Zero degrees!

Winter is here!

This morning, the car was iced over and the thermometer said 0 degrees for the first time since last winter. This is it. It’s officially here. The fields around were misty and white and the trees were dropping leaves in indignation. The combine harvesters have been busy at work and many of the fields of corn around us have been cut down to stubble. What was a hidden gem of a village, coming into Agris, is now bare and clear. No twisting roads through cornfields. No surprise turnings. No thinking I’m living in a strange horror movie.

We now have an extra metre of sky on each side. Big sky has become even bigger and I found myself worrying if I’d be claustrophobic back in Britain with a thin strip of sky between the terraces.

It’s just quite lovely driving down the lanes at impossible speeds, watching the fields going by, waving to the cows on the way. It’s not like Manchester. I find myself falling more in love with the place, despite the cold. None of this grim autumn here. I might be wearing jumpers in bed and hugging the dog to steal a little warmth, but the bright band of blue through my draughty windowpane is worth the cold.

I found a great fabric shop at Champniers: Cache Muraille (hide the fortification??!) where I’m going to spend lots of pennies buying fabric to make quilts and extra curtains and draught excluders. I really want to get into the creative me this winter. So far, it’s been very limited to food, rather than artistic pursuits.

Yesterday, I made walnut and gorgonzola pasta with foraged walnuts. Steve isn’t a fan of nuts in general, so this was more of a dish for me. I have always liked the idea of walnuts and gorgonzola (and walnuts in salad!) but you don’t get fresh ones in England; they’re more bitter and tough. These were soft and sweet and delicious! Now I want more to keep me going through the winter – like a squirrel!!

Jake has made 42 little fairy cakes this afternoon, in cute little Halloween bun cases, to take into school tomorrow. They’re just as cute as the biscuits. I’m looking forward to next week – all the cooking we’re going to do! He even did a little ‘s’il te plait’ when I asked if he wanted the butter – impressive, since we’re still on very formal terms chez nous. It feels very odd to kiss-kiss my clients – I’m not quite used to it yet! I like it though! I was chatting to one of my clients this morning about English formality – and I really feel it’s very odd to be so reserved when the rest of our European neighbours are a little more physical. Okay, maybe not the Germans, but I get the sense the Belgians are in on it as much as the Spanish and the Italians and Portuguese and Greek. I’m not so sure about the Swiss. I don’t think they do kiss-kissing either. Bizarre! What was nice was the guy in front of Sue and I last week in the supermarket. He lent over the checkout in a way that can only be described as if he were going for the till. Maybe that’s the Northerner in me that thinks that. But no, they kiss-kissed and bon apres-midi’d and then she sat back down, he stood back up, she scanned his shopping and they chatted as per usual. Très mignon!

Search engine madness

This is a post from a blog that I enjoy… you pick the random searches that people do that bring them to your page. I remember finding some funny ones, but unfortunately, I haven’t kept most of them.

I get a lot of people searching for David Austin roses, though I mentioned them once. Also, for Lady Gaga and for stripper shoes, bizarrely.

This was the best one I ever saw. Why the hell would ‘girls in jeans farting in mens faces’ result in a link to my lowly blog?! It’s one of the most random things ever. I think the search engine link should also say who looked for it, and then you could tell on them. I bet this was some 14 year old lad from Leigh and I’m sure his mother would need to know.

Today, the searches produced some of the following:

Stripper shoes	2
repair high heels	2
gallic-roman site of cassinomagus	1
worn down heels	1
putain de merde	1

Putain de merde (Fucking shit, or Fucking hell) often links to my page. I get a few for stripper shoes. I hope the people who want stripper shoes (other than strippers) read my post about where to wear them (in summary: the bedroom, the lap-dancing club AND NOWHERE ELSE, ESPECIALLY NOT SAINSBURY’S)

But… next time you do a weird search, you just might give some blogger a giggle. And if I have my way, the infinite powers of the internet will tell me who you are and give me your mother’s phone number so I can tell on you.

Preparations for Autumn

Jake’s been off school yesterday and today – so today we’ve been baking biscuits, as opposed to my usual cookies. I’ve dug out my cookie cutters for Hallowe’en and we’ve iced and decorated our biscuits. It’s a very simple recipe:

• 225 g caster sugar
• 225 g butter
• 1 large egg, beaten
• 450 g flour, sifted

Just cream the butter and sugar, add the egg and then add the flour in 50 g increments, mixing it in with your hands until it’s a dough. Leave somewhere very cool for an hour (or in the fridge!) and then roll and cut out. Some people are fussy about them being level and flat and so on. I don’t care because they don’t last long. Bake for 10 minutes at Gas Mark 4 – whatever that is. Then leave to cool, then ice!

I am unscientific with my icing sugar – Put a bit in, add some milk and mix to a thick paste. Add light colours of food colouring first and be very sparing if you’re adding darker colours to mix to other colours.

Jake and I painted them with a cocktail stick – and then we all enjoyed eating them!!

I’m planning on having a ‘feu de joie’ (a fire of joy – or bonfire to you and I) for the 5th November, seeing as we can’t get back to England at half term. I’ve planned an extensive list of potato and apple products – pommes d’amour (toffee apples), purée de pommes de terre (mashed potato) sausages, jacket potatoes done on the barbecue, parkin (only if I can find molasses, my make-do substitute for Tate and Lyle’s divine black treacle) bonfire toffee, fudge, baked bananas and chocolate, mushy peas, pickled red cabbage – so Jake can invite some of his friends round. I’ll invite a few neighbours and English people who I like – and we’ll have some games and a small bonfire (not forgetting firewood is now a commodity, not something to get rid of!) which I think will be jolly lovely!!

We’d also gone to look for the non-existent maison de la Resistance in Chasseneuil – apparently a room in someone’s house (not unlike a ‘teddy bear’ museum I went to in Japan which really was just someone’s front room done up!!) – but didn’t find it, so I dragged us up to the Necropolis in Chasseneuil instead. Amazing to think it was a small hub of Resistance activity. I thought Jake might be interested because these were your real life Jack Bauers and Tony Almeidas, taking pills to stop themselves confessing under torture. The Necropolis is dedicated to the Resistance fighters in Chasseneuil. It’s quite amazing to think of these real people fighting. Not like the British, sending people to war, but actual war around your own home, affecting everybody – your parents, your children.

Unfortunately, however, in the midst of this solemnity and sombre necropolis, Jake and Steve decided it’d be great to do their usual horsing about, throwing each other about, attacking each other, kicking each other, punching each other. I said I’m not taking them anywhere ever again. They can’t go anywhere without it being street theatre and almost a contact sport for the average passer-by. So they’re staying at home from now on. I shall not allow their noise pollution to escape Les Ecures. I’m sure it’s their way of holding hands, but it’s more like chimps playing. In fact, I’ve seen this very thing on Monkey World, where the little chimp chases after the bigger chimp and they roll about for a bit and then the little chimp ends up playing too rough and the big chimp ends up losing his temper and playing too hard. How little we have evolved.

I’m standing at the foot of this huge memorial, mulling over the seriousness of world war and contemplating life 70 years ago, and they’re rampaging through it like they’ve escaped from La Vallée des Singes.

Next week, I might go and look at some stuff on my own and leave them at home. Men.

As I write, Jake’s just gone outside to set fire to some pine needles, and is murmuring about ‘it only gives off a smoke’ – Neanderthal, then, rather than chimp?!

 

 

L’Hiver le chasseur aiguise son couteau

It’s definitely the advent of Winter – I think Autumn definitely started with the fall of the aspen leaves at the tail-end of August – and now, two months on, the fire is on and there is a definite nip in the air. It’s the kind of weather that makes you need hats, scarves and gloves. I’ve got several immediate projects to get on the go – a draught excluder and some curtains to go across the archway, as there’s a mighty strong gale that blows under the door way!

Steve’s mum and step-dad have now gone back to the UK – and sadly missed! – although Keith needs to bone up on his science knowledge as it seems to have melded into science fiction. If the truth be told, I like the small yet heated debates – it reminds me of my Gramps and my Uncle Paul – both of whom debate(d) endlessly with me over trivialities. Now ‘normal’ life will resume until I have to come back to England mid-November, and which I’m not looking forward to. I am glad I’ll get to see friends and family, but not so glad that I have to be back in England. Mind you, France right now has several English bits about it, beyond the nip in the air.

The country is on strike tomorrow (including Jake’s school, which is a rarity) and there are petrol blockades set up. There was mass panic yesterday when I realised L’Eclerc had switched their pumps off (well, considering they are credit card ones, it’s not a bad idea to stop people filling up jerry cans!) and worried I wouldn’t be able to get petrol tomorrow – you live through petrol concerns once (2000) and you realise what a chaos it can create. Of course, in England, the petrol blockades were announced on a Friday morning, so the great and the good of the retired world saw fit to panic buy and fill up their cars with 40 litres of petrol each, and by the time the offices kicked their workers out, there were mile-long queues and pumps running out. I still remember driving over to Clitheroe at a snail’s pace trying to conserve petrol, the roads empty and half the kids not in school. Luckily, a week in, the UK had had enough, and I wonder if France will feel the same. There’s a certain amount of inconvenience you’ll put up with whilst you’re standing up for your rights, but once you start worrying about how you’re going to get your shopping in, then it stops being a matter of principle and starts being a real concern. If it goes anything like England, the things you’re campaigning about might be held off for the moment (the £1.00 for a litre of petrol) but they’ll soon sneak in the back door virtually as fast as if you hadn’t bothered at all. I wonder if the country will bring itself to its knees without Sarkozy blinking. However, seeing as he’s got an emergency council in place and the press start talking about martial order, you realise they think it’s a bigger problem than they might be letting on.

It’s funny, because this is the first time I feel touched by French politics. I see the problems on both sides and it’s difficult to know what the solution is. I guess, sensibly, top-up pensions for those who want to retire early, though that’s incredibly undemocratic, since some of the hardest professions are some of the least well-paid, and some of the rich fat cats who can afford the top-ups would be able to work until they were 80, desk jockeys as they may be.

We’d planned on going to Aubeterre, but with the pumps being out of commission, it ended up being Montbron. Lovely, but not quite the same.

This reminded me, cobbles in England are being outlawed. Even ancient setts are being removed because councils are so scared of litigious citizens wrapped up in the compensation culture. So sad.

Cognac and Pineau

Steve’s Mum and step-dad have been over here for the last week or so, and we’ve been duly keeping them busy (and warm – it’s decided to drop to 2 degrees at night and haven’s really gone past 15 degrees in the daytime, though it was only last Monday we had t-shirt temperatures and it was far too warm to have the fire on)

Steve’s mum was uber-impressed (but uber-awed) by the land and the amount of work we have to do, but she likes it, and that’s very important! She’s liked the chateau at La Rochefoucauld, which is splendid and I’m also impressed about it myself. It is, if I say so myself, the finest chateau in the region. It kind of makes us very unimpressed with other chateaux. The worst thing is, you stun people into thinking the rest of the region is like that, but it isn’t. Although it’s all jolly lovely.

We’d also taken them to Cognac on Wednesday, on account of Sue being a fan of the old Cognac drink. It seemed rude not to. Cognac is a beautiful town and clearly benefits from its tourism. We sat around the main square drinking hideously priced coffee, feeling all European and cafe-society. It was a glorious France-Autumn day, blue skies, warm enough with a jumper, crisp leaves underfoot. Cognac is lovely. I don’t know why I’d had such a terrible impression of it last time. I think it must have seemed very grey or something. There are hundreds of boutique shops and it all seems very cosmopolitan. And very empty. I know we were there round lunch, but we walked down streets that were utterly deserted. It’s all very odd and Marie-Celestial.

We also went to Jarnac, smaller (and prettier, IMHO) sister of Cognac, home of the delightful Courvoisier brewery. I like Jarnac. The Charente cuts through it wide and deep (Sue’s under the impression that we have hundreds of rivers here. We have a couple: the Vienne is quite impressive, as is the Charente, but they do a lot of winding back and forward!) and it’s got several florists sitting around the car park. The Courvoisier brewery sits alongside the Charente, as it must have done for many, many years, its barrels stacked up several floors. There are three beautiful houses that overlook the river, and there’s a beautiful island park too.

And then we’d stopped at Angouleme on the way back, winding up through the remparts, past the cathedral, all very ‘joli’ indeed. We went in the cathedral this time, which is absolutely immense. Not quite as ornate as Manchester Cathedral, but would probably dwarf it. We were looking for somewhere to eat. You quickly realise that restaurants in France fall mainly into two categories: those who serve andouillette at formica tables, served by a sour-faced old woman who looks about as Parisian as Nora Batty, and those that are more in line with The Ivy, with tariffs to match. All very well if you like to eat shit-passage sausage or you like to pay 200 euros for five thin pizzas, but not so good if you want something in between. In the end, we went to Le Chat Noir, which was pricey and served some food, but was delicious all the same.

It was here Sue had her first pineau. Pineau (produced ‘Pin-oh’) is our local drink, consumed more regularly than brandy. It’s eau-de-vie (uncoloured, unripened brandy) mixed with grape must, not unlike a sherry or any other fortified wine. Sue likes pineau now!

We’d also had what will probably be the last barbecue of the year. Freezing! We have begun to get more of a sense of what it will be like in winter, although I’m not much looking forward to it!

 

Creme de marrons

Crème de marrons

This recipe is quintessential France for the autumn – a purée of chestnuts. It’s a sweet jam ideal for putting with profiteroles or choux pastry as an éclair, or spread on flaky pastry, or as part of a tart.

A lot of the online recipes call for 2 or more kg of chestnuts, but that gives LOTS of chestnut purée – so I’ve used a smaller amount.

Ingredients

500 g of shelled chestnuts

300 g sugar

100 ml water x 2

1. Put a cross with a sharp knife into the top of each chestnut. Put them in a pan and cover with cold water and bring to the boil. Boil for 10 minutes, then plunge them into a tub of cold water.

2. Peel the chestnuts and take the inner skin off too, so you’re left with the flesh.

3. Boil the chestnuts in 100 ml of cold water. It will take about 10 minutes to boil them until you can mash them. Then put them in a food processor and whizz them until they are smooth. If you haven’t taken the outer skin off, this will make it bitter, which is why you need to get rid of them first. That’s the messy, tricky and annoying bit – but after that, it’s easy.

4. Put the 300 g sugar in a pan with 100 ml water and bring to a boil. Pour in the puréed chestnuts and keep over a rolling boil for 10 minutes. Rapid, but not chaotic, and not just simmering. Keep stirring from time to time.

5. Put into a sterilised jar, cover with a piece of waxed paper, seal and leave.

I’m keeping mine in the freezer until it’s cold enough in the pantry to keep it in there. Opinions vary as to how long it can be kept, from 1 month to a year, but err on the side of caution unless you want a nasty case of botulism!

Les tipules, chataignes et araignees

It’s the season where everything seems to want to come inside for the winter, particularly daddy-long-legs, not, as you would have hoped les papas-jambes-longs but les tipules. We have at least three or four come in of an evening for a dance about the living room. I don’t know why they creep me out more than spiders – maybe the spindly legs and unpredictable moth-like dancing.

It’s definitely autumn, though temperatures are still up into the high twenties. It’s not quite fire time yet! It’s also rained for the first time in weeks, properly, although it didn’t last the day out.

Yesterday, we went for a walk to discover the grotte where the Agris helmet was discovered. The Agris helmet was mainly discovered by an archaeological dig in 1981 – quite amazing since it’s from the 4th Century BC – and is made of bronze with gold leaf.

It’s quite something! Anyway, I had heard a rumour from Grumpy (I’m not being mean – he has a sign outside his house that says ‘Grumpy’s Den’ – so it’s an appropriate nickname) that if you went up the road to Chasseneuil from Agris, at death-by-roundabout (drive as fast as you can onto this roundabout for kicks and fun if you live in rural France, just to see if you can cause a fatal collision with an unsuspecting foreign motorist who is under the assumption that you give way to stuff) you could go to the Grotte des Perrats, which is a cave off the dried-up Bellonne river bed (not the Tardoire as it seems to suggest everywhere else) so we set out in pursuit.

Jake likes to think he is mini-Indiana-Jones, so he was up for it. He likes the idea of finding treasure (though it’s illegal to look for it in France, even on your own land, unless you have a permit!) and there’s none of this ‘it’s half yours’ malarky you get in England where farmers find stashes worth millions. You hand it over to the authorities and then they put it in a faraway museum and give you a copy to stick in the local town hall.

I kind of half-followed Grumpy’s directions – park at the riverbed, look for a turning to the left – but ended up parking quite some way away. We wandered around the forest for a bit, picking up bags of sweet chestnuts – getting prickled by brambles for our foraging.

This, I suspect, is the autumn the poets write about. Not that damp, misty, kind-of-colder-than-summer-and-a-little-bit-more-rainy weather of Manchester. Not that freezing-cold-but-blue-almost-winter-weather that we sometimes get, where I need to put on my down jacket. Lovely, warm, clear, bright weather perfect for long countryside walks.

It was still t-shirt walking weather. The leaves are kind of turning brown and dropping their seeds. Lots of acorns and chestnuts, sycamore leaves and cones everywhere.

There were mushrooms, too. Not lots, but a few. The problem is it’s hard to tell which are edible. I suspect the ones that are there are ones people have left, so I’m not bothering eating them. Then there were some that were bright yellow, and something tells me bright yellow mushrooms are not so good to eat.

We picked two kilogrammes of fat sweet chestnuts, which I have very little idea of what to make into. I think some marrons glacés, some chestnut purée and some roast chestnuts (which we had last night and were a bit floury and a bit ‘meh’ – although it does make you feel all Dickensian and Christmassy to eat them. I’ve put a kilogramme aside for the winter – roast chestnuts at Christmas and chestnut stuffing for the turkey, chicken or goose.

When we got to the grotte, Jake was mostly disappointed. I think he was very excited about the idea of going in an actual cave and then not being able to was annoying. It was all blocked off and there were ‘chantier’ signs everywhere – although we sneaked in, the cave looked like a real cave-diving expedition kind of a cave.

Still, we wandered back through ancient woodland, all perfectly preserved and easy to navigate, even stumbling across an apple tree, which we helped ourselves to an apple from.

Cassinomagus, Rochebrune & les citrouilles

We’d decided to go for a picnic today – these three days off school can be a little taxing on the boy if he isn’t appropriately entertained, and he’d been off on Wednesday and yesterday without any ‘real’ entertainment. I really wanted to go to Chassenon and the ancient Roman city of Cassinomagus, a town dedicated to thermal springs, lying on the main route between Lyon and Saintes. We’re actually in the heart of the Gallic-Roman empire here – the crossroads between the north-south road from Poitiers to Spain and the east-west road from Lyon to Saintes lies only a couple of miles away. With a river and the crossroads, a bronze age helmet found in Agris a couple of miles away is a find that shows what an important route it was. I’m sure there’s more to be found, but that’s a story for another day. With cave habitation clear from the Dordogne, and the Gallic-Roman settlements dotted across the region, we’re in prime ‘history’ territory – to mention nothing of the Maquis – the resistance – and the Vichy line.

So… off to Cassinomagus via the lakes at Massignac, a beautiful spot in the Charente region, not far from where the land gives birth to the mighty Charente river. We watched a fishing competition (with a very poor catch) and picked up a bagful of sweet chestnuts – les chataignes – before carrying on to Cassinomagus.

The wonderful thing about France is that it’s not busy. There aren’t huge queues. When we got to Cassinomagus, there was a tour guide in front of us with 20 or so coffin dodgers, but we chose to go via the alternate route, leaving the best until last and until the tour guide was out of the way. Like that would ever happen in Chester or York.

There was a beautiful ‘roman’ style garden, complete with lovely names for plants on roman roof tiles – novel and definitely an idea for me to steal.

It’s definitely an idea to steal! I liked the herb garden very much, filled with rosemary, sage and thyme, and incredibly pungent – in a good way.

What always amazes me is that these Roman ruins were ‘undiscovered’ for a very long time – and it makes me wonder how on earth something of that nature could have been hidden away – the same with Mayan, Inca and Aztec ruins.

The baths were quite spectacular – and it just reminds me of the ‘what did the Romans ever do for us?’ scene in the Life of Brian.

After that, we took a bit of a detour along a short bit of road known as ‘Richard, Coeur de Lion’ – a rather bizarre name for a bit of road – to Rochebrune – a small chateau.

As we drove back through Chabanais, there was a huge fete in swing with lots and lots of pumpkins

les etoiles et les herissons

It occurred to me, sometime around half four when I woke up this morning, that there is a whole life in Les Ecures that I don’t know about: the night life.

Last night, it was an incredibly star-lit night; I’d even dragged Mr H out to have a look at it before I retired for the evening. The moon wasn’t yet up and it has been a long time since I saw so many stars. Out in the desert, maybe, in Morocco. Manchester has far too much light pollution and cloud cover to see anything clearly, and the night sky is not unlike the day sky, just with a grey-amber glow.

This morning, the stars still seemed super-bright when I got up, so I put on a jumper, got the torch and binoculars and went down into the field.

It was amazing. First, there was a warm breeze and it was easily still 15 degrees, following an unusually hot autumn day yesterday. It was the kind of breeze that always reminds me of Brazilian nights, or Mexico, balmy and pleasant – like taking a shower in something very lovely. The kind of breeze that perks you right up. Basil accompanied me down the garden, and it was clear this is ‘his’ territory. He was about as alert and kittenish as I’ve seen him these last few years, running from tree to tree, racing up them then jumping back down. The crickets were in full chorus with their cri-cri, but other than the wind in les trembles and the crickets, there was no sound. No cars. No people. Bliss.

We don’t have the ambient light pollution either, although there was a faint, light glow above Angouleme 20 kms away. They switch some street-lights off here after midnight.

It’s about 50 metres from the house into the field, walking under all kinds of obstacles for an unobstructed (well, fairly… the trees are fairly tall around here!) view – but when I got into the middle of the field, sitting there looking quite bewildered was Mrs Tiggywinkle and her family!

Three lovely, bright-eyed hedgehogs sitting there! I was so close to one I’d almost stepped on it!

Now I’ve never seen a real ‘live’ hedgehog. Plenty dead by roadsides to assure me of their existence, but no real, live ones. And there, at six o’clock in the morning, are three – in my garden!

They soon scuttled off after they realised I wasn’t going to do anything to them, but it was lovely to see them, all the same.

After that, I just sat and stargazed for half an hour or so, Basil racing about the garden, the wind in the aspens and the crickets cri-cri-ing. It’s amazing how much life there is round here in the middle of the night!

Oooh, a lovely bit of crumpet!

Jake and I have been making crumpets this morning. Delicious! In between making the dough, we made some chocolate chip cookies which started going down as quickly as they were coming out of the oven, but there’s still a good twenty or so left. Definitely a day for baking!

Jake's crumpets

New favourite website of the day is re-foundobjects, which is a fantastic website with beautiful treasures found and done up – definitely something I want to do myself. There’s some beautiful hand-painted tins, which is a bit above and beyond the tins I plan on painting to adorn the side of the house next year. I really would like mine in bright colours hanging down the side of the house with some nasturtiums and verbena in acid colours trailing from them. However, I love these beautiful tins

And I also like these rather weird painted plates