Having just read Simon’s post about our choice of a name for our llama herd (and incidentally for our entire ‘farm’ or business), I feel a little more explanation is needed about how we came up with this name in the first place.
During our many (and very long and tedious) trips up and down through France over the last few weeks, I have frequently occupied my mind by trying to think of possible names for our farm-to-be. The list has been very long, ranging from the almost sublime to the utterly ridiculous.
I thought at one point I’d hit on a good one when I suggested naming it after an area of land on which most of our pasture will be based. Unfortunately, a Google search of the proposed name of la Ferme des Bouzigues, turned up a farm/zoo of that name in the Herault region, which could easily be confused with ours. (It also gave me some more ideas for future activities though – they have a petting zoo, with rabbits, ferrets, pygmy goats etc). We didn’t want to be presumptuous and call it la Ferme du Roquetaillade, thus laying claims to be the only farm in the village (although we will be the only one with animals!), or la Ferme du Chateau (after our road name) which might have upset the person who actually owns the village castle.
Many of my other suggestions were considered to be too twee (La Ferme des Feys du Bois was one I liked – meaning Fairywood farm. My daughter snorted, “you CAN’T call it THAT!”), or too hackneyed (La Ferme Verte – meaning Green Farm, yawn). None of the translations of suggestions like Haven Farm, Destiny Farm, Good Luck Farm really worked. At one point I wanted to call it Home Farm, like in The Archers, but Home doesn’t translate well into French, (Chez Nous – how trite can you get?!)
Getting desperate, I thought I needed inspiration. And feeling that this whole experience so far has been rather magical and fortuitous, it didn’t seem unreasonable to ask for a bit of help from the fairies.
Having installed the fairy-door (which was so thoughtfully given to me, as a leaving-work present… “It’s lovely…er, what is it exactly?” “It’s a fairy door, stupid! To invite the fairies into your house”) next to the outside of our front door, I picked up one of my embarrassing collection of fairy books (most of which are ridiculous rubbish, but a couple of which are actually quite reasonable, within the whole scheme of things) and started flicking through, hoping for inspiration.
My eyes lit upon the word ‘dawn’, and thinking of new beginnings, and magical times of day, I wondered what the French word for ‘dawn’ was. Out came the massive French-English dictionary. Having found that dawn in French is ‘aube’, I then looked up aube in the other end, to do a bit of cross-referencing (you have to be sure you’ve got the right meaning of things sometimes). After managing to ignore the distractions of those really interesting words that always seem to appear at the top of each dictionary page (such as gringalet (puny), godemiche (dildo), dodeliner (to nod off) – obviously I was working backwards to the ‘A’s), I got to the entry for aube, and just above it saw the completely unfamiliar word ‘aubaine’ defined as “unhoped for good luck, godsend”, with ‘profiter d’une aubaine’ meaning “to make the most of an opportunity”.
After sharing the idea with Simon, we did a bit of internet research and thus discovered the history of the word and its other meanings, (including the interesting fact that it is another name for the Chardonnay grape, which is also prevalent in these parts).
So, as far as the fairies and I are concerned, our venture will henceforth be known as La Ferme de l’Aubaine, and our llama herd will be Les Lamas de l’Aubaine.
Maktub (and if you don’t know what that means – try this link)
