"Not very stimulating here is it!" said one of our recent townie visitors from England not long after his arrival.  He soon changed his mind - as soon,  in fact, as he had set eyes on the said postlady, Élise, whom he declared 
to be "seriously pretty".

Admittedly Cansal (where my wife and I are the only permanently resident expats) does seem like the back of beyond.  Not for nothing has one recently arrived young vigneron christened his new Domaine here "Le Bout du Monde" - The End of the World.  Quite a catchy label to stick on a wine bottle.

Let me try to convince you why Cansal (c. 90 inhabitants) is never, ever boring.  We'll start with Henri, a nicely pot-bellied octogenarian, strong as an ox, who proudly showed me his graveyard harem one day when I met him by chance in the village cemetery. 

"Voilà!" he declaimed, pointing to four small, neatly tended graves.  Lined up beside each other are his first wife, his first mistress, his second wife and his second mistress.  The story goes that his third wife was 50 years younger than himself: anAlgerian desperate to obtain French residency and therefore willing tomarry him.  Trouble was that when our Henri claimed his marital rights, all hell was let loose when she tried to refuse.  She ended up spending a week in hospital.  However, she didn't press charges against him for marital rape.

Henri now lives alone with a geriatric dog (permanently tied up in his garage, as is often the case round here) and one solitary surviving hen.  These days he contents himself with ogling the sunbathing young ladies who 
come to pick his grapes each summer.

Almost as amorous, it seems, is Mme Boudau. She has three children each by a different man, though the third father now seems to be a fixture. It does seem that in general French women are much more direct than English women in broaching sexual relations. A local English friend of mine was staggered when, after inviting a French lady d'un certain age to lunch, he offered to take her out for a post-prandial walk.  "Is that all that's on offer?" she asked rather peevishly.  Any single man in his sixties round here is besieged with offers from rampant or money-loving mesdames.

There are many other tales of village love.  Take Jean-Pierre, for instance, and his reported "trentaine de femmes" ("thirty women").  Well, he needs a fleet of them to drive him around because of his addiction to pastis.

Then there's Maribelle, a high-powered academic, and her Jean-Paul, a quiet chap content to drift along through life.  Maribelle returned home from a summer conference to find him in bed with a young itinerant grape picker he'd met during the vendange.  Maribelle left, but things didn't work out with the grape picker, so Jean-Paul is now on his own, looking rather forlorn.

The locals here are very pragmatic about broken relationships.  When my second wife left me, the conversation in the bread queue went something like this:

Mme Deneuville: Where is your wife?
Me: She's left me.
She: Silly woman. You must find another wife soon to look after you.

As you can see, the older women round here are unreconstructed.  They see their role in life as getting a good dinner on the table for their men at  noon sharp.  Then a good supper at 7 in the evening.  Plus giving him whatever else he wants.

The village has the obligatory lesbian couple, one of whom was born here.  Her bewildered mother confided to my wife how sad she was when her daughter came home with a new girl friend rather than a nice young man!

The saddest tale of village love is that of Cyrile, a quiet man in his late forties. Born and bred in the village, he lived for several years with Janine, a northern "outsider", before they married about 6 years ago.  Alas, she left him on a very snowy day in January.  A few days later, on a Monday morning, Cyrile went to work as usual at the winery in the next village, filling plastic bags full of wine and putting them in boxes.  As usual he came back to Cansal for "le diner" with his mother soon after noon.  But when he didn't turn up as expected, she rang his house round the corner, twice.  No replies.  She then went round to his house and had to use her key to get in.  There he was with a shotgun and his brains blown out.

Apart from the suicide, the police have only once been seen here in many years.  An unpopular couple with several children came to live in the commune's property assigned by law to "social housing".  They were so strapped for cash the husband disabled the electricity meter to get free power.  (Easily accomplished, apparently, with the many old meters in these parts.)  However, he was spotted by their neighbour and reported to the supply company (EDF).  When the family's power was cut off altogether, the husband bashed in the neighbour's garage door with a sledgehammer and the gendarmes were called.  They were greeted by the lady of the house threatening them with a huge carving knife.  Needless to say we never saw the family again.

There's lots more excitement: wilder parties than you could ever imagine, our gifts from the commune of free binbags, booze and geraniums, the village fête held every August, the wild boar hunting (shame about the disgusting way many of the hunting dogs are treated), the primitive village PA system cranking out Catalan dance tunes before public announcements, the invasion of the Danes.  All human life is here.

I'll end by tempting your palate with the fabulous fare we eat so often, always en famille, Chez La Mère Mimi in nearby St Marc.  Mimi and Gaston rear and grow most of their own food - chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, rabbits, vegetables, salads, everything.  Gaston often brings home wild boar in the winter after his local hunting expeditions. And each year they buy a pig and make their own pâtés, sausages and black puddings.  Recently we tucked into the following magnificent lunch for the all-in price of only fifteen euros a head:

Muscat maison and nibbles; Wild mushrooms in a herby oil dressing; Truffled butter on small rounds of bread; Quiche with winter salad; Grilled home-made black puddings and sausages with gratinéed purée of potatoes; Vin rouge de pays Andreu - in unlimited quantities; Fresh fruit and cheese;  Coffee; Marc maison (don't tell anyone!); Café.
Bon appétit!
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