On a day like this – to modify Dylan – the first Sunday of the year to be precise, it seemed that winter had finally replaced this long, wet and colourful autumn. When I took Daphne out for her morning constitutional, the frost had coated the carpet of fallen leaves and it was twice as hard as normal to cycle up our chemin. On the way back, my fingers froze inside their thermal gloves from Decathlon. I felt for the poor hunting dogs within their cold, loveless, concrete enclosures as they scrabbled up the wire fence and bayed at the pair of us, heading back for a nice warm house.
By the time I took the Good Wife to the station in Souillac after breakfast – we left 50 minutes for a 20-minute drive just to be sure – the sun was out and silhouetting the branches of trees blanched by hoar frost. What a magnificent sight; what a beautiful part of the world; how fortunate we are to live here, we agreed. Debs was off by train to Avignon via Toulouse and Narbonne, to stay with our oldest and dearest French friend, her first client and our daughter's first (and best) teacher. We arrived at the station nearly half an hour too early for a train that was bang on time.
The next day, though, the countryside was already wearing once more the sickly, saturated, post-apocalyptic look of Blade Runner. When my wife gets back, it's forecast to be 14 degrees that weekend. The meteorologists say that the coming winter will be mild again. So it could be that the first beautiful Sunday of December will be our only glimpse of true winter in these parts. All is deranged! All is perturbed!
My conspiratorial Dutch friend up the road from here doesn't believe that climate change is man-made, but merely an excuse for imposing more controls on us. He may be right, but after more than two centuries of a toxic Industrial Revolution it makes sense that we humans are responsible for wrecking the weather. After all, we've wrecked everything else. We can come up with Agent Orange and forever chemicals, so the climate should be well within our capabilities. When we talk about such matters, I generally nod and keep my own counsel. My French isn't quite up to expressing feelings or reinforcing points of view.
Anyway, winter's not officially here till the 21st December, so there may yet be time for the season to establish itself as it should. It gives me a few more days to prepare for whatever it has to throw at us. Just in case. We've already had two red days, so I've fired up the France Turbo wood-burner once more. Our wood is still not dry enough; I captured rather too much carbon when I cleaned the flue this morning.
And will we have enough to last potentially till the end of March? I've taken to dragging back portable dead trees from the woods around here to cut up for firewood. Wearing my Betron headphones that make me look like a 1950s comic-book astronaut and balancing a small tree on my right shoulder as my faithful dog trots along by my side, I must look like a queer fish to passers-by. Fortunately, there is very little traffic on our 'main road' and as yet no one has witnessed my acts of resourceful endeavour.
As for the garden, I'm too late to mow our sponge-like shaggy lawn and the strimmer waits in vain in the cave for a final outing before wintering. There's pruning... Theoretically, it's something I should be able to do. I'm a little less in the dark after speaking to Daniel by the bins during a post-meridian constitutional. He's an ageing man of the countryside, who helps out in his son's sheep-shed every day to ease him into retirement. He used to work for the local garden centre in Quatre Routes, so he knows a thing or two about horticultural matters. Not quite as genial as Monty Don, but a useful source of advice. He suggested that I don't prune the fruit trees now, but wait until February in case of late-winter frost damage. Moreover, I should prune the peach trees twice in fairly quick succession. I'll bet you didn't know that. I certainly didn't. His words of wisdom let me off the hook for a few months more.
Whether mild or severe, winter's still the time when everything shuts down for the duration. Back in the old days, in the deepest Corrèze, back when we had to struggle to keep warm in a draughty old stone farmhouse, it seemed that everyone closed the shutters and hibernated for a few months, emerging from time to time for a concours de belotte (some kind of card game whose mysteries I have never felt inclined to unravel) or, on very special occasions, an accordion-led French equivalent of a barn dance. That didn't tempt us either. Otherwise, we relied on charity in the form of invitations to dinner.
Culture and society aren't quite so limited during the long winter months here now in the Lot. There's the local art et essai cinema that shows films in version originale. Coming back from a prize-winning Italian film only the other night, I caught a magnificent stag in the headlines, ironically just across from the compound where the poor hunting dogs were presumably kipping on their cold concrete. I dipped the lights and it turned and ran off to the security of the woods.
The proximity to Brive also offers the three-screen Rex and the theatre. There's even a late-January jazz festival that has become a regular feature and next year's culminates in a concert at the theatre of the Cuban cellist Ana Carla Maza, followed by the Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca. My toes are already fidgeting. Next week, there's the exhilarating Malian singer and guitarist, Fatoumata Diawara, so things have really looked up after our years in the wilderness.
One local option has now sadly closed. The Big Drama last month was the night when Le Bar Au Coin de la Rue in the centre of Martel went up in flames. Miraculously, none of the other contingent properties were damaged, but the bar has been destroyed and, tragically, we heard rumours that the owner's two dogs were in the building. Small fry, I suppose, in the light of Gaza and the Ukraine, but still shocking. Residents complained about the noise, but it was the only real meeting place for social mixers. Last time we went there, someone came with his llama. The poor creature looked a little disgruntled, but certainly got a lot of attention.
And there are always films, music, Scrabble and books to
keep us going through the dead season. I'm currently belly-laughing my way
through John Kennedy Toole's A
Confederacy Of Dunces. I've denied myself a second read of it for years. I
might not enjoy it quite so much, and there are so many other books out there
waiting to be read for the first time. But no, it's still wonderful, and the
withering diatribes of the corpulent, indolent and flatulent anti-hero,
Ignatius J. Reilly, still make me shake with mirth. My favourite insult thus
far is 'Go dangle your withered parts over the toilet!' What a monstrous, savage slob he
is. His poor over-weaning and long-suffering mother.
And that might be an appropriate moment to sign off and to think some more about wintering the strimmer. From time to time, if it weren't for the noise and the general mayhem, a return to city life seems like an attractive proposition.
