Peta Mathias - Never Put All Your Eggs in One Bastard

A re you mad?

Not clinically, no.

Youre going to sell your beautiful house in Auckland and buy a rat-infested dump in Uzs? What about the euro, what about the economic crisis, what about your dotage? Who will look after a mad old lady with red hair in Uzs?

Well

No one. Thats who. When are you going to grow up?

There are human beings in Uzs just like in Auckland. People will be kind to me.

Theyre not family, Peta. They dont count.

If this conversation feels like dj vu to me, its because it is I had it in 1985. This is the opening to my first book Fte Accomplie, published in 1995:

I had decided to do something about my dream of becoming a chef in France, and my friends and betters were touching in their encouragement:

Youre too old

Youre a woman

Youre a foreigner

You dont speak French

In my book on Vietnam, Noodle Pillows, I recorded a similar resistance to sensible argument, which I made in 2003 in Hoi An when I was trying to persuade a dressmaker to make me a lime-green outfit with red piping. When I chose the lime green, she said, No, Madame, you beautiful but too ol for that colour. When I showed her my o di meets Jean Paul Gaultier design, she said, No, Madame, you too fat for that style. After I showed her the whites of my eyes, she made the outfit for me and it was such a runaway success that I think the shop is still reproducing it.

In my twenties, thirties and forties, I mostly moved countries because I was either running to or away from a man, but I have always suffered from wanderlust. The song in my heart, the song that makes me wander, was probably instilled in me by my ancestors we are all a result of our history melding together from the past. Eventually I became so used to this part of me that I created a job where I was obliged to indulge the inner nomad. Since 2004 I have spent half my year in New Zealand and half travelling around the world with my gastronomic tours and living in Uzs. I have two separate lives, separate friends, different jobs, separate lodgings and speak different languages. I even speak French and English in different voices the French voice is higher.

Every year, when I spend four months in Uzs teaching cooking, writing, and lying about teaching and writing when I am actually sitting around drinking Pastis, I rent a different apartment. This system has resulted in a terrifying variety of living arrangements a tree is possibly the only place I have not lived in Uzs. The first year I struck gold when I was introduced to Gina, a Swiss woman living in one of the most famous grand old mansions in Uzs: the Albiousse on Rue du Dr Blanchard in the best part of town. Gina and her then husband, Michael, had sold the chteau St-Victor-des-Oules outside Uzs and bought Albiousse. They took me on as their boarder for the summer it was there I tested all my traditional southern French recipes for the cooking school I set up the following year. Overleaf is one of them.

Sometimes people offered me dumps to live in, like the year an acquaintance who has a house outside Uzs kindly expected me to live in a place that was still filthy from the last occupants, had stinking rubbish outside the door and no privacy whatsoever. I arrived at night and actually had to put clean sheets on the bed before I could sleep in it. This generosity forced me to find something more suitable, and I ended up in a very nice place in the back streets of Uzs on Impasse de la Trompe (trompe is defined by the