Ramatuelle
It's a month now since I was in
Ramatuelle, at the French national boules championships for rural
wrinklies. As two years previously, I had a very enjoyable time:
good weather, good company and good food, if not so good boules. We
played reasonably well but were inconsistent and finished nowhere.
The very hot weather was welcome and once again I was surprised by
the big difference in vegetation between Ramatuelle and here. The
absence of frost so close to the Mediterranean means that a much
larger number of plants thrive and bloom there at this time of the
year.
I had decided to don my very English
outfit for the tournament, bowler hat and Union Jack T-shirt, and my
garb was received very much in the spirit that I intended. It was a
source of jokes, anecdotes and other pleasantries and the bowler hat
drew particular approval. If we go next year I shall wear it again.
On our day off, as we weren't in the
finals, we visited St Tropez and wandered round the old port which,
as usual, was full of impressive yachts. This time though there were
a number of racing yachts. I hadn't realised how long, sleek and
tall they are; it looked as though they couldn't possibly stay
upright in full sail but they obviously do.
Chestnuts
Last evening at the pizza get-together
Anne-Marie and Patrick brought along some chestnuts that they had
collected in a visit to the Auvergne. Roberto duly roasted them in
his pizza oven and they were passed around to all and sundry. It
made me try again to get some clarification of the French use of both
“marrons” and “chataignes” to denote chestnuts. I was sure
that one must apply to sweet chestnuts and the other to horse
chestnuts but the two words seemed to be used interchangeably.
I still couldn't get any firm
clarification until I asked Patrick. He said that if you ate them
they were “chataignes”; “marrons” were inedible. That, at
least was clear. But what about the “marrons glacés”
(crystallised chestnuts) that were in all the shops at Christmas?
That, said Patrick, was a misuse of the word “marrons”. When I
put this to the other French people present they all agreed. So
that's another puzzle solved.
Incidentally,
the renowned region for chestnuts is the Ardèche,
the area immediately across the Rhône
from us. It is unique to
my knowledge in being the only place where the main “filler” in
food was, in the 19th
century and before, chestnuts. Even bread and cakes were made from
chestnut flour. I know that other regions of the world have,
variously, potatoes, rice, pasta, tapioca, noodles and types of bread
as fillers but I know of no other region that had chestnuts for this
purpose.
Rain
It rained on Saturday, and
how.......Friend Steve likes to point out that our area has a very
similar amount of rain per year as southern England. Here, though,
it comes occasionally and generally in large quantities at a time.
The Ouvèze
became a torrent, ripping up trees from the banks and river bed and
carrying them downstream. This is what happened in 1992 but to a
much greater extent. Then the river blocked the Roman bridge in
Vaison with trees, cars and caravans it had gathered in its flow so
that the water had to flow over the bridge at a height of over 30ft.
When the “dam” unblocked, the subsequent flood killed nearly a
hundred people.
It
was of course a very rare event but it makes me wonder why more
attention is not paid to keeping the river bed clear of trees and
bushes. The bed is very wide in many places so that the river flows
in shallow channels and scrub grows up in the drier places. If the
same intense rainfall as happened in 1992 happened again there seems
every prospect that a similar disaster would again occur.
The
kind of rainfall that we had on Saturday always makes me want to go
and look at the river bed under the village bridge. Heavy rainfall
invariably changes the contours of the stones that cover the bed and
thus also the channels along which the river flows. Sometimes it
spreads out the stones evenly, giving a shallow flow across the whole
bed and sometimes it piles the stones up in hillocks that force a
faster, deeper flow between the banks of stones. This time it seems
to have formed a hillock in the middle of the bed, forcing the river
to flow either side.
