The River and Reflections Thereon

The Ouvèze
Some time ago, whilst I was sitting with the usual boules crowd before playing, Guy Fabre was reminiscing about the river Ouvèze which flows through the village. Guy, at 93, qualifies probably as the Oldest Inhabitant in the village. Anyway, he remembered swimming as a youth in the river. Looking at it now, that is difficult to imagine. It's a couple of feet deep, maybe three, normally in places but mostly runs a few inches deep over stones. When there's significant rainfall here or upstream, it can rise by six inches or so but that is about it; it certainly, even at its fullest in winter, never looks swimmable.

Daniel came round to eat this evening and also reminisced about the river. What he remembered as a child was eating “fritures” from it. I first came across fritures in Corsica, basically small fry caught locally and deep fried; doused in lemon juice and with some pepper, they taste great. But those I had in Corsica, and have had subsequently, have always been from the sea. It never occurred to me that you might do the same with river fish. But Daniel remembered eating gudgeon, sticklebacks and other small river fry as fritures. His father caught them and his mother cooked them. Trust the French to find some tasty way of eating anything.

There are still plenty of fish in the river but I have never seen a mass of small fry that you might, even if the thought occurred to you, catch and...... well, fry. In general, as I understand it, river fish other than salmon, trout and eels are best avoided. They tend to have a lot of bones and taste of mud, which is more than enough to put off most Englishmen. I do know that the Poles traditionally eat carp at Christmas, but they don't bath for a week beforehand because the carp is occupying the bath being de-muddied. There is a species of carp around here called a “sandre” that is prized and appears on restaurant menus but I presume that also is demuddied somehow before being cooked and served. Daniel didn't mention anything about demuddying the small fry so I presume they hadn't lived long enough to pick up the muddy flavour.

Anyway, it appears that the problem with the river is that more and more water is being taken from it upstream before it reaches the village. I hope someone is monitoring that because it would be awful to contemplate the village bisected by only a dry river bed.

Reflections Thereon
Daniel reckons the problem is too many people, hence more demand for water. It's probably true, although there is no industry upstream to make large demands on water supply, but agriculture of one sort or another may be making significant inroads. However, that is difficult to square with the relatively sparse (for Europe) population around here and abundance of natural springs. If it's true here, it must be true of many, many places in Europe.

I do remember a case where this was certainly true, in my very much earlier meandering from Afghanistan into Pakistan and India. In Afghanistan there were villages of a few dozen or hundred inhabitants with a river/stream as their main source of water and they washed in it, did the laundry in it, pissed in it and drank from it with apparently no ill effect. Across the border into Pakistan and India, the sole difference was that the dozens or hundreds of inhabitants had to be counted in their thousands and the result was typhoid, cholera, etc. Pressure of population. But what do we (can we) do about it?