the adjoining six hectares that he rents from us. Six hectares of fine, tall, thick, green grass that will feed his cattle through the winter. Maybe 250 round bales, maybe a few less. Then he will bring his tractor through the electric fence at the bottom of the fields and cut about two hectares that I have left ungrazed. Ungrazed, unfertilised, unmanaged. He will patiently cut it and turn it and then bale it. Driving his tractor slowly up and down the field just like he has over his six hectares. And I will have maybe 5, maybe 10 big bales. When he has finished, he will pop in to say hello and ask me if I would like my bales brought up to the house in a week or two after they have spent a couple of weeks in the field to ensure they are properly dry and not at risk of spontaneous combustion. He will apologise unnecessarily for the fact that I have so few bales and offer me a couple of his so the horses won’t go short over the winter. And he will smile. And I will know why he’s smiling.

But he didn’t go walking through the meadow this afternoon, deafened by the drone of bees, the scraping of crickets, sending a skylark up a few feet ahead, watching the feeding of an unidentifiable butterfly, sitting in the grass to look into the face of a bee-orchid. He has cattle to feed.