Le Couvent Diary

The guests are all out hiking the Pic de Tantajo, swimming in the Mediterranean, or settling down to a lunch of oysters. I've just popped in while the pool cleaner does its work keeping the water sparkling. Ali's making her shopping list of fruit, ham and cheeses for the guests' breakfast. The dogs are asleep at my feet, some hens are on the nest, the birds are keeping up a tuneful chatter - and for once the cicadas have stopped their usual whistle. The temperature's a very comfortable 26 degrees with a breeze and the skies are blue with wisps of high cirrus clouds.

I can't hear any cars, the church bells are silent, but there is the lazy drone of a distant small plane.

It's 12.30 - all the Roujanais are inside having lunch before their siesta. Bon appetit.

There have been many wonderful short courses run by our pals, Nicola & Teddy, over the road in La Maison Sans Fiche but I've never been able to go to any of them since they've always coincided with our work-period. Until now that is. So today, tomorrow and Wednesday I'm chipping away, along with four other learners, in the Spring sunshine.

And what a complete joy it is to concentrate on nothing but the stone/wood and the tools. No-one dare let their minds drift, for fear of chipping off a vital part or feature.

I'm joined by Erzsi, Jenny, Michel and Christina. We fumble along together in a German, French, English, Hungarian kind of a way. And everyone is understood.

It all ends with a fab lunch. What a wonderful way to spend a few mornings.

Any ideas what mine is going to be?

I'm so sorry. It's been ages since I blogged, but I didn't think you'd want to hear about my Mum staying for six weeks while she had her cottage renovated. Nor about how tired we still both were after the season end. Nor about how the wine is still just vouting away in its tanks. Nor that the hens have stopped laying because the days have drawn in. So I didn't write.

However, now we're back in the pink.  Mum's thrilled with her new home and all's well with our world. Today Ali and I finished the latest task of putting up a new greenhouse where the unused table by the pool in the top garden used to be.

Our lovely neighbour, Henny, snapped us while we were just beginning to put the glass in. Now, some five hours later, it is finished, save for the internal bits like shelves and the like.

I'm thrilled with it as it was a complete bargain from eBay - 350 euros with free delivery as it was the end of a line.  Sure, three pieces of wood were missing and there were nowhere near enough screws, but by complete fluke, we had exactly the necessary stuff in my 'don't-throw-that-out corner'. Oh, and the door doesn't fit by a mile. But we can solve all that with a bit of boxing and coxing.

So now I can start to think of all those wonderful Spring seeds. Bring on the catalogues.

Well that's it. I must have recovered from the season. I woke at 7am, raring to get on with the day. At the moment I'm doing all the garden maintenance. So far it's taken two whole afternoons to work my way along half the front of the house. The bignonia and jasmine had reached the roof and were threatening to start infiltrating the tiles. And so, after two trailer loads to the village dump we have completed 1% of the work.

I am aided by my 79 year old mother. Yesterday she went to our doctor for the first time since she moved to Roujan in August. She was running out of medication. I feared we may have a bit of a fight on our hands since she isn't yet registered with the french health system - we're awaiting papers from the UK. However, we had so much evidence, including an e-mailed list from her UK GP that it all went swimmingly. The french quack took her blood pressure and declared it excellent, so my sous-gardener is skipping round like a teenager.

At the moment we have bright blue skies, a gentle breeze and cooler nights. However last week it rained solidly for two whole days. I was thrilled. Not only was it good for the winter vegetables in our potager, our wood-gathering timing was excellent. Each year we use around 8 cubic metres of wood in the fire downstairs in the big kitchen and the wood-burner in our apartment. Our normal log-man said he couldn't deliver until the end of October when I tried to order during last August - by which time it would all have been wet - defeating the object of buying seasoned wood.

A swift schlep through leboncoin.fr led me to a couple of lads who are clearing the dead chestnut and oak from a forest above Pezenes les Mines, anbout a twenty minute drive from us in Roujan. They can't deliver (no lorry could get up the twisting, narrow road  into the forest), so Ali and I made repeated trips with our trusty trailer. Now we have a huge pile of luscious logs. We had just stacked the last one and hauled the giant tarpaulin over the top when the first drops of rain fell. I couldn't have been happier. It was much less expensive and far better quality than the stuff we used to have so I'm tickled pink.

Coupled with that, the drive from Le Couvent to Pezenes les Mines is just wonderful. Leaving the flat lands, passing north through Gabian, you climb through hilly chestnut forests behind Faugeres. The views are breathtaking, and as it's chestnut time and the roadsides are strewn with sweet chestnuts one has to stop to collect a bagful. We'd cook them on a roaring fire if only the sun wasn't still making that unthinkable.

I've been slow to get back to blogging after the summer season partly through tiredness but mostly because my two computers have had an attack of fragility. The cat sleeps on my laptop, so, unsurprisingly, it now only works if I put a vice on the left corner. That's not convenient. It's going to cause a riot taking my laptop through customs when we travel too. My main computer had an attack of the vapours too, freezing at will. Its will, not mine. So, fearful of having my computer die before transferring everything we splashed out on a new one.

My gorgeous new iMac has a two terabyte drive and 8 gig of memory so I'm very, very happy. I'm also in love with Mac Migration Assistant which just transferred everything while I got on with the gardening. How cool is that? So now I can wipe the old one and reinstall is afresh ready for our lovely guests to use next summer. I'm sure it will work fine when it has less to do. Like all of us.

 OK, onwards and upwards. Now where did I leave my secateurs?

Le Couvent doesn't open in the winter. Not ever, never. However we make two exceptions - one week for our volunteers and another for a wonderful group of writers who come here each March. They are all members of the Tricycle Theatre Black & Asian Writers' Goup and the week is sponsored by generous Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York.

All twelve of them have a lively breakfast round the kitchen table, then as soon as we've cleared up, the table is festooned with wires and laptops. Apart from the clackety clack of all the keyboards, you can hear a pin drop. Occasionally someone will get up to put the kettle on. Roy stands up to think. A couple prefer to write in their rooms and one likes to write in Mother Sup's, whilst going through our music collection. So far this afternoon I've heard Gorecki, Madame Butterfly and a bit of Nina Simone filter through to our apartment.

All this quietness makes Ali and I quiet too. I have spent much of today going through cadastral plans trying to work out which tiny piece of land we bought as an adjunct when we purchased our vines. No-one ever actually walked us round the boundaries, so we simply know that there's a small area somewhere en route to our vineyard which stands untended and neglected. I called a friend in the village who's married to a five generation Roujanais. I'm hoping he'll be able to tell me.

Were I not in silent mode I would be continuing my chipping of old wine barrel staves. I dismantled a beautiful oak barrel the other day and have been in the process of making signs for the vineyard. I'm hoping to do one for each parcel giving the name of the grape variety and when it was planted. I've done three so far, just five to go.

By the way, we are already fully booked for considerable chunks of the summer, so if you're dithering over when to come, tarry no longer or your dates might have been swallowed up. (See, I'm just picking up discarded words from the kitchen floor.)