Anyone playing boules without a drink is banned

JUNE Not all our guests appreciated Provence as we did. For a start, the sun was too much for some. Faustin had a favourite joke: ‘What is it that changes from the colour of a dead rat to the colour of a dead lobster in three hours? Les

Anglais en vacances — the English on holiday!’

And then there were ted and Susan. We hardly knew them, though they had seemed pleasant enough when we’d met them in London. Somehow, they had promised to ‘drop in’.

they arrived at dusk, as we were sitting down to dinner in the courtyard — wreathed in apologies and loud in their enthusiasm for Provence, which they had never seen before.

they talked in tandem, a seamless dialogue which neither required nor allowed any contribution from us. ‘Have we come at a bad time? typical of us, I’m afraid.’

‘Absolutely typical. You must loathe people dropping in like this. A glass of wine would be lovely.’

‘Darling, look at the pool. Isn’t it pretty?’

‘Did you know the post office in Menerbes has a little map showing how to find you? Les Anglais, they call you, and they fish out this map from under the counter.’

‘Something to eat? only if it’s absolutely no trouble — just a crust and a scrap of cheese and maybe one more glass of wine.’

the crust and scrap was received with such rapture that I wondered how long it had been since their last meal, and what arrangements they had made for their next one.

By then it was past ten, getting close to bedtime in Provence, and not the moment to be banging on shuttered windows and locked doors.

ted and Susan had better stay the night and find somewhere in the morning, we said. they looked at each other, and began a duet of gratitude that lasted until their bags had been taken upstairs.

they were like two excited children, and we thought it would be fun to have them stay for a few days.

the barking of the dogs woke us just after three. they were intrigued by noises coming from the guest room, heads cocked at the sound of someone being comprehensively sick, interspersed with groans and the splash of running water.

In the morning we met the invalid, Susan, on the stairs, clutching her brow against the bright sunlight, but insisting that she was well enough for breakfast.

She was wrong, and had to leave the table hurriedly. over the next four or five days, the unlucky Susan and her stomach were at war.

Garlic made her bilious. the local milk, admittedly rather curious stuff, put her bowels in an uproar. the oil, the butter, the water, the wine — nothing agreed with her, and 20 minutes in the sun turned her into a walking blister. She was allergic to the South.

It’s not uncommon. Provence is such a shock to the Northern system; everything is full-blooded.

the food is full of strong, earthy flavours that can overwhelm a digestion used to a less assertive diet.

the wine is young and deceptive, easy to drink but sometimes higher in alcoholic content than older wines that are treated with more caution. there is nothing bland about Provence, and it can poleaxe people as it had poleaxed Susan. She and ted left us to convalesce in more temperate surroundings.

their visit made us realise how fortunate we were to have the constitutions of goats and skins that accepted the sun. the routine of our days had changed, and we were living outdoors.

Getting dressed took 30 seconds. there were fresh figs and melons for breakfast, and errands were done early, before the warmth of the sun turned to heat in midmorning. the flagstones round the pool were hot to the touch, the water still cool enough to bring us up from the first dive with a gasp.

We slipped into the habit of that sensible Mediterranean indulgence, the siesta.

the wearing of socks was a distant memory. My watch stayed in a drawer, and I found that I could more or less tell the time by the position of the shadows in the courtyard, although I seldom knew what the date was. It didn’t seem important.

I was turning into a contented vegetable, maintaining sporadic contact with real life through telephone conversations with people in faraway offices. they always asked wistfully what the weather was like, and were not pleased with the answer.

they consoled themselves by warning me about skin cancer and the addling effect of sun on the brain. I didn’t argue with them; they were probably right. But, addled, wrinkled and potentially cancerous as I might have been, I had never felt better. JULY WItH the builders due back to demolish half the house as they installed central heating, we invited our friend Bennett, who cheerfully admitted to being the World’s Worst Guest.

He was so maladroit and accident-prone, so absent-minded and undomesticated that we specifically asked him to come on the eve of demolition, so the debris of his visit could be buried under rubble.

He called from the airport, several hours after he was due to arrive. Could I come down and pick him up? there had been a slight problem with the car hire company, he said, and he was stranded. I found him in the upstairs bar at Marignane, comfortably installed with a bottle of champagne and a copy of the French edition of Playboy.

He was in his late 40s, slim and extremely good-looking, dressed in an elegant suit of off-white linen with badly scorched trousers. ‘Sorry to drag you out,’ he said, ‘but they’ve run out of cars. Have some champagne.’

What had happened was, as usual with Bennett, so unlikely that it had to be true. the plane had arrived on time and the car he had reserved, a convertible, was waiting for him. the top was down, it was a glorious afternoon and Bennett, in an expansive mood, had lit a cigar before heading towards the autoroute. It had burned quickly, as cigars do when fanned by a strong breeze, and Bennett had tossed it away after 20 minutes.

He became aware that passing motorists were waving at him, so in return he waved to them; how friendly the French have become, he thought.

He was some miles up the autoroute before he realised that the back of the car was burning — set on fire by the discarded cigar butt that had lodged in the upholstery.

With what he thought was tremendous presence of mind, he pulled on to the hard shoulder, stood up on the front seat and urinated into the flames.

And that was when the police had found him.

‘they were terribly nice,’ he said, ‘but they thought it would be best if I brought the car back to the airport, and then the car rental people had a fit and wouldn’t give me another one.’ AMoNG the first things we unpacked when we came to live in Provence was the set of boules we

had bought long before, during a holiday. And now we were preparing for the sporting event of the week — attempting to uphold the honour of Menerbes on the boules court. We were quietly confident: our opponents included a girl of 16 who had never played before.

Boules is an essentially simple game, which a beginner can enjoy from the first throw. A small wooden ball, the cochonnet, is tossed up the court. Each player has three boules — heavy, dense, gleaming spheres of steel that made a satisfying chock when tapped together. At the end of the round the closest to the cochonnet is the winner.

We studied the techniques of the professionals who played every day next to the church at Bonnieux — men who could drop a boule on your toe from 20ft away.

The true aces, we noticed, bent their knees in a crouch and held the boule with the fingers curled round and the palm facing downwards. And there were the lesser elements of style — the grunts, the shrugs and muttered oaths when it landed short or long. We soon became experts in everything except accuracy.

As is compulsory, we tailored the rules of our match to suit the occasion.

1: Anyone playing without a drink is disqualified. 2: Cheating is permitted. 3: Disputes are mandatory, and nobody’s word is final.

4: Play stops when darkness falls.

There is a distinct, if slow, rhythm to the game. A throw is made and then play stops, while the next to throw strolls up for a closer look.

A contemplative sip of pastis is taken, the knees are flexed, the boule loops through the air, thuds to earth and rolls with a soft crunching sound to its resting place.

There are no hurried movements and almost no sporting injuries (one exception being Bennett, who scored a broken roof tile and self-inflicted concussion of the toe during his first and last game).

At half-time, when we stopped to watch the sunset, there was no clear score. We played on in the crepuscule, the French word that makes twilight sound like a skin complaint.

Measuring distances from the cochonnet became more difficult and more contentious, and we were about to agree on a dishonourable draw when the young girl whose first game it was put three boules in a nine-inch group.

Foul play and alcohol had been defeated by youth and fruit juice. AUGUST ThousAnDs of tourists changed the character of the markets and villages of the Luberon region of Provence, giving the inhabitants something new to philosophise about over their pastis.

Cafe regulars found their usual places taken by foreigners, and stood by the bar grizzling over the inconveniences of the holiday season — the bakery running out of bread, the car parked outside one’s front door, the strange late hours that visitors kept.

It was admitted, with much nodding and sighing, that tourists brought money into the region. nevertheless, it was generally agreed that they were a funny bunch, these natives of August.

It was impossible to miss them. They regarded the people of the village as quaint, rustic monuments.

The beauties of nature were loudly praised every evening on the ramparts of Menerbes, and I particularly liked the comments of an elderly English couple as they stood looking out over the valley.

‘What a marvellous sunset,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ replied her husband. ‘Most impressive for such a small village.’

one of the quaintest and most rustic attractions was the annual goat race — a Grand Course de Chevres through the streets of Bonnieux, starting from the Cafe Cesar. The ten runners and drivers were listed by name, on a poster taped to the window of a tobacconist’s.

It was clearly going to be a sporting event of some magnitude, Bonnieux’s answer to the Cheltenham Gold Cup or the Kentucky Derby.

on the day of the race, we studied the contestants and they looked back at us with their mad, pale eyes, masticating slowly on some pre-race treat, their chins fringed with wispy beards.

They would have looked like mandarins, had it not been for the blue-and-white jockey caps that each of them was wearing.

Picking a winner on appearance alone was difficult, and we asked an old man leaning on the wall next to us, confident that he, like every Frenchman, would be an expert. ‘It’s a matter of their crottins,’ he said. ‘The goats who make the most droppings before the race are likely to do well. An empty goat is faster than a full goat. C’est logique.’

We placed our bets on a goat called nenette, and wedged ourselves into the crowd of spectators, between an unshaven man with a glass of pastis and a heavy paunch, and a German with a video camera.

To our consternation we saw that, at the starting line, nenette insisted on facing backwards. Beside us, the

man with the paunch growled: ‘Did you know that the last one to finish gets eaten? Roasted on a spit. C’est vrai.’

With a clatter of hooves the runners were off and we heard progress reports being shouted as the goats careered around the village. After a few minutes,the front-runners rounded the fountain, skidded past the hay bales, and crossed the finish line.

one by one, the rest trotted or staggered past . . . all except nenette. ‘The butcher’s got it,’ predicted the man with the paunch.

But we saw nenette as we walked back to the car. she had escaped from her driver and was perched high above the street in a tiny walled garden, her cap hanging from one horn, eating geraniums.

A YeAr In Provence by Peter Mayle is published by Penguin Books at £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99, visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640. P&P is free on orders over £15. Offer valid until February 5.