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sept: Dial M For Merguez
THIS morning, all has changed -- the sky isn't overcast, but purest
blue; I'm woken up not by the rain on my tent but the heat in my tent;
the tractor isn't decrepit but extremely new; and, most worryingly,
it's not in the next field but in this.
 Madame Moulinier appears and
we're expecting her to tell the tractor driver off, tell him not to
mow this field as there are campers in it. But no: she's here merely
to move some firewood out of the tractor's path.
"It's for the sheep," she
says in French, indicating the tractor. "There is some poor grass,
some mauvaise herbe, which they don't eat, so if I didn't mow
it, it would be everywhere. Like it is over there. It would become
forest."
Madame Moulinier has very
thoughtfully learned what sounds like GCSE French, and speaks to
foreigners in that rather than the full-screen full-motion French of
her conversations with French campers. Every so often she pauses,
thinking of how to simplify a complex thing she wants to say. But at
least all four of us can understand her.
In the afternoon we go
canoeing. At least, we call it canoeing, though it bears the same
relationship to real canoeing that a brisk walk over Mill Road railway
bridge does to rock climbing. A more accurate description might be
"floating down the river on pointy things, in a slightly
paddle-assisted manner".
The canoeing company
operates all the way up and down the Vézère, you can choose to start
and stop at any of their riverside stations. One station is just
downstream of The Bridge At Tursac, so we elect to finish there and
start a way upstream at Thonac.
| | The bridge at Thonac, not to be confused
with The Bridge, which is at Tursac. |
Thonac (that's
pronounced Turn-Ack, of course) turns out to have its own bridge,
nearly as good as Tursac's. They really have got bridges sorted out in
this part of the world: not only are they, by and large, lovely, but
they all have little signs naming the river or stream they're
crossing. A tiny example, but emblematic of the French appreciation of
a sense of place, of locality, which the English seem long to have
lost.
The four of us end up with a
two-man canoe (which, at least, looks like a proper canoe such as a
trapper or a Last of the Mohicans might recognise) and two one-man
ones which are just moulded plastic shapes with pointy ends, a shaped
seat and two shaped footrests. The river, however, is quite flat, and
even where it's a bit fast it's not white-watered.
 The best bits are where
the river has cut away the underside of the rocky walls of the valley;
curtains of dripping vegetation hang down, and the heat outside gives
way within the space of a yard to a welcome, slightly damp, cool. The
last, and largest, overhang (in the photo) is part of the Roque St.
Christophe itself, and fifty feet above our heads dayglo-kagoulled
tourists are being shown round the galleried Neolithic caves. We, of
course, are tourists too, but even in the pink plastic canoes we are,
or pretend to be, different: above they are admiring the past, but we
are also admiring the present.
FOR our evening meal, Ian decides to relive his student days in
Toulouse. We'd bought, in a morning shopping trip to La Bugue, some
eggs, instant mashed potato, merguez and harissa. These last need more
explanation: merguez are long sausages, extremely red and
evil-looking, and harissa is a chilli sauce, the consistency of tomato
purée, originating from French North Africa.
Real chilli heat being
almost unknown in France, the harissa tube is labelled extremely
defensively ("s'utilisant en petites quantités"), but as
Brits we, obviously, take no notice. Harissa is actually quite hot,
though not of Encona strength, but it's a fruity sort of hot that I've
not encountered before.
The potatoes are made up in
one pan, the merguez fried in another (Stu, handily, has a two-burner
camping stove). Frying the merguez turns the oil a deep red, but Ian
is troubled about their veracity as student fare. "They haven't shrunk
much," he complains, "they must be some kind of up-market
merguez." We can tell the concept is somehow oxymoronic to him.
"The merguez I used to get," he continued, "used to be about sixty
percent fat, and they'd shrivel to almost nothing. Which is
the whole point, 'cos then you fry the eggs in what's left in the pan,
and they get this wonderful pork-fat kind of taste. These
eggs are just going to be red and that's it."
We fry the eggs anyway, in
whatever these posh merguez have provided. "Filth!" exclaims Stu
delightedly, shuffling the eggs round the pan, "It's all just filth,
this, isn't it?"
And it is, though as we
trough our splat of mashed potato, wonky red sausages, and
motorway-café eggs, helped along with some tidy '94 Gaillac and
Corbières, all we can notice is that it's splendid.
 All Rites
Reversed -- Copy What You Like
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