Isn’t she
great? The Queen. Sixty years listening to people talking to her about some of
the world’s most boring subjects, faithfully keeping a smile and alert. Except
when she is watching ancient rock’n’roll artists droning on in the name of
entertainment, that is. Who can blame her for having a face like a smacked bum at
the Jubilee concert? When some prat called Will.i.am prances on stage
completely devoid of any singing talent whatsoever, or when Sir Tom Jones jigs
around pretending to be 16. Poor old girl would probably have rather listened
to the radio.
Still, at
least they didn’t roll out Jedward or, worse still, Engelbert nil-point
Humpydump!
While the Jubilee
celebrations unfolded over a 4-day period in UK,
life in France
carried on unaffected by all the hype. France doesn’t do hype - although
we Brits did have a couple of parties of our own. At Chauffour, our annual shindig
avoided the forecasted rain as we celebrated a visit from our very own Queen,
my sister Sarah, who is still making great progress after her illness.
Inevitably
one or two guests failed to leave until the next day and the after party-party evolved
into even more fun, as we mine-swept the remnants of the previous day in blazing
sunshine.
Then on
jubilee day itself, a crowd of us pooled our collective British-ness by having
a picnic in a French plum orchard, thus creating our very own little street
party.
Can you imagine
the local farmer’s perplexity when he turned up on his tractor to check his
fruit and encountered strings of bunting hanging through his trees accompanied
by raucous choruses of Rule Britannia - with The Queen and Prince Philip (aka
Craig and Emma Dymock in very realistic face-masks) sitting at top table eating
smoked salmon sandwiches? Poor chap, I thought he was going to have a coronary.
As is the way of most farmers in these parts, however, he did stay and enjoy a
couple of glasses of vin-rouge before going back to work, albeit scratching his
head in bewilderment at Les Anglais.
A few months
ago I penned a children’s novel about the adventures of a small and unfortunate
piglet called Oinky Grub. In the story, poor Oinky got his tail chopped off,
sold on ebay, as well as hunted by police through Paris’s red-light district (the Pigalle). As with most of my books, when
I began it I had no idea of how it would end, but I did have a notion that our porcine
hero would inevitably get a nose for that great French delicacy – the Truffle.
With that in mind, I made a brief phone call to a contact I had met a few years
earlier who runs a truffle-tree farm, requesting that he might be the baddie in
my novel. Needless to say he was delighted to accept. Without spoiling the
ending, the resulting story was relatively entertaining and this weekend Wendy
and I took a trip to visit him in the Gascon area, down near the Pyrenees, so I could present him with a few signed copies.
As well as running a flourishing wine
business, Dick Pyle has one of the most ingenious businesses ever - offering
sapling oak trees for adoption over the internet. In his own words,
truffle-tree.com allows people to ‘
buy a piece of tranquillity’ in the
French countryside, which you are at liberty to visit at any time. For a small
annual fee, Dick maintains the tree on your behalf as it matures hopefully into
a truffle-bearing oak from which you
could
be paid handsomely from its spoils. Now in its tenth year, the thousand-strong
orchard has yet to bear fruit but all good things come to those who wait, and
there are quite a few celebrities eagerly waiting in the truffle queue.
Over the
exquisite dinner table, I was enlightened to a gastronomic organisation known
as Slow Food International, of whose existence I was blissfully unaware. Conjured
up in America over 20 years
ago to counter fast-food, this 100,000 strong army now has ‘chapters’
worldwide, including a fervent presence in France. The idea of slow-food
appeals to me immensely - not least because I can’t cook very fast - because I
am passionate about what I eat, i.e: how it tastes, where it comes from and
what it costs? And this organisation advocates just that. A group of diverse yet
like-minded people, not just beardy-weirdos mind-numbingly blabbing on about
organics and GM crops, but enthusiasts who are supporting the local producers,
keeping existing traditions alive as well as nurturing fledgling new ones. For
example, one UK
cheese-maker was trying to bring back production of old-style Stilton, a
product which was banned and re-directed 20 years ago because it uses
un-pasteurised milk. With some old recipes and quite hefty legal backing, they
are challenging the EU directive, proclaiming quite rightly that ‘raw-milk’
never killed anyone. At present it looks like they are winning and, although the
product will now be called Stichelton, we may soon see it back on our shelves. Incidentally,
nearly all French cheeses are still made with un-pasteurised milk, once again
highlighting France’s
blatant disregard for the rules which they were party to instigating.
Down in the
Gascon, the same group had chosen to collaborate with farmers to revise the
ancient Mirandaise breed of cattle from that area that have been all but
extinct for 50 years since they were no longer required to pull ploughs.
Excitedly I googled
‘Slow Food’, only to discover, somewhat
disappointedly, that there are no groups in our near vicinity that I can join
in with. Maybe I should start my own ‘chapter’? After all, I do have some local
unidentified breeds of sheep and grow masses of Marmande tomatoes. Perhaps they
could sponsor my Autumn chutney festival?
As long as I
don’t have to join the ‘Slow Drink’
society - I am not sure they would take me as a member of that one!
In between
the parties, over the past 3 weeks, I have exchanged writing fiction for that
of writing the more structured language of computer code, as we look to launch
a small internet-based business. Amongst other careers in my murky past, I earned
my living writing Visual-Basic code for 5 years, a language that worked closely
with Microsoft technologies. During that time, as you can imagine, I became
quite fluent in the dark art of variables,
event procedures, arrays and sub functions etc.
Unfortunately,
for reasons I won’t go into, this time around the project I am building
requires to be written in a different language. So here I am, back to the
drawing board with more self-teaching, cursing my variable strings – which have now become string variables – as none of the syntax is the same. It’s like
learning Chinese where before it was Russian. The sentences all do the same
thing except the words are different, and in the wrong order. I really
must apologise to my neighbour, in case he has heard me swearing – backwards –
although fortunately he will not understand my English.
And herein
hangs a tale. After having lived in France for 5 years, my spoken
French is still appalling. You see, in spoken languages you CAN get away with
the wrong syntax and missing the odd semi-colon from the end of sentences and
still make yourself understood. You try doing that in computer code and
everything will come crashing down around you. All this makes me feel extremely
foolish. If I can learn a highly-pedantic written language in just over 3
weeks, why don’t I learn French properly? Back to school at the end of the
summer hols, methinks.
Despite my
best intentions, one subject I cannot avoid this month is the Olympics. Although
I am none too despondent that the torch didn’t come through France (if I’d
wanted to see it I could have bought one on ebay), I did note that it had made
its way through the English Midlands to rapturous applause. But it seems that
the torch relay itself is not without controversy. In Cornwall,
where it started its UK
tour, all references to local Cornish tradition such as flags and place-names
were removed in a bid to portray unity in Britain and affect a global-village
image. They have also removed the Saltire flags from Hamden
Park in Glasgow, which is staging some footie events,
because it’s not British enough. What nonsense.
The problem
is, what the Olympiad – or whoever is organising this years event – fail to
recognise is that Britain, by its own invitation, is a multi-cultural society
where just about everyone wants to fit into a sub-division to gain some identity.
The government, having spent 10 years allowing ethnic groups to ban Christmas
due to their religious beliefs or encouraging entire areas to speak in a
language that no one else can understand must surely feel pretty stupid now
asking them to take down their individual flags and stand united in the name of
a 2000 year old sporting tradition? Let’s face it, the last time a Welshman ran
through the countryside with a flaming torch it was to set fire to English-owned
cottages! And the thought of anyone being encouraged to carry fire through the
Gorbals area of Glasgow
beggars belief.
Can Britain
remain united for 3 weeks in July? Or will Scotland claim all the cycling
awards for themselves and the media start dissecting up the medals table on day
1? If we win any, that is!
