Look at the COLOUR of that honey!
Day 3- Monday 17th September.
Fate has dealt me a cruel blow this morning: a sore throat.
Thinking about it, I’m pretty sure this time last year I had one too. Holed up
in the little study downstairs to work on my Milton essay, I can faintly
remember retiring to my room for illness naps. Bugger. My body’s pretty good
with illness to be honest; I’m not saying that I don’t get ill, God, that would
be the lie of the century. But my body knows when I really can’t afford to be
under the weather, like if I have a deadline or a holiday and it somehow
manages to tide me over until I have the time on my hands to rest up in bed.
We’re here for three weeks and our only plan is to eat, maybe go on a drive and
eat lunches out. So if I have got a cold coming on, it’s pretty well timed. At
first –and I know this would just be a ridiculous hangover from the excess of
yesterday- I thought I’d burnt the back of my throat from acid reflux. Being
punished for my own gluttony seemed on the mark, but after a nap this afternoon
I’m pretty sure it’s a cold.
So this morning, after sorting out the shower (noisily, I might
add), the parents went off in search of bread while I had a honey and lemon in
front of the TV. One little annoyance is that the boulangerie down the road is
closed for a summer holiday, which means we have to drive to Cajarc every
morning for bread. The round trip amounts to about an hour, which means people
do tend to come back starving, then gorge on a late breakfast. This then means
we can be too full to go out for lunch, but that’s not really a third world
problem, is it?
When the bread and parents arrived, we ate breakfast out in the
sun as the church clock struck twelve. Daddy misjudged the chewiness of the
bread and managed to cover himself in his fried egg sandwich. As per, Mum-y and
I had to turn away in disgust as the spectacle went on and on. Demolishing a
Petite Suisse Gervais yoghurt in a matter of seconds, Dad-y simply had to have
another before he was sated. Everyone’s obsessed with the Petite Suisse things. They’re little
blocks of fromage frais I think; sold in translucent crinkly-edged little
yoghurt pots and wrapped in a blue and green piece of paper. The family like to
sprinkle them with a spoonful of crunchy granulated sugar before tucking in.
They’re a bit too sour for my taste and I don’t like the idea of bunging on
more sugar to make them palatable. But Dad-y goes wild for them.
While he scoffed his yoghurts, I went for the butter, honey and
wild strawberry route. It tastes so perfumed, you wouldn’t believe. I think
that the honey and the strawberries bring out the perfumes in each other; on
their own, they’re quite delicious but together it just explodes in a mad
sweet, flowery fragrance. Mum-y bought another croustade de pommes that I
looked at longingly. My throat has prevented me from gorging at all today.
Thinking it was too much acid this morning, I steered clear of cakes. Oh, apart
from when I snuck those deep fried sugar-sprinkled pastry things up to bed this
morning…
We decided to take it easy today and just kick back in the garden.
When the breakfast things had been cleared away, Mum-y and I decided to explore
the riverbank at the end of the field behind our garden, as the people that own
the place say that they swim from there. Even just walking in the sun through
the field was getting a little too hot for me. Hundreds of crickets jumped out
of our way as we stepped through the long grasses. It’s been a very dry summer
here apparently. The grass did seem pretty parched, but the biggest tell that
there’s been no rain is that the fig tree where we park the car has shrivelled
little figs the size of a cherry tomato growing on them. Sadness. In his
reluctance to accept the fact that the figs just aren’t going to happen for us
this year, Dad-y went out and picked a handful of the tiny guys. We made him
throw them out and bought some blinders at the market though.
The river bank is nice and secluded under some trees. But god
knows how people have the courage to swim down there, the water is deep enough
but it’s the kind that the minute you step in it, clouds of mud churn up. There
are tons of little fish in there too. Yes, I’m squeamish. But I did swim in the
sea the other day on St Martin’s so I’m not that bad. I just seem to have an
abnormally bad reaction to mud, this coming from the person who, as a child,
spent hours making “muddies”.
Mum-y and I decided not to walk back the way we came and instead
trolled through another field to get into the little town square. Avoiding a
loud northern family setting up their lunch at a picnic table, we carried on
along the river to admire the views of the immense cliff edges. A couple of
nice chunky grey horses were nibbling the grass on the other side of the river.
A kingfisher darted out in front of us in a silver-blue flash of lightning. Three
sizes of fish lazed about in the slow current of the river before the weir.
Blue and orange fins, whatever they are. There’s a great sense here of letting
nature get on with it. Even the cats are left to their own devices, hanging out
in a pack in the deserted grassy yard next to our garden.
We walked along the river in the blazing heat, stopping to watch a
crazy tiny bird walk up a wall, Dracula-style, hoovering up bugs with its long
beak. Then down to the river we went again, hopping over sand and stones until
we came to the bridge at the end of town. The grassy bank stopped where the two
strands of the river met to flow under the bridge. As it was shallow and sandy,
I had an obligatory paddle, but the water looks a little too stagnant for my
liking. Also it’s littered with hundreds of tiny shells, no bigger than a
fingernail, which don’t make for comfortable paddling, I can tell you. We
stopped to watch a teeny frog before making our way back up over the bank to
dry land, retracing our steps along the river walk to the house.
The afternoon spread out in a haze of heat, Dad-y’s face melting
in the sun as he slept in the dodgy lounger, me getting irritable that Mum-y
ate a huge sandwich when she said we wouldn’t need lunch, and a hot and uncomfortable
nap upstairs to try and sleep off the sore throat. Seven pm arrived and our
plans for a barbeque looked like they were going to hell as Dad-y somehow
decided to use the old, damp coals to make the fire, which of course failed
miserably, resulting in a mad scheme of dry logs and newspapers stacking up on
the smoking grill, not to mention an extremely angry Dad-y.
He retired inside for wine and TV to calm his nerves and so Mum-y
and I tended the smoky contraption, which actually turned out to work pretty
well. We heaped on as many meats as we could, starting with the pork, Armagnac,
fig and foie gras burgers (turned out to be a gristly no on my part), then
piling up the pork and green pepper skewers we’d bought in the supermarket.
Sausages cooked beautifully, paired with sautéed sweet onions rounded off the
proceedings nicely, putting Dad-y back in his usual good mood and Mum-y back at
ease. Dad-y in a mood does tend to ruin the evening…
The Napoli sausages bought from the butcher in the market yesterday
were as good as they looked. Thin, long and very peppery, they could never
taste better than on a barbeque. For me, another treat (apart from the
deliciously sweet and creamy potatoes in our simple mayo salad), were the
little merguez sausages that came in the pack of pork skewers. They seem to be
quite popular in this region, the butcher was selling them yesterday too but
their artificial bright redness scared us away. What they appear to be is a
French version of a chorizo sausage, in that their redness is down to a hell of
a lot of paprika. They’re spiked with cumin and a little heat, which makes them
taste almost like a kebab. Although they're made from lamb, they
aren’t at all greasy, even on a barbeque.
We sat out in the night air, lit by the terrace light and a messy
candle on the table. I kept one eye on the dying barbeque, keeping a look out
for my nemesis of the evening, a half-tailed grey cat who insisted on creeping
slowly up the stairs all evening towards the meat. He ran off again and I
decided it was time for me to hit the hay and rest up. If my throat’s still bad
tomorrow it doesn’t really matter. We’re in France and having a lovely time,
even a sore throat can’t take that away.
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