The Washing-up Fairy is on Strike

I must admit I believe in anything that makes life pleasant or easy. Father Christmas is great; I learned to love Saint Nicholas when I lived in The Netherlands; the tooth fairy was a wonder when I was a kid and I soon would like to believe in her again. The Easter Bunny is a bit vague for my taste, but given enough chocolate, I am sue I can believe in him too. But in my life I have learned that there are other fairies too. For instance, since I moved to France I have had a washing-up fairy. Amazing, particularly as I HATE washing-up, all the dirty dishes of the day get stacked neatly by the washing-up area (by me I might add) and when I get up in the morning, they are all gone, washed, clean and mostly put away. It is only the complicated things like oven dishes that the washing-up fairy can’t cope with finding a home for.

When Cees was in hospital for three weeks, a couple of years ago, the washing-up fairy was so upset by his absence that she didn’t do her work, but hey, it was only me, I could cope. But since Saturday she has gone on strike. Now I realise that she is French and that this is the summer, but what am I supposed to do??? To make matters worse, Cees has a problem with his Achilles tendon and can hardly walk so he can’t do anything the kitchen either. So here I am stuck with washing-up, cooking, cleaning the toilet block (yes that fairy is on strike too!) and also doing my own chores.

If anyone knows of a fairy looking for household work, PLEASE send her here..

La Tuilerie Website

The Concert Series Comes to an End

After more than a month and five concerts, our music festival has at last come to an end.

The concert of Georges Brassens music was very well appreciated by the audience. During most of the second half and certainly by the time he got to "Les Amoureux des bancs publics", almost everyone was singing along and the artist Blahat really seemed to appreciate the interaction. The concert did though, leave me wondering what it was all about. If you read the programme, his aim was to bring the beauty of Brassens poetry and music to a new generation, but if you looked around the audience and you heard people talking after the show, these were all teenagers when Brassens was at the height of his career and whilst they may appreciate the poetry now, when they were kids, they liked the music because their parents disapproved of the lyrics! Not exactly bringing his music to a new generation.

What also disappointed me a little was that he didn’t interpret Brassens music, he played it as Brassens would have, but obviously not as well as the master himself. He kind of struck me as one of those Abba homage bands that sprung up in the nineties, but without the humour of it all. He was really was serious about what he was doing and talking to him (or to be more precise listening to him talk for hours) after the show, all he could talk about was anecdotes of when he met Brassens, and then anecdotes of what Brassens had done or said throughout his life and career. And talk he did, non-stop, for two or more hours. Not one bit of personal chit-chat, not one anecdote about his own life as a professional pianist and later as a music teacher, just anecdotes of Georges Brassens’ life and I was a left with the very sad feeling that he was living his life by proxy, but maybe that’s my psychology degree coming out in me.

In summary: a fun concert, good music, but I wish I had not spent so much time with him afterwards.

The last but one concert was Marielle Nordmann, an internationally renowned harp player. And boy could she play the harp - fantastic ! Cees has a hang-up about harps, saying all you hear is ripple, ripple, ripple and it is true, the harp lends itself to that, but coming from a Welsh background and having been to many Eisteddfods as a child, I knew the harp was much more than that. The title of the concert was “Homage to the Guitar” and she played many well-known and some less well-known guitar pieces from Spain and South America and they were quite beautiful. She used Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” as a background theme to her set, quoting from the story and playing music she felt matched the various stages of the story. Not at all to my taste, particularly as I was very disappointed - when I read the book - at the apparent shallowness of its theme, but that’s just me I think. In any case, it was an original approach and the music and her playing more than compensated for that particular irritation.

The final concert was yesterday afternoon at the Plan d’Eau, Cormatin’s fishing lake and park and was a group of youngsters from Paris – OMMM. I am struggling to find words to describe them, but I’ll try. They had no instruments, so all the instrumental bits were supplied by their voices. One guy was the human beat-box (and very good he was too) and the others sang or made musical sounds, with the help of some clever sound mixing. The second guy in the group did a wonderful bagpipe version of "Ode to Joy" but sadly, he only did that during the sound check and not during the concert itself. Their music was very techo-ish/rap with some jazzy overtones, but I am sure that says more about my inability to define them, than that it gives a clear description of their music! The audience, at an average age of 60 – 70 and mostly locals, had never heard anything like it before, but rather surprisingly, the comments were positive. My feelings were that this group was out of place in our concert series, but having said that we did bring a different type of music to the population of Cormatin and that is one of our aims - so we succeeded there.

Overall the concert series has been declared a success, not one concert failed to bring a positive reaction from the audience. I am struggling to decide which was my favourite concert. It is a close run thing between the young Czech musicians in the first concert and Marielle Nordmann. I think I’ll plump for Marielle Nordmann - I really do love the harp when it is played well.

La Tuilerie Website

Theatre in the Open Air

We were very dismayed this spring when we heard that the theatre company Studio Théâtre d’Asnières, who do all the performances at the Rendez-vous de Cormatin theatre festival during the summer, had gone into liquidation. That meant that the festival was cancelled. Many of us in town have a lot of work to do, to get the whole thing running smoothly during the summer and so the cancellation left a real hole in our little community. We are hoping that the theatre company can get over their financial difficulties (this is not the first time this has happened) and get back on their feet in time for next year. In any case all the members of the association who had paid their dues, were offered the chance to go to a little lunch time performance given by the company’s remaining actors.

We signed up for the play which was last Sunday, but there were so many people who wanted to go, they organised a second showing on the Monday. We duly went to the Plan d’Eau (the local fishing pond) where there is a covered area suitable for sitting. We arrived at 12.30 (after my bike had a puncture – good job I am excessively on-time for everything, at least I was still on time even after having to walk the last kilometre or so). After an aperitif of white wine and little biscuits, the theatre production started.

The performance was originally designed for the gardens around the Château de Rambouillet but it worked very well in Cormatin’s park too. The first part was under a beautiful, old weeping willow, the next on the bridge over to the island, then on to the island itself and then we followed the “faires” back to the last piece on the grass in the shade of a spreading chestnut tree.

The performances were quite exquisite, the actors to my mind performed much better than I had seen them perform on stage, perhaps it was the close intimacy of the pieces that gave them their charm. No props except some trees and a bench, really well done. I really hope it works out for them and I hope that we can have our festival back next year, Cormatin is definitely a lot quieter without it.

After all that culture, we started our pre-packed, picnic lunch not much before 2 o’clock and the dessert of a really yummy fruit tart from Delices de Cormatin was finally served around 3 o’clock. After lunch the two chiefs of the Studio Théâtre d’Asnières, had chosen some readings for us and they presented those - very entertaining. After leaving my bike with a friend to be collected the next day, we finally made it home not far short of 6 o’clock. An excellent day out.

La Tuilerie Website

Back in Business !

We have just received an email from a couple wanting to book for the campsite, they were concerned that our website said we were closed???

It took me ages to figure out they had read my blog. So to all you campers out there, WE ARE OPEN !!!

Well openish, you might not be able to park your car on the campsite if it rains too much in the next few days and we are down to three spaces because we can only accept as many cars as parking spaces that we have available off the site, but we have campers and we even have cars today and here's a photo to prove it!

How to Cheer Yourself Up

This summer continues to be strange weather-wise. For the people in the gîtes, the weather has been quite kind, the rain is keeping itself to concentrated periods, with hot sunny weather in-between, but for the campsite, every drop of rain, whether it falls in the daytime or during the night, whether it is drizzle or in a downpour, is a drop too much. So, with a very heavy heart, we decided to close the campsite temporarily, because the ground is just too wet. We managed to find spaces for everyone in local campsites, not as quiet and secluded as here, but still within the area. The same day we decided to close up, poor Fifi was bitten by a vicious insect that looked to me like an earwig (I didn’t know they bit and hung on for grim death) and we had an emergency dash to the vet to get her sorted. So this last week hasn’t been all that great to be honest.

Sunday morning, feeling a bit down, after yet another night of thunder storms and rain, we headed into Saint Gengoux le National where a free glass of wine and little snacks were on offer to tourists. I do voluntary work for the Tourist Office and not having ducked quickly enough at the last general meeting, I have ended up as the head of the committee for holiday accommodation, arts and crafts and other commercial activities. Don’t ask me what I am really supposed to do, but we have at least had one committee meeting. At that meeting we decided to jazz up the “welcome to our region” drinks. The drinks for the last three years have been a spectacular flop. No tourist seemed to want to have a free drink and brioche (which I detest) at 5pm on a Monday and so we thought Sunday morning, just before lunch, might attract more customers. The wonderful Marilyn in the Office de Tourisme has managed to get some of the local food and drink businesses to donate their produce to offer to the tourists and this morning was the first event of the season.

Cees and I tried to arrive on time (French time that is) but we arrived just before 11 for an eleven o’clock start. Surprisingly the place was a hive of activity, dozens of volunteers crashing into each other, spreading pâté on toasts, cutting up goats cheese and generally flapping about. Even the local journalist had arrived. A table had been set-up on the pavement outside the office and the president of the Office de Tourisme was trying to stop the table cloth from flying away by finding little stones from here and there. I felt rather guilty at not helping, but it was so French in organisational terms, I felt it would be better to give everyone a wide berth.

Finally at 11.15 our President started the speeches and then he said that “La Responsable de la Commission Hébergeurs, artisans d’art et activités commerciales” would like to say a few words, yikes that’s me ! Thanks for the warning Monsieur C. I managed to stumble a welcome and a little description of the delicacies that were before our noses and then invited everyone to a get glass of wine, but no, Monsieur C - the master a long speeches - felt that mine had not been long enough and continued for me, telling everyone what he thought I should have said. We finally got to have a glass of wine just before half past.

The snacks were very tasty and worthy of a mention. Smoked salmon (not tasted by me because of my allergy to fish) and smoked duck breast smoked in St Gengoux by a Scotsman, goats cheese and goat terrine from La Trufière in Lys where we buy our cheese, some delicious bread from the baker Gelin in St Gengoux, jambon persillée (parsley ham - a regional delicacy which I am personally not too keen on, but most people love it) from the butchers Guillemin in St Gengoux, fruit juice from Parfums de Terroir just down the road from here in Taizé and the wine was from the Vignerons de Buxy, which runs the wine merchants in St Gengoux where we buy most of our wine.

All in all not a bad way to cheer yourself up and there were even some tourists who joined our little party as well.

La Tuilerie Website

The Inauguration

There is nothing the French like more than a good excuse to celebrate, so this week we organised an inauguration at La Tuilerie. We invited the Mayor and two members of the council with their partners and all was set for The Inauguration.

The whole story starts really from the time we opened the gîtes in 2007 - a year after the campsite was opened. We had always allowed the campers to use our washing-lines in the back garden, to hang their washing or their wet towels on, but on a Saturday (gîte change-over day) if I wasn’t very clever, I ended up with nowhere to hang the masses of washing. We stuck up signs, warned people and as a last resort even moved their washing to take up less space, so that I could at least hang up one or two of the sheets, but there is no doubt about it, it has been difficult at times. So we were always asking around, if anyone had any old washing-line posts that we could have, to put on the campsite.

Finally last year, our friends Chris and Mary, from Varanges, came up trumps and announced that they were removing their posts and we could have them. Well actually, they had already removed one post and the second was due to be removed shortly. Sadly, Chris had already chopped one of the posts in three bits, because he was preparing to take it to the dump, but the other one could be collected intact.

I may have followed a twelve week welding course back in my student days, but rather pathetically, I never mastered the art or science of electric arc welding and so I had to find someone to reconstruct the continuity-challenged post. At the village party last year, we asked the Mayor - after he had had a couple of glasses of wine of course - if he knew anyone who could weld and his immediate reaction was that he would do it for us – result !

A couple of days later we had two whole posts, but the problem did not end there of course. Anyone who has visited here will agree that, in the dry months, the ground is harder than rock-hard and Cees and I failed to even attempt to dig holes for the posts, but Cees’ daughter and partner are not the sort of people to be defeated by a little bit of clay and they dug the holes. After concreting the posts in place and putting up the lines, we had a washing-line on the campsite, for the first time in our 7 years of being in business.

But what is a washing-line without an official opening? So Thursday evening the Mayor was invited to pin the official sock, with the official peg on to the brand-new line. He then declared our washing-line well and truly inaugurated. Thank you Jean-François !

We then all retired to the back garden to indulge in the real reason for the gathering, a few glasses of crément and aperitif snacks, leaving our campers wondering why on earth we had left a sock hanging on the new washing-line.

For more information on our lovely peaceful campsite with a brand new washing line click here.

Audience Participation

Two superb concerts this last weekend, two violins and a piano minus one violin and the second was piano, trumpet and accordion.

The first lot of musicians were Czech. The violins were father and daughter, but father had fallen ill a few days before the concert. They couldn’t speak French so, I was asked to assist with communication. With a gîte changeover and Cees away at a family party, time was limited, this meant that misunderstandings were inevitably the order of the day. When I arrived at the concert I was met by the President of our club (the only one who has a smattering of English) who was very wound up. I need to put this in perspective, this guy is Mr laid-back-in-the-extreme, so “wound-up” was a bit alarming. He greeted me with “Did you know her father is dead?” I immediately felt guilty that I hadn’t asked after the father’s health when I had seen them earlier that afternoon and no, she hadn’t mentioned to me that he was dead. I was sent to ask. Now how do you ask if someone if their father has just died, a few minutes before that someone has to perform a demanding concert and needs all the concentration they can muster ? But I had been sent and so I gently asked after her father and was told that he wasn’t allowed to fly (well you wouldn’t be I suppose if you are dead would you?) but from the way she said it, it definitely seemed to me that the man hadn’t yet shuffled off this mortal coil.

In any case the change of program to a much more vibrant, dramatic show than had been planned, was well worth it and to be honest, father was most definitely not missed, dead or alive.

Sunday afternoon’s concert was accessible, toe tapping music (Gershwin, Bernstein) and the church was packed, all making for a great atmosphere. One of the players let the side down a bit by failing to properly polish his performance and whilst the other two were note perfect, he fudged a few bits and missed a few high notes. We had organised tickets for the people in the gites and one of them said that they thought it was the acoustics in the church that had squashed his high notes - strange that it only affected his instrument though. Having said that, the concert, as a whole, was top-notch and the whole audience was thrilled to bits with it.

As a volunteer, you get to sit right at the back in the last available chairs and I was squashed in next to an English tourist who hummed along to all the tunes - irritating. In the second half Monsieur P sat the other side of me and clicked his false teeth in time to the music – doubly irritating. But when they struck up “I Feel Pretty”, Monsieur P started to sing along and not that quietly either. I had visions of him dancing round a ladies dress shop - but that is an aside. Madame F, who was sitting diagonally in front of Monsieur P, was extremely irritated by his Natalie Wood (or Marni Nixon) impression and threw him one of her kill-at-ten-paces looks. But this man had spent 18 months in a German concentration camp and he can cope with the likes of her - he just kept going. Madame F always seems to get her own way and she is not known for the gentle side of her nature and so seeing her looking so cross, immediately took away any irritation I had with his singing and even though he murdered “Summertime” to the extent that I could hardly hear the musicians, I could tap my feet and sing silently along to the music myself.

The rest of the concerts in the series look as though they will as good as, if not better than, these two. One thing though, I will make sure I keep away from Monsieur P at the Georges Brassens concert, I can hear him singing already.


For our website with details of the gites click here.

A Woman’s Place..

I am a mechanical engineer, I have worked all my life with men, I may be physically weaker than them, but I can do blokey things within the limitations of my strength. I can put up marquees, I can change a washer, I can put a fuse in a plug, I can drive a ride-on mower, but that is behaviour that just doesn’t compute round here.

I remember the first time I turned up to help put up some marquees. Lots of strange looks and probably strange remarks, but my French was not good enough at the time to register them. To be honest I didn’t notice that I was the only woman there, and even when a woman turned up with something to eat and drink and gave me a weird look, I still didn’t register. Of course now I know better and when Cees went to put up a marquee the other morning and I had to deliver the cash boxes at 6 (yes six) o’clock in the morning, I just sat and watched. I did ask if I could do anything and our president said “Yes, you can sweep”, so sweep I did. Considering the guys were lacking in numbers and really could have done with the help, it struck me as daft, but hey I’m not French and it just confuses them, so I do it their way, well most of the time.

But sometimes I forget myself. The other evening when we were discussing who was putting out the plastic chairs in Chazelle church for the concert series Guitares en Cormatinois which starts this weekend, I suggested that I could help. “Great” said the mayor “you can sweep the floor, and get rid of the cobwebs”. So it appears that I am not even man enough to carry a chair, so sweep I did and de-cobweb I did. Everyone was very impressed with my long de-cobwebbing stick and it was declared “genial”. But again I was the one girl with the blokes and after a glass of wine I made my retreat, wishing them “bon courage” with shifting the piano, I could have helped, but I knew it would just cause tons of confusion.


Anyway, back to cleaning - a woman’s primary role. I often glean tips from campers or people in the gîtes, I have learned that the easiest way to polish a floor is to spray the cleaner on the floor then in bare feet with a duster under each foot shuffle around and there you have it, one shiny floor without an aching back. I have also learned how to keep an electric kettle looking as if it has just come out of its box, fill it with vinegar once a week or fortnight depending on use, leave it to stand for 15 minutes and empty and rinse, the vinegar can be reused. I manage to keep most things looking spick and span, but it is a constant struggle to clean the stainless taps on the campsite and to keep them looking nice. I go around with special anti-cal stuff every so often, but they soon return to “normal” with their high usage. The other day, we saw the taps in the toilet block were absolutely sparkling and we went straight to Mrs S, thanked her enormously and asked her how she had done it. She looked completely baffled. Her husband sniggered away, and then gave us his secret, put a little bit of toilet cleaner on a sponge and hey presto, no more streaks of lime on your taps.

One thing this has shown me is that maybe my thinking about stereotypes is not so different from the locals after all !

La Tuilerie Website

Eternity-Coloured Rose, Perhaps with Gold Reflections

Last weekend it was an open day for the Rosarie in Cluny. This was where I did my rose pruning course back in March. The garden is looking absolutely lovely and it reminded me that I did blog about its opening back in June 2010. A quick look at the blog and I saw the photo below, which I took and I was amazed at the difference that those two years have made. Now the garden is in full bloom, with not only roses, but delphiniums, ladies mantle and sedums waiting to give colour later in the year. It has turned into a really beautiful garden and an asset to Cluny.

As I wandered around and took pictures I noticed a plaque in memory of 22 women from Cluny who were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944. Ravensbrück, was a camp exclusively for women, figures vary but it appears that about 130,000 women passed through the camp during the war and estimates of between only 15,000 and 40,000 atually survived the experience. These kind of figures always pull me up short, especially today as we are going to a wreath laying in Cormatin this evening to remember the Appeal of 18th June, which was when Charles De Gaulle made his famous speech to the French people from London, rallying the country to back the Resistance.

There was no mention at the Rosarie if any of the Cluny ladies made it home, but there was a plaque with a lovely little poem written by Marcelle Dudach-Roset. I won’t take credit for the translation, I found this on a rose website:

“I am “Resurrection”
and all through the years,
all through the seasons,
I will remain a life witness
who will protect from barbarism
all the children of the world,
even when I have become a wild rose
lighting the way for everyone.”


Having searched around since reading this poem, I found out a little background. The survivors of Ravensbrück wanted to pay homage to those who had not survived and they came up with the idea of having a rose (which they saw as symbolising femininity) to become an emblem of peace and remembrance of the horror of the camp. They started lobbying rose breeders with their request for an “eternity-coloured rose perhaps with gold reflections”.

This dream came to fruition in 1974 when finally Michel Kriloff created “Resurrection, the Ravensbrück rose”. What a very special way to remember.

Our website La Tuilerie de Chazelle.

How to confuse two engineers with vertigo

You will probably remember the crime of the century when Fifi stole one of my goats cheeses a couple of weeks ago. Well, we have been struggling with the aftermath ever since. We felt that reporting her to the police would do no good, so we had to take measures to prevent a recurrence of this dastardly deed.

Cees mounted an eye on the top of the cage and with trepidation we both climbed step ladders and hung the cage from the roof covering the staircase to our front door. I put the remaining goats cheese in the cage and away we went. To make up for the lost cheese I put some old grated emmental in the cage as well.

Last week, I then climbed a step ladder - with trepidation - to get the blasted stuff out again and started making my fromage fort. A word of advice, do not dry old grated emmental in a cheese cage. It goes mouldy (as one would expect and as it should) and then it has such a strong flavour that the resulting fromage fort is inedible. Back to square one.

I was not too impressed about having to climb a ladder to put cheese in the cage and take it out again, so my visit to the cheese farm was delayed until a suitable solution could be found. Pulleys - that’s what we need.

Off to Briconuates in Cluny to get some pulleys. It will be easier if we get double ones, less work to raise and lower the cage – I’m an engineer I know these things. We then threaded up the pulleys and proceeded to mount ladders, with wobbly knees, to attach the pulleys to the roof. I won’t draw the pulley design we used, but suffice to say both of us had forgotten our basic mechanics and whilst the concoction looked very professional, it umm, err, well, how do I put this. It didn’t work.

I sat down this morning and engaged my brain for attempt two. Sadly we didn’t have enough rope for attempt two, so on to attempt three - use the double pulleys as single pulleys. Unfortunately, the pulleys then wobble all over the place, so on to attempt four.

Attempt four works!!!

Blast, it’s now too late to buy cheese so we will have to wait until La Trufière, in Lys, reopens at four o’clock. Hopefully I will be able to give a success story about the fromage fort in a couple of weeks.

La Tuilerie Website

A Day Off

Part of our little business is helping holiday home owners and ex-pats with the problems they encounter in France. From finding plumbers and builders, to helping with the endless bureaucracy that seems to be the French way of life. The last few weeks have been very busy. I have been filling in tax forms for clients, helping sort out the remnants of the damage caused by the incredible freeze we had in February, not to mention trying to catch up on gardening work that has been neglected because of the very wet weather since the beginning of April. On top of that, there is the voluntary work with the Tourist Office, Guitar Festival in Cormatin and the Amicale, the club that runs events to fund the annual old-age pensioners’ meal and the kids’ Christmas party. But everything had to be finished before the end of the month, in time to have the day off on Thursday - Cees’ birthday.

When I was growing up, you got to choose what you wanted to do on your birthday. When I was in full-time employment, I always took a day off work on my birthday and did something special. The Dutch, on the other hand, have a party on their birthday and they work their guts out looking after their guests, something I did once and refused to ever do again, bringing comments from all and sundry, I might add. Since we have been in France, Cees has slowly come round to the idea of celebrating birthdays Nixon-style and it was his birthday on 31st of May, so he got to choose what we were going to do.

He got out the Michelin guidebooks and planned our day. He decided to go to Moulins, about 1 ½ hrs from here. From the guide books he found out that there is an interesting monastery, with a lovely cloister, nearby and an old mining village with something special.

We set off early and arrived in Noyant-d’Allier (the old mining village) at about 10 am. All the roads had names like “Allée des Roses” and “Allée des Jasmines” etc, but even these pretty, colourful names couldn’t brighten up the drab terraced houses in the rather overcast light. When I saw the old mine shaft wheel, standing there, unmoving, the image was complete. It took me back quite a few years, to when I lived in a mining community on the Nottinghamshire/South Yorkshire border, during the miners’ strike, and I can tell you, that there is nothing more heart-wrenching, than a stationary pit-wheel.

But we weren’t there to see that. So, we turned our backs on this depressing sight without taking a photo (hence the old postcard image) and we searched the map of the town, to find our real destination. We headed down L’Allée des Roses and, just as the sun came out, there it was, squeezed between the old, derelict railway line and the miserable, miners’ cottages. A pagoda, surrounded by a swarm of Buddhas. This golden chap is the biggest, but there were an uncountable number of other little ones. There was a beautiful Guanyin with a real lace shawl around her shoulders and a very large Buddha, lying in the sunlight.

In 1955, when French nationals were evacuated (or expelled) from Vietnam, Noyant-d’Allier was designated as the town to be used to re-house these evacuees. About 1500 people arrived in this old mining town, to start a new life in mainland France. They brought their customs and religion with them and finally, in 1983, they built the pagoda and have been adding statues ever since.

As we walked around the little park, there were crates of elephants and yet more Buddhas, waiting to be unpacked and placed on the plinths that were being cast that morning. Sadly, I must say that the whole is very messy and looks and feels incredibly out of place, more like a car boot sale than a holy place, but I am glad we went to have a look at this rather bizarre site.

After spending some time in the Asian shop in town, looking for some edible goodies, we left for the monastery at Souvingy.

To be continued…..


La Tuilerie Website

The BBQ is Out Again.

At last our first BBQ of the season. We have eaten outside a couple of times this year, but we hadn’t dared light the BBQ in case we had to dash in because of yet more rain. But Friday night, for the first time in 2012, it was lovely and warm and we declared the BBQ season open. We are BBQ addicts, if there is the slight possibility that we can light up those coals, we are away, chicken tikka, sheekh kebabs, saté of different meats, burgers - with or without meat, sausages - all sorts, pork chops, spare ribs, kebabs – many different types, meat marinated in every possible combination of herbs and spices and even andouillette - once.

I am not a big believer in letting the guy do the cooking though. If I have prepared the meal, marinated the meats, made the burgers, I am not letting someone incinerate my wonderful offerings. I can’t count the number of times I have seen meat cremated by a bloke on his fancy Weber or whatever they are called, and watched the tears in his poor wife’s eyes. I am a BBQ fiend and a real purist. None of this “sausages burnt on the outside and raw in the middle”, “serving one person at a time with cremated offerings”, no when I do a BBQ all the meal is prepared in the correct order, to the correct level of cooking and everyone is served together.

Cees goes on about the state of our old BBQ, falling apart, rusty, wobbly, the lid almost off, wouldn’t I like a new one? Maybe a Weber? No thanks, it works for me and until the legs actually do drop off, it will stay working. You don’t need a fancy, expensive piece of equipment, all that you need are some hot coals and patience and it is the patience that the worst cremators lack - a BBQ takes time. You light the coals and then you wait, possibly for about an hour, until the coals are just right, then you cook, gently.

Anyway, back to why this was a special event. Normally we BBQ from mid-April onwards, every night (unless we have a dinner engagement elsewhere) until the winter arrives. We have even been known to BBQ in March, but that was when the building works were going on and outside, even at 9 degrees, was preferable to sitting inside, amongst the rubble. But this year the weather has been so atrocious, that Friday night, at almost the end of May, was the first evening where we could sit out and enjoy ourselves for hours, listen to the birds, have a BBQ and generally think about how good life is.

It is about time, but it looks like summer is here at last.


The website for our hoiday accommodation La Tuilerie de Chazelle.

Someone Stole my Cheese

You remember those two lovely fresh goats cheeses I put in my cheese cage yesterday? Well when I got up this morning two-thirds of one had gone !

The burglar had gained access via the side panel of the cheese cage, and hauled one of the cheeses to the edge.

I had my suspicions as to who was responsible for this evil deed, when I saw Fifi with a white blob on her nose. But I wasn't quick enough to get a photo.

Having said that, a good detective doesn’t jump to conclusions, a good detective waits until the criminal returns to the scene of the crime.

I wonder who that is?

The cheese cage manufacturer is refusing to take any responsibility for this break-in, saying keeping Fifis out was not in the specification.

Ah well, there goes my fromage fort.

Strong Cheese

The French are big in cheese and one of my absolute favourites is a relatively local cheese, Epoisses. This cheese was invented at the beginning of the 16th century by Cistercian monks at L'Abbaye de Citeaux. A good one (like the one in the photo) is runny and very, very smelly, it has quite a unique flavour, due to it being ripened in Marc de Bourgogne - the local fire water and it is truly delicious. Just a little bit of trivia - soldiers in the Naploeonic armies were strictly banned from carrying Epoisses in their bags due to the pungeant smell.

Epoisses is one of the two AOC (appellation d’origine contrôlée) cheeses that Burgundy produces, the other being Mâconnais. More cheese trivia for you - there are over 1000 known varieties of cheese in France but only 56 have AOC status.

Our other local AOC – Mâconnais, is a soft goats’ cheese, although I must admit I can’t tell the difference between the ones that have Mâconnais AOC recognition and the ones other local farms make, both are very delicately flavoured delicious cheeses to be eaten the day after production, for a very soft cheese, or kept for a couple of days for a firmer and tastier version. However, you can put the fresh cheeses into in a cheese cage and then let them dry and go mouldy. Depending on the season and depending on the temperature, this mould can be created in less than a week or about a month or so. The longer you leave them the mouldier, dryer and tastier they get. In the photo are two fresh cheeses, one that has been dried for about a week and the more mouldy one has been dried for a couple of weeks. You can eat the dry ones, cut into little bits, to go with your aperitif or you can turn them into fromage fort - a very powerfully flavoured spreadable cheese.

Cees made me a cheese cage a couple of years ago and I use it to dry goat’s cheeses to eat. The photo shows two cheeses just starting their drying in Cees' cheese cage. I also dry left-over bits and pieces in it and then make fromage fort (strong cheese). As with any food worth eating round here, there are as many recipes for fromage fort as there are grandmothers. This is my recipe:

Use any left-over cheese you have, Cheddar, Gouda, Camembert, Brie, Emmental, goats cheese, in fact anything you have to hand, dry for about a week. Many recipes include a leek bouillon, but I found it fussy to make and it didn’t add any real taste.

500g left-over dried cheese
50ml dry white wine
1 – 2 cloves garlic
Salt & black pepper

Remove any rinds from the hard cheeses and grate, leave rinds on the soft cheeses and chop into smallish pieces. Put the cheese, wine, and garlic into a food processor and blend until smooth. Add salt and pepper.

Refrigerate, do not cover. After about 24hrs check for dryness. If the cheese mixture is dry, add a little bit of wine and leave for another day, keep checking and adding wine as necessary and the cheese will be ready to eat after about a week. Adding the wine in small quantities ensures that the final consistency is not too runny and that all the liquid is incorporated into the cheese. The ultimate consistency should be a bit dryer than cottage cheese.

This will give you a very strongly flavoured spread, ideal for aperitifs on crackers. A tip on the ultimate flavour - the longer you dry the cheese and the longer you give it the fridge maturation treatment, the stronger the flavour. I have one neighbour who makes hers with non-dried cheeses and she serves it as soon as it has been made, but her cheese is strictly for wimps !

Bon appétit.

La Tuilerie Website

First Ladies, Style and the Law.

Our new president François Hollande, was sworn in this morning and of course the incoming and outgoing first ladies turned up for the show as well. Looking at these two women, I was struck by how scruffy and rather dowdy Carla Bruni-Sarkosy looked (pictured right) compared to the new first lady, Valerie Trierweiler (pictured below). I think someone should have told Carla to at least iron her trousers and blouse before she went out this morning. But more than that, this horrible outfit also reminded me of an article I read in a Dutch newspaper about a week ago about how women should dress in France.

Apparently on 26 brumaire in the year VIII on the Republican calendar - or 17 November 1799, if you stick to recognisable dates - a law was passed to say that women must dress as women, in other words they should not wear trousers. It goes on to say that every woman who wants to dress as a man must report to the local préfecture and request permission. Whilst this law has been amended in 1892 and again in 1909 allowing women to wear trousers if they are on a horse or a bicycle, it has never been repealed.

So not only was Carla committing a fate style error but she was also, most probably, breaking the law.

Having said that, now that her hubby is unemployed, perhaps they had to go home by bike.

La Tuilerie Website

Interesting Instruments and Great Music.

I don’t know how the small towns round here manage to get hold of such quality musicians, but they do. The jazz festival at Trivy (a town of only 278 inhabitants, containing a beautiful church) was the very first Burgundian music festival we attended a concert at - way back in 2005. At the time, we were still working in The Netherlands and had come for a holiday to make our newly purchased house liveable.

We saw a poster announcing that Biréli Lagrène (a world-famous Manouche guitarist) was playing in this tiddly village, not too far from here and tickets could be bought from a chemist’s shop near Mâcon. So off we went to get the tickets. That was our first experience of the many music festivals this area has to offer each summer and that's why the jazz festival at Trivy has a special place in our hearts. Every year, when the new brochure comes out, we sift through the concerts to see what world-class musicians they have managed to bag. This year we saw the name of Richard Galliano and we knew we had to go.

Richard Galliano is an accordion player who manages to fit many styles into his repertoire and make them all his own. Our experience of the dreadful bands that play at parties around here, where one accordion player managed to play a waltz to a beat box tango rhythm and didn’t spot it until he had been going for about two minutes, has reduced my liking for the accordion, but just a few seconds of Richard Galliano restored my faith. He is a master, it is like he brings the instrument to life and gives it a personality of its own.

The concert started with “Tango pour Claude”, a well known tune that he wrote as homage to singer Claude Nougaro, which is a particular favourite of mine. That set the tone and we were away. During the concert, he also played an instrument called an accordina, which is a cross between an accordion and a harmonica. The concert went from strength to strength and in one piece he managed to form the sound of the sea as the accordion “breathed” - quite incredible.

The two hours, of spellbinding music, just zipped past and it was a sad moment when it was time to go home.

La Tuilerie Website

The Locked Door

The first blow to the economy of Cluny came when Napoleon ordered the destruction of the abbey.

A new and different Napoleon has attacked the town again, by locking this door.

When the state owned abbey was opened up to paying visitors in the 1970s, the exit was strategically positioned to deposit the tourists right in the middle of the main street.

As they walked back to their cars or buses, they would stop, have a cup of coffee or a glass of wine on a terrace or buy a souvenir in one of the many shops.

On May 2nd, all that changed - the door was locked, as government cuts bite.

The abbey wants to keep the tourists all to themselves, it wants them to buy their souvenirs in its own shop and have a cup of coffee from its own vending machines.

So today - election day - the shopkeepers and restaurant owners have fought back. They blockaded the entrance to the abbey, to give it a taste of its own medicine.

Will it have any effect? Will they unlock the door? I don't know, but as our new president's campaign said "Change - is now" and the shopkeepers of Cluny won't take this lying down.

That leaves us all with the remaining, much bigger question, will Hollande be the one to find the key to open the door to a better future for this country?

What do you miss?

This is a question that I have been asked by many people since I left the UK more than 20 years ago.

When I was in the Netherlands, Dutch colleagues and neighbours used to frequently ask what I missed. Was it general interest, something to say or their assumption that not everyone would love all things Dutch that made them ask? I don’t know, but my answer changed over the years. When I first arrived, I had a long list of things I couldn’t buy (or couldn’t find) in the Netherlands and 15 years later when I was about to leave the list had just three things on it, English sausages, marmite and hills. I never got used to Dutch sausages (far too much meat and taste), I could not buy marmite except in very expensive ex-pat shops and I always found the excessively flat and windswept landscape depressing.

Now of course I am in France and the question is still frequently asked. Interestingly I have never been asked by a French person, only by Dutch or English visitors to our campsite or in the gîtes or indeed by fellow ex-pats. I suppose the French could not imagine that there was anything in another country that could possibly be missed by anyone. However, I do still miss things, yes still those tasteless English sausages (no self respecting Frenchman would eat one) and marmite (which is so expensive you need to re-mortgage your house to buy it locally). But now I have added to my list, I have lots of Dutch things I miss, Indonesian spices, sambal (chilli paste), ketchap manis (sweet soya sauce) and the most divine food created by mankind: kroketten.

Kroketten are a deep fried meat snack resembling a potato croquette only twice as long and double the diameter, you eat them in soft white squishy bread rolls with lashings of mustard and each one contains more cholesterol than you should eat in a year. My mouth is watering just thinking about them. As soon as we get over the Dutch border for a short stay, we head for the nearest snack bar and we manage to sink out teeth into quite a few during the time we spend in the country.

After many, many, messy and unsuccessful attempts at making them, I have now managed to create a recipe that actually works and so we can have kroketten any time we like. My what-I-miss list now has one item less on it, just those tricky Indonesian specialities to go.

Last Friday we had to go to Mâcon and as we left a shopping mall car park we spotted a shop called Asia Shop, I did an emergency stop into a nearby parking space and we went in to look. They had been open less than a week and they had shelves full of sambal, Indian pastes, special dried fried onions that are a must for Indonesian chicken soup, not to mention spices galore and Indo Mie. Fridges full of beansprouts, tofu and other veg and freezers full of things like durian. We spent ages in the shop oohing and ahhing over the wonderful things they had on offer and left with a selection of goodies.

So my list is now getting even smaller, just down to sweet soy sauce, Marmite and of course we mustn't forget those tasteless English sausages.