Our neighbours have asked us to come around to their house on Tuesday next to eat Crepes for Chandeleur.

I made the assumption that this was a celebration of St. Blaise's day , this was always the day in Catholic Ireland when we went to the church to have our throats blessed. There we all knelt down at the altar and the priest came and placed crossed candles at our throat to protect us from sore throats during the year to come. Thus , for the last few years , when we saw the time come around for Chandeleur to be celebrated (traditionally with pancakes) at the begining of February , we assumed it came from a devotion to St. Blaise.

When our neighbour invited us to celebrate Chandeleur with them next Tuesday I mentioned St. Blaise and was greeted with a blank stare , it was obvious that she had never heard of him, obviously some research was needed.

First thing I discovered was that I had my dates wrong , Chandeleur is celebrated on the 2nd of February , St. Blaise has his day on the 3rd.
Chandeleur is in fact Candlemas , the day in which people brought their candles into the church to be blessed. This feast seems to have merged in time with the purification of the Virgin Mary (which seems to be like the Catholic post birth churching) and the presentation of Jesus in the temple.

Then I learned something else , Candlemas is thought to be a relic of an ancient pre-christian festival of light . It celebrates the day which is mid way between the shortest day and the spring equinox and the return of brightness.

À la Chandeleur, l'hiver cesse ou reprend vigueur
On Candlemas, winter ends or strengthens

In other words what we have here is a christianisation of an old pagan festival of light christianised as are Christmas and indeed Halloween.
In Ireland, a nation suffering from constant winter colds and flu, we use the candles practically as a guard against sore throats- in France they (typically) use the feast as another excuse to party.

Portrait of the Chef as a Writer (taken on the terrace this afternoon by Mrs. Dwyer)

Sometimes I think I have just that.
You will all be aware at this stage that I am plugging away on A BOOK- (at long last ) this oeuvre is at the moment somthing less than half way through but I have been blabbing on about it on the principle that this will shame me into finishing it.
It is part memoir , part travelogue and part recipe book and so will probably disappear instantly between three stools.
It has a working title ; À Table ; An Irish Chef in a Village in the Languedoc.

I was contacted a couple of weeks ago , totally coincidentially , by Waterford Writers Week (which festival takes place at the end of March) to ask would I be part of a panel on an open forum on Cookery Writing (this from my bits and pieces of food journalism) , this I accepted , they further contacted me today looking for a picture and a bio for their programme and to tell me that the local paper wanted to do a spread on me to publicise the festival.
Could any writer (especially putative) ask for better pre publication publicity ?

The divils own luck I tell you.

And now I am certainly going to have to finish the thing!

We did a bit of babysitting over the Christmas and re-introduced Fionn to the French folk song; Il Etait un petit Navire.
Frustrated with having to sing it to him all day I found a version on youtube where , with the help of some earphones , Fionn could indulge in his passion without disturbance.

We are back home in France now for just over a week and the difference of temperature in the house in that time is remarkable.
The first few days after we got back were perishing - this was not at all the fault of the outside temperatures- they rarely, even at night , went below 4 or 5 C -but due to the fact that we live in an old stone house.
Stone has some very strange properties, one of them is its ability to conserve temperatures. We have a large wood burning Godin in our living room but for the first days back it might have been a candle in a freezer for all the heat it gave us. Gradually the wood heat penetrated into the bones of the house and by about Thursday we could come down stairs in our dressing gowns again.

All this time the outside temperatures were rising , which also obviously affected the interior but , oddly , not as much as you would expect.

The house has a remarkable ability - based also on the fact that there is quite a small area of windows- to remain a bit aloof from the outside , a fact which we are greatful for in the summer when the temperatures outside can hit the thirties.

Another relevant factor are the shutters , putting these across the French windows into the terrace in the evenings in winter has an immediate effect on the inside , as this also does in the heat of the day in summer .

We were strolling around the village last week and noticed that the New Builds in the lotissments are all furnished with air conditioning units , it seems almost as standard. These houses are of course , as all modern houses are , built of cavity brick.

Just as we bought our Presbytere , a French government initiative was brought in that each house as it was sold had to be furnished with an energy rating , ours was one of the first in our area to be so rated and I remember the Nortaire remarking to us that it had scored particularly well, better than the new builds.
This is proof -I suppose- that sometimes the old ways were not the worst.

When we bought the Le Presbytere, now five years ago, the sisters who had been living here left some things behind which the archdiosces of Montpellier , whom we paid for house, didn't think worth removing.

In the courtyard under our terrace , just outside the garden lavatory , they left a full sized statue of Our Lady of Lourdes . we were bemused with this legacy , not being strong Catholics it didn't seem appropriate to bring her into the house and offer her a niche on which to be venerated, but still we were far too engrained in our religion to either destroy her or give her away.
She is a little past her prime , we think she had lost her place in the church (replaced by a newer model) when her blue sash started to flake off.
And so she has stood in the courtyard , occasionally putting the heart and soul across an unsuspecting guest who might wander in the garden as she appeared out of the gloom.

Yesterday Síle was doing some gardening and decided to move some plants around , a Lemon tree was moved to a sunnier spot and another Lemon (another legacy from the nuns which has never borne fruit but which has the most spectacular thorns ) was moved out to a place where it would perhaps be less sunny to stop its heady growth .
Then under our climbing Solanum - another legacy from the sisters which produces lovely clusters of white flowers for ten months of the year- we had a hole to fill.
Síle was inspired to put the virgin into this bower and so , with much pulling and hauling (and puffing and panting) we pulled the lady across the garden and set her into her new grotto.

It was made for her.

We are not quite sure what will happen next , the weather may be unkind to her and remove her last vestiges of colour , being made of plaster of Paris she may start to melt away slowly but whatever is in store for her I think we are both much happier that she will not end her days , in a gloomy courtyard outside a lavatory door , but in a position where she can be admired and where she will be crowned with Solanum blossom.