Grand Works

Hard at work bunker building

 Le Comte is currently engaged in Grand Works. Materials turn up weekly by the lorry load; vast quantities of sand, gravel, cement and pipes. A vat of liquid concrete arrived and spurted alarmingly from a tube, petrifying everything before it. Large machines have burrowed dangerously into the rock and clay on which dear old Coldspot is built.  Le Comte, is, of course, having an absolutely wonderful time although it is all, he assures me, Very Hard Work. The official line is that he is building a gym and spa in the cellars under the Theatre Garden, but he has a shifty look about him. I know he is building a bunker.

Admittedly he has put doors and windows into his construction, but these are decoys, as is the running machine equipment he plans to order. Beyond the façade of floating flooring and ambient lighting are a whole series of breeze block cubby holes ready to fill with tinned food and brick up. He has probably been watching The Road. But when the moment comes and the mushroom cloud hangs over Charbonville if le Comte asks me to join him down below I shall think very carefully. What happens when that tinned food runs out? I too, have seen The Road.

Le Comte in his bunker

So while le Comte builds his bunker, I have been employed as Groundsperson. I don’t remember applying for the job, but le Comte assures me I did. Maybe it was that moment when I declared I was fed up with teaching English to stroppy fourteen-year-olds and would stay at home instead. It’s not very well paid but there’s apparently a lot of responsibility so I’m hoping it will look good on the CV. And if nothing else, it is definitely an education; in the Coldspot grounds I’ve encountered weeds I thought only existed on films. In this damp, cold microclimate in the shadow of the mountain very strange vegetation has evolved...

Gardening at Coldspot, like everything else, always begins with a capital letter. This is because le Comte’s thought processes work on a scale several times larger than other people’s. Le Comte is not a man who could easily plant ‘a few potatoes’. Rather, he would plant enough to feed Ireland then try to work out a way to get them there. He speaks constantly of ‘aggrandising’. It is his life’s work.

A good example was the Tomato Summer. This was the year le Comte decided tomatoes were the way forward. He would do tomatoes like no one had ever done tomatoes. He would be Tomato King. He duly sowed, potted on and planted 700 tomato plants which, lovingly tended every one of them, all flourished and fruited prolifically in the same fortnight. A bumper crop. Unfortunately this was also the fortnight when every other tomato plant in the Midi also fruited so there was no giving the things away. We ate tomato stew, crumble, salad, tart, rissole, nuggets… you get the idea. It is a summer that has receded into Coldspot mythology, but it was real, I was there.

Le Comte was understandably disappointed, but he learns quickly. Tomatoes, he concluded, had been a strategic error. A lot of work for zero financial gain. Raspberries were the way forward. You simply put them in the ground and there they stayed fruiting every year with no need for seeds and potting on. So he duly planted 400 raspberry plants. And they are indeed, still there. They have gone forth and multiplied, as have the brambles.

So, the Diary of a Chatelaine seems to have acquired some French-speaking readers. This is wonderful, of course, except that they speak French and have felt moved to offer advice. It transpires that la Chatte is not the term of endearment la Chatelaine imagined it must be. Unfortunately, her haphazard command of la langue Française doesn’t extend to rude words and she had no idea that her little nickname might imply anything other than a furry animal with a tail, whiskers and a penchant for mice. She should have asked the fourteen year olds! Quite why the Princesses never mentioned it she really doesn’t know...