Blogger saves Lot
from crippling drought...
Great job, Sampson! In writing about the dry weather last
week, I precipitated a week of downpours and storms. Nothing too violent
either, but plenty of rain, rain, rain, beau-ti-ful
rain to fill up the rain butts. A friend with an underground cistern that
was just about running on empty told me that it filled up entirely one wet night.
That's 20,000 litres. That's some rain storm.
Holidaymakers won't thank me, of course, but farmers, gardeners
and nature lovers the department over have been leaving presents for the family
outside our front door. Modestly, I told well-wishers that it had really had
nothing to do with me, that this meteorological instability is all part of the
wonderful world of global warming. I don't wish to see straw effigies of myself
in fields and gardens. Personality cults can be very dangerous things.
It's raining again this morning. It was raining yesterday
evening when I went out with a quiche and a bottle of wine to Bret's latest Fête des Mecs. Guys' party night. There
was only a handful of us, which might have had something to do with the
weather. We almost lost Dimitri. He got as far as St. Michel de Bannières and
turned back in alarm when he saw the storm clouds over the Dordogne. He's in
the middle of re-roofing their barn and got back just in time to stop the wind from
stripping away the enormous tarp stretched over the framework of the roof. Such
was its power that it blew away the rocks to weigh down the tarp like mere
pebbles. As in another scene from Days Of
Heaven, during a quarter of an hour of atmospheric turmoil he was left single-handedly
wrestling with ropes in the driving rain to stop the whole caboodle being blown
into the next department.
The roof was saved and he got there in one piece with his
pasta salad and Cuban cigars. I'd turned up an hour before, the first guest to
arrive, to help Bret with his last-minute preparations. It gave me a glimpse
into his unique culinary methodology, based entirely on experimentation that
defies any recipes known to humankind and any acceptable combinations of
foodstuffs. At one point I found myself frantically chopping garlic cloves as
fast as he could peel them. He can be a little too liberal with garlic for my
taste.
A small turn-out meant fewer games and more chance to
chat with people I see only from time to time when I emerge from my hermit's
cave. I even smoked my first cigar in about three years. Not one of the
full-bodied Cuban critters, but one of the little cigarillos that Bret had
bought thoughtfully for our mutual Dutch friend. It was rather enjoyable, but I
discovered this morning that my clothes smelt of tobacco. Much water has flowed
under many bridges since the last time I was compelled to jettison clothes for
this reason.
In talking to Lee, with whom we have years spent in
Brighton in common, I also discovered that we have a mutual experience of Bath.
As a kid in Belfast, I used to go there every summer with the family to stay
with our maternal grandparents. As refugees from The Troubles, the family even ended
up living there for a few years. I used to drink in the same pub as Lee – the Hat
& Feathers in Walcott – in the days when I would wander lonely as a teenage
cloud down to the more edgy, alternative district of the Georgian city in
search of sympathetic company.
Lee got married in the same registry office as my sister
did. Apparently, he and his wife both had long dreadlocks at the time. When he
cut them off in order to move to the Corrèze and become an organic farmer, he
discovered what a joy it was to feel a pillow under his head again. Bearing
dreadlocks, he told me, was rather like living with a carpet over your
shoulders. He told me how to grow them (not that I'm thinking of it at this
unsuitably late stage) and dispelled the myth that you shouldn't wash locks
lest you wash away the oils that keep them together. It was all very
enlightening in a Bunny Wailer kind of way.
Our Flemish friend, Kim, turned up late with a nephew in
tow from his recent trip back to the homeland. Which would have been just fine,
only the nephew commandeered Bret's laptop to assault us with a selection of
death metal music or whatever label it goes under these days. I must be getting
old, because I found myself mouthing phrases like Can't hear yourself think. My grandma used to say that about the
Rolling Stones. But I couldn't. Conversation was impossible. Kim suggested that
we win back the laptop, but I'd forgotten my reading glasses and the screen was
just a blur. When everyone moved upstairs for games, I figured it was time to
cut and run. With my quiche dish and Bret's orbital sander, I found my way to
my car at the bottom of the drive in the after-midnight pitch black darkness by
the sound of my footsteps on limestone chippings.
When I got back home to my old familiar sane and safe house,
the girls were tucked up tight in their beds. There was just the matter of
removing Daphne from the foot of the 'master bed' and returning her to her
basket, before discarding clothes that smelt of cigar smoke.
There were fun and games earlier in the week, during a
respite from the rain, when Darryn and Leanne turned up with their new hound,
Gunter. It's his first visit from England to their building site on the other
side of the valley. Gunter's a Rhodesian Ridgeback. He's an impressive beast,
already double the weight of our Terrierdor, despite being a month younger than
she is. I was a little nervous at first when Daphne met Gunter, and not just
because they flattened the last of the irises (they needed cutting back
anyway). But Daphne's a game young thing and she kept coming back for more, despite
the frequent yelps of fearful pleasure.
Eventually, they found a kind of common ground based on a
mutual respect for each other's physical capabilities. Next time they meet, presumably
they can carry on where they left off and won't need to go through any
unsettling preliminaries. Gunter will be 40kilos or so by the time he's fully
grown and that's a lot of weight to fall on a fragile ribcage.
The rain has stopped now and it will be interesting to see how the weather next week responds to my posting. If the sunshine returns, as I hope it will, there may be more gifts laid at our front door. Fruit and vegetables will do very nicely, thank you very much (if you're asking).
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