The Fixer

6th May
In the last post I couldn’t bring myself to mention that, apart from my sadness at Zizi’s departure, there has also been a massive row with the pétanque club* who are now boycotting the village bar. I can’t describe how despondent this makes me feel – although, as my desire for harmony here is purely self-centered, this amounts to self-pity which is never attractive.


My role on the tv production happening here is as a Fixer. A Fixer sorts stuff out, sometimes it’s stuff to do with getting sets made or getting kit ordered or fixed and a lot of it is just knowing where to get stuff. The easiest way to do this is to go where everyone congregates and until recently that has been the village bar.

Real live red-faced yelling and soap-opera brawling is great entertainment but counter-productive from my point of view. There are already several rifts among the French population here due to the usual generations-old family feuds, the last elections really wreacked havoc and now no-one goes to events in the village hall any more in case they bump into a sworn enemy.

There was a wonderful period last autumn when everyone came to the bar in regular shifts: If I needed a hornet’s nest or wanted to hire a barn I’d go before supper and catch the farmers. I could tap the Dutch at weekends if I need to borrow garden furniture. The Brits go after supper and many of them are twitchers or butterfly enthusiasts (they tend to do surveys which are extremely useful to us). So if they all fall out or one of these groups feels alienated the bar empties and I have to put a pie in my basket and go visiting instead.


* The pétanque club meets twice a week and is a really popular social event with the French, Dutch and British locals at the village bar where I have been known to do a turn as a waitress.

Rain Stops Play

14th April
Due to all the hymenopteran emergencies and the pressing need to film Spring, we’ve not been down to the bar for a while, but this weekend I lobbied successfully for a day off.

A pétanque tournament was scheduled at the village bar for Saturday. Shane the new landlord has been pushing a roller over the gravel courts and tanning his smooth, oiled torso. There was going to be a barbeque and proper official referees - the evening was bound to end in an excellent party.

Nothing went to plan, by midday on Saturday the rain was steady and the pétanque match got called off. Miss Whiplash was struck down by the plague and took to her bed, we had to go to the bar without her.

Shane’s friend Zizi* has finally arrived, he’s lovely and gossipy with a great line in tight sparkly t-shirts. He put lots of Abba and Aretha Franklin on the cd player for us to sing along to, he’s like an anti-Shane.

*Shane’s mother owns the bar and has left her son in charge but he has no driving license. Shane will be running the bar with Zizi who does drive. Worried that people might think he or Zizi are gay, Shane is pedalling his heterosexuality vigorously using a product known locally as Lad Guff.

The Food At The Bar Goes La Di Da

16th March
Shane has transformed our scruffy spit-and-sawdust café into a gastrodome, he's bought new white tablecloths and fine glassware, there are pretty candle holders on the tables and he has introduced a wine list. He is quite meticulous and sculpts all the tomatoes and carrots into roses which means that it takes a while for the food to actually make it to the table - but I mustn't be mean, he did serve an impressive meal to the pétanque club this weekend.

The pétanqueuers didn’t quite know what to make of this, they ordered their carafes of House Red as usual, peered suspiciously at the little towers of food on their plates and dipped fingers gingerly into the raspberry sauce that had been trickled around the edges of their plates, but by the end of the evening while Naughty Vera was running the selection process for who would be entertaining her later on, Shane was regaling a happy bunch of chaps with tall tales of how many Spanish prostitutes he could fit into his ski chalet.

Meanwhile on the filming lot...
We love timelapse filming, I’ve already gone on about it here. For spring we're filming flowers opening. This involves setting up stills cameras to take a series of photographs at regular intervals. We've now got beautiful dandelions opening in a nearby field - starting at dawn, the path of the sun is clearly marked by the shadows of the flowers as they open up. Daisies and celandines are really good too. We’ve also blacked out one of the sheds and placed branches of tightly shut blackthorn blossom in sugared water, these are lit constantly, cameras are left pointing at them and clicking away for a week or so until they’ve fully opened.

Tomorrow we rehouse the ants ...

Death In The Afternoon

15th February
I am not sportive and I’m certainly not competitive about anything that requires me to freeze, get sweaty or wear unflattering clothes in public.

While the weather was pleasant I enjoyed the weekly pétanque games at the local bar, I viewed these events as a sort of themed cocktail party. Kitty and I set standards in the hat, eyewear and daft shoe departments, the men talked about lawnmowers and concrete and we all poked fun at each other. The French club members meanwhile made moves to get the club registered so that we could become sérieux. The rest of us joked around and failed to forsee the consequences of all their activity, or at least I did until today when I found Courtney and the club captain on my doorstep and discovered what signing up for a French pétanque club really means:

The first interclub tournament of the season was starting this afternoon, if we didn’t put up a team for the first match, our club would be disgraced. It is cold outside and the interclub boulodrome is distant. No-one had turned up for the rendez-vous at the bar – Courtney felt sorry for the captain and volunteered hers and my services, I tried pleading ill health, lack of interest and incompetence but was battered into submission and found myself climbing into an unroadworthy ashtray of a vehicle that tipped us out, semi-kippered, at the ‘boulodrome’ .

A boulodrome is like a big car park with a shed in the middle. Hundreds of people were milling around, wearing ill-fitting jeans and lurid sweatshirts blazing dayglo slogans declaring allegiance to their club. During the drive we had been lectured on our comportment: it is forbidden to walk around during a match, we must be quiet. We were also warned that there are a lot of rules about clothing, our appearance for this first match would be overlooked but in future we must all be dressed in a team uniform, like the other participants.

Serious pétanque matches involve a lot of heated discussion and the measuring of spaces between boules. It is like being trapped in a statistics conference in a walk-in freezer. We lost every game, by the time I was returned to my house I was so traumatized by the experience that I had developed one of those stupefied Frankenstein Monster walks.

I’ve had a bath and thawed out, but the house is still filled with the odour of pub carpet that is emanating from my coat in the hallway.

Bar Strife

12th February
In order to keep up with any hot insect-related gossip and generally find out who’s who around here, my best networking territory is the village bar, so I have a vested interest in it’s continued existence.

Mr and Mrs Strange (a British couple) took over the bar last summer, the pétanque club got started, supper events happened, it was popular with the French, British and Dutch communities - then Mr Strange needed to disappear.

One day the Strange parents were replaced* by their eldest son Kurt, a goth rocker/death metal fan and his Scandanavian wife, Courtney. This couple have spent the last few months looking as though they had accidentally pressed the wrong buttons on the teleporter.

Mrs Strange recently came back to visit her bar and there was a big shouting match, this resulted in her son buying air tickets back to Denmark, he has not mentioned this to his mother. Courtney asked me to keep quiet about it because they wanted to break the news at an 'appropriate moment’.

The 'appropriate moment’ didn’t happen and Mrs Strange has gone away again. Courtney said that she thinks the news will sound better in an email. She’d like me to stay quiet about their departure because they are hoping that the other, younger, brother will turn up to take over - a minor obstacle being that he doesn’t want to.

I’m useless at secrets and I really don’t want to keep this one. The pétanque club has just become registered to host tournaments at the village bar, the process has taken months, when it was finalised there was huge joy from the players, match dates for the year are now fixed.

*Mrs Strange did tell me about their flit some time before they left. I was sworn to secrecy on pain of death.

I am The Booby

18th January
The competitive pétanque season will start next month and the club captain is keen that we go forth and win prizes. In order to develop our killer instinct, a tournament was played outside the bar yesterday, with prizes for the winner. Due to lack of talent I played spectacularly badly. My performance was so bad that at the end of the prize-giving ceremony I was presented with a booby prize for being the worst.

The pétanque club are pretty much the last surviving customers of our village bar which is dying a death. The newly married goth couple who are currently running it are fed up and want to go home - they complain that it’s just a village of old people. I’m not sure how they know because they only ever leave their house to get in a car and drive to town – Lord knows I’ve tried to get Courtney to come to yoga with me, when the postlady gets back from maternity leave there’ll be at least one other person under 50 in that class. Neither was Courtney interested in the village charabanc trip to Andorra*, and that was quite a hoot once we’d got everyone who needed lavatories sorted out, then rounded up the ones that had wandered off and got lost during the lavatory chaos.

Kurt has assigned himself the job of chef and lets his wife run the bar. Kurt rarely cooks though, passing his days mostly on the computer while his new wife opens up the bar and sits on her own watching tv downstairs. She’s missing her friends in Denmark and is sad about the marriage. Courtney tells me that she’s not even known her husband for a year yet. He invites his heavily tattooed friends over for poker evenings, the motorbikes parked outside until the early hours tell the villagers all they need to know about the place and Mme Bontette adds speculative layers of salacious gossip.

Kurt is British, his mother and wife (who don’t speak French) both think that Kurt can speak French quite well, but I know that he can’t - which might account for his refusal to be in the bar or write his bar flyers and menus in French. I also know that Kurt’s mother (who owns the place) has decided to come and pay a visit soon to see how they’re getting on.

*Andorra is a duty free principality in the Pyrenees. The French get very excited about going there to buy tax-free butter, I was very excited by the lovely big tin of olives I got for half the price I’d pay in France, that plus the big plastic jerry can of 'Port’ for 5 euros.

Fancy Dress Bar

16th December
I am entranced by the weekly markets in France, after I've bought food I usually go to the hardware stalls where I buy little plastic briefcases for transporting my eggs, novelty plastic fly swats and jugs. I am intrigued by the bundles of small rectangular carpet pieces, hessian-backed and blanket-stitched around the edges - I guess one places them under the feet while watching TV or eating dinner. From what I can see most French people have ceramic tiles or lino on their downstairs floor - perhaps they’d rather have carpet. I imagine one starts off buying just enough to place a piece under each foot, gradually building up a collection that can be placed, like stepping stones, along popular routes around the house.

Women’s clothes on French market stalls are very particular, lots of strange hybrid things; two or three different styles and fabrics are spliced together resulting in the bastard offspring of, for example, a pin-stripe pencil skirt, a gypsy skirt and a lacy curtain. Last week, at the market with Mme Bontette I succumbed to a very cosy coat/dress (droat?) in two-tone green and black; fleecy on the inside, it has a mandarin collar and zips hem to neck on either side. It’s tunic-like and, worn with black tights and boots, makes me feel that I should be on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

Down at the bar it’s all a bit depressing. The big supper last month must’ve used all their battery power because since then Kurt can’t be bothered to cook very often. He usually sits very close to the big screen watching car racing. The French people have been in a few times since the supper event but as Kurt refuses to take his eyes off the screen and his wife can’t speak French they’ve gone away again. Also Kurts friend Ed has problems with alcohol and frequently needs to make use of the bathroom as a vomitorium and keeps missing whichever receptacle he’s aiming for.

I went there for the weekly pétanque game wearing my new outfit this weekend, Kurt watching telly in a 'Satan Rules' t-shirt, Courtney behind the bar in full bondage gear and Mrs Druid sporting a colourful stripey jumper and rainbow harem pants, Mrs D. took a long look at me and said
What a curious garment

A Heffalump Trap

16th November
I’m flipping livid - I can’t believe that my spinelessness has led to me getting involved in another weird fib-telling scenario

This village is mostly populated with elderly people - I’m getting to know and love some of them. Funny, saucy women like Scary Eena and her best friend Hélene, the Berts and I’m even getting a bit fond of Bruno the Knob Destroyer.
And then there is Old Dad, I usually see him at the Saturday pétanque games with his long-suffering family who come every weekend to chop his wood, put food in his freezer and listen to his complaints. I was shocked to discover that Old Dad’s chronological age is only the same as my dad (78), I’d put him at least 10 years ahead.

I nearly ran Old Dad over during the week but I braked instead and then he’d seen me, so I had to stop and chat. When he'd finished describing his various ailments he suddenly invited me to lunch with him on Monday (tomorrow). Failing to think quickly enough I accepted. I’d just got philosophical about this, telling myself that it would be an interesting lunch - probably (in a tedious sort of way) and certainly wouldn’t do me any harm, but he turned up a bit later at the Lovely House with a request
If you see my son you mustn’t tell him that you’re coming to lunch on Monday
I protested, but the man wouldn’t go until I’d accepted not to tell.*

The idea of lunch turning into a conspiracy bothered me. At the pétanque game yesterday I chose a moment when Old Dad was standing alone to go and tell him I wasn't coming, then saw that his lip was actually trembling
But you’ve got to come
Sure – another time
What are you doing on Tuesday?
I paused a beat too long - he jumped on it
You’ll come Tuesday then?
I have no idea what’s wrong with me but I heard my mouth saying OK
Aaaargh

*In my weedy defense I’ll say that OD uses a lot of dialect, he is very difficult to understand properly - and I started losing the will to live after the discussion had gone on for more than a couple of minutes.

Kurt's First Supper

9th November
I went down to the bar for a game of pétanque yesterday. My fellow pétanquers are stunned by the sudden, unannounced disappearance of the senior Stranges. Their replacement by Goth Rockers feels like we’re suddenly extras in a remake of Village of the Damned as directed by John Waters .

Courtney opens up the bar at some point in the afternoon. Wearing a black satin mini-kimono (= instant forgiveness by lingering male population for missing lunchtime) she clears up the remains of the previous night’s party looking a little hungover.

Kurt gets up a bit later, he has announced himself as the new chef and we’re all curious to see what his food’s like. The Director put down his computer to join us for the after-pétanque supper at the bar. The man had made a big effort and it really wasn’t bad at all. After supper we all said it was great, he unscowled and became really rather friendly.

Garden Envy

13th Aug
I have become afflicted with garden envy. Not for the leisure sort of garden with grass and flowers because most examples of that in the area are rubbish. I want a potager like my neighbours have. Great lush ranks of artichokes, beans, courgettes and potatoes flourishing next to high, burgeoning tresses of tomatoes. Bright lettucey things in neat rows and big bushy herbs lining the paths. The potager at the Lovely House has not been looked after for many years and is full of nettles and brambles. Digger Man tearing it up to fill a hole in the dam earlier didn't really help either. I've repaired the worst of the damage, cleared the weeds and started a compost heap, but apparently we're supposed to be making a film, so I’ve had to be content with gazing longingly over Mr Bert's hedge on my way to the phone box to call France Telecom (sigh, still no landline), watching him pick leaves off things and tie-up stuff.

I'm still picking mystery vegetable packages off the gate, Mr Bert claims no knowledge of who it might be.

If I go in the other direction towards the bar there are other gardens but I have to stand on my bicycle pedals to see them over the hedges as I wheel past. Arriving at the bar today people are playing pétanque outside, Mrs Strange is behind the bar, she tells me that some Dutch people have set up a pétanque club.