Flight 2: miticulture

I've long been somewhat aesthetically taken with with mussels and their cultivation, visual as well as gustatory; here's a previous photo post about them.

This went a stage further on looking down at the mussel beds from the air.  We must have been quite lucky with the state of the tide, so that their serried rows hovered visible just below the surface in the aqua- and ultramarine of the bay, their graphic, human-ordered geometry offsetting the random figuring and curves of the rocks and shoreline.

I took a lot of pictures of these, and make no apology for including a lot of them here. 

 

Studying the satellite imagery of the coast here also, it becomes apparent just how extensive the mussel fields are, miles and miles of inshore waters delicately striated with them. One tends to think that human dominion ends at the edge of the land, that the islands stand in untamed ocean where fishermen and mariners take their chances on the surface, whereas often they are almost joined to the mainland by areas of miticulture, plotted and marked out by human agency, made mysterious in their partial concealment by the rise and fall of the tide.

I've heard though, that shell fish in general and mussels in particular, as well as being good and healthy food are relatively sustainable and ecologically benign in their cultivation, especially compared with rapacious over-exploitation of totally wild fish species or other more toxic forms of fish farming, which I rather hope is true, as not only do I love eating them but find the sight of the mussel beds rather beautiful and fascinating.

Flight 1

So off we flew over Trébeurdan and Trégastel,

and over this spine of an empty island called the Île de Tomé.

and on towards Paimpol.  This island above is the Île de Béniguet,

which lies next to Bréhat, where Heather Dohollau lived for many years and which was the inspiration for many of her poems:

at the first sight of the island
among an excess of fragments
like a Leonardo painting 
or a Patinir

I've picnicked by that boathouse on  Bréhat, but it looks like there's no one there today.

This is the Île de St Riom, an old monastic settlement, its owner is restoring the monastery buildings, which you can just see,

And this is the Abbaye de Beauport, which was the mother house of the St Riom foundation where mediaeval pilgrims on the Camino coming from Britain, first came ashore on the continent.

We travelled on down the coast, the western side of the Bay of St Brieuc.

In truth, despite poring over Google Earth and the Michelin atlas, I couldn't identify every place we saw.  The port above is St Quay Portrieux.

It struck me how little we know this coast in detail, with its varied beaches and small cliff top roads, though we drive much further afield to explore sea-girt corners and interesting by-ways.  We should remedy that.

We flew back to Lannion over the Trieux estuary,

with the elegant suspension road bridge at Lézardrieux in the distance.

We flew over woods and fields, see the row of beehives in the heathlands above,

and saw people growing things,

and cropping and packing the things they grew.

And most and best of all the iridescent, silky sea,

and the endless, enamelled, shapes and patterns and textures of the coast, and its natural and human life and movement.

How lucky I am to live here, and how lucky to have friends who want to help me see it in a new way.

~

So that was the itinerary, but needless to say I took many more photos, so I will post more over the next few days.  Because it was such a wonderful experience, I am loath to discard any, however mediocre and blurry, so may end up making patchworks out of scraps and snippets.

(And this is my second attempt at this post.  A catastrophic glitch occurred owing to working on two computers at the same time, and all the text was lost, so this one is rather terser than the first version, with fewer links, for which my apologies.) 

"Flying so high with some guy in the sky..."

...is my idea of something to do.  Especially when the guy or guys in question are the illustrious Barrett Bonden of Works Well, Mrs BB, and our gallant pilot for the day, M Kervoaze, all of whom I was meeting for the first time, though of course the Bondens are far from unfamiliar to me.

In an incredibly imaginative, expansive and generous gesture,  BB took a notion, which he then carried out, to arrange a private flight for himself and Mrs BB over the Brittany coast, and to invite me along as the in-flight photographer.

Tom and I were going to meet them at Lannion airport, which is rather small and specialises in flights to Paris for the technocrats of Brittany's equivalent of Silicone Valley.  However, Tom was ill in the night and needed to rest up for the morning, so I inconvenienced the already rather frazzled (the arrangements had encountered some hitches and reversals prior to this) Bondens by having them pick me up en route.  But never mind, we arrived.

As anyone who knows BB from his blog knows, photographs of the great man are strictly forbidden, paparazzi moments included.  However, he's now back in the UK and I'm here in France, and I've decided the privacy laws no longer apply.  Nevertheless I have stuck to three-quarter rear views.  Here he is inveigling M Kervoaze into imparting the secrets of his calling.  He does a good line in inveigling, does BB.  As you can see, he is really very tall (M Kervoaze is short but not that short).

Mrs BB and I were slightly disappointed that M Kervoaze did not quite conform to our image of the dashing pilot, but I think he was probably a very good one anyway.  His 'kiss-landing' was certainly an epiphanic moment for BB.

"Have you got your passports?" he asked in the airport.  I hadn't thought it necessary to bring mine, and was rather surprised.

"Not to worry," he said "we'll go round the back."

He led us through the car park and into the hangar where the little planes lived.  In truth it would have been enough of a treat (well almost) for me just to have been allowed in here with the camera.

There were Pipers and Cessnas and microlights and who knows what, even one of those tiny little things like a powered hang-glider, 

It was like being in a stable full of beautiful, mythical flying beasts, delicate but imposing. Some of them even had dear little blankets on them.

But our prospective steed was outside waiting for us,

She was called Skyhawk.

"Come aboard!" said M Kervoaze.

So we did.

And off we flew.

(To be continued...)

Cabbages and kings

Inside and out seem to be settling down a bit at last.

Started writing morning pages.  Longhand, streamed, completely private, burn after writing if necessary.  I think it might be helpful.

A helpful finger-wag from someone I love and respect enormously:  'You can't just sit around and press flowers.'

Saw two young girls I help with their English.  They are bright and brown after their summer, their mum is cheerful and friendly, their ancient Labrador is still alive and we were all pleased to see each other.  Another former adult student contacts with a view to coaching his boys.  I feel relieved and useful again, fears are allayed, disenchantment grows fainter with distance.

Remembering with a gratified (flattered) smile our old friend D, when Tom took him to the radiotherapy clinic, uselessly as it turned out, just a few weeks ago. He was dozing and distant, but when Tom was talking about me to J, he nodded and pronounced 'Lovely woman, good mind.'  A compliment to treasure, and accept graciously.

God-willing-weather-permitting (spare me the sententious and bleeding-obvious atheist arguments, it's only an expression), I am set for an amazing adventure tomorrow, thanks to the generosity and marvellous serendipity of Blogland and those that dwell therein.  My camera battery is charged and its memory card is empty.

Red cabbage, before half of it was eaten with balsamic vinegar, sugar, wine and a lot of spices, caramelised apple, new potatoes and a knackwurst.

  

This week

This week, an old friend died.  Old in age, 88, and known to us for about 10 years, so reasonably old as a friend in terms of our time here in France.  His final illness was really very short, but he had been fading out in terms of presence and strength of spirit for quite a long time.  He had had a long, well-lived life, raised in Britain, then a very young fighter pilot in the Second World War, a teacher and professor of maths in Canada, before a late second marriage that took him travelling all over the word, brought him back to Europe, and presented him a whole new acquired family who loved him well.

He was a long-standing feature of our lives here, and his passing changes things, but not utterly; I can't say that either of us was close to him in any very deep or intimate way, he was simply a friendly, familiar and constant figure. In many ways his death it was all that it should be, at a good age with some time to prepare but without too much lingering.

Yet we are left troubled and miserable and out of sorts by it, in ways and for causes which are difficult to express here.

We came back from the funeral ready to start designing our own funeral services that very evening.  We drank quite a lot of wine instead.

This week I met the woman who is taking over from me in the teaching job that I have been doing for the last seven years.  It wasn't an enormous number of hours, but regular, we didn't need the money but it was useful, and it took me out into the world a bit and made me speak more demanding French than usual  and discuss and think about language and get up and project my voice and my personality and generally perform.  All of which was good for me.  But earlier this year, for a number of reasons, I decided I had reached the end of the road with it, and it was time to hand it over to someone else. 

My replacement is busy, businesslike, smart and competent and very easy to get on with.  We had a pleasant lunch together and a couple of hours flew by almost unnoticed.  I'm sure she'll do just fine.  I offloaded the heavy packs of books and tapes and cds and papers accrued over the years with the job, which I'd carried there in a straw shopping basket, and we went our separate ways, and I relished  the lightness of the nearly empty basket on my shoulders.  I bought myself a rhubarb sorbet in a cone (delicious) from one of the many chocolatiers which seem to be springing up in the French retail landscape - this one did ice cream too for the summer - and sat in a spongy bright green chair in the new shopping centre in St Brieuc, and felt genuinely quite celebratory.

This week, almost the same hour that our friend died, other much cherished, friends had their first, long-awaited grandchild.  The birth was difficult and the baby struggled, was put on a drip, lost weight, and suddenly the fate of an unknown infant in a far away city mattered more than I expected it to, because of the sorrows in the changing face of our friend when he told us of it, aside at the old man's funeral.  

But the child has picked up now, is feeding, will be well. 

This week I got to help choose the paper to go with my photo on  this book of poems from Finishing Line Press .  How fantastically cool is that?

~

This week turned into September.  Autumn.

Lay your shadows on the sundials,

and in the meadows let the winds go free

Death and birth, my occupation gone, a new decade ahead  Odd clenching sensations somewhere round the solar plexus - fear, excitement, longing, despair?  My equanimity, serenity, contentment, my hard-won detachment and distancing from too much intensity, from overwrought and messy feelings, seem imperilled by an unaccustomed rawness, and I'm not sure if I welcome this or not. 

This too...