Making An Entrance - Twice

7th June
My friend Florence recently organised a birthday picnic bash for her husband who has been neglected of late due to the recent arrival of a baby.

I baked my current speciality, a MegaCherryFrangipane Tart and set off in the police car but the road into Florence’s village had a big hole in it, and I couldn’t pass. Roads around here will often start off as tarmac and then dwindle without warning into a narrow gravelly track before petering out altogether. Trying to find another way into the village I found myself up one of these tracks and then, in my attempt to turn the car round, ended up backing it into a ditch.

I was tantalisingly near Florence’s house so I left the tart and champagne in the car, crossed the field, pushed through a hedge and walked up the lane to the party, arriving triumphant in torn frock and hair stuck with twigs, Florence ordered the men to accompany me back to the car and get it out of the ditch. They did so in great high spirits but were a bit competitive about how to deal with the problem and managed to further entrench the car, so Florence found a jeep-owning neighbour who came and towed me out. In gratitude I handed over the MegaCherryFrangipane Tart to Jeep Man but then felt thoroughly embarrassed about first stealing the men from the party then re-arriving tartless.

I needn’t have worried, the party had improved since our disappearance, the email that David sent round a few days later includes a reassurance to his friends (who seem to be mostly in their twenties) that being 30 is fine after all, and he then goes on to thank the attendees for their contributions, including this appreciation of my piéce de théatre:

Merci à Lulu pour l'animation de l'après-midi intitulée "A car in a ditch !"

Introducing Mr Fabre

8th February
I have just received a scribbling award from Saucy Scarlet Blue, a lady who’s been making me laugh a lot lately - thank you Scarlet I feel very honoured and flattered. Apparently I have earned it for my quirky style, I'm supposed to pass it on but am crippled by indecision, I'm enjoying too many blogs to make a top 4 - if you're on my side bar I bestow it on you.

If you like quirky, the French entomologist JH Fabre is the man for you. Fabre’s books have been a great resource on this insect-ridden project, but the man deserves several programmes devoted to himself.

A teacher, scientist and author, Fabre was writing copiously at the end of the nineteenth century on the subject of natural history and in particular the insect world. An extraordinary character emerges through his writings. He records his experiments and observations with charm and humour; I’ve just been reading his description of a pair of dung beetles who have finally managed to roll a ball of dung into a burrow, they block the entrance to prevent interruption, and prepare to feast;

…the ball by itself fills almost the whole of the room; the rich repast rises from floor to ceiling ... here sit the banqueters, two at most ... belly to table, backs to the wall. Once the seat is chosen, no one stirs; all the vital forces are absorbed by the digestive faculties.

Fabre’s writing is florid, poetic and at times hilarious, his style was questioned by the more establishment figures of the time. Reading about Fabre I came across a quote that I had trouble understanding and asked my friend Florence for her translation of his thoughts on willfully obscure writing by academics;

Should one page bristling with barbarian and so-called scientific locutions come to my attention then I would say to myself: “take care! This author does not know exactly what he is talking about, otherwise he would have found among the vocabulary hammered out by great minds, the proper way to express clearly his thoughts"

Well quite

Boom Box Stalker

16th January
The optimism of the rural Frenchman in his sexual ambitions is irrepressible;

It is only the totally unsuitable who pursue me, usually very old, sometimes very young. If the man hitting on me is somewhere near my own age I’d put money on the fact that he has never actually been successful in wooing any woman.

I had formed a theory that these men think I will be dazzled by their exotic foreignness. But then I went for lunch at Jeanne’s café with Florence, her pregnant belly resplendent. She is stunning, a more gorgeous version of Audrey Tatou. Not surprisingly I was totally ignored by the gappy-toothed, the boss-eyed and the lame, they were all after Florence who had to fend off several attempts at inappropriate touching and general suggestiveness.

On a dull day before Christmas, Florence and I set out on a walk. When we heard the thump of a sound system coming up behind us, we looked back and saw a fat teenager with a massive boom box strapped precariously in a crate on the back of his bicycle. It was a funny sight and we danced and sang along as he passed. Naturally he took that as an invitation to have sex with him and cycled in wobbly circles alongside us, making encouraging noises and generally trying to tempt us.

Unconcerned, we walked off the road into the forest assuming he’d get lost. Half an hour later we came to another piece of road , it had started drizzling slightly now - Boom Box Boy was there waiting. We crossed the road and went back into the forest walking on for another hour or so ending up back at Florence’s village, it was by now pouring and we were freezing as we squelched our way down the tarmac - boom box man was there, waiting, when he spotted us he started pedalling hopefully towards us.

January Review

14th January
The Bar and La Salle des Fetes:
The rift widened over new year. The Salle des Fetes advertised a St Silvestre Dinner Disco. Kurt 'n' Courtney hosted an evening of New Year jollity with beer and pies at the bar, the bar posters were in English so it was interpreted by the villagers as being an exclusively British event – which it was.

The Pétanque Club:
still meets up at the bar for a weekly game – the club has now become registered and official, the first inter-club tournament will be played next month, we are summoned to start training in earnest this weekend.

The Cats:
hang out on top of a tall basket full of knobbly ropes in the back kitchen, if I walk in there, they shoot out through the cat hole to the wood shed but Kevin will immediately poke his head back through the hole to see if I’ve got food - he is excessively greedy.

Florence:
my friend is roundly and hugely pregnant. Yesterday we visited some thermal baths and wallowed around like a pair of whales then loafed in the Jacuzzi on the roof where it snowed on us. The big hole in the wall of her house has now got a window in it.

Dormant Creatures:
are now sleeping in a second fridge plugged in just for their use, currently only ants and butterfly cocoons in residence.

The Director:
is still editing last year's material in the UK he is expecting a visit from me next week.

The Film Show

24th November
I’m still reeling from going through a year's worth of dramas these last two days. The Director spent Saturday morning setting everything up at the Salle des Fetes – and nothing worked. The speakers were duff, the screen turned out to be puny and the projector wouldn’t work until we figured out how to screw the bulb in properly. Sometime during the afternoon we ditched the tiny screen and wiggled stuff in the right way to make sound happen.

On Sunday while The Director was doing last-minute adjustments I put out some chairs, I wasn’t sure who’d turn up so I put out about 50 and started fiddling around with bowls of pretzels. Our friends set up the drinks table and we realised that Mme Bontette, who is a bit distracted by her new job, had made us a tooth-achingly sweet rum punch so we collected up all the supplies of lemons and limes we could lay our hands on and squeezed them into the mix. Then people started coming - and they kept coming and we were all pulling out stacks more chairs because the hall was filling. The advertised start time was 6.15 but by 6pm there was a room full of people looking expectantly at the bit of wall where the projector was pointing, they weren’t interested in rum punch or Ricard they were just waiting. So we rolled the film which was a shortened version of the pilot with subtitles (thanks Florence!), followed by a series of sequences that we’d filmed over the last few months. At the end everyone cheered and asked to see it again immediately.

Mme Bontette is loving her new job as a reporter for the local paper and has bought a new set of reporter’s outfits which are very glamorous and seem to be mostly furry-edged, she was taking a lot of photos.

Then we cleared up and went down to the bar which was heaving. The Goths had gone to town with candles and drapes and stuff, the tables were put together to make a big U shape and set with pitchers of wine and baskets of bread. Trays loaded with glasses of Cava were passed round. The meal was great: bowls of salad and the famous cassoulet – and they’d even done the crispy crumb thing on top. The really fantastic thing though was that there were people there who’d told me they’d never be in the same room together and there were French women there who told me that they’d never go to a bar because it wasn’t ladylike. Anyway the whole thing went on late and it was a great party. And now The Director and our friends have returned to the UK and I feel completely discombobulated.

Choosing Colours

14th November
The Director has gone back to the UK where our house has become a production office. Over there the bedrooms are now editing suites and the living room is full of people writing scripts and arguing about contracts. I am going to (hide in France) stay here and prepare for next year’s filming. We need a studio to film things that have to be contained (like cockroaches) and slow things like butterflies emerging from cocoons. I’m currently trying to persuade builders to give me a quote to lay a concrete floor for the studio. The outside project is the 'film set garden’, I’ve started clearing a large overgrown piece of land where we will put a shed, fencing, plant flowers and make a vegetable patch. I’m a bit hampered by the all the rubbish the Landlord has dumped here, hacking back brambles I keep dinging into bedsprings and bits of rotten furniture.

For light relief I go and visit my new friend Florence. On Tuesday I took the fabulous chicory tart over to her place. Florence is expecting her second child in the spring. She has recently moved into a small village house that needs some work. We picnicked amid the rubble from a big hole that has just been knocked through the end wall. Turning our backs on the view of a suppurating septic tank in the middle of her garden we perused paint colour charts for the baby’s bedroom.

Star Wars Soup

29th October
Hercule is a robust six-year old, I met him over the weekend at a communal picnic event. I was so impressed by his gourmandising that I invited him for lunch. He bowled into the Lovely House, sat at the table, spotted a bowl of beetroot and made a grab for it. His mother restrained him while I served the soup. I commented that it was made from the remains of a Coq au Vin and had some wine in it. Hercule took a spoonful and became Yoda
Unusual wine in soup to have - it is strong - but rather good

After lunch Hercule had a go at mending one of the cameras with The Director and the Camera Boys. This somehow resulted in a Star Wars fight with torches.

Hercule's mother, Florence is lovely and looks a bit like Amélie. I've been wearing my yeti shrug constantly since I bought it last week, the picnic was no exception - Florence thought it a wonderful thing, then we discovered that we find the same sort of things funny and that we have eerily similar music collections. Florence went to the supermarket before meeting me yesterday, they were selling rubber wellies shaped like cowboy boots - she bought us a pair each, we wore them on our pre-lunch mushrooming expedition.

We went looking for something that I had sloppily translated as 'Love Trumpets’. When the name Trompette de la Mort is explained to me (they should be gathered by All Soul’s Day – 2 November) I suddenly realise that we are actually picking Death Trumpets. We collected lots and I must now lay them out on newspaper for a few days to dry.