Looking back, not forward

Image by your neighborhood librarian via Flickr

It has always seemed a sort of frowsting about month to me, January, with only the indoor plants to liven the scene.

Can't do much in the garden, too early to start off the half hardy annuals, and in these days of eBay there is no longer the anticipation of the box of seeds arriving in the post to cheer the winter day with thoughts of Nantaises Ameliorees or Bedfordshire Fillbasket. These days, little packets arrive all the year round, in response to impulse buying, rather than undergoing the annual ceremony of assembling all the seed catalogues and working through them for the definitive orders.

Arriving in autumn, the catalogues would have been hanging around for a couple of weeks, old favourites and a few newcomers, before a rainy dark afternoon would seem the ideal time to clear the table by the fire and lay them out for proper inspection. This, at least, was my way of doing things when in the U.K. but it survived only in truncated form when I moved to France.

M. Untel saw to that.

I have spoken of M.Untel before, defrocked gendarme, expert in all things bibulous and trafficker in untaxed wine,

http://http//real-france.blogspot.com/2009/04/were-out-of-wine.html

but it was in his role of seed rep that I first made his aquaintance.

I was poking about in the barn in the first autumn after my arrival when a car pulled up at the gate and sounded its' horn. Repeatedly. The first honk got no reaction, but by the fourth, I was on my way to the gate, loaded for bear.

A large man, face an unforgettable shade of brick red, like the facade of Hampton Court, emerged, holding up a hand as if stopping traffic.

'You the foreigner?'

'Yes'

'I see you've been making a garden out the back.'

By the amount of cars that had stopped for a good gawp while I had been turning over the sods of couch grass, it was a wonder it wasn't headline news on French television. Some had even got out for a closer gawp.

'Yes'

'Well, you'll have been spending too much on seeds. I'm part of a co op...small gardener's stuff, you know, and I can get you seeds a lot cheaper than going to the shops. Robbing bastards, they are.'

The man had unerring sales skills. First, I love choosing seeds and second, I love saving money on something.

I invited him in for further discussions and he promptly plunged back into the car...for his catalogues, as I supposed. He emerged with, yes, the catalogue and assorted papers but also with a six pack of wine....uncapsuled bottles in a sort of galvanised milkman's pannier.

We headed for the house and cleared a space at the table.

'Where do you keep the glasses?'

I brought out two and he neatly opened a bottle. It had a sort of hollow plastic cap and he used a rifled plastic plug to get at the contents. He saw me eyeing it.

'Now this is fine for wine you don't want to keep...and a lot easier than putting in corks. Look out for a pack of these when you go shopping...save you a fortune.'

Well, I wasn't at the wine bottling stage then, but I bore it in mind and later trial proved him right. I use them for my half bottles of epine...never last long enough to need a cork.

He got down to business. We discussed the nature of my soil. We discussed what I wanted to grow. He told me what I ought to be growing. He opened a second bottle.

He then showed me the catalogue. He made suggestions about varieties for this area. I made an order. He opened the third bottle.

He pointed out that I had not ordered any flower seed. I pointed out that I did not yet have a flower garden.

'You're a woman. You have to have flowers. Here, you get a free packet of flowers with your cardoons...take some larkspur and by keeping the seed you'll have enough to cover the whole place in a couple of years.'

He rose to go, placing the empty bottles back in the pannier.

'What about paying you?'

'When the seeds arrive. Never pay for anything in advance....that's something else you'll have to learn.'

He departed and I wondered if I had dreamt the interlude, before tottering out to sleep it off in the deckchair. I awoke some hours later, distinctly chilly, but not in the least hungover.

A few weeks later he returned, bearing seeds and the pannier. Luckily, this was a one bottle job, but I did say how surprised I had been not to have been hungover.

'Ah. That's because I'm careful who I buy from. Some of them lace the whole thing with so much sulphur you can even smell it. That's what does for you, additives! Buying supermarket wine as you do'....eye passed critically over my stock.....'you're just asking for trouble.'

Over the years, I began to look forward to his visits - official, about seeds and unofficial - he kept a close eye on my garden from his car and when he had a glut of whatever it was that I didn't have he would deliver a large carrier bag. And the pannier.

It was he who warned me not to go into town on a Friday in November and December, as the gendarmes were making up for lost time in handing out fines before the end of the year.

It was he who showed me how to change my land from being classed as agricultural to being classed as being for leisure purposes.

It was he who introduced me to vignerons, washing machine repairmen and wood suppliers. Thanks to him, I got local's prices, not rip offs.

He gave me the entree to local life. A great gift, and beyond price to a foreigner finding her feet in a wholely strange society.

My front garden was swiftly covered in larkspur and descendents of the first packet of seeds are still with me, many moves on.

I used to see him from time to time when visiting friends in my first village....older now, the high colour even more prominent against his greying hair, asking what I was growing, how was the soil, had I had rain......and always time for a drink.

Then, last time over there, my friends' neighbour dropped in for a chat and happened to mention that M. Untel was moving back up to the north of France, whence he had originated, years ago. His wife, that shadowy woman more rumoured than observed, had died, and he no longer wished to live where they had been happy together.

The neighbour was censorious.

'He must have led her a life, always drinking the way he did.'

I have no way of knowing. But to me he had always been a 'verray, parfit, gentil knyght' and I suspect he had been so to her also.

'

Big bud authors

Image by wallyg via Flickr

I was looking for something else but with my usual keyboard incompetence arrived on the Saga site perusing an article downloaded from another website about how to behave if invited to a French house. I really don't know where these articles come from...there must a be a factory somewhere....but they all seem the same. First they tell you that you won't be invited to a French house anyway - so why, I ask, continue further? Undeterred, they then tell you what to do when you are.....don't take chrysanthemums or foreign hooch - causes offence....don't expect a tour of the house....and all you'll get is booze and biscuits, 'les aperos', which you will be expected to hang out for hours before you can make your escape.
Why do the media buy such derivative stuff? I call it big bud theory from the range of old gardening magazines describing the problem that assails blackcurrant bushes, all of which inevitably stated that the bud was as big as a sixpence, as indeed they would as their authors all diligently copied earlier authors and so the legend began. Have any of these big bud authors visited French houses, and if so, what sort? Which French invite you out to a restaurant in lieu of dinner at home and why?
We have been invited to a great many French houses in our time, but only three times for 'les aperos'. The first time it was my tax inspector who invited us, and we had a whale of a time, the second was an antique arms' collector whose wife sent the champagne round pretty briskly and we ended up taking a startled look at his private arsenal before being invited to try it out in the garden, the third one was the ex politician who wished to impress me with my own insignificence by offering as an aperitif the remains of the Bordeaux he had been drinking at lunchtime. We are in court with the ex politician shortly. This is probably because I turned up my nose at his leavings and joined his wife in a bottle of Pouilly fume. Don't know their place, these foreigners. All three of these encounters were the nearest I have come to the sort of inspection visit described in these articles, and only the third was actually that, so I must assume that the big bud authors are dealing with a stratum of society that does not come my way out here in the sticks.
I consulted Madeleine about the French who invite you to restaurants rather than to their homes and she immediately demanded to have the articles translated, then roared uninhibitedly. In her view, this was all about business in the good old days when anything could be charged to expenses, and if Monsieur invited you to meet him and his wife in a restaurant all it meant was that his wife didn't have to cook and they both ate on the firm, as it were, thus saving the household budget for more important things like buying Madame a nice little car. The mere idea that the French were ashamed of their homes and so avoided allowing outsiders to see them - as suggested in the articles - struck her as hilarious, and she had lived in Paris for years before coming down to retire to the country. They weren't ashamed of their homes at all, she explained, it was just that you weren't important enough for Madame to put herself out - especially as thanks to you she had a good night out as well. This explanation rather miffed Mr Fly who had constructed for himself an alternative theory which was that if, presumably, every businessman and politician in Paris was sexually rampant between the hours of five and seven in the evening - the 'cinq a sept' - then he had to be SR with a female equivalent,which meant that none of the ladies involved would have had time to cook. Thus dining out. After seven o'clock.
Big bud authors, feel free to take up and develop this idea.

Looking back after so many years it is difficult to remember how things started up. People would invite us in for a drink, we would do likewise, things would slide into a lunch, to be returned, you'd be invited to a Sunday lunch to meet the family - a bit like entering the village of Asterix given the size of some of those dining tables - you would invite the family, and buy another table or two for the occasion, and then it settled into a sort of routine as if you were an extension of the family. Cousins would invite you with the rest of the horde. You would invite cousins when the rest of the horde came to dine. I liked it very much. I still do.

No one brought flowers, plants or chocolates. They brought something to put on the table - usually their speciality, awaited by everyone - or something only available in their area. A mate of Didier since they did their national service together always brought his neighbour's brioche Vendeen...which meant that lunch had to be held up as the brioche wasn't baked before nine o'clock and then he had to drive hundreds of kilometres to get to Didier's place. I don't greatly like these sweet breads, but this was unforgettable. Feather light, delicately flavoured with rum and orange flower water it was simple but a masterpiece of the baker's art. Worth putting back lunch, especially given the range of Didier's aperitifs.

I suspect that the big bud authors are not thinking of country folk, but I can assure them that what might be called higher up the social scale it is not so very different. A lady whose acquaintance we made through a friend invited us - without the friend - as she wished to enlarge her circle. We arrived at a most imposing mansion to find that Madame was butler, wine waiter, cook and bottle washer and had not the least objection to handing over some part of her duties. We had an uproarious lunch, repeated several times before her untimely death, and she always insisted on a treacle tart being produced. While the men drooped over an aged eau de vie I would wash up with her the priceless china which she produced carelessly from a cupboard, luckily having just enough drink taken to be confident but not over confident handing these relics of the ancien regime.
She washed up at our place likewise....but our china was never of the same quality.
Those of you who live in France, or are expatriates elsewhere, you must be equally fed up with the big bud syndrome in people writing about your area. What about sharing your experiences so people can see what it is really like?