Badly composed picture of roses, plastic chairs and dead barbecue

After nine weeks in which we’ve seen little more than a spit or a dribble, celestial incontinence arrived here last night. It’s been continuing throughout the day. Rain is, of course, what makes this lovely region so lush, green and fecund most of the time.

The combination of rolling, verdant hills and agreeable heat is what first caused me to fall in love with it in 1972. An American art history major and I had just been down to Cadacques in northern Spain, hoping to meet my hero in those days, Salvador Dali. It was all part of the wonderfully unplanned spontaneity of youth; in fact, so ill-thought through was it that, when we knocked on the great man’s door, the housekeeper told us that Senor Dali was in Paris hosting a retrospective of his work. Youth, as Shaw said, is wasted on the young.

The upside was that, as my friend wanted to sample the fruits de mer of the West coast, I was forced to point our Mark II Mini (GTC 975K) in a vaguely north-westerly direction, and wander through the countryside ahead of us on the other side of the Pyrenees.

There were few if any autoroutes at the time. We drove along bumpy roads, stopped at markets for cheese, bread and wine, and then slept it off in the afternoon. And it was sitting in a field somewhere just east of Bordeaux that it occurred to me I was looking at a hot Devon. To a young Englishman at the time, that sounded close to perfection. And, on the whole, it has been ever since.

Up until last year, rain of such torrential nature would’ve been the signal for buckets, pans and commodes to appear from under work surfaces and inside cupboards. Our roof had great charm – it was made entirely of chestnut shingles – but fell down somewhat on the water-resistance dimension. Towards the end, it just fell down a lot.  So it had to go.

We called local roofer M. Ruggeri – the builders down here tend to be of Italian extraction –  and the following conversation took place:

Ruggeri: What material were you thinking of for the new roof?

Me: Oats. Very thin, light oats.

R: Oats? An eccentric choice Monsieur. What about when it rains?

Me: What happens when rain hits oats, M. Ruggeri?

R: You get porridge, Monsieur. Which the animals, I assume, will then eat. But I can’t be sure. You see, I’ve never built a roof out of oats.

This silly conversation went on for another half-minute, until Mrs Slog pointed out that the word for slate is adoise – not the ‘avoines’ I’d been using, which is the word for oats.
Anyway, we now have a specially-imported thin Spanish slate roof with enough insulation beneath it to keep the heat in and the sun out. And M. Ruggeri has been dining out ever since on the story.

I have said many other equally mad things in French over the years. But then at times, the French too say equally insane things.

“Do your dogs have fleas?” the local vet asked me ten years ago, when we visited him for the first time.

“Of course not,” I replied indignantly, “We are very careful to ensure they don’t have fleas. We have a zero-tolerance flea policy chez nous, thank you very much”. (I nearly added “Johnny Frog” for emphasis).

“All dogs must have fleas if they wish to return to England,” he asserted, his eyes gleaming with steely determination.

“No they don’t,” I answered, “We’ve never taken our dogs back to England with fleas”.

“Well I’m afraid you must from now on Monsieur,” the vet insisted, “It is the law. Every exported dog must have micro-fleas”.

The word for ‘chip’ in French is ‘micropuce’, shortened in everyday speech to ‘puce’. Puce is the word for a flea.

I formed the opinion at one point that the French were obsessed with fleas. I was in the local bike-shop one day when our woodman came in to get his chainsaw sharpened.

“It’s raining,” I remarked. It’s the sort of thing we English talk about.

“He’s a celebrated flea,” he said, smiling at the proprietor Monseiur Chesnais. (“Il est un pouce celebre”)

“No, I think you’ll find he’s a bicycle repair man,” I countered. The woodman pretended he hadn’t heard: a few months earlier I’d told him I was taking the dogs for a walk up the chimney, so he had decided at that point I was obviously deranged. Smiling, M. Chesnais intervened.

“Il pousse l’herbe” he enunciated slowly. It (the rain) makes the grass grow. This made much more sense. I don’t take our terriers for walks up the chimney, by the way: down here they pronounce ‘chemin’ (lane) ‘chemeen’, and I inadvertently said ‘cheminee’ (chimney) thinking I was sounding like a local, as opposed to a lunatic.

The roof makes the house look more grown up, and the slate is dulling down nicely now. It gives our place the slight air of being a chateau. It’s much quieter when it rains, and the squirrels slide up and down it – rather than sounding like a herd of brontosauri lumbering above our bedroom.

The old shingles were recycled for use as fire kindling – and as we had tons of them, most properties within a ten mile radius of our plot sport carefully stacked piles of the stuff. Ours are more informally arranged in the woodshed. The woodshed itself is also pretty informal, in that it’s leaning further south with every year. It used to be a pig sty we’re told; at this rate, it’ll be a pile of rubble with a shingle-roof beneath it before long. That too would be suitably eccentric, and should be avoided if at all possible. But that’s next year’s project.