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I spent many hours at weekends in this shop browsing and trying to imagine which items would be useful for enhancing the house in Frasquenet. The artificial plants were particularly attractive, given that the house was empty for nine months of the year and so real plants were impracticable. Among the items I acquired were three terracotta wall pots and some lengths of artificial ivy and fern, which I figured would help to reduce the austere feel of the shower room. For the mantelpieces in the living room and one of the bedrooms, I bought pottery vases whose early Edwardian styling was reminiscent of the water jug and potty which had graced my grandmother’s bedroom when I was a young child. For these I bought a selection of artificial poppies, irises, ferns and some rather sombre looking large dark red and black tulips, which I thought would fit in with the style of the wall paper in the front bedroom.
A visit to a garden centre near Ruislip, between Uxbridge and Harrow, produced a fountainhead. It literally was a head, or at least the front half of a head, in the shape of the Greek god Dionysus. The Romans referred to Dionysus as Bacchus. As the God of wine, I felt it was appropriate to erect him in the Languedoc. After all the Romans had colonised Narbonne in 118BC. I chose to ignore the fact that their senate had banned the worship of Bacchus some 68 years earlier in 186BC. The head, which had a flat back, seemed to have been moulded from some fibrous, asbestos like material and dyed bronze verdigris green. Having learnt from previous years, that getting up in the early hours to catch an early morning ferry, in fact lead to a sleepless night, caused partly by excitement and partly by fear of missing the alarm clock, we had booked ourselves on the Thursday 11pm, Dover to Calais ferry. I had calculated that given the time difference, we would disembark, at around 1:30am French time and hence we would be well south of Paris, when the morning rush hour started.
On this occasion, we had no passengers and had taken three weeks leave, for our longest stay in Frasquenet, so far. Apart from Jane, Sarah and our holiday luggage, I was accompanied by my previously mentioned purchases, including Bacchus’ head, an electric pump and my video camera. Where as the previous summer, I had tackled the very practical and necessary job of building window shutters, this year’s project was somewhat more frivolous, a luxury rather than a necessity. This would be the year of project "garden fountain". My other intended project, was to make a video documentary of Narbonne and the surrounding area, so that I could lift myself out of the depression of future English winters, by watching the sun filled Corbieres skies, from the comfort of my armchair in London. Despite the absence of passengers, we were not going to be left with many days entirely to ourselves. On the first Monday we were due to collect my elderly mother and even more elderly step father from Toulouse airport. They were due to stay with us until the Sunday, when we would deliver them to my stepbrother’s house at Lodeve. The following Tuesday we were to return to Toulouse to collect Jane`s friend Caroline and her daughter Sabine. They were due to stay with us for ten days, before we would return them to Toulouse for the flight home. page 112 Copyright Frasquenet.com |
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