This has been so far our mildest summer in the south of France, weather has been hovering about the early twenties so working the Chambre d’Hote has not been a constant battle against the heat.
Until yesterday.
The moment it hits you that it has gotten really hot is the moment you step out of the air-conditioned supermarket and get hit by a wall of heat- that happened yesterday afternoon. We hurried into the car to find that the temperature was 37 degrees, nothing record breaking but a lot hotter than it was before.
But you acclimatise very quickly and the old stones, and shutters of our house protect us from the heat of the sun.
I fear it no more.

Last week my friend from Waterford, Eamon Barrett, quoted on his Facebook page a poem by Stanley Baxter (the Scottish actor) which I think I will embroider onto a sampler.
Anytime I feel the least like complaining about the heat this poem should act as an antidote with its strong memories of summer sundays in Waterford.

This is our real damnation,
This thin drizzling rain.
Not the perilous east ascent,
Or the deserts fiery pain.
It’s not the great big kick-up-the-arse things
…that finally get you down.
It’s the steady drip of suburban leaves
That are not in, and not out, of town.

Last night, from the terrace.

When the cold Mistral flows down the Rhone Valley over the Camargue it hits the Mediterranean at the Golfe du Lion.
There it forms these huge banks of soft cloud which the Marin , the soft wind from the sea, then blows over the Pyrenees towards the Atlantic.

It was during last years Festival del Catet , at one of those pre show meals when a man from Toulouse at our table decided to tell us about his family Aperitif; Vin d’Orange.
He said the recipe was a “family secret” but then proceded to give it to us anyway.
Now constant readers will remember my recent and successful attempts with Vin de Noix , which is really a home made fortified wine , and as this years festival del Catet is just finished, that and having a day off , I went trawling through my cook-books to find a recipe which resembled that heard last year.
I found it , in a book by Roger Verge ; Les Tables de mon Moulin . he says it is a traditional Provencal Apero .
Here is his recipe as he gave it.

Put into a bocal (a glass jar) Three bitter Oranges in quarters, 10 black peppercorns, 1 Vanilla pod, a half of a cinnamon stick , 1 litre of Rose wine, and 25cls of Cognac.
Leave this to macerate for 20 days , then add 200g of Sugar, leave for a further 10 days then filter and bottle.

There happened a moment of serendipity.
In my freezer I have still about a dozen vanilla pods which were left over from the restaurant, also in the freezer were a couple of dozen Seville Oranges ready to be made into Marmalade, we had just bought a large quantity of Rose in the co-op of Roquebrun and on my last trip to Spain I had bought a bottle of incredibly cheap Cognac.
My spice cupboard easily yielded up the cinnamon and the peppercorns so it was all systems present and ready to go.

Since my prettiest Bocal is Four litres I decided to multipy all by three (except the oranges by two ) and a mere five minutes later the above mixture was commencing its maceration.
In thirty days time I’ll get to taste it.

This morning we have nobody for breakfast , tonight no-one for dinner.
We can now slop about the house all day in our dressing gowns and I can do my famous imitation of a parsnip, on the couch.

It is a moment to look at the logic of two middle aged Irish people who , having worked all their lives , reared children , passed through that incredible balancing act of managing to provide shelter , food and security for a family while running a business where you had to provide all these things for your employees. Why should this couple then not rest on their laurels and fade gracefully into the sunset ?

You know the answer as well as we do , we would be bored silly.

Just because I happen to be sixty two (and Síle some years younger) is no reason whatsoever for us to act our age- and anyway what is our age?
It begins to appear that the sixties are the new forties.

I think one little surprise about this business is that it is much more work than we expected , the other surprise is that that work is so painless.
When you get to a certain age getting out of bed early – even to feed others breakfast- is not much of an effort- chances are you have been lying there awake for some time anyway.

An unexpected bonus is the making of new friends ,especially at our age .
There is something about a shared dinner on the terrace that brings all people together.

As well as scores of Irish people , lots from Waterford – old customers of Dwyer’s – we now have had visitors from the UK , from most of the continental countries of Europe , from the States , some from as far away as South America and from Africa as well as people from every corner of France.
Christmas cards are going to start costing us a fortune!

I suppose I should state here that we had fantastic advantages for our new jobs and made very suitable preparations.
Síle has fairly faultless French, learned on several exchanges to Brittany when she was a teenager , mine is (very slowly) improving but some time working in a kitchen in Anjou in the seventies , a passion for French Chanson and constant attendance at Alliance Classes in Waterford have helped me to at least sound proficient.

I was always a person who welcomed visitors- a trait I inherited intact from my mother , and Síle , in her new role as chatelaine has discovered that she has a natural talent for making people welcome- a happy extension, if you think of it, from someone who spent years keeping four year old boys happy.

So now it is five years since we bought Le Presbytere and heading for three since we had our first guests, so it is really pleasant to find that we have no regrets and have great hopes that we will be able to keep doing this work for some time.

There wasn’t a lot of useful stuff left in the house when we bought it in 2006 but this chair we both liked and so it was saved from the dump.
As it sits in the corner of the Red Room it always reminds me of a Van Gogh painting, I was never sure which.

On Clive’s last trip out in Spring he brought out (almost) the last of our books which as yet have no home here so they have stayed in their boxes.
Every so often I go through one and all the contents manage to surprise me, I had forgotten so many of them.

I found a little book of Van Gogh paintings, it must have been bought hundreds of years ago because the price was 4 shillings , and there I found the painting of the chair.

Somehow I think Van Gogh’s picture is a little nicer.

And then Eugene pulls the other half of the picture out of the drawer and there is sister Deirdre, and we are in the tennis court in Tree Tops, and behind me is the mother’s rock garden.
Amazing how it comes back………

My nephew-in-law Eugene Mc Veigh unearthed this relic from some forgotton drawer or box and surprised me with it. Taken I would say in about 1951 (you do the sums) it is, I confess, myself in my very first motor.

Having put his sister Laura up on the site how could I possibly not put up a
picture of her young brother Eoin, especially one as full of mischief as this
one taken by his Dad Eugene.

Leading to this shot of his cousin , my grandson Ruadhan , taken by his mum.
There is a great Irish expression for this knowing smirk – “He’s been here before ”

Here is a sneak preview of my niece Ann and her daughter Laura as they will appear in next years Downs Syndrome Brochure.

You may well be wondering how Pierrot and Columbine, our two Collared Doves are getting on.
Well since I wrote about them first on June 18th (cf, for some reason my blog doesn’t like to link to itself) they haven’t missed a night on the tree. The first four or five weeks were fraught with much hanky panky- to the astonishment of some of our guests- and we would have to spend time in the garden every day gathering dove gray feathers discarded in the height of passion.
Now they have settled into a pattern of quiet domesticity and the most active signs of affection are the mutual groomings and scratching.

We feel that they do like our company and one or other of them checks that we are on the terrace every so often.

But otherwise they just sit there companionably, puffed up against the night chills, until morning.