Aonghus Caitriona and Fionn in the Park on Sunday.

When ever we went to France on holidays there were two books which we always consulted.
For eating we always checked with the Michelin Red Guide , not so much to eat in restaurants with Stars- normally much too expensive for us- but to find the more inexpensive options indicated by the symbol of two coins or, on special occasions, to eat at restaurantys which had the Bib Gourmand symbol which indicated a good quality restaurant but moderately priced.

For our overnight stays there was no doubt that our bible was the Guide de Gites de France this organisation was the one which governed the standards in Bed and Breakfast establishments (Chambres d’Hotes) and we never stayed in an establishment which was in that guide which fell below par.

This year we felt confident enough to apply ourselves to that august body for inclusion.

This morning they arrived for the inspection.
They warned us in advance that there would be quite a few of them, there were.

There were the two inspectors from the Gites de France, there was a member of the board of that organisation who ran a Chambre d’Hote, and there was a young apprentice. Accompanying this posse was the local tourism representative for the village and the lady who ran the local regional tourist office.
(It’s a big deal as you can see)

The inspection took two hours and was extremely thorough.

We had, we were warned, to have a full breakfast laid out for two on their arrival. We had set our table with freshly squeezed orange juice , a compote of dried fruit and dates and bowl of vanilla scented fromage frais. I produced my two homemade breads, little brown yeast rolls made with Howards Oneway (which I bring in specially) and my Pompe a l’Huile, a fruit and olive oil brioche- as well as the normal baguette and croissants from the village baker. With these I offered best Breton butter and five different jams, all faites maison. (Cherry, greengage, lemon with ginger and fig)

Judging from their expressions they were impressed with this.

They then started on the bedrooms, all were measured as were the bathrooms, the beds were stripped and also measured, the quality of the sheets and indeed under sheets were minutely examined,as were the pillows and their covers, the very hangers in the wardrobes were inspected (They are all wooden, this is good, metal ones are not allowed)

They clucked disapprovingly at some things , the unevenness of some of our old floor tiles, the size of one of our wash hand basins , but mainly they seemed to approve,you could see they thought everything displayed proper taste and respect for the age of the house.

Then the eight of us sat down to coffee while they wrote out their reports.
These will then be put before the bord of commissioners and, if we are fortunate enough to be accepted into this prestigeous group, we will then be commanded to Montpellier to sign in in the regional office.

We now await their judgement, it’s a bit like waiting for the leaving results.

On our constitutional in Vendres Plage today when we noticed these elegant beauties picking their delicate way through the dunes.
They aren’t unknown here, but sufficiently rare that they get their picture on the paper when they come over from Africa for the winter hols.

Not as pink as I imagined, this probably means that they are lacking that shellfish which gives them their pink pigment.

This is the attic in Le Presbytere as we saw it in July 2006, N.B. the basins on the floor to collect the drips from the leaking ceiling. We always reckoned that this space was going to be our bedroom and….. finally….it is.

Nearly six years later we now have a section of the attic at last organised as the master bedroom- and as befits a couple of a certain age it is very simple – almost monastic- but we have our own bathroom with a huge bath (fit for large people) and all the trimmings , even a bidet, and (a luxury this) our own dressing room with a vast mirrored wardrobe.
We sleep there tonight for the first time ever.
Took a while.

Yesterday we started the above society with a St. Patrick’s Day lunch Launch in Cessanon.
About 40 attended and all went well, I had advised Stephane, the chef de cuisine in Restaurant l’Orb on some Irish dishes so he did a very Gallic twist on Irish stew and Bread and Butter Pudding.
Martyn Turner (the Irish Times Cartoonist) who is one of our members provided the above cartoon for our logo and we managed to raise €500 for the excellent Cancer Support France society. I met a large quantity of hitherto unknown Paddies who have settled in the area so it was a great networking moment.
Congratulations to Judge Brian Sheridan who organised it.

About a fortnight ago I finally got connected to my new computer (the last one had developed senility and was so slow we often thought it had died).
This one has Windows 7 which I am having a hard time adjusting to, but, slowly, I progress.
In the last few days I think I have cracked how to put pictures on to my blog (which has been a very wordy one of late)

Also in the last few weeks constant readers will be aware of certain medical procedures which have occured.

At my last visit to Le Cardiologue, I said “Are there any life style changes you feel I should make ?”
“Well” he said “You should lose weight ” and he accompanied this with a moue of the lips and a raising of the shoulders and a half stretching out of the arms with the palms facing me. This translated as ; “this you must do, but it must come from yourself, there is no point in me nannying you.” (there is much more than language in French communication).
Then he also said in plain words- “Try to walk for a half hour every day”

So I am, and as it is beautiful spring weather I brought the camera along.

For the first time on Tuesday we went East along the flooded gravel pits by the river Orb.
There we found these strange islands, each with a building on top.
Our guess is that they weren’t allowed destroy the houses when they dug for gravel.

Yesterday we took a new path along the Pech across the valley from the village, there we saw Le Presbytere from a new angle.

This is it even closer (its the one with the leafless tree in the garden, and you can just glimpse my red umbrella on the terrace)
This picture also shows quite clearly how the old village walls actually cut through the middle of our house.

And this is the real sign of spring here , everywhere there is copious quantities of almond blossom.

Yesterday was a beautiful day, temperatures uip to 30C on the terrace.
I had a couple of personal things to celebrate also.
Yesterday was my 63rd birthday.

I like birthdays.

The Facebook internet age means that I got a wonderful assortment of birthday wishes from family and friends on line, by text, by phone and even by snail mail so there was no feeling of being isolated here in France.

Síle (who knows me well) gave me an absolutely perfect present- an envelope of money on which I am allowed carte blanche to spend as I like at Vide Greniers.

The plan was that we should dine in Octopus a one star Michelin restaurant in Beziers- which we did and that was completely delicious.

But the highlight of my day happened in the afternoon.

As you will all know by now for the last several months I have been busying myself with A Book .
Tentatively called :

À Table,
An Irish Chef
in a Village in the Languedoc

It is a sort of travel/memoir/recipe book.

Last week I finished draft one and started the very painful bisiness of submissions.
This is the ultimate cold call , in the submission form they ask questions like :
Please tell me why you think your book should be published?

A hard one to answer by a modest retiring violet like me.

I have sumbitted the oeuvre to three publishers in the last week and so far have been delighted to have recieved only one rejection.

The highlight of my day yesterday was that I recieved an email from a family member of a publishing firm (a person totally unknown to me) who reads and enjoys my blog and requesting that I might submit the draft to them.

Now I know that the whole project is still a long shot but that letter somehow brought me a few steps closer to the moment when I might smell the binding of my own first book.

Exciting times.

Maybe life begins at 63 ?

It is 30C on the terrace this afternoon so I had to put up an umbrella against the sun. The summer comes in like a galloping horse here, last night was the first night we didn’t have to light the stove, and now I am feeling overdressed.
It’s a sudden old climate.

I am always relieved when the 12th of March has passed without incident as this blog from 2005 explains.

Today is the 11th of March .It is not the Ides of March.
In March the Ides, for some reason best known to the Romans, falls on the 15th.
My youngest daughter, Deirdre, sent me a text message this morning saying “Beware the Ides of March” .
She sent it because she knows me well, and knows this is the sort of thing that will have me running to dictionaries and Shakespeare anthologies in a positive lather of enjoyment finding out as much as possible about said Ides and everything to do with it.(As indeed I just did)

In fact I , unlike Julius Caesar , do not fear the 15th of March. The day I fear is tomorrow, the 12th of March, and thereby (as you have probably just guessed) hangs a tale.

A couple of years ago, on March 12th 2001 to be precise, the same daughter Deirdre asked me to pick her up in school early and bring her out to the hospital where she had an appointment to get her dental brace checked. I duly left her out at the hospital at the appropriate time and decided to wait for her in the car and listen to the radio until she finished.
It was a sunny spring day and as I sat in the stuffy car I felt a headache coming on. Not a particularly bad one but a stinger none the less.
What amazed me then, was that my body started to panic. It was almost as if I was observing what was happening from outside myself. My heart started to pound, I came out in a cold sweat, I started to shake, to gasp for breath, all the symptoms of a panic attack , something I had experienced once before.

Fortunately while my body was having this attack my brain was still feeling calm. This told me that I was sitting in the sun, in a car with the windows up, I should get out and get some air.
I did and immediately began to calm down, and the headache started to fade.

After a while Deirdre came back and I started to drive her home.
On the way I started to tell her about my strange headache/panic attack.
“How long is it now since your Brain Haemorrhage “ she said. I started to think,” well it was about this time of the year…..”
Then I nearly had a second attack but, this time it would have been justified.
The 12th of March is the day before my birthday, not a day I would ever mistake for another.
It had been on the 12th of March 1991 when I had had the haemorrhage.

What’s more it had been at about 3.00 in the afternoon, as it had been when I had been waiting in the hospital car park.

That meant that it had been exactly 10 years ago to the year, day and hour since I had had the haemorrhage which had seen me rushed to hospital to Cork by ambulance, and, from which it had taken me about 5 years to recover completely.
Could it possibly be that some strange time clock in my body had recognised this macabre anniversary and was telling me about it?
As I said I had only once before experienced an attack like the one I had just had in the car. That had happened a few weeks after the initial haemorrhage when I had my first headache since the attack and it had been spookily similar to the one I had just had in the car.
I guessed at that time that my body , rather than my mind, was deciding that I was going to have another bleed and had gone into panic mode. On that occasion also, a walk in the fresh air had calmed me down and got rid of the headache.

It does make you wonder though . Have we got a separate body memory of past traumas? Does this body clock recognise the Gregorian calendar and British Standard Time ? Or was it all just a strange coincidence?

For my part I’m just not sure ,but, I still beware of tomorrow;
the 12th of March.

Last October’s Nature Strollers in the Mediterranean Garden in Roquebrun with Colm and Síle.

Courses for 2012
– Tastes of Languedoc, Nature and Food

This year we are again going to run some short relaxed courses in Le Presbytere.

Síle’s brother Colm Ronayne, nature lover extrordinaire, will be your guide to the natural beauty of this undiscovered part of the Languedoc and Martin will introduce you to its cookery and food.

Colm’s Taste of Languedoc Nature will be two series of four days of short strolls taking in the natural history, plants, birds and insects of our beautiful region. The May walks will reflect the enormous natural diversity of this Mediterranean area where the river valleys separate the mountains from the sea, exploring the Seaside, the Garrigue, and the Waterways of the Vallee d’Orb and the Canal de Midi. The October outings will also look at some of the autumn foods to be garnered from the hedgerows and woods of the area.

Síle and Colm with Last Autumn’s strollers in the Mediterranean Gardens in Roquebrun.

Martin’s Taste of Languedoc Food will consist of four days of morning demonstrations of cooking the wonderful produce; shellfish, vegetables, fruit, lamb, duck and wines available in this part of France.

The Taste of Languedoc Nature with Colm will take place this year in May and also in October
• 1. Arrive Sunday May 6th 2012, depart Friday May 11th 2012
• 2. Arrive Sunday October 7th 2012, depart Friday October 11th 2012

The Taste of Languedoc Food with Martin will be in October.
• Arrive Sunday October 14th 2012, depart Friday October 18th 2012

Both courses will include Bed and Breakfast and a light lunch for the four days of the course and dinner cooked by Martin for the five nights you are with us – Aperitif, Starter, Main Course, Cheese, Dessert and Coffee served with the delicious wines of the Languedoc.

For the Taste of Languedoc Nature we can pick you up at Girona Airport on the day of arrival and bring you back there for your flight home. You do not need a car as we will organise your transport to the various walks.

For the Taste of Languedoc Food you need to arrange your own transport as you will be free to explore the mountains, the rivers and the beaches of the Mediterranean in the afternoons.

Each of these courses will cost €675 per person sharing with a single supplement of €100.

For any further information contact us at:
Martin and Síle Dwyer,
Le Presbytère, Chambre et Table d’Hôte,
14, Rue René Lenthéric,
34490 Thézan Lès Béziers,
France

Telephone : +33 (0)4 67 48 70 18
Email : martin@lepresbytere.net