Strange how things go around in circles.

An after dinner conversation on the terrace some weeks ago was about the demise of the old Latin mass.
I , like most schoolboys of my generation , learned to serve mass and was thoroughly familiar with the Latin ritual- so much so that I can still quote large chunks of the mass, in Latin , without trouble .
Now even though I understand Pope John 23rd’s reasons for turning the Latin into English I also would think that I would date my first English Mass as the moment when I started to lose my religion.
In this case I reversed Spinoza’s saying , for me to understand all was to forgive nothing but to wonder what rot I had spent all my life mouthing.
And then as you do in La Ronde de la Vie I discovered that one of my heroes , Georges Brassens , felt just as I did about the vernacular mass.

He had written a Phillipic against the Catholic church ; Tempete dans un Benitier
(Storm in the Holy Water Font)

This has lines like:

Sans le latin, sans le latin,
La Messe nous emmerde

Which I suppose you could translate as :

Without Latin the mass is a heap of shit.

But what ties up my circle completely and brings me back to where I started (or at least to a blog I wrote just a few days ago ) is a line in the song.
To make his point Brassens deliberately mis-quotes my new motto , that enigmatic line from Le Mystére de la Chambre Jeaune

Le presbytère n’a rien perdu de son charme, ni le jardin de son éclat

“The Presbytery has never lost its charm nor the garden its colours.”

Instead of this Brassens says;

La Presbytere sans le latin
A perdu de son charme

Or

Without Latin the Presbytery HAS lost its charm.

My thoughts exactly M. Brassens.

Living as we did in Waterford for twenty years there was no way we could not become familiar with it’s Crystal.
I am not the greatest fan of the elaborate and complicated cuts of Waterford in its recent hayday , finding it a bit overcomplicated and fussy.
I am however a great fan of glass cut at its simplest as Waterford did with its Sheila range and also with Curraghmore.
Over the years I have gathered some of these classics, the cut was not of course invented by Waterford , it is classic Georgian wedge cut designed to simply divide natural light prismatically.

This morning was my time for one of my Chambre d’Hote chores, the polishing of the glasses and the cleaning of the glass shelves.
While I was doing this I lined up all by glasses with I call the Sheila cut.

First is a Sheila Champagne flute , next to it is a similarly cut English (I think ) Georgian cut glass, bought in Devon, which I love because it was broken but the owner valued it so dearly that he mended it with a rather crude rivet down its stem , next is a Waterford Sheila Claret.
Next at the back is a similarly mended wine glass , this time bought in Languedoc so most likely French , again crudely mended with what looks like a knob from a cupboard door.
In front of this are two little Curraghmore Liqueurs from Waterford.
After these is one of my favourites, a deceptively simple Sheila tumbler or Whiskey Glass , deceptive because these cuts were so simple that they could only be made into flawless glass , the more fussy cuts could cut away any imperfections or bubbles in the blowing.
The last two are the strangest , even though these are identical to the Sheila Champagne Goblet they are not at all. We bought them in an antique shop in Florence in Italy about 15 years ago so I can only assume them to be Italian.

I am , I confess , a little self indulgent and am no longer as light as I was when I got married nor is my waist the same measurement.
As a consequence of this indulgence I take a certain number of tablets, under prescription, every month.
In Ireland a lot of the cost of these was covered by the Irish Drugs Payment Scheme , I was covered by this scheme for any amounts over €120 a month.
My tablets therefore cost me €1440 each year.

On one occasion as I was buying six months supply (for €720 ) from my chemist in Waterford he whispered into my ear that I was quite mad.
He told me that if I slipped across the border into Spain I could buy these drugs without prescription- just by producing the packet- for a fraction of this cost.
This it turned out was quite true.
Thereafter followed our three monthly trips to Spain where the cost of the same drugs , without subsidy, was about €75 , for a months supply.

Riddle me that Irish Pharmacists ?

However this was never intended to be a long term solution as, because we have a business here , we always intended to be legitimate and avail honestly of the excellent French Medical Services.

Having over the past year completed the necessary miles of forms , using enough paper to have taken out a whole rain forest , just last week I finally got my long sought after Carte Vitale which registers me into the French national health scheme.
This involves an automatic payment from our account into the French National Insurance scheme , roughly the same as the Irish PRSI.

On our accountant’s advice we also topped this up with a small medical insurance , about €60 a month for me.

On Wednesday , I paid my first visit to the doctor here . (Scary moment I confess, he had no English so we were on my French, however all went well)
He gave me my relevant prescriptions , demanded the standard fee (€23) apologetically but reassured me that the government would reimburse that into my bank account within seven days.

This morning I went to the chemist , produced my prescriptions and my medical card and my insurance documents to the pharmacist and was given all my drugs(embarrassingly my normal dose of aspirin is so small that here it comes in a box decorated by a laughing baby).
Then as I started rooting for money the smiling pharmacist assured me that “No I was completely covered, there would be nothing to pay, now or ever ”

I gather that we are also (at least partly ) covered for the dentist and for the optician.

You do the maths , free doctor , free medicine, and other help besides.
It seems that this is a great country for old men.

Just in case there is anyone out there who thinks that the Dwyers have it made living in their sultry paradise, drinking and playing the French equivalent of Beer and Skittles let me give a small reality shot here.

At the moment we are busy , have been busy since the begining of May.
Today we got one of those really lucky days , a total day off.
No-one for breakfast and no-one for dinner and no-one staying tonight.

Voila La Vie en Rose.

Síle wakes up this morning with a thorough stinking cold , the rest of her day is percieved through a cloud of phlegm.

At 10.00 am we are summonsed to a meeting in the local tourist office to discover some new informations VITAL for our Chambre d’Hote.

We then have a long powerpoint presentation by a young one in jeans from Beziers explaining the new initiative the French government have taken on our behalf.

A NEW METHOD OF GRADING !

Now we will all be given star grading with the backing of the French government.
Every Hotel , Campsite , Gite will have official grading.
(We did this in Ireland forty years ago)
But observe my statement , no mention of Chambre d’Hotes …
Madame in Jeans informs us that the government have decided that Chambre d’Hotes are ungradeable (unlike all other mentioned establishments) so our two hours of power point have been thoroughly useless.

One French proprietor of a C d’H is sufficiently upset to give the entire presentation a right bollicking.
I went up to him afterwards to congratulate him and discovered that he was (of course) married to an Irishwoman had spent 15 years in Ireland learning how to bollick and that yes we must get together soon.

The morning was not entirely wasted.

The afternoon was spent with our French Accountant .
As with all accountant’s meetings I glazed over the moment we started to talk and regained consiousness as we left the office.

This is how we spend our days off.

However the evening is our own and as soon as I finish this I am off to the glowingly warm terrace (it will now have started to cool a little) there I will find cool Rosé , fornicating doves , the sound of bells and the screaming rush of adolescent swallows as they do their nightly gorge of the flies under the tree.

Soon all the pressures of the day will be past.
I will enjoy le jour de congé.

First French cookery course students just packed off and gone , it went well and I am confident that they went off with a full portfolio of new recipes and techniques AND had a good time. Best successes ? Probably the Duck Confit , the Walnut Praline Icecream, and the Pork Fillet stuffed with Apricots .
Best idea during the course was an impromptu decision to scrap all classes for a day and give them a guided tour through the food stalls of the market in Pezenas .
Boy was it hard work though ! I’m glad I have three months to recover before the next one.

Nice photo taken of us on the terrace by Terry and Eilish just last week.
Thanks friends.

The whodunit , The Mystery of the Yellow Room was written by Gaston Leroux in 1907, it was one of the first of this genre and still is one of the best , both John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie heaped superlatives on it.

I have just finished reading it and the ending totally surprised me .

My blog friend Martine started my interest in the book by quoting a line from it ,which is seminal to the plot, as a response to a blog I put up about the presbytery and it’s garden.

Le presbytère n’a rien perdu de son charme, ni le jardin de son éclat

“The Presbytery has never lost its charm nor the garden its colours.”

This wonderfully enigmatic phrase runs as an unsolved moment through the book, only being revealed in the final pages.

As such it became championed by the surrealists in the twenties and became a sort of motto for them.
I confess it has now lodged itself in my brain and I think I must include it somewhere as a sort of house motto , maybe on the top of our billheads .

Leroux after wrote scores of detective novels , including his most successful , and most adapted ; The Phantom of the Opera .

.

The brother Ted, never one to let an opportunity slip by , decided to send a recent visitor to Cork a little memento of her stay.

Herself , also it seems not one to let the grass grow under her feet , replied quickly and graciously.

There’ s two of them in it.

As Ted said to me our Mother would have been delighted .
(Don’t you just love the address, no street number, no street name , no town and even no postal code- there’s posh )

We have two uninvited guests in Le Presbytère at the moment , they are moving slowly through their chosen melieu, in this case our Lilas d’Inde Tree in the Garden, fornicating as they go – this in full view of the table on the terrace.

They are Collared Doves, very close to pigeons in appearance but pale fawn and with a collar.

Columbine usually starts the ball rolling by settling on the top of our neighbours terrace canopy and cooing with great seductive power.
It is usually not long before Pierrot arrives , they then retire into the tree to conduct their business.

I think I am beginning to understand why Doves are thought to be the great symbols of romantic love.

Anyway there then starts tremendous games of cache cache among the branches. This game, it should be noted, is not always gracefully performed , there is frequent falling off branches with a mad scrabble of claws and flapping of wings until a balanced perch is achieved, there is much approaching and seductive foreplay only to be followed by very indecisive flapping about by either party as they decide to cool off on the wing and to decide, after they have taken off , where (the hell) they will land.

At this stage I should point out that , whereas they are careful to conceal themselves from other sides they have decided that we are obviously experienced and medically qualified members of the pigeon family so there is no need whatsoever to be discreet before us. I should also point out that the Lilas d’Inde grows up from our garden underneath the terrace and the tree’s Premier Étage , the one with the bedrooms, is directly on our eye level as we sit at the table on the terrace.

Eventually either he wears her down or she wears him down and then very quickly and with “A sudden blow the great wings beating still “ the full blooded act is performed.

The Sudden Blow

This is the only moment we know for sure which is Pierrot and which is Columbine.

There follows some time in post coital bliss.

First , sitting very amicably together , they start to search their chests for lice or grubs with their beaks , then gradually she (we think) starts to have a rummage in his , then he in hers and then (as Angela Mc Namara said long ago ) it is a question of “knocking on the door above to get in below” and the whole cycle is repeated.

Now the interesting and new further stage which happened last night was that after three bouts (but who is counting ) they then started a whole new game called branch bouncing.
This consisted of bouncing up and down on the weaker branches of the tree until they- with a frantic flapping and clawing- nearly , but never quite, fell off.
Sile thinks they are testing the branches looking for a good site for a nest .

If so they will certainly become members of our family.

I put out my first blog post on February 26th 2005 , about 6 and a half years ago.
Since then I have posted 1661 blogs , about 256 every year , roughly 20 a month , 5 or so a week.
My pieces has been read 217,764 times , heading towards a quarter of a million hits in 6 and a half years.

Seeing as it provides no material gain and nothing to me except enjoyment I can only suppose it to be an ailment , a minor one hopefully ; blogarrhoea.