Wednesday 14 July (Bastille Day)

~ The other day, I asked myself why buy beer, even quite nice, artisanale Belgian, French or  Breton beer, from a big supermarket when there's a micro-brewery, the Brasserie de Launay, just down the road?  So I stop by the roadfront house by the old Gare de Moncontour, peer through the glass door into the front room which has been turned into a plain and makeshift little bar, then find the young chap with the long dark pony-tail, who I've seen coming and going around there, in the garage space next door, with some large vats and tubes, and a couple of big buckets of fragrant brown mush which I take to be something to do with hops and malt.  He is graceful and pleasant to talk to, and I follow him over the road to a storeroom.

You have an accent, he remarks, (which can be a polite way of saying your French is rubbish...) and suggests that  English people often like the rousse, the darker beer more like an English bitter, it's even made with English hops, or maybe malt - giving me a name I forget now but which I'm sure I've heard Rouchswalwe, our resident brewing expert, mention - and persuades me quite easily to take a bottle of this as well as some of the blonde which I tend to prefer in summer.  They are unpretentiously bottled and labelled, and are both very good.  Tom has not drunk beer for a long time, but is rather taken with the idea, and we share the bottle of rousse this evening.  It has a good head and flavour, and does taste a bit like a nice British bitter.  I think I'll go there again.

~  Having swallows as next door neighbours - they're nesting in the garage again - you begin to understand something of their language.  The calls this afternoon are quite different from their usual exuberance, or the histrionics provoked by cat, magpie or even sparrowhawk.  They are quieter and more earnest, as if they prefer not to waste too much energy.  I step outside and see a couple of them pursuing a hobby, at one point seeming to make contact with it.  This is quite brave as the small falcon is very agile, and could turn and catch one of them.  It wheels round and they chase it quite low overy the roof, so I can see its streaked breast and Egyptian-looking face.  I never see one of these birds of prey without an intense feeling of wonder and privilege, though I would be sad if it ever caught one of our swallows.

~

Hoverfly shenanigens.  Not something you see every day.  Perhaps not something you'd want to, but I do like hoverflies, so I don't mind them making more.

Friday 9 July

~  A bottle of Ch'ti  beer, chilled.  It has a champagne-type wired cork, which explodes from it vehemently; it doesn't foam, but a mist rises from its pebbly brown glass rim.

~  Tom waters the garden with the hose.  A blue tit flies down onto the white Winchester Cathedral rosebush and hangs from its stems and leaves, drinking the droplets.

~

~  Saints' motifs and emblems, from the windows of the monastic chapel at Pontmain.  The cock, the two fish together and the keys are St Peter's, the dove and the upright fish are with St Francis, the dove held in his hands.  I forget who had the little beehive cell like an igloo. 

(I can't find any very useful links about Pontmain as a place; most of the available information about it, both on-line and at the place itself, concerns the story of the apparition of the Virgin Mary to a group of children there in the 19th century, which led to it becoming a shrine nearly as important as Lourdes, apparently, rather than the resulting 20th century art and architecture there.  It's in the Mayenne, near where my brother lives.)

Black harp black wheat black beer for the Black Month

A quick break from croppings for beer. This is dedicated to Rouchswalwe, the expert. 

Telenn du is a beer dark in colour but light in texture, like a feathery Guinness.  It is made with organic buckwheat, known here as blé noir, black wheat, because it is much darker and coarser than ordinary wheat flour.  It's also called sarrasin, because originally it came from somewhere far away, they knew not where.  Sarrasin comes from Saracen; there are still myths that it was brought back to Brittany by the Crusaders, but really I think it came out of Central Europe.  It's just that the Saracens were the archetype of the foreign and mysterious, hence the sarsen stones at Stonehenge, the blue stones which form the central circle so much older than the rest, so no one could work out where they came from, therefore they must have been saracen.  In fact they came from Wales.  The words Guinea, Muscovy and Turkey also came to mean anywhere exotic and fabulous, and were applied vaguely to anything of uncertain non-indigenous origin, like turkeys, and guinea-fowl, and Muscovy ducks.  Funny it was always poultry.

I'm quite a fan of buckwheat.  It's full of goodness and free of gluten. I like it cooked as a grain like rice, and I also like galettes, buckwheat pancakes, wrapped round sausages, or filled with all kinds of stuff: ham, bacon, eggs, cheese, onions, mushrooms, cooked tomatoes, even trout or salmon and spinach and creme fraiche, though my neighbours have been known to pull faces at this idea.  You can make them as carnivorous or vegetarian or even vegan, since they're made without egg, as you choose.  We don't eat them often enough as Tom doesn't really like them.  One of my students makes them from scratch, most people buy them, and hers are like fairy food.  I have never eaten kig ar farz, the buckwheat dumpling cooked in a bag with what is pretty much a standard pot au feu of meat and veg.  It is so local to one area of western Finistere that it is unobtainable here, and I am told you really need exactly the right kind of bag to cook it in.  I can't find a decent link to it in English, of much in French either.  It is one of my ambitions, hopefully a more easily realisable one, to partake of it, either by travelling to the right neck of the woods or by cooking it myself, but I'd need to get a few people round to make it worthwhile.

Buckwheat has an earthy, slightly mushroomy flavour.  I imagine I can taste this in the beer, or perhaps I really can.

Telenn du means black harp in Breton.  I wonder if this is a reference to Guinness or just a coincidence.  The Breton for buckwheat is gwinizh du, apparently, black wheat again.  We are also in maes du, the Black Month, which is how November is regarded in Breton, it seems.

But where the grain and the beer is concerned, black is beautiful.  It's light silky bitterness would nicely offset the roasted turkey, and even candied sweet potatoes... 

Happy Thanksgiving !

~~~

Postscript - Please take the time to read Setu's wonderful crêpe lore and related matters in the comments.  Delicious!

Horses and daffodils

As I have said, this really ought to be what I call this blog, since said items feature rather often. While making the pink and yellow grid collage the other day, I inadvertantly hit the multi-exposure option instead, and discovered another potential source of frittering away hours messing about...

If you use a lot of different images, they become so dense as to become almost unrecognisable as anything, the vertical slices are the result of using both landscape and portrait orientations,

and for some odd reason, if you use a really large number of photos, it can't always cope with it and only produces a heavily horizontally cropped section, like the one below.

I do like Picasa, the editing tool for idiots. However, lovely Apprentice, by whose photographic, poetic, horticultural and many other skills, and general greatness of soul I am unfailingly impressed, is taking me in hand, and very generously going to share her Photoshop secrets and try to teach me. I have Photoshop, in French. I have always pleaded this as the reason I don't get to grips with it, but it is largely a pathetic excuse; everything is in exactly the same place, and, frankly, an unsharp mask means as little to me in English as whatever is it's French equivalent. So in anticipation, and not to be entirely unprepared, I have been trying to find out about curves. Anything I read in books or on webpages failed to get anything through my thick head as to even what the two axes on the curves graph represented, but then I found this video on Youtube, and the penny dropped.

However, what also became clear was that there was a huge amount more I didn't understand. Socrates was right, the old smartarse. At the moment, I'm not really able to achieve much more with curves than with Picasa's little shadows and highlights sliders, until I find out more.

So this is my mission, to learn more of Photoshop, with Apprentice's very generous help. Though I might still find myself slipping back over to Picasa to mess about in a hit and miss fashion.

***

A couple of updates:

I took the collage to post to Bangalore, from where it should be forwarded to Bihar. Asked if they could put some pretty stamps on it, and the post-lady said, might it not be stolen for the stamps, she had heard that could happen...? To be on the safe side she printed out a vignette instead. Is this a possibility?

Throat is better, and I'm tasting almost everything normally again, except for red wine ( I haven't tried white...), orange juice is OK, not quite right. However, in my rediscovery of beer, I have also rediscovered the fabulous Brasserie Lancelot. Difficult to say which is more beautiful, the artwork on their bottles or the heavenly nectar contained within. The one made with blé noir, buckwheat, called Telenn du, is like a light, soft, smooth Guinness, but better, and when the blonde pure malt Duchesse Anne I opened this evening exploded much of its contents on the kitchen worktop, I unashamedly spooned as much as I could rescue into my glass rather than waste a drop. The founder really is called Lancelot and the brewery is situated in the Forest of Broceliande. Some kind of magic is there.