For me, life in Frayssinet has always been a hive of social activity. It is here that I burn the candle at both ends. My life in Australia has always had a strong element of socialising, but over the past decade the shift has been from friends and work colleagues to my own ever-expanding family. I simply don’t have the energy to cook for and entertain friends when the weekends are often taken up with large family gatherings that involve the preparation of mountains of food and all the accompanying caring for and clearing up after small children.
So France has become a very special place for me, because it is where I enjoy the company of friends almost to the exclusion of all else. While I get homesick and certainly do miss the little ones, I also revel in the freedom of being able to spend time with friends whenever and wherever I please. I haven’t really been able to do that since before I had children and I am sure most working mothers would recognise the situation – family and work commitments always seem to take priority over just plain ‘having fun’.
David finds the social life in France overwhelming. He’s much more of a homebody and can’t keep up with the pace of the life I lead when I am ‘in residence’ in the village. There’s always something happening and I seem to be out virtually every night in the summer and often busy during the day as well – either meeting my mix of expat and French friends for drinks or a visit to markets or having a ‘serious’ lunch. Lunch is serious in France, and I can’t resist being part of the spirit of it all.
My friends are diverse. Many are funny and odd, even eccentric, and while they don’t all get along with each other, we somehow muddle along amid frequent social gaffes and the occasional outright embarrassment. There’s an undercurrent to social life here that I have only really begun to discover by coming back year after year. During my first visit I viewed the social scene through rose-coloured glasses, but now the more subtle nuances of the life here are beginning to sink in. I try to ignore them as much as possible, but it isn’t always possible.
My good mate Jock is somehow at the centre of my social scene because everyone seems to love him and to realise that a lunch or dinner with Jock will never be boring. He speaks very softly, which can be a problem at large, noisy gatherings, and he often remains subdued early in the evening, so that those who don’t know him may be fooled into thinking he is shy. But Jock is crafty. He’s simply biding his time. Getting a feeling for the room and the other guests. He usually starts with the odd one-liner. A quip that is perfect for whatever is being discussed. Then come the jokes – every year he seems to acquire a new repertoire. And finally, as the evening begins to disintegrate with too much good food and wine, Jock starts with anecdotes of his years as a journalist – first in New Zealand, then Australia and finally in New York. They are mostly hilarious, often self-deprecating, and demonstrate his wit and the path he trod to develop his easygoing philosophy of life. He sometimes falls off his chair with enthusiasm as the anecdotes get more lively, and our friend Roger, the English artist, describes this as ‘Jock’s attention-getting behaviour’. Roger has drawn the most delightful action cartoon of Jock in the process of falling backwards off his plastic chair.
Roger too is a larger-than-life character. He lives half the year in a small cottage on the outskirts of a remote village and the other half at Brighton in the UK, where he is surrounded by a vibrant artistic and cultural scene. The best of both worlds. Last summer Roger and his wife Ann installed an in-ground pool at their French cottage and the ongoing saga of its construction, with the accompanying fiascos and communication breakdowns with the tradesmen, kept us entertained all summer long. It was finished just in time for the autumn cool. It’s hard to lure Roger out of his studio and garden – he’s become a bit reclusive these last few years – but when he can be inveigled into an outing it’s always a bonus. He throws outrageous parties – often fancy dress – and prefers inviting people to dinner to being asked out.
Jan and Philippe remain constant companions, although they have become more subdued these past few summers. Jan, like Jock, was born in New Zealand but has spent most of her life in the northern hemisphere. She gave up alcohol a few years back and now drinks a variety of ‘mock’ champagnes while we quaff the wonderful local reds. It must sometimes be alarming for her to observe the conversation and general demeanour of the table deteriorating as the night wears on. Philippe is a landscaper, so they are therefore rarely available for lunch – and if they do come to dinner they tend to flag early. The big difference is that while so many of the people in our circle are retired and can sleep off the excesses of the night before the following morning, poor Jan and Philippe are usually up at dawn to start work. They find the late nights totally exhausting. Jan is also very careful about her weight and eats like a bird, which seems madness when, like all of us, she is constantly surrounded by so much tempting food and wine. She stoically endeavours to keep Philippe on a punishing ‘health regime’, but every so often he breaks out and falls ravenously upon the foie gras and the red wine. It’s good to see. Jan is my translator and support system for the walking tours and we always have a riotous time together – feeding, entertaining and guiding our Australian visitors around this corner of the world that we both love so much.
Philippe, like most of my French friends, is fascinated by all things Australian. The French, on the whole, don’t travel overseas as often as many other nationalities, but they certainly read a lot and watch documentaries about foreign countries, and Australia is always one of their favourites. I have a lot of fun teaching Philippe slang expressions, which he trots out at social gatherings to the amusement and amazement of everyone. I taught him to say, when feeling thirsty, that he is ‘dry as a dead dingo’s donga’, which he pronounces with such an alarming accent on the word ‘donga’ that people fall off their chairs with laughter. Someone else then taught him to say, ‘I am so hungry I could bite the crotch out of a low flying duck’, which is totally appropriate given the quantity of duck eaten in our region. Finally, I taught him the expression, ‘Don’t come the raw prawn with me’, which he just adores but gets wrong every time because of the order in which the French language places words.
‘Hey Mary,’ he says with gusto, ‘don’t come on me with your raw prawn.’ It brings the house down.
I also teach Christian and Christiane from the bar to say ‘gidday’ as a greeting, and they use it regularly instead of ‘bonjour’. It results in very strange expressions on the faces of their French customers, and once again their pronunciation is way off the mark. It makes me feel a little better about my muddled French!
Claude, the retired photographer, has recently undergone heart surgery but it doesn’t seem to have slowed him down. Being from England, he could have had his operation in London using a top surgeon, but chose instead to go to a hospital in Toulouse that has the reputation of being the best facility for heart surgery in the world. While the operation and immediate aftermath were traumatic, Claude has bounced back in his inimitable style. He exercises daily and watches his food and alcohol consumption to some degree, which results in his looking at least a decade younger than his chronological age. He still loves to tap on my window just as the church bells chime at midday, in the hope I might join him for ‘une verre’ at the bar. Invariably we end up lunching together, often with a few other waifs and strays who have wandered into the bar at lunchtime.
Claude’s only concession to ageing is his vagueness, which appears to have plateaued but is nevertheless quite noticeable to his friends. I suspect he has always been a bit vague; it’s just that it’s become more apparent of late. His way of dealing with the problem is to write himself reminders on yellow Post-it notes which he sticks in obvious places so he will be reminded of what he needs to do. On his bedside phone will be the note he’ll see on waking, reminding him of his first few chores of the day. By the main phone are numerous notes with instructions about which tradesmen he needs to call and what myriad small jobs require attending to around his large house and garden. On the back door he leaves notes about what he needs to do when he goes out shopping – these are quite apart from the actual shopping list. His house seems perpetually covered in yellow sticky notes, and even then he still manages to forget things. In preparation for a trip to the UK, he bought hundreds of euros’ worth of glorious French cheeses and some local saucisson to distribute among his English friends and family. Despite a note on the back door reminding him to pack the tasty gifts into an esky and put it in the boot of the car, he left the lot behind and we were the beneficiaries, after a frantic phone call.
‘For heaven’s sake, help yourselves to the cheeses in the fridge,’ he bleated on his mobile phone from the English Channel ferry terminal. ‘They’ll be off by the time I get back.’
Indeed, Claude’s generosity can sometimes cause a problem, because people tend to take advantage of his ‘open house’ policy. When he goes away, he often leaves the keys to the house with friends in the hope they’ll keep an eye on things, and he then invites them to ‘have a dinner party’ and ‘help yourselves to the wine in the fridge’. Which we have all done on occasions when he’s been away travelling.
One year he left me the keys because I was clearing his phone answering machine and feeding the ducks that live on the millstream that runs under his house. As Claude’s dining room is so large, I did have a party, inviting several of the locals. It was to be a progressive dinner. Miles and Anne, who come down from London to their house just outside the village several times a year, were in town and, as Miles had recently been to a conference in Moscow, he invited a group of us for ‘vodka and caviar’ as a first course. The plan was for the dinner party – which also included Jock, Jan and Philippe and Anthony from the next village – to then move down to Claude’s for pizza, salad, cheese and dessert. All went to plan, except that the vodka was much stronger than most of us expected (Miles knew, but didn’t really let on). So spirits were high by the time we reached Claude’s, and even higher by the time we drank our supply of wine and ate the pizzas. Jan and Philippe left straight after dinner, because of their usual early start the following day.
Remembering Claude’s parting words – ‘Help yourselves to the wine’ – I said that I was sure he wouldn’t mind if we had a couple of bottles, thinking I could probably easily replace them the following day. Miles had other ideas. He knew that, quite apart from the wine in the kitchen, Claude also had a well-stocked cellar, and he suspected there were some bottles ‘about to go off’. I am ashamed to say that, despite a few vigorous protestations (from Anne) we drank a bottle of very, very good vintage wine with all sorts of ludicrous justifications being bandied about: ‘We’re really doing Claude a favour’; ‘This wine would have gone off in another six months’; ‘It’s a shame to let good wine like this go to waste’.
Outrageous. I felt honour-bound to confess our misdeeds to Claude when he returned. He was not at all amused, and the aftermath caused quite a ripple for the entire summer. Being the holder of the key, I felt responsible for the episode and we had a whipround and bought Claude several bottles of good quaffing red. But nothing that could match his now totally unavailable Mouton Rothschild.
Whoops.