We arose early the next day for our drive to Toulouse. I drove while Jane and Sarah caught up on lost sleep. Once past the Corbieres hills the landscape becomes a little less interesting, so I turned my thoughts to the imminent problem. Earlier in the year, I had invited my mother Mabel and stepfather Jock to visit us during our holidays. I had reasoned that as senility took its toll, there may not be many more years when such a trip would be possible for them. Luckily, my brother Dick and stepbrother Ron, had arranged holidays that overlapped with ours.
While Dick’s small house, steep stairways and large family meant that Mabel and Jock would not be able to stay with them, they could at least provide a day’s entertainment. Ron’s house was sufficiently big for him to accommodate them for a few days, making the trip worth the cost from their point of view.
The main problem that concerned me was that Mabel had informed me that “Jock doesn’t like the French” and “Jock can’t eat garlic”. Not liking the French I could deal with. Jock after all came from a different generation and had an inbuilt mistrust of the French based on a different cultural upbringing and the events and propaganda of two world wars.
For my own part, I thought that Jock’s love of good food and alcohol, must mean he wasn’t as different to the French as he thought. I knew also that our area was liberally peppered with monuments attesting to the presence of a strong resistance movement. Last but not least, Jock couldn’t speak French, so any anti French comments he might make would not be understood.
The more serious problem was the inability to eat garlic. Obviously we could overcome this when eating at home, but there was no way I was prepared to ask for dishes to be cooked “sans ail”, when we ate out. Within half an hour of picking up our charges from Toulouse airport, I tested the water, “What effect does garlic have on you Jock?”. “Don’t worry about that, it doesn’t hurt me”, he replied. “Oh, you know how it upsets you”, retorted Mabel.
Several days passed, along with a good number of garlic laden meals. Jock appeared to suffer no ill effect, indeed he seemed oblivious to the presence of the garlic. He seemed to enjoy sitting in the courtyard in the early morning with a cup of coffee and a book and then again, in the evening with a gin and tonic or glass of wine. Meal times were another highlight of his day. I had concluded that Jock’s problem was more psychological than physiological, or in other words there was no problem so long as he didn’t realise what he was eating.
Mabel was clearly embarrassed that her predictions of doom and gloom surrounding Jock and garlic had not materialised. Given the statements she had made, it was more than she could bear to see him contentedly down a coquille St. Jaque, or lamb cutlets rubbed with garlic and sprinkled with rosemary. In desperation she resorted to the underhand trick of drawing attention to the garlic, with comments such as “I’m amazed you can eat that Jock” and “My god this is strong”.
Each time she used this device, my blood began to boil, but because this was a rare holiday for them, I tried to contain my anger. In the event Jock did the job for me with a gently delivered retort, along the lines of “From the meals you gave me at home, I had no idea that garlic could be used so subtly”.
The first week of our holiday had passed, it was our second Saturday, so as prearranged we took Mabel and Jock to Agde to visit Dick and his family. While Dick and his wife Sybil escorted their guests around the town, I went on my own little treck with my video camera. I captured about 2 minutes of film before the batteries went flat. Returning to the rue de Fraternite I slept for a few hours, while the others sat in the blazing sun on the roof terrace, drinking gin and tonic, pastis, beer or wine depending on their predilection. Before we left for the return drive to Frasquenet, I invited Dick and family to pay us a visit a few days later.
After all it would be nice for Sarah to see some more of her cousins. The fact that, myself, Dick and his eldest son Jace, together might also be able to get the fountain trough up to the court yard, had naturally never entered my head.
The following day, Sunday, we drove to Lodeve, taking a scenic route via Roquebrun. Despite leaving the address and hand drawn map in Frasquenet, we found Ron and his wife Gertrude’s house with little trouble.
This success, was mainly helped by our almost failed attempt to find their house two years earlier, when my step sister Sally, who is Ron’s sister had been staying with us. In the event I was able to extract the maximum enjoyment from the journey by appearing to find the house, by always taking the opposite direction to the one that Mabel suggested.
How Mabel could possibly have had any opinion as to the direction we should travel, given that she had never been there, beat me, but this was not an unusual phenomenon, where my mother is concerned. Later that day, after an excellent meal at a nearby trout farm, we bade Mabel and Jock goodbye and returned to Frasquenet.
Three days on and we were on the road to Toulouse again. This time to pick up Jane’s friend Caroline and her daughter Sabine. Sarah and Sabine were the same age and played well together for most of the time. By making their respective bedrooms out of bounds to each other, except by invitation, the anticipated conflicts between two “only child” children, thrown together for ten days, seldom materialised.
Dick and family visited and we successfully manoeuvred the fountain trough up the steps to the courtyard. The fountain was able to be completed, with my earlier purchase of a lower throughput aquarium pump and several interesting experiments with the French wiring system.
Because I was paranoid, about electrocuting my future tenants, I had gone to great lengths to make the system as safe as possible. The wires were encased in grey plastic conduit and since I had been unable to track down a suitable exterior switch, power could only be denied to the pump by either switching off the mains supply at the fuse box, or pulling a plug out of a socket, which I had installed in a robust plastic box screwed to the courtyard wall.
The cover of the plastic box was held secure and watertight by four long stainless steel screws, which took several minutes to screw in or undo. This made switching off the fountain a non trivial task, but since I was enjoying the sound of flowing water, I was happy to leave it running permanently, knowing that it would be switched off at the fuse box, when the house was vacated.
Fountain & Trough
Within minutes of switching the fountain on, there was a deputation of Frasquenites outside my front door.
Clearly there was huge concern about the stupid Englishman wasting water. A couple of delegates were invited in to see first hand that the water was being re-circulated using a pump and not simply running out of a tap and into a drain. There was a lot of laughter and they all departed happy.
We spent the rest of the day by the pool at the Frasquenet Pizzeria. In the evening we moved from the poolside to the restaurant and watched the sun set behind the surrounding hills, while sipping chilled rose wine and eating the best pizza I had ever had.
The pizza I chose was topped with a wonderful combination of tomatoes, olives, tuna, anchovies and Roquefort cheese. The cooking pizzas added a new dimension to the already fragrantly scented air.
We all agreed that it was nice to occasionally be able to enjoy a swim, without the towels and socks getting full of sand, as happens when using the beach.
The days ran into each other as we alternated between the beach and the pool.
One morning as we were making preparations to spend a day by the sea, Caroline appeared and announced that Sabine was unwell and that we wouldn’t be able to go out that day. Caroline is a single mother and I have to say that from what I observed, Sabine played her like a fiddle.
I was dispatched to Narbonne to buy Paracetamol. I found a pharmacy and returned to Frasquenet with the medicine. After a bit of a confrontation with Caroline, where she asked me to go back and obtain orally administered Paracetamol, I convinced her that none were available.
After one dose of the Paracetamol being administered into her rectum, Sabine was fully recovered long before the second dose was due, and we all departed happily to the beach.
As arranged Isabelle, Daniel and family came around to the house one evening during our last week, to experience some of Jane’s Asian cooking. Since I know that not everybody can manage hot chillies the way I can, I had already checked with Sabine that they liked food that was “chaud” (hot).
We assembled around the table in the courtyard, while Jane served the first course, a Thai dish called Tom Yum soup, using spice ingredients she had bought in the UK.
Isabelle took a tentative sip, went red in the face and emptied a glass of chilled red wine down her throat. She quickly refilled her glass and drank that as well. I enquired if the soup was “trop chaud” (too hot). Sabine gaspingly told me that the soup wasn’t too hot at all, but that it was “trez pique”.
I checked my French – English dictionary and although I couldn’t find pique, concluded this was the local short form of piquant. Until this time I had not appreciated the significance of how we interchangeably use the word “hot” in English to mean two totally different things.
Daniel tried the soup, went red, drank some wine and declared the soup “tres bon”.
He manfully finished his bowlfull, but declined to finish Isabelle’s for her. The main course, a fiery yellow chicken curry, was declined by Isabelle, while Daniel again proved his manhood, by eating a plateful.
Apart from one sip of Tom Yum soup, Isabelle’s experience of our Asian meal was mainly limited to eating a bowl of plain boiled rice, accompanied by a baguette.
My love of the sound of the fountain, was severely impaired when Daniel alerted me to the fact, that it sounded just like a man, urinating into a pond. I guess it was his revenge for what may have happened to his bowels after the Asian meal.
His observation obviously played on my mind, along with dreams of tenants electrocuting themselves, because one particularly hot and mosquito infested night, I tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep, irritated by the noise being made by the incontinent fellow outside in the courtyard.
Eventually unable to bear it any longer, I got up and spent ten minutes at 3:30 in the morning, disconnecting the pump. The fountain did not operate again, during the remainder of our holiday.
The last few days of our vacation passed, we returned Caroline and Sabine to Toulouse airport and finally set off for the long drive home.
The journey was more memorable than most, because I had eaten some suspect sardines at a seafront restaurant the night before, forcing us to stop at every convenience on route.
The temperature outside was 36c, so the air conditioning in the car decided to pack up. At one of our forced stops a little south of Paris, we bumped into Ron and Gertrude, who were also on their way home.
They had returned Mabel and Jock to Toulouse a week earlier and had then entertained other visitors from England. These visitors had stayed on at their house, as paying tenants for a further week, after Ron and Gertrude had left.
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