In Search of the Perfect Christmas

Ever since I was little I’ve been in search of the perfect fairytale Christmas.

Maybe it’s just a product of having grown up in LA. Southern California is kind of seasonally challenged when it comes to the whole Christmas thing. There’s no snow, no frost on the window panes. There are no chestnut trees, and the only open fires are produced by either sterile gas burners or toxic Duraflame logs, neither of which are fit for roasting anything. So out of a kind of yuletide Napoleon complex, we overcompensate. You will never find so many people in Santa suits, holly wreaths, blinking lights or plastic reindeer than in LA. From late October to New Years Eve LA becomes one enormous celebration of climatically-confused winter-wonderland kitsch.

So ever since I left I have continued to act out this symbolic, neurotic quest for the perfect Christmas. Christmas in London ticked most of the boxes. Working on Fleet Street and living in a Victorian terrace house gave the season an undeniably Dickensian flavor, and the thought of mince pies and dark ales and the lights strung up over Regent Street still takes close to center stage in my imaginary idyllic holiday season. Even despite London’s particular winter horrors - the drunken office Christmas parties, the London Underground with its winter smell of chilled petroleum-based sludge, the disturbing English tradition of the Christmas pantomime – despite those downsides, we had good times in London over the holidays.

So now it’s our fourth year of Christmastime in the Quercy, and the fairytale jury is still out. I don’t quite know what I imagined – horse drawn sleighs maybe? Carolers wandering door to door, crossing the good mile or two between farms to sing a song and be rewarded with hot chocolate? At least a bit of snow, surely. The reality here, on the other hand, is resolutely more mundane.

The French don’t traditionally make much of Christmas. New Year’s Eve is their big excuse for winter celebration, and much of the Christmas festivity one sees nowadays is imported from the German or English traditions. That makes for an easy transition. The leap from Father Christmas to Père Noël wasn’t any harder than that from Santa Claus to Father Christmas. The mulled wine and Christmas lights remain a constant, and if mince pies have fallen off the radar screen, they’ve been replaced by crepes, walnut cakes and aligot, a specialty of the nearby Auvergne which seems to be a potato-and-white-cheese-based form of wallpaper paste. The French may lack the peculiar enthusiasm that the English bring to Christmas, they make up for it with a slow, quiet, family-focused holiday that has its own charms.

In fact, the quiet here can be a little overabundant. During summer, when our holiday cottages are full and our time and attention are in constant demand, we yearn for some solitude, but as winter sets in it sometimes brings a little cabin fever with it. Our old friends and extended family are all abroad, and most of our new friends here, whether French or foreign, have fled to spend the holidays with family elsewhere. Amid the hush of the winter countryside, house after house silent, shutters closed and chimneys cold, it’s hard not to wonder whether perhaps they all know something we don’t. And with the climate just mild enough to preclude the consolation of snow in most years, it’s no surprise that Claire and David rush off to family on the Mediterranean coast, or that Miranda takes the kids back to England during the school holidays. They know better than to hang around for cold rain and deep silence.

This year the village of Duravel hosted its second annual Christmas festival, and we were determined to take advantage of whatever holiday cheer we could lay our hands on. A Christmas of Legend, it was called. I suppose the idea was to bring to life various fairy tales, and to the extent that that was the goal, they did it well. And yet, as we bought our ticket and entered the enclosed public park where the event was being staged, I couldn’t help wondering what on earth all this had to do with Christmas.

For a start, there were the witches. I’m not just talking about one or two to evoke the story of Hansel and Gretel, which at least has a Christmas connection, however tenuous, via the gingerbread house. No, there were dozens of them. Five or six at least were clustered at the entrance, leering at the children as they entered and taunting them with threats to boil them in a cauldron. Another group had set up camp around the cauldron itself, just up the path, waiting for their hapless victims with a punitive glee which reminded me ever so slightly of Sebastian’s old kindergarten teacher. It was as if the French witches’ union had chosen Duravel for their annual convention. Their noses and green skin were most impressive, but there was a certain lack of, well, of ho ho ho about them.

The other fairy tales worked a bit better. There was a short Snow Queen play which, although inaudible, at least looked enchanting. The kids seemed to enjoy the maze of white pebbles which lead to hidden treasure (in practical gift certificate form), and only perhaps one in three burst into tears when adults in wolf costumes jumped out from behind trees to startle them. There were lambs, and a baby donkey, and in one corner an opportunity to have a photo taken with a scruffy-looking Père Noël. For braving the wolves, Sebastian was given a small Furby – its unreplaceable battery already dead - with McDonalds printed on the label. He was as happy as a clam.

This gentle, well-intentioned chaos was as far from a star-studded neon-lit Los Angeles Christmas as it could get. With the possible exception of those witches’ noses – detailed enough to have come straight off the set of the Wizard of Oz – everything about the evening was defiantly imperfect. The lighting was blinding in some places, nonexistent in others, and taken together would have met the test for gross negligence in any American court of law. The theatrics were resolutely amateur and the hygiene standards at the grilled sausage stand troubling. But for all that, it was wonderful. Scores of people had volunteered their time to make the evening a success, and for the hundreds of people who came, all the effort and good intentions seemed to be what mattered most. What it lacked in polish, it more than made up for in its generosity and simplicity. It was local. It was ours. It was a chance to get out and see other people. That’s all that mattered.

So I guess that’s where things stand with my fairy tale Christmas. No place is perfect, nothing can quite live up to the ideals we form in our heads while growing up. But a little imperfection focuses your attention on what matters. When the big day came, we gave Sebastian a new racetrack and I dutifully spend hours putting it together. The cars jump off the track all too easily, as they did with mine when I was little. There were tears. They dried again. It was as flawed and wonderful and happy a Christmas as anyone could want.

And this morning we had snow. Plenty of it.

Merry Christmas.

The Not-so-Fine Art of Woodcutting

Winter is in full swing, and a tenacious fog has wrapped itself around the Quercy. Colored lights have been strung in all the surrounding villages, and a large Christmas tree festooned with odd bits of multi-colored tinsel has taken up residence in front of the village hall. And from every chimney, down every country road, a cheerful plume of smoke rises to merge with the low leaden sky.

It’s woodcutting season, and I’m in my element.

Honestly, there’s nothing like starting up a chainsaw to boost a man’s sense of machismo. The weight of the machine, the little jolt of torque as the chain starts to spin, the seemingly gratuitous but necessary gunning of the motor to disengage the choke – it’s all calculated to bring on a testosterone high like nothing else. For me, it’s a high that lasts right until I start cutting.

I love cutting wood, but somehow, even in my fourth winter here, I’m not very good at it. Oh, I’ve improved, no question. I’ve got a better sense of how often to pause, pull out my file and sharpen the chain’s teeth. I know just what length to cut so that it’ll fit in the wood-burner, and which logs are too knotted to bother trying to split once I’ve cut them to size. I’ve got my rhythm, and I’ve still got all my fingers, so I can’t complain.

And yet it’s always humbling. Some days the logs seem to fight back. I’ll nestle one into the V of the sawhorse, and just as I reach down to pick up the chainsaw the log will inexplicably shift its weight and hit the ground with a mocking thud. So I reposition it for better balance, but now not enough of it is protruding for me to cut the right length for our insidiously small wood-burner. So I try sliding it with one hand, I try kicking it a bit with my foot, I try invoking the spirit of the tree it once was. And all the while I’m grateful to be alone as my mojo is ground into so much sawdust.

Splitting the thicker pieces usually involves the same sort of Marx Brothers routine. No matter how carefully I set the short section of log on its end, it rarely stays there long enough for me to hammer a wedge into it and split it in half. I won’t go into the silent humiliation, rarely witnessed by others but just as poignant nonetheless, of hefting my sledgehammer and swinging at the perfectly balanced log and wedge only to miss.

All this is just shooting fish in a barrel compared to cutting down a tree. Live trees have much more creative ways of fighting back than logs. They position themselves on awkward slopes near your house. They drop dead branches on your head while you’re cutting. Even in the throes of death they will twist as they fall - see you in hell, you can almost hear the branches curse as they plummet towards you. Taking down these wily bastards is an art in itself, and although I’ve mastered it enough to tackle the smaller ones on my own, I don’t mess with any tree that’s too big for me to hug. We have a few of those that need to go this winter, and that’s where Francois comes in.

I keep putting off calling Francois. He’s a pleasant and kind man, and is one of the best tree cutters around. He doesn’t grossly overcharge me, and he is always ready with a smile, friendly conversation and expert advice. At least, I think so. I can’t understand a word Francois says.

Having trouble following all of a conversation is a pretty common problem when you live abroad and speak the language imperfectly. There are always moments when you have to ask people to repeat themselves, and the French, at least around here, are usually pretty obliging. But you can only ask for so many repetitions before people start speaking to you very loudly, which for the record really doesn’t help at all. So then you’re left with piecing together the words you do you know and filling in the gaps with your best guesses based on context.

After a while you start to watch out for the telltale puzzled looks, awkward silences and nervous laughter that warn you when you’ve guessed wrong. These looks, like the toes bruised from logs falling on them or the singed hairs on my hand after an awkward encounter with the wood-burner, are the daily reminders of how much we still have to learn here. At one time Sophia and I spent our days bringing our expensive educations to bear on the arcane complexities of corporate law. Now we find ourselves struggling for mere competence in the daily necessities of living in so raw and unmediated a place.

I’ll get around to calling Francois. I’ll ask him when he can drop by, and he’ll say something like behn, damang, fang de matinay in his gruff, rapid-fire Cassagnes farmer’s twang of which, on a good day, I can make out one word in four. And I’ll say sure, great, see you then, and be forced by my own cowardice to hang around the house for days hoping that he hadn’t actually suggested an afternoon in February.

And when he does arrive, and is in the process of pointing at various trees and emitting strings of sound that I’m sure could be resolved, with enough time, into something resembling the French language, I’ll start to feel tempted. Perhaps cutting down big trees is actually less challenging than deciphering the local dialect. Next year, maybe I can start taking a shot at the trickier ones myself.

The temptation won’t last though. A day or two later I’ll be cutting firewood again. Between bursts of sawing, the familiar sound of English expletives will drift across the fields and woodlands around our house. Francois’s work will be safe for another year.

A Visit with Badger

I walked this morning.

I do it less often than I care to admit. On the occasional winter morning, however, when feeling distracted or restless, I put on the silly hat that I can only wear because wild boar can’t laugh, grab my favorite walking stick à la Bilbo Baggins, and head into the woods.

The sheep were quiet this morning and the frost was just leaving the fields as I passed the neighboring farm. The mist seemed to block out almost all sound other than my own footsteps and the occasional rooster, and by the time I had wound down the little dirt path and reached the valley floor I felt myself in another world. The path then joins a larger track – this one just wide enough for Gerard the baker to ride his quad bike on the disturbingly rare days he leaves the bakery – and I turned left. The woods here are young, mostly hornbeam with a scattering of obligingly gnarled oaks, and visible among the now leafless trees wind rows and rows of crumbling stone. This is all that’s left of the retaining walls that would a century ago have supported the terraced plots of a thriving vineyard.

Especially in winter it’s hard not to detour now and then to explore among the old walls looking for abandoned farm equipment or hidden cave entrances. Today I found a badger set. No sign of the badger of course – he was I’m sure staunchly holed up deep in his cave, protected on all sides by cold gray stone and packed earth, wondering what strange smelling creature was lurking at the gates of his little underground kingdom. So I left him in peace and continued on my way, past the overgrown ruins of an old stone barn, skirting the edge of a young walnut grove, until the path forks. Here I examined for perhaps the tenth time a large battered stone which I am convinced is a flint core from which prehistoric men chipped the raw material for their arrow heads and scrapers (bear with me, it’s just plausible enough…).

The flint core tells me it’s time to stop. I’ve gone farther, many times, through the little hamlet I know lies ahead and beyond. I am probably no more than a mile from home as the crow flies. But here my comfort zone ends, and today I’m not up for an adventure among foreigners. They are border people – not far beyond them lies the frontier with the Dordogne. I just can’t face it.

The funny thing is that I’m only half-joking. One of the corollaries to living in such a slow and remote place is that your sense of local begins to contract. It’s not really so much a question of physical distance – in the countryside you inevitably are obliged to drive farther afield for shops and services than you would living in a city or suburb. But the psychological and cultural territory seems still to correspond to the old feudal boundaries. Like the skeletons of the old vineyards and the leftover stone-age tools, the ghosts of small scale feudalism still leave their mark on the human landscape.

Our part of the Quercy occupies the northwestern corner of the Lot, and borders on two other provinces, the Lot-et-Garonne and the Dordogne. These new administrative borders, arbitrary though they may look on a map, have huge local significance. Our tourist information office, for example, carries almost no information about sites a mere 20 minute drive away, simply because they are on the wrong side of the border. Collecting information for our holiday cottages we must go to three different offices to get pamphlets on all the nearby happenings during the summer tourist season.

But it’s more than bureaucracy. The local economies are different. People smile less over there. And then there’s the driving - people from the Lot-et-Garonne are terrible, aggressive drivers, at least by our standards over here in the Lot. The last two numbers on French licence plates reveal which district the car is registered in, and we have learned from experience that when you see car with that tell-tale 47 plate, you’d better give them a wide berth.

Even the smaller scale feudal territories present some startling contrasts. Take language. They all speak French, right? Behn oui, any of the old timers here will tell you, but they don’t speak the same French in Cassagnes as they do in Montcabrier. Cassagnes is a small village of about 200 souls, a little over an hour’s walk away. Each of these tiny villages have their own dialect, their own character. And don’t talk to a hunter from Montcabrier about the Cassagnes hunting association. Savages, every last man of them.

It’s a contagious frame of mind, and even foreigners (I mean real foreigners, not just the ones from other villages) who have moved here find themselves acquiring both the folk-wisdom and folk-folly of their adoptive village. It is at times surreal to listen to English and Dutch people talking about the micro-climate in Frayssinet-le-Gelat just up the road (it’s too cold for wisteria to grow there, our English neighbor assured us) or the big-village airs put on by the shop girls in Prayssac. I get it most when I’m walking. On foot, every familiar tree stump or pile of rocks is a reaffirmation of belonging, and every unexplored path both an opportunity for adventure and a potential for hidden menace. As much as I enjoy exploring an unfamiliar patch of woods, I find more and more in myself a sense of fellow-feeling with that badger, snugly tucked away in his hole and reluctant to stray very far.

But times change, and younger generation, with their mobile phones and Internet access, are starting to leave some of this feudal attitude behind. Now that several villages must combine to share a school in order to have enough pupils, village cultures are beginning to blend in a sort of micro-globalization. Our own son’s two best friends are from Cassagnes. One of them is the girl he says he want to marry some day.

We’re trying to keep an open mind.

Loto Night

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared with what lies within us.” The quote appeals to me, perhaps because living abroad involves a lot of looking within. Inevitable daily reminders of your own otherness necessitate an almost constant process of self-reevaluation. This week I looked within, and found something unexpected and disturbing. There, among the hopes and fears, the secrets and shadows, lurks a love of bingo.

I was not brought up to love bingo. Bingo is what elderly aunts play on cruise ships and in retirement homes. I’m 38 years old, male, Harvard educated, city-born, and I’m sure for all sorts of other reasons totally outside the bingo paradigm as I have always understood it.

So the sheer delight I felt the other night at our school Loto as I, the operator of the boulier no less, turned the handle, withdrew the numbered plastic balls and handed them to the nursery school teacher to be read out, gave me cause for concern. Sure, it was all dressed up as a quaint rural French tradition called “le Loto,” pronounced “low tow.” I could easily try to intellectualize it as a cultural experience, or write it off as an amusing Peter-Mayle-esque adventure in mingling with the locals, or use it as a pretext to feel smug about having “integrated.” In fact, I’ve done all those things. But even sitting here in my study, surrounded by books, striving to live the part of the intellectual country gentleman, I can’t shake the feeling that the game itself if fun.

The preparations were not. It takes some organizing and some manpower to run a village bingo night. The evening before about a dozen of us, parents and members of the village council, gathered in front of the “Salle de Fetes,” or village hall, and spent the next few hours carrying trestle tables and chairs and even pew benches out of the church and setting them up in the three adjoining rooms of the village hall, the mayor’s office and the larger of the two classrooms of Sebastian’s school. Saturday afternoon was spent organizing all the donated or purchased items into boxes to form prizes for each round of “quine” (one row on your bingo card), “double quine” (you can guess…), or “carton plein” (a full card). Lucky players might go home with just about anything - a DVD player, a coffee maker, vases, corkscrews, a large carved wooden Porcini mushroom, lighting fixtures, homemade pâté. Some of the prizes couldn’t go into boxes, so we wrote out little I.O.U.s for the wild boar haunch courtesy of the Montcabrier Hunters' Association or for the several live chickens, ducks and rabbits donated by farmers.

But once it was all in place, things ran like clockwork. It was a cold night, and the afternoon’s rain was now freezing on the roads, but still they came. An hour before we were scheduled to start, even as we were still divvying up the cash boxes between the desk where the bingo cards were sold and the “café,” the serious players began to arrive. Older women mostly, in comfortable baggy clothing and sporting their own plastified metal chips and magnetized batons with which they could effortlessly gather up the chips at the end of each round. The amateurs arrived a bit later, families with kids in tow, some with their own chips, some scooping up a cupful of dried corn kernels from a sack at the entrance.

My boulier and I were lodged in a corner up on stage, and at the table next to me were several of these hard-core enthusiasts. One deftly managed to spread her chips among 18 bingo cards, despite the surprisingly fast pace at which I drew and the teacher called out the numbers. Another kept turning around to stare at the boulier, and as if to ensure against foul play. Under the pressure of her gaze, each time I pulled out a number I felt inexplicably guilty.

And so for a solid three hours, with one break for coffee and homemade crèpes wrapped in tinfoil, I turned that tumbler and the numbers were called. An occasional wave of excitement or laughter rippled through the crowd as someone called out “quine” or, more often, let out an anguished cry when they missed out on winning by just one number. It was intense and exhausting. When the prizes were all given out, a couple dozen people stayed behind, not just the organizers, but random others as well, to put everything back in place. Trestle tables were disassembled. Church pews returned to their rightful home. The mayor’s desk moved back into place ready for Monday morning. And then, the work done, the crowd dispersed again. I couldn’t help feeling a little sad as we locked the door. On that bleak cold night, far from anything that could be called a city, surrounded by the frosty hush of a country winter, that bright noisy village hall had seemed like the warm center of the universe. The Loto is so popular, I realized, because out here, with so little else going on, it is the ultimate cure for rural loneliness.

The Loto was a big success – we raised a good 3000 euros for the school – and it has a new fan. Despite my lingering suspicion that I had been so readily offered the job of operating the boulier because in it lurked some hidden horror, the only downside had been a painful arm from turning that damned tumbler. And that I had been unable to play. The wild boar haunch, alas, will grace someone else’s table this Christmas.

But in a few weeks the Football Association is hosting its own Loto...

Thanksgiving, chez nous

Thanksgiving, I am convinced, is best celebrated abroad.

Okay, there are a few disadvantages, even beyond the obvious absence of family and friends. Canned pumpkin, for example, is almost impossible to find beyond our borders except in world capitals boasting a large American expat community, and even then it’s a brutish Hobbesian struggle to get your hands on any before limited supplies vanish. Ditto cranberry sauce. And then there’s the stubborn refusal of foreign governments to recognize our four-day weekend – unless you’re self-employed, you have to take a vacation day in order to wallow in the overstuffed hung-over bliss of the Friday after.

But the advantages far outweigh the shortcomings. For a start, living abroad means there are no expectations, apart from calling your mother. Don’t like those candied yams? Does anyone? No matter. Don’t like Aunt Margery? She’s thousands of miles away. Daunted by spending a week picking over leftover dried out turkey meat and battling the supposedly mythological but all-too-real L-tryptophan induced stupor? No worries. As long as you don’t invite any other Americans, you can just roast a chicken. No one will know the difference. Celebrating Thanksgiving abroad means you can honor the traditions as selectively as you like. You can even make up a few, although from personal experience I would advise against trying to convince your six-year-old that Santa Claus has a less-talented brother known as Turkey Claus. Being ridiculed by a six-year-old is not pretty.

So, unshackled from the burden of tradition and constrained by Sebastian’s school schedule, we had our Thanksgiving Thursday dinner last Sunday at lunchtime. Since one of the other pleasures of celebrating the holiday abroad is initiating foreign friends into the tradition (or such bits of it that you choose to observe), we invited David and Claire over with their children, Chloe and Theo.

Having French people over for a meal is not always easy. Most of our neighbors are old-fashioned rural French, and are uncomfortable with being invited over for a meal with someone they aren’t related to and haven’t known for at least 30 years. For an aperitif, maybe after a few years of saying “bonjour” at the bakery, but even that is a stretch.

And then there is the food issue. The French, for all their love of great cuisine, are not terribly open-minded when it comes to foreign food. To vary the ingredients of a traditional dish is heresy, and to serve something outside the accepted French canon is for many, well, beyond the pale. Start waving marshmallow-covered sweet potatoes at them and they are likely to run away screaming. As, quite frankly, they should.

But Davie and Claire are both grew up in more cosmopolitan parts of France and are mercifully flexible. While the kids played and the chickens roasted, we sat down for a drink and I explained to them exactly what Thanksgiving is about. I ran through the history, aided in large part by having watched the Peanuts TV special so many times, and proudly described how it is perhaps the one holiday almost totally unspoiled by commercialism. And if I am guilty of having sidelining some of the darker details – the subsequent war and genocide against the Native Americans, the grotesque spectacle of shoppers throttling each other in the Friday sales – let’s just say that this holiday is about being thankful for the good, not dwelling on the evil. It’s already enough that they braved the succotash.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Where there's smoke...

Having grown up in LA, I have very fond memories of childhood winters. After summer’s unbearable heat and autumn’s furious winds and wildfires, I found myself yearning for cool cloudy days, for nights that closed in well before dinnertime, for the occasional rainy afternoon by the fire. I remember making popcorn to snack on while I watched the rain fall, wrapped in a warm sweatshirt and listening to the occasional sizzle of the reliable three-hour-burn Duraflame log. Mom would bake cookies while I, always the romantic, imagined our late-60’s Spanish-style house to be an ancient thatched cottage tucked away in the English countryside. In a land of endless freeways and almost no rainfall, I appreciated all things cozy.

These days I’m up to mes oreilles in cozy, and it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Cozy, in the context of a picturesque medieval farmhouse nestled among the hills and dales of the Quercy countryside, turns out to be hard work. We all picture the obvious: outside are crumbling stone walls and magnificent old trees dripping with November rain, inside it’s all hand-knit sweaters, warm cups of tea and a roaring fire comfortable filling the enormous open hearth. All great stuff, for which we are grateful every single day. But that fire…

For a start, let’s get it out in the open, fireplaces do not heat your house. Eighty percent of all the heat that’s produced goes right up the chimney, bounces off the stratosphere, and returns to Earth somewhere in the Arctic where it feebly conspires with the oil industry to discomfort polar bears. Our enormous medieval cantou, the local rendition of the Inglenook hearth, is big enough to climb into because that’s precisely what they used to do before central heating. The cantou traditionally would have had a cooking pot suspended in the middle and a chair to either side in which the grandparents could sit to keep warm. The rest of the family kept warm by working hard in the fields until they reached old age, probably at forty, and earned their turn by the fire.

Given that its nominal heat production renders it essentially ornamental, the fireplace is awfully high maintenance. We don’t need to sit by it; we can keep perfectly warm all day by ferrying in the enormous logs that it consumes like potato chips. It makes me wistful for those Duraflames.

Better, on that score, is the lovely old Godin wood-burning stove in the dining room. This quaint green-enameled piece of 19th century technology gives off much more heat with much less wood. But that wood must be cut into 45 cm sections and not be too thick; the hours I spend with a chainsaw every week sculpting little logs to fit into the Godin’s narrow jaws are gratifying to my sense of machismo and affinity for country life, but quite frankly I could do without them. At least the Godin is happy when I feed it; it thanks me by belching large quantities of smoke into the dining room.

Nonetheless here I sit, my laptop warming my legs, my clothing reeking of smoke, happily entering what will be our fourth French winter by the fire. Like every year, Sophia and I are discussing the option of using our magnificent medieval fireplace to frame a modern wood-burner that would actually keep us warm. But despite the absurdity of all this chopping, carrying and choking in homage of a romantic ideal, we won’t do it. Sitting here by the fire, sooty and reeking of smoke, watching the logs disappear as fast as the raindrops hit the drafty single-glazed window, it’s just too damned cozy.

Armistice Day

Yesterday Montcabrier, along with the rest of France, paused to commemorate Armistice Day.

I have to confess, we don’t always make it to village events. I suppose the curse of running your own business is the ever-present feeling that there is something you should be doing, something more important than whatever is going on out there in the big wide world. But today we were determined, so a little before 11:00 we hopped in the car and wound our way up to the square.

There, gathered in front of the church, were between 50-75 of our fellow “Cabrimontains,” as inhabitants of Montcabrier are called. The mayor, the two schoolteachers, and the baker’s wife were all there, as were assorted parents of Sebastian’s classmates and a handful of other villagers, both friends and strangers. After a few minutes of saying bonjour, of handshakes and bisous, Jean-Pierre the mayor corralled everyone over to the Monument des Morts.

Montcabrier’s war memorial is a stone obelisk bearing eighteen names of men from this tiny village who gave their lives for France during the First and Second World Wars. It is smaller than many a tombstone, so we all gathered closely around under the large mulberry tree to hear Jean-Pierre give the customary speech. To one side remained a cluster of seven children, some with flowers. As Jean-Pierre spoke, the children looked on, quiet and solemn, trying with their little brains to follow the mayor’s words on war and sacrifice, on honor and tragedy. It was a scene out of a sentimental French film.

Except that among those little standard-bearers of tomorrow’s France was my son.

It seemed strange to me at first. Setting aside for a moment the color of his passport, what is Sebastian? Half American, half Dutch, he is growing up French. I’m feeling more patriotic than usual these days in the wake of the election, and I could not help, for a moment, feeling uneasy at the thought of my son becoming a little Frenchman. But then Jean-Pierre spoke. The mayor’s speech could have dwelt only on the victories and defeats of his fellow villagers. It could have been a pompous invocation of the greatness of France. Instead he spoke of the sacrifice that so many made to keep France free; not just the Cabrimontains, not just the French, but also of the English and Americans and others who came to France and died by the thousands. He spoke of the African brigades who fought here, far from home. And he even spoke of the newfound hope, felt by so many all over the world, inspired by the election of Barack Obama. As if to underline the point, the commemorative wreath was laid by our village’s eldest veteran, not a Frenchman, but an Englishman who landed in Normandy on D-Day.

Jean-Pierre then read out the list of the men of Montcabrier who had died in the wars, each bearing the familiar-sounding family names of our friends and neighbors. And after each name, “mort pour la France” spoken softly by everyone in the crowd. Dead for France. It was touching, and honest, and humble, and as I watched Sebastian speak the words along with his classmates, his fellow villagers, my angst over his identity faded. If Obama is a post-racial American, then Sebastian is a post-national one. He is Cabrimontain. As the ceremony concluded with its minute of silence and Sebastian ran off to play tag with his classmates in the village square I couldn’t help but think that Cabrimontain is a pretty good thing to be.

"Flavor Week," French style

It’s so much fun to stereotype the French. The berets, the baguettes, the Pythonesque outraaaaaageous accents, it all begs for satire. Many of our preconceptions are, as one might expect, outdated, purely regional or just plain nonsense. Frogs legs, for instance. Yes, the dish exists, but after three years I have yet to see it on a menu. And berets, despite many Americans’ vague association of them with leftist European intellectuals, tend to be worn only by old French farmers, and even then they are not so common a sight anymore. And as far as I am aware monkeys, even here, do not eat cheese.

But this week I have been reminded that the legendary French obsession with food is, if anything, understated. The French are totally indifferent to breakfast, often sending their children to school on empty stomachs (which, when I think back to the Frosted Flakes of my youth, may not be such a bad thing). But the idea of a simple sandweeeesh for lunch is considered barbaric. So our village school has the luxury - deemed a necessity and sacred right in this blessedly civilized place – of its own kitchen for supplying the children with hot three-course lunches.

The things that come out of this kitchen are not quite what you’d find kids eating across the suburbs of America. The first course is generally soup, salad or cold cuts. Then meat and a vegetable side dish. We’re not talking turkey dogs and fries here: recent offerings have included duck breast, confit de canard (a traditional farmer’s dish of duck leg preserved in its own fat), veal ragout, quiche and courgettes gratinées, often followed by a cheese course. And then, yes, the occasional hamburger (the French way, no bun and blood rare).

But this masks the more important side of the Gallic food fixation. While it’s important what makes it onto the plate, more crucial is that the food be eaten from a plate, at a table, with others, and slowly. Food is not only about eating, it is about tradition, culture, a way of life. Process is as important as product. Montcabrier’s elementary school students – all 31 of them – sit down at table and eat their three course long lunches like little ladies and gentlemen. Comme il faut.

To shake things up a bit, this week Sebastian’s school is having its Semaine de Gout, badly translated as Flavor Week, intended to introduce the children to more exotic foods. In a country where they eat snails and reeking unpasteurized cheeses, that seemed to me like an ambitious goal, especially for first graders. But there I was losing track of the bigger picture. The French generally have little interest in foreign food – even in Paris you’re hard pressed to find much more than the occasional Vietnamese or North African restaurant as a nod to France’s colonial past. In a farming community like this one, where locally produced tripe and paté are the norm, Italian food counts as a cultural experience.

So Sebastian’s foray into international cuisine has included pizza, sauerkraut, and an unidentified meat in sauce which was meant to represent that most exotic of cultures – France. After all that excitement, I’m sure he’s relieved to come home every evening to his familiar old standbys like Thai green curry, and next week for the school menu to return to the comforting norm of duck confit.

This morning's visit

It’s a tricky thing for any man to admit an affinity for sheep. But they’re here again, and I can’t help loving them.

The visits started early this summer. I often hear the dull clank of the sheep’s bells when they are grazing in our elderly widow neighbor's field, an idyllic stretch of grass, clover and wild thyme sloping down from the road about 100 yards from our house. But one morning they were louder than usual, and later I noticed our grass studded with little brown balls and looking like a giant green chocolate chip cookie. A few days later I heard the sound again, and on investigation I found nine or ten sheep in our field.

This is no problem for us, but sheep aren’t the brightest of animals, and I worried that they might wander too far from home. Visions of white fluffy road kill convinced me that I needed to do something. Their owner didn’t answer her phone. If those sheep were going to get home, I was going to have to take them.

So I pulled on my boots, grabbed a walking stick (shepherds always have sticks), and set out to shoo them home. Of course, growing up in suburban LA didn’t expose me to a whole lot of livestock and law school, sadly, teaches much about fleecing but little about sheep. Yet they were almost as wary of me as I was of them, so by simply walking behind them I managed to coax them down the narrow country lane that leads from our house to the neighboring farm. The entire way back, the rest of the sheep followed us on the other side of the fence, eager to welcome their friends back into the fold. As feel-good moments go, this one was golden.

Until we got to the farmhouse. No one was home, but figured all I’d have to do is get the sheep through the narrow gate that led into the field. The other sheep were waiting there, so I would simply open the gate and my little band would rush in. After a lot of tiptoeing and false starts I managed to get around behind my little flock and drive them toward the gate… and right past it. Again, I got behind them and closed in, and again they ignored the gate, this time making for a narrow open barn. I followed them among stacked hay rolls and old farm equipment to the end of the barn. They settled into a corner and wouldn’t budge. I tried luring them out with apples (they love apples) and was met with a stony silence. I tried getting behind them again, but just ended up chasing them in circles. I tried pushing one of them from behind, but that resulted only in a comic visual that makes me grateful to have been far from onlookers.

Eventually I gave up and returned home tired, defeated, and smelling of wet wool. Every morning we awoke to the sound of sheep bells. Our neighbor reassured me that the sheep wouldn’t stray too far and almost every weekend that summer her children arrived with new rolls of fencing and bundles of solid chestnut stakes, testament to her determination to keep her flock, both two- and four- legged, close to home. By August the sheep had stopped visiting.

The other day, when my son told me he’d seen a huge white dog in our field, I thought nothing of it. We often get hunters’ dogs roaming through. But this morning I heard the bells again and I knew. My friends are back. This time they can stay as long as they like.

In from the cold

Free at last!

For the past few days my poor newborn blog has been incarcerated and awaiting interrogation on suspicion of spamming. Some time last night, it was released without charge. I can only imagine what the guy who reviews suspicious accounts for blogger.com must have thought when he came across two short posts and a photo of Montcabrier. Like stumbling upon a little Jewish lady at Gitmo grumbling that her polyester orange tracksuit gives her the sweats.

My brief time as blogger non grata should not have felt like a big deal. A few days of silence are nothing to fly back to Washington for. But life out here, away from the daily buzz of world events, suspended in the amber of another language and culture, brings with it a sense of disconnectedness. There is no lack of news here, of course, or of concern for the outside world – Catherine the baker’s wife knows more about the US elections than does your average American “undecided” voter. But the feeling never really leaves, the feeling of remoteness.

The irony of it is that we are just as dependent as before on that big bad mechanized world we supposedly left behind. Sure we live small and local and simpler than before. I know the man who raises the cattle for our beef. I get annoyed at eating tomatoes if they haven’t been grown nearby. I’ve started thinking of Cahors (population 20,000) as a big city. But we still have television and internet (even a cell phone, tucked away in a drawer somewhere), and my relationship to these things seems ever more fragile and needy. They are all I have connecting me not just to far away family and friends, but to a culture that I have only partially have left behind. Computer glitches no longer just make me mad, they make me feel vulnerable.

So would we have embraced life in the French countryside without the internet? As I walk through the woods that stretch for miles from my front door, or when I drive up to the village and am greeted by familiar faces and a round of “bonjour,” it seems like a petty question.

But please don’t take my blog away.

The perils of acceptance

Last week my wife, in a moment of what I’ll politely term raving lunacy, generously volunteered me to be treasurer of the Montcabrier Parents’ Association. I am now responsible for a budget of a few thousand euros on behalf of the parents of 31 kids. And I am deeply stressed.

This should not be a big deal. As a former corporate lawyer I have been involved in multi-million dollar deals spread over a dozen countries. I’m no stranger to responsibility. Yet the weight of files handed over to me last night at our first meeting seems unbearable.

I suppose the financial responsibilities aren’t really what’s getting me. I’ll need to keep the books, write a few checks, and file receipts – all tasks I think I can manage. But there are other issues. One is language. I can hold my own just fine in a one-on-one conversation in French, so long as I don’t have to stumble over fast-spoken Parisian slang or the heavily-accented and patois-ridden mutterings of some of the local farmers. The problem is that last night they were not speaking French. They were speaking Loto.

The Loto, as I discovered when I attended one a few years ago in quest of local color, is more or less Bingo night. I’m a 38-year-old lawyer. I don’t do Bingo in any language. To me, “double quine” sounds more like a treatment for malaria than a game. But one of my jobs is to help select suitable prizes for this “double quine” thing as well as for the “carton plein,” which translates somewhat unhelpfully as “full box.” I am, quite frankly, out of my depth.

And yet the real problem is deeper than that. Ever since we moved here three years ago, we have endured the uncomfortable feeling that we didn’t quite follow what was going on around us. That is one of the stresses - and the joys - of living abroad. But this week it has become personal. I have been given the trust of my fellow villagers and fellow parents. They have opened a door and invited me in, and suddenly I can no longer smile and pretend to understand what’s going on.

It is not so much the fear of inadequacy that haunts me, but the burden of acceptance. This is a good problem to have. I’ll have to remind myself of that next month on Loto night – I’ve also been chosen to call out the numbers.

The Big Decision

I do miss living in Dunster Gardens. Pleasant Victorian architecture, a genuine neighborhood feel, good transport links and several great pubs within a few minutes’ walk all conspired to make Kilburn one of London’s most vibrant up-and-coming neighborhoods. From the window of my study I could look out over London, the city I’d dreamed of ever since watching Sherlock Holmes as a kid, and feel pretty smug about it.

I had bailed out of the stress and long hours of life as a corporate lawyer, a life I’d never wanted and for which I’d never really been suited, to become a stay-at-home dad. I spent over two years pushing a buggy, chatting with the mothers in Queens Park, shopping at our local organic greengrocer, and in my spare time writing a novel. I had it pretty good.

But that life had a dark side. My seemingly idyllic existence was only possible because my wife Sophia had kept her own high-pressure job in the City. She would come home every evening tired, grey, and battered from a long day at the office and a seemingly longer hour in the subterranean nightmare of the London Underground. Our son was growing up among pretty gardens full of hypodermic needles, lovely streets fouled by crime and pollution, and facing a choice of substandard state schooling or the expensive class-conscious bubble of private education. We were living the middle class dream, and it was killing us. A lot of our friends and colleagues felt the same, but we all kept going, stumped by the question: What else could we do that wouldn’t just be another cell in the same prison?

That was reality, but I’ve never been a big fan of reality. So we tried to think of alternatives. Returning to my native California would simply give us the same issues with more sunshine and less curry. The Netherlands, Sophia’s home country, offered the same life packed into half the square meters. And then we took our first vacation to the Quercy region of France. We stayed in a little farmhouse, ate goat cheese, toured around from vineyard to village through quiet oak forests, and we were hooked.

We returned to the Quercy again and again, every time experiencing that same sense of happiness that had so marked our first visit. But the holidays just weren’t enough. It was a new lifestyle we needed, not a periodic escape from the big bad world. So after a couple of years went by, and we grew increasingly restless in London, our enthusiasm overtook us, and the idea of packing up and moving there started to seem not so crazy. City life is a trap, I said. It’s time for a change, I said. You only live once. Think outside the box, Carpe diem, Just do it, Have a Coke and a smile… Maybe my great escape from the urban globalized corporate media circus was a product of that very circus. Maybe you can never really escape.

In retrospect, it was a little reckless. But urban lawyer life had pushed us to the edge, and it was clear to us that we needed to do something drastic. So after a lot of debating and nail-biting and familial threats to have us committed, we did it, we held our breath and jumped.

Three years later, and we’re still flying.