Ariège Moun Pais

The new Ariégeois anthem! Will it take over from Se Canto, I wonder???? (Sorry. Ariège joke ...).

ARIEGE MOUN PAIS

(Paroles et musique Florent Adroit mars 2010)

Je viens te parler d’un morceau de terre
Pas plus grand que ça mais dont je suis fier

Pas loin de l’Espagne même près d’Andorre
Comme un privilège, comme un gros trésor

Toi tu montes au « Pass », eux, ils montent au pa
Ce n’est pas l’Ardèche, non tu connais pas ?
Pourtant je t’assure qu’il y a un grand A
A comme l’Ariège, A comme Ariégeois

REFRAIN

Lève ton drapeau, chante tes couleurs
Au vu des montagnes qui sont ton bonheur
Car les gars du nord aiment ton accent
C’est parce que ça monte et puis ça descend
Chante « se canto » la main sur le cœur
Ariège « moun païs » rien ne te fait peur
Car il n’y a pas plus fier que d’être Ariègeois
Chante le bien fort et chante en patois

————

Non pas toulousain, non pas Doriphore
Nous on les aime bien, eux ils nous adorent !
Pour nos champignons et nos Pyrénées
Nous pour le travail, c’est juste à côté !

On est espanté de voir que ça pègue
Dans nos expressions, là haut ils roumèguent
De ne pas comprendre la moitié des mots
On dit pas qu’est ce que c’est? On dit « Quésaco !!!»

REFRAIN

Et à son panneau tu klaxonneras
Comme une sirène pour dire Ariègeois
Tu verras ensuite le panorama
Qui est magnifique, qui laisse sans voix

Car si tu t’exiles un peu trop longtemps
Loin de tes verdures, loin de ton accent
Tu verras alors que des bons côtés
Tu verras l’Ariège : ça va te manquer !

REFRAIN

Chante « se canto » la main sur le cœur
Ariège « moun païs » rien ne te fait peur
Car il n’y a pas plus fier que d’être Ariègeois
Chante le bien fort et chante en patois

The Slow Road to Salau

At half past eight yesterday morning it was foggy, and I was up my ladder, paintbrush in hand. At half past nine the sun started to come through. Knowing that it would probably be our last chance this year to get out amongst the extraordinary autumn colours here, we needed no persuasion to down tools and set off in the car on the Slow Road to Salau, the last village in the Haut Salat before the Spanish frontier.





After the obligatory coffee and croissant stop, this time in the bar at Castillon that we got to like so much in our Ariège holiday week, we set off down the Bethmale valley towards the Etang de Bethmale, which must be one of the department's most contemplative places. Amazingly, we had it to ourselves, and could contemplate in peace. After a while the sun disappeared behind the peaks just to the south and we moved onwards to the Col de la Core, a few kilometres away, from where there are amazing views to both east and west. The Col de la Core is part of Le Chemin de la Liberté, a path that commemorates one of several secret escape routes in World War Two; as one whose father spent the war years in the RAF and who as a child was fed a diet of war films, I can't help but find it a moving experience to walk in the footsteps of those who found refuge on these trails.

Our Slow Road took us down through the small town of Seix and out along the valley of the river Salat, through the village of Couflens and then on to Salau where we stopped to explore the small Romanesque church. Salau has, appropriately, a real end of the world feeling. By car there's nowhere else to go but back where you've come from; on foot, however, a three and a half hour walk will take you up to an altitude of 2087 metres to the Port de Salau, the border with Spain. This is a path that's been in use as a trade (and contraband!) route since medieval times and links between those living on either side of the (relatively recent) frontier have always been strong; the first Sunday of August is the occasion for Les Pujadas, a meeting of people who have walked up from both sides to celebrate the links between them.

We didn't have the time to do the whole walk, although it's On the List, and we will, one day, when life returns to normal (!). We did, however, walk briskly up above Salau to two rather impressive waterfalls, one short and fat, the other long and thin, and found ourselves in a lovely but un-named cirque. My map tells me that there are nine springs here that jointly form the source of the Salat. In true mountain fashion the mist started to roll in and within a few minutes we were surrounded by cloud; time to make an excuse and leave.

On the way back through Salau we were a bit taken aback to come face to face with what could have been an inner city estate in Toulouse, or Birmingham, or London: five seventies-style concrete blocks of flats set on a desolate piece of ground just outside the village. Bearing in mind that Salau, together with its neighbouring (larger) village of Couflens, has a population of just 81 people, at a density of 1.4 persons per kilometre, my mind boggled. Google, as ever, was my friend, and later told me that they were built to house workers at the tungsten mines at Anglade, closed in the early 1980s. (But who lives there now????? Some, at least, are clearly still occupied. Bizarre).

And today's been rainy and windy, with a snowstorm of leaves, and I've been back up my ladder. Carpe diem, and all that.

Culture shock 2

We're just back from a few days break away from Grillou, a kind of punctuation mark between the life we've led this summer and the one to come over the winter. Fitting, because it coincided with Samhain, traditionally a time for looking back, for letting go of the old to make way for the new. We went to Périgord Noir, between Bergerac and Sarlat, an area that neither of us had visited before. Beautiful though it is, after the first day we almost turned tail and came home.

On the agenda was a bit of exploring, and a lot of walking, and so we stayed in a small, and very pleasant, town between the valleys of the Dordogne and the Vezère rivers where we thought we'd get the best of both worlds. What I wasn't prepared for was the sheer heights to which tourism has been raised there. Now I'm not a good tourist at the best of times: I hate 'attractions' and guided tours and all the junk that comes along with them, and I hate being regimented; I'd much sooner stumble upon quirky, low-key places almost by accident than have everything presented to me on placards and in guide books. And I particularly hate being seen as exploitation fodder. So when, on the first day of our holiday, we thought we would briefly explore a couple of the well known villages on the Dordogne before setting out on a walk from the third, I neither expected nor appreciated having to stuff a parking meter with a rather large amount of change in order to park anywhere within four kilometres of - well, anywhere, really. Hectares of each village were given over to paying (yes, even between 12pm and 2pm, unheard of and truly shocking) parking, with all other land barred off; in spite it of being the Toussaint school holidays the car parks were mostly empty, meaning of course no trade for local businesses ... now how crazy is that as a policy ??? We did stop at one and had a desultory look around, but after half an hour of feeling as though we were in an over-restored and twee theme park we decided, simultaneously, to beat a hasty retreat.

The same evening we ate out in a simple restaurant in our local town known and recommended for its wood fired pizzas. We ordered a pichet of red wine. "You'd prefer a half bottle of this" said our host. Er, no, actually we wouldn't. He snorted, and asked us whether we'd like water. Of course we would. "Still or sparkling?" asked our host. No, just a carafe of tap water, I said. It's many years since I've been through this charade; in Ariège, as in most of southern France, water is brought to your table with a basket of bread almost as you sit down. He snorted again. We ordered pizzas. "Would you like a side order of chips?" asked our relentless host. (Chips?? With pizza???) By now we were feeling distinctly uncomfortable, as if as visitors to the area we were fair game to be milked for cash. Our host sulked off to the kitchen, returning a couple of minutes later to ask ... if we were Belgian.

For the rest of our stay we did our best to get more off the beaten track. The landscape is lovely - deep valleys, limestone cliffs and wooded hills - as is the vernacular architecture. But it's just all so ... nice. The verges look as though they've been clipped with nail scissors; nearly all the houses are immaculate; even the trees are neat. There are no soixante-huitards or 'eepees', not a dreadlock or a beur to be seen (and gens de voyage - travellers - are actually prohibited from stopping anywhere in the two valleys). The level of control - for residents as well as visitors - is awesome. After a few days I was longing to get back to the laid back, well worn, non money-grasping, somewhat anarchic, culturally mixed vibe of Ariège.

And so here we are, home. And at home.

On progress, and the revolting French

This is a bit of a sad week for me: yesterday was my last day (for this year at least) working at the yoga centre, which is about to close for holidays until next May. I've done some lovely stuff with some lovely people from all over the world, met some other folk living locally who came, through word of mouth, for regular sessions, and reclaimed a bit of me that's been filed under 'pending' in a cupboard for the last eight years. Much as I'd love to have carried on working with my local clients over the winter, reality (as in a seriously unfinished réno and a long suffering partner who'd probably kill me) has set in and so it's back on with the blue overalls seven days a week, head down, and full on with all the outstanding bits of work.

Have you ever noticed how things that you set up in your mind as terminally difficult actually turn out to be relatively straightforward (and vice versa)?. Just a week ago, we started to put up the bookshelves in the new dining room, which on its mezzanine level has an alter ego as a library. We swiftly discovered that the wall consisted of plasterboard dotted and dabbed onto hollow brick ... some 10 centimetres away from it. Now why oh why oh why would you do that?? The dots (or is it the dabs?) were dabbed (or dotted) at random, so no chance of screwing the shelves through them. And a brief attempt to fix through the placo and into the brick was not exactly successful - it chewed up the placo then fell out of the brick, in spite of the biggest wall plug in the world. Clearly there was nothing for it but to build a made-to-measure shelving system from scratch - a solution we'd hoped to avoid because of the bizarre dimensions of the space. Sigh. So with heavy hearts, a design was swiftly put together - to accommodate sloping walls, sloping ceiling and sloping floor - wood was duly bought, and over the week the carcasses were duly made (by John), lasured (by me), and hoisted up to the mezzanine (by both of us),

And it worked.

(Yes, I know there are no shelves. Be patient. There will be.)

I'm beginning to think that creating this dining room is just about the most dramatic, and rewarding, thing that we're doing: not only does it give us a whole new room and link up the two previously separated bits of the house, it really opens up a sense of space and light as you walk into the hallway from the front door: whereas once you saw this

now you see this:

Which is just a great step forward, and gives us both the courage and the wherewithal to go on. So the next month (maybe more) will see us putting up a spiral staircase to the library area, building new oak steps down from the hall, fitting oak windowsills and skirting boards, repairing and sanding and finally painting the balustrade and window frames and doors, deep cleaning and oiling the terracotta tiles and building cupboards across the back wall using some reclaimed shutters we found in a local depôt vente.

Meanwhile, unless you've had your head in a paper bag this last week or so you'll know that the French are revolting: ostensibly at the proposed pension reforms but also I think, underneath, out of sheer despair at Sarkozy, his style of leadership and the general unfairness that his policies engender in so many levels of society. Schools are closed, transport is affected, fuel is desperately short with a quarter of petrol stations empty and millions of people, including large numbers of students, have taken to the streets. Life as we know it has been inconvenienced but do you know what? I'm proud to live in a country where people care, and are willing to show outwardly that they care rather than living in depressed apathy and/or finding a scapegoat to kick. The French, I believe, feel no differently from those living in other European countries where policies increasingly ask 'the people' (for want of a better phrase) to pay while capital continues to accumulate in the hands of the few: they're just more accustomed to showing it. And so the protests have my support, as well as that of over 70 per cent of the population, who clearly feel the way one protester on Saturday did:

The placard reads: "Carla, on est comme toi, on se fait niquer par le chef d'état" ...

 Look it up!

Culture shock

I just got back yesterday from a fast and furious weekend (out Friday afternoon, back Monday morning) in London, working with a group of bodyworkers and therapists. It's a while since I was in London, though I spent a lot of years living and working there and know it pretty well. But oh boy, did I struggle with it this time ...

It all began pretty well, with an on time flight and a quick and easy train ride on the Stansted Express. With a bit of time in hand, I decided to make a pilgrimage to one of my favourite bookshops, Watkins Books. Great bookshop, crap location: in a small alley just off Charing Cross Road, and right by Leicester Square tube. Mistake. Sardines and strap-hanging in the tube I can cope with; I even managed not to disgrace myself with my ignorance of how to use my new Oyster Card. The West End crowds, however, were another story. From the moment I emerged from the underground, I was swept up into a gigantic and frantic crowd of people, all trying to get somewhere I didn't want to go. It was impossible to counter the current. I felt claustrophobic, disorientated. Everybody seemed to have an impossible number of carrier bags (crise? What crise???) or, worse, a pull-along suitcase - yes, my legs have the bruises to prove it - and the vast majority seemed interested only in pursuing their chosen course, utterly oblivious to the presence of other persons, who were simply pushed out of the way. I'm really not trying to offend anyone here and I'm sorry if you're a Londoner, but it was horrendous, shocking: as the French would say, hallucinant.

After an hour of this I wanted to cry and after two I wanted to come home. It was that bad. It continued to be That Bad, too, as I made my way up towards north London to join my group; I felt increasingly invisible, irrelevant, dispensable. I wasn't a person but a thing, an object. I was a grockle, a fish out of water. I wondered how people who live there cope without becoming depressed or homicidal: the noise, the lack of space, the all-encompassing concrete-ness, the traffic, the sheer number of people, the lack of politesse or just basic respect for others' needs and personhood. I guess you just have to close down, to put a wall around you, to grow a thick skin, to put yourself first. And there, of course, is the rub.

I did have a great weekend, working with some great people - one of whom was (and I almost wrote 'also' here!) French, another was also an emigrant, having moved to live and work in Ibiza. But clearly, with four more such weekends coming up over the next 15 months, I need a creative strategy, and one that isn't of the thick-skin-growing 'if you can't beat 'em join 'em' variety because that's just not me. So, any city dwellers out there got advice for a Pyrenean neo-paysanne?

House of ladders

Blog silence has reigned for a couple of weeks while we've been ... up ladders. Not 'a' ladder, you'll notice; no, the plural is deliberate.

We've been (finally, and only two years later than originally scheduled ...) lime washing the walls of the goat-shed-turned-office-now-turned-dining-room. It's - er - five metres high. Hmm. Plans to use the scaffold that The Perfectionist had brought in were quickly scuppered when it had, rather suddenly, to move on to another project. We were left high and dry - or rather, dry but not high. We considered our options. Short of attaching a rope to the central beam and swinging backwards and forwards, or turning the highest wall into a climbing wall, there was only one: another scaffold. The grapevine swung into gear, and within a couple of days we'd borrowed a tower from some friends. Another couple of days (and much swearing, ranting, cursing, foot stomping and crockery smashing) later, it was up.

The problem is that the dining room is a room of lots of different heights. We've built a mezzanine gallery, which is going to house a library; there's a central beam; and the ceiling slopes down towards the windows at the front of the house, where the height of the wall is only four metres or so. And so we needed not one, but many ladders, which is why for the last fortnight the room has looked like this:

Six days, seventeen thousand colour tests, and four coats of lime wash later, the room looks like this (don't panic, the orange pine will disappear very soon, as will the white painted walls at the far end ...)

and we've got quite fond of the scaffold (yes, the same one that we spent six hours trying to fit eight bolts into to hold the two platforms ...) and will be sorry to see it go. It's made a long job hugely easier, so a big thanks to the mob at Camping Le Montagnou at Ustou for lending it to us - we owe you one!

All we have to do now is to take it apart. So don't expect to see either of us any time soon ....


PS ... look who dropped in to visit today:

It's a praying mantis. Isn't he lovely?