It’s a dog’s life on the port

Today, I write about the French love of dogs and share a menu for a light summer lunch with a recipe for squid, sorrel and potato soup.

Barney, surveying the avenue de la Marine from the top step.

If it weren’t for my two dogs, I wouldn’t know nearly as much as I do about the history of my house. Soon after we arrived here, I was walking them along the port and fell into conversation with a couple walking their chihuahua, Lola. The husband’s family has lived in Marseillan for many generations. There’s even a street named after them. Like so many here, their income came from tending the vines that creep right up to the edge of the village. “Your house belonged to the Voisin family, one of the biggest wine merchants in Marseillan,” he said. I knew Jean Voisin had built the grand Haussmann-style building at the other end of the port, now a restaurant, but not that the same family had built our house too – all the better to keep an eye on the warehouses and barges filled with wine barrels that lined the harbour, I suppose.

Dog owners everywhere talk to each other. In our London park, I knew the names of more dogs than people. There, my dogs would run around with their pals, while I chatted with mine. Here, people keep their dogs on their leads more and are less likely to want them to play with each other. Which means they are sometimes very reactive with other dogs, which means they don’t get to play with other dogs, which means they are reactive around other dogs…

Making themselves at home in France.

But if dogs here are not so well socialised with each other, they still lead very social lives. There’s hardly a shop, bar, restaurant or café where they aren’t welcome. Often, there’s a bowl of water under the table before there are glasses of water on the table.

This village is filled with dogs of all sizes and shapes. There are more Yorkshire Terriers than I ever saw in Yorkshire, fleets of chihuahuas, battalions of fluffy white Bichon Frises – all small dogs, well adapted for living in small houses with doting, often elderly, owners. They’re affectionate, eminently pick-upable when necessary, and will fit easily in a puppy pushchair when the time comes. There are the slightly rakish dogs that live on boats, including a white German Shephard of infinite glamour. On market day when people come in from the surrounding villages and hamlets, the streets fill with larger, rangy black-brown dogs, who sit watchfully under tables at the Marine Bar, ready at a moment’s notice to put any highly-strung local dog in its place.

While France might be famous for its friendliness to dogs, it also has a reputation for the evidence of their presence on every pavement, in every park. Huge – careful- strides have been made in the past few years to combat this truly unpleasant problem. In our village, there are free poo-bag dispensers on almost every lamppost. Some places now levy hefty fines if you’re caught not picking up after your dog, in the case of Bergerac in the Dordogne, it’s an eye-watering, shoe-saving €750.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how many hairdressing salons there are in our village of 8,000 people. There are also two busy dog grooming parlours and several mobile groomers, all plying their tabard’d trade across the region. At some of the bigger markets, there’s a dog accessory stall that’s fido-fashion-central, with collars, leads, neckerchiefs, bows and even bonnets, for the sprightly pooch about town. They also sell a fine range of made-to-measure pouches to carry your dog in, in the manner of baby slings.

Once upon a time, I would have turned my nose up at this, and at the push chairs intended for dogs. People calling their pets “fur babies” makes my teeth itch – they’re first-rate animals, not second-rate children. But, as they say, when you know better, you do better. As my beloved border terrier, Barney, ambles through his seventeenth year, I can see the attraction. He loves to be outside greeting his public, sniffing the air and, well, everything else. His mind is sharp if his joints are weak. So I can see myself at some point, not without self-consciousness, pushing him along the front in a little chair like a Bournemouth Dowager, particularly in the summer when the temperature crawls into the high 20Cs and the pavement becomes too hot for paws. (The test is, apparently, can you press the back of your own hand on the pavement for a full seven seconds? If you can’t, it’s too hot for your dog. And don’t worry, if you’re not sure, there’ll be someone along in a minute to tell you off.)

Having a mid-century modern sit down in the groomer’s.

Not all dogs live such charmed lives. Summer is a busy time for animal shelters here. Around 100,000 pets are abandoned each year in France, 60 per cent of them in the summer months, as people go off on their holidays. In 2020 – public shame being a strong motivating force here – a powerful advertising campaign aired. To the tune of We Are the Champions, pet owners were encouraged to shrug off the shameful honour of being the champions in Europe at abandoning their animals. This was only exacerbated, as in Britain, during Covid19 when people bought animals almost on impulse with little thought as to how they would take care of them when normal life resumed. Add this to the annual casting off of hunting dogs too old to work or breed from at the end of the season, and the shelters are full.

As in Britain, these shelters are often run by volunteers. I see around me good women of the village (it’s almost always women) patiently, carefully, coaxing the wild out of these dogs who have often never known kindness. In some cases, they have never been indoors, walked on grass, or even had names.

In my own house, there are scratches on some of the doors about a handspan from the floor. In a conversation at the gate, a neighbour told me that the lady who lived here had a dachshund who, when she died, was rehomed in the village. It makes me sad to think of the dog walking past its former home and not understanding why he can no longer come in, why there are these other strange dogs living here, playing in his garden. In the cellar, there are also scratches on one of the doors, and the ventilation slats at waist height are gnawed almost through. Some of the plaster is heavily grooved with scratch marks. It’s a long way from my dogs’ lives of beach walks, tweed beds and homemade organic treats. “It’s a dog’s life” now has a whole new meaning, in this house on the port.

On the port.

Squid, sorrel and potato soup

When I posted a picture of this on Twitter (I’m not calling it X, don’t be ridiculous), half a dozen people tweeted me, “When I first saw that, I read it as squirrel,” something to do with the SQUId soRREL thing I imagine. It made me think about how we name recipes. I suppose the convention with recipe titles is: most important ingredient first, most interesting ingredient second and then a workhorse ingredient that’s seldom going to be the headliner but puts in a full shift to pull it all together – and so often that’s a potato, isn’t it?  So here you have it: squid, sorrel and potato. No squirrels were harmed in the making of this soup.

The sorrel adds a deliciously sharp flavour which is terrific with the squid. If you can’t find sorrel, use spinach and finish with a good squeeze of lemon juice.