Ahem
As August turned to September, I was with my Kiwi friends Ramon and Colleen in the lounge of a ferry shuddering darkly out of Newhaven harbour on its five-hour journey to Dieppe. I have done this trip several times and, despite my consistent inability to sleep during the crossing either way, it remains for me the best way to get to and from France by car. For once, I had carefully prepared the journey south west to our holiday house. We stayed the first night in Amboise on the Loire, having stopped during the morning to view and appreciate the spiritual mystery of Chartres Cathedral and its astral measurements, reportedly aligned with the builders of Orleans Cathedral (which we visited on the way back) and, less probably, of Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Egypt. The next day, after inspecting the vast Chateau d’Amboise, we drove south via an exceptional lunch in Lussac to Oradour-sur-Glane, where an entire village population was massacred by the German SS in 1943. 642 people, including over 200 children, were deliberately killed and every building in the village was burnt down in one day. Its grim aspect has remained largely untouched since that day as a witness to one of the most gruesome of the Second World War’s many war crimes in France. The visitor experience has been brilliantly conceived for maximum emotional impact . It was a shocking experience to walk from within a museum into a tunnel lined with the pictures of all the victims and onwards up into the site of the old village. We fell silent for a while after coming out of there. I would love to say that the world took a sober lesson from Oradour-sur-Glane but the systematic and massive genocide of Palestinians indicates that I would be wrong.
From there we drove on south to La Hune. Alli joined us a couple of days later and her Belgian friends Sophie, Claude, and Laurence arrived on the same day. Jessie, Becky (daughter of Ramon), and Casey, her partner, joined us a few days after that. Nigel and his son James, who had also been our guests at La Hune some 20 years ago, arrived a few days later. Sadly for some, the expected pool activity and sunbathing were compromised by the unseasonal weather, which was dominated by clouds and drizzle. Happily, Alli’s birthday was feted on one of the sunnier days. Despite it all, we enjoyed the Lectoure and Valence markets, had a dinner with repeated power cuts in St Antoine, and a jolly supper for ten at the Petit Palais in Auvillar, as well as some fine cooking by our guests in our own kitchen. The changed rhythm of the house caught up with me after a few days and I had a brief attack of amnesia, mixing up my dates for the arrival of our New Zealand friends for lunch, then forgetting keys and documents even as I met lawyers and old friends in Valence. All were resolved as different combinations of our contingent revisited familiar vineyards in the Domaine de Thermes in Auvillar and Labastide d’Orliac near Golfech, discovered a new vineyard at the Chateau d’Arton near Plieux as well as another further south, the Trois Domaines, which produced a reassuringly cheap rosé wine labelled “La Hune”. After checking that it was drinkable, I bought several bottles to present to visitors next year in a deliberate pretence that somehow or other it is our own product.
Claude and I often went for the early morning French bread order from the Auvillar baker, while taking a coffee on an outside table to watch dozens of grey-haired pilgrims emerge from their lodgings and begin their day’s hike on the Chemin de St Jacques de Compostelle. With Thomas and Nigel, I walked around the interior and the gardens of the recently renovated Chateau de Gramont, now showing a rare and inspiring display of Renaissance tapestries, its magnificent Simon de Montfort Tower, and a 125-year old Japanese Sophora tree in the manicured garden. I was very pleased to be invited by Gerard to see his father Jacques, who helped us for many years at La Hune. Predictably, the lunch was delicious. Finally, I commissioned an overdue repair and repainting of our 20 wooden shutters and 120 iron gongs that connect them solidly to the stone walls.
The friendly La Hune ’25 crowd gradually dispersed until Ramon, Colleen, and I were left to visit the Bardigues fete on the last night then drive north to the Loire Valley via a quick rainy stopover at the Montcuq market, spending the night in La Ferté St Aubin, before arriving in Versailles on the glorious D2020 road towards Paris. That road, incorporating the RN20, is the equivalent of England’s A30 and the USA’s Route 66, and goes from the Spanish border to Paris. We went to the spectacular Chateau de Versailles the following day on separate tours before Ramon and Colleen left for the airport for their flight back to New Zealand. After locating the site in Versailles town of Louis XV’s notorious finishing school for wannabe mistresses, le Parc des Cerfs, I drove across country through ancient Normandy to return, exhausted, on the Newhaven ferry from Dieppe. It was also drizzling and cloudy when I arrived. The weather this past month in southern France and southern England has been identical.
Yours falling autumnally,
Lionel