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 Arrival Of Miss Whiplash

11th April
The hormonal balance has been restored by the arrival of Miss Whiplash, a lady whose real job is performing by night in selected venues where she sings and shakes her bottom around the stage in a series of exotic catsuits.

As Miss W is very good at sums and she’s taller than the rest of us we asked her to be our grown up which means that two or three times a week she gets up before tea time, puts on her Production Manager’s uniform - consisting mainly of outsize leopard-print sunglasses and thigh boots - and she whips our production into shape by making up schedules and contracts and scaring us about money.

She's come out to France to top up her tan and make sure that we’re all behaving. The boys have to be told off for buying too much Boy Stuff (lenses, hard drives, air guitars...) and I have to promise that we’ll eat nettles twice a week until the next tranche of money arrives from the Big Controller.

Tonight we’re taking Miss W to our village bar – my choice of venue because I’m quite keen to see how long it takes before she pushes Shane’s teeth down his throat.

Customer Survey

22nd March
I made a business trip to the village bar on Friday evening - to let it be known that I’m in the market for any old garden-related stuff that people are throwing out or won’t be needing for a while. I’m going to use it to dress the garden sets.

I took the new bar manager Shane shopping again last week and the trip was decorated by some colourful swearing. He cursed the tight-fisted a******s who are refusing to buy his fancy wines. This is mainly due to unrealistic expectations on his part, I suspected that our village society might not have the right profile for his plans and decided to conduct a survey of his existing clientele on a typical Friday night:

Old Dad
Turns up wearing fat slippers, usually drinks Ricard, rarely eats out, likes to see a piece of meat and plenty of chips on his plate.

Herisson
Comes in for beer after long day farming, lives with his parents, his Italian mother would be volubly upset if he ate away from home.

Frank and Philippe
Pétanque club captain and his best mate, they wear unfashionable jeans, drink beer mixed with mint syrup then Ricard chasers, their idea of evening entertainment = burping contests, when they’ve got drunk enough they go for a pizza.

Mimi
Philippe’s wife, she’s very smart but as a perpetually designated driver she just drinks Coke.

The Mullet* family
Mme Mullet is a hairdresser and does the family hair, her husband does stuff with used vehicles and leers shamelessly at other women in front of his wife, she watches miserably clutching a Kalua-based cocktail. There are two doughy-faced sons in biker leathers, their mullets resplendent enough to gain free entry to a Guns n Roses convention. The boys drink beer but M. Mullet surprised me by drinking what amounted to about a pint of Muscat (an inexpensive sweet white wine) They do eat out together a lot, I’ve seen them at Jeanne’s café, they tell me that for a special treat they would go to the Macdonalds in the out of town shopping mall.

Lost Bloke Asking Directions
No purchase

Me**
I hung with Mimi and put rum in my coke.

* The Mullet family are French, I was curious to discover what the French might call this cut and came across this place and this one
discovering along the way that

the French term is Coupe à la Waddle, referring to Chris Waddle, the English football player who adopted this haircut in the 1980s while he played for Olympique Marseille.

** I went to the bar on my own, The Director wanted to stay in and finish making a ratchet-sprung gnat-catcher and the Camera Boys took the car to go find somewhere a little more lively.

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 ...

Ant Condos

13th March
We’ve been preparing the new homes for the ant colonies that are hibernating in the fridge. We have some fat logs and tree stumps ready for the carpenter ants, a section is sliced off the log and holes are drilled to make a network of chambers, most of the holes will be bunged up on the outside with little corks leaving just two exits/entrances for the ants, when they have settled in we can unbung a hole and put in an endoscope to film what’s going on.

meanwhile down at the bar...
Shane has arrived to run the village bar, Kurt’s younger brother and chief adversary. Kurt was nursing a black eye when I took him and his wife to the airport.

Shane works out a lot, his body is waxed and his hair shorn with a number two blade, he wears neatly pressed white shirts, black trousers and shiny Doc Martin boots. He also has an intense dislike of women, non-French people and anyone over 30 ... he does not possess a driving license. Our village is a 20-minute drive from the nearest shop. Because I would like the bar to survive I have agreed to take him shopping with me once a week until his friend arrives to help him out next month.

Our first run to the shops didn’t go particularly well because I resent being treated like his personal chauffeuse and he doesn’t seem to like the sharp edge of my tongue.