Since my swissophilia extends to a knowledge of their car registration system I was able to open a conversation by asking how things were in the Valais. Apparently all is well and not much has changed in the mountains above Sion since I slept in a barn there in the fifties. Strangely enough these people, or at least the older ones in the party, were here in the fifties, living and working in this village. The bulk of them lived in the house opposite, now being renovated (slowly) for eventual occupation by Alain who has a sawmill here and runs a carpentry workshop in Chatelus. They took various photos of themselves with the house in the background and set off to have a look around the village.

I discovered that one lady had lodged in our house. I was intrigued by the idea of finding out what the place was like fifty odd years ago so I invited her in. Had the positions been reversed I’d have jumped at it but she said maybe after the walk, and then after the walk the minibus slipped away unseen.

As you see I’ve not been keeping to my resolution of blog maintenance at all. I almost erupted into print one recent Tuesday in celebration of a very good golf score but it was so quickly followed by a disastrous performance in competition that I had to bite my keyboard to stop a logorrhoea of despair splashing out into cyberspace.

To vent my frustration I attacked the weeds around the fosse septique. Despite the reforming zeal of Brussels, mains drainage is yet to arrive in these parts. So we have a system of loosely buried tanks through which household waste waters seep to appear miraculously cleansed at some far end from whence they disappear to merge into the surrounding ecosystem.

I once did battle with a similar system in south-west Scotland. It filled up and refused to accept any more waste. When local forces were rallied to effect a rescue we discovered that the man who had laid the pipes decades before had only just passed on. Unaccountably he had failed to commit his design to paper. Much digging about with JCBs over a period of days was needed before normal service was resumed. Most of us managed the interruption in service discreetly enough and the youngest in the party, not then toilet trained, was entirely oblivious. But my mother-in-law had to be ferried periodically to a convenient local village. We learnt later that the Six Day War had been going on the while but somehow our six days have always been more memorable.

To disguise the concrete outcrops of the waste system we planted cotoneasters a few years ago and envisaged them spreading rapidly and smothering everything around. In practice the soil there seems to be more suited to the nutritional needs of weeds. Last year Sally dressed the cotoneasters and other plants in plastic survival suits before drenching the area with a junior member of the Agent Orange family. The weeds fell over almost instantly and turned a satisfactory shade of brown but this seems to have been but a subterfuge. This Spring they, or their mutated cousins, are back in force and have had to be ripped out of the ground. I know they will regroup so am keeping watch.

This morning such excitement. Not much happens in this village and I seldom am aware of what little does happen since our house is at the entrance and I never have to pass through the village to get to anywhere I want to go. So when a Swiss registered minibus stopped at the door and a dozen or more people poured out chattering animatedly I abandoned my conversation with the postman about the Cambodian junk mail he had just delivered to concentrate on them.

Having started this blog I thought I might turn it into a little record of my summer in France. Not that it will rival A Year In Provence but it might keep me and my few readers amused. I’ve occasionally tried to keep holiday diaries, never managing to sustain the effort to the end of the trip. Reading them months or years later has been fun and made me regret that I hadn’t persevered.

But here I am already three weeks into my stay and nothing noted down. A quick review is called for. After six months of being barred and bolted you can never be sure what state the house will be in. All was well, unlike last year. No pipes burst as I turned the water on. The new fridge withstood the impact of the first stream of electrons in contrast to its predecessor and no dead rodents were to be seen. There was one little body, a bird that had somehow got in but failed to find a way out. That was quickly removed, furniture uncovered and shoved about a bit, bed linen found, wood stove fired up, a quick hoover and it’s gardening time. Four cuts so far but it is hard to keep the grass down when it’s being watered and warmed generously by mother nature. The moles have not left town and previous lashings of herbicide seem to have only encouraged the weeds in the lawn and everywhere else. It’s a case of pulling them up again and again. I’ve trimmed the vine to the bone and held back the ivy’s assault on our tiled roof.

After that the priority is to bow before French public health legislation and get a doctor to certify that there are no indications that would suggest that I am not fit to play golf. This law is almost universally mocked but you have to comply. It covers all competitive physical sports, even petanque but maybe not tiddlywinks or chess. I must ask the postman. He’s a chess fanatic. They tell me my blood pressure is a bit high but I’ll probably survive the summer so it’s off to Limoges for the first competition of the season. It’s organised by The Senior Golfers of the Four Leagues, a splendid club that offers us half a dozen outings between April and October throughout four regions; Limouson, Centre, Poitou-Charente and Auvergne. My chum Jean and I usually go the day before for an exploratory round, stay in a little hotel and share a bottle of red over dinner and then hack our way through the competition. Just as at my home club, Les Dryades, the competitions are well supplied with prizes so you don’t have to be a star to go home with something in your hand. There is also usually a draw for left over prizes and that’s how I came home from Limoges with a tee shirt and a little porcelain dish. You’re never far from porcelain in Limoges.

There was another SG4L competition last week near Orleans. Since I’d never been in Orleans, always having whizzed past by train or car en route to somewhere else I thought I’d go up a day early and be a tourist. It took me 50 years of whizzing past Berwick on Tweed before I visited it. I didn’t want that to become the norm.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was committed to giving a friend a lift back to this area and that I had volunteered to help out with a regional golf event at the weekend I’d still be there today. Because Orleans was in full Joan of Arc celebration mode. There were all sorts of processions and medieval tournaments and concerts and what not to celebrate the relief of the siege on 8th May 1429. There’s a heavy Scottish element to this year’s festival, not only because 8000 of the 30000 Scots who went to France to help chase out the English lost their lives fighting on Joan’s team but also to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the twinning of Orleans with Dundee. The Tayside police pipe band are there in force and some chaps called the Ardblair Highlanders are doing what seemed to be a mini Highland Games. There was a very good exhibition on about the Auld Alliance presided over by a French gentleman splendidly got up in a dress kilt and jacket.

There are a couple of spots near here called respectively Ecosse Lavoir and Ecosse Chateau. According to the postman (he’s a bit of a historian) they were so named for the Scots who were quartered there at some point in the Hundred Years War. The mirror image of Petty France in Edinburgh.

Orleans is also very proud of a certain Charles Péguy. He was a writer and political thinker of the Belle Epoque, a friend of Zola and such like world figures. Perhaps it’s because he died leading his men over the top in the 14-18 war that he failed to be detected by my radar. Anyway I dutifully went round the exhibition in the centre dedicated to studying his work and expressed my satisfaction when asked by the curator. I must ask the postman about him.

He was born and spent his childhood in Chile; the postman that is not Charles Péguy and he likes to practise his Spanish. He’s probably disappointed that David and Sally have decided to stay on in Málaga but he makes do with me. I bumped into him at a film the other week and he regaled me in Spanish with his views on nuclear power. He was just back from a big anti nuclear demo in Cherbourg. At least he didn’t expound while the film was showing. I met him once before at a concert of Georges Brassens songs. While we were listening to one song he’d be whispering the words of another one in my ear. You’ll have gathered he’s a Georges Brassens fan. When he learnt I was off to Orleans he told me he was off there soon himself to support an anti GM group who are to appear in court charged with cutting down GM crops. You’d have to go far to beat the lot of a rural postman in France.

The lot of the summer visitor is not too bad either. I was sitting in the lounge about 8.30 on Sunday’s peaceful morning looking through the French window over the garden, down the field at the damp and misty forest beyond when a deer bounded across the lawn past the window, paused at the hedge to sniff out danger and vanished. Rural idyll in spades.