A lament for the foreign correspondent’s house – and his hospitality

Until January the foreign correspondent lived in a late-18th-century house with a vineyard, olive grove and vegetable garden close to the village centre. You’d go through a gate, then another gate, and find yourself suddenly in the countryside and being yapped at by Mary, the most spoilt and spherical spaniel in Christendom, and then the foreign correspondent himself would appear in front of his lovely old house with arms open to welcome you. Usually the first thing he would say was that he was thinking about having a drink and why didn’t he go and fetch a bottle and glasses.

Each year his vineyard produced about 400 bottles of very dark red wine, just enough to provide him with a fairly potent staple yet not quite enough to stimulate the interest of the French state.