Last weekend was our 60th birthday-cum-housewarming party. We’d been preparing for it for months, though hopes that the house would be finished, or at least habitable, faded a few weeks ago.

Gemma flew in from Australia, her case full of bunting and other decorations, followed the next day by Alex and her two daughters from England. The place was starting to fill up. It wasn’t without incident, however, as two guests who arrived a couple of days in advance missed the drive, put their camper van in the ditch and had to be towed out by a friendly farmer neighbour.

On Thursday we went to the market to buy heaps of melons, lettuce and other necessities and Hervé brought us 13kg of home grown tomatoes. On Saturday morning I picked up two huge sacks of bread while Nick went to collect the croustade, a delicious local dessert,

Everyone was put to work, cleaning, preparing food, installing the tables and chairs we’d borrowed from the village and the gazebos lent by friends. Gemma decorated the cake while Karen, who’d flown in from Northern Ireland, created beautiful table decorations from anything she could find in the garden. Didier brought the red wine and Jacques the white and rosé, as well as the armagnac, without which no meal is complete here. Maithée did a bit of everything, from washing up, to making toasts, to cleaning the new kitchen till it sparkled.

Twenty-something people sat down to lunch, grateful for the shade afforded by the gazebos, as it was a hot day under a clear blue sky; then we set to to prepare for the evening. We coloured sand to put in little jam jars, borrowed from everywhere, to use as night light holders, and wrapped them in ribbons. We made 300 toasts and various other aperitifs. We poured wine into carafes. set the tables and hung fairy lights. Francis not only lent us crockery, cutlery, glasses and an industrial dishwasher, set up in the back garden, but also made a magnificent paella for eighty people for the evening. Adrian and Jacques brought and set up a sound system for the bands.

Suddenly it was nearly 7o’clock, time for a very quick change of clothes before people started to arrive.

The evening passed so quickly. Hervé brought us a cremaillère, which is a piece of metal, traditionally hung in the chimney in the kitchen, from which you hang a cooking pot over the fire; the French phrase for housewarming is pendre (hang) la cremaillère. Once you’ve done that, the house is really yours.

Between eating, we played Irish music with EtCelterra then later moved on to some rock classics with a band put together for the night. Ade and Thierry were our lead guitars, Didier on rhythm, me on vocals and Kerri, the daughter of one of my students, who was here on holiday, played base. We’d never all played together before and hadn’t managed to find a drummer, but both Gemma and Alex had a turn as drummers. Perfect it may not have been, but it was great fun and all our guests seemed to enjoy it.

We brought out the cake, a fruit cake in true English style as most of the guests were French and had never tasted one; but as we started to cut it, the table collapsed under it! Incredibly, the cake landed right side up on its board, totally undamaged!

By the time we got to bed at 4am, we were absolutely shattered, but happy as everybody seemed to have had a great evening.