Jul 27
On a beautiful day nearly two years ago, The Brains, The Bean and I set off for a walk that starts in the wonderfully named St Poncy (if you are English this will make you smile – my American is not good enough to know if Ponce means the same in your vernacular). Along the way three became four and this is the piece I wrote at the time – I hope you will enjoy it.
My home is in France. I will reside in the USA until mid-October. My heart breaks for this place. Of course my heart breaks for France. It’s my status quo. That my heart is breaking is hardly surprising. Here, numerous lives wasted by guns. In France, just about to lift it’s highest possible security alert after the abominable attacks last year, 84 literally mown down and numerous others injured many left in a life-threatening condition which you can seamlessly translate to ‘if they live they will have a steep slope to climb if they are ever to live a full life again’ in Nice on 14 July. A bloodbath on 14 July in France, by the way, is akin to a massacre on 4 July in the USA..
And then there are those others. The copious blood spilled in numerous locations which cannot have escaped your attention, lives exterminated, bagsfull maimed in other places. None of it is justifiable to a reasonable person let alone a pacifist. None of it is right to a rationalist let alone an idealist. All of it bids to erode my inate and possibly foolish optimism. But I will not let awful un-lawful acts rule my life. I will strive to find a way through.
How so? How on earth? First I must comment that what happened in Nice is in all likelihood not a terrorist attack. You can play with the semantics, of course and you can tell me that most nutters root back to religion, politics or any combination therein that feeds their sick souls but I don’t count that. An organisation has taken the most half-hearted responsibility for the 19-tonne truck deliberately barrelling down le Promenade des Anglais just when it was bound to be full of revellers gathered for le Fête Nationale. They were clearly going to. Fear bolsters up their macho resolve, so to claim responsibility is almost inevitable. Some sort of tenous connection makes us all feel even more scared. When I was growing up in England it was the IRA – any mention had us quivering in our boots, soiling our knickers and feeling very very insecure. The world moves on. Though I must say that I fear that the IRA never really went away. And the recent British Brexit vote that narrowly resolved to leave the EU (or UE if you are French) will add fuel to that nicely weakening fire. So claims are made and responsibility often falsely attributed and we all quake and shake and wonder if we can really really go out of our front door safely and if our babies and their babies and their babies not even thought of are ever EVER going to be safe.
I put two notions to you.
The first is this. We have become an increasingly tiny planet. By this I do not mean that the world has physically shrunk from a big fat fully inflated and energetic basketball to a teeny weeny, possibly depressed ping-pong ball but rather that we know what goes on in every crevice and we feel a part of it where once we did not. Media and especially social media shout and scream at us even when we sleep – buzzing and bleeping and flashing that something is happening. I remember Gerry Anderson’s ‘Thunderbirds’ – I remember those puppets being woken by the bleep-bleep of a catastrophe. And they went out and resolved it. Solved it. Made it all right again. Kept us safe. Now we all bleep and buzz and ring and weep. It is not healthy. We cannot absorb it all. Leeloo in the 1990s sci-fi film, ‘The Fifth Element’ starring Bruce Willis, of all people, could not absorb it without breaking down with the sheer emotion of it, and she was manufactured to be the savior of humankind – it’s too bluddy much for one person, one creation, to take in:
The second notion is born of my idealistic nature. I think that if we can, and do spread love and decency and kindness and tolerance eventually (not in my short life-time), eventually the world will see sense. I will leave the notion of spilling blood to others. But I will give you this thought. This weekend I had a situation that should have ruined my relationship with my husband. This weekend I was told I was hated by his son, by one of his son’s closest friends. This weekend I could easily have told my husband I wanted to terminate our relationship because of his closest kin, his spawn. But I didn’t. I squawked and I cried and I shouted and I threatened but I stayed. Out of love, I stayed. I am imperfect. If I can reach into my vat of love, we all can. I say this because I am absolutely unperfect. Blemished and scarred and not at all pure. So it stands to reason in this tiny brain of mine that we CAN all tolerate if we firstly want to and secondly put a little thought into the process. Here’s the thing, we can all be decent just because we want to be decent. It is absolutely in all our hands and minds and hearts to want to change and to stop being selfishly driven by our own needs and to accept that we are all particular and that none of us is a better particular, a more worthy particular than any other.
The picture is in response to the Weekly Photo Challenge ‘Detail’ – my title is a bastardisation of the known (‘The devil is in the detail’) and the less known but proper (‘le bon dieu est dans le détails – ‘The Good of God is in the details‘). With my mish-mush belief system I can take from both and manipulate you as all good terrorists do. What I will bring to you is the detail of harmony, peace and tolerance – not things that just magically happen but things that require work. My picture illustrates this through the idea of a diversity of lichens co-existing on a rock.
If this is my rock then let it be known that every religion,whatever colour, LGBT, men, women, straight and yet to be determined, able bodied, disabled, are welcome, Don’t rock me and I won’t rock you. Fact.
PS: I find it interesting that ‘The Devil is in the detail’, most notably attributed to 20th Century German Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is the accepted venacular over the original le bon dieu est dans les détails which is attributed to Gustav Flaubert (author of my beloved Madame Bovary) who died twenty years before the turn of that century. God-Devil. Good-Bad … personally I think we are better placed attempting to be good ourselves rather than bathing in books and falling back on them when their language will surely fail us so long after they were supposedly penned.
The first time I saw this place, I was on honeymoon three years ago (or thereabouts). The place my husband had chosen for this special moment is owned by the most delightful of men.
A self-proclaimed Royalist, he is married to a psychiatrist who practices her head shrinking in Marseilles some 5 hours south-east of his bijou chateau in Aurillac. They speak every day, and lovingly, by phone and sometimes he goes to see her and sometimes she comes to see him. At the time we had no concept that the next 2 ½ years would see us in the same tub. The mere notion would have seemed absurd.
A man of short stature and with magnificent, almost Dali-esque, waxed moustachios he is quite clearly Hercules Poirot’s long-lost, should be discovered twin, separated at birth. He is positively a mine of information, a historian and a trawler of knowledge with that sponge-like ability to soak up every last teeny drop. Rather like a human hoover, he vacuums up all the specks of material in his path, then assimilates them, files them according to relevance in the boggling laberynth that is a mind and brings them forth at the precise moment of crowning relevance. And with quiet aplomb. Like nurturing a perfect fruit to pluck and present it at it’s precise moment of optimum ripeness. His great joy, therefore, apart from providing an impeccable interlude for his guests, cooking delicious local recipes from local ingredients and sharing, free of charge the contents of his not insignificant cellar, is to impart tips and advice and to guide his guests to even greater enjoyment of what is already a perfect break. Never to debate or undermine, he coaxes your holiday spirit out of hiding, assesses it with the expert eye of the head of a great household assessing the crystal and silver and porcelain laid for a banquet and only then makes suggestions which are as carefully and thoughtfully shared as a glorious vintage from a gleaming decanter and your breath baits as you wait for the treasure to be revealed. For treasure it will surely be. He is quite one of the finest souls I have ever encountered in a lifetime studded with fine souls. The most absurd thing, or perhaps the most sensible, is that he does not advertise his wares at all on the interweb … like the wild mushrooms he served to us in a perfectly executed sauce, you have to know where to seek him and sometimes I wonder if we dreamed him into being in our collective-romantic.
On our second morning he suggested we visit Rocamadour. It is just over the border in the Lot departement. Although it attracts tourists like a swarm of bees to a pollen filled flower-garden I would recommend anyone in the faintest locale to go. It quite literally is built onto the rock and cleaves and clings to it with majestic defiance. That it is medieval and that they managed to believe and then achieve this is beyond my puny imagination ….
Since that entrancing start to our married life, I have been back to Rocamadour just once with my eldest daughter on a blistering hot July day when even the rocks seemed to be clammy with salt perspiration rather than the usual cooling dampness of vast stones. I took this picture that day and it seems to fit the weekly photo challenge this week titled ‘Look Up’ and as ever you will find all the other laudable entries here.
The staircase screams to me of Escher and so I snipped him for my title:
‘Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it’s in my basement – I’ll go upstairs and check’ – M.C Escher
PS: Last year we revisited the chateau we had stayed in for those first enchanted days of our marriage, armed with a book. It was a copy of my late and always lamented father-in-laws opus‘The French Cheese Book’ because our host had lit up at the unimagined absurdity of an Englishman taking the time to journey throughout France discovering well in excess of 700 cheeses, but more than that to have spoken to multitudes of makers, farmers, dairy owners, researched the history of the terroirs, their people and their production and produced a work of such magnitude about FRENCH cheese one of which, by the way is a delectable little chêvre disc made in Rocamadour. These two men come in many ways of a common mold and it seemed entirely reasonable to give him a copy of the book, inscribed with our thanks for making the first days of our married journey so magical. He regarded it with the exact same reverence with which I look upon him.
I could have called this post ‘where there’s muck there’s brass’ which, if you are British you will know instantly is an old saying from the North of England that means ‘where there’s sh*t, there’s money’. But given that many of my readers are not British and on account of the much more important fact that I wanted to give you all a bonus at the end for being SO patient with me as I clawed my way back from the arrid desert of a dastardly writer’s block, I have opted for the title above.
The image was taken in April when we were back in our beloved Cantal for a few days and took the opportunity for a longish hike which promised a waterfall.
Alert as ever, my bat-like hearing was teased by a low humming which rose steadily to a gutteral grumble and finally a spluttering roar as rounding a corner on the craggy track we were ambling along, I was confronted by this. A tractor with a tank on the back spraying cow dung on the field. Muck spreading in fact. Actually, I should say that our olfactory glands were alert to the identity of the machine long before we spied him.
I will forgive you for wondering what on earth this has to do with the weekly photo challenge this week titled Jublilant. Even for me, this might seem a stretch. But bear with, do. In France the farmers always look positivily euphoric when they get the opportunity to splash some dung about. They sit in the cabs of their tractors with beatific smiles seemingly wafted to an odorous corner of paradise. I have no explanation for this. Perhaps you can help me out? But I do promise you I have studied the phenomena and it is a truism. The grumpy growers I have seen in England scowling from their cockpit, nose invisibly pegged, mouth set in an inpenetrable line, eyes stony and unyielding are a world away from these merry manure slingers and even though my nose may be wrinkling decorously at the fetid stench they are generating, they always upgrade my mood as they lift a paw casually from the steering wheel, like John Wayne riding one handed across the range, and bestow upon their mildly stunned audience a raptuous and infectious grin.
PS: I promised you a bonus and a bonus you shall have. And an explanation. When I saw the title I closed my eyes and imagined myself for a moment on Christmas Eve, the wireless turned on as I potter through the preparations for the big feast the following day listening to The Choir of Kings College, Cambridge sing carols and hoping this will be one of them.
If you are of my vintage, you will remember that Mike Oldfield produced a thoroughly exhuberent instrumental version. Here are Pans People, dream date of every boy of my age and every girls aspiration joyously dancing on BBC Top of The Pops in 1975.
You might have a favourite, I love both and I particularly love that In Dulci Jublilo means ‘in sweet rejoicing’ which is exactly what I am doing since I purged my clogged creative channel.
As I kiss au revoir to The Bean who is flying back to Boston with Two Brains whilst I fly to the UK to spend time with family and friends, it seemed only polite to re-post an early blog from her. Rest assured she is working hard on her transatlantic flying blog. After all when you are a jet-setting Bean it is your duty to share your wisdom with the masses ….
This place, this place, this place. However hard I try, I do miss this place. Snapped last summer during le canicule (the heatwave), this is my corner of France parched, thirsty – gasping for water but still flaunting green trees. And there’s a tower beckoning Rapunzels and Ladies of Shalott from far and wide. Or in my case just girls that never grew out of romantic ideas that a tower in a fanciful mind will make all those whimsical dreams come true. And give roots.
My offering for Claudette’s Emotography Challenge (free-form simplicity – just a simple ask that you offer a photograph along with the notion of the emotion it was prompted by or that it provokes in you) screams homesick to me.
Hence the necessary PS that my title is the teeniest stolen snippet of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues
These cows are blended cows. Not cows that have been put in a blender – that would be grisly and hopefully illegal. These are half and halfs and the palest are known as jaunes (yellows). The ancient cow of Cantal is the Salers. They were originally black and you still find blacks amongst them. They are celebrated and fêted and look as though they have migrated from Spain to avoid being Matador fodder. The more familiar Salers these days is a ruddy red – deep auburn and hardy. And pronged with splendid Harley Davidson handlebar horns. They are emblematic of their place. Their rich creamy milk goes to make the many cheeses for which the region is renowned – most commonly Salers itself, the ubiquitous Cantal, St Nectaire and Bleu d’Auvergne. Their meat is prized in the region and in Paris too – in fact if you visit the Cinquieme Arrondissment you will find that in addition to being the Latin quarter it is also a veritable hive of restaurants specialising in produce from Cantal including wonderful dishes based on Salers beef and veal. These cows are bovine A-listers in our locale. But some farmers, breed them with the great white Charolais, themselves beef royalty the world over. This breeding produces the yellows. They too are prized – their meat is sublime and the price is good. It is called progress by some, meanwhile the purists frown. I stand neutral. I’m not a farmer, not a native of Cantal and have no right whatsoever to judge. I just love cows. I find them to be rather harmonious creatures. So they seem appropriate sitting in their stunning landscape under a rudely blue sky on December 28th last year as my illustration of Harmony the word named as prompt this week for the Weekly Photo Challenge. I think you will agree that the panarama too is pretty easy on the eye – the grassy Plateau de Limon looking across to the Cèzallier mountains beyond and in between the snail like crater of one of the numerous volcanoes that gave the region it’s personality all those aeons ago.
But wait! There is one thing – if you look at the foreground you will see diggings. Not the minings of moles but mole rat shovellings … these pesky rodents have multiplied alarmingly in Cantal in the very recent past and they have become a tremendous nuisance. The question is can we live harmoniously with these critters or should steps be taken to eradicate them? I’ll leave you to ponder the damage they do to this wholly agricultural territory versus their right to peaceful occupation.
PS: The title is from The Sneetches by Dr Seuss, a story of creatures identical in every way to one another except for the stars on the bellies of the entitled ones … the moral is elementary – after all what hope have we of saving the planet if we can’t co-exist with our own without dwelling on what they have or have not upon thars!
An occasional series chronicling the tale of the renovation of a former medieval watch-tower in southern France …..
The previous owner of the house was a photographer of some talent. He could make the silkiest purse out of a lady pigs ear, of this I am certain. When we looked at his wonderful images on the numerous websites that carried Maison Carrée to her adoring public eager to stay for a few days and sample the delights of his culinary skill as well as the comfortable and welcoming interior she offered, we never once worried about wall coverings. Downstairs was pristine white and upstairs had some sort of nice neutrally wallpaper. When we arrived to view what turned out to be the Wreck of the Hesperus, one of the stand-out moments was the realisation of what that nice neutrally wallpaper actually was. Not wallpaper in fact. Not fabric. Nothing so outré for our Monsieur. Nay, nay and thrice I say nay … he’d gone a whole new road – a positive Route Nationale, a Motorway, an Interstate Highway. I can imagine the sprightly conversation he had with himself inside his head:
‘What shall I cover the upstairs walls with?’
‘How about floor, old chap ..?’
‘You genius! Floor! Of course – floor is the way forward for these walls. And shall we perchance wallpaper the floor?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Obviously not. That is an absurd notion’.
And so it was. Laminate clip together floor. But not just any laminate clip-together floor. Oh no! This was laminate clip-together bargain basement, below economy starter range floor. The floor that the salesman guides you too first before pointing out that absolutely anything at all that you choose from here will be better, even spending tuppence halfpenny more and thus securing himself an extra portion of fries on the commission he earns. That sort of laminate clip-together floor. And it had been slathered all over the walls. Look closely at the top picture …. do you see what I see?
Having done as bidden by the kind M. Terminateur so that his crew could busy themselves ridding our roof of those pesky vrillettes we occupied ourselves as best we could, whenever we could (remember it’s a four hour round trip from North West to South West tip of le Cantal on winding backroads descending and scaling deep gorges and negotiating tight épingles (épingles de cheveux being hairpins) and though I am presently living in the land of mahusive distances and ludicrously cheap fuel, I honestly think it’s a stretch for a daily commute that you aren’t getting paid for. I was polishing the staircase for entertainment one day when there was a thunderous crack followed by a thud, and a whisper later, a riotous crash. I dropped my bottle of special wood oil and rushed up the stairs (killing the chances of the oil drying to a gratifying sheen in the process) to find HB² looking frankly irritatingly smug. He had taken a crowbar and jemmied a generous sliver of the offending floor from the wall and underneath looked rather interesting.
He proceeded to slice his way through both the front bedrooms and the back one – the one with it’s cleverly placed shower delivering to a spontaneous auditorium at the back of the house for the ladies of the village, should he decide to give of his famed full frontal peep show once more. I’m considering selling tickets if we get desperate enough that we need extra funds. By lunchtime the walls were fully delaminated and revealing the secrets of their pre-veneered days. My nerves were in shreds because this stuff was razor sharp and entirely rigid. Two Brains clearly should have been wearing a helmet but instead favoured an interesting series of movements that echoed accurately St Vitus Dance to avoid being brained or scalped by the merest slither of a second. We had a car full of laminate to take to the lovely man at the déchètterie with the enviable view. After two p.m. Obviously. This is rural France and everything stops for lunch. For two hours. It took multiple trips in Franck our trusty unalluring but reasonably priced car and a deep and meaningful conversation to ascertain whether this vile material computes as wood. It doesn’t. It is to be viewed in the same way as a carnivore regards nut cutlets. It simply is not meat. Nor indeed wood.
Do you see what I see ….? It’s Franck skulking sneakily waiting for his next load of laminated booty
Meanwhile back at the ranch The Brains was eulogising over what had been uncovered. Previously we had paid scant attention to the one unplastered wall on the stairwell merely having a cursory discussion over whether we should give it too a smooth finish. But in that deluge of lethal laminate everything changed. It was akin to the moment in Carl Sagan’s Contact when Jodie Foster sees the universe with fresh eyes from a beach somewhere out ‘there’ that she has landed on after being lunged through space at a squillion miles an hour. In the comedy shower-closet bedroom are exposed the same glorious planks, cut by someone with an eye for rigidly even lines that rivals my mother’s. By way of explanation – my mother is a wonderful letter writer but has always shunned the slip of lined paper popped under the page to guide the pen evenly approach and consequently, although she commences elegantly (even now in her mid-eighties) she rapidly starts to wander at an angle so that by the time she reaches the bottom of the page she is writing at a 45° slope. It’s a foible that no-one ever mentions, but all notice. These walls were clearly made by a kindred charpentiere. They are of tongue-in-groove construction, about 9″-10″ wide and slender. They slot together very well sporting the odd large flat headed nail to complete the perfectly rustic and rather naïve effect.
And still the excitement continued. The layout of the house, and we had assumed the original layout, was a small landing with doors at right angles to one another. One into a bedroom with a square double doorframe through to a further room and the other into Peeping Tom’s Joy – the room with the freestanding shower in front of the window. But taking the cladding off the walls had revealed a door from PTJ into the back bedroom. This poses new questions about how we lay out the upstairs. Our thought process is fluid and a teeny bit erratic so this revalation just adds a zesty new spritz to the operation.
On the other side of the wall were further, piquant delights – loose hessian overlaid with several layers of historic wallpaper. A couple of florals, a groovy grey linear embossed which immediately took me back to the dull horrors of my childhood and my favourite, a sort of squarial pattern each square containing a picture – a flowerhead here, a windmill there, there again a boat, and even the makings of a medieval town. I wonder about the person lying in bed looking at the pictures – I wonder if they had ever travelled from Marcolès and whether they dreamed of getting on that boat and searching for treasures in far-off lands. In fact we know that a very tall Russian lady lived in the house for decades last century – maybe she was put in a boat to cross the sea or maybe her journey escaping White Russia as a small child was overland. Either way it must have been arduous, gruelling and not a little frightening.
I am reminded of another house long ago and far away in England. The girls and I lived in the grounds of the, by then closed, only Jewish Public School in the country (US readers Public School obscurely means Private School in England). Carmel College. There was a house called ‘Wall House’ which was perfectly invisible except for a front door with a letter box. In it lived a very very grand Russian lady of advancing years who wore astonishing velvet and brocade ensembles which cascaded to her ankles and conjured up vivid reminders of an age so bygone that I never knew it. She invited me to take tea. I was seated on a glamorous and very upright silk upholstered chair. She called out in Russian and clapped her jewelled hands smartly whereupon and instantly in the corner of the room a shabby bundle of cloth shifted revealing a remarkably decrepit and faintly moth-eaten man. He bowed and moved into the kitchen from whence he returned after a pause during which she and I continued a rather formal and resolutely non-probing conversation, bearing a silver tray complete with very ornate fine porcelain teapot and guilded and delicately painted teacups with their dainty matching plates on which were slices of terrifically inebriated fruit cake. He served us sombrely and then went back to his corner, disappearing like the Psammead into his quicksand of sheets. I suppose he had been with her all his life. The world is full of surprises and some of them are quite uncomfortable.
Anyhow, there was a statuesque Russian lady for many years in Marcolès. Hold that thought. Particularly the height. Because the other curiosity hidden behind the disgusting veneer is a series of oval holes. You might remember there is one that casts down on the stairwell from the privy giving it an air of anything but privacy. But there are more. Some have been boarded over and some stuffed with newspaper. But why? They are reminiscent of those holes you stick your head through on an English Pier and have your photo taken as a pin-up girl in an eye popping bikini or a muscle-bound man in striped bathers. The odd thing is the height of them. If you wanted to stick your head through them you would have to be a VERY lanky lady indeed. I imagine they were crude internal portholes to let some light into the middle of the house but I rather like the image of a Frenchman on stilts, complete with compulsary moustache peering through various cut-out holes just for laughs.
PS: When I arrived back after taking the very last load of the offending clip-together laminate flooring to the dump (and we have kept a plank as a grim reminder of the way it was) the elderly couple opposite were arriving back from a toddle out. They meandered across the street and asked me how it was going. Oh, really good I regailed them. We’re progressing well with the clear out of all the dreadful things – can you imagine, he had cheap laminate flooring on the walls. Lunacy – he was clearly mad. They nodded in that slightly absent way that polite people have and took their leave. As they opened their front door, I swear I could see laminate flooring on …. the walls. Just another oh bugger moment and a further reminder to self to keep thy big mouth shut.
The bonus is entirely to indulge my mother and the child-me that she raised – she used to play Johnny Mathis to us on the gramaphone in the drawing room on rainy days amongst so many other 45s of Unicorns and Doctor Kildaire, Nellie the Elephant and Dusty Springfield and Ferry Cross the Mersey and Doris Day, as we puzzled our puzzles, stuck our fuzzy felt and honed the skills required for taking tea with grand ancient Russian ladies by making our own tea party for the teddy bears. Those halcyon days when I didn’t question her lack of ability to keep a straight line when writing her comments on my report cards or the milk order because she was just simply ‘My Mummy’ ….
If you enjoyed this you might like to catch up on previous installments by typing Coup de Coeur into the search box in the side bar. The more the merrier at this party – so much more fun that way.
I think it was Voltaire who said ‘Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well’. Today I have Terry at Spearfruit to thank for nominating me for a Blogger Appreciation Award. Terry writes every day and is gradually piecing together for us his past, his present and his future. He has a very precise approach to telling his story. He has planned out rigidly what to divulge and when and runs separate linear threads that are gradually knitting and fusing to reveal his tapestry. It is the polar opposite of my own scattergun style and it is hugely engaging – I would encourage you to go and visit him … he’s a keeper. Actually I also need to thank Terry for the recent revelation that his name is Terry. Prior to this, when interacting I never quite knew whether it was etiquette to shorten him to Spear. Or Fruit. Or whether, out of politeness I needed to call him Mr Spearfruit. In seriousness, he has battled multiple issues and continues to have rather radical bumps thrown into his path and he is genuinely inspiring. He also shares the music that has patterned his life which I see as an extra perk (you will gather he has taste. If he didn’t the perk would be a punishment). And I appreciate him which means that his journey belongs to me in some way too. I am enriched.
The rules of engagement for this award are very simple (which can only be a good thing). You thank, you tell something positive about yourself and you suggest and notify as many bloggers as you wish to that you are passing the wand or cudgel depending on your personal style, to them.
Having thanked Terry, therefore, I need to write something positive about me:
Like many, I find it hard to write about me. Even though I refer to myself as Little Miss Me, Me, Me I’m not really comfortable banging on about self – I find other’s stories much more compelling and I am a shameless Pinocchio nosing around for the anecdote sitting in the café, passing me on the street, simply living a life.
So instead I will share the wisdom of a friend many years ago ‘find the purpose in the way things are’ …. he said it to me at a particularly bleak time in my life when pushing water up a hill and sticking needles in my own eyes seemed infinitely preferable to the status quo. And I wanted to thump him. But being non-violent, I chose instead to quietly niggle away at the statement and you know what? There is always a flip side. Always a positive to that negative. As Oscar Wilde said in his poignant and tragic ‘The Portrait of Dorian Grey’ ‘behind every exquisite thing that existed is a tragedy’. And that’s another personal positive – people do genuinely ask if I keep a portrait in the attic (I’m 98 if you were wondering) but the fact is that I simply have lucky genes. And I smile. A smile is the best accessory because it makes you feel so much better as well as looking better or at the very least looking fatuous and providing some necessary comedy in the day for the smilee.
And my nominees … all of them terrific and each quite different from the others:
On the road cooking – Pan makes delicious meals in the cab of her truck. Which she shares with Stewie. She’s a delight
Rose Bay Letters – nicknamed ‘the sidekick traveller’ by her son, Janet’s blog is such a pleasure. Whether travelling or at home in New England, she treats us to beautiful pictures and insights. We share a love of Oscar Wilde so the Dorian Grey is for her
Redo Sue – Sue writes, she says, because she has to. I read her blog not because I have to but because what she writes is really very very good
Maison Travers – Nadia is a South African born cordon bleu cook who lived two decades in Los Angeles before settling in le Dordogne where she runs a Chambre d’Hotes and cookery school. Delicious.
Sultana Bun – Lynda is a housewife and describes this as an admission of a dirty word. There is nothing dirty about this delightful blog – just humour and pathos and life. Its a joy.
So there you have it. Feel free to ignore me as the strange woman with the pokey nose who smiles inanely and continues to find the purpose in the way things are.
PS: The title is Benjamin Disraeli – ‘I feel a very unusual sensation – if it’s not indigestion, it must be gratitude’. I believe he said it to his arch enemy William Gladstone in some or other parliamentary debate. In these days when politicians seem so hell bent on throwing rocks and never quite managing to move the obstruction in their throat that prevents them from being gracious to one another or, heaven forbid acknowledging that the other might have some credence, it would perhaps be an idea to cast minds backwards and concede that not all progress is good progress. Manners maketh the man after all. Even when the man (or woman) has designs on great office.
The photos in this post were all taken on a balmy hot day in the Belledonne mountains above Grenoble. My father seemed so close as to be walking beside me that day over a decade since his death. His love, his influence are woven so thoroughly into my own tapestry – I may not be able to see him but I never fail to feel him.
I was fortunate to have two Grannies when I was small. In fact I had two until I was nearly 16 but unhappily one succumbed to dementia and was in a nursing home for nearly 8 years before her life extinguished. So, at the time, half of mine was spent with her vibrant, outspoken and faintly outrageous personality, full of bell-like tinkling laughter chiming through her house replete with rather exotic and eminently touchable artifacts and half with a shrinking, fading somewhat pathetic reminder of whom she had been. I remember being vaguely scared of her when we went to visit as she evaporated slowly away. She was withered and bent and painfully thin with skin parched and almost transparent through which the vessels carrying her aged blood were defiantly visible. Dessiccating. She had the faint odour of care home and often didn’t utter a sound except the thinnest of hints of breath in and out. When she did speak she had a habit of rambling in guttural spitty Arabic having lived in Egypt in the 1920s and 30s during the up-market tourist boom of that era when my grandpapa was chief accountant for Thomas Cook. Sadly it was a relief to be sent outside to play with the nursing home dog – an unfeasibly large pyreneen mountain dog called Uggles who resembled Nana in Peter Pan and was similarly hard-wired to nurse-maiding children. When she died at the age of almost 92 there were few left to mourn her so her funeral was tiny – eight of us including my cousins, my elder brother and I. So feeble were our collective voices that the crematorium put a cassette tape of the Kings College Choir singing our chosen hymns to bolster us up. Outside it was cold and damp and I realised my father was crying. I realised my father was a son. I realised my father was a feeling, emotional creature just like me. It was a seminal moment.
As I’ve grown older I miss her even though I barely had opportunity to acquaint with her and I wish I’d had the moment to know her better. I’m told I’m like her. I take it as the greatest compliment – she lost an arm in the First World War when nursing in France. Gangrene. Not carelessness, just caring for others in greater need. When we were small children she used to swing one armed into a string hammock and then pull us all in with her, one at a time and read us stories under the lilac trees. She also had a wonderful and positively enormous cat called Kim who resembled an overstuffed fur cushion. She was, therefore Granny Kim.
This lady sitting in les Jardins de Luxembourg hijacks me, reverses time and delivers me to a presentday now past and long forgotten yet seamlessly evoked. A time I wish I had noticed when the then was now. She knows nothing of her curious power of course as she casually soaks in the sunshine. Behind her the children play, the lovers drift hand in hand, friends gossip on benches. Every one of us growing older as time relentlessly moves us forward. Carpe diem.
I post the picture in response to The Daily Press Weekly Photo Challenge entitled ‘Time’ – you can see all the other, far worthier interpretations here
PS: The title is from one of the most touching and bittersweet poems I know ….
When You Are Old
WB Yeats
