Today we’re recovering from a fairly big weekend that included La Nuit du Spardos, St Pardoux’s boozy annual festival. Prior to that, our socialising kicked off on Wednesday when we were invited down to the equestrian centre for drinks and nibbles. This was to mark the fact that the club has, for the 2nd year running, just won a gold medal at the french national championships. It was in a somewhat obscure division, but a fantastic achievement nonetheless. Both Léa (the young girl who won the medal) and Jenny, her coach, were justifiably proud.
We ended up spending most of the evening chatting to some neighbours of Jenny’s who we’d seen around before but not gotten to know. They’re called Guillaume and Babette and are both very interesting and pleasant. We agreed to invite them over socially soon. And in the interim, he is in the market for a website so may be calling around this week to discuss. He’s a “reiki” healer, something which I believe to be utter crap, but I shall diplomatically leave my cynicism aside.
The following day we went down to Milhac to drop off our finally-completed dossier for our marriage. There were a few documents we weren’t able to provide as they don’t exist in the UK or the US, but this didn’t seem to pose a problem. It looks like it will be the mayor himself doing the ceremony which is slightly unfortunate as 1) he was apparently initially reluctant to marry two men and 2) we’d much rather our friend Jackie do it. It seems the mayor’s decided it would be better politically to be seen to have no problem with the concept. At the end of the day, it’s a very short administrative process and we don’t care enough either way so we’re not pressing the issue.
Knowing we had big saturday plans, we deliberately did nothing on the Friday, something we subsequently more than made up for over the weekend. We invited Lewi and Pary over to ours on Saturday for a pre-Spardos meal. We’d had utterly dire weather all week but it did brighten by Friday and in the end Saturday turned out to be warm and sunny, so we ate outdoors. Spardos inst really Pary’s scene so she declined to join us but the remaining three of us had a very pleasant meal and a few drinks. We started with salsa made with tomatoes from the garden, followed by Mexican rice and bean pie. Dessert was plum crumble, made from plums from our back garden.
We left for St Pardoux much later than usual, getting there at around 10pm. As every year there are a few incidents of (often under-aged) drink-related mishaps, the organisers this year were much more strict about dishing out the mysterious and potent drink for which the festival is named. They’d obviously made less this year too as they were already literally scraping the barrel by the time we ordered. In the end we only had one a-piece, but this was probably all for the best.
We did a tour around to take in all the bands, seeing en route quite a number of people we know, including a number from Musique en Herbe. Only one of the bands was a duffer – bassist, rhythm guitarist and drummer all hopeless. The lead guitarist in contrast was extremely skilled, but also extremely drunk and apparenty not able to stand up. We left them to their catastrophic attempt at a Carlos Santana song and returned to see the pick of the litter. This was a band of lads who pretty much exclusively play AC/DC covers. AC/DC if you don’t know, are an Aussie band who play fairly aggressive hard rock. The music’s not really our cup of tea, but all the members of the band are incredibly talented musicians, and this group from Bordeaux were churning out note-perfect renditions. The lead guitarist in particular was just awe-inspiring. A good 10 years younger than me, he already had a talent I will never posses. However it was hard to feel disheartened when the show was that spectacular so we stayed there until they finished their impressive 3-hour set.
Lewi left us at that point and we got to chatting to Benoit & Viriginie, both of whom were working there, manning the bar. They were also putting the band up for the weekend as they’re all friends with their daughter, Eva. Seeing as they were entertaining a big group anyway, they invited us over to join them for lunch the following day.
After a bit of a slow start, we got to theirs a little before 1pm the following afternoon and had a drink or two out on their terrace. The youngsters had stayed up till 7am the night before and were a little quiet at first but they soon rallied. We then moved next door to eat. Benoit’s parents live in the adjacent house and have a large terrace that is perfect for big family meals. One of Benoit’s brothers will be celebrating his 50th next weekend and so he and his family were also present – they live in Paris but are holidaying down here for a few weeks. This meant there were around 20 of us. We had a delicious BBQ washed down with pastis and wine and ended up spending the whole afternoon and evening over there, eventually leaving around midnight. And that’s more or less the story of our week.