Just a warming reminder of summer on the terrace last June, Summer is just bound to be a coming in as soon as this freaking Tramontane goes away.
(I hope you all recognise yourselves)

When it comes to gardening chez nous (or indeed cleaning but that is another story) there is no doubt about who is the boss and indeed harder worker ; it is Síle.

Whereas I will retire to the kitchen and sulk when life becomes too much for me Síle retires to the garden- and there performs miracles.

This is a picture of our garden as we first saw it nearly six years ago- not a lot of promise there.
A lot of people would have thrown up their hands, called in a man and a rotavator and started again from scratch.

Not our Síle.

She felt, correctly, that underneath this wilderness of weeds lay a structured garden, created and loved by the various encumbants of the house, the priests, the housekeepers and latterly the three sisters who were the last vestiges of the church here.

With some help from D’s boyfriend Ano, she started to clear the wilderness.
A secret garden gradually appeared, all laid out in little paths outlined by stones, and planted with all manner of shrubs and flowers.
For the last five years she has mantained, weeded, watered and loved the garden , despite having to relearn every thing she had learned in Ireland- plants here by the Mediterranean behaved in totally different ways, exotics became easily nurtured, commomplace Irish standby plants became exotics.
That which the drought and the extreme summer heat did not kill the sudden and unexpected frosts of winter did.
In short every aspect of gardening is more difficult out here.

In all this time my principal role in the proceedings was to be occasionally called in for the heavier lifting and to try and help with sorting out the long term problem about how to make the place more visitor friendly.

Every year brought a different solution, the stone paving , when priced, was way above our means,sowing with grass seed, we were warned from the start, was a long uphill battle with the elements during the summer, gravel was affordable but really hard on the feet and on small grandsons knees, a wooden patio would be totally out of keeping with the stone walls which surrounded it.

It was when Síle started in desperation, to vaguely contemplate the awful possibility of laying an artificial lawn (amazingly common out here) that she realised that there was yet another possibility, that of laying an already grassed lawn of turf sods.

So now this is where we stand, a square in the centre of the ground has been cleared (leaving standing our old (possibly on its last legs) pink Oleander.
This has been dug over and now must be further aerated and then levelled.
We then must order our sods (the cost coming in at an affordable €3.50 per square metre, we need about 12) then collect and lay these.

I will keep you informed as to our progress.

I notice that our most recently purchased crop of pears are all sporting fetching little red wax berets- presumably this adds to their life span.

I had an odd encounter when I was in Spain briefly, to see my sister D, earlier this year.
I discovered that, staying in the same hotel, was my old French teacher, a man we always, with stunning originality, called Froggy.
I made myself known to him and he (incredibly) recognised me from the thin blond skinny spotty thing I was fifty years ago.
During the course of our conversation I discovered that a teacher with whom I had a particular antipathy had been punished after my departure.
A barking dog in the street was disturbing one of his classes so he sent first one and then another of his pupils out to silence it. Both were unsuccessful so, exasperated he decided to do the job himself. Sutane flying and in a cloud of chalk dust he descended on the animal and was then bitten twice for his pains and had to be rushed to the nearest hospital for stitches.

Such was this man’s ability to inflict pain with “The Leather” that the school went into universal rejoicing.

But that of course is not at all the point of this piece.
I have a clear memory of my very first class with the same Froggy, he started to teach us the colours in French. Rouge, he explained, gave us the word for the red pigment then universally applied by our mothers to their pale cheeks, French yellow, jaune, gave us a very common disease of the time Jaundice, which turned us yellow.
The following day he arrived in to examine us on our colours and we dutifully stuck up our hands to answer the questions.
I can clearly remember one fellow in the class, I can even remember his name, it was Pat Mc Carthy and he was so small his mother had kept him in short pants as she must have thought he was not tall enough yet for “Longers”.
Anyway this Pat, when asked the French word for “Green” arrived at a perfectly appropriate answer (given the French inclination to name their diseases after colours) : It was he said ;”Gangrene”.

Catherine Cleary, whom I met at the Waterford Writers Weekend a few weeks ago and to whom I told my life story over lunch, visited L’Atmosphere (and Languedoc nearly) on this morning’s Irish Times.

A perfect piece of France
L’Atmosphere, Waterford

CATHERINE CLEARY

EATING OUT: Close your eyes in Waterford’s L’Atmosphere and it’s not too hard to imagine you’re sitting in a sun-soaked Languedoc square

MARTIN DWYER DID what many of us dream about on the last night of a great holiday. The Cork-born chef, who was running his own restaurant in Waterford, upped sticks with his wife Síle and bought a 12th-century presbytery in a Languedoc village to run as a chambre d’hôte.

Nearly six years later, has the reality lived up to the dream? “Even more so than I expected,” he says after a reading at the Waterford Writers’ Weekend. And the best bit? It’s the end of the day when he gets to sit with his guests on the terrace and share the meal he has cooked for them. These meals can go long into the night as the wine and the sun go down and the swallows swoop . . . Okay, he didn’t mention swallows. But that’s what I’m imagining.

The links between Waterford and France go way back. It was Huguenot bakers who brought the blaa here. The city has three French-run restaurants at the moment. And while parts of Waterford have a bleak shopping-district blandness, its Cathedral Square on a bright evening could almost be a perfect French town square, only missing a war monument and sun-baked stone streets. Running down from Cathedral Square there’s Henrietta Street, a steep narrow terrace leading to the river. And halfway down there’s a perfect piece of France in a small restaurant called L’Atmosphere, which is owned by owned by French chefs Arnaud Nary and Patrice Garreau.

I’m on my own, with no booking, on a busy Saturday night, but thankfully it’s still early and the people of Waterford seem to be taking the late French dining habits to heart. I’m sat in a small brownish annex to the main restaurant (which is small enough already). It seems a little like the naughty corner, but I’m glad to get any table in a place where the food smells coming from the kitchen are so welcoming.

Relaxation is at the heart of the great French meal. It’s a leisurely stroll rather than a sprint, and the French bistro creates the comfort zone by offering set menus. So before you step through the door, you know what the bill is likely to be at the end of the night. Here there is a €20 three-course menu between 5pm and 7pm. The €20 includes a glass of wine, which is terrific value if the food is as good as it smells. I’m going with the €35 menu (three courses after 7pm) and a €4.50 glass of the house red.

A platter of mixed starters is a jazz-hands start to the meal, showing exactly what this kitchen can do. It includes a snail drenched in garlic butter, half a scallop, a prawn fried crisply in its shell, a glass of creamy fish soup, strips of delicious fried bread, a velvety chicken liver pate and a quenelle of the loveliest combination – globe artichoke and fish-egg tapenade.

It might be as culinarily cliched as a beret and a string of onions, but the boeuf bourguignon is still, as Julia Child put it, “one of the most delicious beef dishes concocted by man”. At L’Atmosphere it’s done superbly.

The first thing to arrive at the table is a book-sized chunk of timber; it’s the pot stand for the devilishly hot black cast-iron pot in which my main course has been slowly cooking for what tastes like long, sweet hours.

The lid comes off, as beautifully as any polished silver dome, and a steam of red wine, beef, lardons, carrots and potatoes rises into the room. The meat (beef cheeks, I reckon) has been cooked down to silken strands that barely require chewing. There are perfect button mushrooms, generous chunks of potato and carrot and a last-minute sprinkling of micro chives over it. The lardons have released glistening beads of fat into the wine and beef stock. It is the king of stews.

The île flottante dessert is a similarly retro-treat, the means by which a frugal French kitchen used up the egg whites left over from a batch of creme brulees. It harks back to a better time when kitchens weren’t using bottled eggs to make their desserts. Here it comes as light as air, an egg-white island bobbing on its vanilla sauce with a caramel tuille and coffee granité. Some teeny home-made chocolate cookies round off the treat.

Failing an escape to the Languedoc, going to L’Atmosphere is a little like being on holiday, or finding a special restaurant that you just want to keep to yourself.

Dinner for one with a glass of wine came to €39.50.

L’Atomosphere

19 Henrietta Street, Waterford, tel: 051-858426

We have at last decided, I think, what we are about to do with the garden.
Having considered gravel, stone , wood , beaten earth, and various other expensive, shoddy, uncomfortable or inappropriate surfaces on the ground we seem to have gone for the obvious solution, that is the obvious solution in Ireland but not here : Grass.

Then following the various books- inevitably written by British ex-pats- which contain extensive advice on what type of grass to use, we decided to go and have a look at some to make up our minds.
The first decision, easily made, is that we will not attempt to spread grass seed ourselves, a difficult and often unrewarding job in this climate- all the books tell you that you are much better to prepare your ground and then lay sods. (no giggling there at the back)

The French word for these types of sods is Gazons.
It seems we had several distributers of Gazons here in the Languedoc, all offering, according to their websites, a wide variety of different sods with different types of grass.
Without exception each of the nearer ones scoffed when we asked them what type of grass they offered- there was only one, and No, we couldn’t see a sample, they only cut it to order some place else and then we could collect it, sight unseen, but money upfront, at their convenience.
One particularly impressive website seemed to offer us more, the Gazoniere was very close to Montpellier, about 80 klms from us, but I managed to persuade Síle that the journey was worth the effort.

We headed off this morning at 10ish on our journey. Before we left we had decided to make another few calls on the way to the Gazoniere, one to another
turf cutter in Florensac, and one to Pinet to purchase gazillions of Picpoul.

Those errands done we discover that the hour is fast approaching noon, lunch time in France so, like the good French people we have become, we get a little peckish and where better to get peckish that at the edge of the Bassin de Thau, wher the very best Oysters and Mussels are produced. (As God is my judge I had not planned this-well truth to tell it had crossed my mind)
We parked in Bouzigues, which is really a village of seafood restaurants, and then walked up and down, reading menus, for a happy fifteen minutes deciding which one we would honour with the Dwyer presence.
As all of them basically offered the same menu, plateaux of Fruits de Mer, Oysters etc we eventually decided to make our decision purely on price. Most of the set three course lunches were about the €20 mark, one brave man alone Bruno at Restaurant 29, offered one at €14.90.

Well given the limitations of what was on offer we ate there extremely well.
Madame, after a few unpleasant encounters with the bivalve, no longer eats oysters. I thrive on them.
While she tucked into a superb fish soup, with all the cheese, crouton, rouille trimmings, I had a platter of Oysters and Mussels all beautifully served on a bed of cracked ice and seaweed. I chomped and slurped my way happily through them.
For my main course I had a rather luxurious version of Moules Frites as the moules were dressed with an excellent white wine and shallot sauce and Madame had some barely cooked and excellent Swordfish (I bartered some for some of my chips)
With this we drank a typical chilled Picpoul, and then finished with the national dessert of the Languedoc- Creme Catalan-a cross between Creme Caramel and Creme Brulee.
All this with change from €40.00.

We then headed off top our Gazoniere.
Comme Toujours he only had one choice but he was able to offer us a view of the sods he would cut for us- a sufficient enticement for me to want to return and buy from him.

If it hadn’t been for the excellent lunch in Bouzigues one might have thought it a waste of a day.

Yes I know I am am in danger of becoming a major medical bore but I cannot resist this last bit.

The brother Ted had prostate cancer a few years ago and he also submitted the story of his successful operation to the Irish Times Health section where it was featured.

Last week, because like me he is a man who likes to stir it, he sent a copy of my piece (“Surgeon sings as he works on my heart”) from a few weeks ago in to his surgeon.

His surgeon obviously enjoyed this as he sent him the following reply:

Very nice Ted! You know… I was singing too, but you were asleep. Too
bad, we might have got that into our article!
🙂
Well done to you both.
Must be a new record to have you both record your stories in the IT

It seems it is a family failing to air our operations in public.

The brother Ted spotted this wonder being used to knock on doors- I wonder who she represents.

At the MonCiné in Beziers they take part in the Metropolitan Opera HD season and broadcast Operas live from time to time from the Met in New York.
About two years ago we went to a production of Lucia with Natalie Dessay which was a wonderful evening’s entertainment. Last year we had gone to the ballet from the Paris Opera Ballet; Les Enfants de Paradis which hadn’t been as stimulating. In January we turned up to see Mozart’s Don Giovanni only to have it cancelled at the last moment as one of its stars had an illness.
Last night’s Live from the Met, was La Traviata, again with Natalie Dessay in the title role and, as this is one of the very few operas I am familiar with since my youth, we headed off with much anticipation.
Act one didn’t let us down, the singing was magical, Dessay’s voice liquid beauty, the tenor also sounded so good one was prepared to overlook the fact that has acting ability was not up to much and the baritone, a Russian, with an impossible name, and a great head of white hair looked likely to be able to produce the act two showstopper, Di Provenza with élan.
Just at the intermission after act one our little world was turned upside down. Sirens went off in the Cinema and we were told to form a queue and leave the building in an orderly style. Now the MonCiné is on the very top floor of a huge new shopping in Beziers called the Polygone.
With sirens blaring the (fairly full) cinema started to shuffle off towards the door they had come in. This was the moment when a little Irish initiative seemed in order. As we shuffled off I noticed a stairway with a lit emergency exit sign, to the obvious alarm of the shuffling people around us I headed off down the stair, with Sile following, and managed to wrench the door at the bottom open.
We found ourselves in the very alimentary canal of the Polygone, in a well-lit but entirely industrial concrete block stairway. At every floor there was a bolted door but I soon discovered how they were opened and, now followed by about twenty, mainly elderly French people, we headed towards safety.
We were spurred on a little by the nasty smell of smoke which seemed to be coming up from the very bottom of the building where the car park was.
We eventually hit the light of day at the entrance to the car park where a huge vent from there was pouring out acrid smoke. We were sent over to one side by the Sapeurs Pompier, passing a huge mobile air pump manned by firemen and an open ambulance where a young man was being fed oxygen through a mask. We discovered that a fire had somehow started in a car in the car-park and this was being put out but the whole area was now filled with smoke.
The next half hour or so was spent with an ever dwindling number of French people perched by the car-park entrance while various little dramas were taking place. Two distraught dog owners arrived and explained that they had left their dogs in parked cars in the basement; two heroic Sapeurs donned gas masks and disappeared into the smoky depths to emerge later and to applause carrying a miniature yapping dog.
We eventually went around to the front of the centre only to find business more or less as usual and when we climbed the stairs to the cinema found that the opera showing had been restarted and that those who had shuffled out the front door were re-seated enjoying act three.
We were given an option of a complete refund or to continue watching the show so we went back to see it through. Unfortunately New York had not had the consideration to delay their matinee in the Met to allow for the car-park fire in Beziers so we completely missed Act 2 and just got back in time for the Di Provenza in Act 3.
Somehow though the magic had been taken from the evening and it was until the final death scene that I felt truly involved again.
Earlier, outside the building as we were being eaten by midges, an elderly French lady (one of my followers down the fire escape) said that they usually see these transmissions in Montpellier and “Nothing like this ever happens in Montpellier”.
Maybe that is where we should go for next years offerings.

Canigou, Lord of the Pyrenees, still covered with snow, photographed through the lens of my binoculars from the terrace this morning.