Reading old posts

Tonight we head to the airport ready for an early flight to Sardinia, for our 'real' summer holiday.  By chance I mentioned this blog to an online group I belong to, and asked for comments, suggesting they might like to read back through old posts and see the sort of thing I have written about.  I decided it was a good idea for me to do that too, and I must say (without being too big-headed) I was really surprised and pleased by some of what I have written over the years.
It's clear that the best posts have stories in them - things we heard, or anecdotes, tales of the old days, reasons we were given for why things are the way they are.
It's also clear that some of the posts were written in too much haste, mostly descriptive and with not enough planning or forethought.
But I think this will in due course make a reasonably interesting book sometime soon.
So - if you are reading this now, please do browse through some of my old posts, and leave comments. These are so intensely valuable - genuine feedback.
I hope our Sardinian trip will be leisurely enough for me to give you some high qual accounts. We leave Faversham basking in a glorious warm sunny September light, with the food festival in full swing in the marketplace, and everyone relaxed and content. We've been to the allotment and come home with copious amounts of tomatoes, damsons, blackberries and windfall apples. These are now either cooked for the freezer, or given to neighbours... How lucky I am to have this as my birthday month - the cornucopian flows of glorious, sweet abundance from the plot. We pruned the great loquat tree in the garden and took the stiff proud branches up to the recycling centre, and now the last things are going into the (new) suitcase - with four wheels for easier manoeuvring at the airport.  No-one know how much longer we'll be able to flit like this into Europe and out again... Either Brexit or global warming will close it all down, maybe.  So we are savouring everything about this trip. 
The next post ought to be from Cagliari.   

Two meals

I was a paying guest at a meal which my sister was helping to arrange - a summer supper for the English Ladies Group hereabouts. This group of British expats has recently lost its chairman who has gone back to live in Blighty, and they had resolved not to have a chairman, as such.  However, a highly energetic character (shall we call her ‘Beady’?) has apparently taken it upon herself to jump into the role and had decided the annual supper would be at her house. The catering was to be organised by another woman, but she - very unfortunately - had developed a series of worrying medical symptoms and was rushed to hospital.  My sister and her husband were suddenly in the forefront of organising at short notice an emergency stand-in programme as regards the food.

Consequently in the 36 hours leading up to this event we were all flung into the logistics of who was buying what, where, and when, and who would bring what …  In France, to order a super-pretty desert, or dessert as they say, you have to go to the supermarket a day or so beforehand and speak to someone. Telephone orders will not suffice. The only supermarket with 'un résponsable' on duty was of course much further away than the local Carrefoure… so we traipsed over there and ordered.  Then there was the always-mutable discussion about what the menu was to be - and my sister is good at giving orders and remembering, but her husband is the only one who cooks. So there was a certain amount of shrugging of shoulders, and swearing….

In the event, we loaded their car with trays and trays and trays of cooked chicken, chilled burgers, bowls of salads, dressings, sauces, marinades and the like and set off for Beady and George’s house…. It’s far far away, and sits behind a long lawn with a central ornamental long pond surmounted with a diving beauty-queen. There are endless sheds, lights, ornaments, troughs, tubs, swags, stone footsteps set into the grass…  The hostess had clearly taken her responsibilities very seriously, because there were about 12 tables set out with plastic covers and then paper cloths, bread, condiments, stuff.  Each of us was to bring their own plates, cutlery, drinks, glasses, etc.   

My bro-in-law was i/c of the Pimms but the hostess did not after all have the promised ginger beer, so the Pimms was extremely strong and eager punters rapidly went in search of something to slacken it a bit.  

The house was stunningly beautiful - underneath a groaning burden of terrible art, furniture, ornaments, ceramics, ironwork, rugs,… who knows? Amongst all this is a thread of beautiful items - artisan crafts, silk wall hangings, framed paintings, a pretty piano.  But the hostess, Beady, thin as a rake, wearing shiny low-heeled slingback sandals, was clattering about in a frenzy. Her voice was high pitched, screeching, ill-toned and strident. She screamed at her patient small husband to tell him off every few seconds, criticised everything he did, ignored the guests, said “I’m far too busy to talk to you!”, brushed past, answered no questions, ran, clattered, screeched, made sure everyone knew how busy she was, how important, how much in control. It was a tragic and painful thing to watch. She is so very needy, so off-putting, so organised and so rude that the entire party - as they arrive, one by one, couple by couple, avoid her, look somewhere else, sneak away. 

The meal, in the end, proceeds with some merriment - small groups gathering at different tables as dusk falls, ignoring the cries of the hostess as she comes round with trays of roasted potatoes, or pans of tinned sweetcorn…. We move on from barbecue to cheese to dessert…. We meet a few new people but it’s hard as there isn’t enough room to move on the crowded terrace, despite the sweeping lawns.  Someone breaks a solar lamp in the darkness and chucks it into the hedge. There are jokes, swapped contact details, and then we eventually gather up our dishes and bottles and glass and head out across the darkened lawn to the car. Back and forth carrying bags, saying goodbye to the mournful dogs, making plans with friends for tomorrow.   

No thanks are enough for the hostess… she barely hears them, still busying herself with collecting cash from the diners, carrying bowls, doing everything. It was one of the saddest things, that she never once sat down, or talked, or listened, or relaxed. Her husband told me how he had mended the rain-sagging roof of their barbecue cover by inserting some cheapie Ikea plastic floor panels which hold the covering up into an arc so the rain actually falls away. He looked hunted.

But today, a lunch with two from that supper, Martin and Laura, was at a restaurant called Nazère, a bit of a spa….. And how wonderful that was. The setting is a suite of ancient building all restored at great cost, with gardens, pool, verandahs, walks, old oaks.  The menu is leisurely and loving. The serving staff are highly informed, careful, attentive. The patron asks: do you know what  kir is? and from nowhere I find an answer…. a dash of crème de cassis and then white wine - Bourgogne Aligoté. And that turns out to be absolutely correct.  If not that wine, it is not a kir. It can be a kir maison, or something else.  If you add red wine, any, then it is a cardinale.    The courses succeed each other. The cheeses are utterly divine - from a factor in Toulouse called Xavier…   Actually I couldn’t really afford to be there, but I will be back and I predict it will become a famous place, because it is aiming high, it all looks fantastic, with many resources for people staying for a night or two, and the host and his wife are charming and attentive.  Ten out of ten.  

Living abroad

The landscape in this part of the Tarn-et-Garonne is enchanting, the small wooded hills and smooth seductive valleys, and tiny settlements and villages – some fortified, some with less dramatic histories. The mark of ancient dispute is everywhere, with yesterday‘s power struggles displayed in bigger or smaller churches, towers, chateaux and gates. The prosperity of the land is shown by the huge covered market places in the centre of the larger vills, still in use and clearly so practical – why we don’t have them in rainy England is a silly wonder. That’s one product of the French/English wars which we should have adopted. In the signage and infos in the various castles and points of interest, they never fail to mention war with the English – though we had enough French kings and for long enough to make this particular jibe feel a bit unfair.

Yesterday we went to the town of Lectour -for the market and to meet friends for lunch… This was on one of the three great French pilgrimage routes to Saint James at Compostela, and accordingly has some grand buildings on the main street. But it was also a famed centre for something called ‘le bleu’ - the making of blue cloth and other materials - paint, for example – from woad. The last business (and museum) carrying on this truly ancient practice closed down in 2016 – there are films on YouTube showing how they did it. It was a labourious and repetitive process, putting the cloth over and over again into the vats of dye in order to get any intensity of colour. A crowdfunding attempt at rescue was not enough. So blue cloth  now presumably comes from the Far East, or is totally mechanised. Anyway, the prosperity brought by this trade help to make the town into a marvel of ornamental and impressive architecture and along the high street.

The slightly distressing thing was (and what hypocrite I am) that the street and market were full of les anglais, all a bit ‘yah’, very much at home, presumably the grandparent generation like me, enjoying the late summer sunshine and lower prices now the school holidays are over. It just felt horribly wrong, invaded. Maybe with all this Brexit thing going on, and the climate change debates, I am over sensitive to the issues of migration, migration in general, the damage done by tourism… It was clear that the town is benefiting mightily from English tourists, so many cute things on sale, the honey, the soap, the very large nets of garlic, the tempting cheeses and dried sausages, the local art pottery… But I felt very uncomfortable. I want to be the ONLY English person wandering around. My sister winces at how some of her English neighbours around pronounce the French place names, and French in general. She points out how where English is pronounced somewhere at the back of the mouth, at the top of the throat, French is articulated at the front of the mouth, with lips and pursed cheeks – rather exaggerated from an English point of view. But the British expats speak the French as if it were English – too deep in the mouth. So it never sounds right.

We had lunch in a restaurant run by an ex-teacher from London who happens to be Danish, sitting under parasols on the sunny terrace. He told us he’s packing up at the end of this season - too many responsibilities to family (elderly father needs help). I keep hearing this now – at least one well-established business back in Faversham is closing for the same reason. The old days are coming to an end. Our conversation at lunch – and later at our friends’ tiny house in a stunning valley at St Jean de Bouzet was about the care of family members with profound needs – both young and old – and the difficulties of getting the right kind of help from anywhere at all. People demonstrate pure love in giving up everything they can in order to care for their weak or helpless loved ones. Everything slowly diminishes. I used to wonder how the Roman Empire ended, and this is how. They depended on slaves, and we on migrant workers. In Britain we have started to turn such migrants away, and the government is even throwing out the long established foreign-born, who have worked in the UK all their lives, as professionals, paying taxes, raising children, adding to everything. It is tragic and stupid. I wonder how long the French will tolerate all these English residents in their pleasant southern lands? Nationality is suddenly back on the agenda. Pilgrimage is not. 

The pleasures of emptiness

There’s something about staying with family when you go travelling - a mix of anecdote, nostalgia, questions, laughs, watchfulness, diplomacy… quite unlike any other kind of travel. I’m staying with my sister and her husband in their old farmhouse in the Tarn et Garonne, in a landscape of beguiling hills and valleys, quiet villages and farms, and an emptiness which we scarcely find in England these days, maybe parts of north Norfolk.

One of my purposes was to try to get a good painting of the little road which rises up on the other side of the small valley here. I have tried painting and drawing it many times before. I don’t know why it’s so intriguing, but it’s typical of the way the country roads go around here - with gentle bends, rising up between mixed small fields to a wooded crest, and several old farmsteads within sight. The land was rich enough to support families in close proximity, which is unlike north or west Norfolk in that respect.  Here's a preparatory sketch I did yesterday morning.

Yesterday, which was brilliantly hot and sunny, we went out after lunch to look at a small castle at Gramont and drove through this magic landscape of valleys, woodlands and twists, with the bright stone villages (such as Marsac) perched on their hilltops, and the fields of sunflowers on either side, slowing darkening to ripeness. The castle really has two parts - a medieval or Gothic phase with a tower named for Simon de Montfort, and a Renaissance wing behind it, with fabulous Italianate doors and window mouldings.  The older part is tall - with one vast room on top of another, one huge upstairs floor made of local river pebbles (recently, perhaps), and the roof of the highest room constructed almost like a Kentish barn with king posts and visible beams.   The ‘newer’ part, made in the 16th century, is more palatial with these fantastic stone surrounds for the doors and windows, complete with putti, coat of arms, pilasters, swags, and classical ornaments. 

     

The whole thing was taken on by a rich couple called Marcelle and Roger Dichamp in 1961and repaired and restored and furnished, before being handed over to the nation.  A young woman is employed to sell tickets and do the tours. She was intensely serious about her tour, wouldn’t look any of us in the face, and spoke very fast with no concessions to anyone not familiar with the Langue d’Oc. But she pointed everything out to us, explained the tapestries and the forensic evidence showing the architectural history (mainly one lost long side corridor which once linked the rooms in the Renaissance part).   The castle is highly polished, with lovely windows and interesting bits of clunky furniture, but it is mostly empty. 

The funniest thing was the vast collection of paintings adorning all the rooms in the building.  These paintings are in the collection of the artist, one Pontencin or some such name, a Belgian, who liked to paint portraits of people with dogs’ heads, and giving each painting a cute title… ‘Father and Daughter’, ‘The Aristocrat’, etc.  These are truly ghastly, known as anthropomorphic art, a style which (worryingly) is becoming more popular as you will see if you google it.  I could only bring myself to photograph one of them, in this instance, a monkey head.

I imagine the artist (or his family) and the castle management team are all well-pleased with this arrangement. But, for me, the pictures make the visit memorable for entirely the wrong reasons. 

Coming back to the house, it was wonderful to have a swim in the little pool, watch the sun go down, and enjoy the silence. 

The sky at night.....

We got home from Denmark on Monday evening. The next day I set off for a few days with my sister in the south of France.  One good reason for coming here is her very beautiful salt-water swimming pool, which I have just been in...   But getting here was less smooth....
I’ve had a swipe at airports before…. their terrible scale, their dehumanising zig-zag queues, their sheer frantic greed… Despite the fact that this is how millions of modest families get their fortnight in the sun, and students get to see the world, and business people can swoop across the world to find new markets, yes yes, this is clear, but it’s grown and grown and now it is truly ghastly. Everything has to be paid for (of course) so the parking (or 'parkering' as they say in Denmark) is charged by the second, access to the hallowed selling space - sorry, waiting rooms - is via a disgustingly stinking (perfumed) chicane of booths or selling spaces with harpies on either side trying to flog you carry-on booze, or fantastically expensive and useless coloured grease to smear on your face, or squeaking boxes of sugar disguised as forest chocolate…. ah, my dear, it is really truly completely horrible.   And if anything goes wrong, such as a luggage-management system, whose given task is to whisk your precious suitcase crammed with knickers, medicines, t-shirts, games for the kids, whatever…. all that precious ‘stuff’ has to be trundled along (safe from vicious thieves) and get itself stowed into the belly of your particular aircraft ready for you to collect at the far end…. Well, when this goes wrong (as it did yesterday at Gatwick) then we have trouble.  For a start, no-one knows about it because it’s a responsibility of the airport… not the airlines'. The airline staff are blithely assuring people everything’s ok when seriously it is not. Thousands upon thousands of passengers take off to destinations all across Europe - Hungary, Italy, Spain, Greece, who knows where - but their cases are not there for them when they arrive.  No wedding clothes. No medicines. No clean knickers. No toys for the children.  Nada.  And the delays begin, the anger, the searching of websites, the complete lack on information, the despair…  
It turns out that Twitter, of all things, is the go-to place for information. Anecdotal, graphic, out of date or up to the minute, the tweets tell it as it feels.   I heard about this after I had left home, though Easyjet ‘could’ have alerted me to the problem if they had chosen to, or if they knew … (I’m sure they did).  But I had all my stuff in my heavy case, and a small handbag to take aboard…. I decided to extract my irreplaceable laptop from the case and carry it on board myself, along with some Juice Plus+ (my precious!!!), and some knickers, in case the case did not arrive in Toulouse with me.   
You can’t buy a cabin bag until you’ve gone through security, etc… (see above, all the anguish and boredom and barely concealed anxiety of those surely pointless manoeuvres with scanners and trays and electric archways and bossy uniforms….)   
Memo to self. Get a concession to sell luggage int the hallways BEFORE the security checks….Anyway, the choice of new carry-on cabin bags (which, incidentally, are not really checked once you’ve passed the initial bag drop area), ranges from utterly eye-watering hundreds and hundreds of pounds for a pull-along wheeled patent black or red or silly thing, down to (cheapest I found) £40 for a tote. That’s what I bought. Put my laptop in to relieve the stress on my poor handbag, and when I did eventually board - (thanks Easyjet for just a 'short' three hour delay which they blamed on the luggage problems earlier in the day) - I had my handbag with book, my tote with computer, and (safely in the hold as it turned out), my case with everything else.  
To while away the time, I ate a Lebanese meal and did a drawing of the resto. 

I will just add a reminder here.. the waiting time at the airport is in a purely plastic space, where everything is too far away, and basically hostile, and wanting money off you. MUNNEE. It's a horrible place to be, a true purgatory.... (and yes I know there are worse places in the world, but those are mostly involuntary... This is supposed to be something I chose, wanted, opted for. A process. A journey! I believe 19th century train travel was infinitely more desirable than this. I predict that it won't be long before civilian airports are repurposed - as prisons, or development sites, or nuclear dumps, or military training zones.....).
We set off finally at the time we should have been landing in France.  Not so late that I'd be entitled to compensation. They're not that stupid. The flight was fine.  I could see Paris from far away... rather sweet. Ha! I slept, a bit. My sis and bro-in-law met me at Toulouse, drove through the empty winding French countryside to their house… we got here at 2am, more or less.  That was fine.   I had met a woman waiting at Gatwick who was supposed to have been on the 8.35 flight in the morning but it had been cancelled…. so she was more than 12 hours delayed, along with her very sick husband who was in a wheelchair. My complaints subsided to NOTHING beside that.  At the house, looking up through the black black night, we could see the stars. Millions of them. The Milky Way, clear as you like… amid a million stars. I have not seen them like that for years in England.  The light from nearby airports (ie. motorways, cities, suburbs, shopping centres, roundabouts…..)  has obliterated them.  

Elsinor - Helsinger

Wherever we have been around Copenhagen and this coastal area we have noticed beautiful granite paving, couples, setts, steps, etc. These are in every possible colour, and form a beautiful and almost unnoticed walking surface. I wonder where it has all come from – because I think Denmark is mostly a sandy soil and not ancient granite. Perhaps it came from Sweden? I must find out.

We are heading home today, and I’m very sad because it’s all been so harmonious - some people have respectfully and mournfully mentioned Brexit but we have been able to avoid fretting about it.

Yesterday‘s outing was to the castle at what we call Elsinore, now known as Helsinger in Danish. Shakespeare has generated a lot of tourist money for the town – if Hamlet ever existed, who knows? 

The castle is much later than the setting of the play. It forms a large square round a deep courtyard, a slightly gloomy structure with broad spiral staircases and pleasant rooms, some with views over the Øresund to Sweden. A steady troupe of tourists ambles around. A graphic display and tiny cell are used to illustrate how the poor – possibly ex-conscripts – and anyone convicted of theft, could be enslaved and made to labour there for decades. It was the Royal Castle but never used for permanent residence. In fact it seems mostly to have been a giant grocery store, piled up with goods, waiting for the king and his court to come back for his next visit.

Citadel & waterbus

In the event we did not get as far as the David collection. But we explored the wonderful citadel which in map plan looks very like the fortifications made by Vauban at Gravelines (n of Calais) which we visited to 3 weeks ago. 

  

The two ‘castles’ are huge, flamboyant and roughly contemporary. At Gravelines the ramparts are faced with stone and stand at a slightly steeper angle, and here they are grassy banks, now planted with trees and forming a beautiful public park with the military base still intact in the centre. There’s a fine Dutch style with an ornamental top and a beautiful church which is now used a lot for weddings. We saw it being prepared for one with tiny sprigs of white flowers at the ends of the pews, while we sat and admired its huge plain white space. There is a beautiful model ship hanging from the ceiling of the nave – a nave within a nave – something we have seen in other Danish churches.

Walking down to the harbour we decide to take to take the ferry across the water to Reffen, which is billed as the largest street food market in the Nordic countries. It’s quite hard to know what to choose but we shared a couple of takeaway dishes and had a nice time. We decided not to go to the big weekend art fair as the entry charges were just too high. 

We took the jolly waterbus back to the main part of the city and explored a very smart supermarket there on the quay with a remarkable range of extremely expensive things presumably just for the benefit of tourists coming by cruise ship from further along the wharf, and then slowly wandered home. 

Having supper with my aunt’s sister was extremely pleasant – it’s strange seeing how two houses, both so different in architectural style, can nonetheless look very similar, with family objects on display and a similar instinct for arrangement.

During the night two colossal thunderstorms seemed to centre over our house. I have never heard such huge cracks of thunder and the lightning was almost continuous for two separate hours at a time. I was extremely grateful to be tucked up warm snug and dry in bed while the storms raged outside. 

This morning the sky looks ragged and distressed as if it has not yet vented all its spite.