St Brieuc, Port le Légué.

This is the river mouth and old port area of St Brieuc, which is our departmental town.  Of all the department capitals of Brittany, St Brieuc is probably the least well known and least glamorous.  But it can grow on you.

The port has a varied history, at different times timber from the Baltic, linen from the interior, shale and marle, building stuff, fishing vessels, all kinds of things passed through it, and there are people from all over the world whose families have been established there for ages.  I don't know a huge amount about it.  Sometime in the sixties I think, they built a massive flyover to carry the route nationale.  It towers over the port settlement, but makes surprisingly little noise.  It give one the sense of being in some land of the giants, and somehow makes me think of a Terry Gilliam animation.

Le Légué is coming up in the world.  There are some chic restaurants, art galleries and a few trendy shops, and they've tried to establish it as a yachting marina.  But it's still a working port, its topography and tidal movements are not suited to day tripping and large pleasure craft, so happily, it will never be a resort of the very rich in their floating gin palaces.  The sailing craft that moor up there are mostly quite modest, the arty folk that are establishing themselves there seem a down-to-earth and homely bunch, and plenty of people look like they've always been there.  There's an industrious feel about it; it insists on being itself, though it's happy to scrub up nicely.

Last week, we ended up there, rather by hazard.  We'd had a late-ish night feeding some friends (the lateness more to do with our finishing off the wine and lounging about after the washing-up, too lazy to go to bed, than the riotousness of the assembly), and when we got up, Tom said 'Let's go out.  If we stay home we'll fritter the day.  Lunch at the Green Cafe.'

Uncertain whether I wanted a meal out after the night before, but knowing I needed one or two things, and inclined to take advantage of my often stay-at-home other half's cheerful impulse, we went, and actually chipolatas and chips were rather good comfort food.  Instead of the usual paper menus as placemats at the Green Cafe, there were flyers advertising a themed week on the subject of the Arctic, down at le Le Rosengart, a restaurant and conference centre very tastefully converted from an former boatbuilding building at the port (the building on the left of the river in the picture).  The film and lectures we weren't really up for, but there was an exhibition of photographs, so off we went.

The photos, large black and white blow-ups of Greenland were only really a quick browse.  Some were stunning, but there was a slight element of romantic ethnography about Inuit life, in particular the hunting of polar bears, which made us a bit uncomfortable.  I know tribal people in harsh environments have to hunt... but anyway.

So we wandered on. And indulged in one of our favourite activities, looking at boats.

And boaty things,

many of which were blue.

The Scotch Queen is a very old herring fishing boat, which has had all kinds of interesting advetures.  She's here as a kind of museum piece now.

And then we looked at buildings and other oddments, and had a most delicious tea experience.

But I'll tell you about that tomorrow.

No larger than the nail on my little finger, miniature works of amber shellac, hanging on the dry brown stems of the summer's foxgloves.  Is there anybody in there?

~~~

The same day Qarrtsiluni said they'd still take my photos in and around the chapel, if I didn't mind making a new commentary, and if my admirably loyal readers didn't mind being directed to yet more on the same subject, an elderly local historian, who I'd completely forgotten I'd contacted, having sent an e-mail off into the ether of his general direction some days ago, mailed me back with an enormous attachment, reams and reams of French in tiny Marigold font, with everything ever known on the history, archaeology and toponymy of Tredaniel and its environs.  I thought I wouldn't be able to read it without getting some form of mad-eye, but before I knew it I was totally absorbed.  Thus passed much of my afternoon.  Though having finished my assignment on the effective teaching of English vocabulary, I felt I could live dangerously and indulge my passions.  I curled in my cool blue room, and wrote about cool bright air.

~~~

Then bad news from an old friend and fellow blogger, which leaves me troubled for her.

~~~

The rain it raineth every day now, and my Toussaint holiday is nearly over.  I've done some of the things I intended to.  Molly lazes her days away and gets up too early in the mornings.  Tomorrow the weather forecast says will be better, so we'll head off to Dinan, a holiday outing we'd been promising ourselves.  With curry.

Lucky

By the plan d'eau, a particular stand of sycamores which turn unusually varied and bright in their colours, with some dogwoods and others, reflected in the lightly moving water.  Hitting the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' enhancement button in Picasa, 'Lucky' seemed to mean adding shades of lilac and turquoise.  I can't say I mind.

Yes, I'm still doing the quick and easy babyish thing with Picasa, rather than bending my mind to Photoshop.  Though a while back I discovered the 'liquefy' effect in the latter.  It's good fun, but it's nice when nature does the liquefying for you too.

Turning round the summer and winter clothes today; I've put it off long enough, though the pullovers look itchy and hot and uninviting. Tom's assembling the new ceramic storage heaters, so we should be warmer this winter, though we've still not had a fire.  They often say round here that the weather turns abrubtly at Toussaint, and it did.  But we have been lucky; October's been so kind and golden.

For Toussaint, revisiting the Seven Saints.

' The great advantage of the saints was that they actually existed in the material world.   Some of them can still be seen in churches, where they have a dual audience: a parishioner or a pilgrim communicating with a real being, and a tourist looking at an example of religious art.  A saint was not a theological concept or an artisitic representation.  The statue or the figurine was the saint.'

(Graham Robb 'The Discovery of France', ch 7, 'Fairies, Virgins, Gods and Priests')

Robb's book is one that has impressed me perhaps more than any I've read this year.  Revelation is an overused word, but it is what it is; it unveils things I have struggled or been unable to see about the country I live in, provides a key to things hitherto closed.  A highly accomplished scholar of France and French literature, he spent four years cycling the length and breadth of the country researching aspects of its social history the depth of which are astonishing.  It causes me by turns to gasp, laugh aloud and, occasionally to weep, in part at the sufferings and hardship described, but also with regret at the passing of a world so rich and strange. In all, it caused me to wonder, and his writing is inspired, full of affect without giving any cause to doubt his accuracy and academic authenticity .  It's difficult to avoid quoting vast tracts of it here, or getting into the territory of reviewing it, but the discipline of daily blogging means best keep within parameters... There's a good NYT review here.

I was reading it when, back in August, I set off to revisit the Seven Saints chapel at Trédaniel, about which I have written before, with a view to finding some images for the current Qarrtsiluni theme of 'Words of Power'.  It was just after Assumption, when places dedicated to the Virgin Mary get a bit of special extra fuss, and imagine my surprise when I found that, not only was the chapel full of flowers and candles, but the Saints were back!

They are not the originals, which were stolen many years ago, nor the faithful copies which replaced them, which were also stolen rather more recently, but very carefully made new wooden copies.  They aren't at all bad, in my view, keeping and even perhaps strengthening the essential naivity of the originals, while bringing in a consistency of scale and palette of colours , and a simplicity of line which those rather lacked.  I've been meaning to find out who made them, and how they went about it, but so far haven't done so.  I am slack about keeping up with local press, and on-line information is hard to come by.

I admired the new arrivals, only regretting that the little roughly carved wooden dog who had led the blind St Hervé, and who had survived the theft, had somehow or other disappeared in the clean-up.

 I wondered afresh at the enigmatic angel with the book in granite relief,

and enjoyed the Virgin's starry blue gown, the baby Jesus' flannel nighty, and the Little Breton's red coat.

And in my search for Words of Power, I looked at the votives, plaques in marble, the oldest of which dates from the late 19th century, but the majority of which were from the 20th century, and even one or two from the 21st.

Robb points out that the veneration of local saints, which I've tended wrongly to think of as particularly Breton or Celtic, was truly a pagan thing, in the word's original sense of being of the pays, the local region, these spirits are rooted to the spot, earthbound.  Many local legend told of fruitless attempts to relocate images and statues, which magically became too heavy to move.  And their powers were practically and materially helpful to the people who invoked them by means of practical and material actions. There are hilarious stories of statues having bits of their anatomy rubbed and scraped away to effect the relevent remedies, and equally, of their being punished, thrown in rivers, thrashed, and dragged through nettles when they failed to deliver the goods.  People's relationships with the sacred was nothing if not down to earth. Their names were also construed to appertain to their powers, so St Clair was (who is believed once to have been among the saints in the chapel at Trédaniel) was supposed to help people's bad sight, St Pissoux to fix with urinary troubles, and the feast of All Saints, Toussaint, which is today, was said to be the time to pray to cure a cough, as it sounds like the verb tousser, to cough.

'These beliefs' Robb says, 'thrived on the established church like mistletoe on an oak'. Even the figure in St Bernadette's vision at Lourdes was described by her as 'uo petito damisela',  (she didn't speak French as we recognise it), dressed in white with flowers round her feet, which had a special meaning, not the holy Virgin she was eventually interpreted as, but a fairy, a not-always-benign nature spirit.  However, as he says, 'the vital point was not the metaphysical status of the being but her actions and sympathies'.

(St Mamert, who specialises in disorders of the stomach, especially in curing troubled babies of their colic, holds his exposed entrails carefully between his hands, all the while smiling beatifically.)

I braved the adders, and took the path down through the woods to the fountain, the holy well that probably predates the chapel as a place of healing.  A fallen tree, long since assimilated into the landscape and ivy-covered, forms a low arch in front of it.

 

A lop-armed crucifix, with the typical gingerbread-man granite Jesus, stands before the stone basins built around the spring,

where people have thrown in other votive offerings, as they always do.  The wishing well tradition derives from something much older.

I was followed by a foursome of Parisians, who had alighted, wearing slightly pastiche clothing, chiffon skirts and light trousers, from an open-top retro sports car.  They asked me what I knew of the place, and I tried to tell them as much as I was able.  It seemed to me slightly ironic, an agnostic expat Englishwoman with an interest in the quaint and folklorique and a bunch of dressed-up Parisian sophisticates earnestly comparing notes at a ruined and deserted place of former peasant  belief (and 'peasant' too, comes from the same root as 'pagan'...).

They skipped back up the path, and left the place to us.  As I was leaving, I saw another homespun votive, mysterious and poignant, written in marker pen on the ivy stems clasping the fallen tree trunk,

'Cécile, we miss you.'

~

The lasting changes to the world of saints and fairies came when people were no longer exposed to the frightening, isolated little worlds where unknown creatures lived complex lives of their own.  The great symbol of secularized France is not the operating theatre or the ballot box but the vast megalithic alignments of autoroutes that bypass towns and villages and offer just an occasional glimpse of a cathedral spire fleeing across the landscape.  New, high-speed roads erased the pagan spirits by removing knowledge of the spaces where they lived.  The spaces themselves are still there, and when the small road on the map turns into a track and the sky defies the weather forecast, it takes an act of faith to believe that their sacred inhabitants never existed.

(Graham Robb, 'The Discovery of France'.  Read it.)

~~~

Qarrtsiluni kindly accepted two of the photos I took; I have used slightly different ones here.  I'll post when they are published there.

Blogger's new post editor is really good once you get used to it.  You can upload all your pictures in a stream, keep them in reserve and just pop them into the text when you want, change their size and position sur place, delete and replace them. No more HTML headaches for me!  And it has a preview button that really works, and an undo/redo function... Go check on settings if you don't have it and change it.  Well worth the bother. 

This year's pumpkin.

We didn't grow any pumpkins this year, and I didn't think to seek one out for Halloween, or to do much to mark it at all, it's very much an optional feast here.

Then J turned up with a massive tranche of one, grown by their friends H and H in Ile-et-Vilaine, when they came round the other night. 

I meant to take a picture of it next to Molly, to give a sense of scale; it's about as big as she is.

It looks a little watery and insipid, as mega-veg like this often are.  But it's a handsome brute anyway.

I think what I'll do is, bake it in the oven underneath tonights pintade - guinea fowl - along with the chestnuts I've been finding in my pockets, and plenty of things that do taste of something: onions, garlic, herbs some sun-dried tomatoes in oil I've got in a jar... oh and not forgetting a stock cube or two!  It's a trick that works well with all manner of rather bland vegetables.

So that's Halloween sorted out.

~~~

And tomorrow begins Nablopomo, when one can blog every day, legitimised by custom, without worrying about imposing unduly on one's gentle readers' patience.  I'm quite up for it this year, I think, though whether my internet connection will be is another matter.  Last year Tom was in hospital and the phone lines went down and my resolve to blog daily quickly did likewise.

Happy All Souls, see you on All Saints!

Three October haiku

Clouded yellow, down

and out in the marigolds

white with exhaustion.

~~~

Morning's minion treads

the blue afternoon, enhanced,

grainy and owlish.

~~~

Works in progress

making mountains out of molehills.

Hugo's on his hols.

~~~

(Trying out Blogger's new post editor, in the run-up to Nablopomo.  Don't know if I like it yet, though it does give you an extra-large option on pictures, and a jump break...  Anyone else using it?)

(Post-post edit, extra large just chops the end off the photo in this layout.  Large does too.  Great.)

Lumix likes leaves,

red oak ones,

and others.

And rosehips that the birds have pecked (they like the hard and hairy seeds, the sweet flesh they don't bother with...)

and those weird purple berries,

and sometimes, leafy landscapes.

Through the pinhole.

As I mentioned before, the Lumix has a novelty setting called 'pinhole'. This is supposed to produce the effect of an old pinhole camera, softening the focus, leaching out the colour, and creating an ellipsoid penumbra around the subject. It seems a quaint irony that it is a mark of the camera's sophistication that it has a special function to mimic its primitive ancestor.

However, the results can be intriguing. Doubtless the same could be achieived using Photoshop, but would take more time, and also, doing it on the camera, the file size is significantly reduced, the images being well under a megabyte in size against the 4 mb or more when the camera is used normally, whereas using PS would probably increase their size.

I took it out the other day on a walk, on the kind of day at this time of the year when all is grey, bleak and sparse, the colours already leached out of things. The recent maize harvest, though welcome as always for opening up the countryside, revealing views which had long been absent, also temporarily has the effect that always occurs when something substantial is removed that one has become accustomed to seeing there, of uncomfortable, bereft absence, where other things struggle to fill the unwonted space. And the land always looks so muddied and spent, so sucked bare by it. The stalks are wan ghostly things, they look like an indecipherable script, an attempt to write from a bad dream, something wanting but failing to be understood.

Altogether, a melancholy day and a melancholy mood, and the dark-surrounded, desaturated, stripped-back pinhole images were exactly what we called for.

The tree stands forlornly over an ossuary of other trees.

In the view down to the mournful sarcophagus of Plémy church, I haven't desaturated the image at all, only warmed it up to make it like sepia.

And the scraggy sallows reflected in the factory warehouse window didn't need any enhancement to render them sepia,

neither did the sunburst view inland, to make it gloomily dramatic.

But in the orange opening of the iris foetidissima pod I have increased the colour, so that it seems to emerge quite joyfully from the dark around it.

The only remedy for melancholy is melancholy. We need shadows, even, or especially, invoked ones.

Next time, perhaps, Lumix will show you something more luminous...

Catalpa

(Sorry, I realise this sounds very morbid and melancholy! Lumix likes leaves, so we went to the arboretum. I've always loved the name 'catalpa', the Yeats quote was the only one that came to mind...)