Friday 29 August 2014

A Snapshot of our Hamlet in the Charente and Jerome's farm

In our tiny hamlet in the Charente region of France we have five neighbours.

In the first small house live Eloise and her partner Amaund, a young working couple. They have a new puppy, not a house dog but destined to grow up as a great hunter. So he lives and whines in a dog house in a pen in the back yard. He loves company and would love to be molly coddled but this is not the French way for the serious business of raising a hunter!!

Opposite we have Vincent, a young single teacher with a lovely throaty sports car which he loves to drive with proper French élan. From time to time he has extended company, a lovely young lady, or is it a series of lovely young ladies. Ah… such proper French élan!  

Down the road a bit resides Monsieur et Madame M, who keep a beautiful house set in a beautiful garden. M et Mde keep the village looking spruce all year with trimmed green lawns and gorgeous seasonal flowers. “Mon Dieu” said Val on our arrival so many months ago…. “we simply can’t let the side down”.  So Val matches seasonal flower with seasonal flower and I drudge with the mower. Our reward: gracious nods and a few words of approval, en passant!
A view of Monsuier and Madame's garden

Where the hamlet lane peters out to a rough farm track we find Sally and Colin, absentee English landlords (for the time being). They are rebuilding a tumble down barn into a lovely farm home, mezzanine floor, gorgeous open plan living area and stunning bathrooms and kitchen with beautiful timbers, new and old.  Everything one reads about the “joys” of renovating in rural France is absolutely true, they say.

Jerome, the farmer, lives between us and Sally and Colin.

In my naïve way, I had envisaged Jerome as being the latest incarnation of a long line of farmers tilling the same village patch, century after century.  Well, his grandfather owned a small farm near the village of Pillac, just outside our commune of Juignac. Claude, his father, was also a farmer who in 1972 purchased a different patch in the Juignac area. Twelve years ago, Claude retired from active farming and Jerome bought his 60 hectares. He has since built this up to 100 hectare and would buy more if it was available.

My ignorance knows no bounds! I assumed that 100ha must be a fairly small farm. (Now, dear reader, be honest: did you too think this was small?) Amazingly, a whopping 96% of the 490,000 French farms are less than 200ha in area, with 40% less than 20ha! Jerome is up there in the top 20% of farms that are of 100ha or more.

Before you start to think the Australia has it all over the Frenchies in farm size consider these facts. There are 135,000 farms in Oz, 36% are less than 50 hectares in area and a further 36% have between 50 and 500 hectares. Not only that, but 55% have a turnover of less than $100,000.
Val, Jerome and Jerome's dog with some of his tractors

 Now anyone that has driven in rural France will allow that an awful lot of French tractors roar around on French roads. I can now reveal why this is so!

Jerome has an astonishing 32 separate land titles making up his 100 hectares, spread over six major but quite separate concentrations which are kilometres apart.  His smallest field is just 0.25ha, the biggest 13ha with an average of 3ha. Apparently, this is quite a common structure for farms. So he has to tool around the country lanes on one of his four tractors just getting to the different sections of his farm. All the other farmers are busy doing the same thing. And of course there is the traditional 2 hour French lunch break. Just think, come 1200 noon, 490,000 farmers jump on their tractors and head off home for an apero and four course lunch!  

Except for livestock paddocks, the farming fields in this area usually irregular in shape and are completely unfenced with just a rough post or bit of iron rod to mark the various corners.  Ancient walkways cut through farms and even in places proceed between a farm’s buildings 

Claude’s retirement interest is in wood. He supplies split fire wood, however, I suspect his greatest pride is his 85 year old farmyard saw mill. It’s a beauty, a two meter high bandsaw arrangement complete with baling
Claude and dog pose with his 80 year old bandsaw
wire repairs and chocked with wood blocks where necessary. With this he produces oak planks and beams to order. In fact Claude supplied the new oak beams, 8inchx8inch, for Sally and Colin’s rebirth of the old barn. Delivery would not have been difficult as the old barn is only 10 meters from the old saw mill.  

All you old farmers out there already suspect that the French farmers are handsomely subsidised.  Last year the European Community gave France 11 Billion euros as the farm subsidy payment. 490,000 farms means an average subsidy of E22,000 per farm. But, of course, averages can be highly misleading as clearly the 40% of farms with less than 20 hectares must get less cash each than, say, the 20% with more than 100 ha.
The upper wheel of the bandsaw!! 


Jerome points out that the subsidy is compensation for the low controlled price that he gets for his wheat, maize and sunflower. The price is set at the going world rate for the various commodities. He must also abide by a contract with the agricultural department enforcing such things as the maintenance of ancient walkways, riparian zones and the use of pesticides. That can’t be bad.

As France is the second biggest European economy much of that 11 billion euro package would come from France itself. So France gives the EU heaps of money, the EU then gives France heaps of money back.  Then 490,000 French farmers have multipage agreements with the French Agricultural department. All that lovely paperwork for all those lovely bureaucrats!  It’s a lovely system! It’s French!

A bientot, off to Prague tomorrow for a few days

Cheers to all

Bryan and Val

Saturday 2 August 2014

Bastille Day, Summertime, Flowers and Food

Bastille Day, Summertime, Flowers and Food

Ah, “la Fête Nationale”, 14 July, better known in Oz as Bastille Bay.

Well, I had hoped to give you a riotous account of the happenings in celebration of “la Fete Nationale” in Juignac and surrounds. Alas, I can’t. Mainly because nothing really happened here. The only French flags we saw jauntily blowing in the breeze were the two Val and I had bought for our front porch. (Doing our bit for the hamlet, don’t you know?)
Flags fly at La Petit Maine for
La Fete Nationale

Perhaps I‘m being a bit severe because there were fireworks at Montmoreau and Chalais, our two shopping towns. Well I should say our supermarket towns; “le shopping’ in the French sense requires heels, smart frocks and doing lunch, whereas “faire les course” only requires thongs, tacky trackies and a big trolley, and rushing home before the ice cream melts. But enough of my impromtu French lesson.

Our friends, Ian and Pam, invited us to watch local fireworks from the deck of their house, after a BBQ and perhaps a glass or two of a fine Bordeaux. Actually with Ian, luckily, it’s always a glass or three! The sky show was very good, the BBQ was rained out, the Bordeaux excellent, and we could hear dance music in the distance, presumably for the traditional “public dancing in the street”…though this year in the rain!

Oh, we did come across an older gentleman in Montmoreau, nattily decked out in jacket, tie and beret and sporting on a lapel a rather grand medallion, backed by the blue, the white and the red colours, the tricolour. So perhaps there was a ceremony somewhere complete with La Marcellaise….I certainly hope so.

But enough of this jingoistic Francophilia…it’s summertime and the French certainly do a good summer.

The Charente and surrounding area has the reputation as being the sunniest part of France outside the Mediterranean South. The daily temperature at Le Petit Maine, our hamlet, has quite surprised us. Often in the low thirties, but feeling much hotter. It’s a dry penetrating heat, enough to burn the skin off a basking lizard!

Even the most introspective tourist will notice that flowers are huge business in France. In Spring Val and I had observed council workers attending to and repairing street and bridge flower beds. Now it’s summertime, and the villages are beautiful with stunning flower beds and pots everywhere. Any Commune councillor silly enough to ignore the summer time flower arranging responsibility would be set upon by vengeful, pitchfork weilding villagers. Mon Dieu, it would be a hangin’ offence for a village to be downgraded by a fleur or two in the “Villes et Villages Fleuris” ratings.
Flowers decorate a bridge somewhere in France.
We have seen prettier ones but stopping in the middle of a busy town
can be a tad difficult!

Town bridges seem to be the favoured architectural structure for displaying a Commune’s floral artistic flair. Every town bridge we have seen is florally decorated. Typically on the railing on each side there will be several long pots filled with carefully chosen plants. They may simply be chosen to present a proliferation of colour or as a repeating pattern of just two colours. The more daring floral architects will have multiple pots soaring several meters high. The colours are rich and vivid, much more so than we see in Australia.

Summer is also the time for “vide greniers” and “les marchés  du producteurs”.

“Vide grenier” means “from the attic” and it’s the opportunity to get rid of all the stuff that accumulates in one’s attic. Each village holds a vide grenier and each stall seems to have the same unsaleable stuff! Val has developed a passion for the vide grenier but I think it’s that voyeuristic instinct to check out everyone else’s stuff. “Oh, I’ve got one of those at home” or “Hey, isn’t that piece just awful…it’ll never sell”
A typical small village "vide grenier"

The best “vide grenier” combines both genuine car-boot stalls and dealer stalls. We’ve been to enough now, however, to recognize many of the various dealers showing up at each event. To our dear mature children at home, rest assured that your Christmas presents are being carefully sourced from only the very best of the second
hand stalls!

The last vide grenier we visited was near the village of Les Essaudes and beautifully situated on a country laneway running alongside the river Dronne…well it would have been beautiful if a summer torrential storm had not done it’s worst. We particularly felt for one stall holder presenting a huge range of baby wear so carefully laid out. All were totally saturated.

But as grandmamma always said (God bless her) “every cloud has a silver lining”. Last of the big spenders that we are (sorry about the inheritance, kids) we had intended to treat ourselves to a take-away helping of the French national dish, frites, to which I’ve become quite addicted (just pop another cholesterol pill after eating).
The food tents in the middle of a muddy field at Les Essaudes


Two long marquees joined side by side just had to be the mess tent, so to it we trudged through the rain and the soaking grass on the quest for our hot frites. Bingo! A gay and noisy troupe of volunteers were bustling about a make-shift kitchen ready to serve the expected hordes of hungry fete visitors. A quick reconnaissance and a few rudimentary questions established the rules. A complete “plateau du repas” was the offering at the staggering price of eight euro.

“Hang the expense, let’s do lunch” Val enthusiastically decided. Each plateau (that’s tray) included a roll of bread, a melon quarter, triangle of cheese, a small éclair, a generous serve of frites and either two BBQed sausages or a heap of moules (mussels to us). Not feeling culinary adventurous I opted for snags; Val took the moules and was well satisfied. That’s another gourmet box ticked for her.
Val getting stuck into her moules, frites and melon.
Check out the field kitchen in the background! 

Naturally the plateau included a glass of vin rouge or vin rose. We have noticed that vin blanc is seldom on offer at these ‘lesser” village affairs.  

There we were in the soaked marquees, rain thudding on the roof, water dripping in from the gaps where the roofs joined, half the bench seats wet, lighting sometimes on, sometimes off, the rattle of another batch of cooked moules being tossed into the serving tureens, and the laughter and chatter of the volunteers. Marvellous.

“Oh, bother it’s still raining! Why leave such a happy place?” we ask ourselves. I brave the internal waterfalls and join the short queue for a second round of vin rouge, just 50 centimes a plastic cup full.  Vin rouge extraordinaire, it surely is.

à bientôt, love to all our friends
Bryan and Val