Middle class

The chesty Corsican taxi driver was giving me his earnest appraisal of the way things were headed in France politically. On the right we were passing the battlefield of Aquae Sextiae where the Roman general Gaius Marius, commanding 37,000 legionaries, massacred a 100,000-strong Teutonic horde thought to be headed for Italy after laying waste to northern Spain. Then, on the left, the church of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume with its fragment of Mary Magdalene’s cranium displayed in a spookily lit showcase. Later, turning south, we would pass through the countryside of Pagnol’s childhood, now split by the motorway. And a bit further on — glimpsed through roadside trees at Aubagne — the Foreign

‘Have you met the man who keeps his horses in this field?’ said one silver-haired lady to the other, as the pair stood by the gate of the builder boyfriend’s smallholding. ‘No, but I hear he’s not very nice.’ ‘He’s an oaf. He won’t even let us walk our dogs through his field.’ This vignette was captured on one of the game cameras we have dotted around the fields where we keep our horses. We’ve captured thieves in the act of loading up feed, fly-tippers in the process of dumping rubbish and we’ve now found out what the locals think of us. The BB was flicking through footage when he