Weekend of the Patrimoine. The recently moved-into house of the Tea Together youth is up the road from the Abbaye of Dommartin, on the edge of their village at Tortefontaine. Always a lift of the spirits to pass the mighty stone gateway which has kept its twin overflowing cornucopias of fruit as topping on each side of the entrance. Even from the road, it’s clear that wars and revolutions have reduced what was a powerful self-contained world to shattered pieces.  Today, though, that glimpse of what still lies beyond widens to become une vue totale. We get to walk in under the arch and around the demesne. Eighteenth century farm buildings, including the brasserie, the forge, the woodcutter’s hall, the pigeonnier – the dignified ruins of another grand stone gateway at the far end of the demesne – but the surprise is the wildly romantic grandiose ruins of the original eleventh century church, the shattered columns marking out a ground plan as large as a cathedral, the flint and stone walls reaching for the sky, all swagged with curtains of fern and ivy. Between the two stone portals, small groups of locals promenading under the old apple trees and discussing with lively interest the freshly revealed demesne.

Magalie with Nick and Eli swopping shipping tales.

Today,  Magalie of SDV‘s Le Havre office came to call. SDV is the freight company that gets palets of Tea Together jams to the States, to Singapore and all points between. Her inside view of what is going out, what coming in, what going up and what going down, makes her an effective barometer of the economic climate seen from the workface. It’s Magalie who tells us that four thousand containers of French wine sail to Japan every week, that every port in China has a different Export speciality – textile, white goods, toys, and so on around the coast – and that the incoming ships are unloaded by teams working three hours per shift, the pressure and the danger of the job being intense. They’re talking in the upstairs library where the walls are covered with photos of the Caudron brothers, the daring pioneers of flight who had their School of Aviation on the coast at Le Crotoy, not thirty minutes from St Remy au Bois. Go to the little Tourist Information office in Rue, between us and the coast, for a knock-out spread of images of the men and women who gave up their sensible lives on the local farms or in the textile mills to hurl themselves into the air alongside the Caudrons. The men slouch their flying jackets, their ear-flapped helmets, the cigs hung just so on the lower lips. The gels ooze a stylish, jaunty confidence. The most extraordinary one among them was surely Bessy Coleman, child of a dirt poor cotton picking family in the American South who made her way via Chicago and Jazz Age Paris to learn to fly with the Caudrons on the Baie de Somme.

Determined I am that we get to harvest fresh greens come next March-April and these two are not favoured by local veg growers, whose belief in turnips and leeks is unshakeable.

Grey light, wind rocked trees, poplars opposite bowing and scraping in the gusts – the year tipping into Autumn. One of the grand classics of Paris hotels that is part of the Dorchester family orders up boxes of the jam we have made for the pre-opening of the UK’s Coworth Park, hotel with polo ponies attached. The plan is to give them as presents to their staff to mark the Coworth opening. Tea Together signs up for our second Garden Weekend in Belgium. We are regulars at the magical Journees de Plantes at the Abbaye of Aywiers, near Waterloo. A week later, for the first time, we shall be with our jams at the Park of Beervelde, where the theme for this Autumn is the Mulberry Tree. As we have promised ourselves a Mulberry for the back field, seems like a good omen.

With all that, it’s a glum kind of day and the arrival of Helmut, patron of the Petit Manoir at Gouy St Andre, the next village to St Remy, brightens us up. Helmut is, always,bright, wears red, and this time around, is bringing a box of his home-grown veg. His chambres d’hote are unlike any others, having about them a style and a verve that comes from the design sense of Jennifer and the dash of Helmut.

Surprise visit from Helmut and his veg

Then a call from our partner in Manhattan to say that one of the iconic hotels of NYC is in contact, with fond memories of Tea Together samples. Could be good.

Lunch with friends at La Coupole, always magnificently theatrical, Parisian waiters doing their thing, and their clients, ditto. Next to our table, a blue-jeaned and beautiful young woman dining – alone. Briskly ordered up oysters and a glass of red wine. They arrived. glistening on their bed of ice. She gazed, called back her waiter, and asked to be presented to the three different oyster varieties posed on the platter. Oysters named, they were polished off in short order and  she swung out  into the Parisian afternoon. We had fallen quiet over our frites. Impressive.

On to the Musee du Quai Branly, first visit to the ethnological museum of Paris in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Lapped in its half-light and tanned hides, ravished by textiles and carvings that whispered of meanings on the edge of our understanding, crouching to passage down into a leather lined cave where in the half light our shaman spoke to us .. on film, still weirdly present .. was a big experience.

Nightfall at the Palais du Tokyo for the presentation of the photographs Herbert Ponting took of Scott’ s doomed expedition to the South Pole. Icy clear, dazzlingly composed and detailed images, from the hugger mugger of man and dog and pony in the hold of their ship to frail figures in the white vastness of ice caves and glaciers.