One of the fixtures of the golfing calendar at Les Dryades is a competition sponsored by the Chateau de Poinsouze, an upmarket caravan park popular with British and Dutch tourists. A number of happy campers come along with their clubs and join the regulars. The day culminates in an invitation to all participants to dinner at the chateau. For one reason or another I haven’t made it to the dinner in previous years. This year there was no reason why I shouldn’t go and since I happened to be playing with the son of the sponsor there was an extra incentive.

I’m very glad I did. Al fresco dining bowled me over when I made my first trip to the continent way back. I was used to Sunday school picnics in local parks, sandy sandwiches on the shores of Fife and chewing damper (a peculiarly indigestible mixture of flour and water) around boy scout campfires in Highland glens. These undeniably outdoor eating experiences had not prepared me for filling the afternoon with a leisurely lunch, a proper lunch, at a table, a proper table, in a sunny garden on the shores of Lake Geneva where apricots could be plucked from the branches above one’s head. A lunch at which our hosts, prelates of some persuasion or other, made sure that the wine flowed freely even in this impressionable sixteen year old’s direction.

No prelates at the chateau but buckets of wine and a very fine meal in a beautiful courtyard setting. I count myself as a local so once the preliminary socialising was over I left the Brits to their own devices and sat down with the French. At my table was Philipe. He’s a baker and pattissier and supplied the yummy fruit tart pudding. From time to time his wife minds the shop on a Sunday morning while he and his daughters play golf. There was Lucien, the dentist, and his wife Claudine who teaches maths. One of the topics of conversation was that worldwide dinner party favourite – the difference between men and women. According to Claudine boys tend to geometry whereas girls favour analysis and this illustrates some fundamental difference or other. It was generally agreed that women have no trouble understanding men but not vice versa. Lucien told a long but quite amusing joke in support of that thesis. Fortunately I understood the punch line. Claude, an insurance man and the organiser of our competitions harangued me about adding some Scottish flavour to a future competition but when I tried to pin down what he wanted a few days later it seemed that his idea had disappeared with the last of the evening’s wine. There was Kévin, our hefty young golf pro who tells a story well and delights in recounting the wonders and oddities of his golfing experiences including a trip to Scotland. Then Jacques, a retired oil something or other and his wife Claudine. She took up golf because she was fed up being a golf widow and turned out to a slightly better player than him. She’s not currently playing because she’s undergoing chemotherapy. I don’t know what particular cancer she has. From her behaviour in social situations you wouldn’t dream there was a cloud in her sky. Jean, my particular golfing buddy was there. He’s a retired digital imaging fundi. He spent some time in Beith in his teens improving his English and has been a Scotophile ever since. He can manage a quite convincing “haw jimmy”. Hugues, the lad I had played with in the competition and his mum Claudine joined us intermittently. Could this be a record for the number of Claudines at one dinner table? She enjoined me to speak only English whenever I have occasion to play with Hugues, a request I will act on only when feeling particularly unselfish. I’m sure there were others because it was a big table but that damned wine seems to have dimmed my memory. Maybe Pierre and his fourth wife?

Roches, the commune within which I’m summering, boasts fewer than two hundred entries in the phone book. Amongst them incidentally are a Jean and a Christian whose Scottish surnames suggest that some of the soldiers stationed hereabouts during the Hundred Years War made non military conquests, and honest women of them to boot.
Despite its numbers it can muster a sizeable brass band (not all Rocheois, they recruit elsewhere) which struts its stuff on festive occasions. Amongst the most festive is the Pentecost Fair celebrated last weekend. It’s a three day extravaganza that according to one of my neighbours attracted hundreds from a’ the airts in her youth. Today no doubt a pale imitation but still a draw for the locals.
The “bourg” (tiny eponymous town that’s commune HQ) hangs out its bunting, plants decorations made of coloured tissue paper (trees, butterflies, bees and the like), flies the tricolour from the Mairie, scrubs out the Salle des Fêtes and the public toilets and has a ball. There is literally a ball, and a fireworks display and a race and a parade of decorated floats not to mention dodgems, several roundabouts, shooting galleries, a beer tent and a selection of second hand junk stalls.

This year there was a novelty. Amongst my postman’s many passions is chess. He set up a stall with half a dozen boards with the aim of playing all comers simultaneously. When I turned up after lunch he was reading disconsolately alone. It seems that the honest burghers of Roches having first been disabused of their assumption that he was selling chess sets had by and large declined to pit their skills against his. Naturally he counted on me and eventually persuaded a member of the Espérance to make a third thus formally creating a simultaneity. Espérance is what they call the band – surely a connection there with our Band of Hope of yesteryear – musical historians please advise.

As a sideline he was inviting signatures to an anti GM crops petition. I was unwise enough to say that I wasn’t altogether sure that I was against them. There followed a storm of facts and figures which reminded me of nothing so much as the anti nuclear diatribe he drilled into me when we met at a film show some weeks ago. But I held fast, politely, and didn’t sign. I even offered a couple of points in their favour; swept aside by his relentless stream but still.

Of course he beat us, but then I’ve been beaten by an eight year child so it was no real challenge. He beat me several other times in the course of the afternoon but that was the only simultaneous contest since the horn player was soon called to duty. At least I learnt the Spanish names of the pieces and I suppose a bit of speaking in tongues was appropriate for the season.

I regained my amour propre by bursting a couple of balloons with my deadeye shooting skills to carry triumphantly home a little soft toy. I’ve placed it beside the little soft toy that David won the last time we went shooting at Pentecost.

A friend complained that there were no pictures on this blog so I thought I would try to have at least part of one.