by Caro Feely
'Fight, fight, fight!' chanted Santi, like kids would in a playground.
We all cracked up. He defused the situation with a hilarious gesture.
By the time we said goodbye to Santi and Sandra, we were crackling with excitement about a permaculture vineyard and Bruce and I had steered clear of any more heated arguments. But it was the start of the vacances de Noël and I wondered if we would find more 'fight fight fight' situations. He was a strict disciplinarian but deeply loyal and loving. At just over 50 he was ahead of us in age but the first out running in the morning even after a few glasses of wine the evening before.
The following morning, Bruce opened my office door and peered in as the dawn was breaking.
'Have you heard of the Five Tibetans?' he asked, his breath billowing out like plumes of smoke in the cold air.
'No, who are they?' I said.
'A set of exercises a neighbour does on the beach every morning,' he said. 'He swears by it. He's fifty and you wouldn't know it. I'll show you when I get back from my run.'
Bruce lived a few paces from the beach in Mauritius. For a few years his work had taken him there and he had been juggling life between his family in the UK and the island.
'I'm in – anything to get you to close that door!' I said.
We both laughed. He closed it and took off.
When he returned we rolled out yoga mats in the tasting room and he showed me the routine. It was simple and quick and I felt good after doing it. I needed something to make me feel good since I was in the thick of a new task that French bureaucracy had thrown at us.
'You have to join a voluntary compulsory health scheme on behalf of your employees,' explained the accountant on the phone. 'It's the new law and you must have it in place by January.'
I was a little surprised by the idea of this new scheme being both voluntary and compulsory but it was an oxymoron I had already encountered so I knew that questioning this aspect would be futile.
'Do you have any suggestions of who we should sign up with?' I said, hoping she would make it easy for me.
'We're not allowed to make recommendations. You can sign up with the company you like. Look online and I'm sure you'll find one that fits,' she said.
I heard an advert on the radio for an international health insurance company, then received a cold call and found them online. They offered a package at half the price of the one proposed by the partner of our local bank plus they were friendly on the phone and I could do everything online. It seemed too good to be true. After a quick search online for other alternatives, I decided it was the one and signed up. Everything was smooth and super easy.
The following day I received an email inviting me to go and add my employees to the policy I had created. I went online with Cécile's details, hoping to get this task off my list. The time it had taken in investigation and administration was already way out of line, another victory for French bureaucracy.
I got to the second page after filling in Cécile's details down to her great-aunt's favourite pet and then it asked me for her centre RO, caisse RO, code grand regime and rang de naissance. I was stuck. I looked through the papers I had and found nothing of this order. I tried calling. All the lines were busy. I waited patiently in the queue and my call was dropped about ten minutes later. I tried again and had the same experience.
Then it was past business hours and the helpline closed. The page I had been working on closed me out with a session timeout. I logged in to see if it had kept the details from the first page that I had validated and found it had saved nothing. I walked outside and howled into the wild winter night.
The following day I contacted the administrator that helped us with payslips and asked if she knew what these codes were.
'Ah mince. You can't sign up with that company. The agricultural unions in Dordogne have done a deal with a single company. That's the only company you can sign up with.'
Now the new voluntary compulsory scheme was also a monopoly scheme.
'If they did that why didn't they pass the administration directly through the MSA and charge it as part of all the other voluntary compulsory payments?'
'You could ask that,' she said.
'It's the same company that was proposed by our bank. It's almost double the price of the one that I've signed up to,' I said.
'I know,' she said.
'It seems like a commercial gift for the company,' I said.
'You could say that,' she said.
I hung up feeling beaten. French bureaucracy had me crushed; I didn't even have the energy to howl a second time.
Bruce gave me a one-page outline of the 'rites' often shortened to 'The Five Tibetans' by those in the know. Over the following days I went through them either alone or with Bruce. After three times I remembered them without needing to look at the page. Each time I did it I felt good.
I found a moment in business hours to call the company I had signed up with. After ten minutes of queuing I explained my dilemma to the call centre representative. She said the only way to unsubscribe was to handwrite a letter to the company headquarters and rattled off the address.
Then I went to the voluntary compulsory monopoly company's website hoping that signing up with them would be as easy as with the people I had just had to un-sign from. There was no information about the product I needed, no way of getting in touch easily, no email address or direct phone number for a local agency. I filled in a contact form and waited for a response. I waited two days then sent a reminder. Still there was no response. I took ten deep breaths. I was trapped in a devastating, time-wasting loop. I could not have written a better imaginary skit on French bureaucracy than this reality. The next day I went back on to the website and sent another request. I emailed my bank that had originally told me about this company's offer. I heard nothing. I had spent several days researching and trying to implement something that had been decided for me but that was now proving impossible to put in place.
'How can you soar like an eagle?' I moaned out loud.
'When you're a turkey,' said Ellie, looking in the door.
'He he he,' I laughed.
My emails and calls disappeared into a black hole like my howl into the night; months later I was still waiting. Everyone knows from Economics 101 that monopoly is not an optimal solution for efficiency or for the good of the economic participants. Now I knew it was not good for my karma either. I rolled out the yoga mat and did the Five Tibetans to bring order to my disturbed spirit.
There was something about doing these five exercises that restored balance – perhaps even hormonal balance – inside me. Perhaps I was naturally reaching the end of perimenopause or perhaps there was some magic to them. The backache and stiffness I experienced when I spent too much time at the computer vanished; I felt more energised. The great swathe of grey developing in my hair even seemed to be disappearing.
The outline of the leafless oak next to the winery was stark against the winter sky. I sat on the bistro chair outside the kitchen door and pulled on my wellies then made my way to the Sémillon vines. Pulling wood was therapeutic. The sounds of winter birds and the rhythmic twang of the wires mingled. Each vine was like a movement in a dance. Grab the canes, yank downwards, drop the freed wood into the middle of the row, bend to gather up the canes that dropped at the foot of the vine, throw them into the middle of the row, pull away any remaining bits. Stretch up tall. Step across to the next vine. Start the dance again.
It was like a yoga movement, a meditation, especially if the sun was out and we weren't under pressure. Bruce joined me and we worked together, chatting, sharing experiences from the years since we had seen each other. He created a motivational force to get things done. During our second French summer he and his children, Duncan and Emma, came to camp with us and we mowed down projects like they were skittles. This time was no different.
We decided to bite the bullet and grub up a large section of ancient vines that were no longer paying their way. After cu
tting the vines off the wires and pulling the wood we had to dismantle the trellis wires then take out the poles. It was possible to rent or purchase a wire winder that worked on the tractor's power take-off (PTO) but we found horror stories on the internet of people being strangled. Thierry Daulhiac passed by and we asked his advice.
'Oh. Yes, it can be dangerous or, he he, funny. Joel's fatherin-law was helping him roll up the wire and it grabbed on to a hook on his pants and ripped them off. There he was standing in the vineyard in his underpants. He he he.'
I found it strange how winegrowers talked and even laughed about the dangers of our métier as if it were normal to risk life and limb every day as part of your job. We weren't into strangulation or losing our pants so we decided to use our hand-operated roller, preferring a little extra work to potentially losing our lives. Over the next few days, Bruce, Seán and I rolled up two tons of wire and stacked a mountain of old wood trellis poles.
It was the start of a new phase of the vineyard, a phase of plantings that would be original individual vines from massal selection, each cutting taken from a different vine, rather than from the same clone. We were bucking the system and it would cost us almost triple what a standard planting would in terms of foregone aid and extra cost but we knew it was the right choice. With the latest aid rules, farmers had to use a specific clone from a specific varietal to avail of replanting aid. The state dictating the clone and varietal that had to be used was wrong: it created uniformity, took away the freedom of choice from the farmer who knew their conditions better than a bureaucrat, and made the plants of the region identical and weak. It would devastate biodiversity, the importance of which was a high point of conversation in the media that year. I wondered how many people understood what it meant. We decided that the longterm benefits of our decision would mean it was the right one despite the immediate financial pain. As a client said earlier that year, 'It's like me with my woodwork. You buy the best wood and cry once.'
We took a morning off from clearing trellising and Sophia, Ellie, Bruce and I cycled to Gardonne for the Sunday market. We bought a chicken from a local producer and organic supplies from a newcomer to the market, a lady in a roulotte (a wagon), who offered dry organic products en vrac (in bulk). Christmas carols warbled through the speakers strung around town; there was a general feeling of good cheer in the air. Stocked up with our supplies, we settled down on a low wall on the square to enjoy crusty croissants and pains aux raisins and bask in the clear winter sun, taking in the chatter, colours and aromas of the market. It was magic, a reminder of what we loved about France – the markets, the food, time to chat – things we had been missing of late in our frenetic lives.
After coercing ourselves back into the saddle we headed for home. Bruce and Sophia streaked ahead and Ellie and I lingered a few hundred metres behind. We crossed the train track and passed a hunter walking back into the village in combat gear with his shotgun hanging over his shoulders. About 50 metres on Ellie stopped. I pulled in alongside her. She was white as a sheet and wide-eyed.
'What's wrong, mignonne?' I said.
'Who is that man?' she asked.
'It's just a hunter like we see every Sunday,' I said.
'But what is he doing going into Gardonne like that?' she said, her voice shaky.
'He's walking home after hunting,' I said.
'I was worried he was going to shoot the people at the market. I was so scared, Mummy,' said Ellie.
In the past Ellie would never have had that reaction to a hunter walking on the road. Her reaction was a stark reminder that the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris had affected us even deep in rural France. The ripples in the psyche of her generation were perhaps greater than we had realised.
'I'm so sorry, my lovely,' I said and gave her a squeeze.
'I was so scared, Mummy,' she repeated.
'Oh, my lovely,' I said, giving her another squeeze and holding her bike stable. 'Are you OK to carry on?'
'Yes, but I feel so tired,' she said.
'It's exhaustion after the adrenalin of being scared and getting a shock,' I said. 'We'll take it slowly but we'd better get on and try to catch up with Bruce and Sophia or they'll worry.'
We took off again. Ellie stopped every couple of hundred metres to check in with me and catch her breath.
Duncan, Emma and Glynis arrived and we got outside into the vines. It was fun working together and catching up on years missed. Soon we were singing and working. Duncan and Emma had beautiful singing voices. Duncan was part of an a cappella group at St Andrews University called The Other Guys, one of the top groups of their kind in the UK, with professional CDs and videos, the proceeds of which went to charity and with the bonus of helping marketing for St Andrews. Not that St Andrews needed help for recruitment: it was famous as a matchmaking university since Prince William met Kate Middleton there.
'You know, a couple of days ago I was at Bonny's and JeanFrançois, another winegrower, came in with a huge smile on his face,' said Seán. 'Mr Bonny asked why he was so happy. He said, "I have two Portuguese people pruning for me, and they are singing and working. It's two decades since I heard people singing like that in the vineyard. It brings joy to my heart." I can say the same thing here.'
We were having fun but also munching through the work. What would have taken me months on my own had taken a couple of days for our large family group.
That evening we wandered up to Saussignac for dinner. Glynis and Bruce walked ahead holding hands like young lovers.
'Why don't you and Papa ever hold hands like that?' asked Sophia.
I could have said, 'Because we've lost touch with each other. Because we're working too hard. Because, because…' But I didn't because I didn't know the answer. Instead I caught up with Seán and took his rough hand in mine. It felt good. I wondered why we didn't do it.
On Christmas Day the sun was shining. We did a polar swim after breaking the ice on the pool. I felt alive. As I prepared scrambled eggs I asked Emma if she could recognise parsley and to fetch me some. She nodded and instead of heading for the garden she opened the fridge. I realised how differently we were living to the majority of the world's urban population. We were connected to nature, earth and sky every day. As a global community we had to find a way to reconnect with nature. It would change people's thinking and it would change the world. If we all grew some of our own food we would store carbon through those plants and prevent the carbon dioxide emissions generated by transport required to bring food to us. Small local farms were key to this renaissance, but making a living as a small farmer was tough.
The Wine Cottage renovations were gaining pace. The timing had already been pushed out two months and each day took us closer to when clients were due to arrive.
Tomas, our mason, appeared at the door.
'We are short of a few tiles,' he said.
'What? I ordered an extra ten per cent,' I said.
'I know but with all the cuts we have lost quite a bit,' he said.
'I'll phone the supplier to see what they can do,' I said.
I had searched Bergerac and Sainte-Foy-la-Grande for the perfect tiles. In the end I had done a special order based on a catalogue photo, a test of my renovation mettle. Each time I thought of it between order and arrival I felt a little spike of adrenalin. When the order arrived the tiles were beautiful, exactly what I was looking for. The risk had paid off. I called the supplier.
'Ah no, that was a special order. We don't have it in stock,' he said. 'I have a single display tile that I could give you.'
'I'm not sure one will do it. We need two or three,' I said.
'Then we're really cornered. I can't put in a special order for two or three tiles – it needs to be a good volume for us to do a special order. Anyway, even if we did order like last time, it would take about six weeks to arrive.'
'Mince. Please keep the display tile for us alors. We'll collect it today,' I said, praying it would be enough.
Tomas collected the
tile and they carefully sorted the cut pieces and made up what was missing. They finished the floor so perfectly it was complete to my eye, but for them the last section would have been better if they had had that extra tile.
I took ten deep breaths. I had learned another lesson: when doing a special order, add 15 per cent. I would be 'building wise' when Château Feely was finished but 'finished' was a relative term. We would never be finished. Already the Lodge needed to be touched up. A living business and farm was an ongoing circle of renewal.
