I am, I think most of my friends would agree, a gentle sort of a yoke. An eschewer of anything violent, be that a war film, a rugby match or the pursuit of the fox.
When I was about 14, roughly 45 years ago, I discovered a chink in this gentle facade- I discovered a total fascination for the bullfight.

On a holiday in Sitges (when it was respectable) in the early sixties, I went to a bullfight in Barcelona, to my amazement I was absolutely captivated by the experience and went another time before I went home.

This little known streak of blood lust has remained dormant since then, until yesterday.

The part of the Languedoc we live in, due to geographical proximity, Charlemange granting land to 11th century Spaniards fleeing the Moors, and a renewed settlement at the time of the civil war in Spain, is very Spanish.
The chief festival of the summer is the Feria in Beziers in mid August.
This is a completely Spanish festival with Flamenco Singers, Flamenco Dancers, displays of Spanish horse riding skills and, above all, a week of bullfights in the Bullring in Beziers. It may surprise that there are bullrings outside Spain but bullfighting is huge here. There are also bullrings in Nimes and Ales and I suspect tens, if not hundreds of other locations in the Midi.
I was at a dinner party here last week when one of the guests, a secondary school teacher from Kanturk, announced that having long loved Hemmingway’s The Sun also Rises he was determined to go to a bullfight in Beziers this week. I immediately offered to join him and then, to my surprise, Ano, my daughter Deirdre’s gentle vegetarian boyfriend decided to join us too.
(One of his friends unkindly suggested that if it was an aubergine that was being ritually slaughtered he wouldn’t have been so keen)

Last night the three of us attended the Corrida in Les Arenes in Beziers- it was an amazing experience.

A bullfight is part ballet, part opera, part pop concert, part boxing match with a strong dollop of the Roman circus.
Three handsome young men, dressed in costumes which made tights look baggy, displayed incredible bravery and skill by dancing with six bulls.
They strutted and postured, turned their backs and walked fearlessly away from an animal which was trying very hard to kill them, and then finally and inevitably they killed them.
They crowd was on the whole on the side of the bull.
A messy kill or signs that the matador was toying with his prey and the ring rang with whistles and boos and loud mocking choruses of Viva Espana

We had three bullfighters, their CVs, consist mainly of the amount of ears offered per bullfight. This is the sign that the crowd, and the judge, think that the fight has been bravely fought.
Below are a few photographs from last night.

This was the crowd outside the bullring, my guess was that there was about 7 thousand there, I could well be way out.

This is a pass performed by Miguel Perera (all of 24 years old), the crowd’s favourite, who was awarded an ear for both of his fights. The object of the pass is to get the bull to charge as close to the body as life permits. This frequently left the matador’s suit of lights covered in blood as the horns passed within inches of their vitals.

This is the moment of death performed by El Juli.
At this moment the matador must line up his sword and sever the spinal cord.
If this action was not clean and successful (as in two of last night’s fights) the bull fighter was not granted an ear and was heckled by the crowd.

Perera, doing a walkabout after his second successful fight, casually throws the ear into the crowd. This was faught over and is reckoned a great prize.

The French are great fans of old stuff. An antique fair will be treated as a family outing and will get the kind of houses reserved in Ireland for ploughing championships.
There are various catagories of antiques.
Poshest, and usually in smart shops in towns are Antiquities these, while interesting to visit, are usually too dear for my budget.
Next down in the pecking order are the Brocantes usually good for a bargain, loads of tat but the odd “find” and can vary enormously depending on the “eye”and taste of the Brocanteur.
Still cheaper and tattier are the Vide Greniers-literally empty attics, which are much as our car boot sales. Puces, short for Marches des Puces or Flea Markets which are usually no better than that sounds.
This I thought was it until I came to the Languedoc.
Here I have discovered yet another category; Les Trocantes.
As Troc is the French word for Swap, what we have here is a depot where house holders can flog their surplus furniture.
The system is that one arrives in the Trocante with ones Armoire, they put a price on it (including their commission) and then display it.
If it doesn’t sell after a couple of weeks they drop the price until either it sells or you are asked to take it away.
Therefore one is well advised to visit these on a frequent and regular basis.
(The vendor only gets paid when the object sells)
We have already bought a rather nice marble topped dressing table in a Troc and a few days ago we went browsing with friend Clive in one in Beziers.
True to form Clive spotted a set of beautiful elegant chairs which had come down €100 since they were initially put for sale.

Ten minutes later we were the proud possessors six of these beauties, all in perfect nick bar a little (treatable) woodworm and all perfect in appearance and age and style to grace the bedrooms of the Presbytere.
I think the acquiring of furniture is going to be the most fun part of this process.

I am not a natural DIY person, these skills come to me with some difficulty but here in France, and faced with the prospect of doing without during the builders holidays, I am resussitating such skills as I possess.

Faced with the prospect of putting in screws and lacking what I would have called a bradawl, or sharply pointed tool to make the hole for the screw (a crude instrument rather like a screwdriver with a point) I repaired to Mr Bricolage.
There I explained to the man what I wanted and that I didn’t know the word in French.
He took me to this tool, a beautiful piece of design which works like a dream.
Do we have something similar (or as elegant) back home ?

When we got into the house this time the builder had (at our request) removed the false ceiling in the old kitchen.
These wonderful old beams had some great forged nails sticking out of them.
These I took a picture of with a 1 inch panel pin to show scale

We are, at last back in our beloved Presbytère.

For the last three days we have been at home.
We have been searching, and in some cases even finding all the bits and pieces we had hidden through the house out of reach (we foolishly thought) of the reach of builders and their dust.
We have now started the business of making a camp out of our house as we try and make the place habitable for the rest of August.

Here are a few shots of the house as it is now, warts and all.

My blue syphon which now sits in the old safe of the now razed larder.

This is the bedroom we call The Red Room because of the tiles.
One of my jobs for the winter will be to remove the wallpaper,lose the glue which disfigures the tiles and turn this into a silk purse.

This is (I think) an ingenious idea of mine.
Two cheap Ikea shelves I have bridged with some pine boards I found in the cellar. This has given us someplace to put the clutter in the kitchen/livingroom/dining room.

This is the camp kitchen, next week Clive Nunn comes out to measure up the final job which will be installed in the autumn. These are every sort of bric a brac adapted for use. (It includes a rather nice butchers block which I made up from a flatpack piece in Ikea)

My friends Isabel, Paul and Lucy on the terrace, note out new bamboo awning providing (as the man in the shop promised) “Dappled Shade”.
This was put up by Sile and I(with help from Peter and Siobhan)
A hard days work in this heat.
Tomorrow daughter Deirdre with four of her young and energetic friends arrive out to start stripping off paper etc. I will with relief return to the kitchen and doing what I do best!

As we get more obvious confidence in French, and being in France we seem to attract lost English souls in supermarkets and shops who are completely without any French and have found themselves in a part of rural France where the vast majority of the population are totally without English.
About a week ago when a confused man heard Sile and I talking in English in queue in Intermarche (he was lucky, if we had seen him coming we would have been talking as gaeilge )he asked me was there any chance I could guide him to the salt. An even more pathetic Scotsman approached me at the jam section a few days ago and asked me “Which one was most like Marmelade?”
Yesterday in front of us in a queue were a very young English couple who hadn’t a single word of French. They were hauling up to the check-out from the trolley a huge pack of bottles of water (the lords knows why, we drink happily and healthily from the tap.)
The check-out lady said to them, in French of course, that there was no need to do this as there was a little tab they could pull off to read the bar code without hauling up the whole works.
Total confusion, the English thought they had done something wrong, the French girl was mortified at her helpful attempts seeming to have been taken as a rebuke.
Sile stepped in and told the couple what the girl had said.
The wife thanked us profusely in English, the check out girl thanked us profusely in French and the husband summoned up the full strenghts of the English education system by announcing proudly to Sile “Marcay Bookoo”

Ted, the brother, is out in France at the moment cheering on his son Owen who is triathaloning in the Alps (with great success) and visiting his brother in Languedoc. On the way down his four-wheel-drive, automatic Honda ceased being an automatic, got stuck in bottom gear and generally gave up the ghost on the side of the autoroute about 100 klms north of Clermont Ferrand.
The emergency services arrived swiftly and hoisted the car, Ted and his wife Mary on to an ambulance and into the nearest garage.
The garage were mystified,beyond recognising that it was a computer problem that they couldn’t fix.
Their only sulution was to ambulance the car to the nearest Honda agent, in Clermont, and see what they could do.
Recognising that this would mean that they would miss Owen’s triathalon Ted in desperation decided to phone the man from whom he had bought the car, Finbarr in Johnson and Perrots in Cork.
Finbarr’s reaction was; “There is a trick that might work” and he told Ted to tell the French mechanics to do something quite ridiculous. This was to remove the positive and negative poles from the battery and hold them together(I am not sure that I have this exactly right but it is something like)
When Ted, in his best school French tried to explain this to the French mechanics they assumed he was a raving lunatic and were convinced that he was talking rubbish.
Ted got back on to Finbarr. “Hold hard” says Finbarr “We have a French mechanic working in the Emmet Place branch I’ll ring him, explain the situation, and get him to ring you, Pascale is his name.
Pascale duly rang Ted, and Ted handed the phone to the mechanics.
With looks of total disbelief they were reluctantly prepared to to follow these instructions if given by a French lunatic.
Two minutes later the car was fixed and Ted proceeded successfully on his journey, leaving behind some totally confused French mechanics and Ted blessing the advent of the Celtic Tiger which brought French mechanics to Ireland.

I am actually writing this in our house in Thezan while the electrician, the last of the workmen in the house until September, cleans out and packs his van to go.
In a mere half hour or so the house will, for the first time since May again be in our possession.
A shout of joy would probably not be out of place.
The work is not over but we have been granted a temporary respite.
As I write Sile is busy with our new industrial vacuum on her third attempt to get rid of the dust in our living room, a Sisyphean task which will be repeated for most of August.
Since some friends have contacted me and told me I have sounded a little peevish of late (I would have thought that almost an understatement at times)
I have decided to give you a photo journal of my month here without mentioning Macons, Plumbieres or even dust.
Life does exist outside of building.

This was taken on one of our first days in France this summer on a trip to Pezenas, the Brocante capital of Languedoc, in search of furniture.
Considering the relationship between that town and Moliere (and his known contempt for the medical profession) I assumed it to be a malediction.
In fact i think it is just a street named after two doctors with an unfortunate surname.

This is by way of being a representative shot of the river Orb which flows by us and where we have been immersing ourselves from time to time as the climate hovers about the early thirties (as it has all month)

I was so taken by the style of this sign I photographed it as an inspiration for my own.
In fact it was belonging to a restaurant called Auberge de l’Abbeye where we afterwards had a very good dinner.
Always judge books by their cover!

While we were in Faugeres they had their annual Fete de Vin and, the whole village became a wine fair for the day, the excellent Chateau des Peygrandes chose our doorway for their display and the son of the house Herve Boudal-Benexech manned the stall.

As the day went on we saw birds of startling plumage begin to gather in the lanes.

These turned out to be the various Confreries de Vin who marched past our balcony in procession later. (Some were even gracious enough to acknowledge our presence)

We went on a trip to Villeneuvette on the 14th July, our 35th Wedding anniversary. This is a stunning ex-cloth factory built by Louis 14th. The main watersupply for the village was fed by a hansome fountain into a cystern.

And by a marvellous series of waterways from the nearby hills.

On the 18th the Tour de France passed through the village.The streets were lined by enthusiasts, this one carrying a banner to welcome their participating cousin to the village. This insured them a liberal supply of freebies from the passing publicity vans.

There then passed many vans carrying freebies which they cast on the crowd.
(Our Thezan cousins then blotted their copy books a little by departing the scene before the race arrived, showing little concern for their “cousin” and his efforts, but possessing enough keyrings, fridge magnets etc to last a life time.)

We ungreedy Irish waited on to cheer him on as he passed.

That evening the local choir gave us a concert in what we (the proprietors of the presbytery) think of as OUR church.

At an excellent little Vide Grenier (literally Empty Attic) in a village above Fougeres I picked up this perfect copper pot for a snip at €5.

And this old coffee bowl (without the appropiate cherries ) for €1

With friends Peter and Siobhan I climbed (in the midday sun) to the Mediterranean Gardens in Rocbrun. The siting, over the River Orb, is spectacular. (they used the village for externals for the film Chocolat)

Last week end, as at the same time last year, they turned the lane next to our house Rue del Catet, into a tiny amphetheatre for a concert of Flamenco music.

The month finishes as it started in Pezenas, this is the galleried facade of Hotel Alphonse where Moliere used to stay. Quite my favourite building in France.

It is now close to four weeks since we left Ireland to come to France for the summer and I have managed about four blogs in that time. This however should soon change soon as we now, after fifteen months of effort and travelling down cul de sacs , have finally got broadband in Le Presbytere so now all we are missing is the house itself.
After a whole month of missed deadlines we think that we are going to regain temporary possession of our house on Thursday with some hope of moving in on Friday or at least Saturday.
Possession of a house with a thick layer of sticky plaster dust on everything, with all our possessions, hopefully packed against the builders in places we thought they would not venture, now in hopeless jumbles in completely different places.
(Note, there are no places that builders, or plumbers, or electricians do not venture)

We have, as already mentioned been incredibly fortunate to have been given the free use of a house in Faugeres for the duration and have even manager to fit in the earlier of the summer stream of visitors in this house.
However it will be great to move in to our own but better still when we manage to get it sufficietly clean to be habitable.

During this time it hasn’t been all work and no play, far from it.
We have enjoyed the sight of the Tour de France passing through the village, been in the centre of the wine festival of Faugeres made various trips to various beautiful villages in our area, and investigated swimming holes in the rivers around us but mainly enjoyed the pleasures of wonderfull sunny days and cool evenings eating and drinking chilled rose on the terrace of the house in Faugeres-the latter being I think the greatest pleasure of this and every summer here.

In the meantime I have stored up in various parts of my computer accounts of our various activities and as soon as I get the time, all will be revealed and shared.

In the meantime here is the first picture of the New Roof.
(Ours is the house on the left with the tree in the garden)

In response to Martine’s request I am now giving you some pictures of the work in progress in Le Presbytere.

Even though the place still looks extremely rough, and rather better in the flesh than in the shots, I accept that, if only to compare with the finished product, these should be published.

This is one I am rather proud of, a door which was never there before. We found in the attic and , despite his protests we persuaded the builder to install it.
It now looks as if it was there for ever.

This bedroom, which, for obvious reasons we call the fireplace room, at Clive’s insistance and again despite the builders objections, we cleared the false walls at both sides so that the fireplace again stands proud.
It makes a great difference.

This is a long shot of the Kitchen /living /diningroom.
The plumber has erected a tempory sink at the end for us for the summer as the kitchen proper won’t be installed until October.
Very much a work in progress this.

Just to give you an idea of how filthy and unfinished the house is we were there on Saturday at lunchtime and picniced in the garden rather than anywhere in the house

We are still in Faugères waiting for the builders to finish our house. They are trying really hard, I don’t know what the French for Blue Arsed Flies is-Mouches aux Culs Bleus?- but they are giving a fairly good imitation of the same in their efforts to finish the house, or at any rate to have it habitable for La Toute Irlande which we have threatened arrives on Sunday.
I think that we have now come to a compromise.
They are going to have their part of the ground floor and the first floor ready, basically the kitchen / living room and downstairs loo and four bedrooms with bathrooms, by Wednesday .Ready means the building work is done, the electrics will be in situ, the showers and loos will flow and flush.
The décor will be either half stripped wallpaper, cracked plaster, drunken cornices or brand new plasterboard and (in the bathrooms) tiling.
They will come back after the builders holidays in September and do the attic and generally finish off the job.
From Sunday of next week La Toute Irlande really does arrive.
We expect about 24 friends and relations to visit us in the next six weeks.
They will be installed in various parts of the house.
Our job, as soon a s the workers go, will be to remove the centimetres of layers of dust which now coat everything.
We are already pricing industrial vacuum cleaners.

The consoling thing is that we like all the work they have done so far.
The bathrooms do look a little tighter than expected but they are pristine and crisply tiled.
They builders and the plumbers have proved themselves adept at replacing tiles that they have damaged by clever substitution and even at replacing and reusing stuff like sinks and doors that they had previously discarded.

We now think the lowest moments, those when they seemed to be destroying our beautiful presbytery before our eyes, are now passed and now the place is starting to look better.
We are very likely wrong.