The weather has been praeternaturally dry for a long while, and there’s been more outside activity (than internal). Now at last we’re getting some rain to go with the winds : gusts of 100 kph means more time at the keyboard.
O we have winds here – and they have names. L’ Autan blanc and l’ Autan noir (one dry, one wet blowing up from Spain); le Nord; le Grec; le Marin (a mild, damp and depressing wind from the Med), le Ponant (from the west); and lastly our predominant wind (that used to blow for 230 days a year, went away this summer but has now been with us for over a month) la Tramontane – in occitan: lo tramontanto alto (N.N-W), lo tramontano basso (W.N-W). It’s related to le Mistral – born out in the Atlantic, becoming ungovernable youngsters in the Bay of Biscay, then wild teenagers rampaging down the Rhone valley or in our case, over the last mountains of the Massif and down the plain to Narbonne. Here it has a local name, le Cers. Say it hard, with a growl, with a hiss: Serrsss! The summer windsurfers love it – but out there today les p’tits vignerons pruning their vines are swaddled like Inuits. It’s bending the trees and driving me indoors.
But what’s all this got to do with the price of fish? Very little at all.
Except I saw the following flight of fancy on the label attached to a pretty (pretty expensive) embossed glass tub of sea-salt at the supermarché today.
I have been wilfully literal in my translation :-
The Tramontane wind, predominant element of the Aude coast, influences our culture and our passions. It is its force which in summer overwhelms (makes fecund??) the expanses of water over our salt pans.
Come the dawn, when as if by magic the tempest abates, a salt is born – so light it is reluctant to sink.
The Flakes of Salt of the the Aude Country, fruit of the duality of the winds, will bewitch your palate with its typical flavours, for the greatest benefit to your health.
And what has this collage got to do with the price of chips, you may ask:-
Well – Gruissan is where the salt is born. It’s a pretty little old village with a pretty large and ugly salt works, and a pretty amazing collection of fisherman’s chalets-on-stilts that stand clear of the sea when it’s running high up the beach. And it’s where a pretty steamy film was made back in the mid-80’s that got quite a cult following in Europe. It’s a passionate-but-doomed love affair between Betty, a waitress and Zorg her writer boyfriend (the torrid Béatrice Dalle & the tortured Jean-Hugues Anglade). It doesn’t end well. It’s how the French like it.
It’s still hot after all these years – and is in fact called ‘37°2 le matin’ or (99 F. in the morning) – the English version : Betty Blue.
