When we were doing our tour of the village a few weeks ago our guide pointed out to us the spot where the community oven :- Le Four Banal used to stand .
Now there’s a word which has made a huge leap in meaning , from describing something which is enjoyed by all the community to something which is trite , commonplace and humdrum.
But the amazing thing about the word Banal (and the jump is exactly the same in English as in French) is that it has made this leap into pejorative meaning without really changing in meaning at all- rather it is our attitude to community which has changed.
A Four Banal at one time was indicitative of a real triumph of civilization. It was the acknowledgement that instead of everyone having their own oven to cook their stews , bake their breads and even (I suppose) heat water for washing clothes they could instead pool their resources and have an oven that all could avail of.
Then somewhere along the line (about the time perhaps when M. Chagal had a good year on the vines and bought Mme. Chagal her own personal oven ) it became unfashionable to use Le Four Banal, it became something that the oven-less ladies of the village used, the less well off , the common people.
And so the practices of the less well off community became a stick with which their better off neighbours could beat them . Their practice became commonplace , of the ordinary , and therefore uninteresting.

It is interesting to look at another word in English which has made exactly the same leap into pejorative meaning ; the word Common.

Common and its change in meaning is perhaps a little more subtle. Its pejorative meaning used nowadays (or at least in my youth) indicated something which was percieved of being in a class below one’s own.
My father abhored that we should call the driveway outside our house as “The Yard ” , that we might say things like “I amn’t” or pronounce “Forty” farrty, these practices were “common ” .
When I worked at one time for an upperclass Protestant family they used to murmer N.O.C.D to each other when confronted by someone who might be beneath them , after a while I worked that the letters stood for Not Our Class Dear or, as my father would have said “Common”.
The subtlties of meaning wern’t restricted to the upper and middle class.
At one stage , while working for a restaurant in the country , one of the waitresses , a small farmers daughter , refused point blank to wear wellingtons to get to work on a snowy night. She had she reckoned bettered herself and regarded the wearing of wellies (her father’s perpetual footwear) as “common”.

And so it is that two good servicable words , both indicitive of a civilizing moment in our history, have been brought down by snobbery.

Reading an article in the New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger about Southern food in the States he explains the expressions “high on th hog ” and “low on the hog” as relating to which parts of the pig you could afford “high” being the tenderloin, “low” being the feet.

As Ireland is a nation who’s national meat must be pork (and bacon) I am suddenly filled with an understanding of an Irish expression, the origins of which had puzzled me for years : Ar muin na muice ” On the pigs back.
Of course the implied state of happiness related to which part of the pig you were able to enjoy.

Voila.

This is a pictureI of maple leaves on tarmac which I took in November 2009 in the Botanics in Glasnevin and blogged two years ago on this day.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Oscar Wilde

A few years ago we stayed in a hotel whose bedrooms the Guide Michelin describes as “cosy”, a word which they had borrowed from English.

That sounded fine to us until we saw the room and realised that they meant extremely small.

Yesterday in the magazine section of a bookshop I noticed several magazines with decor ideas for “Maisons Cosy ” and discovered that the use of this word extended past the Guide.

The French are of course using a euphemism because in this context small would be pejorative.
In fact the English language had exactly the same problem and auctioneers have always referred to smaller properties as Bijou the French word for a jewel, again a borrowed word somehow carrying less sting.

Funnily I never thought before that small, in some contexts , could be a dirty word.

We have been having really wretched weather here for the last fortnight. It has rained at least every day , sometimes all day. Apparently the entire average rainfall of the Herault fell during the first week in November.

If we do manage to sneak out for a quick breath of fresh air the black clouds over heads threaten and then fulfill their threats.

We now understand why the French have built such huge drains through their villages .

The normally placid Orb was in spate at Reals yesterday , I have never seen it like this and from the evidence on the trees and bushes it has been even higher over the last few days.

The people on the village shake their heads and tell us that never in 30, 40, 60 years have they seen rain continue for so long.
The Meteo offers no respite and says we could have another week of this .

We had a client staying with us who went to the local beauty parlour last week.
The girl there gravely informed her that she couldn’t wait to retire to somewhere “Really sunny like Reunion ”

And then out of the blue- or should it be into the blue..

We get a morning like this.
Blue skies , no wind , sunshine , bone warming heat – even a few hours of this will get us through.

We had breakfast on the terrace in perfect comfort.

One consolation , we shouldn’t have to water the garden for a few weeks.

I am now enjoying what must be my tenth drink free November and , while sometimes the moment when the sun dips below the yard arm has me a little shakey, on the whole I think it is really never as tough a proposition as thinking about is. I’m feeling fine- in fact today I am having a mad spurt of energy so , while Síle is at her choir practice I decided to stock up on goodies for the freezer for the winter.
I made a good load of Ragout Bolognaise , my usual mixture of minced beef, bacon, onion carrot and celery with tomato basil and origano . This I use indiscriminately for a Tagliatelli Sauce (Spaghetti leaves me cold) and Lasagne, and, I find it makes a wonderful base for an Irish/Italian Shepherds Pie (Pasticcio in Crosta di Pastore I will cheekily call it )

The first arrival of the winter vegetables is upon us so I also made various little boxes of a Spiced Carrot and Celeriac Soup and a good stock of what Jane Austin called Palestine Soup which is made from Jerusalem Artichokes.

This is all with a background of wind howling and falling rain as the Languedoc experiences its worst storm for years and the Meteo give us no respite, it could last , they tell us , another week .

It is a totally miserable day here today, rain lashing down and wind howling.
The Meteo tell us that a storm has been created in the Mediterranean by the action of the Mistral on the warm sea and that this storm is being stopped in its progress north by the Massive Central, the very plateau which usually protects us from the bad weather from the North.
We have a lovely couple from Waterford staying with us, its their third visit, they came to escape just this type of weather in Ireland and I feel personally responsible for the state of the place.

To offer them some warm comfort (and to allay my own cabin fever) I am cooking them a special dinner this evening.

The Starter will be my Tranche St. Remy , a recent rediscovery of mine from Elizabeth David. Tonight (I vary this quite a bit) the base will be a good short and buttery pastry, in layers along this will be three fillings, first little cubes of tuna which I will barely sear in olive oil, once these are cool I will mix with a little very olive oil mayonnaise and some stoned green olives. Middle filling will be some prawns, large wild ones, these I will shell and then cook in a sauce of fresh chopped tomatoes, spicy with garlic and a touch of paprika. The third filling of the Tranche is the one which makes it truly from southern France, this is some very long slow cooked onions, cooked until melting and starting to caramelize, these will be then criss crossed with anchovies and studded with black olives.

Main course tonight is some of my village butchers excellent lamb from the Ardeche. Tonight I am cooking a loin.
This I have boned stuffed, with onions, chopped prunes and walnuts bound with a very little breadcrumbs , and I am going to serve a little bowl of grape and orange jelly with this.
With this they will be eating a dish of dauphinoise potatoes, another of glazed carrots and – for freshness- a bowl of barely cooked spinach which is at its best just now.

After the cheese (I have some nice local Goat, some Blue from the Auvergne and my great favourite some aged Comté ) I am going to give them a special dessert.

I have been experimenting lately with various versions of the French Pain d’Espice which is very like our own Gingerbread.
Using a combination of the two recipes I have produced my present favourite version.
This is sweetened with half French honey and half Irish treacle and in it are chunks of stem ginger, chopped dates and walnuts. Slices of this I am going to toast at the last minute and then top with a few quickly sautéed apple slices (courtesy of my Normandy neighbours ) and top with a boule of my coconut icecream.

This will all be digested with the help of some of my Vin de Noix.

I hope this will make up for the appalling weather.

The Canal de Midi , that incredible engineering work by Paul Riquet, flows by Beziers only a few kilometres from Thezan. One of its great attractions is that, to get past Beziers the canal has to drop dramatically and it does this by dropping through seven locks just outside the city.
This place attracts a terrific fascination to all comers , just the movement of canal boats and barges through the seven locks is a marvel of hydraulic engineering , all the more so when you realise that it is unchanged since Riquet opened it in 1681- a breathtaking 330 years ago.

Once the canal has dropped through the locks it then passes towards Beziers where it then performs another feat of wonder by passing on a Pont Canal over the River Orb.

Síle and I decided to walk along this canal path for the first time yesterday.
It is a lovely walk and the tow path over the river gives superb views of Beziers. (Not at it’s best yesterday though , being dull and overcast)

But it was when we were walking along the side of the canal , on a wide part obviously intended to be somewhere that barges could be moored , called the Quai de Port Neuf when we spotted across the water an extrordinary building which we went to investigate.

On closer inspection it proved even more extraordinary. In what I suppose is the Art Noveau style it was decorated in a wonderfully flamboyant fashion.
The stairway window was protected with a marvellous iron grille .

The door was a masterpiece on its own , and the walls were decorated with beautiful over the top medallions and cartouches .

Over the door was the name of the building, Villa St. Felix.

There was a car parked outside and the house showed every sign of being cared for and lived in.

I would love to know something of its history.

In the summer of 1968 , as a holiday job , I worked in Barley Cove Hotel in Cork.
I worked as a waiter in the dining room and lived in a chalet in the grounds.

I had a friend from college (I was just finished first arts in UCC) who lived in the nearby village of Crookhaven , his father was English and his mother from France.
The family were very hospitable to me, a stranger in their area, and they often asked me to dinner on my day off.
Together with his sister and some other friends we started to experiment, after these dinners , with an Ouija board.
This became strangely addictive after a time and became a regular parlour game with us.

Now on a particular Wednesday I was due to have dinner with them when there was a minor crisis in the hotel.
Their regular barman had fallen and broken his arm in an accident.
As I left the premises I was asked would I stand in and work in the bar for the night.
Now (as the telephone service was run from the P.O in Goleen and shut down at 5.30. ) there was no way I could tell my friends so I just accepted that I would give my excuses on my next visit, and set to work in the bar.
I worked for about an hour , plodding about making mistakes , until around 10.00, then suddenly I started to feel quite different.
Suddenly everything became much easier, strangely I seemed to know everyone’s order before they asked it , A lady (a stranger to me) asked for a gin and to my amazement I said ” Would you like that with water maam ?” “Thank you ” she said “How did you know that is how I always like It ”
This feeling of supreme confidence and mild elation was accompanied by a strong palpitation of the heart (I remember going to the barmaid on duty and asking her to feel my heart pounding.)

At eleven everything settled down again and I worked through until midnight.

The following day I rang my friend in Crookhaven to apologise.
Strangely he was able to tell me everything about the night !

” We contacted you on the Ouija board at 10.00 ” he said “and you told us about the bar and what you were doing ” He then added the most amazing fact.
“When you were serving Mrs. X , a neighbour of ours we told you she liked her gin with water ”

At 11.00 , as they told it, they had put the Ouija to bed.

I have no idea whether there was some skilled detective work going on , or if was a case of suggestion to an open innocent mind but that is the story as I remember it.

I have never played with an Ouija Board since.

About 10 years ago my daughter D gave me a present of a book which is a sort of compendium of great photographs which gives an example of one work from each of the photographers selected.

As they list these in strictly alphabetical order there is no room whatsoever for a relationship between the photographs being editorially decided.

The two images below, the one on the right by Inge Morath, called Ox Shoeing and the one on the left (which is of the American dancer Martha Graham) is called Letter to the World

The reflected line and leg elevation displayed by both subjects can only be a coincidental juxtaposition , but a truly serendipitous one