If you preheat your oven at all – you know – when you are going to put some concoction in there to cook (even though your oven provider may say, if using the fan option, that you can bung your casserole straight in, cold…) well, if you do preheat your oven, you will most likely have experienced that blast of hot air in the face you get as you go to slip in the quiche, loaf tin or roasting tray . . . open the door…
Stifling: takes your breath away for an instant. If you wear specs as I do, the blast of heat can also steam one's lenses up instanta, rendering one unable to see anything in the oven anyway, should you be checking the progress of your cooking, rather than initially front loading your Bosch, Nef, AEG, De-Longhi or Aga even… exacerbated here at the home base by a busted interior oven light, but I am getting off the point.
Even the locals opined it was rather warm and were dodging exterior work from about noon onwards, starting instead almost at the break of day.
As I say, we took the advice re shutters etc, but I cannot say the strategy was much of a success: the house, oven-like, just got hotter and hotter day by day until the only place we could get relief from this, the hottest of summers the region has seen since records began, was in the air conditioned comfort of the motor.
We had fans on day and night. We crawled into cold showers. And we watched the Tour-de-France, thank God, the best race since Bernard Hinault won in 1987.
But does one come 800 miles south to sit in a darkened room in front of a TV set watching a bike race, FGS? Well, we did… it won't be happening again and that's a fact. Good race though, this one. Top flight.
The real heat only got going after my senior bro left us to return to Blightey and we (returning from depositing the relative at Avignon TGV) had purchased a new TV as our Tesco cheap-job had finally decided enough was enough. So now it's our third TV in Sablet, the first was so small you could cover its screen with a snuff-hanky. The new acquisition allows one to read subtitles at least and has excellent picture quality. It doesn't eat dvds like the Tesco number (it doesn't have the facility). The new screen certainly made watching the Tour a considerably better experience out in France than heretofore.
We did get out to some extent; this post is really mostly an aide memoire to your author, of what some of those rather limited excursions were. We went out for breakfasts, early morning forays to markets, short walks and mercy dashes to boulangeries, Intermarché and the shadier café exteriors. We did eat out too where shade and tolerable heat levels could be reasonably expected, so we were not in actual fact in complete heat lock-down. But the last rain we saw in Fr was a short sharp downpour in Vacqueyras for brother Terry's benefit, just after lunch there, on 7 July. Rain. We sought it in vain after that. How we longed for it to fall. It didn't, not even on our return to Bullsmead Barracks, and then more weeks of hardly a drip of the eau de vie.
So: in no sort of order, here are a few highlights on Summer 22. In picture form. They are likely to be the last pictures I ever take in the S of F in the summer time. We just can't take the heat.
Here are landscapes of the eastern end of Ventoux, the Caderousse barrage, Le Géant from Orange hilltop and a foray towards Les Dentelles above Durban, where we discovered we were where we didn't ought to have been as the tracks and footpaths up there had been closed as a fire precaution . . . we did not transgress again. Then there is a panorama from Richerenches interior square…
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