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.