We must really be in France

John has already made the local press as you can see from the photos. My nose features over someones shoulder. We are also on the front page in the far distance at the end of the table.

Yesterday we spent a day which suggests that we are settling into the French way of life.

The first of the two events was the annual Repas of the local Société de Chasse (hunting club). We had been recommended to attend by Eugène, the builder who had largely rebuilt our house over 40 years ago and who came to sort out our blocked toilet a couple of weeks back. He assured us that there would be plenty to drink. The repas was advertised to start at “Midi”. Aware that “midi” could mean at 12 noon sharp or, more vaguely, “lunchtime”, we turned up at 12 but, seeing that there weren’t many people at the “Foyer Rural” (function room attached to the village Mairie), we popped over the road for a beer at the village shop/bar. At twenty-to-one, seeing that a few people were starting to arrive, we went back into the Foyer Rural and found that people were grouped around the bar drinking aperitifs. Apart from soft drinks there was whisky, port and pastis. The French prefer these drinks before a meal rather than afterwards. We had a couple of ports – with ice – and were then bought some pastis by someone were talking to. The meal consisted of mushroom soup, crudités, wild boar stew and then barbecued wild boar chops. They must have been enormous boars, judging from the size of the chops and many of them must have died to provide us with lunch, as all the courses seemed to arrive twice. Personally, I was looking forward to the wild boar ice-cream but Hester Blumenthal’s reputation doesn’t seem to reached here yet and the next courses were salad, cheese and fruit tart. To accompany these we had, successively, red, white and rosé wine, apparently produced in Labatut and, appropriately, they were also rather tart. Finally a large bottle of unlabelled Armagnac arrived and despite my protests (nah, not really) we had a pretty good glug of that.

After that we went home, drank some wine and watched an incredibly long TV special of aged French rocker Johnny Hallyday at the Stade de France performing everything he had ever sung over the past 50 years. How French is that?