Maison(s) de Village

This is the kitchen in which tonight's dinner is being prepared. You may be able to see a dusty bottle of old wine on the left-hand work surface. It will not be there for much longer...

The point of the photograph is that our friends who are our hosts for a few days have joined two old, small and decrepit village houses to make a very comfortable second home for themselves in this village about 20 km north of Béziers. I am told that the wooden arch into the kitchen was specially crafted by an artisan carpenter (curiously from Canterbury but who could not find work in the UK, son of a Polish airman and an English woman).

Our friends normally live in Manchester, but on present showing it rains much more here!

As a matter of fact, the rain let up a bit today, and we saw the sun shining. It's certainly not at all November-y cold: about 21 degrees (C) at the day's best. Crossing the Canal du Midi, we took a drive to the Mediterranean coast (at Valras-Plage), where we looked at the waves, and the many, many fish restaurants. The latter were quite full of French people out for their traditional Sunday lunches, and were evidently doing good trade out-of -season. Our hostess insisted on going paddling (I have photographic evidence!), and told us that the sea was quite warm. We even sat in the outside part of a bar and drank beers while admiring the waves, and children playing on a kind of abseiling thing. As the restaurants emptied, the clientele seemed all to go for a stroll along the sea front (such a stroll is, of course, what a "promenade" is in French, which is why I have avoided the word!). Quite crowded: but unpatriotically, we thought it might be nicer like this than when the place would be jammed packed during high summer with Brits and sundry others.

On our drive, we passed Pézenas, where the worst floods are. Fields and roads all around the autoroute were completely submerged for as far as the eye could see. Some autoroute ramps are cut off and shut. One of the most impressive things we saw was a "STOP" sign, presumably on a road, of which only the red top was showing above the water.

Now I am helping with food preparation by drinking a tumbler-full of 50/50 Ricard, and writing this commentary. I am hoping that this mixture will settle my slightly off-colour GI system. At least it's better than what I have been told is the cure in Egypt: strong black coffee with freshly squeezed lemon juice added. Bach organ music is playing downstairs (I suspect our host has recently bought the complete organ works). So all is well with the world (except that I am still worried about our car, which is abandoned for the weekend and tomorrow in a garage in one of the remote places you can imagine).