A December violet

Over the last month we've continued to enjoy extraordinary autumn weather here at Grillou: 160 hours of sunshine - over a third up on the average - and only three days where the sun didn't put in an appearance, along with balmy temperatures often in up the twenties. It's not unusual, at this time of year in particular, for the Pyrénées and their foothills to have much warmer and clearer weather than the rest of south west France, including the Med, and for Ariège to be leading the way temperature-wise. But looking at the weather stats for the last fifty years or so and talking to local people, it seems as though the pattern here is shifting quite noticeably towards warmer/dryer. Which if it continues (and the forecast is for just that: I've been looking at Metéo France's long term predictions for 2050 and 2090 and even the most conservative scenario gives us an increase in the average temperature of 3.5 degrees by 2070) is going to have huge repercussions on all sorts of aspects of life - and wildlife - here.

We're seeing that on a micro-scale here at Grillou. During the last month we've had great tits and blackbirds singing at full pelt; butterflies still swarming round the buddleia; marigolds, geraniums and nasturtiums still in flower; spring primulas bursting into flower too. At the end of October we planted several tiny bare root rose bushes: already, they've all put out huge numbers of shoots and leaves; some our established rose bushes have bloomed again in their fourth flush of the year. The yucca plant has flowered. We're still eating tomatoes and basil from the potager. Some of the birds that normally migrate - our blackcaps, for example - have stayed put. Our several-hundred-year old oak trees are showing signs of stress.

And ... the violets are coming out. Normally we'd expect them at the end of February. But yesterday - the first day of December - we had a small carpet of them. Hmm.

Whoever invented persiennes ......

.... had obviously never painted them.

Persiennes are the things known in English as louvre doors (why???). I like them. But painting them is truly chiant. Oh yes.

I'm one third of the way through painting and patining seven of them, front and back. Each door has 66 slats. Each door needs three coats: one base, one wash coat and one patina coat. That's 2772 slats, if you count both sides. Each one is at a silly angle so that if you're not hyper-vigilant all the paint runs down and pools venomously on the other side, forcing you to leap like an ant-bitten maniac from one side to the other every twenty seconds.

It's - how can I put this? - interesting ...........

Pyrenees Retreats ...

... otherwise known as What Has Been Keeping Me Up Till The Early Hours, or reason number one why I've not been blogging much of late:

It's funny. We've been at Grillou a bit over four years; by the time we (hopefully!) welcome our first guests in April 2012 it'll be nearly five. During that same period, someone I know in a neighbouring department has set up a hospitality business, separated from her partner, sold their house, bought another house and offered chambres d'hotes, met another partner, and has now bought another house in which they'll be open for business next summer ... hey ho. Slow living and all that ....

So, one site down (or up), two to go. I may be some time .....

A latecomer to the FIP ball ....

A few days ago, as I was driving home from Toulouse and enjoying my usual fiddle with the car radio, I stumbled upon a radio station I'd never come across before: FIP. It stopped me in my tracks because it was playing the kind of music I don't often hear on French radio - or radio anywhere, come to that - a long, drawn out kind of jazz-funk track. After that came some salsa stuff, then afro-beat, then .... one of Dowland's Sorrowful Songs. And then - oh deep unjoy - I lost the signal.

But I was intrigued, and more. There seemed to be something so .... different going on here. Google told me that FIP has been around since 1971 and began as France Inter Paris, started up by two weekend presenters at France Inter. It's always been a radio station with a difference: its music is completely a eclectic mix of genres. So each programme is likely to feature jazz, blues, folk, rock, world, traditional, film music and so on, linked by a more or less obvious theme and moving in a kind of wave. Soon after its beginnings in Paris other 'FIPs' started up in different cities and the P changed according to location: Toulouse's station, for example, was FIT (though it's moved back to FIP now. Are you keeping up here). Some have closed, some - like Toulouse - have been resurrected after periods off air for various reasons, but FIP goes on, still a part of the Radio France group.

And there's a particularly quirky part of its history: for ten years, a resident of Brighton, UK, re-broadcast FIP on two frequencies until Ofcom closed it down in a raid in 2007. It was hugely popular and developed a cult following there: there remains a blog, LoveFIP, and a local appreciation society called Vive La FIP; and it's rumoured that people actually moved house to areas with good FIP reception .....

I have to admit that since that journey home, FIP has rarely been off my airwaves. I've discovered that it's one of the hundreds of radio stations that form a part of my TNT TV package, and that it streams 24 hours a day on the internet, with collections of music available for re-listening too. I'm hooked. It reminds me of late nights listening to my late hero John Peel - you never quite know what's going to come up next, and the presenters have something of the same touch of irony and humour. It's exciting. It's unpredictable. It's a one off. And already I'm grieving the 40 years I've never listened.

So if, like me, you're a fan of eclectic, non-mainstream music and despair of the pap turned out by most radio stations (the two community stations over this side of Ariège, Radio Transparence and La Locale being honourable exceptions, though both are - inevitably - more repetitive than FIP) I'd urge you to take a listen:

You can listen via the website at http://sites.radiofrance.fr/chaines/fip/endirect/index.php

or there are downloadable apps here: http://sites.radiofrance.fr/chaines/fip/evenements/applications/

or via the Astra satellite at 19.2 degrees east.

I'm listening now, of course. Just one more track (and one more, and then one more ....) and I'll turn off and go to bed. Honestly, I will .............

Ici Londres

When I was in London last weekend I had a couple of hours to spare one afternoon. I decided to find out more about the French community in the city.

I'd got interested a few weeks ago when I read Marc Levy's novel 'Mes amis, mes amours' which is set in South Kensington and follows two thirty-something, single-parent Frenchmen in their search for lurve. The novel portrayed South Ken as being rather stuffed full of French, which was news to me; I do remember lots of coach trips to the Institut Français there to see the latest French film when I was a student, but I've not been back to that area for years (bit posh for me, since you ask; I'm more of a Shepherd's Bush type).

A bit of research told me that there are now around 400,000 French people living in London. Wow. And that London is in fact France's 5th city in terms of its number of registered voters (they're even going to get their own deputé - Member of Parliament - in the next French elections). Let's put that into context: apparently somewhere around 300,000 Britons own houses in France - but a lot of those are second homes, and the number of 'proper' immigrants - those who live here full time - is largely unknown: there's no official means of collecting such information - even the census asked us only to tick a box saying we're of 'other EU origin', which I thought sounded a bit like a food ingredient.

So who are the French in London? Well, it's a very different demographic to the typical Brit in France, that's for sure. Whereas the latter tends (with exceptions, naturellement) to live in a deeply rural area and to be retired, the French in London seem to fall into two main categories. There are those in high-powered jobs, often in the financial sector, particularly banking, here on three or five year secondment (though more and more are, it seems, staying on); and then there are increasing numbers of younger people, often single, who come to improve their English, to get away from the restrictions and red tape that they experience in France where they find themselves in a difficult and closed employment market where (I quote) they need the correct diploma even to sell flowers, and just to experience something new. Favoured areas, particularly amongst the BCBGs, are South Kensington itself along with other suitably leafy, genteel parts of west London such as Chiswick, Ealing, Holland Park and and Barnes, with newer outposts in Kentish Town (where a new French school has just opened), Clapham and - um - Hackney.

As I arrived in South Kensington - known as the 'twenty-first arrondissement' - and wandered into Bute Street - known locally as Frog Alley - it was as if I'd come back home: all the shops, cafés and restaurants were French; I only heard French being spoken around me, so I too lapsed quite naturally into French. I stopped for a drink (ahhhhhh - first decent coffee for three days!) at a café near the French Lycée (4000 pupils) and found myself deep in yummy maman territory. It became very apparent very quickly that there is a real expat/immigrant community here (the kind of community that I do my best to avoid in Ariège - and that is often disapproved of here by many  French people who see it as evidence that the British don't want to integrate! Hmm. Interesting, non ...?). There are magazines like Ici Londres, what seems like hundreds of internet forums to help incomers find their way round and make contacts, and even a local Francophone radio station, French Radio London. There are French doctors, dentists, pharmacists (who'll make sure you get French drugs!), opticians, plumbers, builders, therapists, computer experts; people who'll set you up with French TV and people who'll look after your children and make sure they speak French. And from what I can gather from my earwigging session over coffee there are also masses of groups, classes and clubs set up specifically so that the French community can interact with itself.

It was all very illuminating, and very fascinating. Most fascinating of all though was the abiding sense that I was left with that, just like the fabled Dordogneshire British expat community with its cricket clubs and English pubs, the French community in SW7 actually seems more French than it would be if it had stayed in France ........

On the rocks

No, I haven't been taken to hospital having been run over by a mad monk in pyjamas (as my mother used to say with her cheeks sucked in when yet again I'd failed to make the Sunday evening duty phone call). I am still here. It's just that there don't seem to be enough hours in the day to work'n'eat'n'blog. How do other people do it, I wonder?

I notice that a month ago I was writing about our Indian summer. Well, it's still here. Admittedly the sun took a couple of days off last Friday and Saturday, but otherwise it's been shining from a cloudless sky almost constantly; if it weren't for the shortening days I swear you'd not know it was mid-October. Metéo France tells me that last month we had a total of 227 hours of sunshine, considerably up on the average (although the same thing happened last year too ...) and only two days with no sun at all; this month we've already had well over half our average monthly quotient, with not a single day without sun. We're still eating dinner outside, which is something of a record for mid October .... even the birds are singing: today I heard a blackbird, a blackcap and even a great tit. It's all just much too good to miss, so we've thrown much of the inside work to the winds for a while and removed ourselves lock stock and barrel outside, where we're doing our level (or, in the case of our garden, our non-level) best to catch up with some of the general clearing and cleaning work that we failed to do when we were flat out inside (aaaargh .......).

The focus at the moment is the rocky area in front of the house, which is in effect a natural rockery, albeit long since disappeared under tonnes of ivy and moss. It feels as though I've now spent at least half my life clearing the rocks: it's a long, long task, involving a complicated sequence of clippers, scrapers, wire brushes and plastic brushes, together with a mixture of elbow grease and painstakingly minute work in the endless folds and creases of the rocks (good mindfulness practice!). But it's just sooooo good to be working outside on the earth again, which after all is one of the things we came here for. And we've uncovered rocks we didn't know were there - our own mini-Pyrénées.

This is what we inherited when we moved in over 4 years ago:

And this morning ....

We're not finished yet (actually I'm not sure that 'finished' will ever be a word that can be applied to Grillou ....), but we've sure as hell come a long way. And when we finally get some rain, we can start planting.

The weather's set to continue unchanged until next Monday. Alas, I won't be in it. From Friday till Monday I shall be workshop-ing in London. Do I want to go? No. Much as I enjoy the work, I simply have no appetite for being in the UK. Ah so.