Camp sights: Part One

I have just come back from ten wonderful days in Ramatuelle with two of my children. We did hardly anything at all except sleep, read and sunbathe and it was perfect – well, almost.

I’ve never been camping with my children before. If we ever went on holiday, it was with my husband and he did all the booking, organising and driving. I am quite proud, therefore, that I managed to do all these things by myself and only got lost a teeny weeny bit at the end – hardly anything at all really; I just missed the turning for the campsite on the route des plages and had to do a nifty U-turn in a vineyard. No problem.

We stayed in a bungalow toilé. This was not some grotesque parody of English suburbia as I had first imagined, but a glorified furnished tent full of zips: the cupboards were zipped, the bedrooms were zipped, the windows were zipped, the door was zipped…Forget the sweet, soft chirping of crickets at dusk - every evening at bedtime, the air fairly resonated with the sound of zips.

The showers were great, which was a good job, since my two girls had refused to leave home without at least three kilos of make-up and toiletries – each. The loos, on the other hand, were Turkish. These holes in the ground have always inspired in me fear and loathing: what if I slip and get my foot stuck? What if I overbalance? It has not happened so far although the last one I frequented had a rather aggressive automatic flushing system which took me by surprise because I hadn’t quite finished…

There were a lot of Dutch and German people at the campsite, all tall with headfuls of gleaming Boris-Johnson hair. Our immediate neighbours - a blonde couple with two blonde, well-behaved children - provided us with fine examples of Teutonic discipline. When we staggered out of our bungalow at midday, bleary eyed and dishevelled, they had already left (at dawn) to visit some interesting, historical monument. They had prepared a healthy picnic and never forgot their sun block. I know this because I once got up very early to go to the loo and saw these items neatly aligned on their table. Our own table was strewn with the debris of the previous evening’s meal (cheese rind, gobs of pickle, apple cores and crisps) and our beach towels were hanging off the backs of the chairs rather than neatly pegged on the clothes horse provided. They also aligned their shoes on the terrace and I never once heard them yell ‘Where the *µ@% is my other flip-flop?’ as we did quite often.

It was a ‘family campsite’ which is a euphemism for ‘very noisy’. On most evenings, an animation was provided. We never went to any of these – we didn’t need to because we could hear everything from the comfort of our own beds. On the first night, an extremely irritating ventriloquist with a stupid voice kept us awake until half past eleven (I would have told him just where he could throw his voice but I am far too polite). The following evening, we were regaled with a couple of slightly out-of-tune guitarists who were obviously having a bit of plectrum trouble and a few nights later, a magician - who sounded suspiciously like the ventriloquist – performed an act which seemed to consist in shouting ‘Are you having fun, children?’ every five minutes to a worryingly silent audience.

Of course, it wasn’t really proper camping but it was bucolic enough for my tastes. I bravely squashed a huge spider with my shoe but I am ashamed to admit that when a giant cricket found its way into my children’s bedroom one night, I was unable to come to the rescue. Once more, it was my fearless daughter, Rachel, who found the courage to dispose of it (after suffocating it with fly spray) while I trembled in my own safely-zipped-up room like the despicable coward I am.

To be continued…

Liberty, Equality and Strikes

The other morning, I thought I heard rioters outside my door. Hundreds – perhaps thousands – of people were hurling incomprehensibly; traffic had come to a standstill; I could smell tear gas. Nevertheless, I ventured outside. Call me foolhardy if you wish, but I needed to buy some bread for lunch…

A substantial portion of the unruly mob was shabbily dressed. Men with straggling grey hair and corduroy trousers were brandishing placards; ferocious-looking women were punching the air with menace. The strains of a seventies’ protest song struggled to keep afloat above the chanting crowd while police stood on street corners looking a trifle bored. I spotted my daughter’s history teacher and nodded pleasantly. Ho hum. The teachers were on strike. Again.

The origins of the phrase faire grève, which means ‘to go on strike’, have more to do with looking for work than stopping it. The word grève means ‘gravel’ and by extension ‘shore’. In Paris, in the fourteenth century, workers would wait on the ‘shore’ of the Seine hoping for employment when the ships came in. The area was known as Place de Grève and functioned as a sort of job centre without the paperwork. It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that the phrase acquired its present meaning, when it finally became legal to go on strike.

Oh, they like a bit of Revolution, do the French. Look at Robespierre. He would have been right up front today with a megaphone and a handful of flyers, egging everybody on. Indeed, these strikes are a sort of Reign of Terror, although the rolling of heads is just a figure of speech and the only chops to be had are lamb ones sizzling on the barbecue set up in front of the Préfecture (this is France, remember, and not even strikers would forgo their lunch). And who could forget mai ’68, when a student protest meeting in Paris sparked off a month of violent riots involving not only students but workers, school children, teachers and university lecturers? In a spectacular example of overreaction, the CRS – French riot police – were immediately sent in with truncheons and tear gas. The demonstrators reacted by building barricades, setting cars alight and hurling paving slabs. Hundreds of people were wounded on la nuit des barricades (the Night of the Barricades), including seventy-two policemen, but this merely added fuel to the fire. The trade unions joined the movement and by the end of les évènements, over ten million strikers had brought the whole country to a standstill. De Gaulle had even contemplated bringing in the army…

Yet, despite the violence and the inevitable shake-up of French society, the demonstrators aroused much public sympathy and this is still the case whenever there is a strike. In 1997, the lorry drivers went on strike and blocked access to the refineries so nobody could get any petrol. Did anyone complain? No. Even my (sort of ex) husband, whose fuse is so short he makes Basil Fawlty look like a monk on Prozac, happily stacked jerry cans full of petrol in the garage without so much as a murmur. And what about the civil servants? Normally the target of vicious and paranoid mutterings from the seventy-five per cent of the French population who do not work for the state, they suddenly become paradigms of virtue whenever they go on strike. Or maybe it’s just not that easy to tell the difference… Striking while the iron is hot, so to speak, the unions make sure they cause a maximum of inconvenience to everybody - which is, of course, the point. We all know that every year, the postmen will go on strike in the run up to Christmas and the dustbin men will choose the hottest month of summer.

Ask any French person if they think all this is thoughtless, foolish or downright mean and they’ll reply cheerfully that no – it’s democracy. Strange, then, that a mere ten per cent of the French working population belong to a trade union, compared to twenty per cent in the United Kingdom and a whopping eighty per cent in Sweden. Another French paradox, evidently…

Back to this morning, and as I waded through the throng in an attempt to reach the boulangerie on the other side of the road, I thought fondly of my seventeen year old daughter. She has also been on demonstrations for the past four Thursday afternoons with the rest of the lycéens, protesting against a proposed educational reform. How mature she is for her age, I mused – she has already found a cause to fight for! Was I witnessing a political activist in the making? A future leader of the Green Party, perhaps?

“So, dear,” I asked her at lunchtime. “Why exactly are you doing this?”

My daughter shrugged.

“Well,” she said. “There’s a chance I might be on telly…and also I get to miss maths.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have asked.

Purple Haze

 

 

As a child, I hated the smell of lavender. It reminded me of elderly ladies, furniture polish and that can of air freshener we always had in the bathroom. Now, however, it is one of my favourite scents which leads me to think that it is perhaps a smell one acquires as one gets older and more sophisticated, rather like acquiring a taste for olives or oysters or wine. Either that or I’ve been overdoing the aerosol sniffing again…

Lavender is a wild, aromatic shrub that loves the sun and thrives in dry rocky soil. It originated in Persia and the Canary Islands and has been in documented use for over two thousand years. The Egyptians used it as scent and as an ingredient in the mummification process; the tribes of Gaul used a lotion made from lavender essential oil called celtic nard and it is possible that the nard mentioned in the bible – the ointment with which Mary anointed the feet of Jesus – was also lavender. The plant was brought to Provence by the Romans who used it to scent their linen or their bathwater – hence the name ‘lavender’ from the Latin lavare – which means ‘to wash’.

Three types grow predominantly in the south of France. Lavandula vera or true lavender, which grows above 800 metres; lavandula augustifolia also known as ‘asp’ lavender because it is a favourite hiding-place for snakes and lavandula hybrida, a hybrid of the above which can grow at a much lower altitude and has a higher yield of essential oil. English lavender, brought over by monks when they fled the French Revolution, is lavandula augustifolia.

 

Lavender was (and is) used for its medicinal properties: Pliny the Elder mentioned it in his writings and Dioscoride, a Greek doctor and botanist who lived in the first century, advocated lavender tea as a cure for headaches and insomnia. In the twelfth century, the abbess and herbalist, Saint Hildegarde de Bingen, recommended lavender eye drops and believed that lavender promoted ‘pure knowledge and reasoning’ – whatever that means. In the fourteenth century, people carried around bunches of lavender as protection from the plague – and indeed, it may have helped as lavender does repulse fleas. In the sixteenth century, it was used as a treatment for mental disorders and chewing on it was believed to restore speech to those who had lost their voice – the sufferer’s first words presumably being ‘Yuk – what is this stuff?’. Later, it was discovered to relieve rheumatism, catarrh, vertigo and period pains, mood swings, digestive headaches – an intriguing condition that translates as flatulence on the brain – hysteria, asthma and ringworm…to name but a few. Lavender was indeed a panacea.

It had other uses, too. Rubens and his fellow painters used lavender oil as paint thinner and it is thought that this is why the colours have retained their brilliance over the centuries. It also had its place in superstition– lavender kept away the evil eye; rubbing the flowers on one’s forehead before going to sleep ensured premonitory dreams; a few drops of lavender in one’s toilet water prevented marital discord (hmmm – wish I’d known that before). In Provence it is said that a man who eats lavender flowers while standing in a vineyard that has been abandoned for more than twenty years has a sporting chance of seeing ghosts…and frankly, if he’s going to go to all that trouble, he deserves to see ghosts…

As if that wasn’t wacky enough, as recently as 1965 a 41- year old lavender farmer, Monsieur Maurice Masse, spotted a rugby ball-shaped object in the middle of his field on the Valensole Plateau. Moving closer, he noticed two small beings busy gathering lavender. Now Maurice, being quick-witted and not at all one stalk short of a posy, realised at once that he was in the presence of aliens (rather than two small boys who had just come to get their ball back.) What were they doing? Taking samples, perhaps? Was lavender an essential component of a new deadly weapon with which they would take over the earth? Were they going to genetically modify it? Or did they simply have a problem of lavatory odour on board? Maurice would never find out. The aliens saw him and zapped him so that he was paralysed and could only watch helplessly as they boarded their vessel and shot off into space. The mystery was never elucidated but for many years afterwards, no lavender or plant of any kind grew in the spot where they had landed…and Maurice is now in the Twilight Zone…

Lavender is a herb, like rosemary or thyme and is an ingredient of herbes de Provence. Chicken and lamb are particularly good with lavender and lavender cream, lavender ice-cream and lavender mousse are delicious. If you put a few sprigs of lavender with sugar in an airtight jar you can make wonderful lavender-flavoured cakes and biscuits. However, it is a pungent herb and must be used sparingly if you don’t want your food tasting of fabric softener. Lavender honey, on the other hand, has a delicate, fragrant, summery taste. Pale and golden, it is considered by many to be the best tasting honey in the world as well as having healing properties…talking of which, I feel a bit of brain flatulence coming on and I’m going to need to take my medicine…and what better way to take it than dripping off warm toast?

 

 

Waterway to go...

France has a rich network of canals. If you wanted to – and if you had the time - you could travel from north to south and from east to west without ever setting foot on dry land. There are quicker ways to do it, of course, but why rush?

Canals have been around for thousands of years and France has a great tradition in hydraulic engineering that reaches back to the twelfth century. They were built initially for irrigation and then as a means of linking towns to rivers but it wasn’t until the sixteenth century that the French began to build longer canals – a feat made possible by the invention of locks. In 1526, a man with the unfortunate name of Adam de Craponne, was born into a noble family in Salon-de-Provence. A hydraulic engineer, he developed several canal networks in the region but his most famous canal, the Canal de Craponne, provided water for Salon and irrigation for the Crau, an arid rocky plateau nearby. At sixty-two kilometres, it was the first grand canal. Monsieur de Craponne not only invested his entire fortune in the project, he also had to borrow money from his friend, a certain Nostradamus - who evidently foresaw a great future for canals. Unfortunately, he was unable to foresee Adam de Craponne’s fate: he died a ruined man, poisoned - so the story goes –by rivals.

Probably the best known canal in France is the Canal du Midi which was built to link the Atlantic Coast to the Mediterranean. The idea had existed for over a thousand years - the Roman emperors Nero and Augustus considered it as did Charlemagne, Francois I, Charles IX and Henri IV. Several attempts were made at building a canal but they all failed.

The reasons for building one were simple: the sea route around the coast of Spain was not only long (3000 kilometres) – it was also dangerous because of pirates. Moreover, the Straits of Gibraltar were controlled by the powerful Spanish Kingdom who lined its coffers at every passage. This would be a way to weaken Spain’s economy.

In the seventeenth century, in the reign of Louis XIV, one man made the building of this canal his life’s work. His name was Pierre-Paul Riquet, a tax collector from Béziers. Within twenty years he had become very rich (no questions asked) and launched himself into the project with dedication and almost foolhardy enthusiasm. In 1666, the King issued an edict for the construction of the canal and work was begun the following year.

The canal was built to link the Garonne river at Toulouse (which flows into the Atlantic at Bordeaux) and the Etang de Thau, one of a string of lagoons along the Languedoc coast. It was a great challenge that had defeated many an engineer before him, not least because of the features of the landscape. But Riquet was undeterred. When he came to a hill, instead of going around it, he built the world’s first canal tunnel – le tunnel de Malpas; when the ground sloped, he built a lock and when a river had to be crossed he built an aqueduct. Today, there are three hundred and twenty-eight such constructions – some of which are over three hundred years old.
Twelve thousand people worked for him. He paid them above the going rate and – unheard of at the time – he paid them on their days off (which included rainy days) and when they were ill. They were even provided with subsidised housing. Needless to say, this didn’t make Riquet terribly popular with other, less generous employers…

Poor Riquet died exhausted and bankrupt in 1680, just a few months before the canal was completed. His son carried on the work and in 1681, it was inaugurated by the King. Known as the Canal Royal de Languedoc up until the French Revolution, it was renamed the Canal du Midi by paranoid revolutionaries.

From the very beginning, the canal was used to transport people and mail as well as merchandise. The Barque de la Poste (Postal Barge) took four days to travel the 240 kilometres from Toulouse to Agde and stopped regularly along the way to allow its passengers to eat (the stops were called dinées) and to sleep (couchées). At every stopping place there was a chapel, an inn and stables for the horses that pulled the barges. Horses were used for traction until the 1930s, when motorised barges replaced them.

Between 1830 and 1856, another canal was built linking the Canal du Midi to Bordeaux because the river Garonne flowed too slowly to be economical. Ironically, the Bordeaux-Sète railway line was finished at around the same time and marked the beginning of the decline of fluvial transport.

photo www.canal-du-midi.org

Today, the canals are known collectively as Le Canal des Deux Mers: - Canal of the Two Seas – which covers a total distance of over four hundred kilometres. In 1996, it was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO. Together with the other 6300 kilometres of waterways in France, it accommodates thousands of tourists messing about in boats every year while cyclists and walkers travel the old towpaths beneath the shade of the plane trees. It is a wonderful way to experience the variety of France and a perfect opportunity to just relax - and go with the flow…

French bloomers

There are two flower festivals in France during the month of February: la fête de la violette in Toulouse and la fête du Mimosa in the south of France. It’s nice to have something to brighten up the dull wintry days between Christmas and the first signs of spring.

I remember eating Parma Violets when I was a child and calling them ‘perfume sweets’ because I thought that’s what they were made from. In a way, I suppose, they are. Perhaps Toulouse, called la ville rose because of the colour of the buildings, should have been named la ville violette after the flower that is its emblem. Certainly, the Parma violet is omnipresent in this town. As you stroll beside the Canal du Midi, a heady scent drifts along the towpath from La maison de la Violette - a fragrant barge that has been turned into a shrine to this purple flower with its heart-shaped petals. Once inside you are offered a crystallised violet (only one, I’m afraid) and are free to look around and learn about the history and the uses of this flower.

In ancient Greece, the violet was considered a symbol of fertility and love and it was used in love potions. As it was also used as a cure for a headache, the recipient had no excuse not to succumb. Violets were used extensively in the middle-ages both in cookery and in medicine: apothecaries made cough syrup from them and they were used to add colour and flavour to food.

During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, they were still used in cookery but it was also fashionable in court to douse oneself liberally with violet-scented powder to mask bodily odour - although violet-scented soap may have been a better idea…

Violets were Napoleon’s favourite flowers. Josephine wore them on her wedding day and Napoleon sent her a posy of violets on every anniversary. After her death, he picked violets growing on her tomb and wore them in a locket around his neck. In exile on the Isle of Elba, he promised his followers he would return in the spring… with the violets. This earned him the nickname of Caporal Violette and the flower became his emblem, worn by his followers in his honour. Suddenly violets were everywhere: on pots, on clothes and on postcards. The postcards looked innocent enough but they were cleverly drawn and on closer inspection, revealed the outline of Napoleon’s portrait cunningly camouflaged. When he returned from exile, women offered him bouquets in the street and violets were strewn beneath his feet. Up until 1874, the French government tried to ban – with little success - any reproduction of a violet because it was the symbol of the Bonapartists

In the language of flowers, the violet is symbolic of faithfulness in love. It is associated with Valentine's Day too, since legend tells us that violets grew outside the window of the jail where Saint Valentine was imprisoned. And in a profound philosophical statement, this delicate, sweet flower also represents death...

Mimosa, on the other hand, represents sensitivity and feminine energy – whatever that is (I certainly haven’t got any…). This sunshine-laden tree is a member of the acacia family and was brought to the Mediterranean from Australia in the early nineteenth century. Rich Europeans planted it in the gardens of their villas on the French Riviera and enjoyed the masses of golden flowers that bloomed in the late winter months. Mimosa is prized for its delicate fragrance and is a component of several well-know perfumes as well as being used to scent soap and other products of the perfume industry.

Mimosa growers are called mimosistes and between January and March, they export more than eight million bouquets of their flowers all over the world. The fête du Mimosa takes place mid-February in the small town of Mandelieu-la-Napoule where the streets are vibrant with music and gaily-coloured floats. La mimosette – a cream-filled brioche decorated with mimosa and made from a secret recipe - is baked especially for the occasion and you can also buy mimosa syrup, sweets and even jelly.

photo mandelieu

In aromatherapy, mimosa is taken to relieve anxiety and depression and to liberate oneself from “oppressive memories”. It apparently provokes feelings of joy and lightness of spirit and the truly whimsical can use it to induce prophetic dreams.

On a less picturesque note, mimosa extract is used to treat a variety of ailments including swollen ankles and sensitive skin. The bark is used to make an astringent gargle and to treat colic and… chronic diarrhoea.

I expect that is where the feelings of joy and lightness come in…

Crumbs!

In French the word for friend is copain, which comes from the Latin cum pane (with bread) and is the person with whom you share your bread. One could be forgiven for thinking that the French invented bread but it was probably the Egyptians: however, while few people have heard of eesh baladi, nearly everyone knows what a French stick is.

Along with strings of onions and smelly cigarettes, the baguette - that thin loaf of crusty bread that makes a sandwich as long as your arm - is an enduring, albeit hackneyed, symbol of France. The elongated form of the baguette was created in the early twentieth century and was invented for townspeople who lived near to a bakery and could buy their bread fresh, twice a day. The bread was made to be eaten on the same day as purchase and this is still the case. I have tried wrapping leftover baguette in a tea towel; I have put it in a plastic bag overnight; I have popped dry bread in the microwave, I've sprinkled it with water and baked it in a hot oven - but the result is always the same: day-old French bread tastes like carpet slippers.

Bread has been the staple diet of the French for centuries, even if they are now eating a mere five ounces a day as opposed to the two pounds they were eating in 1900. The Ancient Gauls ate their food off a thick slice of bread called a tranchoir and when told to "finish your plate", that's exactly what they did. This custom lasted well into the fourteenth century, although the wealthier classes would give the sauce-sodden tranchoir to the poor to finish off. The quality of bread eaten was an indicator of wealth and the whiter and finer the flour, the more expensive the bread. At this time, the humble peasant had to make do with coarse, black rye bread that he made himself - but not before he'd paid tax to his overlord to grind his flour in the communal mill and more tax to be allowed to use the communal oven. As if that wasn't humiliating enough, he often had to add straw or even clay to the grain when times were hard, producing a loaf that, I suspect, closely resembled the 100% natural high-fibre rustic bread you can buy for a small fortune in any organic bakery today.

The rising price of bread was one of the reasons for the French Revolution. The harvest in 1788 had been extremely poor and the population was starving. At the beginning of 1789, riots broke out throughout the country, and not for the first time. People were demanding work and bread and it was then that Marie-Antoinette - who was a little half-baked herself – was supposed to have suggested that if there was no bread, they could eat cake instead (actually, she didn’t say that, but I wanted to get that joke in about her being half-baked…) Later, in 1791, the Constituent Assembly fixed the price of bread and decreed that bakers could only bake one sort of loaf, the "Equality Loaf", made from three parts wheat flour to one part rye.

In the 19th century, the mechanical kneading machine was invented and bakers no longer had to knead their dough by hand - or with their feet, which had been the case for some types of bread. Consumers were hostile to the idea but professional bakers welcomed the chance to lighten their workload. Further changes followed, including the replacement of brewer's yeast with baker's yeast and the use of steam ovens over wood-fired ones until finally, in the 1950s, bread was being made in what is known as industrial bakeries, thus becoming plentiful and cheap. In the face of this competition, 6,786 traditional bakeries were forced to close down between 1968 and 1975. Today, shops known as "baking terminals" sell bread that they have bought frozen and partially baked and which they have finished cooking in their own ovens, to con you into thinking it is homemade. American and British-type sliced bread has also become popular - I have even seen it sold without crusts: pale and limp and wrapped in cellophane. It’s enough to put you off your croque monsieur…

Thankfully, there are many for whom bread is still the staff of life and 36,000 traditional boulangeries continue to flourish in France (that's one for every 1,500 inhabitants). Each region produces its speciality in a myriad of shapes and sizes, some flavoured with walnuts, raisins, bacon, olives, basil or garlic and others with names that read like poetry: fougasses, flûtes and fibassiers, polka, choine and gâche. The feast day of the patron saint of bread, Saint Honoré, is celebrated on the 16th May and events that include processions, free breakfasts and bread tasting are held throughout the country. And once a year, the Grand Prix of the Parisian Baguette (yes, really), is organised by the City of Paris, the victor walking away with a prize of 4000 euros (almost £27,000) and the honour of providing the President with his daily bread for a year. Now, that's what I'd call a real breadwinner…

*My camera has given up the ghost and I have had to find pictures on the Internet. I do not know who took them so please - if these are your photos - let me know and I will post your details (or remove them, whatever you prefer!).*

Noël, Noël...

Christmas customs were brought here by the Romans and the first celebration of the day was in 496 when King Clovis was baptised in Rheims along with his entire army of three thousand warriors, presumably in an Olympic-sized font. Charlemagne was crowned emperor on Christmas day in the year 800 and on the same day in 1066 that other Frenchman, William the Conqueror, was crowned in Westminster Abbey.

The first Christmas tree appeared in 1837: it was brought over by a German princess on her marriage to the Duke of Orleans (Germans obviously considered a tree to be a suitable romantic gift because Prince Albert brought one over too, when he married Queen Victoria). Father Christmas evolved from Saint Nicolas, a thinner and more discerning person who distributed presents on the 6th December, accompanied by the Père Fouettard – a rather politically incorrect Father 'Spanker' who punished naughty children by whipping them. Saint Nicolas's day is still celebrated in the north- east of France and so children there get twice as many presents in December as everybody else, which seems a tad unfair.

You can buy Christmas crackers and stockings here now, even though traditionally, French children put their shoes beneath the tree on Christmas Eve. Mind you, as my own children pointed out, that’s only fun if you have big feet. They prefer Christmas stockings because they can tie them to the bedposts and stretch them big enough for Father Christmas to stick a stereo in there and maybe a laptop while he’s at it. The idea for Christmas crackers, on the other hand, came from the French bon bon – a sweet wrapped in tissue paper. Tom Smith, a 19th century London baker, brought these back from Paris, added mottos and gifts and eventually got rid of the sweet altogether to add the ‘snap’. Crackers are still a novelty in France, though – the French get their ‘snap’ from papillottes: foiled-wrapped chocolates which also contain a silly joke but no gift (unless you count the chocolate).

Leaving aside the premature fake-snow-and-holly-wreath window displays, the real run-up to the festivities begins – at least for those who live in Provence, as I used to - on the 4th of December, which is St. Barbara’s day. You plant grains of wheat in a saucer (rather like planting cress), and watch it grow tall and strong by Christmas. We still do this in our house even though my wheat nearly always dies, which apparently means I will not be prosperous during the coming year. Curiously enough, this has so far proved to be true.

The French have not entirely forgotten that Christmas is a religious festival and the focal point is not the tree or the fairy lights or even the bowl of mixed nuts. It is the crèche - the Nativity crib. In Provence, the figurines are clay representations of the Holy Family and also of villagers and local craftsmen. These are called santons - little saints - and the people who make them are santonniers. One santonnier I heard about has made a santon of every single person in his village and at Christmas, each villager brings his clay 'double' to the church and places it in the crèche. The crèche is often the first thing people want you to see when you visit their home although I’ve noticed that no one is ever impressed by my own cotton wool and papier mâché representation. Too conceptual, perhaps.

Children are kept busy here on Christmas Eve, either with cartoons on the television or attendance at Midnight Mass. Père Noël comes by at midnight and the presents are opened then. Rather than falling exhausted into bed, clutching their new Barbies/Playstations, with bits of Sellotape stuck to their pyjamas, the children then have to eat a gargantuan meal with friends and family, called le Réveillon. There is usually a turkey, stuffed with sausage meat and chestnuts, quite often oysters, foie gras, smoked salmon, plenty of champagne and a bûche de Noël -Yule log - for pudding. In Provence, they also serve les treize desserts - symbolic sweetmeats representing the twelve apostles and Christ, which include dried figs, nougat and calissons, a confectionary made from almonds and preserved melon. If you manage to get through that lot, you are allowed to go to bed, unless you are a guest in someone’s home, in which case it would be polite to offer to help with the washing up.

Chez nous, however, Christmas is resolutely English. When they were younger, my children would go to bed early on Christmas Eve after a few carols, mince pies and mild threats involving boughs of holly. They would wake up five minutes after I’d gone to bed and open their presents very noisily and would not want their Christmas dinner because they’d have eaten all the chocolate tree decorations. This year, the only difference will be that they’ll probably go to bed early on Christmas morning.

Joyeux Noël everybody!