Back Again

Oh To Be In England.......
Well I was, and in April too. Having been warned of a mini heat wave which was top hit the country the weekend I arrived I took only one sweater; which proved to be just about enough. However, my mother's birthday went well and during my stay I managed to buy her quite a lot of plants and also to plant them. Her garden is looking good and she seems pleased with it. It's important because that and the birds that come to feed there are her main source of entertainment now.

I expected to see lots of spring flowers on my drive from Southampton airport and did but to my surprise they were cowslips rather than primroses and in abundance. When I was young and in the Chiddingfold area, primroses were common and cowslips quite rare. The reverse seems now to be true or is this just an exceptional year? There were wood anemones also, and I managed to see some bluebell woods before I returned home. Primroses we have here but not cowslips, wood anemones or bluebells.

I had noticed on my drive down to Avignon airport that the Judas trees and tamarisks there were all showing their colours and, on my return, they were back in the village too. The coronilla filling the wayside and hillsides with yellow have been joined now by broom and so the broom will continue for another couple of months as the coronilla give up. Also on the wayside are abundant purple salvias, white campion, red poppies and lime green euphorbias. The latter two look great when growing together.

People passing by still compliment me on the front of the house but it's looking a bit sad to me, with the bulb flowers now all dying. My pansies too seem to have contracted some sort of pansy rot, a thin film of mildew on the leaves. However I shan't do anything about them until I return from the Great Boules Contest in the Alps starting in ten days' time. The women coming with us have said they will act as cheer leaders so I've told them I expect to see miniskirts and pom-poms on all of them. And we need a chant of some sort, such as “Mollans, Mollans, on gagne tout le temps”. (In my dreams!). I won't record some of the more scurrilous chants thought of.

Avignon airport, by the way, is a dream; the way every airport should be. It does depend somewhat though on having only two or three flights a day coming and going (absolute maximum, and that is in peak season). The airport building is little larger than my house, you can park right outside for a week for a pittance and if you have to wait more than 10 minutes for your luggage or there are more than three people in front of you to check in then it's obvious that something is terribly wrong. There can be a slight downside; my plane arrived about a half-hour early once and, since the customs people weren't supposed to be on duty until the scheduled arrival time, they refused to let the passengers in until then. So we waited outside the arrivals entrance until we were due to be there. Only in France......

Friends Steve and Jo kindly ensured my seedlings were watered while I was away; they now need potting on or transferring to where they are to grow and I need to get that done quickly so that they are able to look after themselves before I leave. But the weather here continues to be inconsistent so it's a question of dodging the showers to get them in.

This afternoon I went to the Rieu Frais vineyard in St Jalle to try to get some Viognier in bag-in-box. Not only did they not have any but they said they wouldn't have any this year as the harvest had been 20% down last year. They have it in bottles but at 6.90 euros per bottle it's not for everyday drinking. The Domaine Durban in Beaumes de Venise has a respectable Viognier at a couple of euros less so that will have to be it. At Rieu Frais they haven't yet used the English translation of their brochure that I did for them last year; said they were very grateful but hadn't had the time (with the tourist season already started). Well, we are in Provence.

On my way back I noticed some small flowers that looked interesting by the wayside, one lot pink and the other lot blue. I have no idea what they are but they are clearly alpines and they were on the St Jalle side of the mountain; I've not seen them this side. I then found to my chagrin that I hadn't got the usual trowel in the boot of my car so there was no chance of digging up a sample to plant in my garden; plants like that here all have long tap roots to take them through the summer and there's no chance of getting the root up without a trowel or similar. Jo gave me a small penknife to attach to my car keyring for just such an occasion but I'd taken it off to travel to England (no chance of getting it through airport security) and hadn't put it back on. Tough.

Daniel called round this evening for a whisky after working on his film on olives this afternoon. He invited me to go with himself and Kevyn to visit a vineyard that Kevyn knows in Cairanne tomorrow evening. I've already tasted the vineyard's top of the range wine at Daniel's and it's very good but expensive for a table wine at around 7 euros per bottle. Presumably the vineyard is outside the designated AOC area. When France gets around to it (next century?) it will drop the AOC system. It no longer serves any useful purpose that I can see. Nobody now produces plonk and expects to be able to sell it in an increasingly discerning market. The market for the Algerian/Moroccan red that was cheap enough to take to a party and aunty's Blue Nun have now gone. The best value wines around in France tend to be those that fall outside AOC areas and therefore can't command the AOC premium price but are often better than their AOC neighbours. How you find these, other than by tasting, is another question. Anyway, the visit should be suitably liquid and I've invited Daniel and Kevyn back here to eat afterwards. I feel a curry coming on......