THOUGHTS FROM A WET MILL

It is pouring with rain: bathroom-shower like rain that falls vertically in thick grey sheets. The lowest of the clouds are actually below the tops of the hills; the wispy vapour giving the absurd impression that the valley is smouldering. For the last couple of hours I have been getting steadily wetter and wetter, slashing at yet another hidden garden, this time beside the millpond.


Completely impenetrable it is with fifteen years of brambles, alder, and budleia strangling the remains of the fruit trees, apple, pear, peach, struggling to blossom in this pig of a spring. At one time this garden might have been a mini-orchard. In the middle of it, I discovered a perfectly serviceable clothes line, dating I suppose from the times when numerous people lived here; it must have been over fifteen yards long. The wooden line-prop lay on the ground. When I tried to pick it up it fell to pieces in my hands.


Still, most of the garden is clear now, at least clear enough to see your way around and ponder what trees should be removed and to sow grass in the sandy soil. It could be pleasant to sit in there, I suppose, under the trees, the dappled summer light reflecting on the water of the millpond; to drink tea or to take an early evening ‘Ricard.’ Just the setting to see a kingfisher patrolling the leat that carries water from the weir to the Millpond.

I have christened this place the Waterside garden. It joins the extravagantly named (by me) Sleeping Beauty garden, one bay of which I planted yesterday with potatoes. Of course, I may never be here again to see the potatoes for the Mill is still up for sale, the price reduced in fact. We (or rather for I must curb my irritating tendency to become proprietorial) have potential buyers arriving tomorrow, so I wasn’t going to invest in expensive seed potatoes. Equally, I have a horror of bare (well-ish) earth, particularly in the deluges such as occur here.

The local Spar supermarket however had a convenient 10 kilo bag of old potatoes that looked as though they might be persuaded to sprout and these I dug into the shallow earth. If they do grow a great many will be green as there isn’t much chance of earthing them up, but it will be the first time that the garden has produced anything edible for several decades. If it does that is.

And even green potatoes would be a miracle: for wild boar live in the woods and hunt constantly for underground comestibles. And even if the boar don’t break in, there are field mice hiding in every nook and cranny.

I still have another half of the Sleeping Beauty garden to plant. What I want is a Homebase or a B and Q where you can acquire Petunias and Marigolds in industrial quantities at knock down prices. Here they are expensive. In the market in Maurs this morning 10 petunias would have set me back by 5 euros, or £4, in our enfeebled currency. As I would need about 100 plants for my efforts even to be noticeable I shall have to find some other way of leaving a trail of colour behind me.*

Now I am in the warm kitchen, thawing out. It isn't cold, but the dampness penetrates, through the skin it seems. I am busy bashing away here without any means of communicating these thoughts to the outside world.

Those of us who complain about British Telecom might ponder whether France Telecom could just be worse. For we arrived to find the telephone had been cut-off and no reason given. An engineer eventually remedied the situation leaving a note to say the company would be levying a call-out charge. But surprise! It wasn’t the old line he reconnected, but a new line altogether. Now the broadband contract, of course, was on the old line and the new line isn't broadband enabled.

So we sit here out of touch with the outside world, my computer talking wirelessly to the new Livebox on the desk, (the old Livebox having suffered an ‘impact de foudre’ - a lightning strike - last autumn and given up the ghost). No doubt all will be sorted out eventually but by then we shall be home and I shall have missed the Party!

Without broadband to divert us we have fallen back to discussions on etymology, to wit how the Mill got its name. It is called ‘Moulin du Clout.’ Mill of the...what? The word ‘clout’ doesn’t seem to exist in French, though it does, of course, in English - as in ‘a clout round the ear.’ A clout nail also exists, or so I understand. It is a nail with a large head and perhaps it is from this that we derive the idea of ‘clout’ meaning ‘hit.’ The word nail itself is beginning to acquire a similar meaning. One rugby player 'nails' another these days.

The Scots, who derived many of their dialect words from French have that useful expression about ‘nae casting a clout till May be out.’ Here, ‘clout’ seems to mean coat - but maybe a clout nail is no more than a nail with a coat or cover.

Now the Mill is unusual in being (when it was working) a water mill driven by wheels that are horizontal rather then vertical. Each wheel is a sort of turbine - not unlike one of those desktop fans that have multiple blades, though a lot bigger, of course, and set on its side. The water then shoots out of a hole in the mill chamber and strikes the mill wheel from an angle of about forty-five degrees, sending it spinning around. Could this be called ‘clouting?’ I don’t know. Neither it seems does anyone else. Answers on a postcard please.


*In fact baulked of petunias I left a taste of Wales and sowed a packet of leeks, whose likelihood of becoming vegetables is probably even less than the potatoes.