How to Go South in Summer

They say in France that people are either Southern or Northern, and I'm firmly in the northern camp.   I have until now refused to go south in the summer, for the following reasons:

• Too hot
• Too bright
• Light too unforgiving
• Traffic jams
• Crowds
• Holiday rental property prices ridiculously inflated
• Riff raff

In the summer every peeping tom, pick-pocket and pimp heads south, as do all those intent on becoming disagreeably drunk and drugged up in large crowds.  We've seen it on the crime programmes.  Dreadful.

However, the three skinnies fancied the idea of a bit of hot sun, and reminded me that I was the only one to enjoy the torrential rain and plummeting temperatures of the Finistere coast.  So I relented.  We consulted the Bison Futé which predicts the state of the roads:  Green Day is good, Orange OK, Red Day means that you can be assured of a good jam on all roads to and from the South,  and a Black Day means that if you look out of your window you will find the traffic jam commences at your own front door so don't even think about it.  Also your mother in law phones you in a state of gleeful doom saying 'tis a Black Day' and chills your very marrow.

The French must like traffic jams because all their rented holiday accommodation goes from Saturday to Saturday, and so all French people who do not have family homes by the sea travel in a long slow moving queue on Saturday.   Not only that, no French business dares to close when there is custom about, only daring to close in the 1st two weeks of August when everyone is on holiday - Black Days assured.   BUT, joy of joy, heh heh heh, I found the ONLY gite in France which starts on a Sunday.  We decided to leave at 4pm on the Red Saturday to avoid the traffic and finish the journey on Green Sunday.  Consequently we left at 9pm, after an ugly incident where we had to turn back from Versailles for my reading glasses, a record breaking 5 hours late.    We reached Beaune without a single jam.  The next day, predictably, no French people were on the road except for the odd lone male, cigarette dangling, who had been sent out to the DIY shop.  We had fun shouting out the other nationalies:  GB, Denmark, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and mostly Netherlands NL, true to stereotype, hurtling south with their caravans. 

When we stopped at the first 'relais' after Lyon, I started to feel uneasy.  The light was horribly overhead, rendering my paleness uninteresting, my pinkness purple and my multicoloured ensmble ridiculous.  I gained several kilos.  Everyone was wearing khaki, buttermilk and copper tans.    I became convinced I was in hostile territory.  The air had a menacing hot feel which made me finger my throat.  This even though the temperature had plummeted to a seasonally unprecedented 16 degrees with torrential rain forecast.  I developed prickly heat and had to be calmed and coaxed into the continuing the journey.  However, we encountered not a single traffic jam and the first hurdle of holidaying in the south had been successfully overcome.

The second trick was to avoid the coast, and stop at the edge of the Cevennes mountains on an organic farm with a pool.    This was the fourth time I had visited the South, the other three times we were met with seasonally unprecedented plummeting termperatures and unremitting torrential rain and this was no exception.  I was politely requested not to come to the South in the summer again.  JC had left in the car to go on a Medicinal Plants course in the Pyrenees.  We did not know it because his phone was out of action, but he was experiencing a 10 degrees centigrade coldwave, wind, rain and log fires. BUT LUCKILY I had invested in a portable DVD player and had bought 4 Dads Army DVDs in the Charity Shop in England, so we were saved from desperation.  It must be a sign of age that I find Captain Mainwaring appealing and his behaviour admirable.

We still went swimming in the cloud breaks, enjoying one another's screams of pain as the Southerners do not heat their pools (?).

Cevennes Sport and Leisure

R succeeds in his mission to make Papa look silly.

R loves this one of Papa looking wild, a spitting lion fountain...

Some people dive in, some people do it inch by painful inch...

I specified that only pictures of me looking lean tanned and athletic were to be taken.  R enjoyed taking some of the worst pictures ever of a butterball who he claims is me, and spent many happy hours gloating over them and snickering.  I did some pretty heavy censoring and have published the bearable ones where most of me is hidden under water.

R pretends to crack an egg on my head much to B's delight.

B's delight, close-up.

A primate in the trees.

The skinnies dipping.

We went to Forest Parc - a place where wild climbing adventures are organised in trees.  R&B were remarkably agile, for JC it was more of a challenge.  The place was full of Dutch people, some of whom we felt were culturally ill-attuned in the rudeness department.

I flee R's attempt to make me believe there is a spider crawling on my head.

R carries on, JC displays admirable love and patience...

JC takes the management challenge in the over 12s section,  inspired, encouraged and patiently directed by B.

Cevennes Food

Here is the terrace where organic farmhouse vegetarian meals are taken in clement weather, with potted lemon and lime trees and a glimpse of the surrounding mountain forests of the white oak which is evergreen.

Upon fields and orchards

Growing towards harvest

There look with blessing

The spirits of heaven;

And their gaze searches

Our hearts for ripening' 
From 'August' by Adam Bittleston

Smiling tomatoes, fluffy little peaches, crowned pomegranates, and developing figs and olives...

...prepared in our own miniscule kitchen, local sausages fried with rosemary, pasta salad sprinkled with wild flowers, cucumber salad with sheeps milk yoghurt and wild mint dressing.

We also ate pourpier sauvage (purslane) as a green salad and grilling herb.  It's a wild plant which grows in between the rows, much hated as a 'pervasive weed' by the FDA and horribly killed, but in fact delicious, medicinal, and rich in vitamins and Omega 3.  On the farm they feed it to the hens to make their eggs rich in omega 3. 

In the shop selling local produce, we found 'brebis' (sheeps milk cheese), excellent sausages from pigs which trot between the chestnut trees, and everything you can think of to make from chestnuts with their sweet fruit and bitter flower.  We particularly enjoyed herb and flower 'syrops':  thyme, rose and lavender.  All you have to do is make a strong herbal tea with a good lot of flowers/herbs and 500 mls water, then add 500 mls of 'sucre complet' (whole sugar) and boil up into a syrop.  Can be used  to make drinks diluted with iced water, or to flavour yoghurts.   We invented 'honey rose' sheeps milk yoghurt, with mountain honey and syrop de rose food for the Gods.

A hot smoking southern rosemary...

A pumpkin turning golden, ready for harvest when the umbilical stalk is dry and no longer feeding, kept for winter soup, or if particularly big and beautiful, kept as decoration and doorstop to remind us of Jupiter's largesse.

www.lemasperdu.comgite ferme biologique

Cevennes

We're back from the Cevennes, and we have a few days to gather the fruits from our holidays and store them over winter under the headings Food, Sport and Leisure and Way of Life.

If you walk up these stairs you will enter our gite, a small semi-independant section of the main farmouse with a miniscule kitchenette, dark rooms, comfortable beds and bountiful mosquitoes.  The bowl of scraps on the third steps is for the chickens.  JC's root of Consoude (Comfrey) which he collected from his medicinal herbs course in the Pyrenées, is drying on the green chair where windfall apples wait to be turned into compôte.

www.lemasperdu.com