Jazz in Marciac

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!

Thanks to Saint Sylvester

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.

A Village Outing

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.

Wild flower meadows.

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.

Lost in France

Sometimes you read 'The morning dawned bright and clear'. But it was luminous, yellow-tinted, sweet-smelling. Silent and still. It promised a day as glorious yet unbearable in it's heat as all those we had known in the previous two months. But now at just after seven in the morning, it was golden light, soft shadows, bird song, deer on the stubble fields. A white sky fading into blue. The swell of the crop fields, their washed out greens, greys, golds, passed us slowly as we drove through the lanes. We sliced through hamlets with honey-stone walls, the houses and churches hiding behind sentinels of green cyprus, pine, oak, walnut. Dark green or sky blue shutters, open now, sucking in the cooler air of the night and the dawn, but soon to be closed until evening returned. Silence. No-one but ourselves on the lanes. Rural France playing it's clever trick. Pretending no-one lives here.

Go into the cities. Go on. Tarbes, Toulouse, Pau. Leave the lamplight for the neon light for the sodium light. You'll find people there. People to befriend, talk with, laugh with, drink with. People who will help you to believe in yourself. Who will laugh at your jokes. A slap on the back. Have another drink. You look nice today. Is that a new shirt? You know Nick don't you? Interplay. Intercourse. Back in the herd again. Safety in numbers. And you can tell me I'm great and I'll tell you and we'll smile and laugh. Same time tomorrow?

Now come out into the country if you think you're hard enough. No lights. No shops. No people.....no people. Real aloneness. Now, stare it in the face. In the sky. In the field. Stare at the closed-shuttered no-farmered farmhouse. Stare at the empty road as it snakes over the empty hill, around the empty bend. And then another. And another. And as you stand there staring, feel yourself absorbed, dissolved, disappearing into this bucolic. Becoming part of the story, a saga that plays itself out year after year, century after century, oblivious of your presence, mindless of you and your bit-part.

The red kites soar, the buzzards mew, the wind whispers in the cyprus or howls round the crumbling stone walls of the abandoned chapel and pushes the scudding clouds away from the pyrenees. You barely have a speaking part and then you're gone. Off-stage. You weren't the starring role after all. How hard are you now?

The Gascon kitchen

Nadine is slim, almost petite, with smiling eyes that look to you not through you and always giving not asking. Her strappy floral dress hangs comfortably on her almost childlike frame. Narrow shouldered, small breasted, with curling shoulder length sun-streaked hair. I follow her through the the old oak door, out of the glaring full sun and into the cool dark of the kitchen, one of only two habitable rooms in this rambling gascon stone house. She bends to take a beer from the fridge and gives it to me. The short dumpy green glass is cool in my hot hand. We talk, still standing. Nothing much. We go over old conversations, well-worked topics in the way that we all re-instate and re-affirm commonalities. A way of saying 'We are friends. We are on the same side aren't we?' I think we are. At one point, Nadine turns to me, eyes bright, passionately, she says 'I love my kitchen'. I say nothing but smile, embarrassed in the moment by her enthusiasm and exclamation. But the thing is, I love Nadine's kitchen too:

It is a perfect rectangle. The old oak door, bitten and gnarled, is bottom right on a short side. The immediate effect, as you cross the dusty stone and concrete slab from the vast grassy space outside is one of dark. Of walking into a Vermeer painting. The white light that strokes and spots the interior walls and shelves and enormous dark wood table comes through a small squarish window on the same side as the door. So it's ill-lit then. Or maybe well-lit. The room isn't large by french farmhouse standards so the gaping space that burns metre length logs and takes in almost the entire wall opposite is overwhelming. The table, assembled from left-over doors, fills the rest of the kitchen. It leaves only enough room to walk around to your seat with a little extra on one long side where the cooker and fridge and a motley melange of wooden planks and old chests of drawers serve as Nadine's working area.
The sink is original, or at least original enough. Deep white china, it sits under the only window, which is wide open. The window paint has peeled away to nothing. There is only a cold tap, trapped against the failing beige render by it's lead pipework.
Caroline's kitchen isn't like this. Caroline is incredulous. Caroline calls Nadine's kitchen 'primitive'. Nadine has no splash back tiles fixed to the walls, chosen in colours to match the base unit doors. Nadine has no tiles. She has no base units. Nadine's walls are mixed-up red brick, stone, concrete, old plaster, new mortar, who knows, who cares.
Nadine makes dinner for everyone. Everyone who comes in dusty from the vegetable garden, stinking from the horse stables, red and slow from drinking beer under the magnolia tree. Sometimes she lays a cloth first, embroidered, lightly crumpled, before placing bone-handled knives, like crucifixes, carefully, at their settings. Nadine, walking slowly around the table, her lips moving silently as she lays the names of each of her people. Each place laid with love for all the people she will feed. Flowers, weeds, pulled from somewhere below the house wall, pushed into a jug at the centre. Pull up a chair or drag one in from outside. Put your elbows on the table and talk across it. Breath down. Smile. Relax. Nadine will put food on the table. You can depend on it.

The French Builder's Life

The man's putting down chipboard. 75 meters of the stuff and I had the enviable job of getting a price from our local builders merchant's merchant, Mr Daste. Mr Daste, and Mrs Daste, and any number of little Dastes all live in a new unattractive villa on the main road in to town and only an exterior staircase away from the yard.

The convenience of living right next to the workplace scores every time for the french. It means they can get home for lunch. Quickly. The requisite two hour lunch break, not being interrupted or shortened by any unnecessary travelling to and fro, is then a full two hours. This is far more important than the fact that the house and home is stuck right next to a builder's yard. It simply would never do in England would it?

The English would far rather take a two hour trip in the Mondeo, get stuck in traffic all the way out to the ring road, and grab a tasteless pointless sandwich for lunch at the office desk. Anything, absolutely anything mark you, rather than have the house next to a place of work which would inevitably impact on the price of their modernised Edwardian semi in yet another 'up and coming' area. But then the English don't stop for a four course family lunch, take seven weeks holiday a year, work a 35 hour week, keep their weekends sacred and still manage to be the 5th most efficient economy in the world. They prefer a £200,000 mortgage and being at the office desk by 8am. Ummmm. Think I'll go for the builder's yard myself.