21. Farewell to the gite

I’m glad my stay in hospital is behind me.. I’ve just got to go back on 28th January for a final check-up. The staff were really friendly and a cut above the staff in NHS hospitals.. (in my experience)

I remember going to visit my Mum who'd been taken into the Accident & Emergency (A&E) Unit at a NHS Hospital (that shall remain anonymous) in 2006. As I arrived, an ambulance was parked outside the entrance to the A&E Unit and its crew were cleaning out the inside of it – one of them was holding a bloodied stretcher that looked like it had come from a chainsaw massacre while the other chap was hosing the blood off it. I wouldn’t have minded but this was in the entrance to the A&E Unit and everyone walking in or out had to walk through these pools of bloody water..!! I couldn’t believe it..!

1st February 2008. We’d settled on 1st February 2008 with our Hereford-based removals company as the date for the delivery of the bulk of our possessions which had been in storage since the summer of 2007. The New Year came and went and as we neared February the last few jobs in the house neared completion. We had to seek permission from the Town Hall to block the traffic in the road while the removals lorry was unloading.

On the day, we were at the house at 7.15am ready for the removals lorry which was expected at 8.15. We turned the heat on and waited. We cordoned off a part of the avenue with some barriers that the council had kindly dropped off for us. I was half expecting a call from the lorry asking me to direct them here but nothing. Madame was getting increasingly agitated as the witching hour approached with still no sign of them.

At 8.15 I was pacing up and down outside when suddenly the big lorry turned into the avenue on the dot of quarter past.. (with the “Dambusters March” playing in my head!) The driver was the same chap who’d moved us from the cottage into their storage facility in Hereford - so we knew him. Anyway, he and his mate soon got cracking and despite regular pit-stops for cups of tea on the hour every hour (unlike our Basque boys!) they soon had everything unloaded. Where did all these boxes come from I asked myself..? Boxes and still more boxes appeared. I opened one and found they’d packed half a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits we’d left out for them to have with their tea in the cottage five months earlier. I resisted the temptation to offer them to the men..

We managed to position most of the boxes in the right rooms and then we went back to the gite where we were staying for our last night. It was reassuring to see that our old things had emerged safe and sound not only from storage but also the long trip down. I was desperate to read a book other than "Out of Africa" - great though that is.

The next morning we were up early to fetch the rented camionette (light van) from nearby Ustaritz which we were going to use to transport all our things from the gite to the house.. In the end this evolution took 2 trips. We said our final goodbyes to Monsieur and Madame D who in turn invited us for a coffee in a few days time. Then we returned the van and headed off to the house. In the meantime, the last touches were being applied to the kitchen and the bathroom.. When we’d finally created a bit of space around the sofas, we opened a bottle of champagne that a friend from work had kindly given us - with a few bits of smoked salmon.. It felt good to be reunited with all our things again.

On the Friday morning, our new TV was delivered and connected up. We’ve now got hundreds of channels of TV from around the world – including Al-Jazheera which I don’t think we’ll be watching. They also brought round the new dryer and fitted that on top of the washing machine.. Before long Madame had most of our stuff put away and we were starting to see the walls again.

On the Saturday morning at about 8am I was putting together Madame’s old armoire (wardrobe) when I tripped over a piece that I’d put down on the floor and I went down like a sack of spuds - a sack of pommes de terre doesn't have the same ring to it does it? I landed on top of the attachment fittings for the electric radiator which hadn’t been put back up and whose edges were razor sharp. On getting to my feet I found I had a sliced cut across the back of my fingers on my right hand (across the first joint) which I hardly felt but then they suddenly started leaking blood.. Madame patched me up as best she could with what we had to hand and then I drove into town to find a pharmacy that was open because here in France, pharmacists will dress a wound for you as well as - here's a surprise - identifying edible from non-edible fungi.

When I found one, the woman took one look and said “’Opital!”.. When I got there I was whistled through to the Urgent Dept and where we found to our astonishment that the doctor there was a young Welshman.. His parents live here for six months and the other six months they spend in Welsh Wales so he grew up speaking French.. I had my hand x-rayed in case some foreign body had got into the cuts and I got a tetanus jab.. and they tied my hand up like a parcel and said no work for you this weekend. A result!

However, after a few idle minutes though, I started carrying on with the million and one jobs that needed doing, of which one of the most time-consuming was changing 20+ plugs on everything electrical from the familiar old British 13 amp to your basic untrustworthy foreign jobbies.. (I jest) And so the days of that week passed.. each day we’d open a few more boxes and put things away, downstairs in the basement or out in the garage to go to the dump.

One morning we went to the gite for the coffee as promised.. and as 12 o'clock approached Madame D brought out a few nibbles.. then it was time for an 'apero'.. at which point Monsieur D came in from the farm - then a bowl of soup appeared.. next minute, there's a roast farm chicken on the table, wine glasses, and we're having a real farm lunch.. cheese.. then a tarte and then coffee and a glass of Basque liqueur.. When we finally came to leave, they presented us with a porcelain Basque pattern coffee service.. Words failed me at this point. They are two of the most generous people I've ever met - we'll never forget them.

15. Antiques and another thick head..

We had a very pleasant day out a couple of weekends ago. We set off just after 9am to go to Pau (looking for an old armoire – or wardrobe). We took the motorway and soon ran into morning mist but as we neared Pau it lifted. The countryside looked beautiful and once again I regretted not having a camera to hand. As we went over the top of one hill, the landscape ahead was hidden in low early morning mist with the tree tops standing clear in the sunlight. The folds in the landscape looked like an endless procession of blue waves rolling towards us… they receded and faded into a blue haze with telephone wires gleaming silver in the morning sun. Magic.

Pau is one of those places that had its heyday back in the twenties and thirties when, before the advent of civil aviation, the rich used to rumble down there in their Bentleys or Hispano-Suizas for the winter sun. Pau also used to host a Grand Prix that was run around the streets of the town back in the era of the state-funded German works teams – Mercedes Benz and Auto Union – in the thirties. It's hard to believe that the Pau's narrow streets once echoed to the shriek of these supercharged Art Deco symbols of Nazi Germany - but they did. I firmly believe that this was the Golden Era of motor racing when Europe's top drivers struggled to keep these powerful monsters on the track - and all without any of the driver aids that today's F1 drivers are used to. Traction control was called the accelerator in those days - and 'downforce' was provided by the car's weight! The prodigious power of these cars pushed the tyres of the day to their limits.

Looking south from Pau

It had this “lost in time” feel. The road into the town centre took us through some fairly run-down areas but once we’d parked, we found our way to the old town and there the picture changed markedly.

Place Royale

The town is built on the edge of a flat-topped hill that looks south with a splendid panoramic view of the Pyrenees. Naturally enough, the chic part of Pau is on this side.. and there were some lovely old buildings and stylish apartment blocks here as well plus an old restored castle that had formerly been occupied by Henry IV. The style of building in Pau is totally different to that in the Basque country – no big white houses with overhanging roofs – here, the roofs were more steeply pitched with flat tiles - as opposed to the pantiles that are the norm on and near the coast. Henry IV was the king who, according to legend, promised to put a chicken in every pot. We found the Place Royale (above), a square that couldn’t have been in any other country but France. It was bordered by elegant old apartment buildings in pale stone, all with shuttered windows and the square itself was lined with clipped trees in rows that surrounded a raked light gravel centre with a statue of King Henry IV. In one of life's strange intersections of history, Mary Todd Lincoln, the widow of the assassinated US president Abraham Lincoln, lived in this square for a few years (believed to be from 1876 to 1880). 

After a light lunch we wandered through the square to a viewpoint looking south. The flower borders were full of colourful flowers (chrysanthemums according to Madame) and there were palm trees all around. There was a free funicular railway that ran hordes of pensioners (ie, people over 60)(like me) down to the bottom and back if they felt in need of more excitement than could be found in a cup of hot chocolate.. We wandered along the edge of the hill in the warm sunshine till we found a card shop. After we’d bought some cards we just sat in the sun and soaked up the sunshine.

We had a look in a few antique shops for armoires but they wanted crazy money for them. As luck would have it, there happened to be an antique fair on that very weekend – and free admittance.. There were some OK armoires there but they weren’t sufficiently well made to prise any excess funds from the vaults…

One last thing we noticed was an English estate agent had set up here with all the adverts in the window in English and French.

By this time we’d had enough excitement (!) for one day and so we set off for home. As it was the end of the month we went downstairs to pay Mme D the rent for the month and she invited us down for a drink.. (Uh-oh!)

She put out some ham on crusty bread for us while M’sieur D took hold of the whisky bottle in a firm grip. Can he pour them…! I think I had 2 of his US Marine Corps-size whiskies (equivalent to a Jereboam!). Mme D said that the ham came from her own pigs. In fact, I’d heard the odd grunting from a sty and she confirmed that they kept 2 pigs at the moment. They’re both over 200kgs each (about 450lbs or so) and they’re both due for the chop in a month… At this point Monsieur D went into graphic detail about how the job would be done. Suffice to say, it takes them about 3 days to fully finish butchering the animals. The annual killing of the pig is embedded in Basque tradition. Neighbours combine to help each other in the cold winter months and turn the day into a festive celebration. With a few drinks of course. (Pictures here - warning: many are gory)

He said that each ham (ie, leg) weighs in at around 22 kgs or almost 50lbs.. They salt the legs to turn them into ham, the blood is used to make black pudding, they make sausages from the head and… well, you don’t want me to go on, do you..?! But they use everything except the squeal.. It does sound a bit cruel to us townies but it's the harsh reality of farm living. It happens every day at an abattoir near you – except there, the numbers are measured in hundreds or thousands.