The Midday Sun ...

Either Gordons have started bottling a special "Made in Marseilles" gin for the French market, or up at the bar Lionel has taken to washing out the empty gin bottles with pastis and then refilling them from the vat of industrial alcohol out back. And it's not just me, Angela spotted it too. It's ... interesting, not totally unpleasant but not an experience I'm really looking forward to repeating, just saying.

I guess that most of you are - sadly - familiar with the over-rated oeuvre of Peter Mayle, in all its condescending glory. He did however, through some oversight, manage to get one thing right: when summer really starts, it's as if life has come to a sudden and mysterious end. The bleached stone houses bake in the sun and the air shimmers over the empty narrow streets - there's not even a mad dog, nor an Englishman, to be seen. Were you foolish enough to wander about  - keeping to the shade as much as possible - you might sometimes come across ambiguous signs of recent occupation: a fly screen curtain moving lazily, despite the complete absence of any movement of the air, or it might be a thin wreath of charcoal smoke. But otherwise, just the incessant chirping of sex-starved cicadas.

It's all just tricksy and deception, of course: those who can retreat to the dim cool of the ground floor rooms, behind the metre-thick stone walls, or if they happen to have a shady garden they might be found out there, around the pool.

I have spoken before of Julian and Batu: she is the rather unforgettable, larger than life African woman, and he is her British now-husband. At some point he must have read A Year In Provence and drunk deep of the Kool-Aid, for he decided that nothing would do but that he come to the south of France, buy a vineyard and make wine.

It is not good wine - not yet, at least, because he started off not knowing the first thing about wine-making - I've bought a couple of boxes from their first year which now sit in the cupboard under the stairs, and I take them out from time to time to look at them and wonder what the hell I'm going to do with them: they may improve with age. Whatever, he is happy, because he's doing what he really wants to do before he dies.

Anyway, he definitely belongs to the mad dogs and Englishmen school of thought, for rather than - like all the other vignerons around here - get up at 4am for a couple of hours work in the vines and then go out again around 9:30pm, when it's nice and cool, he prefers to go out in the midday sun. Godnose why. But so it was that the other day, around 13:30, I was out on the terrace and saw him coming wearily up the road and into place St-Régis, at which point he called out and asked if I happened to have such a thing as a pair of bolt-cutters. Or a hacksaw.

Now why, you may well ask, would he want such things? A fair question, and I put it to him. He has some vines in the garrigue around Montbrun, and he had taken his Toyota 4x4 out there to do a bit of work - at midday! - and had driven it over a rock and burst a tyre. Not having a mobile about his person he had then trudged 4km under the blazing sun back to Moux to seek help. Still doesn't answer the question "why bolt-cutters?", because in my experience these are not very useful when it comes to changing a tyre: but recall that it is a 4x4, and the spare tyre is hung on the tailgate, and so that people don't nick it it is attached with a chain and padlock. And when he came to unlock the thing, he found that had rusted solid over the years, and would not open.

So I got out the boltcutters, and the hacksaw just in case, and he actually thought to take his mobile this time, and he was driven back out to Montbrun, watched as he cut the chain and took the spare down, and left him to it. What could go wrong?

Just about everything, for ten minutes later - just as I was thinking idly of a nice cold drink chock-full of vitamins, such as a nicely chilled rosé - there came a call from a UK number and it was Julian, to ask if I had some WD40 and a hammer, because the wheel bolts were - like the padlock - rusted in place. And so it was back to Montbrun with these things and hanging around this time and watching as he started to remove the bolts: at which point it was evidently pretty much "mission accomplished", and time to go back home.

Ten minutes later, another phone call: all the bolts were out with one exception, the anti-theft bolt, for which the special key no longer worked. Cue a third trip, with a roll of duct tape and some of that aerosol stuff you can inject into a tyre as a sort of emergency measure so that you can at least get to a garage on a flat without completely knackering the rim of the wheel ... duct tape fixes an awful lot, but here it had met its match because when he'd driven over the rock he had more or less split the tyre over more than 30cm, and despite the tape the expanding foam stuff was pouring out of this gaping hole.

Finally gave it up as a bad job and got him to drive - very, very slowly - back to Moux: luckily the tyre was so badly damaged that it looked almost as though the wheel was wearing slippers, so the rims weren't in too bad shape when he made it back. And this explains why there is a beaten-up Toyota parked outside The Shamblings, waiting until he can order a new anti-theft key.

Did I mention, by the way, that although they've been here more than three years the damned thing is still registered in the UK, has no contrôle technique and to top it off, is uninsured? Which is probably a good reason for not doing what any normal person would do under the circumstances, and call a tow-truck. (The car disappeared at some point on Friday. John has - in addition to his Corvette - an entire mechanic's workshop in his garage, and locked bolts do not daunt him: in fact, I rather think he takes them as a personal affront.)

Went off the other night with Philippe and Caroline to a little restaurant in Ferrals called Chez Bembe, and I can heartily recommend the place. The food is very simple - a choice of four or five grillades done over an open hearth, excellent chunky chips and salad - and extremely good. The eponymous Bembe (a very cheerful ex-rugby player, tall and about the same diameter as his height) sources thick pork chops from a local poacher farmer who lets his pigs run wild and live on acorns, the huge entrecôte steaks come from some other local place, and I don't know where he gets the jamon ibérica but I am pretty sure it's never seen the inside of a freezer.

It's small - probably seat maybe 25 tops - so you do have to reserve, but it is definitely worth it: and to top it off he comes round after the meal with a conical metal jug with a long thin tube in lieu of a spout, full of carthagène. Which you are then expected to drink in the approved fashion, which involves holding the end of the tube about 10-15 cm from your wide-open mouth and tilting the whole thing so that a stream of sticky-sweet alcohol goes neatly down your gullet. That's the principle, anyway: in my case most of it went down the front of my shirt, or up a nostril.

(Purely as an aside, we repaid the favour by having them around for dinner: a decent bit of onglet, with beurre café de Paris slathered on it. Caroline was quite taken with it, and apparently googled the recipe: unfortunately she misspelt, and looked for "beurre de garçon de café", which is not the same thing.)

Google, you is drunk. I have just had the occasion to pull up Goofle Maps for the charming little town of Olonzac, where there just happens to be the Café de la Poste - I know exactly where that is, for I have drunk there (listening all the while to English tourists complaining about their sunburn, and the difficulty of finding decent porridge oats ...). And according to Google, there are at least four of them, one of those (the original article, I assume) which seems to have swapped places with the actual Post Office - another couple are randomly situated on the same street, and the fourth is slap in the middle of someone's swimming pool off on a side street. This, I guess, is only to be expected when you crowd-source your location data to ratshit GPS and an incestuous self-referential mix of Wifi hotspot locations.

But right now I am even more idle (and foul-tempered) than usual, due to the fact that the big muscle at the top of my left calf spontaneously and quite gratuitously decided to rip in half the other evening. So now I have an elastic bandage wrapped tightly about it to keep everything in place while it (hopefully) heals, and a bad case of limited mobility which really pisses me off. Still, it does serve to reinforce my determination to not go through to Carcassonne of a weekend at this time of year, given that the roads are awash with bloody tourists.

Anyways, mind how you go now: I shall go back to sweating like a pig in the heat.