In response to Martine's request I am now giving you some pictures of the work in progress in Le Presbytere.

Even though the place still looks extremely rough, and rather better in the flesh than in the shots, I accept that, if only to compare with the finished product, these should be published.

This is one I am rather proud of, a door which was never there before. We found in the attic and , despite his protests we persuaded the builder to install it.
It now looks as if it was there for ever.

This bedroom, which, for obvious reasons we call the fireplace room, at Clive's insistance and again despite the builders objections, we cleared the false walls at both sides so that the fireplace again stands proud.
It makes a great difference.

This is a long shot of the Kitchen /living /diningroom.
The plumber has erected a tempory sink at the end for us for the summer as the kitchen proper won't be installed until October.
Very much a work in progress this.

Just to give you an idea of how filthy and unfinished the house is we were there on Saturday at lunchtime and picniced in the garden rather than anywhere in the house

We are still in Faugères waiting for the builders to finish our house. They are trying really hard, I don’t know what the French for Blue Arsed Flies is-Mouches aux Culs Bleus?- but they are giving a fairly good imitation of the same in their efforts to finish the house, or at any rate to have it habitable for La Toute Irlande which we have threatened arrives on Sunday.
I think that we have now come to a compromise.
They are going to have their part of the ground floor and the first floor ready, basically the kitchen / living room and downstairs loo and four bedrooms with bathrooms, by Wednesday .Ready means the building work is done, the electrics will be in situ, the showers and loos will flow and flush.
The décor will be either half stripped wallpaper, cracked plaster, drunken cornices or brand new plasterboard and (in the bathrooms) tiling.
They will come back after the builders holidays in September and do the attic and generally finish off the job.
From Sunday of next week La Toute Irlande really does arrive.
We expect about 24 friends and relations to visit us in the next six weeks.
They will be installed in various parts of the house.
Our job, as soon a s the workers go, will be to remove the centimetres of layers of dust which now coat everything.
We are already pricing industrial vacuum cleaners.

The consoling thing is that we like all the work they have done so far.
The bathrooms do look a little tighter than expected but they are pristine and crisply tiled.
They builders and the plumbers have proved themselves adept at replacing tiles that they have damaged by clever substitution and even at replacing and reusing stuff like sinks and doors that they had previously discarded.

We now think the lowest moments, those when they seemed to be destroying our beautiful presbytery before our eyes, are now passed and now the place is starting to look better.
We are very likely wrong.

Three or so years ago our friend Petra, who enjoys giving presents for no particular reason- a thoroughly delightful habit- gave us a present of a burned CD,it had Pink Martini written on it.
My impression was that it was a compilation of various tracks that Petra had enjoyed, I recognised “ Et puis Je fume” a song which was used for some sort of ad on the tele.
The songs were of so many styles and in so many different languages that it was difficult to find a unifying thread.

It was some time after we got it first that I saw a reference to Pink martini somewhere and realised with a bit of a shock that I was listening to a CD of a single group.
And furthermore these multi lingual songs were being sung by just one singer.

It was a slow burner in our house, played at first because it seemed to provide pleasant unchallenging music, a sort of big band jazz meets a classical orchestra with world music.

It didn’t take too long before we stopped to listen to them as tafel musik and start to take them a little more seriously.
Firstly there was the singer to take into consideration.
All the solo singing was done by one China Forbes, a lady with a huge vocal and emotional range.
Then there was the man who was the musical powerhouse behind this group.
Thomas M Lauderdale,was the pianist and founder of the group.
I don’t think anyone could have invented a more romantic background for this extraordinarily talented man.
Adopted into a mixed race family in Indiana, Thomas was of unknown Asian blood. His adopted father came out of the closet when Thomas was twelve, he and his wife had a thoroughly amicable divorce and the family moved to Portland where his father was ordained a Church Pastor.
This obviously didn’t set Thomas back as he later succeeded in getting into Harvard to study Literature and history.
There he met China Forbes herself studying English Literature and Theatre. She was also (but of course) from a mixed race adopted family, her mother being Black American, her father half Scottish, half French.
These two met when he started to accompany her opera recitals on the piano, from that they decided to set up Pink Martini.
The observant among you will now begin to see where the modern, classical, sophisticated and multilingual group sprang from.

From Petra’s original present we became fans, now have another of their CDs and are soon, after last night, to get some more.
Before we headed off to Languedoc for the summer Sile did a bit of scouring of the internet and she discovered that the same band were giving a concert in Beziers, about six kilometres from Thezan, on the very week we arrived.
We booked it, and last night, in the cloisters of St Nazaire, Bezier’s cathedral we saw them perform.
It was electrifying.
A description of the various numbers would not do them justice.
Here are just a couple of moments.

They started their set with a very free version of Ravel’s Bolero which made me realise why the Catholic church banned public playing of this piece for many years.

At the end of one of the numbers when the whole group broke into a joyous rendering of “I love to go a Wandering” they were granted a mid-number standing ovation, the first I have ever seen happen in many years of concert going.

The audience (of mainly over forties, like ourselves) clapped for a good five minutes after they left they stage until we got our encore.
This was the old standard Brazil to which China Forbes invited us to dance.
There was a lot of old fat flesh doing a whole heap of sambaing and rumbaing for the following five minutes.

Beg, borrow and steal to get to one of their concerts.

Greenhouse Salad

When I was growing up we lived in a very special house in the suburbs of Cork.
This house was on a hill over the city and there was a wonderful view from the garden of the river Lee flowing eastwards out or the city to the harbour.
My mother’s pride and joy (and a contribution towards the household economy) was a huge greenhouse at the very top of the garden.
In this she principally grew two of the most beautifully scented fruits I know; tomatoes and white peaches .

In one of Elizabeth David’s cookery books she talks of an autumn spent in Spain where every day they ate for lunch a simple salad of tomatoes, warm from the vine and dressed in olive oil, a meal she claims it would be hard to better.

My other kitchen goddess, Myrtle Allen, in her book about the food of Ballymaloe says that she has tried for many years to make the perfect tomato soup, she feels it should taste of the juices left in the bowl after a fresh tomato salad.

When my daughter Eileen was ill, a long time ago, they told us in the hospital that she should be encouraged to eat as much as she wanted in the times during her treatment when hungry to compensate for those times when she would lose her appetite.
Eileen’s favourite food at that time (and very possibly still) is bread dipped into the vinaigrette left in the salad bowl from a tomato salad. I have a distinct memory of making tomato salads and (being unable to face another) discarding the fruit to leave the juices to our four year old daughter.

In another of Elizabeth David’s books, I think Summer Cooking, she gives a recipe from Italy, for a salad of tomatoes and peaches.
I remember trying this out and being so impressed with the taste and the wonderful way both fruits brought out each others flavours that I put it on the menu on the restaurant.
While it was never a best seller, those that tried it grew strangely addicted.

Just two weeks ago I was flicking through my old friend Michael Waterfield’s new edition of his great great aunt Janet Ross’s book “Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen” because I was reviewing it for a local paper.
There at the bottom of a long list of various ways of dressing tomatoes for salad I found a throwaway recipe for a salad of Tomatoes and Italian Peaches.

Today, at last, all of these various threads came together.

We are staying in Faugeres in the south of France, living in a little village house with a south facing terrace.
The temperatures are in the mid thirties.
Just yesterday we had bought a large green umbrella and stand as otherwise we were finding the terrace too hot in the middle of the day to eat outside.
At lunchtime today I went to the fridge to find something to eat.
There were large sweet ripe tomatoes and ripe and blushing white peaches.
All of the above came together as I made the following salad (which I have named after my mother’s greenhouse in Tivoli.)

La Salade de La Serre

3 Large Ripe tomatoes
2 Large Ripe White Peaches (yellow peaches or nectarines will do at a pinch)
1 teaspoon caster Sugar (in Ireland only, not needed in the south where the fruit sweetens naturally in the sun)
1 Energetic grinding of black pepper
1 large pinch of Maldon Sea Salt (crushed lightly in your fingers as you scatter)
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons of fruity olive oil
6 to 8 leaves of fresh Basil

1 crisp fresh French loaf or ciabatta

Peel the peaches (by plunging in boiling water if needed)
Slice into eight of ten segments off the stone and then halve these.
Cut the tomatoes into similar sized pieces, discarding the core near the stem.
Sprinkle over the sugar (if using) the pepper, salt, oil and vinega,r tear the basil leaves over, and toss together with a spoon.
Leave for about ten minutes to blend, then eat, on its own or with some cold meats.

When the tomatoes are finished (and this is the best bit) finish off the tomatoey peachy vinaigrette by dipping pieces of the bread into these juices.

The gods probably lived on food like this.

Progress at Le Presbytere

We got to Thezan on Saturday afternoon and went to the house with some trepidation.
We knew that our builder had done the roof but we were rather hoping that the plumber and the electrician would have done their bit.
The roof was finished, the velux windows made a superb difference to the place lighting up the whole magnificent attic

and the opening he had cut for a window in what was to be our bedroom was amazing, gave a previously dead space a narrow view of the vineyards and the hill .

We knew we wouldn’t see any workmen until Monday so we headed off to Faugeres.

We have been granted an immense stroke of good fortune and kindness in that some friends of ours who have a house in the village of Faugeres told us they wouldn’t be using it until August and gave us the keys and their blessing.
We had assumed that we would be using this for the first few days but now it looks like at least a fortnight before our Presbytere is even ready to be squatted in.
Thank you again to Katherina and John.

On Sunday we were invited to lunch with our friends Barry and Mary, who bought in Thezan much the same time as us (and whom we met there for the first time, despite us both being at my brother Ted’s wedding thirty odd years ago).
They are old hands at living in France and not only were their builders come and gone but they now have a swimming pool.
We ate beside it on Sunday, and tried to convince ourselves that it was the most normal thing in the world to be eating and drinking there.
They also convinced us that if we wanted any chance of getting into our house by the summer we would have to stop being nice guys and start rattling some sabres.

We got ready for action therefore on Monday only to find the house a mad hive of activity with plumbers and builders (even at 8. in the morning) all plastering, hammering and sawing.
Our builder complained about the plumber not doing his job on time, the plumber blamed the builder, both blamed the electrician who we got on the phone and who promised to with us the following day.
It was I guess a typical build but with a lot more shrugging.
The system out here is that you employ the builder, plumber and electrician (and indeed the joiner should you need one) separately.
Even though our builder had recommended the others there was a lot of buck passing between one and the other and Sile was constantly having to phone one to pass on the same buck.
We are not quite sure whether all of this is quite as real as it seems, there could be bits of pantomime inserted for our benefit, but the work so far seems good and the builder has even managed to recycle some of the doors (at our request) despite his evident conviction that this is lunacy.

We have explained to them all the all of our families (La Toute Irlande) are arriving out on the 17th and we must have a habitable space in the house by then.
This isn’t as far from the truth as you might think. We are going to have a steady stream of visitors from the 20th to the end of August.
The builder has taken this on board (we are both convinced that he is a decent man) and has promised us the ground floor and the first, with bedrooms and bathrooms) by then.
The attic, two further bedrooms and a bathroom, will be done after we move in and (it may well happen) after the builders holidays in August.