Rural Life

Comice Day 2 - the important stuff!

While Day 1 is seriously agricultural, Day 2 is more about community, or communities.  The morning is marked by the ploughing competition between the mayors of each of the villages in the commune, not made easier by the fact that they aren't all farmers, they have to use old tractors (I think there is an option to use a horse, but never taken up), and they have to wear period costume.  For some reason not totally clear to me, this year actually seemed to turn into the festival of the old tractor, and the parade, while led out by the mayor of Vieil Baugé, in a fetching land girl costume, numbered some 75 old tractors, which takes a long time to go past!  We got an early preview as most went past our house to get to the staging area.  The exhaust does stink rather.

Anyway, here are several old tractors, to give you an idea.

There were a few oddities - this one I found puzzling, including wondering what it was for and whether there was really enough demand to make a run of them!

While this one is not allowed on the road, so had to be brought in by trailer!  You can see why.  This one had a staring role as it had been restored specifically for this Comice by the mayor's husband, Yves.

So many old tractors, all wanting to take part in a ploughing match, meant that went on way longer than normal.  But some tractors had to hurry away as they had a second role - pulling the decorated float for their village. 

In the past I have been involved in floats, I've designed them, I've made flowers for them, I've made papier maché bits and bobs, I made a fake organ once, and I've been on them too.  They take an immense amount of team work and hours of volunteer labour to get ready for their moment of glory on the Comice Sunday afternoon parade.  Thankfully it was dry - wet weather and crèpe paper don't mix!

Anyway, to give them their due, here they all are - led out by Vieil Baugé as the hosts.

Vaulandry followed up - they will be the hosts next year.

Fougeré should be the year after - their idea of a stop me and buy one ice cream seller was interesting.  

Baugé will host after them - this is always a challenge as there is no farm land in Baugé any more and you need 27 hectares for a ploughing competition!

Next up le Guedenieu - the more mature ladies of my acquaintance say that there used to be good parties there in the sixites but they always ended up with a fight...

Cheviré le Rouge always manage to get a musical theme and a song going on their float - this year, that wasn't a challenge.

We had lots of fun at the Bocé Comice, I hope they had fun at ours.

Most tractors pull their floats - Cuon pushes theirs.  I have no idea why that is at all, apart from it must be to do with the design of the underlying trailer.

St Martin d'Arcé were accompanied by musicians.

Then came Echimiré, who bravely hosted the first post-Covid Comice.

Finally Pontigné brought up the rear - they hosted last year.

The afternoon and early evening entertainment was provided by Mademoiselle Orchestra - a six piece cabaret band, who are very good and very amusing.  Sadly the heat and the excitement took its toll on us and we went home for a nap, but did catch the end of their second set, before joining the queue for the pig roast dinner.  14 locally born and raised pigs had been turning on spits over fires since 9am, and by 8pm we needed our portions!  The guy on the next table (British) complained there wasn't any crackling, so his French chums went off to find some for him, and came back with a whole head.  Lucky so and so!  The small boy next to him was astounded.

The final band of the weekend was a boisterous group mixing rap, hip-hop, French pop and a sleazy horn section.  The energy was amazing.

All good French events end with a firework display.  By this time we had gone home, but popped out to the field opposite our house to enjoy the spectacle.  It was very loud!

Now all that was left to do, was to tidy up!

 

Day 1 - the serious stuff

I know you are never supposed to apologise over this sort of thing, but I had hoped to get the Comice story out there earlier than this.  I blame a combination of being VERY tired indeed, extreme heat, the challenges of getting a new van, and a sort of general maiaise (not Covid - but we did check yesterday, we were so off) for not getting down to it sooner.

Friday night wasn't the best night's sleep as we worried about the podium and the rain.  We were on the field promptly, but the forecast was still dodgy so we didn't unwrap things until about 10am when we could see no more clouds heading our way.  There were also magnificent arrangements of dried grasses and grains, some with a bit of red paint to them, to give a classier air to the stage, in time for the hour and a half of speeches to open the event.  I caught up with those on a live stream on Facebook - I really could not be bothered to wait around to see them in person!

The serious stuff on the Saturday morning, other than the speeches, is the Young Farmers' Ploughing Competition - held on slightly adjacent fields, and with its own bar, so the ones on the field were quite quiet.  I don't know much about ploughing matches, so I didn't go and watch.

For those of us on decorations duty, the other thing to do was to ensure that the tables were decorated and ready to welcome diners - there were 580 metres of tables, each with benches on either side, giving a theoretical 1,400 covers.  We certainly needed them on the Sunday!

There was a certain nostalgic feel to the event - while guingettes are becoming popular again, they were more of a 20th century phenomenon.  It was therefore only right that there were a lot of old tractors knocking around and also a few other old implements - this is the chain oil application end of a two person chainsaw that was demonstrated a few times over the weekend.  It did the job, but it was loud, fixed and needed two people to make it work.

Day 1 is also about livestock, with a cow competition and a Percheron competition (a local breed of heavy horse).  The cows and goats were mostly only in for one day, although a few came back for the second day, just as an interesting feature.

While we weren't there too long on the Saturday afternoon, I did insist on going to see the Percherons.  The mares are so beautiful, and the foals often behave so badly!  A bit like a Lippizaner, Percherons are generally born dark and as they grow older, take on a grey white colour.  They are good work horses - sometimes they are used by loggers to move tree trunks around as they do less damage to the soil than machines - and also make reasonable saddle horses for the portly with long legs and supple hips!

After that, we went off to feed cats, water plants, eat food and rest up as Sunday would be a long day.

The Sunday story should be available during the week - keep an eye out for it!

 

Final push to get it all ready

My last post was brief and quite enigmatic as much of what we were working on was embargoed until the weekend of the Comice itself.

John and I were working on the big arches for the two entrances to the site - the big one was an issue just because of its size, as it was over 2 metres tall and very long.  To get sensible sized letters, we had to make a number of stencils for letters that would be nearly 60 centimetres tall.  The logo could be projected onto the panel and traced, but any other decoration had to be done by hand.  And for the reverse side - the "see you next year, elsewhere" - apart from the fact the letters also had to be pretty huge, there was no guidance, no colour scheme, no theme, so we made it up as we went along.

The smaller arch was more of a problem - no space for projections, too long in relation to its height, and more space to fill in.  Our preferred method of doing the letters with packing labels did not work as, and I'm not sure you will believe this, packing and shipping labels aren't brilliant at sticking in slight humidity.  The weekend before the Comice it was a real rush to get that one finished, so that I was free for the next set of tasks.

There was a nice video of John working on the arch, but Typepad won't let me upload it, and YouTube has done something silly with it, it seems to me!

Then on Monday and Wednesday (Tuesday was a bank holiday) we started to put up more decorations in the village - up to that point, it had just been bunting and the straw bales, now we had silhouettes of dancers popping up all over the place and a stream of jolly music along the wooden barriers by the village hall.

Then on Thursday and Friday we were on the Comice site, putting up even more bunting, dressing the podiums, decorating the vast numbers of marquees, adding fairy lights, signs and all sorts of other bits, so that the exhibitors had a clear run on the Friday afternoon to get installed.  Lunches were served at the village hall for the workers - cold beer has never tasted so good!  It was lovely being all together, working to a common goal and getting to know new people.

Then on Friday evening, we were all summoned to the site for the distribution of volunteer t-shirts for anyone working on site over the weekend, a few words of encouragement from our President, and the unveiling of the big arch.  There is a video stream of that, but California doesn't seem to want to play ball with technology at the moment - I guess they have other problems - so here is the great arch unveiled, and there was applause, which you will have to imagine.

So after a drink to seal team solidarity, it was home to a sensible meal and early to bed to be refreshed for the event - except that rain was forecast, so we spent the night worrying about how various aspects of decoration would stand up to moisture!

To find out how that panned out, look again in a couple of days' time as I'm not wrestling recalcitrant IT any more today!

 

It's nearly time, and still so much to do!

Yes, nearly that time - indeed by this time next week, the procession of decorated floats will have happened and we should be watching a fine women's orchestra cabaret.  If you aren't aware or aren't in the area - the bales are out and about and decorated.  There was a team of 5 of us on Monday doing the first 5, then a team of 6 on Tuesday finished off the last 4.  Here are the first and last.

The first time I got involved in a Comice was at Chartrené in 2008, where with a friend's children and John as a windmill, we did a spirited rendition of A Windmill in Old Amsterdam for no good readon - read about it here!  In 2009 we were a bit more daring and a large group of us danced the Time Warp for a very confused audience!

The last time the Comice was at Vieil Baugé was 2010, when we had a stall so were only really involved in helping out on the Sunday evening meal - we will be on the same field as last time.

The year after us, it was Vaulandry's turn with stinking hot weather.  On the Saturday we did a rendition in French of Old MacDonald had a Farm, while on Sunday there was the parade of decorated floats and ploughng matches.  2012 was Fougeré - we weren't particularly involved in that one, but did go to see the floats.  I think 2013 might have been Baugé when I dressed up as a mad chef as part of a tableau of Ratatouille, and I have no recollection of 2014 at all on the blogs.

2015 and I got my act together a bit for Cheviré le Rouge and our visions of lands local and far away.  2016 was an epic event where we celebrated the Battle of Vieil Baugé at Bocé complete with Scottish mercenaries, victorious French and wounded English - no blog though!  In fact the next one I did a blog about was in 2021 when Echimiré bravely did the first post-Covid session, and very good it was too!  Last year it was Pontigné's turn just after the major forest fire - a really good communal event.

Next week's blog will naturally be delayed by a day, or possibly two, and now I must go off and do secret squirrel decorating tasks, because one or two things are getting a bit urgent.  I hope you enjoy looking back at previous events.

So much to do, so little time!

It's the final straight before the Comice.  Most days this week have been taken up doing "stuff", but unless that stuff is already out in the streets and fields, it is embargoed.  The weather has meant less progress has been made on some aspects than we would have liked - the wind and rain made working on straw bales nearly impossible.  It was possible to progress items that will be installed on the fields in due course, as we are working on them in a disused piggery, so we have shelter, power, space and quiet (unless we have a bluetooth speaker with us to blast out radio).  And when I say we, it isn't just John and I, it is all sorts of other people, including my next door neighbour's granddaughter, getting involved.

Next week I will find links to blogs I have written on previous Comices (Comici?) to show what the fuss is all about.

When not working on decorations, I have been keeping an eye on the new trail camera.  The boar are still around and a deer or two have passed by - they look rather odd from a higher angle!

On Thursday, I caught a different strange animal on the camera - one that I would not expect to see on our land before September.  I wasn't delighted, but I think I remember seeing a couple around this time last year too.

We think that the cristophine might be contemplating flowers - today there was a slightly different growth on a couple of the main stems.  It has grown another three feet or so in a number of directions so there is certainly enough oomph in it to think about flowering and fruiting I would suggest.

The sweetcorn got a real battering in the winds during the week - two named storms at this time of year and this side of the Atlantic is a bit odd.  While we were not near the strongest gusts, the gaps in hedges and trees funnel the wind in weird ways.  The big fields of maize are closely planted and dense, while our wee area of sweetcorn is only three rows deep, but it has all survived and the silks are out and starting to turn brown, which is good!

Digging up the week's potatoes, I met one of my garden helpers.  From the size and shape of her, I think she has been doing very well on slugs, and certainly none of the potatoes have slug damage, so I think she is rather effective, if not the prettiest person on the plot.

Anyway, I must now go and deal with a rather pleasing problem.  Back in the days before Brexit was even considered, my mother in law bought us a Victoria Plum tree, to take the place of the medlar tree that didn't seem to like our garden (shame as the flowers were gorgeous).  It wasn't cheap and we had to source it in the UK, as they aren't a thing in France.  Since then we have nurtured it and protected it and been rewarded with at best a dozen fruit in a season, and only if we can get to them before the chickens.  This year is different.  This year it is loaded and we have supports under many branches to help it cope.  This afternoon I have promised myself I will make a batch of plum crumbles for the freezer, as well as one for tonight, so I'd better go and pick and stone some fruit and get baking.

Have a good week!