7th August 2010 – Grammatical Pesto

The next day I sat with Nathalie, Sophie, Marta and one of Marta’s friends from the city called Evelyn, who liked to escape to the countryside every now and then. She was older and smoked even more than the others, and she looked somehow tired and haggard, but she was incredibly friendly. We were making pesto using the farm’s fresh basil and potting it up to sell as a sideline on the market stall. Francis was sitting with us too, on a mission to rid the farm of flies, as Theotim had just taught him how to kill them with an elastic band. He was fast becoming a master stealth-hunter. 

At one point when I was talking, Nathalie corrected a mistake: I had said j’y suis étée when I should have said j’y suis allée. At first I was shocked to be corrected – in all my WWOOFing time nobody had done it so blatantly – but I really appreciated it. I was well aware that, although my French was fluent, it was far from perfect, and that it was good to be corrected. I said as much, and only then did it come to light that both Nathalie and Marta had trained to teach French as a foreign language. Marta, I had discovered a few days earlier, was Columbian, and Spanish was her first language, so she would understand at first hand some of the difficulties of learning French. I couldn’t help but feel that they might be quite useful to me in my last few days. Why oh why had I not started talking earlier? I really needed to learn not to cut my nose off to spite my proverbial face.

As we sat talking, I was watching the farm’s dog. He was a pitiful old creature, a hulking mongrel with some black Labrador heritage. His fur, once ebony, lacked the lustre of health and was streaked with thick white. His eyes were dull and only seemed to half-see life as it revolved around him. His back hips had long since ceased to function, and when he wanted to move he heaved himself up on formidable shoulder muscles – if dogs had shoulders – and dragged himself along the ground, whimpering in his tremulous high pitch of discomfort. Abelard couldn’t bear to have him put down. So there was a human side to Abelard after all.

There was Reblechon in the post box! The previous day’s midday alcohol intake had addled our brains enough that we had forgotten. Sophie and Raphael took a walk up to the top of the drive, and returned forty minutes later with a plastic bag bearing a slightly smelly, rather too-warm cheese. Quite how long it had been sitting in the letterbox, which was on the top of the hill in a clearing and therefore in full sunshine for most of the day, nobody was sure; it could have been three days. We were all sure, however, that once it was cold again it tasted wonderful, and that its affinity to red wine made it even better.