The Befouled Weakly News
19 July 2009 Welcome back! Apologies for the interruption in service you experienced last weekend but these things happen from time to time, I’m afraid. The wedding we attended in the south of France last weekend was as nice an event and as relaxing an occasion as we can imagine. The weather was absolutely glorious – temperatures in the 80s and cloudless blue Mediterranean skies – and the wedding was excellent. This was the wedding of Joe Jefferies and his French girlfriend, Amandine Bories and as such it was a delightful mixture of French and English values and traditions. Joe, you will remember, is the middle son of our very dear friend Jan who we lost to cancer some years ago. Her three boys and ours were roughly the same ages and attended primary school together and it was Joe who took us cycling in France a couple of years ago. He moved down to the south of France about five or six years ago and has renovated one house and is nearly finished with his second which is how he met Amandine.
I may have written about Caux when last we visited Joe and Amandine a couple of years ago. It is a wonderfully delightful fairly typical French village – narrow, twisting alleyways built in a 10th century circular street pattern – la Circulade – a defensive arrangement that reflects the turbulent history of the region (have a look on Google Earth – 43 30’24.11” N, 3 22’05.55” E). It is full of crumbling buildings, ramble shack doorways and shutters all crowned by the dazzling deep blue of the Mediterranean skies and dozens of darting swifts.
The wedding was on the Saturday afternoon where we all gathered in the courtyard of Amandine’s family home (43 30’ 26.80” N, 3 22’ 04.48” E) for a greeting or two and then made our way in procession to the Marie (the Town Hall – 43 30’ 24.00” N, 3 22’ 06.66” E) in which the civil ceremony was to take place, the Mayor presiding. (All French weddings take place in the Marie, apparently; it’s a civil requirement. Some couples have additional church weddings and in the morning, as we wandered through the street market and the myriad of narrow, winding back alleyways in Pézenas, we witnessed the congregation arriving for a wedding as we sipped a coffee outside the church. We watched for a while hoping to pick up enough tips so that we didn’t completely embarrass ourselves at Joe and Amandine’s. Unfortunately, we picked up no tips whatsoever other than the fact that the French clearly wear whatever they like to a wedding. There were gentlemen in suits and ties, women in lovely dresses with large hats and, at the same time, young men in shorts and t-shirts.)
The ceremony was short and sweet (very fortunate as it was conducted, of course, entirely in French and a significant number of us understood not a word of it. Fortunately, Joe is fluent and Amandine, clearly, is a native so hopefully they each understood what they were committing to). As we left the Marie a number of Amandine’s tennis playing friends had arrived to create a ceremonial arch of tennis rackets which caused considerable amusement. Following the ceremony, we all leapt in our cars for the drive to the reception which was held in a vineyard about four or five miles out of Caux (43 30’ 48.56” N, 3 25’ 54.30” E). The French have this delightful habit (Mom and Dad may remember from our travels in France) of following the wedding convoy with their car horns blaring constantly for the whole of the drive. So, along with most everyone else, we leaned on our car horn for the duration of the journey, much to the undoubted chagrin of the mothers trying to settle their infants for their evening snooze.
The setting for the reception was simply outstanding. Joe and Amandine had hired tables, chairs, crockery, cutlery and just about everything else from the Marie and had set everything up in the front garden of the vinery. The views over the surrounding vineyards, disappearing in all directions, were stunning and the light and the sun were sensational. A Moroccan family from Pézenas had been brought in to prepare the meal and when we arrived the lamb was slowly roasting on an open barbeque. There was olive tapenade on French bread, olives, Parma ham (the French equivalent), melon and quantities of wine from the Domain itself to keep us from getting too hungry before the main feast which started at about 9.30 and went on until well after midnight – Oh! Those wacky continentals!!
Some of us played Boules in the golden evening light – others sat like spectators at Wimbledon above the surrounding wall and cheered us on. And then, the feasting and dancing went on until the early, early hours. We finally left about 2.30; the youngsters kept it up until 7.30 in the morning when, apparently, the tradition is that the survivors are presented with French onion soup.
At 7.00 on Sunday evening we all gathered once again at the vineyard for yet another evening of food, drink and conversation. This time people were less ‘dressed’ although I can’t say that anyone felt the need to dress up particularly the previous day – everything was just so wonderfully relaxed and totally informal the whole time. The Moroccan family provided a couscous and vegetable stew with roast lamb, cheeses and fruit again and the most delicious array of sweet Moroccan cakes dripping with honey. Delicious! And there you have it (or, at least most of it). A really wonderfully relaxing weekend – good wine, great food, wonderful company, splendid weather and a joyously happy occasion; what more could anyone ask? Much love to you all, Greg In line with the occasion, I thought some marriage-related anecdotes might be appropriate; apologies for those we’ve used before. There was once a man and woman who had been married for more than 60 years. They had shared everything. They had talked about everything. They kept no secrets from each other -- except that the old woman had a shoebox in the top of her closet that she cautioned her husband never to open or ask her about. For all of these years, he had never thought about the box, but one day the little old woman got very sick and the doctor said she would not recover. In trying to sort out their affairs, the little old man took down the shoebox and took it to his wife's bedside. She agreed that it was time that he should know what was in the box. When he opened it, he found two crocheted doilies and a stack of money totalling $25,000. "When we were to be married," she said, explaining the contents of the box, "my grandmother told me the secret of a happy marriage was to never argue. She told me that if I ever got angry with you, I should just keep quiet and crochet a doily." The little old man was so moved, he had to fight back tears. Only two precious doilies were in the box. She had only been angry with him two times in all those years of living and loving! He almost burst with happiness. "Honey," he said "that explains the doilies, but what about all of this money? Where did it come from?" "Oh," she said, "that's the money I made from selling the doilies." Typical macho man married typical good-looking lady and after the wedding, he laid down the following rules: "I'll be home when I want, if I want and at what time I want-and I don't expect any hassle from you. I expect a great dinner to be on the table unless I tell you that I won't be home for dinner. I'll go hunting, fishing, boozing and card-playing when I want with my old buddies and don't you give me a hard time about it. Those are my rules. Any comments?" His new bride said, "No, that's fine with me. Just understand that there will be sex here at seven o'clock every night... whether you're here or not." Husband (a doctor) and his wife are having a fight at the breakfast table. Husband gets up in a rage and says, "And you are no good in bed either," and storms out of the house. After some time he realizes he was nasty and decides to make amends and rings her up. She comes to the phone after many rings and the irritated husband says, "What took you so long to answer the phone?" She says, "I was in bed." "In bed this early, doing what?" "Getting a second opinion!" A man has six children and is very proud of his achievement. He is so proud of himself that he starts calling his wife, "Mother of Six" in spite of her objections. One night, they go to a party. The man decides that it's time to go home and wants to find out if his wife is ready to leave as well. He shouts at the top of his voice, "Shall we go home, Mother of six?'" His wife, irritated by her husband's lack of discretion shouts right back, "Anytime you're ready, Father of Four." And finally, a video from the Guardian web site about the annual Wife Carrying competition held in Finland.
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We flew from Luton to Beziers on the Friday morning along with a crowd of cousins, an aunt and uncle and a couple of friends of Joe’s. Travelling together meant that the celebrations could start straight-away and, although Ryan Air is one of the world’s worst airlines, it was cheap and cheerful and the flight is a relatively short one, only about an hour and a half. Once the formalities of French immigration had been completed (all the French, Brits and other European nationals wave their passports in the general direction of the sleepy border officers whilst the American passport holders amongst us, i.e., me, are escorted to a small booth where a very bored and lethargic immigration officer – this is the south of France, after all – rummages through his drawer of stamps to find the appropriate one with which to adorn my passport) we were off in convoy to Caux, the village in which Joe and Amandine reside and where the wedding was to take place.
At the Marie the Mayor greeted us all at the entrance (I have to confess, I originally thought he was the caretaker as he was somewhat relaxingly dressed but he turned out, indeed, to be the Mayor, a status which was evident when he re-appeared at the front of the congregation resplendent in his Mayoral sash.
On the Sunday we all did our own thing, some going to the sea, others to swim in a nearby lake. We took ourselves off on a little sight-seeing drive and tried to find all the little villages we had cycled around when we were visiting with Joe and Amandine a couple of years ago.