Farm Blogs from Around the World: March 2009

Tuesday, 10 March 2009

Meet my Neighbours

My friends and neighbours (500 m. away) here in France have a farm (they have a herd of about 35 cows and they make cheese). I'm here at their house and the discussion of the day is: should they increase production, raise prices or both!

They've also started a new blog http://fermedeshauteschaumes.blogspot.com/ and I'm alarmed to see some very unflattering photos of me as we killed and butchered the two pigs our two families share.

The guy with a green beanie, a long green coat and looking confused is an American English teaching assistant who is spending a year our local high school, after 2 years with the Peace Corps in Togo.

HELP SUPPORT FARM BLOGS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.
A big ask I know, but if you can, please help me support my time on 'Farm Blogs from Around the World' by buying, reading and blogging/reviewing my book:

A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream

It's about urban downshifting to rural England (and a bit more).

I don't take any advertising on this site but your support would help me show my wife that this blog project is more than me just pursuing my obsessive interest in all things farming/gardening/smallholding!

Please support your local independent bookshop, but (yikes!) dare I say it...

A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream (Amazon.com)
A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream (Amazon.co.uk)

A Place in the Auvergne
Ian Walthew

Farm Blogs
Ranch Blogs
Rural Blogs
Countryside Blogs
Smallholding Blogs
Urban Homesteading Blogs
Homesteading Blogs
Homestead Blogs
Allotment Blogs
Apiculture Blogs
Bee-keeping Blogs
Voluntary Simplicity Blogs
Eco Farm Blogs
Modern Homesteading Blogs

Auvergne
Auvergnate
Auvergnat
Auvergnats
France
Rural France
Blogs about France

Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / vacation furnished apartment rental

Cabbage Tree Farm Recommends

Bridget from Cabbage Tree Farm in New Zealand (Recommended by me to Ian) has kindly come back to us with her recommendations for Farm Blogs From Around the World

Eco-Gites
of Lenault in Calvados, France,
Stories from an English family in France who are setting up an eco homestay and intend to supply organic veges and local produce to their guests.

2. Farmlet.co.nz
A NZ family striving towards self-sufficiency, cheese making is one of their interests among other things.

3. The Cottage Smallholder.
Not a farm, however this great blog is about an English couple trying to be more self sufficient with growing their own veg, keeping chickens, curing their own bacon and trying hard (succeeding too) to make gourmet meals from budget priced supermarket food.

HELP SUPPORT FARM BLOGS FROM
AROUND THE WORLD.
A big ask I know, but if you can, please help me support my time on 'Farm Blogs from Around the World' by buying, reading and blogging/reviewing my book:

A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream

It's about urban downshifting to rural England (and a bit more).

I don't take any advertising on this site but your support would help me show my wife that this blog project is more than me just pursuing my obsessive interest in all things farming/gardening/smallholding!

Please support your local independent bookshop, but (yikes!) dare I say it...

A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream (Amazon.com)
A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream (Amazon.co.uk)

A Place in the Auvergne
Ian Walthew

Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / vacation furnished apartment rental

Saturday, 7 March 2009

New Contributor to Farm Blogs: Please meet Liz from the Mad Bush Farm.

I'd like to say a very large thank you to recommended farm blogger Liz at Goings on at the Mad Bush Farm in New Zealand, who has kindly agreed help me edit and keep up to date Farm Blogs from Around the World.

Liz and I will be sharing the workload and I hope this will reduce the delay in getting your recommendations up here.

(She is also going to be handling the blog full-time for a short while during an upcoming hospital stay I have to do in the next few weeks.)

Liz from Goings on at The Mad Bush Farm (NZ) and now Farm Blogs From Around the World Editor

Here's a bit more info about Liz:

Liz was born and raised in Auckland New Zealand.

While she doesn't have a background in farming directly Liz has always grown up around rural life and farming.

Liz has three daughters 24,11 and ten. She live with her two youngest girls on a small twelve acre farm surrounded by the animals they have mostly raised from young.

Her cartoons and articles have been published in Rural Living, Rodney Times and the Dargaville and Districts News.

She has a background in advertising, administration and Real Estate and Liz is also the current editor of their local town newspaper.

Liz is now writing a book and in July will she will be starting a Media & Communications Degree through Massey University.

"I love the life style, the land, the animals and the people I have had the the privilege to come to know. Farming in all its forms holds a great interest for me, it's a way of life and not just a business. I've known hardship and good times and that's why I am where I am now."

I can't thank Liz enough and I hope that over time we can improve the quality and presentation of this blog, while keeping it's basic organic growth simple and user friendly - good bloggers recommending better ones leading to the best from around the world.

If you're interested in joining us as a volunteer editor (the workload isn't heavy but easier when shared, then drop me a line).

Onwards.

Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / vacation furnished apartment rental

Friday, 6 March 2009

Cabbage Tree Farm (Kaipara District Northland New Zealand) Recommended

Cabbage Tree Farm was recommended . Here's a word from Bridget in New Zealand

The Cabbage Tree Farm blog aims to describe some of the day to day happenings on our 10 acre piece of rural land in Northland, New Zealand. Our priority is to produce for ourselves as much fresh, natural food (i.e. not sprayed with pesticides) as we can. We moved from the city onto our ‘block’ (short for lifestyle block, the common NZ description of our land) in mid 2006.

We are working on the land: establishing an orchard, trying to maintain a good year round supply of vegetables and herbs in our garden, landscape our surroundings for privacy and wind protection, and raise a small number of stock. At present we have our own supply of fresh eggs, some meat from our chickens and 5 cows (for meat later).

We are striving towards being more self sufficient. We're interested in growing food, hunting/fishing and gathering. Future projects could include bee keeping, cheese making, making homemade wine, various crafts such as candle making (beeswax) and weaving flax (Phormium tenax) baskets.

I suppose the majority of my posts are recipes. Also I post details of progress (and failures!) in our veg garden and orchard, and details of other projects we're doing around the farm.

Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / vacation furnished apartment rental

Wednesday, 4 March 2009

What is the best American memoir about urban downshifting/downsizing/voluntary simplicity/modern homesteading/ moving to the USA countryisde?

Since the publication of my book in the U.S.A. about moving from city life to the countryside (A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream), I've been involved in an interesting dialogue over at www.amazon.com about what is the best memoir written by an American, leaving city life for one of 'voluntary simplicity'. I specifically asked for some recommendations and was pleased to get quite a few which I'll share here.

One person involved said that to find a contemporary memoir, one is better off looking to the blogosphere than to main stream publishers, and that may be why I am finding it difficult finding a good contemporary memoir on this subject.

Anyway, you can take part in the discussion either here, or at www.amazon.com but for now the books that have been recommended to me:

MsBecky says:
"There are books out there. The concept of downshifting is not yet in mainstream American vocabulary. "Voluntary Simplicity" is the more common phrase people here identify with. The NYTimes published an article about a family who sold all their possessions, the house and expensive cars for an RV. (Chasing Utopia, Family Imagines No Possessions: By RALPH BLUMENTHAL and RACHEL MOSTELLER Published: May 17, 2008.)

The article author and headline writer eluded to "Utopia" and that is the biggest hindrance the Voluntary Simplicity movement has these-days: The hippie allusion.

So most people chalk it up as crazy talk, or impractical, or "a bit extreme" is what I most often hear when talking to people. They couldn't be more wrong.

There is a strong blog world out there documenting life and times of families choosing voluntary simplicity.

The family in the NYTimes article can be found at www.cagefreefamily.com.. I'm sure they can put you in contact with other families keeping blogs who have downshifted.

Runners World this month has a short article about Jim Simpson who downshifted to single living in his overcab camper and travels the nation running marathons with his 50 state marathon friends. He does not have a book out, but its proof that there are folks out there choosing voluntary simplicity downshifting!

If the concept is "a bit extreme" for mainstream Americans, then finding a published book on the subject is also a challenge. But, yes there are a few out there.

(1) Simple Gifts by June Sprigg about her time in the 1970s when she lived a summer with the elder women of the last remaining Shaker community;

(2) Simple Days : A Journal on What Really Matters (Paperback) by Marlene Schiwy, and while she doesn't embrace the ditch everything and start over concept she does tackle the same questions you ask about;

(3) A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins is a "classic" in the eyes of some. In a school I taught at it was used as the novel in a HS Geography class, and is the story of a disillusioned man who walked from New York to New Orleans 1973-1975, mostly along the Appalachian trail. A good read, but probably not as contemporary as you seek;

(4) Choosing Simplicity: Real People Finding Peace and Fulfillment in a Complex World (Paperback) by Vicki Robin and Linda Breen Pierce is a collection of stories from people today who have chosen voluntary simplicity. Vicki Robin co-authored Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century (Paperback) and Linda B. Pierce has written books on living deliberately. This book may be the closest "book memoir" out there.

Other books that I've read that have helped solidify the option of downsizing, is A Walk Across France about a British Couple, and Sagittarians Always Want to be Somewhere Else: A Memoir by Karen McCusker (Paperback - Nov 21, 2006) about being an Ex-Pat all over the world.

But again, those are about overseas experiences, not a contemporary American memoir.

My vote?

The Voluntary Simplicity families in the blog world are your best bet.

Check in with the Cage Free Family!

Happy Reading!

Oh! I almost forgot! If you are looking for books about relocating to the countryside, then you may want to use a search term like "Modern Homesteading." This is the US term people most use when describing families who choose farm life, chores, using a well, organic farming, rain water collecting.

"Eco Farming" is a less used term. I know some of the smaller, family based organic farms have blogs, but may not have memoirs out yet.

http://www.simpleliving.net/main/ is a site you may find helpful. They have many of the how-to books you note that you don't want to read, but perhaps writing them an email may put you in touch with self published memoirs or other memoirs that won't be at a larger bookstore chain.

These folks are overwhelmingly helpful to those who are leaping into voluntary simplicity / downshifting / homesteading.

Hope this helps Ian! The reason you may not be finding the book you seek is because the people living those lives are blogging instead of contacting publishers about their memoir!

Happy hunting!

Nancy Diggins says:
Hi Ian,You may like Elizabeth Gilbert's The Last American Man. I found it very interesting, and although not as contemporary as you may like, a very good read about a man who leaves the modern "American lifestyle" to seek living within the wilderness, and being as self sufficient as the pioneers of days long past.

Karen R. Lindquist says:
I don't know if it helps, but Helen and Scott Nearing wrote Living the Good Life (1954). They became the leading gurus of dropping out and opting for a sustainable existence in the USA before it was fashionable. Seems perfect for you.

HELP SUPPORT FARM BLOGS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.
A big ask I know, but if you can, please help me support my time on 'Farm Blogs from Around the World' by buying, reading and blogging/reviewing my book:

A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream

It's about urban downshifting and voluntary simplicity in rural England (and a bit more).

I don't take any advertising on this site but your support would help me show my wife that this blog project is more than me just pursuing my obsessive interest in all things farming/gardening/smallholding!

Please support your local independent bookshop, but (yikes!) dare I say it...

A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream (Amazon.com)
A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream (Amazon.co.uk)

A Place in the Auvergne
Ian Walthew

Farm Blogs
Ranch Blogs
Rural Blogs
Countryside Blogs
Smallholding Blogs
Urban Homesteading Blogs
Homesteading Blogs
Homestead Blogs
Allotment Blogs
Apiculture Blogs
Bee-keeping Blogs

Voluntary Simplicity Blogs

Eco Farms Blogs

Modern Homesteading Blogs

Auvergne
Auvergnate
Auvergnat
Auvergnats
France
Rural France
Blogs about France

Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / vacation furnished apartment rental

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ABOUT FARM BLOGS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

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GENERAL RESOURCES

At Farm Blogs I am trying to gather in one place the very best of global blogging about farms and anyone involved in food or natural fibre production on any scale.

The idea behind Farm Blogs From Around the World is that people involved in farming/rural blogging recommend the blogs that they themselves find the most interesting.

When a blog is recommended to me, I add the blog to the blog rolls below, then contact the recommended blog, asking for their own recommendations.

And so it grows, organically, hoping that good bloggers will lead us to great ones.

Thanks for your interest and support.

This is a non-commercial blog and doesn't take advertising.

Contact me: info AT ianwalthew.com

Blog: A Place in the Auvergne

Books:

A Place in My Country (Amazon.com USA)

A Place in My Country (Amazon.co.uk)

Website: Ian Walthew

HUGH-FEARNLEY WHITTINGSTALL

‘When stressed out media exec Ian Walthew panic buys a Cotswold cottage as an escape route from the urban treadmill, he unwittingly acquires a window on a corner of rural Britain at work and at play, and his writer’s eye sees just what’s going on. Walthew has a genuine gift for bringing both people and places to life and marshals his runaway real life narratives with a novelist’s skill.
The story of his surprising friendship with his neighbour Norman - who is trying to keep his ramshackle farm and his dignity together with a few strands of baler twine, while his millionaire neighbours embrace the prairie concept of modern industrial farming - is compelling and often deeply moving.
And Walthew’s own struggle with age-old issues of identity, friendship, community and a place to call home are fresh, sympathetic and never trying. It’s not the sort of book you’d pick up expecting a page-turner, but that’s exactly what it turn's out to be. It even has a proper ending.’
Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall
http://www.rivercottage.net/

TIM BUTCHER

‘I have been reading about the British countryside all my life but this is the first post-modern take on a national asset so routinely taken for granted. Author Ian Walthew takes a 12-inch plough to the cosy complacency that so many apply to the subject and reveals that 21st century rural life is not a place for the genteel - in a corner of Gloucestershire most commonly viewed by outsiders from their 4x4s as they hurry to overpriced weekend retreats, he finds a farming heartbeat that is proud and defiant, defended by a cast of characters that outshine The Archers. A revelation of a book.’
Tim Butcher
Author of Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart(Richard and Judy Galaxy Book of the Year 2008, 3rd Prize Winner)

THE OBSERVER

'Stressed city couple seeks slower life in Cotswolds idyll'. The premise is so familiar there's even a predictably technical term for it: 'downshifting'.
Yet it's hard to think in those terms about A Place in My Country, given the care with which Ian Walthew has skirted all the sprung traps of nostalgia and sentiment.
A thoughtful observer and magpie-ish collector of oral history, Walthew has a sharp sense of the absurdities and the assets of his native land, reinforced by years living overseas. In his country life, escaped cows and the hunt ball jostle for space with barn raves and hawkish property developers.
Avoiding the usual bland elegy for the rustic and redemptive, his book is a valuable memoir, both personal and social, a meditation on belonging in one of many Englands.'
The Observer

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

‘Having lived and worked abroad as a director of the International Herald Tribune for most of his adult life, Walthew, along with his Australian wife, Han, made a snap decision, aged 34, to buy a house in Gloucestershire, and embrace life in the country.
This is familiar territory, but Walthew combines his own story - coming to terms with the untimely deaths of his father and brother - with that of the land and the people who make up village life.
Funny, touching and ultimately very moving, this is a beautiful, unsentimental account of a personal loss that is reflected in the rapidly changing texture of life in rural England.’
Sunday Telegraph

CHRISTCHURCH PRESS

Who hasn't thought, occasionally, of chucking it all in and starting up a new life in the country?
After years in France climbing the corporate ladder, Ian Walthew finds himself back in his native England and, with a working life looming in London, does just that, although it must be said more by accident than by design..
On a whim, he and his wife buy a cottage in the Cotswolds – surely one of -England's prettiest regions.
Walthew is something of a burnt-out case when they arrive, and the story of this book is as much one of his own regeneration and coming to terms with his past, as it is an account of a life in the country.
As Walthew adapts to his new situation, it is his neighbour, Norman, a struggling, small-scale farmer (who barely acknowledges the new arrivals in the first few months) who gradually becomes the focal point of much of their day-to-day existence. Having lived what could be seen as a fairly typical modern life, flitting around the world for work and leisure, Walthew has his eyes opened to his own country by a man who has rarely left the area.
Through Norman – and his hard, battling, rustic life – Walthew develops a greater appreciation of what is there, and, just as importantly, what is being lost as the rural landscape – both social and physical – is irrevocably altered by 'progress'. It is a disappearing life – traditional farms pushed aside by bigger operations and developers catering to affluent lifestylers.
Walthew is not a hopeless romantic – he is well aware of the economic forces at work. But you can't help but feel that on many scores he's absolutely right, and while the country may be economically richer, it will be socially poorer as Norman and the likes are gradually squeezed from the land.
Well written and well constructed, this is an enjoyable, funny, often poignant book, and one that will resonate with many New Zealanders.

Waikato Times (NZ)

'As an ex-Pom and a current country dweller I found this book both moving and sad.
Walthew was a high-flying media executive whose jet-setting lifestyle had driven him to the edge of breakdown.
When a business reorganisation sees he and wife Hannah moved from Paris back to England, a Sunday drive finds a cottage in the Cotswolds and a dramatic change of lifestyle.
Hannah was a web designer and Ian thought he'd get work as a consultant.
Instead he found himself doing a lot of running, and very slowly getting to know some of the locals.
When a miracle happens and a longed-for but seemingly impossible pregnancy becomes a reality, bringing them baby Annie, their affinity with a rural lifestyle seems assured.
I found very moving Walthew's narrative, with its vivid descriptions of the English countryside and its people. However, while the varied flora and fauna may be still there, at least in some places, The massive changes being wrought by money, the class system, industrial farming and modernisation are making irreversible changes to the rural population and way of life which has long been thought of as quintessentially English.
His farmer neighbour, Norman, is a taciturn but determined remnant of what was once an area dominated by small mixed farming, mainly done by tenants of the landowning class.
Ian becomes aware of the difficulties faced through the closure of local sales, and the competition for help from local contractors.
Lack of work and dwindling finances finally force Ian and Hannah to give up their rural dream, and move to Brussels to recoup.
What struck me about Walthew's story was the various similarities to what is happening here in New Zealand. An interesting, but sobering read.'

OXFORD TIMES

'Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone. The story of finding the dream cottage, the impulse buy, and the last-minute panic are standard for this genre, but Walthew has some more interesting things to say. His outgoing personality - and perhaps his cosmopolitan background, and his Australian wife - allowed him to integrate into village life but keep an outsider's point of view. He gradually realised that the villagers were far from the united community of townies' dreams, and that economics was forcing drastic changes on traditional rural life. Highly recommended.'
Oxford Times

FINANCIAL TIMES

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in.
For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze.
Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.
What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’
Financial Times

LUCY WADHAM

‘This is a story about a man who leaves the reassuring numbness of the rat race, in order to relearn how to live. Not usually a non-fiction reader, I'm generally wary of 'confessional' books, which I often find narcissistic and dull.
A Place in My Country is beautifully written, poignant and wise and has all the narrative pace of the best fiction.
For anyone who loves England but doesn't necessarily know why.’
Lucy Wadham
Author of Lost, Castro’s Dream, Greater Love (Faber and Faber). Her first novel, Lost, was shortlisted for the Macallan Gold Dagger Award.

WWW.THEBOOKBAG.CO.UK

‘At the age of 34 Ian Walthew was the worldwide marketing director of the International Herald Tribune living in various parts of the world and leading a jet-set lifestyle. He was also on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Faced with a move back to London, he resigned and rather than buy a property in London he and his Australian wife bought a cottage in the Cotswolds to give Ian the peace which he needed to recuperate.
The cottage was next door to Norman's farm. Norman was a bit fearsome until you got to know him, but his struggles to keep the farm going in the face of falling prices and competition from the highly mechanised 'agri-business' arable farms kept him under a lot of pressure. Little by little Ian and Han develop a relationship with Norman and the other characters of this tightly-knit community.
When I started this book I did wonder if it was going to be an English version of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence - an amusing and entertaining read but ultimately rather superficial. I couldn't have been further from the truth. This isn't just the story of two people wanting an escape from the city; it's an examination of the state of the British countryside and a careful consideration of whether or not the way of life is sustainable. At times the writing had me close to tears.
The stars of this book are the people. Although Ian narrates the book he doesn't dominate it, but allows the villagers to shine through. It was fascinating to see his relationship with them develop after it was initially assumed by some people in the village that he and Han would be part of a more upper-class set. The couple's growing relationship with Norman sees him take a fuller part in village life. Geoff, the larger than life landlord of the local pub becomes a firm friend, but it's Tom, the ex-gamekeeper, to whom Ian becomes closest and who introduces him to the real country way of life.
It's several days now since I finished the book, but I was so moved by it that I didn't feel able to write about it immediately. It's by no means an easy read, but it's one of the most rewarding books that I've read for quite a while.’
www.thebookbag.co.uk

HOW CAN YOU HELP?

If you would like to be listed on this site, please write to me at info AT ianwalthew.com.

If you would like to recommend your favourite farm blogs (and you don't need to be a farmer or blogger to do this), please also write to me.

If you are listed here and haven't sent me your own recommendations, then please, return the love! And if you like, please feel free to link to Farm Blogs From Around the World.

This is quite an ambitious project; it will only work if bloggers share their knowledge and insights and spread the word.

So please, if you can, do so:

Please link to this site, email your farm/rural blogging friends, invite them to join in.

A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

'The Auvergne'
by Ian Walthew
(Published in L'Express - in French: 31st July, 2008)

Auvergnats always ask why you chose their ‘pays’, can’t understand how you could leave yours.

You don’t want to disappoint with the prosaic truth.

That you were searching for anywhere with a little land, south of an east-west axis traversing Lyon (the weather); more than 100 km from any airport that can take a Ryanair jet (to avoid their passengers).

Somewhere to hide from people talking about property prices, private schools and ‘plans for the weekend’.

That you were searching for a place where you could still smell the soil and the ‘fumier’ and the ‘cave’ on the clothes of your friends.

That you saw a house on the internet in a region called the Auvergne, a region you had never visited; that this house was too close to a RN, but the contours rolled well over the map, distant from the blue lines of autoroutes – you’d pass by this place on your way back to Paris from the south one day.

And we did.

People think they can find good houses, places, people. But you can’t. They find you. You set out, drift around, and wash up on a friendly shore.

Most people are scared of the open sea, the great expanse of the Auvergne, so they take the TGV to places they know, places where they have friends and acquaintances, places where they drop anchor with their urban determination to self-associate.

The Auvergne has no TGV, it’s poor. That’s why the people are so welcoming and hospitable, says my neighbor, Jean-Baptiste.

He’s 86 now, a retired ‘menusier’, the missing fingers to prove it. He speaks Oc, at the market – when it’s not too hot, too cold, too wet, too snowy, too foggy - when the ‘troisieme generation’ go down the mountain early in the morning to talk a lot and buy a little.

Rich people, rich places, they’re not so welcoming, they don’t give so much. Arms are held wide to greet you but the embrace never tightens.

My wife didn’t want to go too far south, to the land of two seasons and burnt, aching, brown grass. In the Auvergne, winter is long, but spring and autumn explode and implode in shades of colours too fleeting to paint; the summer is hot and languid, deserved by the trials of winter, not an easy given.

The Auvergnats like to think of themselves as reserved, cautious, private. They can’t show their endless curiosity about you, because here privacy is hallowed, so their questions are absurdly roundabout or so direct so as to appear unlike a question at all - more a statement of fact that you may wish to confirm or not. (I do, they don’t.)

But they do open up, and quicker than they like to acknowledge. They are a kind, warm people with a brusque façade but one which is easily chipped in the cold, melted in the heat of shared seasons.

How would you describe Auvergnats, Jean-Baptiste?

‘There aren’t many of us left.’

He pauses, sitting on a bench in his ‘potagère’, made of a piece of wood rested on two old oil drums, in the shade of June apple tree, green and hopeful. Reflecting. ‘Amoureux,’ he smiles.

And their faults?

‘We have none. No, one mustn’t exaggerate. Of course, I’m sure we do.’‘Such as?’

He doesn’t like to say.

They’re not to be shared lightly, not with the readers of a newspaper that Jean-Baptiste has only vaguely heard of, and certainly never read.

So this ‘foreigner’ (and here that word doesn’t mean coming from another nation) will tell you things you know but do not understand.

That ‘radinerie’ (stinginess) is a virtue, nothing is wasted. And you dare to speak of reducing consumption, of recycling and saving this planet.

That for the Auvergnats, land is an obsession: their willingness to argue over a 20 cm strip of useless ground; the story of a family picnic where two brothers end up fighting over who would sit under the shade of which of two trees.

So how did we get here? We stumbled, that’s the answer. Emotional refugees from a land of loss to the Auvergne, a place of endless discovery.

The EU and one arm of the government pours millions into the region to attract incomers like us, while another Minister closed the maternity ward and threatens Ambert hospital that brought us near this town, where our third child was born.

I asked Brice Hortefeux (when he was sent last year from a place called Paris to win over the bourgeoisie in the valley) why this was, why one hand could give so much while the other took away life, our future.

That’s a good question, he said.

(His suit looked very expensive in our marketplace, positively gleaming, his tie so fat and silky, his hair coiffured like a woman’s: that must be what they call ‘French flair’.)

So what’s the answer then?

His bodyguards hustled him away. He didn’t stay long.

The Auvergne: apparently a part of a country, ‘une et indivisible’. But I see no proof.

A place where the poor own their homes and their land, and have done for generations.

Where everyone has the right to build their own home on their own land, however ugly-pink and destructive to the Auvergne’s greatest asset – the ‘patrimoine’ that serves the tourists – and turn the roads leading to its towns into messy, elongated stains.

A place where Jean-Baptiste, the third generation of his family to live in his house, who has had three neighbouring families in his family’s life here, his place, greets an Anglo-Australian couple with two children and a removal fan from Brussels without missing a beat (nor when his dog kills our cat two days later, nor when our dog kills his chickens). Curious. Calm.

It was close to misery here; people got by on 3 or 4 cows. They ate beef only once a year, even the rich who could live well off 10-15 cows. The Fete du Pays, August 10th, a beef pot-au-feu.

We eat more beef now. There is little misery, not much money. But life in the Auvergne is a life apart: simple, straightforward, our table the farm food of ‘petits producteurs’ (still); clean air and cold water that slide off and out of primordial mountains; stories old and new, jokes, a small universe, an immense space of freedom.

Do we live in France? I’ve no idea.

Ian Walthew is the author of ‘A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream’ (Phoenix, May 2008, London).

Photos of his mundane, simple life from his place in the Auvergne can be found at www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com

A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

'The Old Soldier in Hospital'
by Ian Walthew
(Published in the International Herald Tribune, 17th April, 2008)

PUY-DE-DÔME, France: The world has turned, the markets have dropped, panic is in the air. I suppose.

Here, in our mountain home, we are sick with flu, first me, then my wife. The weather is closed in.

Down the mountain, at the hospital in town for my monthly treatment - because of a medical condition, they need to top up my gamma globulins every month - I sleep so deeply that two of my bottles are changed without Pascale, the nurse, stirring me.

When I awake, I have a roommate. The Auvergnat is old, frail. I am English and 42 years old. Normally I have a room to myself.

When I lived in Brussels, the day treatment ward was shiny and new - 16 reclining seats, facing each other. I used to take the same chair by the window, with its view of the power station.

If you shared the same treatment rhythm as someone, you could see their steady improvement, or more often their gradual decline. Four hours, once a month, watching the person opposite fade. Never did we speak.

Here they closed the maternity ward, but the hospital remains open; two beds a room, a view of the church and the hills above. And people speak to each other.

We strike up a conversation and I discover that my roommate shares the family name of one of the masons working at our house.

In these parts it is a common name. Despite this, he knows the mason, and his father and mother, and where he lives and how their families are related.

Monsieur Beal has had six operations in as many years. He used to weigh 86 kilograms, now he weighs just 48 kilograms, 106 pounds. He has had a kidney removed, and half his pancreas, if I hear him right, and more, too.

When I ask if I might take his picture he stands tall, like the soldier he was. He did his military service in the elite para commandos under the command of an infamous colonel.Monsieur Beal did 26 combat drops in Algeria, mostly intercepting rebels on the Tunisian and Moroccan borders.

When not fighting, he was the colonel's driver: "It was like that. At base we were drivers or cooks, but when we jumped we were all the same."The colonel? "He was a great man. For his 40th birthday, he gave the entire regiment leave and we drank so much beer, we purged our bodies of the desert through every orifice."

What happened to the colonel?

"He was captured at Dien Bien Phu, but he escaped, pretending to collapse, while crossing a single file wooden bridge, into a crocodile filled river."

Monsieur Beal likes the English. His regiment was deployed from Algeria to Cyprus. They weren't told why until a few days before the operation, but it was for the drop on the bridges over the Suez Canal, south of Port Said.

"We had the easy bit, we French only had a couple of regiments to spare, everyone else was in Algeria."

Resistance was low. "The enemy soldiers weren't soldiers, just men conscripted at the last minute, without shoes, without rifles. A few nests of resistance, some pill-boxes, it was over very quickly. We found piles of abandoned helmets that could fill this room. The Israelis had destroyed the Egyptian Air Force; it was all done before we dropped."

On sentry duty at the canal, the English guards never took out a pack of cigarettes without offering one of their fine smokes to us French - the French Army gave us straw to smoke. And the English always poured us hot tea, with milk, without asking. With Egyptian honey for sugar. They were good men."

In Cyprus, Monsieur Beal and his fellow soldiers were given a tour of a British warship. As they went down the gangplank afterwards, each of them were handed a cornet of frites - not a little thing, like an ice cream, but a great big bag, hot and steaming. They were the best frites he had ever eaten. He never forgot those frites.

The last poilu - the last French World War I infantryman - is dead. Now it is the men of Indochina and Algeria we shall speak of.

Why is the past always more interesting to me than the present? Why is the heard more rich than the read?

Twenty-six combat drops. Suez. The colonel.

The colonel is still alive. And so is Monsieur Beal, next to me in a hospital bed in the Auvergne.

Ian Walthew is the author of ‘A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream’ (Phoenix, May 2008, London).