Rich experiences on the recent Town Twinning visit to Clisson. The Chouteaus, who we normally stay with, were on holiday so I stayed with the Pasquiers; just me this time, J having elected to remain to 'keep an eye' on the labels business.

The Pasquiers have a beautiful house, built or rather rebuilt, during the reconstruction of the devastated town around 1800. House and garden descend in a series of stories and terraces from street level to the River Sevre, 40 feet or more below.

This produces a very curious effect. Sitting by the river, the 'terrasse' cantilevered out of the back of the house, is almost as far above you as it is distant, giving the garden a feeling of depth and space altogether unmerited by its physical dimensions.

On Saturday night the Pasquiers entertained us with 'cotes de boeuf' grilled over culled vine trunks in the open fire in the kitchen. Bernard produced an extraordinary device for this purpose: an enormous species of double grill with two iron holes set in the handle at 45 degrees. These fitted over an iron rod mounted vertically on a moveable stand by, or rather in, the fire itself, the weight of the grill holding the rings by friction, thus allowing an infinite variety of cooking heights and positions.

He said that he had bought the device, made by a blacksmith apparently, in the market one day but, much to his chagrin, had never seen another one since.

As usual on these trips there is too much both to eat and to drink and the sheer length even of the simplest buffet meal compels you to eat more than you should. Another problem is that you never quite know what is coming. One course follows another, salad, meat, cheese, desert, coffee etc all accompanied, naturally, by delicious bread begging to be eaten. When you add that wine bottles outnumber their water filled counterparts by at least two to one, it is not surprising that one returns heavier than one goes.

Best of several visits was that to the Chabotterie - a manor house some half-hour's drive to the south west of Clisson - restored inside and out to something resembling how it might have appeared 200 years ago.

It has a history in that Charrette, the last of the leaders of the Vendéen counter-revolution, was caught not far away in March 1796 and brought wounded and bloody into the house, where he was laid out (Loufoque chronicle style) on the same oak table that graces the kitchen today. Whether the cook then went about preparing supper around about him is not recorded.

Indeed all the furnishings in the house date from that period and are designed to show how the house might have looked had its occupants suddenly deserted it - in Marie Celeste fashion - without pausing to put on their coats or collect their belongings. Game therefore still hangs in the kitchen - presumably someone having had the foresight to stuff it sometime in the intervening two centuries - while the range with a curious mechanism for turning a spit based on descending weights - is still burning too.

The Charrette connection has provided the excuse to turn the outbuildings into a vivid depiction of the history of the Vendéen wars, suitably packaged for sensitive spirits with the bulk of the atrocities removed, though it remains a pretty horrific tale by any standard to anyone with imagination. The uprising, which began in 1793 as a protest against conscription, had always the characteristics of a doomed rural revolt, mirroring, in its internal dissensions and the reluctance of the peasantry to march on the capital, the British Jacobite rising of 1745.

At the final dinner on Sunday night I asked my old friend Jean-Pierre Garot why he had shaved off his trademark luxuriant moustache - the model, many years ago now, for Zebedee. For the Magic Roundabout and its enchanted characters were originally created in a studio in Clisson, with Dougal appearing under the rather less than enchanting name of Pollux. Jean-Pierre was one of the illustrators.

It was becoming too much trouble, he said, which I suspect is a shorthand for it was turning grey. None of us are immune from the ravages of time. Besides it has its advantages, he added archly, in that I am no longer pestered by women.

Be that as it may it didn't stop him wrapping his arm around me all through the singing of the Marseillaise, with his wife seated not six feet away and giving us both evil looks. But I confess I hadn't quite the heart to disentangle myself.