Home Sweet Home
I returned from visiting my mother in England last Tuesday. After her stay in hospital she has managed to remain in her own home with carers coming in twice per day. Having witnessed the care service by an NHS assessment team I have to say that it is excellent in every way. Unfortunately they pass over to an agency shortly and I am just hoping the agency staff are as good.
My own home was just as I had left it, a few plants (plumbago, begonias, french marigolds) still blooming in the front and some gallardias doing the same at the back. The chrysanthemums there have yet to get going but are full of bud. I turned the heating on on my return and the house is now warm in the mornings and evenings as well as during the day. The weather wasn't bad while I was in England but the clear blue skies and sunny days since I've been back have reminded me of one of the reasons I opted to move here.
So it's back to boules in the afternoons, with an added bonus. The village powers that be decided to reward the boules team with a cheque for 40 euros each for putting the village on the map; I don't think that indicates a need to get myself an agent yet but it was a lovely gesture.
Structure Of A French Meal
I'm getting too old to appreciate a full French meal very often; it knocks me out for the rest of the day. When eating alone I'll generally just cook the one (main) course à l'anglaise but the full treatment seems to be de rigueur when I have guests. I'm thinking of changing that with some friends by leaving out the starter course. One incentive is that my favourite starter (figs split, goat's cheese inserted, honey drizzled over and the whole placed under a grill for a few minutes) is now out of season; the fig harvest is over. And I don't really see the need for a starter unless the main course is a bit thin. The cheese course allows any hunger remaining after the main course to be assuaged which means that the starter is superfluous unless it serves merely to get the appetite going. But that seems unnecessary in most cases.
I saw a large chunk of stewing beef on the bone for a couple of euros when I did my restocking shopping on my return and so am making my first stew of the winter. I do it over three days, leaving it in the fridge overnight to skim off the fat and allowing the flavour to evolve. I also bought a couple of kilos of shallots which I will turn into pickles onions. The French don't have pickled onions and don't know what they are missing. They don't have malt vinegar either and I find wine vinegar too strong in some cases, of which this is one. So I use cider vinegar instead, plus ginger, chilis, mustard seed and cloves in the final product. The result even goes very well with some French cheeses such as Cantal, Salers and Comté.
The Discovery Of France
I took this book by Graham Robb with me for the journey over to England and managed to find some more enlightening titbits in it. Apparently the French investigated some reluctance among their troops in the first world war and discovered (top secret at the time) a definite lack of patriotism. The problem, it seemed. Was that few troops considered themselves French; they were Normand, Breton, Marseillais, Savoyard or whatever but not French.
This somewhat parochial view explains the difficulty in translating the word “pays”. OK, so literally it can be translated as “country” but the connotations aren't covered by that. Pays is, in the first world war sense, the country of the troops but the country wasn't France; and Normandy, Brittany, etc, aren't countries, except traditionally to their inhabitants.
I'll relate more such insights as I get further into the book.
jeudi 28 octobre 2010
vendredi 8 octobre 2010
Autumn and Boules Championships
Signs Of Autumn
When I got back from the national boules championships in Ramatuelle I found my car covered in splashes of sand, a sure sign that the Sirocco, the warm wind that blows in from the Sahara, had been blowing when it had rained. The little wind that there is now is clearly coming from that direction too as I still have no need for any heating in the house. Leaves are changing colour all around, including some of the vines starting to turn, and they are carpeting the ground. Yet another sure sign of autumn here is the mushroom season. The somewhat despised button mushroom, champignon de Paris, so familiar in England is available at most times of the year in the supermarkets but the better varieties arrive only now: pieds de mouton, chanterelles, trompettes de la mort, girolles, morilles, etc. Time to make mushroom omellettes and risottos!
Boules
In brief, we finished 28th out of 80 teams in the national rural wrinklies championships in Ramatuelle and so honour was upheld. Hardly earth-shattering but not bad for un petit anglais. And we again finished with a higher ranking than any other team from the Drôme or Vaucluse, so no doubt there will be another article in the local paper. The tone was different from that at the regional championships, more serious and intense, albeit still friendly. Matches typically took twice as long as here in the village, an hour or more each, as the pitches were examined in detail and strategy/tactics discussed between throws of the boules. It was a pity then that the pitches weren't better. There's clearly a general problem here, the same as at the regional championships, in that facilities that have the required accommodation (there were around 500 players, other halves and supporters) doesn't have the required number of pitches: 35 were required to complete the tournament over the three days. So temporary pitches are marked out and those at Ramatuelle were under pine trees, providing a very fast surface with many bumps and underlying roots that were difficult to discern in the half-light. It was, of course, the same for everyone but a better surface would have allowed better boules.
We were playing solidly for two days, 8.30 to 18.00, with a two-hour break for lunch (compulsory everywhere in the south of France). On the last afternoon we were finished and so went into St Tropez, to walk round the old harbour (filled with very expensive-looking yachts) and take a boat trip round the bay. The boat trip commentary consisted mainly of pointing out the houses owned by rich luminaries on the hillsides outside St Tropez: Michelle Morgan, Luis Funez, several unfamiliar to me and, of course, Brigitte Bardot. Her house was surprisingly modest in comparison to many of the others, right on the water front but shielded from it by a high concrete wall which was apparently to prevent paparazzi taking photos. After the boat trip we took a look at a Modigliani exhibition in the Annonciade museum in the old port, which I found rather disappointing; few exhibits and mostly ink drawings.
The countryside around St Tropez had many of the familiar type of pine (must research the name) that one sees everywhere along the Côte d'Azur, with it's naturally rounded, sculpted shape. One could think that a topiarist had been hard at work all along the coast. There were oleanders a-plenty, many palm trees and some magnificent specimens of large plumbago in full flower but no sign of any bougainvillea, which I have always associated with the Côte d'Azur.
All in all, it was a very worthwhile trip and no doubt we'll get around to having a few drinks in the village on our (relative) success.
When I got back from the national boules championships in Ramatuelle I found my car covered in splashes of sand, a sure sign that the Sirocco, the warm wind that blows in from the Sahara, had been blowing when it had rained. The little wind that there is now is clearly coming from that direction too as I still have no need for any heating in the house. Leaves are changing colour all around, including some of the vines starting to turn, and they are carpeting the ground. Yet another sure sign of autumn here is the mushroom season. The somewhat despised button mushroom, champignon de Paris, so familiar in England is available at most times of the year in the supermarkets but the better varieties arrive only now: pieds de mouton, chanterelles, trompettes de la mort, girolles, morilles, etc. Time to make mushroom omellettes and risottos!
Boules
In brief, we finished 28th out of 80 teams in the national rural wrinklies championships in Ramatuelle and so honour was upheld. Hardly earth-shattering but not bad for un petit anglais. And we again finished with a higher ranking than any other team from the Drôme or Vaucluse, so no doubt there will be another article in the local paper. The tone was different from that at the regional championships, more serious and intense, albeit still friendly. Matches typically took twice as long as here in the village, an hour or more each, as the pitches were examined in detail and strategy/tactics discussed between throws of the boules. It was a pity then that the pitches weren't better. There's clearly a general problem here, the same as at the regional championships, in that facilities that have the required accommodation (there were around 500 players, other halves and supporters) doesn't have the required number of pitches: 35 were required to complete the tournament over the three days. So temporary pitches are marked out and those at Ramatuelle were under pine trees, providing a very fast surface with many bumps and underlying roots that were difficult to discern in the half-light. It was, of course, the same for everyone but a better surface would have allowed better boules.
We were playing solidly for two days, 8.30 to 18.00, with a two-hour break for lunch (compulsory everywhere in the south of France). On the last afternoon we were finished and so went into St Tropez, to walk round the old harbour (filled with very expensive-looking yachts) and take a boat trip round the bay. The boat trip commentary consisted mainly of pointing out the houses owned by rich luminaries on the hillsides outside St Tropez: Michelle Morgan, Luis Funez, several unfamiliar to me and, of course, Brigitte Bardot. Her house was surprisingly modest in comparison to many of the others, right on the water front but shielded from it by a high concrete wall which was apparently to prevent paparazzi taking photos. After the boat trip we took a look at a Modigliani exhibition in the Annonciade museum in the old port, which I found rather disappointing; few exhibits and mostly ink drawings.
The countryside around St Tropez had many of the familiar type of pine (must research the name) that one sees everywhere along the Côte d'Azur, with it's naturally rounded, sculpted shape. One could think that a topiarist had been hard at work all along the coast. There were oleanders a-plenty, many palm trees and some magnificent specimens of large plumbago in full flower but no sign of any bougainvillea, which I have always associated with the Côte d'Azur.
All in all, it was a very worthwhile trip and no doubt we'll get around to having a few drinks in the village on our (relative) success.
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