Farm Blogs from Around the World: A Place in the Auvergne

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Thursday, 23 October 2008

A Place in the Auvergne Recommends

My wife being Australian and having three Australian passport holding kids from 2.5 to nearly 7, I am always keen to find good farm blogs from Australia, to help keep the Australian in them alive and well, given we live in rural France.

So I am delighted to recommend Bredbo Valley View Farm, in New South Wales, Australian, which was brought to my attention by farmer/blogger Martyn. (Martyn has also sent me some great recommendations which I hope to post shortly.)

Sustainable - Ethical - Local – Valley View Farm is a small family farm featuring a rustic old tumbled down cottage on the plains of the Southern Tablelands, filled with animals both big and small – the cottage that is!.

Here's what Martyn has to say about his blog and farm:

I grew up in the Army, following Dad from posting too posting, 11 schools in 10 years. When he discharged we settled in the hinterland of the Gold Coast. My parents found a beautiful old dairy farm tucked away in a green valley above a crystal clear mountain creek and I lived there until I joined the Army.

I love the outdoors, I love the solitary, the feeling of self and the isolation of farm life.

My wife had a different up bringing, she is the youngest daughter of German immigrants, grew up in the South Australian outback and loved having her family around.

Farming is something that we both talked about and always wanted to do.

Around 2000 we started looking to move into the country, but as Australian real estate prices skyrocketed and rural property prices exploded we began to worry it would become way too expensive. So we jumped in boots and all. In hind site we probably shouldn't have bought a place in the middle of a drought - but hey, it was cheap.

So for the last eighteen months it's been adventure after adventure. We usually have more animals in the house then humans, it's getting that bad I have started calling the house the Barn.

The kids love the adventure, the wife loves the freedom and I love getting up early and fixing electric fences.

So what did we do on our farm?

When we started we had the brilliant idea of breeding free range rare breed pigs and growing heritage vegitables. We started with six pigs - I now have eighty, we have 15 hectares of oats, recently acquired 40 sheep and have been given three goats. The fun never stops.

Our Blog is a diary of our daily adventures, our ideas, hopes and thoughts.

A Place in the Auvergne
A Place in My Country
Ian Walthew

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Wednesday, 15 October 2008

A Place in the Auvergne Recommends Goodness Gracious Acres (Florida, USA; 1.5 acres; goats, Nubians, turkeys, chickens)

As a blogger of my own on Farm Blogs from Around the World (even if my own rural blog is a bit different - check it out) I'd like to recommend Goodness Gracious Acres, A.K.A jojosfarmlife.blogspot.com in West Palm Beach, Florida.

"Well sort of.. Closer to Lake Okeechobee than Donald Trump", Jojo laughs.

What I like about Goodness Gracious Acres is that it is one of best mergers between someone's non-farming professional life and their mini-farming experiences that I've come accross. Jojo is a graphic designer outside and inside her 1.5 acre "ranchette" as she terms it, although, she writes with a smile, that it seems much bigger to her.

Goodness Gracious Acres is a wonderfully ecclectic mix of material from the intersection of her professional, personal and rural life. Writing myself as someone who is an author, but who used to work in marketing, design and communications (and still reluctantly dabbles, now and again, to pay the bills) Goodness Gracious Acres also had a particular appeal to me personally.

Many of the bloggers on Farm Blogs from Around the World are not full-time farmers, that's a reality, and I would recommend anyone who wants to attempt this type of 'mixed-blog' to check it out.

Naturally, with Jojo being a graphic designer, the design values are high, and it's a little self-promoting of that side of her life - but tell me a farm blog that isn't, in some way, a little self-promoting, from produce & products to farmers markets to B&B and to bloggers 'day jobs', so I won't hold that against her!

She's the first to admit that it's not "a real big farm" but she still likes to live as rurally as possible. Jojo makes cheese and soap from her dairy goats, sells the milk and breeds and raises Nubians, turkeys and chickens.

Goodness Gracious Acres has been active for about 3 years and this is how Jojo describes it and herself:

"Animals. Animals. Animals. City girl gone slightly country. Totally, left of center. Living the simple life, on my own. With a little ranting thrown in to keep the balance. I live on a small "ranchette" with over 30 animals makes for some interesting stories. And in between mucking the stalls and milking goats I support my habit of rural living, by being a creative director, designer, art director, hack, type slave, layout artist, communicator. I blurr the lines between work and play all the time. Why wasn't it always this way?"

That's me too, and I couldn't agree more.

Some days she writes about design and artistic endeavors, some days it’s about bucks in rut.

"I’m not bipolar," Jojo wrote to me, "but my blog is".

Check it out.

Monday, 6 October 2008

Pigs from A Place in the Auvergne

A Place in the Auvergne went to get their pigs on Saturday, four that they will share with five families.

The barn temperature at the farm was 28 degrees Celsius for the piglets on the sow, 25 once off the sow and 20 thereafter.

We're worried ours won't take the shock and warmth is 1/3 of pig management. We've yet to plank the concrete floor of our pig-sty too. So work to be done.

For more on the day out and pictures of a typical mixed French farm in the Auvergne that we went to pick up our 25-28kg pigs from, visit A Place in the Auvergne.

A Sow

The Dad

Two of the new arrivals

Their new home

Friday, 12 September 2008

French market pictures

Many of the bloggers on Farm Blogs From Around the World sell their produce at weekly markets.

I go to our weekly local market every Thursday, sometimes helping out my cheese making friends and neighbours, or selling my books in July and August, and as a customer virtually every week.

In fact, as a family of five, we do nearly all our food shopping at the market, save staples like rice and pasta, and some other meat which we get on barter or buy from a friend who produces organic beef or from our local butcher.

We also do other barter (e.g. hay for potatoes), have our own garden, orchard and chickens, and best of all, there is our very generous 86 year old neighbour Jean-Baptiste who has to be the best vegetable gardener I have ever met, and who gives us lots of produce and advice.

If you'd like to look at photos of our local French market here in the Auvergne, you can visit my blog A Place in the Auvergne and click onto the label 'Marche' or look for any posting titled a Thursday.

I started this blog at the beginning of the year (but the labels only later in the year, so again, look for postings from any week entitled Thursday) so you can see the produce, colours and crowds of the market right through an entire year.

For my follower The Dairy Princess in particular, here are some photos of the goats cheeses made by another of my local friends, photos you can also find at A Place in the Auvergne, Thursday, 11th September, 2008.

Monday, 8 September 2008

AOC Auvergne Cheeses (France)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I accompanied my friend and neighbour Laurent to the 3rd Summer University of the French Branch of Slow Food. (For more pictures of our day out, visit A Place in the Auvergne.)

I attended two work shops, the first being on the cheeses of the Auvergne region where I live in France.

A presentation was given by MARIE DE METZ NOBLAT of WWW.FROMAGIUM.FR.

The English version of her blog is called Caseophile.

"For cheese lovers (caesus = cheese, phile=who likes) here is an English version of the French blog "Fromagium" written by Marie de METZ NOBLAT, consultant in cheese marketing - creation of cheese & wine events. You will find here infos on cheeses, cheeses & wines… Caseophile & Fromagium: all you always wanted to know about cheese !"

Whilst it was an excellent presentation on the AOC cheeses of the Auvergne, it did not present the many producers in the Auvergne who have decided NOT to become members of their local AOC.

Happily Olivier from Fromagerie Nivesse in Clermont Ferrand made up for this by organising a tasting of 4 cheeses, only three of which were AOC cheeses.

It's worth remembering that AOC is NOT necessarily a guarantee of quality. The more likely stamp of quality - but not always - is 'fermier' cheese (farm) which is cheese that MUST be produced at the farm using the milk of the cows from the farm.

However, there is no obligation for a farmer in a given region to participate in his or her local AOC and many don't.

This is because they are often at odds at with the very wide generic definitions of the cheese that can carry the local AOC mark, and often at odds with the quality of the local AOC mark.

A good example of this would be Laurent's 'Fourme Fermier'.

It is produced at his farm, by he and his two colleagues in a co-operative set up. It is near to Ambert (of the AOC Fourme D'Ambert), in fact much nearer than most of the milk which goes into making AOC Fourme D'Ambert).

What is more, his cheese is 'fermier', and of all the AOC Fourme D'Ambert, one of the great secrets is how little of the cheese AOC Fourme D'Ambert is 'fermier' (there is just ONE AOC fermier producer); and how little of the milk suppliers to the industrial cheese makers that make AOC Fourme D'Ambert come from anywhere near Ambert - indeed much of the milk doesn't even come from the department which Ambert is situated in (Puy de Dome).

But that's another story, and perhaps one of the reasons Laurent's cheese can be found in Michelin stared restaurants and the best cheese shops accross France.

Indeed the French magazine L'Express, one of the biggest selling magazines in France with a weekly circulation of 650,000, when writing about Laurent's cheese, said that the only problem with this sublime fourme is that when you taste it, it will make you think less of any other fourme you have ever tasted.

Along with Marie's presentation there was a tasting of four different cheeses:

Laurent's Fourme Fermier (North on picture of plate)
A garlic flavoured cheese (East)
A 'tomme fermier' (South)
A cantal (West)

Marie de Metz Noblat, Laurent Dumont Saint Priest

and Olivier of Fromagerie Nivesse

Fromages AOC D'Auvergne

The following photos are of the slides from Marie's presentation. They are in French and I'm afraid I don't have the time to translate them at the moment, but if you would like further information, you can write to me at info AT ianwalthew.com.

For now I have added the web site for each of the AOC cheeses mentioned, and each of these sites can be accessed in English.

AOC CANTAL

AOC SALERS

AOC FOURME D'AMBERT

AOC BLEU D'AUVERGNE

AOC FROMAGES D'AUVERNGE

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008.

THE PRESENTATION SLIDES WERE PREPARED BY MARIE DE METZ NOBLAT OF http://www.fromagium.fr/.

THE ENGLISH VERSION OF HER BLOG IS CALLED

Caseophile

"For cheese lovers (caesus = cheese, phile=who likes) here is an English version of the French blog "Fromagium" written by Marie de METZ NOBLAT, consultant in cheese marketing - creation of cheese & wine events. You will find here infos on cheeses, cheeses & wines… Caseophile & Fromagium: all you always wanted to know about cheese !"

A Place in the Auvergne

A Place in My Country

Ian Walthew

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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.

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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

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

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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).