You say patatas – I say potatoes

My seed spuds are on the chitting-tray, but it’s cold and the sprouts are a long way off, and my hands are numb so I’ve come indoors to google.

patate – it can mean an idiot [invective] or a punch,  or a million old French francs, or the graphic representation of Cantor’s Set Theory.

être dans les patates – to be wrong or mistaken [Québécois colloquialism]
avoir la patate – to be in good form [French colloquialism]
en avoir gros sur la patate – to be very upset about something [French, with mayonnaise on top]
faire patate -  to screw up [Québécois]

We’re going to plant these Vitelotes again this year : they are the original Quechua spuds that came over in the 16th. century and while they don’t grow big, they are massively filling and taste like chestnuts : dense and floury at the same time. They stay purple too – unlike those treacherous purple beans . . .

While preparing the lazy-bed for these multi-denominated objects I have passed through all the above stages :- some of the time I’m enraged at the folly of our leaders, and the waste of people’s hard work and savings – then I revert to being in good form, because the work is satisfying and it’s going well. Then I want to wallop someone – a politician, an economist – for their wanton squandering of my efforts and of the future of my children.

And if the graphical representation of Set Theory resembles a potato – then I realise that this is probably the point that the Whizz Kids of econo-mathematics probably got away from the rest of us – and the regulators who likewise couldn’t keep up either.

So – if I don’t want to be une patate, and would much rather avoir la patate – then I’better get on with preparing the potato-bed.

The good thing about planting spuds is that they are ideal for new ground. Little by little the lawn is giving way to the kitchen-garden – and the lazy-bed is the best crop to help break up this much-compacted area. We are unusual in this region of the hot south to have such a thing as a lush green lawn. It has been a welcome area of cool green for the Northerners who come to visit, and who don’t want to toast themselves silly in the bronzing sun. The big old trees have permitted this rare luxury, giving shade and thus requiring less watering.

We face a future where our ArtHoliday.com business will go slowly [or maybe rapidly] downhill, and we will be left with no painters and no mosaic-makers and no yoga groups and no walkers. We will have no need for the lawn. But transitions are not clear-cut. The ArtHoliday business continues, limping from crisis to crisis – and it may be difficult to tell when – if ever – the project that brought us here ten years ago and took so much of our time and all our money, is finished for ever.

So in the meantime we continue, as so many people must be : just continuing – because that’s all we know what to do. We continue and we up-date our site and we look forward to a different future. The lawn may shrink but in its place I am growing things that may have an equal or greater appeal: the garden – I am determined – must remain formal. As long as there are visitors who come to work at their art, who come to contemplate French gardening, who rate our vegetarian cooking, and who might want to see how a family can manage on a reduced diet  – of art and gardening, hard work and friendship.

Water

Every week around Wednesday on The Oil Drum.com the editors invite a guest to propose a topic that addresses some practical aspect of the Peak Oil situation. This week it was a guest post from Sharon Astyk (TOD reader jewishfarmer). She is the author of one current book : ‘Depletion and Abundance: Life On the New Home Front.’ and two forthcoming books.
Her essay this week was about the issues involved in adapting to the Long Emergency – it’s about adjusting to a different type of ‘city’ and lifestyle than we are currently used to.

Mary and I have tried to get our friends to take a look at what TheOilDrum.com and TheAutomaticEarth.blogspot.com have to say about our present predicament – but they don’t, and they won’t, and that is that.

One of the central points in her essay, picked up by several commenters – and of particular interest to me this winter – is the key role that water-supply will play.

Here’s a taste of the discussion:-

jewishfarmer on The Oil Drum February 4, 2009
My own feeling is that where we may end up may well come down mostly to water in the next few decades. Soil yes, but water first and foremost.

Ron Broberg on February 6, 2009
As I survey my 1/3 acre domain, it becomes quickly apparent that water is my limiting factor (Colorado Front Range).
I was telling this to my wife a couple of weeks ago when, literally the next day, a water main burst and we are on boiled water for the rest of the week.

KingPing on February 6, 2009
I guess, as I survey my small “suburban” lot I have the exact same concern–water.

Will Stewart on February 5, 2009
Richard Seager, et al, Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America, Science 25 May 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5828, pp. 1181 – 1184 DOI: 10.1126/science.1139601
“there is a broad consensus among climate models that this region will dry in the 21st century and that the transition to a more arid climate should already be under way. If these models are correct, the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought or the Dust Bowl and the 1950s droughts will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.”

wrighttracks on February 5, 2009
Future water availability was mentioned and truly this will be an issue. It is already an issue. All areas with large populations and anticipated water problems are suspect as being viable.

nelsone on February 5, 2009
It’s all about the water, isn’t it? Food shortages can be dealt with by slow, steady shipments of nonperishables, but how much water can you tanker in to Atlanta or LA?

Richie Gunn on February 6, 2009
Rainwater in the Southeast is the new liquid gold and it should be treasured so. We all should collect rainwater from our roof tops at the least.

Here in the Languedoc region of SW France, water has always been a major factor in rural life. There is either a drought – or a deluge. The last major flood, in 1999, killed 21 people in our immediate area. Hosepipe restrictions are a regular factor each summer. Higher up in the Corbières Hills a friend lost her vigorous little stream for several months: her isolated small-holding depended on a temporary [and illegal] pit being excavated in the stream-bed.

There is water in this valley – fed by the snow melt from the Pyrenees and a myriad of other tributaries. Little is taken out for industry – there is none. But each village is experiencing a decades-long North-South drift, and this region is expanding where others are shrinking. The water-demands of bulk wine and little suburban developments is taking its toll.

Our village, with its new station in 1856, was set to be a new market-town mid-way between Narbonne and Carcassonne. But while each big house had its own wells [we have two], and the ‘ordinary villagers’  had a constantly running fountain/horse-troughs/public pumps – this was the limit of our village’s water supply. The market town was built 7 km. away in the valley bottom. Where the floods of  ‘99 hit hardest.

Our huge house has just survived the most violent wind since ‘99 – Tempête Claus – with roof intact and two trees down; quite minor. The water table [ la nappe phréatique ] is high again for the first time in years, and my fears for our kitchen-garden abate a little. The house well holds ten cubic meters of sweet water and the ‘grand bassin’ holds another seven. The swimming pool contains 80 cubic metres – but when the Economic Collapse occurs we won’t  be worrying about our ArtHoliday guests objecting to pondweed and oxygenators. The Black Swan still circles our little corner.

This is the skeleton of the water pump on our workshop barn. The other photos show the remains of wind-driven well-pumps in villages around.

One train – or the other

I was first made aware of Peak Oil by my wife Mary, nearly three years ago. She had started to read The Oil Drum which had been running for some two years. I was just getting deeper into the archaeology of this corner of south-west France : the Minervois and the Corbieres region of Languedoc. We’d sit down together at about 6 with a bottle and something to nibble – which we’ve been doing for 30 years now – and swap the latest news on Peak Wood [ - in the Bronze Age : plus ça change - plus c'est la même chose ] and Peak Oil.

At the time, Stoneleigh and Ilargi were TOD’s Canadian editors posting regularly on global economic matters. At some point a year or more back, and for reasons best known to themselves,  the editors of TOD and S & I parted company – the latter to form The Automatic Earth:-

These are the days of miracle and wonder
. . .

A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires . . . From ‘The Boy in the Bubble’. Paul Simon. Graceland.

The information and analysis posted on TAE were every bit as urgent and compelling as those on TOD – indeed more so. I began, belatedly, to read both. They seemed to feed into eachother : the crisis in one sphere looping  feedback to the other.  But it was indeed a classic case of  ‘one train may conceal another’.

Now it just so happens to be our lot to be living in ‘interesting times’. We may be nestling at the foot of that mountain in the photo in a bucolic little village – but the trains of History pass close by. And there are not just two trains to watch out for – the collapse of capitalism and the peaking of cheap oil – there are five or more threatening a massive train-wreck.

Resource depletion – from precious metals to trees, to bees, to water, to cereals – is already upon us. Climate change is being experienced the world over. Oceanic acidification is another. But the biggest and most unstoppable one of them all is population. And it’s the one we find impossible to discuss. It is behind all the others – exerting the greatest pressure of all. It is the invisible human locomotive that will crush us all.

Of course civilisations rise and fall, cultures wax and wane – and there will always be some renaissance. It just won’t resemble anything we’ve seen before. It will emerge from the wreckage and exist in a stranger landscape than we can imagine. Some have tried to envision it – when the crisis was nuclear : say, Russell Hoban’s ‘Riddley Walker’. It’s a strange and difficult book, but then so is life and survival.

Meanwhile – before the crashes begin to run into one-another – we still have enough time to read poetry that treats words as valuable and love as precious.

One Train May Hide Another

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line–
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it’s best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person’s reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you’re not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia
Antica one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another–one colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath
may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
One idea may hide another: Life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple–this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother’s bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter’s bag one finds oneself confronted by
the mother’s
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love
or the same love
As when “I love you” suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love lingering behind, as when “I’m full of doubts”
Hides “I’m certain about something and it is that”
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the
Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading
A Sentimental Journey look around
When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore
May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk
May hide another, as when you’re asleep there, and
One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the
foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you’d have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It
can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

Kenneth Koch

The man with the hoe

It’s a comfortable 68F./20C. here, at 8 pm, with the doors and windows open on a still evening. Tomorrow we’ll go walking the hills, it’ll be 70+, the warm low 20’s of an early summer’s day. But there’s a chill wind forecast for monday – and it won’t be just a leaf-storm blowing:

” . . . we are witnessing the two stages of a tsunami. The current disappearance of wealth in the form of debts repudiated, bets welshed on, contracts cancelled, and Lehman Brothers-style sob stories played out is like the withdrawal of the sea. The poor curious little monkey-humans stand on the beach transfixed by the strangeness of the event as the water recedes and the sea floor is exposed and all kinds of exotic creatures are seen thrashing in the mud, while the skeletons of historic wrecks are exposed to view, and a great stench of organic decay wafts toward the strand. Then comes the second stage, the tidal wave itself — which in this case will be horrific monetary inflation — roaring back over the mud flats toward the land mass, crashing over the beach, and ripping apart all the hotels and houses and infrastructure there while it drowns the poor curious monkey-humans who were too enthralled by the weird spectacle to make for higher ground. The killer tidal wave washes away all the things they have labored to build for decades, all their poignant little effects and chattels, and the survivors are left keening amidst the wreckage as the sea once again returns to normal in its eternal cradle.
So, that’s what I think we will get: an interval of deflationary depression followed by a destructive wave of inflation that will wipe out both constructed debt and constructed savings, scraping the financial landscape clean. There’s no question that stage one is underway. But we can be sure the giant wave of money recklessly loaned into existence, in just a few weeks time will wash back through the global economy leaving a swath of destruction.”

That’s my favorite doomer, James Kunstler, writing the other day. Ilargi on  TheAutomaticEarth is no less worried. And then this is from the Mainstream Media:

The financial crisis gripping world markets is “the worst in human history” and we are only just beginning to feel the fallout, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England has warned.

Do our rulers know enough to avoid a 1930s replay?
Events are moving with lightning speed as the global credit freeze evolves into something awfully like a classic trade-depression.
The commodity and emerging market booms are breaking in unison, leaving no more bubbles left to burst. Almost every corner of the world is now being drawn into the vortex of debt deflation.

Shipping is slowing as fast as it did in the grim months of late 1931. “The crisis is now in full swing across the entire world,” said Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s finance minister. “It is hitting the real economy, the productive forces of industry. It’s global, it’s total, and it’s everywhere.”
The world stole prosperity from the future for year after year, with the full collusion of governments, regulators, and central banks. Now the future has arrived.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Daily Telegraph Oct 20 2008

I feel profoundly shaken by all this, transfixed and aghast – and simultaneously stirred into action. These momentous upheavals are being played out far from here : meetings in Washington, London, Paris, and the People’s Great Hall in Pekin. Millions are being spent on the American election – and thousands on wardrobes and makeup. Drama and melodrama, tragedy and farce, anger and pathos – all on an epic, on a global scale.

But I certainly don’t feel helplessly apart from it all. I have not been standing by in dumb incomprehension these last few months, waiting like cannon-cattle for my call-up papers. I signed up some time back – possibly 30-odd years ago when I dropped out and ‘Went Back to the Land’ leaving my teaching job in London to join a small commune in south-west Ireland.

The Phoney War is over – billions of dollars have been thrown onto the wrong fire -and soon the real damage will become apparent. What does the ordinary foot-soldier do? Well last weekend I armed myself with a mighty weapon – the heaviest forged-steel hoe I’ve seen around.

heavy hoe and new acacia-wood shaft

I bought it from my antique tool-seller friend, Monsieur Sargatt, at another vide-grenier. It weighs in at a whopping 4 lbs./< 2kg. and has a thickened cutting section. Paired with the extra-long shaft I trimmed from a local Robinia tree, it is a murderous weapon – capable of separating the head of any Wall Street pirate from his well-tailored torso.

old tools at a vide grenier

But as is usually the case, when Great Events of History become just too much to digest – the simple action of shaving the wood to fit, and hefting the tool to do its job was enough to dispel my maddened frustration with the folly of our Leaders.

new hoe and new bed

This hoe is just the job for breaking new ground – look right to the Hoe Page for more examples of this versatile tool at work in the world – and in history and art.

Digging it.

Summer here in Languedoc went by as usual in a blur of work: cooking and cleaning, teaching and entertaining our residential art groups. The weather couldn’t have been better – but the money could. Global crises were echoed by family ones – both offspring had to be ‘rescued’ from Ireland : daughter with a broken foot, son with a bipolar episode. Somehow we all managed to knit it back together – perhaps the global convulsions helped us all to focus on our strengths and on our need to hang together.
The perennial sit-down at six o’clock, an unfailing feature of our 30-year marriage – for wine and olives and serious conversation – gets us all around the table to be civilised and intelligent about the world and our situation in it. The daughter is in her last year of university but what will a degree in French and Politics mean for her? The son is struggling with his art and his life. We are attempting to handle the transition from a world of plenty towards a life with very much less.
Less would suit us two more – but for her and him it’s going to be difficult: there may not be a job or a career waiting at the end of her studies. I fear for the fragility of his talent in a world that may become brutal and impoverished. And I worry about us two – we have a large property that can’t be sold, and that is far from being self-sufficient.

autumn ivy at the back

But the glorious summer has segued into a delightful autumn, and there is work to be done. Summer work is all indoors, looking after the dozens of visitors : autumn sees us outdoors again (at last!) with cooler air and a garden that has been begging for attention. There’s not much actual work you can do in the south of France in High Summer – it’s just watering and picking. With no rain for the last 3 months there are few weeds – everything is simply ripening. But now there’s a mass of stuff to do, and glorious weather to do it in. The days are clear and blue and warm – but the nights are clear too : stars glitter from horizon to horizon – and the mornings are cold (that’s under 10 C.!)

The evening that we need a fire . . . is the turning point in the year. Slipping into sandals and shorts is a gradual affair when spring beckons and then betrays. The transition from long pants to short, socks and shoes to sandals is a blurry zone. Then suddenly it’s done : the socks are impossibly hot and prickly, and cloth clinging to leg is a horror. Now cloth against leg is a comfort, and sweat worked up by midday is chilly by afternoon.

our compost bins

My priorities sharpen – the Leaf Storm is a week or so off and there are beds to prepare, four compost stacks to turn, manure to locate/buy/shovel/unload – and then the Plan. What is the Plan this year? Each year the flower-beds shrink and the potager grows, and the question of self-sufficiency and chickens and rabbits returns – more urgent with each year, more fraught with serious questions about what and how we eat.

new bed and new tool

The frog has had a good summer by the looks of it – no food problems there.

frog in autumn sun

a golden greengage summer

our reine claude or greengage tree

Greengages are for the rich – or the scavenger. A little punnet at the market was priced at the equivalent of E 4.90 per kilo – by far the most expensive fruit on the stalls. They were large and green, and I really wanted to try one – but at that price I hesitated at picking one out and popping it in my mouth (the customary thing on market day). They looked like big green plums – and not a patch on the little golden globes that I’ve been picking this last week.

I’ve just gorged on greengages, and picked nearly 30 kilos of them, and made jam and chutney and crumble and cobbler and compôtes – and I can swear that I’ve never tasted such a thing in fifty years. It’s honey in a golden globe. With a tang around the edge.

In France we know them as Reine Claude, brought back from Asia when discovered as a green-fruited wild plum (Ganerik) in the early 1500’s and named after Francois the First’s wife, Good Queen Claude. Then Sir William Gage spotted them in France and brought them back to England – only he ‘lost the label’ on the channel-crossing, and had to give his own name to the subsequent exportation around the world. It is commonplace that history and fortunes can be made on the high seas. But doing it on the cross-channel ferry seems particularly cheap.

It’s an unreliable commercial crop at the best of times – and I suspect that there are graftings and meddlings going on in the commercial world that are muddying the status of the real gage.

Michael Karp’s article in the New York Times is journalism at its best – a personal and perceptive piece on A Finicky Fruit. He went to France to find this green queen of fruits, but never discovered the golden glory that appeared this summer in our village.

What happened was this: a dull tree that had never produced anything in our 8 years of living here, suddenly burst out in golden-yellow fruit. Whether it was the short-sharp frost of winter, or the good long rains of spring, or the benign warm spells of summer – it’s unknown. The golden jewels, pendent from this most anonymous of trees, was a revelation. And once up upon the long ladder I could see, in my neighbour’s garden, an even more pendulously-hung tree. And beyond that, a third.

I visited Monsieur et Madame Chalret in their vast and rambling domaine to ask permission to pick their trees. They are both well over 90 and were as surprised as I was that such a crop had appeared in the old abandoned kitchen-garden. They know nothing about the trees and assured me that they hadn’t planted them. If this type of plum has a life-span of 40 years, and grows to a maximum of 40 feet then they must be nearing their term – though from the evidence of the fruit there’s life in the old wood yet! They thought that the cultivar might be ‘Reine Claude d’Oullins’ also called ‘mirabelles’ – a name that seems entirely appropriate – and that some birds must have deposited the seeds in both our gardens. My theory is that the gardeners in both these Big Houses had horticultural ideas of their own.

out on a limb

So ladders and hooks, and bags and buckets were summoned – and the kilos were picked, and the good neighbour recompensed, and the freezer filled. Jam was made, crumble was made, jars were filled and stored or given away.

or stairway to heaven

This was a Greengage Summer.

It’s not an expression, apparently, or a common phrase – tho’ it should be. It is however a film made in the early ’60’s from a book by Rumer Godden.

The Greengage Summer (called The Loss of Innocence in the US) is a 1961 British film directed by Lewis Gilbert and starring Kenneth More and Susannah York (in her first leading role). It was based on the novel, Greengage Summer, by Rumer Godden. Set in Epernay, in the Champagne region of France, it is the story of the transition of a teenage girl into womanhood.

More later named it as his favourite film, stating, “She [Susannah York] was just twenty-one and an adorable creature…it was one of the happiest films on which I have ever worked.”

And I have to say that these days spent swaying perilously up among the bendy branches, with the Montagnes Noires over my shoulder and the Tramontane wind making this climb a struggle to gain the crow’s nest on a heaving ship and the taste of honey in my mouth as the reward for my daring, were the most happy hours I’ve spent in a long time.

But the worm of knowledge was present too. I am up this ladder because life for us here may depend on these sudden bestowels of bounty. What today is a joyful game may be tomorrow’s serious survival.

several fruits had a tiny black pinhole entry - leading to this

. . . an allusion to the film’s theme . . .

a single reine claude on a spur off the tree trunk

wells and water restrictions

our house, the village and Alaric Mountain

We live in an arid landscape. This is our village huddled at the foot of the biggest of the Corbieres Hills. It has just a small stream running through it, but many wells. Our house is the big building at the bottom.

After the reading and the talking and the thinking – one has to act. Put the Peak Oil theory aside and get going. So I have begun to make an inventory of what we have here on our property, and what is out there around the village. However, the list soon span out of control : water, fuel, power, shelter, tools and equipment, protection and defense. I needed to slow down and concentrate on what was immediately practical.

As it happened, the matter was decided for me : just a few weeks ago the Mairie announced over the village tannoy system [I don't know if all villages still have one - this remnant of the Nazi Occupation] that a restriction on water-use was now in force throughout the departement of the Aude. No hose-pipes to be used around house or garden, from 8 to 8. We not only needed to get up early to water the kitchen-garden, we needed to have a reserve in case this hot dry summer continued and the ban became total. I had better take stock of our water supply.

We have a house-well that is six metres below ground-level and when recently measured was just two metres deep (it’s usually 3) – but it’s clean and cool. At the time it provided for the needs of the family that built this place in 1860. We have used it occasionally – four years ago when water ran low in the region and I drained it when topping up the swimming-pool – and I imagine it would keep the two of us going for domestic use the year round. But it is inadequate for a serious potager (kitchen-garden).

There is another well – same stone construction, same depth – at the bottom of the garden. But this one has always been closed over. It is foul and sulferous-smelling, and is probably too close to the run-off from the wine-makers when they wash out their vats. It once must have filled this bassin , which is now ornamental ( though the koi and the frog who live there would call it Home ).

bassin at the bottom of the garden

frog in le bassin

In the garden of the house next-door is a modern well [un forage] dug at great expense by a neighbour who only occasionally visits his holiday-home. I should add that he grew up in the village, remembers the Germans, and like every good Frenchman always only desired a house to retire to – after a career as an oil-man in Paris – in his own village. He was out there in his garden today – fit at nearly 80 – pottering about his quarter-acre of largely unproductive trees and ornamental shrubs. He has offered us the use of his water, should we ever need it.

Then there’s the pool itself – a luxury in the eyes of many, but a business necessity if you’re running a holiday guest-house/art centre. It’s big by some standards, at 12 x 5 m.

poster for artholiday.com

It’s a constant problem to maintain and the costs are high in chemicals and electricity and my pool-boy-hours. I’d be glad to see it with its kerb-stones removed, filled with oxygenating plants and capable of supporting small insect life and large ducks. For the present it remains a sterile but necessary business asset. It may also play a crucial role as a ‘battery’ storing wind-generated electrical heat, to be used in conjunction with a heat pump. The subject of wind-power (in which the region is bountifully provided ) will be dealt with in a later post.

So one of my projects this summer has been to refurbish le grand bassin hidden away in the clump of trees that was once le parc, and is now the Jungle. (More about formal French parcs and English wildlife gardens in a later post)

Richard tiling le grand bassin

The water for this pre-World War 2 proto-swimming pool (built by the previous owner for his children) arrived via a lead pipe from the sweet-water well in his neighbour’s potager . It may well flow again.

Here I am tiling the top row with tiles we painted and fired for a mosaic that didn’t happen. It will give the bassin a non-lavatorial look. The tiles below will all get covered with pond-weed. The odd lines of tile were from a previous attempt to make this thing hold water. 90% of these tiles are redundant – I just don’t know which 10% actually cover the serious cracks.

This part of Le Languedoc has erratic weather: pushed by the Mediterranean and pulled by the Atlantic weather systems, we are caught between drought and flood. But we do have two growing seasons, spring and autumn and a heatwave in the middle when almost everything grinds to a halt (except the courgettes, aubergines and tomatoes).

All we need is water.

swords – and ploughshares

What is the gun doing there? Is this a ‘Peak Oil doomer site’? Is it going to be full of talk about ‘guns and food and bunkers’ ?

Well yes and no. Yes, that’s a gun.  It’s leaning against an old reversible plough that we found in the the courtyard here ten years ago. The plough will get its wheels fixed and will some day be pulled through the clay soil of Languedoc. The shotgun is of a similar vintage: it has been buried beneath a load of junk since we moved from Ireland nearly ten years ago. It belonged to my wife’s grandfather, an old IRA supporter in the ’20’s [note to the young and un-informed: the Official IRA was the ad-hoc army that opposed British rule during the early years of the 20th. century. The unofficial IRA were the ones who waged the no-holds-barred guerrilla war through the '60's to the '90's.]

We brought it to France as a family ‘heirloom’ – a curiosity from a distant past. I dug it up again the other day because it seemed to me to be a possible element in my future. I became aware that I might need to defend myself, or my wife, or our food-supply. And that if I followed the logic of what I was reading – then the future was not necessarily going to be a peaceable ‘hippy-type’  scenario. The interim future might in fact be messy and violent.

If I am capable of thinking the unthinkable, then I might have to imagine doing the unimaginable. The idea of putting up barbed-wire to protect my carrots is one thing: the possibility that I might have to defend my family with a gun that has no sights and hasn’t been fired in a hundred years . . .

So that gun is both real and symbolic. It serves as a reminder that pacifism is not one of my options, and that in this typical little French village of 500 people there are twenty serious and committed hunters. And that I might need to join  A.C.C.A. [ Association Communale de Chasse Agréée ] and get my permit, and get something a little more accurate than that old blunderbuss.

The role of the hunter, and ‘les gens d’armes’ in French life is central to an understanding of this country, and is significant for us in this village. It will be given more space in a later post.