Two posts ago....
"Hopefully we will have some more seasonable weather before we begin to head north in three days time. Our plan is to stay in Meze, have a Picpoul de Pinet and some seafood in one of the harbour side restaurants, perhaps manage to have a pedal by the Etang de Thau"
I suppose it is too much to ask for all your hopes to be realised, so the fact that some of them were gave us something to celebrate as the weather in Meze became increasingly spring-like over the three days we stayed in the aire. However when we arrived it was very wintry. On our first morning we woke to 6.7° inside and barely over zero outside.
A minor triumph of design in our moho is the way the heating control knob can be reached by dangling your arm out while the rest of you remains under the duvet. Once you've mastered the trick of twiddling the contol from above then you never need to get out of bed until the interior temperature reaches the mid teens. It would have been nice to have snoozed away half the morning, but France tends to rise early. Yesterday in Castelnaudary traffic and angle-grinders serenaded us from from 8am; here, in deference to the fact it was the weekend, testing out the P.A. system in the adjacent Salle de Fête was delayed until a little after 8.15am.
MC Marteau seemed to have some kind of special effects thingy, because he jabbered away for what seemed for hours on a setting that made him sound as if he was underwater. At around 10am the sub-aqua rapping was replaced by music, then interrupted by frenetic commentary as we if some kind of community sports event was happening. Eventually curiosity got the better of Gill and she stuck her head around the door "There are lots of families with kids and two bright yellow gazebos," she reported. This failed to distract me into taking a peek, I had become so engrossed in blogging about cabin fever I was unable to extricate myself from its malign effects, as if being trapped inside had become a semi-permanent state, like Stockholm syndrome.
Time slipped by, sometime after lunch Gill announced she was going to check out what was happening. I muttered something about not moving an inch until the temperature outside reached double figures, so she headed off on a solo social anthropology foray, returning twenty minutes later clutching a jar of locally produced honey. "It's a fête," she announced, showing me the photo she had just taken of the adjacent jollifications.
The music changed from lo-grade Europop to jaunty Occidental folk. The sun made a brief, paltry appearance, I realised for the sake of my sanity I was going to have to take a walk, so we both headed off to explore the delights of ville de Meze's "la Fête du Printemps." It must be the one day in the year where there is some sense in municipal architect 's decision sometime around 1993 that the town' investment in a new Salle de Fête would benefit stylistically from the addition of two protuberances of a vaguely phallic nature at its entrance.
I don't know which is more impressive, the expectation from the locale populace that the municipal authorities will provide regular cultural and social events for their delectation, or the assumption from the Mairie that locals will patronise them, whatever they maybe and whatever the weather. Given the icy blast the spring fair was busy, the big tables beside the food stalls, now half empty, were covered in bottles, plates, scrunched-up serviettes weighted down by drained wine glasses; clearly a jolly collective lunch had been had by all.
The event was bigger than it looked from the van, stalls selling local produce and art and crafts - heartfelt junk - as Gill calls them, stretched along the shoreline of the small 'plan d'eau' that separates the football field and Salle de Fête from the Olympic sized skate park and adventure playground.
The folksy music became ever more Occidental, a hurdy-gurdy wailing behind the jaunty tune. The dances were quite intricate, patterns forming and reforming like you get in a kaleidoscope, it was absorbing watching how the mirrored cadences of the melody were reflected in the interweaving figures of the dancers. Some were skilled and dressed in traditional costumes, others a bit bamboozled but they all looked as if they were having fun.
Really traditional dance demands a live band but the music today came through the PA. This resulted in an impromptu moment of cultural dissonance. MC Marteau 's appearance was considerably cooler than his early morning attempt at sub-aqua rapping would have led me to expect. He was tall, thirtyish, wearing skinny jeans, a beany hat and a khaki parka with faux fur around the hood. Despite the gloomy weather he sported shades and his hipster beard looked professionally maintained. As the dancers below expressed their Occitane identity with gusto MC Marteau made some cool moves of his own behind the decks. I do wonder if in his head he was deejaying a pop-up live set featuring Roisin Murphy on a sun drenched beach in Ibiza while the rest of us wiled away a blustery Saturday afternoon in early April in Meze.
Next day was still cold, but sunny and the biting northerly blast that had plagued us for days abated. We unloaded the bikes and headed to the Intermarché in town before it closed at 12.30. Afterwards we rode back to the van via the harbour. Even though the air was bitterly cold a few hardy souls were eating lunch outside of the fish restaurants on the quayside. As Gill remarked, why would you do that, wouldn't the meal be stone cold long before you had finished it?
We passed the stop for the water bus to Sete. Tomorrow's forecast was better than today's, I hatched a plan to take the boat across the Etang and see if the Rita Hayworth toastie I had in the small café in Sete last October was as seductive a culinary experience as I remembered. With that we pedalled back, had lunch, decided it was still too cold to cycle around comfortably. Gill continued her project to re-read every word Jane Austen has written, I finished the previous blog post that started as a reflection on the issue of moho cabin fever then meandered aimlessly all over the place. We need to do something we agreed, Sete, tomorrow, whatever the weather.
In fact Monday dawned gloriously clear and without a breath of wind. It was still very cold, but so long as we wore hoodies and our quilted jackets then it was possible to cycle without the risk of imminent hypothermia. It was one of those luminous days in the south that you never get in summer where the clarity of light is such it transforms the mundane into the hyperreal.
Not everything went to plan, when we locked up the bikes at the water bus stop Gill reread the timetable. "It only operates June to November," she informed me.
"Oh, I must have missed the small print yesterday," I mused, a bit crestfallen. Gill advised that actually the writing was quite big.
Back to plan A, lunch at one of the fish restaurants by the harbour. There are lots to choose from, some offering very reasonable fixed price menu de jour. The problem was we didn't want a full meal, what we wanted was tapas, but France doesn't do small plates. In the end we settled for a snack, we did manage have a croque each, a Monsieur and a Madame,. but no Rita for Peter.
They were fine, but nothing special. I reflected that I have had a very toastie orientated few months, starting with the sex bomb croque in Sete last October. Nothing since had quite reached Rita's heady heights. However I recall the one in Milfontes with fondness even if I can't recall exactly what was in it.
Same goes for the XL sized toasted sandwich I had in Sesimbre, halfway through I recall thinking you can have too much of a good thing.
However, last week in Zumaia at the Kraken café, there was a toasted sandwich almost in the Rita Hayworth league, a simple concoction of cheese, mushroom and caramelised onion. Clever the way it had been put together so the flavours were layered. Not as outrageously squidgy though as Sete's Hollywood queen of a toastie.
Am I developing a toasted sandwich fetish? I guess that's fairly vanilla as fetishes go. In one other respect our lunch in Meze was memorable, the rosé was delicious and looked fabulous against the blue sky.
We wandered about after lunch just reminding ourselves why we love it here.
Pleasing mix of pleasure boats and inshore fishing ones in the harbour, with view of old town beyond. In an alternative reality we bought a small house in the narrow streets behind the quayside and are going into a gentle decline due to over-indulgence in Picpoul de Pinet and prawns.
Love the central square with the old fountain and Mairie beyond. As well as the Tricolour, the EU's gold stars and the Languedoc region flag, the yellow and blue of the Ukraine flag was fluttering too.
It took us a few visits before we came across the little park behind the Salle de Fête in the centre of town with a view of the Etang de Thau.
The posters for the first round of the presidential elections have just gone up. It's like a gallery of the usual suspects.
Coincidentally we were in Meze in May 2018 on the day of the election when Macron won. Pundits are predicting it will be the same candidates in final round this time, le Pen versus Macron, with a victory for the incumbent forecast. Worryingly le Pen may get a higher percentage than the 35% she achieved last time.
The forces of the right are always with us, and even now when the bloody consequences of unbridled nationalism are all too clear to be seen, a sizeable minority of people in France seem still to be drawn it. And to portly traditionalists with enormous noses
However it's much too colourful a day to become sad about the world.
Especially when just for you Gaia puts on her brightest clothes and lights up the whole earth with a sunny smile, asking, "Why are you, my cleverest and most favoured children so confused and fucked-up?"
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