I am still reading Words of Mercury by Patrick Leigh Fermor, which is really a compendium of his travel writing.

I have just come across a piece he wrote for the Architectural Digest in 1986 about building his house in Greece.
He starts the piece with the following words:

“Where a man’s Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is, there shall his heart be also”

Having been lucky enough to inherit exactly that edition of those volumes from my parents, and having brought them down to Languedoc and deposited them in our house there just two weeks ago I feel I understand what he is saying.

While coming back from Languedoc last week Clive and I had a chance to explore the beautifully preserved Breton town of Dinan.
I have previously only managed to see Dinan in mid summer when it is black with tourists.

We went through it at 9.00 on a wet Sunday morning in March, empty but for ourselves and a few hardy souls so I felt I was seeing it for the first time.

This little roof sticking out of the side of a building caught Clive’s eye.
Look at it closely.

You will see that all the slates are carefully graded in size from the larger ones in the front to the little tiny ones at the back.
The building was at latest seventeenth century.
I was reminded of a lecture I attended about Irish chandeliers.
At this the lecturer told us that the very finest examples of chandelier were made in the 17th century. Then the prisms of glass were meticulously graded from the largest ones at the bottom to the smallest ones at the top therby giving the chandelier the illusion of extra height and elegance.
Wonderful to think that a 17th century French roofer thought his roof a thing of sufficient beauty to employ the same technique.

Our friend Petra thrust a book into my hand a few days ago and said “Take this Martin, I didn’t like it very much but I thought you might”
She is quite right.
The book is by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a travel writer of the mid twentieth century whom I have often read references to, but never actually read before.
I will be reading him from now on.

I am going to quote you a long passage from a piece he wrote in 1969 for, of all publications, Holiday Magazine.
When he was in his early twenties he decided to walk to Constantinople, he travelled sometimes sleeping in ditches or with shepherds in their bothys, at other times between silk sheets with the local gentry who recognised him as one of their own.
On this particular night he got lost by the shores of the Black Sea, fell, lost his torch and wounded, and seriously cold he stumbled into a cave occupied by Greek and Turkish fishermen and shepherds.
The fed him, dressed his wounds and when he produced a few bottles of Raki in thankfulness the party began.
There follows a description of Costa’s dance, I have never come across a dance better described;

“The next dance, on which Costa now embarked solo, was although akin to its forerunner, odder still. There was the same delay and deliberation, the same cigarette in the centre of his lips as he gazed at the ground with his eyes nearly closed and rotated on the spot with his hands crossed in the small of his back. Soon his arms lifted above his head and slowly soared in alternate sweeps before his lowered face, like a vulture rocking in a slow breeze with an occasional carefully placed crack of thumb and forefinger as the steps evolved.
The downward gaze, the precise placing of the feet, the sudden twirl of the body, the sinking on alternate knees, the sweep of an outstretched leg in three quarters of a circle with the arms out flung in two radii for balance- these steps and passes and above all the downward scrutiny were as though the dancer were proving, on the trodden fish scales and goat’s droppings, a lost theorem about tangents and circles, or retracting the conclusion of Pythagoras about the square of the hypotenuse.
But more striking still was the doomed aura that invested this dance, the flaunting so quickly muffled and the introvert and cerebral aloofness of the dancer. Absorption lifted him so far from the others in the cave that he might have been alone in a distant room, raptly applying ritual and undeviating devices to abstruse and nearly insoluble conundrums or exorcising a private and incommunicable pain. The loneliness was absolute. The voices and hands had grown silent, isolating the wiry jangle of the strings.
On a rock, lifted there to clear the floor, the round, low, heavy table was perched. Revolving past it , Costa leaned forward: suddenly the table levitated itself into the air, sailed past us, and pivoted at right angles to Costas head in a series of wide loops, the edge clamped firmly in his mouth and held there only by his teeth buried in the wood. It rotated like a magic carpet, slicing crescents out of the haze of smoke and soon travelling so fast that the four glasses on it, the chapfallen bagpipe with its perforated cow’s horn dangling, the raki flask, the knives and the spoons, the earthenware saucepan that had held the lentils and the backbones of the two mackerel with their heads and tails hanging over the edge of the tin plate, all dissolved for a few swift revolutions; then it redefined itself, when the pace dwindled into a slowly revolving still life.
As the dancer sank gyrating to floor level, firelight lit the table top; when he soared into the dark only the underside glowed.
He quickened his pace and reduced the circumferences of the circles by spinning faster and faster in the same place, his revolutions striking sparks of astonished applause through the grotto: cries which rose to an uproar. His head was flung back; muscles and veins corrugated his streaming features and his balancing arms were out flung like those of a dervish until the flying table itself melted into a vast disc twice its own diameter and spinning at such a speed at the cave’s centre that it should by rights have scattered the still life that it bore into the nether shadows.
Slowly the speed slackened. The table was looping through the smoke five feet from the floor. Soon it was sliding from its orbit and rotating back to its launching rock, unhurriedly alighting there at last with all its impedimenta undisturbed. Not once had the dancer’s hands touched it; but, the moment before it settled in its place, he retrieved the cigarette he had left burning on the edge of a plate. Dancing slowly back to the centre with no hint of haste or vertigo, he tapped away the long ash and replaced the cigarette in his mouth. Gyrating, sinking and rising again, he unwound the dance to its sober initial steps; then, straight as a wand and poised on tiptoe at his motionless starting point, he broke off and sauntered with lowered lids to the re-established table. Picking up his raki glass he took a meditative sip and, pokerfaced in the clamour, slowly subsided.”

I took these four pictures on the Normandy last week on my way back from France in a large swell.
I was hoping the difference in the horizon would show the movement of the boat.

Not as much as I hoped.

Oh Yes, I’ve just noticed the date.
Happy Birthday to me!

I have been wondering about the accent on the e of lès
In the formal spelling of Thèzan lès Béziers .
The dictionary yielded nothing.

We were fortunate to have Sile’s sister and her husband, Padraic de Bhaldraithe
Staying over the weekend and I laid the query firmly on Padraic’s lap.
(Him being the son of Ireland’s great lexicographer)

Padraic took the question to a French academic friend of his and got the following and very satisfying reply.

Bonjour,
En fait, c’est de l’ancien français et ça s’écrivait autrefois ‘lez’ et ça
veut dire ‘près de’, ‘à côté de’.

The accent was of great importance, the lès indicating that the village close to Béziers and has, as I suspected nothing to do with the plural of the definite article.

Many thanks to Padraic and to Martine Joulia for solving my little conundrum.

On February 19th we in Euro-Toques had our AGM and I handed on the mantle of Commissioner Generalship to the totally able hands of Lorcan Cribbin of Bang Café in Dublin.

I suppose my initial reaction was one of huge relief.
Relief that I had managed to keep the organisation running for two years without it foundering or getting into debt or the members organising a palace coup and having me deposed.

Despite the relief I am extremely grateful to Euro-Toques for giving me the opportunity to lead it for the two years, you never know whether or not you can do these sort of things until you try.

The highlights of my time in office were probably seeing my initiative with children’s food being brought into the classrooms by ourselves and Slow Food, the two seminars we held in Macreddin Village, (one on educating children about food and the one on Food Tourism,)and especially the Euro-Toque Food Awards and the great satisfaction of doing something which significantly helped these talented food people along the road.
The bits I will be glad to see the back of are the constant trips to Brussels, the catching of the early train to Dublin for meetings and the truly surprising moment which happened only last night when, at a Slow Food dinner when I realised that for the first time in two years I was attending a function at which I didn’t have to make a speech!

I must say that my two years in office were made possible by Ruth Hegarty, Euro-Toques secretary general, who with enormous tact managed to stop me making an ass of myself most the time.
Thanks Ruth!

Another highlight of course was young Peter Everett from Waterford Castle winning the Baileys Young Chef wreath in December, as I wasn’t even a member of the judging panel I can take no credit for this but I can take some credit for ensuring that my last official function in office happened in the same castle.

It was a superb night.
Michael Quinn, a talented and under awarded chef, pulled out all the stops and gave us a brilliant meal.
This included some delicious Brawn made from his own Ballymacaw Saddle Back pigs, a simple but lip smacking Chicken Broth made from Paul Crotty’s chickens and a most stunning Oxtail Pithivier which he served with the Venison.
Gilbeys also gave us superb wines for the night, the l’Explorateur Shiraz from the Barossa Valley lives with me still.

A careful reading of the menu speaks volumes of a chef who is neither afraid to innovate or to follow Escoffier’s dictum of; Faites Simple.
Well done Michael and Peter too.

That I was relieved by the end of the night I think was evident by my jubilant behaviour and I suppose I should apologise to all the people I hugged.
I should but I wont, I enjoyed it.
I will be staying on as a commissioner in Euro-Toques for the next two years so I will be able to attend all dinners and functions but without having to speak!

How could I resist this theatre in Chateaubriant in Brittany.

As far as I can see the glass bit is only the foyer but, knowing the ingenuity of French theatre people, I imagine they manage to get up to all sorts of shennagins in the same foyer when they want to entertain the people of the town.

As seen from the van as we flashed home along the motorway.

The night of last Saturday week was the first night I slept in the Presbetery in Thezan.
On all previous attempts we have found it impossible to get into the church.
It has remained firmly locked, even on a Sunday morning.
To my great joy I heard a great carillon of bells on the Sunday morning after my first night and, looking out the window I saw the church doors open.
I ran up to it immediately.
I was greeted by a lady who apoligised profusely but said their would be no mass today, instead they were having a prayer meeting.
Once I explained that I was the Irishman who had bought the presbytery I was welcomed warmly and had no trouble getting permission to borrow the keys later to take some photos of the church.

My little cup overflowed when by the door I found a statue of the old exhibitionist and dog himself; St Roch.
There he was coyly lifting his skirts enticingly just yards from my new house.

The best omen yet.

St Roch de Thezan

After we had bought the house in Languedoc Sile and I started to agonise about how we were going to convert it into a B&B. We know what we want to achieve but our problem, as always, has been to find the best way to get there.
In fact we were back from France , fresh from our offer on the house having been accepted, and trying to decide how in hell we were going to turn this huge old fashioned presbytery into a functional Chambre d’Hote and still retain its old French character, when we had the almost simultaneous solution;
Maybe Clive would design the conversion for us.
Clive and Sue Nunn have been close friends of ours now for over thirty years, Sue is the anchor woman of KCLR and Clive is a man of many talents. He has been an antique furniture restorer, a cabinet maker, a furniture designer, an interior designer in fact he can turn his eye to anything where his great visual intelligence can be employed.
He designed the original Dwyers Restaurant and then again the complete conversion we did twelve years later.
He has always acted as our eyes when we wanted to buy, change or restore any building and we also have several favourite pieces of furniture which he designed for us. He was always going to be the obvious person for the presbytery but we were almost nervous to ask him because it was a job so far from home.
We needn’t have worried.
Before we even had the deeds signed and before he could touch a piece of the building Sue and himself came with us to Thezan and did a check of La Presbytere.
The fates were on our side, Clive approved, and even better, like the two of us he fell in love with it.
I knew that we had hooked him when he called in the following week and told me that he and I were going to Languedoc in February, with his van full of my furniture, to make a survey of the building, crack into walls to see what they were made of (and what loads they were bearing), check services and decide how best the job should be done.
I felt as if a great burden had been lifted.
Clive not only has a golden eye he also has a great ability to listen, the jobs he has done for us in the past have always sprung from our wants and desires but he has always succeeded in transforming our rough ideas into practical and aesthetically pleasing results.

So on Wednesday 21st March, under our wives sceptical gaze (how could we possibly survive without them!) we headed off to Rosslare, the Renault Traffic bursting with the contents of our attic (including a fridge freezer and my entire collection of antique glass) to catch the ferry to Cherbourg.
Clive was suffering from an eye infection and was complaining of being in some pain. Now as I know, Clive is a product of the English public school system and as such does not admit to ever feeling pain, I was well aware that this pain must be considerable.
He was reassuring, he had just been to a specialist eye doctor who had assured him that is was an infection on some old scar tissue on his eye and that a course of antibiotics would have him as right as rain in a couple of days.
Shortly after we sailed it became obvious that this was not happening, instead of getting better Clive’s eye was becoming more painful.
Still he was convinced by the given diagnosis and after a tempestuous crossing we arrived late in Cherbourg and decided to check into an Ibis for the night and proceed towards Languedoc in the morning.

By the morning Clive realised that he had hit his pain threshold.
He knew that he had to have some medical treatment, and have it fast .
After a quick call to Sile to get the words for scar (cicatrice) and pain (douleur) we got a taxi to the hospital in Cherbourg.
The Urgences (A & E) department in Cherbourg Hospital was incredible.
There was no queue, we were the only people there, within minutes we had been signed through, been seen by a doctor and were been led up to the eye department to see the consultant Ophtalmalogiste.
Although this man was not particularly sympa, he immediately and thoroughly examined Clive’s eye and came up with an immediate diagnosis; Ocular Herpes.
He then gave us a prescription for a cornucopia of drugs and a list of instructions which were beyond my French to understand.
(As my French comprehension is better than Clive’s it was accepted that I should attend all consultations. The medical training of France seems not to contain any element of language training.)

The message was clear, the diagnosis in Ireland was incorrect and the antibiotic treatment useless for his condition.

It was with some hope then that we bought up a chemist shop of drugs, taxied back to the van (in which we had had the foresight to insure me) and started to crack the 800 odd miles to Thezan Les Beziers.

It became evident fairly soon that the drugs from Cherbourg (of which the most important was a Zovirox pomade to be squirted into the eye) were not going to give immediate relief.
It was a sunny day and the poor unfortunate patient spent most of the day, head in hands, obviously in agony.
We managed about 400 miles along the motorway, as far as Saintes, when we decided to stop in a hotel for the night.
The following day, as soon as the sun hit him, Clive became convinced that he needed further help.
What if the second diagnosis was also incorrect?
We made the decision, for better or worse, to head the extra 400 miles to Bezier where I could easily find the hospital and then would have a nearby base in my house in Thezan until the situation would resolve.

There followed another journey from hell.
Clive by this stage was not just in pain he was also ill.
Despite the sun he insisted in having the heater on full blast to warm him.
(This from a man who cut most of a finger off on a band saw and had to be beaten into Kilkenny for treatment)

I had a friend in Beziers who was able to give accurate directions to the hospital so, by lunchtime we were sitting in the Urgences in Beziers hospital.

This was not the wonderful calm area we had seen in Cherbourg.
This was chaotic and bloody like our own dear A & E departments.
However before too long we did manage to see the doctor in charge.
I was under the impression he was taking this a little lightly so I rose to the occasion, drew myself up to my best French and fairly shouted that Monsieur was a man of Grand Courage and was in Incroyable Douleur.

Something seemed to do the trick because we were quickly told that the Ophtalmiste had been summoned from home (it was a Saturday afternoon) and would be with us in an hour.

Within the hour a chic blonde and pretty thirty five year old came for us and gently led us from the horrors of Urgences to the cool modernity of her futuristic consulting rooms.
We both knew instantly that all our troubles were over.
This woman was an angel.

Within seconds she had Clive out of pain, a bed in the hospital organised for him and with a wave of her magic stethoscope had turned two gibbering wrecks into human beings again.
(Her dossier for canonization is already with the Vatican)
She neither agreed or disagreed with the herpes diagnosis, and when Clive began to tell her about his VHI insurances she shrugged as if this was of the most minor importance.
“Here we are in France Monsieur, not the United States”

I wanted to cheer.

I was now off the hook so I headed out to Thezan to unload the van and try and make myself some sort of a nest in this uninhabited empty house.
To its great credit it welcomed me with open arms.
Within an hour I had an empty van (a kindly neighbour had shouted over did I want a Coup de Main)- furthermore as the sun was shining I had ensconced my self on a deck chair on the terrace and was fast finding my way down a bottle of one of my favourite tipples, the local Picpoul de Pinet.
The Angel of Beziers had saved us.

The following day I called to see Clive in hospital.
He was a new man, pain all gone, health restored in a semi private room he was already flirting outrageously with the nurses despite the restrictions of being on two separate drips and dressed in a hospital issued backless paper dress.
The Herpes diagnosis was confirmed, so , in the end, his decision to travel on to France had been vindicated.

By Monday he was out of hospital, with another million drugs, and we were both settled in my beautiful and welcoming house in Thezan.
And within hours Clive had succeeded in turning on the water, a skill that had proved beyond me.

Clive’s immediate concern was that we still accomplish our objective so by Sile’s good graces and skilful use of the internet we postponed our return journey until Sunday and started to work.

The house yielded up its secrets gracefully and the fates, as if to compensate us for our troubled journey down, provided no hidden house terrors.
It is going to convert beautifully.

We actually managed to have a great time for the remaining week.

As we were working hard during the days the nights were certainly for enjoyment.
On Tuesday we were enjoying an excellent meal in La Chamberte in Villeneuve ( where Sile and I had stayed before Christmas) when a beautiful Sri Lankan lady entered, and to my astonishment her husband came over to me with hand extended, it was Richard, one of the auctioneers from whom we had bought the house.
Such moments really make me feel at home in Beziers.
The following morning I went to the chemist to collect some pills for Clive and the Pharmacist amazed me by knowing exactly who I was, what we were doing with the presbytery.
It turned out that he was a great rugby fan and had been at the two matches in Croke Park.
(“ I am so ‘appy you beat England”)

Being the man with the (marginally) better French I also had to do a lot of the organising and was immensely satisfied to crack the French automatic petrol pump, and then even more so to succeed in cutting a swathe through the French bureaucratic system and getting a “permission to dump” card without the necessary permit de sejour.
This also permitted us to dump all of the old nuns’ detritus from the house in the van in the local (and free) Decheterie

We had picked the brains of the excellent Jannis, the wine waiter in La Chamberte, so on Thursday we took an empty van on the road and, having had an incredible hour or two of retail therapy in Ikea in Montpellier (how do they manage to be so cheap!) we went on a wine buying binge.
We filled the van with the superb Viognier of La Madeleine in Marseillan,some of my mothers milk; Picpoul de Pinet, the excellent reds which we had brought home from a previous holiday in Cabrieres and the even more stunning (but way more expensive) Fougeres of La Tour Penedesse.

On Friday we made a serious attempt to have the house clean for Sile as we come across in April- well Clive did, should the truth be known, as he had at this stage began to realise that I was not, like him, a natural cleaner.

On Saturday we belted back on the motorway, this time with Clive rather than me doing most of the driving.
By this stage I had begun to realise that he was not a natural navigator!
(And that after an unintended tour of Centre Ville Bordeaux)

We had an excellent stopover in La Guerche de Bretagne where the Caleche; a restaurant with rooms, provided us with exactly what the Michelin said it would; Genereuse cuisine de terroir and Chambres functionelles.
Sile’s brother and sister in law, Brian and Beth, have a house nearby, close to Dinan, and had Colm , another brother of Sile’s, staying with them there. They gave us a great Sunday lunch of French chickens and far too many French cheeses before we headed back to the boat in Cherbourg.

The crossing was another tempest, I am just grateful that Sile, who is prone to seasickness, wasn’t with us.

Rosslare greeted us with howling winds and lashing rain.

This was enough convince me that I have made the right decision to have at least a toehold in La Belle France.
They certainly do better food, weather and now I have also discovered: medicine.