24 – 28th February: New Kid in Town

We watched Paul Thomas Anderson's film The Master recently, with Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role as the charismatic leader of a cult bearing some resemblance to Scientology. It featured a fantastic performance by Joaquin Phoenix (who doesn't use his middle name) as a violent drifter traumatised by war.

I was impressed to see that Joaquin, brother of River, has lent his weight to PETA's campaign to highlight the horrors of the latest horror from China, the brutal dog-leather industry. Mr. Phoenix is evidently an animal lover in general and a dog lover in particular. So he'll approve of Daphne (that's Daphné in French), the latest addition to the household.

Butter wouldn't melt...

She came on Tuesday. We drove south in the morning on the A20, down past Cahors and through a lovely old town called Castelnau-Montratier to the extreme south-west of the department. The Daughter had found an animal shelter on the internet run as part of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation by a woman with the memorable name of Danielle Diczi. Her husband, she told us, is of Hungarian origin.

The place is off the beaten track, but her directions were impeccable. It was well signposted and the visible dog shelters suggested we were there. When Madame Diczi emerged from her house to greet us, she was followed by a troupe of very young or very small dogs, including a trio of those rather unappealing furless Chinese dogs with wispy foreheads and tufty tails. Among the boisterous crowd were the two pups that our kid had spotted: a Labrador cross called Jelly and a sheepdog cross called Joxx. Clearly last year, when they were born, was the year of the J. I suppose, at least, such regimentation helps you keep track of your dog's age.

Personally, I had fallen for the photo of Joxx, because there's something about black and white cats and dogs (and films) that I love. We debated the matter long and hard before plumping for Jelly/Daphne. Living near farms, as we do, we are all aware that sheepdogs are often unhinged. The type of dog that attacks your car when you're least expecting it. Fortuitously, Joxx had already been claimed by the time we phoned up to reserve the yellow dog.  

Madame Diczi brought us into her cluttered living room, past a remarkably patient cat determined to sleep and ignore all the canine attention to his or her basket. She sat us down to go through the customary complex paperwork. There were photographs on the wall of Madame Diczi on horseback in full dressage gear, so I imagined her as a renowned equestrian before devoting her life to dogs. I didn't ask for confirmation. She can talk the hind legs off a poodle, so I didn't want to offer her another potential tangent.

Although we weren't looking for an identikit of our beloved Alf, it turns out that Jelly/Daphne was also born in December and also rescued from drowning in a bucket of water. Which suggests that it was an adoption meant to be. Her mother was a Labrador. Judging by her fur, part smooth but part wiry, her father must have been some kind of terrier. We speculated about a Jack Russell, but couldn't comprehend the sexual contortions involved. So Daphne née Jelly Sampson is a Terrierdor.

Our hostess with the canine mostest told us that her best customers are the Dutch and the Brits, because generally they are less concerned by the purity of the race. She brought our new bâtarde out to the car, found an old towel for her in a shed and said her goodbyes. All the way home, Daphne sat on the back seat with her head on our daughter's lap. It felt good to be chauffering her to a new life in a good home, but I kept imagining all those domestic critters out there that aren't so fortunate.

A happy corrective trainer

It was Tilley's job to contact Madame Diczi to inform her that we had changed Jelly's name to Daphne. Being a sensitive soul, she waited 24 hours because she didn't want to appear that we were dissing her chosen name. It was the good wife's self-appointed job to go out after lunch and buy the new resident the smallest collar available and a selection of chews and other toys. Meanwhile, though, Daphne had claimed an old single glove used for transporting hot pre-kettles from the oven of our wood-burning stove to the electric kettle. And she had already discovered the mesmerising new game of chasing the brush. She grabs its bristles and holds on with a terrier's tenacity. Which just goes to show that you can buy all the fancy toys in the world, but there's no beating the simple things in life.

And so the rest of the week became largely a process of Educating Daphne. A matter of rewards and admonishments (Come back here with that onion, you scamp!) and much mopping. We're fortunate to have terracotta tiles, but God knows how people manage with fitted carpets.

She seems to be a fast learner, which suggests a knowing intelligence in that winning expression of hers. On day 1 she learnt to bash her way out of the cat flap. (On hearing of this feat, a friend suggested that she must be a Labrador crossed with a Chihuahua.) Understandably and despite the calming drop of lavender oil on her neck, she whimpered when we attempted to leave her on the first night, so our girl gamely spent the night on the sofa to be with her and to make sure that there was no cat-flapping in the wee small hours.

'Kip of the Serene'

It's the cats that have been the biggest problem so far. Daisy has taken umbrage and gone on one of her safaris. She hasn't been seen since Tuesday evening despite the foul weather, so we're all wishin' and hopin' that she's simply biding her time and that nothing calamitous has befallen her. Myrtle, her outsized sister, has been gradually getting braver, coming down from her sanctuary on the mezzanine, stair by stair, to investigate the feisty upstart. But the disruption suggests that we were right not to adopt the four-year old large Airedale/Otter Hound cross badly in need of a loving home.

Tilley the Kid's learning fast, too. She it was who lobbied longest and strongest for a new puppy and she's discovering how much hard work goes with the pleasure. But the girl's done good. She's done her fair share of cleaning up messes and more than her fair share of occupying Daphne. She's even taught her to walk on a lead. For a dog of two months, that's remarkably impressive. Barbara Woodhouse, the stern TV trainer of errant dogs, would have been proud.

It's a horrible, dreary Sunday and there's still no sign of Little Miss Daisy. Daphne, however, has just got through her first night without accidents. She went out first thing and did her copious business – numbers 1 and 2 – on the grass. It's true that she starts off in Alfie's old basket and ends up on a forbidden sofa, but she looks at you so engagingly that it's hard to be cross in the context of such educational progress. We displayed the same kind of pride in the achievement as our kid did when she slipped the word subsequently into the conversation.

It's hard work and very time-consuming having a puppy dawg. I'm rather looking forward to a time when she can't get out of the cat flap. Before normal service is resumed, however, I'm going to enjoy what is, after all, a very short stage of a dog's life. Right now, our new Terrierdor is showing every sign of being a good 'un.

16 – 21st February: High Society

One social event in a week here is rare enough; two is aberrant, but three is charting new territory. The week was nothing short of dizzy.

It started, as weeks tend to, on a Monday. The three of us went to Brive to meet up with our ceramicist of choice, Ingrid Squirrell, who bought our old house in the Corrèze. She's here for a couple of weeks: to check on the house and get the oven fired up to do some potting. She got here to find that the gas boiler wasn't working and there was no water in the house, so she's been freezing despite the glorious winter sunshine. Freezing in the company of friends who had rented out their house near Argentat to some Brits, over here for a fortnight to ski in the mountains of the Cantal. Her friend, Sue, is a potter, too. Ingrid had left her clay in water to keep it malleable, but the water was so cold that the process of working it almost froze their fingers off.

We were to meet the three of them for a pizza at the Napoli followed by a film at the Rex. We went early enough to stock up on whole foods at Vital Form before they closed at seven. The place calls itself a supermarket, but the prices are more in keeping with a boutique. We knew how expensive whole foods were in France when we moved over here permanently and would bring stuff in bulk from Infinity Foods in Brighton or Lembas in Sheffield. Which was fine until the dispiriting day when we had to jettison 5kg of mite-infested sesame seeds. Now we're part of a small private co-operative that orders these foodstuffs in bulk.

Even so, we go to Vital Form sufficiently often for Debs to keep an in-store reward card. It's a big deal. They stamp your card when you spend over €15 and a fully stamped card entitles the bearer to a mouth-watering 2% off their next purchase. We spent nearly €70 on Monday evening and my wife valiantly argued that her card should be stamped three or four times, but this was far too complicated for the counter staff. What one should do, of course, is to go round three or four times for amounts of €15 or just over. But therein madness lies. Personally, I value my sanity at a little more than a 2% discount.

At the cinema, we were told in no uncertain terms that we couldn't buy our tickets any earlier than half an hour in advance of the 9 o'clock showing. Forget it, Jake. It's France... Being nominally vegetarians in France, as are two of the three friends we met outside the restaurant, we don't eat out much. Pizzas, like omelettes, have a limited appeal and, on Monday evening, I found my pizza a little too doughy and salty. The green salad was drowned in a dressing with far too much vinegar, so even though it's rather nice from time to time to eat in the company of one's fellow humans, it wasn't a memorable culinary experience.

Besides, we learnt from Ingrid that a nice man from our old village – an active man who kept himself fit enough in his retirement to enjoy equestrian holidays in far-off places like Rajasthan and Patagonia – has been struck down by some kind of cancer in his back, which has confined him to a wheelchair. And we heard from Ingrid's friends about a 'shed-tax'. A legacy, apparently, of Sir Cosy's presidency, it's a one-off tax on sheds, car ports and any other kind of independent outhouse that's calculated, allegedly, at around €700 per square metre. If true, it puts the kibosh on our proposed straw-bale wood shelter. Forget it, Jake. It's France. Being France, it could well be true. Nothing like a new tax to keep the civil servants in business, while keeping individual ambition in check. It'll do wonders for the DIY trade, too.

Never mind, eh? A Most Violent Year was a most entertaining film. Set in New York in 1981, just before zero tolerance, the film was partly shot in Detroit to give the urban scenes a convincing air of dilapidation. The subway carriage totally covered in rabid graffiti brought back memories of travelling from JFK to the centre of Manhattan on my first visit to New York at around this time. Uncomfortable memories of the fear I felt, clutching my bag to my chest as I scanned the carriage for potential muggers. In those days, New York had the kind of reputation for crime that we now associate with places like Johannesburg. 

Come Friday evening and we were able to dress up in our glad rags once more, this time for the annual Cabaret du Coeur at Curemonte. Now in its 11^th year following the tsunami of December, 2004, in aid of which it was originally conceived, this is something mounted – roughly speaking – by the same small private whole food co-operative I spoke of. Not so small these days, actually. We must be more than a hundred strong. Certainly, the little salle de fètes seemed even more packed than it usually is. Some years I take part (often in the capacity of an MC), others I don't – depending on factors such as motivation, inspiration and commitment to rehearsals. January's familial disruptions gave me the excuse I needed to sit back in the audience and enjoy the hard work and artistic endeavour of others.

In some ways, it was the best yet. It was shorter and tighter, and having a dedicated stage manager made the business of getting one act off and the next one on a slicker affair and less reminiscent of a parade of enthusiastic amateurs. Our Dutch friend, Dmitri, glowed with the pride of having obtained a whole row of cinema seats from somewhere, I think, in St. Céré, for a sketch that seemed inspired – but probably wasn't – by Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. He showed up again on banjo in a nice version of 'Cotton-Eyed Joe', made famous by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

His wife, Margot, was part of a hilarious chorus line based on something spotted originally online. Seven women side by side by Sondheim in shades and dressed in black bar two-tone leggings: one black leg, one white. So, by lining up with adjacent white legs and black legs and choreographing the kicks, you achieve an effect of two white or two black legs raised off the ground at the same time. Rather like the comedian Harry Worth's old routine of raising both arms and legs off the ground at the same time using the angle of a shop window – if you can remember that far back. Anyway, take it from me, it was clever, deceptively simple and very funny.

The three Steves – the Rockin' Royales – finished things off with nice versions of 'Fly Me to the Moon' and 'Every Day I Have the Blues', and we were able to slip away into the wet night and leave everyone else to the tidying and washing up. I've contributed in previous years, so the guilt wasn't too burdensome. It meant, too, that we were tucked up in bed before midnight. 

Which was just as well, because we were off out the next night. The press were gathered outside to report on the egregious event for the local paper. Looking tired and shell-shocked, the Sampson family slipped wearily out of their home for a meal with four of their oldest friends in France. Sometime after midnight, their car returned. Bearing a hand-picked overnight log, man of the house and femme de foyer, Mark, told us that they'd had a cracking evening. 'We talked of those early days in a foreign land, when we would spend time socialising with people whom hindsight would reveal as glaringly unsuitable. The past seems like a different country now.'

Oh, and I forgot to tell the reporters that we spent at least half an hour analysing the French word for undertaker. While the unofficial word is a croque-mort (or dead-biter), the official word is entrepreneur. Literally, someone who undertakes a task – which is presumably the same derivation as the English word. In high society, one talks of such esoteric matters.

9 – 14th February: Up on the Roof

Shame about the inevitable rain on Saturday, great sheets of it, because it was an extraordinarily beautiful week. One of those cold, crisp and luminous weeks that make you appreciate the rare joys of winter. When it's as dry as that, it's not difficult to keep warm. The cold doesn't penetrate your bones.

I let the fire go out overnight on Monday for the first time in about a fortnight. I'd viewed the overnight log that I put on with suspicion. Sure enough, the next morning, there was no life in it whatsoever and the stove metal was cold to the touch. So I seized the opportunity to sweep the flue, from below and above. Up on the roof, working the hedgehog and rods down the still-shiny chrome steel of the chimney, with the landscape beneath me bathed in the first intense sunlight of the day, I felt a little like one of the old Viscounts of Turenne must have felt. Up in his now abandoned tower that dominates the northern horizon, surveying the same undulating basin that in days of yore constituted the old viscomté. 

It was about this time of year, with the same glorious winter weather, that I spent several weeks sublimating my fear of heights, helping the couvreur put the roof on this house. A methodical man in a beret called Michel. A quiet, sober man with a distinct air of sadness. During our time on the roof together, I discovered that the sadness derived from child deprivation. He was a member of an organisation that called itself SOS Papa and he'd spent a chunk of the previous decade fighting his former wife for the right to see more of his children. Over lunch one day, he showed me some newspaper cuttings that described the legal battles that led his appearance at the European Court of Human Rights (or some such august body).

I hope he won his struggle for equal viewing rights, because I remember particularly the way his face lit up with love and pride when he brought his young son and daughter one day to the construction site to meet me and say hello and see where their dad was working. He was a changed man and I saw nothing on the faces of the children to suggest anything but affection for their mild-mannered father.

While the girls have been poring over pictures of deserving dogs that need a good home, I have been much preoccupied this last week with roofs. I saw quite a bit of my latest roofer of choice. He's a funny little taciturn man called Mario – though, ridiculously, we still call each other by the formal Monsieur. He's taciturn and a mumbler, which makes intelligible communications problematic. Nevertheless, over recent years, we've developed a kind of understanding and a mutually beneficial professional relationship. Mario does jobs for the co-proprietors at the chateau I look after, and in return he does me a price for any private roofing jobs I need doing. These days he even gives me his version of a sheepish smile when we shake hands. 

Now that the Tenant of Wildfell Hall has quit the apartment above my wife's clinic, I've been able to engage Mario to fix a hole in the roof where the rain gets in. To stop my mind from wandering while he was outside addressing the fissures in the mortar, I went off into town to buy some posh tea for the girls at the Café Bogota. On my return, I caught sight of him on the roof at the back of the house, standing back to regard his handiwork. We waved sheepishly at each other.

It didn't make me queasy, because the roof above the tenant's sitting room is a flat one. At the chateau, however, Mario does a walk of death each time he goes out to inspect the latest problem with the wafer-thin guttering. It renders me almost physically sick. This week, the problem lay at the back of the building, so he walked all the way around the cornice of the chateau. I help him out via one of the Velux windows in the middle of the top three flats, then retreat to pace around the parquet floor, trying not to imagine a cry of distress followed by a sickening thud as a human body hits solid ground below.

This time, I found the courage from deep within to wander downstairs and out onto the back lawn to check that he had reached his destination without incident. He was already up there at the angle of the cornice and when he saw me looking anxiously up at him, he pretended to topple forward. His idea of a joke. It didn't amuse me. 

I left him to it with instructions to lock up and hide the key. Back home, though, I had to calculate roughly how long it would take to do the necessary before I could safely phone him on the mobile. I have this disaster scenario whereby I phone him and, distracted momentarily by his ringtone, Mario loses concentration for a split second and topples forward for real. 

'Bonjour Monsieur,' I called eventually. 'You're not up on the roof, are you?'
'No no. It's all done.'
'Ah good. It went off all right then?'
'Im-pecc-able.'

So all was quiet at the Big House and I was able to go back to retrieve the key and check that everything was locked up securely. From a Velux in the adjoining flat I could see a shiny pristine length of zinc guttering laid in the part of the cornice where the old gutter had perished. Mario had lived to walk the walk of death another day and, thanks to his remarkable sang-froid, he had managed to fix two holes in two different roofs to stop the leaks before the rain came on Saturday.

I like to think that I choose my roofers, as we must choose our next dog, with care.