Introduction

When asked to write a few words, a column, for an internet website relating to southern France and receiving over 9 million 'hits' a year, can one refuse?

Are there not already countless would be writers with their blogs, their obsession with wine and cheese and lavender, their desperate efforts to fill their gites? Are we the first to discover La Belle France? No, we are not!

How could one be different? What new angle or shaft of light might be thrown upon a way of life now so well documented by those explorers who, like Christopher Columbus, set out not knowing where they were going, arrived not knowing where they were and (on occasion) returned not knowing where they had been - and maybe did it on borrowed money?

From Robert Louis Stevenson, 'Travels with my Donkey' the wonderfully named Modestine, men and women (generally English-speaking) have been describing their experiences of this strange and disparate land where 'La France Profonde' is to be found not only in the Oc but even in metropolitan Paris, the City of Light. Only the French could call their capital by a name that translates in English as 'Bets'! Only the French could build a huge glass pyramid, (love it or hate it) in the front courtyard of one of the premier palaces in Europe and therefore the world!

And where are the travelogues written by all the other immigrants, the Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians? In every cafe in France there is to be found a table occupied by a lone anglophone (m or f) scribbling away in a notebook, recording his/her novel (to him/her) experience of the sights and smells and local mannersfor the benefit of posterity, and, one hopes, the bank manager.

So what to say now?
Talk about the poor old Cathars - a con if ever there was one? Forty years ago there was no hint that one day there would be Cathar estate agents, Cathar garages, Cathar undertakers and restaurants even. Cathar castles? Yes, they were occupied by them in some heroic stands before their pointless roasting on the grill, crying out in their last desperate agonies 'No, I shall not abjure!', but the castles had already stood for three hundred years against the advance of the Moors and the extension of the Caliphate.

Talk about some perhaps less noticed aspects of the difference in  French and British culture? How a chicken's carcase is displayed on a French butcher's slab breast down and thighs up, how a chicken might even have an Appelation Controlee, Poulet de Bresse for example, always lying there, grey with yellow legs, with its fancy label and its head and bloodied comb bent round casting a reproachful eye at the potential purchaser and a price that says 'I am VERY expensive but I'm WORTH it!'? A wing and a leg, perhaps? Have you ever bought one? Do!

Or perhaps talk of the wonders of nature so seldom seen in that overcrowded island so many of us still call 'home' but which becomes less recognisable as such with each succeeding visit? Of the peregrine seen from the window, shepherding a flock of starlings into a tight ball of panicky, screeching fear before rising suddenly three hundred feet, closing his, or more likely her, wings and stooping through the flock and taking one to the ground. Safety in numbers, I suppose, but always one less at the end, like musical chairs. Of the huge grass snakes stretched out to warm on the tarmac roads at the end of winter. Of a picnic site chosen at random when hunger bit, beside a bank of thorn bushes or sloes one May, to be enchanted by a nightingale concert. No Berkeley Square, but then the Pyrenees were shining white in the foreground, the temperature was in the seventies (F), and the Camembert and the Cote de Malepere were perfect.

And so I will endeavor through my writings to bring to you something just that little bit different, observations presented from an interesting angle, something  delectable to tempt your jaded palate once in while.

A Languedoc Wine Tour taken in a sprightly and dignified old lady, The Grand Duchess perhaps ?

 

Un(im)Parfait

www.languedocwinetours.blogspot.com