The importance of the TGV to French country life!

Welcome to the third post, in this series based around village life in south west France. Today, I want to set aside a little time to share with you my thoughts on the TGV (Train `a Grande Vitesse), or in English, the high speed train. Discussing what a life line it can be for those choosing to relocate to the French countryside. 

When we found and fell in love with the 'old presbytery', I must admit the proximity of our village to a train station on the TGV line was something to which we hadn't given a lot of thought. It was only after signing on the dotted line, as we began to plan our move to France, we realised the TGV station at Angouleme was only 30 minutes away. Simply, a stroke of luck!

And so it transpired, from the start of our French adventure, that the station at Angouleme would play a major role in our new life. It began one dark rainy night in November, when at 9pm precisely (as the TGV is almost always on time), we stumbled onto the platform, blinking through the station lights to a whole new world that awaited us. Little did we know that evening, this same platform would set the scene for so many happy encounters through the coming years. There would be hugs and kisses as a steady stream of loved ones emerged through the crowds to greet us on their regular visits, not to mention our own occasional trips to Paris. On these rare, but none the less exciting trips, my husband and I would exchange our country life for the bright lights of Paris. You can read about one of these trips, if you would be interested, in my post entitled,  'Stepping Out Of My Empty Nest, Into The Lights Of Paris', written back in September 2012.

The train station also holds another happy memory for me, as it was the destination for my first solo car trip in France. Driving  into the city to collect my daughter from the train, I remember the feeling of achievement as I set out from our village. Here I was in a foreign land, driving on the opposite side of the road, in a car with a gear stick on the right, while negotiating round-a-bouts and underground tunnels. Arriving at the station, as I chatted to the car park attendant in French, I got such a buzz; here I was at last living in a foreign land and feeling at home. Picking my daughter up from the train, we sped home through the French countryside and I could tell, she too, was proud of her mum!

The TGV is 30 years old now and provides France with a fast, clean and efficient service, cutting down travel time between major cities dramatically, as it reaches speeds of up 200 miles an hour, with an excellent safety record. French citizens and expats alike can enjoy connections all over France and across Europe with journeys like Paris to Marseille only taking 3 hours and 5 minutes. I have included a map here showing current lines and both new and imminent ones. You will note that LGV refers to 'ligne `a grande vitesse' or high speed lines. Perhaps food for thought when you are planning your next trip to France or looking to relocate to the French countryside.

To conclude this post, I would suggest to any of you out there thinking about choosing a place to live in the France, bear in mind the importance of being near a branch of the TGV.  There are still areas of central France where the TGV doesn't operate and it can add to a feeling of isolation, but then again, perhaps that's just what you're looking for!

My Love Affair with France!

Bienvenus, mes amis! Welcome back, everyone. Apologies for a longer than normal interval between posts, but sometimes life just gets in the way. This particular upheaval, involved moving all my books to a new venue and it was during this mammoth task, I found myself sitting on the floor in the middle of a pile of packing cases, holding the book that initially sparked my love affair with France.

Carol Drinkwater is the author of a trilogy of books, The Olive Farm, The Olive Season, The Olive harvest and later, Return to the Olive Farm. All of which I consumed voraciously, but the crowning glory of my enjoyment of Carol's works, is the treasured book I hold in my hands today. The Illustrated Olive Farm, a companion to her best selling series. What a joy, after reading of this beautiful life changing place, that the author should be so generous as to share with her readers this collection of newly written prose and pictures, putting flesh to the bones of what we, the reader, can only have imagined.

Inspired by Carol's writing of her love affair with the handsome French film and television  producer, Michel and their discovery together, of an old villa, high in the hills above the bay of Cannes, I was later to follow in her footsteps and purchase the old presbytery, of which you are perhaps now familiar, from my recent blogposts.

If you dream of a life in the South of France, I highly recommend that you get hold of Carol's books. She writes beautifully, with a great love of nature that flows effortlessly from her pen. Originally an actor, you may remember her from her role as Helen Herriot in the television series, 'All Creatures Great and Small'. It was after she met her husband, Michel,who proposed over dinner on their first date that her life was to drift further away from acting.

Michel invited her to join him in the south of France, where he was attending the Cannes film festival. While he was caught up in the hurly burly of the festival, Carol passed her time swimming, sauntering the streets of the old town, daydreaming and gazing in local estate agents' windows. It had always been her dream to live by the sea.  Little did she know, she was about to discover the house of her dreams, that would change her life forever.

The villa, built by Italians at the turn of the century was named 'Appassionata', a musical term meaning, 'with passion'. Sitting high above the bay of Cannes, its terraced slopes fell steeply towards the Mediterranean. An old olive farm, well off the beaten track, it was completely overgrown and lay derelict, but Carol and Michel fell in love with its faded grandeur. Leaving England and setting up life with the man she loved, her story is filled with passion, for the handsome Frenchman, a beautiful old olive farm and the Provencal life in all its splendour. We follow her through an evolution that sees her become a best selling author, film maker and a successful olive producer.

Readers, I urge you to dive into this trilogy and surface in the glittering sun of the Mediterranean. It could change your life forever, the way it changed mine!

Appassionata 

The old presbytery

        

Food and French Country Life!

Me on the steps of 'The Old Presbytery'

Hi everybody, welcome back to a taste of village life in the Charente region of south west France. I am really looking forward to sharing with you my passion for this beautiful corner of France.

This week I thought we would look at food. The subject seemed an obvious choice, as not long after moving here, I realised while talking to a French person, no matter what the subject, the conversation would always come back to food! Yes, it is not a myth; the French are passionate about food. 

It is indeed through food that our neighbours reached out the hand of friendship to us in so many ways. Francoise and Jacques, an elderly couple from the village, had the most wonderful potager (vegetable garden). I saw them there each morning when I opened the shutters and Jacques would still be there in the evening, when the church bell called him in for aperitifs at seven. During the growing season, they often had more than they needed and Francoise would appear at the door and present me with a basket full of the most delicious tasting tomatoes, broad beans or whatever happened to be in season. 

I remember a lovely afternoon shortly after I got to know her, when she took me down to her cellar. It was like stepping back in time. Francoise preserved food as they have done in the Charente for years, bottling it in Eau de Vie, (a clear colourless brandy made by fermentation and double distillation of grapes). Not only fruit, but she showed me glass jars of Foie Gras and something called Civet de Lapin, which turned out to be jugged rabbit. She went on to explain she had preserved the Civet about thirteen years earlier and described

how the flavour would improve with keeping. It was our great honour to be served this ancient stew a few weeks later for Sunday lunch with the family. Yes, I did feel a little nervous tucking into something that was celebrating its thirteenth birthday, but I have to agree with Francoise that the flavour was out of this world.

In the next village, a weekly street market was held throughout the year. This provided us with the opportunity to sample a wide range of different specialities from around the Poitou-Charente region. It is worth pointing out that some of the best sea food in France comes from the Atlantic coast of our department, which is famous for its oysters and muscles. One of the best day trips I can remember was to La Rochelle on the coast, where I enjoyed the perfect 'Moules Frites' (muscles and chips) in a little restaurant overlooking the harbour, complemented beautifully by the smell of the Atlantic ocean.

Finally, I couldn't finish this chapter on food without mentioning my favourite restaurant, 'Chateau des Tallyrand' in the small town of Chalais.  The setting for this restaurant is within the castle itself, approached by its original drawbridge. The magic continues inside with the reception one gets from the host, a Monsieur Jean-Louis Bruneau. Jean-Louis welcomes each guest personally and remembering names and faces, he manages to make each guest feel special for the evening. Behind the scenes, he presides over a professional kitchen with talented chefs, creating delicious food in the true French style, utilising local, fresh and seasonal produce. 

I hope you have enjoyed this look at French country food in my region and perhaps someday, if you read the book, it will help provide the perfect backdrop. In the meantime, I look forward to the next time we meet, when I will introduce you to more aspects of our life in France and living the dream!

Bienvenue! Welcome to French country life.

Hi, everyone! Welcome to the first in this series of posts from the Charente region of southwest France. Over the next months, I look forward to sharing with you my experience of life in a small French village, at the heart of this beautiful region. As you can see from the map to the right, the Poitou-Charentes area is divided into four separate departments. In the south of the region you have Charente-Maritime - the coastal area to the west and further inland La Charente - the gently undulating hilly area where we made our home. If you look closely at the map, to the left of the word Charente, you can just make out the name of Angouleme, the large fortress town, which is the capital of this department. The old presbytery where our story is set, is situated in a little village 30 minutes to the south of here.

Me & Murphy my dog

One of the reasons we chose this part of France was the climate. It boasts some of the mildest and sunniest weather in the country, after the Mediterranean coastal area of the south. Around our village the countryside is vast, the Poitou-Charentes region itself covering some 10,000 square miles. The main crops in the rolling fields are sunflowers and maize, with some vineyards mostly growing grapes for the famous Pineau des Charentes. This is an aperitif created almost exclusively in the Charentes. It is a fortified wine made from a blend of lightly fermented grape must and Cognac  eau-de-vie; a rich golden aperitif with quite a kick. It didn't take us long to acquire a taste for it!

Surrounded by such beautiful countryside, it is not surprising that the 'Randonnée' is the most popular form of recreation, with Petanque or Boules a close second. It is basically a cross-country hike, often organised by the village walking club or just a group of friends. We had only moved in to the presbytery about a month, when the door bell rang and I was greeted by a group of French ladies of a certain age, dressed in sturdy walking shoes and brandishing long hiking sticks. They had kindly called to ask me to join them on the weekly Randonnée, which met each Wednesday in the village square. Through their kindness, I soon got to know my neighbours and improve my French, (although I have to say, at first, walking and talking French was a tall order and I often returned exhausted). It was, however, the most wonderful way to discover the countryside.  For the first time in my life, I walked alongside sunflowers well over six feet tall, with heads the size of huge dinner plates and marvelled how they all turned towards the sun, as it journeyed across the clear blue sky.

Coming from a small country like Ireland, I soon discovered the size of France and the vast openness of the countryside would be a wonderfully liberating part of my new adventure, which was to blossom into a life long love affair with this beautiful place. In the months ahead I look forward to sharing it with you.

Life in the south of France, in tune with the Church bells!

Welcome back everyone! After a little Tuscan dreaming, I think it's time to come back down to earth. Recently I found myself with some time on my hands. The book is finished and while I endeavour to search for a publisher, I had the idea that it would be fun to introduce you to the house at the heart of my memoir, 'The Old Presbytery'. 

We spent three wonderful years here, in the centre of a tiny village in the Charente region of south west France. In my next blogposts, I hope to share with you some of our experiences;  renovating an old French house, discovering this beautiful area of France and discussing the food of the region. Of course our story will be in the book, but what a wonderful opportunity this is, to set the scene for you. I can introduce you to the amazing house which remained at the centre of our French adventure, until family circumstances dictated our return to Ireland. Not before our renovation was complete, however, and the old presbytery was up and running, as a beautiful 'Chambre D'Hote'.

The picture below shows the house shortly after we bought it.  As to how we found it, well, it was a case of love at first sight for me. Not in an estate agents window, but on the Internet hundreds of miles away in Ireland. We did, of course, eventually view the property, but only after exploring many other regions. What we didn't fully appreciate when we moved in, however, was that the position of the house at the heart of the village and next door to the Mayor, was to make our French adventure a complete integration into village life. It meant our lives would be bound up entirely with our French neighbours, often proving both challenging and hilarious, but ultimately never boring!

The Old Presbytery

The house was built in 1852 as the presbytery for the village Church, which stands nearby. Our neighbours had many happy memories of the place.  They enjoyed telling us of times, as children, when they would attend confirmation classes in the front room and of summer Fetes in the grounds, when the whole village gathered to enjoy a family day out. They explained that our old barn in the garden, housed the 'corbillard' or hearse. This was a beautiful old horse drawn affair, brought out when any one in the village passed away.

And so it was that as we renovated this lovely old place, we lived our lives by the bells of the Church. Rising in the morning early, before the mid day heat, to the sound of the 'Angelus' and downing tools at seven in the evening, to enjoy an aperitif at the end of the working day.

Join me next time and I'll share more of this lovely region of France and village life in the Charente. 

Tuscany-Lifted into Gothic splendour to fly with the Angels!

Hi, everyone! So glad you dropped by. Just this week, I came across an e-mail from my daughter. Nothing strange there, I hear you say, and you would be right, as we often keep in touch this way. This e-mail, however, is different; it contains something of a first for me - a link to a recording of a piece of organ music. On first inspection, the subject matter of the e-mail is entitled, 'Memories of Tuscany' and below, the only text reads - 'Remember hearing this music playing in the little chapel we went into?'

The air inside is still, its coolness pouring over our sunburnt shoulders, feels like cleansing holy water, as we step inside the little chapel, out of the relentless heat of the mid-day Tuscan sun. Around us a heavenly silence hangs in the dark, damp air, so quiet that its assault on our senses is as profound as any cacophony of noise one can possibly imagine. Gradually, our eyes adjusting to the light, we focus on marble pillars, drawing our gaze upwards to the Gothic splendour of a deep-blue roof, dotted with golden stars. On either side of us simple wooden chairs face the altar, where a painting of the Virgin Mary gazes down lovingly. Her face illuminated by the light from the many ornate candles on the altar below, reflects the light of Christ in a tranquil corner of our busy world. Suddenly, the emptiness of this holy place is filled with organ music and, as our souls rise on the notes of Bach, we find ourselves lifted into Gothic splendour, to fly with the Angels.

Unbeknown to me at the time, Katie had taken out her phone and recorded the moment and playing it back today, here in my 'empty nest', I stepped out of the Tuscan sun once more, into the beauty of that magical place. You can read about our adventures, a mother and daughter enjoying 'La Dolce Vita' in the Italian sun, in a blog post I wrote some time ago now, entitled - ' Nesting in a Medici Hunting Lodge in the Hills above Florence'.

Perhaps you too enjoy visiting churches on your travels? Please do feel free to share your magical moments!

The Art of French Eating!

Welcome back, everyone! I hope you enjoyed our trip to 'Parfums Sucrés' in my last blog post. Since writing it, I have just finished reading, ' Mastering the Art of French Eating' by Ann Mah. It got me pondering my own years living in France and the profound relationship I developed with food, learning at the table of my wonderful French neighbours and sampling regional dishes from Paris, to the shores of the Cote d'Azur.  

Ann Mah, the wife of an American diplomat is a lifelong foodie and francophile. When she learns of her husband's new posting to Paris, she begins plotting the gastronomic adventures they are going to have. Shortly after their arrival, as they settle into Parisian life, however, her dream of a romantic sojourn in the City of Light is brought to an abrupt end, when her beloved husband is unexpectedly posted to Iraq for a year and Ann finds herself alone in Paris. 

 Faced with isolation, Ann must make a life for herself and it's not long before her love of food draws her out in search of comfort.  She sets off on a journey around France, looking for the signature dishes of each region, delving into their history, how they are traditionally made and at the same time meeting the amazing characters involved in their production. Dishes like cassoulet, boeuf bourguignon and the infamous andouillette sausage, are just a few of the recipes to give up their secrets. Temptingly, Ann ends each chapter with a regional recipe for us to try at home. 

Cassoulet

My own French food experience can be summed up in a word, which Ann explains very clearly towards the end of the book. The word is 'gourmandise'.  It is a wonderful word, for which there is no exact English equivalent, but it sums up the attitude of the French to food, an attitude which is ingrained in them from birth. It is basically the cultivation of an educated palate, the art of fine dining, the enjoyment of a good meal. It originates from the French word for taste, 'gout' and is all-encompassing in its description of the art of food appreciation.

In our little village in France, when you pass the school gates, the menu for the week is printed each Monday morning for parents and children to eagerly anticipate. There will be starter, main course, a cheese course and of course a dessert. Also from an early age the curriculum will include lessons in food appreciation and education of the palate. I know this all sounds a bit extreme, but what it has done for the French is to equip them with the ability to really enjoy good food.

Next time, I will talk more about the food in my region of France, La Charente.  In the meantime, if you too are a francophile, with a love of good food, why not get hold of a copy of Ann Mah's book, 'Mastering the Art of French Eating' and enjoy!

My Favourite place to eat - 'Chateau Talleyrand', Chalais France