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Anthony Peregrine scares the local wildlife and has visions of
the past on a jog around rural Languedoc.
In preparation for the Six Nations Championship, I have recently
taken up jogging once again. One never knows. It will only take injuries to a
dozen key wing forwards. Stuart Lancaster’s head sinks deep in his hands. The
bottle is empty, the pearl-handled revolver within reach. Suddenly he looks up,
ecstatic.
“That spindly fellow,” he exults, remembering. “A line-out maestro,
so convincing in his school’s second XV in the early Seventies. He’s our man!”
I intend to be ready.
Not that it’s been easy to restart le footing after a year off
for reasons too boring even for me to go into. Wrapped up in tracksuit, scarf
and bobble hat – the polar ice cap, diminishing in the Arctic, has been
re-forming in the Med for the past month – I shuffle along like the bloke
featured in police posters, above the legend: “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?” Dogs go
crazy. Cats flee directly into the path of oncoming cars. Near the primary
school, mothers gather their infants closer to them. The effect is of the
Elephant Man moving through the community, without his sack. And all that’s
before I mention the punishment that various body parts are giving me. If this
were being televised, there would be insistent electronic music heralding doom
just before the commercial break. But I stick it out – minutes on end with
barely a pause – in case the call should come.
So the scene moves from the village itself down to the plain,
which, when we arrived 25 years ago, was entirely covered in vines. As was the
whole region. You travelled from the Rhône to the Spanish border and were
rarely out of reach of a grape. Now it’s more patchwork than carpet, with
tracts of land in early retirement from a wine business that no longer needs
them. Subsequently, they’ve tried melons and they’ve tried barley, but in the
past couple of years have apparently determined that the best thing to try is
nothing at all. The remaining vine fields, and there are still plenty, appear
vigorous by comparison.
They do to me, anyway, as I stagger past. The fledgling Cévennes
hills are in the mid-distance. In the foreground, white horses – we’re close
enough to the Camargue for them to feel at ease – ignore me in favour of grass.
And, bobbing among the vines, 75 yards down a row, an elderly fellow gets on
with the pruning. He’s swathed in every item of clothing from his wardrobe, for
Mediterraneans take cold as a personal insult. I gasp a “Good day!” He waves
electric secateurs in reply and carries on. Poor devil.
Every wine person I’ve ever met has claimed to enjoy the winter
pruning of vines. Keeps them in touch with the plant and the earth, they say;
allows them to shape the development; here is the promise of next September’s
ruby crop – and so on, ad infinitum. I’m fairly certain they’re lying.
Consider. In Languedoc, there is generally a minimum of 4,000 vine plants per
hectare (or around 1,700 per acre). It is by no means abnormal to have 10ha of
vine to tackle. That’s 40,000 vines not only to prune but also, in some cases,
to train and to attach to the wires, so that they grow right. Now, you can
imagine that doing 10 or 20 might be intriguing. Maybe even 30. But don’t tell
me that one then wakes up ecstatically on a Tuesday morning, crying: “Still
39,970 to go!” before skipping off along the track with secateurs in the hand
and a song in the heart. Certainly, the old chap I’ve been dragging past
doesn’t look the skipping type.
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It’s good to see
him, though, as the sun finally rises above trees to hit the Pic Saint-Loup –
Languedoc’s version of the Rock of Gibraltar – way over north-west. This is an
ancient land, now flooding with the light of centuries. Since the Romans,
vine-pruning has denoted the annual renewal of optimism. But it’s also a worry.
Who on God’s increasingly abstemious Earth is going to drink all this wine?
We’ll be doing our best this evening, and I’d be obliged if you would follow
suit. Otherwise everything around here goes wrong.
Meanwhile, I stumble from the plain, up a minor slope or two and
into the garrigue woodland of holm oaks, spiky bushes and herby items, all the
scrub stuff that covers vast stretches of Mediterranean France. From where I
enter, it’s essentially infinite. It both enfolds and bids you beware. Like all
dry, hot-weather vegetation, its aim is to shred your tracksuit trousers (or,
if you’re wearing shorts, your legs). Branches reach out to rip off your bobble
hat. Roots and rock outcrops have so positioned themselves that tripping is
automatic.
The garrigue appears untouched but isn’t. Plunging into this
grey-green, shadowed and prickly world is plunging into the locality’s folk
memory. And, in common with all memories, it’s full of an indistinct past overcome
by recent growth. Ruts in the rock tell of two millennia of trailers carting
limestone from quarry workings. Until the early 20th century, quarrying was
artisanal; aside from the big sites, local workers might have been digging and
slicing absolutely anywhere. So, through a bunch of oaks, the rock will
suddenly drop sheer by 100ft, giving rise to the condition known technically as
“jogger’s broken neck”.
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Avoiding that, I slump on. Here and there, in the bushes, are
remnants of dry stone walls. At one time village smallholders cultivated olives
and vines, or kept sheep, in spaces that would scarcely suffice for a sitting
room. They corralled them with the walls. Back then, they didn’t need much. (A
packet of fags, a bottle of wine, a salted ham – and you still had change from
five francs.) Now trees burst through walls, and brambles, wild lavender and
thyme colonise what once villagers broke their backs to cultivate. Nature has
crowded the past, but hasn’t effaced it. As I jog through, there’s an awareness
of men and women who had no horizons beyond right here.
And then I forget them, because I’m suffering amply myself. And
then I come across a hunter, 12-bore broken across his shoulder. It’s Thursday.
Hunting on this commune is allowed on Thursdays, Saturday and Sundays. We are
in dense garrigue, out of touch with everything. I’m relieved beyond measure to
have an excuse to stop. I say the obvious. “What are you hunting?” “Boar,” he
says. “Good luck,” I say. He’ll need it. As mentioned, I’ve been roaming this
Med woodland for a quarter of a century and have never seen the slightest
evidence of wild boar. He might as well be hunting moose.
“I come through here quite often,” I say. “Please remember –
anything over a metre high isn’t a boar. Don’t shoot. My country might need me
from one moment to the next.” So saying, I jog on. Ready when you are, Mr
Lancaster.
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