Franglais

By the time I'd lived four years in Brazil I was virtually bi-lingual.  Not entirely, because there were whole areas of Brazilian life where I didn't have the vocabulary: like discussing the previous night's episode of the latest "soap" on TV (didn't watch it), or visiting a beautician (which all Brazilian women seemed to do weekly), or taking the car in for repair (mind you I struggle with that in English).  But my business Portuguese was pretty good and I even wrote reports and gave presentations, which most people seemed to be able to understand.

By contrast, my French is still abysmal.  There is still much that I do not understand (at least on first hearing) and I often have to ask someone to slow down and repeat what they have said.  I managed that in the post office this morning - a reply paid package to Belgium that I wasn't sure would be accepted.  The lady behind the counter smiled and rattled something back at me.  We started again. This time, S L O W L Y.  Ah! if, I'd brought a copy of the label with me she would have stamped it so I would have had a record of the despatch - sensible idea!

I left feeling smug that I'd understood, but then rapidly deflated as I realised that I would not have been able to say any of that in French to someone else.

Yesterday, after I'd dropped Tod off at Bergerac airport I popped into Jardinland, pretending I was there to buy compost, but really for a tea and cake in the glossy small cafe surrounded by the sweet smell of fresh greenery.  I stood at the counter waiting to make my choice. A woman alongside me struggled with three words of French, gave up and said (in English) "I'll have that one".  The French girl behind the counter smiled and said (in English) "of course".  The "that one" was a tarte au chocolat.

Although I am far from fluent, what my time in Brazil has given me is the courage to gesticulate, make a fool of myself, make up words that are a mixture of French, English and Portuguese and to realise that quite often the French I need is not that different from the English.

However, I may just not understand the reply!

Tod has 'Flu

Casting too many clouts before May is out, if you ask me!

That, and leaving the cottage too early and moving back to our draughty house during what was a brief moment of warmth.

The Godin stove is lit in the lounge.  Spicy butternut squash soup is warming on the stove.

Tod is asleep under the duvet and Bertie is lying on top as a hot water bottle.

We're hunkering down for a wet, cold week.  Unfortunately Tod is booked on a flight to the UK on Wednesday and we're running out of his magic all-powerful (not available in France) remedy - Lemsip.

At least he'll be able to stock up when he gets there.

Aftermath

The cold weather in January has had a devastating effect on gardens and people are posting on the forums swapping advice and suggestions for what to do.

The received wisdom seems to be to wait and see whether new green shoots begin to emerge before pruning back dead branches.  Maybe wait as late as the end of May for some plants.

We have two bay trees, a young mimosa, a large ceanothus and rosemary on the rockery, a great oleander bush on the bank up to what one day will be the front door, all with burnt, brittle leaves and dead looking stems.   And my pride and joy - the phormiums, with their bronze spikes that form such a feature in the borders in front of the veranda - have completely collapsed, their centres a mushy mess.

We've already cut back the tops of the yuccas at the end of the swimming pool.  Looking like something out of Where the Wild Things Are their rotten mop heads would never have recovered. I've left their long trunks, at least we can grown some annual climbers up them until (hopefully) new growth starts from the bottom again.

And there is hope. Buried in the dead stems of a hydrangea that I thought we'd lost bright green leaves are emerging; and nestled right at the base of a very sick looking berberis I was weeding yesterday, I found two tiny pale new shoots.

Oleander

Yuccas

Phormium

The Phormium in Happier Times

Hydrangea new shoots

I Blame Shirley Conran

It was that "Superwoman" thing in the seventies when somehow women were going to be able to hold down high-powered jobs, work all hours and then rush home and play the little home-maker; cooking delectable meals while re-upholstering the lounge furniture, at the same time being funny and flirtatious with the man in their life.

Somehow, some of that over-aspirational perfectionism still sticks with me.  So when we invite friends round for supper, it's not enough to prepare a meal.  I want the food to be delicious, the house to be spotless, the garden manicured, the planters over-flowing with flowers, the kitchen clean and tidy and me, relaxed and unstressed in some "little number" that I happen to have found at a local flea market for a song.

Needless-to-say real life's not like that, even with Tod's sterling help. It's a miracle if I've managed to shower and get changed by the time our first guests arrive and I'm usually hot and bothered in the kitchen with still wet hair, peeling the spuds and wondering if the burnt sauce can be rescued.

The problem is, anything less than Superwoman perfection can feel like a failure.  And it's only afterwards that I realise that perhaps we all did enjoy ourselves, even if the paving round the swimming pool (which nobody could see anyway from where they were sitting on the terrace with their drinks) did need weeding and cleaning.

It took a friend to remind me of Leonard Cohen's words ...

"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in."

Thanks N.  And yes, we did have a good time.

Tonight ...

... I close the shutters of the cottage and through the big window on the landing - the window that used to be the doorway into the hayloft - I can see in the dark north western sky Venus, Jupiter and a red crescent moon low on the horizon of Monsieur F's field where he will shortly be planting maize.

As I close the shutters to the small window on the other side of the landing, the one that looks towards the south, through the branches of the lime trees I can just see Orion's Belt.

The air is mild and the night is clear.  We are in for a week of warm, sunny weather and this is the last night we will sleep in the cottage.

Tomorrow we will move back to the house for the summer and the cottage will become once again the place where our friends stay.

Bitten Off ...

I think my mother considered she married well.

The ninth in a late Victorian / Edwardian family of ten children to a policeman, she more or less had to bring herself up.  Her mother died when she was eight and all the older sisters were much too bored by then with their small siblings to care how she coped.

She met my father - a bright, only child - when she was in her teens and I think he offered her the space and aspiring middle-classness she needed to move away from her big extended family.

When I was a toddler my parents moved to a bungalow in Bookham on the edge of the North Downs.  Through the whole of my life, my mother made much of the fact that the bungalow came with "a third of an acre" - so different to the tightly packed terraced houses of Beckenham where she grew up, with their small gardens, outside toilet and alleyway along the back, .

Something of that desire for that space of "a third of an acre" has rubbed off on me.  No doubt she would be thrilled to know that her daughter is now living in a house surrounded by five acres.

But then I also know the family folklore that the third of an acre was too much for Dad, working full-time, singing in the choir, attending council meetings and squeezing gardening into late evenings and long weekends. He had bitten off more than he could chew and the garden became a burden, not a pleasure. So they moved - to my mother's chagrin - to a smaller garden.

At this time of the year, everywhere I look around the five acres there is work to be done and Nature is running ahead of me laughing.  My father is standing at my shoulder and I know exactly how he felt.

Fig Weed

When we first moved here and the cottage was but a bramble covered ruin open to the sky, on the far side, partly hidden by elder bushes and barricaded by stock fencing on worm eaten wooden posts, there we found an old fig tree.

"How wonderful!" we thought, imagining some future where our guests, sheltering under its branches from the afternoon sun, would reach up casually to pluck a ripe fruit, to be eaten sweet and juicy with fresh sheep's yoghurt.

Our second summer, one evening we sat on the veranda by the house and, intrigued, watched a flock of starlings swoop round the derelict cottage below us.  Having seen the figs begin to ripen and thinking that one or two might just be ready, I investigated the next morning to find the starlings had been busy. Not a single fig remained. Not even the tiny unripe ones. We would have to wait another year before we would be tasting our own soft, sweet figs - starlings permitting.

Four years on, this great thug of a plant alongside the now restored cottage terrace is not a thing of unalloyed joy.  Too close to where our friends sit on late summer evenings, the rotting figs high in the branches beyond human reach are a magnet for marauding hornets and wasps - an unwelcome presence for those guests of a nervous disposition.  So each spring now, before the rising sap burns and stings I take pruning saw, secateurs and loppers and bring back to ground level all but a handful of branches furthest from the terrace.

The fig weed thrives on my harsh ministrations.  In a few months a thicket of new growth will be eight, ten feet into the air - the most enticing of figs yet again high above, there for the taking by starling and hornet.

Nevertheless, I know come late summer this brute will delight me. I will wander down to the cottage in the early morning, through the still wet long grass and pick from the lower branches the sweetest of breakfasts and be glad that the tree is there.

Saturday Morning

Bertie lies under the kitchen table, warm body, soft fur against my bare toes.  With much cracking and squeaking of plastic on plastic, he happily chews an old battered water bottle.

A tentative beam of sunlight briefly appears through the window and lights up muddy dog footprints, a film of pale dust over the dark red tiles of the kitchen floor. The sun doesn't linger and the view down to the stream and the small bridge returns to a subdued misty grey.

Elbows on the table, pink scruffy dressing gown sleeves pushed back, gardening magazine read, tea cup empty in my hands, the sweet-sour taste of Tod's home-made bread just a memory on my tongue. It's time to face the day.

Or maybe linger a while longer, with another cup of tea?