IS IT VERVEINE OR CHAMPAGNE?

Verveine! Or, as it's sometimes called here, Verbena, is a most unprepossesing little weed which I first met on a 'herbal walk' conducted by that eminent herbalist, Zoe Hawes. It was growing in a sandy car park, I remember, and had little purpley-pink flowers.

Now I can't live without it, for made into a tisane - a type of herbal tea - and drunk at bedtime it ensures that even insomniacs like me will have a good night's rest. There are two problems, however: first it tastes like cat's pee and secondly you can't easily buy it inexpensively in Britain.

As to the first, well it is amazing what you learn to put up with for a good night's sleep but an admixture of orange or peppermint improves the draught. And as to the second, the answer is just to buy the stuff in France where the supermarket shelves bulge with rack after rack of tisanes of every description, including half a dozen different preparations of Verveine. The cost is minimal - about €1.30 for 25 sachets.

Knowing my weaknesses, my neighbour, Annie, who is French, came back from a trip home this week not only with several boxes of Verveine tisane but a winebox as well. I suggested that an aperitif was due over an above a monetary settlement. She agreed but insisted we came to her.

There's an upside to that, for Annie always serves champagne and not only any champagne but a champagne - Denis Salomon Brut Reserve - that is not sold in shops but which she acquires mysteriously by the cellarfull. It has a wonderfully, dry biscuity taste that is so much friendlier than many similar concoctions. Anyway, in no time at all we had managed to put away two bottles and reeled home to supper full of that especial bonhomie which only champagne can bring on.

The following day we were on Theo duty - looking after our grandson of two and a quarter whose diversion of the moment is painting rather than champagne. We covered the kitchen floor with blank paper, mixed a pot of blue paint, put a brush in his hand and in no time had some thoughtful abstracts, vortexes of blue against the swirling white for which a gallery might have proposed the name 'Parental Anguish.'

We tried some hand painting, and then some foot painting; bold prints tracked across the paper.

"Why, Theo," I asked, "don't you try painting a head?" I was wondering whether he might attempt John the Baptist or whether that might be a step too far.

He contemplated the problem, stroking his cheek with the business end of the paintbrush. Then his face half-blue, he lay down on the paper and pressed cheek to canvas. A broad blue spludge resulted. Well, I had suggested head painting.

On Thursday we flipped the phone through to the mobile and headed up in the late afternoon for our first visit to the Hay Festival where Russell, an old friend and colleague and now a Professor in Cardiff, was delivering the Richard Livsey Memorial Lecture.

As it happened our host - who was also introducing the talk - had been delayed and so we were sitting there in the tent, a small but select gathering, wondering what to do. For a moment I thought that I might have to make the introduction, which indeed I was to learn later I was well placed to do. But then our host arrived, the introduction was made, and we heard a most interesting exposition on the History of the Welsh Liberal Party.

But it made me wonder whether I should perhaps be writing some of this history; certainly of the anecdotes and stories of the local and national figures that I had worked with during the eighties and nineties. I mentioned this to Russell in the sponsors' tent afterwards as we sipped an obligatory glass of Cava. "But it's all in my book," he said. "We did a two hour interview, you gave me a great deal of material. Do you not remember?"

That must have been three or four years ago, but all memory of it is wiped! Gone! Now that he had reminded me I recalled a dim trace that he was preparing something or other. So now I have to wait until September when the book comes out to see what is and what isn't in print already.

Oh dear, I am getting old. Or maybe a side effect of drinking Verveine is memory loss. One never knows quite what these innocuous herbs do - and it must be doing something to send me to sleep as it does. Then again it could be the champagne!

THREE SISTERS

Each year without fail for the last sixty-five years I’ve had a birthday in this month. It always turns up, as regularly as clockwork at the time the chestnuts come into full flower. I used to think that my parents had been very clever to arrange for me to be born on the most beautiful day of the year, but the reality turned out to be somewhat different: my conception was an unintended, but not wholly unwelcome product, of the 1945 Japanese surrender. My father and mother were so impressed by the achievements of General MacArthur that they got quite carried away.

I suppose I (and later my sister) were some kind of peace treaty in their more domestic hostilities. If we were, then peace didn't last very long and both went their separate ways taking one of us each along with the furniture and the curtains and each spawned new families along the way. The families became estranged, by design rather than accident.

Once sixty-five was a fine old age a time of white hair, a lined face, a permanent stoop and nodding off in the afternoons. Today sixty-five is merely a beginning - or so I try to tell myself. What has gone before - a lifetime’s exhilarations and futilities - is just the gestation for a period of maturity and flowering, of threads being drawn together, of putting one’s duck’s in a line.

Birthdays are a particularly good place to start this renewal process. So I thought it might be a good idea this time to introduce some of my sisters to some other of my sisters who had never had the privilege of meeting before. My full sister had never met any of my half sisters (of whom I have five), nor had they met my half brother either for that matter, or his family.

As we were staying with Rosie and Jim down at their son’s Mill in the southern Auvergne, I suggested that I might hold a little party and ask the various sisters - or at least the two half-sisters who live in South-West France and the full sister who lives in Suffolk, to come. They most kindly agreed; the invitations were sent and the sisters who had never met arrived in due course.

They brought with them roast duck breasts and a magnum of champagne to show us how they live in Gascony while Rosie baked an intriguing cake most improbably out of courgettes and cocoa that made a satisfying accompaniment to the champagne. More: it played Happy Birthday, courtesy of some clever Asiatic piece of miniaturisation.

Incidentally, it was the first time I had ever to pour champagne from a Magnum bottle and by jingo you need strong wrists to control it for the bottle is heavy and you have no idea how far the liquid will gush. I spilt more than I had intended. (For a Jeroboam or Methuselah I suspect you would need some species of harness).

Several kind souls, including the former mayor, joined us from the village and also brought gifts - his speciality being a home-made concoction of raw alcohol laced with fruit flavouring. Never have I tasted anything as strong. Still if ever we should run out of petrol....

More practically, his wife brought a wonderful ‘fouace.’ This is an auvergnat bread cake shaped like a giant doughnut and exceptionally tasty. The following morning (see picture at the head of this post) we climbed up to the village for coffee and cake in the sunshine on the terrace of Dennis and Caro’s beautifully converted barn from where you can see for miles and where the rays of the midsummer sunset pass through the a special window cut into the bedrooms.

But back to the sisters: I don’t know quite what I was expecting. I suppose I had some romantic vision of sisterly love. Great embraces accompanied by oceans of tears of the sort you might find written into one of the more dreadful soap operas. But of course it wasn’t like that at all. They were strangers and strangers in mature middle age do not fall upon one another’s necks. Instead they made polite conversation about the price of ducks and enquired of each other whether one had come far.

Well at least they didn’t fight. And they did eventually did show a modicum of interest in each other and the sixteen children they share between them. If the temperature is not yet warm, at least the ice has been broken, the ducks on the same pond if not yet in line. You never know they may even meet again sometime. And we did have a splendid party. I wonder what my old father - our old father - would have made of it?

Here they are falling upon each other with excitement: from left to right: Vicky (full-sister), Sarah and Alyson (half-sisters).