Gites de France contacted us and requested "Une Belle Image de la maison" for their website.
Now as the front of our house faces due north it is very hard to get a shot of it in full sun- except during the middle months of the summer and then only very early in the morning.

At 7 am yesterday I started my vigil.

Slowly (agonisingly slowly) the sun crept down the building, at 8.15 it lit the front door (the upper windows were already out of sun) and so I got my shot.
Patience rewarded.

This anti-European bias is producing an indecent-seeming amount of schadenfreude—on the right but also on the left—about the prospect of the dissolution of the European Union. The potential Franco-German split, Germany’s own ambivalences, the Greek crisis, the fall of the Dutch government, the backslide of the British economy—the tone about all this is oddly punitive here, as though the E.U. had been the product of some Brussels bureaucrat’s utopian folly rather than a miracle of coexistence wrought by a handful of quiet visionaries after more than fifty years of catastrophe. In thinking about Europe and its union, the number that one needs to keep in mind is not the rate of the euro exchange or the measure of the Greek deficit but a simpler one, of sixty million.

That is the approximate (and probably understated) number of Europeans killed in the thirty years between 1914 and 1945, victims of wars of competing nationalisms on a tragically divided continent. The truth needs re-stating: social democracy in Europe, embodied by its union, has been one of the greatest successes in history.

Olivia FItzpatrick, on Colm's Spring Walk, enjoys the sea at Vendres Plage while your host adopts a recumbant position.

Another very successful week for Colm and us all.

A l’ancien presbytère situé au 14 rue René-Lenthéric à proximité de l’église Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul réside un couple d’Irlandais, charmant et accueillant, Martin et Sile Dwyer. Ils ont fait l’acquisition de cette maison il y a environ six ans. Elle appartenait autrefois à la paroisse, à la suite d’un don provenant d’une famille thézanaise. Pendant de nombreuses années, ce logement a été occupé par des prêtres et quelques temps avant la vente de l’immeuble, par deux religieuses, Marie et Marie-Claire aujourd’hui décédées.

C’est en venant en vacances une fois à Marseillan-plage que Martin et Sile sont tombés sous le charme de la région et plus particulièrement de l’Hérault et de cette maison pour y faire des chambres et tables d’hôtes lorsque la retraite aura sonnée. Après de nombreux travaux réalisés par des entreprises locales, leur projet a vu le jour en 2010 et l’ont baptisé Le presbytère. Du rez-de-chaussée à l’étage tout a été repensé. Des chambres au rez-de-chaussée tout a été agréablement aménagé pour accueillir leur activité. Une grande salle-à-manger cuisine donne sur une terrasse à la vue imprenable sur la plaine et les Pyrénées et sur le jardin du curé. Un havre de paix, verdoyant et fleuri où les clients aiment aller se reposer.


Ils viennent de différents pays : Irlandais, Anglais, Allemands…mais aussi des Français. « Dernièrement nous avons accueilli un Chinois », précise Martin qui, en tant que membre de l’association Euro-Toques créée par le grand chef de cuisine Paul Bocuse, il a l’intention dans les jours qui viennent de donner des cours de cuisine à ses hôtes. A Waterford en Irlande, il était chef de cuisine dans un grand restaurant. « Je leur apprendrai la cuisine française avec un style irlandais », exprime en riant Martin, très heureux d’annoncer de concert avec son épouse l’obtention, depuis quelques jours, du label gîte de France qui garantit des normes de confort, des prestations de qualité. « C’est pour nous un moyen supplémentaire pour nous faire connaître ».

We laid this this afternoon with Bro-in-Law Colm's help. It is made of pre-grown Gazons (Grass sods.)
Now all we have to do is water and pray.

In preparation for the season (and to celebrate the end of a long and bitter spring) we have been giving our facade a bit of a face lift.
We got the painters in to paint up the cartouches of the windows and repaint the shutters and the windows themselves. More controversially, we decided to repaint the wood effect panel at the bottom- this was terrible until we decided to age it a bit by sanding it down.
Síle has been tending the window boxes which have responded gratefully to her green fingers.

Just this morning a local man installed these wrought iron window guards (required as a safety feature by Gites de France) which he made so perfectly A L'epoque that they look like they were there forever.

They are putting this on in four different venues in Languedoc between now and the end of June.

Concert Human Rights à Port la Nouvelle
Le 05/05/2012 de 20h30 à 22 h 00
Théâtre de Port-la-Nouvelle

Concert Human Rights au Chateau Abbaye de Cassan
Le 06/05/2012 de 16h30 à 18 h 00
Château Abbaye de Cassan

Concert Human Rights à Béziers
Le 12/05/2012 de 20h00 à 22 h 00
Théatre des Franciscains à Béziers

Concert Human Rights à Bédarieux
Le 23/06/2012 de 21h00 á 22h30
Salle de la Tuilerie

Just got a phone call from Gites de France to tell us that YES ! we have been accepted as members and will be in the next guide.

We may be forced to have a drink tonight to celebrate.

Shucks.

Just a warming reminder of summer on the terrace last June, Summer is just bound to be a coming in as soon as this freaking Tramontane goes away.
(I hope you all recognise yourselves)

Whereas I will retire to the kitchen and sulk when life becomes too much for me Síle retires to the garden- and there performs miracles.

This is a picture of our garden as we first saw it nearly six years ago- not a lot of promise there.
A lot of people would have thrown up their hands, called in a man and a rotavator and started again from scratch.

Not our Síle.

She felt, correctly, that underneath this wilderness of weeds lay a structured garden, created and loved by the various encumbants of the house, the priests, the housekeepers and latterly the three sisters who were the last vestiges of the church here.

With some help from D's boyfriend Ano, she started to clear the wilderness.
A secret garden gradually appeared, all laid out in little paths outlined by stones, and planted with all manner of shrubs and flowers.
For the last five years she has mantained, weeded, watered and loved the garden , despite having to relearn every thing she had learned in Ireland- plants here by the Mediterranean behaved in totally different ways, exotics became easily nurtured, commomplace Irish standby plants became exotics.
That which the drought and the extreme summer heat did not kill the sudden and unexpected frosts of winter did.
In short every aspect of gardening is more difficult out here.

In all this time my principal role in the proceedings was to be occasionally called in for the heavier lifting and to try and help with sorting out the long term problem about how to make the place more visitor friendly.

Every year brought a different solution, the stone paving , when priced, was way above our means,sowing with grass seed, we were warned from the start, was a long uphill battle with the elements during the summer, gravel was affordable but really hard on the feet and on small grandsons knees, a wooden patio would be totally out of keeping with the stone walls which surrounded it.

It was when Síle started in desperation, to vaguely contemplate the awful possibility of laying an artificial lawn (amazingly common out here) that she realised that there was yet another possibility, that of laying an already grassed lawn of turf sods.

So now this is where we stand, a square in the centre of the ground has been cleared (leaving standing our old (possibly on its last legs) pink Oleander.
This has been dug over and now must be further aerated and then levelled.
We then must order our sods (the cost coming in at an affordable €3.50 per square metre, we need about 12) then collect and lay these.

I will keep you informed as to our progress.

I notice that our most recently purchased crop of pears are all sporting fetching little red wax berets- presumably this adds to their life span.

Such was this man's ability to inflict pain with "The Leather" that the school went into universal rejoicing.

But that of course is not at all the point of this piece.
I have a clear memory of my very first class with the same Froggy, he started to teach us the colours in French. Rouge, he explained, gave us the word for the red pigment then universally applied by our mothers to their pale cheeks, French yellow, jaune, gave us a very common disease of the time Jaundice, which turned us yellow.
The following day he arrived in to examine us on our colours and we dutifully stuck up our hands to answer the questions.
I can clearly remember one fellow in the class, I can even remember his name, it was Pat Mc Carthy and he was so small his mother had kept him in short pants as she must have thought he was not tall enough yet for "Longers".
Anyway this Pat, when asked the French word for "Green" arrived at a perfectly appropriate answer (given the French inclination to name their diseases after colours) : It was he said ;"Gangrene".

Catherine Cleary, whom I met at the Waterford Writers Weekend a few weeks ago and to whom I told my life story over lunch, visited L'Atmosphere (and Languedoc nearly) on this morning's Irish Times.

A perfect piece of France
L'Atmosphere, Waterford

CATHERINE CLEARY

EATING OUT: Close your eyes in Waterford’s L’Atmosphere and it’s not too hard to imagine you’re sitting in a sun-soaked Languedoc square

MARTIN DWYER DID what many of us dream about on the last night of a great holiday. The Cork-born chef, who was running his own restaurant in Waterford, upped sticks with his wife Síle and bought a 12th-century presbytery in a Languedoc village to run as a chambre d’hôte.

Nearly six years later, has the reality lived up to the dream? “Even more so than I expected,” he says after a reading at the Waterford Writers’ Weekend. And the best bit? It’s the end of the day when he gets to sit with his guests on the terrace and share the meal he has cooked for them. These meals can go long into the night as the wine and the sun go down and the swallows swoop . . . Okay, he didn’t mention swallows. But that’s what I’m imagining.

The links between Waterford and France go way back. It was Huguenot bakers who brought the blaa here. The city has three French-run restaurants at the moment. And while parts of Waterford have a bleak shopping-district blandness, its Cathedral Square on a bright evening could almost be a perfect French town square, only missing a war monument and sun-baked stone streets. Running down from Cathedral Square there’s Henrietta Street, a steep narrow terrace leading to the river. And halfway down there’s a perfect piece of France in a small restaurant called L’Atmosphere, which is owned by owned by French chefs Arnaud Nary and Patrice Garreau.

I’m on my own, with no booking, on a busy Saturday night, but thankfully it’s still early and the people of Waterford seem to be taking the late French dining habits to heart. I’m sat in a small brownish annex to the main restaurant (which is small enough already). It seems a little like the naughty corner, but I’m glad to get any table in a place where the food smells coming from the kitchen are so welcoming.

Relaxation is at the heart of the great French meal. It’s a leisurely stroll rather than a sprint, and the French bistro creates the comfort zone by offering set menus. So before you step through the door, you know what the bill is likely to be at the end of the night. Here there is a €20 three-course menu between 5pm and 7pm. The €20 includes a glass of wine, which is terrific value if the food is as good as it smells. I’m going with the €35 menu (three courses after 7pm) and a €4.50 glass of the house red.

A platter of mixed starters is a jazz-hands start to the meal, showing exactly what this kitchen can do. It includes a snail drenched in garlic butter, half a scallop, a prawn fried crisply in its shell, a glass of creamy fish soup, strips of delicious fried bread, a velvety chicken liver pate and a quenelle of the loveliest combination – globe artichoke and fish-egg tapenade.

It might be as culinarily cliched as a beret and a string of onions, but the boeuf bourguignon is still, as Julia Child put it, “one of the most delicious beef dishes concocted by man”. At L’Atmosphere it’s done superbly.

The first thing to arrive at the table is a book-sized chunk of timber; it’s the pot stand for the devilishly hot black cast-iron pot in which my main course has been slowly cooking for what tastes like long, sweet hours.

The lid comes off, as beautifully as any polished silver dome, and a steam of red wine, beef, lardons, carrots and potatoes rises into the room. The meat (beef cheeks, I reckon) has been cooked down to silken strands that barely require chewing. There are perfect button mushrooms, generous chunks of potato and carrot and a last-minute sprinkling of micro chives over it. The lardons have released glistening beads of fat into the wine and beef stock. It is the king of stews.

The île flottante dessert is a similarly retro-treat, the means by which a frugal French kitchen used up the egg whites left over from a batch of creme brulees. It harks back to a better time when kitchens weren’t using bottled eggs to make their desserts. Here it comes as light as air, an egg-white island bobbing on its vanilla sauce with a caramel tuille and coffee granité. Some teeny home-made chocolate cookies round off the treat.

Failing an escape to the Languedoc, going to L’Atmosphere is a little like being on holiday, or finding a special restaurant that you just want to keep to yourself.

Dinner for one with a glass of wine came to €39.50.

L'Atomosphere

19 Henrietta Street, Waterford, tel: 051-858426