Pants.

So today, while the children were at school, we ventured into Avignon for a fancy lunch. I frocked up in this little number that I bought when out and about shopping in London with Faux Fuchsia and Janet last week.....it was on sale at Anthropologie for the grand old sum of £55 (around AUD$80):

It's emblazoned with flowers, which seemed appropriate, considering that we'd just been OD'ing on flowers at the Chelsea Flower Show. Of course, when I wore it in the depths of a freezing cold London spring, I had to workshop it with a long sleeved black tee shirt, thick black tights and boots. Not today. Appropriately, espadrilles were the accessories of choice for the South of France on a gloriously sunny day.

Our lunch destination was the courtyard at Les 5 Sens and seeing that I'd lugged myself over hill and down dale in the valley de l'Eure on the outskirts of Uzes this morning, jogging no less, we opted for the 3 course Menu Gourmande. Look how delicious it was. 

Foie gras....bien sur:

Magret de canard:

And for desert a chocolatey concoction of cake, mousse and ginger ice cream:

A lingerie shop opened onto the courtyard in which the tables were set....with the usual scanty confections of lace and not much else, on display in the window. At the table next to us were a couple of French twenty somethings....obviously on a date and experiencing the first flush of young love. When she sloped off inside to the loo, he left the table and dashed into the lingerie shop and in less than five minutes, purchased her a present. Impressive. On her return she was delighted by the surprise on her chair....and even more so when she grilled him as to what size whatever in the bag was and that it turned out to have been the correct 'trente six'. My husband and I  were speculating how long they had been together....obviously long enough for him to know what size to buy....but not long enough for him to register the shop as wallpaper.

Afterwards, we had a quick turn around Avignon before we had to rush back to Uzes to do the school pick up and provision for dinner:

We just had enough time to nick into Petit Bateau to buy the 2 year old some big girl pants as a reward for doing a poo in the toilet and into H&M to stock up on boxer shorts for my husband. Guess we'll be watching TV tonight.....or maybe not....after all we do have four children.

Rx

Festivities.

I'm the first to admit that I know absolutely nothing about......chickpeas. Oh, except that they're the main ingredient in houmous. So there was an element of curiosity when we heard that a village five minutes down the way was holding it's 6th Festival of the Chickpea. So, along with friends who were staying with us, we decided to go and check it out. The programme was giving nothing away:

Montaren & St Mediers is a maze of labyrinthine narrow, stone walled, pedestrian laneways.  We followed the signs with the masked chickpea to.....of all places, Chickpea Land:

Where we emerged into a parallel universe, where the chickpea was the raison d'être :

I'm still trying to work out exactly what was going on. Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you....that happy, festive looking chickpea is smoking an enormous spliff, filled with....grass....literally. I kid you not. One of those signs translates as 'NO to coal seam gas...YES to chickpea gas'. Putting two and two together and judging by the amount of toilet humour going down, I'm assuming that chickpeas must have the same effect as baked beans....and contain a lot of dietary fibre. 

There was a veritable feast of chickpea dishes for lunch:

In honour of the festival, the local boulangerie was even concocting a special vegetarian fougasse stuffed with olives....and chickpeas. Usually down in these parts it's filled with a porky lard:

There was also a beautiful, bejewelled tent, complete with Persian carpets and lanterns and evocative of faraway Morocco, in which to eat the said chickpea delicacies:

Emotional singing in Occitan (the traditional language of this part of the sunny south), uninhibited dancing and the chanting of 'poischiche'....'poischiche'....'poischiche' was going on. Curiouser and curiouser. People had gone to a lot of trouble to dress up, not only themselves:

But also their pets:

Surely the most outrageous costuming went to the chaps representing the 'Confederacy of the Little Brothers of Unrepentant Farts'.....who were tricked up in lolly pink, ankle length robes topped off with sharply pointed hats, which made them look like a cross between the Ku Klux Klan.....and a condom. You'll just have to take my word for it as I'm afraid that the best I could do was the glimpse of one of their sandalled feet, accessorised with a toilet roll, captured in the above photo, sorry.

In case this wasn't all bizarre enough.....there was a Chickpea Museum:

And this was where things disintegrated into the seriously weird and wacky. The welcome sign reminded you not to forget that the psychic 'Mauricette Pea' was performing fortune telling readings divined through the interpretation of a bowl of chick peas. Here she is, in all her glory, heavily adorned with chickpea accessories and accompanied by the tools of her trade:

....and not to overlook the display of 'The Confederacy of Little Brothers of Unrepentant Farts':

'With Pegasus chickpeas of Montaren make gas and.....good wind!' If you are looking to increase your French vocabulary.....then a verb that you may not have come across in garden variety French lessons - at polite school or adult education classes - is 'péter' which is 'to fart'. Try conjugating that. Hint....it's not an irregular verb.

Like in any good museum, there was a guide leading tours:

The exhibits were exceptionally strange....the display below explores 'Research and Development' and includes an embryo in a test tube of a 'humano - vegetoide'....which I'm assuming is what you get if you cross a human with a chickpea. Of course, I could be wrong:

And an exploration into the origins of the mask worn by the masked chickpea - just like the dashing Zorro - and whether it is myth or legend:

The point at which I actually dissolved into uncontrollable giggling was when my husband found himself explaining to our inquisitive ten year old exactly what the enema can on display was and.....what it is used for....in real life.... as he was somewhat stumped as to the supposed arcane ritual associated with the chickpea that it was referencing. Maybe he should have taken the guided tour. Or maybe not. Needless to say, the ten year old was surprised.....and horrified. But then Chickpea Land was just a tad like that. Zany and irreverent and a little bit off putting in it's absolute no holds barred perversity.

However, within this strange little world of the chickpea there were pockets of reassuring beauty and normality.....people who happened to live within the designated zone of the village which had morphed into the land of the chickpea had an open garden scheme of sorts going on.....for people to mingle, have drinks and eat their chickpeas in. Look how gorgeous the gardens were:

I still don't get it, though....and I don't think that it was lost in translation. The French usually seem so overwhelmingly sensible. The Festival of the Chickpea was anything but. We really should have taken that guided tour.

Rx

Tick.

I'm back in the bosom of my family after ten days of skiving off from family life and all associated domesticity.....my previous record away from my husband and four children was five days, when I went to the Gold Coast......to go to a yoga workshop with Bikram Choudhury. This time I've been on a garden odyssey in the UK.

During my brief foray outside the realms of my everyday reality, I've been busy ticking off gardening related activity from my bucket list.

First and foremost, I'm pleased to report that I drank champagne at 'Highgrove'.....yet you'll just have to take my word for it as cameras were strictly forbidden......and then dropped in to visit Prince Charles' second cousin Ashley Hicks at 'The Grove' where we wandered around the garden, in the rain, while he regaled us with amusing anecdotes about his late father, while his mother was tucked up in the house on the sofa under a blanket, knitting:

Sadly, they didn't invite us in for a restorative G&T.

After a turn around the late Rosemary Verey's old house and garden there was a delicious lunch in the village pub just across the road:

Followed by a cream tea a couple of hours later sitting out amongst the topiary in the garden at West Green House:

Which was utterly gorgeous and theatrical:

Look at the stunning chinoiserie chicken coop:

I finally gazed upon Hidcote gardens with my own eyes, after dedicatedly growing the lavender bearing it's name in my own garden, way back in Hobart, for years:

It was glorious.....even though I may have been called something rude by a not very nice man in the cafe, after a stoush for a vacant table in the sunshine. And there I was thinking that flowers and gardens made people happy.

Great Dixter was beautiful too:

Not only was Christopher Lloyd big on creating tapestry effects with the plants in his garden, inside, he also did tapestry of the needlework variety, making cushions to go with his sofa. You've got to love that in a man....after nursing my own tapestry fetish back in my twenties, I've already introduced my eldest daughter to the joy of tapestry.....maybe I should also try to teach my boys.

Last, but not least, I saw Sissinghurst again:

It has been almost ten years since I was there last, yet I still felt my skin prickle with goosebumps when I peered into Vita's room in the tower....it's the one place where her presence is still tangible.....probably because it isn't overrun with hordes of people, like the garden is.

Almost the first words uttered by my husband, when I arrived at the airport in Montpellier, were that there was no food in the house and that we were expecting friends in for a drink.....although, luckily, there was still some drink. So I hit the ground running and mercifully, after a momentary scare, my French came back after laying idle while I used my English. Phew. After ten days of cream teas and various roasts accompanied by yorkshire pudding, I ordered the foie gras when we wandered down to the Place aux Herbes for dinner:

....because I wasn't quite ready to cook!

Rx