Michael Wright's column C'est La Folie has appeared in the Daily Telegraph since early 2004, initially in the Property section and subsequently in the Weekend supplement every Saturday. Click on this link to read how it all started: Crazy? Moi?

PLEASE NOTE: All articles on this page are copyright Michael Wright/Daily Telegraph. Please do not copy without permission. 

Dec 20: Christmas at La Folie

Here at La Folie, the good news is that no rain is falling right now. The bad news is that this is because it is whipping horizontally across the landscape, borne on an icy blast reminiscent of the one that greets me whenever I am foolish enough to climb into bed before Alice has warmed it up. Pregnancy has endowed my wife with a thermal coefficient roughly equivalent to a nuclear-power station.

Christmas will be different for us this year, because the imminence of the birth means that we must stay at La Folie, rather than heading back to Blighty to thaw out with our families. The animals are visibly thrilled about this, because now Digby won’t have to buy presents for all the dogs at the kennels, and Cat and the outdoor brigade will be spared the pleasure of being looked after by Monsieur Jadot. Fond as I am of old Jadot, his approach to animal-care is distinctively French.     

“Sheep don’t need water in winter,” he told me, last time we went away. “And I probably won’t let your chickens out, because they’re just us happy staying in.”

“I’d really prefer it if you would let them out,” I reply, wondering why I sound so apologetic. And the answer is simple: I know that this rugged French peasant still sees me as a soft English townie, too sentimental even to leave my dog chained up outside when I go away. He hasn’t been able to take me seriously ever since I took one of my chickens to the vet.

“And not too much food for the cat this time,” I add, doing my best to channel my inner Chuck Norris. Each time we leave Jadot in charge of Eva, we come back to find her looking more like Jabba the Hut than ever.

“Bof,” shrugs Jadot, raising his eyebrows. “I just fill up her bowl. It’s up to her how much she eats.” 

What Jadot does not understand is that we Brits – humans as well as cats – are incapable of self-restraint at Christmas. If Mum has provided the food, we must eat it. So, after years of our mothers doing the providing, it will be a new experience for Alice and me to be cooking Christmas lunch ourselves in a few days’ time. Admittedly, my Mum did bring out a Christmas pudding as part of the latest parental supply-drop, along with mince-meat, cranberry jelly, Christmas crackers and a stocking for Wright Minima. But we’re not going to let this stop us feeling like the pioneers we are.

My parents are doing Christmas differently this year, too, and will be having lunch with my brothers in London.

“Do you mind, Mum?” I ask my mother, knowing that cooking Christmas lunch for the family at home has been central to her job spec – treasured and dreaded in equal measure – for far longer than I have been on the planet.

“I’ve cooked Christmas lunch for the last 49 years,” she replies, firmly. “I’m quite ready for someone else to do it now.” Despite her cheerful tone, I can’t help detecting a hint of the wistfulness of a village cricketer who has just been given out to a dodgy LBW decision, one run short of his half-century. 

But the change will be a good thing. Alice and I both come from the kind of tribes where food occupies a central place in family life, and – sometimes – the pressure for the food to be perfect at Christmas can make us all forget what is really important, namely that the food is incidental to, and not the raison d’être [circumflex on penultimate e]of, the occasion...which is being together, as a family, and celebrating peace and goodwill, not on a global scale, but a domestic one. Martyrdom is not obligatory.

This is what I tell myself, anyway, as Alice and I contemplate cooking for the very first Noël we have had en famille at La Folie. The French, despite their reputation for taking eating very seriously, are wonderful at this business of allowing the food to be the servant, and not the master, of their gatherings. So whilst our Christmas may be English in style and warmth and stuffing, I hope – as I gaze out at the freezing rain lashing across the landscape – that in spirit it will have a certain chilled, French quality, too, in the unfrostiest sense of the word. And may this be true of your Christmas, too, wherever you may be.

Archive: Wedding Day Blues

One of the good things about playing the organ, however primitively, is being invited to play at friends’ weddings. This month alone, I have been losing sleep over an English one, near Carcassonne, and a French one, near Orléans. This is a blessing, for it stops me losing sleep over my own nuptials, now only weeks away. It’s not the getting married that worries me, incidentally. It’s whether we shall have to eat standing up, after Wrighty cunningly forgot to order any chairs before France closed for August.

      The Carcassonne wedding is special to me, because the bride happens to be the grown-up version of a little girl whom – 20-odd years ago – I tutored in Maths and Latin at an old wooden table beside a swimming-pool not far from Toulouse.    

     Sometimes I even wonder if I would ever have bought La Folie, had I not spent that idyllic fortnight in the French countryside, teaching hic haec hoc on a shaded terrace in the mornings, discovering the pleasures of fresh sardines and local cheeses at lunchtimes and cycling, wobbly with wine, along sun-bleached roads through avenues of poplars in the afternoons.

     I am reminded of that youthful delight today, as Alice and I drive down to Carcassonne, the earth becoming redder, the cows paler and the light more brilliant, the further south we go.  But I begin to feel jittery with nerves when we arrive at Camon’s beautiful 12th century abbey for the rehearsal. Everything here feels much grander than I was expecting.

      I have a nasty feeling that the full-gospel-welly  arrangement of Amazing Grace I’ve practised could be a horrible mistake. I must remember to ask the bride what she thinks. And whilst I knew I’d have to accompany a couple of soloists on my electronic keyboard, I had no idea that one of them would be a  professional tenor with a distinguished international career. I feel a bit like an old donkey in a straw hat, told that Frankie Dettori will be my jockey in the next race.

“Would you like to try that again?” murmurs Ted, pressing his palms together as if in prayer, after I have just made the opening bars of his beloved Donizetti sound more like Donny Osmond. “I’m so sorry,” I stammer. “I’ll do better tomorrow.”

 “Yes, that would be...good,” says Ted, raising his eyes to the ceiling.

 And then he begins to sing. And as the first notes of Una furtiva lagrima float up into the lofty recesses of the crumbling abbey, and the sun shimmers through the stained glass, and the ladies doing the flowers stiffen into awe-struck statues, I am torn between feeling transfixed by the weird beauty of this moment – two English men making Italian music in a French church, in preparation for the wedding of a child I once knew – and utterly unworthy of it, too, my fingers fumbling over the keys while Ted’s voice somehow makes the thickened air of the darkened abbey seem to sway with rapture.

  It is a moment I shall always remember. Nor shall I forget Amazing Grace, next day. As we reach the end of the first verse, I make a fateful decision. I hit the “Gospel Organ” button, whack up the volume, hold my breath, and stab the next few blues-style chords as if we were in Memphis.

 The congregation’s response to this is immediate and overwhelming: there is an appalled silence, as if I had just wheeled a barrel organ into the British Library. No one sings a note. As I cringe, my mind racing with adrenaline, it dawns on me that I never did ask the bride what she thought.  

 Then, suddenly, from behind me, comes a trumpet-like sound; a burnished war-cry that sends tingles down my spine. It’s Ted, and he’s on fire. Not literally, you understand. But as his blazing tenor fills the air, I sense the grinning souls in front of me beginning to latch on, like Lilliputians clinging to Gulliver, until they are all bellowing out the words with a lusty riotousness that takes me by surprise. Here, in this holy French place, I can’t help feeling a wholly English pride at the glorious din my countrymen are making.

Afterwards, I glance across at the bride, nervous at having lowered the tone of her special day. And though it may sound strange, I feel at once deeply impressed and inexplicably sad. Impressed, because the little girl I once taught, now a poised and beautiful woman, has the presence and kindness, in the midst of her own wedding, to give the poor old organist a thumbs-up and a smile. And sad, I suppose, because it is a smile I remember from a world I still miss, as we sat at an old wooden table in France, on a summer’s day just like today.

Archive: A Question of Kennels

Alice and I are spending the week in Blighty, staying with my family in a splendid Landmark Trust house that my mother has rented for her 70th birthday. Leaving La Folie is always difficult, but never more so than in high summer, when a lazy gardener’s struggle against les mauvaises herbes is already an unequal one.

     The good news is that Monsieur Jadot has agreed to look after the chickens, the Rastafarians and Cat while we’re away. I’m particularly worried about Gaston, my old ram, as he has no teeth, and therefore cannot eat enough to survive without extra nosh in his trough. The bad news is that Jadot pulls a strange and far-away look when I ask if he’d be willing to keep an eye on les mauvaises herbes, too. I think dealing with someone else’s weeds in rural France must be a bit like having to wear someone else’s swimming trunks.

     Jadot adopts an even more mystified grin when I tell him that Digby will be going to une pension for the week. He says we’re crazy to spend money on kennels; we should leave the dog chained up outside. I begin to explain that Digby – a soft-hearted labrador castrato from Baltimore, who used to sleep with his head on Alice’s pillow, and whose pushiness is, I suspect, a mask for his many insecurities – isn’t that sort of a dog. But in the end it is easier simply to agree with him that we Anglais are indeed a bit soft in the head when it comes to les animaux.

      At last we land in England – by FlyBe, not by Luscombe, since my aircraft has languished unflown for longer than I care to admit –  and, as we drive southwest from Southampton Airport, I’m struck by how lovely England looks; by the doughty charm of dry-stone walls after endless French fences, by the umpteen different shades of green in the fields, and by how sturdy the old houses of Devon and Cornwall appear, compared with the dusty crumble of a place like La Folie, whose friable stones are held together with little more than earth.

     Much of our week is spent outdoors, with a day-trip to Mousehole in Cornwall offering that most quintessential of English experiences: an ice-cream by the seaside in the rain. Yet I notice that going for walks is somehow trickier in the Devon countryside than in Haute-Vienne, since the footpaths around Wortham Manor all lead through fields full of livestock: our next-door neighbours are 20 hefty rams, each swinging a sporran the size of Glasgow. It doesn’t help that the ground underfoot is beast-trodden-boggy as school trifle. Around Jolibois, the ancient footpaths tend to bypass the fields, most of which don’t even have a proper gate to climb; a stretched length of wire fencing, braced with wooden struts, does the job.

     Perhaps this is why I feel such a primeval thrill in standing in the wind on Dartmoor, with not a wall nor a fence in sight. How wonderful to see these wind-blasted crags studded with ram-raddled sheep; with unkempt ponies straight out of a cave painting. There is, I see for the first time, something very special and very British about such wildness. In my French dictionary, I cannot even find an equivalent for the word ‘wilderness’ – perhaps because the French do not have moorland in this way. Even if they did, they’d most probably have prettified it by now. Not because they have no taste but because, sometimes, they have too much.

     It’s coming back to England that brings such differences to mind. Strange, by the same token, that we Anglais in France will often live happily in freezing, draughty old houses, wrapping ourselves in blankets to keep warm, while the French are far more attached to their home comforts, and heat their houses to a degree that can feel like a health hazard to hardy Blighty types. Yet when it comes to housing our pets when we go away, it’s completely the other way round. Indeed, as I gaze at the mighty rams in the field beside Wortham Manor, I have a thought that could only have been generated by an English brain: next time, I wonder if I could send Gaston to the kennels, too?

Archive: Tractor Envy

Gilles assures me that there’s no chance of anyone building on the land above and behind La Folie. It’s far too steep and boggy, he says. But someone must have had the same reservations on this same hillside, several hundred years ago. And it didn’t stop them building La Folie.

So what does he think? Would Old Boulesteix sell me the field in question?

“Ah-ouf,” shrugs Gilles. “You know how Boulesteix feels about les Anglais.”

“Yes, but even so...” And if I were able to buy the land, would Gilles consider selling me one of his tractors when he retires at the end of the year, to keep the scrub at bay?

  At the sound of this question coming out of my own mouth, I almost have to sit down, giddy with the vertiginous unlikelihood of it all. Did I, the namby-pamby ex-theatre-reviewer, really just ask a sage French farmer if I could buy a tractor off him? It’s hard to describe the feeling of exhilarated disbelief that washes over me in this moment, but imagine Lofty from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum single-handedly storming a machine-gun nest, and you have the general idea.

A tractor. A real, live tractor. The implications of true farmerhood, as they dawn upon me, are daunting. I shall have to stop shaving; buy myself a red neckerchief; learn the art of glancing over my shoulder while driving on the open road, the better to enjoy the sight of the snaking queue of irate drivers shaking their fists behind me.

Gilles snorts, unaware of my private epiphany, and says that his smallest tractor – the red one, with the hydraulic front-loader – might suit me. It needs some minor révisions, but he’ll think about it.

Next day, Mme Boulesteix phones. Good old Gilles. “I’ve been thinking about selling the land above La Folie,” she says, “and wondered if you might be interested.”

 “Ah...er...oh...peut-être...” I reply, pretending to sound surprised.

Madame says she has already spoken to Yves-Pascal the notaire, and that 2500 euros per hectare is the going rate for – and here she drops her bombshell – land that is constructible. Licensed for construction, in other words.

  That afternoon, my mind dancing with images of red tractors with hydraulic front-loaders, I head straight down to the Mairie, to consult the plan cadastral.

“I’m still waiting for a utility bill, and a copy of the passports of witnesses two and three,” barks Madame Lemuel when I walk in. I love Mme Lemuel. Alice and I have been seeing a lot of her as we assemble all the forms and certificates for our mariage civil. A taut, upright woman of unguessable age, she is the queen of the Mairie; the power behind the throne; the woman who makes sure that Jolibois’s paperwork is in order.

Together we study the plan, on which each parcel of terrain is numbered and categorised and designated. And there’s no doubt about it: the land above La Folie is NC: Non Constructible. Relieved, I hurry home.

A week later, Old Boulesteix and his wife drive up to La Folie for an apéro. If Boulesteix hates the English, he isn’t showing it. Well, not until – after I’ve poured out the second round of Pastis for the two of us, and a second dose of Alice’s mum’s lethal sloe gin for Alice and Madame – he announces how much he wants for the land.

   “Quatre mille euros l'hectare,” he says, smacking the edge of the table.

   “4000 euros?” I cough. “For a field on a steep slope, half of which is marsh or bracken...but how can that be correct?” Boulesteix folds his arms and gazes out across the valley. I look entreatingly at Madame, who is staring at her feet, hands clasped, lips pursed, in the international posture adopted over the centuries by the wives of embarrassing husbands. Either that, or else the sloe gin has done her in.

      So Alice and I will not be buying the land after all. This is a relief, for as I mentioned last week, more land simply means more work. And I have no wish to wade dripping from a lake in a pair of cream-coloured breeches, surveying my vast estate. And yet, and yet...

     “It’s good news, really, isn’t it?” says Alice, as we sit out in the moonlight, watching the flitting silhouettes of the bats.

     “Yes, it is,” I reply, as bravely as a man can who has just lost his excuse for buying himself a tractor: a red one, with a hydraulic front-loader and all.

Archive:  A Whole New World

It’s hard for me to describe how much my life has changed, since I left London and came to live alone at La Folie. With hindsight it seems obvious that I was always going to have sheep and chickens, write a book, become engaged to a girl I’ve known since I was 12, and spend most of my life chopping firewood. But of course I didn’t picture any of that at the start.

    Three years ago, I never could have guessed that I would be sitting here today, having my photograph taken with a fiancée and a labrador with an American accent, on the eve of the paperback publication of this book that has somehow managed to sell an unfeasible number of copies in hardback. It’s all very peculiar. I think the only thing in my life which hasn’t changed is the cat.

     Today’s photo-shoot is tragic timing, as far as Digby is concerned, for Alice’s dog has been angling to have his picture in the paper for almost a year, and now – still recovering from his run-in with a French coiffeuse called Marine – he’s really not looking his best. The poor hound is used to having his fur trimmed in the summer. He’s not used to being scalped for the Foreign Legion. I can see why they call her Marine.

    The photo-shoot is bad timing for the dreadlocked Rastafarians, too, because – unlike Digby – they look so much better when their fleeces are shorn. Gilles promised to come and tondre them as soon as we have some decent weather, and of course there hasn’t been any yet. Blighty has no monopoly on rain. 

    While Digby attempts to divert attention from his own nakedness by chewing the felt off a tennis-ball, Paul the photographer wanders around La Folie, seeking out camera angles. And as I watch this admirably urban chap – a townie in trainers, just as I once was – I have the strangest feeling that I am watching a version of myself, three years ago.  

    “Am I all right here?” he asks, squatting down in the middle of the potager. “These are weeds, aren’t they?”

     “No,” I laugh, with fellow-feeling, “they’re carrots.”  

     “You must have green fingers,” declares Paul. And again, I can’t help laughing, because it just seems so weird, someone saying this to me. Back in my East Dulwich days, I could wither spider-plants simply by looking at them. I had never seen a potato plant. And I had no idea that sowing and planting were two entirely different processes. Now here I am, picking the doryphores off my third crop of spuds, and teaching someone else about my vegetables. 

      “Those are gooseberries, right?” asks Paul, pointing to a row of plants attached to stakes.

     “No,” I reply. “They’re tomatoes.”

    “Stupid of me,” he says, embarrassed.

     But it’s not stupid. The tomatoes he’s pointing at are cherry tomatoes, still green. They do look rather like gooseberries. And unless you have ever grown tomatoes yourself, or seen them growing, how would you know?

     “We need to keep our voices down,” I tell Paul, when he suggests a photo with the Rastafarians, “because as soon as they hear me, they’ll all come galloping over.”
 
      “No way,” he murmurs, visibly impressed. But, as I explain, I’m no sheep-whisperer. No, the secret of my power lies in the bag of stale bread that I have in my hand: Ouessant Maltesers.   

     And then they’re flying towards us, with their glittering eyes and flashing hooves, a sight to gladden any man’s heart: 15 little sheep with dreadlocks – the pygmy All Blacks – careering across the hillside like oil over the surface of a hot pan. I remember seeing them do this for the first time, three years ago, in someone else’s field. Again, how strange it is, to think that these wild creatures are somehow mine.  

    “What on earth do you do with them all?” asks Paul.

     “Good question,” I reply. Because I don’t actually do anything at all with my little Ouessants. I simply contemplate them, and do my best to look after them. I fear for toothless old Gaston’s fading chances of seeing out another winter. I admire their dark beauty against the bleached grass of the hillside; watch the way the flock changes and develops each year. And I marvel at the unruffled constancy of their existence; that stoic plod along well-trodden paths which, like the fading rhythms of rural life itself, I know that I, as a town-bred human in a world that’s changing fast, might do well to emulate.