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.