This past week we've been privileged to have the Bloomberg Tricycle Writers Group staying with us. Each year, thanks to the Bloomberg Foundation and the Tricycle Theatre around a dozen writers meet together for a week here in Roujan where they find space to work on their current writings. Each evening we've heard scenes from plays, short stories, stand-up routines and seen short films made by the individuals in the group. It's been utterly fantastic to hear such wonderful imagination at play.
So thank you Hassan Abdulrazzak, Michael Bhim, Neil D'Souza, Jennifer Farmer, Amit Gupta, Amy Evans, Winsome Pinnock, Trevor Williams, Dolly Dhingra, Lorna French and Kwame Kwei-Armah, you've been absolute stars. See you next year?
Just so you can see how your breakfast is coming along I thought I show you some figs that will arrive on the Le Couvent, Roujan breakfast table a little later in the year. These are on one of about five wild fig trees that we have in the Le Couvent vineyards.
Although nowhere near ripe yet, having a couple of months to go, they're looking good. Currently, however, it's the asparagus season. We're not at all happy that our lovely neighbour Stephane Cabrol, who used to have a long stall of luscious asparagus outside his house each evening, has decided to move to Alignan-du-Vent, a few minutes drive away. Gone are the days when we could stroll across the road for the fattest, most delicious thumbs of fresh-picked asparagus. I drove off to buy some last Friday. I needed three kilos to make some delicious dense soup. Although he only had the little finger sized ones they were perfect for the velvety soup.
Our lovely writers are here still - just until tomorrow morning, when Ali and I will be very sad to see them go. They've been wonderful. There's a gentle hum of energy and thinking running right through the house. We've loved it.
Meanwhile, Ali and I have had time to do a little more in the vineyards. A good deal of the time we were pestered by Kit the Labrador wanting to ride round on Queenie the Quad. Here she is with Neffies in the background.
And here's a pic especially for my step-father, John, who's having a rough time with chemo, and for Sarah who's thinking of camping in the vineyards all summer. Here is a pic of your vineyard - they're coming along well.
Hey look at this. While we've spent the winter pretending to be vigneronnes, our good friends Hans & Christa at Domaine Bourdic have been preparing proper wine for the guests of Le Couvent, Roujan. Here's the new rosé looking gorgeous.
It's a much lighter colour than previous years, has the addition of Grenache and is just delectable. Perfect for a cool glass as you arrive at Le Couvent, Roujan. There'll be a bottle waiting for you in your room as a welcome from Ali & I. We hope you enjoy it.
If rosé is not quite to your taste we have a luscious 2004 Le Mori, also from Domaine Bourdic. Here it is with the rosé, looking smart in its black & white livery.
Ok, so we're not officially open until 1 May, but this exceptional week we have a group of Black & Asian writers staying, working on their films, stage plays, radio plays, TV dramas & books. They're all jolly well known, and they're just lovely and very interesting. We had supper together last night with the writers and our chums Nicola & Teddy who've arranged this particular jape. They do lunch & supper and we have everyone to breakfast. Lucky us eh?
I have a personal challenge to see how many different fruits I can serve at breakfast and the current record is 13. It's early in the year so I wasn't being too hopeful but I managed passion fruit, kiwi, physalis, melons, oranges, apples, strawberries, pineapples, star fruit & bananas this morning. That's 10. The record looks in danger this year now that we have Chateau Mal Au Dos where the fruit grows in abundance.
Crikey, is it as cold where you are as it is here? We have a ferocious wind blowing straight off the snowy heights of the Massif Centrale and it's perishing. I'm a bit worried about my tomatoes. They were described as precocious by the man at the market who sold them to me, but they'd need to be stalwart to survive this onslaught.
Flynn the husky, despite still having his winter coat, has decided to stay in today.
Ali's in the middle of framing a gazillion more pictures and photos. We'll have to move - there certainly isn't wall space to hang them all, despite Le Couvent being a fair old size.
Our lovely neighbour, Maria, has just made her daily visit with bread for the hens. She's rescued a huge pot of geraniums that have dived off our gatepost ahead of the gale. I'd just put them back there after the winter, in readiness for our first guests who arrive on Tuesday. We've spent the past week spring cleaning ready for the season. Between our two cleaners, Patricia & Sophie & Ali & I, we managed to spend 28 hours cleaning on Friday. Yikes. Just a few more curtains to go back up and we're there I think. A cup of tea or coffee anyone?
It didn't start well. The four of us in the car were arguing about where exactly the restaurant was. We'd pulled up outside a huge wine factory and the signs for Bistrot d'Alex ran out, only to be replaced with dozens of others saying 'Vinipolis'.
I, because I am a Virgo and therefore always right, and because I'd looked it up on the internet moments before, insisted we were in the right place and to just park. The others didn't believe me. I was right, of course. This new restaurant is part of the wine factory and looks like the entrance to a small modern airport. Sliding doors usher you in, then you stop dead. The floors have a colossal section which is glass, so you can look down on hundreds of wine barrels many feet below. I'm not good at visual cliffs, so tiptoed round to firmer ground.
Photo pinched from Cwiosna CABANE - Merci.
We were at this new restaurant to celebrate the birthday of our friend Jackie Devereux . And what a find it is. If you can get past the place looking like the works canteen at IBM and concentrate on the food and the price of said food, you'll find it excellent. In a huge, lofty and airy space, with spacious seating for about sixty or so people, jolly waiting staff serve excellent food of the region. I had six of the freshest oysters from the Bassin de Thau served on a bed of ice, guinea fowl with the creamiest risotto I've ever tasted followed by a dish of strawberries prepared five different ways. Everything was beautifully, cleanly presented and perfectly cooked. For 18.50 euros. That's £14.36 at today's rotten exchange rate. The wines are largely from the cave co-operative which is part of this Vinipolis complex and are good and well priced.
We're on a winner here for at least another six months if they don't do something about the signage. No-one will be able to find it, so we should be fine for a table. Yesterday was Sunday, however, and the restaurant was full to the gunnels with savvy french locals all keeping quiet about the place. If you're coming to stay at Le Couvent, Roujan I'd advise you to ask us to book you a table well in advance. They could be making funky new signs as I write.
Just occasionally something completely unexpected happens in Roujan and it happened again last night. We got to witness an amazing cultural event way beyond that that you'd expect in a small village in deepest Languedoc..
Thanks to our friends Anne & Fran at La Maison Verte over the road we went to a fantastic concert in the church, just 150 metres away. Anne & Fran had heard that a choir of fifty girls from Hungary would be on their way to Spain to take part in a competition. La Maison Verte is huge so A&F invited the choir to spend a stopover night there. In exchange the girls gave a free concert, despite having spent 26 hours in a coach and arriving in Roujan a mere 3.5 hours before the event.
Wow, but were they good. They were extraordinary. Here's a video that does them no favours visually, but will give you a flavour of them. This piece is a bit frivolous in comparison with some of the beautiful Renaissance music they treated us to last night. I doubt there was a single person in the audience who didn't have shiny eyes and a skin tingle. Thank you Pro Musica from Nyíregháza in Hungary . Hála. Szerencse a versenyben.
Last week I received this e-mail from the niece of a friend of mine.
Hello friends
As many of you will know, I am a professional busker, earning my living singing opera and playing the cello in Covent Garden. I love my job! But I might not have it for much longer as the owners of Covent Garden are a multi-national corporation who want to rid the place of its unique charm and turn it into a shopping mall. What the hell will I do then? Be a waitress?? Practice voodoo???Sniff Glue????
Please take 2 seconds to follow the below link and sign our petition. And if you've still got any energy, please forward this link to all the people you know who would also like to keep music and street performance alive. Thank you very much in advance.
Looks like a big parasol closed up doesn't it? Well, you and I are both wrong about that. It's actually the winter sleeping quarters of a tiny pipistrelle bat. I inadvertently forced it to open one ear yesterday when I unfurled the umbrella for the first time since last October. I feel a heel. I do hope it's going to be OK.
This isn't my thumb, I didn't pick the poor creature up. I nicked the photo from another website - thanks if it's yours. Please let me know who you are and I'll acknowledge you.
It's been a busy week. We're don't officially re-open for the summer until 1 May, but , as a favour to our pals Nicola & Teddy, we're making an exception. We have a group of writers coming to stay for a week's workshop from 25 March. So we have to get the house and garden in guest mode a bit early.
As a result Ali has been painting like a dervish all week, the green bathroom's now germolene pink. We're not at all sure about it, but hope that the addition of lots of art and photos might make it bearable. At least it's a lot lighter now. The ceiling has yet to be lowered and new lights installed. I know, wrong way round, but you try getting a workmen at this time of year. Ali's now moved on to the orange bedroom, re-painting the ceiling and a couple of walls.
Some of the windows have taken a battering during the winter so a little outside work has to be done on those. The windows and shutters are wonderfully battered and beautiful. The paint's weathered naturally into the most glorious multi-hued fade - the sort of thing TV makeover people try to do by distressing things. There's nothing remotely stressed about our shutters, they're just slack and gorgeous. But that comes at a price - we have to be gentle with them, just doing enough to ensure they're safe and that they work, but not deciding to replace them with brand new ones. When it comes to that time we will sell up and move. I would be very sad to see this beautiful old girl tarted up like a teenager on a date.
I, on the other hand, get to tickle the garden back into shape. Actually, it's less of a tickle than a short back and sides. Having spent the whole winter pruning our vines the garden has had less attention than usual. But we must have done something right in the previous six years because it's stood up to this neglect rather well. The plants are all thriving and there really aren't millions of weeds. Last year we invested in a garden shredder and shredded everything in sight, tossing the mulch on the garden. I'm assuming the weeds gave up in the darkness because relatively few have bothered to surface.
Actually I'm rather disappointed. I was hoping to have tons of garden waste to take to the tip in our new trailer. I am particularly hopeless at reversing it and the municipal tip is the perfect place to practise. It's a huge open bit of ground and if I choose my timing carefully there might be no-one there to witness me jack-knifing repeatedly. For the moment, though, I'm doing it in a simulated kind of a way. See how you get on in this reversing game .
Damn, damn, damn. We lost, outright, no messing about with second rounds, we just lost. So we have the old Maire and his team for another six years. I console myself with the thought that we chose to live in Roujan because it felt like Britain in the 50's and with a bit of luck some things might remain that way if the villagers are so entrenched.
The main problem for me is the proposal to build a big supermarket in the village. Roujan has two fantastic butchers, two excellent bakers, two general stores, a post office, a bank (albeit with mercurial opening hours), a bus into Pezenas twice a day, two bars, a florist, a pharmacy, heaps of estate agents, two hairdressers, two newspaper/tobacconists and so on. But the villagers are super keen for a new supermarket to be built on the outskirts of the Roujan.
Having lived through the demise of the English village we encourage them to imagine how our lives will all be when one-by-one the shops disappear and we all have to traipse nearly a kilometre down to the supermarket to drag our shopping another kilometre back up the hill. Either that or get the car out all the time. Unfortunately the rosy glow that sits over the village leads the villagers to believe that the independent shops will all remain. Now that would be a first.
Today we voted in the municipal elections for the first time. It's a simple affair. One is handed a blue envelope. On the table are two lists of 19 candidates. You choose the list you want to vote for and stick it in the envelope, or if you want to choose some from each list you can go into a booth to make your choices. We were both happy with one of the lists so into the envelopes they went. Then a short queue before handing in your voting card to be stamped, the envelope hovers over the open ballot box and you sign to say you've voted and an important person slides a lever to let your vote fall into the box. All very civilised. Here's Ali placing her vote.
And me outside the Mairie after having voted. Yes my face is all puffy because I STILL have this bloody cold and cough.
I'll let you know how we got on tomorrow. I'm praying our party ousts the current Maire and his gang. The contenders have great plans which include a festival and a market in the village - both of which I would love.
