Summer in France: Heat, Howls, Hydrangeas, and Hunting Hidden Hughes Houses

It has been a while since my Epona review, which is now on sale for those anxious to try it! I came to France nearly three weeks ago, and have - perhaps counterintuitively - gone and chosen one of the hottest days of the year to sit down and write a blog post finally. It is 38C in the shade today, and was 44C in my car earlier before I got the aircon going. The heatwave has been ongoing since the day after I arrived. No one can possibly believe in that old adage that says men "perspire" and women "merely glow". I am doing a lot more than glowing, let me tell you... I remember my visit in April being the coldest spring trip ever, with the temperature in my house never getting above 13C the whole fortnight. I had five layers on indoors at all times, including a roomy dressing gown over a "coatigan", and prayed to the weather gods that they would make things up to me in July when I came back. Talk about being careful what you wish for!

Heat

You would think the locals would be well used to such searing temperatures, yet the heat is a main topic of conversation in those little exchanges you have with people you pass in the street. There is much sharing of anti-heat strategies (such as closing shutters during the day, which I don't want to do as they are closed most of the year, haha, having a cold shower before bed, laying frozen gel packs on your stomach in the middle of the night etc), and especially suggestions of where to go to instantly feel cool. 

The supermarket (but with the added danger of overspending)

The church (there's a limit to my back's tolerance of a hard pew)

The swimming pool (half an hour in the water, weaving between the Scylla and Charybdis of child-topped lilos, is about my limit)

The library (where the knitting club had a particularly good turnout both weeks I went for this very reason!)

And...drum roll...The "Abyss of Fage", which is a steady 10-13C all year round. I went there yesterday, and overheard visitors saying it would be heaving today, as the temperature was going to be even higher. Down there you actually need a jacket!, but the cold was frankly delicious after the stifling heat above ground.

Howls

The village where my house is has an ever-changing cast of feral cats. There are two main cats on the block at the moment: a shy, and rather beaten up tabby and white that I call "Bruiser Truffle", and a mottled grey cat, who is known amongst English-speaking locals as "The Yowler". 

The Yowler is emaciated and suspected to have worms, but whatever the cause of his extreme vocalising, that cat can howl! It is piercing to the point of ear splitting, and might even be a yowling howling contender for the Guinness Book of Records, like Bella, the cat with the loudest purr.

Same feeding station, different cat

Hydrangeas

I have always been partial to hydrangeas, but on this visit I was struck by how many there are everywhere, and with such enormous blooms! Apparently they have done so well on account of the rain they've had in France - and in England. I have seen every shade of hydrangea on the acidic to ericaceous spectrum, and a friend in the village is kindly keeping me supplied with a single (topheavy!) bloom for my vase.

I also noticed on my sightseeing travels that many of the religious statues were similarly equipped. "What are we going to do with all these hydrangeas??" I can imagine the verger saying, before thinking: "Let's give them to all the Virgin Marys, and the saints if they have room in their niches."

"Oh go on, the cherubs can have one too..."

Walking around the village, there were clumps literally at every turn! Even the dying mop heads had a certain faded beauty to them.

Do you prefer pink? You are never far from the colour of your choice. ;)

Hunting Hidden Hughes Houses

On this holiday I have been reading "An Unauthorised Life" by Jonathan Bate, an absorbing literary biography of the poet Ted Hughes, whose violent, sensual and mythic poems are inextricable from his tempestuous and tragic private life. To lose not one but two wives or girlfriends to suicide on your account - by the same means, even - looks like much more than carelessness, to not quite quote Oscar Wilde. 

Book also accessorised with obligatory hydrangeas

On P175 Bate mentions that Hughes and his wife Sylvia Plath had stayed in a house belonging to American Poet Laureate William Merwin, in Lacam near Loubressac in the Lot. I love houses associated with literary figures, and immediately hatched a plan to seek it out on a circuit of the Dordogne and Lot that also took in Beaulieu and Turenne.

Although I had found a photograph of the Merwin house on the Internet before setting off, I noted in the book that it was well hidden, plus the photo was taken from down the valley looking up at it, rather than from the roadside, so I knew I might have to do some asking around to find the place. The first old honey coloured house I saw in the immediate vicinity of the destination dot on my satnav - which was a bit thrown by the extremely rural nature of the area, and the general lack of buildings of any kind - was perched on a hilltop and reached by a long narrow track. I identified it as some kind of Manoir, and managed to find a phone number, which I duly rang. Turns out that I was in the hamlet before Lacam, but only about 800m away. I was to look out for a house with pale blue shutters, and irises at the front.

No one mentioned the rather distinctive barns!

Five minutes later I was parked up in Lacam and made a beeline for the first house with pale blue shutters, in which a family was having a lazy Sunday lunch with the door open. The wife came out and said I was mistaken - the Merwin house was further along - and immediately abandoned her meal and walked me round the corner to it. More pale blue shutters awaited me, and a flowerbed full of green spears of vegetation that may have been irises once before they died in the heat. ;) No one was in residence, so I had a good nosey round and even stole some string as a trophy(!) that was serving absolutely no purpose on a gate. 

Having successfully found one hidden Hughes house - or "Hughes-related" house to be more exact, as Ted Hughes was only a guest there - I felt I was on a roll, so when neighbours in the village, a couple also called Hughes, suggested that I might care to take a look at a couple of houses they had once owned, I leapt at the chance. The first was an old watermill between Martel and Creysse in the Lot again (The Moulin de Cacrey), which has its own entry in Wikipedia, with the Hughes actually named as past owners; the second was a town house in Creysse itself.

I had been warned that House No 1 was very off the beaten track, and so it proved...the satnav directed me down a gravel path which I decided to walk along in case there was no room to turn round again in the car when the track emerged from the forest. I finally coincided with the red blob on my phone, and found myself staring at a set of wrought iron gates, firmly padlocked. On an adjacent tree was a sign saying: "Beware, guard dog, do not enter!" I consulted my verbal instructions from the Hughes again, and found to my great delight - having feared for a moment that I had come all that way in vain - that I needed to turn left and follow the gravel track up the hill, before cutting through the woods (ignoring the "dead end" sign!) and stepping over a fallen fence at the end of the trail. (I got rather extensively stung by nettles in the process, but considered the collateral damage well worth it as my sense of anticipation mounted.)

Having followed the instructions to the letter, I was rewarded with the sight of a Narnia-like faerie kingdom of dilapidation and disrepair, that nonetheless had a magical charm to it. The Hughes assured me that they had kept the place in good nick in their day. 

The highlight was the mill pond and cliffs behind.

There's a Japanese quality to that picture...

Give those cherubs some hydrangeas! 

There was also a waterfall (former mill race?) and secret streams running beneath stone bridges.

NB I have since learnt that the Moulin de Cacrey was rented for a few summers before the Hughes bought it by Caroline Conran, longtime wife of Terence Conran (of Habitat fame), and stepmother to Jasper, Terence's son by his previous - and arguably more famous - wife Shirley. Had I known this interesting connection in time, I would have brought out my Jasper Conran Woman perfume to France to wear on the day. ;) Here is my mini-review of the perfume (my fifth post on Bonkers from 2009!).

So from the watermill it was on to Creysse itself, and House No 2, known as The Conciergerie. My instructions said it was near the Mairie (town hall) and a tower, and in fact I went straight to it (also with pale blue shutters, as it turned out). However, I wasn't sure I had definitely got the right place, because I had missed the photographs my friends had sent of it in Messenger(!), so I popped up to the Mairie to double check. The Mairie was only open two half days a week, and not on a Tuesday. 

I asked a neighbour, and she wasn't sure, so knocked on the door of the Dutch couple next door, who weren't in. Then she walked me down the hill to the house of an elderly lady who could be seen having her lunch through an open window. Perhaps surprisingly, she didn't know, and sent me to the village's one hotel to ask the woman with glasses (and only her). I spied the bespectacled woman in a back office and summoned her out, and sure enough she knew exactly where I meant and confirmed that I had been right all along...

I had now run out of Hughes houses, however tightly or tenuously construed, but picking up the earlier theme of dwellings connected with writers, I drove on to the village of Saint-Sozy, where I had read that Virginia Woolf (to whom I am very, very distantly related) had once stayed in the Chateau there in 1937. To my consternation, part of the Chateau complex was on fire when I arrived, and fire engines from all over the region were in attendance. 

A great deal of damage was done to the interiors of two towers and their roofs, and it was completely inappropriate to go wandering up there, picking my way over the firemen's hoses which snaked across the road. 

I contented myself instead with a photograph from a distance, a chat with two ladies who lived opposite and were quite traumatised by the incident, and a white Magnum ice cream, which I ate in the village square with this view.

More blue shutters!

Editor's note: I hesitated about whether to add an apostrophe to "Hughes' Houses" and decided not to in the end. But if anyone would like to put me straight on this point of grammar, I would be glad to have it clarified!

Concrete, consumptives, and Coco in a convent

The winsome Post Office!

Two months have gone by since my last post! You may be forgiven for thinking I really had thrown in the blogging towel, but not so, or not yet. I was merely dormant, fielding various issues on both houses. For as with the kitchen renovations, being the only person involved in maintenance / repairs does take up that bit more time on top of the usual everyday chores. Why, I can easily spend an hour and a half preparing, eating and clearing away lunch. ;)

So anyway, Facebook friends may have seen an album of my holiday photos from France this summer - I use the word "holiday" advisedly, as there is always a substantial element of tradesmen liaison on every trip. Or attempted tradesmen liaison, and a lot of futile waiting around. I got more militant on this visit though - or do I mean more zen? After a couple of days of waiting for the non-appearing tradesman in question, I would just say: "Stuff it, I'm going out", and out I duly went. 

Thus it was that I did a lot more sightseeing this year, of everything from a slate quarry to an industrial forge, to a river gorge, to assorted picture book-pretty villages, to the convent where Coco Chanel lived as a little girl(!), to a place that looks as far removed architecturally from people's mental image of the Dordogne as it is possible to be...Clairvivre.

Designed by the architect Pierre Forestier, Clairvivre was built in the 1930s in the Brutalist style, specifically to house WW1 veterans with tuberculosis. Its unremittingly boxy buildings - with a slightly mitigating Art Deco nod here and there in the occasional curved line - assault the senses on arrival, jarring so starkly with the soft honeyed stone of the surrounding villages, such as Génis, where (in the absence of any public facilities) I popped to the loo in the town hall. 

I was the only British car in Clairvivre - the only tourist indeed - and one of only a handful of people out and about, period! Apparently some / many? of the current residents also have health issues, which may explain the dearth of pedestrians. It was a blisteringly hot day, and I wandered around the various levels, dazzled by the sunshine and incongruity of the buildings in equal measure: it was as though I had stumbled into the DDR or somewhere of that Soviet block ilk. 

Council offices!

And here is the town hall in nearby Génis, as a "Dordogne architectural control"...

Clairvivre managed to conjure up both the ambience of a sanatorium - with its attendant whiff of illness and worse - and that of a rather drab holiday camp. Think Butlin's in the early '60s, say. It was one of the most peculiar places I have ever been to, not least because of the sheer uniformity of the buildings, both domestic and commercial. The post office pictured at the top of this post reminded me of the secret headquarters of Thunderbirds on Tracy Island. ;) But fair play to the place, it dared to sell postcards, without a hint of irony. 

Another day, I drove to the furthest reaches of the nearest big town to my village, Brive-la-Gaillarde, on a quest to buy linen for a door curtain. My guest bedroom in the French house, though small, has no fewer than five doors(!); it is your Feng Shui nightmare, basically, and I thought if I got some fabric to make a curtain for the one that leads to the attic, that would at least take the edge off the room's "door intensiveness". 

One door down...!

My errand completed, I realised that I was only about 20 minutes' drive away from the Abbaye d'Aubazine, famous for being the childhood home of Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel and two of her sisters, after the death of their mother and departure of their father to America, leaving the children effectively orphaned. Her two brothers arguably had a worse fate, being placed with local peasant farmers, and put straight to hard manual work despite their young age. 

Gabrielle was 11 at the time she entered the convent, and remained there for seven years, before moving to another convent(!), a sort of "finishing school" in a place called Moulins. If the cloistered life had been so intolerable, you would think Coco and her sisters would have struck out on their own instead, but maybe she was so institutionalised by this point that the transition was easily made. Her time with the sisters of Aubazine was a very regimented lifestyle, certainly, and not particularly academic; according to Lisa Chaney's biography, Chanel: An Intimate Life, which I review here, Coco escaped into romantic fiction, which she managed to squirrel away in her attic quarters. In later life she refers to being cared for during this period by "aunts", who turn out to be a deliberately vague conflation of actual aunts and the nuns at Aubazine. It was not a happy time, according to Chaney:

"Surrounded as she was by unloving authority figures, Gabrielle's early experience was one of consistent disharmony, repression and neglect."

Abbaye d'Aubazine

I would have liked to have gone on a tour of the abbey, but I arrived too late for the last entry time. Instead I contented myself with taking a good look inside the en suite church, which boasts some fine wood carvings. 

There is an impressive sarcophagus of Saint-Etienne (as in the actual saint, not the town, football team, or band of that name).

I also climbed up the hill to the Canal des Moines, a remarkable engineering feat fashioned by monks in the umpteenth century to supply the abbey with fresh water. (Okay, 12th C.) I only walked a short way along the path though, as I was due to collect a friend's son from the station in Brive. Still, it is nice to have a reason to come back there again when I have more time...

Mind how you go: why six swallows do not a summer make, and one cuckoo flew the nest

This post is a tale of two halves...it starts with the latest on my "supermarket sweep" of comorbidities (I exaggerate, I know, but I have gone and picked up another diagnosis!), and then the action moves to France, where I have boldly gone, despite the Government's relentless pushing of "staycations". The very word alone would propel me to go abroad for a holiday, I will be honest. More on that anon. 

The Thursday before I left I had a bone density scan at a hospital in Burslem (one of The Five Towns in The Potteries, not to be confused with bursitis). I didn't know this hospital even existed - and I nearly didn't have the scan at all, as there was some confusion in my records as to whether I had actually fractured my scaphoid bone back in January when I fell on ice, as you may recall. For they could only scan people who had sustained a fracture, being strictly a Fracture Clinic, not a "Had a Nasty Fall of Any Kind Clinic". However the staff put their heads together and decided to let me through based on a 1-1 draw of medical opinion for and against, plus the fact that it had taken me an hour to get there, what with the roadworks on Stoke's notorious 'D-Road' being such a nightmare at the moment. Good job they did, as I came out with osteoporosis(!), which I did not see coming. 

Source: Pinterest

The nurse in the Fracture Clinic I was sent straight in to see after the scan had what looked like two plaster of Paris objects on her desk. I had no idea what they were, and was told they were cross-sections of two kinds of bone: one normal, one with osteoporosis. The healthy one was dense and thick and full of wavy lines with reasonably small holes in between like a Gaudi building in Barcelona (okay, eyeballing that photo maybe the holes are bigger than I remember ;)); the other one looked like a Cadbury's Crunchie bar you had sucked the middle out of - surely you must have done that? It had much thinner stalagmites and stalactites that had been snapped off here and there as though someone had driven a model Dinky car all the way through. Plus the top and bottom of the cast skewed sideways at a disconcerting angle, like a Leaning Tower of Pisa made of bone. I did not want to accept the conclusion in the direction of which I was being pointed, namely that my bones looked more like that one...Next up, a perky young student with the Stoke equivalent of Scouse brows took blood - to rule out other unspecified sinister things (as they do). She announced brightly afterwards that she hadn't had any practice with needles since Christmas. ;) It looks like they might want me to go on bone strengthening drugs, but these are quite punishing on the oesophagus apparently, so there would need to be 'buy in' from the nice gastric consultant who made a cameo appearance in a previous post. At the very least now I need to mind where I put my feet.

Like this, but *much* holier and more slanty ~ Source: ABC7

Moving on, the very next day I had a barium swallow requiring a six hour fast in the run up...well, I say "swallow" - it was in fact a series of about six tightly choreographed swallows preceded by a pause where you have to hold the liquid in your mouth first. I found it a strange and interesting procedure, standing on a platform that tilted this way and that - a bit like being an astronaut. Plus some lying down in an Odalisque pose and drinking through a straw at exactly the sort of angle a person suffering from reflux like me would never dare to do, hehe. And rolling over through a full 360 degrees in fits and starts as though you were an insomniac (which I also am) trying to find a comfortable sleeping position. The barium stuff tasted way better than I expected: like molten Love Hearts or a raspberry flavoured Sherbert Fountain crossed with Gaviscon. I was bracing myself for something far more elemental, like sucking on Shungite. 

Blimey, I wasn't far off too... They must have a jolly good juicer is all I can say. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barium

I don't have the results of that procedure yet, but calculated that I had a perfect window of opportunity to come away to France and check on my house there while waiting...the lifting of quarantine on my return, and the removal of the requirement for TWO of the four Covid tests being the icing on the cake. There's even talk of capping the prices of the PCR test I have to take on Day 2 after I get back.

[In case anyone is shocked at my skipping the country in this manner, I promise I didn't take my decision lightly: I checked the French pandemic situation on the Worldometer site, and note that France is running at 22,636 new cases at the time of writing, with 81 deaths a day. The vast majority of people with Covid at the moment (99.86%!) have mild symptoms. Then the dreaded Beta variant accounts for about 2% of cases, mostly in Reunion Island, some 5,700 miles away. So the country looked as safe if not more safe than Britain, not least the sleepy village where I was headed. Masks are still compulsory in French shops, and vaccine passports are required in a whole clatter of public places like cafes, restaurants, museums and cinemas - even open air markets.]

I also took a lateral flow test for my own peace of mind before leaving the country, even though that was one of the tests you no longer have to do, and arrived at Newhaven ferry terminal with a bristling clutch of documentation - as much to do with Brexit as with Covid to be fair: passport, International Driving Permit, Green Card, vaccination certificate, and a sworn statement in two languages to the effect that I didn't have any Coronavirus symptoms. A marshal from the ferry company promptly gave me yet another similar form of their own to fill in, so I had now sworn my health status in triplicate. All my paperwork was found to be in order, which felt like a win, and I had a lighthearted moment with the Border Force team, explaining that I had a Hoover, ironing board and two feather dusters with me, and was driving 600 miles to do a load of housework. As I drove onto the ferry I felt a surge of excitement, as though Neptune was favouring the brave. Mad, bad, completely cuckoo? You decide.

The ferry was sparsely populated for August, and there were probably no more than 25 cars aboard. I met a lady who had made the trip to the UK back in April (I am not sure on what grounds, as travel was even more tightly controlled back then) and she said there were only 8 cars on her sailing, yet the ferry staff said that was a good day! I managed to use the ship's wifi during the crossing, and given the mere smattering of passengers I'd say there would have been ample bandwidth to go round, even if all the mostly retired folk in the lounge had been avid gamers.

Some 400 miles later, I reached journey's end, having only spotted half a dozen British cars since leaving Dieppe. And felt sad for the many more who didn't feel they could or should have the holiday they had planned.

The house was nowhere near as dirty or damp and musty as I was expecting after my long absence, though there were numerous impudent lianas of wisteria which had insinuated themselves inside the shutters and dead leaves all over the floor, while spiders had taken back control like a spindly multi-legged version of the Taliban. There was also a huge pile of post for a couple who have the same street address as me, but in the next village. The next day, I walked to their house to deliver it all. Luckily they had a sufficiently roomy letter box. They weren't around in person so I could explain, so I imagine it will give them a bit of a shock... All those offers on casual slacks and camping stools they have missed!

There have been a couple of incidents so far which brought it home to me how much I value the little quirks of village life. My French elderly friend is very ill, sadly, and I went to buy her some flowers in the supermarket. A man of a similar age jokily asked me at the till if they were for him, and quick as a flash I said: "No, they're for R...", knowing full well he would know who I meant.

After that I popped to the Post Office, which is housed in a Media Centre at the end of a long passageway. The postmistress was sitting on the ground, leaning against a wall, mask slung round her chin, soaking up the sun. On my approach, she scrambled to her feet, reassembled herself, and scurried into the PO seconds ahead of me.

On the way back, armed with lots of stamps for postcards I may not get around to writing if past years are anything to go by, I was astonished to chance across Neptune himself nestling in some boulders on the ground.

Another evening I ran into the sick friend's cousin, who was sitting outside his house in the dark, his little auburn-coloured dachshund by his side. He mentioned his upcoming visit to the doctor's in another village. "I drive there with the dog - she's no bother. As long as I can drive I will stay with that practice, as I am used to them. Obviously not when I can't anymore, as she would not be great behind the wheel." "No indeed", I replied, "There are her short legs for starters."

I haven't spent any time yet in holiday mode, as I am trying to get the house shipshape ahead of a friend coming to stay. The other day saw me brushing the cobwebs off the rafters of Miss Havisham's attic and sweeping the floor and stairs. I am not sure I could have faced the task were it not for the prospect of a visitor spurring me on.

In other news, I am now on Day 2 of waiting in for an Amazon parcel. In the UK you are given a precise and narrow time slot for delivery, whereas Amazon France have guaranteed delivery days, not hours, and thanks to a nifty oxymoron these 'guaranteed' days are only estimates, as I now realise. And this despite signing up to a free trial of the French version of Amazon Prime: normally held in high regard as a behemoth of speedy shipping, over here it is a completely meaningless concept. I am the only one who appears to be 'primed' so far, eagerly awaiting the mattress topper I have bought for my guest...

Touching briefly on scented matters(!), I have brought a few more perfumes out here to join my growing collection. I keep them in the bathroom cabinet - I know, sacrilege, flying in the face of my own advice from way back - because I am on holiday, and have clearly let my usual standards drop. ;)

Oh, plus I have made a new furry friend! Please don't tell Truffle...

Sun, sage, salamanders and Sisley: another holiday in the Limousin - Part 1

I have just come back from my French trip - to cool temperatures, overcast skies, and fitful rain. I sallied forth yesterday to buy croissants and whole milk in a bid to recreate the holiday experience, but nice as the croissants were, they couldn't cut the mustard - or rather the homemade vat of confiture with which my friend L presented me on the first morning of my stay.  I guess a sense of anticlimax is inevitable after such a lotus-eating idyll, which is pretty much what it was, give or take the lotus-eating. And you may be surprised to learn that there was a big fat, astonishing perfume episode bang in the middle of the trip, which warrants its own post in Part 2, while all the other scented aspects of my visit - of which there was a surprising smattering - will be covered 'en passant' in this post. Quite literally, indeed, for in a general chat about perfume, L's neighbour C happened to remark that she liked the smell of lilac, so I commended 'En Passant' to her in passing.

Jam today, jam tomorrow, jam for the foreseeable future

So here goes with the main part of the 'travelogue with fragrant accents'...

On the day of departure, I had to get up very early, and managed to squirt tinted moisturiser all down my clean T-shirt before 6.15am. It's that Paula's Choice Resist Super-Light Daily Wrinkle Defense cream (sic). I would add that it is 'super-prone to geyser-esque eruptions' at the merest flick of a lid, and urge extreme caution when using it.

Manchester airport was absolutely heaving...the sort of crowds where you'd stand up to peer at the departure board for two seconds, only to turn round and find someone in your seat. Also worthy of mention is how the airport - or certainly Terminal 1 - has a disorientatingly elastic sense of time. The gate was due to open 'in 5 minutes' for what must have been all of half an hour. As my plane was also delayed, I had ample time to browse in the Duty Free, but only took a moment to respray my scent of the journey, Hermes Eau des Merveilles, and tuned out to everything else, including the gigantic Toblerone ingots, which were three for a tenner, and should really have been reclassified as an offensive weapon on the joint grounds of weight and pointiness. I am pleased to report that my knitting needles were not construed as an offensive weapon on this trip. I decided not to attempt to hide them, but rather waved them ostentatiously at security staff. I think the added verisimilitude of my mentioning I was hoping to knit an entire flannel whilst on holiday might have swung things in my favour.

When we eventually landed, the disembarcation at Limoges was slow and torturous, and it took an hour to get through passport control and pick up my hand luggage, which had had to go in the hold. There were 189 people (the capacity of a Boeing 737, as I now know) crowded into an area the size of a convenience store. When I was finally disgorged into the Arrivals hall, I exclaimed to my friend: 'Sorry, it was chaos back there...complete and utter carnage...bedlam...mayhem...a shambles...disarray...did I say "pandemonium"? It was also pandemonium.'

Small child with Lancaster bomber - or rather the A400M

As we walked towards the car park pay station, I noticed that L had surprisingly strong sillage of a perfume I couldn't quite place. It occurred to me that if it was a favourite scent, she might have become anosmic to it and started to apply more and more in a bid to smell it on herself. Later, I tentatively inquired what the perfume was: it turned out not to be one of L's staples, but the remains of a bottle of Issey Miyake that was a cast off from a friend, and which she was trying to finish up, as she wasn't sure she cared for it all that much. Well, I was glad to learn that, and it immediately explained the sillage issue. Issey Miyake may be the 'poster child' for the inoffensive and supposedly anti-perfume trend of the 90s, but it has a monster melon note - a 'monster melon that has freshly exited a shower cubicle', as I am sure I have said somewhere on the blog, but don't ask me where.

On arrival in my friend's village, her ceramicist friend S, with whom we made the excursion to the Bernaudaud Foundation the previous year, popped round with some flowers from her garden for my bedroom. She herself left a discreet trail of La Vie est Belle, which continues to be her signature scent, while the bouquet itself included several sprigs of sage. These had a fabulously pungent aroma - unlike anything I had ever smelt in a Schwartz jar, which is pretty much my acquaintance with the herb up to this point. Oh, also in Paxo Sage & Onion stuffing mix, obviously.

We met up with S and her husband for al fresco coffee the next morning, and I kept stopping in my tracks as I caught whiffs of sage in different spots in their garden. So if walnuts were the plant leitmotiv of last year's holiday in the Limousin, sage was shaping up to be the vegetal theme this time round!

Later that morning, after sponging the jam stains I had incurred at breakfast on both trouser legs - silly spillages were to be another theme of the holiday - L invited me to join her in clearing out her fireplace, something she had omitted to do in the two years she has owned the house. Game for anything, I followed her upstairs to the sitting room and we carefully lowered the glass door protecting the grate to reveal...drum roll!...a carved metal salamander!

Well, we weren't initially sure it was a salamander, but a question on Facebook quickly elicited the confirmation we were after. I also learnt from a post on the blog 'Writing the Renaissance' that these mythical beasts were a common embellishment on the fireplaces of royal palaces, no less, while the chateau at Chambord has over 800 different kinds of salamander carved into the ceiling of the main hall.

And it gets better...!

"Salamanders appear not only on buildings, but on many royal possessions. Salamanders were tooled into the leather covers of books bound for the royal library. A perfume-burner designed by Raphael for the king had salamanders and fleurs-de-lis on the lid."

Thrilled by this discovery in her humble townhouse, L pressed me into service with a brush and a pot of linseed oil. I would never have guessed I'd be spending the start of my holiday oiling a salamander, but there again, I never expected to find a well-appointed table tennis station in my hostess's barn.

In the afternoon we went shopping in the village's bijou and compact Carrefour. It may even be called Carrefour Compact, come to that. And speaking of melons, to lighten L's basketload of shopping, I offered to carry a melon in one hand and a bottle of rose wine in the other, and sneaked in a few bicep curls with them on the way home. We ate in the garden that night (as we did every night we were 'in'!), and I managed to drop courgette carpaccio, which turns out to be 'a thing', really - a thing dripping in oil unfortunately - on my newly swabbed trousers.

We completely forgot to have a game!

The next day I had a major crisis on finding I was unable to access my flight booking for the return leg - I thought it wise to download my boarding pass well in advance of my return, you see. Ryanair seemed to have no record of it under the reference code I was given. I ended up spending an hour locked in a live chat session with a Ryanair customer services representative while he endeavoured to get to the bottom of the puzzle. It turns out that I did have a booking, but it was under CW6I7C, not CW617C. And yes, I had to look twice, especially as the 'I' of my booking print out didn't have a serif on the top and bottom of the 'I'. My eye read the booking number like a car registration, where it is customary to have a block of letters, then a few numbers, then maybe a letter again. You would never find a letter smack in the middle of the numerals. I realised afterwards that the only place that would ever happen is in one of those gobbledy-gook passwords that comes with your broadband. And now, Ryanair booking codes...so be warned!

Crisis over, we ventured forth into the Dordogne, after a picnic in a field, during which I managed to spill L's beer, followed later by my own tea in a cafe in Brantome (insert your own circumflex). I had visited Brantome in 1996 with Mr Bonkers, and in the intervening years it has become a lot busier and more trippery. However, I was pleased to spot that 'mushroom omelette' was still the (somewhat surprising) special on the menu of the riverside restaurant where we had eaten on that holiday. L and I decided that while Brantome was chocolate box picturesque, compared to the peace and quiet of her own village, where the stillness is only broken by the cooing of turtledoves, the chirrup of crickets, and the skitter of a lizard in the undergrowth, the Dordogne was too hectic by far - not to mention awash in those multiple view-type postcards - some with kittens! (Cue group shudder.)

The toilet of the cafe where I spilt my tea was noteworthy, mind, for this big bottle of cologne. It is only by Schwarzkopf (Henkel), a brand I associate with haircare products rather than fine fragrance, but I had a sniff as you do, and was amazed at the more than passing resemblance to Guerlain Sous le Vent. A drugstore cologne that is clearly punching above its price bracket.

That night we ate out with friends of L at a local produce market in a nearby village. The idea was to buy food and drink from the stalls that lined the square - well, more of a rectangle, really - then take your meal and eat it at the long trestle tables placed in the centre. The women in our party all had trout and chips. It never ceases to amuse me that VAT in French means 'vidé avec tête' - 'gutted with head'.

The following day was L's birthday, and I was up betimes on a quest to hunt and gather breakfast ingredients, after first changing my T-shirt due to yet another tinted moisturiser incident. First stop was the boulangerie. I asked the boulanger for his 'most medieval' bread, as L had mentioned that she liked one that was made according to a 'centuries old' recipe. He looked a little askance initially, but after scoping the fixtures with  professional care, settled on a rye cob. I got a couple of croissants with that, and though I quite forgot to ask for 'epitome-shaped' ones, he instinctively knew to proffer his most perfectly puffed up and crescent-shaped specimens, so that was a bit of luck. The fruit tarts had not yet been put out on display, but the boulanger helpfully went out back and fetched them for me, and with that I had the 'morning goods' side of things covered. Next up was Carrefour, to procure the wherewithal to make Bucks Fizz. Cue more weight training on the way back with two bottles of sparkling wine. And because of my wish to retire to the area myself one day, I couldn't help but home in on any little old ladies sitting outside particularly photogenic houses along the route, and surreptitiously try to gauge their likely life expectancy.

L was very pleased with my choice of loaf, which she declared to be 'commensurate with my great age'. I will leave the account of the rest of L's birthday till Part 2, as it was on that day that the big unexpected perfume episode occurred! In my excitement, I may have slightly hijacked her festivities in the process, but she was most gracious about it, certainly.

Does this bread look ancient to you?

Then the day after L's birthday we made an excursion to the hilltop town of Turenne, which boasted a fine selection of échaugettes, complete with inverted walnut whip terminations (see below). The steep ascent to the castle proved excellent for the calves and challenging for the lungs, and we were not sorry it was cooler that day. On the way down, we both made impulse purchases of mugs - two in my case! - even though my kitchen cupboards are already bulging with a 40-strong collection. But sometimes impulse purchases just have to be made, and the one I managed to bring with me on the plane has been in constant use.

That night, there was a street fair in L's village, and we joined some friends and neighbours of hers, including the aforementioned lover of lilac, C. I quizzed C about her taste in perfume, being totally floored by what she was wearing on the night (I am invariably floored by what anyone is wearing, to be fair). It turns out C is pretty much a Sisley loyalist, wearing the new Izia in summer - which I had never smelt before - and Eau du Soir in winter. We discussed our respective stances on Eau de Sisley 1, 2 and 3 (neither of us were big fans), and lamented the ubiquity of certain scents that shall remain nameless, but which may contain 'Mademoiselle' in the name.

There is a parfumerie in L's village, would you believe, that doubles up as an ironmonger's and a toy shop - of course it does. Or it did, rather. Today there is a only a rather forlorn collie in the window, who may or may not be officially guarding the deserted premises.

I also introduced L to Songes edp on the holiday, and we both wore it on her birthday! L's daughter is a fan of Chance, and L had asked me months back to suggest additional scents her daughter might like that had some crossover with it, though I hadn't managed to give the question any thought until the other day. So I have now belatedly given L samples to pass on to her daughter of AG Grand Amour (hyacinth floral), Chanel La Pausa (all about the iris), and Prada Candy - simply because I introduced another Chance lover to that one and she thought it was the bee's knees. ;) And I am very partial to it myself too. So we will see...

Coming up in Part 2 - the extraordinary perfume related episode! I do hope I am not overselling this, haha.