Not even a barracuda in the pool would have stopped ‘friends’ inviting themselves to stay!

The sun was baking hot. The rosé chilled. Just one cloud on the horizon: the stream of gatecrashers on Peter Mayle’s doorstep, as he recalls in his joyous memoir

PETER MAYLE, who wrote the comic gem A Year In Provence about moving to France with his wife, died last week aged 78. To celebrate his wit, all this week we are serialising his instant bestseller and follow-ups, Toujours Provence and Encore Provence. Today, he recalls the exhaustion of coping with the endless stream of English acquaintances who came to stay . . .

MAY

THeRe is nothing quite as thickskinned as the seeker after sunshine and free lodging. Calls from distant acquaintances were frequent occurrences, the phone usually ringing just as we were sitting down to dinner, and followed a predictable course.

There would be a brief inquiry about the weather, and then a casual question as to whether we would be around next month, or whenever suited the caller. With that established, the sentence which we soon came to dread — ‘We were thinking of coming down around then’ — would be delivered, to dangle, hopeful and unfinished, waiting for a faintly hospitable reaction.

It was difficult to feel flattered by this sudden enthusiasm to see us, which had laid dormant during the years we had lived in england, and it was difficult to know how to deal with it. Normal social sidesteps don’t work. ‘You’re booked up next week? Don’t worry — we’ll come the week after. You have a house full of builders? We don’t mind; we’ll be out by the pool anyway. You’ve stocked the pool with barracuda and put a tank trap in the drive? You’ve become teetotal vegetarians? You suspect the dogs have rabies? Don’t worry!’

It didn’t matter what we said. There was a refusal to take it seriously, a bland determination to overcome any feeble obstacle we might invent.

We soon learned what it was like to live more or less permanently with guests. The advance guard had arrived at easter, and others were booked in until the end of october. Half-forgotten invitations, made in the distant safety of winter, were coming home to roost and drink and sunbathe.

The greatest problem, as we soon came to realise, was that our guests were on holiday. We weren’t. We got up at seven. They were often in bed until ten or eleven, sometimes finishing breakfast just in time for a swim before lunch. We worked while they sunbathed.

Refreshed by an afternoon nap, they came to life in the evening, getting into high social gear as we were falling asleep in the salad. We washed dishes far into the night.

It’s true that we took little persuading to turn every meal into an occasion. We were becoming as obsessive about food as the French. For breakfast, which we took on a small terrace which faced the early sun, we would have coffee and cherries, picked from an old tree that stood 20 yards away, bowed down with fruit.

FoR lunch, we might have asparagus, brought to us by our neighbour Faustin in bundles so thick I could not get both hands around them. The pale shoots were as fat as thumbs, delicately coloured and patterned at the tips. We ate them warm, with melted butter.

At dinner, we ate bread that had been baked that afternoon in the old boulangerie at Lumieres. We drank the light red wine from the vineyards in the valley. We supported local industry and agriculture with every mouthful. We didn’t always eat at home, of course. To the French, quality of food is more important than convenience, and they will happily drive for an hour or more, salivating en route, in order to eat well.

one Sunday we discovered the Auberge de la Loube in Buoux, a place hidden in the hills and barely large enough to be called a village. The chef was Maurice, and the success of his restaurant was based on good, simple food rather than flights of gastronomic fancy, which he called cuisine snobbery.

There was one menu, at 110 francs a head or under 15 quid. It started with 14 separate hors

d’oeuvres — artichoke hearts, tiny sardines fried in batter, perfumed tabouleh, creamed salt cod, marinated mushrooms, baby calamari, tapenade, small onions in a fresh tomato sauce, celery and chick peas, radishes and cherry tomatoes, cold mussels.

Balanced on the top of the loaded tray were thick slices of pate and gherkins, saucers of olives and cold peppers. The bread had a fine crisp crust. There was white wine in the ice bucket, and a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape left to breathe in the shade.

The other customers were all French, people from the neighbouring villages dressed in their clean, sombre Sunday clothes, and one or two more sophisticated couples looking fashionably out of place in their bright, boutique colours.

At a big table in the corner, three generations of a family piled their plates high and wished each other

bon appetit. one of the children, showing remarkable promise for a six-year-old gourmet, said that he preferred this pate to the one he ate at home, and asked his grandmother for a taste of her wine.

The main course arrived — rosy slices of lamb cooked with whole cloves of garlic, young green beans and a golden potato and onion galette. The Chateauneuf-du-Pape was poured, dark and heady, ‘a wine with shoulders’, as Maurice had said. We abandoned plans for an active afternoon.

The cheese was from Banon, moist in its wrapping of vine leaves, and then came the triple flavours and textures of the dessert: lemon sorbet, chocolate tart and creme anglaise all sharing a plate. Coffee. A glass of marc from Gigondas. A sigh of contentment.

our guests that weekend were used to London, with its overdecorated restaurants, theme food and grotesque prices. They told us about a bowl of pasta in Mayfair that cost more than the entire meal each of us had just had.

on the way home, we noticed that the combination of food and Sunday has a calming influence on the French motorist. His stomach is full. He is on his weekly holiday.

He dawdles along without being tempted by the thrills of overtaking on a blind bend.

He stops to take the air and relieve himself in the bushes by the roadside, at one with nature, nodding companionably at passing cars.

Tomorrow he will take up the mantle of the kamikaze pilot once again, but today it is Sunday in Provence, and life is to be enjoyed.