La Fête de la Musique

We British call 21st June 'Mid-summer's Day', the French call it the first day of summer. Given the state of the weather over the past 6 or 7 weeks, let's hope it's they, rather than we, who are correct. However, in France 21st June is also the National Music Festival. In virtually every town and commune in the country there are musical events in the streets.

In past years we've taken the up-market option of going to Aix-en-Provence for a few days. Aix has a week of

free events in the streets as well as a top-of-the-range series of musical events for which you have to pay. However, this year for the first time we passed the Fête in our local 'big town'.

Our 'big town' is the Departmental (county) 'capital' but is nevertheless quite small, with a population of 15000. Normally, after 7 in the evening the streets are empty. On Thursday, however, the streets were, by its standards, heaving.

We started at a concert of schoolchildren, supported by a few adults (above). After that, our choir sang for about half-an-hour in the Mairie (town hall). We then set off into town, passing an all-female (students of one of the Lycées or grammar schools) rock group singing in extremely profane English. What was left of my hair curled at the lyrics which, presumably, the French folk of most ages - young children through to grandparents - couldn't understand.

In the market place a group from the local Evagelical Protestant Church was singing Gospel music, surprising many French Roman Catholics who are used to a rather po-faced experience of religion. Further down, outside the inevitable Irish Pub, a Trad Jazz Band was playing swing music to the audience seated on tables outside the pub.

The atmosphere in town was really great and, despite it being a relatively cool evening, apparently the festivities went on into the small hours.

More Creatures - Footnote to our previous post.

Every September/October so far, Mr A has been attacked by some unknown, and unseen, creature which has produced very painful blistering on his ankles and lower legs. Recently, friends have told us that these are almost certainly caused by the 'aoutat', a tiny little critter which is parasitic in nature. Subsequent investigations have revealed that in the UK this monster is called the 'Harvest Tick'. In the US it's the 'chigger.

This horrid creature, only .25mm across has now taken to attacking Mrs A. Although her blisters and level of suffering are, naturally, much less impressive than those of Mr A, they are nevertheless not to be welcomed.

On a different scale, we found this little beastie in the barn the other day. It looked as if something, perhaps an owl?, had dropped it. Could this be one of the mysterious 'things' that scrabble around in our roof?

Springwatch – The Alternative View

What is it with the animal kingdom? You spend your life being nice to animals – apart from moles, which get all they deserve – and what do they do? I’ll tell you what they do. They go out of their way to wear you down.



Let’s get the moles out of the way first of all (and how I wish we could). Our garden this year is riddled with mole runs. It’s impossible to walk around the garden without sinking, sometimes almost ankle deep, into the turf. OK, that’s hardly the end of the world. It makes maintenance difficult and the molehills make a bit of a mess of the garden but that’s just about bearable. However, when they get in amongst the food crops and/or expensive plants they become a real problem. Consider our poor tomato plants. Tomatoes form a very important crop for us. Not only do they provide a lot of our food in summer, thereby giving us fresh, healthy, chemical-free food on the doorstep as well as reducing our shopping bills, but they also go into pasta sauces, soups etc for the winter. This year, growing them has been a real struggle. The very warm and dry April has been followed by cool and damp weather throughout May and so far in June. Consequently, the poor things are really struggling. However, several have died off completely due to being undermined by mole-runs. This is just the sort of sabotage that we’ve come to expect from the despicable mole and explains our zero-tolerance approach.



What about the other creatures though? Apart from flies, mosquitoes and ants (don’t get me going on ants), we’re nice to everything. We feed the birds in winter, we give carrots and apples to donkeys, we talk to the cows(!), we make a fuss of dogs, we leave wild areas for butterflies, hedgehogs and other creatures. How are we rewarded? We’re rewarded by constant noise and disturbance, that’s how. OK, during the day you expect dogs to bark a bit, but it really would be nice if our local West Highland White didn’t yap almost continuously. Butterflies are very beautiful and interesting, except when they have no difficulty finding the open windows on the way into the house but can’t find a way out. Consequently there are often dozens of them fluttering around the house and scaring Mrs A to distraction.

It’s during the night that we really suffer though. The cattle, especially the bulls, can make a fearful racket in the middle of the night. Owls are always hooting and screeching. Donkeys ee-or regularly. ‘Things’ scrabble around in the roof spaces. The cat has noisy disagreements with pine martens. (On top of that, she knows when we can have a lie-in, or grasse matinée - fat morning - as we call them here. If we have to get up early, she's a quiet as a mouse - not that she'd know what one of those was. However, if we can lie-in, she's screaming outside the window from 6 o'clock onwards.) But in May and June, the pinnacle of noise creation is the dawn chorus. For unreliable sleepers such as yours truly, there’s nothing quite like being awoken at 5 a.m. every day for two months. Hundreds of the little, and not so little, beggars seem to line up just outside our windows to welcome the day, impress the opposite sex, argue about politics or whatever it is they do. It’s just as well I’m a fairly phlegmatic person or I could get quite grumpy about it all.

I’m off to bed while the little swine are reasonably quiet!