The Food Of Love - Part II

I packed up the Taste the World tent last night after Andy White, assisted by professional toast-maker John Leckie assembled and served a spectacular Rock ‘n’ Roll Breakfast.

Menu
Coco Pops & Kalua
Granola with Strawberries Flambéed in Irish Whiskey
Champagne with Marmite Soldiers.
with a side order of beer

John had said that he would make Eggs Benedict, but then decided that he wasn’t up to making a hollandaise sauce
Andy: but you’ve produced Radiohead
John: making Hollandaise is much more difficult than producing Radiohead


My work done, there was still time to go and see more musicbefore the end of the festival, all the food left had to be thrown out or given away, there were 4kgs of lamb in the fridge with no takers, so I divided the meat between my shopper and my handbag and took with me to go and meet Miss Whiplash who was watching Roy Ayers at the other end of the arena - I was halted in my tracks by music from this band*



and got no further. I saw no more of the Whiplash but she sent a text to say that Roy was totally amazing and she was running after his tour bus to see if she could have his babies.

I did see/hear a lot of great music, The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble are raw pulsating sex on 18 legs, if there’s a show coming near you - see them.


I bought Antikrisis after seeing this and I’ve been playing it non-stop since I got home.



* Sorry about rubbish sound but it's as near as I can find to what I heard from Ba Cissoko a man currently being touted as Africa's Jimi Hendrix.

The Food Of Love

In Real Life I’m a cook, these days I take short cooking jobs and fit them around the work going on at the production house. In my early cooking days I catered for pop stars and I still do quite lot of work with children, but it tends to be non-musical events. I am therefore, really excited, about  my job this weekend at WOMAD, a music festival set in a vast parkland strewn with people performing songs and dancing, I'm especially looking forward to seeing these people.






One of the performance tents has a stage set with a kitchen – artists, who are also performing on the larger stages, come here and cook something for the public who come to watch the spectacle - it’s like Food Art with music.


My role in all this? I am The Girl Who Shops; I get sent details of what the musicians want to make, I buy the ingredients, make sure they have enough of the right sorts of pots, and when the cooking gets going I might end up stirring a sauce while they toss pancakes.

My shopping list includes ‘crumbs of salt cod’, chorizo, smoked ham and ‘moong divide', the Food Events start with Cuban Chicken on Friday and end with a rock ‘n’ roll breakfast on Sunday evening (Kalua and Coco pops and a demonstration of the sort of meals you can make inside a hotel kettle).

the musicians often send accompanying notes, placing their choice of dish in context. Many WOMAD performers are in some way exiled from their homeland, Mariam Hassan is currently resident in Spain, she will be making a lamb dish from the Sahara, to finish she will serve 3 different sorts of tea, the first will be As Bitter as Life, the second will be As Sweet as Love and the third will be As Soft as Death.

Bringing It All Back Home

The Director is back from filming in Botswana, most of the kit is in storage but the lenses are up in the spare room for testing and cleaning. He's mostly been asleep since his return, which is a shame as I was hoping he might do some Man Jobs, like get the congealed fat out of the drain.


He's hoping I'll do some Woman Jobs, like fix all the broken trousers that are in his clothes bag. I won't be doing that because I'll have my arm down a drain, but I will model the trousers that show what happens if you stand too close to the camp fire.

Young, Dumb And Sponging Off Mum

I rely on other people to point me in the direction of telly that's worth watching, in view of the post I put up a few days ago I'll be watching Charlie Brooker's recommendation from behind the sofa.

Dilo Doll Mania Starts Here

Now that we’re blessed with so many television channels, the content needed to fill the yawning chasms of televisual space must be found from somewhere. Mr Dilo in Romania has come up with a winning proposal for a game show; his idea is to pitch his wife Banzai-style (who I totally back to win) against some other people with an unconventional take on their chosen religion.

I’m planning to steal his idea (Genius Steals – Mssrs Picasso, Wilde & Elliot said so), but first I need a photo of Mrs D so I can get some plastic dolls made and a load of other stuff with her image on it – then I’ll be onto a winner and get rich.

I know this because I have recently had a lesson in the economics of children’s television from a lady working for a Spanish television channel - she has a budget of 8 euros ($11) per minute to spend on children’s programming*.

For this sector, programme ideas come mainly from people who want to sell stuff; so a set of characters is thought up by a marketing person, they get together with a manufacturer who then make a load of toys, clothing - you name it they'll make it, branding the characters over as many bits of old tat as possible. The marketing people write out guidelines for the merchandise and then get it strung together into an extended advert which is then called a children’s television programme.

Dilo's idea is perfect for kids, they love punch ups don't they? Earwig Sandwich will soon be given over exclusively to offering you our latest range of Dilo Dolls, Mrs Dilo Lunch Boxes, football strips and ear wax holders. Hand over her photo Mr Dilo and I’ll cut you in – don’t make me make it up!

*To get a broadcast-quality tape of an hour-long programme copied and sent to a tv channel, it would cost in the region of $150 plus courier costs.

The Point Of It All...

Barney has been in the office helping out for a few days, I’ve known him since he was very young, he’s now 18 and has become awfully tall and spotty, I have my suspicions that aliens visited him a couple of years ago and exchanged his brains for bits of fluff and mice.

He finished with ‘school and stuff’ over a year ago but hasn’t been able to get more work than the odd shift at a local bar. We talk about what he could do with his life, I make encouraging noises about the things he’s good at, he makes polite noises back.

Finally, frustrated at my lack of perception he puts the nub of his problem more clearly

I just want to get some money.
(with that uplift at the end, like it’s a question)

RIP Monsieur Splendido

I have spent the evening trying to find the words to write to someone who has just lost her husband. As a couple they clasped me to their bosoms, became my friends and gave me an unparalleled introduction into the tight little society that is rural France.

I was in France looking for a farmhouse that we could use as a filming location and crew accommodation. I had spent my first few nights in increasingly dismal hotels, so when I walked into the lounge of Hotel Splendido, a sixties timewarp of black quilted vinyl, shiny teak veneer and flamboyant floral displays, I felt I’d come home.

Monsieur Splendido and his magnificent moustache were rivetted to a banquette his eyes fixed to a fuzzy image that might have been a sport game on a huge old television screen, he must have divined my presence through his whiskers because he didn’t take his eyes off the box as he bawled for his wife to come and sort me out.

Madame Splendido was stiffly coiffed and wore the sort of makeup that frightens horses. She was sharp and to the point and gave me a thorough interrogation before handing me the keys to my room.

The hotel's restaurant is popular with the locals, in the summer, dinner is served outside on a sunny terrace. The evening that I arrived most of the tables were full of chatty laughing couples, I was shown to a table in the middle of the terrace and Monsieur Splendido (now dressed in chef's whites) appeared by my side, he introduced me to the other diners with a grand flourish, as though he had produced me from a hat;

This is Lulu she is looking for a house to rent, please help her if you can.

The Splendidos were a double act, the magician and his glamorous assistant and it is impossible to imagine one without the other.

Holy Turtles

Carnival is basically a Good Thing, but I usually try and be out of town when it's on, partly because of the racket, but also because the police chases and firework fights can get tedious, I also find it alarming when people hide behind my wheelie bin to shoot up.

Having spent most of the last 3 years out of the country, I had completely forgotten about this annual Caribbean bonanza. However I finally twigged by noon on Saturday when my radio had become inaudible despite only being two feet away from me. I decided that I might as well give up and join in.

I crossed the road to the main body of the party alongside a girl in a vest and face paint, her toes had scraped their way through the fabric of her red slippers and she was propping up a grinning man with a propeller on his head.

The parade was cranked up to full volume, local community groups samba-ed along in enormous glittery costumes, banging drums and pushing trolleys piled high with sound systems. Punctuating the groups were dancing girls wearing little more than body crayon, big shoes and feather headdresses.

The only community group that had decided not to compete in the sparkle stakes were Team God who had opted for a theme entitled 'What I wear To Shop At Asda’. Unity was achieved by dint of large gold cardboard stars tied to their backs, making them look like a flock of holy turtles. Each star was customised with text, mainly a single inspiring word: Give, Smart (??), Happy... emphasized by repetition, like the turtle-man who had the word hopefully written many times in biro all the way down his back.


I think they must have salsa’d too hard, too early on, because by the time I saw them they were trudging wearily and trying not to look at naked girls and men on stilts with bananas in their jockstraps.





This morning I swept up the remains of the television I heard being kicked down the street during the night.

The View From the Office

Over the years I have worked intermittently for this production company, mixing film production work with my other (quite different) freelance work. For the last few months I have been working here full time.

Our film crews are currently working in the US and in Africa. Miss Whiplash and I remain, up to our necks in budgets, schedules and cake, in the production office.

We hear from the field when there are problems; the Monarch butterflies have been unseasonably late arriving in Wisconsin and excessively cold weather has arrived in Africa. This weekend, after days without word from Africa I received a call from a cold and exhausted Director, he has decided to break camp and the crew will make a 2-day journey to another location which should be easier to work in.

Being in a good communication zone a new post has been emailed for the Botswana blog, it is full of details of the local wildlife and practicalities of making a film. Meanwhile back in the office the phone calls fill us with the visceral sense of how these projects lurch from triumph to tragedy.

Today I have dealt with a batch of invoices - they tell a story too.

Here’s a section from the African camp suppliers:

1 X replacement battery charger
2 X replacement radios
Long Johns
Gloves
10mm wing nut
Brazing Rods
5 X Famous Grouse Whisky
2 X cases of Red Bull
1 X box re-hydrate powder
Game Powder Energy drink
Rennies tablets (large)
1X bag of rags
1 X tarpaulin + 6 X duct
vehicle respray for filming vehicle*
re-modelling of filming vehicle
ski rope

*The standard safari vehicles in the area are white - ours is resprayed khaki, partly because a white vehicle is a distraction to hunting animals, but more importantly, as camouflage against other humans out on safari, once they spot a vehicle parked up, they pile over in their droves, creating an instant car park, which is also off-putting for the animals.

Superorgasm

Zena joined us in the office this week, a ravishing Swiss scientist who has been doing some research for an upcoming production on complex insect societies. We have given this film the working title of Superorgasm.

The Latin names of many insects trip off Zena’s tongue, but Whiplash and I need the Idiots Guide to Relevant Species that she has made for us and stuck up on the wall.

TV companies like a bit of sensationalism in their programmes so I’m looking for 'stories’ – ideally someone who has had a limb dissolved by ants or people who have had their car stolen by wasps.

A Pink Evening
In my continuing quest to get reacquainted with my neighbourhood, I have spent the evening at my local cinema, it’s the sort of place that serves Spanish brandy and carrot cake, their films are scheduled to start at 8pm but everyone knows that they never start on time and turns up later, the cinema staff wait until they think everybody has arrived before they start the film. Tonight their Japanese pink film season opened with A Lonely Cow Weeps at Dawn which is about a woman who pretends to be a cow.

Actually it was about more than that and managed to be touching as well as ludicrous. I think Jim Jarmusch must get inspiration from this genre.

Rubbery Cleaners Revisited

In the mornings, on her way in to work, Miss Whiplash brings us excellent coffee from the lesbian café near the office.

These days it's just the two of us in the office - everyone else is away filming. Whiplash spends half her time nagging a television company to cough up long overdue payments and the rest of her time is spent trying to reassure our creditors. I talk about biscuits and help think of ways to raise finance. In the absence of people I have noticed that enormous dust bunnies have been breeding under the desks,  I’m also thinking of ways to brighten our lives a little.

I do the afternoon coffee run. yesterday, three closely shorn women were sitting outside the café arguing about the qualities they’d be looking for in a nude cleaning person, I don’t think I’d like a completely unclothed person cleaning around me but fancy dress could be diverting. I remembered the ad for rubber cleaners that I’d spotted earlier in the year - I’m still a bit confused about who pays who, but it has occurred to me that if I get it the right way round I could kill several birds with one stone.

I kicked myself for not asking the lesbians where their fetish staff come from, but I had noticed that the café advertises communal stitching afternoons (an activity that has flourished in this city while I’ve been away). I decided to join in and see if I could infiltrate their intelligence network.

As it turned out, communal stitching is not attended by the lesbian community, it was full of girls who like kittens and sparkly things - I have returned knowing far more about knitting gonks than I did before - my quest for a cleaner has not advanced.

Leaving France Behind

The car incident from the previous post was the last thing to happen before I left France last autumn.

Earwig Sandwich has been largely based on the journals I kept while we were filming Smalltalk Diaries

Many incidents did happen at the time of writing and everything that I have written about actually happened, all of those people exist and I maintain contact with many of them.

We kept the Lovely House on after we’d finished filming Smalltalk Diaries and did other filming work there. All the work lined up for the coming year is away from Europe so we reluctantly handed it back to the owner.


Smalltalk Diaries is a series for children, it’s been aired on various BBC channels but for the moment there is no sign of it being shown anywhere else (this has been a frustrating saga and and too tedious to relate).

We can't sell dvds yet (however I can give away dvds to the first 10 people who email me an address).

The Director is filming in a very remote place in Botswana at the moment – I’ve set up a blog here for his reports from the Kalahari.

Dodgy Car-Dealing

We’ve pretty much ticked all the boxes on our sequence lists and I’m now in full packing-up mode, this includes selling the old French police car, a Laguna that I'd bought for this project last year.

I’ve been telling everyone that the car is for sale. A couple of weeks back, when I was alone at the house, I had just stuck a 'For Sale’ notice in the car's window when I saw a familiar Mercedes pulling into our drive, M.Mullet got out of his car, greeted me a little too intimately, prowled around my car and asked me why I was selling it so cheaply, ‘Leave the car with me when you go - I will sell it for you’.

The paperwork for selling vehicles in France is complicated and I told M.Mullet that I needed to have the car sold before I left France, but if he found a buyer he’d get a cut, I went into the house to get drinks for us. When I came back out M.Mullet's demeanor had completely changed, he seemed to be trying to control himself, then he put his face close to mine and snarled, ‘you will never sell that car’ and drove off.

That shook me up

I stepped up my campaign, there was a pétanque tournament at the village bar on Saturday, so I drove the car there and parked with my ‘For Sale’ notice showing prominently, by the end of the afternoon one of the players, a Dutchman, had made an offer and we shook hands on what we both knew was the bargain of the century, he insisted that I took the ‘For Sale’ sign out of the car, I passed it to him and he tore it up. We drank many glasses to celebrate the purchase and he said that he would come by and exchange cash for the vehicle a few days later.

While the Dutchman was out test-driving the Laguna, The Walrus who is also Dutch looked at me and gave me a warning.
be careful! he is from Holland – he will not pay what you are asking.
So when I received a call that evening from another prospective buyer, I said that it was probably sold - and I took her number.

Sure enough, a couple of days later the Dutchman phoned, having assessed my urgency to get the car sold, he was offering me a considerably lower price than the one we had agreed - he said that his new price was all he was prepared to pay, he would call back when I’d had a chance to think about it.

I phoned the woman back, asked if she still wanted the car and took it over to her that evening. She lived a long way away and it was midnight before her husband drove me back home with 3,000 euros stuffed in my underwear.

...and I got to tell Mr Dutchman where to put his money when he called the following day to see when he could pick up his Laguna

Dressed To Impress

12th June
I haven’t seen the Maire since we went hive shopping a couple of weeks ago – he’d said that he would come and move our bees into the new hive - we’ve been poised for bee action, but we've also been busy with other things…

Yesterday we were all in the garden filming the hatching eggs of a swallowtail butterfly when hoards of winged ants started coming out of the earth behind us and climbing up the stalks of chili plants to launch themselves off on their nuptial flights. We’d just scrambled another camera to film the ants when the Maire’s car pulled into the drive and two men in futuristic-looking white overalls got out and walked towards us, the Maire was pumping bellows attached to a metal jug that puffed out smoke, it was like Gardener’s World had merged into an episode of Lost in Space.

The smoke calms the bees down, the Maire and his son set the new big hive next to the one already in the garden, they opened the lid of the new hive and put in a couple of frames of new wax, then they opened the top of the old hive and pulled out frames full of bee larvae and honey and crawling with bees, these were slotted into the new hive.

We wanted the frames spaced wider inside the hive for easier filming - we couldn't do this - the gap between the frames should be the width of a bee, otherwise they get stressed trying to keep the hive temperature constant.

The Maire left us with the smoke blower and his bee outfit, we will have to improvise more protective clothing from net curtains and the dressing-up box when we start filming.

Insect Striptease

8th June
We’ve been filming a lot of insects getting out of their skins lately; cockroaches, spiders, dragonflies, butterflies and this firebug









The most astonishing transformation to my eyes has been the bluebottle. The boys have been fighting over who gets to go down to the dead badger in the orchard, filming the arrival of flies, the laying of eggs and the resulting maggots*.

We took the maggots that dropped off the badger to the studio to film them pupate and then emerge as a fresh new fly.

You might not want to scroll down any further if you’re eating your dinner...

A set was ready in the studio; a fox carcass placed on a tray of earth with a few leaves scattered around (set-dressing – creating a mood). The maggots were placed on the set - we did have to pick them up off the floor as they kept wriggling off. But many of them did make a brown shell.

Then an amazing thing happens - the pupa cracks a little, a white balloon is inflated from the inside forcing the pupa to crack open further until it splits revealing a damp and naked-looking fly with enormous eyelashes.



*we are thinking of rebranding maggots as fly caterpillars – would that make them more popular?

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 !"

Mr Potato Head Under Pressure

5th June
I went down to the woodyard to get some ply from Mr Potato Head, his mother is extremely tiny and fierce. As I walked up her drive she threw back her head and yelped which is her way of calling her son's attention. Four little dogs joined in the racket, barking and jumping up at me until he arrived.

I had to wait to tell Mr Potato Head what I wanted because his mother had to shout at him first - she was telling him he wasn’t allowed to do anything until he’d delivered the truckload of wood sitting outside the house.

When she’d finished shouting, Mr Potato Head asked me what I was after and I said that I needed three sheets of ply but I was hoping he’d cut them up for me and he said fine and took my drawing away leaving a red-faced and distraught woman on my hands. She told me that her husband is going into hospital soon to have his leg amputated - the protracted result of a tractor accident and spilt battery acid many years ago. This is too sad to hear, Mr Potato Head put the ply in my car and said he must hurry and do the delivery before his mother bursts, I remind him that he hasn’t ever sent me a bill yet and that he must do it soon because we will leave next month...

Omigod we’re leaving! - there’s still loads to be filmed and masses of leaving stuff to sort out (like reselling the police car!) and I’m coming up to the one year mark for starting this blog which was only intended to run for the duration of this project...

Testosterone Poisoning?

2nd June
We're all in a bad way at the moment - not me obviously because I'm a girl, but the boys have all got bad legs or fingers or something, one of the Camera Boys is so badly affected by hay fever that one eye is bandaged up and he appears to be out in soldarity with Pirate Cat. Ms Woolsfoot is concerned that we have succumbed to Testosterone Poisoning.


The Director has something snuffly - what could it be - Man Flu? ... no worse,

Swine Flu? ... worse even.

It must be Swan Flu!!!!

Watch out - it's coming to a menagerie near you.

A Man's Man's Man's World

May 31st
The household testosterone levels have reached the highest point yet on our testerometer with the arrival of The Editor...












Ed is here to look through the footage and make 'selects reels’ but the Camera Boys have got him involved with fluffing* the spiders that they are filming in the cellar. Ed has embraced this role with enthusiasm and has invented a technique to control spiders by blowing gently at them through drinking straws.

*wrangling is the correct term for managing animals but we think it sounds a little crude


In other news ... the last dragonfly larva made his bid for freedom just as we sat down for dinner, meal abandoned, two stills cameras and a movie camera switched on - we now have the whole dragonfly emergence sequence in the can - Hoorah!

Flying Under The Radar

29th May
The dragonfly larva are sneaking out of the tank when our backs are turned. We go off and film spiders or stop for lunch to find another empty skin is attached to one of the reeds on our return.

We know the remaining larva are ready to go at any moment because they are no longer paying any attention to the tadpoles we put in the tank - a treat they normally hunt down voraciously. We now have them under constant surveillance. Dragonfly larva have very good vision so if they catch us looming over their tank they duck back under the water and get behind some weed.

Milk And Beans, Beans And Milk

26th May
There's a farm nearby that sells milk hot off the cow’s teat - on my previous visits I'd turned up at the wrong time (too early they're still milking, too late the milk lorry has taken it all away). Today when I arrived at the dairy a woman was swabbing the floor, we chatted in French at first, then she asked where I was from and she started speaking to me in English Canadian which was nice and interesting so my return was considerably delayed - but I did have several gallons of milk with me.

When I finally got back to the house I discovered that Mme Costaud had cycled by to tell us about a bees nest up a tree in the woods that was all open at the back. I was mortified to discover that The Director had shown her my potager. Like everyone around here Mme Costaud's potager is massive and immaculate - mine is a mess, the beans especially, are weedy and smothered with aphids. The Director thinks that she gave him some advice about pruning but I suspect she was telling him to set fire to it and start again.

I returned Mme C's visit and found her dressed in her husband’s clothes picking her way through a field of tree-sized broad bean plants. M. Costaud was in the back yard, wearing a lady's veiled sun hat and chopping wood. I joined in with the bean-picking and was sent home with very large sack of beans for our household.

Smellyvision

25th May
The dead badger that we are filming in the orchard is getting quite smelly now. The whiff is detectable from our front door but the Camera Boys have been doing some macro filming right up close to the body and they’re looking a bit green.

As a break from the badger, they're preparing to film a dragonfly larva emergence. We've set up a big tank of pond water with aquatic plants and creatures in it, it's surrounded by lights and cameras. There’s a clump of stiff grass fixed in the middle of the tank and when they’re ready, the dragonfly larva will climb up a grass stalk and shed it’s last skin before becoming an adult and flying off. Several likely-looking candidates are swimming around in the tank and we’re all keeping a close watch on them for signs of emergence.


Someone found out that the old radio in the house will work if a tub of salt is placed on it. We've discovered a surreal radio station that plays a fantastically eclectic mish mash of music, I think it’s run by a co-operative; a piece of Schuman will follow hip hop or flamenco, there’s a Latino enthusiast who puts in a lot of chachacha when he’s in charge of the decks but they curb the heavy metal enthusiast by giving him his own show in the evenings. They play back to back music for an hour or so then someone reads out small ads on a sort of endless tickertape ...

Laurent from Beauville seeks a fridge, call him on 06 065 0982, Marie in Dodon has found a small black dog, if you have lost a dog call her on 06 986 8761, Eric wants to sell his sofa it is black vinyl and a little bit damaged but still extremely comfortable, suitable for a student perhaps call him ...

...And Now With a Grown Up In Charge

22nd May
The Director took charge of fixing up our new hive this time:

Bee's go to a lot of trouble to keep a constant temperature inside the hive, using their bodies to warm the hive up if the temperature drops and fanning with their wings to cool the place down. So we devised a way to get access with our lenses (boroscopes and endoscopes if you were wondering Mr XL) without letting in a draught.


We made holes about three inches in diameter in the sides and back of the hive

then we stole someone's yoga pants and cut off half a leg, stapling the stretchy lycra over the hole - The lycra has been cut with a cross so when the lens goes in it is covered by the material

To finish off, pieces of wood are fitted over each hole, they can easily be slid out for filming.

Inept Cat Scaring

20th May



















Bowing to overwhelming demand (well one from French Fancy)
I present my actual, real life cat-and-children-scaring footwear

Hive Shopping

Following our recent bee fiasco I went and threw myself at the Maire’s mercy.

Where can I get a bigger, empty hive so we can make holes, then put bees in it?*

The Maire is quite mumbley and said something that I translated as
hhrrrmmmhmmm … later mmhm…nhmmn are you at home?

I wasn’t sure what this meant exactly but I said yes then went and lurked around the house wondering if he was planning to turn up today, tomorrow, next week... I really needed to go off and buy bricks and more plastic sheeting. The boys had gone filming at a lake and were out for the day. I ended up trying to intimidate a feral cat who comes round and terrorises our cat Julie - the invader is white with a black pirate’s eye patch. I made monster-claw hands at her and hissed, she flattened her ears, and made low blood-curdling growls like in those devil films. Monster-claw hands obviously weren’t going to work so I turned the hose on her.

The Maire turned up after lunch and I got in his car (still no idea what the plan was). He took me to a commercial apiculturalist – a very short man who was quite severely disabled, he swung himself about on a pair of crutches and gave me a tour of a machinery-filled shed where the honey is separated from the combs, it was quite gruesome - all dripping sticky after the morning’s honey-processing, with a surprising amount of dead bee debris around.

Honey Man and The Maire exchanged money for new wax sheets and a big wooden hive. The Maire refused my attempts to reimburse him and put me and the hive back at the Lovely House. He say’s he’ll be round when the weather is suitable to transfer the bees.

*The bees that the Maire brought round earlier this month were a small colony in a half-sized hive, as the colony grows they can be put into a full-sized hive (like repotting a plant)

Midnight Farce

18th May
The Director and I were fast asleep last night when four of our crew got back from the pub in the pouring rain and remembered that they’d promised to put holes in the beehive...

An electric drill, several extension cords and an umbrella plus black plastic bin liners were involved - and zero protective clothing.

The one holding the umbrella and the torch also filmed this adventure but much as I’d love too show you the wobbly, grainy footage of boys screaming in the rain, they are refusing to hand over the tapes, so you will have to take my word that bees did get upset, people did get stung and the holes were mostly drilled in the wrong places.

What we were able to see through the one useful hole was that there was too much wax and too many bees, packed too densely to be able to film in this hive. I now have to go back to the Maire to see if we can transfer this colony to another, bigger hive...

Bee Electricity

17th May
Until recently I’d dismissed our Maire (mayor) as a dreary sort of chap; hunched over, grey and lugubrious, he is renowned for his lack of interest in village issues. In the past when I have visited the Maire with the simplest request he has looked around anxiously for an exit and suggested that I return when his secretary is in.

Near our house there is a giant sequoia, it has been split by lightning and a large colony of honey bees live in it. Early in May masses of bees swarmed out of the sequoia and settled on a tree branch right outside our house. The Maire is a beekeeper, we would like a beehive in our garden, needing some advice I decided to give the man a go...

It turns out that bees are the electricity this man needs to function - when I told him about our swarm he was transformed, told me what the bees are up to, the conditions that they need to make a move* and offered to help me get a beehive set up in our garden. He didn’t want to use the swarm settled outside our house but he came over a few days later with a hive containing another wild colony that he had collected.

All we have to do now is work out a way to film them, drilling holes in the side of the hive to allow access to our lenses is on our job list (but we think that might upset them). The Director has insisted that we must film the bees this week. The holes must be drilled tonight…

*My shortened and very inexpert interpretation is that when the bee's nest gets too full, a queen (the queen thing is way to complicated for me to explain here) takes half the nest to look for a new home. They settle somewhere like the branch of a tree, all in a solid mass, while scouts go off looking at new housing possibilities reporting back to the swarm with information that they convey by means of a waggely dance. This can go on for days until a consensus is reached. In the middle of the day and when the weather is settled, they make their move to new premises.

Pests

15th May
I might not be squeamish about insects but I still find them a bit of a nuisance, around here it is the season for nuptial flights, when freshly hatched ants are supposed to fly off and start new colonies. The walls of The Lovely House are made from mud bricks and lots of ants seem to be living in there, at the moment our wooden window sills are covered in earth as millions of ants emerge from underneath the windows inside the house, they fly around hopelessly, then drop down dead as they fail to find a suitable mating spot.

Our response is to spend most of the time outdoors, I’ve failed to stem the mouse population so it's more hygienic and it’s warmer outside anyway*. I cook supper on a fire under the lime tree - this is quite an owly neighbourhood too, which is nice.


All this ‘Live and let Live’ stuff is messing with my head actually - if I was an American I would describe myself as being 'very conflicted’.

It is killing me that my new vegetable patch, nurtured with my own bare hands is simultaneously flourishing and being ravaged by wildlife – this means that my project is a raging success, I made the garden to attract these bastards, why do I feel like machine gunning them all off?

*Our Lovely House is like a damp cave all year round, mud brick and stone buildings are very common in this region, it should be a very 'breatheable’ structure, the original limestone render on the outside of our house has been 'repaired’ with concrete in large patches, - this is what keeps the house so damp.

TV Gold

14th May
We decided to stop early last night and set off for an aperitif at the bar. On the way we were distracted by some fresh roadkill. Someone ran for a camera to film establishing shots. The dead badger is now lying in the orchard next to the house, a stills camera set up to record the inevitable invasion from the insect community.

Icky Stuff

13th May
I’m quite hardened to the sort of stuff that might make some people leap up on stools and scream. This project is, in effect, an anti-squeam boot camp. Last weekend Barney came in thoroughly grumpy from a failed fishing session, he’d taken a box of maggots out of the insect fridge to use as bait, on his return he stuck the half-full box of maggots in the food fridge … and it wasn’t properly closed … and during the course of the evening the box was knocked over … I discovered this the next morning…

For the cockroaches we made a sort of Barbie Doll House set in a three-sided box, this had to look like a corner of a kitchen with tiled sides and formica base, accessorised with a chopping board, a knife and food items. Before we let any cockroaches loose we had to devise security:

A large wooden box was lined with thick black plastic and filled with water (a sort of square paddling pool), there was a platform island in the middle of it, here we placed the set and then we airlifted in the cockroaches, any actors wanting to leave the set were thus slowed down by the moat.


Cockroaches are my final frontier, I don’t like touching them if I can help it, but all the other stuff; flies, ants, snails I’ve got terribly fond of. How can you not love creatures like this?




One of the programmes we are making looks at the human desire to destroy insect life and the quantities of products on sale to that end. We can’t show real brands so we have thought up some product names Bug-R-Off, Zap'em Dead, Flies Undone, Ultimate Doom etc., then we printed out labels and used them in our shed set.

Boogie Nite

11th May
I was a bit late arriving at the village bar on Friday night and walked into a scene straight out of a David Lynch movie, tables of retired army-types played dominoes, a tall, skinny man stood at the end of the room picking out gloomy tunes on a guitar, the Andrews Sisters sang over the speakers.

Brenda hosted the evening, she's seventy and had a lot of surgical enhancement in the days when they used to just pull your face up and tie it behind your ears, heaven knows what her chest is packed with. Her cigarette constantly on the go Brenda has never been known to surface before midday - possibly due to the fact that she is quite tiny and it's probably quite hard to overcome the gravitational pull of pre-war implants.

By the time I got to the bar Brenda, her wig awry, had clearly been on the electric soup. Wearing a long and shiny halter-neck dress, her breasts looked as though two cannon balls had been stuffed to the ends of a pair of tights, she waved a big Tupperware box of cheese straws at me and passed me a Pina Colada that she'd decided was one too many for her.

I had a go at the dominoes but it’s never really been my game and the old buffer opposite was nowhere near as funny as he thought he was. So I let him win quickly and settled on a bar stool for the rest of the evening with Brenda, her stories are relentlessly tragic but delivered with dry wit and the bleakest of black humour, she told me how she’d been in the process of buying a cocktail bar in Marbella but got waylaid by a fleeting affair with a young and muscled rogue who wanted to go to France it was the saddest story in the world - but strangely compelling. If you’ve never watched Coronation Street here’s a clip;

Fish and Cabbage

10th May
A comment on my last post from Mr Dilo in Romania indicated that I might not have explained the butterfly/cabbage thing adequately. Earlier this year I started a vegetable patch so that we would have a context to film some of our insects, I planted all the usual stuff including some flouncy green cabbages, I kept a few of the plants in pots - they don’t like being confined. The butterflies may well turn their noses up at my pathetic cabbage stubs but if there is no other option, they might lay their bright yellow eggs on the leaves. (I nicked the egg pic from here, where there are also some nice shots of the young hatching and a Cabbage White pupa)


Fishing on Friday didn’t go down well, none of us have wielded a rod (and to be frank, I've never seen the point of all that standing around) but there is a lake on the land that we rent and it is teeming with fish, fishing is the sort of thing a father does with his son ergo etc...

The chaps came back after less than an hour in a state of distress - a fish had responded to the baited hook with such gusto that it entirely swallowed the hook, it all ended very messily, the fish not being the sort of size to bother eating.

The fish are very friendly, they will come if I call them because they know that I have bread. My neighbours have dug a reservoir and want to stock it with these fish so yesterday I went to the lake, and once they were feeding I just dipped a bucket and Hey Presto!





My favourite fishing method is to creep up on the herons, they catch the big fish by stabbing them, if I surprise the birds just as they have made a catch they usually drop the fish as they fly off.








You've probably been irredeemably traumatised by that vision of my unmanicured toes, tomorrow, unless otherwise distracted, I'll tell you about Brenda's party.

All Quiet On The Home Front

The household has suddenly become smaller again, I took Ms Whiplash (our Production Manager) and one of the Camera Boys to the airport yesterday and dropped Spider Man at the railway station a short while ago. This evening The Director and his son Barney are down at the lake seeing who is the least competent at fishing.


Meanwhile I’m sewing a net curtain into a big shroud that will fit over a wooden frame the size of a shower cubicle. The whole thing will sit outside with Cabbage White butterfly pupae in it and some cabbage plants that I’ve been growing in pots (they are looking a bit stunted), we’re hoping the pupae will hatch, then lay their eggs on the cabbages (and we’ll try and film that).

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.

Brenda Steps In

5th May
Since our village bar was sold last year it has languished in an ever-deepening Vale of Tears. A British couple called Strange bought it for tuppence from a lady desperate to make a quick sale, Mrs Strange thought that a bar would be a nice retirement hobby for her husband but after a few months they suddenly needed to disappear, leaving their eldest son in charge. Kurt The Goth spent the winter emptying the bar’s bank account ... then he also needed to leave, he persuaded his brother Shane The Fascist to come to the village and take over...


Shane is the only member of the Strange family who speaks French, he is an angry young man with a long list of dislikes; top of the list are British people, women and anyone over thirty. He doesn’t drive - for his first few weeks in the village Shane relied solely on the kindness of elderly British women to take him shopping. One day Shane's lovely and extremely camp friend Zizi arrived to help run the bar and do the driving.

Mrs Strange only discovered that Shane replaced Kurt a couple of weeks ago, she has returned and Zizi has gone. I was told that Zizi’s girlfriend was unhappy about him working at the bar - so he’s had to leave - unfortunately.

There is a bright spot on the horizon however – Brenda* has decided to liven things up. While seated at the bar listening to the update of this story my eye wandered over to a pile of bright flyers written in English and using the full array of jokey fonts currently available:

Friday Nite is Brenda’s Nite
For Fun, Frolics and Mayhem
Bring an instrument and a song
At the *** ***** Bar
8 til late

* Brenda is a Liverpudlian septuagenarian, chain smoker, owner of many wigs and recipient of some very large implants.

Arrested

May 4th
Our village is buzzing with gossip about the arrest for fraud of our notorious local estate agent. It was impossible to buy a property around here without Madame Vilaine being involved, new occupiers of property who’d just been (unknowingly) fleeced by her would be approached with the suggestion that they in turn act as agents, introducing their house-hunting friends in return for a cut of any resulting sale. These semi-retired incomers were flattered that their prowess in the property market was finally being recognised and they worked quite hard to deliver more victims to the Vilaine business.

I had an audience with Mme V when I first arrived in the area, I was only looking to rent and I’d happened on a rare day when she was in the office. Seated on a Louis XV chair, she’d sniffed at me and handed over the details of a property that was clearly a garden shed on a rubbish dump, I declined, she heaved her bosom, sighed heavily and told me that I couldn’t be helped - I was dismissed.

I’ve been hearing stories that make my hair freeze, like the one about properties rotten with termites that had been waved through by the surveyors Mme V appointed, but her most common trick was the 10% deposit scam:

In France when the buyer's offer on a property is accepted, they hand over 10% of the agreed price as a non-refundable deposit. This should be held by an independent notaire (legal person). Mme V managed to persuade many of her naïve foreign buyers to give her this deposit directly, she used these deposits to support her other illegal activities, (we’ve been loving speculating on these) using various stalling tactics the sale then progressed very very slowly. This scam depended on a high turnover of sales and a constant influx of deposits and is the reason her empire has now unravelled.

Eighteen months ago The Strange family made a very low offer on the village bar for sale through Madame Vilaine. The previous owner was trying to avoid bankruptcy and agreed to the price for a quick sale. Mrs Strange handed her deposit to Madame V who held onto it for six months, this had catastrophic results for the vendor who still lives in the village.

French Farce

1st May
I’m not readjusting well to being back. Yesterday morning, I completely forgot that I was supposed to be collecting Spider Man* from the station, he called to see where I was just as I’d started washing my hair in the shower, so I had to do all that cartoony hopping around with an arm in one sleeve while trying to get my shoes and pants on at the same time and soaking myself with my own hair.

I was still trying to get an arm through the other sleeve and do my zip while backing the car out of the drive and I failed to put a mobile phone in my bag. Spider Man meanwhile had decided to get on another train, I arrived at a deserted station and then had to work out where to get a phone card and the matching call box to find out where he’d got to.

We have recently acquired an old blue Laguna that used to belong to the police (gendarmes), while I was running around after Spider Man it ran low on diesel so I stopped at an unmanned fuel station - I hadn’t refuelled this car before. I'd spent a full half hour hunting for a release button to open the petrol flap by the time a passing gendarme found me frothing at the mouth trying to forcibly prise the wretched thing off with my finger tips, he kept his distance and pointed out that I had to turn off the central locking to get at the petrol tank.

*Spider Man comes and stays for a few days now and then while he logs our material, he is French and unnaturally fond of spiders

Sexy Cockroach Girl

30th April
That last roachy post got me a Sexy Blogger Award - I’m beginning to worry about the sort of men I’m attracting:

The deal with the SBA is that I have to tell you 5 sexy things about me;

1. I’m probably even sexier now that I’ve had a wash - apparently some men find cockroaches repulsive and think girls should smell nice

2. I tend not to bother putting a top on, and now that it’s officially Spring I’ve removed the hat

3. I must be sexy because many of the local octogenarians have offered to 'entertain’ me, a fat boy on a bike stalked me last autumn (although it was probabably my friend he was really after) – and Bruno is still hanging his knobbly roots on my gate post

At this point I’m casting around for help, the Camera Boys and Barney have snorted beer out of their noses ...

4. Miss Whiplash says she would snog me - under different circumstances - but I'm a work colleague and she's a consummate professional

5. The Director says that I would be more sexy if I stopped typing and help him find his glasses

I think the SBA is a like an STD that I’m supposed to pass on to others, Madame Defarge can consider herself doubly infected - she is so sexy that she's already picked it up from Emerson - everyone else, please have a go ...

Keep Your Cockroaches Secure

29th April
Back in France I find I’ve not been missed, Miss Whiplash and the boys have become regular pizza-eaters at the Belleville Rendezvous, (something bad has happened at our village bar but I’m not sure what). My newly made garden is thriving, the insects in the fridge are all surviving, some cockroaches and house crickets have been delivered and our white board has been updated.





The board is our record of who’s living where and their special needs. Just in case you can’t read that bottom line here’s a close up.



Some of the cockroaches are in the fridge, but as we don’t know exactly what effect refrigeration will have on their performance we have some in a glass tank in the guest bedroom with a weighted lid on and the top two inches of the inside of the tank have been coated with petroleum jelly so they won’t reach the top of the glass sides*. There are cardboard egg-box trays in the tank for them to hide in.

Tomorrow I go and get supplies to build the cockroach film set.

* If left unjellied the cockroaches will all gather on the underside of the lid ready to pour out and up our arms when we take the lid off!

Elephants In The Room

24th April

The email in the previous post is probably connected to my attempt to introduce our Production Manager to village society before I left her there to fend for herself.

Soon after she arrived in France, I took Miss Whiplash to the village yoga class. I am a good head higher than the tallest woman in the village, we have all got used to me being the village giant, when I brought along a new classmate who stands head and shoulders above me.

Miss W tried her best to mingle but the local accent is strong, her French didn’t work and she and the villagers found each other mutually unintelligible, so although the class were impressed by her height and leopard skin leotard, everyone became too embarrassed by this failure to communicate and soon got on with their business as though she weren’t there (there is always a half hour of gossip before the class starts). Miss W spent the evening with a grin clamped on her face to prove that she is basically friendly, but being ignored makes one feel invisible.

I am currently obsessed with the idea of invisibility/visibility partly because I have taken a couple of weeks away from the insect filming to do a job in an Arabic country. I am transfixed by the way the Arabs float around in their flowing robes while the western visitors walk among them looking like raw sausages.

There are plenty of muslim women with their faces completely uncovered and they easily make eye contact with me but the ladies who peep out through a letter box in their face coverings and the ones who are completely covered behave as though they are invisible. What I hadn’t realised was how different these garments can be, there is an abaya shop close to where I am staying, in the window are styles cut in different ways, decorated with pearls, diamante and embroidery, I was particularly struck by a pleated and diamante-studded abaya that clearly inspired the Darleks. Outside this shop swings a large sign with a painted image of a woman wearing a black abaya, her hands and face originally in the painting are now covered over by three crude blocks of black paint


*no time to do a fancy image today, that one’s straight out of the tin from Crazy Spandex Girls

Whiplash Strikes Out

22nd April

Latest email from Whiplash…

… went for pizza to that bar in Belleville, the one with people/cow creatures painted on the windows - you HAVE to go. There are all these photos up of the people who go there having orgies, it was a bit embarrassing because I was looking at them and then I looked closer and said to Barney (and I might have been a bit loud) 'Christ it’s another gay bar' and it went all quiet then someone said, 'We do understand English you know' and there were these two girls snogging really hard in the corner and someone else said, 'We welcome everybody here'.

You didn’t tell me they understand English, I have made a complete plonker of myself.


W
xx


PS They do good pizza

Correspondence From Miss Whiplash

21st April
Miss W is holding the fort back in France. There are a few things puzzling her, I thought I'd share some of the emails ...

Friday
I can’t deal with your kitchen - I’m going out to buy a load of bread and we’re just doing sandwiches til you get back.

Saturday
Those jars in the fridge – should I tip everything out and check whatever's in the damn thing when I change the damp tissue? I can’t tell which are the bits of twig and dirt and what’s alive and I’m frightened that a bug might be in the stuff that gets on the floor

Sunday
That woman came over to put her sheep back in - WTF!!!, the boys spent the morning with her!!! – she got right on my tits - do we invoice her??!

Surprise Holiday

19th April
The journey door to door France to UK takes 16 hours. On Thursday at 5am The Director slammed the car boot shut ready to start the drive.

Then it dawned on me that we weren’t supposed to be leaving until the following day. Builders have been busy in our house and we’d agreed that they could destroy the place until Friday tea time, then it all had to be cleaned up. After a lot of tutting and eye-rolling we decided to set off anyway and stop somewhere en route - a surprise holiday.

I did a quick internet search and found an interesting-sounding place to stay that night, nearly all the B&B’s in France are run by British citizens, this one had a Russian proprietress (novelty value) and was in a rural area we were unfamiliar with.

Svetlana is as extraordinary as her house which is a combination of royal hunting lodge and the sort of sweetie-trap that Hansel and Gretel wandered into, our bedroom ceiling all pointy wooden slopes, the walls lined with deep-coloured, ornate fabric. Throughout the house there is curly-legged antique furniture and lots of gilt, in the salon a shiny grand piano. An astonishing dinner (for dessert: hot strawberries in port) was cooked and served by Svetlana who modelled a full-length, shiny turquoise evening dress. over the course of the evening we listened to her life story; she’d been a concert pianist but with the arrival of her children she’d become a music teacher at a school in an area with a lot of social problems, apparently the teachers there were expected to act as a sort of über-social worker, she’d visit the children in their homes and they stayed with her when their parents were ill or in prison.

She met her English husband in Russia and he convinced her to go to England with him for a 'better life’. In the UK she worked as a shop assistant at WH Smiths, newsagents, an isolated and friendless existence with scratchy teenage children but she persisted, got promoted and a few years ago, children now away working, she exchanged her Surrey semi for the gingerbread house.