Summer has at last arrived,a little late this year,and it is hot, hot.Friends with holiday homes here arrive,grey and exhausted from their hectic lives in England,to recharge their batteries.The summer routine quickly establishes itself, a few friends over for lunch after a quick dip in the pool,now 25°C which is just about ideal:soon it may get too hot. Gaspacho and maybe a salade niçoise in the shade,washed down with chilled rosé or white wine from the local “cave co-opérative”, which produces delightful wines at very modest prices. Talk is of the French team going on strike in South Africa,so very French, and whether Andy Murray will ever win Wimbledon.He has time on his side but we all wish he would cheer up!
When the guests have gone, a lazy afternoon reading by the pool.I have decided that Trollope is the ideal writer to read here in the summer. You get half way through the book and nothing has happened,but the writing and the characterization are exquisite.Or Chris Mullen’s amusing and worrying “A view from the foothills”,an account of the life of a junior minister.It seems that the wonderful television series “Yes Minister” is horribly close to the truth, one of the most entertaining books I have read in a long time.
Summer is of course the time of “fetes”(for some reason known only to nerds the circumflex accent will suddenly not insert itself over the “e”), and every village has at least one and often several.Any excuse will do, wine,Occitan music, babies and hydrangeas (no kidding),street theatre,more wine, more music.All have at least two things in common; food usually produced by local people and of course local wines in abundance.As the local Anglophone paper put it “You’ve found heave
n without first having to die!”