But It Was Going Cheap ...

Another herb that grows around these parts in abundance is dill, or aneth as a Frog-thing would say. I cannot see why it should do so, for wild salmon do not, as a general rule, roam the garrigue, and the only reason for dill is making gravlax. It is a mystery, at least to my poor tired brain.

May 8 was of course a public holiday over here, celebrating la victoire glorieuse de la France in WWII. We very reasonably skipped the apéro at the mairie, and went off instead to the foire de printemps at Narbonne. Think of it as a sort of half-assed A&P show, only without the combine harvesters, and you'll get the idea. In any case, it all just goes to show that I really should not be let out on my own.

Because, you see, it was bright and sunny, and there was a leg of lamb sitting mournfully in the fridge, as these things tend to do, and in an excess of enthusiasm I had promised the neighbours a barbecue that very night - so despite the fact that we already had a barbecue we came back with two more. A little black Weber kettle job, just the right size for two or three people, and another one that is ... somewhat bigger.

Somewhat to my surprise the montage was relatively fool-proof, for I got it all together without losing any skin or, indeed, my temper, and there were no parts left over when that was done. Quite providentially Richard came past at that moment with a sack of fresh mussels, as he'd been out in the kayak at Gruissans, and couldn't help himself. So Margo very generously accepted a bucket-load, which cooked up - apparently - very nicely. (I wouldn't know. Given my history with the little rodents - I'm thinking oysters here - I do tend to avoid shellfish unless I absolutely know that I can eat them without, um, side-effects. It may be paranoia, but at least I'm not squatting the toilet all night.)

But I can see that I shall have to learn the fine art of dosing the charbon de bois for a kettle barbecue, as I had to finish off my boned-out butterflied leg in the oven. Never mind. And it's a good thing that Cash'n'Carry* are old enough to remember the time when garlic bread was considered pretty cool.

I hear the collective intake of breath as I tell you that, not content with that, we headed off to Montpellier the very next day, to take a look around Ikea and see what they had that we liked. You'll be relieved to hear that we left, a number of hours later, arms unencumbered, having bought nothing. (Apart from lunch, that is, which was when I discovered to my horror that they would not permit me to have a glass of wine with my salad. Only with a hot meal - must be healthier or something.)

However, as we were unladen and had the time, we had the bad idea to look around the rest of the huge mall, and came across a branch of Du Bruit Dans La Cuisine. I do not need any more de Buyer saucepans - and in any case I can get them just as cheaply online should I feel some sort of moral imperative coming over me - but they did have one KitchenAid stand mixer - in gloss black, admittedly - left in stock, at the ridiculous price of 500€ instead of 630€. Hell, 20% off? What was I supposed to do, under the circumstances?

I know what I did do, which was help them pack it into its carton, flash the plastic and walk off with it. So OK, neither of us should be allowed to go out without adult supervision. And of course once I got it home I was confronted with the existential question that hangs over all those of us with small kitchens - where to put the damn thing? Good one, Bruce: as it happens the faithful old Kenwood doesn't see that much use, so it's been banished to the pantry and the KitchenAid has taken its place right next to the imposing black German multi-function microwave.

Now I can see that I shall be forced to dig out Ruhlman's book Charcuterie and go online to search for things like the sausage-making attachment, and just possibly the pasta roller too, why not?

So just for a change I headed off to Narbonne on Saturday, hoping that just maybe after the market I would be able to find the Arab bazaar that I vaguely recalled was over by the gare, and that perhaps they would have some of life's necessities like sweet chili sauce and oyster sauce - oddly enough, these are things that are not easy to find in these parts.

I managed to pick up some cherries, first of the season, some of the adorable little pêches plates about which I have written before, spare ribs and tomatoes with taste and, just because I can, a couple of daurade royale (which I learn are bream) destined for the evening barbecue accompanied by some skewered vegetable chunks - courgette, kumara and onion, I thought.

And with that lot safely stowed away in little Suzy I ambled vaguely off in the general direction of the train station, studiously ignoring the blandishments of those that would have sold me all sorts of things going cheap because really, I think I've bought enough stuff for one week.

Although I am still on the lookout for some decent oven gloves: the pair I have are on their last legs but I will not be having with those damn silicone ones that make me feel as though my hands are encased in an over-sized football. So if any of you are wondering what exactly to buy me as a spur-of-the-moment present just because, now you know.

Sadly I was stiff out of luck: they stock many spices - I even recognise some of them - but the shelves were destitute of what I crave. Maybe I'll have no choice but to stock up next time I head off to Chambéry.

And on the way back life continued to spite me. When this place got done up some time ago, not only did the guy that did it have a penchant for holding things together with vast quantities of 7cm screws, but he was also only an approximative electrician. Case in point, the neon under the cupboards over the sink in the kitchen. The tube started to die and the actual fitting was sufficiently delicate that it took two of us to get a tube in and then you had to twist it just right to get it to actually work, and god help you if it got so much as a dirty look afterwards ... it seemed like a no-brainer to just replace the whole damn thing.

So cue a quick trip on Friday night to pick up a new fitting and a spare tube, head back home and start to take the old one down. Somewhat to my surprise, when I exposed the wires that lead from the switch to the old fitting I discovered that all three were red, which is not really what one expects. I guess that the guy ran out of wire.

He had thought to wrap some blue insulating tape around the neutral, and the earth was more or less recognisable because it was just screwed straight into the metal of the fitting, but he still managed to surprise me again when I found out the hard way that he'd put the neutral through the switch, rather than the phase, as would be normal. I know, I know, I should have pulled fuses one by one and used a multimeter to check that power was off to the lights (and I've no excuse because I actually own a decent multimeter), but I'd still have had to go and reset all the clocks in things like the microwave, and the UPS would've screamed at me ...

Whatever, the tingling stopped after a while, and I cursed a bit and decided that I was doing no more till I'd got some more reels of cable and rewired the damn thing comme il faut.

Also, add to the exhaustive compendium of the guy's sins the fact that half the power points downstairs, in what is currently my office, do not actually have an earth - something that became obvious the day I plugged an old desktop PC in down there and touched the case whilst barefooted.

Hence, if you like, my feeling that life is conspiring against me because when I came back from Narbonne past Bricomarché with the idea of at least getting the cable, I was reminded of the fact that they close at lunch-time.

Sad, too bad. It all got done anyway, just a bit later than I had planned. And it's not as though I'd counted on getting any work done that day.

And now, children, I'd better drag myself inside from the bright sun and start planning dinner, for I have a large hunk of pork with the ribs still in and not much of an idea as to what I shall do with it, nor what to do on the side. Decisions to be made.

* Actually that's Cash - for Catherine - and Terry, but I can't help myself.

Screens And Salivation ...

In paragraph 42, alinea b of our mission statement, it is set out - for reasons unknown to me, but there it is in black on white - "Eat out more often". Let it never be said that we do not respect to the letter our contractual obligations, so when Margo got back from Nantes the other day we did in fact go out for dinner. Also, I couldn't be arsed cooking ...

Cédric had given us the name of a restaurant at Fabrézan, just down the road, where - he assured us - "the desserts are to die for" and so we headed off to Les Calicots to see what we would find. Skip the entrée, for I took foie gras because it's a given that if that happens to be on the menu I will take it, and get on to the main course. Margo opted for the agneau de sept heures which is, as its name suggests, lamb that has been very slowly braised for about seven hours, although I doubt anyone actually bothers to time it, and I went for the cuisse de canard confite - on the grounds that a cassoulet would have been too much.

The lamb was as it should be, meltingly tender if a bit on the sweet side, but personally I remain unconvinced that the combination of a duck's leg simmered in its own fat for four hours and a sauce aux cèpes is a particularly happy one. In fact, I'm sure that you could do better things with both, but pairing them is not a Good Idea. But the beignet de courgette on the side was perfect, hot and crisp and totally unsoggy.

Madame found her tiramisu a bit on the stodgy side, but my crème brulée aux fleurs de lavande was wonderful, a subtle hint of lavender under a thin crisp of sugar. Be warned: they serve wine by the glass, the glasses are large, and they have a generous hand when filling them. Just saying. Luckily it's not too far from here,  on the back roads yet.

Anyway, if I was a happy man last weekend, what with my book turning up and all, imagine my pleasure when the Chronopost person turned up at the door with my new laser printer all to myself and that I do not have to share, and the ViewSonic 27" screen I'd ordered just because. Of reasons. Like, because a 21" screen just doesn't hack it these days, and I was bored. Of course the HDMI cable I'd ordered to connect the aforesaid screen to the PC did not turn up at the same time ... what can one expect?

Truth to tell, I'm not sure I actually like it that much. It's 16:9, like most screens these days, which is fine if you're watching TV or whatever: the thing is, I spend most of my time coding - when not watching cute kitty porn - and I want to see what I'm doing in context. And because coding involves lots and lots of lines (of code, fairly obviously, and snide, obscure, or obscene comments - actually COBOL was rather good, because you could write a line like PERFORM [sex act of choice] UNTIL [appropriate organ condition]), most of which max out at about 130 characters (for purely historical reasons, involving the width of line printer drums), I could care more about the width of a screen.

No, what I want is one onto which I can fit as many lines as possible, and by that criterion a modern screen is a retrograde step because I've lost about 200 pixels in height, let's call it 15 lines. Never mind, I can live with it - and I went off and bought another because let's face it, it is good for watching TV.

So now I have three unused LCD/LED whatever screens sitting around, and add to that the set of Altec speakers from the living-room because of course the ViewSonic has built-in speakers which just work when you're connected over HDMI so that avoids faffing about with yet another cable to plug in. (Although I am keeping my Altec pots, they're heavy on the bass which makes them great for my sort of music. Which is what they get used for.) And speaking of cables, I have a whole box full of them. Some of them are sufficiently weird that I cannot think what bit of gear it could originally have been for, nor why I still have it, come to that. I think there's still an ancient SCSI-I cable in there somewhere ...

And I can see that I shall have to get another box, just for the power cables. Which are at least, for the most part, still bagged in their original packaging, so their little part of the box does not resemble a mass of writhing vicious snakes. This is always a relief, and makes a pleasant change from going off to look for a USB extension cable or maybe a bit of CAT-5, because contrary to common belief I do not actually enjoy packing a Glock in order to defend myself if attacked.

Be that as it may, in France Thursday was the 1st of May - maybe it was the same for you, I don't know - which is la fête du travail in these here furrin parts. Normal people (insofar as we can qualify French-things as normal) celebrate this by going off and getting stinking drunk and not working (and, should it fall on a Thursday, they take the Friday off as well due to being so hungover that it's not really worth their while turning up): unfortunately, the Swiss do not subscribe to this model. They prefer to respect the day by working their arses off, which I personally find rather depressing because that means that I am more or less obliged to do the same.

In other news, let me advise you against buying a house in the south of France. Not because of woodworm, not because of rising damp, not because I really don't want you as a neighbour (although all of the above could well be true), but quite simply because if you don't have a really deep cellar your charcuterie is not going to work out, and then you'd be sad.

I say this because, if you recall, I made saucisson à la Pépin a short while back, and as there was still a faint whiff of mould in the garage (and it is also inhabited by various cats, whom I do not trust) I thought it prudent to hang them up in the attic, in what will - God willing, at some point in time - become our apartment.

Point the first - twelve hours in the brine was quite enough, after eighteen they're just a tad salty. Not bad, but still ... and point two, it's just too damn hot and dry up in the attic. A nice slow drying over five weeks would have been good, rather than the two weeks they eventually took..

Perhaps the next time the garage will be fit for purpose, or just maybe I shall let them slowly dry out on a rack in the fridge.

Also in the "wonderful news, you could probably care more" department, a little old lady at the Carcassonne market sells actual grapefruit as opposed to those gross balloons full of sugar water and snot from Florida. Small, orange-yellow, and acid. Takes me back to my (misspent) youth, when one of the pleasures of going home for a weekend was coming back with a crate of grapefruit from the various trees around the house, and juicing those we couldn't eat. (Remember when grilled grapefruit, spread with honey and ginger and stuck under the grill until it all caramelised nicely, were all the rage in what we thought of as classy restaurants? It dates you, you know.)

And there's still green asparagus - you can't imagine just how bored I'm getting with that - and the first of the apricots and the nectarines have arrived on the stands. Not local - too early for that - but still, just shipped in from across the border with Spain. Which, as you'll recall, is not far from here. So I feel no guilt whatsoever,  no matter what the "sustainable locally-sourced" yoghurt-knitters may say.

Oh, there are also the baby poivrons now in various hues, just crying out to be stuffed with a bit of chèvre such as that which I just happen to have in the fridge, and I reckon they will go down quite nicely alongside a good kilo of barbecued côte de boeuf. Which also, since you mention it, is lurking in there too. (Along with a bit of filet, which I picked up on the same occasion because given the ridiculous price it'd have been criminal not to do so.)

There's also rhubarb: I'd always been at a bit of a loss as to what to do with it until recently (probably sad memories of sour watery puddings, but who knows) but then I came across this and although I cannot honestly say that it changed my life it did at least convince me to give the stuff a try. And it's not all that bad, actually. (And I would just like to point out that it is certifiably local, coming as it does from one of the rough and ready market stands that are run by a couple of elderly people selling the surplus from their garden.)

And the stems always look so pretty, scarlet at the base, fading into green - it was not my fault, the Devil made me do it.

So you can probably guess what I have lined up to do this evening. But first up on the agenda is a walk with STD in the sun - assuming that we can escape the attentions of EBK, who thinks that we are not capable of tottering around the village on our own and require his assistance, so he follows in the usual kitten fashion of dropping back and then running ahead, and generally puts Shaun off when he's trying to concentrate on having a discreet crap - and then I have an  appointment with a tin of WD40 and one of the recalcitrant sliding doors from the verandah out onto the terrace. I had better get on to that. Have fun.

The Humble Spud ...

Now I is a happy man, for the facteur pulled up in his great throbbing yellow Kangoo, leapt from his seat, thrust a large package into the letterbox and was off again in a shower of shit and small stones before Shaun could get his wits together and bark. And sure enough, when with frenzied fingers I'd succeeded in demolishing multiple layers of packaging (sustaining only minor flesh wounds in the process), it was indeed the new cookbook I'd been waiting for.

I read his blog on a regular basis, as you may be aware, and when I discovered that David Lebovitz had come out with "My Paris Kitchen" I just could not resist, and even paid for a copy with my very own money. (Oddly enough, The Book Depository in the UK offer free world-wide shipping, and they were cheaper than Amazon by a good margin. Go figure.) Now my only challenge will be to take it slowly and savour a few pages every evening, rather than reading from whoa to go in one fell swoop.

Actually, when I say "my money" what I really mean is "the gubblemint's money", because it is theirs and they wish me to pay for the privilege of using it. Fair enough I suppose, they're the ones that printed it after all - they need to get a decent ROI for their shareholders. In fact, they wish me to pay for the privilege of getting old and still working, hoping that if ever I actually retire I shall keel over from a heart attack on receiving another letter asking for only 500 000€ for "les fonds de solidarité social" or whatever, or maybe a letter to the effect that they actually owe me 200 000€ which will be repaid in monthly installments of 10€ over some 1600 years, and then they will not have to pay me a pension. Although the Bank of Hell does accept good intentions.

But I digress. I had an inkling that there was a decent spare-rib recipe in there and so, as one will, I'd picked up a kilo of pork spare ribs at the Narbonne market on Saturday, just on the off-chance ... he reckons you should serve them with mashed potatoes but with all due respect he's wrong: baked potatoes, either with a very mustardy vinaigrette as they like it in Lyon, or with mustard butter, are essential. And salad - I like to make a honey vinaigrette and then mix in a good dollop of sour cream (if you've got the amounts right the vinegar will not curdle the cream, you'll just have to work it out for yourselves) and then sticking in some sweetcorn, sliced spring onions, chopped mint and maybe grated carrot and leaving that to marinate a bit before turning in the lettuce. A lazy man's slaw, I guess.

I also had a shoulder of lamb lurking in a fridge (yes, we have more than one, go complain if you like), so it seemed a reasonable idea to bone it, spread a mixture of breadcrumbs, garlic, fresh rosemary and grated parmesan over the flesh before rolling it, tying it neatly and roasting it. A bit much for just the two of us so we invited Richard and Mary, our Irish neighbours, around and it was very gratifying to see it disappear. Despite the humorous interval with the empty gas bottle halfway through cooking, fortunately we did have a spare and, exceptionally, it was not empty. A mistake I will not make again.

I know I mentioned that we have a new maire - we went to the inaugural pissup a while back for the free food'n'booze - and he seems determined to make his mark. Only two months or so into his reign term and we have already received two sternly worded letters on the mayoral stationery reminding us that a) it is forbidden to park in front of the rubbish bins, especially on those days when the dunnykin come past to empty them and b) dog-poo is a no-no.

And with a new mayor comes a new mayor's idiot nephew: I don't know if it's a job requirement nor, if so, in which way the causality operates. Two possibilities present themselves immediately to mind: either you have an idiot nephew and are thus fore-ordained to become a mayor, or if you are elected mayor and, for some reason beyond your control, you have no idiot nephew, one pops spontaneously into existence once the votes are totted up and you are found to have got in. Which could, I guess, be embarrassing.

Anyway, the municipal employee and he were out this moaning in the municipal utility vehicle (a tiny three-wheeled Piaggio of which the cabin is barely large enough to hold the employee, for he is of imposing stature: at least it has an engine, of sorts, and the employee is not obliged to pedal) - well, the employee was in the vehicle, and the idiot nephew was hanging on for grim life behind - doing one of those important jobs that need doing in small-town southern France: making sure that the village is gai by planting flowers in the municipal flower-pots.

So just one thing, the next time I head off to the market, a smile on my lips and a song in my heart - or just possibly an all-over scowl, depends on the weather - announcing my attention to buy "bio" vegetables, do me a favour? Distract me (possibly by pointing to pretty flowers, or a non-existent fighter jet scrambling overhead, or just sparkly! shiny! look! A SQUIRREL!), stun me (if required, and only with care, please), make sure you have one of those nice linen waistcoats that does up down the back to hand, and take me off to have my head examined.

Don't get me wrong, I am perfectly well aware that all vegetables are in fact "bio" because if they weren't biological we'd be eating rocks, now wouldn't we, and I know very few people that like to sit down to a plate of warmed-up schist. But just sometimes it's nice to get that warm fuzzy feeling of having saved the planet (from what is not clear, but probably irrelevant) when you go out and buy - let's say, potatoes -  from some honest horny-handed son of the soil whose idea of pesticide is a good piss.

Getting back to the potatoes - we are, I think, in agreement that the best bits are just under the skin, and that too is where the eventual toxins (from the DDT, Agent Orange, arsenic, genetically-engineered nanobots, sperm whales - are you listening? - and cadmium cocktails that Big Agribusiness likes to spray on the leaves to kill unicorns and make small children cry because there are no fairies left anymore) are going to be, and so it would follow that if I shave a half-inch off the exterior of each and every humble spud I prepare, then I am safe. Vitamin-free, but unpoisoned. Although possibly at risk from a falling sperm whale.

Given that my bio potatoes have been pissed on (but only under a full moon) to disturb the nesting codling moth - or whatever, and what about them, anyway? Don't they have a right to live? - it would seem prudent to wash them, at the least. But sadly, as their homeopathic pesticidal treatments are about as efficacious as scrubbing lepers with acne cream, I wind up taking an inch off the outside, just to make sure that our mashed spuds, chips or whatever are not going to be full of black spot, grey rot, and brown mould.

I would like to do the right thing, really I would, but if I have to make the choice between paying three times the price for bio vegetables, half of which I have to chuck away because they're either rotten or full of weevils or something (and then I feel even guiltier because I know that starving children in Korea or Chicago would really love that extra protein, and I am putting it in the bin), and buying something much cheaper that I can actually eat, I know what I will do.

You're quite right, I was planning on doing myself a plate of steak-frites for dinner tonight. However did you guess?

But let it be said that the combination of frites cooked in duck fat with a bit of sea salt, fresh thyme and paprika (at the last minute, that - tis a delicate spice, don't want to burn it) and a slab of hampe chucked in for three minutes a side before serving with beurre à la moutarde is pretty damn good. And, of course, makes a pleasant change from all that Gordon Blue cuisine what we is usually eating around here.

Anyway, just at the moment I have a dog insistently thrusting a slobbery tennis ball into my crotch, so I know what I have to do. Mind how you go, now.

Veni, Edi, Discessi ...

... came, ate and buggered off. Old Jules, despite his undoubted talent for turning a Latin phrase, was writing in simpler times, and I guess didn't have people turning up unexpectedly at his doorstep.

Anyway, I find the yoof of today undemanding, and rather rewarding, when it comes to the food department. It fair warmed the cockles (St-Jacques, as it happens) of my cynical old heart to see how rapidly it all disappeared - yea, even unto the bretonne aux fraises  that followed the cheese - and I'll spare you the comments, lest you think they've gone to my head. But I did find the sight of all three of them getting out their cameras to take photos of the food before they ate to be somewhat - alarming.

The next morning (given the hour, only nominally so) after they'd devastated the cereal and laid waste to the jam, we managed to stuff them and their backpacks back into little Suzy and Margo pootled off to decant them at Narbonne, from whence the day's plan was to hitch down to Barcelona before heading to points even further South. Hope they make it to Marrakesh for the big party on the 23rd.

I remember reading an article in The Register by Alastair Dabbs, the gist of which was that he couldn't work out why it was that mentioning that you're in IT seems to make you irresistible at parties. Women still avoided him like a six-months-dead otter with psoriasis, but males he'd never met would come up unasked and engage him in serious conversation about the merits of this that or the other hard drive, which would inevitably lead to the confession that their PC was running rather slowly and did he think he could spare a moment to come look at it?

I only mention this because it is in fact true, and I would seriously recommend that anyone thinking of a career in IT forget about it and become a trainee sewer inspector or something or, if you absolutely have to do it, make sure no-one ever finds out. If you are planning on having a normal social life, anyway. Kevin has said that much the same phenomenon occurs to electricians as well: he might be at a party with Janet, hobnobbing with the academic crowd, and then somewhere off in a corner someone whispers that Dr. Soler's husband is an electrician and suddenly he's the centre of attention.

The Dean of Education hangs on his every word, senior lecturers fawn at his feet, and elegant faculty wives invite him around for the afternoon, when they excuse themselves for only being able to offer him whisky but every time they plug the kettle in to make tea the fuses blow all over the house ...

I suppose there must be some professions where supply is sufficiently ample that people are prepared to consider paying for their services, but electricians in England are apparently rare enough that if you manage to lay your hands on one you don't let the opportunity slip through your grasp, and so it is with computer people. Just admit that you know something about it and you are promoted on the spot to tech support for friends and family (if you weren't already - I said to make sure no-one ever finds out, just lie to them, say you've given up your university studies to go on the game) and most of the neighbourhood.

The point I was getting to here was that old Neville around the corner picked himself up a PC for 80€ at Emmaus the other day, and was having one or two little problems with it ...

So I turned up one afternoon with a couple of Homeplug adapters so that he could at least get on to the internet without stringing 30 metres of CAT-5 cable between the ground floor where the Livebox is and under the eaves where he's built himself a very neat, tidy office.

Which is where the first hiccup occurred: their twisted little house has two entirely separate power circuits, one for the ground floor and the other for everywhere else. So much for the easy connectivity solution: I told him to go off and buy a USB Wifi dongle and read the manual.

And he did, and got it installed and working and everything, no small feat considering that he's in his seventies, speaks sod-all French (although trying his hardest to learn), and was doing all this on a PC with the French version of Windows 7 installed.

Too good to be true, of course, and it wasn't long before he was back with a tale of woe, and how slowly the PC was running. Having better things to do, and being of a naturally kindly disposition, I headed round again to take a look at the pestilential thing. Fairly quickly it became evident that this was not going to be a simple five-minute in-and-out job, so I grabbed the box and took it home.

Oddly enough, as I sat there waiting for it to boot I could not but notice that the boot logo was a Compaq one. Anyone else remember them? I thought they got borged by HP back in 2002, but I guess they must have kept the name going - out of respect for the dead, maybe.

Around midnight I finally worked things out, more or less: the thing hadn't been used for some time, a backlog of Microsoft updates had built up which needed to be loaded and installed, and one of them seemed to have gone into an endless download/update/fail loop, and the update task was eating about 90% of the CPU time, and all the band-width.

Luckily, fixing that was fairly straightforward and whilst I was at it - told you I was sweet-natured - and as the previous owners had paid through the nose for a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, I set it up in English. Which means that the next time Neville has a problem - and I fully expect he will - he will at least be able to tell me what it is.

You know, the life of a tech-support person is not really that sexy: in fact, re-reading that lot it looks, even to me, to be rather boring. I cannot see why we're so popular at parties, it can't be because of being good in bed.

One of life's little mysteries - why are animals so gross? Came down the other morning and went out onto the terrace (nearly all tiled now! Yay!) to enjoy the first coffee of the day in the warm sunlight, and Shaun scurried furtively off into a corner with what looked suspiciously like a bird's wing waggling out of one side of his mouth.

When I finally convinced him that it would be a Good Idea to spit it out it became evident that the poor beast had not been of this world for some time: I can only assume that the cats had been out foraging earlier and, coming upon this mummified carcase, had brought it back as a special treat.

Very thoughtful of them, I will admit, but I could wish that they had not done so. Disposing of surplus-to-requirements fleshy envelopes is not really part of my job description, and even if it were I would much rather not have to do it before I'm set up for the day.

I recently came across a marvelously simple recipe from the excellent Jacques Pépin (a French chef who is, incidentally, virtually unknown in France but very popular in the US, and whose two primers on cooking - La Technique and La Methode - are amongst the very first cookbooks I ever bought) with a new take on saucisson. Why, he reasoned, do I take all the trouble of mincing fat and meat and salt and stuffing that into sausage casings when, with much less effort, I can simply and rapidly brine a whole pork fillet and hang that to dry?

And as it is - according to tradition, or an old charter or something - a grey rainy Easter Sunday over in these here parts, and as I happen to have a couple of excellent pork fillets on my hands (don't know why, but Lidyl - a German hard-discount chain - has splendid meat. I wouldn't touch their vegetables with a barge-pole, but the meat - and the butter, and the bûche de chèvre - is above reproach.) I have just, following his instructions, trimmed them, rubbed them well with a cup of gros sel mixed with 2tbsp of brown sugar and a bit of saltpetre, and put them in the fridge.

The saltpetre is optional, and only toxic in large doses, but it does mean that the meat keeps a lovely bright rosy colour. If you happen to be able to get sodium nitrite use that instead - about 6% by weight - or just use pink curing salt if you can get that.

Anyway, tomorrow I shall take them out, dry them, and rub them with a bit of cognac, cracked black peppers and some herbes de provence before wrapping them and hanging them somewhere cool and airy to dry for four or five weeks. I'll let you know how that turns out.

How Hard Can It Be?

I always look forward to April Fool's Day here at The Shamblings. Although sometimes it can be difficult to work out just who the joke is on. Usually, I guess, it's on me.

Anyway, the more alert of you - those who've had their morning coffee - may have noticed a brief hiatus. This is nothing sinister, just due to the fact that once again I headed off to Chambéry for a week's worth of working, and for once that meant exactly that - sod-all spare time for anything else.

The general idea was to recuperate Jeremy, the eldest son, and bring him down here for a few days: he actually had a week's holiday, and has never even seen the place, so it seemed a reasonable concept. The idea was simple, as always: reality tends to be messier. He went off to a party on Saturday, ETA chez lui sometime Sunday afternoon, so we arranged to meet up there at 16:00 before heading back down.

Let it be admitted, I was late - all of fifteen minutes late. No sign of life, I rang and I wandered around Montmélian until I was thoroughly bored and still no Jeremy. Two and a half hours and five calls going straight to voice-mail later I decided to call it a day, but for some reason as I was heading down the hill towards the autoroute I gave one last call. "Oh fuck" squawked my phone, as the son awoke.

Only fallen asleep on his sofa, hadn't he? Margo had suggested that I count to ten and take a couple of deep breaths and it worked because four hours later (admittedly, three hours later than planned, which kind of screwed my ideas for dinner) we were home, without mayhem being committed. Mind you, we're neither of us great ones for chatting in the car, which probably helps under such circumstances.

On the bright side, I had at least gone round on Saturday and we'd loaded the oven hood from St-Pierre (which, for some reason as yet unknown to me, had wound up at his place - go figure) into the boot of the car on the grounds that it might eventually turn out to be useful (we'll see about that one) and there was also a good kilo of decent Beaufort lurking in a chilly bag, awaiting its imminent date with destiny.

For Jeremy, you see, has realised that good cheese Costs Money, which he would rather put to other purposes, such as the purchase of mildly illegal mind-altering drugs, and so he no longer falls, like a wolf on the fold (although, to be fair, rarely have I seen him gleaming, whether it be in purple and gold or anything else) upon the cheese in the fridge, for there is none in his apartment. Cheese, that is, for a fridge there is: I know it well, it must be twenty years old or so and once adorned our cellar in St. Pierre, relegated to the noble calling of keeping copious amounts of wine and beer at a reasonable temperature. And it still does sterling service, even though in its dotage the temperature regulation is a bit iffy, so things are either tepid or half-frozen, but given what Jeremy keeps in it this is not really a problem.

Whatever, we finally left around 18:30 and I was starting to feel a bit peckish when I pulled in to the service station at Mornas, so it was a shame that when, having fed Suzy, I went off to do the same for myself, I discovered that the decent-ish sandwich joint was closed (it was, I admit, Sunday, but even so ...) and that my options were to buy a sorry-looking Vienna roll enclosing a bit of limp lettuce and sad watery ham all wrapped up in cellophane, or to go hungry. I have learnt my lesson, sometimes Experience manages to stop Hope getting up with the simple expedient of a quick kick to his balls, and we carried on.

At Tavel even the coffee bar was closed, so I got a watery café americain from the vending machine out back, promptly wished I hadn't, and drove off into the night. Fortunately at that point we weren't too far from home, and when we arrived Jeremy spared five minutes to make the acquaintance of the dog before retiring to the kitchen, where he appropriated our solitary baguette and set about some serious work with butter and cheese.

It is sad but true that this is that awful season where we have but limited choice in fruit and vegetables: right now, for instance, we are more or less obliged to subsist on asparagus and strawberries. It is hard, but we force ourselves, for one has to eat. To add to my misery I had to go off to the supermarket this moaning - happily, there is one open at Lézignan on a Sunday - to get food for five, as we got a phone call last evening from a niece to say that she and friends were hitch-hiking to Morocco and could they stay the next night? (Assuming, of course, that they manage to get from Bordeaux to Carcassonne.)

Now not only have they reorganised the Intermarché there, so that things are no longer where they once were AND none of the helpful signs that hang from the ceiling indicating the contents of the aisle actually correspond anymore to what you will in fact find down there - and come to that the price tags are more or less random as well - it is barbecue season and they have cut back on their meat selection so my vague plan of a leg of lamb went out the metaphorical window and I was forced - forced, I tell you! - to buy some coquilles St-Jacques instead. Hope no-one's allergic to the little sweeties.

And as I was swallowing my disappointment at life's little cruelties and getting ready to pull out and drive back home I found myself with an unexpected ten minutes of time to dedicate to further contemplation, as about a hundred or so OAPs turned up on their shiny throbbing Harleys to fill their tanks, paralysing the parking lot.

(Yer French bikies are not the fearsome crew that you lot tend to get, and I suspect that their only ties to the drug trade are in the form of purchase of industrial-scale amounts of Viagra and haemorrhoïd cream. The only ones who can possibly afford to buy - and to run - a Harley are those with large amounts of disposable income, which pretty much rules out anyone under the age of 65. Sometimes it brings to mind that Python sketch, with the evil grannies.)

Be that as it may, nothing too depressing that it couldn't be cured by sitting out in the sun on the terrace for a bit, wistfully imagining what it will look like on the day it is actually finished and has real tiles on it and everything. (For at the moment, although it is now waterproof so that even if it does rain heavily we will not be able to take showers in the garage underneath, there are only two lines of tiles down because Cédric turned up yesterday afternoon to get started on that. Maybe for next weekend ...)

Around the church, the little place next to us where the yoof of the village tend to hang out during those long sunny evenings of the summer holidays is littered with sticks. Crows are lousy architects and worse builders, and given that they apparently think that a beakful of two-foot sticks, some of them with the original thorns still on them, make a good nest I'm rather surprised that the species is still a going concern.

Or maybe it's just the male of the corvidae that labours under this impression, and in his eagerness to woo (and get around to doing the fun parts of reproduction) thinks that quantity rather than quality will do the trick: what we find on the ground are the results of careful selection by Mrs Crow, who sees little point to brooding with an acacia thorn up the jacksie.

Anyway, I shall make a gigantic leap of faith here and believe that these young persons are really going to turn up some time in the more or less immediate future, which means that I really ought to head off into the kitchen and start work on a few minor trifles, such things as might help stave off imminent death by starvation. Mind how you go, now.