For years I’ve wanted to go to the quilt festival in Ste. Marie aux Mines, in the diagonally opposite corner of France, near the German border. We had thought of taking the camper van and making it part of a two week trip, but there was too much going on in the garden to leave it for that long; so we went in the car and booked an hotel.

We set off at 6.30 on Tuesday morning; with a little over 1000km to do, we needed an early start. Only stopping for natural breaks and to swap drivers, we made it in 13 hours and found the F1 hotel in Colmar, near the Statue of Liberty roundabout, the small replica statue constructed to celebrate the life of its designer, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a son of Colmar.

It was 40km to Ste. Marie, so the following morning I dropped Nick off part way there; he was going to spend the two days cycling in the Vosges, something he’s long wanted to do, and I headed for the show. It’s held at 19 sites in four villages with buses shuttling visitors from one site to another; with 20 000 visitors you wouldn’t want all of them driving back and forth all day.

There were over 1000 quilts on display, so there was something for every taste, from the very traditional to contemporary to 3-D installations; quilts made by Americans and Canadians during the second world war, for refugees in Europe; incredible “thread painted” quilts which could easily be taken for photos and a huge quilt, made entirely by hand of tiny pieces of fabric, over the last ten years; though one had to ask “Why?”

There were exhibitors from all over the globe; Japan, Korea, America, Canada as well as many European countries. The visitors were mostly French and German, but lots of English, Italians, Dutch and other nationalities whose languages I couldn’t place.

The work of one artist particularly caught my eye; she was doing a workshop on the technique of fabric manipulation, but not till after we’d left. I went back for another look and asked if there were still places at the workshop, if I could persuade Nick to stay another night; yes, she said, but she could do me a workshop the next morning if I wanted – I didn’t need asking twice.

By the evening, I was exhausted, having walked around over half the show in the day; I wasn’t impressed at receiving the first speeding ticket of my life on the way back to the hotel, when I was so busy looking for road signs telling me my route that I completely missed seeing a village sign, or the two gendarmes hiding a few metres behind it.

We went to Colmar for dinner; not the choucroute Nick had been looking forward to, but ate in a Yugoslavian restaurant. We didn’t manage choucroute the following evening either, but ended up eating a superb mezze in a Lebanese restaurant. Colmar is a beautiful city, with an ancient centre which buzzes in the evening.

The morning of day two was spent at my workshop, learning to do what turned out to be a modern form of smocking; I was delighted with the result and will be able to pass on the technique to the rest of the women in the Art Textiles group. In the afternoon I managed to get round the rest of the show; you could easily spot quilters by the end of the day – weary looking women, mostly laden with bags of fabrics, buttons, rulers and surprisingly often accompanied by their other halves, some in a capacity as photographers, others clearly bored and wondering how much longer they’d have to stay, but a few genuinely interested in the art on display.

The following day we left early, it was a long, hard drive home, wet for the first ten hours; but the trip was well worth the effort, I loved the show and Nick thoroughly enjoyed his cycling.

Apart from a shower on August 19th, we’d had no rain since June 15th. And for most of this time, the weather has been pretty hot, between 35 and 40ºC in the shade most days.

Unsurprisingly, the garden has suffered. Thanks to the system Nick installed, which allows us to use the treated water that comes out of the septic tank, along with water pumped from the well, we’ve been able to water the veg plot and plants in pots, but that has taken all our water and up to two hours a day. Plants on the banking have died, trees and shrubs in the park are looking very sad and the grass is brown and crunchy underfoot. Friends reliant on rainwater butts have had to stop watering as the cost of using tap water is too high to justify. The vines look green enough, but the vignerons are expecting a small crop of grapes this year, about 10% less than normal, due to lack of rain.

So yesterday afternoon, when I heard distant rumbles of thunder as I picked tomatoes, I was quite excited at the prospect of some rain. The clouds were gathering in the south, obliterating our view of the Pyrenees; the air became heavy and sticky; we could see that it was raining across the valley. Finally, the sun disappeared and the first few drops arrived, big, heavy drops. We moved the geraniums out of the shelter of the house, pushed the chairs back from the edge of the balcony and I have to admit to jumping around the garden for the joy of seeing the rain, before adjourning to the balcony to watch nature’s firework display.

It rained steadily for several hours and I’m sure the grass looks ever so slightly greener already!

It’s that time of year; the time of year when the extra freezer is turned on and filled, the time of year when the garden produces so much good food that we’re hard pressed to cope with it all, the time of year when the shelves in the arrière cuisine groan with the weight of bottled beans and beetroot, jars of pasta sauce, jams, chutneys and pickles.

I’d reorganised the shelves several times, shuffling stuff about to squeeze in another jar here, another bottle there, and this time there really wasn’t any more space for the next lot of jars to be housed. It was time to implement plan A, pushed aside several years ago because we could cope with plan B (open shelving made from briquettes and old planks), so it wasn’t a priority. Plan A; to fit cupboards the length of one wall in the arrière cuisine, giving us more storage space and keeping the jars and bottles in the dark. First step; a trip to Brico Depot in Pau for the cupboards, just the cheapest they have and one day Nick will build decent doors for them. He was supposed to start building them the following day, but we also found a very nice cast iron bed frame in the Troc (second hand furniture shop) in Pau, so he had to go back with the trailer to pick it up. Plans, eh?

Kieran came over to help build and fit the cupboards which I’ve now filled in an organised manner; it’s a real treat to be able to find what I’m looking for.

The small freezer is only half full; something that irks Nick, so as it was too hot to go outside this afternoon, we made a couple of batches of sausages. The first lot are pork and haggis, the rest are pork, apple, sage and onion. They should keep us going for a while.

The weekend of Nick’s birthday was always going to be a busy one, coinciding as it did, with the Caupenne village fete. We went along on Friday night, just to meet up with people, have a drink and eat mussels and chips. On Saturday evening Didier’s band was playing, so, like the proverbial bad pennies, we turned up again, keeping his wife and mother company. Sunday lunch is always the highlight of the weekend, with hundreds of people arriving first for the aperitifs, then a lavish, multi-course lunch which goes on well into the evening.This year the music was provided by a Gascon male voice choir, singing traditional Gascon and Basque songs that most of the locals knew.

Nick had been out cycling with the club in the morning, so had to have a quick shower and change to go to the meal; no sooner had we finished with the coffee and armagnac, than it was time to dash home, change again and head out to the restaurant I’d booked for the evening. A bit excessive? Yes, probably, but a friend was booked to play there that evening, so it would have been a shame to miss it. This is fast becoming our favourite restaurant, not least because of the efforts they make to accommodate my diet, but also simply because the food is superb.They also remembered from when we’d booked back in June, that this was Nick’s birthday, so his dessert was brought to the table with a firework and Nam’s band playing Happy Birthday as the rest of the customers and staff joined in.

He seems very pleased with his present; a week’s course learning to paraglide in the Pyrenees. I don’t know when we’ll have time to fit it in, but I’ll do a full report.

Sorry for the quality of the photos, taken on my phone in the half light of dusk and later.

In the run up to our party, our poor garden suffered horribly; weeds have taken over most of the potager, smothering lettuces and strawberries and making it almost impossible to get between rows of tomatoes. Plants on the banking have died, simply because I didn’t have the time to water them and next to nothing was picked for nearly two weeks. Fortunately, since it has only rained once in the last two months, the grass has given up growing, so hasn’t needed mowing.

This week we’ve tried to get back on top of things; not easy as with the current heatwave, it’s impossible to stay out past 10am, but we’ve picked the last of the courgettes, 10kg of aubergines, heaps of beans and tomatoes and our ridiculously huge crop of onions.

We defrosted the big freezer in preparation for the filling season; bags of caponata and courgettes Provençal, trays full of yellow beans and sliced aubergines and ready meals of stuffed round courgettes. The dehydrator is running 24 hours a day – found the right food dehydrator reviews on time, great – full of plum tomatoes and black figs from my neighbour, our white figs will soon be ready along with apples to prepare and freeze. I planted rather too much Swiss chard, have given bags and bags of it away, but I think I’ll have to start blanching and freezing that too. Nick’s started a batch of a blackberry aperitif, that we hope will be as good as the cherry one he made last year.  The next job is to plait the onions so they can be hung up in the cabanon.

Work on the house is on the back boiler for the time being, until we can get out of the kitchen.

Pendant les semaines autour de notre fete, notre pauvre jardin a souffert horriblement; les mauvaises herbes ont repris la majeure partie du potager, étouffant les salades et les fraises et ce qui rend presque impossible d’entrer entre les rangées de tomates. Quelques plantes sur le talus sont morts, simplement parce que je n’ai pas eu le temps d’arroser pendant près de deux semaines. Heureusement, car il n’a plu qu’une seule fois au cours des deux derniers mois, l’herbe n’a pas poussé, la tonte n’est donc pas nécessaire.

Cette semaine, nous avons essayé de revenir au-dessus des choses; pas facile car avec la canicule actuelle, il est impossible de rester dehors après 10 heures, mais nous avons ramassé les derniers des courgettes, 10kg d’aubergines , tas de haricots et de tomates et notre ridiculement énorme récolte d’oignons.

Nous avons décongelé le grand congélateur dans la préparation pour la saison de remplissage; sacs de caponata et courgettes provençal, plateaux pleins de haricots jaunes et les aubergines en tranches et des plats cuisinés de courgettes rondes farcies. Le déshydrateur fonctionne 24 heures par jour, plein de tomates italiennes et figues noires de ma voisine, nos figues blanches seront bientôt prêts avec des pommes pour préparer et congeler. J’ai planté un peu trop de blettes, j’ai donné des sacs et des sacs de loin, mais je pense que je vais devoir commencer à blanchir et de congéler aussi. Nick a commencé un lot d’un apéritif de mûre, que nous espérons être aussi bon que celui de la cerise qu’il a fait l’année dernière. La tâche suivante consiste à tresser les oignons afin qu’ils puissent être accroché dans le cabanon.

On ne fait pas des travaux à la maison pour le moment, jusqu’à ce que nous pouvons sortir de la cuisine.

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.

When I asked Joel, our builder, what our chances were of having the crepi finished before the party, he looked doubtful. It would depend largely on the weather; it can’t be done if it’s raining, or if it’s too hot and then of course, he’d be on holiday for 2 or 3 weeks from the end of July. I had visions of a party around the scaffolding.

But he’s a good bloke and we got home from Auch to find scaffolding erected around the house; Joel arrived the following day to say the the heatwave was over, so he and his men would start the next morning. It would still be hot by the afternoon, so they’d be here at 6am.

At 6.03 the vans began to arrive, loaded with bags and bags of the stuff for the first coat, a mixer and a sprayer. By lunchtime the first coat was on the side of the house. The following day they did the base coat on the front; the chaufferie didn’t need a base coat. They decided to work Saturday that week, getting the finish coat onto the side, then Monday top coated the rest. One would spray the product onto the wall while the other three smoothed it over; it had to rest a while then, till it was the right consistency for the final rub, and it was done!

I’m sure we’ll very soon get used to it, but for the time being, we keep going outside to stand and admire our lovely house.

In the meantime, the heatwave may be over, but it hasn’t rained in weeks. We keep emptying the water storage tank that fills from the fosse, the rain butts are dry and we’ve pumped everything out of the old fosse, that now catches rainwater. The plants were looking very dry; it was time to plumb the well, there’s about a metre of water, 15m down.

We bought yet another pump and miles of pipe and pumped the water into the storage tank by the potager; we can pump the well twice a day as it takes a while to refill, but we have plenty of water now.

Joel est venu faire le crepi la semaine dernière. Lui et ses ouvriers ont bien travaillé, de 6h du matin, et nous sommes très contents avec le finisson. La maison est très jolie maintenant.

When I was volunteered, at the cycle club AGM, last January, as official representative of translation company for the 12th European Cyclotourism week in Auch,  I really had no idea what I was letting myself in for! Nick offered his services as one of a team of 300 volunteers too, doing whatever was needed. It turned out to be a very interesting, if totally exhausting, nine days.

There were three cycle routes each days, marked with arrows, of around 50, 100 and 150km, that took in roads, countryside and villages all around Auch. Lunches could be ordered in advance and there were several fast food stands on the site, entertainment in the evenings in the form of traditional music and dance troupes, a jazz band, as well as a screen to watch the tour de France and the football.

Wednesday 6th

We went to a meeting at the “camp site” in Auch, for anyone involved in parking, driving, etc., as Nick was to drive the shuttle between the camp site and the showers a kilometre away. It didn’t look much like a camp site; more a big field.

Friday 8th

I arrived in Auch by 8am, to start work welcoming the 3000 or so expected cyclists. The site was transformed; toilet blocks lined up along one edge and named avenues and numbered parking/camping spaces were all neatly marked out. There was a big tent for the reception area and a series of smaller marquees at the far end of the site, for fast food stands and shops selling local produce and cycling-related stuff. My responsibility was the non-French contingent; the Belgians, Swiss and English were no bother, slightly more difficult were the Ukrainians and the Poles, nearly 300 of them in total, very few of whom spoke any English or French, so communication involved a great deal of sign language and mime. I had Fabienne, a French woman who speaks excellent English to help me for part of the time. We finished about 8pm.

Nick arrived in the camper in the afternoon, learnt the route for the shuttle and started guiding people to their allotted camping emplacement, a hot task, cycling back and forth in 34ºC heat.

Saturday 9th

We started work at 7am, Nick driving and cycling again, me welcoming people, sorting and explaining the various bits of paper in  their dossiers. I was given a speech to translate for Sunday’s opening ceremony.

A Ukrainian lady fell in Lourdes, she got back to the site, but wasn’t well. I got one of the organisers to call the ambulance, me translating from French to English, then a young Ukrainian translating to her own language for the patient; convoluted, but it worked. The woman was taken to hospital, where she was diagnosed as having broken ribs and vertebrae.

Finished 11pm.

Sunday 10th

This was the hottest day, at 37ºC in the shade. Having manned the departure point from 7am, I was invited to go with Fred to follow the route by car, calling at Lupiac, where our club were providing refreshments. A day off, I thought; but we had a call to say people were missing some of the signing in Auch, so turned round to go back. There were already four arrows at the junction, but it was on a big descent and people simply weren’t seeing them. So while Fred went back to base to pick up more signs, I directed cyclists to the right road.

In Lupiac, the birthplace of Dartagnan, a team of Musketeers had been hired to entertain the cyclists with fencing demonstrations, as they ate their lunch, which lent a great atmosphere to the place. En route back to Auch, we encountered several people in difficulty due to the heat, and even one man in a car, whose wife had called to ask him to pick her up; he couldn’t find her and was running short of petrol (she turned up  eventually). We gave out water, food and salt as we made our way back, me panicking slightly that, though I’d translated the speech, I hadn’t had time even to read it through.

I got back in time to have a quick shower and head to the opening ceremony, but having had virtually nothing to eat all day, started feeling faint; I had a banana and ran, arriving to find everyone waiting for me, very embarrassing.

Monday 11th

Monday was cooler, after a big storm overnight. We were given the afternoon off, once Nick had finished driving the minibus, so we went home to water the garden.

Tuesday 12th and Wednesday 13th

Cool, cloudy days with drenching showers, but Nick and I managed to have a ride on Tuesday afternoon and stay dry. We were getting quite used to getting up at 6am by now and Nick enjoyed his daily trip to the nearby bakery for breakfast.

Thursday 14th

The day started uneventfully and Lionel, one of the organisers, asked if I’d like to go around the route with him in the van. Surely this would be an easier day than the last time, I thought. An hour in and he received a call to say that a young Polish lad had had an accident and they were waiting for the ambulance. At the lunch stop we heard that he was being admitted to hospital and they needed a translator; by this stage I knew most of the Poles and Ukrainians who spoke either English or French and was soon able to spot a Polish lady whose English was fairly good. We explained the situation, and she agreed to go with us. We put her bike in the van and headed for the hospital, where we discovered that someone else was doing the translating, though she had to get back to work soon after.

The young man, only 17 years old, had descended a hill too fast, missed the turn at the bottom and gone face first into a tree; he was in quite a mess, but there was nothing for us to do for the time being. We went back to the site, taking his friend, who, luckily for us, spoke excellent English, not knowing if he’d need to be transferred to Toulouse. We waited for what seemed an eternity, then heard that he’d be staying in Auch, so back to the hospital with the friend, her fiancé and the boy’s uncle; there were emails from his mother (in Poland) to translate when we arrived, but we finally got to see the doctor, who explained that he’d fractured his skull, had several facial fractures and had broken his collarbone. They weren’t sure about his neck yet and would have to re-scan that in a few days, though happily he hadn’t suffered brain damage and was able to move his arms and legs and to speak and won’t need surgery for the fractures. We sorted for his mother to fly over and one of the organisers was looking into arranging accommodation for her. A very long, very emotional day, though if he hadn’t been wearing a helmet I think it could have been a lot worse.

Friday 15th

I was given a day off (for good behaviour?), so Fabienne and I rode the day’s short route, 50km. It was the best weather of the week, through beautiful countryside and pretty villages.

The closing ceremony over in the evening, Nick and I collapsed, definitely ready to come home the following day.

I’m happy to say that this is an international event, so won’t be held in France again for a good few years and when it does return, it won’t be in the Gers. If nothing else, this experience had given me a huge amount of admiration for real translators.

It seems a while since I posted anything about the progress of work on the house. We’re all too well aware that it’s only a few weeks till our housewarming party, by which time we really ought to have moved in, but feel as though we’re moving at a snail’s pace, even though we work, most days, from morning to night.

The tiling is all finished, grouted and the cement bloom cleaned off with acid. The garden is in a much better state than in previous years. The kitchen is nearly fitted; Nick and Kieran fitted the chimney to the cooker hood last week. They were going to fit the sink, but it’s a resin one, the same as a friend’s and prone to the same problems of staining as the one in the gite; so plan B – we bought a black granite composite sink on Saturday instead, which I hope will be fitted soon. As sink fitting wasn’t a viable option last week, the lads filled in the time putting together the wash basin unit for the bathroom; it has no legs, so is currently stood on bricks until we decide exactly what height to make it.

You might notice from the photos that, in spite of there being glass panels in the door, no light comes into the hall. When we fitted the door, it rained shortly afterwards and the rain poured straight in, so we decided we’d have to build a porch. I went to the mairie to ask which sort of planning permission we’d need. In typical French fashion, there are different forms for any number of types of permission, all to be filled in in triplicate at least. The lady at the mairie asked if we’d finished the original building work. No, I replied. So we’d need this form, sheaves of paper to be filled in and accompanied by detailed drawings of the porch, including every possible dimension, numerous photos, detailing where each one is in relation to neighbours’ houses, distances from them and the road, etc., etc. It took us three evenings to fill the forms in, which I took to the mairie, then we waited. Eventually the reply came back – refused. Because we’d filled in the wrong forms. I went back to the mairie; the lady said she hadn’t known we hadn’t finished the other works yet(!!??) Had she known, she’d have told me to fill in different ones. I kept my cool, outwardly at least and collected a new sheaf of paperwork, very similar to the previous one, but didn’t this paragraph in the rejection letter mean that we’d need an architect? No, you don’t need an architect for this, said in a “don’t be silly” tone of voice.

Why, I wondered, couldn’t I just re-submit at least those pages that were duplicates, surely they must still have them in Auch (the centre). I phoned Auch; they told me that normally they’d have been sent back to my mairie. So back again to collect the half of my dossier that had been sent back, resisting the temptation to ask where the other half might be. Another two nights of head scratching form filling and we sent off the next lot.

The postman brought a recorded letter this morning; another rejection. He’s a lovely guy who likes to practice his English with us, so we asked him to help decipher the jargon; even he struggled, but we think it’s been refused this time because we needed an architect to do something.

Sometimes banging my head against a brick wall sounds very appealing!

NIck went to the Pyrenees this weekend with the cycle club; they cycled there on Saturday, doing a couple of cols en route, stayed overnight and cycled back on Sunday. The weather wasn’t brilliant in the hills and they couldn’t see the tops at all, but it improved as they headed for home on Sunday. A total of almost 300km; not bad.

On Monday we retraced his route, this time in the car, as it was my big day, when I was to have a tandem paraglider flight. The weather was perfect this time, hardly a cloud in the sky and light winds. Nick set off to cycle up to the take off area, while we took a car ride with all the gear; the two pilots, myself, another passenger and the driver arrived shortly after Nick, who was waiting, camera at the ready.

We got all the gear on, prepared the canopy, took a few short steps down the hillside and we were airborne; it was an amazing sensation as we turned this way and that, finding the thermals to give us more lift as we soared above the trees, on a level with the birds. Teo, my pilot, was able to point out all the local landmarks; the views were just unbelievable! After a little while Teo let me take the controls, turning left and right as we floated over the lake, until we hit a patch of turbulence, when he quickly took over again, bringing us down for a perfect landing just minutes after Nick arrived, having descended the col as fast as he could.