Shooting and fishing: A wild boar had been spotted at the bottom of the overgrown slope

I was standing in the window at 8am in the warmth of a Languedoc sun, inwardly sniggering over the weather forecast from home, when Jean Paul appeared down the street followed by his cat; or rather the cat which has adopted him and now follows him everywhere.

Jean Paul may or may not have been a photojournalist in Iraq, a yacht skipper in the Caribbean or an ex-Legionnaire on tankers in the Indian Ocean. He is certainly short of an eye as a result of some unspecified incident and all the married women in the village had perked up enormously when he arrived last year.

“Psst, psst,” hissed Jean Paul loudly from among the tomato plants on the terrace below. “Il y a un sanglier,” and gestured conspiratorially into the steep ravine below. A wild boar had been spotted somewhere at the bottom of the overgrown slope that had once been the villagers’ stone terraced kitchen gardens. Now the stone walls had collapsed along with the rural population leaving the Languedoc villages to the old and infirm, the holiday home owners and the likes of Jean Paul who appeared to survive on a small military pension, sangliers and the occasional mouflon, the highly protected wild sheep.

Both animals are hugely destructive, rootling through vines and crops at night.

So Jean Paul, looking for something to do other than work and tend his dope plants and aubergines, had become the village’s self appointed trapper. No one really expected him to catch anything, but at least his activities appeared to spook the beasts.

On this day there were, of course, no sangliers in his pieges – giant snares made out of what looked like old yacht rigging. But we scrambled about following tracks from snare to snare, two of which had been scornfully dislodged.

The last sanglier he caught had been a monster 84kg found dead in the snare. A gleeful photographic record had been kept of the communal butchery which had to take place deep in the woods away from prying eyes and national park officials.

Of those present only one, a retired farmer knew what to do, having butchered family pigs as a boy. The others were respectively an oil trader, a pottery salesman, a school teacher and Jean Paul, all grinning like naughty schoolboys.

The final photograph showed Jean Paul crouching proudly on a tarpaulin on which all the cuts had been carefully laid out. It was impressive.

On our last night we ate barbecued spare rib of sanglier marinaded in Thai fish sauce and lemon juice with aubergines and tomatoes from the garden baked with mozzarella cheese. And the weather was perfect. Snigger, snigger.