Silver linings

Yesterday was a thoroughly unpleasant day: cold (very cold), wet (very wet) and dark (very dark). There's a wonderful French word, much loved by weather forecasters: maussade. It means dull and dismal; it also means sullen. (Don't you just love the idea of the weather being sullen? Perfect word.) And the fact that I was putting the seven hundredth and fifty-ninth coat of paint on yet another of our panelled glazed doors did nothing to assuage my mood.

But there was a silver lining: cranes. Halfway through the afternoon a strange and loud trumpeting noise drew my attention. Wah! Geese! yelled the ex-Norfolk me to anyone who'd listen, before realising that the only geese you're likely to see in Ariège are on your dinner table. Flocks of hundreds, even thousands, of flying geese - we'd get them over the house almost daily in the wnter - are about the only thing I miss from the Norfolk days, especially the Brents with their growly 'rruckk' call. I racked my paint-befuddled brain and realised that they must be cranes.

And cranes they were. Huge V shapes of them, common cranes (grues cendrées) on their way across the Pyrénées to spend their winter in warmer climes. Ariège is not on the main crane route, which is much farther west, but birding friends here have told me that we can expect to see them every so often. To see a big flock flying over our house was a huge treat. To see a second flock following at dusk was an even bigger one. But to hear, and then glimpse, a third, flying right over the chimney pots at midnight on the night of the full moon, was something unforgettable: in spite of the bitter cold, in spite of the lashing rain, in spite of being half undressed for bed, I ran outside to the track and watched, and listened.

The picture is not, I confess, mine. But this is what I saw:

And today I stumbled upon this video, captured by a local person at St Lizier, just a few kilometres down the road.





An ah -so moment.

The reckoning

If you're wondering why it's been a bit quiet on the blog front of late it's because I've been ruminating (and as my Aunty Connie used to say "can'tknitneatnall ...).

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down and started to write a pedantically detailed list of everything that still had to be done in order to be ready to present Grillou to guests in mid June as planned. After 11 pages of A4, and with at least as much more to go, I gave up: without even trying I could see that it was as impossible as trying to find the square root of minus one.

We've been working at this now for just over a year, seven days a week, anything up to 14 hours a day. With the best will in the world, I don't think we can up that. And to be honest, I think there's a limit to how long we - anyone? - can go on working at that level. We were doing okay when we were working mainly on L'Atelier d'Artiste - although it's by no means finished, the work there went much more according to timetable, probably because it was effectively a brand new conversion and so was like painting on a blank canvas. But La P'tite Maison has stymied - and continues to stymie - us. Everything we've done there - and that's a lot - has taken three times as long as I'd calculated it would. And it's not just us - The Perfectionist has been working in the dining-room-to-be for what feels now like most of his life, but still has a good couple of weeks to go (and that's with everything going to plan - ha! - and a following wind ...). In moments of despair we've all wondered if La P'tite Maison is jinxed (and in really bad moments, whether it's haunted), but rationally I know it's because the whole area was never really finished in its previous existence and so we're dealing with all the aftermath of, for example, walls that had been plastered but never primed or painted, other walls that never made it beyond the rendering stage, radiator pipes that crossed a room hanging off a beam, and lighting either non-existent or in the most bizarre places (none of which were useful, or even functional). And all the rest, too boring to mention.

To realise that meeting the deadline I've been holding for two years looks nigh on impossible was depressing, to say the least. The other thing it did was make me realise just how tired I was. I was still doing all right physically, but mentally I was exhausted, mainly from holding all those blasted spinning plates up in the air for so long. Another couple of months pushing on at the same rate seemed do-able; another six distinctly not.

And so as those who bore the brunt of my miserable git-ness will testify, I spent a not too pleasant week or so trying to find my way through the whole dilemma. When could we expect to be ready? What would it take? Could anything be simplified or dropped? (No!) Could anything more be contracted out ? (No!) How to let down those people who've already expressed an interest in booking for early summer? How to stop the grass and the weeds from growing? And so on. Round, and round, and round.

Today was a beautiful day - blue skies, early 20s in the shade, birds singing their hearts out - and this afternoon I - radically - took some time out from La P'tite Maison to hoe the potager. And it's funny how going back to the earth puts everything into perspective and makes life seem simpler. Yes, we could choose to up the ante, work 18 hours a day, forget all the stuff about enjoying the process and just get our heads down and do the necessary. That way, we might possibly make ourselves beautiful enough by July. Possibly. That would mean no potager, doing nothing more outside than keeping the grounds under control, no apéros in the garden, no time away from Grillou, no time with friends, no festivals, no swims and probably no sleep. By the time you got here for your Slow Holiday we'd be foutus (look it up!). Now what on earth would be the point of that, either for us or for you? Call it corny if you like, but hospitality for us has always been about the joy of sharing our home and our food with others, not about 'being a business'. Or, we could choose to drop the deadline, breathe, carry on taking pleasure in what we're doing, still work hard but live something of an ordinary life at the same time. Which, of course, is what we came here for. (And I have a sneaking suspicion that in the contrary way of the universe, letting go of the deadline will actually free up the stuckness and let things start to flow again ...).

Eh bien. There's no contest, really, is there? I'm off to sow some carrots.

Slow Retreats

I've just spent a very Slow, peaceful hour sitting in the garden in complete darkness. It was warm, but not silent: the rhythmic sounds of crickets (grilloux), grasshoppers, bushcrickets and the occasional insomniac cicada filled the air along with owl calls and the usual unidentified scrapings and scufflings of Grillou at night. It was the perfect end-of-day retreat, better than the best chill-out music.

I had an email from Carl Honoré this afternoon. Not that I know the guy personally, you understand (Carl, in case you've not encountered him, is the author of the book In Praise of Slow) - we've only ever exchanged a couple of emails - but I've been a member of Slow Planet since its inception. The email was announcing the 'first-ever' Slow Retreat, programmed to take place in Umbria this coming October: a week in a delicious looking farmhouse offering the chance to "explore and experience the ideas behind the book that defined the international Slow Movement with the author himself; a chance to connect with your inner tortoise, reset your metronome and reinvent your life". Sounds good ... and only £1299, too. Hmmm. Clearly you need to be pretty wealthy to be Slow (for most households around here, ours included, that represents over a month's income ...). 

Readers who've kept up to date with our plans for Grillou, and who dip into our 'proper' website from time to time, will know that for several months we've been planning to offer Slow Retreats here. And indeed we shall do so, though they'll cost you considerably less than £1299. (But there again you won't get a famous author as your mentor - just yourselves, and us, and of course Grillou, which could probably do the business all on its own ...). In case this is all news to you, here's the blurb:

"For people who want to take some time out and discover for themselves how to live more Slowly, we'll be offering Slow Retreats, periods of three or four days during which we'll explore our own relationship with time, and practice the art of slowing down. Good (Slow!) Food and wine, simple meditation practices, Slow Walks and play will form the core of these retreats, with plenty of time for reflection and space simply to be in Grillou's bucolic surroundings. This is a retreat to lift the spirit and (re)discover life's slow and simple pleasures, not one for existential angst or self-flagellation ... but beware, it might just change your life!"

End of Shameless Plug Number 654 ....

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. 

On being Slow

It's occurred to me, given some of my recent posts, that you must think I spend my entire life stuffed halfway down a soil pipe. I admit there is some truth in this. It feels as though we've been rebuilding our downstairs loo now for most of my adult life, and although progress is being made and rumour has it that we may well finish it this year, it's been a painfully slow and tedious job, for all sorts of (mainly) good reasons. 

Not least of which is that at the same time, I'm deeply embroiled in the final details of sourcing and spec-ing for The Work to our guest accommodation. Because yes, I can at last report that artisans have been found, devis have been signed, deposits have been paid; work will be starting in earnest in May, and is anticipated to take 122.5 days (yes, really) - with a break for les grandes vacances, naturally. After more than a year, with not a few false starts along the way, I can barely believe it myself. In the end, and most importantly when we were ready - practically, and psychologically - for it to happen, the process of finding the right person to mastermind the job proved to be a much simpler one than we expected; a relationship was made straight away and my gut instinct just said yes.  

We ourselves are taking on a fair amount of the work. Partly because we want to; partly because we can; and partly, frankly, because we need to to keep within budget. So, for example, amongst numerous other things, John's doing all of the outside work: creating terraces, building paths and steps and all the rest; I'm stripping and sanding and refinishing three floors and four staircases, putting in a new loo (yes, again!), upgrading a shower room with new plumbing and fittings, and tiling nearly 200 square metres of wall and floor; and together we'll be fitting over 100 metres of new skirting board and other woodwork, and putting around 120 litres of paint and limewash on the walls. 

I've become umbilically attached to my project file; even though I may not always know what day it is, I can spout for hours about the precise differences between this shower mixer and that one, or about the r values of different kinds of insulating materials, or about the drying times of hemp plaster. I suspect I'm perhaps not the world's most scintillating company just now, though you'd have to ask other people about that one.

The biggest challenge of all is going to be managing, and doing, all of this without losing the sense of Slow. We're going to be working eight or nine hours a day, probably to the point of physical exhaustion, over six days a week, for at least the next ten months. So how on earth, as a friend said to me recently, can that be Slow? Surely it's an oxymoron?

I don't think it is. Slow, as I understand it, is not literal. It has nothing to do with clock time, or with doing everything at a snail's pace. Rather, it's about doing things at the Right pace - right in the Buddhist sense, that is. It's as much about process as about product - valuing the journey, as well as the destination; being present in it, as well as being able to take time to stand outside and look back in. Put simply, if we're not going to engage with and have fun with the process of doing this work; if we're doing what we're doing just to save money; if we're going to plough through it with hidden resentment just wishing it were finished ... well then there would be no point.

But there's more. Hard to define, beyond a kind of know-it-when-you-see-it 'aha!' moment, but it's something to do with a sense of truthfulness, of authenticity: to ourselves, for sure, to but also to this house, to the land around it, to its history and its pays; to the materials we're using, the skills that we're bringing to the work and those that we're learning from it; to quality, to creativity and to simplicity; to relationship: with the environment, with each other and with those we're working alongside; and not least, to the process itself.

I think we have a choice. We can either look on the next year or so as sheer bloody hard graft, go onto auto-pilot, get everything done as quickly and as unthinkingly as possible, and simply look forward to the day it's over; or we can Slow right down, become a part of the process itself, and live it, with mindfulness - the good, the bad and the plain old indifferent, all lived in the moment, each moment.

A man walking across a field encountered 

a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. 

Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a 

wild vine and swung himself over the edge.

The tiger sniffed at him from above. 

Terrified, the man looked down to where, 

far below, another tiger had come, 

waiting to eat him. 

Two mice, one white and one black, 

little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. 

The man saw a luscious strawberry near him.

Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked 

the strawberry with the other. 

How sweet it tasted!

Zen parable.