Wednesday 17th August

~ Tom is looking for pictures of oranges, with leaves, for a painting reference.  An image search is put to me as a job, so I can settle into it browsing the internet looking at and collecting mouthwatering pictures with no sense of guilt whatsoever.

~ Potatoes or dumplings in the chicken soup?  As if I really needed to ask...

~ Photo:

The cats at no 32.  Also Josselin.
Or - Instances of the number 2.
Or - where's my bike?

Tuesday, 16th August

~ I went out to give J a lesson on forwarding and copying e-mails and text, so she can keep their numbers of distant friends informed about D's health, which isn't good now.  We had tea after, and Tom walked in unexpectedly, having been out and about on other business and thought he'd look in and see D.  The latter was at his radiotherapy session, and we left together, drove off separately but met up and got out at the top of the hill to give Molly a run.  She decided she'd swap cars for the rest of the journey, and we raced each other home (not at speed, just to see whose route is quicker), Tom taking his preferred wider, longer road past the house with the yellow pvc windows and up the Plemy road, and I the winding water tower route, past the donkeys and the black sheep and the house with the peeling gate and pink hydrangeas that I suspect our neighbour C may be renting, taking refuge from being divided into one less part than Gaul between his turbulent and rotund wife and his tungsten sparrow mother.  Tom was home before me but only just. 

We never usually get to meet in an impromptu way outside the house like this, and of course it requires a wasteful duplication of car use. Nice though.

~ A basket of greengages on the table, rapidly diminishing.  They are meltingly sweet, their insides taste gold and their skins green, even with your eyes shut.

Photo:

Cadeaux et souvenirs, loto et tabac.  Old couple seated in a restaurant window, Josselin.

Monday 15th August

~ Today was Assumption Day, and a public holiday - this fiercely secular country is remarkably attached to its religious feasts, movable and immovable. I decided to say 'begone dull virus' and take myself out.  In Quessoy, a small town near here, there is an odd little shrine which I've never quite established the status of, one of those  modelled, I suppose, on the grotto at Lourdes. It's in a woody, gated garden and driving past on special days, including Assumption, I've observed candles lit which twinkle among the oak trees and give it the air of a something more ancient, a sacred grove, perhaps.  However, I've never had the camera or been in a position to stop at those moments, so today I decided to make a special expedition and try to look closer and take some photos.. 

But it was not to be, no candles, it looked gloomy and unpromising, so I passed it by.  It remains a mystery, which may be no bad thing.  Mol and I had a good walk in the arboretum, where we met a cheerful group of handicapped people having a picnic, and on the way home stopped at the sawmills, where I filled the car boot up with chunky offcuts of wood for winter fires.

~ Brother Phil has sent me a scan of the 1911 census, just made available, for our dad, who was just three at the time, and his family.  We couldn't work out who the baby of ten months was, I said it didn't look like Victor(known as Dick) or George or Horatio, in fact it didn't look like anything so much as 'Bagins', which I remarked would have been an interesting prefiguring of the spate of Tolkien-inspired names in the Glastonbury area (land of our grandfather's birth) some 60 years later.  Finally we worked out it was probably Bevis, and recalled that Uncle George was originally Bevis George. I remember Bevis as being a popular name of the time, from another children's book.  Phil and I chat by e-mail, recalling bits and pieces told and remembered about long-gone aunts and uncles and the places they lived, and other family lore.  We have become the elders now, I suppose, accruing enough patience and curiosity to pick over the residue of stories and  memories left by the tide of time, which washes away more and more, while leaving other stuff behind in its place, perhaps about us, when we will be the long gone aunts and uncles...

~  Photo - 

I like the exercise of picking out an odd single photo to put on these posts, trying to resist using more and making little series and photo essays. While we have established that flowers and vegetation are fine, it's good to have a change.  This is my sister-in-law A in Mayenne, in the kitchen there.  It's not a flattering portrait, she's very much more beautiful than this shows, so I hope if she sees it she doesn't mind.  But there's something lovely in the light and the atmosphere there, and I like the feel of the photo.

Sunday 14th August

~ Delicious caramel flavour cough mixture can't stop me coughing at 6 am.  I come downstairs and cough freely on the sofa for a while, and wish I had the energy and the will to keep my eyes open and do something more constructive (didn't I used to blog at this hour? Those were the days...).  I fall asleep and don't wake up until 8.30. So then, it being Sunday and I being poorly (-ish), I allow myself a day on the sofa to answer an e-mail to a friend and read the second half of Atonement.  I feel too desultory to write, but finish the book, then write the e-mail and take Molly for a walk, so that's not too bad. I certainly found Atonement a gripping read, I don't mind that he's wordy and allusive and uses a lot of adjectives and changes of pace and style, but I did feel a bit toyed with and cheated at the end.  Actually that reminded me of the end of Villette, I wonder if anyone else has noticed that?

Not sure what the beautiful thing was there, maybe lazing on the sofa with a book.

~ We keep the curtains open until last thing at this time of year, often don't close the back ones at all.  Sitting where I am now, it's almost dark, and I look out on the open timbers of the lean-to barn.  The familiar form of a blackbird sweeps up and lands on them, silhouetted against the last light in the sky, its tail and head cocked upward, I imagine rather than hear its jagged call.

~ Mexican orange, second flowering.  They smell delicious.

Saturday 13th August

I've been promising clams for the end of the week. I always assumed these amandes de mer (above) were a luxury version, judging by their size and glossiness, and that the price might be per clam.  But looking closer, it really was per kilo, and they really were about eight times cheaper than these palourdes

from the bay of Mont St Michel.  (I think they're known as carpetshell clams elsewhere).  

The amandes really were absurdly cheap, so I bought rather a lot of them.  They turned out to be  dog cockles, which are scarcely considered worth eating in some parts of the world, though they are a plentiful, sustainable source of protein, largely a by-catch, and so really just the kind of thing we should be eating.   However, there's a reason they are not considered a delicacy, delicate does not really describe them, they rival whelks for, er, robustness of texture, and they were rather hard work. But the magic trick of steaming shellfish and watching them pop open like Chinese water flowers (I haven't seen those for a long time...), the alchemy of the court bouillon made from the tail end of some cheap rosé and the stalks of the parsley, lemon thyme and fennel which went into the garlic and herb butter I stuffed them with, and mopping up the juices with crusty bread, were all rather wonderful, and the real palourdes were delectably tender by comparison.  

Also there was ...

~ this French food blog I found looking for advice and recipes as to how to cook them.  French foody stuff doesn't usually do much for me, for a variety of reasons, but this is lovely, cheerful and quirky and original, though it's more fussing over food and  wine knowledge than I can aspire to, it's a nice place to wander.

Then there was 

~ the Viognier we drank with it.  I like a nice Viognier very much and will drink it with pretty much anything.  This was an Ardeche one, as were the first VDP ones I came across, but it was labelled  Indication Geographique Protegee, which I'd never seen before but apparently it's just a European version of VDP.  In fact I have two whole bottles of real Condrieu which I got for my birthday last year and didn't drink then, and which I am too much in awe of and have wanted for too long to quite have the nerve to broach  now (or is it breach?).  But I get them out and look at them sometimes.  I've never tried a New World one - how would I have done?  

Friday 12th August

~ Dr Ban, the Asian rheumatolgist, is, by general consent, the best in the business hereabouts.  Fierce and delicate and direct, he manipulates Tom's arms and shoulders rapidly. 

'This way now. Pain? Pain now?'   

His English is so unhesitating, curt and quickfire that there's no question of trying to stay in French.  He is warm and kindly too, pats and squeezes our hands and shoulders reassuringly, is funny and responsive.  He drives the dreaded cortisone jab straight down into Tom's shoulder from the top into the socket so quickly and lightly that it is barely felt. 

' Hey Mrs Kempton, you don't want to watch? You can watch, it's a movie: Mr Kempton and the Needle!'

The phone goes mid-injection.

'Oh that'll be President Sarkozy.  He needs me.'

'He's heard you're the best too, then?'

'That's it.'

It's done, at last.  Let's hope it's fixed it. 

~ Stopping at the top of the hill above Hénon, it's very clear, and the dark blue band of the sea in the distance never fails to steady and lift the spirits.

~ Pink water lily in the pond, which needs clearing.  Oddly it's a task I enjoy so much I tend to put it off, thinking there must be something more disagreeable I should do first, which is a little hard on the fish who must be gasping for some more oxygen to the surface.  Thanks for the encouragement to keep on photographing flowers; the water lilies just clamour for it every time.

Thursday 11th August

~ Yesterday I dug up an accidental potato plant which had planted itself by the compost bins, and which I had been rather whimsically earthing up with grass cuttings.  The yield was not large, but there were enough for a small bowl for my lunch, with chopped chives, some mayonnaise and a little tinned tuna.

~ Lately I have been succumbing to Tom's latest teatime (well, winetime really) television quiz indulgence, Pointless, I do like that Alexander Armstrong.  Tonight I knew, and the contestants didn't, that Skellig Michael was a UNESCO world heritage site in the Republic of Ireland.  This set me to dreaming of  that tiny cone of rock in the ocean, where a thousand years ago and more the monks sat out the Atlantic storms and held their precious texts and images to them, living with, and on, the sea birds at the edge of a darkening world, and of how I hope one day to visit it, and climb the long, tenuous stone stairs up to the beehive cells, before the world darkens again.

~ Straightened my blue room up completely at last after the children had been nesting in it, so it looks like this again,

I like seeing it being used to the full and covered in bedding and bears and books and all their junk too, but it's nice to get it back.  I took this photo before, in fact, to send to MH, my former student, who gave me the beautiful blue pot that has the fern in.  The patchwork quilt was made by my sister Alison, whom we lost last year, for my eighteenth birthday.  I only recently took it out of storage, I don't know why I left it so long.  My other sister made the small patchwork cushions.  The space on the wall above the fern is waiting for a print of Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière which came from Chartres and which I've still not got around to having framed. (Thanks to Christopher for prompting me to post about the blue room in the last comments.) 

Wednesday 10th August

~ Last night, going outside at about 11, strains and snatches of the Tuesday night concert, a mile or two away in Moncontour, float up to where we live.  Electronic and ethereal, it mingles prettily with the chiming harmonics of the garden toads.

~ Doing yoga for the first time at S's house, where her silky, pewter-coloured old lurcher watches me with bronze eyes and a long smile from the sofa, then jumps down and tries to settle next to me on my yoga mat.

~ Sweet peas from A's garden, which scented the whole room.  They're finished now, but I'm still enjoying the photos.

Fun and frolics and some whimsical quasi-archetypes at the seaside.

The weather was good enough on Friday, and everybody just about got out of bed in time, to get to the beach, one of the plages sauvages, the open ones with no buildings and unsupervised bathing near Erquy.

We sat on the rocks and had a picnic,

people wrote their names in the sand,

and everyone, his father and grandfather being first in line, took a turn at burying Benjy,

until only his extremities remained above ground.

- Except for his sister who, wistful and remote, buried her own feet, perhaps pleading powerless mermaidhood in the case. 

Here she is again with her mum.  I was the only one who went into the sea for a swim, which was delicious, and for which I was pronounced 'hard' in admiring tones, though everyone (except Tom, who doesn't tend to) paddled and splashed about a bit. It was a bit chilly, we're having a cool summer after a hot spring, but really if you can't swim in the sea in Brittany in August you might as well give up and spend the afterlife in Centerparks.

Later we had a splendid meal at le Vivier, our favourite seafood joint, where the staff and surrounding diners beamed approvingly at Benjy's rolled 'r's as he pronounced caramel et fraise when ordering his ice cream, and at the scene of a pretty 14-year-old eating her first oyster from her grandfather's plate, which she did with great aplomb and which clearly brought out the inner Maurice Chevalier in one half of a handsome and tanned French couple of a certain age at the next table.

I'm sure we'll remember it well.

Molly has recovered well and seemed to be very much brightened up by her visitors, I think they really helped take her mind off feeling poorly, and when she went for her return visit to the vet at the end of the week she barely noticed, it was just another potentially interesting thing that was happening next.

They are sweethearts, it was lovely to have them.  Now it's lovely to stretch back into all our space again, and  only have to do four slices of toast at breakfast.

~~~

I've a feeling that my blogging muscles have got somewhat atrophied, and a fancy to do Three Beautiful Things again for a bit, to get back in the way of it.  I'll start tomorrow.

A cat, a kite, and other bits and pieces

As Setu noted in his comment to the last post but one here, Fontaine Daniel was developed as a kind of 'model village' by the Toiles de Mayenne factory, with pattern book, pretty houses built by the owner for the workers rather like Port Sunlight or Saltaire in the UK.  I don't know how common this was in France, where industrialisation didn't follow the same kind of patterns, and I don't know much about the history of the place at all.. (Setu knows so much about so many things, and speaks and writes an astonishing array of languages.  Lovers of land art shouldn't miss his post on American artist Patrick Dougherty's amazing willow installations at the domaine de Trévarez,  )

Anyway. for one reason or another I didn't take many pictures until we reached the lake, so I can't show you much of the architecture, but it was attractive and the houses looked solid and practical and comfortable, which the projects of whimsical entrepreneurs with notions of combining the philanthropic and the picturesque weren't always.  I did snap one of the pretty neo-mediaeval church,

which has an Arts and Crafts look about it.

As we entered the village, this cat spied us.

in particular Molly.

Her look was none too friendly - Mol hadn't noticed her at all - and she followed us a little too eagerly.  She had the desperate look of a very young cat with kittens, and they often won't hesitate to have a go at a hapless deaf and short-sighted dog which wanders too close.

The day was hot by then, but then there was water, perhaps non potable for us,

but with a thoughtful bucket positioned below, which Mol appreciated.

***

A little late in saying, but there's my response to Plutarch's question about kites and swallows over at Compasses/Questions.  I've been fairly slack on the blogging front all round of late, I feel, and have left this response a long time, so thanks to those who still look in there and express interest; erratic and sporadic though I am with it, it's the only prompt type of thing I've been motivated to stay the distance with, and I appreciate the patience of prompter and readers alike.

When I finally settled on a response I found two came along at once.  So I gave Plutarch the choice of which one he preferred, and he chose the first, and we batted it back and forth quite a lot, so I made, and resisted, quite a few changes, and I always like it when we do that.  Like the poem in the last post, it's got quite a lot of end rhymes and its own sort of pattern to how they come, but doesn't fall to any established form.  I'm quite taken with this way of doing things at the moment.

The other one was really a bit of frivolity to loosen up a bit.  Joe liked it less because he has reservations about concrete poetry, which in fact I think I tend to share; it's not something I've tried before to the best of my recollection.  It can easily become a gimmick.  But it has quite a long and reputable history, though it wasn't even called concrete poetry for much of it, what with Herbert's Easter Wings and Hardy's Convergence of the Twain, way before EE Cummings et all.  I was going to mention Clavics, which I gave up on, having bought it as a present for a friend who is a Geoffrey Hill fan and beside whom I am a poetical and intellectual pygmy,  but I quickly realised on googling for a link that getting onto Geoffrey Hill was wandering into areas of Poetry as a Contact Sport wherein I would be rendered a mere squashed bug before one could say enjambment ...

Anyway, my bit of messing about with concrete hinges on the text centring function, and looks like this:

A

kite:

a red lozenge

high over house and hill 

criss-crossed with cane struts  

a ringed line running from

 end to end, its string

strung out straight

 tethers it taut 

to earth, 

its tail 

like

an

S

.

trimmed and

tasselled

.

a tentative

try-out

.

laughing at

lightning

.

looping the

loop

.

twitching

twittering

.

aflap and

aflutter

.

swooping with

swifts

.

swapping with

swallows

.

 imitating

Icarus

.

funny or fearful 

fight or flight?

~

Kites seem to be quite a fruitful source of  memory and imagination for people.  Feel free to share what they bring to mind for you, and indeed, to add a little alliterative dyad tassel to the kite's tail if you wish.

~~~

Then in addition, to try to show Plutarch my birds eye view of a kite, I discovered the new insert a drawing function in the Google document we use for the 'test bed', with this result

Then I tried to do a swallow.

Oh well.  Plutarch was very kind about my introduction of graphic elements but gently discouraged their inclusion in the sequence as possibly distracting.  But I have no such scruples here.

~~~  

Well, it seems to be feast or famine around here.  Having thrown all manner of nonsense in as garnish, I shall probably go missing again for a bit.  We've got E and B and their parents (Tom's eldest daughter and co) coming for a few days tomorrow, which is always a joy but keeps us busy and leaves us a mite fatigued afterwards. Mol's had ear trouble for the third time in 6 months, after a hopeful year free of it, poor mite, after the operation and the broken wag and all, she is a dog of sorrows and no mistake. I'm only being flippant because it makes me too miserable thinking about it otherwise. She's on the mend and the way up again now, loving and cheerful again, fortunately as she has her adoring public to meet.  

~~~

I saw what looked like a freshly minted swallowtail butterfly in the garden the other day, I dashed out with the camera but it was gone.  No way of knowing if it was one of the caterpillars, but I'd like to think so.

~~~

Must go, promises to keep and far to go etc...