Party time in la France profonde

Our holiday season in the gites finished last Saturday, so this should have been a quiet, restful week. It turned out a bit differently, hence no blog entries since almost a week ago.

To celebrate the end of the season, Mrs B likes to throw a big party, so we had that on Saturday night.

After a week of beautiful warm weather, during which we sorted out the garden to make sure it all looked perfect for the big day, Saturday evening turned out to be cold and miserable and apart from hardy smokers, driven by guilt not to smoke indoors, nobody much ventured outside the door.

I had been assigned parking duties – telling people where in the field to park – which is more of a challenge than you would think, since everyone is determined to park as close to the exit as possible, in case they need to make a swift getaway. It took until about 9pm before someone (as yet unidentified) decided they would park across the entrance, thus condemning 20 other families to a long night whether they liked it or not.

It is possible that Mrs B paid someone to park there, to ensure she could call the party a success, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, the children got whooshed off to the house to argue about crisps, pizzas and what language to watch a DVD, while the adults enjoyed a magnificent spread in the barn – everyone had brought something along, so it was quite a feast. It’s quite a treat to have a kitchen that can hold so many people without being crowded.

It can be quite difficult having a ‘mixed English-French’ party because there is always a danger that the room divides into two parts, as the French despair of trying to understand what is being said to them, and the English tire of trying, but all seemed to go well and it was very late in the night when the last guests got escorted from the premises.

The following day a farmer friend came round with a tractor and lugged some old dead trees up near the house, so I can cut them up for firewood. I stood around trying to look efficient and helpful but actually looking like a city-softie.

You can tell autumn is on its way, because the sound of the hunters shooting blindly into ditches in the hope of accidentally shooting a rabbit is being drowned out by the sound of chainsaws in all directions.

Meanwhile the hedge-cutters are also out and about. This is not the quiet, suburban experience you might imagine. It involves a large tractor with an array of enormous cutters hacking through every tree and bush in its path, reducing an attractive ancient hedgerow to a skimpy row of sticks in about 30 minutes.

We were horrified the first time we saw (and heard) this devastation, because it looks so severe that you can’t imagine anything could survive, but the hedges do seem to grow back quite quickly. I’m less sure what happens to the hundreds of birds that were quietly nesting in the hedge.

So I’ve got a couple of days of wood-cutting and chopping ahead of me, to prepare for the winter – which might be two cold weeks in February, or might be three months of cold arctic winds starting at the weekend. We’ll just have to wait and see.