I know I included a small version of this shot in yesterdays piece but couldn’t resist giving it another whirl in a larger format which just shows off the lovely sky.

More travelogue I’m afraid.

As we left Carcassonne on Monday last in our hired car and headed towards Faugeres, via Thezan, across country, it quickly struck us both that we were seeing an aspect of France never before seen by either of us.
We have spent so much time there in the last years that it now seems remarkable that this was to be the first time either of us had been in any part of France during May or June, and boy did it look different.

There was a greenness and lushness to nature which we just had not seen before. Late spring, it appears, is the rainy season and the display was so good that we forgave the day of rain we had to go through while we were there this time.

Our own garden which was flourishing, producing great displays of Irises, terrific roses, and countless other flowers all granted to us by a previous green fingered nun.

The tree though was the greatest delight, we have now established that it is an Indian Lilac but this was the first time we had seen it in flower.
The blossom was quite discreet but very pretty and the scent, a mild lilac sweetness which perfumes the whole place is just beautiful.
Something to look forward to, each May, from now on.

We were also delighted to find that, possibly due to last summer’s watering, our citrus (lemon, orange or lime, we don’t know yet) tree is now green and healthy looking.

Virtually the only crop of the area of Herault we live in is the vine but these had now recovered from their February pruning and were in good growth.
It rather surprised us on a walk to see a large wood still remaining in the centre of the vines but then we discovered that it was an oak wood, obviously retained for the symbiotic relationship between its roots and another cash crop of the area, the truffle.

The little Bothys, or Bories which dot the vines here are an indication of the method of farming and living. Because the farmers don’t live in farms in the vineyards, but sensibly together in villages, they usually have a little hut, sometimes big enough to fit a bed, to keep their tools for their vine maintenance.

Here you see an example of a spreading movement in our local vine fields.
The old, “wine lake” war horse vines, with grapes like the Carignan, are being dug up and ruthlessly ploughed in to make room for the newer finer grape varieties so that Languedoc can compete in international markets by producing quality instead of quantity. (Our own wine co-op in the village went bust last year so there is extensive replanting happening around us)

We have decided to add to the vine harvest our selves by planting a vine in our garden, this is however a Chasselais, a white table grape which will, we hope provide us with some dessert grapes in a few years time.

Okay, this is the start of it.
All you people who have no interest in our renovation job on the Presbytery can switch off now for a while because this is where I feel I am going to get a little obsessed.

The Presbytery in Thezan les Beziers (or the pres in thez les bez as some of my less respectful friends call it) was being lived in up to about three years before we bought it but by three nuns who were not interested in being in “Homes and Gardens”, or to be fair “Homes” the garden shows evidence of long loving care.
One of the first things I did (and you can read back through the archives and find all this stuff) was to bring out my great friend, the designer Clive Nunn to the place and on his plan we decided to destruct and rebuild the inside of this house. In the process is the intention to turn a three reception, four bedroom, large atticed, one bathroom house into a two reception (one a huge kitchen, living, dining room) six bedroom five bathroom chambre d’hote or bed and breakfast.

About six weeks ago a builder, an electrician and a plumber (this is the French way) were asked to do the job and we arrived out on Monday last for our first view of the work in progress.

We were very pleased.

The work was well under way, at least the destruction part of it from the builder and the plumber and electrician had also been busy laying pipes and cables.

Out original kitchen and dining room had been joined to provide us with a rather magnificent large public space.

I have spent the last while trying to work out the size of the area we now have, difficult because the house is in the centre of a “Circulade” or traditional Languedoc spiral village, which means that the width of street side of the room is roughly 4 metres, the opposite end is closer to 6 metres.
As far as this maths duffer can go it looks like the whole room is about 600 square feet. in other words its a good size.

This is it from the north (the street)

And this the room from the south (the terrace)

These are (let me hasten to add) the “befores” destructed but unrenovated shots)

Now this is where it gets interesting.

You will notice in the next shot;

The beginings of a hole in the wall in the middle right hand side.

When Mario, our builder came to see us he said that he had been waiting for us to break this through to see what we would find.

Well, to all of our amazement it turned out to be a doorway into next door (at the moment, Deo Gratias unoccupied) The decision was quickly made to build back the neighbours wall and to turn this opportunity into a glass displaying cupboard.
Then I pointed out a similar anomily on the opposite wall of the room.

This turned out to be exactly the same, but of course, in this instance leading into our corridor.
This becomes another glass display.

The strangeness of these doorways seems to reinforce a theory I have now held about the house for some time.

Given that the church is thirteenth century (or thereabouts) and that our presbytery is one of the closest houses to the church I have made the fair assumption that the origins of our house must be similar.
The cellar shows all the appearances of being contemporary with the church.

Given the new evidence of doorways running laterally through the house at the south side I have now decided that at one stage out house was devided laterally.
The northern side, on the street by the church was likely the parochial house, interconnecting with the house next door (which has a far more impressive portal) the southern half was a typical “Maison de Vigneron” with a steps up to the front door over a cellar.
The one problem with this is that there is no southern access.
My theory is that there was a ruelle or lane to the south (which is now part of our garden) which gave access to the south but that this was changed in the 1900s when the original presbytery (at number1) became the girls school and our number 14 became the Maison de Cure.
The ruelle was then comanderred to become Le Jardin du Cure, where the priest could say his office.

Well its a good theory I think, my wife thinks its hilarious.

Post Scriptum

I have just remembered a book written many years ago by Julia O Faoilean called (I think) The Woman in the Wall about a medieval nun who decided to entomb herself, alive, in the wall of the abbey she lived in.
Given the history of our house maybe we should have been a little more circumspect before we opened up these secret holes!

or
Yes I know there is a different fauna in the south of France but……

We were in our house in Thezan (briefly) last week -of which more in the next few days- sitting on the terrace when we had a strange and close encounter.

I had been hearing a pecular hooting noise and had assumed the the child next door had got a new noddy car, and was parping away, when with a certain ungainly crash of feathers this creature arrivend on the wall over our terrace and stared malevolently at us through the wires on which we hang our sunshade.

A peacock!

Before I had time to do much more than reach for the camera there was a second rattle of feathers and his brother, with a far prettier neck, landed next to him.

Then the two of them proceeded to eye our tiny garden with much interest.
(It is the only patch of green in the centre of the village)

Having seen how awkardly they flew, and knowing how vicious they could be when crossed we were rather unwelcoming and-to avoid having two huge monsters squatting in our patch of turf- we took the brush to them and persuaded them to move on.

With some reluctance, and a great show of elegant dignity, our two beauties picked their way off over the tiles.

Where they had come from nobody seems to know, they must be from some local chateau kept for their decorative value. neither had a tail which made us think at first they must be female but according to the books they were much too gaudy to be hens.

Are we going to find them ensconced in the garden on our return?

“In French, Italian and Spanish ‘time’ and ‘weather’ are the same words(temps, tempo,tiempo), a sure sign of the reassuring regularity of the seasons and the sun. Even more tellingly, heaven and the sky in most romance languages are the same (ciel or cielo). In the south they can see or imagine heaven when they look up into the infinite celestial blue.”
And what do we see here?
“The clue is in the derivation of the word sky. Its root is the Old Norse for cloud”

From Sunshine: One Man’s Search for Happiness by Robert Mighall

While I was in Ballymaloe last week, actually at the school waiting for Darina to finish a class and have a meeting about Waterford’s Terra Madre, I noticed a familiar face running the shop there.

I must give you a bit of history here.

In the early eighties I worked as chef in a restaurant in Waterford called Ballinakill House run by George and Susie Gossip and their best friends and frequent callers were Tim and Darina Allen who used to arrive down with their kids for weekends and the same kids , as kids do, used to often end up in the kitchen.
The familiar face in the shop, whom I would not have seen for about twenty five years, was I was fairly sure one of these kids.

It turned out to be Toby, their younger son.
Once I explained to him my tenuous connection to his extreme youth he delighted me by remembering these times in Ballinakill and, in true Allen fashion remembering it through a taste.
“You are the chef who made the fantastic Pistachio Ice Cream!” he said.
I was, and he had made a friend for life by remembering.

My daughter Caitriona is here for the weekend and I was telling her the story of Toby and the Pistachio Ice cream and she suddenly remembered a chocolate Ice cream which I had made at home about the same time.
A chocolate Ice cream with chocolate chips in it.

Very impulsively I decided to make it immediately so it would be frozen enough to eat after dinner tonight.

Dark Double Chocolate Ice Cream
4x100g bars of very Dark (70%) Chocolate
3 Tablespoons milk
6 Egg yolks
110g Sugar
50ml Water
200g Cream
200g Crème Fraiche
2 Tablespoons Caster Sugar

Melt three bars of the chocolate with the milk either in a bowl over simmering water or at defrost in a microwave.
Let it cool.
Chop the other into chips.
Put the sugar and the water together in a small saucepan, bring to the boil and simmer together until the bubbles start to move slowly, about five minutes.

Beat the yolks with an electric beater until frothy and then dribble in the hot syrup slowly beating all the time.
Now continue beating these until they are cool, white and thick-another five minutes or so.

Beat the cream in another bowl until thick and then beat in the Crème Fraiche until that also thickens.

Now fold together the yolks, melted chocolate and the chips with the creams and pour into boxes and freeze.
Because so much air has been captured by this method you do not need to churn or stir.But do take it out of the freezer and put it into the fridge for about an hour before you want to serve it.

Happy Birthday Síle

In the early 80s I ran a fish restaurant in the Strand Hotel in Dunmore East .
I normally got my fish from the auction in Dunmore but one day I was caught short and had to go into Waterford town to Flanagan’s Fish merchants to get some to top up my supply.
I couldn’t find a handy place to park the car so had to park in Christchurch Cathedral a couple of hundred yards from the fish shop.
I got two large bags of live prawns which proceeded to wriggle desperately as I clutched them both to my breast on the way back to the car. As I was crossing the road to the cathedral one managed to escape and lay in the middle of the road doing spectacular back flips. To put down my wriggling bags would have been a disaster so a made a bolt for the car , hurled the prawns into the boot and turned to collect the prodigal.
He was still there, twitching, in the middle of the road but had managed to attract a small audience of astounded and alarmed people. As I looked at them a man who had been closely studying the twitcher raised his eyes from the prawn and looked, questioningly , straight up into the sky.
I abandoned the prawn, got back into my car and slowly drove away.

(On such incidents does The Fortean Times acquire copy)

Sky, Sea, and Sand at the back strand Tramore.

I was at a meeting in Ballymaloe today, a planning meeting for the Terra Madre in Waterford in September.
There were just five of us at the meeting, among them two of my food heroes, Myrtle Allen and her daughter-in-law Darina, when we were interrupted by a visiting third food hero.
It was Alice Waters, who was staying in Ballymaloe and she had popped by to see Darina.
To say I was impressed would be the understatement of the year.
I must confess to having done quite a lot of fawning, some sycophanting and (if the other committee members are to be believed) even some grovelling.

As I shook her hand I told her how marvellously she had spoken in Turin last year at the Terra Madre there, offered to put her up chez nous should she decide to come to Waterford for our Terra Madre and generally made a total twit of myself.

However no regrets.

I still think that Alice Waters, perhaps alone among my food heroes, is worthy of a good grovel.