The world is so small: in one day we have woken in Poole, been shopping in Bromley, arrived in Marseilles and driven to Rognonas. All this and experienced the delights of Ryanair – the uncaring airline who, by some illogical train (or plane) of thought, expect you to book in online AND wait in an ill-tempered crocodile at Gatwick to do so again. I imagine this to be so they can demonstrate a diverse range of baggage scales none of which are set the same. Everywhere we look there are harassed holiday makers, including us, unpacking and re-packing suitcases and hand luggage in an effort to meet the weight deadline on a second or third attempt. Eventually squashed into our filthy plane seats, we wait for a sweaty young man who arrives at the last minute clutching a huge rucksack and twelve bulging M & S bags which he has somehow managed (irritatingly) to get past the ‘one small cabin bag only’ Oberfuhrer.
Thankfully (in some respects), Leonie drives through the black French night like a woman possessed and I go through the strange transition of experiencing forty minutes of white knuckle terror and ten minutes of feeling that I am coming home as we travel down the lanes to the Mas where I lived for six months in the not too distant past. Whilst Leonie hides behind the locked loo door, I must remove a very large cricket from the bedroom in order that we can sleep.
The next morning…..
…..a tortoiseshell cat appears on our small patio and Leonie assumes her apprentice cat lover’s voice to speak to it: ‘halloooooo’. My daughter is practising for old age. In Bromley, a neighbour’s cat visits frequently and Leonie dons an apron in the hope that it will sit on her. Not being a cat lover, the witch’s familiar naturally sits on me. Later, we go to the Alchemist’s Garden. This is a place I have written about elsewhere extolling its virtues which, on a previous visit, were many: secret magical glades of lavender; copses of wild flowers; the journey through the black/white/red gardens replete with so many roses that I once lost Beverley amongst the blooms. We arrive full of anticipation about three months too late. This is Provence in August and roses die around the end of June. No-one has even bothered to dead-head. We retreat and head towards the nearby village of Eygalieres, one of the most beautiful settings in the south where the rich and famous vie for property. Last year, for example, it was rumoured that Brad Pitt and Nick Sarkovsky were in competition for the same pile. We are to browse chic boutiques and partake of an expensive cocktail. Unfortunately, it’s the annual festival of the local saint and the whole village is drunk: not just pleasantly merry but full on, shirts off, chucking alcohol at passing strangers drunk. It’s worse than a Friday night in Bournemouth. We have a quick ice-cream and escape, circumnavigating a multitude of drainage ditches strategically placed to un-nerve those unused to driving vehicles with steering wheels on the wrong side. Leonie drives and my mantra is ‘you’re too close to the ditch’ which proves irritating. I drive and Leonie, who has secretly decided never to mention these words, immediately says ‘you’re too close to the ditch’.
People watching
The ideal English family-or not- are pool-side: a well-behaved child, an apparently loving father who appears to dote on her and a beautiful mother with blonde shoulder-length hair and a horribly perfect body which she displays in a range of miniscule bikinis all of which are smaller than my collection of dusters in the box under the sink. It’s a French woman’s figure – the kind you get from being paranoid about your man buggering off any minute now; the type of body which involves very little intake of food, little or no alcohol and a heavy regime at the gym. A body which feeds only on neurosis. Ever looked at a French (excluding Parisiennes) woman’s hands? Callouses don’t come into it. Neither, for that matter, do nails. Years of waiting hand, foot and all other bodily parts on French men bear the scars and tell a tale or two. This mother, not being French, had the shape but nothing else: the husband and daughter fetched and carried water whilst she spent the duration reclining on a sun-lounger nourishing and nurturing her tan. I even heard the charming husband ask permission to swim. This was denied as he hadn’t spent the regulation two hours playing with his daughter. They are leaving two days early as the child has an appointment at Pizza Hut.
News arrives from home: Jack has pig flu! Having been abandoned by his family, the sister who is not in France has helpfully assumed the mantle of flu buddy. It’s all most untimely. Due to copious notices warning us of impending staff and student shortages in the autumn term, Leonie and I have reserved the third week of September for our bout.
St. Remy……
……on market day and the usual scrum prevails: nowhere to park and an endless stream of cars full of folk anxious to pay the extortionate prices that this possibly once delightful but now ridiculous little town demands. I have a cunning plan. I will place the car at the back of beyond where I used to park for my French classes. There are a few unpleasant bends and turns to navigate but we will have the last laugh. The bends and turns are made more difficult by a large number of cars coming in the opposite direction, some backwards, having failed to secure a place. Plan B: back on the road, Leonie notices a van about to leave a tiny space which I steer into arriving about three feet from the kerb. Leonie offers muted instructions regarding reversing and I shout. In all my extensive travels in France my experience is that most holiday arguments are related to driving. Knowing this, the perfect Virgos leave both the car and the argument behind. Shopping (of the cheap variety) calls.
At the very first stall I see a brown top that I might like with ties at the sides. As it’s the first stall, I do the usual thing of not enquiring about the price and not trying it on in case I see something nicer further on. Some hours later, we pass by this stall on the way back to the abandoned car. Of course, the top won’t be there but, surprisingly, it is. Madame is ebullient and pulls it over my head demonstrating a range of ideas for the side ties. She informs me that it is trés flexible, lightweight and usefully, given that I do not have a French woman’s body, not transparent. It will go particularly well with a brown pair of trousers. Leonie says it looks nice and as the two of them have now ganged up on me, I buy it. It’s a purchase which I have been cajoled into: I think it looks verging on the bloody awful but, in the heat, I have lost the will to live. In any case, I have bought a nice pair of orange shoes which I chose in the face of Leonie’s preference for the red ones with roses but no backs.
Nature day
Several Brits crowd around a corner of the pool to watch a spectacle of nature. A large number of half drowning wasps have been removed from the water with the aid of a pair of goggles and deposited on the side. Whilst still in their death throes, an army of minute predatory orange ants the size of pin pricks have arrived to push and pull the ingredients of this surprise lunch down the crack between the pool edge and the terrace. Along with the contingent from the Isle of Man, Leonie and I watch for a good half hour. Apart from three year old James, who will appear promptly at 4pm clad in a full length costume, peaked hat with a foreign legion flap down the back, water wings, goggles and a rubber ring, entertainment is on the short side here. And you don’t get much shorter than James who, after his ablutions, is further wrapped in a hooded spider-man towel and taken off for his omelette. I imagine wasp watching to be the holiday highlight of anyone from the Isle of Man although this may be unkind as I’ve never been there. For all I know, it may well be the entertainment centre of the universe.
Later, at Glanum, I am, as ever, overawed by the concurrence of two cultures and of the unknown. This well-sized Roman town sits uniquely at the literal foot of the Alpilles remaining undiscovered in its French habitat until less than a hundred years ago; and only properly excavated in the last fifty years. It’s this sense of being hidden and lost for so long that continues to both thrill and mystify. How could the French peasants (and anyone else) journeying along the road from St. Rémy and Les Baux for hundreds of years not have had an inkling of what lay to the left? It’s not as if there were no clues: on the right of the road is a massive triumphal arch which historians have visited since the seventeenth century. Didn’t it occur to Pierre or Pascal to wonder aloud what the purpose of the carved arch might be? As Michel was staggering up the lane, did he never say to Serge ‘don’t you think that arch looks a bit like a gate-way? Wonder where it leads to?’ That’s what Pastis does for you: nothing on your mind save the price of melons.
This being Leonie’s first visit to Glanum, I anticipate her taking a lot of photographs. And she does: three of the Roman ruins and forty-three of a cicada in an olive tree. There’s a wildlife photography competition at her school. First prize is a trip to South Africa and she’s going to win it. To be fair, spotting a cicada is not easy to the untrained eye. Their perpetual clicking/humming/buzzing resonates throughout Provence but you try finding one in a bush that’s clearly full of the things. The minute you creep up on them they are silenced. It was, therefore, quite a coup to actually see one land. There are two temples, a forum, a sacred spring, numerous wells and untold numbers of houses in Glanum but cicadas rule ok!
Visiting hours
To St. Paul Trois Chateaux to see old friends who, this time last year, were new friends. In England, everyone is buckled down indoors hiding from the BBQ summer that never arrived. In France, tout le monde has burrowed away inside to escape the intense heat which, today, hit 40C. Gareth and M.Jo enquire whether we’d like to eat on the terrace. Of course we would: we’ve come from England and relish the warmth. We are extremely well-looked after by our hosts who, having prepared a wonderful lunch, also devise innovative ways of keeping us cool. A small fan is placed on the window-sill but, proving ineffective, is quickly replaced by a larger version which must be balanced on a wooden table placed lengthways and potentially precariously across the ledge. Gareth, forever the artist, is now in full creative mode and sprays us intermittently with one of those plastic bottles of water that we used in the bygone days before the advent of steam irons. Subsequently, he decides that aiming this at the large fan will imitate the heat relieving effect attained in more affluent cafés. We look on with some trepidation as M.Jo reminds him that electricity is involved. Gareth is, however, almost French. C’est la vie.
On to see the delightful Annie and Michel, my ex-neighbours. Their car is in the drive and the garage door is open indicating that they are chez eux. Shouting does not raise them and there is neither sight nor sound of Lunette the guard poodle. Annie and Michel are hidden in the dark behind a metal screen which shelters them from the day. Luckily, we eventually alert them to our arrival and are ushered indoors as if they were Bedouin rescuing us from the Wadi Rum. I am very happy to see them. When I arrived in Rognonas a week ago I had a half sense of coming home. When I reached St. Paul, I realised I was truly there. Strange to think one feels drawn to the Avignon environs only to find one was meant to be elsewhere.
Lastly to Valence for an overnight stay with dear Cathy who sports a head of new, short hair having thankfully recovered fully from her illness. She is still indoors doing the ironing: rien change. We are taken up in the hills, chez Martine, to watch a glorious sun setting over the Ardeche and partake of a four hour dinner spent in the company of rabbit breeders. Les francais pass most of the evening discussing problems associated with rubbish disposal. This is a surprise move away from the price of melons. Finally, a quick visit to Monoprix the following morning to see Beatrice who, due to a misunderstanding, we sadly missed the previous evening. ‘Le prochaine fois’ says Beatrice. And already I long for the next time.
Thankfully (in some respects), Leonie drives through the black French night like a woman possessed and I go through the strange transition of experiencing forty minutes of white knuckle terror and ten minutes of feeling that I am coming home as we travel down the lanes to the Mas where I lived for six months in the not too distant past. Whilst Leonie hides behind the locked loo door, I must remove a very large cricket from the bedroom in order that we can sleep.
The next morning…..
…..a tortoiseshell cat appears on our small patio and Leonie assumes her apprentice cat lover’s voice to speak to it: ‘halloooooo’. My daughter is practising for old age. In Bromley, a neighbour’s cat visits frequently and Leonie dons an apron in the hope that it will sit on her. Not being a cat lover, the witch’s familiar naturally sits on me. Later, we go to the Alchemist’s Garden. This is a place I have written about elsewhere extolling its virtues which, on a previous visit, were many: secret magical glades of lavender; copses of wild flowers; the journey through the black/white/red gardens replete with so many roses that I once lost Beverley amongst the blooms. We arrive full of anticipation about three months too late. This is Provence in August and roses die around the end of June. No-one has even bothered to dead-head. We retreat and head towards the nearby village of Eygalieres, one of the most beautiful settings in the south where the rich and famous vie for property. Last year, for example, it was rumoured that Brad Pitt and Nick Sarkovsky were in competition for the same pile. We are to browse chic boutiques and partake of an expensive cocktail. Unfortunately, it’s the annual festival of the local saint and the whole village is drunk: not just pleasantly merry but full on, shirts off, chucking alcohol at passing strangers drunk. It’s worse than a Friday night in Bournemouth. We have a quick ice-cream and escape, circumnavigating a multitude of drainage ditches strategically placed to un-nerve those unused to driving vehicles with steering wheels on the wrong side. Leonie drives and my mantra is ‘you’re too close to the ditch’ which proves irritating. I drive and Leonie, who has secretly decided never to mention these words, immediately says ‘you’re too close to the ditch’.
People watching
The ideal English family-or not- are pool-side: a well-behaved child, an apparently loving father who appears to dote on her and a beautiful mother with blonde shoulder-length hair and a horribly perfect body which she displays in a range of miniscule bikinis all of which are smaller than my collection of dusters in the box under the sink. It’s a French woman’s figure – the kind you get from being paranoid about your man buggering off any minute now; the type of body which involves very little intake of food, little or no alcohol and a heavy regime at the gym. A body which feeds only on neurosis. Ever looked at a French (excluding Parisiennes) woman’s hands? Callouses don’t come into it. Neither, for that matter, do nails. Years of waiting hand, foot and all other bodily parts on French men bear the scars and tell a tale or two. This mother, not being French, had the shape but nothing else: the husband and daughter fetched and carried water whilst she spent the duration reclining on a sun-lounger nourishing and nurturing her tan. I even heard the charming husband ask permission to swim. This was denied as he hadn’t spent the regulation two hours playing with his daughter. They are leaving two days early as the child has an appointment at Pizza Hut.
News arrives from home: Jack has pig flu! Having been abandoned by his family, the sister who is not in France has helpfully assumed the mantle of flu buddy. It’s all most untimely. Due to copious notices warning us of impending staff and student shortages in the autumn term, Leonie and I have reserved the third week of September for our bout.
St. Remy……
……on market day and the usual scrum prevails: nowhere to park and an endless stream of cars full of folk anxious to pay the extortionate prices that this possibly once delightful but now ridiculous little town demands. I have a cunning plan. I will place the car at the back of beyond where I used to park for my French classes. There are a few unpleasant bends and turns to navigate but we will have the last laugh. The bends and turns are made more difficult by a large number of cars coming in the opposite direction, some backwards, having failed to secure a place. Plan B: back on the road, Leonie notices a van about to leave a tiny space which I steer into arriving about three feet from the kerb. Leonie offers muted instructions regarding reversing and I shout. In all my extensive travels in France my experience is that most holiday arguments are related to driving. Knowing this, the perfect Virgos leave both the car and the argument behind. Shopping (of the cheap variety) calls.
At the very first stall I see a brown top that I might like with ties at the sides. As it’s the first stall, I do the usual thing of not enquiring about the price and not trying it on in case I see something nicer further on. Some hours later, we pass by this stall on the way back to the abandoned car. Of course, the top won’t be there but, surprisingly, it is. Madame is ebullient and pulls it over my head demonstrating a range of ideas for the side ties. She informs me that it is trés flexible, lightweight and usefully, given that I do not have a French woman’s body, not transparent. It will go particularly well with a brown pair of trousers. Leonie says it looks nice and as the two of them have now ganged up on me, I buy it. It’s a purchase which I have been cajoled into: I think it looks verging on the bloody awful but, in the heat, I have lost the will to live. In any case, I have bought a nice pair of orange shoes which I chose in the face of Leonie’s preference for the red ones with roses but no backs.
Nature day
Several Brits crowd around a corner of the pool to watch a spectacle of nature. A large number of half drowning wasps have been removed from the water with the aid of a pair of goggles and deposited on the side. Whilst still in their death throes, an army of minute predatory orange ants the size of pin pricks have arrived to push and pull the ingredients of this surprise lunch down the crack between the pool edge and the terrace. Along with the contingent from the Isle of Man, Leonie and I watch for a good half hour. Apart from three year old James, who will appear promptly at 4pm clad in a full length costume, peaked hat with a foreign legion flap down the back, water wings, goggles and a rubber ring, entertainment is on the short side here. And you don’t get much shorter than James who, after his ablutions, is further wrapped in a hooded spider-man towel and taken off for his omelette. I imagine wasp watching to be the holiday highlight of anyone from the Isle of Man although this may be unkind as I’ve never been there. For all I know, it may well be the entertainment centre of the universe.
Later, at Glanum, I am, as ever, overawed by the concurrence of two cultures and of the unknown. This well-sized Roman town sits uniquely at the literal foot of the Alpilles remaining undiscovered in its French habitat until less than a hundred years ago; and only properly excavated in the last fifty years. It’s this sense of being hidden and lost for so long that continues to both thrill and mystify. How could the French peasants (and anyone else) journeying along the road from St. Rémy and Les Baux for hundreds of years not have had an inkling of what lay to the left? It’s not as if there were no clues: on the right of the road is a massive triumphal arch which historians have visited since the seventeenth century. Didn’t it occur to Pierre or Pascal to wonder aloud what the purpose of the carved arch might be? As Michel was staggering up the lane, did he never say to Serge ‘don’t you think that arch looks a bit like a gate-way? Wonder where it leads to?’ That’s what Pastis does for you: nothing on your mind save the price of melons.
This being Leonie’s first visit to Glanum, I anticipate her taking a lot of photographs. And she does: three of the Roman ruins and forty-three of a cicada in an olive tree. There’s a wildlife photography competition at her school. First prize is a trip to South Africa and she’s going to win it. To be fair, spotting a cicada is not easy to the untrained eye. Their perpetual clicking/humming/buzzing resonates throughout Provence but you try finding one in a bush that’s clearly full of the things. The minute you creep up on them they are silenced. It was, therefore, quite a coup to actually see one land. There are two temples, a forum, a sacred spring, numerous wells and untold numbers of houses in Glanum but cicadas rule ok!
Visiting hours
To St. Paul Trois Chateaux to see old friends who, this time last year, were new friends. In England, everyone is buckled down indoors hiding from the BBQ summer that never arrived. In France, tout le monde has burrowed away inside to escape the intense heat which, today, hit 40C. Gareth and M.Jo enquire whether we’d like to eat on the terrace. Of course we would: we’ve come from England and relish the warmth. We are extremely well-looked after by our hosts who, having prepared a wonderful lunch, also devise innovative ways of keeping us cool. A small fan is placed on the window-sill but, proving ineffective, is quickly replaced by a larger version which must be balanced on a wooden table placed lengthways and potentially precariously across the ledge. Gareth, forever the artist, is now in full creative mode and sprays us intermittently with one of those plastic bottles of water that we used in the bygone days before the advent of steam irons. Subsequently, he decides that aiming this at the large fan will imitate the heat relieving effect attained in more affluent cafés. We look on with some trepidation as M.Jo reminds him that electricity is involved. Gareth is, however, almost French. C’est la vie.
On to see the delightful Annie and Michel, my ex-neighbours. Their car is in the drive and the garage door is open indicating that they are chez eux. Shouting does not raise them and there is neither sight nor sound of Lunette the guard poodle. Annie and Michel are hidden in the dark behind a metal screen which shelters them from the day. Luckily, we eventually alert them to our arrival and are ushered indoors as if they were Bedouin rescuing us from the Wadi Rum. I am very happy to see them. When I arrived in Rognonas a week ago I had a half sense of coming home. When I reached St. Paul, I realised I was truly there. Strange to think one feels drawn to the Avignon environs only to find one was meant to be elsewhere.
Lastly to Valence for an overnight stay with dear Cathy who sports a head of new, short hair having thankfully recovered fully from her illness. She is still indoors doing the ironing: rien change. We are taken up in the hills, chez Martine, to watch a glorious sun setting over the Ardeche and partake of a four hour dinner spent in the company of rabbit breeders. Les francais pass most of the evening discussing problems associated with rubbish disposal. This is a surprise move away from the price of melons. Finally, a quick visit to Monoprix the following morning to see Beatrice who, due to a misunderstanding, we sadly missed the previous evening. ‘Le prochaine fois’ says Beatrice. And already I long for the next time.
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