There is a calendar to be adhered to in La France Profonde and without it, I'm told, we would be lost - flotsam floating on a sea of uncertainty.

The rural French don't like the unexpected; historically tied in, as it usually was, with doom for both people and crops.

They like to scan the skies for it, search the runes for meaning and portent, and then if troubled, seek the familiar for reassurance.

Hence the calendar of events, all firmly tied to an annual date and following each other in time-honoured succession usually coordinated so as not to overlap with neighbouring villages.

The spring/summer year, locally, kicks off with the two-day Puygaillard fete 2kms from me.

A huge wooden hall is brought in for the repas and dancing. By day the men play knock out pentanque and the woman cook vast quantities of food to please them.

It was last weekend and for the second year running I wasn't there. I should have been, but my son was visiting and, well, it was his last night and we had things still to say to each other.

The first fete repas he went to he found as exciting as I did at the time. A new foreign life, new people, new ways of being, allied to old, old traditions.

In those first couple of years it was still amazing to find the sun did switch on, on a due date, and, with a few blips, didn't switch off again for months.

Actually, to me, it still is. And it's why I'm still here.

So eating as part of a community, under shaded, perfumed, heat as the 'clocks' of the pentanque balls chimed against the musical murmurs of a different language, was an enchanting experience.

Until, sadly, the novelty wears off, and the old city mindset takes over again, and the cynical headwork gets bored with the very continuity it found admirable.

But that doesn't mean I don't understand, admire and appreciate the value of the certainty of the fixed calendar.

Can't follow the melding of Pagan/Roman/Christian festivals as various tribes and conquerors stamped, or gently placed, their heels on the peasants.

Don't enjoy and often celebrate alongside the descendants of the wily survivalists who swapped fertility goddesses for Mary, Bacchus for St Noe, as they did/do in nearby Auvillar; feasting on, and praising, the wine each summer.

Four kms away, I've watched young men leap through huge bonfires on St Jean's Eve, or Midsummer Night, and felt it more pagan solstice than any pretence of celebrating the birth of St John the Baptist.

Seen them run with a wild yell at the edge of a time-lost village, leaping into seeming infinity to fields beyond, to be greeted by girls in modern clothes, yet with old, knowing faces and souls.

Such moments remain fixed in my mind - for the different cruelties of 'real' life have infiltrated this world in a sudden burst.

Where the local boys leapt over the fire only four years ago, security now paces the event following an incident where outsiders arrived by car and one drunkenly stabbed a man.

I'm sure such things happened through time as old scores were settled, but it all seems so much more random and therefore more dangerous now.

So, those with families tend to meander along the other great signs and markers of summer and the calendar- the brocantes and the vide greniers.

The first is more antiquey, the second more car boot sales without the car.

The brocantes overflow with tables of monogrammed linen. Full sized napkins, beautifully initialed; sheets, nightshirts and nightdresses.

Most were folded and kept in trunks as part of a bride's dowry.

War and the death of the hoped for one, meant they stayed there, yellowing, forgotten until opened by a more astute family member.

Or, more often, a dealer.

Each year the prices rise but are still ridiculously low for the love and work in each piece.

The sellers wash and starch them and tie them in dozens with a blue silk bow. Sheets are folded into fours and similarly tied.

The best can rise high in euros but the feel of washed, soft linen is beyond compare.

I buy when I make a bit of cash. My guests sleep upon the pillows but rarely the sheets, which are too small for our beds.

They do wipe their mouths though, on the dreams of spinsters who wove their initials in hope.

I like that, for we do have fun, and often I like to raise a glass in memory of them and let them know their work is acknowledged and enjoyed.

The brocantes in a way are my calendar.

I like to prowl them and look at the pitchers, the ewers, the linen, the dinner services, the formal photographs, and the enormous soup tureens.

In them I see a glimpse of the French I know. A glimpse of the past, the personal they treasured. The bits and pieces we all love.

In the fetes I see the flow of history. In the brocantes, the love.

Without both, the French are right, we are just flotsam.