23. Paint, Pastis and Tapenade

The TGV was something of a disappointment, not because it didn’t travel fast, but because there was little sensation of speed, as it glided, smoothly through the French country side. Also the hype that one hears in England appears to be a little overdone. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told either by newspapers or UK television stations, that French trains always run on time.

We had decided to stop at Montpellier rather than travel through to Narbonne, because I had not managed to track down a car hire office there. This TGV arrived at Montpellier ten minutes late, a few days later on the return journey, it left thirty minutes late, then made up sometime, arriving in Paris fifteen minutes late.

You seem to cruise along, presumably at the high, publicised speeds and then stop in the middle of nowhere for several minutes, before speeding on your way again.

“Cor, its bloody freezin!”, said Sam as we stepped off the train at Montpellier, he repeated this observation every few minutes throughout our four day stay.

I had to admit that the advent of May had not provided the upturn in the weather I had anticipated, when moving the date of the house opening, from April.

The days passed relatively uneventfully. Each morning started with the same ritual  of me getting up at 7:30, switching on the landing light and then making as much noise as I could, hoping that Sam would take the hint and get up. A cup of tea taken to his room at 9:30, always elicited about an hour of coughing, which when followed by “there’s a croissant and another cup of tea for you on the kitchen table”, resulted in Sam himself appearing downstairs, looking fed up and still muttering “Cor, its bloody freezin!”.

I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised by the friendship Sam struck up with his paintbrush. Apart from the frequent references to the temperature there were few complaints, and his tenacious application of white emulsion to the kitchen walls, was only interrupted a couple of times each hour by, “it’s OK mate, I’m just having a fag break.”, and “make us another cup of tea, mate”. These walls had been covered with some kind of stucco with a rough surface, so painting them properly required perseverance, which Sam seemed to have.

Isabelle, breezed in one morning and invited us round to her home to share a pastis with her husband Daniel before lunch. We explained that it would be a short visit, since we were planning a drive to Toulouse that afternoon.

This turned out to be a most productive drink, since Isabelle volunteered Daniel, who was unemployed at the time, to strip and paint the middle bedroom. This removed a task from our itinerary and hence, left Sam and I with an extra day to pursue less gruelling activities. Daniel explained that on the Languedoc wine planes, vineyard related work was becoming harder to come by. Mechanisation was taking over many of the traditional manual jobs, including sulphur dusting and grape picking. In the past it had been normal for large numbers of vineyard workers to arrive from Spain during the late summer picking season, but this had now almost ceased.

To communicate all this, Sam, myself, Daniel and Isabelle made numerous references to the French-English part of the dictionary that I had brought with me. In one area Daniel had no problem communicating at all. While positioning his arms as though he was holding a rifle, he would say “Les Americans, Les Anglais, Les Francais – Saddam Hussein – Boom Boom”. He would then guffaw with laughter. This performance was repeated numerous times with the “Boom Boom” getting louder each time he took another sip of liquor.

Daniel would not let us leave after just one pastis of course. Protests about me driving were countered with stories about the gendarmes being asleep, due to their own liking for pastis. I did manage to restrict my consumption to a second “pastis trés petit”, while Sam helped Daniel drain the bottle. The drive to Toulouse was short on conversation, due to Sam being asleep.

Sam was not particularly appreciative of my efforts to expand his cultural horizons, with a mid journey walk around Carcassonne. He did however purchase a Carcassonne snowstorm and a plastic knight in armour, to add to the tasteful light up Eiffel tower, which he had purchased in Paris.

In Toulouse I returned to the restaurant that Mark, Pete and I had discovered the year before. My main justification to Sam for coming to Toulouse in the first place having been “you must try the scallops!”. I was relieved to find the restaurant had not been pulled down or restyled and was even more pleased when we managed to get a table being served by “Robert”, our waiter of the year before.

We browsed our menu’s and I pointed out the mandatory scallop dish to Sam. “I am sorry sir, but we have no scallops tonight”, said Robert, looking genuinely distressed. I chose sole instead, which was good, but not a substitute for the scallops. Disappointed we returned to Frasquenet, where I rectified my low alcohol consumption before going to bed. Sam was still asleep on the sofa when I got up at my usual time the next morning. This fact had no effect on the procedures required to solicit signs of life from him.

After a few hours work and a ham stuffed baguette we went for a drive inland past the canal du Midi. Sam had brought his video camera and was looking for shots, he could splice into a amateur pop video he was trying to make for a friend who managed a band.

“Stop the car” he shouted. We halted some 100 yards beyond the designated film set. “Reverse a little, its bloody cold out there”, “alright, reverse a lot then”, “OK stop”. I watched in my rear view mirror as Sam meandered around a small roadside cluster of poppies, holding his video camera in front of him at knee height, swinging it up then down, left then right and back again.

“What were you doing?” I asked a few minutes later when he returned to the car.

“Pretending to be a bee”, came the reply. We drove about 300 yards before there was a cry of “Stop, that ones got more poppies” brought us to another halt. It was several miles on and “poppies, take 15”, before Sam decided that the light was fading too fast to make further filming useful.

That evening we ate at a seafood restaurant, by the marina at Gruissan. The lack of people in the area and the fact that several restaurants had not opened up, confirmed that we were still well out of peak season. Hearing the wind howl through the steel rigging of the nearby moored yachts, enabled me to understand why this was still not a popular time of year for tourists.

I sampled Tapenade for the first time. It came as an almost black coarse paste, served in place of a sauce on a piece of white fish. The Tapenade itself contained some of the prime ingredients of the area, olives, anchovies and garlic.

All too soon it was time to return to Montpellier, the TGV, Paris and England, but we had the compensation of knowing that we had the poppies captured on video to watch whenever we wished.

It transpired, when viewed on a full sized television, that Sam’s bee suffered from cataracts, hence the poppies were out of focus. A disappointing result for a professional photographer, but compensated by the fact that I now had some good wide angle pictures of the interior of the house in Frasquenet, to put in my holiday rental brochure.