How Blue Is My Valley Read online

  They would have been less surprised if they had not had all their furniture from the UK fumigated and vacuum packed into quarantine, to prevent import of English beetles to New Zealand. There was in fact no shortage of wildlife in their new country, beetles included, but they were taken aback when the estate agent told them that there were pink bats in the attic of their home-to-be.

  Contemplating the intricacies of bat protection laws, and wondering how they could catch a bat colony anyway, legally or illegally, they were relieved to discover that the pink bats were a kind of roof insulation. This explained why the estate agent had presented the bats as a plus; they had thought him some kind of over-enthusiastic animal lover.

  Inspired by company, we turn a mountain into a friend, walking the full length of Grace Dieu’s ridge, with its views across into the Beconne valley. In the Second World War, the maquis were active here and their communications line is now a waymarked path, winding above the lavender to Nyons, at the mouth of the gorge that leads into the Alps.

  Nyons marks the beginning of serious olive country but here, further north, lavender rules. We see impossibly steep and curving fields of true lavender, which only grows above a certain height, as well as the hybrid forms planted in the valleys. In winter, the rows are gray hedgehogs, curled up tight against the mistral.

  From the slopes of Mielandre, we look down on the lavender and stone cottages of Teyssières, the village where the Sky, weary of work, rested and left traces of his Blue in the rocks as a sign. Sky’s Blue certainly sparkles over the valley and keeps us company until the shadows of a deep gorge, St Ferréol-Trente-Pas, so-called because the gorge is only ‘trente pas’, thirty paces, from one side to the other. As I am not driving, I find this quaint and scenic.

  When kiwi-fille is dropped off at Lyon airport, she is caught in a tourist survey and in response to the question, ‘Were you satisfied with the service in your hotel’, she gives us a glowing report. Our month offering room with full board has brought all the children home-from-home, except for my belle-fille who is now a maman herself and instead she provides us with the dubious pleasure of a one year old in real time over a webcam and microphone.

  Conversation is much like Apollo 13 to Space Control, along the lines of ‘I can hear you now... I’m losing you...’ with the bonus of ‘Did you hear her?’ (unpleasant droolly sound effects). There is still something to be said for two-dimensional, quiet photographs and we receive those too. It is a pleasure, even at long-distance, to witness such a blossoming into motherhood – and to know we can pass back the wriggling fruit when it cries or smells.

  If I had photos of the last month and flicked them into animation and the illusion that everyone was here at the same time, there would be an extended family eating at my table and telling the stories of their lives. It is not summer, it is December, and we have snow two days before Christmas, which lasts, silvering the fields and footpaths. We are not sitting under the trees but in a dining room with crumbling walls and a desperate attempt at inadequate electric heating. However, one daughter has turned potter and her gift of a ‘pichet’, a jug for wine or water, sits on the table like a fat blue robin, opening its beak for more, and I have laid the table with the lace cloth we bought in Venice. This is not everything I wanted but it is something, an important something.

  First Christmas in France adds to our food education. At last we find out what those mysterious paper-protected vegetables are – why didn’t we realise straight away that they are cardoons? Of course, cardoons (and that’s the English word)... so what exactly is a cardoon and what do you do with it?

  My French Complete Larousse Encyclopaedia of Cookery comes into its own at these moments as it is arranged alphabetically by main ingredient, which makes it virtually impossible to look up recipes and absolutely fantastic if you want to find out what to do with something you’ve bought by linguistic accident, such as sea urchins – or cardoons.

  I also discover that my French gardening book is a useful back-up, telling me how to cook the items I grow in my ‘potager’. And so we discover cardoons, a sort of winter celery tasting vaguely of artichoke. Like all the other customers, I leave Super-U looking like a pantomime soldier in Macduff’s army, camouflaged by an enormous three-feet high cardoon bundle. This turns into several gratins, popular with the vegetarian contingent.

  Less popular is the preparation of the Christmas turkey, which is so unmistakably farm-fresh that it still has head, feet and ... bits. Provençal tradition dictates scallops and sea food but we cheerfully mix old ways with new. According to the media advertising, the one essential is the büche, a Christmas log, and the shops offer büches of chocolate sponge, ice-cream, nougat and every variation of patisserie – ‘order now for Christmas!’

  Entire Christmas menus can also be ordered in advance and there is a queue at the hypermarket counter for this service. There are promotions on gift-wrapped chocolates and extra plastic children’s toys on display but otherwise we notice little difference. Despite the adverts showing Maman, stressed out because she has not yet bought her büche and there are twenty-five coming for dinner, there is none of the British seasonal frenzy. We don’t miss the crowds or the traffic jams.

  I risk opening my jar of Picodons and it is just as well I do so in solitary secrecy. It is just possible that the wooden doorstops are marginally softer ... I break off a piece... and a little milder... possibly. I absently lick the oil of my fingers, then concentrate, dip a finger in the jar and lick again.

  The cheeses might not be a total success but you have heard of olive oil flavoured with basil, with garlic, with herbes de Provence? Flourish of trumpets - I have created Picodon oil. You are ahead of me already, adding your flavoured oil to bread dough, your pasta, your roast potatoes, your omelettte pan... forget truffle oil. The luxury taste of the Gilborough household will be Picodon oil. I sigh and return the jar to the cupboard, to the very back of a shelf, banished from the Christmas table.

  I need to do more theoretical Picodon research before I return to the practicalities and a trip to Paris, with a three hour wait at Charles de Gaulle Airport, gives me the ideal opportunity. I discover that the Picodon is not a cheese, it is a war zone.

  Unthinkable as it is, not everyone considers Dieulefit to be the centre of Picodon production. More upsetting still, regions outside the Rhône-Ardèche pretend not only that their goat cheeses are Picodons but even that they produced them first. Although this sacrilege is dismissed by screeds of historical evidence, even my Larousse credits the Dauphiné or the Languedoc with the origin of the Picodon. I am horrified. Things get worse.

  The Picodon is illegal in the U.S.A. I remember vaguely some fuss about unpasteurised cheeses and pregnant women but as always, when you know and love an individual against whom there are prejudicial laws, your sense of outrage is suddenly woken. I am outraged. I cannot believe that our unique cheese had to be sneaked onto the 1996 NASA Columbia space mission (by a Drômoise medical specialist) where it proved its nutritional value. I love this French astronaut, who personally made the Picodon the first and only cheese to venture into outer space.

  He ranks with the nineteenth century Montélimar politician who made it to the Presidency and whose most important act, from a Dieulefitoise viewpoint, was to ensure that his weekly rations of Dieulefit Picodons reached him in Paris. He must have missed the arrival of the marketday train, nicknamed ‘le Picodon’ which made seventeen stops on its route delivering coal for the wool and silk factories, bricks for the potteries and Picodons from Dieulefit to Montélimar market, twenty-eight kilometres. Nowadays, two cats blink at the world from the windowsills of the old station, a toy-town house in the middle of a Dieulefit carpark.

  The Picodon is not a cheese, it is a flattened round of history, a flavour of home, as to the man who wrote home from the front in the First World War, thanking his wife for the cheeses which she had sent him. The Picodons were ‘so good that there is only one left’ and the soldier was ‘con
tent that Marie is looking after the goats so well and is so sensible and my little Jean too, but I mustn’t think of them too much or I will feel terrible.’

  It would have been his wife, his mother, or his grandmother, who actually made the Picodon. Goats were ‘the cows of the poor’ and it was the women who made the goat cheese, handing the recipes down through the family in a purely oral tradition. This is another reason for the Picodon wars.

  The upmarketing of the Picodon has led to standardisation in production, to meet the appellation controllée requirements, and now that it is proper work, it is dominated by men and has its own confrérie, a sort of Guild. There seems to be agreement, at least in the Drôme, that the Picodon Dieulefitois is the prince of goat cheese, and that the méthode Dieulefitoise requires more than a month’s refinement, being regularly salted and washed.

  According to Monsieur Cavet, neighbour and master cheesemaker, there are Dieulefit Picodons.... and the rest is just goat’s cheese. From my recent research, I suggest to a worker at Cavet that the Picodons are washed in eau-de-vie and she laughs, shaking her head. ‘Water,’ she tells me, ‘nothing but good plain water, not white wine, not eau-de-vie – and don’t believe half the rubbish you read about Picodons.’

  Even amongst the experts, the arguments are passionate; different producers have their own techniques for encouraging the final characteristic blue colour, or even changing the colour with wet cloths. Who needs to make up stories when one goat farmer is convinced that not just talking to the goats, but what you say to them, will influence the piquancy of the cheese?

  I will keep goats, I will make Picodons à l’ancienne, in the old way... In 1953 the Prefect of the Drôme stated, ‘We must do everything we can to prevent the increase of goats, ‘l’ennemi de la forêt’.’ There has been more battle over the goats than there is now over the cheese. In 1231, the village of Valréas banned goats completely, because they were eating everything green, including the vines and the trees; in 1567, Grenoble banned goats from the vineyards but stopped short of a complete ban because the peasants would starve. In 1725 Languedoc went for a total ban. I contemplate the anti-goat laws; I reflect on the current view that goats are a positive part of conservation because they clear scrub and prevent fires. I remember my own encounters with the devil’s spawn, and I settle happily for the goat bells tinkling not too close up in the woods as the herd moves to new pastures.

  No-one is interested in the latest information on Picodons. I tell my family about the confréries and feel a moment’s regret. I could have joined the Picodon Confrérie, dressed up in Picodon robes (I know that the Confrérie des Olives wears olive coloured gowns so perhaps Picodon experts wear mouldy cream ones?) and presumably engaged in funny handshakes. But no. It is not to be.

  Perhaps I should aim to join SCOFF, which, as you would expect, is an association of cheese-makers, or the Confrérie of the Big Omelettes (honestly, it does exist, and they have just broken the record for the biggest truffle omelette ever made). But again, no.

  The most I manage is an attempt to impress with my new found tasting skills and the capacity to rank the cheese’s quality according to its after-taste, which, at its best, should have a slight hint of hazelnut and a definite piquancy, and which should definitely not taste metallic or of potatoes .... but then Christmas distracts me once more from the Picodon Project.

  Dieulefit holds its ‘switching on the lights’ ceremony and it is like being back in Llanelli, except for the fireworks and Père Noël being joined by Père Foulard, his spiteful opposite, who plays tricks on naughty children.

  Circus entertainment takes over the television screens and the stars of the French pop scene play a goodnatured role in children’s musicals and variety shows. We knew of one French singer when we moved to France and we now have a repertoire of a dozen, who drop in on each other’s shows in a sociable circuit of duos and trios, epitomized in the annual charity concert tour as ‘les Enfoirés’ (the Bastards) in aid of the ‘restos de coeur’, the shelters and food for the homeless.

  We are quickly hooked on the melodies and the lyrics, even after we recognise the clichés. No-one has an orgasm in France; everyone ‘touches the stars’, and love is all very well but you do sometimes wish they’d get out a bit more.

  I am, however, impressed by the recognition given to the song-writers, flagged up on album covers, as important as the chanteurs. This is not the case for the musicians and I am Englishly amazed by the abuse of the instrumentalists, who are anonymous and backstage. I could list twenty rock guitarists who take centre stage whenever they appear, from Clapton to Santana, and not one of them would have done more than smile at the end of the show if they were part of the French scene.

  No, if you’re French, then you sing or you write – or, if you are especially talented, you do both, but only classical and jazz musicians are fully appreciated. If you are determined to make a noise, you can of course create the interminable techno beat to which there is a strange addiction on French radio.

  My choice of French music clears my sitting room of visitors in seconds. I am bitterly disappointed that a voice of broken gravel, which shatters glass when merely saying ‘Bonjour’ is not more appreciated. How did Garou discover that he could sing? I like to imagine him as a child, volunteering for the school choir, or at breakfast asking someone to pass the milk. I bet his mother told her friends, ‘He has a lovely smile but he’ll never be a singer,’ and everyone laughed.

  8.

  Interesting Things to do in a Bath

  There are hundreds of interesting things you can do in a bath, with or without company. You can stick your toe up the tap and, if it’s a mixer, you can set your own reward, betting on whether the first drip will be freezing or scalding.

  You can drape a hot wet flannel across your face and breathe through it; in fact a hot wet flannel will make interesting and strange landscapes over most parts of your body. Try shutting your eyes, place flannel randomly, then open your eyes and, looking only at the flannel portrait, decide what might be underneath. A sleeping dormouse? A German helmet? A little bath foam and you can bubble mould your body or sculpt cute animals.

  If you find all of that too childish – trust me, for some of us the wet flannel can provide a real moment of Jean-Paul-Sartre existentialist absurdity – but if you’re a real thrill-seeker, then try sharing a bath with a clockwork dolphin. The challenge is not to flinch when it goes on a high-powered zig-zag straight for your interesting bits.

  You can also play hunt the razor when you’ve dropped a new blade in a bath opaque with bubbles. You can drink champagne, eat chocolates, read a book and sing very loudly along with your special non-electric bathroom-friendly CD player. You can vary any of the above by drinking the champagne before playing e.g. Hunt the razor.

  Then of course there are the variations for two, and the family versions, which include watch-the-baby-turn-blue – or of course red, and very loud.

  For all of my past entertainments at bath-time, I never thought I would be washing dishes in my bath, nor checking for splinters – not from the champagne glass but from the hazards of washing up. It’s amazing how carefully you check for broken glass when about to sit on it, naked.

  Why are we washing up in the bath? Because a kitchen is taking place, slowly, and meanwhile, in addition to intermittent heating and electricity, and a record tally of three white vans and two cars (none of them ours) parked in our drive, we have no kitchen sink.

  It’s raining men. The pets are conducting a sit-in wherever there is most furniture piled up; they remember this sort of chaos and they’re determined that we will only move house again over the combined dead bodies of two Pyreneans and two cats. We feel much the same. John’s asked me for the third time what I’m doing about a bin – how the hell should I know? The phone rings and I can’t remember where he told me he’d put it.

  The garden is full of machinery, tools and workmen .... working. The house is full of workmen’s ‘truc
s’, ‘things’ which include a splendid masonry drill about two feet long, like the horn of a giant unicorn. I tell the young electrician that my husband would love one of those; he tells me it cost three thousand francs. I am suitably impressed, once I have converted to euro, and I run away to blush in private at the stupid things I say – and get away with.

  It is like being a young teacher again, understanding the double-entendres too late. I remember the French-speaking French teacher who asked us why her pupils found it funny when she told them that Louis XV had big balls. I would like to say that we, her English-speaking friends and colleagues, were sensitive to the difficulties of speaking a second language and that we delicately, with straight faces, clarified the double meaning. If anyone could have stopped laughing, they might have.

  The only time I feel badly done-to in my attempts to communicate is in the local Tourist Office. I want to know if there is a rugby match on in the next fortnight. ‘Rugby’ is ‘rugbi’ and ‘match’ is ‘match’; easier than ‘valve to bleed a radiator with’, no? Definitely no. First the younger, then the elder woman looks at me blankly as I carefully repeat my very simple question.

  I am used to the pained and wrinkled expression which crosses French faces, either at my assassination of their mother tongue or to aid them in concentration, I never know which. However, I had really not expected it this time and am lost for other ways of saying ‘rugby’ and ‘match’. The older woman asks me to say it in English. ‘Rugby’ I say, ‘match’ I plead. ‘Oh,’ she says, meaning ‘Why didn’t you so in the first place?’, then she adds, ‘rrrrrugbi’.

  Now I accept that I should have rolled my rs better (we all get older) but there surely isn’t that degree of difference? To add insult to injury, she tells me, ‘I thought you said ‘marché’. ‘Why?’ I ask myself – until a great truism about communication finally dawns on me. It was what she expected me to say.