Now we go a-gathering. Or do we?

This week, I’m filling my basket with mushrooms, ideally not the terrifying kind. Plus a recipe for chicken with girolles.

An easy, but luxurious-tasting recipe for chicken with girolles and leeks.

A feeling of calm has descended on the port. After the bustle of summer – the tour buses visiting Noilly Prat, crowds queuing to board L’Etoile de Thau for tours of the oyster beds in the lagoon, the families lining the quays for concerts and firework displays – it’s now just us. The locals. After two years of living here, dare I count myself among their number?

On market day, it’s easy to get a table now on the terrace of the Marine Bar. The stalls selling cheap plastic toys and hammam towels have packed up for another year. In the greengrocer’s, O P’tit Primeur, the crates by the till are filled with cèpes, girolles, Jerusalem artichokes, potimarron pumpkins and fragrant, furry-skinned quinces.

When I take the dogs out for their evening walk, there’s a smell of woodsmoke in the air. The hunting season has begun, and in the early mornings, I often hear the pop-pop-pop of shotgun fire from the fields surrounding the village.

It’s still warm, but scarves have been pulled out of wardrobes, and short boots have replaced sandals on many feet. It won’t really get properly cold for a few months yet, but there is a growing sense that each sunny day is precious. When you meet people in the street, they share stories of beautiful bike rides around the lagoon in the afternoon sunshine, as though it might be the last one for a while.

Again, in the greengrocer’s, the woman behind the counter told me she’d been to the beach the night before and it was glorious, but, of course, she didn’t go in the sea as it was far too cold. It’s the Med. It’s never really cold, certainly not to me, one used to swimming in the North Sea, my skin the full Farrow & Ball paint chart of greys, from Wevet to Mizzle and, on a bad day, Plummett.

I’ve shared with you before my belief that we have moved to a village that seemingly never sleeps, even in autumn and winter when many rural French places seem to shut down fast and locals survive with only the daily bread van for company. Here, after the frou-frou of summer, the autumn calendar is filled with concerts in the church and new plays in the little theatre, apéro evenings and wine festivals for the new vintage. One of my favourite events is Le Jour de la Nuit, an evening when the street lights in the town are turned off to better enjoy the stars in the night sky, and to experience the village as it once was when not so comprehensively illuminated.

As I scour Facebook Marketplace for useful bits of furniture, in among the marble-topped washstands, copper pans and linen sheets are crates of mushrooms, locally sourced, mostly cèpes, yours for about £13 a kilo, gathered fresh near Castelnau-le-Lez or Pézenas, the latter avec le persil offert (with free parsley). This is about half the price of the mushrooms in the shops, but it’s not necessarily something I want to get a cheap deal on, from an unknown source, to be perfectly honest. Nothing tastes so good that I want to find out how organ failure feels.

It’s true that mushroom hunting here is as much a part of autumn as cosy sweaters and cups of hot chocolate – perhaps even more so as we bask in temperatures in the 20C range almost until Christmas. It’s an emotional tradition almost as much as a culinary one, the mycological treasure hunt a reminder of a more rural past, even if your days now consist of commuting into Béziers or Montpellier from your modern house on a nice little estate on the edge of the village.

Given the enormous affection the French have for mushrooms, it would be natural to assume they know what they’re doing when it comes to gathering them. Natural and, in some cases, very wrong. More than 1,000 people a year are treated for mushroom poisoning, and about 30 to 40 people die from it. In part, this is because some deadly mushrooms look remarkably similar to the ones you might happily fold into an omelette, see for example the deadly death cap (give a mushroom a bad name…) and the sainted cèpe.

Girolles with their parsley in Pézenas market.