Le Couvent Diary

Ali's gone shopping thank God. That means I don't have to. Winding the windows down is the nearest we get to air-con in our ancient Freelander. It's around 36 today so inside or by the pool's the only place to be. So our guests decided to cycle around the countryside early this morning - how wise.

I'm on a diet so I spend hours trawling through recipe books for luscious things to cook for supper. Tonight we're on spiced chickpea cakes with red onion and coriander salad. If it's good I'll put it in the recipe book here. The diet's going well thanks to my mentor Rachel . Thanks hon!

The only fly in the ointment at the mo is the spider/bee in the potager that stung /bit me the other day. As a result I have a fat hand that is causing me some consternation as it's now three days later and it's still swollen. At least I have Jan the homeopath on the case & it is a little better today in that I'm not tempted to just cut it off to relieve the itching.

Since I last talked about the new restaurant up the hill at Vailhan, Le Presbytere , lots of guests and friends have been and all declare the food very good. Ali & I went again the other day too. The co-proprietaire Sylvia is a bit cool so the food and the view have to make up for the lack of dynamism, but they do it brilliantly. The view is unbeatable and the food tastes wonderful and looks like this:

Tempted? Go on a balmy night and sit out on the terrace.

What's stoolball? It's an old English game, the fore-runner of cricket, originally played by milkmaids. You probably haven't heard of it because it's only played in Kent, East Sussex and now, Roujan. If you'd like to know more about the game you can check it out here .

Last year Ali & I made some wickets, painted them jolly colours and hauled together a team of friends and family & called ourselves the Languedoc Crocks. We were mentioned on a website and as a result the lovely Clare, captain of Causeway Stoolball Club in Kent, got in touch with us. Despite the fact that our team had played just twice Causeway was insistent on coming to play against us. It was a howling success as witnessed here .

Within moments of going home they booked to come for a long weekend again this year. So we did it all again. We had supper at Le Couvent, we went to Pezenas market, we played on the cricket pitch at St Pons de Mauchiens.

We laughed, we lost, we were 31 for dinner at Les Goutailles , we played again. Ali & Nicola got silly.

We were 36 for dinner in the vines at Chateau Mal Au Dos and then they squeezed themselves and all their bags into two people carriers and grinned their way back home to Kent. All between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. And then Clare wrote to book for next year. Hooray! What can we conjure up as a surprise then I wonder?

Thanks to all our friends and family who worked their socks off cooking and lugging stuff and providing wine, not to mention actually playing. And thanks so much to all our friends from Causeway Stoolball Club. It was fantastic. And we're going to beat you next year. 

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.

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/cov2008/petition.html

Evie x

God knows if petitions have any effect, but if you could bear it, sign up to this one - who knows, it might just make the developers think twice.

We've had our lovely Cambridge friends Sarah & Dawn visiting for the past three days. No-one gets to stay while Le Couvent is closed during the winter unless they put in a bit of work, so they pruned olives, bushwhacked thistles and planted salad & strawberries.

Their reward for all this work this was taking us out to lunch in Meze where we had stunning shellfish looking out over the sparkling sea. The Picpoul de Pinet was almost a finely chilled as the sea. Ali & I passed on the latter. Our sweet guests got soaked, but reckoned it most refreshing.

It wasn't as warm today but we pruned hundreds of vines, and now I can barely type, so painful are my hands.

Ali woman-handled the bush-whacker. Here's the proof.