Tears in Provence. By Catriona Olding

'La France est un paradis peuplé de gens qui se croient en enfer' said the writer Sylvain Tesson in 2017.

France is a paradise populated by people who think they’re in Hell. It’s a quote that a friend, André, admires so much he has it inscribed on the wall of the shed where he keeps his large and elaborate model of the Tour de France.

The Côte d’Azur of F Scott Fitzgerald, Katherine Mansfield and Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool (1947) has become overpopulated, expensive, glitzy and, in parts, ugly – forcing many holidaymakers deeper inland to the Var. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1989) drew Brits away from Tuscany towards the Luberon.

The result of this pincer movement is that Cotignac, the pretty village I’ve lived in for ten years, has become increasingly popular. And now George Clooney is to open a restaurant here.

But my tiny cave house is hardly a wealthy advertising executive’s dream. There’s no access, other than a narrow cliff path, few straight walls (it’s mostly live rock) and no pool to lounge around, sipping rosé.

I paint, write, let out the little cave apartment next door in the summer and manage a few holiday rentals. Local people are amused by, and tolerant of, the eccentric Scotswoman who speaks terrible French and lives high above the village among the eagle owls.

We’ve just finished the short high season. The restaurants and bars were full, as was the swanky new Lou Calen hotel and restaurant complex. My eldest daughter and her husband ate at the Jardin Secret on Sunday and saw George Clooney and Amal dining in the next room. Tony Blair was spotted a couple of years ago, but we try not to let that put us off.

Last week, I saw an earnest and bespectacled Swiss family of four into an old stone cottage in the forest above a nearby village. The mother was wearing harem pants.

They hadn’t been this far south before. ‘Is the village safe at night? Is it OK to drive in the dark? Is it dangerous when it rains? Is there a problematic number of mosquitoes?’ Later she sent me a text, saying she’d gone the full Manon des Sources and fallen in love with the place. I did the same thing 17 summers ago, wandering about the deserted hills, lighter of heart and spirit than I’d been since early childhood; high on the hot, sweet scent of wild figs, thyme, and rosemary.

But bashing France is fun sport for English journalists. I read febrile columns suggesting that all France is about to go up in flames. On the day of the Olympics opening, there were fires on the track of the high-speed TGV rail network – but there was nothing diabolical going on here.

We then had horrific forest fires this summer.

We love our village and it’s too hot to throw cobblestones. Local farmers protesting against EU agricultural policy have carefully turned the village name signs upside down.

My coming to France ten years ago with no French and very little money wasn’t done on a whim. I supported myself: cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, picking up and dropping off kids, caring for – among others – a famous elderly frail author, and helping with holiday lettings.

I’d had a cleaner and gardeners at home before I left and it was difficult to adjust. Luckily, the bar was set pretty low.

The woman I replaced in the letting business, Tracy, left her role after being caught drunk and having sex with a chap from the village while waiting for renters to arrive. On the way out, she misjudged the driveway and reversed into the family’s hired car.

In Truman Capote’s story A Day’s Work (1980), Capote follows his cleaner, the magnificent, dope-smoking Mary Sanchez, around to find out about her work and clients.

If you have a cleaner, you should read it. Your cleaner knows everything: your filthy bathroom habits, the minutiae of your relationship with your spouse, what you keep in your bedside cabinet and how drunk your teenage children were when you went on holiday and left her in charge. Pay your cleaner well.

Unlike Mary Sanchez, I’m a rubbish cleaner. The only cleaning I have to do these days is my own house, and the apartment I let on Airbnb, which is entirely cave. It’s more Hobbit than batman – and guests love it. They tend to be charming, bookish and often gay.

In 2023, when I was nursing my terminally ill husband – the peerless and beautiful Spectator Low Life columnist Jeremy Clarke – the apartment shower leaked. The lovely German guys who were renting bought sealant and fixed the problem.

My middle daughter was staying the following spring and helped me get the apartment ready for rentals. I was vacuuming under the bed and saw something unpleasant. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh,’ she said, looking. ‘It’s OK, Mum. It’s just an earplug.’

The best houses are easy to spot and get booked up quickly. Well-renovated houses of character with a pool, good beds and decent plumbing, within walking distance of the village, will always let well.

If you want to party, it’s better to rent a place in the countryside. I felt sorry for guests I saw in last year – a mother with two grown-up daughters, one of whom was heavily pregnant. They were models of rectitude. The people next door made a racket late one night. My guests woke to find raw eggs had been thrown at the front door by an angry and mistaken neighbour. Most of our renters know Provence and are happy to be here.

Occasionally there are problems. One summer, it’s pools going green. The next, it’s plumbing. But sometimes it’s the people who are at fault; badly behaved guests or difficult owners.

A few years ago, a Swedish woman was angry because she couldn’t get Sky Sports in her expensive rental property – a tall truck had taken down the wire. She was drunk and insisted a colleague drive over at 11pm to fix the problem. On the last day of her holiday, she forced sanitary products down a lavatory, which resulted in the front garden’s being flooded with excrement from the toilet and effluent from the septic tank.

In another property, six German cyclists, rather than taking their rubbish and recycling away, hid eight large black bags full of stinking ordure and bottles in the oleander bushes in the back garden.

If Jeremy was well enough, and I was elsewhere when they arrived, he’d meet my Airbnb people.

He once brought an American couple to the apartment – Cathy, a psychiatrist/neuroscientist, and her husband. The following morning, I went to the boulangerie and bought them croissants. We got chatting. It was Jeremy’s gentle, magnetic charm, humour and modesty, combined with the otherworldliness of the place, that sparked a friendship. They came back twice more and bought a second home on the other side of the village.

After Jeremy died in May 2023, I was a mess. The pain of losing him, the physical hardship of caring for him, and not eating or sleeping for two months had taken their toll. Cathy took me for walks in the hills above the village. Her wise words helped me through the dark and lonely winter months to follow. And one of the best things she did was to tell television-hating me to watch the TV series Ted Lasso.

Last July, another American friend, Puddles – ‘the sad clown with the golden voice’ – and his wife were on my terrace high above the village.

We’d just clinked glasses and said ‘Santé’ when we heard prolonged and agonised screaming. We looked through binoculars but could see nothing. ‘Please, God, it’s not a child in a pool...’

We were relieved to watch an ambulance go past – but the screaming went on. I ran down. In flip-flops, it took three minutes.

When I arrived at the cheap apartment block, I was confronted with a woman sitting like La Pietà, screaming, blaming herself, with a dead German Shepherd dog on her lap. Her young son and teenage daughter were hysterical; husband and grandfather ashen and pacing.

They were a poor family; the children were sticky and smelt unwashed. I tried to comfort them. In the excitement of arriving, each thought the other had let the old dog out of the car.

When I told Cathy, she said, ‘Oh my God. That’s so sad and terrible – and your hippocampus has hardly healed yet.’

Catriona Olding wrote a tribute to her late husband, Jeremy Clarke, in the new book, Low Life: The Spectator Columns: ‘The Final Years’