Happy Times

Phil's Birthday
Friday evening I was invited to Philippe's party to celebrate his 75th birthday, together with his other friends from along the road and one or two strays. It was what is called here an “apéro habillé”, supposedly less than a dinner but food with drinks. We drank a sparkling muscat throughout the evening and were regaled with what in Spain would be called “tapas” but which were definitely French in nature. Brilliant food which Simone, Philippe's wife had organised, and it kept coming and coming.

With everyone replete and well oiled a bit before midnight, Patrique got out his guitar and we got down to singing; Brassens of course (mostly). I tried to think of how a similar evening in England might have ended with songs but couldn't think what the songs might be. True, some English friends and I had ended an evening singing pop tunes of the 1950s (see a January posting) but somehow it wasn't quite the same. Two things were different; Brassens songs are undemanding of the singer. At my previous pop evening we had sung badly (I certainly had) but nobody minded. You can't really sing Brassens badly; all you generally need is a low growl interjected with an occasional high note which you don't have to hit (Brassens himself never did). And the lyrics are totally different. I commented before on the banality of the lyrics in 1950s pop and the lyrics of Brassens' songs are anything but banal: many are taken from poems from the likes of Prévert and Louis Aragon. If I'd been at a similar evening in England, what would we have sung that had any kind of equivalence? Probably the ubiquitously murdered “I Did It My Way”, maybe “On Ilkley Moor Bartat”, maybe some traditional rugby club songs, maybe some old East End favourites like “My Old Man's A Dustman”. These have their own cachet, if you can call it that, and are certainly redolent of a time and place but they don't have anything like the flavour of Brassens. And the French all seem to know their Brassens. If the French had tests of “Frenchness” as a prerequisite for acquiring nationality, as are being proposed in Britain, surely one of them would be the ability to know a Brassens song or two by heart..

Footnote On The Camargue
I forgot to mention salt production in my previous posting on the Camargue. It always was, and still is, a major industry in the area. And with food aficionados getting into different varieties of salt, Camargue salt has its own place amongst the varieties.

Another point I omitted to mention was the “gardians”. These are the people who herd the black bulls of the area. In times past it was mostly children who kept an eye out for where sheep or cattle went and the “gardians” were simply responsible for branding the bulls, a claim on ownership. In more recent times fencing has more or less eliminated the need for both but the branding and “gardians” persist as a tradition. The “gardians” also have a traditional garb that seems to owe more to Spain than France, although there is no evident Spanish influence in the area. Maybe it comes from the Italian workers who were drafted in during the wine bonanza or, perhaps more likely, it is a gypsy influence congruent with the former lifestyle. Whatever, “gardians” is not a French word other than in this special case and the plural “lou gardianoun” even less so. It's pure occitan.