Farm Blogs from Around the World: Skoog Farm

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Monday, 6 October 2008

October at Skoog Farm (NY, U.S.A.; 5 acres; horses; organic garlic, vegetables and flowers)

It's always a pleasure to hear from Farm Blogs from Around the World bloggers with seasonal updates from their part of the world.

If you'd like to send me some photos and text, please feel free to do so (no more than once a month and no more than 5 photos please!)

Here's news and pictures from Skoog Farm in NY state, U.S.A.

"Ian...we are surrounded by 120 acres of soybeans that should be harvested soon. After nearly a week of rain, the sun is back out and the air is crisp. The orchard at Apple Creek Farm is bursting with fruit. Our Farm Market continues to be full of vendors."

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Monday, 8 September 2008

Farm Market in western New York (7th September, 2008)

Thanks to The Skoog Farm Journal for these pictures of the local produce available at their local Farm Market in the in the village of Brockport, western New York (photos taken 7th September, 2008).

The market takes places every Sunday from 8-2, and was the idea of Carrie Maziarz, a young woman on the Village Board, about 4 years ago.

One of the streets is closed off and a dozen vendors/farmers bring in their goods.

"It starts in June", writes Lori, "and runs through the end of October, with this being the time when the variety is the greatest. The produce is less expensive than that found in the local super markets, and rain or shine, has a great following."

"We also have a bakery, a sausage maker, and a florist represented."

"One of the side benefits, is the socialization that is taking place. There are now umbrella tables set up for people to sit at and chat with their friends... it turns into real community experience and we love it."

"Here in western New York we have an amazing number of orchards and farms that grow a great variety of vegetables. The sun and rain may not have been good for making hay, but it sure was perfect for making gardens grow. The basket of veggies is from our own garden."

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Wednesday, 27 August 2008

Hay Harvest News from Skoog Farm (NY, U.S.A)

"At long last, the rain let up for a stretch of 5 days," writes The Skoog Farm Journal in an email, "and the farmers managed to get in some hay. Some of them have lost nearly 70% of their crop. We had 300 bales delivered last week...combined with what we got in July, we are hoping we are set for the winter."

Thanks Lori for the news.

Here in the Auvernge, I have to report we have had a great summer and a wonderful hay harvest. At A Place in the Auvernge we barter hay for potatoes, until we get some livestock, which we are hoping to do, perhaps next year - small kids, house renovation, one thing at a time!

It's nice to see small bales. Even here in the mountains it's a rare sight, large round Heston bales being the order of the day for nearly every farmer here.

Sad, because bale bumping on a hot day has to be one of my favourite work-outs.

JUST A WORD ON PHOTOS AND NEWS

At Farm Blogs I love to receive montly news and photos (max 5) from any of the bloggers listed here. It gives a great sense of what is happening in different parts of the world.
Please provide photos with captions in their file description. Thanks.

P.S!

I am afraid that I have lost many of your recent emails, specifically any sent to me between 15th August 2008 and 26th August 2008. Obviously I am annoyed at my stupidity, but also offer my apologies for all those people who took the time to write to me at what is, for most people, a busy time of year.
If you did write to me between the above dates, I can only apologise, and ask you to re-send your email to me.

http://www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com/
http://www.ianwalthew.com/

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ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY KIND PERMISSION OF THE SKOOG FARM JOURNAL 2008

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Friday, 8 August 2008

Please occassionaly send me some photos

Anyone listed on Farm Blogs From Around the World is more than welcome to send me some photos from time to time.

This helps drive traffic to your blog (traffic at Farm Blogs From Around the World is growing quite quickly as word spreads).

But most importantly it helps give a sense of the changing seasons and their activities from various farms, homesteads, ranches and smallholdings around the world.

If you do send photos, please send a maximum of 5 (just for time reasons my end). Once a month would be great, more I don't think I can cope with.

If you are listed on Farm Blogs From Around the World, please do make a posting about it, as many of you have, and certainly, if you can find a moment, please also add a link to Farm Blogs From Around the World.

Many thanks.

In the meantime, here are some photos from The Skoog Farm Journal.

Lori writes (6th August, 2008):

Here are the horses in a shot taken this morning.
I have included one of our beautiful summer nights and a sampling of flowers from our many gardens.

She also writes that she is in contact with FOOD, FUN & FARM LIFE IN EAST AFRICA ! and that they are communicating, which is what it's all about isn't it? Great.

The Skoog Farm Journal.

http://www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com/
http://www.ianwalthew.com/

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Monday, 28 July 2008

Produce photos from an iPhone

Lori at Skoog Farm in New York State, U.S.A, sent me 2 great iPhotos (as she described them) of some onions pulled from their garden this weekend.

By iPhotos, am I to suppose they were taken by an iPhone?

If so, this is a nice illustration of how things are different for farmers in New York State and where I live, in the Auvergne, France.

Firstly, I had never seen an iPhone until I went up to Paris a few weeks ago and a friend had one. (Admittedly she is both American and the technology editor of a newspaper, so one might expect her to have one! Although she nearly lost it when someone tried to pickpocket her, having seen her use it on the Paris metro en route to a Bruce Springstein concert.)

The idea of anyone here being able to afford one, certainly a farmer in this region, is difficult to wrap one's head around.

But more importantly, even if they could, they wouldn't buy one, because, quite simply, what would be the point?

Most people have a mobile phone, we send textos as they are called here, we use them occassionally when there is a signal up in the mountains, but they are a simple, functional item.

What I like about living here is people's complete lack of interest in materialism and consumption. Condie Rice was recently in Australia, and, talking to a group of young students, informed them that her favourite hobby was 'shopping'.

Here, for now at least in our secret valley, the idea of going shopping being a planned leisure activity has not taken hold. It will, no doubt, but not yet. You go not shopping, but to a specific shop or market to buy something you need. It's not a hobby!

Anyway, what's all this got to do with farming? Not much, and we can now say that an iPhone takes great pictures of onions. And what fine onions.

(This year our vegetable crop isn't the best. Too much rain in the spring, and now hot, parching days and then quite cold at night. Not ideal.)

www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com

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Farm Market in Brockport, New York

Thanks to Lori at The Skoog Farm Journal http://skoogfarm.blogspot.com for sending me these photos of a farm market in the U.S.A. this last weekend.

She writes:
"More and more vendors are appearing now that the fruit and vegetables are ready to eat. We live in and area that is full of orchards as well as big farms that grow veggies. Thanks to the horses, our dirt is very rich and our gardens do very well."

I just posted pictures of a French market from last Saturday, and it's interesting to compare the difference in prices, especially given how low the dollar (or 'peso' as some less charitable people in Europe call it now) is against the euro.

Please do send me pictures of your local farm market. I am particularly interested in also hearing about the clientele and their demographic.

Of course here in France, the notion of a 'farm market' is not one that really exists. There are simply markets that have been in existence for centuries and which continue to flourish, at least as far as food is concerned.

For other products, such as clothes, with so many cheap imports from China available to all wholesalers and retailers, many market stall holders are struggling to compete against regular shops. Their price advantage has evaporated and the timing of the markets (during the week and working hours mostly, except in the larger towns) doesn't suit a more office/factory workforce when the markets had traditionally served more flexible agricultural communities and ones with more non-working women.

What has changed though, certainly, is a dramatic increase in a new generation of well-educated, lifestyle driven and especially organic 'petits producters' (small producers). They are breathing new life into markets that during the 80s and 90s were struggling to differentiate the quality of the food available with that of the supermarkets.

www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com

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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.

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).