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

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.

Prince to Frog

This journal will be an irregular account  of my preparations for an unprecedented upheaval of our western society. It is based on my belief that there will be a collapse in both the supply of affordable fuel, and in the financial system. I’m hoping that there’s about five years left to make the transition from Prince to Frog. The Prince is how I have been living this last 50 -odd years, with cheap oil doing the work of dozens of servants, and allowing me to know more about the planet and visit more places on it than any ordinary man was previously able to do. The Frog is the shape of my future, with choices much-reduced and travel severely circumscribed. There could not possibly continue to be so many princes – not on a planet this size. The life of the frog however is feasable and sustainable – and so it shall be my roll-model for a while.

The ‘five years’ is quite arbitrary – the crash could catch me with my fancy pants half-down, and my new nobbly skin not quite in place – but it’s a guess based on the information that appears on sites like the Oil Drum where ‘discussions about energy and our future’ have been conducted over the last four years. It is now generally accepted in these circles, and increasingly in the wider world of the media, that oil production has already peaked. What is not certain is how long the ‘plateau’ at the top of the curve will be – nor when and how the down-slope will take effect. The world has never experienced such an abundance of such a potent and cheap energy source – so we are not mentally or emotionally prepared for its decline and disappearance.

I have tried over the years to shape the future of my life and the life of our family : as a self-employed business person and artisan/designer I have had more opportunities than many to do this. But I never pictured this scenario : that I would be preparing for my last couple of decades as a subsistence-smallholder, in a small village in the Languedoc.