On The Via Domitia

July 2009: The end of France ...

2009-07-22T16:12:00.007-04:00

(July 6)

In three weeks time, we’ll be leaving Narbonne for good, and I wanted to add one more last blog entry before we go. (Hey, The Who had, what, six farewell tours? I can have two final blog entries.) This entry has all the pics at the end—a year's worth—so you'll have to click on that link when you get through this to see the visuals ...

***

On the weekend, at a beach called Les Ayguades, about 15km from us, I was in kneeling in water ten inches deep and dragging my fingers through the clean, yellow sand with about forty other people (most of them over the age of seventy) looking for the little clams they call here tenilles. In most of the rest of France, they’re called tellines, but you know, the langdociennes always have to be different. The tenilles are about 2cm long and in the shape of a clementine wedge. The oldsters just pop ‘em with their thumbnails and eat them raw, but if you want to make a meal of them, you need about 300 for about a cup of meat. We took about 100 of them home, left them in their seawater for about four hours with a dash of cornmeal, and then quickly sautéed them in butter, garlic, and parsley. Heaven. (The tenilles eat the cornmeal and spit out the remainder of the sand in their shells; the cornmeal scours out their guts and acts as a kind of stuffing. I imagine you could add granular garlic and dried parsley as well and then just heat up the bucket.)

This seems as good a detail as any to begin with in telling our last stories of France. It fits well into the category of things we never thought we’d ever do more than once (we’ve now had a couple such feeds), and it’s a good vantage from which to look over our lives here and the life we’re returning to.

As you can imagine, the reality of coming home has been on our minds for months, and with Anne and I having both travelled back to Toronto this spring (she for a job interview and I for the Griffins), the fact of our time here ending has been unavoidable. All of us have been adjusting to it differently: the kids claim to be ready to leave yesterday; Anne is doing an excellent job of living in the present (although she is the one with the most concrete reality awaiting her: she got the job!); and I’ve swung madly between grief and excitement. I’ve gotten used to telling those who ask that I’m not sad I’m going home to Toronto, but I’m devasted to be leaving France. If you followed the blog or visited us here, you’ll know exactly why. As the months left dwindled to weeks, and now days, it’s hard not to wake up in the mornings and beg the gods to make the day go as slowly as possible. But the days here never do.

The seasons and what they bring remind you daily how time is passing down here: the final blooming and fruiting of the cherry tree, the last of the potatoes, the grass going yellow, the cicadas groaning in the trees ... all of this flipped the pages of the calendar better than anything else could. And now we are here trying not to think of that moment when we walk out the front door of this house for the very last time and head to the train station.

Our second year here was very different than the first. We did about the same amount of travelling (no airplanes for a year, please), but the mood was different. We stopped being tourists and just lived. It was as we’d hoped, thinking in advance that if we stayed for two years, there’d be, like, ten months in the middle when it might just feel normal, and it did. A side effect was that the second year wasn’t as exhilarating on a daily basis as the first year was, but who can live at that pace, anyway? We did more things closer to home, worked more, fell a little out of touch. It was good for us and it allowed some of the things we were feeling, as our experiences whizzed past us, to settle some more. It clarified some personal things about what a home is, and what we need to survive as well as what’s window-dressing. We really got into our books. One dread secret of home is that we don’t read as much as we want to: I can now admit that there are entire months in Toronto when I don’t read a whole book. I’m too distracted, my focus is splintered. I’m not going to say that won’t happen again, in fact we know it’s going to be impossible to bring home much more than the memories of what life was like here—life in Toronto will be what it is. But it was so lovely, for two years, not to feel guilty that I was falling irretrievably behind in my reading.

So, after the last entry (August 3 2008!??) we enjoyed the rest of the summer, visiting painterly Provence (and seeing Cezanne’s homes) and had a wild, water-rafting, wine-guzzling visit from Jean-Gilles, Janice, and co. Then we settled into the fall (during which I suffered, for about six weeks, a bizarre bout of insomnia) and went to Helsinki to see Goodness premiere there in Swedish. Catherine Bush and her niece, Naomi, came to visit for a few days during which we truffled, and ate a great many excellent meals. Naomi and Catherine are both writers as so during that week, I had company at my writing café for the only time I’ve ever enjoyed it. Imagine: three Canadian writers sitting at one table in Narbonne. And then, most strange of all, we went home for Christmas. This was the beginning of injecting a bit of reality into our lives, and the visit home was very important and wonderful. Not only because we got to see everyone we’ve been missing (and vice versa we were pleased to note) but because we were able to recall first hand exactly why we love Toronto, and we confirmed that there is still somewhere for us to return to. Of course there always was, but you have to feel such a thing to be sure of it.

(July 13)

This morning, the day after returning from our valedictory visit to Paris, we learned that Anne’s sister, Julie, is finally in labour. We say “finally” because leading up to her due date, the wait became interminable. But today’s actually Julie’s due-date. So Anne has been on the phone and up and down from her chair, looking excited and wondering what, at 4am in Canada on the highway between Peterborough and Toronto, her middle sister must be going through.

The birth of Julie and Ron’s first child is another category of experiences that happened differently for us here. There have been births and deaths and illnesses and break-ups, triumphs, failures and transitions that we have been away for, times in which we needed to be with people and they needed us, and we simply were not there. We spent a lot of time on the phone at these times, and on email, but this was absolutely the hardest thing about our two years away: the fact that we have either missed important, profound touchstones in people’s lives, or that we have not been physically present to shoulder our share of the burden when we were needed. We know no one begrudged us our time here, but the raw fact of being away during those times we wanted to be home for a day or a week is one of the inevitable failings we have to live with, a cost of our time here. I know Anne will be overjoyed later today to learn who her new niece or nephew is, but it will also be crushing not to share that first day with Julie. So there is, at least, that powerful pull home. (Later: welcome to the world Gabrielle Marilyn Doreen!!)

Paris was, as Paris is, wonderful. We took the train up and down, ate marvellously, saw our friends Julien and Kersten one last time, and Alex and Amy one last time as well. Julien, who is a major foodie and a great guy to share a meal with, took me to Josephine Chez Dumonet, one of the city’s best bistros, and we had a very good meal there, including a 1973 Doisy-Däone, a sweet wine from Barsac, within which AOC you find Sauternes as well. I met Julien on the net, trying to find those restaurants I took Anne to for her surprise 40th birthday visit to Paris, and we’ve stayed in touch. He’s a self-described food pornographer, and his blog is well-worth a visit.

Then we had a bittersweet farewell to Amy, Alex, and Isaac at Le Dernier Metro, another neighbourhood hangout out by the Eiffel Tower, and a memorable place to eat with actual locals. We met Amy and Alex shortly after coming to France (Alex and I were introduced by Jim Harrison, who was sure we’d hit it off: he was right) and proceeded to have a beautiful friendship with them. They lived 40 minutes from us and we spent many nights draining bottles together, BBQing hamburgers, and swimming in secret rivers. They’re leaving for Texas, where she is from and where he has got a job, and so at least we’ll be on the same side of the ocean, but Texas ain’t Buffalo … so we knew we were saying goodbye to our regular get-togethers.

In fact, leaving France, in terms of the people we’ve come to love here, is impossibly painful and much more difficult than leaving a home we knew we were coming back to. We know that many of the people we care for here are folks we are unlikely to see again for at least a number of years. We know, in the case of a couple of elderly neighbours we’ve come to adore, that when we say goodbye, it will really be goodbye. I can barely think of this without feeling utterly desolated. Tomorrow night we say goodbye to our dear friends Joanna and John, and as the remaining two weeks unfold, the farewells will mount up. Perhaps by July 30th we will be relieved to be getting on that train with only “welcome home”s ahead of us.

***

I was running down the mad activity of our second year back there. I’ll continue. We came back from Toronto recharged and ready to drink up our final seven months here, and we did in the manner to which we became accustomed: we chose some places and went there. First it was to Angouleme, in February, to see the “BD” festival there: a whole town dedicated for a week to comic books. An insane sight, with almost too much to do, but we all loved it. Later that month, we made our first foray into “true” Spain, which is to say, we ventured out of Catalonya. We visited Seville, Cordoba, and Grenada and saw some of the most beautiful places we’ve seen anywhere in Europe, including the grand mosque in Cordoba, and the indescribably beautiful Alhambra. We hadn’t encountered much Islamic art or architecture in our travels, and the mosque and the Alhambra were the best imaginable introduction. (I don’t think we would have felt as welcome in Mecca.) Busy February came to a fine conclusion with a visit from Elizabeth, Anthony, Leone, and Ethan, all of whom we destroyed at bowling.

Jim Harrison was here in March for a couple of days and scandalized the children with language even we had to look up. He also taught us how to make Poulet basquaise, which might have been the best chicken I’ve ever eaten and also the only time in my life I've ever liked eggplant. Jim, who has lived about three lives in the space most of us are lucky to live half of one in, was in excellent form, and we had to have Amy and Alex present just to help us sop up all the energy. Spring then came on hard and beautiful, which seemed to be the last good weather we saw until June. April and May were awful, weatherwise (as is July, by the way—we had five hot, hot days at the end of June, but as of this writing, we haven’t seen the sun in about ten days), but we spent the last of the good weather in Paris, taking the bateaux mouche for the first time and doing our favourite thing in Paris, which is to wander. That break, we also went to Berlin for the first time. For all intents and purposes, I’ve never set foot in Germany, and Berlin was hard to swallow. To me, it was like visiting a house where a dreadful crime was once committed, but almost all trace of it is gone. Almost, I say, because Berlin has taken care to document, sometimes within its very sidewalks, its dark history. But even with the Berlin wall gone, this feels like a very schitzophrenic place, and as we later agreed, we’d probably not go back without a reason. It was very odd, for instance, to be in the Holocaust memorial just below the Brandenburg gate at 1 o’clock in the afternoon, and an hour later, be in the Lego Museum. Memory and history short-circuit in such contexts. (Not to mention the fact that no one at the Lego Museum found it at all strange or in bad taste that the little animated film you see upon entering the museum features little Lego men in the Lego “Faktory” forming up in long rows and marching in unison to their important task, which is to build more “Lego” men!!)

Anne was in Toronto in April, we paid a second visit to Rome in May (it might be a dead heat for best city on the planet between Rome and Paris), a first and last visit to that shithole known as Marseille (apologies to fans) and then I was home at the beginning of June. Our last major trip was to Venice in June with Joanna and John (what a city!) and since then, the ground has slowly, gradually, graded downwards toward the end of July …

(July 22)

And here we are at the end, under continuing cloudy skies and heavy hearts. The whole tone of life here has changed: our beloved next-door neighbour, Madame Castain, passed away on Monday and we spent this morning in a tiny church in Roquefort les Corbieres saying goodbye. We returned home to the vision of her heartbroken husband—too weak to go to the funeral—standing in an upper window, waving to us and weeping.

We had been in Biarritz, the boys and Anne learning to surf, and drinking up the only sun we’ve seen in all of July when Bernard called to give us the bad news. But it seems of a piece: now is the time to mourn. Narbonne feels less real day by day and news of home—things that must be planned for, dates in our future that are less than ten days away—make the end of our time here more and more palpable. How will we feel when we get home, when Anne is sitting at her new desk 72 hours after touching down and the boys and I are collecting our various belongings? What will it be like to be enveloped again by the familiar? Well, you’ll know, because we’ll tell you in person. And somewhere down the road, back in our “real” lives, when we’re no longer living in this lovely dream of ours, we’ll begin to process it and tease out of it what it all meant.

I’m sitting at Le Duplex—one of my coffee haunts—on Rue Gambetta as I write this, watching the traffic putter by and drinking a crème and perhaps the best thought I can leave all you readers of this blog with is the wish that sometime in your own lives, you’ll know the rare pleasure of discovery and adventure we had here and that it will also make you new ... as it did us.

(If you want to see a lovely, but LONG slideshow of our life in France in 2008-2009 click the picture below, and when you get to Picasa, click the "slideshow" icon in the upper left ...)

August 2008 - July 2009

Our Year in France

2008-08-03T17:24:00.009-04:00

On August 2, 2007, some nice person at Pearson International Airport took the above photo, a portrait of four people who had no idea what the hell they were getting into. All you have to do is look hard at our faces to see that we were a family who’d dreamed aloud about something and then made the mistake of actually doing it. I say that from the point of view of the man in that airport lounge: I remember what I was thinking. It was What the fuck are we doing?

I write these words from my back garden, one year later. It’s a year in calendar time, an all-but-useless measure of our lives since arriving here, a time that, measured in experience, emotional life, and cultural shifts needs a different unit, one I can’t imagine. Just my perspective from the green plastic table I sit at now (shielded from the 10 am heat by the rear wall of the house and the massive cloth umbrella above: it’s 33 already and promises to hit 37 today) and all the things that have happened in this garden space hint at the changes rung in our lives here and how hard it is to quantify them. One year ago, the space in front of me was colonized by artichokes, more artichokes than even the biggest thistle enthusiast could consume; now it’s a sprawling garden of over twenty fruits and vegetables. But a year ago as well, this was a strange, cryptic space, one we were decoding. What was the tree between the peach and the two apricots? (In May we finally figured out it was a cherry tree.) What kind of care would all these trees require? What could the earth do here, treated properly? Would we fail this generous green sward or unlock its joys? Although these appear to be questions about the garden in the house we’d rented, they were really the BIG questions, writ small, about the place we’d come to live. Would we find a way to be here temporarily and also feel like we belonged? Could we bring our way of seeing the world and still see this place as it actually is? Could we look out our windows and feel that we were home?

From the perspective of this morning—the bells of Saint Just ringing the Sunday matins beyond the fig trees, the birds dive-bombing the insects still feeding off the rotting plums, the voices of my children in the windows above me—the answer is yes. A qualified yes, since I have to answer these subjective questions through my own subjective filters, but the fact that I cannot imagine myself as I am today from the perspective of a year ago suggests we have succeeded in being here. For those of you who have been following this blog, you’ve seen the evidence of this in the way we’ve lived, but a lot of what I’m talking about has been internal, has been a kind of daily osmosis, and is a reality deeper than the one suggested by the fact that my butcher calls me by name or that we know the shortcut to the beach or that no part of the French bureaucracy surprises or troubles us anymore. It has to do with things as subtle as the fact that when I dream of the past now, sometimes I dream of France. Sometimes I even dream in French. It has to do with the fact that sometimes I’m not even aware I’m in France. Yesterday, standing chest-deep in the chill water of Gruissan Plage, looking at the many things I’ve become used to here, I made myself close my eyes and say You’re in the south of France, in the Mediterranean, in August and I tried to recapture the frisson those words would once have provoked in me. But I couldn’t. I was only ten kilometres from my front door.

And as for my children and my partner -- who are they as their French selves? Anne is a joyful Narbonnaise—well, she is joyful anyway, but here there is a new freedom for her, an ease, a sense of connection that comes with living in a small city. She has a tiny fiefdom and it suits her. And the boys. If you’ve been looking over our shoulders this year, you know what a revelation it’s been for these two young men. Ben, whom we worried would find it very hard to adjust, has been the proverbial fish in water: he was fully adjusted by day three and Max by day four, and they have pals coming out their shirtsleeves, not just guys (Ben is fairly set upon by girls here); they are exotic and interesting to the locals and have made themselves utterly at home. Ben even has the local accent now. I wonder, looking back on all this, if the signal memory of our time here might not be watching those boys and their dog walk up the street to get a baguette at Le Moulin … and then watching them return (because we wait, anxiously, on the balcony). That might be the best memory of so many good ones.

Of course, being a foursome with almost no outlets has had its challenges as well. You want togetherness? Try moving to a town where no one knows you. That’s togetherness. And it’s been very, very good for us, as a couple, as a family, and for the boys as brothers. They fight a lot, but check out those loving faces in the photos. They’re connected at the hip (Ben might use the word “chained”) and they adore each other. In the times when it’s been trying, it’s been quite trying. But that’s the cost of reducing your world to four people; there’s no one to turn to but each other.

In this (inevitably long) post, Anne and the boys are going to try to talk about all of this as well, but I want to talk, for one last time, about some of the things I’ve learned, that I might not have gotten to in these fifty posts. One of the more important things I’ve learned is that there is no “France.” On one level, this country is one of the last cultural monoliths in the Western world, a place where to say “it’s French” is to have the final word on the way something is practised. That means spoken, cooked, grown, built. I recall clearly the way a new friend—a man who was born in this town—sneered at the way I’d dressed a porcini mushroom. I say “sneer” because that’s the way it had appeared to me, but of course he didn’t sneer at me. I’d drizzled some olive oil and lemon juice on thin slices of fresh porcini, and to him, I’d ruined it. If, at home, this man had poured orange juice and salt into his coffee, I would have reacted in a culturally similar way, that is, I would have laughed and asked him what the heck he was doing. I would have tried to save him from his error. That’s all this man was doing, even though the mushroom was bloody delicious. It just wasn’t done that way here; it was unimaginable to do it that way. That is one experience of France.

And yet, this “France” … it didn’t exist until about three hundred years ago. It was just disconnected fiefdoms, territories, ecologies, belief systems. There wasn’t even the French language. There was French, Oc, and Oil, and all of their subtongues and dialects, numbering hundreds of pidgen variations. There was here, where Occitan was and is still spoken, ten different dialects within fifty kilometres. A friend tells us that “dog,” in Narbonnais, was “Gos,” (gooss) but it was “Cien” (kyanh) in Bezieran, and “Cano” in Carcassonais. So the notion of teasing out what France “is”—even three hundred years later and from our perspective—is a mug’s game. And yet, there are some conclusions to be drawn …

Apart from Paris, which is an international city, France is still a country of local customs and economies. The Narbonnais who travels to the Dordogne will encounter an entirely separate set of cultural norms. From the Revolution onwards some of the national stories link up (ie, every town in France has a memorial to the World War One dead), but the physical reality of these places almost always predates the Revolution. So there is local architecture, local specialities, often local idiom. We were in the Dordogne two weeks ago and apart from the fact that people spoke French, we might have been in a different country. But then again, look closer and it must be France. The cuisine, although consisting of different ingredients, is still definitively French. In fact, there are the same six salads on every menu, except where in Narbonne there is a salad with goat’s cheese, there it’s a Rocamadour salad (a local goat’s cheese). Here there is a smoked salmon salad, there it is a gesier (roasted duck gizzard) salad. The local specialities make their appearances in the rotating idiom of national French cookery.

This is the way things are done here, a consistency we don’t know of in North America because most of our towns and cities are melting pots. It’s made me realize, as a sort of strange corollory, how lucky we are to have been exposed to all the different cuisines we’ve been exposed to coming from an immigrant society. Because I can as happily eat Tom Yung Goong as I can eat a pastrami sandwich; I’m enticed equally by agadashi tofu, murgh jalfrezi, chicken curry on injeera, rapini in olive oil and garlic, burritos, sake or slivovice, guacamole, veal marsala (okay, I prefer it with chicken), moussaka, maguru sashimi and so on. Your average Frenchman will touch none of this. His palate, as refined as it is, is a traditional one, and almost everything outside of it either does not appeal or it downright disgusts. This is monoculture. And yet, when you do your subset of meats, vegetables, breads, pastries, not to mention alcohols, as perfectly as the French do, where is the upside in expanding your repetoire? Probably there is none. My palate is an expression of the immigrant’s dilemma, only worse: I want a taste of home here, and yet “home” is everywhere for me, in a culinary sense. I have never belonged as an eater in any culture: I am a genuine omnivore. The French are not, and they like it that way.

This chauvinism, which has its charms on a culinary and cultural level, presents problems on a political one. Like most European countries not yet comfortable with the realities of immigration, France can be scarily racist, especially in the south, where most of your immigrants with troubling skin colours come. It’s here where the far right has had its greatest successes, and here where the assimilation of especially North African populations has posed the greatest challenge to both the immigrants and their new neighbours. Anne, when she went for the check-up that was part of getting her carte d’identité was all but waved through the process. Being healthcare-savvy, she wondered aloud why she wasn’t being examined more thoroughly. She was told, in as many words, that she was white and, therefore, Bienvenue à France. By a doctor. Imagine being the Algerian in his waiting room?

And what about the language? Anne and the boys arrived here fluently bilingual, and I … well, I had a functioning French. So where am I a year later, after living among the French, reading French newspapers, writing French emails, taking French classes? The truth is I’m nowhere. My improvement has been measurable, my comfort level has increased, but where I thought being immersed in French would make me close to fluent, that hasn’t happened. In part that’s because I’m still living in English -- I read in English, write in English, watch movies in English, talk (mostly) in English with my family, but that’s not really it. I’ve discovered, much to my surprise, that my English-language skills are more an adeptness with a tool, rather than a talent. It turns out I’m not a language person after all. I’ve always had a strange suspicion this was true: I suck at Scrabble and crosswords, for instance. What trying to up my game in French has finally proven to me is that I’m a math-head, a rationalist. And language is social, abstract, and organic. I know: I’ve published four collections of poetry, what the hell am I talking about? And novels, which are complex machines with no math in them at all, it would seem. No, but these things have structure, and I’m good at structure. And they have geometries and resonances and symmetries and asymmetries, all of which light up my brain. Language is just the way of getting at them. In French, once I have some of the structures down, I can use them. But grammar is social, associative, intuitive; so are verb tenses and idiom. And, try as I might, although I can grasp meaning in what I hear or read, I still have a very hard time constructing it. So that’s been one of the surprises and disappointments of living here for me. I still have another year, and in the fall intend to intensify the classes, but learning a language out of books and cassettes isn’t the way to do it. The way to do it is the way I’m doing it by living here and, well, it just hasn’t happened the way I’d hoped it would.

But enough of the socio-polito-cultural! What has it been like for me? For us? I think I might speak for all the Redhill-Simards when I say this has been the most remarkable year of my life. And not just because we’re here, doing everything that we’re doing, but because we’re not—I’m not—there …. For the first time in my life I’m apart from everything that is familiar to me. The guy in the photograph at the top of this post was sort of terrified of that, but being away was part of the goal. And I’ve discovered that, although I miss people and places (and sushi), I turned out to be pretty good at it. Christ, to think that after forty-one years I turned out to be adaptable! How about that. The best part of being here has been the almost constant excitement of what is coming next. The travel, the ever-flowering small deepenings associated with being in a place, the expansion of all kinds of vocabularies. Having a garden has been no small part of it: finally tapping into that part of myself that has always been frustrated by the Canadian growing season and one inopportune growing space after another, having soil this willing, and light this generous has been an enormous awakening for me. Many times in the last two months we have sat down to meals where more than fifty per cent of what we were eating came from my garden. We have not bought jam since May, and most of the items that go into a salad have come from the back yard in the last six weeks. A three-course dinner we shared with Joanna and John three weeks ago, save the duck, the pie shell, and some olive oil and butter, came entirely from the garden, including potatoes, leeks, onions, zuccini, tomatoes, the cherries that went into the sauce for the ducks, and the apricots in the tarte. At this age, novelty usually comes in the form of pain, but that night three weeks ago, I felt an unknown power, feeding my entire table from things I’d grown. It was unlike any experience I’d ever had. Being apart has opened possibilities for the future.

But life has also been “real life” here. After the initial glow and overstimulation of being in France faded, there was the cost of living, colds and flus, loneliness (counteracted by being, at times, overvisited), bad sleep, occasional depression, writer’s block, bad restaurant meals, and even moments of regret. There have been times when I’ve refound that original bewildered thought: what the fuck are we doing here? Although these days it’s reformulated as what the hell are we going to do when we go home? For the spectre of returning to Toronto, no matter how much we miss it and everything it contains at times, is a truly terrifying one. I don’t fear rejoining all the subcultures of our lives there; in fact, I look forward to it. I worry about losing this feeling, the one I’ve never been able to describe in here, that I’ve given up trying to describe, but there it is, that thing that is inherent to this experience that, above all, I fear I’ll be walking down Muriel Avenue a year and a week from now to buy a carton of milk at Sun Valley and I’ll have the dread thought: Did any of that really happen? And I’ll have proof in this blog and the over 3000 pictures and movies we’ve made of our time here, but the feeling will be gone. I do dread that. But maybe when it’s gone, I’ll be able to name it. In the meantime, I continue to live in it. But what is it? An atmosphere? A sounding? An instinct about something? I don’t know, but it’s central to what it’s been like to live here, whatever it is. Maybe it’s in this short film:

The other three members of the Redhill-Simards have loved it here as well and I’ve tried too often to speak for them. But here they are now in their own words:

MAXIME:

I learned new bad words in French! I have friends that can only talk French, and hockey here didn’t have many games practically, it was only practises – back in Canada it was only games and almost no practices.

I’m happy here. Ecole Lakanal, my school, is really small: only 5 classes. It felt like the way Madame Fenuille taught us was different but I’m not sure how.

I did plenty of good things in my life here with my family, I can’t even choose my favourite. My favourite trip was I loved going to Villa Nova in Spain. It was amazing. I loved living on a farm. I thought that we’d have to work but the cows were very nice. One day me and Ben went to touch them. I touched a baby cow and it licked my hand and I almost fell over cause his tongue was so hard.

What I love about Narbonne: I really like that we have a dog here. The city is so old, 2000 years old. Isn’t that unbelievable? I like it in France a lot, and I like all the activities.

This year, I learned how to read, much quicker than back in Canada. And I learned lots of mathematics and how to write en lettres attachées.

Funny things: the way they drive – they are just crazy.

For the year ahead: I am hoping that it’ll be like this year and I’m going to have such a good time as this year: I hope that my friends will stay in my school, I want to read and write more, I am hoping that the teacher for CE1 isn’t too hard on us. I’ve changed this year: I got much bigger. My personality didn’t change. My French has gotten much better.

I miss Cormac and all my friends and family back home. I think going back to Toronto is going to be good.

BENJAMIN

I feel happy that we are here and that we are staying for another year. This year went really fast. I had a great year at school, made a lot of friends and my marks were really high. Especially when all the rest of the class’s marks went lower!

I’m very very happy that it’s vacation and that life is relaxed. The school year was much much harder than back in Canada. More work, just more. I found it hard.

Tomorrow I’m going to Picou for 5 nights and I’m a bit worried ‘cause you know how I get worried. When I come back to Narbonne, my best friend from Canada is coming… we’ll have a very fun time.

I really liked how we had Wednesdays off so we could play whatever sports we wanted (especially moto). Also with my parents, doing PAF – very exercising and you get to go in trees and do whatever you want.

For my birthday we are going to do quad. I will invite my best friend Lilian.

My favourite trip as a family: I really liked all of them. I have to admit. I can’t pick from Tenerife, Amsterdam, London, Paris. I really do love Paris. Spain, Barcelona, cool. Girona, the big party. Going to Béziers, partying with Amy, Alex and Isaac. Making good friends and having a good time was really what counted for me this year.

My favourite thing about Narbonne: I love going to Les Halles to buy fresh food and fresh fruits, walking around the old city is great. I also love my house with lots of space in it, the animals that are outside. I love our next-door neighbours (the ones on the right!) I love our little bluebell, putt-putt car.

And, my little Charlot. I am very happy to have him.

For the year ahead: I hope to have another very good year. Get a bit higher marks back at school. I think that the year I had this year is just about the perfect year and I’d like to have the same year. If it is possible.

As you may know, a year ago today we were getting in Bubbie’s minivan and going to the airport. I was scared and a bit stressed. And look at me today, I’m happy and life is perfect.

How I’ve changed: My French is better and I have a different accent. I’m growing of course, and I feel like I’m growing into a teenager. I feel a bit weird sometimes. I feel like my writing has gotten very good. I’ve learned that I’m very lucky to be here and that not many kids do this. Some of my friends have never been on a plane even. Sometimes I don’t realize that I’m lucky because I am doing the things.

ANNE

After a year, I’m not sure where to start. I guess I wonder most about how we’ve changed, as a foursome, as a couple, and as individuals than anything else. And I honestly think that we haven’t changed that much, but have been considerably enriched. So maybe the boys are a whole different species: taut, lean, taller, moving about their lives with busyness and assurance. But their little boy selves are still intact. A gecko continues to offer the greatest pleasure. They still love to cuddle (though slyly, at times). Me, well I still stumble about occasionally.

I was cycling down to the market this morning, wondering about what markers of change I could recognize. They are elusive, especially ones that I can name outright. We have adapted to life in another place, at a different pace, in another language, among strangers. But really, there are many faces in the crowd who know us, and have befriended us. I kiss my fruit vendor. I rarely walk through town without seeing someone I know. I have a much more tactile life here: walk by the hairdresser, the school, the bakery, the grocery store. The scale is something that we’ve learned to appreciate. A friend’s voice called out my name from a window as I walked past yesterday. We looked at each other and just laughed ourselves silly. Friends came to dinner, brought champagne and home-made punch, and laughed when part of dinner was ruined, saying: “But it’s just us you’re cooking for! It doesn’t matter!”

We are still very much ourselves. Despite best efforts to let go of our stresses and fears, they follow. Narbonne has had both a calming and an opening effect. We are more focussed here, less distracted. Different thoughts and perspectives mold us. The bigness of our home city sometimes means that there is a lot of static in our lives. Here the signals are loud and clear and the opportunities are many. Sometimes, I feel we are really part of life in France, which of course, we are. But on other days, when I am constantly queried where I’m from (Benjamin is the only one who has mastered the Languedoc accent) I feel a certain exhaustion. A tired “other” self who can never be from here.

The hardest part of living in France is missing the people who populated our daily lives and our emotional lives. Being away from you, those of you who read this blog, that’s really the lonely part of living here. I personally haven’t really missed Toronto though being away has revealed its qualities. I don’t spend much time comparing though. Having lived in many places growing up and since, no one place has been imprinted for me as home. Except Caribou River, I guess and that’s only been a summer constant. But really, home was my family. I feel that has replicated for us Redhill-Simards: we are each other’s home. And that’s been the greatest achievement of this year. Though I must also confess, difficult at times.

So I won’t bore with a list of joys and woes. But I will say that I feel this move was the greatest thing we’ve done as a family. It has brought us to new experience, to new relationships and to deeper understanding of each other and the world around us. The travelling has been a source of absolute fun and adventure – who knew that four Canadians could cover so much turf once off-shore? Making Narbonne and the Languedoc home has taught us a great deal about the secrets and wonders of caves and rivers, sea and sand, mountains and valleys, history and architecture, time and memory. I am ready and excited about the year ahead. Strangely, last weekend at the beach with my friend Amy and her son Isaac, I too walked into the Mediterranean and stood, hipdeep in salty water. I felt a deep sadness coming over me: only one year left. So, I sign off saying that I’m ready for that year and all it will offer, and I’m grateful. Thanks for sharing our life with us long-distance.

And so … back to me.

What else can I tell you? I’ve learned a lot of very small useful things. I don't know how you can use these things, but here they are:

Basil likes to be picked.
Farm eggs to store-bought eggs are like comparing oysters to shoes.
No antihistamine on the planet can defeat French allergens.
The French love pastries, but outside of the bakeries no one knows how to make them.
Sidewalks in North America are being wasted on pedestrians (we park on our sidewalks here).
Roast chicken is a perfect food.
Driving styles in Europe are keyed to the basic national myth: in France, it’s liberty (let everyone do what they want), in Italy it’s the leftovers of fascism (take what you need, no one’s going to give it to you).
The difference between a brilliant red wine and an immortal one is a single degree and about two hundred Euros.
France is romantic, but Italy and Spain are erotic.
Outside of the major cities, no one in France cares about the cinema.
It’s possible to be lovers at the age of eighty.

I’ve also learned that there are four seasons in France and they are subtly different from our own. They are Fall, Winter, Pollen, and Naked Germans.

Which brings us to now.

It’s hot here and promises to get hotter. We seek water to swim in every day. Luckily, it’s close by, fresh, chlorinated, and sea water all, although at the beach you risk seeing Angela Merkel starkers. August can be a nightmare. It’s the thin end of summer, the hottest time, the pink tissues at the bottom of the Kleenex box. It’s also European vacation season, which means double driving times everywhere. I went to Prague last weekend to visit with a friend and almost didn’t make the airport. (Usually 45 minutes, it took almost two hours.) Non-locals, not used to the culture of the superhighways here, are sacrificing themselves at alarming rates. Turn on the radio and there’s another Italian or German who’s jumped the guardrail. I remember last summer, only a week after we arrived, seeing a car on fire, on its hood, on the shoulder and it inspires me to stay off the roads.

Which hasn’t stopped our usual round of mad travelling. As I mentioned above, we were in the Dordogne a couple of weeks ago, I was in Prague last weekend (thank you Ken!), and as the summer goes on, the boys are going to go to overnight camp, we’re going to take another couple of driving trips (including one to Aix en Provence) and in two weeks our friends Jean-Gilles & Janice, and their kids Julien & Camille are coming to visit. Then, in the fall, it’s back to school, we’re going to Helsinki to see Goodness open in Swedish in September; Belgium, Vimy, and Ireland in November, back to Rome (we hope) after Christmas, maybe Israel in February; we still want to rent a camping car and do the Loire and the Normandy coast, and there are wishlists galore with places like Istanbul, Venice, Seville, Bordeaux, Budapest, and even Berlin on them. Time will run out long before our lists do.

So: another year is ahead of us, but this is our last post about it all ... we’re ending the blog because it’s time to retreat into the background and really be here, which is less easy to do when you’re subtly aware that you’re collecting things for a diary. The other thing is that the blog is now 60,000 words. That’s about three quarters of a novel, and the truth is, it’s longer now than anything else I’ve been able to write since I got here. So although I thought the blog wouldn’t interfere with my writing, I suppose it has. So I’m going to find out what happens when I shut off this tap. I hope those of you who have counted on this window onto our lives can forgive us for pulling the curtains across it, but you know how to find us and how to reach us, and we’ll come up with interesting new ways to keep you all updated.

You may be interested to know that a lot of people have been following us this year, many of whom just came along out of interest, who don’t know us and whom we don’t know. To all you quiet folks at the back of the virtual room: thank you for reading. We had a total of just under 5000 visits to this blog in the year it’s been up …

So that’s it. I end this post with a strange feeling of sadness and joy. Sadness because this blog was one of our last regular links to the world we belong to and joy because our time here goes on. Thank you for following us this far. We send you our love and we continue to think of you and of home.

À tout à l’heure from Narbonne,

Michael, Anne, Benjamin & Maxime

(Click the below for a replay of our first year in France in pictures ...)

Year End Roundup

Days of wine and ... well, dung

2008-07-07T16:34:00.012-04:00

Retournes chez-toi Benjamin! called the girls from behind the fence at La Kanal, the boys’ school. C’est juste nous filles!

This was the message at 2pm this afternoon when I took the kids in for a few hours on what is the second last day of school. But all of Ben’s male classmates had already decided the year was over, and he turned from the school gate with a look of horror on his face and begged me to take him home. Alack, I had to leave him, with five girls looking rather delighted, in order to spend an hour or so with this blog. Sorry Benji. Suck it up, pal, and get used to it.

School’s out, more or less. They go to July 8 here, but schoolwork was all but done by the end of June. Why they don’t decide to go on greve now, I can’t say; given their feckless way with striking at a moment’s notice, one would think with all the teaching done, the professors might have found a good reason to strike for seven days on July 1, but instead they’ve had the kids playing outside games all day. So be it -- we just hit the beach at 5. But summer starts in earnest tomorrow afternoon.

We have plans, but we’ve learned to keep things simple, given how busy our spring was. The kids are going to go to a couple week-long camps, and we have a trip to the Dordogne planned for the end of July. Some concerts, some daytrips, maybe even some fishing … we’ll see, but mostly I think we’re going to hang, ya know?

ANYONE WANNA BUY A ZUCCHINI?

Meanwhile, it’s not time off in the garden. Since the last writing, we have been overwhelmed with what the garden is producing. I have picked at least three zucchinis this week about the size and weight of Maxime and we are trying to "use them up" in the suitable phrase of a friend who understands that when you have this much zucchini, you do not eat it, you find a use for it. Anne has made zucchini bread and zucchini-chocolate muffins, the recipe for which would be perfect if it didn’t call for all that zucchini. (The truth is, like carrot cake, sweets made with a moist vegetable like zucchini are both bulky and moist, making these cakes, if you can get the image of a giant gourd lurking amongst your chocolate, quite toothsome.)

But we don’t have zucchini trouble compared to our apricot nightmare. I’m thinking back to the end of April when I thinned the apricots from the trees. I must have plucked, with great remorse, about 500 apricots from those two trees. Well, would that I had plucked 1500. We have two trees and despite my request in writing to the trees that they work out a sensible schedule for ripening they have all ripened at once. So: we have at least 3000 apricots and not enough time or ideas to deal with them. We have made 12 pints of jam (400 apricots), frozen about 6kg of fruit (about 300), given away another 6kg or so, and still they plummet richly and comically from the branches, as perplexed as we are as to the meaning of their existences. I am actually afraid to look at the window and wonder how much more waste I have created by not standing under the tree with an open mouth. The two trees are about 200 metres from my desk; I am looking at them now. My life has turned into that I Love Lucy episode where she’s wrapping chocolates on an assembly line and has to start eating them just to keep up. (She finally fails.)

The plums are next; I think we have a grace period of about two weeks now before we have to spend all day and night eating them.

When a zucchini this big asks to play cards with you, what choice have you got?

A FRAGRANT HOLIDAY

A Vilanova moment ...

We have earned our punishment though: we had a dreamy week in Spain with Gil, Grant, Esta, and Doug and their four kids, so that was six adults and six kids in all, with a pool, a verdant countryside location, and a great deal of food. Also cows. They didn’t mention the cows in the ads on the web for this place, which was probably a sound move on their part, as an ad that read “Gorgeous 500-year-old stone farmhouse with pool surrounded on all side by cows, pigs, and their copious, stinking manure” might not have attracted our business. It was a bit of a surprise. Behind and beside the truly beautiful farmhouse was, in fact, two large cinderblock cow paddocks with no fewer than 300 packed and rather unhappy steer. The milk cows wandered free, cropping the green around our house on all sides, even coming right up to the pool with their disinterested faces and giant eyes, and all 200 of these animals were equipped with cowbells. So imagine, if you will, a symphony of atonal clonking day and night to go with the nose-rippling pong and we still had a brilliant week together, which says a lot about the quality of the company, the food, and the activities. I believe the one insomniac among us found it 14% less charming than we did.

I imagine the Deacon-Gordon boys and Gemma (Esta & Doug’s little girl) are just about now unwrinkling their fingers, to judge by the amount of time they all spent in the pool. And some of the adults are just healing from wrist injuries incurred by playing ping-pong and/or dealing cards. There are some psychic scars as well, not all as a result of cribbage, but more on that later.

One of many legume-rich suppers. Pass the Bean-O!

Reading en pleine aire

I crush your head

The goils trying on dresses in Berga.

One item on a scavenger hunt for the kids:
A picture of yourselves seeing a UFO in the sky

Many of the days we spent at the house itself, deeply breathing the ammoniac air (when the wind shifted, you could smell the grass, the trees, and the river, although, it must be said, the amount of legumes consumed by certain persons guaranteed that when the wind shifted, the fragrances stayed more or less the same). We swam, read books, did crossword puzzles (which at least one of us found very exciting), and ate outside these tremendous group-prepared meals. Other days, we struck out for adventure. We all drove down to Barcelona and walked the sunny Ramblas and went to the aquarium where Doug, marine biologist, ruined everything by giving away the ending. We also found a hidden little tapas place where we had a genuine Spanish tapas meal and drank a lot of sangria.

The Spalding-Fudges on the Ramblas

The boys confront their demons

On another day, the Deacon-Gordon-Redhill-Simards went down to Montserrat and took the funicular up to the monastery and church there, and had a long walk along the mountain crest. The valleys of Catalonia to the west and south spread below us in varying shades of green and tan, a stunning sight, one you usually only have from an airplane. Monserrat is the site of the black virgin, a much-venerated statue that inspires people a) to line up for two hours to genuflect in front of her, and b) to stand on the marble disk in front of the church and raise their arms to the sky as if they’ve just won the World Cup. I felt like telling everyone there that the black virgin was black because some medieval fool had left her too long in the toaster, but I don’t know how to say that in Catalan.

Les Redhill-Simards at Monserrat

That day, Esta, Doug, and Gemma went to visit Cataques and Figueres, Dali’s birthplace, and unlike us, they had luck getting in the museum, which they pronounced brilliant. So we’ll try again!

We also visited nearby Berga twice, once for the market, and once for an important saint’s day, the name of which I forget (anyone?) but I will not forget Berga because it was there, for two or three seconds, that each of the six adults believed they had lost a child. This is the psychic scar part. We were trying to decide on a restaurant and most of us had crossed a small roadway to go look at the menu when we heard a sound that was unmistakeably that of a car striking a body, complete with skid and people loudly gasping. I was on the side of the restaurant, and when I turned to see Anne striding from the other side into traffic with a look of white horror on her face, I was certain Max was gone. (I knew Ben was beside me.) All that was left was the indelible, life-destroying moment of witness, and for those three seconds I was certain that that was what awaited me. The others went through a similar moment, and it took a breathless minute of counting heads to realize everyone was accounted for. As it turned out, a child had been hurt—a young boy had run into traffic and hit the side of a passing car and been badly, but not gravely, hurt. We all stuck around to make sure the shocked parents got the help they needed, but inwardly, we were all sick with the image we were certain was going to greet us in the road. And then we were sick with the realization that despite the fact that a child had been hurt we sincerely preferred it to be someone else’s child. Of course we did. But that animal instinct bubbles up in an otherwise meaningless evening and there it is to reproach you: you would trade the children of ten strangers to preserve your own. There were some anxious tears among us afterwards and the clutching of precious cargo, all of which are capable of being as distracted as that poor Catalan boy was. But there he was, alive as ever, sucking on his father’s glass of red wine. And we ate hot dogs and drank beer. Because life allowed us to.

The week went in a blur and it was over too soon. I drove down to Barcelona with our Canadian friends and then drove Gil and Grant’s rental car back to Narbonne. Our new camera didn’t arrive in time (it has since: a nice Panasonic Lumix … bye-bye Canon) so everything you see here is courtesy of the Deacon-Gordons and the Spalding-Fudges. We had such a fantastic week that all we can say is: next year in the Ring of Kerry???

Best friends saying so long ...

SUMMER IS HERE

And then it was the last week of school, the Kermesse -- a big end-of-year party -- and time to start thinking about making more jam. On July 1, our two Canadian boys went to school for probably the only time in their lives. July 4, for that matter too. Gradually, somewhat disbelievingly, Narbonne and the towns all around us, are shifting into their summer gear. The streetside ice-cream chests have been rolled out. The program for Narbonne’s summer festival is out (I have already seen a genius piano prodigy play in the synodic chambers in the Palais d’Archeveques -- two hours of music, all played from memory, with his eyes closed -- sort of the equivalent of doing all the parts in King Lear and Hamlet together, fast). There’s a lot going on in the south of France this summer -- a veritable embarassment of riches. If not for all the goddamned fruit in our backyard, we could get out and see some of it.

Actually, “getting out” is a meaningful problem for France this year. This country, which is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, anticipates a major decline in tourism this year owning to fuel costs. Even among the locals, we know people are scaling back on their plans. A litre of diesel right now costs the equivalent of $2.40; a litre of the good stuff is closer to $3. A year ago, it was $1.70. We continue as planned, because we can’t say “maybe next year it’ll be easier,” but we feel the crunch. There have already been serious protests from fishermen and women, as well as wine-makers, a small group of which actually rioted two weeks ago in a town ten kilometres from us. The organization that represents vintners from our region says that 98% of them are on the verge of bankrupcy. Take away the presumed exaggeration here and you still have a very high number, even if it’s only 60%. People are angry and scared and the story is about traditions being lost as well as livelihoods. Sarkozy, both as president of France and the EU for now, says it’s on his agenda, but so is the environment, so it’ll be interesting to see what he does.

AUGUST 3

Just under a month from now, we’ll mark one year in France. It will be a strange and wonderful milestone -- here at the eleven-month mark it sometimes seems to us that we have not been here as long as we felt we had in, say, December. Our relationship to the place, to our lives here, the ways we have changed -- all of it makes true perspective hard to grasp. The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s been the most remarkable year of my life and probably I speak for the other three members of the Redhill-Simards. I’ll talk about that, and so will Anne and Max and Ben, in a kind of summing-up in our next and final post to our blog, on or about August 3. See you then.

And what a May it was ...

2008-06-12T17:09:00.025-04:00

April showers bring May flowers … but what do you do when it rains all of May as well?

From the above headline, you can see what kind of May we had in Narbonne (the headline reads: “Most rotten May in 58 years”). For a part of France reputed to get 300 days of sunshine a year, after the March and May we had, it should be clear sailing for the rest of the year. (Ye gods of weather: I’m joking. Of course I don’t want to invite your wrath … pleeeease be nice to us in June, July, and August?) Add to the weather the fact that we had guests for three weeks out of the four and you can see what a challenging month it was.

Which is not to say that we and our guests—soaking, moldy, coughing, and sometimes grumpy (us, of course, not the guests)—didn’t make the utmost of it. When the sun came out, we all but exploded from the house and drove off for picnics and sightseeing. Granted, we usually came home in a roaring downpour, but it was worth it.

BUT FIRST ...

Anne and fellow Canadians Eitan and Denny among the vines

... we shared our last couple of meals with Eitan and Denny in May. These folks, introduced to us by a mutual Torontonian friend, came to France in October and left at the end of May. We were grateful to have them nearby, these sometimes-prisoners on their windy hilltop aerie, and shared many memorable meals with them. Eitan and I came awfully close to making a truffle roadtrip together to Perigord, but illness got in the way, and I regret it.

Come back to the Languedoc-Rousillon Eitan Cornfield, Eitan Cornfield will be the name of my future truffle memoire.

We had a great lunch with the two of them at L’Hospitalet at the beginning of the month, dinner at their place mid-month (my god, duck a l’orange!) and then a final send-off dinner at home near the end of the month, the latter two feasts with Renald and Doreen. More gracious minds, at least in English, will be hard to find here with them now gone. We wish them great new adventures in Montreal and have but one question: why the hell didn’t you stay for the summer?

DOWN UNDER IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE

Rewind to the beginning of May and our Australians from the April post. Nick and Sarah, after a short 35-hour hop from their home in Brisbane, came for a wet, but fun week in Narbonne. Nick, a well-known author and three-time Queensland Yahzee champion graciously pretended to lose to Maxime a number of times (see him pretending to be upset that Maxime whupped his ass, repeatedly, below), and Sarah … well, Sarah ate cheese. I know this doesn’t sound like much of an accomplishment, but once you learn how profoundly lactose intolerant Sarah is, you’ll understand. Cow-milk cheese bad, goat’s-milk cheese good. When we took Sarah to our favourite fromagerie in Les Halles and showed her the thirty cheeses she could eat, I thought she was going to vault the counter and push the owners out of the way. So it was a massive joy to see Sarah eating cheese. For breakfast on baguette. For lunch as dessert. And for dinner. Just a big wheel of brebis with a glass of water.

Nick, on the other hand, can eat anything, and often will. We ate a lot, too, just to be polite, and then we all walked it off with long hikes at Bages and at Chateau Peyrpetreuse, where the wind threatened to carry the boys off. We spent the end of that windy day at Colliore, a place I never tire of despite its being a tourist magnet, and Ben and Max collected rocks while Anne showed our guests that lovely town. Which had milk-free gelato, so guess who did what. On our way out of town, I made everyone stop so I could finally visit Antonio Machado’s grave, whose lost poems Jim Harrison has come twice to northern Catalonia to find. While Nick and I stood over the great poet’s memorial, we tried to think of a poem we should say, but could only come up with something having to do with Nantucket.

Two green authors

One dead one. (Not from Nantucket)

Nick & Sarah

This was also the last week before the cherries became truly, memorably delicious, but that didn’t stop us from eating some underripe ones. The birds were at it too, so Nick and I acted like men and swung a couple of nets over the tree to protect the fruit from the birds. It worked: by the end of the month, we’d collected at least ten kilos from the tree and had put them to work in the form of cherry cobblers, cherry pies, and at least two magrets de canard à cerise. The second one of these, in which I stewed cherries in balsamic vinegar and chicken broth, and then violently boiled it down with some Banyuls, was pretty damn memorable. Memorable, too, was the three or four nights Anne and I sat her parents at the kitchen table pitting cherries in two-kilo bunches and putting them in bags to be frozen for future fancies.

Real men do net cherries

ALP, WE'RE TOO BUSY

We had a couple free days when Sarah and Nick left to continue their Continental-European adventure, so of course we got in our car and drove five hours to the Alps. Because we don’t like to sit still, we Redhill-Simards. It’s fair to say I didn’t want to go on this particular trip after Italy and Australians, and it was an invitation to go to Bernard and Francoise’s place in Colmar Villars, in the lower Alps, which meant finding brain power I sorely lacked to talk French for three days solid. And yet, somehow, this little mad interlude in a month of madness turned out to be a perfect weekend, no small thanks to Bernard and Françoise’s warmth.

Happy boys in the mountains ...

Just an aside here to say: planning to spend a couple of years in the south of France and having it work out in as consistently lovely a fashion as it has is enough, but to have a landlord like Bernard, who just might be one of most kindhearted people we’ve ever met, is really above and beyond the call of karmic duty. I know he can’t read this, but if we ever told him how lucky we are to have fished him out of the universe of landlords he’d just shrug it off anyway.

And, his lovely partner has a 500-yr-old stone house halfway up a mountainside, to boot. We ate, drank, gabbed and also trekked, ie, 25km in two days with our rather game sons in tow, up and down a couple of mountainsides. Rather incredible experience, especially the second walk, which saw us hiking along the serpentine edge of a rushing river, then up to a waterfall for lunch, followed by six more km along the sheer, stone-scattered face of a mountain canted at a 70º angle, only a path worked into the rock keeping us from sliding 600 metres to our deaths. I ain’t joking: see the pics. And yet, apart from one or two extremely scary little bits, we felt safe. You tend to believe in surroundings this gorgeous that nothing can go wrong, and the fact is, nothing did. Except we ran out of red wine.

Not joking about the danger.

Scenes from two days in the mountains ... sun, cool air, lots of exercise and GOOD FOOD

A LITTLE BOY FROM OTTAWA ...

Next stop on the tour of love was a much- anticipated visit from Nanny, Grandpapa, and Cousin Jacob. Jacob had never been overseas before, so this was a big jump for him, and he seemed to adapt wonderfully. And of course his young cousins were over the moon to see him, even if he’d somehow grown four inches in ten months. The three boys ran around, played soccer, went to the beach for dips in VERY COLD water, watched movies, ate awesomely, and bickered. A little. It was great to have Jacob in the house. Nanny and Grandpapa had gotten through a pretty stressful spring, with Renald’s knee-replacement surgery, and although the knee threatened to be mean to Renald on a couple of the days, overall it was a great two weeks with him able to be up and about.

An intellectual moment at St. Guillaume le Desert

Mmm, Nanny's chicken-asparagus lasagna!

The last supper ... two days before Denny & Eitan go "home"

We spent a great, hot day at the Pont du Diable, where the beach was mysteriously busy with English highschool students. The water was DAMNED COLD, and some of us managed to get into the water for two or three minutes.

Charlot: not a waterdog

Perfect ice cream moment

But this visit wasn’t about sightseeing so much as it was about being together, and that we did. Lots of nice meals, including some much-needed Nanny-cookery, and those nights spent pitting cherries resulted in a big batch of delicious homemade cherry jam (of which, one month later, we have almost none left). There was also a great deal of cards, which, with no bias at all, I have to say the team of Renald-Redhill was more or less unbeatable. I frankly don’t know why those women even bother, but I have to salute their pluck.

A pictorial guide to making cherry jam in four steps:

And there you go: jam! That was easy. (Don't believe what they tell you
about lemons having enough pectin to set jam. The buggers don't. Use pectin, dammit.)

At the end of ten days in Narbonne, Anne and the boys went up to Paris with Nanny, Grandpapa, and Jakie for a three-day adventure in Paris. Yours truly locked the door and worked as Narbonne once again treated its patient citizenry to three straight days of astonishingly violent rain. At one point, the morning after everyone left, the skies were so dark at 9am that it would have taken a flashlight to find the car. Hey, you don’t see that every day.

Anne may well insert some details of the Paris trip, but as a second-hand witness to it, all I can say is that it paid off for me in a rather large package of pastrami from the Rue de Rosiers and some bagels, so I assume it went very well indeed. That won’t stop me from putting some pics up though!

THE GREEN REPORT

It’s been a while since I’ve updated you greenthumbs on the garden, and because our digital camera has cacked (thanks Canon -- I just discovered the problem with the camera is the object of a class-action suit against you -- glad I spent $500 on this bloody thing) I can’t show you pics of the yard, which is really something else. While our Ontario visitors were here, I dug up about 2kg of new potatoes from the potato patch, which gave me the real-life sensation of one of my only recurring dreams, that of finding a trail of coins on the ground. The potatoes, which as you well know, grow in the rootball under the plant, are irregularly spaced, and if you want to harvest from a live plant without actually uprooting it, you have to dig into the mound the potatoes are planted on and find the little treasures yourself. So you root around and clear some dirt, and there's a glowing yellow ball, and then, look, there's another beside it, and one underneath them ... Man, they were wonderful: delicate, sweet, and so fresh. In a couple more weeks, I’ll take up the maincrop (which will probably be the same size) and we’ll have a second feed on them.

I just put in the last crop for now: watermelon. They call it pasteque here, and it’s a smaller, greener melon, but it’s basically the same fruit. The melons join cucumber, zuccini, snap peas, peppers, green beans, the potatoes, artichokes (done for the season), cocktail tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, and something called "russe," which is supposed to be like oxheart tomato, but whose blossoms are all falling off, leeks, onions, radish, carrot, three types of lettuce, basil, and something we call a “Cape Gooseberry” if we call it anything at all -- most people have eaten it, but don’t know what it is. It’s the orange berrylike fruit that comes in a papery Chinese-lantern-type skin. There's often one on your plate as a dessert garnish in shmancy restaurants. It’s called Physalis peruviana, although they just call it physalis here. It’s related to tomato and tomatilla, but it’s used much more as fruit. I love them, and since they’re available to grow here, I thought what the heck.

So that’s the vegetable patch. The fruit trees are in full fruit now, although the cherries are done and nothing else is quite ready. We have some big peaches and apricots, but they’re still hard, and the summer figs are enormous, but hollow-feeling and hard, and I’ve been told they’re not that good to eat. We have to wait for the ones that will form in August and be ready to eat in October. I'm discovering how strange and ancient fig trees are. For one thing, many people believe that fig trees fruit without flowering, but the strange fact is that the fig fruit itself is the flower; it's an "involuted" flower, which is to say the flowers grow inside the fruit. The little hole at the bottom of the fig is actually the entrance to the flower, which is pollinated by tiny wasps specialized to figs. These wasps go inside the fig to lay their eggs and often die inside the fruit. The acidic fruit dissolves the wasp's body, but the prevalence of maggots (larvae) inside figs is a result of the wasps' life-cycle. Bet you were wondering why they were so crunchy, huh? Also, fig trees produce a milk-white latex that, in ancient Egypt, was used to make coffins for mummies! Mmmm, crunchy mummies. And local folk cure has it that the sap that comes off the stem of a unripe fig cut from a tree is good for soothing burns.

More on all of that anon, but for the meantime, he’s some sexy shots of cherries just dying to be popped into your mouth. Don’t worry, we did it for you.

And that was May. We’re well in to June now, and it’s been lovely and quiet and often very warm. I made it out to Lyon for a few days last week to do some research on something I’m writing, and I found our May weather lying in wait for me in Lyon, but I escaped and drove down the Rhone, which is half wine, half nuclear power plants. Depressing, in fact, in places. But there was a lot to see, and some really lovely unexpected towns, like Vienne, which was packed with Roman history and was gorgeous to boot (less so under lowering skies) and Valence as well, where Napoleon lived as a sixteen-year-old army lieutenant. And I ended up at Aix en Provence, a town I hadn't yet seen, and I fully understand now why people love it. Outside of Paris, it’s probably the most beautiful city in the country.

Next week, we’re joined by friends from Canada, with their excited children in tow, and the twelve (!!) of us head down to Spain to spend a week in a stone farmhouse. (Check it out!) Hopefully we’ll have the camera fixed by then! But until then, some random May images. So long until July ...

A typical Charlot moment. Shows at 1, 3, 5, and 7pm.

A very dark, brooding flower we saw both at Peyrpetreuse and in the Alps.
Fragile, growing alone or in small groups, black-cowled with bright yellow faces hidden underneath. Stunning plant, no one knew what it was called.

Finally, we found frogs in France. In St. Chinian ...

The very last picture our $499 Canon SD800 digital camera took before cacking.
On the road below Lyon. Maybe it had something to do
with my choice of subject matter?

PS: want to know when the blog is up? Write to me and I'll put you on our blog group alert ...

Flash from the Alps

2008-05-13T10:38:00.003-04:00

This pic is too great not to post it now. It's Ben and Max sitting at 1900 metres, at the halfway point of our walk with Bernard and Françoise this past weekend, five km in, with five km to get back to the car, just after a lunch of ham, fresh bread, red wine, apples, and cheese. Hate us if you need to, but just look at these kids ...

April and other amusements

2008-05-06T12:08:00.015-04:00

Yes, wild horses have been keeping us away! The crazy season is upon us and April went by in a blur of visitors, travelling, ripening fruit trees, seedings, and deadlines. Somehow in the midst of all these preoccupations, we are working, and April was a Brick month and one of various deadlines for Anne as well. But that’s not what April was about. As March rains gave way to many mixed weathers (some of it desireable!) we prepared ourselves for a veritable embarassment of riches in the form of visitors. As I write, we are delighting in the company of Nick and Sarah, who came all the way from Australia a couple of days ago and have braved some significant jetlag (who eats dinner wearing sunglasses?) But one month ago, it was Buby and Elaine who came and spent nine days with us, but especially with the boys, who have not been properly spoiled since Nanny and Grandpapa visited in November.

Some nice ladies we met in Arles

There was a lot of cuddling to be done, but we did manage some adventures as well, such as finally having lunch at that farmhouse above St. Pons, in St. Chinian. This was a place Anne and I discovered in our perigrinations last fall, a little spot at roadside where—if you make a reservation—you can have a lunch made entirely of things grown or raised on the farm. I have to say, the food wasn’t amazing (think food the way granny used to make it, that is, if granny wasn’t a great cook) but it was lovely to be in this old roadside farmhouse being served what you can be sure the folks who worked there were also going to eat today.

A fine farmhouse lunch

We also visited the entirely stunning marvel of a town called Minerve, a cliffside village carved out by ancient rivers, and wandered around in the sunshine. A couple of days later, the sun still cooperating, we took a two-day feast of a driving trip and went to Montpellier and Arles. This was my second time in Arles, and I have to say, even without a van Gogh obsession, this is one terrific town. We stayed in a hotel on the square that van Gogh painted his famous café on (although everyone in the hotel warned us—vociferously—not to eat in that café … a gesture of aid, or was there, perhaps, some enmity between these two establishments!?) We had a great dinner on our night in Arles, at a tiny, hidden spot called Le 16. The next day, we wandered around Arles, taking in its ancient sites (how I love the thought of that poor, syphyllitic van Gogh wandering around those same streets in a fog of depression and inspiration) and I finally went and found the bombed-out grassy place where the maison jaune existed prior to WWII. On that spot, at the cost of an important bit of history, as well as a number of lives, some American GIs and members of the French resistance held their ground against Axis forces and reclaimed Arles for the “free world”. But in the fracas, the house van Gogh and Gaugin lived in was bombed to splinters.

Buby being repaired after a fall by Nurse Anne

Minerve Jews

Ben and Elaine

Dinner in Arles (will a kiss excuse Max from having to eat his supper? Stay tuned.)

Everyone in Arles

Charlot overlooking van Gogh's Night Café

A night-time tectonik show in Arles

Buby "singing" to a couple of "lucky" boys in Montpellier

We had lunch at Le Cilantro that afternoon, a truly great local spot, and went to Chateau Beck again to stock up on the 2001 rouge. These bottles, representing what is the best affordable red within 150 km of Narbonne, are on their last legs, I’ve discovered, and must be drunk up right away. Some rotten and damp corks have soured the purchase, and we are bidding adieu to what was a remarkable vintage, a genuine grand vin hidden among the pricier bottles and bigger names of the bas Rhone terroir. I imagine, for ten times the money, you could have a Chateau-neuf-des-papes not nearly as good as this Chateau Beck 2001 ….

It was so nice to have a week to yak and wander and eat good food with Mum and Elaine, and we were sorry to put them on the train to Paris at the end. This is where Anne was, having left a few days earlier to visit with her old pal Katya for a few days. It will be up to Anne to report on that trip, but judging from the pictures, they had a great time. Mum and Elaine splurged and stayed in the Luxemburg Parc where Anne and I stayed for her birthday last fall.

Happy girls in Paris ...

After a brief interlude for gardening, report-writing and -reading, novel-dabbling, and school, we had a short but great visit with Alana Wilcox, who’d come to England for the London Book Fair and dodged down to see us and hang out at 44 Beaumarchais for a few days on her own. On her own, because after filling her with red wine and duck, the Redhill-Simards were off to a much-anticipated visit to Italy. Maybe not anticipated enough, though, because we slept through our 4:30 am alarm the next morning and missed our plane. I think Alana was surprised to find me in her bedroom at 8am that morning, printing out new flight information in a panic. It involved (at an expense not to be quantified and never to be spoken of again) driving at a breakneck speed to Barcelona to hop what turned out to be one of the all-time terrifying flights (a storm over the Mediterranean had stirred the air up pretty badly).

A one-way flight to Rome costs what?

But then Rome rewarded us with bright sun, 22-degree air, and its considerable treasures. We saw many of the things one must see in Rome, with two boys who eagerly devoured it (as well as the gelato that, naturally, comes with it) including the Sistine Chapel on our last morning. We got to see our friends Jeannie and James, and their shockingly blond and unspeakably cute son, Nico.

Welcome to Rome (at last): the much-longed-for Tazzo D'Oro receives its cappucino-starved admirer

A nice pied a terre in Rome

Nico. Yum.

St. Peter's (I actually took this photo, so fuck off Getty Images)

Gelato!!

Anne and boys at the Roman forum (now eleven euros to get in)

Ben outside the Teatro Marcellus (hands off, girls)

The Pantheon at night

Making a wish at the Trevi Fountain

We also had a harrowing and wildly fun morning in the Villa Borghese, on a quasi-motorized bicycle for four that should probably be illegal to operate ...

Yes, we survived.

On the lake at the Villa Borghese

And we had the best pizza of our lives in a little sidestreet pizzeria in Trastevere called Dar Poeta. Feast your eyes!

***

I have a special place in my heart for Italy, and especially for Rome. There is something about the carelessness, joy, and cunning of the Italian soul that speaks to me. People seemingly this laissez faire, who have been resting on their laurels for 1800 years, as if they’ve got nothing else to prove: such an attitude amuses and delights me. Their signature gesture seems to be that up-pointing, steepled hand beside the ear that explodes into an open palm like a flower blossoming. As if to say do you understand NOW?

I love the contingent quality of life in Italy, the catch-as-catch-can-ness of it all. But there is also a downside to it, which we encountered on the Amalfi coast, and especially on the outskirts of Naples, which is dotted with depressed towns completely in the thrall of a long-standing battle between local governments and the Camorra, the region’s mafia. There, a years-long garbage strike has already gone past the point of no return, and the people live among mounds of shocking, sick-making trash that is collected no more than once a month, probably in acknowledgement of the fact that there will be no more pockets to pick if the populace dies of cholera. In Campania, there is this contrast between the profound natural beauty and the difficulty of daily life. This is not only true in the grey, crippled towns surrounding Naples today, we also witnessed it in Pompeii and Herculanum, where Vesuvius, over a single day in 79 AD, wiped out every living thing for leagues around. But nowhere was the value of taking what you wanted more accentuated than in the behaviour of drivers. We knew we were in for challenging driving around Amalfi, but nothing could have prepared us for the cliffside hairpinning roads stocked with insanely speeding drivers, weaving motorcycles, tour buses, amateur peletons, crooked old biddies walking their dogs, the occasional fisherman standing by the concrete guardrail, and the general sense of important, irreversible decisions being made moment-to-moment. But the coast road was nothing compared to the highway, where two lanes were routinely used as if four existed, and we spent, one afternoon, two hours driving five kilometres. The beauty of the coast itself is not enough to motivate me ever to go back.

Which is not to say that we didn’t have a great time when we weren’t in the car: we did. Visits to Pompeii, Herculanum, and Vesuvius were days well-spent, and Herculanum, with its silent witnessing to terrible natural tragedy, especially moved us. We were staying just outside of Amalfi in a little house perched high up on a hillside, surrounded by dogs (which the boys adored) and a very kind family, including Rosa, who carried all of our bags up the sixty steps to the front door, grunting like a bull. Rosa turned out to be one of the roadside lemon- and orange-sellers, and we passed her numerous times and stopped to buy (when she would let us pay for them) some of the juiciest, sweetest oranges on the planet. We visited most of the towns on the Positano side of the coast, and Positano and Ravello were the highlights. Ravello, one of the highest towns on the coast, was a hidden gem, a small town with a big cultural agenda, and a garden Gore Vidal called the most beautiful in the world: Villa Cimbrone. Here, Greta Garbo stole away to marry Leopold Stokowski in the thirties, and the villa and the gardens certainly gave you a reason to linger and perhaps even to marry in secret … (we’ll never tell!)

On a wall at a Roman brothel ...

A stunning floor mosaic

One of Pompeii's many restaurants

The lovely Rosa ...

Pictures from the really very lovely Villa Cimbrone

Positano, also, was a stunning place to visit, its houses ranging up the steep hillsides like barnacles stuck to the rock. But the town itself, packed with businesses and restaurants and art galleries, felt like a real place, unlike some of the other towns, which have become full-blown tourist traps with shops that should have vacuum hoses sticking out the front doors to advertise their intent.

Positano

And so, after a week in Italy and a safe return, we are here with our Australians, and soon Nanny, Grandpapa, and Jacob will be here to drink up the late-May sun, and then June is upon us, a month that has been renamed Party Party Party. Right now, I’m spending a lot of my time surveilling the fruit trees, which have needed thinning, fungus treatments, and much worry. And as of yesterday, when the first of the cherries went deep red (you did know that was a cherry tree, right? We didn’t …) and I discovered the birds are faster off the draw than I am, I have a new challenge: Save Our Cherries! Here is Nick and me covering the tree with anti-bird netting; proof that girly-men like him and me can rise to certain agricultural challenges.

We’re sorry to all of you for the way this blog has fallen apart, but hopefully this makes up for a quiet month online, and the below should keep you full of Ben, Max, and Charlot. A final note is to tell you all, officially, that we have decided to stay on in France until the middle of the summer, 2009. We hope you’ll forgive us for that too. (Well, I hope at least you won’t be dancing in the streets.) Also, since the blog has become somewhat less frequent, if you would like to get on a mailing list that will alert you to new entries, please send me an email to say so. If you are not an immediate member of the Redhill-Simard universe (ie, you lack our email addresses!) you can leave a comment with your coordinates and we’ll put you on.

***

I haven’t got our pics of Herculanum into the computer yet, but better (I hope you agree) is a poem about the place, only the third I’ve written while in France …

Herculanum

Its wall still encircles it, that dead city. They use
its sewers as wine cellars, at least one
basilica stores collectable
LPs. From the hill, in the private city,
there is less than silence. The locals fished,
rich Romans came in the summer.
Water at the gate and the mountain behind
and there was no back, forward, or down, no
retreat from the ever moment
they were about to enter. Sixteen metres
of mud walled them into the sea
or stilled them in their houses, perfect
simulacra of themselves. They found
an ivory comb in the pocket
of a little girl. Her mother’s earthpacked
mouth still forms
one of the sounds of her name.

(At last alone, I stood
in one of the back rooms of the stripped villa
above the baths and touched a yellow line
of paint, laid down two millennia ago.
For two hours, someone waited for the blue
to dry and with a fingernail
I scraped the yellow and saw
those hours. Incontrovertibly
alive at that moment, all of them, in their
summer home. Seen in a window, the men
in their wood-and-iron boats on the blue
August sea, and it was lunch time, olives
and bread and grilled fish on platters. The girl
pulling the white comb through her hair. Still
alive as they had been, I’d
gone missing and one of my sons
called my name. The sound of time
is roaring at our backs.)

(Obligatory cheesecake photo.)

Charlot with namesake

What the heck is happening to your blog, Redhill-Simards?

2008-04-27T15:00:00.002-04:00

We know, we know.

But here's the problem. Soon it'll be nine months we've been here. And we love it as much, if not more, than the very first day we got here. But unlike that day, these days feel familiar to us, and there's not as much to tell (in that breathless, you'll-never-believe-what-we saw/ate/did tone) and as a result, we've slipped here. A lot. We're still trying to get in our reports of who came and what we all did together, as well as reports of our travels, but there seems to be longer and longer lag times ...

So. We're going to change focus here a little. We're going to try for a monthly report, to be posted in the first week of every month. And we may not be as thorough as we've been. But we'll still be here!

So, April's report in about ten days ...

(Also, for those of you who know how to do it: you can call us, too! We're always more interesting in person ...)

Pictou County comes to Narbonne

2008-04-01T11:03:00.012-04:00

Guess who came to dinner?

Boysalooza

It seems hard to believe, but it really happened. Our friends Alta & Tom from Nova Scotia arrived last week with their two sons, Mitchell and Alex. Rue Beaumarchais expanded to welcome our visitors, and the weather decided to be kinder to the Owens than it had been to Julie and Ron. After wetting their feet for five days in Paris, touring the Normandy region and a very long travel day, the Owens made it to our corner of the country. Alex, a lifelong lover of elephants, finally had his first real encounter with the beautiful beasts at the Réserve africaine in Sigean. He said he'd waited ten years and thirty-four days for the happy moment. The whole family shared his joy—and they all had fun encounters with various wild beasts to report (Mitch is still shaking his head in laughter at that ostrich).

Mitch's love of all things skateboarding lead them to locations we didn't know existed and they made quick friends with the owner of Narbonne's skateshop and various market-stall sellers. Somehow, Mitch also found himself behind the wheel of a Porsche. For about two minutes, but he was in heaven.

Lots of shopping ensued as well. Montpellier's parking garages were somewhat unkind to Tom—who had his worst lifetime driving experience while going down the upramp. Luckily, the French drivers (not known for their easygoing politeness) didn't insist on driving up at the same time. And, some nice drivers offered their spot (after they stripped off several layers of clothing to get back into their vehicle). Some drivers seem to forget that their neighbouring car also has doors, especially when parked way way down in those underground parking garages.

"Old" friends in a bind in Figueres

We all discovered that Figueres has one of the coolest playgrounds we've ever played in (Alta and I agree) although the Dali teatro-museo and its two-hour long lineup will have to wait for another time. On Easter Sunday—after picking up our lamb at the market—the Dads planted the eggs for the egg-hunt and supervised their collection (that's them in the upstairs' windows).

Two men locked in the house to keep them away from the chocolate.

Lots of chocolate eating later, Narbonne-Plage beckoned. Alta and I collected sea shells, though it was too windy for one of our patented sand-houses (complete with stick people). In our thirty-six years of friendship, we've perfected their construction. Instead, we wandered about while the boys dug into the dunes piled up near the concrete wall. Alta was spilling sand out of her pockets for days afterwards. Michael's close friendship with M. Séguy introduced us to the delicacy of lamb shoulder and unfortunately, to head cheese. Oh, and if Michael offers you something to eat while in les Halles, consider the old adage: taster beware.

Karting Krazy

Max Andretti

After the beach, we wandered toward Gruissan when we spotted a mecca for boys of all ages: karting! We rushed back home, picked up Tom, Michael, and Mitchell and headed back down for a go-karting extravaganza. Neither Max nor Ben had ever tried it before but they impressed us with their natural speed-demon qualities. I'll let the official race photos do the talking. The older "boys" also raced around like fools, with both fathers obsessively passing poor Mitchell around the track.

We left Aude for the Cévennes on Easter Monday, and wandered into the Grottes des demoiselles. On first sight, the mountain can't possibly have any caves as it looks like a solid chunk of rock. We boarded a funiculaire elevator which took us up into the mountain (*yes, seems counterintuitive, doesn't it?) Les grottes des demoiselles was discovered in 1770 and widely excavated in the 1870s; its funiculaire has been in place for nearly 80 years. So, all that time and human exploration has opened up its secrets to a wide audience. We were struck by how open and welcoming the caves were, with tall cathedral ceilings and expanses of open space.

Anne, unfrightened in a cave, with cute boys

A view of the interior. Cinematography: M. Redhill

Not nearly as creepy and claustrophobic as expected (yes, another Anne phobia). The stalagmites and stalactites were spectacular—here's one the boys took of a dinosaur-shaped form ... that's about a million years' worth of drips ....

Among the trees

Our region of France offers a chance for exploration from the vantage point of its treeline; a sport known here as Parcours arbo-forestier or PAF. Our little group donned the funky safety lederhosen required, learned how to clip on and clip off, and set off on the green parcours to apprentice. Ben and Mitch quickly demonstrated their expertise (they were miles ahead of us), and Alta, Alex, Max, and Anne poked our way forwards, cautiously. With Tom cheering us on, we had a spectacular time, notably perfected our tyrolian techniques (screaming is good) until the thunderclouds gathered and we were repelled down from the blue parcours by a very amiable monitor. As Alta wisely said: I don't do thunder.

Various folks PAFfing the day away:

All in all, a terrific visit! Thank you, Nova Scotians!

Redhill Garden Update (for all you legume-heads)

April is here and things are about to run riot. From my window, I can see the apricots dotted with tiny fruit and the big peach tree is blooming insanely. Here's probably my favourite France pic so far ...

I stood under this tree on the weekend and listened. There must have been a hundred bees in the tree and another two hundred roaming about the tiny white flowers that are growing on the thin green stalks around the trunks. It sounded like the universe's violin section tuning up.

Busy as a ... um ...

Right now both apricot trees are putting out fruit—about five hundred on each tree. When they're about an inch long, I'll have to prune them back to about half in order to get the tree to concentrate its sugars in the fruit we'll want to eat, starting in late May, early June. The tree doesn't care what its fruit tastes like: it's just after dropping as many seeds as possible. But I'm dreaming of jam and tartes abricotes, so I'll be pruning ferociously.

The biggest one on this branch is about 1 1/2 cm long ...

Meanwhile, the potatoes, green beans, cilantro, basil, parsley, and radishes are in, but there is nothing above ground yet. The wild leek transplants are not happy and seem to be dying, but we'll see ...

This, also, is growing ...

Spring Has Sprung (and we're growing visitors)

2008-03-18T08:51:00.018-04:00

WARNING: JEW OPERATING HEAVY MACHINERY IN AREA.
USE EXTREME CAUTION

GARDEN OF EATING

It’s 22 degrees here today under blue skies. I know you get tired of reading that, but I never get tired of writing it. The wild part of our backyard is changing every day now. The fruit trees are either in flower or they’re beginning to fruit. I spend about fifteen minutes a day out there now, studying the branches, staring at the progress of various flowers, watching buds open to reveal either a studding of flowerheads or a tiny spear of leaves that, within a month, will create a shady canopy over this part of the backyard. (That's a fig-studded branch above; to the left are the first apricots breaking free of their flowers.) The grape vines are sending out silvery-green new shoots, the ground is covered in a carpet of wildflowers, and here and there, there are wild onion or leek laying their green feathery leaves over the ground. In a few days, I’m going to dig up a bunch of these and transplant them to the vegetable patch.

Ah, the vegetable patch! Not fair to call it a patch, either: I have a proper garden for the first time since my late twenties, which was the last time my father used the big space beside our cottage to grow tomatoes, cukes, strawberries, peppers, and the like. I’ve tried so many times in Toronto to make a garden, but from the tiny, shady strip on Montrose Avenue to the chestnut-shadowed backyard on Muriel, we’ve never had any luck with much more than beans and basil. Not this year. I’ve just spent the last three weeks tearing out artichokes (down from 40 plants to 10) and turning the soil, taking out huge patches of grass, all to get ready for the big show, which begins this week with the planting of potatoes, carrots, beans, radish from seed, basil, coriander, and parsley from seed, and transplanted leeks & onions (there are wild versions of both plants growing in the backyard; I'm going to dig them up in their soilballs and domesticate them ...) I have a box behind the shed with brand new strawberry sets in it, and I’ve built Anne a lettuce patch on the right side of the garden. In all, there’s about 60 square metres of arable earth waiting for us to put whatever we can dream of in it. Below the artichokes is a chunk of earth that’s going to wait for tomatoes (a few more weeks), which will have carrots and basil interplanted. The carrots are good pest companion-plants (the carrots and tomatoes will protect each other from bugs), and the basil is a good intercrop. The potatoes and beans are good companion crops as well. Later, there’ll be spinach, red pepper, cucumber, climbing peas, more herbs, a couple horseradish plants at the corners for pest protection, and maybe a couple of surprises. There’s a hunk of 1-metre square earth at the bottom of one of the two rows of artichokes that might become a single big squash plant, we’ll see.

Where did this green thumb come from, ask ye who know me well? It’s a submerged, vestigial thing in me, I can't explain it. But I like to see something start off as a seed and turn into something. Anyway, what's a red pepper plant if not a natural novel? You put in the seed, something interesting starts to happen (if you're lucky); the shoots of green and leaf seem pretty worthwhile, but then it gets ever more complex. Flowers! Fruit! Bugs! (We call that "a reversal" in the narrative arts.) You can even mark time with it. And then the third act (ripening) ends with a shocking twist: murder. But we just call it salad.

I’ve tried so many times to do something worthwhile in Toronto vegetable beds, all to no avail. Living in Little Italy was pure torture, too, as my elderly neighbours elided all semblance of living space in their backyards to grow these massive gardens in dark black soil. I can remember one of them, a guy about eighty years of age and at least four feet tall, appearing at my fence as I hand-mowed the little amount of grass that grew in front of our house on Montrose. He asked me if he could have the grass to mulch his tomatoes and I put it into the bag he was lugging around the neighbourhood. I’m sure my grass contributed to the growth of a few massive veggies, but that’s as close as I’ve come in the last two decades to growing my own food.

On Monday, as you can see from the pic above, Jacques lent me his rotocultivateur after I’d proven my mettle in his absolutely massive vegetable patch on Saturday morning (where I received my first gardening “lesson” from him and his friend Jean). Jacques’ garden is 150 metres from his front door and he’s growing just about everything under the sun in what is more like a small field than a vegetable garden. I mean, the man is growing marrow for God’s sake. Parsnip. Salsify. You got room for salsify in your garden, you’re almost an actual farm. Plus, he has tons of little trees growing various fruits and nuts. It’s inspiring. The three of us toiled under the last of the grey skies that had infected the region over the last couple of weeks (more, mournfully, on which later).

I was the grateful recipient of tips on how to plant potatoes, how to deal with snails (apart from snailbait, you take them out of your garden—where they like to gorge themselves on lettuce and strawberries—and you mercilessly crush them beneath your hobnailed boot), and some forbidden pairings. For instance, you never plant potatoes and tomatoes together, nor do you rotate them in the same soil, since they’re susceptible to the same kind of worm. Garlic, onions, and shallots stunt the growth of beans. And here’s a cool one: young dill improves the health of your tomatoes, but once it matures, it stunts the fruit. Finally, I was grateful for the instruction on how to use this bull of a machine ...

So yesterday, I turned over my soil, having enriched it with compost and stale baguettes. Charlot has since eaten about half of that bread, thus proving he is part vegetable. Whether you like it or not, I’ll keep you posted on my legumial progress.

But now, let us rewind a few weeks and catch you up.

WE WENT TO THE CANARY ISLANDS

Tenerife, to be exact. Do you really want to know everything we did? It’s an island. We stayed in a hotel in a zone tricked up for tourists 30 years ago called Playa de Las Americanas, which seems like a brilliant name for a new tourist area, except for the fact that Las Americanas (as well as Los Christianos, right beside it) is choked, swarmed, overrun, and infected by Brits. Average age: 214. So it’s a kind of retiree paradise, which caters to them with “real” English breakfasts, tea shops, and all the really horrible British newspapers with unisyllabic headlines like "Soused Sot Kills Tot." Not the height of culture, is Tenerife. But if you ever want to see what ruddy skin looks like burnt to a crisp, Tenerife is the place to go. (If you poured a little bit of glaze over the men, they'd be indistinguishable from baked hams.)

But I obsess. We had an amazing time. We stayed at a hotel called La Bitacora, about 1 km from the beach, and it had a brilliant pool, and a buffet that we didn’t get sick of until the fourth day, and we sunbathed and read about four books each, and walked the fairly commercial town itself a whole bunch of times, a couple time to play minigolf, and a couple times to escape the buffet. There’s not much narrative here, though—the days sort of bleed together. We did take one day and rented a car to go look at the rather spectacular island, which has as much gentle as unforgiving beauty, being a volcanic island with a lot of inaccessible inland (what is accessible is either used for tourism or banana plantations, see left). We drove north around the edge of the island under high bright skies, and then turned inland where it rained heavily and a crown of fog descended on everything. When we got to the other side of the mountains, we found ourselves in a lovely authentic little town called Puerto de la Cruz, which had a stunning little town square. And miles of hotels.

The rest of the time, our days were like this:

The pool at La Bitacora. No reserving of chaises longues allowed (Unless you're British and over the age of 70, in which case you're allowed to reserve your chair with a towel as early as 6 am)

Happy boys on their balcony

Minigolfers in minigolf paradise

Anne describing the size of something

One of my very cute boys at poolside

Max & Papa on the beach (nice lips, huh?) (His, too)

Volcanic cliffs of Tenerife

Mama & Ben at supper

Papa & Max

And our nights were like this. What you see below is a dance contest. It took place every night at the “kiddie disco” (because a day vamping in the sun wasn’t enough to tire them out). When the music stops, you have to instantly hit the ground. The last kid to sit down is out. The group thins. The last guy left wins. To wit:

We swam, we ate, we loafed. Max tried to learn some Spanish. Here he is explaining how the Spanish word for “more” is “mohre”:

(In case you didn’t get that, they spoke plenty of English at the hotel.)

Not much more to tell here. It’s sort of a footnote, albeit an incredibly enjoyable one. Anyway, we know you’re more interested in this story:

SPRING VISITING SEASON IS UPON US!

And what better way to initiate it than welcoming Tante Julie and Oncle Ron to Narbonne! We’d all been counting the days and hours (with Julie’s help, who has a very accurate how-many-more-sleeps clock at her house) and, at last, they descended the train, and so began a week in the bright, beautiful sunshine of the south of France.

Um, what I mean is, as you can see from the video, the weather was stunning when their train pulled in, as it had been for much of the preceding three weeks. But the next morning, not so much. And the day after that, well, a little grey and rainy. And … um, for the entire week. Cold, dark, rainy, windy. Right up until they had to leave us a week later. And half an hour after their train left for Paris that morning? 20 degrees and gorgeous. As it has remained ever since. Narbonne can be a hard mistress. We felt bad that Julie and Ron were here to see the dark side of the weather. There is sun 300 days out the year here, so we were a little bitter that they got ten percent of a year’s supply of shitty weather all in one week.

But did that dampen our pleasure? Did we enjoy our beouf bourguingon and café au laits any less? Drink red wine with reduced joy? Go exploring with any reduction in fervour? Play fewer games of Up and Down the River? Nay, we did not. Screw the clouds.

It was a wonderful week. Some of the highlights are best presented pictorially, so forge on.

Ron, Michael & Julie wandering through Albi

Lovely sisters

Duuuuuudes!

Tante Julie with lookalike

Almost all of us in Albi (the missing number if behind the camera)

Some of the highlights are not photographed, however. One had to be Ron’s and my visit to the market one morning, to buy succulent roast chicken and veggies. We moseyed through town, got to the market, did our shopping, looked dead eels in the eye, and when we were ready to go, I proposed a nice relaxing coffee at the one bar where the guy makes a genuine cappucino. I ordered my foamy delight, and Ron opted for an americano. Which, anywhere in the world, is a shot or two of espresso with hot water. It’s called an “americano” because when the American GIs wanted coffee in WWII, there was no drip to be found in Italy and the baristas there added water to the espresso to make it more like coffee from home. The name is actually meant to be derogatory, since Italian baristas considered it a sacrilege to water down espresso. (See what you learn on this blog?)

But that’s not what Ron got. It turns out there’s an “americano” cocktail that’s made from vermouth, campari, and soda water. And when you order it at 10 am in the market of Narbonne, they figure you need a strong one. So there it was, glinting in a collins glass and the both of us thought it was pretty funny, especially me, who didn't have to drink it. Ron got it in him, though, God bless him, and that was hard owing to the persistent giggles. Then I carried him home. Where’s one’s camera when it’s needed? In case you wake up one morning and a coffee just isn’t enough, here’s the recipe for an americano, Les Halles style:

* 1 shot Sweet Vermouth or Noilly Prat Red
* 1 shot Campari
* splash of club soda
* Garnish: orange slice

Pour over ice into a collins glass. This will give you a drink of about 150ml of almost pure alcohol. Good morning to you, sir!

More of the same weather greeted Julie and Ron when they took a couple days to visit Nîmes, the Pont Du Gard, and Avignon, and it sounded like they survived it. Julie has unwisely offered to be a guest-blogger here at Ontheviadomitia, so I hope in a couple of days to add a post from her and Ron that tells you all about their time here, including their culinary experiences in Provence, which I think you will be amused by. I’ll preface those stories by saying that we have learned here in France that it’s actually okay to criticize wine—whether in a restaurant or at a domaine, because anyone who drinks wine must know what they’re doing, and wine can be very personal. But when you are served a dish in a French restaurant, it arrives perfect. So beware if you don’t like it …

Another reunion!

We had a dinner party Friday night with Charlot’s godparents John and Joanna coming by, and I made my first honest-to-goodness beef Bourguignon. It took all day to cook, and in my mind, it was perfect. Now, either you come from a mushy-meat background or you don’t, and one of my favorite foods is brisket. Bob Huggan, a regular character in this blog, makes a mean stew, and I’ve been known to dabble in goulash. But Anne prefers her meat the way she likes her men: firm and quick to bleed. So for her, a plate of bourguignon is a nightmare. But everyone else adored it, and it gamely offered itself as an additional couple of lunches afterwards, and as all you fans of toothsome stewed meats know, two days in the fridge can turn a very good stew into a memorable one. Mmm.

On the weekend, Ben had a hockey tourney in Toulouse, and the four of us tootled out to Albi, another dot on the map we’ve never visited. It was quite a surprise, this stunning little jewel. It lends its name to the “Albigensian Crusade” which was struck to eradicate the breakaway church of the Cathars in the 13th century. The Cathars were a hyperstrict sect of gnostic Christians who were deeply antimaterialist and attracted a lot of followers in the south of France. Rome started to get pretty uneasy about it all, and over seven decades, starting in early 1200s, they set about annhilating them all, and eventually succeeded. In Albi, a new catholic church was built to monumentalize the defeat of the Catholics and it’s more of an enormous fist than it is a church, on purpose. One of the most disturbing and beautiful cathedrals in France.

Albi is another of those places we might never have visited, but it’s a great small city, about the size of Narbonne. Its proximity to Toulouse, however (it’s 80km north) gives it a slightly more cosmopolitain feel than Narbonne has. It may be in the middle of nowhere, but it’s cultured, busy, and full of little surprises, like Le Papillon, the restaurant recommended to us by our hotel owners. Run by two Californian ex-pats, it’s a strange, modern-cuisine oasis in the middle of the monolith that is French food. These two guys, one an ex-lawyer, the other a guy who never cooked before coming to France, are educating the locals in such things as burritos, unusual savories, different soups, and new approaches to the old ways of doing things, such as frying a whole fish in tempura. Some folks won’t have anything to do with it, but they report a growing group of regulars and the food was marvellous. The other nice thing about Albi is that it clearly has a gay population, and in choosing our hotel, we lucked into the gay mafia and got great advice on what to see and what to eat. Narbonne is in desperate need of a few players from the other team to bring the cultural and culinary goods up to snuff. If you’re gay and you’re reading this, please come to Narbonne. There’s only so much a minor Canadian poet can do by himself.

Ben had a hockey game in Toulouse on Sunday, where it spat a vile greasy rain and all the restaurants were closed save one: an Indian restaurant and not merely a passable one. Someone was looking down on us. Butter chicken? Mmmm. The game itself was one of the best we’ve seen played between two teams of this age. You’ve read of the kind of hockey played in the south of France: picture the puck as a magnet and the players as iron filings. It looks more like rugby than it does hockey, and Narbonne’s teams tend to be beaten by scores that look more like the odds that the Leafs will ever will the Stanley Cup again. But this Sunday, augmented by players from Castres and Toulouse, the boys put on quite a show against Barcelona and beat them 5-3. Poor Ben, though, got his only good chance on goal on a breakaway in the second period that got buzzed dead at shift change when he was all alone coming over the blue line. Bad timekeepers!

The Monday, we kept the boys in school and the four adults lit out for the windy cliffs of Leucate. We had a disgusting lunch in town, and then went out to the abandoned falaise and walked in the insane winds. Despite our fears of being blown out to sea, we had a wonderful walk, exploring the ruined walls of old pastures and being held up by the gusts. Then we got back out to the car, which was parked at the end of the middle-of-nowhere road, and found a parking ticket on the windshield for 35 euros. This is extra funny if you know that I’ve been parking illegally in town for eight months and have never been fined. But drive half an hour out on an unkempt, empty road to the windswept netherworld of the Leucate falaise, probably visited once a day by humans, and you better look out for the gendermerie hiding in the gorse. It probably cost the Leucate municipality 50 euros in gas and salary just to have that yo-yo drive out there and make sure no one was breaking the law. Whatever law it was we broke. We still have no idea.

Julie & Ron at Leucate

A very sexy pair (wind was about 80 MPH)

We went into Fitou for a wine-tasting afterwards, which was our second wine-tasting of the week, the first being at the much-adored Chateau de la Negly, who make one my favorite wines here, La Falaise (no relation to our parking ticket location). They also make two very expensive wines, one called Portes du Ciel, and the other Les Clos des Truffiers. They can't open bottles of these wines for degustation, but they can suck a little of the unbottled stuff out of the barrel it's aging in and give you a little from a giant glass dropper. Which our friendly oenologist did. The Portes du Ciel was really lovely, but still very alcoholic and juicy; the Clos Des Truffiers, however, was like encountering a rose still clenched in its bud. It was way intense, very heavy and dark in colour, almost syrupy, and too heady to drink, but you could tell, no matter its youthful battering-ram energy, that it was a great wine. It's a fist now, but when they bottle it (we were trying the 2006) and it opens, it's going to be a grand vin.

A wine-tasting adventure at Chateau de la Negly

The spoils

Tuesday night was cassoulet night for Ron and me (the girls begged off peasant food; the bouguignon was their nod to tradition for the week). We’d agreed a nice autumnal meal was in order given the weather they’d had and he and I went to the supposedly famous Castelnaudary cassoulet stall in the market and picked up a crock of it. I love cassoulet, but I’m fully aware that it’s a small step from a rich bean stew studded with fragrant meats to a mushy pot full of gristle and hard-to-identify bits of crunchy badness. This one was somewhere inbetween, and as I sat across the table from Ron, who was smiling courageously as he worked his way through his serving, I knew this was probably the last cassoulet he’d ever eat. That might be the case for me too: I woke at 5am the next morning feeling like a dead porcupine was making its way through my guts. This feeling lasted for four days. So my next cassoulet is coming to my table at an authorized establishment, no more buying it from Les Halles.

I can’t report very well on Wednesday because I was mostly in agony and spent a lot of it in bed. But I hear a lot of cards were played. We kissed Julie and Ron goodbye at the train at 8 am Thursday morning. Ron and I cried bitterly in each other’s arms, gripping each other for dear life, as Anne and Julie shook hands and Julie said, “Thanks Sis, that was fun. See ya.”

The house felt pretty empty. But it smelled better. Ron: pack more socks next time, would you?

OUR NARBONNE

In the panic to get the story of our lives into this blog, I begin to feel sometimes that I’m letting the portrait of this wonderful city fade into the background, and there’s really so much to tell of the profoundly joyful dailiness of this place. As March gets warmer and even brighter (sorry Jules & Ron) people are creeping out of their hidey-holes and beginning to live in the streets again. We’ve always done this, all year round so far, because this place is liveable every day of the year to us Canadians. But the Narbonnais really only spread their wings from April to early November. The other four months, they kind of hibernate. And when we got here last August, we lived among them truly, drinking in their joie de vivre and watching them play. But it’s been a good four months since we’ve felt that vibe here, and we’ve gotten used to Narbonne being pleasantly sleepy. Now, though, we begin to sense their cocoons opening again. Little girls are drawing chalk hopscotch pans in the back alleys. The skateboard kids are doing their thing on the Quay des Barques. Within a couple of weeks, the three riverside snack stands are going to open. And the real sign of spring: the local putt-putt train is back at its depot, ready to take people around to see the sights of town. (Including, I must add, the newly reopened Musée de Lapidaire, the home of the much-longed-to-be-seen artifacts of the Roman wall. We took Julie and Ron there to see it. It’s in a church repurposed to hold these ancient stones, made up of stele, decorated stone, and funerary monuments. It’s a huge cold barn now lined with alleyways of stone to about four metres in height. And it’s entirely unsigned, undocumented. You have no idea what you’re looking at. And then, half an hour into your visit, they dim the lights and project a sound-and-light show on all four walls of the church, a spectacle they seem to be very proud of, created by two Italian fellas, and which has nowt to do with the artifacts you’re standing, now in the dark, among. Strange beyond comment.)

So the real life of Narbonne is blossoming. There is even more kissing in the streets. And as our time here continues, we belong more to it. A case in point is the slowly thawing love affair between myself and André Seguy, the 61-year-old grandson of the founder of Seguy Boucherie in Les Halles, the best butcher shop in Narbonne. Presiding over the freshest beef, lamb, and pork in town, M. Seguy is a large, slow-moving man with the half-lidded eyes of an alligator. I shop for my meat at his stall exclusively. When I first started patronizing his shop, he or one of his countermen would serve me without a by-your-leave, and sometimes, a prized local standing behind me would be served before me. Then, after a couple of months, M. Seguy began to recognize me. I began to tell him what I was making, and he would choose my meat for me. When I made my bourguinon last week, he cut me two kilos of shoulder, weighed it, then cut what must have been an extra half-kilo and put it into the paper for free.

But our relationship has just moved into an important new phase. The Jean I referred to above, with whom I gardened last weekend, is André’s younger brother. I mentioned this to André yesterday, who was delighted to learn that I had met his kid brother (age: 48) and was friends with Jacques Hemon. Then he wanted to know if I lived in Narbonne (he must know I do, but I gather this was the time to ask) and we actually sort of gabbed. Then he gestured me over to the other end of the counter and took out a slab of a rubbery-looking terrine. “Home-made,” he told me. “The best in the market. Try it.” He cut off a slab. It was fromage de tête, ie, a pâté made from all the parts of a pig’s head that are edible but you can’t really put on a plate. Cheek, tongue, ears, skin. It looks exactly as it sounds. And it’s held together by a yellowy gelatin to complete the aesthetic home-run.

I’m Jewish, okay? But I eat bacon and sausage and pepperoni and cappicollo and mortadella and what have you. I’ve never really had a taste for pork chops or ham, but there’s no good reason why I shouldn’t eat it if offered it. However, I’m pretty sure no matter how liberal my fellow Jews might be about eating off the uncloven hoof, I think there may be a genetic/tribal proscription against pork noggin. Give your average reform Jew a banquet-burger and stand back. Slices of pig ear in aspic, get out the smelling salts. So a kind of racial moment of truth was at hand for me in front of M. Seguy, as he waited for my reaction. I put the quivering, fat-pocked, glistening chunk in my mouth and chewed.

And here’s the thing: it was delicious. It really was delicious. And I almost puked as I swallowed it, thinking of what I was eating. I must have done a pretty good job of showing my delight, though, because M. Seguy wrapped up the whole slab and put it into my bag. “Fait cadeau,” he said, smiling.

It’s true love now. But I hope he has other goodies he feels like sharing with me next time.

OUR FRANCE

Not to venture too far out on the political limb, but I’ll close this massive post with a few words on our Dashing Leader, M. Sarkozy. Even in a country that still adheres to the old fashioned forms of etiquette, Sarkozy has provided a spectacle even the non-tabloid papers of France can’t resist. He campaigns for office with an obviously long-suffering wife at his side, gets elected, is dumped by the grimacing wife almost immediately, takes up with a middle-aged, but still-firm Italian model, is seen canoodling with her on every beach and every café patio in France, and then marries her, but not before (so reported some papers) he wrote his ex-wife in secret and told her if she’d come back, he’d cancel the wedding. Sarkozy sued the papers that printed this particularly juicy bit of information and it was retracted, but I imagine he sued not because it was untrue, but because there was some threshhold of foolishness even he didn’t want to be seen stepping over. This, combined with the man’s intolerance for anything either non-American or non-French—as minister of the interior, he called a French minority group “scum”; he later declined to campaign for the presidency in the south of France where most of them live—makes him look sometimes like a Monty Python Nazi, but for some reason, the detail that really made me wonder if the man was a genuine menace happened last week in Belgium. The European Union is governed in six-month blocks by one of its member nations. Right now, it’s Slovenia; in June, France will take over the helm. But it’s still Slovenia’s gig, and at a formal EU leadership dinner last week in Belgium, the current Slovenian president presided over a meal to all the member delegates that comprised a selection of delectable Slovenian national dishes. But Sarkozy threw a quiet fit and demanded an omelette. They had to go out and find him eggs to make him one. For this reason alone, you can be sure we’ll eventually return to Canada.

And yes, Charlot has learned to fly ...

We Are Very Badly Behind On Our Blog

2008-03-14T19:22:00.002-04:00

The management would like to apologize for the appalling lack of timeliness in adding new posts to this blog. The prospects of somehow writing up our experience in the Canary Islands, followed by the visit of Tante Julie and Uncle Ron, has caused our verbal and pictorial gears to jam. There is much to tell, but it is 22 degrees outside under sunny skies and the birds are singing and I have a very bad three-day tummy ache. But I—er, we—will try to have something readable up here by midweek next week.

I don't even have a picture for you. Sorry.

Somehow, the stinky baby is seven ...

2008-02-22T04:11:00.016-05:00

Max turned seven yesterday! (More on the dog later)

Birthday shenanigans

Busy week here at 44 Rue Beaumarchais. Especially today when, under the first sun in four days (it was 22º here today, people) we held Maxime’s seventh birthday party. Yes, that small, giggly, jelly donut of a child is somehow seven. We don’t know how it happened either.

Max had been counting the days to his birthday, and despite a late night last night, he all but erupted out of bed at 7:30 this morning, chanting that he was seven. (He later revised this to say he wasn’t going to be seven until 10 am, which is when he was born, but he was not willing to wait until 4pm to assert he was truly seven, which is what the time difference would demand, if he were going to be accurate and honest about it, which he wasn’t.)

Here I must pause briefly to go and get one of the ten leftover cupcakes Anne made today for the party, and of which a mystified and bemused French parent asked “Is this a Quebecois speciality?” It’s moments like this that still make me wonder who these people are. Who doesn’t know what the fuck a cupcake is?

That’s better. The last one with pink icing.

So after preparing for three straight days, nine of Maxie’s classmates showed up for four hours of sugar and games. The highlight was the chasse au trésor, which Anne and I cooked up yesterday and involved two teams with treasure maps. The maps lead to a clue and that clue lead to another, and so on. The best part was that each group was eventually lead to the freezer, where they found an icecube with a piece of paper frozen into it. When they put the cube into a handily available pan of boiling water, the paper turned out to be a web address, which lead one team here and the other team here. We had about as much fun as the kids, I think. Here's some video from the hunt.

Team one hunting a clue in the backyard

Team two finds their treasure!

Afterwards, many presents were opened and Max and Ben both complained their bellies hurt from eating too much sugar. But not for long. After most of the guests were gone, we sat around afterwards with Bérangere and her two guys, the irresistable Gaby, and his wonderful elder brother Axel, and drank beer and tossed a ball around.

Party Animals

Max opening his presents

The irresistable Gaby

The resistable Papa

Mama knows how to bring it

That lying dog

You don't want to know what's in those artichokes

Charlot (whom, after Jim Harrison saw a picture, said should be named Sky King) went to see his new vet for the first time yesterday. And there we learned that our sweet, playful puppy is a shameless liar. Shocking news: Charlot, who told us he was just over four months of age, is in fact probably six months of age. This owing to the tell-tale sign that he has lost a tooth, which only happens after five-and-a-half months. He might have been able to put that over us, poor trusting Canadians, but a French vet saw through his ruse right away. He's practically a teenager. So we’ve taken away his Oil of Olay. He also has an undescended testicle. If we do ever change his name, it'll probably be Uniball, the Sky King.

And worse, as it turns out, is that he smokes. How can we ever trust this animal again? At least he looks very French doing it, doesn't he?

"Why, hello dere, babydoll. Whaddya say you make us a coupla highballs, two for me and pour a sody-pop for yourself, and then we'll see what kinda fun we can have. But foist, I gotta get my whistle good and wet. Shake it, baby, I don't got all day."

A Great Deal of Eating

After a considerable period of social quiet, we sort of lost it this week and had dinner parties Monday and Wednesday, and a long, lovely tea on Tuesday. Monday night we at last connected the Canadian expat community, as we know it, by having dinner with Bob & Isabel, and Eitan, Denny, and their son Joseph. We made a full-blown Indian meal, which was transporting (we made our own ghee!), and more so because we drank a lot of excellent wine. Filet mignons drenched in a tamarind/sugar marinade came off the grill slightly caramelized and extraordinarily juicy. I would never consider marinating a filet, but a dear friend served this very dish to me in Toronto two weeks ago, and all I can say is that if there’s a way to improve a filet, it’s this way. (Screw bacon.) We also made our own paneer, a documentary on which follows immediately.

It was lovely to have some lengthy English conversation around our table, lovely to follow everything that was being said. Anne claims that even the wish for such a thing is holding me back from becoming a truly fluent French dude, but hell it was nice. Smart people, good food, a couple controversial opinions received in the spirit of inquiry: it was perfect.

Clockwise from top right: Saag paneer, tumeric new potatoes, basmati (covered) and a curry to go over the tamarind/demerara sugar-glazed filet mignon (not shown, sorry) ... yummmmmmm

So how to make paneer. We live in the heart of cheese culture, but my suspicion that the average French person doesn’t actually know the first thing about making cheese was confirmed this week when I tried, abortively, to find cheesecloth. Wine they can talk about endlessly, but I think that’s because it’s everywhere. The grapes, the men picking the grapes, the caves and cellars: everyone knows wine here because wine is everywhere they look. Cheese is not. Yes, it’s in the market and people know what they like, but the stages of its life are not omnipresent. If wine is in plain evidence, then cheese is a kind of culinary unconscious: created in the dark, through a process similar to wine’s, but shrouded in mystery. The average French person could not tell you the first thing about how cheese is made except that it involves milk.

Well, now I know more about making cheese than any of my neighbours, and I did it with a gallon of milk, a third a cup of vinegar, a dash of sugar, and medical gauze.

The finished paneer awaiting a delicious slathering of hot saag in its coconut curry sauce

Tuesday’s affair was simpler: just boiled water and some tea leaves. We had a visit from Charlot’s stepmum and -dad, Joanne & John, who will be taking the pup for a week starting Saturday when we go to the Canaries for a week. (We need a break from the south of France, you know.) Charlot was seeing his big sister Alba for the first time in over a month, but the two dogs immediately picked up where they left off. I think Charlot will have a quite wonderful week, although he was drenched in Alba’s spit by the time they left, so I hope Joanne and John will wring him out thoroughly before we pick him up next week.

And then Wednesday night, we made an incredible Poulet de Bresse dans deux vinaigres -- amazing dish. Our guests were Alex, Amy, and their young son Isaac. We used as well the risotto that had the leftover truffle sitting in it for a few weeks since we bought them: the rice was drunk on truffle odour and the risotto was delicious. Amy and Alex met in the States but now live in a very small town about an hour from us, in an ancient house that belongs to Alex’s parents. Isaac is five and cute as a button and the three boys get along terrifically.

So, what do you do after having guests three days in a row? Throw a party for eleven children. Now you know why we need to sit on a beach for a week.

We are definitely not in Kansas anymore

My fruit trees are blooming. White and pink and tiny sharp buds of green leaves. It’s February 21 and my baby is seven and I’m going to have apricots and peaches and plums on trees I pruned and watched over this year. Who knew.

Talk to you all after we get back from the Canaries.

A dream of home ...

2008-02-17T15:01:00.004-05:00

We’re not in Narbonne anymore, Toto

If one of the strangest experiences of my life was leaving Toronto for France, not much can touch the strangeness of returning to Toronto for a mere week, in February, on “business”. There is a blog for Consolation and all things literary, so I won’t go into much detail here on what I did at home on an official level, except to say that leaving Canada turned out to be a fine career move. It puts an interesting gloss on that old joke, “How can we miss you if you won’t go away?” The folks at the Toronto Public Library put on an incredible show and their support for the book, their inventions to help people get into the book, both real and digital, turned my head. This alone was worth the price of admission, an interactive map of Consolation’s Toronto, both the fictional and real city of 1858. Wow.

The week kicked off with an incredible event at the Metro Reference Library, with about 250 people in attendance. Ross Manson did readings from the book, and Mary-Lou Fallis did some period songs. Tina Srebotnjak interviewed me from the stage, and folks asked questions from the audience. A nice welcome home.

Redhill and Manson try to look attractive for the camera

People who thought they were getting a free turkey

During the week, I did a bunch of readings, got very sick, went to parties and dinners, visited individually with family and friends, sat with the mayor in his office for half an hour, and shopped. I brought back to Toronto 12 bottles of wine from France, and my suitcase weighed more heading back to Narbonne than it did when I left. There were some celebrations this week, too (who said I didn't have good timing): Mark's 40th birthday, Dad's 71st, and my neice Lily's first. Her father made her a duckie cake. No one ever made me a duckie cake. Thanks Mum.

"I hate Consolation! It's pedantic and unconvincing. And the present-day sections are, like, totally ass."
(People turn one and suddenly they know everything.)

I think I managed to see almost everyone who mattered in Toronto. The two or three folk I missed know how hard I tried to get to them and I hope they’ll forgive me. We had a particularly marvellous night at Alana Wilcox’s house the Sunday after I got in, a gathering of about 25 people and a bottle of wine for just about every person. Left to right, that's Susan Glickman, Kevin Connolly, Darren Wershler- Henry, Gil Adamson (who's brilliant novel from last year, The Outlander, should be on your bedside table), and our host, Alana Wilcox. After being away for six months, you mark the oddest little changes. Okay, so the belly on Laura Repas wasn’t exactly subtle, but lots of other little things were. A changed hair colour here, an ex-smoker smoking again there. The sly look on the face of the person who had to leave early because he had a new lover he wanted to get back to. The one with unexpected good news, the one with dreaded bad news. These things you mark day by day when you see folks moving through their changes under your gaze, but noting them in person after an absence introduces a bittersweetness to one’s friendships and makes you wonder how you have changed to your friends, in ways you don’t see day by day in your own mirror.

Bellies. Redhill on left (subtle), Repas on right (unsubtle)

Claudia and Don. Not on drugs. Always smiling. They're like that.

Two nights before, the experience of seeing lives change was even more profound, when I had dinner with a small gathering of folks whose kids have grown up with ours (and so we adults have grown up together). Two little girls turning into women, Maxime’s best friend without his baby-fat, Ben’s best friend looking yet more muscular, and three brothers keeping pace with each other, their faces just a little bit older. That hurt to see, because we mark the passage of time in our children and in the children of those closest to us, and I realized how many people are missing a chunk of Max and Ben’s childhood, and a good part too. A blog doesn’t cut it for those who wished they could bear closer witness. Even I see now, in Ben, the teenager lurking under that bright, soft flesh. Soon, he is going to start retreating into that secret world we were all once a part of and will never gain entry to again, and I am not going to be the coolest person in his life.

(Yeah, that's Ben, and he's still only nine. You know you're in trouble when one of your child's classmates, a girl, comes straight up to you after school and says, matter-of-factly, Je suis amoureuse de votre fils "I'm in love with your son.")

***

That was the week that was in Toronto. And now that I’m back “home," it's, well, weird. Naturally, it’s a bit odd to pop back into existence in the lives of our friends and family and then pop back out, but more than that is the feeling that I’ve broken the French spell. I keep waking up thinking I’m just a Torontonian pretending to live in France. And of course I am. But I just found it a little more convincing before I went home.

I do remember feeling this right after arriving here last summer: I can recall sitting bolt upright in bed that first night, August 3 2007, and wondering what the hell I was doing. I went upstairs that night and poured a large scotch to stop my heart from hammering, and I wrote in a diary: Good Christ, I’ve given someone my house and I’ve got nowhere to go back to. It took a while to settle—it was a big change—and it took about a week this time too. (By the way, last week I saw that house, and the folks in it are actually living there, among my things, and that was more like being posthumous while still alive than I’d ever like to feel again. I don’t think I’ll mind being posthumous when I’m actually dead, but walking around like you’re your own ghost is pretty strange.) Anyway, this is the kind of thing that takes extra doses of red wine and cheese to fix, but luckily you can get that prescription filled anywhere in town.

And now I'm back under the February sunshine, Charlot at my side hoping we’ll go back out into the garden and chase each other through the artichokes. It’s February 17 and I’m finally digging out the clods of grass in the patch I want the garden to go into. We have the artichoke toilet (Charlot will pee and poop nowhere else in Narbonne but in these artichokes) a patch for all the things I want to grow, a zone reserved for the pool when we put it back up in June, and then the rest of the place, with its fruit trees already in bud. No wonder I feel a little like Keanu in The Matrix, when he wakes up in his pod and realizes he’s dreaming his life. It’s a nice dream, but there’s a nagging voice that says, You’re supposed to be freezing your ass off right now and not liking it one little bit. What the frig are you doing in France??

For an answer to that question, stay tuned. At the end of this month, after a week in the Canaries (I foresaw that a mindless week on a beach might be necessary after the madness of February), we replace our front entrance with a revolving door and the spring visiting madness begins.

(PS: for those of you who have been getting impatient for a new entry, here it is, and I promise another one before we leave for the Canaries that is more about the Redhill-Simards, their hopes and dreams, their dinner parties, and especially their dog.)

(We end today's post with three photographic proofs:)

I really was in Toronto

Michael Helm has stalker, who is none too careful these days

and Ken Babstock is really going to be a father ...

In Dog We Trust

2008-01-25T06:10:00.001-05:00

It's been a week since Charlot arrived in our lives and, really, we haven't been living in the south of France for this week as much as we've been living in the country of Dog. It's been both a difficult and wonderful week. Difficult because Max came down with a really rotten flu that kept him out of school to Thursday, and wonderful because our very goofy, sweet, lovable Charlot was comic relief the whole time.

Favoured activity: romping through the artichokes

While Max was sweating away, Charlot slept with him or tried to play with him, and generally kept order in the house. That's when he wasn't finding secret places to poop, such as below my desk. Beware rolling a wheeled chair through poop. It's hard to clean. Also, if you're a writer, the occupational hazard of writing something shitty shouldn't really manifest itself in the real world if you want to stay sane.

The love-doctor is in

By the middle of this week, Charlot had learned to sit, and then sit and stay, and he seems to be immensely proud of his ability to learn. Our only problem, apart from the standard puppy troubles (housetraining, overenthusiastic biting) is kennelling him at night. We both hate the idea of keeping him in a box at night, but right now it's necessary or he may decorate the house while we sleep. At first, he didn't protest too much, but last night he cried at intervals the whole night and it was heartbreaking, not to mention difficult to sleep through.

He much prefers a situation like this one:

Although this is a fuller picture of the sleep habits of Charlot Crookedtail Redhill-Simard:

We'll try our best to tell you more about life in France next time. Although no guarantees, as I'm heading home in a week, for a week, and your next post is probably going to take place in Toronto in February. In the meantime, if you want to feel close to Charlot, you can answer our new survey, which is scientifically proven to be absolutely pointless, and is overseen by Price Waterhouse.

Recent Acquistions

2008-01-20T11:04:00.000-05:00

We've had an interesting week. A bunch of new things in the house. We'll let you see for yourselves, as you know, a picture speaks a thousand words ...

(NB: with the recent strength of Canadian words, the exchange rate means these pictures each speak 1044 words)

We got a new fridge because the old one kept milk at exactly the right temperature to make yoghurt. And ...

Ben got a hot new hairdo, a gift from Santa. Keep your hands off my kid, girls.

And ...

Finally, after much agonizing, delaying, and wondering, Anne and I decided to have another baby:

Say hello to Charlot (what the French called Charlie Chaplin ... believe me it fits). Although right now he's still known by his slavename Crousti. Yeah. We know. He's a dog, not a breadstick. Although I think he probably likes breadsticks.

We spent a lot of the fall talking about dogs, we went to a couple of pet shows in the last two months, and we'd pretty much settled on getting a Brittany Spaniel, although we had some major misgivings. One was worrying about how much energy it was going to take to raise and train a dog as high-maintainence as Brittanys can be. But we were ready for that in the end. The other problem, though, had us visiting a couple of local pounds this week because both Anne and I were wondering about the moral issues surrounding the breeding of dogs when, in our tiny corner of the world, there are over a hundred dogs without homes. So we started looking, and on Thursday, we saw a picture of this little fireplug and we visited him the next day (just the two of us). He was being fostered outside of the pound by a lovely Dutch woman named Joanna. Crousti had been brought in at eight weeks by the neighbour of his alcoholic owner, who'd finally decided the pup was too much work. Ten days at the Port-La-Nouvelle pound made Crousti almost insane, so Joanna, a volunteer, took him on and started to train him. One month later, she felt he was ready for the world, and at that moment precisely, we happened to be surfing the pound's site ...

Yesterday, we told the boys we wanted to take them to see a jewel Mama was interested in. "A diamond?!" they asked. "No," we said, "a black and white jewel." We showed them a picture of Crousti in the car on the way there and they were sold even before they met him. Ben wept tears of joy the whole way there, grabbing Maxime and kissing him.

Ohmigod we have a dog we have a dog we have a dog
(hey ... what are we going to drive our parents crazy about now?)

We think Crousti's part spaniel, part terrier (Jack Russell), and to judge from his teeth, part shark. We took him home yesterday afternoon. After exploring the house at his own pace and romping through the artichokes, he seemed to give us his seal of approval. He sat in his little dogbed while we ate supper (thank you Joanna!) and then slept happily in his kennel in our room overnight. No barking, soiling, marking of territory ... just a happy pup surrounded by people who want him. And apart from some overenthusiastic nipping and a tendency not to hear his masters' voices when he's got something more interesting to do, he's a very easy little guy. I taught him to sit still this afternoon with a few pieces of cheese: he'd agree to sit, quake as he tried not to leap for the food; then I'd move back five paces while telling him not to move, and then tell him to come, and he came (after a couple of tries) for his treat. Once we'd done this a few times, I decided that was enough for the time being, and went to read a book and he immediately came over and sat down smartly, like he was doing a demonstration, and stared at me expectantly. Hey bud, here I am, sitting my little heart out. Where's my frikkin' cheese? So he's clever, too. I think we love him.

Anne and I, who have some sad and loving memories of Bailey, have been ready for a dog for a long time. But it's hard to imagine any creature taking her place. However, judge for yourselves from the picture below: are we off to a good start?

Yes, people, it's Anne's patented Love-muffin pose.

And now we are five.

In the heart of a French "winter"

2008-01-14T07:49:00.000-05:00

Waiting for the three kings: fiery epiphanies in Girona ...

Somehow it’s been five weeks since I wrote in this blog. Bad form, but December was insane and I suspect the coming months will be much the same with the front door beginning to revolve. But it’s also a function of most of the “new” things about living in France being behind us. That might sound like we’re bored, but we’re not. We’re more deeply ensconced, daily life has a shape to it that’s begun to feel familiar. At the same time, the distance between us and what at times feels like “the old life” increases, which provokes all kinds of existential anxieties such as ones that begin with the question “who are we, anyway?”

I’m sometimes amazed (still amazed) that a place I'd never heard of two years ago is now so important to me. Narbonne? Even though it is a major city of this region, I probably would have lived the rest of my life without once hearing its name, and yet now I follow its politics, I listen carefully to its civic plans, I marvel at its modernity even though it is one of the oldest cities in Europe. How could a place like this have ever passed below my notice for forty years and how many other dozens of cities are there like this in the world that I am poorer for not knowing? Narbonne, for now, will have to represent them all and I realize that as I walk its streets and do my daily work in it, that my sense of home has changed permanently. This is a Torontonian of forty years speaking. Among all the people you know, I might be the most rooted one of all, the one least likely to feel settled outside of his hometown. And yet, here I am, wondering how I’m ever going to go home. (For all you grandmothers of certain children out there, just let me say that’s rhetorical. We’ll come home. Promise.)

Five months ago, this place was a dream realized. Now it’s a house, a school, a workplace, a collection of businesses where we shop and go out to eat, where people know who we are (even if they don’t know our names: a strange formality that obtains here ... people don’t ask your name and don’t offer theirs), as well a sense of place that can’t be faked. There is now no longer anything casual about our presence here. We have put down roots; thin roots, but roots just the same. We’ll tear these roots up next Christmas (we plan to stay on a little longer now) and then what will the world look like, feel like? Gazing on photos of our friends’ kids the other night we realized that the adults will be more or less the same (more grey, more paunch-slash-droop perhaps) but the kids are going to be completely different, as will ours to those who haven’t seen them in this time. On a hike yesterday with Anne and the boys, we were talking about how provisional one’s identity can seem. (Anne and I were talking about this. The boys were discussing the size and utility of their walking sticks.) The busy components of daily life—the streets you drive, the people you see every day at school, the parties you hold, the parties you go to, your favourite restaurants, the people you speak to on the phone every couple of days, the guy who grinds your coffee, the friends you worry about, the friends who worry about you—all of this has a bracing necessity to it, gives you a sense of being enveloped in purpose. So when you leave it, you should feel bereft, right? And we have at times, we have missed people so deeply, and been lonesome for them, and sometimes even wondered if the space we took up in their lives is closing over like a gash in the bark of a tree, but we’ve also discovered that the urge to make order out of one’s days is pretty deep, and you import your talent for ritual and repetition to a new place easily. A lot of people already know this; I didn’t because all of my traditions have taken place against the same backdrop. It shocks me to feel at home somewhere else.

This doesn’t mean you should stop obsessively missing us or staring at our pictures or checking this blog hourly. Although we’re wondering now if people have given up on it, hence that little survey to the left. Will you answer it, please? Apparently we get 200 visitors a week, but maybe it’s just you checking back 200 times. In which case, we’ll call you from now on, okay?

DETOX

One of the side effects of Getting French has been exposing our bodies to an even-greater-than-normal supply of mind-blowing food. Read: wine, white flour, butter, saturated fat, delicious dairy (the siren call of cheese), caffeine, and sweets. So as of January 8 Anne and I are “detoxing” for about three weeks, which means none of the above is entering our bodies, although after four days of sizzling headaches, I went back on coffee. But with soy milk and honey, so shut up in the cheap seats, okay? One week in and I’m down about six pounds, Anne looks impossibly hot, and both of us would drown a sack of puppies for a steaming baguette with ripe camembert on it. There’s a reason we humans like fat and sugar: it’s gooooooo-ooood. I think when this is over I won’t touch chicken for a month. And as for the gluten-free, wheat-free, yeast-free “bread” we’ve been eating, I’m going to track down the bloodless freak who invented it and I’m going to colonically irrigate him with 35% cream. But in the meantime, our livers are thanking us for this even if our souls are not, and even better, I’m growing my own sprouts which I know is deeply gay, but they’re really nice in salads. (I mean “gay” here not in the sense of being homosexual, but in the sense of growing your own sprouts.)

Papa jonesing for a taste of the real thing

“WINTER” IN NARBONNE

Now with Christmas and New Year’s in the past, we enter the heart of winter here, which is not what you would call it. Yesterday I was pruning fruit trees and pulling out the too-numerous green stalks of the artichokes I don’t think we’ll be wanting to eat in the summer. This weekend in go the winter peas and a couple other things: the planting season is just around the corner. Every week of the year here, something is in bloom. Right now it’s the big white flowers that look like inverted frosted bowls, as well as the little purple numbers opening on the short, spikey stalks we saw in the mountains yesterday. The continuing fecundity of this part of the world sometimes strikes me as comic. As if there’s so much blooming to be done that all the plants drew straws and the unlucky ones have to open in January. Nothing is truly asleep here. The grass outside my window is green; the trees in the yard have already budded and some people are still harvesting last fall’s chard. One of the undiscovered things about life here is about to happen: a garden! It’s been so many years since I had a proper garden. Really since before Anne and I met. I haven’t had more than tomatoes and beans since I lived on Manning Avenue in the late eighties.

We had a pretty marvellous Christmas and New Year’s, although it was strange at times to be just the four of us when this season is usually so full of people for us. We got our dose of warm Christmassy people goodness on the 26th and 27th, when we went out to Mas Blanc to spend a couple of days with the Huggans. Bob “Invincible” and Isabel “Cardshark” Huggan made us feel right at home as they usually do, and this time there was the added bonus of Abbey, their daughter, and her boyfriend Saulis, who had come for the holidays. Ah, when I think back to those days of munching chocolate right after our healthful salads, I could cry. Alack, our camera was out of juice by the time we got to Mas Blanc, so I have only the photographic stylings of Isabel “Quick-study” Huggan to prove it ever happened.

A "friendly" "game" of "cards"

Max, Ben, and their new friend Matthias

After New Year’s, we headed south to Barcelona to spend a few days in that city. I’d never been there and was amazed by it. First by its beauty and sensuality, second by the incredible rudeness of the people. Anne and I have been warned numerous times by various cognoscenti that city “X”, be it Paris, London, New York, Kitchener, you name it, was full of the rudest people on earth. And we’ve never had the pleasure of meeting those people in the places in which they were alleged to congregate. But that’s because they were staffing the markets, stores, and restaurants of Barcelona. I’ve rarely experienced a disconnect as great as the one between the cultural qualities of a city and its people. I know these are dangerous generalizations, and granted the weather was crummy, and Christmas had just ended and Epiphany was right around the corner (a bigger day than Christmas in Spain) and so on and so forth, but rilly, people. Why so grumpy? Lady who made me a disgusting nearly white “cappucino” with almost no espresso in it after ignoring me for five minutes in her empty shop and then charged me an extra euro when I asked for the coffee to go: is your world really that twisted? Did merdeing me really make you feel better? I do hope so, because you put so much effort into it. Surely a lip waxing and taking all of the curlers out of your hair would make you happier. Dude at the fruit stall who insisted on picking my mango for me and put the rottenest one he had in a paper bag for me knowing I wouldn’t look at it until I got somewhere where I could peel it: hey dude, that wasn’t cool and what’s more, I think I can smell cheap brandy on you too. And Madame? Yes, you who snootily informed us that you couldn’t measure our child’s feet in order to try on a pair of shoes in your shoestore because you didn’t have such a device owing to the fact that you are a “specialty” store? I'm not going to even bother to think up something clever for you: just fuck off.

And as for the waiter who sternly warned me not to take a picture of the interior of his restaurant, here’s my reply:

Nice painting, huh? The artist is Javier Mariscal and he’s pretty hot. That thing above, about 10 feet long by three feet high, done on plain white paper in pastel and watercolour would sell for about 20,000 Euros. But you can look at it for free and Mr. Mariscal can have the promo for free. Click on his name and see more of his work. He’s pretty amazing.

But despite the coldness of the people in Barcelona, we loved the city and will give it a second chance when the weather is nicer. And maybe we won’t stay on the Rambla, which I suspect gave us as accurate a vision of the city as staying at Queen and Yonge would give the visitor to Toronto. We did see some absolutely brilliant things, including Casa Batllo, one of the buildings designed and built by Antonio Gaudi. (A view of the inner, sun-filled atrium/stairwell is to the left.) Gaudi, whose work when seen in pictures has always struck me as fey, is, in real life, startlingly erotic, fresh, and his materials have a wonderful warmth and depth to them. Like Dali, who has always struck me as the first party guest you’d get tired of, I’d always thought of Gaudi as a one-trick pony (I still want to punch Dali in the nose) but the scale of his work, as here and in Parc Gruell and the Casa Mila, gives a weight to his ideas that Dali’s two-dimensions never granted him. Also, the sheer brute work involved in Gaudi’s accomplishments means the things with his name on them are limited, whereas Dali created more than 5000 works of painting, sculpure, and drawing, and almost all of them have a pair of spindly legs in them somewhere.

The Redhill-Simards atop Gaudi's Casa Battlo

The old part of Barcelona, called “Barcino” by the Romans is really lovely too, if also a tourist trap. One of the best things we saw there was the excavated remains of the city, uncovered under one of the palaces and stretching for a couple of city blocks underground. You go down about ten metres to it and walk in the Roman streets, look through the Roman doorways at laundries, fish-preparation plants, and even a winery. None of it is faked up or overly interpreted for you: it’s set out plainly, cleaned but not restored, and it’s one of the most stirring archeological sites I’ve ever been in. The kids got a little bored, but Anne and I walked through it with our mouths open. One of the little details that will always stay with me was seeing old Roman milestones being recycled as building materials. Incredible layers.

A fish-preparing plant in Barcino, circa 100 AD

Shops along a Roman street

GREETING THE THREE KINGS. CAREFULLY.

After Barcelona, we went up to Girona to meet some of our Goodness/Bondat friends. Pere, Anna-Karina, Jordi (right, with the gorgeous Joffre) and his wife and kids had invited us to take in their Epiphany parade, which is the arrival of the three kings and is the biggest moment in the social calendar of Catalan children. Girona was the perfect size for this intimate, ancient and joyful ceremony, and it seemed like every last one of its 70,000 inhabitants was out in the streets. The parade begins with the convergence of three separate bands of merrymakers in a park near the old Roman wall, where they meet and announce the arrival of the three kings, who then parade at great length through the streets. This kids hold lanterns and guide their way.Candy is thrown, marching bands play, clowns rouse the crowds into endless choruses of the same song (one that Maxime had learned by the end of the evening, realizing, in his eminently practical way, that if he sang it, candy would fly through the air in his direction). This was one of those perfect moments that’s hard to foresee coming: being among new friends, welcomed into the family for a very personal ritual, and delighting in the freshness of something that is an old tradition. I felt as if we could have been on the streets of Girona circa 1400. Apart from one small detail. I was filming each of the kings coming down the street toward us when this happened:

We were all standing about ten feet away when it happened. At first, I thought the fire was a cute little furnace burning in the front of the carriage; a rustic touch. But then people were rushing at the king to get him off the carriage and we were all enveloped in a caustic smoke made of burning rubber and extinguisher foam. It was even a little scary. Later, when we joined the rest of Jordi’s extended family further along the parade route, the kings passed again.

Yep, he did the rest of it on foot. The show must go on. As a rather amusing sidebar, you can see Pere in that clip, at bottom right, talking to a bearded man who, as it turns out, is the editor of one of the major newspapers in Catalonia, El Punt (in which I was interviewed for Goodness back at the end of November). What are they discussing? The fact that I have the Great Fire of Girona on tape. After the parade, I was bundled off to the newspaper’s offices, where the footage was downloaded. It was there that I was told the second king had been played by the president of one of Catalonia’s biggest banks. (I guess these honours go to upstanding citizens.) So the fire at the parade was news in more ways than one. The next morning’s newspaper featured a sort of fumetti made of nine images taken from my film. My fame in Catalonia expands.

One more cool thing about the parade was that there were a couple of people in it whose job it was to go up to new two-year-olds and collect their pacifiers. Evidently, the arrival of the three kings is also used to help young children kick the habit. They're told a couple of months before the parade that the sucker-collectors will be there and the kids will trade their pacifiers for lots of presents from the three kings. A rather brilliant strategy. Here's one suce-beringed collector with his bounty.

Suckahs!

Well, that's it for now. Here, it’s life back to “normal." The kids in school, me back at my desk, Anne back at hers, and rice crackers with homemade chicken salad on them for lunch. We’ll try not to write again until we can drink. Until then, we miss you all and send love from our “home” to your “home”.

Memories of those laid-back Barcelonians

A Christmas Tale (among others!)

2007-12-31T09:32:00.000-05:00

Christmas even comes to the south of France!

Much merrymaking to you

It's that crazy holiday time of year, and we're a little behind on the blogging. But, we're not going to let that stop us from wishing the merriest of Christmases to all of you, friends and family back home, and saying that we are thinking of you and wishing you health, prosperity and happiness in the coming year. Joyeux noël à vous tous!

We awoke much too early yesterday, thanks to Benjamin's exceptional gift-opening enthusiasm. Our Christmas is full of wonderful traditions: champagne and orange juice, croissants (bought fresh from Le Moulin, who were open!), one-at-a-time gift opening, and lobster rolls. I think that everyone's hopes came true, and we were all delighted with gifts that arrived from Canada way. Un gros merci.

In the afternoon, we went for a stroll through Narbonne while the boys whizzed ahead of us on their scooters. It was 14 degrees and sunny (if you are keeping track of these things). The city felt like it was just ours for the day, la rue Droite and Place de la Mairie were empty, the stores stilled, the canal without any activity. Of course, the crèpe-making stands were in operation. Vive la France.

A visit with the Redhill men

Shortly before the holidays, Marshall and Mark (Michael's dad and brother) arrived for a visit. The gentlemen arrived in Narbonne with massive amounts of spoils from home (I'm still secretly enjoying the Caramilk bars), and a spirit of adventure for Southern France. Benjamin and Maxime were especially thrilled to see their Uncle Narky and Zaida—a little touch of home—and two new initiates to life à la narbonnaise.

Once the jetlag passed, we loaded our foursome into the faithful Yaris for an adult-only visit to Château de Peyrepertuse, one of the five sister castles where the Cathars took refuge from Simon de Montford's rampaging armies seeking to destroy them. Mark and Marshall were dazzled by our fields of vines and the lovely rolling Corbières hills. We plied them with clementines and baguette and readied for our trek. Peyrepertuse was never attacked, and as we climbed into the clouds to reach it perched on a limestone cliff, well, it clearly would have been madness to attempt an attack. Just starve them until they give up. Once we'd parked the car, we couldn't actually see the castle, the drop of the mountain is so steep.

Peyrepertuse stretches across the top of the cliff, and leaves no room for error. The castle is the width of the cliff itself (and that often means it narrows to a couple of metres). The Redhill men, being far braver than I and part billy-goat, climbed up to the highest western point to gaze upon Quéribus (the last Cathar stronghold to fall), the snow-capped Pyrenées, and the valley below. Luckily, I found some friendly Aussies caravaning through Europe to distract me from the fact that I was hundreds of metres above ground.

No visit is complete without sampling the local flavours: grape and other. Here's our little group enjoying lunch at Le petit comptoir in Narbonne.

Hockey in Narbonne poses its own challenges as we've elaborated, but unbelievably, the Narbonne White Tigers play on the international scene. Early Sunday morning we loaded into two cars for the drive to Puigcerda, a Spanish city just inside the border in the Pyrénées. The Corbières are hills, but whoa, the Pyrénées are true mountains. Winding roads, death-defying turns, spectacular sun-lit mountain villages. Another great discovery. We found the stadio-sportico (through sheer dumb luck and the fact that women ask directions!) so that Maxime could dress in time for his first game. They played three, all losses, the last a desperate 15-0. But, our little player scored his first international goal in game 2, all captured on video.

Here's Maxime, scoring one for the team:

Michael, Mark, and Marshall went off to visit Provence on their own for a couple days, taking in the Pont du Gard, Arles, and Avignon. They stumbled upon les bornes milliaires, proof that if you read the fineprint, you can discover the most amazing things (even in guidebooks). The bornes milliaires were road markers, installed every roman mile along the Via Domitia. These three markers, in the styles of successive roman emperors Augustus, Tiberius and Antininus Pius are the only such milestones still standing in France.

Another happy guidebook accident revealed that Arles has a one-star Michelin restaurant. So, after taking in Vincent Van Gogh's inspiration, Mark, Marshall and Michael wandered for a three-hour lunch at Le Cilantro.

Having Mark and Marshall here was a touch of home in our far away land. Lots of cuddles and enjoyable dinners around the dining room table. Oh, and the occasional bottle of champagne. Here are some more pics from their visit!

All the boys at the top of Gruissan's ruined castle

Dad, looking out over the Corbières from Peyrepertuse

Brothas atop Gruissan

On the road to Peyrepertuse

Overjoyed Santas in Uzes on their wine-break

Happy New Year from all of us in Narbonne!!

We miss you all and send you tons of love!

Michael, Anne, Benjamin, and Maxime

December in Narbonne

2007-12-10T03:58:00.000-05:00

Don't drift off! The Paris section is almost done!

Christmas is coming to Narbonne

Fifteen degrees under sunny skies and the good people of Narbonne are Christmasfying the city. It’s very funny, in a sweet and charming way, to see the square outside the Hôtel de Ville tricked out with elves and giant transparent bubbles full of blowing snow. They’ve tied tiny Christmas trees to all the lampposts and soon, Santa is coming. You have to admire their pluck: it’s like seeing beach umbrellas in the Arctic. How did they know?

Okay, I know you want to get out of Paris, but see how much there is to tell? More than one of you has written to remark on my “truffle porn” in the previous post. I am not ashamed. That nature created something so ugly and so delicious is something worth trumpeting. If I could go back in time, I would go to my bespectacled, bowl-haircutted, pot-bellied, halitosis-inclined, too-hairy-for-a-fourteen-year-old self and show him a truffle. And I would say “If something this repulsive can be the object of passion, my son, then so, one day, might be you. Although I wouldn’t count on it, especially since you’re wearing corduroy socks and there’s a Wonder Woman decal ironed onto your underwear which no one can see but you can bet half the kids in school know it’s there.”

NANNY, GRANDPAPA, MAX AND BEN CONQUER PARIS

We awoke Saturday morning, ready for the next leg of our journey, but we were going to need help. And into the fray jumped Nanny, Grandpapa, and two little boys who had braved an early-morning plane ride in order to ensure we could all be in Paris together. (The strike made it impossible to count on the train.) We met at a hotel near the Porte D’Orleans and struck out immediately for FUN. We had lunch in a nice little restaurant tucked into a sidestreet near the hotel, and then took the metro to the Musée de Cluny, near the Sorbonne, the site of some of the oldest Roman ruins in Paris. Renald and I are both suckers for old rocks and this place had, underground, the remains of some stunning old baths. There wasn’t much left of it, but reconstructive drawings showed what would have once been a very elegant bath, very close to the Seine. Cluny was named for the abbey that later stood on the same spot, and the museum had some great artifacts in many rooms, the most interesting of which (for this old garage-sale snuffler and trash fanatic) was three large vitrines full of little objects that had been found in the Seine in the nineteeth century. Many of these were seals—clay insignias carved with the reverse images of what their owners wished to impress into wax—as well as bits of jewellery, children’s toys and the like, all of which had, at one point or another, been deemed no longer useful or important and had been tossed into the river.

We had to take care with Grandpapa’s leg, which has been giving him trouble of late, so we had a break in the late afternoon, and in the evening, we went out for an Italian meal, up near the Montparnasse. It’s been a while since I’d eaten Italian (apart from the French version of pizza) and we had a very enjoyable meal. The owner chirped to us in Italian, which we didn’t understand a word of, but it was a nice break from French food.

Doreen, Renald, and a lion's bum in Paris

The Sunday began with breakfast in the neighbourhood, then we headed out to the Jeu de Paume to see the Steichen exhibition. The Jeu de Paume is the king’s old tennis courts, and its been used as a photography space since 2004. Anne and I saw an incredible Cindy Sherman retrospective here in 2006.

The Steichen was two floors of the museum, a very thorough selection of his artistic as well as commerical work. Steichen was Julian Schnabel before there was a Julian Schnabel: he was general in the art photography scene before becoming extremely famous in the forties and fifties as one of Hollywood’s and Broadway’s best known imagemakers. His earlier compatriots accused him of selling out, but it doesn’t really matter what the eye of a great photographer is turned on: the Brooklyn Bridge at night or a bar of soap. The eye is selling light and composition, not the thing being photographed, and Steichen had an incredible eye and a brilliant sense of space. Ben and Max weren’t as impressed as the adults were, but I think both boys saw (especially in Steichen’s early work) how someone with a camera can change something by taking a picture of it. The prints that Steichen and Steiglitz made and had tipped into Camera Work (probably the most important and influential magazine of photography ever printed; it ran from 1902 to 1917 and set the ground rules for art photography for fifty years) were handmade photogravures that both photographers considered gallery-quality prints. A roomful of them were on display here and although one sense that they have faded somewhat, they were stunning to see. (As an aside, Anne and I had seen a Camera Work print of a Steichen image made in New York in 1910: it was selling for 900€.)

After a short rest, we six headed out for our final supper together. We had wanted to go to Le Dome, but it was too expensive, and instead we went to La Coupole, which, with its enormous bright room was well worth choosing second. Lawrence Durrell writes of La Coupole that it used to be famous for being willing to accommodate any culinary whim, and he once knew a painter who would sit and eat and smoke and at midnight would have a fresh litre of bull’s blood. (It was brought to the door from Paris’s slaughterhouses by a man on a motorcycle.) You could sense the many decades of history that happened over oysters and red wine—and sometimes bull’s blood—in that room. It’s now owned by a major chain, but they do their best to remain authentic, and the service and food was amazing. But judge for yourself whether or not we had a good time!

Boys with "cocktails"

Max in fondue heaven

Three happy (and full) guys

Unfortunately, that night at the hotel, we all had to say goodbye. No pictures of that. One side effect of Anne’s birthday surprise was that it meant the visit she was looking forward to from her parents in January wasn’t actually going to happen (it was part of the ruse). So goodnight and goodbye on the Sunday night meant that we wouldn’t all see each other again until April and it was rough on everyone. Anne got up at 6 a.m. to say goodbye to them again and then Nanny and Grandpapa, having braved white lies and an intercontinental flight, headed home.

That morning, the Redhill-Simards elected to get on an earlier train, and we took the Metro to the Gare de Lyon. Infernal chaos ensued, the lowlight of which was being nearly crushed to death getting off on the platform at Chatelet with 2000 people in a space that looked like it could safely hold 1000 where we had to transfer to the number 1 line to get to the train station. After escaping that (I can’t tell you how truly terrifying it was), we found ourselves trapped underground between the 4 and 1 lines with at least 4000 other people who were filing into this one pedestrian tunnel from three directions. It took forty minutes to travel 150 metres. Anne and I had to paste looks of calm authority onto our faces to hide from the kids how scared we actually were. But even in this, a little moment of grace found us: a man, standing beside me, could see how frightened Ben was, and he reached into his coat pocket and took out a handful of fruit Caramellos. Then he passed a couple forward—Parisiens passing candies hand-to-hand in an underground hell—until they got to Maxime. Then we got on the 1 line, made it to Gare de Lyon, and escaped Paris at last, glad to have been, and glad to be gone.

This officially marks the end of not only this very long Paris entry, but also the Curse of Paris. On my fifth attempt, I had a perfect visit. Not even the strike could screw it up. Thanks Paris, you cruel mistress.

BONDAT

That’s “goodness” to you. As in Goodness, my play, which has been translated into Catalan and premiered last weekend in Girona, Spain. I’d written to the production to tell them that I was in Europe and would love to come and see the opening, and they arranged it, although I later learned they dreaded my coming. Ignorant of this, I drove off whistling to the Spanish border and crossed it for the first time in my life last Friday afternoon under dazzling bright skies and headed to this ancient Catalan city.

Beautiful Girona

A word on Spain and Catalonia. I thought I was going to Spain to see my play in Catalan. But I was not. I was going to Catalonia to see my play in Catalan. The people of this region are very proud of their separate history and they react to being presumptive Spaniards in much the same way a Quebecer might bristle at being called a Canadian. In fact, they fetishize Quebec’s status in Canada and long for something similar in Spain, where ninety-three centimes of every tax-Euro they send to Madrid pays for something outside of Catalonia. I was having the vaguaries of Catalonia’s longing for independence explained to me in a café on the river the day I arrived. My interlocutor was Jordi Mestres, and he pulled back the curtain on the mysteries in a way no one in Canada would be brave enough to do: Catalonia’s issues are financial ones couched in cultural terms. As are all such protests. (One wonders, having come from an example where the culture wars continue after the money has been spread around fairly, whether expressing minorityhood might not be a main feature of such identity struggles?)

Jordi was my entrée into the Catalan theatre, and he interpreted between myself and the director, Pere Puig (pictured with me at left), and anyone else who wanted to converse. English and French was sometimes enough, but thank god for Jordi. He was a man who by dint of love now finds himself living in the theatre. His wife is one of the two daughters of the founder of Sala La Planeta, the theatre where Bondat was opening, and Pere’s wife is the other one. They also have deep ties to the main newspaper in Girona, El Punt, so being brought into their company felt as if I was shaking hands with a particularly benign mafia: a cultural one. Naturally, El Punt interviewed and photographed me (the article appeared on the Sunday with a, natch, very positive review of the play) and my hosts treated me with incredible grace. I say they were scared of my coming down, but this had more to do with their respect for artists and the play itself than it did with any reputation of mine. Those of you who know me personally know that I am the last person for whom a red carpet should be laid, but this they did, in deference and even terror, which thankfully was lifted soon afterwards. This treatment was also a product of the kind of people the Catalans are: a loving bunch, a warm bunch, big-hearted and expressive. I’d never met Catalonians or Spaniards before and I found these people almost damp with emotion. Coming from Toronto, a place only damp, it was overwhelming, to be shown such warmth. You could get used to it.

The play opened Friday night—at 10:30 in the evening—and received a roar of approval from the audience. (At the final curtain, which was at 1 a.m.) This was not my Goodness, nor Volcano’s – it was very different, and even some of the songs were different, and of course I understood only the words with latinate roots, but under the different clothes, I recognized my work and it was moving and strange to see it there. It was as if I’d passed myself in the mirror and seen an entirely different face, but one that had to be me. We celebrated afterwards with champagne and snacks, and when the audience filed out of the partyroom, at 3 a.m., dinner was served. This ebullient cast, now relaxed having made it through the fire, joked and drank and posed for pictures and generally seemed to be of the species of actor I’ve known everywhere else. They were a wonderful bunch.

The cast of Bondat (the guy playing me is fifth from right ...)

Pere Puig, in particular (his name is pronounced “per-uh putsch”) was a man of incredible grace. Painfully shy, it seemed to me, and utterly self-effacing, he had dedicated himself utterly not just to this play, but to me as well. Without my knowing, he had purchased all of my fiction and had it sent along to one of Catalonia’s best-known rising literary lights, a man named Javier Cercas, and had his books in English for me, as well as Javier’s phone number and email address. He felt strongly we should get to know each other. All of this said and produced in a silent backroom at the theatre at 2:30 in the morning, without Pere making eye contact with me, and in painfully halting English. A very special experience.

Saturday, most of the cast and crew met for lunch in the old city. Girona’s old centre is made of rising tiers of ancient streets, with stone-arch stairways leading up and down and tight, winding streets. It’s a very beautiful city. The restaurant we ate in was right on the old Via Augustus. We ate a great meal of many dishes, including a bacalao drenched in tomatoes and red peppers, and a fish we call monkfish, which looks so disgusting raw (like an oily intestine) but was one of the sweetest, firmest white fish meats I’ve ever eaten. I’ll have to cook it looking away from the pan, but there you go.

We drank a lot of wine, joked in our broken tongues, exhausted and delighted from the night before, and when it was almost all over, I gave a toast in English, which Jordi (his inimitable self at right) translated, and half of them burst into tears.

Write a play, make sure a Catalan falls in love with it, and I promise you you’ll feel like a million bucks. And as a even more wonderful aside, the three-day run was so successful, that Bondat will, in April, play an additional two weeks in Girona, tour the Catalan small-theatre circuit for two weeks, and then play for a month in Barcelona. And although I’m delighted that it will, the thing that really pleases me is that I’ll get to see all these people again.

PUPPY HEAVEN

The day after I got back, we all went to Carcassonne to see the Foire d’Animaux, a two-day puppy- and kitten-fest with breeders from all over France. The main event was held in a large room smelling of puppy-sweat and -poo with little creatures mainly sleeping, exhausted from being loved for two days by desperate boys and girls. We are kinda sorta in the market for a dog now, having looked into how we get an animal back to Canada (it’s pretty straight-forward) and our guys are dying to get an animal that their parents can feed, walk, and clean up after (beyond day three, you know how it is). The chien du moment is an Epagneul Breton (a Brittany spaniel) a kind of hunting dog known for its sweet temperment and ability to sense a squirrel from nine kilometres. (A friend from Toronto writes that they have a very high “prey drive” that made one of her Brittanys “basically autistic outdoors.”) But the argument for or against a puppy is not made in words. This is the argument:

What do you think’s gonna happen?

(Me, I want one of these:)

MAXIE IN TOULOUSE

For a long time, I have owed Maxime a sporting event to even up the basketball game Ben got to go to with me in Toronto earlier this year (brotherly math). So on Wednesday night of this week, we headed out to Toulouse to see the Toulouse F.C. play Nancy at the Stade de Toulouse. We drove through terrifying fog to get there, and although the stadium was wreathed in mist, the lights cut through to the spectacle and we watched our very first European soccer game together (with our purple Toulouse scarves around our necks). I have to say it was an amazing experience—our seats were awesome—and the athmosphere was fascinating.

There were at least three discrete sections of noisemaking: a rabid Toulouse fanclub at one end, a small Nancy fanclub at the other, and someone on the other side from us, a clutch of fans with instruments, including a sousaphone.

Max got a little bored at the, uh, ten minute mark of the first half, and by the twenty-minute mark, he was ready to leave. I convinced him to stay to the half. At the intermission, I was happy to go home (it took 90 minutes to drive, half in blinding fog), but Max talked himself into going back in for the second half. “It’s my very first soccer game, who cares if I’m bored? I should go and watch!” So in we went, and at the seven minute mark (which coincided with the end of the chocolate) he announced he really wanted to go. So we left and traded scary stories in the car until he fell asleep somewhere near Mirepoix.

Crazy Birthday week, part II

2007-12-03T10:49:00.000-05:00

Two forty-somethings in Paris, November 15, 2007

PARIS ON A THURSDAY …

Well, two weeks have passed since we hit Paris, and I admit at the rate things happen here, it’s beginning to feel a little distant. After my last post, Anne and I had two more days in Paris alone, which we filled almost exclusively with eating. Lunch on Thursday at Guy Savoy was the first of our two mind-blowing meals in Paris. Guy Savoy is a three-Michelin-star restaurant in a backstreet near the Arc de Triomphe. A sliding door (through which you are admitted only if you have a reservation) brings you into a collection of intimate, bright rooms full of African art and lovely objets of all sorts. Our waiter was someone I later learned was one of the best-regarded waiters in Paris, Hubert Schwermer. A German with perfect French, he treated us to an experience almost as special as the meal itself. For one, he told us we were the only non-regulars in the place. Some of the men and women in the restaurant ate there up to three times a week (on expense accounts, natch, as lunch with wine can run a group of four two thousand euros, no problem) but we were the only new faces. This prospect excited him visibly. He loved that we’d never eaten in a restaurant as fine as Guy Savoy and from the instant we sat down, we felt like it was his treat to have us there, not ours. (A sidenote: we had lucked out and reserved the 100 Euro menu, available to one table every lunch and only reservable through the internet, which is why our lunch did not cost the prorated amount all of you no doubt did the math on a couple moments ago.)

About to have one of the best meals of our lives ...

So off to the food itself. We started with a glass of Billecart-Salmon champagne (yum) then were served two amuses gueles, which were brought together, one hidden under the other. The first was a soupe à l’homard, avec une croustillante de chataigne – an incredibly instense five tablespoons of very rich, very delicious bisque. It was served in a ceramic love-seat kind of thing: the ceramic bowl was inverted on the other side of the object to form an upsidedown bowl beneath which was hidden the second amuse guele, a little lobster springroll. Herbert watched us from a discreet distance as we discovered these fine surprises.

It seemed at Guy Savoy that the employees almost outnumbered the guests. The level of attentiveness was such that I had no doubt if I happened to choke on something that I would be Heimliched before I could even gesture for help. The level of expertise and attention exceeds what would be reasonable by anyone’s standards, but since this is as much of a performance as it is a meal, anything that is done to surprise or delight you could never be considered “too much.” You are paying for “too much,” and it is delivered in spades (and glasses and fine china and little tiny bowls and so on).

We ordered our meals and instantly the sommelier appeared to take our wine order. He almost declared a national holiday upon learning what my selection to go with our main course was (gibiers – a platter of sliced wild duck, pheasant, and pigeon done in a crock pot), but of course, he would have steered me elsewhere if he felt it wouldn’t have been a good match. (The 2005 Les Chaillets Condrieu, however, would probably go with Rice Crispies.) Then there was also the white-gloved bread girl, who appeared in order to suggest which of the six fresh-baked breads would go best with each course.

The wine-pourer (note, not the sommelier) came and opened our bottle, poured a very small glass, sniffed it, swirled it, looked at it in the light, sniffed it again, and then to our complete shock and delight tasted it himself. Yes, you are in Paris, people. You don’t tell the server if the wine is drinkable. He tells you.

It was drinkable. (Lord, was it drinkable.)

We shared our starters: a Coquille St. Jacques with parsnip crisps in a rich, dark sauce, the thin scallops almost raw. Then it was the soupe d'artichaux aux truffes et une brioche de champignons avec une beurre de truffes (the second bread dude—maybe he's just the brioche dude—cut the brioches for us and lathered them up from his very special truffle butter pot. He took it with him back to the kitchen). Luckily, this soup wasn’t a member of the opposite sex, or we each would have left the other for it. This was the first of my two encounters with truffles on this trip, and I can now say I understand what the fuss is all about. Black truffles are like eating the earth: a round, pungent, fleshy flavour comes off the black truffles, while the white are another story (although a very good one) entirely. More on the white truffle later, but here the black turned the artichoke soup into a small display of oral fireworks, although “fireworks” suggest flashiness while the taste of this mushroom is fugitive and muscular, and although I can’t imagine this is going to come out right, there is something in the black truffle of the inside of the body, something organal, something like sweat and skin. See, it didn’t sound right. But the taste is lunar, rare, and spectacular.

Our main course was brought to the table still in its crockpot: we were invited to smell it, and then it went back to the kitchen to be sliced up, arranged on an autumnal mix of forest mushrooms and choucroute in a wild- mushroom sauce and topped with a massive slab of foie gras. This was a very ambitious dish and it was probably done perfectly, but we later agreed it lacked something, some layer that would have moved it beyond simple pleasure and made it memorable. The meats were lovely (although pigeon is perhaps a bit too gamey for me) and the choucroute—sauerkraut—gave a slight tang that brought out the flavours of the meat. However, for a restaurant with three-stars, invention and perfection need to go hand-in-hand: we are seeking immortality. Anywhere else, this dish was a homerun, here it was very, very good, but it was not brilliant.

After this, the punishment of dessert began. Our ordered desserts came to the table (including a little cake with a candle in it for the birthday girl): terrine de chocolate. Incredible. But then the dessert cart, manned by the impishly grinning Hubert, arrived. Chartreuse guimauve, a spoonful of head-spinningly delicious Earl Grey sorbet (yeah, I know!), a single raisin enclosed in a little crispy wafer, a chocolate-enrobed fruit jelly. If Hubert wanted us to shout oncle, we were ready. We thought, seeing our glassy-eyed satedness, that he was finally going to leave us alone, but then he reappeared, crying “Regardez qu’est ce j’ai trouvé!” and gave us more treats.

Half of this would have been enough, would have ensured that we would remember the meal always, but Hubert had one more thing in store. He’d been visiting us throughout the meal, gossiping … tenderly can be the only word … with us about the rest of his guests, ensuring we were happy, joking with us, and so on. And at the end of the meal, he presented us with the restaurant’s business card, on which he had written “Hubert, Menu de 100€, 22:30.” He explained this meant that when we came to Paris next, he was inviting us to have dinner at Guy Savoy for the same price as lunch, at 10:30. The normal prix fixe at lunch is at least 270€; at dinner, it is 365€. Per person. We were floored. Is this a common courtesy, extended to all Savoy virgins? I have no idea. All I know is that he made us leave the restaurant—stepping into the November Paris sunshine, drunk and full—feeling very special indeed.

After Guy Savoy we went right to the Rue de Rosiers and each had a pastrami sandwich and a hamentaschen.

Okay, maybe we went home and had a nap.

PARIS ON A FRIDAY ...

Happy girl at Le Bristol

You can see how much food makes me run off at the mouth. You try to describe Guy Savoy in 750 words or less.

Friday, somehow rested and ready to face the world again, we decided to try Paris’ wonderful “Vélib” bike rental system. Although the strike was placing inordinate pressure on this rental system (175,000 rentals a day during the strike as opposed to 90,000 normally) we found the system worked beautifully. You buy a one-day membership, put in your code, take a bike out of its computerized dock, ride it as long as you want, find one of the hundreds of downtown lock-up locations, and return it. You can walk six blocks, put in your code, and get another bike.

We rode all over, enjoying Les Jardins du Luxembourg, and back up to the Louvre, where we went to see Paris Photo. This November institution is a three-day international photography love-in, with three enormous display rooms commandeered below the Louvre to show everything and anything you can think of. Early salt-paper prints (including work by William Fox Talbot) daguerrotypes, strange colour images made on celluloid from the turn of the century, as well as every photographer you can think of: Steichen, Mann, Steiglitz, Cameron, Bertillon (who invented forensic photography), Man Ray, Nadar, Atget (a stunning self-portrait from the late 1800s, which comprised only an image of his shadow behind the camera; would that I’d had 18,000€), Cartier-Bresson, Hine, Kertesz, Eisenstadt … lord, it was overwhelming and wonderful. The website has a list of exhibitors and you can tour examples of the work they had by clicking here.

After a couple of hours apart (in which I saw a fairly serious bike accident—the traffic crushes in downtown Paris were terrible because of the strike—and watched about seven strangers become a team: two helped the injured biker, three directed traffic, and two called the police and ambulance) we met back at the hotel and got ready for our second Michelin experience. Forgive me for the detail here, but if you can’t bear it, you can skip to the next section.

The stunning winter garden dining room at Le Bristol

Le Bristol is also behind the Champs d’Elysées; the restaurant shares the name of the hotel it's in: both are among the best in Paris. This restaurant, however, gave us a much more classical experience of a fine meal. The service, impeccable and perfect, was considerably less personal than Hubert Schwermer’s (on the Savoy website, Schwermer is described as "'the European' who is lost without his guests...") But the service was still extremely attentive—almost clairvoyant—and the room was incredibly beautiful. You could see Catherine the Great approving a room like this. It was the dining room on the Titanic, except the only thing to fear was bloating.

Again, some marvellous little amuse gueles arrived (after the immediate offer of champagne; immediately accepted): little jewels of delicious silliness, followed by a strange serving of jelly with bits of beef and carrot within: the warmth of your mouth melted it into a soothing, wonderful soup. And again, an almost embarrassing array of bread appears; the second you pop the last morsel of one piece into your mouth, the bread server (I’d invent the word painnier if it wasn’t so close to the thing you stick on your bicycle) reappears offering more. Here, at long last, is the original fantasy of food, the one from infanthood: it appears magically, just when you want it, and you can have as much of it as you can take.

We were served next a foie gras starter with a sorrel foam, which was very foiey and particularly grasy (and, okay, a little bit salty) Anne had their signature starter, artichoke “macaroni” farcis avec truffes. She loved it.

Ohmigod, this is not bad at all ...

Then they brought two dishes in a row that were in the top five things I’ve ever eaten. The first was Le Bristol’s interpretation of Coquilles St. Jacques. One fat, quivering scallop in a rich, mossgreen watercress & white truffle sauce with three tiny gnocci. I was about to tuck in when a waiter arrived with a small wooden board on which was a glass jar half full of arborio rice and three absolutely monstrous white truffles. He took off the lid, waved the jar under my nose, picked me up off the floor, and then took one of the truffles and shaved five enormous, gossamer slices of it over the scallop.

White truffles … well, tell me this: have you ever had sex? I bet you think you have. You probably think that, once in a while, you've even had great sex. Fahgeddabouddit. White truffles are sex, pointe finale. Absolutely reeking of pheromones, redolent of the human body, its secret fragrances. Put these with a fresh scallop, electric in a watercress reduction, sharpness of seasalt, the sinewy texture of the warm scallop, the melting and explosive taste of the truffle and you have an absolute culinary atomic bomb. This dish took my head off, filled it with rosepetals, the scent of Penelope Cruz’s armpit, and the lost woods and lakes and oceans of my childhood, plopped it back on, then reached down the back of my pants and gave me a giant wedgie. I almost died. And then, while I was quaking with pleasure, my pupils blown, gibbering in lost Assyrian, they brought the next course: a small sole filet stuffed with girolles in a creamy golden pool of sauce aux girolles, a creation of incredible delicacy and force, all at once. The way this sole dish complemented the scallop was remarkable: faintly similar textures treated quite differently, but with these arborial notes throughout. Call it a pretence, but these two dishes, together, had more in common with the structure of a sonnet than they did with food. Simple patterns inscribed in a masterful way, unobtrusive-
ly rhyming with each other—the abab, cdcd of the sonnet's structure: ocean forest ocean forest, cream salt cream salt—leading to epiphanies. One of these dishes would have made the evening; to have the two of them, one after the other, was to suffer joys heretofore unknown.

The mains were also incredible, but in context, mere brilliance was a letdown after the two entrées. They served a wonderful chunk of venison in a dark, woody, meaty sauce with roasted beets. Then a cheese course. Sorbet of cassis and blood orange. A roasted fig with a tiny sliver of gold leaf, a fig in jelly (see Anne, below right, deciding if she can survive two enjellied dishes in one night), homemade milk chocolate ice cream, a mascarpone ladyfinger bracketted with tiny splints of chocolate sitting on a crust of opera-cookie, a salt-caramel macarron, and finally, to ensure we could not walk, a teaspoon with a tiny jelly looking like bathbead that when you bit into it exploded a little gush of citrus-flavoured tea.

Okay. I’m hungry now. By the end of this week, I’ll finish and tell all about the Nanny-Grandpapa-boys weekend we had, our last-moment terrors in Paris, and Goodness opening in Girona, Spain, this past weekend.

A crazy birthday week, part one ...

2007-11-23T03:49:00.000-05:00

THIS JUST IN: ANNE IS OLD

Well, now I live with a forty-year-old woman. It was bound to happen. But the madness is over and the kids are off to school this morning under a grey and rainy sky and it’s 9am. Today’s just a regular day here, although nearly four months after we arrived “normal” is still hard to define. The last two weeks have been a case in point: today it’s exactly two weeks since the evening shown in my last post and in that time we’ve had a terrific visit from Nanny and Grandpapa, we’ve celebrated, feasted, one of us has turned forty, we’ve been to Paris and had an incredible time, and then we’ve said goodbye to our visitors. We miss the pitter-pat of grandparently feet.

Anne with her secret interlopers

Doreen and Renald’s secret visit was the untold story of this blog since long before I wrote its first entry. Doreen and I had actually begun discussing Anne’s birthday back in March, but we didn’t make final plans until July, and on July 7, Renald and Doreen had their plane tickets and then it was waiting and hoping none of us spilled the beans. In the meantime, unspoken in the background of this story you’ve been reading since the middle of August, I was buying train tickets, plotting separately with Christiane and Jacques (who got into the game by inviting Anne for a birthday “drink” and by being the picker-uppers at the train station when D&R got here), Doreen and I were writing nearly daily emails (a nice bonding experience, doncha think Dodie?), and every time Anne’s mum or dad called in the week leading up to their arrival, I sat in the office pouring sweat. I almost gave it away the night before when Anne revealed we were going to the boys’ hockey practice before going to Christiane and Jacques. I’d thought it was off and I argued it would be rude to be late for a birthday drink. “What birthday drink?” said Anne. “Christiane doesn’t know it’s my birthday.” (Sound of trucks crashing in Redhill’s brain, until he remembered:) “We talked about it when we had them here for dinner two months ago. Remember? They’re leaving for their desert walk in Libya the day of your birthday? Why do you think Christiane wanted to ensure they saw us before they left? Duh.” (Phew.)

Anne says seeing her parents through that door stopped her brain. I could see it skipping like a needle on a scratched record. I’ll never forget the way she backed away from her mother like she was seeing a ghost and I guess she was. It came off perfectly, and we toasted her with champagne and waited for that look to fade from her face (it didn't, for a couple of days!). That morning, I’d thought she knew something was afoot, but unless I’m spending my life with Sarah Bernhardt, she didn’t know a thing. As for the kids, it was like a magic trick. Ben kept saying “I didn’t know! I didn’t know!” and Max wouldn’t leave either of them alone all night.

A GREAT BIRTHDAY WEEK

We had four days at home with Nanny and Grandpapa and we filled them with wine, wonderful food, walks, and drives to local haunts. We had a soccer game with Ben on Saturday and watched him play goal (he was amazing), and drove around the local countyside where the fall colours have really come in now. Renald’s leg and ankle have been giving him trouble of late, and sitting for long periods is difficult, but after braving the airplane (eight hours in economy!) he wasn’t going to let anything hold him back.

We gave Anne her gifts in two chunks: first, on Saturday morning, I gave her a card called Chez Redhill, which set out the formule for the week like a prix fixe menu. On it, she discovered she was going to Paris with me for three days midweek. Then, the next morning, the big day itself, we gave her all her gifts. (This, by the way, is the last piece of evidence that Anne was ever in her thirties:)

Doreen and Renald had brought a pile of gifts from Canada, my mum had left something in August, there were cards, and little packages in the mail had also come. The most incredible gift was the one her mother and sister Julie had worked for two months making: a “life book” for Anne. This leather volume was filled with over thirty messages of love and remembrance from a great many of Anne’s family and friends. It was filled with pictures, stories, jokes, drawings and so on and when she saw it, she wept. I don’t think she’s even finished reading it: every time she opens it she starts laughing and then she becomes silent and I go into the room and there are tears streaming down her cheeks. Here’s some pics of her birthday morning:

The birthday Life book ...

Grandpapa checks it out ...

A necklace from Buby ...

A scarf from Isabel and Bob ...

Anne had always said she wanted to be on a beach on her birthday, so we went down to Gruissan Plage the day of her 40th and walked in the wind and sun and it was wonderful. (That’s the pic at the top of this post!) That morning we had gone to the market to search for all the goodies we wanted to make for Anne's birthday dinner. Oysters! Beef tournedos! Lamb chops! Merguez sausage! And Doreen was going to spend part of the afternoon making Anne’s favourite for dessert: angel food cake! Wheeee ...

In the middle of buying the oysters we got caught in a sort of "when in Rome" moment. One of the delicacies the French love is sea urchin. There's not a lot in a sea urchin. It's mostly a filter for sea water. It doesn't even have a brain. Inside, there are five strips of glistening goo, which the Japanese call uni (you've seen it on sushi menus and stayed away from it). This is the urchin roe, and some people adore it. The fishmonger at the back of Les Halles saw us staring at the spiny pile of living urchins and offered to let us taste them. The boys, of course, wanted to try it, but we thought better of that. In fact, we all thought better of it, but when the fish dude decided he'd had enough of our waffling, he scooped out a quivering mass of orange snot and told me to try it ...

... I felt more or less obligated.

Hmm. Not too bad. Kinda salty. Kinda fishy. See the big hunk left on my spoon? I decided to be brave about it and eat the rest of it. That thing I said about it being not to bad? Never mind. It was like eating something out of a baby's diaper. But let Anne show you how she felt. She was compelled by the fishmonger to have some. It was her birthday and one's forties are about trying new things, right?

Mmmmm! Urchiny!

A FORTY-YEAR-OLD CANADIAN IN SARKOZY’S COURT

Everything for Anne’s birthday week had been so meticulously planned that the gods had to revolt: as it turned out, the day I was supposed to take Anne to Paris for three days, the national train union was going on strike. So we had to revise our plans under the gun: we’d leave on the last train before the strike began, on Tuesday night, and we’d arrange for Doreen, Renald, and the boys to fly in to Paris rather than train in on Saturday. Then we discovered that the strike also meant that the Metro would not be running in Paris either. Ah, yes, remember my earlier entry on the Curse of Paris? Would it strike again?

Well, try as they might, nothing can ruin Paris. And this time, despite the real challenges in getting around, we had our best visit ever to Paris, and three days of alone-time enjoying it like adults was capped by a brilliant weekend en famille when her parents arrived with the kids.

We had such a great time, and, thanks to the generousity of the good people of Gruissan, we also had two of the most memorable meals of our lives. I’ll explain. I play poker. A little. And in September, the little grungy casino at Gruissan, fifteen minutes from me, started playing hold ‘em poker. So I began to go once a week, and by the middle of October, I was up 1,400 Euros. So I plotted to have lunch and dinner in Paris at two of the best restaurants in that city, on the good people of Gruissan. I have to say, one of the best parts of planning the Paris trip was plotting with people on chowhound.com about the two restaurants I should take Anne to. Here’s the conversation, if you’re interested, with especially thanks to Julian Tort ("Souphie"), a local foodie and aficionado who also wrote me privately, fully in the spirit of what I wanted to do, and helped me make my mind up.

Anne and I got in safe and sound late Tuesday nite, and when we arrived in Paris, we were the last train running: the strike had begun. The Metro was also going to be crippled (although, we discovered, it was still possible to get around on the much-reduced -in-service 1 and 4 lines, which are the main north-south and east-west lines in central Paris, and the whole system was free to ride during the strike). We celebrated with a drink near the Bastille, and in the morning, made our way to our real hotel, the Hotel Luxembourg Parc. Hotels are expensive in Paris, but this hotel, which is rated #1 on TripAdvisor, and for good reason, is a shocking good deal for the money. They gave us a room with a view of the Parc du Luxembourg (where Catherine de’Medici had a palace built for herself owing to the fact that she was tired of the Louvre, poor thing) and we LOVED it. What a great hotel.

We spent our time tooling around, having fun, drinking it in. Everywhere you go in Paris, you're stepping through history. Wandering up toward the Seine from Les Jardins du Luxembourg? Well, here's where Manet was born.

We also found this, the last of 16 official metre measurements carved in marble at the end of the eighteenth century and distributed around Paris to help standardize that unit. Picture a milliner and his customer standing here with a bolt of cloth, holding it out against this wall ...

The Wednesday was devoted to the Louvre, which I’d never seen. It’s not a gallery: it’s a city of art. It overwhelms, and yet, if you can manage to slow down and stop in front of some of it, shut out the noise of digital cameras firing, and just focus, you can really have some great moments of communion. The Louvre is stocked with busy ghosts and the evidence of so much passion and longing—for the eternal, for justice, for remembrance, for glory—the work of so many hands and spirits. I recalled being in the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam with the kids and trying to find the words to express, to explain to them why art is important, but it’s hard to help children get to the thought you get to so easily as an adult: these works move you because they speak directly to your own mortality. Take a painting like this one, by Ingres, the portrait of Madamoiselle Rivière, made in 1805, just after Napoleon crowned himself Emperor and around the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars:

This painting not only keeps alive a beautiful young woman for all of time, but in its brushstrokes, in the evidence of all the decisions about composition, colour, and feeling that Ingres brought to it, we have a record of one man’s thoughts; we can almost hear his voice. In the background of the painting, we witness him in coversation with Leonardo da Vinci, we know how much he felt for the Italian in the homage he pays him with not only the landscape in the background, but in the smile Mlle. Rivière offers us. This is Ingres’ Giaconda. And as a viewer, standing in a future none of these people would ever know, you become the latest in a chain of deathbound seekers of fulfillment, of beauty, of knowledge and hope. You can get to this thought with one painting, but it’s hard to lead other people to it. Which is why visual art offers you a rare opportunity, in a very private moment, to be both alive and dead at the same time. You stare into the eyes of this fifteen-year-old girl, her whole life ahead of her, and you are tied to her. And then, when you learn she died the following year, the cognitive/emotional circle is complete. Your moment in time, no matter how beautiful, is marked as well.

We saw so many great things on Wednesday. The Delacroixs, the whole Italian renaissance, the sculpture garden, Napoleon III’s apartments (wow). The only disappointment was that tiny painting of a smiling Italian lady—someone’s wife I hear—set behind bullet-proof glass, with rope keeping people at least ten feet away from it. The Mona Lisa, forever doomed to be called The Greatest Painting Ever, and further damned by Dan Brown, whose book has transformed it from a moment of grace in the history of art into kitsch. If ever a man should be consigned to one of the circles of hell, it should be Dan Brown, whose book has stolen the possibility of appreciating this painting for millions of people, both the millions who have read his book and now think of the Mona Lisa as a bit player in a religious detective yarn, and the millions who will be forced to view it as if from the last row in the AstroDome. There were people having themselves videoed standing fifteen feet in front of the painting, waving like idiots while the painting lay there, tiny and insignificant, like a cracked egg in an empty nest.

Lucky people in Paris ...

There’s too much to say about Paris, so I’m going to do this post in two parts, the rest after the weekend. Just a couple words about the strike, which may be over by the time you read this. The rail unions have gone on strike and crippled the entire country. I’m a good lefty, but something like this gives every pinko pause: here’s one of the best-paid unions in France, with enormous benefits, including, for some of them, the right to retire at 50. Well, Sarkozy has done the math, and France is one of the slowest-growing economies in the Western world. And a future where the next generation is going to have to pay for half a million men and women retiring at 50 with 30 or 40 years of the good life ahead of them has made him wonder if it’s really such a good idea after all. Up to five hundred thousand people getting paid a pension, plus benefits, every year for, say, an average of 25 years? Modestly, let’s say it costs the government $20,000 a year per worker. My calculator won’t do the math for all 25 years, but by the time three hundred thousand workers are on the books (that time will come), in one year alone, the costs will run to six billion Euros. During the bulge, when the greatest number of workers will be collecting their pensions—a period of possibly fifteen years—the costs will be astronomical. And as more than one unsympathetic Parisien said to us: who’s going to pay for this? Our kids. So Sarkozy, who campaigned on this issue, is making changes that will ensure a better future for all French citizens. And this is a broken promise to the union, who was lucky enough to be governed by successive regimes here who wanted to avoid strikes and who caved to unrealistic demands, and who now strikes for their right to suck the nation dry a decade or so from now. Hard to feel bad for them. As one taxi driver said to us: “Human nature is to want more. It doesn’t matter how good life is, there is always something missing, and that is the thing people will focus on.” Catherine de’Medici tiring of the Louvre, indeed.

(By the way, did you all know we're an uncle and aunt again? Nanny brought pictures of Lynn and Josh's latest, a little girl named Megan. Here's her big sister Leah feeding her here baba...)

Because we think you're dying to see this ...

2007-11-11T08:42:00.000-05:00

As many of you already know, Anne's 40th birthday is today. And for the big event, her parents and I plotted a major ruse (in the works since May!). Unbeknownst to Anne, they flew into Paris and trained down to Narbonne on Friday. Jacques and Christianne picked them up at the train station while we were at hockey practice and then afterwards, we all headed down there for what Anne thought was just a little birthday cocktail. We got there at the appointed hour and Anne knocked on the door ...

(Don't worry about the bad filmwork for the first few seconds ... I was hiding the camera behind my back!)

She has had her first birthday gifts, the phone is ringing off the hook, and we have a huge grillade planned for tonight. If you are one of the dozen-or-so-people who had to keep quiet to preserve her surprise: thank you! You can see from the video that she didn't have a clue and she is in seventh heaven. Which is a good place to be if you also have to be forty.

One of Anne's gifts is something she's been saying for years: I don't care where I am for my fortieth, as long as it's Paris. So we are off, the two of us, on Wednesday for three days, after which Doreen, Renald, and the boys will join us for a crazy Paris weekend! More after that ...