We’re just back from a fortnight in France. I had great notions that this time I would post a diary of the time there and, with this end in mind, I wrote the piece below the day after we arrived.
Typically, that was that, my entire diary entries for the two weeks.
Anyway for what it’s worth here is the good intention.

Wednesday March 19th 2008

Thezan les Beziers

We arrived here at 8.00 exactly on Sunday evening having driven the 1100 miles from Roscoff in just 12 hours.
I love the drive down through France, it is only by driving through the country, North to South that you begin to see the many different countries of which France is composed.
Roscoff is Brittany, the quarter of France which my friend Isabel unkindly calls “West Cork with croissants”
Brittany was our first holiday experience of France, this was the place we came camping with the children when they were little, the ideal trip because you only had to travel a couple of hours from the ferry, only a few hours of cantankerous children in hot cars waiting for the holiday to begin. And it was hot, hotter than we had ever experienced in Ireland, we lived in some fear of the children being burned from contact from this burning foreign sun.
Something has altered this hot Brittany over the years, is it climate change making it wetter and colder there, or is it that we now , having experienced the weather further south, have risen with this to expect more sun for our holiday.
On Sunday as we drove through Brittany we also drove through driving rain all the way.
The same rain also followed us through the Vendee, which would have been our destination of choice when the children were able to travel a little further.
The Vendee is strange part of France, flat wheat fields and huge expanses of sunflowers, no hills and a population traditionally royalist and strongly catholic.
We travelled through the Vendee on the 14th July 1989, the centenary of the fall of the Bastille and bought our daughters tricolour ribbons to celebrate the day.
We stopped overnight in an old farmhouse Chambre d’Hote where Madame looked in disapproval at the ribbons and said “Ici, un celebre pas 14ze Juillet”.
After the Vendee one travels through the Charante, but not through the interesting coastal bits, pass by the great riverine parts of France, the Dordogne and the Lot, again places where we had experienced fine family holidays.
It is not however, until you pass through Bordeaux that it begins to feel that you are passing through into the south, and, it was here on Sunday that the rain began to abate and the countryside to show that it was no longer gripped by winter.
The proliferation of vines of course help to give this impression, not that these are in any way lush at this time of year. Now is the time of pruning the vines and most are now reduced to one single shoot to concentrate the power of the grape into as few grapes as possible to add intensity to the wines of Bordeaux, still some of the most expensive in the world.
The next major town after Bordeaux is Toulouse, truly our gateway to the Languedoc, not only was the rain stopped at this stage but the bone dry roads indicated that there hadn’t been any falling there all day.
The temperatures now began to rise into the early teens, blue sky appeared and the vegetation changed also. We could now see orchards of plum trees in blossom near Agen and cherry and almond in flower as came into Languedoc.
The glimpse of the walls on Carcassonne from the motorway is always a moment of some triumph, we now know we are only an hour from our French home.
On Sunday it was dark as we approached Thezan so we missed the sight of the village with the monts d’Enserune ringing it from the north.
But the house was intact, having lain dormant for four months it was still dry and unvisited by any alien life forms. There was even a supply of Picpoul de Pinet to console me for the journey.