That magical name synonymous with relaxation, Pastis, sun and holidays. Ampus is a tiny hamlet, pop. 100, located up in the hills of the Var, the south eastern French département that overlooks St Tropez and those other fancy
It is hard to describe the Ampus area, no matter how much you try -the sheer beauty of the place, miles away from anywhere. 
Maybe a word on the house itself: two stone cottages, one made up of two bedrooms (one up one down), the other (the main building) has got the kitchen (complete with massive fireplace for roasting chickens and grilling sausages) which is the definite center of the house. It has a huge wooden table and two benches and about 8 can sit round it cosily. There are pottery fruitbowls. 
It's got a stone sink and you can't drink the water, and all the other details that tell you you're in a real country house.
Upstairs is the master bedroom and a corridor/room that is full of beds. The basic structure of the place dates back to the 16th century, though of course it is all about the outside: one terrace, between the two cottages is thatched, the other, in front of the main building gives out on to a multi-green hued valley and the distant town of
Then there is the ambience.
It all starts with Arnaud, 
Olivia's dad, ex- soixante-huitard politically hyperactive, rabid left-winger who can talk for hours and hours. He is the main source of amusement and debate. His philosophy for Ampus is that people can do whatever they want, "on est libre à Ampus!", and we do. 
In the evenings we have apéritifs and then all crowd around the dinner table and drink and talk in to the night, fuelled by gallons (usually 10 liter cubits) of local plonk. 
A bunch of us are regulars: some years are chaotic (like last year, when there were about 15 of us including a rock band for all of 7 beds), others years are more quiet. This year there were about ten of us: the pater familias Arnaud, his girlfriend Véronique and her son Romain, Olivia, Axelle, Chook & myself, Véro's brother and girlfriend and his 7 year old boy. Laurent, an old friend of the family who is a philosopher-peasant that looks like Jesus, a fascinating and brilliant man, popped over for a couple of days.
The days fly by: we sometimes go to the nearby lac de
other has pebbles with a bar and a huge bouncy castle in the water. Axelle, Chook, Valentin the year old and I had a terrific time on that). Other days we just lounge in the sun reading and waiting for apéritif time. This year we also went down the olive groves to the abandoned stone cottage that we (mainly Olivia and Anthony to be fair) have started doing up. Chook started building a table, Olivia created steps leading down; we dusted and dug and raked and swept, let's hope our efforts still show next year! What else? Memorable moments include an invasion of flying ants, driving down to the
We had whacked our way through pastis and melon liqueur, then through about ten liters of wine with our flame grilled sausages and the night got darker, the debates louder. Suddenly, 56 year old Arnaud bellowed, "Let's go & see the precipice!!". "Hurray!" we all drunkenly cried.
It appears he owns a plot of land that gives on to a precipice and that is only accessible by going through the neighbour's garden ("l'enculé!!!"). So it looked like this: 9 drunken adults in
shorts/skirts/sandals/fliplops went whacking down the overgrown olive terraces (slope of around 30 degrees), through thorns, bushes, bugs. We couldn't go down together so the first person had the torch (the 7 year old's, about as bright as a flickering candle), then a huge chain of us crashed down behind. We got to the precipice (invisible in the total dark, the moon was hidden away behind the house) and star-gazed; the milky way shone, shooting stars darted about; we sat and stared in awe.
After a while, we crashed back up to the house, as delicately as we had left. C'est l'été... and to quote Arnaud's favorite phrase "On n'est pas bien à Ampus?...". Yes, we certainly were.
