There but for the grace of Gaia ...

The winds and hurricane of Saturday night passed by and left us completely unscathed. In fact we bathed in ridiculously high Foehn effect temperatures (it was 25 degrees at 10.30pm), and enjoyed a truly spectacular flare at sunset:

Other areas weren't so lucky. Like the rest of France, we've been watching, with a mixture of horror and disbelief, the daily TV coverage of the floods in Vendée, where 28 people have died in the communes of L'Aiguillon sur Mer and La-Faute-sur-Mer alone, surprised in their beds by the storm surge that devastated the walls built to keep the sea away from the huge bungaloid estates that have sprung up over the last 20 years. At least 10 per cent of all the agricultural land in neighbouring Charente Maritime has been invaded by the sea; the Ile de Ré (where 'only' two people died) has been split by the sea into its original three islands, and entire villages are still cut off.

This stretch of coastline is remarkably similar to that of north Norfolk, where we lived for 8 years before coming to France. Our house was barely 2 centimetres above sea level and a few metres away from hectares of salt marsh; like the rest of our street we were front line in the flood zone, and our house was one of many that had been flooded to nearly three metres high in 1953 (over 50 years later, salts were still coming out of the wall and so like our neighbours' houses, all our inside walls remained boarded). Although a new (and ugly) concrete sea defence had been built between us and the marshes, we remained at risk; the local council regularly delivered sandbags, our flood board was always at the ready, the flood warning siren was tested without fail on the first Saturday of the month, and we would get occasional phone calls from the Environment Agency requiring us to get "ourselves and our livestock" to higher ground. In the back of our minds was always the question: what should I save? It was somewhat discomforting; we all knew that one day another huge surge would come. And so it will, of that I have no doubt.

Probably because of that experience, I find myself being particularly affected by the flooding in Vendée. What I see every night on my TV screen is what we all, at an almost unconscious level, feared in Cley in our everyday lives. And yet there are some huge differences. The early warning system in north Norfolk is well developed, if not especially well thought out (many of the phone alerts, for example, came in the form of voicemail messages in the early hours of the morning ...), but there seems to be no warning system at all in place in the Vendée and Charente Maritime in spite of the fact that huge swathes of the land has been reclaimed from the sea and lies at - or below - sea level. Last night I listened to the President of the Conseil Général explaining how the flooding "could not possibly have been foreseen" because it was a result of a combination of events which had never happened before: high winds, spring tides, and an atmospheric depression that caused a further increase in the height of the tide. Er - yes ... that's exactly what happened in the floods of 1953 ...

It seems that many of the sea walls date back to the Napoleonic era when the land was first reclaimed from the sea, and have been slowly falling into a state of disrepair. Even more disturbing, though, is the number of homes that have been built in flood zones - and I'm talking at, and below, sea level - since 1999, the year of the two successive hurricanes that caused untold damage to much of France: 100,000. Many of these are, like those on the estate at L'Aiguillon, single storey 'pavillons' (in fact at L'Aiguillon, two storey houses are not permitted ...). There are, of course, huge incentives to classify land, however unsuitable, as constructible, and it's well known that many a town or village maire has done very nicely thank you over the years by doing just that. Rightly, the merde has begun to hit the ventilateur about all of that today, and hopefully we may find that this particular stable door is, if not shut, now pushed a little further closed.

Fat lot of good that'll be though to those who discovered, one Saturday night in February, that while you can build walls and banks and barriers and defences of all kinds, Gaia will, one day, have her way.

The little prince is saving his planète

So he's done it. Unless you've had your head in a paper bag for the last couple of days you'll know that Nicolas Sarkozy has put his money (or rather, our money) where his mouth is and introduced a carbon tax. From the beginning of next year, businesses and households will pay for the privilege of using carbon-emitting fuels at the starting rate of 17 euros a tonne.

Assuming, of course, he manages to steer his proposals unchanged through both houses of parliament by then. And that, from my armchair vantage point, is not looking entirely likely. Because although in theory politicians from all parties agree with ecologists that a carbon tax is necessary (Nicolas Hulot, France's tame popular ecologist, famously managed to extract a pre-presidential election promise from all the candidates that they would introduce a carbon tax if elected), now that push has come to shove most of them are finding reasons to disapprove: it's the wrong time; it will penalise the poorest families; it goes too far; it doesn't go far enough; it's too unwieldy to work; it's never going to change behaviour.

Now I'm no great fan of our president - people as hyper as he is scare me - but I have to concede a sneaking admiration for him on his determination to integrate green thinking into day to day politics. Not being one to underplay his own importance, Nicolas Sarkozy sees himself as a 'leader in the fight to save the human race'. And in spite of all the criticism and hyperbole flying round, I do actually believe he is genuine on this one. France is now committed to reducing carbon emissions to a quarter of the 1990 figures by 2050, and for several years now we've had decent financial incentives (and now interest-free loans) to install energy saving measures and renewable energy systems. For our petit prince, the new carbon tax is not 'just another tax', but a whole new way of looking at taxation - the first step in a fiscal revolution which will lead France into a post-petrol economy: he wants to shift the burden of taxation from labour towards polluting goods and services.

That's a pretty tall, and radical, order. The nitty gritty is that we'll all pay around 4 or 5 centimes more per litre of petrol, diesel and heating oil; a little less on gas; nothing on electricity, because it's almost all produced in nuclear power stations. All the money thus raised will then be returned to us: every household will benefit from a tax reduction (non tax payers will receive a 'green cheque') which will vary according to family composition and whether people live in the town or the country. Urban dwellers who use public transport to get around, and electricity for all their energy needs will therefore do nicely, thank you. People like us, in the middle of nowhere? Not so well.

There's a certain, rather comical, irony in all of this for us at Grillou. As some of you who knew us in our restaurant days may remember, we were pretty active in campaigning on the whole issue of carbon emission: we were England's first - and then only - carbon neutral restaurant, and we ran a carbon offset scheme for our guests and customers to balance the carbon emitted in their journey to us. And now, here we are living in a house with - yes, oil-fired central heating! We have become the polluters, and we shall pay. Don't get me wrong, of course we should pay. And one day, when (or rather, if) finances allow, we intend to replace our (German, and very efficient) orange monster of a boiler with an all singing all dancing wood pellet model. But carbon neutral we're not, nor will we be.

If I have one criticism of Nicolas Sarkozy's scheme it's that behaviour change needs more than willingness; it also needs resources - in this case, financial ones. And financial resources are in pretty short supply for the average rural household in France: people here simply don't have pots of savings into which they can dip to finance new heating systems, or less polluting cars, or photovoltaic or thermal energy; nor do they have spare disposable income to pay back loans, whether interest-free or not. Not only that, but if you already do all you can to minimise your energy use not so much from green conviction but because you can't afford not to, where's left to go?

Perhaps that's why two thirds of people here profess themselves to be 'largely unhappy' with the new scheme. Perhaps if they also saw hefty tarifs on food that's travelled 6000 kilometres to get here, or on air travel (which, bizarrely, remains exempt), or on goods imported from 'dirty' carbon countries; perhaps if they saw the building regulations for new build houses altered to require the use of renewable energy sources; perhaps if they saw their politicians and Eurocrats living and travelling more modestly: perhaps then they might feel less picked upon.

We shall see.

Zen and the art of hemp and lime

Exciting things are happening right now in the huge first floor room that will become the bedroom/salon of L'Atelier, part of our guest accommodation. Nearly 50 square metres in size, with a ceiling height of over 5 metres and fantastic vast windows to two walls, set into the original barn openings, it was used by Grillou's previous owner as an artist's studio but was never completely finished: bare stone walls, basic wiring, halogen lighting, ventilation pipes from shower rooms and loos protruding into the room. It's a stunning space - it probably sold us the house - which needed something equally stunning doing to it. That something baffled me for quite some time.

Until, a year or so ago, I read an article in Maison et Travaux (my fave French doing-up-house magazine) about chanvre-chaux - hemp and lime plaster. I was hooked.

Hemp has a list of uses that would give most other plants an inferiority complex (did you know, for example, that the bodywork of the first Ford car was made from something called Hemp Plastic?), though it's in the arena of green building and renovation that it's really beginning to make its name. Mixed with lime, it creates a breathable, sculptable, warm, stone-wall-friendly, insulating plaster which is highly strokeable and has great character. As if all that weren't enough, research suggests that it's not just carbon neutral but negative: hemp absorbs a huge amount of CO2 as it's growing, and effectively sequestrates it in the walls: up to 50kg per square metre of hemp walling - much much more than the meagre CO2 emitted in the production of the lime.

Hemp has been used in building in France for many years, where it's widely grown (archaeologists have reputedly found a sixth century hemp-reinforced bridge), and is gathering quite a following now in Ireland too; sadly, I'd never really come across its use in England, where it would have so suited our cold, hard Norfolk flint walls. Sigh. French eco-builders have adopted hemp and lime in a big way; most often used in new-builds (where it can be used in almost every part of the construction, including foundations and floors, using a material known as 'hempcrete'), it's just beginning to be used in our kind of 'retro-fit' restoration.

Given all that, how could I even think about using anything else? A chance encounter with our charming and good looking Perfectionist (there - will that do? Just knock it off the bill ...), much research and many conversations later, and we were away. And last Wednesday, the process began. I don't know which of us is more excited by it .... Anyway, here goes the week, in pictures.

Our builders' merchant manages, somehow, to squeeze the tipper lorry into the tinest space to deliver over 6 tonnes of sand ...

... and uses an amazing amount of skill to drop two pallets of lime, and (narrowly, and fortunately) miss the telephone wire:

Phew. Just half an hour after the delivery, the long-awaited process begins. Our three guys are all going full pelt and flat out. One is The Mixer: his job is to keep two cement mixers going simultaneously, the contents of which are transferred into buckets ...

... then winched up to the first floor by The Wincher:

The first stage is to apply a coat of lime render to the bare stone walls, to prepare them for receiving the hemp plaster. Because of the sheer scale of this job, this (together with the initial coats of hemp plaster) is being sprayed, under pressure, onto the stone walls to make sure that all the gaps between the stones are completely filled. This is naturally the task of The Perfectionist, although The Wincher makes sure he gets a bit of a look in here too. A little non-human assistance is required as well, however ...

The final sprayed coat of hemp plaster is then 'scratched' in preparation to receive the finishing coats next week:

Someone described the application of hemp and lime as being a bit like trowelling tuna mayonnaise onto walls ... Hmm. Moving swiftly on ... look at these lovely rounded corners:

Two and a half days in, and two thirds of the walls are now 'scratched' and ready for their finishing coats. The sun shone relentlessly; the temperature hovered around 30 degrees in the shade. The guys worked from 8.15 to 6pm, with just a couple of breaks, while we also sweated digging out the dining terrace just outside and shifting hundreds of big stones. They'll no doubt think I've completely lost it for saying this, but there were moments - hours - when the task - hard, hot and dirty though it is - became a kind of dance; when the rhythm took over; when all three were lost in total awareness of what they were doing; when the process was all.

Zen moments.

We have plumbing, we have hemp, and we have ... landfill

This has been a good week. (Mainly. More of that in a minute).

We've finished destroying two ancient shower rooms, chiselled off more white tiles than you'd need to open a shop, knocked down a wall or two and a few bits of serious concrete, and become very friendly with the guy at our local déchetterie, who now thinks we have nothing better to do than to visit three times a day with a trailer full of building rubble. Plays hell with the fingernails, but it's great for my arm muscles, which haven't been so - er - obvious since the days when I used to unload and dry up 144 heavy white plates from the dishwasher every night.

We had an exciting moment (yes, I know, sad) when a fork lift truck from our lovely builders' merchants in Saint Girons actually made it down our narrow, rocky track (weight limit: 3 tonnes) with a huge pallet of stone for the new terrace (weight carried: 8 tonnes). Oh, and it's coming again next week, twice. Don't tell the local council. Don't you just love France?

Following the complex task of completely replumbing, from scratch, the rooms in our new guest accommodation, Wednesday saw the Ceremonial Turn On: and yes, we have water, we have waste and we have no leaks. Not one. Not even a dribble. I - unlike our uber-perfectionist artisan (it takes one to know one) who spent several nervous minutes pacing and biting his nails before we turned on the stopcocks - expected nothing less. But it was cause for a bit of a celebration nonetheless.



We have hemp. Two thousand litres of it, ready to be mixed with sand and lime to make an insulating plaster for the stone walls in what will be the bedroom of L'Atelier. Now this is really exciting: it's brilliantly environment-friendly, hugely effective, and pretty damned attractive to boot. It's also how I first met The Uber-Perfectionist. Long story.

And finally, after half a millenium of wet weather delay, we've managed to start digging out and preparing the ground for a new car parking area, a dining terrace and a stepped path to L'Atelier. It's backbreaking clod-by-clod work, largely because the ground is so wet, but hey, it's only 69 square metres ...

And here comes the yes-but. Ever since we've moved in I've wondered why there was a strange shaped grassy hummock outside the door of L'Atelier; today I found out. It's a landfill site.

Sand, gravel, big pebbles, small pebbles, bits of broken tile, bits of broken glass, bottle tops, medicine labels, a Belgian franc, a shoe, a belt buckle, bits of skeleton ... okay, the last one's a lie. Possibly. 

Don't you just love France?

An ordinary life

As I was ruminating on my sunbed late yesterday afternoon (yes, it finally stopped raining), I got to thinking about the kind of life that we've begun to settle into here. As you do. Or at least I do. And I realised one thing in particular. We're ordinary. 

For many years living in England, I felt my own sense of What Really Matters becoming more and more out of kilter with the prevailing ethic. As a person-centred therapist, for example, I was - and remain - shocked and angry at, and disturbed by, the ceaseless moves towards statutory regulation of the practice of counselling and psychotherapy. (If you want to know why, you could do worse than visit The Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy and watch the video talk by Brian Thorne, who was my tutor and mentor. I can't put it better than he does. Never could, actually ...). As a restaurateur, I was saddened by the general belief that we must be motivated by, and in it for, profit ... and exhausted by continually having to explain that we didn't see things that way. I lost count of how many presumably well-meaning people told us how much more we could earn by opening on more days or for longer hours, or turning tables, or cramming more people in, or using wholesalers instead of small producers, or any number of so-called 'normal' trade tricks; explaining that we were simply interested in creating a life that sustained us and was sustainable usually led to (at best) disbelief and (at worst) pity. And as a person, the things that most inspire me - growing things, creating things, sharing things, community and communities, meditation, nature, creating space for people to be and discover themselves and others, living a simple but not a plain life - were certainly not those that surrounded me on a daily basis. 

Here in rural France, and in particular in Ariège, I'm no longer counter-cultural. As everyone well knows, the French work to live rather than live to work; in spite of Nicholas Sarkozy's best efforts to get everyone to "work more to earn more", the nation remains singularly unconvinced: earning enough is what it's all about. Commuting is rare, and despised - a last resort, to be dispensed with as quickly as possible. Almost everybody grows their own vegetables. Credit cards are all but unknown: you want something, you pay for it, now. Houses are bought as homes, not as investments, and mortgages are strictly and legally regulated. The consumer society is muted: shops are closed for two hours at lunchtime, and on Sundays. Cars go on for at least twice as long as they do in the UK, other machinery even longer; there really is no pressure to have the latest equipment or the fastest PC or the trendiest trainers or spend the most on your child at Christmas or dress in the most stylish fashions (if you've visited a rural market and seen some of the clothes on offer, you'll understand what I mean and wonder why on earth the French have a reputation for being elegant ...). In spite of la crise, the essence of daily living continues to be dominated rather more by simple pleasures than by desire or by fear. What Really Matters here is living a life of quality not quantity; living well, and appropriately.

And so, blessedly and with a great sigh of relief, I find myself finally to be living an ordinary life, just one amongst countless others doing the same. 

The pale blue dot

In 1990, when Voyager 1 was around six and a half million kilometres from Earth, the astronomer Carl Sagan pesuaded NASA to point its camera back at us, and take this picture from the very edge of the Solar System:

This is what he had to say about it.

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space] and, if you look at it, you see a dot.

That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there - on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling and, I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

What's the point of all this? Well, today, April 22, is Earth Day, being celebrated for the 39th time; over 500 million people all over the world are marking it in some way. It's a great time to do something green - plant a tree perhaps, or start a compost heap, or replace an incandescent light bulb by an energy saving one. But don't let it be the only such day, because for that tiny pale blue dot, every day is Earth Day ...

Trees for life

Grillou is, quite literally, lost in the woods. Everywhere you look, there are trees: willow, ash, alder, chestnut, hornbeam, holly, wild plum, apple, pear, oak ... Living here is like being rooted in the heart of the forest itself. It's impossible not to feel a deep connection to the trees, the land, the earth itself. There isn't a point at which Grillou ends and the woodland starts: the trees are a part of us: they are our neighbours, our community, involved in our day to day life.

Trees give our home and land its very particular energy: ancient, knowing, powerful and bizarrely content. They watch over us. They mark the turning of the seasons. They shelter all kinds of birds and other wildlife.





Ancient myths speak of oak tree spirits that watch over those living close by. Our two old oak trees stand like silent sentinels, guardians of the place and its people. Working in the garden today, I couldn't take my eyes off them, or my energy away from them.

Les intempéries

I love that word. So much nicer than 'bad weather'. And definitely nicer than the storm that ploughed its way across south-west France yesterday. We were warned: Metéo France put numerous departments on Alerte Rouge - the highest kind of severe 'don't go out on pain of death' weather warning, used only for the kind of rare phenomenon that happens once every ten years or so, the last time being the huge storm of 1999 which brought down millions of trees and killed 88 people. This time, we were once again to expect winds of near-hurricane levels, up to 160 km an hour. Bizarrely, whilst every other department across the south-west, from Pyrénées Atlantiques to Pyrénées Orientales, was on Alerte Rouge, Ariège - which sits right in the middle of the storm's projected path - was only on Alerte Orange, as if the storm was somehow supposed to go round us.

Which it did, in a fashion. It was windy. Very, very windy. But I'd guess that our winds were maybe around 100 or 120 km an hour rather than the 180-odd touched in Landes, Gironde, Perpignan and on the Aude coast. In Aude, our neighbouring department, the Prefect actually decreed at lunchtime that all shops and shopping centres of more than 1000 square metres must close immediately, leaving customers and staff inside 'for their own safety', and banned all traffic from the roads - even the pompiers unless it was a situation of life or death. 

So what of Grillou? Well, we lost electricity at around 10am yesterday morning, phone a little later and mobile phone signal a little later still. We covered the freezer in quilts and blankets, lit the wood burner and settled in for the long haul - we were in France during the aftermath of the 1999 hurricane, when it took three weeks to restore power to every household. Listening on fading batteries to SudRadio's special day-long 'solidarity' programme, I discovered that we were just one of 1,700,000 households without power. We watched as the storm hit; millions of particles of lichen flew around, creating a kind of green blizzard; tree branches broke off and zoomed past the windows. The trees around us bent to unbelievable angles in the gusts; some came down, a few more lost their tops. Our beautiful ancient oaks, fortunately, escaped unscathed. So, but unfortunately, did the five huge leylandii planted (for reasons that escape me, given my lifetime loathing for the things) by our predecessors that are on the A list for cutting down as soon as the weather improves. The trees, that is, not our predecessors.

By five thirty the worst winds had passed, on towards the Mediterranean coast where they inflicted huge damage. We went into camping mode and cooked by oil- and gas-light, ate by candlelight and walked around the house with our LED head-lamps on. This morning, we awoke to find our power and telephone had been restored. It's a gloriously sunny and warm day; the air resounds to the sound of chainsaws (including ours) as everybody sets to to clear land, roads and chemins. Over the course of the the storm, four people died, several more were injured; many, many communes, particularly those close to the Atlantic and the Mediterranean where the winds hit speeds never before seen in France, will be today surveying serious damage; over a million households are still without electricity; some of the worst hit areas are today under flood alert as yet more heavy rain swells rivers that are already in, or close to, flood. We have been lucky.

A salutary tale ...

... of how if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Back in spring, our local M. Bricolage (DIY warehouse - Grillou's second home) was running a promo on seagrass carpeting - 5.99€ a metre length. Now we've got some upstairs in our little TV / music salon, and apart from being an absolute pig to haul up our twisty stairs (mutual murder was a distinct possibility for a while) and then cut, it went down well enough and looks great. So, brilliant, we thought - just the thing to cover up the white tiles in the lower half of our salon proper that make it look like a public toilet. We bought some, along with several rolls of cork insulation and some Neoprene glue to hold it all down. The statutory week to let it settle, a few more blisters, et voilà ... down, fitted and looking good. Oh, we thought we'd been so seriously clever...

A few weeks ago, it grew a beard, overnight. A green beard. My favourite French brico forums were consulted; it was pronounced to be a form of mildew; not, apparently, uncommon. No big deal - a squirt of dilute bleach, a rub down with a brush and then a hoover should deal with it. And so it did.

A week or so after that, I noticed a strange smell in the room. Our carpet, though still clean shaven, was reeking - not the normal seagrassy smell, which is quite pleasant. No, this was something else again. A squirt of slightly less dilute bleach, a rub down with a brush and a hoover, and it was gone. Except it wasn't. It came back again. Now the salon smelt like a public toilet instead of looking like one. Out came the bleach bottle again, etcetera.

Now I don't like being defeated. I like going forwards, not backwards. So I tried the old bicarb trick. Sprinkle bicarbonate of soda over smelly carpet, leave it for 48 hours, hoover and end of smell. In mitigation, I do have to say that it always worked for the smell of wet dog. It didn't, however, work for smelly seagrass.

Please read the next sentence carefully, because you may never read it again. I was defeated. I gave up. Beaten by a bit of fibre. One of my 'virtual' forum pals reckoned that it was always going to happen, because the seagrass had almost certainly been incorrectly dried and stored and was reacting with its latex backing (the words 'Greeks' and' gifts' spring to mind somewhere ...). So, yesterday, John - not me; there is a limit to my acceptance of defeat, as there is to my ability to tolerate destruction - cut it up and threw it out. It's currently acting as a ground cover mulch on a new bed in the potager, but the smell is now so strong that I fear it's taking over the village, 3km away, and tomorrow it's going to have to go to the déchetterie. In spite of the fact that its presence there will not further endear us to the rather fierce déchetterie attendant, who already has us marked down as beyond the pale because we omitted to sweep up after ourselves on our first visit.

And today we spent many hours trying to remove the Neoprene glue from the tiles, because yes, the glue smells too. Have you ever tried to remove Neoprene glue from tiles? No, I thought not. I expect we'll be doing the same tomorrow. And the day after.

Oh how we laughed.

It's not easy being green. Etcetera. Etcetera.

Well, it isn't. And sometimes it makes you want to cry. Like yesterday, for instance, when we had to hoick out all twenty tomato plants because of late blight.

It was a bit like déja vu. We'd already had a serious attack of tomato blight in June (aka monsoon season), and in retrospect probably should have pulled up all of those plants and burnt them well before we did. But we didn't: we tried to save them. But we didn't: in the end they had to go. In went the next lot of tomato plants, in another bed. They thrived; it was a joy to watch them every day. True, some of them showed the occasional small brown patch, which we quietly removed. As all the other local organic growers do here, we gave them a treatment of Bordeaux mixture. Tomatoes started to form; we held our breath. So far, so good. Until last week, a couple of days of which were cool and a bit damp; we went to bed one night with healthy plants, and woke twelve hours later to four rows of sad horrible brown wilted scabby things. It was that fast.

If we discount my original theory that the Saints de Glace are having a laugh at my expense, I'm baffled. Our land hasn't grown vegetables for nearly 30 years. We don't grow potatoes. Our neighbours haven't got blight. We raised the plants from seed. So why? Yes, I realise it's probably not A Really Big Issue in the overall scheme of things, but it's pretty devastating when it happens. And we're going to have to think hard about how to deal with it next year.

There's an approach to growing practised here in France, originally just in viticulture but now more widely in agriculture, called 'lutte raisonée' - literally, 'reasoned struggle'. It's not organic, exactly, but those who practise it will only use any form of pesticide or fungicide treatment as an absolute last resort, having weighed up the environmental impact of treating against the overall impact of not treating. So no spraying 'just in case', and if the decision is made to treat, it will be because it's necessary to save an entire crop, and it will be done in such a way as to minimise damage to the soil and to beneficial insects. Almost all of the top wine domaines practise lutte raisonée, and I can see why. To me, sustainability has to be holistic, which means taking into account the personal and financial impact of an action as well as its impact on the Environment with a big E.

For example (and deep greens, look away now), we occasionally use slug pellets. We do so not because we don't know about or haven't thought about other methods, or because we don't care. We do so because we live and grow, here at Grillou, in an environment which can sometimes be very challenging indeed: in the middle of woodland with, in wet weather, more (and bigger) slugs and snails than I have ever seen in my life. Beer traps, eggshells, coffee grounds and all the rest simply don't cut it here: with half a hectare we can't afford nemotodes; I'm certainly not paying 30 euros for six copper rings (especially as we'd need at least 60 ...); and sorry, but staying up all night to pick the things off my plants is simply not an option. So if we're to produce any seedlings or any lettuce at all, pellets it is, sometimes.

Being green isn't the nice cuddly, fluffy little number it's often made out to be. It's about hard work, hard thinking and even harder choices. And it's not easy.