Ahem,
I travelled down to La Hune with Jurrat and Jessie in a well-loaded car on the first day of May. Only this time I was not the driver. For the best part of 15 hours, Jessie drove almost continuously from Uckfield through the Channel Tunnel and down from Calais to the Tarn-et-Garonne in southwest France. I dozed in the front seat, stirring myself occasionally to wave my card at the péage machines on the French autoroutes that flew by like milestones. It was a heroic drive that ended not at La Hune, our house, but at a carefully organised rendez-vous at the Petit Palais restaurant in Auvillar, where we met with Ant, Susanne, and friends Mike and Ellie for a gargantuan meal mostly of roast Côte de Boeuf. We had been delayed on the way by a winking, orange engine light on the car, which we ignored on the advice of a French depanneur who arrived to help us. However, it had delayed us; Jessie had to drive a bit faster to get us to the restaurant.
For the next few days, we undertook various tasks around the house. Mike and Ellie had come primarily to help with the garden. Ant and Susie had brought some unwanted furniture in a van from their house in Luxembourg. They installed two very useful leather sofas and a double bed in the front rooms of the ground floor, creating a fourth double bedroom and a much more lively and accessible “music” room. Apart from doing plenty of work around the house, Jessie was the kingpin and foreperson of the activities. I was a gratified beneficiary who wandered around from room to room expressing surprise and thanks for the hours of work of the team, although I managed to hang a few pictures, did some writing, and paid the bills. I also attended a concert of chamber music in the Chateau de Flamerens and hosted a lunch in Valence of all involved in our La Hune Spring ’26 work party, including Marlene and Jean Louis.
Jessie, Jurrat, and I then drove on to San Sebastian in Spain, where we met Alli, who flew in from Gatwick. Unfortunately, three hours were added to our four-hour car journey when I announced that I had not brought my pills, meaning that we had to go back to get them after 90 minutes of travelling. The multiplication of my memory failure lapses come just in time to confirm the validity of my intended new status as a grandparent in September. Again, Jessie did practically all the driving to San Sebastian. We all spent an indulgent three days, walking, wining, eating pintxos and dining in the city with (reportedly) the most Michelin stars in the world per inhabitant, culminating in a delicious lunch at Laia, a super-cool Basque restaurant in the foothills of the Pyrenees near Hendaye. The dinner was our present to our first-born for her 35th birthday. 35 years? I know, I know…
Ella and Sam have moved into their fantastic new home in Burgess Hill after the families helped with their removal from one part of Burgess Hill to another, with Uncle Nick doing a sterling job driving the hired van and adding muscle to the removals team of Jessie, Sam, his friend Lee, and Sam’s parents, exactly as happened when Ella and Sam first moved to Burgess Hill six years ago. Alli went over a few days later and spent a day working in their sizeable garden.
I remained in France preparing La Hune for its new season and ensuring that everything worked well. The list of improvements this year included: the renovation and repainting of the main gates; the widening of the space between the entrance columns; the repair and enhancement of house-wide internet coverage; the strengthening and heightening of the staircase banister on the first floor with a cast iron frieze railing, thus achieving a sense of good design and satisfaction allied to regulatory compliance; the purchase and construction of a sidecar-style gas barbecue and four parasols for the outside; the installation of a new water heater, and several tasks inside and outside in the garden undertaken while Jessie and Jurrat, their friends Mike and Ellie, and the Mileses were there. I also had dinner and stayed with old friends Marc and Edith in their beautiful house in the Gers, and afterwards with Marlene and Jean-Louis in Flamarens, which featured a morning in the village of Romieu, famous for its stone cats everywhere, illustrating a moral medieval fable about how useful cats are in controlling rats. The village is also famous for its 11th century cathedral and cloisters, as well as a charming annual Fete des Rosiers where the whole village converts into a rose garden.
Before leaving, I managed to get through a great deal of washing sheets, towels, and pillow-cases, and spent time with village characters Gerald (watching Bordeaux Begles hammer Leinster in the Rugby European Cup Final), Wilfredo, Alain and Marie, the business-like new mayor and his team, and lunch at the fabulous Coquille on the Camino trail, where Isabel was as generous and attentive as usual. The long journey back home included an unforgettable detour and stopover in the stupendous Carnac in Brittany, a village and megalithic site I had always wanted to visit. With over 3,000 standing stones, mostly laid in straight lines, Carnac is the biggest and best concentration of megaliths in the world, older by at least a millennium than Stonehenge or Avebury.
At the end of the month I met with cousins Richard and Madeleine in Battle, near Hastings, where I walked around the village and we had lunch at the Bull Inn. They will be in La Hune next month and we talked about local sites and happenings that might interest their party of friends and relatives. On the last Saturday of the month I had a surprise last minute invitation to join Jessie, Jurrat and their guests on one of their increasingly popular monthly Sussex supper club events. https://www.instagram.com/sussexsupperclub/ This was five-star dining indeed and I swirled in a breathtaking, high-level “foodie” conversation among confirmed aficionados about food, wine, local vineyards, restaurants, cafes, and Brighton’s vibe, all of which left me well fed but feeling ever-so-slightly under-prepared and inexplicably tongue-tied.
I have now put the finishing touches to my international best-selling novel (now retitled “A History of Love and Loss”) and formally signed the publishing contract, then I sent copies of the draft manuscript to those of you brave enough to read it and to tell me the dreadful truth.
In litteris veritas,
Lionel