Pretty pink pomegranate pictures

 

Hair cut

Got to the point where the only way I could tolerate my hair so long was to tie it up hard then put it up in a thing with a spike through it, which device probably has a name but I don't know it, it's made of leather and wood and looks like the prototype might have been found in a bronze age archaeological site as part of some female hunter-gatherer's grave goods.  Also, when it gets past a critical length it starts falling out and blocking the plug hole.  

So off I went to the hairdresser, one of a chain with a particularly horrible yellow and grey décor, whose main attraction is you don't make an appointment, and rarely have to wait more than half an hour which is about the limit of my tolerance for reading old copies of Paris-Match (I seldom remember to bring a book, but anyway I see hairdresser's and doctor's waiting rooms as a salutary opportunity to dip my toe into the cultural milieu of my host country via its popular magazines; as I say, the wait in both places is not usually too long but usually quite long enough).

But the hairdressers are always nice, and not frumpy or incompetent, and this time I got quite a trendy young one.  I told her I was fed up with  the length, and would like quite a bit off.  About to here? she indicated roughly the level of my chin.  Fine, I said, then tentatively asked if perhaps she could cut the back shorter  than the front, just by way of a change...

Her eyes lit up:

 'Carré plongeant!* C'est très à la môde!'

Well that's a first, I thought.  She set to work with energy and a will, darting and snipping with her little scissors.  How blithely we trust hairdressers, I thought, with their razor-sharp blades and dagger-like points around our necks, ears, eyes and throats.  The tips of her scissors scored and prickled my neck but never hurt; she was clearly enjoying herself.  Could she cut it quite short at the back? she asked, and what about the fringe (bangs if you're American, which always sounds bizarre to me), could she do that at an angle? 

Why not, I said, so delighted with the novel experience of a hairdresser enthusiastically engaged with my hair,  rather than just sighing boredly and asking why don't I colour it? The best bit was when she did the sides, holding a wide section down and drawing the scissors through all of it on the diagonal with a satisfying slicing sound, just like a haberdasher cutting through a length of calico.  She shaped it and dried it with a big round brush and generally sculpted it in ways I didn't imagine possible with my grizzled mop.  I left with a spring in my step, invigorated by the fresh breeze on the back of my neck, and allowed her to sell me an expensive thing of conditioner to help maintain it.

It's hopeless, of course.  I have neither the kind of hair, the kind of face not the kind of life that permits a  très à la môde, beautifully sculpted carré plongeant hair-do.  Within twenty-four hours the whole is a mass of different length ends blowing about in the wind, the cow-licks on either side of my forehead have re-established themselves with a vengeance and the spiffy sharp points at the corners of the plunging square are hanging down all on their own like pot-hooks.  I knew it would happen, but I don't care, we had fun, and it's still so good to feel the air on the back of my neck again.

The photos were taken on the same day, while it was still just about holding together, in the rather unpleasant livid light of the old downstairs bathroom. 

* Literally a 'plunging square'; I've tried to find a translation, the best seems to be 'angled bob'.  My mum used to talk about shingled hair, from the 1920s, which I always liked the sound of.

Meddling with medlars,'and al was for an appil...'

The two medlar trees by a rather sombre, fairly modern house on a route I take every week are dropping so much fruit all about that no one seems to be collecting I was determined to try by fair means or foul to get hold of a reasonable quantity of it. So this week I stopped on my way home and somewhat trepidatiously took the steps up to the door at the side of the building which seemed to be the main entrance and rang the bell.  There were windows a-plenty open, and I was sure I heard movements and voices inside, but no one came, so I went back down and gathered an armload of dropped ones.  As I was doing so, a cheery group of bin men  stopped at the house.  A young black guy saw my haul and grinned, 

'What are they?' he asked

'Medlars (des nèfles)' his mates replied in chorus, and before I knew it they were all jumping down, picking up the fruit, chucking them about and engaging in an excited exchange about them with which I was eager to join in but I was a little afraid that all the brouhaha would draw the house's inhabitants out.  I repeated a couple of times that I had gone to the door to ask first...

'No, they aren't ripe, you can't eat them like that, you have to wait for them to rot...'

'Can you make jam with them then?' 

'What country are you from then?'

Etc etc.  Only in France, I'm inclined to think, would you end up in a discussion with a group of bin men on the gastronomic properties and virtues of medlars.  I scooped up another armful and tossed them into my basket in the car, and we went on our way, the bin men giving me a merry bip and a wave as I passed them.

The foraging bit between my teeth, I decided to stop at the sawmill and fill the boot with offcuts for firewood.  If you stop on the opposite side of the road from the mill itself, and only take from the piles of oddments, not the tied together bundles, it's free.  It's well seasoned and sometimes there are some very nice chunks. It's a bit grubby but my car's used to it.

That done, I walked Mol down the avenue of poplars and turkey oaks approaching the château of Bogard, then rang Tom to put the kettle on.  Just as I was approaching Beau Soleil, I thought the final cherry on the cake, as it were, would be to pick up one of the delicious-looking rosy apples that had been dropping on the verge there all this autumn to munch on the last leg of the journey home.  I pulled over, left the engine running, shut the door behind me, ran across the road, picked up three apples, ran back... and couldn't open the car door.

I had shut the buckle of the seat belt in it.  This happens quite frequently, perhaps because of the two-door Saxo's design, perhaps because I have to have my seat a long way forward, or perhaps, as was pointed out subsequently by our friendly, treasured, but sometimes annoyingly  know-it-all garage man M Turbin, because there is a rather clumsy velcro-attached thing on the belt to pad it against your shoulder, put there by the somewhat large people who had the car before me and which I've never taken off, which stops the belt from rolling back properly and makes it hang awkwardly. Hwever, it has never before resulted in jamming the mechanism of the door handle.

Everything, except for me and the apples, was in the car: keys, bag, mobile, Molly... the engine was running and the passenger door was locked.  The woman whose apples I had scrumped at this point leaned out of her window and looked curiously at me.

'I have a problem.'  I told her.

It was my greed (gourmandise, not quite greed as we scarcely reconstructed protestant Anglos know it, but I'll save the comparative semantics for now)  that has caused this, I confessed, I was stealing your apples.  This didn't seem to worry her, fortunately.  

'Hold on a minute and I'll get a wire.' she said, and came down with an unravelled coat hanger.  This didn't work.  Her arm was thinner than mine and she was nearly able to reach the button of the passenger door but not quite.  Molly barked a bit but happily didn't attempt to savage her, and let her stroke her nose through the opening.  Then she she said

'What about the boot*?' 

Why hadn't I thought of that?  Of course.  I opened the boot to reveal my haul of scruffy firewood.  Poor Englishwoman, she must have thought, reduced by the dismal exchange rate and the dwindling value of their savings to gathering old bits of wood and nicking apples.

'Would you like me to climb in?' my saviour asked kindly.  I assured her I could do it, scrambled in ungainly fashion over the wood and the back seat and asked her please to close the boot behind me.  The door proved to open perfectly well from the inside, the engine smelled a bit warm, Molly was pleased to see me and the tea was well brewed when I got in.  I confessed my sorry tale to Tom, who said 'Serves you right for scrumping', which Adam might well have said to Eve, I suppose.

Unfortunately, the door handle is broken, and M Turbin can't fix it till Tuesday, as he and all his suppliers are  'making the bridge' - taking a long weekend around a public holiday, so I am having to open the passenger door and lean across every time I want to get into the car, which is slightly less undignified that clambering in the boot.  All my frugality will be set at nought against the cost of the repair, I dare say, though our gallant garagist will always try to get a cheap salvaged part for us, which probably means I'll have a pillar box red door handle on my bottle green car, further to remind me of my folly (actually he said he's spray it for me if that happened, and perhaps it wouldn't be necessary if he could just rehook the mechanism, so fingers crossed).

~

Anyway, here are the medlars.

After research into the bletting process, I have arranged them on straw in an old winebox under cover in the woodstore, so I'll keep you posted as to their progress.

~

* trunk, if you're American.  This post seems to be one that almost requires a glossary.

Well, I can't quite think what I was going to blog about today.  Medlars again perhaps, and other scrumping related tales, or perhaps about getting my hair cut today in a different shape.  What, the imminent collapse of the Eurozone and its repercussions, did you say, or the latest on Iran's nuclear capacity?  Nah, what do you think I am, a serious blogger with intelligent observations to make or something?

Anyway ( to use an over-used adverbial tag), whatever it was I meant to show-and-tell you about will have to wait, because Tom said there was a full moon tonight so let's go to the beach and look at the sea under it, so we did, taking back some fleecy shirts which were too small to Leclerc on the way as a sort of attempt to justify a totally gratuitous pleasure trip (only it turned out Leclerc wasn't really on the way at all so we drove much further than we probably would have done if we'd just made two trips).  We asked Leclerc if they had any sack cloth and ashes we could change the shirts for but they were fresh out of those so we just got some bigger shirts, grey check fleece chockful of winter warmth, for Tom really, as we worked out he's been wearing the same two fleece shirts for fourteen winters now, but I've sort of got my eye on them for a borrow.  There were red ones and purple and rust too but Tom's not a great one for colourful checks.

Then we went on to Morieux, to the cove at Béliard.  We'd checked the tide tables (always to hand here, even before there was the internet), and we know the tide would have turned at 6.40 and it was just a bit after 7.00, so the sea was a swirling misty grey void below us, but it was racing back quickly and already by the time we got to the bottom of the stairs down the cliff there was enough beach for us to walk all the way along to just below the chapel at St Maurice.  The moon hadn't shown up so far but it was light enough with just the torch to steer us round the rocks and Molly on her long lead.  And when we got back to the car I'd packed a thermos of mulled wine (some old Bordeaux that wasn't up to much before the addition of orange peel, cinnamon, cardamon and coriander seeds and sugar), and we leaned on the car bonnet  and looked out across the bay and finally the moon made an appearance from behind the clouds, and we drank from some little brown Japanese teacups without handles which spend most of their lives containing leftovers in the 'fridge but which have in fact been waiting all this time to have mulled wine in them by the seashore on a moonlit night in November.

Then we came home to slow-cooked ox tail and shallots and chestnut and white bean (mogettes de Vendée) and garlic purée and I lit a fire of offcuts and pine cones even though it wasn't really cold, and we finished it off with some After-Eight mints someone brought round a bit ago.  And it was a completely perfect evening and all's right with the world, which of course it isn't but what that means is, just for now and ignoring all else, all's right with me.

So I haven't got so much as a picture to post here, I'm afraid.  But there's always tomorrow

Two Little Sausages: a family heirloom

My mother was known for her repertoire of comic songs, the kind of thing to entertain her offspring on long car journeys.  Brother Phil's and my favourite was, I seem to recall, one called The Body in the Bag about a man who had to bury a dead cat.  Sounds macabre? Don't worry, it all turns out all right in the end (the link is to a set of lyrics, one of the very few internet references I could find to that one).

My twin nieces, however, my sister Helli's girls, who used to spend their summers for several years at our parents' house in Brighton, had a thing about a song Mum sang about two little sausages, a tale of star-crossed  love and happy endings among charcuterie folk.  They made her sing it over and over (she was nothing loath) until they had it off by heart as well as she did.  Being twins, shared things, jokes, songs, memorised repartee, have great sticking power with them.  They carried The Sausage Song around with them into adulthood, after Mum died, until the internet came along and enabled them to rescue it from the fragile oral tradition, locate its place in history, and reconstruct any words missing from the fossil record.  Though the form they learned it in, along with any errors it may contain, is dear to them as 'the way Grandma sang it', so many corrections have not been made.  It has long been a party piece of theirs, and as it is in fact a duet the form suits them.

It's actual provenance is from a musical comedy of multiple authorship of 1907, seven years before my mother was born, called The Girls of Gottenberg, It only had a short run so where she heard it we don't know, except her brother had a gramophone and records.  Fifty years later she was still singing it to the twins.

Thirty years on, one of them now lives in Australia, the other, who I saw last month, in England.  Bee, the Australian twin, decided during a recent get-together that it was time her partner, cousins - my sister Alison's three children - and their partners were initiated into the joys of Two Little Sausages, and a performance was devised, arranged, videoed and sent to her sister, who shunted it over onto my laptop when I was there ( by means of a USB key in the shape of a dinky toy Land Rover, which is another story).  So the Two Sausages live on, for as it says in the final lines of the song

... on any day you'll meet'em
for there's no one wants to eat'em


The video is, of course, daft as a brush - it's only a truncated version of the first verse and very short, all the lyrics can be found here, and an MP3 of the tune can be heard if you go to this page and click on no.20, if your interested and find the song as delightful and amusing as we do, which you might not, but the words are funny, and perhaps it's something other people remember, I'd be interested to know.

I just find it rather marvellous that a silly song from more than a hundred years ago was preserved in one child's memory into old age, handed on to two other children who kept it until the internet came along, and it can now be seen and heard being sung by a motley collection of 20 to 40 year olds, naturalised and native Australians, New Zealanders and Spanish, boat builders, airline workers, psychotherapists and hotshot young academics.

So I give you Bee, Hywel, Hamish, Mikey, Isabelle, Elen and Bel * with Two Little Sausages, courtesy of their late grandmother Marjorie.

* Hywel, Isabelle and Elen are Alison's children, Mikey is Bee's shaggy boatbuilder, Hamish is Elen's other half, and Bel is Hywel's lovely Spanish girlfriend.

Poetical friends

I've really rather a lot of these, but this is about just two of them for now.

~ 

First, Plutarch has replied to my question about following swallows over at Compasses.


... to follow the most delicate of birds, which drinks
as it skims the water, crosses oceans and continents,
feeds on flies, perches on telegraph wires
like musical notations, knows where to go, where to land
and when. Its nests are mythic architecture.

His poem is called A ball of string, so as you might imagine not only swallows but other themes emerge.  It's a beautiful, visionary poem which sweeps broadly through time and space, to the edge of clouds and down into labyrinths, belying the human limitations he laments.  To me it forms a fine diptych with one he recently had published in Qarrtsiluni, where he posits that

To monitor the flight of birds
in consideration of what is received
(for which we should be truly thankful),
to count and name their variations,
their prey and predators,
is reason enough to be on Earth.

I'm inclined to agree.

~

Second, these came in the just the other day:

I've corresponded with and come to know and love Teresa and her work for a year or so now.  I have both her previous books of poems, and found them wonderful, and when she asked me if she could have a photo she saw here for the cover of her next, Itching, itching, I was honoured and delighted.  I've been waiting for my copy impatiently.

In the first poem there is an artist, who 

took pain and shaped a vision

and this is what Teresa does.  There are a number of artists in these pages, like the metal artist, who

labors

into the night, twists

the thin strands, presses

with tools of mysterious use

and who

rubs 

shine back into the hammered medallion

of blackened silver

There is music, too, especially jazz, woven through her writing everywhere, a kindred spirit appears unexpectedly 'to borrow earphones' and then stays, in a sensual encounter, incidentally there is 'Mingus in the other room', and elsewhere

chords 

that thumbed the G, spun it straight in

to hope's solar plexus

This kind of music seldom exactly has savage-beast-soothing charms, though; like the love and passion of which it forms a part it is often a lacerating, flaying experience, so a man's 'easy singing'

rusts a scream onto bare arms

There are moths and a sinister, metaphorical cat, there is raw physicality in plenty - chests, throats, teeth, bones; we find ourselves up at 3 in the lonely morning more than once. This is pain-filled stuff indeed, (more so than in her two previous volumes, I would say) but love is also exalting and exulting, even if it is absence and loss which reveals this; the voice of the beloved lost brother to whom the book is dedicated 

... splashed 

down the channels of my ears...

and she longs to hold on to 

everything you ever touched, the golden light that rests

on places where your arms passed through.

Time and tide only increase the store of beauty of those we love -

nieces came

and went, growing lovelier with the storms

(how I love that one!)

This often isn't easy writing, but so what?  It is sometimes hard to follow, as in the appositely titled An upside down vision, you -

... lapels flying and clean grin
for friends, lover mother, then wavering
at the edge like reed, windblown
a whole block of flats, shimmying in streetlight,

but syntactical ambiguity can express and enrich a complex emotional landscape.

And sometimes it's hard to confront such an onslaught of intense, sometimes violent, synaesthetic sensory impressions, the omnipresence of  pain and shadow and the lightning flashes of ecstasy, which are in essence a refusal to experience life by any half-measures, no matter how much it hurts.

The title poem starts with the poet

At the sink in nettles to my elbows

which makes one wince, of course, but it is the sting, the itch, the pain, the acid taste of

... still-warm rhubarb that sets my teeth on edge

which needles and drives and provokes the creative act;

searching a stony streambed, we seek the heart

of all that water, the salt and darkness, the emptiness

that billows jewelled nets strung from every part 

of this place where nothing misses me.

If I didn't know her a bit, and if I didn't know enough to know that one need not confuse the writer with the places where they take you, I might worry about Teresa.  But that kind of worrying about can be a sign of smallness, resistance, jealousy even; that I can't quite go to those places on my own, but need her to take me there. It is a privilege to share something of the vision and experience of someone who has

...yew

along the front path, violets down deep, forsythia, mint she'll never

be free of, bleeding heart, the sounding out of poems fresh

and mysterious, a source she'll never tire of sipping.

I hope she never does tire of it.

(Itching, itching is published by Finishing Line Press )

Beech nuts

While finally getting around to putting away the t-shirts and shorts and getting out the woollies and fleecies I caught BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme, which was about wild food and foraging for it.  It is, in a small way, a thriving business, with dedicated and knowledgeable foragers with long client lists of top chefs and restaurants who are just queuing up to buy not only wild mushrooms, always sought after and paid handsomely for in most of Europe though not until recently by the wary British, but stuff like hogweed seeds, goosegrass, and even pine needles - used as an aromatic and infused into sugar, among other things; Heston Blumenthal was going on about how he dusts it onto mince pies in an ad for Waitrose the other day. A little while ago someone was telling me about how they'd stopped at a fashionable and well-reviewed restaurant on a UK holiday and eaten nettle soup with snails in ( on purpose, apparently, not because they'd omitted to wash them off the nettles), something with wild garlic, I think, followed by deep fried sand eels.  

I have long been an inveterate forager. Richard Mabey's Food for Free has been a vade mecum for me for a very long time, I got my first copy of it out of the library in my early teens and have scarcely ever been without it. Richard Maybe was on the programme, speaking intelligently about the difference between the hobby foraging of today and the necessity of supplementing diet and income which had driven it in former times.  He applauded the chefs and foodies and professional foragers for exploring it and reviving the interest, and for getting people back in touch with nature and natural food.  

Yet, call me a grousing malcontent, but something about this rankles with me. Perhaps it's just the kind of resentment one tends to feel when one has always enjoyed something but rather been looked askance at  and considered eccentric for it, then suddenly it becomes fashionable and everyone is indiscriminately jumping on the bandwagon. And it is indiscriminate; I've eaten a lot of this stuff, some of it's good, some delicious, other things you'd really only bother with if you were in imminent danger of demise from starvation, or scurvy at least. There are good reasons why humankind selected certain plants over others and developed them to grow bigger and better. It seems to me the current gastronomic wild food craze is a kind of faux frugality, flirting with back-to-nature, a pose, Marie-Antoinette playing shepherdesses, and in the end all about novelty - we've eaten every kind of exotica flown in from everywhere and our palates are jaded, bring us coarse weeds from the hedges to tickle them, we'll pay good money and drive our 4-wheel-drives many miles to get them... 

For all the Athenians and the strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear of some new thing...

Decadent. When I went to look up a link for Mabey's Food for Free, the first search result that came up was for an organisation of the same name which seeks to redistribute the enormous amounts of waste in from modern food outlets. This in America it's true, but waste is endemic everywhere, playing at self-sufficiency and eating from the hedgerows doesn't really address that; true frugality would be better served by wasting less, indeed, by eating less, by doing with gluts and doing without, not chasing around after something different all the time.  

But no, this won't do, grousing malcontent indeed.  Better the hirsute foragers, who do no harm to the environment they forage, than mange-tout flown in from Kenya, and I don't think anyone's pretending it's really contributing to sustainability. And I'm just as bad myself.  I like to think that my foraging is about developing skills of identifying and preparing wild food, and a way of making the best of being, relatively speaking, time-rich and cash-poor, as gathering and picking over and processing takes time, but it's really just for fun, playing around and trying to be different, which is probably why I'm cross about other people doing it too - I enjoyed being seen as a bit quaint.  And I'm very aware that while my jams and syrups and liqueurs may be from fruit and flowers from the hedgerows, but the sugar and booze comes courtesy of the wicked multinationals and their cash crops; the the herbs and leaves might be out of the fields and banks where the wild thyme blows but the olive oil they're dressed with cost money from the other kind of bank and came quite a long way to be here. And I'm hooked on trying new things too.

Never mind, I'll go on fiddling in my own way while Rome burns, and lucky I am to be able to do it.

All of which is a long and grumpy preamble to the original matter of this post, which is proof positive that I really must have too much time on my hands (I don't really, I just distract myself with trifles while the floor goes unswept and the dog unbrushed).  

Beech nuts.  

Chestnuts and oaks are the predominant broad-leaved deciduous trees in these parts, but there are a few beech trees about too, and for the first time I can remember I noticed this year that the little triangular, three husked nuts, or mast, were unusually plump, and on closer examination, they proved to contain actual nutty little nuts - usually they are empty.  So while Molly mooched around in one of her favourite Stations of the Mol, a lay-by under a large beech tree in the woods above Quessoy, (she often doesn't care much to go for a proper walk in these places, but barks as we approach them, even when she has been apparently fast asleep until that moment, and likes to potter round in circles indefinitely) I gathered a handkerchief full of beech mast and took it home to experiment with.

In fact I couldn't find much positive about beech nuts as a food crop, they were generally left for the pigs to munch on, or made into oil.  They have a high oil content and it keeps well.  They tend only to fruit this abundantly about every four years.

As I had done with the seeds I'd salvaged from a pumpkin, I left them on the kitchen counter and shelled them in dribs and drabs just with my nails as I was passing.  You can get through quite a lot that way.

I have chosen in the name of honesty not to crop out the box of Cabernet d'Anjou or the jar of boiled sweets, just to prove I am no earthy purist in food matters, but really have quite low tastes.

The nuts are perhaps a centimetre long, and covered in a brown skin.  They may be a bit high in tannin for comfort it seems, so the skin needs to come off.

The first lot I toasted skin-on,

rubbed the skin off in the palm of my hand a few at a time while they were hot and blew on them to winnow them.  It felt nice.

The second lot I blanched with hot water like almonds, which is quite quick, and then toasted after.

I thought the first method was probably best, they seemed to toast more evenly and the flavour was better.  Like most nuts and seeds they're tastier toasted.


My plan was to make a kind of pesto with them, with the basil that won't stop growing on the windowsill, and the pumpkin seeds and some small but very nice walnuts also foraged from a tree by where our friends used to live.  Their neighbour, since deceased, used to carefully gather the walnuts and clean them all and put them in wooden boxes and give them away to anyone who wanted them, now I just pick a few up if I'm passing.  However, the three-seed collection was so nice as it was, I've  just been keeping them to one side and scattering them on salads as and when.  


Probably not really worth the bother, but interesting anyway!

Bless thee Shakespeare thou art translated...

Left myself short of time again, yet I'm still enjoying daily postings.  There seems quite a bit of it going on this year, even if not everyone's all signed up officially for it, something of a resurgence of blogging motivation, which is good to see, even when it means the sidebar feed is changing its configuration faster than I can keep up with it.

A dull grey day today, and this afternoon I trotted along to the unfortunately acronymed CAC ( think it stands for Centre d'acceuil culturel, not quite sure, it is to be found above what used to be the Spar supermarket and is now a state of the art Carrefour minimarket) in Moncontour to meet J and E, who had agreed to come along to see Le TrUC, an am-dram group from Rennes in a French language version of  A Midsummer Night's Dream ( Un Songe d'une Nuit d'Été).  Ok, you can smile, how desperate does one have to be to get out more?  I had until now sworn off any small scale French language theatricals once and for all since being taken, some ten years ago now, to see a production of something in a village theatre resembling a tin can with old cinema seats ( actually it wasn't badly equipped really) with a convoluted plot involving a woman from the provinces who inherits a town property which unbeknownst to her is really a brothel but then the girls turn out to be spies but then the woman herself turns out to be the top spy, or something like that.  It's probably some classic of French popular comedy which I shall now be berated for my cultural ignorance for not knowing about but I only remember it as one of the most interminable and excruciating evenings I have ever spent.  I didn't have my own transport and was really almost in tears of desperation by the time we finally got away.  After that it was music, dance or, at a pinch if Iso and Pascal are in them, mime performances only, with a time limit, and strict insistence on one's own transport and the possibility of a quick getaway.

But I was so surprised to see a big banner for MSND and thought, why not, if they can take the trouble to come out here and put it on I can at least give it a go, and since the ins and outs of the play and quite a few of its speeches are probably about as familiar as anything could be, and since I'd a reasonable idea of its likely duration, it couldn't be too unendurably incomprehensible.  Surprisingly I even found two other people prepared to turn out with me.  It was on last night and this afternoon, with about 30 odd people in the audience and the same the night before, which might have only been about three times the number of people involved in the production but also probaly constituted about half of the compos mentis, ambulant population of Moncontour, so not bad.

And in truth it really wasn't bad.  It was too long; bits of it dragged rather and were spun out unnecessarily, especially the bits with the lovers, and it occurs to me that they're probably often rather tiresome. T he rude mechanicals ended up making us laugh quite a lot in Pyramus and Thisbe, but their rehearsals were weirdly halting and uncertain, and Bottom translated was too fearful and pitiable for my taste, he ought to have a really good time being petted and lusted after by Titania and run around after by Pease Blossom et al.  Titania was rather good, tall  and slinky in thigh boots and a mini-skirt.  All the fairies were good, camp and wacky and enjoying themselves in all kids of coloured tulle and roller skates and other bits and pieces. Though Oberon was somewhat declamatory, the young woman who was Puck was the epitome of Puckishness and very watchable, and generally they could have cut a lot more of the tedious lovers and kept in more fairy stuff.

So much for the action, but what about Shakespeare in French?  I don't know, it seems a truism to the point of the bleedin' obvious to say it should be in the original, but then again, if you aren't English speaking what do you do?  I recognised much of it but it seemed unrecognisable, I had hoped it would be a different music but it seemed sadly unmusical, but that might be a lack in me.  I know there's a worthy tradition of French translation of Shakespeare but don't know enough about it to be discerning.  

Glad I went though.

~

A few more pictures from the same morning as the liquid amber ones.

Still life and woodpecker

Oh my, I am tired.  Been doing this and that all quite interesting but left me no juice left to write about any of it.

Here's a still life, because where there's still life there's still hope.

Some if it was scrumped, some otherwise serendipitously acquired, some just bought.  Scrumped included the medlar, which is useless since it is not yet bletted.  I thought I had found the last word on medlars here,(and the source of another wonderful and enriching on-line friendship), but then there was this post at twisted rib just the other day, which is amazing and hilarious and somewhat filthy and in places oh so right (DHL, looking at you and it's true I'm afraid even though you did write Bavarian Gentians, and The Song of a Man who has Come Through, and Shadows ...)

~

Then there was this fellow who came and alighted in the eucalyptus and shouted and yaffled 'IT'S GOING TO RAIN!!!'  for a full couple of minutes before flying off and he was right, it did.   

~

And now I really must go to bed.

Sheila's cotton

A beautiful thing arrived today.

Sheila lives in Memphis and blogs at Folk, Flocks and Flowers.  She loves... well, she just loves, but all sorts of things, music and words and birds and flowers and Italy, (she lived there for years and speaks fluent Italian, can even give lectures in it); she loves her friends and her family and Drazen her husband (who's Croatian, she speaks Croatian too) and her dogs who have the fabulous names of Pablo and Tosca.  She is beautiful and talented and courageous and rich in faith and hope and love  One day she'll come and live in Europe, in Croatia, and then she'll be just sort of down the road, and we are going to sit in the sunset together when we are old ladies..  She's been a has been a faithful blog friend to me for years now, and we e-mail and sometimes snail-mail.

So quite out of the blue, though the elegant italic script on the envelope looked instantly familiar, a big jiffy bag arrived this morning.  Inside was another envelope with my initials exquisitely cut-out and stuck on it, a card and a letter, and another box which had once contained cranberry and orange biscotti, and inside that were...

cotton bolls!

Where Sheila lives they grow cotton, of course.  One day they were driving past a big field of it and she thought how lovely it looked, and surmised quite rightly that I would not be familiar with the sight of a field of cotton in its glory, and decided that she'd rather like to share something of the experience with me, so she got Drazen to stop, jumped down, turned around and picked a boll of cotton (or two), and sent it to me.

I just think this is magical, just to think to pick up, without harm or damage to anything, a little, simple piece of the world around you and share it with someone thousands of miles away to whom it is new and unfamiliar.  We all ought to do things like that more often.  Bless you, Sheila, as I'm blessed to have such people in my life.