When I was 18 I spent a summer in Soustons in the south west of France in the Landes department (40) working for a farmer called Jacques who had a lot of corn fields.
My job – and that of my school friends – was to castrer le maïs – pull the flower off the corn plant to stop it reproducing.
We used to walk down a line of corn in a big field, pull off the flower while getting whacked in the face by the wet corn plant leaves.
To this day it is the best hangover cure I have ever encountered.
Well, bad news for British schoolkids who want to spend their summers in the Soustons sunshine (well if Brexit wasn’t bad news enough for them and put a stop to that).
As the cornfields of Venelles will attest to, castrer le maïs has become the work of machines.
I suppose that’s progress.
One story from my time in Soustons. We slept in tents on Jacques land and, early one morning after a night on the eau de vie, he woke us up by unzipping our tent and shouting: “Dépêchez vous.”
As one of my school friends crawled out of his sleeping bag, he looked at me and said: “I think there’s fish for breakfast.”
Thrown to (the) Lyon 