Seeking a change from farms, the next stop was a property in a small town, just south of Toulouse. The host, Cecile, was building herself a home out of straw and needed people to help with the construction. After arriving at the bus station, Cecile, her boyfriend sam and dog Lulu picked me up in a battered hatchback and welcomed me warmly to the area. Lulu was a beautiful three year old Malinois who, prior to being adopted by her current owners, had been trained as a guard dog. She greeted strangers with defensive aggression, barking and snapping if you tried to pet her. Cecile didn’t mention her dog’s predilections, but chastised Lulu affectionately after she had attempted to bite my hand off; I was perched nervously on the back seat with Lulu during the drive to the house. En route we stopped off to see if any events were going on at the commune; a community of people living on a co-owned patch of land. There were no events but the commune sold drinks, so we broke the ice over an apero before continuing to the house. Cecile had a day job, and building the house was a labour of love that filled her evenings and weekends. Sam occasionally lent a hand with the house, too. Both had worked abroad in the past on similar projects and were now looking to offer the same opportunity to others.
As we drove out of town and into the fields and hillsides, the faint outline of the Pyrenees was silhouetted in the distance. Besides the mountains, the Haute Garonne region was recognisable for its characteristic pinkish-orange clay. This was used to make the bricks that gave Toulouse (the department’s main city) it’s nickname, ‘the pink city’ (la ville rose) but the same bricks could be seen on buildings across the region. The houses we drove past followed a theme; walls were coated with off-white plaster, gently sloping roofs were constructed from terracotta tiles, and the window shutters (les volets) were painted a greyish blue and framed with the characteristically pink bricks. Blue pigment, it turned out, was the original source of Toulouse’s wealth. It used to be produced in the region and was very fashionable some centuries ago. Since then, Toulouse had developed into the aerospace capital of France, but Haute Garonne still retained the colours of its history.
The straw house was an impressive timber frame with a traditional French tile roof, both of which had been installed by professionals. Two of the downstairs walls had been filled in with straw bales (pronounced “straw balls” by my hosts), piled like enormous fuzzy bricks, and at intervals empty wooden window frames looked out onto the forest that fell away from the house. Besides this, it was still in progress, including the guttering (la gouttiére). This was a problem since, when rainfall came, sheets of water would fall from the roof onto the clay soil in front of the house to form pools that eventually seeped through the foundations and into the underground garage. Cecile seemed content to commit a great deal of her time to emptying out the garage with buckets, despite having a gutter lying in front of the house waiting to be attached. When I pointed out that attaching the gutter would be a relatively quick fix, she frowned at me sympathetically as if this was an extremely stupid suggestion and replied that it would be too complicated.

Prior to starting working on the house, the living arrangements for the workers needed to be addressed. When I arrived, the main water supply was leaking, so my first job was to connect a new hose. When this was successfully attached, the hose carried cold water to an outdoor shower and a washbasin that drained into a bucket. When the bucket was full, it would be hauled away and emptied into a pile of straw a few metres away. Straw was the solution to all problems. It was used in the toilet in place of water, and we used it to construct a flat surface on which to erect a tent for me as there was no level ground on the property.
We started work on the house the next day, which started with sanding the old beams using a handheld sander. However after two days of inhaling wood dust, we moved onto building another straw wall for the downstairs. This involved stacking hay bales end to end in a row, compressing them in place by propping the last two bales against each other at an angle then pressing them down until they lay flat. In the absence of a sufficiently short bale to fill a gap, a new one would be made by deconstructing a larger bale using string and a pair of metal spikes. After the bales had been assembled into a wall, fine adjustments were made using an enormous homemade mallet the size of a small adult. The process was tricky, and an essential pair of French words that came up frequently were “dessus” (above) and “desous” (below). It’s unfortunate that two words with completely opposite meanings can sound so similar, in this case the only difference being the intonation on ‘ou’ and ‘u’. My hosts patiently attempted to teach me the difference which, to English ears, didn’t sound sufficient to constitute a new word. The ‘ou’ was pronounced like an English ‘oo’ whereas the ‘u’ seemed to come from somewhere in the back of the mouth. The difference was too subtle to tell which was which on the fly, so I made do with asking for the English version when it came up in conversation.
The walls were secured in place by cutting a channel along the top side of the straw bales using a chainsaw and placing a beam inside. Two Estonian students had also arrived to work on the house at this point and, with zero experience between us, we apprehensively took turns to use the chainsaw. Later, we were joined by a young German couple so we all worked as a group, punctuating the straw bales and sanding by eating meals around a picnic table setup beneath a huddle of oak trees. Cecile generally prepared the food which, though simple, included an array of delicious, quintessentially French cuisine. Rice salads were livened up with homemade vinaigrette, always with oil and vinegar but sometimes with mustard, tahini or curry powder (the recipe would change each time). Two or three fresh baguettes from the boulangerie accompanied every meal and when they became too stale to eat they took on new life as French toast (Pain Perdu, literally ‘lost bread’). At one point we tried Fois Gras, still legal in France, which had been gifted to Cecile and Sam by a friend. They also introduced us to an entirely new meal called Le Gouter. Le gouter is a sugary snack that every child in France is treated too after school. It can take on many forms, but the classic is a buttered slice of bread with a block of milk chocolate as the filling.

Life in the countryside of Haute Garonne was relaxed. Sam was a superb guitar player, and would play at the table whilst food was being prepared. There were two guitars, so Sam and I would teach each other songs and attempt duets. In general the weather was also excellent. After a cloudy first day, the sun had reappeared and steadily ramped up the heat until it reached a sweltering forty two degrees. This was sustained for two days and made working on the house almost impossible, so instead we treated ourselves to long siestas (les siestes). The water hose wasn’t buried so its contents would heat up over the course of the day until it became unbearably hot, at one point causing a connector to rupture and jet scolding water over the caravan. Lulu, usually tireless in her search for someone to throw sticks or tug a rope, flopped in the shade and panted loudly. Two days after the initial introduction she had calmed down considerably, at which point she had stopped growling whenever I appeared and became very friendly.
The only things flourishing in the heat were the mosquitoes (les moustiques). Cecile had made the curious decision to place two half-barrels next to the picnic table and fill them with water. One had plants but the other contained nothing else and served no obvious purpose. Since mosquitos require water to breed, they had thrived in the new conditions, growing in number and aggressiveness by the day, ultimately resulting in the German couple leaving early to find a new host further north. The mosquitoes at the house were a species called Tigre, named as such because of their black and white striped bodies. Tigre mosquitoes were elite parasites, floating silently until they landed on a bare patch of skin or a piece of thin clothing, at which point they would establish a strong position, point their stingers down and squat deeply, injecting the sting. They could take off absurdly fast, so it was nearly impossible to swat one until it was heavy with blood.

Time flew by at the house of straw balls, and by the end of my stay I’d become good friends with Cecile, Sam and Lulu. The heat eventually subsided and we continued making progress on the house which, after twenty days, had a fully enclosed lower level, some new windows on the second floor and a couple of bird boxes. What made the project particularly impressive was that almost everything used for the construction was recycled. Steadily the house was taking on new life as a cosy home in the South of France.