I didn't have much time for taking photographs this time in the Languedoc but here are a few shots which I took that I like.

Walking along the hills by the village you notice all the vines are remarkably neat, all have now been pruned to two, or even one shoot.
The wine growers have been out working slowly and hard on their vines all over Easter week end.
The resulting fields are remarkably neat and uniform, the Peuch or hill in the back here is the Peuch Cemtiere which rises over the back of the village.
They bury their dead close to heaven in Thezan

There are many signs of spring now in the fields, quince blossom as well as blackthorn and there, gleaming white in the middle of a field, a cherry covered in flower. Is it wild or carefully nurtured?

We took one trip to the coast and found this deserted beach, mercifully free of cafes or shops. It is called Les Cabanes de Fleury and it is at the point where the Aude reaches the Mediterranean.
We were alone there except for the lifeguards station.

This one is so good I am tempted to call it by its initials; Ahh ! Tart (but I wont.)

It is a direct consequence of the free availability of ground hazelnuts in our local Super U in Thezan, which I find very exotic, and bring home loads of them to use in desserts and cakes.
The other piece of serendipity was finding that some of Joe Moore's apples were still in perfect nick in my shed, it must be something to do with the temperature this winter and spring.
The recipe is sorta loosely based on the classic French Pear and Almond Tart but I discovered that using the combination of hazelnuts and honey(and do try and get some decent Irish stuff for this) gives the apples a very special and exotic flavour. I served it with some vanilla flavoured fromage frais which we had brought back from the great French fridge clear-out but yoghurt or cream would do as well.

Apple Hazelnut and Honey Tart

For a 9 inch (25 cm.) tart or quiche tin

Pastry;
175g (6 oz.) Flour
90g (3 oz.) Butter
3 to 4 tbs. Water

Filling:
110g (4 oz) Butter (preferably unsalted)
110g (4 oz). Honey
110g (4 oz). Ground Hazelnuts (or Almonds)
2 Eggs
Apples;
700g (1 ½ lbs.) Apples (cookers or eaters)
30g (1 oz.) Unsalted Butter
1 Tablespoon Honey

This is very good with ground hazelnuts but they are hard to find here.
To grind your own first roast some shelled nuts in a hot oven for about five minutes, then rub them in a cloth to remove all the surplus skins then grind in a food processor.
If you think that is too much fiddle use ground almonds instead.
Pastry;
Blend the butter with the flour (either by rubbing in or in a food processor) then add in the water and then use this pastry to line the tart tin.
Cover this with non-stick paper and some weights and bake blind until golden brown.
While this is baking peel and slice the apples and cook them gently in a pan with the ounce of butter and the tablespoon of honey for about 5 minutes.

Nut Batter;
Beat the butter with the honey until light.
Beat in the eggs, and the ground nuts.

Spoon the apples onto the pastry base and spoon over the nut mixture.
Bake at 180C/350F/Gas 4 for about 25 mts. (test to make sure the batter is cooked with a skewer)
Serve warm or at room temperature with some fromage frais or quark.

One of the great advantages of achieving a certain age is that, without really doing anything about it, one finds one has achieved, with it, a certain gravitas.
The mad obsessions which one has harboured for years become endearing eccentricities and are no longer regarded as the manifestations of an unsound mind.
I have been plagued by obsessions for years, my son-in-law kindly calls them "interests".
These range from acceptable interests like cookery, and cookery writers, novels by Patrick O Brian, interests in France and all things French to the slightly less acceptable, like my interests in Judy Collins, the novels of Dornford Yates and everything and anything to do with Absinthe.
There are of course darker interests, of which I will never tell, but one rather sinister one that keeps coming back to me is my shameful interest in St. Roch.

I first came across him in a church in Languedoc, not surprising really as he comes from Montpellier. The picture of an otherwise saintly looking gentleman lifting his skirt just fascinated me.
Once I started looking I found him everywhere and have reproduced lots of his images, varying from the coy to the downright salacious in blogs I have written here and here.

His fame and efficacy as a cure for the plague has spread throughout Europe, my friend Finola found him in full display in a church in Montenegro, but barring one single image my brother found in the Franciscan shop in Cork, there hasn't been much evidence that he ever managed to make it across the channel to England or here to Ireland.

Then as luck would have it Bertie Ahern stepped in on my side and by christening his first grandson Rocco (the Italian version of the saint) he brought the man right into twenty first century Ireland.

One of the my great joys in the church in our village in Thezan was finding a statue to my patron in the church there. I now sleep easier when there knowing that he is only a hundred yards from my bed.

My friend Clive Nunn has been one of those people who have been understanding about my obsession and suffered many visits to Languedoc churches when we were together there last year as I searched for St. Roch's image.

Clive's family have strong roots in Surrey in England and he inherited a lot of memorabilia of that area from his parents.
Just yesterday he sent me the following note and the attachments which follow.

"Mart,
I was tidying books and came across this .
Given that I have had connections with Puttenham for all of my life, I flicked it open.
It opened on this page.
The house in which this discussion took place was my aunt's house. She died when I was ten and the house must have been sold to the Miss Grigson of the tale.
David Winter, also referred to, is my first cousin once removed: in other words, my aunt's grandson. He bought the house back within the last twenty years or so.
I just thought that the circle of connections between yourself and your discovery of St. Roch in Thezan and myself and Puttenham just might appeal to you.
Clive"

Clive was of course right, there follows the story exactly as it appeared in the little book.
More food for my obsession but also fascinating to wonder how one of his rare appearances across the channel was nearly lost.

He now has I think, by his reappearances in my life, declared himself as interested in me as I am in him.
Sile reckons that to assuage his spirit we should get a statue of the Saint and put it with the one of Our Lady of Lourdes in our little Jardin de Cure in Thezan.
I think she is right.

I have only one small quibble with the above, which is a lovely ghost story even if it had no connect to my personal Saint, and that is the artist's impression of St. Roch.
But then who can blame him?
Given the lack of images of the saint in England who would have thought that he should be pictured coyly raising his skirt rather than reading piously in a missal.

We're just back from a fortnight in France. I had great notions that this time I would post a diary of the time there and, with this end in mind, I wrote the piece below the day after we arrived.
Typically, that was that, my entire diary entries for the two weeks.
Anyway for what it's worth here is the good intention.

Wednesday March 19th 2008

Thezan les Beziers

We arrived here at 8.00 exactly on Sunday evening having driven the 1100 miles from Roscoff in just 12 hours.
I love the drive down through France, it is only by driving through the country, North to South that you begin to see the many different countries of which France is composed.
Roscoff is Brittany, the quarter of France which my friend Isabel unkindly calls “West Cork with croissants”
Brittany was our first holiday experience of France, this was the place we came camping with the children when they were little, the ideal trip because you only had to travel a couple of hours from the ferry, only a few hours of cantankerous children in hot cars waiting for the holiday to begin. And it was hot, hotter than we had ever experienced in Ireland, we lived in some fear of the children being burned from contact from this burning foreign sun.
Something has altered this hot Brittany over the years, is it climate change making it wetter and colder there, or is it that we now , having experienced the weather further south, have risen with this to expect more sun for our holiday.
On Sunday as we drove through Brittany we also drove through driving rain all the way.
The same rain also followed us through the Vendee, which would have been our destination of choice when the children were able to travel a little further.
The Vendee is strange part of France, flat wheat fields and huge expanses of sunflowers, no hills and a population traditionally royalist and strongly catholic.
We travelled through the Vendee on the 14th July 1989, the centenary of the fall of the Bastille and bought our daughters tricolour ribbons to celebrate the day.
We stopped overnight in an old farmhouse Chambre d’Hote where Madame looked in disapproval at the ribbons and said “Ici, un celebre pas 14ze Juillet”.
After the Vendee one travels through the Charante, but not through the interesting coastal bits, pass by the great riverine parts of France, the Dordogne and the Lot, again places where we had experienced fine family holidays.
It is not however, until you pass through Bordeaux that it begins to feel that you are passing through into the south, and, it was here on Sunday that the rain began to abate and the countryside to show that it was no longer gripped by winter.
The proliferation of vines of course help to give this impression, not that these are in any way lush at this time of year. Now is the time of pruning the vines and most are now reduced to one single shoot to concentrate the power of the grape into as few grapes as possible to add intensity to the wines of Bordeaux, still some of the most expensive in the world.
The next major town after Bordeaux is Toulouse, truly our gateway to the Languedoc, not only was the rain stopped at this stage but the bone dry roads indicated that there hadn’t been any falling there all day.
The temperatures now began to rise into the early teens, blue sky appeared and the vegetation changed also. We could now see orchards of plum trees in blossom near Agen and cherry and almond in flower as came into Languedoc.
The glimpse of the walls on Carcassonne from the motorway is always a moment of some triumph, we now know we are only an hour from our French home.
On Sunday it was dark as we approached Thezan so we missed the sight of the village with the monts d’Enserune ringing it from the north.
But the house was intact, having lain dormant for four months it was still dry and unvisited by any alien life forms. There was even a supply of Picpoul de Pinet to console me for the journey.

OK I have been going on a bit about the elusive view of the Pyrenees from the terrace of our house in France.

It is strange, the villagers say that if you can see the mountains, (they are nearly 150 klms away!) it is a sign of rain.

Just last week Sile's brother Colm called me to the terrace in some excitement.
Not only were the mountains amazing clear to the naked eys, they were also covered in snow and beautifully lit by the morning sun.

The photo was disappointing, what looked incredible with the naked eye just looked like a faint detail in my camera.

Then Colm had an idea, he held his camera up to the lens of his binoculars and with this makeshift telephoto lens got the best shot of these elusive beauties yet.

(it rained the following day)

Post Scriptum
The "Dancing" is intended to be a metaphor which probably deserves explaining.
The mountains appear and disappear behind their curtain of clouds with such gay abandon that they remind me the words of the song "Lanigans Ball"

I stepped out
I stepped in again
I stepped out
I stepped in again
I stepped out
I stepped in again
Learning to dance at Lanigans Ball.