Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The old friends of Garrigue, the mice, continued to be part of the landscape. As I pulled the
flat-pack boxes off a pallet to prepare a new wine order, a mouse leapt off the stack like a
small, grey flying saucer and scampered across the room. I screamed and ran in the oppos-
ite direction, my heart beating like a runaway train.
I could not help my reaction of 'scream and run'. This one had created a beautiful nest
out of shreds of paper from some of the packing around the boxes. Fortunately there were
no baby mice in it. Mice are tiny but I was scared witless by them. It was illogical but
I couldn't stop it. Sean, grumbling about my lack of country wife skills, checked for the
mouse and set a trap.
Once he was sure there was no sign of the intruder, I got the boxes I needed and cleaned
the stockroom from top to toe to make sure there were no more unwanted guests. At every
moment I expected another mouse to leap out at me.
The same week, as I was walking home from Hillside vineyard, a large snake slithered off
the vineyard track into the limestone cliffs. According to Myreille's theory, I had to remain
calm if I was bitten. Here I was, far from being bitten, but my heart was racing. Clearly I
was one of the ones who would be DOA at Bergerac Hospital if I ever had the misfortune
of receiving a snake bite.
Sean mocked me. He had never seen a snake despite being outside far more than I. A little
while before, I had nearly stood on a snake in my flip-flops. The racket the snake made
slitheringclumsilyacrossthegravelpathwasliketambourinesbutSean,acoupleofmetres
away, heard nothing. I leapt a metre into the air and ran away screaming, proving to Sean
what a wimp I was.
The next mouse episode took place during a course by the Syndicat des Vignerons Bio
d'Aquitaine (SVBA), the organic wine producers' association.
The instructions to find the first class in Entre-Deux-Mers were typically French. I had
a farm name in a
lieu-dit
in an obscure village and no phone numbers. All communes are
made up of many
lieu-dits
, the old name of the place, almost like a street name. Our area in
Saussignac was La Garrigue so that was the address for all the houses on our road includ-
ing ours, which was the final property at the end of the cul-de-sac. I found the village but
could not find the
lieu-dit
. Panicked at running a few minutes late, I called the association
to see if they could help but got the answering machine. After circling the village several
times I stopped at a winery that looked open.
Finding no one inside I paced around hoping for a call back or for the appearance of life.
Five minutes later two burly farmers came out of the nearby house. They were taken aback
to find a mobile-phone-packing foreign woman in their yard but they knew the property
and quickly explained how to get there. Soon I was flying along vague roads in the middle
of nowhere.
