Last Of The Winter Wine

Chistmas decorations in the village are now down and the last of the main winter events in the village took place over the past ten days. The Friday before last there was the mayor's aperitif evening for the whole village and today there was the Old Fogies' lunch.

Old Fogies' Lunch
For the first time I went today to the lunch offered annually to all senior citizens (or old fogies, as you prefer) by the village council in the large village public room, the salle bicentennaire. I've witnessed several similar lunches for old people in public halls in England and so did not arrive, at 12.00 as requested, with high expectations. The kind of menu I would have expected from experience in England would have consisted of a Provencal equivalent of tomato soup followed by meat pie and two veg. followed by apple pie and custard or some such; and there's nothing wrong with that but.................. Anyway, I hoped to meet some more people from the village whom I didn't already know as well as many whom I already did. The latter expectation was partially met (I didn't meet anybody new) but the menu...............

The reason for arriving at 12.00 was to have a bun fight over which table to sit on and that had already been sorted out by a foresighted friend. The aperitif to begin the meal was not served until 12.30; and I eventually left at around 5.30, with most of the gathering still there. The menu was as follows: aperitif, foie gras with pear, cold salmon with prawn, the “trou Provencal”, duck leg confit with mushrooms and potatoes, cheeses, baked Alaska, coffee and marc de Provence . Rosé and red wine were freely available throughout and sparkling clairette de Die was served with the dessert. The cooking and presentation were impeccable throughout and we were waited on, equally impeccably, by the members of the village council.

The French like to accompany foie gras with something sweet, typically a muscat white wine, and I find that the sweetness can be overbearing. Pear, by contrast, worked brilliantly, adding just a touch of sweetness. The “trou Provencal” was a local version of the classic trou Normand, a glass of Calvados to dissolve the first part of the meal; in this case it was a scoop of ice cream swimming in the marc de Provence served separately at the end of the meal. Marc is a spirit distilled from the residue in barrels from the first stage of wine-making, like grappa in Italy. I'd estimate the charge in England for such a meal, given the content and quality, at around £100 per head, It was certainly not what I had had experience of in English public halls for old peoples' lunches. And I shall of course go again next year.

In conversations during the lunch Michelle Mouret explained to me how the expectation of cousins within the village had come about, at least in her case. It's a point I have touched on in previous postings. She had four brothers, all of whom had families and had made their lives in the village. She had married a local man who also had four brothers who had proceeded similarly. The result was over 20 cousins in or around the village. It takes only a handful of people with a similar history to seed a village full of cousins.

The Mayor's Cocktail Party
The annual Mayor's aperitif is a chance to catch up on what the village has been spending it's money on and plans for the future. A surprise for me was the amount spent on the new drainage that had disrupted boules in the old station square during the autumn and winter of last year. The need for new drainage wasn't obvious to me but the huge drainage pipes and associated equipment and labour had clearly cost a significant sum; in fact it was a whopping 340,000 euros. It seemed another case of providing much-needed jobs locally but of dubious necessity otherwise, at odds with my English experience.

The main local interest in the mayor's speech was that the village post office, threatened with closure, had been saved, with the exception of the availability of a financial advisor. Since no one appeared to use the financial advisor, who presumably couldn't advise on other than post office savings products, it was a small price to pay. The post office will now no longer be autonomous but a sub post-office of that in neighbouring Buis les Baronnies and will double as a tourist office, which the village hasn't previously had. There were rumours that some horse-trading had gone on to achieve this solution. As I mentioned in a posting a year ago, the village had then reached the mile-stone of having 1000 inhabitants, which entitled it to have a chemist's shop in the village. However, Buis les Baronnies had acquired two such, on the basis of including the inhabitants of Mollans within its catchment area; it didn't have enough people to justify two chemists by itself alone. This is a rule imposed by the national chemists' association. I thought at the time that this situation might lead to some local brouhaha. Well, the rumours are that the village council lent on their counterparts in Buis and traded the right to have a chemist's shop (and to force one of those in Buis to close) in return for Buis' support for the Mollans post office. Who knows? But if it's true it's a deal well done.

I was also interested in possibly getting involved a new village website which I had been told was being proposed; the existing site is woefully inadequate. However, it turns out that the IT work going on in the library at the moment is to provide what is effectively a virtual PC for people in the village who don't have their own. It's obviously beneficial and a higher priority than a new website but I was disappointed that a new website had been put on the back-burner. It made me wonder whether I have the energy to go it alone on a new website.

The other, more personal, rumour circulating was to do with the mayor himself. It turns out he has split up with his long-term mistress Isabelle, apparently a physical double for the wife who had previously left him, and the betting was whether he and his former wife were going to get back together. This is, of course, just village gossip but illustrates again the closely entangled if not literally incestuous relationships that prevail in the village.

BBC iPlayer
I haven't yet downloaded the BBC iPlayer but several friends have and have encountered the problem of BBC programmes not available over the Internet internationally. Of course the BBC has the right to sell its programmes to providers in other countries, which is why availability is restricted. However, the restriction is easily overcome by means of a proxy server, freely available from various sources. My reason for mentioning this is simply that it illustrates the virtual impossibility of restricting information stored electronically. Wikileaks is but another example. I got to know some of the intricacies of this matter through close contact with Bird & Bird, one of the leading legal partnerships on intellectual copyright, during the latter 1990s. The matter poses many questions that can be quite fascinating and for which there are at the moment no clear answers. It's an issue that is going to run and run. While it runs, despite some unfortunate side-effects, it can't be bad news for those of us who really believe in democracy and freedom of information.