8. Chocolate & Car Number Plates

A day or two later we had to go to the tax office in Bordeaux to straighten out some administrative wrangle. We finished the business there early and so we had time to find a little restaurant in a side street for lunch where we sat outside in the September sun and had some salad and a steak. All for about £6 each.

After that, we went for a look at Arcachon, a swish seaside resort near Bordeaux I’d not been to before. It had that unmistakeably expensive look of a well groomed and manicured town. Someone had told us that house prices there are even higher than those in Biarritz and, looking at some of them, I could well believe it. Unfortunately, just as we found our way to the front, it started to rain so we never did get to get out of the car for a walk along the beach as we’d wanted to.

One for the ladies - chocolate heaven! 

After Arcachon, we drove back to Bayonne and parked in the centre to try one of the famed ‘chocolatiers’. Chocolate first came into France in the 17th century via Bayonne and there are still a number of specialist ‘chocolatiers’ grouped together in the narrow streets of the old town that date back to those times who still make their own chocolate from scratch (cocoa butter) and sell boxes of handmade chocolates (at wince-making prices). We had a hot chocolate at one of these establishments where it is still made from real solid chocolate (as opposed to cocoa powder) and was incredibly rich. They shave a block of chocolate and add hot milk to melt the shavings. As Madame is a chocaholic she enjoyed it very much! A real treat. The displays of superb hand-made chocolates would make many women weak at the knees. (Ideal for that first date then..) (oo-er missus!)

Then the weather changed…. It rained heavily during one night and it felt like the first day of autumn here in the morning. After sorting out some insurance quotes for the car, we went to our bank in St Jean de Luz to check our account, after which we came back to the gite for lunch the scenic way over the hills. The sun was out and the lush green countryside sparkled as it had been washed by the rain in the night, those big Basque farmhouses shone dazzlingly white in the sunshine and the jagged outlines of the blue mountains of the Pyrenees stood out sharply in the distance. What a landscape..!

This is a song that's dear to the hearts of all Basques - it's called Hegoak - it's almost their national anthem:

When we got back, I remember having a rich fish soup with some crusty fresh bread with a restorative glass of Bordeaux (about £1.50 a bottle in a local supermarket).

With all the bathroom and kitchen work coming up, we’ve been hitting the kitchen and bathroom showrooms pretty hard because I remember that afternoon we went to a huge DIY supermarket to look at tiles for the hall, kitchen and bathroom. After a while, I began to lose the will to live as it seemed that thousands of tiles were dancing before my very eyes. (although I might have overdone the lunchtime Bordeaux!) We also looked at shower enclosures. After a while, we both felt like we were ‘all shopped out’ and we’d definitely had enough for the day so we headed for home.. It’s definitely hard work being a pensioner.

At about this time I was taking the dog for a walk up the lane when I saw the strangest thing – the longest worm I’ve ever seen was in the middle of the lane. It must have been at least 18” long and it was almost as thick as my little finger. It definitely was an earth worm – and not a snake of any kind. The dog and I were fascinated..

More steps forward.. We registered the car with the French authorities and they allocated us a new plate with a local number – 64 - that will go on the car. To us, this was quite a symbolic moment – we’ve often talked about the day when we’d do this but it had always seemed so far away. We then drove to a garage and they made and fitted the new number plates while we waited. I must admit it felt strange to see the fitter take off my old plates, bend them in two and throw them into the bin.. A small part of me (the vestigial Daily Mail part) felt like saying, “Oi mush! They’re real British number plates they are, mate.. Get your hands off of them!” – but, of course, I didn’t..

After that, we’d just about had enough excitement for one day so we came home. When we got here, outside our door was some cheese that Madame D had made for us – she’s very kind. A few minutes later I was outside washing the car when she came along and we had one of those conversations where neither party is entirely sure what the other is saying.. (happens all the time to me when I’m speaking French!) But I gathered finally that she said I could use her hose to rinse the suds off my car.

Now why wasn’t this covered when I did French at school..?

7. Steak & Kidney Pies and Baguettes

We were bumbling around Bayonne the other day (as you entitled to do when you’re a fully paid-up pensioner) and we found an Irish shop – its window was full of Scotch whisky – but we went in for a look and found that they had a food section. They had HP sauce, baked beans, S&K pies in tins (like Fray Bentos do), custard creams, tins of Bird’s custard, syrup, treacle, Jacobs Crackers, PG Tips – in fact, everything any self-respecting Englishman would need when sojourning abroad.. (joke!)

France has changed in many ways in the last forty years. The French are finally becoming a nation of home owners and more of them (but still only a minority) are living in houses and on estates. I would still guess that many still prefer to live in town in an apartment and, in my view, long may this continue. This is probably the main factor which keeps French town centres alive after 6pm – unlike across the Channel where many English town centres are ‘no-go’ zones in the evenings due to binge-drinking yoofs (not like us at all!).

Those English tabloid hacks who persist in retailing horror stories about surly French waiters and general French rudeness have got it all so wrong. It may once have been true – but I doubt it. It’s just that the two cultures have different concepts of manners. Unlike in England, in France it is considered polite to acknowledge other customers upon entering a shop or other patients in a doctor’s waiting room with a bonjour or a mesdames, messieurs. A shopkeeper will invariably wish you a bon continuation, a bon après midi or a bon fin d’après midi. Or if you thank them on leaving, they will often reply – No, it’s me who should thank you.

Shaking hands on meeting someone (whether a friend or a stranger) is expected – and if you don’t – as we Brits tend not to – people will think you’re either rude or standoffish, or both. However, if these hack stereotypes help to stem the tide of Anglos (apart from me) from invading France, then fine.

However, some aspects of French life remain unchanging. I realised that we were deep in rural France (la France profonde as it's known) when we took the Golf for its Contrôle Technique, the French equivalent of an MOT, at a garage in the village. There was a notice up on the wall that advertised a forthcoming Bingo night. One of the prizes was half a pig…

Another ever-present element in French life is their continuing love affair with the baguette. I used to think it a French affectation when you’d see them nibbling the end of their still warm baguette on the way home from the bakers. But, all I’d say is - don’t knock it until you’ve tried it! I’m sure a small fortune awaits the person who can work out how to make just baguette ends.. While the French love their baguette, it’s true to say that the number and type of baguettes have proliferated – each with their own name. Although the one that’s currently ‘in’ with us is the baguette à l’ancienne, there are many others.. such as the Tradition, the  flocaline, the banette, the campaillette or the croustinette.. But each baker has his own name for each – so, as my French teacher says – just point at what you want. Some bakers advertise that their bread is baked in a wood-fired oven. This is worth trying as the wood smoke imparts a pleasant flavour to the bread. Each to their own though.. Trial and error in a baker’s is not exactly hard work!

The final thing to bear in mind is whether or not you want one that’s a bit more high-baked.. In that case, you specify that you want your baguette bien cuite – without forgetting that all important final ‘e’ as baguette is feminin.. (it never stops!) Buying bread in a supermarket is not recommended. It's an industrial product and similar to the bread found in UK supermarkets.

And now if you'll excuse me, I'll bid you bon fin d’après midi as I've got half a pig to deal with..

6. The house

Every summer for years, we'd base ourselves in the same small village that we'd found in the foothills of the Pyrenees. For us it was an oasis of calm and tranquillity in the evenings after the hustle and bustle of the coast during the peak holiday season. We’d stay at a small family hotel/restaurant that had 3-4 rooms upstairs and some of the best French country cooking I’d ever had. Demi-pension (half board) stayed the same price for years: 235frs each. (or ~£23) Later it became ~35€. For B&B and a four course dinner. And this was in the high season in the Pays Basque! Over the years, we became very friendly with M and Mme Landart and after their retirement, Bernadette & Philippe, the owners (at the time of writing), and were treated like family. The first day we arrived each year, the staff would rush out into the car park and insist on carrying all our bags in.

The style of their restaurant hit exactly the right note for us. Forget about Rubik Cubes of Freedom Fries and clichéd towers of designer food with some poor beknighted chef's signature black pudding, with 2 slices of carrot or whatever the latest fad is (on an oversize white plate, natch) arranged by an interior designer with an artistic 'swirl of jus' around it. No, here it was all brought to the table in serving dishes and it was left up to us how much or how little we took. Portion control was a concept that they didn’t understand. They selected what we were to have each evening for the starter and the main course and so over the course of a two week holiday we would work our way through their menus. Never the same dish twice. When it came to the cheese, they would just bring a 2 tiered cakestand-like affair laden with around a dozen cheeses to our table - only taking it away when we’d finished.

No doubt there are those today who would insist that they were doing it all wrong - but curiously there was seldom an empty table. . 

They kept the same staff year on year too and we got to know them all.. Each year, half way through the holiday, I’d go through to the kitchen and give Jean-Marie (their solidly built rugby-playing chef) a bottle of whisky and he, in turn, looked after us. One final evening he offered us a new dish of his to try - Magret de Canard in an Irouléguy reduction. We still talk about that..

One of the waitresses, Sandrine, had a droll sense of humour. They served a home-made pistachio ice cream that I always found hard to resist. Each evening, I'd invariably order pistache et chocolat, or pistache et cafe, or pistache et vanille in preference to all of the other choices on the menu. One evening, when Sandrine came to our table, after taking Madame's order she looked at me with a dead pan expression and said, "Pistache et quoi..?" before bursting into laughter!

Each day, we'd wonder what we were going to have that evening. For the final dinner of our stay there, Bernadette would give us la carte and tell us to order whatever we liked from her extensive menu..

We once had a memorable final lunch there. We'd planned on driving to Biarritz airport in the afternoon for the return flight home to England - and so we'd only ordered a half bottle of Madiran (a great red from the SW). The starter was an Assiette Gourmande which, when it arrived, we saw would have been more than enough but that was only the first course. Madame had ordered a poulet basquaise as a main course and when that arrived, it turned out that she'd been given half a chicken..! After eating solidly for a while Madame started shimmying her upper body like a limbo dancer. She explained she was making space! Of course, by the time Bernadette arrived with the cheese, the Madiran had inexplicably evaporated. She stood there.. looking at our empty bottle before observing with a laugh, "But you can't enjoy cheese without wine..!" We said yes but we're driving in a minute. At that, a charming couple at the next table turned around and offered us their bottle of wine saying that they'd ordered too much and we were welcome to finish the remaining half of their bottle.. It turned out that they were a couple of teachers from near Bordeaux and we chatted with them for a while. It was a pity we met them on the very last day of our stay.

When we started going there (in '91), they used to charge £3.50 for a bottle of their own Bordeaux.. (I know - “and then the Korean War came along to spoil everything!”) There was even a signed photograph of Charlotte Rampling on the wall in the dining room.. Another satisfied customer.

Bernadette would always offer us either an apéritif or a digestif. There is a superb Marc d'Irouléguy produced from the local Irouléguy wine which comes out at ~44° BV.. and it was this that she offered me once as a digestif. Marc is a pomace brandy that's made from the pressed grape pulp, skins, and stems that remain after the grapes have been crushed and pressed to extract most of the juice for wine. In short, Marc d'Irouleguy is a little-known brandy made from a little-known wine variety. Marc can be fairly rough and is often described politely as an 'acquired' taste but this Marc d'Irouleguy was anything but. She'd filled a brandy glass up the the point where the sides of the glass start to slope in again.. Ouf! After I'd finished it (churlish not to, m'lud), we thought it best to take a precautionary walk around the village before heading off home. Strangely, I had no trouble falling asleep that night. Another example of their kindness was when we would come to leave after our annual visit.. We would have paid the bill, I'd have a suitcase in each hand and we'd be saying goodbye when Philippe would produce a bottle of Irouléguy red wine, from behind his back and he would tuck it under my arm with the words, "Think of us when you drink that..".

If this next clip doesn't set your feet tapping, there's no hope for you! Take a break with some hot gypsy jazz guitar starring Dorado Schmitt (guitar centre left) from the 2004 Django Reinhardt Festival in New York:

Time for another quote – and this is an oh-so-true one from the pen of P G Wodehouse:

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Majestic at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”

Meanwhile, back at the house search.. As I said before, we’d gone around all the agents in St Jean de Luz and Biarritz, left our requirements and contact details and not heard from any of them. We soon realised that there was no way that we’d find what we wanted in either of these places as the prices were waay beyond our means so we decided to look at Bayonne (only a 10 minute drive from Biarritz) and there we went into the first likely looking estate agents that we saw.

We gave the lady in the agency our list of what we wanted and to our surprise she said that she had just the place for us and, what’s more, that it was in the most sought after area in Bayonne as well.. The thought “Yers, a likely tale..” did come to mind - but we gave her the benefit of the doubt. She quickly locked up and took us there in her car. When we pulled up outside, we saw that she hadn’t exaggerated at all. The stone built house is in what's known as a 30s neo-Basque style - with the added bonus of a forty foot palm tree in the front garden. It fitted all of our requirements exactly. What’s more, it was only a 2 minute walk to a row of shops on the edge of the town centre.

On entering, there was a tiled hall with a polished wooden staircase on the left. The sitting room was square in shape with a raised fireplace in the corner. There was an arched walk-through to the good-sized dining room which had French windows that opened out onto a terrace. The kitchen - which needed modernising - was large enough for a table. There was also a small balcony upstairs at the front. There were 3 bedrooms. The house had belonged to an elderly lady and it needed re-decorating from top to bottom. There was a downstairs bathroom that could easily be turned into a utility room, and the upstairs bathroom needed replacing as the suite and the fittings were all very dated. There was a good sized garden at the rear and a garage. And a cellar.

Having found somewhere that met all our essential criteria so soon, we found ourselves in the position of having to move very quickly and in doing so, commit ourselves to spending more money than either of us had ever done in our lives. No pressure then! We questioned ourselves - was this the house that we really wanted..? There was no doubt that after that first viewing we both had felt that indefinable sense of being comfortable with the house - so much so that we decided to arrange another viewing for the following day.

There was something of a "Mary Celeste" feel about it.. It had belonged to a lady in her eighties who'd died a couple of months earlier and as her children had moved away there had been no-one on the spot to clear the house - even a little. She had clearly only been living in the downstairs section as there was still a made-up single bed in the dining room with a small bag of sweets on a bedside table, there was food still in the fridge, clothes in wardrobes and wine in the cellar.. and walking through the house we felt as if we were intruding on someone's privacy.

After this second viewing, we both knew it was the house for us.. Madame had inherited a fine English mahogany bookcase (over 2m tall by 2m wide) from her parents and it was crucial that there would be space for it. There was. We mentally blocked in all our pieces of furniture and amazingly there was a place for everything. We decided "Yes" there and then.

The kitchen had obviously last been re-fitted around the early days of the Fifth Republic and was in dire need of replacement. The key theme of the house was pink.. (think Barbara Cartland meets Liberace!) There was pink wallpaper everywhere, there were pink curtains and we found later that every shrub or flower in the garden had pink blossom.. The bathroom was a symphony in pink - with its pink bath, a pink lavatory, a pink bidet and a pink shower curtain with - yes, you've guessed it - a pink shower rail. And pink tiles. Aaaargghhh!

We asked the estate agent lady if she could recommend anyone for kitchen work or for bathrooms. The estate agent lady said she knew a Basque craftsman who had contacts with other 'artisans' who might be able to help us. More about this later.

Meanwhile, I started going to a language centre in Bayonne as they provided French lessons for foreigners. I had to have my French evaluated by a woman there and she said that it was very good! All those years of studying have finally paid off.. (ahem) I went back a few days later to take a 2hr written test (well, it was actually a 10 minute test but it took me – hey, you’re ahead of me!) so they could find out exactly where my French needs improving. I could have saved them the time and trouble!

Right, having adopted a suitably hangdog, furtive and shifty expression I'm off into Bayonne to negotiate the purchase of a fresh baguette...

In the immortal words of Captain Oates, "I'm just going outside and I may be some time.."

5. Life in the Gîte

The windows open wide in the gîte so in the morning fresh air breezes in and we can hear the sounds of Madame D conducting a conversation at Force 9 with a friend who’s stopped by. There’s a fenced garden so our cocker, Chibby, can run around to his heart’s content. The farm faces south and along the edge of the garden are three tall palm trees mixed in with a few Scots pines. The Pyrenees provide a misty blue backdrop.

The farm is about ½ mile outside the village and it lies in a dip at the bottom of a winding single track lane. When I take the dog out for a walk up the lane in the evening, all I can hear is the sound of a church bell, M’sieur D calling from the fields to the farm in Basque or his heavily accented French and Madame D calling back to him over the sound of a passing tractor.

Madame D stopped by one day and offered us an omelette that she’d made using home-grown sweet green chillies and at least 6 fresh eggs from her chickens. It was the most unbelievably delicious yellow omelette. A few days later she came by with 6 more eggs – still warm from the production line - and some more of her green chillies. This time Madame made an omelette from them… sublime.. mmm, the taste of an omelette cooked with fresh free range eggs.

Food does have a different taste here. Occasionally in England we'd buy tuna steaks but they must have been a few days old by the time they reached us because they usually tasted like cardboard. Madame prepared some the other evening that were chalk and cheese compared to what we could find in England. There, she found that it wasn't easy to cook à la française - finding the right ingredients and produce - the fruit and vegetables that she was accustomed to, not to mention the cuts of meat, poultry and game, fresh fish, the variety of cheese etc. And the wine.. Another difference I noticed between life here and in England is that when people are sat around the table here, they often talk about the meal they're currently enjoying, one they've had or perhaps one they're going to have - or, as is often the case, all three! In England, it's definitely non-U to appear to enjoy food too much. Or at all. As one dear colleague said to me once when I was describing what Madame had prepared over the weekend, "But it's only food.." And therein lies the difference..

The temperatures were just about perfect for the first 3 weeks. The skies were blue from horizon to horizon almost every day and the temperatures were stable at around 24C, although one Sunday it was up as high as 32C. We'd always heard that September was the best time to visit the Pays Basque and so it proved. The madness of July & August is no more as the vast majority of families have gone back and parking in Biarritz or St Jean de Luz isn’t much of a problem anymore.

The light in Biarritz is amazing – it must be something to do with its location right on the sea and the fine spray/mist that is lifted up by the surf. It’s dazzlingly bright and very sharp. Just by the indoor food market in Biarritz (Warning: a place to avoid if you feel peckish) we had lunch one day in a small café/bar – Bar Jean - that was very authentic, very Basque/Spanish and very busy.. Gypsy guitar music swirling through the buzz of conversation, tiled tables, bullfighting posters on the walls and lots of animation..

First we ordered some grilled sardines and, to fill the gap until they arrived, we had some tapas and a tortilla. An icy cold bottle of rosé kept us going while we waited. The sardines came with a baked potato which was one of those waxy yellow ones that they have here. This was the second time we’d been to Bar Jean and it appeals to us both very much. It’s rustic and simple and the seafood is as fresh as you like – it comes straight from the fish market which is just across the road.

We were in there one lunchtime and an elderly couple from Bordeaux shared a table with us. Within minutes we were chatting away - she told us she was 85 and her husband was slightly younger. They were both so much fun. (and when did you last say that about a brace of octagenarians..?) He ordered a dozen oysters (hoping, optimistically perhaps, that one might work!) and his wife had grilled tuna while talking dix-neuf to the douzaine... They both seemed so alive and vibrant.. and gave me renewed hope that being eighty need not necessarily mean the end of everything we enjoy.

Now where did I put my cardy..?