Tree Felling In Provence

I'm just watching a huge mature pine tree tumble outside my window. There - it's down. It's lying right across the dirt track which leads down to the village, barring the way for any vehicle that may turn up and need to pass.

On the other side of the dirt track, a friend's workman just moved his tractor forward a little to tug the tree away from the house as the tronconneuse or chainsaw severed its trunk.

Four tall pines will be chopped down today. I've been worrying about these trees for a few years now. On New Year's Day 2008 I woke up to find a massive pine had fallen across the driveway of the house. There'd been high winds in the night and I vaguely remembered stirring when I heard a loud thud. The pine could easily have hit the house but instead it lay dead on the gravel, inches away from my car - which it could easily have crushed - and completely barring my way off the property. Alone, with no chainsaw and no idea how to use one, I was pretty non-plussed. Luckily, a neighbour soon passed, on his way to his olive grove, and hopped out of his 4x4 with a chainsaw to hand. He buzzed the whole tree into firewood in about three minutes flat and asked for nothing more than a smile and a hug for his work.

After that, I began to worry from time to time about the trees around the house. Some are too young to pose a problem but a few are tall and mature and pose a threat. Several right outside my bedroom looked to me as if they could end up on my bed in a real storm. I got to the point where every time the mistral blew hard in the night I'd pick up my duvet and pillow and go and sleep on the sofa.

A couple of summers ago I asked my neighbour, Gregory, if he could chop them down. He has an elegage business which takes care of all the plane trees in town so he was equipped with all the necessary ropes, pulleys, machines, men and expertise - but he was too expensive. His quote for the work was over 1000 euros and I didn't have that to spare at the time.

So I carried on worrying and relocating to the living room during storms and high winds.

Today though, the work's finally being done. The men are sawing away as I write and although I dislike the idea of felling trees it's more disturbing to worry about them falling naturally and smashing through the roof...

There goes the second one. The first has already been sawn up and dragged aside. It'll make good firewood once it's seasoned, in the winter of 2012. When the men go this evening, I'll start to pile it up bit by bit, behind the winter 2011 pile. (Using properly seasoned wood is important - it gives out more heat and less smoke than wood that's unseasoned. And unseasoned wood, especially resinous wood like pine, creates sticky residue in the chimney. It's best to mix even well-seasoned pine with oak, beech, cherry and olive.)

Work stopped at midday, naturally, for lunch. We ate outside, just black olives from Nyons, bread, cheese, saucisson and red wine from Sablet. Eric, who's helping out, is from Frejus on the coast and told me how he regrets having to move inland. "For lunch I used to just catch a fish or baby squid" he said. "We'd eat outside all year round." It's February as I write and we're eating outside now but, for Eric, the cold months of November, December and January are hard to take. He left the Cote d'Azur because his wife wanted to live inland but they're now going through a divorce. He's about to take up a job looking after the animals in a large garden centre. "Cats" he said, "dogs. Fish, birds, rabbits, guinea pigs.." "No women?" my neighbour asked, jokingly. Eric shook his head vehemently. "I've had enough of women to last me a lifetime" he said. "I'd rather live with a bunch of tigers than a wife."

After eating, and drinking rather a lot of red wine (I was dubious about mixing alcohol with chainsaws but the men brushed that aside) the work started again. I'm now watching (and hearing - it's loud...) the two men sawing the third tree. My Siamese cat Coco has hopped onto the tractor seat and is looking at the men with disinterest. He loves vehicles of all kinds and always jumps onto or into any car, motorbike, van, tractor or trailer that arrives. The police called round a while ago to tell me my gipsy neighbours had been using my address as part of a tax dodge. I have no idea why they called really because they refused to give me any real information and left with a cheery au revoir, telling me not to worry. A minute after they drove off in their little van they returned to turf Coco out of the back seat. The same happened with the electrician who was halfway home when Coco stepped onto his shoulder from the backseat.

One or possibly two more pines to go and after that I'll be able to thumb my nose at high winds in the middle of the night. Well, I wouldn't do that - far too much respect for (or fear of) nature - but you know what I mean. I'll be able to sleep without being terrified of being crushed before dawn. The guys just gave me a thumbs up sign about the largest tree. They walked around it, had a bit of a confab, then attached ropes to it. Now the sawing is re-starting. Looks like the tree will soon be firewood.

Provence is like that very often. Locals take a problem, circle it, give it some thought and then put a rope round it and turn it to their advantage. 'That's not a tree waiting to smash through your roof' they'll say. 'That's a stock of firewood for winter.'
Not a bad approach.

Choosing Vines for Soil in the Vaucluse

So I have two vines that aren't growing well. They're on each side of my terrace and have struggled since 2004. One grows and produces plenty of leaf but few grapes; the other is stunted and won't grow at all.

I was given the address of a pépiniériste (nurseryman) at Caromb and decided to go and talk to him. He specialises in vines. A neighbour who wants to expand his little plantation of 20 vines decided to go with me. When we arrived on a Saturday afternoon the pépiniériste was trundling about tinkering with a small tractor, accompanied by a vast white Pyrenean mountain dog, the type used to chase wolves away from sheep.

We got talking and as the dog beat its tail against our legs and woofed a bit, I explained the problem. What variety of vine did I have, he asked? I didn't know. Behind him were rows of small, healthy looking vines and a large poly-tunnel with the door open. Another little army of vines was growing inside.

Never mind, he said. The issue was to find vines that would grow. Presumably I wanted raisins de table? Not much point having grapes that make wine if you only grow 2 vines. But did I want grapes at all? A sterile vine wold be pretty but wouldn't produce grapes so I wouldn't be bothered about wasps in late summer. Mmmm, I thought I wanted grapes.

OK, he said. What type of soil do you have? Well, I replied, it's in pine forest, it's rocky. Limestone.
Ah. If it's calcaire he said, it's necessary to know whether it's actif or not? I had no idea.

Vines are apparently sensitive to calcaire actif and, if you have it, you need to grow vine varieties that can cope with it.

My neighbour wasn't sure if the soil in the hamlet near my home had active limestone or not. He had a note of the vines that currently grow fairly well on his land and, looking at those, the pépiniériste said it was unlikely there was calcaire actif
in the soil. He wasn't prepared to recommend vines without knowing more about the soil though and we agreed to find out. A proper soil analysis would be too expensive he advised us but we could talk to local agriculteurs who would be sure to know. At this point an old chap wondered over to us. He had just about the most French look I've ever seen in my life - huge white handlebar moustache, wispy white hair, a weathered and crinkled face, kind twinkly eyes and a great big smile.

Papa, the guy asked him, is there calcaire actif in the soil at Velleron?

Papa didn't skip a beat. He shook his head and gave us a concise discourse on the soil composition of pretty much the whole of the Vaucluse. (He added a short digression on cultivating truffles.) Anyway, it turns out that where I live, there's no calcaire actif to worry about.

That cleared up one aspect of the discussion. Things then got a little more complicated as we discussed planting, pruning and the months when different varieties produce their grapes.

My neighbour had quite a lot of questions and the last one was whether the pépiniériste could note down a few suitable varieties for his land? He still had several things to think about and decide he said, but in the meantime he'd like a list to consider. The chap laughed and said that in his house he had a book around 500 pages long on vine varieties. My neighbour had to make a few decisions about the type of vine and grape he wanted and then, when he came back with the answers, he'd get the recommendations he needed.

We chatted a bit longer and found out that this nurseryman provides vines (grafted, but that's a whole other discussion) to vignobles growing vines across hectare after hectare. He's used to supplying hundreds and thousands of plants at a time and yet here he was taking time to inform and advise us when he stood to sell a few vines for 5 euros apiece!

That's one of the things I love about Provence, and France in general - the care and pride and attention that go into so many activities whether agricultural, culinary or purely social.

We thanked the chap and set off for Velleron, stopping briefly in Caromb for a coffee. The little café was in darkness but a woman was sitting outside and welcomed us. "It's the crisis" she announced cheerily. "I didn't have any customers so I turned the lights off."

"Well you can turn them on again now we're here" we said.

As we sat in the weak February sunshine drinking rather bitter coffee, two workmen arrived and had coffees too. They jumped back in their van to leave and reversed casually into the car behind them as people quite often do here. They gave it quite a bump. The driver beamed at us and signalled "It's OK isn't it?" Yes, we nodded. It's OK.
He'd only hit the bumpers.

I got home pondering the expertise of the pépiniériste. He supplies fig trees too - naturally, since Caromb is the home of the popular Caromb fig variety. And almond trees. I bet he knows as much about growing figs and almonds as he knows about growing vines and grapes. Having a magpie brain that flits too easily from one subject to another, I find that mastery of fields of knowledge really admirable. And, to me anyway, knowledge of the natural world is far more seductive than knowledge of, say, law or economics. There is something very substantial about knowing the land, the climate and vegetation. Which is partly why we use the term grounding, I suppose, to mean steadying or stabilising.

I'll probably never gain the really thorough understanding or experience that people here have of vines or figs, truffles or oysters, olives or olive oil - but I have come to understand how much complexity and richness there is in each aspect of nature in the Mediterranean. It's pretty overwhelming sometimes but certainly fascinating. And while it's sometimes frustrating to realise how little you know about a subject under discussion it's often a joy to discuss, listen and learn. And to admire the knowledge of people here who really know their stuff.

Provence - The Dark Side. Part 1: Suicide in Provence

People who holiday in Provence are often - understandably - seduced by its obvious charms. Particularly in summer, visitors to the region will find that almost an overkill of sensual pleasure is easily available. The markets, the cafés and restaurants, the olive groves, the bees humming drowsily in the lavender.... Add a two or three month dollop of hot sun and a swimming pool and it's clear to see why Pagnol's Jean de Florette spoke of finding Zola's paradise.

I'm all for that view of Provence. That's why I live here. I regard Provence in the way you regard a lover in those first dazzled months, except that the feeling has lasted over 30 years.

It was before I lived here though that I began to see a bit of the dark side of this area. And like anywhere populated by human beings, there is a dark side.

My first glimpse came a couple of decades ago when I witnessed friends break up. The husband ran a business converting clapped out old farmhouses into luxurious second homes for Brits. He and his wife had the clichéd "all" - beautiful children, beautiful home, beautiful bank balance, beautiful life. But having it all didn't stop him running off with another man's wife and destroying his family. Not long after, his wife committed suicide. (Never try this with paracetamol, or doliprane, by the way. You don't drift off to a dreamless sleep with a paracetamol overdose. You languish in hospital for a week or more, as she did, wracked with pain while your liver collapses.)

Now, divorce and/or suicide happen. Anywhere. But my impression is that there's quite a bit of both knocking around these parts. In posts to follow, I'll talk about local divorces, about prostitution in Provence and about inter-racial tensions between the indigenous French, gipsies and North Africans (or maghrébins.) I'll give alcoholism a shot too. For now, I'll stick with suicide.

Some time ago I mentioned to a friend that, as I live on my own in the countryside, it might be an idea to keep a gun in the house. Guns are all over the place here - every guy in the village seems to have one, for hunting - and I frequently come across cheery men with guns wondering around in the forest around the house.

"Only thing is" I told my friend "I don't know where to get one."

He threw up his hands, said "Come with me", and led me to a great wooden cupboard. Throwing it open he carefully lifted out four shotguns wapped in blankets, just as you see in turn-of-the-century films about the mafia. One had belonged to his father, for hunting. One was his own. Can't remember the history of the third and he acquired the fourth when a girl friend called him in distress one day because her father had committed suicide. Some time after arriving at her home to help deal with police and pompiers, my friend was handed the shotgun. "Please get it out of the house" the bereaved daughter said. "He shot himself in the head with it."

Last summer, an old chap arrived in the little hamlet near my home and stood looking at the houses for a while. There's a canal just below the hamlet and he trundled down to it, looking sadly into the water. One of my neighbours wandered over to chat to him and heard that his father had worked at the old gypse quarry before it was abandoned long ago. He'd lived in the hamlet where my neighbours now live. The chap recounted a short history of disappointment and sadness in his father's life and added: "I've never been back here but I wanted to see the place. He drowned himself in this canal."

Last winter when we were collecting our olives round here, we got news that a couple most of us know had not only broken up but that the woman involved had promptly killed herself.

And some time before that I had my own little brush with suicide on the dirt track by my home.

This is what happened. I was going through a divorce (as you do in midlife....) My much-loved partner of 19 years had a spectacular midlife crisis, became cruel and violent and ran off to Scotland with another man's wife. For a time I had to live in the unpleasant chaos he generated. One day I drove down the track to town and noticed a smart white car parked off to one side in the forest. When I returned hours later I noticed it was still there. Since clandestine lovers sometimes park there I didn't think much of it. The next morning though, I went into town again and the car was still there. I instinctively knew what that meant. Someone had hanged, gassed or shot themselves. For a second I thought of stopping. But knowing what I'd find, I drove on. I had enough to deal with and simply thought "That's the job of the pompiers. Someone will find him or her today but it's not going to be me." I felt sure it was already too late to help. In fact, I didn't even think of reporting it.

Later I drove home and the car was still there. A couple of hours later a neighbour came dashing round and thumped at the door. When I answered, he took a deep breath and said "So it's not you." The pompiers had found the person hanging from a pine tree but when they were stopped (naturally) as they went down the track with the body in the ambulance, all they would tell the neighbours was that 'a person' had hanged themselves. The neighbours concluded my divorce might have done for me. In fact, it was a man in his sixties. We never found out what drove him to kill himself. But clearly he'd found that even the beauty and light of Provence were not enough to make life worth living.

Time Travel: A Visit to the Archives in The Palais des Papes at Avignon

The Vaucluse here in Provence is an area, like many others I suppose, with a rich history when it comes to industry and agriculture.

When I first bought my home near L'Isle sur Sorgue, I realised there was a long history of olive cultivation on the land around the property. Everywhere in the surrounding pine forest there were young, untended olive trees that had struggled out of the roots and mattes of olive trees ruined by frost in the hard winter of 1956. The ruined olive trees are at even distances from each other and there are often straggly lavender plants nearby which, like the oliviers, have been wild for years. Presumably at some point after '56 the people growing olives and making olive oil left this hillside forest and abandoned their olive tree and lavender cultivation. But the story wasn't, and still isn't, clear to me.

The other part of the puzzle is that this is also an area which was quarried by Provencal people for centuries, for gypsum, to make plaster.

Near my house is an old gypse quarry which, like the olive groves, has been reclaimed by nature. Where local men once burned logs against the rocky quarry walls before scratching at powdered gypse to collect it, there are now just trees, song birds, wild flowers and mushrooms. And near the quarry is a small hamlet, the Hameau de la Parisienne, which once belonged to the quarry company or its workers and was rebuilt with incredible energy, and no formal knowledge of construction, by my (then-hippy) neighbours in the late 70s after it had fallen into ruin.

Now - I've tried to investigate this puzzle before without much success. It seems Provencal families have grown olive trees here for over 2000 years. The vast pine forest around my home, mixed with oak and other trees, grew up in recent decades. The land was once studded with healthy olive trees and pretty lavender bushes tended by people who - I assume - lived here rather than in the village and - I guess - kept sheep and goats and cats and dogs around them and carefully pruned their olive trees under the blue spring skies and collected their olives in winter just as I do with neighbours today. The wonderful exhibition at Arles in 2010 - Cesar - Le Rhone Pour Memoire had a map of ancient Provence which showed that people around here were busy growing olives and grapes 2000 years ago. (Not much change there then). A wonderful thrill ran down my spine when I saw that map in the Musée des Antiquités. It was in the room just next to the 2000 year old bust of a majestic Caesar (despite a chipped nose) which archaeologists had recovered from the Rhone riverbed along with hundreds of other Romans' possessions. On a spot more or less where my home is, there were quirky little drawings of grapes and olives, bringing home the sturdy continuity in human activity here since and before Roman times.

But. I've also read, in a book on the history of industry in the Vaucluse, that local people have 'quarried' gypse here for 9000 years, individual hands scraping it painstakingly out of the land to use in building.

So I wonder how, in recent times, in the 19th and 20th century, did the olive growers interact with the gypse quarriers? Were the olive growers put out of business by the killing frost in 1956? Did they just leave the area when irrigation made agriculture easier down on the plain by Isle sur Sorgue? Were olive growers families simultaneously involved in olive oil and gypse production? Or did the quarry company that eventually turned individual gypse and plaster production into a business in the 19th century somehow force the agricultural families out?

This week I went to the Archives at the Palais des Papes in Avignon to see if old documents would shed any light. It was an experience fairly typical of Provence - part charm, part beauty, part eccentricity.

If you know the Palais des Papes you may have seen the discreet little entrance to the Archives. You go up the stone steps towards the park and almost pass the door before you notice it. Inside, I climbed more steps and entered the ante-room to the Salle de Lecture. Apart from a couple of computer screens it was more or less Name of the Rose territory. A first-floor balcony runs round the room, packed with bookshelves and dusty books. Access is by a spiral staircase. The ceiling is made of huge old wooden beams. I was immediately conscious of my boots clicking loudly on the old traditional floor tiles. An ancient-looking archivist greeted me and asked what documents I was after. We had a long discussion about my topic... She then got me to fill out a long form, writing down most of what I'd already told her. Then she asked me to check the archive indexes and note the documents I wanted to read and gave me a crayon. "Thankyou" I said, pushing it back at her. "I've got a pen. I don't need a crayon". Gently, she pushed the crayon back at me. With a sweet smile she said: "It would be terrible if a pen leaked ink onto a unique historical record, don't you think?" I took the crayon.

I sat at the only table with the only other researcher. He was a very old man with wildly straggly white hair and a neatly clipped white beard. He sat in a wheelchair, gravely regarding a vast medieval book supported on one of those wooden book stands. It was hand-written, with dense writing and symbols and the pages were crumbling at the edges. I felt a bit envious - his book looked fascinating and I wanted to ask it was. Instead, I noted the documents I wanted to see and noticed he was glancing across at me. Then he leant forward and spoke in a calm voice: "You know it's nearly lunchtime?" he said. "You'll have to wait 2 hours for those."

Later, after lunch, I was ushered into the reading room. Here, you look down into one of the Palais's medieval courtyards, framed by buttery-yellow stone arches and columns. Another archivist took the note I'd made and brought my documents. He deposited them one after another - thumping great piles of paper tied up with string. I started to read.

In front of me at another table there was a couple leafing through old documents. The woman was silent but every so often the man, who looked like an old paysan, thumped the table or cursed - putain!
in a booming voice. The reading room 'invigilator' went over after a while and said politely: "Monsieur, I would just remind you that we are always quiet in the reading room. Silence aids concentration wonderfully. You have a marvellous voice but it carries!"

The old chap beamed at him and said proudly: "This voice is the result of wine, tobacco and a life spent in the open air with my goats." He promised to shut up.

I read offical and personal letters and legal documents from the 19th century which didn't contain the answers I was looking for. I found out that the old quarry close to home had been functioning as a business since at least 1850. There was no information on the buildings in the hamlet. Were they built when a plaster factory was added to the quarry? Were they originally farm buildings, bought by the quarry company to house workers?

An elderly archivist tried to guide me to an ancient map of the area. Scanned into the archive database, she was unable to find it. "I do hate this new technology" she said. "How does it work?" How it worked was immaterial really - when I displayed the image it was so faded that it could just as easily have been a diagram of someone's heart and lungs as a map of an old olive grove and quarry.

I learned a frustrating amount about the history of gypse and olive production in the Vaucluse that afternoon - enough to make me more curious but not enough to solve the puzzle. I'll now try the Isle sur Sorgue archives and possibly talk to Lafarge, the big French company which gradually swallowed up Provencal quarries in the 20th century.

As I left the fabulous archive at the Palais des Papes, the old goatherd looked up at me. I was struggling to re-tie the string round my fat bundles of paper. Somehow the string seemed shorter than when I'd un-tied it. I cursed quietly under my breath. The old chap beamed and nodded. Then he put a finger to his lips and whispered: 'Sssh!'

Place Georges Brassens in Provence

Last week I invited some friends round for an aperitif. One of them said he had to leave around 8pm because he was going to another friend's place.

The other friend, Felix, was away in Figueres in Catalonia, Spain. He's Provencal but with Spanish origins and was taking a trip back to his (and Salvador Dali's) home town.

"Why are you going over there when Felix is away?" I asked.

"There's something I want to do for him before he returns" was the answer. "Can I borrow your ladder?"

Ladder lent, most of it sticking out of the back of his car, he departed.

I forgot about the incident but the other day I ran into him and Felix chatting in our local market. Felix was recounting how, on his return from Figueres to Isle sur Sorgue, he found someone had been onto his property and fixed a plaque in an outside seating area he'd created. In fact, to say it's a seating area is pushing it a bit - it's a sort of scrappy courtyard populated by trucks, building materials, old chairs and a tangle of kittens. Felix lives in a huge agricultural hanger that he's converted into a muscular, open-plan, bloke's living space. It's all heavy industrial wooden beams, woodburning stove, forged iron and inox. Sort of New York Loft meets Mad Max. A maçon with his own roofing business, he's also a former sailor, a former chef who cooks like a dream and an artist who paints sinewy, vaguely figurative paintings on large canvases dotted around the mezzanine.

He told us that the green metal plaque that had been installed had presumably been pinched from some town square and said Place Georges Brassens. Felix is an admirer of Brassens' work and was touched by the gift but he wondered who'd climbed over his wall to install it. He'd asked a few friends, who denied it, but now he figured out who it was. My neighbour laughed and agreed that it was his Christmas present to the builder/sailor/chef/artist.

I trundled off to buy Sortilège coffee, ("magic spell...", which I used to misread as Sacrilège.)

As I whisked my purchases through the self-service check-out at Intermarché I wondered about Brassens. I knew he was a singer and poet but other than that I had little idea about his work.

So I had a look online at Wikipedia and found that he was born in 1921 and died in 1981. He was born in Sète, a tough and interesting coastal and fishing town near Montpellier. As well as being a well-regarded postwar poet he wrote songs and set others' lyrics to music. During World War II, the Germans forced him to work in a labour camp, helping them manufacture BMW aircraft engines. Objecting, as you would, to furthering the nazi war effort, Brassens failed to return to the camp after getting a few days leave. He spent the last five months of the war in hiding in Paris. Brassens' view of the 20th century was understandably gloomy. "The century we live in is a rotten century" he wrote.

"Nothing but cowardice and baseness.
The greatest murderers attend the greatest masses
And are the greatest favourites of the greatest kings."

In lighter vein, he wrote - among over 200 songs - a song about a well-endowed gorilla which escapes its cage. Taking a bewigged and robed judge for a woman, the gorilla rapes him. The lyrics contrast the judge's cool and impassive voice when sentencing a man to death with his shrieks for mercy in the grip of the gorilla. The song was banned for a time but is still well known these days in France.

Brassens always credited one of his teachers with having sparked his interest in poetry and songwriting. The influence of this one man led Brassens on to study the works of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Hugo among others.

"We were thugs" he said "at fourteen or fifteen, and we started to like poets. That's quite a transformation. Thanks to this teacher, I opened my mind to something bigger."

Just the sort of sentiment that is appreciated in Provence (and Paris and Sète) and led to parks and squares bearing the name Georges Brassens.

Raising Rabbits in Provence

Provence has long had a much-deserved poetic image. The sun. The stunning natural beauty of the countryside. The coastline. The glamour. The richness of rural life. The heritage and culture. Provence is widely seen as a great place to live or take holidays, infused with joie de vivre and a lighthearted approach to life. Author Marcel Pagnol did a lot to reflect the beauty and poetry of Provence in his writing. But he hardly shied away from the tougher rural aspects of this terrain.

There is no doubt that Provence is seductive but it has plenty of darker, tougher aspects to its character than visitors may suspect. I've lived here now for six and a half years, discovering significantly more about life here every year. There's certainly a simplicity about life in Provence, but it's a complex simplicity, if that makes sense. Or you might say there's a complexity about life here, but it's a simple complexity. It's hard to convey. I'll write about some of these darker aspects of Provence in future posts.

For the moment I just want to make an observation about raising rabbits.

Lots of Provencal paysans - small producers - raise rabbits. (Saying you're a "peasant" here has no negative connotations, by the way. It just means you live mostly off the land. You grow fruit and veg or raise animals.) Pagnol wrote about Jean de Florette's project of raising rabbits to make a living. Anyone who's read the novel or seen the film knows how badly rabbit rearing worked out for the would-be farmer.

Still, raising rabbits in the Provencal countryside seems like a gentle rural occupation. The sun, the open air, the floppy ears, the furry bunnies...

I overheard a conversation about raising rabbits the other day. I was in Isle sur Sorgue in my local café, the Café de France, and a young American woman was telling her husband how wonderful she thought it would be to raise rabbits here. The picture she painted was of bunnies hopping around enjoying their freedom in the sunshine.

It's perfectly true that there's more poetry and more beauty in handling rabbits in the open air than in handling widgets or computer programs (just my opinion.) But the reality is, of course, more complex for the paysans here who breed rabbits for sale or to put on their dinner table.

My neighbour's mother bred rabbits. He still has the large rabbit cages they were kept in, piled in an old hen house. His sister-in-law breeds them too. Our local kiné and another neighbour both exchange their rabbits for litres of olive oil that several of us produce co-operatively. I eat rabbit but I must say I find the sight of a dead, skinned rabbit quite poignant.

Local people who keep rabbits (or pigeons or chickens or pigs...) say it's important to love your rabbits and feed them well. And then they'll make a good meal. That's not cynicism - it's just rural tradition. I know very kind-hearted and sensitive women here who think nothing of killing animals they've raised from birth. One friend told me his mother would bring a live pigeon into the kitchen under her arm and before she reached the kitchen worktop she killed the bird with a swift twist to its neck. He said it happened so rapidly you hardly saw the movement. Provence is not all lavender, honey and pink wine. There's plenty of muscle, sinew and death in the background too.

A housewife here who raises rabbits, or whose husband raises rabbits, will choose a rabbit for lunch or dinner and dispatch it rapidly. She holds it upside down by its feet, strokes its fur several times, (sometimes telling it gently that it was well loved and cared for) and then hits it abruptly on the back of the head. Those who are practised will kill the animal outright every time. Others may give a couple of extra whacks. The dead rabbit is then hung up. The owner puts a bowl or other recipient beneath it, takes out one of its eyes and collects the blood which flows. Once the animal is skinned it can be cooked with or without the blood added in various ways.

Raising rabbits in Provence may sound poetic and undoubtedly much of the work is. Still, it's not an occupation for sensitive souls.

The joys of airport parking in the south of France

An unlikely title I know.

A friend has just invited me to her flat-warming party in Edinburgh in January 2011. After a divorce and a few testing years, she's just started living with her much-loved new boyfriend in a wonderful new flat they've rented overlooking the Firth of Forth.

Hmm. Leave Provence, which is cold enough in January, for Scotland - which will be freezing? I weighed the pros and cons. I'd certainly like to celebrate with them. I'd quite like to visit Scotland again as I lived there for 20 mostly very happy years. On the other hand, travelling can be a pain. Airports, security, delays...

However, the pros beat the cons so I'll look for a flight to book today.

One of the things I won't have to worry about is airport parking. I'm based near Avignon and can fly from Avignon airport, Marseille or Nimes. Even Nice airport is fairly reachable when necessary, though it's a three hour drive.

In all the years I've flown back and forth from these 4 airports I've never had to worry about leaving the car at the airport (touch wood.)

Nimes and Avignon are tiny airports with very few flights per day. You can just breeze up and find a car parking space any time, which is great. At Nimes there's an underground storey and a 'first floor'. The top parking level is open and even when the 'basement' is pretty full, there's always plenty of space on the level above.

The carpark at Avignon airport, as at Nimes, is right outside the small airport building. I like both airports because they're so easily negotiated. You walk in half a minute from your car to check-in and you walk across the tarmac to your plane in half a minute too. So much nicer than the mammoth airports like JFK, Heathrow or Schipol in Amsterdam where you can walk for miles to get to your flight.

Parking charges are reasonable too. The last time I used Avignon it was, I think, around 4 euros a day. Nimes was the same. If you're picking someone up, you get 40 minutes free parking which is civilised, as it should be. And you don't have to pre-book a space, giving your life history, in order to park when you take a flight.

Marseille is a larger airport. Marseille is France's second city - after the beautiful capital, Paris, naturally - and serves destinations in Europe, north Africa and beyond. The parking is still very reasonable and, again, the numerous large car parks are in easy walking distance of check-in or Arrivals.

Last January I went to Amsterdam from Marseille. The return flight got in after midnight and I was horrified to find my car wouldn't start. It wasn't very cold but it was very dark and I was an hour away from home in an almost deserted airport carpark. (The car was a Peugeot. To be fair, it was the only time in four years I had a problem with it.) Having not the slightest idea what to do, and not even sure if my car lease deal had breakdown cover, I wondered over to the intercom at the pay station and pressed the button hopeful I'd be able to speak to a human. Yep. Even after midnight, someone was there on duty. (I love France.) I started to explain that my car wouldn't start and I'd have to call a breakdown service and asked if I'd have to pay if the car was stuck in the carpark all night and the next day?

"No problem" he said cheerily. In French, obviously. It just sounds like a flat battery. Happens all the time. I'll come out with the leads and I'll get the car going for you." (I love men.)

Two minutes later he raced up in his van, had a chit-chat, opened the bonnet, did something technical with leads and the battery, and the car started. I was so pleased I gave him a huge hug which I think startled him. He said re-starting cars with flat batteries was "all in the service." To me it was heroic, frankly.

He drove off back to the airport terminal and I went to the caisse to pay for my few days' parking.

Like Nimes, Avignon and Nice, Marseille airport's pretty reasonably-priced but I thought it was darned good, as I paid my euros, that - however they set the prices at Marseille - they build a basic breakdown service into the cost. Even at New Year, even in the cold, even after midnight.