Basque (and Bearnais) windows and doors

Round and about.

Basque red.  You can buy it in tins, but the peeling patina takes more like years.

Windows and ex-windows.

Chapel at Bascassan, more later, but not much.

A notaire's in the Bearnaise.

Always did love that shade of blue.

Pilgrims

'When we were in northern Spain' said Emy-the-vet's husband Paul, a big, gentle, hirsute Dutch ex-trucker,  now Emy's receptionist-cum-muscle-man, 'we met a guy who was doing it with a monkey...'

'It' was the St James pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, the Camino.  Nevertheless we both looked at him a little askance.

'Um, do I mean a monkey?'

He gave Emy the word in Dutch, but we had already pre-empted his meaning; Paul's English is normally very good indeed - of course, he's Dutch.

'No, a donkey.  Yes, he was making the pilgrimage with a donkey.  Anyway, he showed us some photos he had taken of it.  One was of a road in Spain, a great long straight road going off to the horizon in an empty landscape, like a desert, with just groups of people as far you could see, like ants. I thought, that's not for me.'

'I'd rather walk the sentier des douaniers, round the coast of Brittany' said Emy  'just me. Paul could pick me up and meet me for dinner at the end of every day.'

~

Like Emy and Paul, I'm not a joiner, I tell myself I don't want to follow the crowd, and the current mania for the Camino, feeding and fed by books and films and TV, is drawing very big crowds.  In all weathers and seasons the refuges, with their shared dormitories and Spartan fare, are always full; if you don't get up and on the road before first light, and on to the next stopover by about three in the afternoon, there's a strong chance you won't make it in the scramble for a bed for the night.  The roads and paths along the whole principal inland route in northern Spain, the Camino Frances, are never empty of groups of pilgrims.  Its rise in popularity coinciding with that of the internet, it must be one of the most documented, photographed, reflected on and shared journeys of our time.  I don't claim to know a lot about it, and I'm not going to bother to try to put in any links about it or really much further information, there is so much about it out there already.

The images of this swarming, gregarious crowd, the lack of privacy, the competition for space and the drivenness of it all fill me with horror.  And yet...

~


Some years ago, a friend reported on another:

'Mike made it to Santiago on his pilgrimage.  He said he was doing it for his mother, she died last year. It was hard but he was glad he'd done it, he said.'

'Can't be doing with any of that kind of thing,' said J.

'Any of what kind of thing, exactly?' I asked, bristling at what I knew was J's knee-jerk anti-religious scoffing. I feel the same about knee-jerk religious reactions, only living as and where I do I generally tend to encounter more of the anti-religious than the religious, and I suppose I'm not really sorry it's so.  I just get a bit cross at anyone's assumption that the way she thinks and feels on such matters is the only remotely intelligent and sensible way to be, and anyone who doesn't can only be stupid, and if I've got half a brain I can only agree.  Especially from someone whose intellectual powers are in inverse relation to their not very intelligent prejudices on other matters...

'Oh, you know, Christian attainment and all that.'

~

Clearly, from all the people who do it, it's not necessary to be a paid-up Catholic or even a Christian to walk the Pilgrimage route, any more than you need to be a paid-up Lutheran to sing in Bach's St Matthew Passion.  If you do it properly you get a card which you get stamped and various privileges that go with it (I don't think these include absolution or time off Purgatory any more). I understand sometimes there's a questionnaire about your reasons for doing it, whether religious, spiritual, cultural or whatever, but  I don't know what the breakdown of responses to this is; a lot, I think still do it for religious reasons.

~

Brother # 2 has, over the last 20 years, covered much of the Pilgrimage route from various points in France right up to Santiago, mostly by bike.  He is in general rejecting of the conventionally religious, but has had various experiences along the way which might, I understand, be called transcendent, and he has become deeply involved with and knowledgeable about Romanesque art and architecture.

He sometimes gets, in his own phrase, rather hippy-shit about imagining an atavistic sense of connection with the Way, fantasising that one of our medieval West Country yeoman forebears (whose patronym was James, as it happens) took himself off there with his scallop shell, and he, Bro#2, is retracing his steps.  Since the routes were, relatively speaking, as well frequented in former times as they are now, and since you don't have to go back all that far before we all start sharing ancestors anyway, this may indeed be statistically possible. By the same token it's also not impossible that our forebears did all kinds of things from steeple-jacking to mass-murder, one might say, we don't choose to feel connected to all of them.

There are, it seems, a lot of Japanese and Koreans walking the pilgrimage route now.  Whether any of them imagine lines of historical genetic connection to it I don't know.  It's easy to get judgemental, bordering on racist, about this; oh well, now the Japanese tourists have got there... One thinks also of the Dalai Lama's suggestion that it might be better to stick to our own traditions.

But this is bang out of order.  Westerners have been looking at the rest of the world on the page and the screen and saying  'I want some of that!' for ever; they' ve been hitting the hippy trail to the east, (or the Spice Road before that), visiting Japanese Buddhist shrines, colonising the beaches of Thailand and Bali in search of Paradise ; they were eager enough to swarm all over the Great Wall, the tombs of the Terracotta Warriors, the Temples of Angkor Wat, as soon as they possibly could.  And it's not all in the pursuit of an exotic kick and easy escapist hedonism, there is a sense that the great monuments, the historic traditions, the tangible traces of supreme human attainment, material and/or spiritual, the possibility of revelation in touching the alien and astonishing past, belong to all of us, are not the preserve of the culture that owns them.  Jung's positing that myths and archetypes, numinous and spiritual experiences, are culturally, or even racially, specific, brought him uncomfortably close to the Nazis.  Helen Waddell, whose work inspired a love of the medieval period that would be one reason for taking up the Pilgrimage route myself, was born and brought up in Japan, translated Chinese poetry as well as medieval Latin; the boundaries between these cultures were porous for her, she compared them cheerfully.

~

Niece K, she who makes me laugh, has also done quite large sections of the route, mostly with her dad, Brother # 2.  She'd mostly call herself a pagan I think, and is very into standing stones.  She looks to find traces of the magical and pre-Christian past in the places and tracks, in the green men and monsters and fabulous beasts of the Romanesque, and in the rocks and woods and stones along the way.  I must say New Age Paganism, with its pseudo-anthropology and pseudo-archaeology, and its over-active and sentimental imagination (back to the Bronze Age!  Human sacrifice and a diet of acorns anyone? I once saw incontravertible proof that you could prove that all the Woolworths stores in the East Midlands were situated on and joined together by ley-lines...), frequently exasperates me beyond measure, as I'm afraid does much of the 'spiritual-but-not-religious' line, which sometimes seems to me to be a woolly kind of cop-out, a having of numerous cakes and eating them, and simply a rather trite, bland  formula.

But then I am a great but inconsistent nay-sayer in so many ways, and I don't really mind about the paganism because everything K does she does with enthusiasm and aplomb, and she wouldn't care whether I minded or not anyway.

She also simply likes doing stuff with her dad, which is great.

~

Brother # 1, who is walking the Camino now, is a fully paid-up practising Christian, a former chaplain to a Seafarers' Mission,  and one of the people-of-faith whose belief I don't like to see rubbished as stupid.  He's had a fair few struggles with proselytising, power-mongering, arrogant and ignorant people within his church, with whom he is not in sympathy, but he sticks with it.  It's not something I understand altogether, and though we are quite close, I don't seek to make a window into his heart about it, either to embrace or reject it, and he imposes nothing, beyond liking to say grace at meals sometimes, which is no real imposition.  I don't think he's doing the walk to atone for anything or to get a privileged pass into heaven.

~


'I rather fancy myself as a Foul Fiend', said Tom, after teasing Brother # 1 about how dangerous and uncomfortable the pilgrimage route over the mountains in the rain was going to be, and generally besetting him round with dismal stories.

'I'll be a Goblin then,' said I.

We sang:

' No goblin nor foul fiend
Can daunt his spirit.
He knows he at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies flee away,
He'll fear not what men say
He'll labour night and day
To be a pilgrim.'


Both brothers and sister joined in.  The younger generation looked at us with tolerant but puzzled amusement.  Evidently in the ten years or so between my youth and theirs, John Bunyan's great hymn ceased to be part of everyone's cultural furniture, so they must have missed giggling at singing 'to be a pilchard'  too.  Maybe no one eats pilchards now either.

(Bunyan, the Puritan, came from a world which had rejected acts of formalised atonement and attainment such as pilgrimage, getting badges and certificates to buy off your time in purgatory and soften the blow of judgement.  His idea of pilgrimage was fundamentally an inward and allegorical one,  the places and personages which could seduce and destroy the valiant pilgrim were elements within the spirit of humankind.)

~

So, what's my point?  Not sure I have one.  Not sure I need one either.  There are more than enough people with points in the world, nasty sharp ones they keep jabbing into other people.  I suppose I wonder, in chucking out the frequently rank and toxic bathwater of conventional religion, if we aren't in danger of chucking out a few babies, whether these are artistic and cultural babies, or somewhat more numinous ones.    On the other hand it doesn't look as though the bathwater's in danger of being chucked out any time soon.  

Too many metaphors by half there, I fear.

~

No, not a joiner,  I wonder though, if this much-vaunted independence of spirit, the refusal to accept mediation and intercession, the rejection of institutionalised belief and aids to salvation and  insistence on finding our own way to grace, stems in part from a deeply ingrained protestantism, with a small 'p', if you like.  Yet protestantism, with its accent on works and will over confession and forgiveness, on the word and the letter, became, in the end, quite as worldly, conformist, intolerant and repressive as the Catholic religion it supplanted; the Non-Conformists chapel folk (from whom my family largely sprang, not so long ago) ended up being as repressively conformist as anyone.

~

I'm not a joiner, and I don't want to follow the crowd, I say.  I'll walk my own path, (if there's any such thing, or if there's anything else...).  But for all that, for all the atrocious weather, the awful sounding communal sleeping arrangements, and my awareness of my own physical unfitness, I found myself hankering to be joining them.  And every time I saw groups of wayfarers in groups or singly, chatting away in a babel of tongues, dour and cheerful, old and young, making their way upwards into the mountains, I felt an inadvertent longing and a lump in the throat.  Even as we drove away up north and east into the Bearn region, along tracks and green ways, running alongside and crossing the road, small knots of them could still be seen, backpacked and waterproofed, with their sticks and hats, trekking south and west towards the great city and cathedral of St James in Galicia, hundreds of miles away, and I felt a bit sad to be going in the opposite direction, even though I was really more than ready to go home.

And the point of it is the joining; just finding any old sustained and challenging walk, like Emy's coastal sentier des douaniers, and taking it up would not be the same. Part of me, I know, wants to submerge and lose myself in this tide of moving humanity.  And I am intrigued as to why it's calling to so many people - I know it's a craze, I know there's been a film, but why?  Without getting religiose or hippy-shit myself, I do wonder if the outward course of the Camino Frances in particular, the verdant and lovely rivers and foothills from which pilgrims ascend to the arduous exaltation of the rocky high places, the passes into the dry and arid plains and the final approach to the wondrous city, with its gold and incense and crowded jubilation, offers people a spiritual narrative which either mirrors what is inside them, or furnishes an absence.

Whatever.  However, it really seems as if the pilgrimage route, or at least the Camino Frances, has pretty much reached saturation point.  While the companionship of the crowd, and the inevitable unplanned encounters and contact with others, are in a large part the point of the journey, probably very authentically mediaeval too, the infrastructure of routes and accommodation seems to be about full to capacity now, and there seems little potential for solitude, contemplation and going at one's own pace, which must surely also be important elements of the journey.  The Northern Route along the north Spanish coast, in sight of the sea and with its own interesting history as the way taken in former times to keep pilgrims outside of the lands in Moorish occupation, would seem interesting and less crowded, but there is little accommodation, and the paths are poorly signed and maintained.

Anyway, I'm really not likely to be doing it any time soon.

~

So, to round off this lengthy post,a few pilgrim-related photos.

In fact, a day or two before their departure, when there was uncertainty about the weather and the route, Tom and I (and Mol) jumped in the car with Brother # 1, and said we'd just explore a little way up the road towards Spain.  In fact we ended up driving the 24 or so kilometres to Roncevalles, their first stopover, and the most difficult part of the journey.  I wondered if he would feel a bit disappointed about this, that it would seem like cheating, but in fact it encouraged him, as he was able to reconnoitre the route and the weather.  It certainly was pretty chilly up there,

there was still a bit of snow around,

(this one I was back in the car for).

The abbey at Roncevalles is an austere sort of place, and the weather was awful, but we found ourselves surprisingly excited to be there; we were in Spain, people were talking another language,

and Brother # 1 would have less than 800 km still to go. 

So here they are, on the (early) morning of departure, not looking terribly solemn or spiritual.

Tom saying goodbye to K.  She is surely an incarnation of the goddess if ever there was one, we do love her.

And off they go down the road.  We went back inside only to notice the stick, or pilgrim stave or whatever, that Bro#1 had made a special trip into St Jean the day before to buy, leaning in the corner.  Tom picked it up and went in pursuit.  Came back in due course, breathless and laughing.  'I can't believe it really,' he said 'there I was, a 74 year old bloke running up the road in his pyjamas waving a stick.'

They were actually going a couple of hundred yards in the opposite direction, then they turned left, crossed the river and took a side road up into the hills, passing above the house.  We looked out for them but didn't see them through the trees, but we heard a distant whoop, and I whooped back.

The following day, we took my sister and the twins to Biarritz to catch their plane, and then it was just us, Tom, Molly and me, with a day to ourselves to wind up the house, pack our bags, and turn our faces towards home.  Tom said he felt a bit like Sam at the end of The Lord of the Rings.

~ 

( There are some more pictures from the trip as we spent a day out with sister and nieces, then a pleasant morning just to ourselves in St Jean, and then an interesting stopover in another lovely B&B, or chambres d'hôtes since it was a French owned one, and some other oddments, so there'll be a few more photo posts yet to come.)

Interlude: more maquettes

I'm really delighted to say that the indefatigable Clive Hicks-Jenkins, whose praises I cannot sing too highly so I'll just shut up (well, I might one day), has seen fit to include my maquettes in his glorious feast of an on-line exhibition on the theme.  As well as the original donkey and Molly prototypes I made a while back, I finally, and at the last minute, made a full set of Musicians of Bremen figures, on which I spent much of this last weekend, including a new dog and donkey, all made using the same medium (good old Inktense pencils) and colour pallette, to scale and facing the right way, so they could be assembled into the classic Musicians of Bremen animal tower, as they are shown in the sculpture in the town of Bremen, and in most illustrations of the story.  I think some of the appeal of the story is in this stacking up of the animals from large to small; give a child a set of animal figures like this to play with and they will inevitably end up trying to get them to stand up on each other's backs like this.

It was an interesting exercise, the cat ended up with more complex articulations than the dog and donkey, including eight separate joints in the tail alone, because that was the only way to convey anything at all of the fluidity and flexibility of a cat.  It was surprisingly difficult to find many pictures of a cat at full stretch showing exactly how and where it moves to draw from, cats are more often than not curled or twisted or hunkered or asleep - I have been drawing cats fairly competently since I was about three but still found I needed reference.  While all vertebrates are basically made on the same frame with the same number and orientation of joints,there's a wide variation in how they use them, of course.  But the complicated ones were the more satisfying, I really enjoyed making the cockerel too, and studying the colouring and patterning of these handsome creatures carefully.

There's a larger version of the picture at Clive's Artlog, and also separate collages of all the figures in different positions.  There are also many more really stunning contributions by other extremely talented, imaginative artists of whom I'm very proud to be seen alongside, everything from the eerie to the endearing, and much more.  The range and standard and originality of all the work so far is truly outstanding, and there's more to come.  Clive's put enormous time and effort into this at a very busy and productive time for him, for no personal gain or glory, so hie thee on over to the Artlog and enjoy.  So far there have been parts one, two and three, and so far he's been posting a new batch every day.

Every time I think blogging might be losing its lustre, something new and terrific comes along to make me fall for it all over again...

Basque sheep

These seem to be of two different kinds, the all white all over ones in the photos, with little or no horns (though maybe they de-horn them?), and the ones with black faces and speckling, and really impressive long twirly horns.  There were some like that a bit further down the road, but it wasn't an easy place to stop, and also, they had been shorn - or is it sheared? - so they didn't look as beautiful in the fleece department.  (I don't know as much about sheep as I do about cows.)

Those below were the kind that lived directly around the house where we went for a walk up the hill in the first day or two we were there, my three nieces, my sister, Molly and I.  They had lovely long fleeces, as you can see, and they delighted and amused us when they first saw us by running skittishly away from us with stiff legs, their woolly locks flowing and bouncing as they went (they soon settled down and turned back and regarded us with curiosity, so we weren't guilty of sheep worrying or anything).  A few farmers' vans went up and down, one of them driven by a very dour-faced character, who barely nodded and certainly didn't essay a smile when we moved to one side of the lane for him.

'He looks very unmoved by such a collection of beautiful women,' said Niece-Who-Makes-Me-Laugh. 

We went on to conjecture that perhaps women weren't his thing; perhaps he preferred his sheep.

'Ah like ma sheep' said Niece-Who-Makes-Me-Laugh, in her best cod French leery accent 'zey 'ave the beautiful long 'air, and zey shake when zey run...'

Well, they certainly were very pretty sheep anyway (not a bit like maggots, thank you Plutarch),

some of them had bells on, which it was easier to hear than see,

and they seemed very loving and affectionate, at least with each other.

And the cheese made from their milk is delicious, especially with black cherry jam.  I've still got some I brought back in the fridge, I think I might have some now.

Home from the hills

And the hills were truly splendid. 

But they were a long way away from here, and, notwithstanding a stop in a comfortable bed and breakfast run by a very nice English family, the road through Les Landes, currently being made bigger, with its great trains of lorries from every corner of Europe grinding their way down to Spain (what can there be to be taken to and from Spain in such quantity?  Hothouse-grown and out-of-season fruit and veg, I suppose, coming from, but what do they fill up with from Mittel-Europe, the Baltic and Balkans and the old Soviet bloc, going there?), its contraflows and palimpsests of erased, altered and temporary road markings, its pocked and patched and roughened surfaces, was very long. Imagining the shepherds who stalked on stilts across the landscape two centuries ago, communicating in whistles and propped up with their knitting at rest, and wondering at the expanses of pine trees all filling the bricolage stores of France with two-by-one and tongue-and-groove, went only some way to alleviating the dreariness of it. 


But we got there, in time to pick up the flying members of the group from Biarritz, and made our way carrying Australian brother, his hat and an extra backpack or two.  We stopped at a supermarket just short of our destination, bought bread and buns and I tried to 'phone the owner of the house where we were staying.  I eventually spoke to, or tried to, an elderly (-sounding) man with an incomprehensible Basque accent and became thoroughly confused, but we made our way there to find our landlady waiting for us anyway, with the heating on.  When it comes to finding suitable and not too costly accommodation for eight people and a dog, beggars can't really be choosers.  Mme Eyheracher (a good Basque name) did everything she could to make the house comfortable, and was kind and friendly.  There were a couple of washing machines (it was really two separate appartments) and a dishwasher, none of which we used, decent fridges, plenty of crockery and glasses, coffee machines and toasters, and to our pleasant surprise, teapots and mugs with handles - standard French arrangements often include only small coffee cups and large bols without handles, which serve for cereal and hot drinks both; I actually quite like drinking milky coffee out of one of these, but tea isn't quite right.  There were, however, no kettles, so water was boiled in saucepans.  Everything was very clean and smelled of furniture polish, and there was abundant hot water, for which we were thankful.

It was called, it seems, Arrossagarayėnia.  I should have collected some photos of Basque signs and names. We wondered what a Basque Scrabble set would be like, presumably it would contain a lot of zs, xes, ks, and js which would be worth very few points.


However, it was an old and old-fashioned place, square and gloomy, single glazed, lino and formica and ugly patterned wallpapers and endless dark brown wood, shabby-sans-chic.  The central heating was oddly timed, and perhaps needed bleeding, so while those of us accustomed to more rustic conditions were OK, one or two of the family members, softened-up by urban British or sunny antipodean living, and with less flesh on their bones, were a bit chilly at times.  There was a dining area with a big table next to the kitchen, but no comfortable seating, so one was obliged to follow William Morris's injunction: 'If you want to be comfortable, go to bed'.  Unfortunately the beds weren't too comfy either, though they could have been worse. 


In a valley, it was hemmed in somewhat by a river on one side and a road on the other, the one leading up to the pass of Roncevalles.  We had a few hours of fairly sunny weather in the next day or so, and managed a walk up into the hills above the house, where I took a lot of photos of sheep, which perhaps will have  post of their own. 

After that, and as the predicted departure of the pilgrim contingent drew closer, the weather grew wetter and wetter and worse and worse.


We were obliged to make our own indoor entertainment (there was a little television set with French channels but we only used it for weather forecasts). We ate well,

Aussie brother made scrambled eggs most mornings (without the banana, that was just trying to get into the shot)

We chatted and shifted our bottoms on the hard chairs, and took our leftovers down to feed the two poor little half-starved hunting dogs whiling away the eight months of the year when they aren't out hunting ( and presumably terrorising the sheep) cooped up in a small enclosure at the end of the yard, with scant shelter, food or bedding - a fairly typical element of French rural living, very picturesque. I had hoped to get some maquette making done while there, but somehow the time seemed to run away, in cooking and other arrangements.  However, my sister had brought some origami kits at the last minute, so the rough paper and crayons and other things I brought was put to good use.  

(Left to right, twin nieces T and B, their mother my Lovely Sister, and K, the Niece-Who-Makes-Me-Laugh-More-Than-Anyone-Else, all origami-ing.)


At one point the origami took an aeronautical turn, and the room became filled with flying paper aircraft.  As I listened with half an ear in the kitchen to the discussion on 1950s plane design between my brother and Tom, one craft hurtled through the door and landed in Molly's dinner.  We left a row of origami penguins when we left, along with the wild flowers Niece-Who-Makes-Me-Laugh had picked, and the gold foil rose niece B had made from wrappers from the chocolate bunnies her mother had brought,

which caught a rare ray of sunshine just before we left.  


We all survived, and it was a good thing to spend time with my family.  Molly stayed well, and the pilgrims made it over the mountains and into Spain.  But that'll do for now, and I'll do some posts with more photos anon.

Eve of departure

'You never know,' I said 'we might all still be alive by this time next week and feeling quite happy.'

'Mmm, I shouldn't push it.' said Tom.

This trip to the Basque Country end of the Pyrenees has been somewhat hedged about with anxiety for many of the people concerned; our particular element of which has been Molly going down with a severe infection, quite unexpected and unrelated either to ears or lymphoma, which has entailed both horrible smelling and tasting antibiotics and an almost total and uncharacteristic loss of appetite and unwillingness to swallow anything on her part.  Further details I will spare you. I finally got the medicine into her by making up a sugar syrup, stirring the ground-up pill into it, then squirting it into her mouth with a plastic syringe while Tom did a strong arm restraint on her.  She would very suspiciously condescend to eat a few shreds of duck meat and a slice or two of broccolli stem a day, occasionally consenting to having these dipped in yoghurt ( though only the best creamy Greek style yoghurt, mind).

We had more than once resigned ourselves to the loss of the holiday, and indeed at times faced the thought of losing Molly herself, but, with every conceivable part of our anatomies crossed while touching wood, we look set to start travelling south tomorrow.  Mol is quiet and tired, but much better and more cheerful than she was last weekend, and has now extended her repertoire of acceptable foodstuffs to fish and chips, and even Healthy Doggy Treats but only if the vet gives them to her. She's on a different set of antibiotics now which don't smell so bad and seem to be concealable and swallowable in duck meat so, hopefully, those battles will be over ( I hope she's not reading this...).  Emy, the vet, says that the produce of the Basque Country is varied and interesting so we should be able to find something to tempt her.  She is eyeing the luggage accumulating in hall with excitement - the enthusiasm for a road trip will surely be the last thing to desert her, though there have been a few times when we, and others involved, have voiced the sentiment that perhaps it might be better to stay at home and spare oneself worry...  

We have a lot of road ahead, are scheduled to spend tomorrow night in a B&B in the Charente, then to rendezvous at Biarritz airport with my two brothers (one French domiciled with car and and one Australian, without), one sister and three nieces the following afternoon, whence we will go in a two car convoy to the town of St Jean Pied-de-Port, where we have rented a large and suspiciously cheap gîte.  This establishment has basic facilities and central heating, but no linen, so we are also carrying a suitcase full of sheets and towels, which, along with Mol's extensive equipage of home comforts, will make for a squeeze in the car, fortunately many of my family members are quite thin.

We are currently experiencing a brass-monkey cold April, colder than December, and snow is forecast in the mountains, during which time my brothers and one niece are planning to take off on the ascent and descent from St Jean to Roncevalles which makes up one of the most notoriously arduous legs of the Santiago de Compostella pilgrimage route. French brother has done most of this journey at one time or other, but mostly by bike and camping - introvert style - and says he is less fit than he was.  Aussie brother has been in training and is very serious about it, but has been training in heat and humidity, not devilish cold.  They are doing it extrovert style on foot and staying in hostels. They are both hovering around their seventieth year, and may have to rely on 30-something niece to carry them.

But they will be all right, because I have ensured they have a lucky pilgrim's scallop shell to take with them!  I commissioned this one specially from lovely, talented Chloe at Slightly Triangle ( that's her blog link, but there's also her website and Etsy shop, go there and spend money, but not necessarily much money, for there are untold and exquisite treasures to be had there for a song...).  I can't believe how much I love the things she makes, by painting and stitching, and she just turned to and made this one in next to no time and sent it to me to take with me.   She's another maquetteer, and a friend of Clive, which is how I found her.  I love blogging, even though I don't do it as much as I have done, for the people I still find and the things they do.

And although I am not intending to walk the Camino myself, or no more than a few kilometers of it, as an act of faith I have waxed my walking boots, a gesture of care and comfort they have not seen in a while.  I have had these boots for nigh on twenty years, and though my walking career has waxed and waned and had its ups and downs, and had its ups and downs, I don't regret buying them and they have proved their worth, though they seemed terribly expensive at the time, when life was often precarious and hand-to-mouth, much more so than it is now.  Though Mol will still be convalescent, and has really not been up for long hikes for a long time now, and though the weather may be inclement, and they may get an outing. 

We hope to visit the last vineyard left in the area at Irouléguy , and see funny long haired sheep with bells on, and wildly painted chapels, and visit an espadrille museum, and eat Espelette peppers and Bayonne ham and ewes' milk cheese, and not to have to go and dig people out of the snow, or look for a Basque vet...  

Fingers crossed, and anything else; we'll be back in about ten days.

Looking nature in the eye (and grouching a bit about Picasa)

Bits and pieces, all with something of an eye-balling theme.

~

Just as Tom was about to go out and check the post today, (we have external mailboxes here, of course, though ours is only a step from the house, and our regular posties tend to wait for us to come out and hand the mail over), there was an enormous thump on the window which made us nearly jump out of our skins.  It was not one but two squabbling cock chaffinches, so absorbed in their quarrel they forgot to look where they were going.  One of them landed, punch drunk, on the fence post outside the window.  At first, he was very wonky, his sides heaving, so knowing that having time to recover from shocks like this can make the difference between life and death for small birds, we waited for him to fly off at his leisure, before going out for the post.  

After a bit he straightened up, and started to look around him, including at us through the window, and at the rival, presumably, he had been scrapping with, who was taunting him from the house guttering above.  He must have stayed there a good ten minutes, then I remembered that the surest way to make any creature move off is to try to photograph it.  I took half a dozen or so pictures of him, then sure enough he flew away.

One of the nice things about creatures, like chaffinches, which have clearly differences between genders is one can refer to them as he or she without feeling sentimentally or childishly anthropomorphic. The wall brown butterfly, above, on a dandelion (which seem especially early and prolific this year, but don't they always...) I couldn't have been so sure about; the butterfly book (companion volume to the seashore one a couple of posts back), told me

the male and female are quite distinct, the former having an oblique band of scent scales on the fore-wing, which are said to smell like chocolate cream...

Mm, scratch-and-sniff butterfly.  Even so, the pictures in the book weren't really clear enough to be sure, but the internet came to my aid.  This one's a girl.

If I could have got close enough to smell the chocolatey scent scales (which she doesn't have), I'd have moved that grass blade across the top of the wing.  There was a bit of an exchange somewhere recently about how we tend to feel slightly guilty about rearranging nature to suit our photographic purposes, even in small ways, and how that's really a bit silly.  I don't know how it compares with retouching the photo.

This Normandy cow is also a girl, of course, or she would be a Normandy bull.  I'm very taken with Normandy cattle, which are more and more unusual hereabouts, being superseded by the ubiquitous Holstein-Frisian black and white standard Common Agricultural Policy issue.  There is an old rare breed of native black and white Brittany cow, apparently, but I don't know any.  They are small with rather delicate, dished faces, and beautiful upswept horns, but though their numbers are healthier than they were, there are only somewhat over a thousand in existence, and they mostly live south and west of here.  (I could become something of a livestock anorak, I fear, I love rare breeds...)

I find it is often a problem photographing animals like cows and horses, as they tend to dip their heads down to look at us, and then there is a strand of electric wire across their faces.  In the above picture I touched it out, with Picasa's increasingly easy to use retouch button.  I did it very carefully with a small brush size, but I can still where it was.

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Talking of Picasa, they've messed about with it again, so it's now Picasa 3.9.  It's no longer so evident how to make collages. The big collage button on the bottom menu bar is no longer there; you can collage every picture in a folder, by clicking on the small icon at the top of each folder, but it won't just collage selected, pinned pictures in the tray like it used to, which I liked because I could just flick through selecting the pictures I wanted then make them into a collage straight off. I feared I would have to export selected pictures into new folders especially, which would have been a pain.  Eventually I found you could do it as before by pinning them in the tray then going to the 'create' tab along the top, and then to 'Picture collage'.  It's only one extra click, so I shouldn't grumble, and doubtless I could have found it out quicker if I'd read the help forums or the blog or whatever, but I was slightly distressed to find the familiar button gone, it seems like not an improvement to a popular thing.  As to all the new effects - comic book, invert colour, Orton-ish, Holga-ish, posterize, heat map etc etc - they're quite fun, but mostly novelty and gimmick, so far I've only felt incline to use the 'HDR-ish' one and then only a little bit (in the photo of violet syrup last post).  I always rather liked Picasa because it was intuitive, I didn't have to be techie and clever, it wasn't Photoshop and the choices were limited.  Now it still isn't PS, because it can't do the really clever things that can, which actually take skill and know-how and aren't intuitive, like layers and levels and tools and so on, it's just trying to stick on some of the frilly bits.  Still, I suppose there's no harm in it.

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And then the other morning there was one of those strange and rather magical low-lying mists, which made us feel as though we were a ship afloat, or dwelling in Avalon, or something (my charming sailing niece really does dwell in Avalon, it's a suburb of Sydney, a very nice one, mind, and she lives on a boat).  And the great eye of the sun gazed at us across it, and though one shouldn't, we gazed back.   

This from the bedroom window.

Chatting to my blog

That's what I should do more of, in the way that I used to write letters of old, rather than aspiring and failing to say or show anything original or self-consciously beautiful or structured or important.  In fact the blogs I read that continue and continue to be enjoyable are possibly, I think, by the people who are least concerned with any sense of their own importance, and just do it anyway, without it claiming too much of their own or other people's time and energy.  The tendency of my memory to go into holes troubles me somewhat, here as elsewhere ; I often do think of or see things which I think would be worth putting on here, but by the time I come to sit down with the computer, they have completely evaporated.  Carry a notebook, of course, and remember to the use it.  I don't how people manage to tweet all the time; I suppose they carry mobile devices, and remember to use them.  I lurk on Twitter enough to know that much of what people say there is drivel, but sometimes it's not, but witty and creative.  

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Sunday afternoon and I took myself off to Viscomica's place to see puppets, with Iso and Princeling.  We had understand it was a Guignol show, the seeing of which is one of those things in my bucket list (being very backward, I've only recently learned of this expression, though I've had one for a long time), not an important thing it's true, but one of those easily accomplished things. It turned out to be Polichinelle, a French version of Pulcinella, and a kind of  forerunner of both Guignol and Punch and Judy.  The puppets were beautifully made but there weren't many of them, the story was insubstantial, too long for children and too simple and repetitive for adults, and too samey for both, and everyone grew bored before the very charming, faun-like young man whose show it was even embarked on his lecture on the history and etymology of the genre.

But it didn't matter, because the main thing was it was one of those glorious early spring days that take you by surprise, every time, when the low warm sun makes everything flat and pearly, and we sat outside on the grass before and after, and with the change in the hour - not a thing I usually feel very merry about - we did so until quite late in the day.  Last time I saw Princeling and his mum back in the winter he was having a bad day and I was grumpy and critical and interfering, and the memory of it was sour, but he raced round and beat on the car door as I pulled in, hugged me cheerfully, and then there was a small troupe of sturdy, friendly children for him to play with, and best of all a fabulous big old gentle dog, who should have been Nana in Peter Pan and who could catch and manoeuvre a large squashy football between its paws time and again, never letting it roll towards the drive where the cars were occasionally passing.  Sun and spring worked into us and loosened up the stiff places, the boy rolled around and got covered in grass cuttings so he looked like a green shaggy monster, there was a bar with beer and apple juice,and we relaxed and enjoyed each other's company.  We'll get to see Guignol another time.

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Another thing, which hardly quite constitutes a placing on the to-do-before-I-die list but which I've been meaning to try for a while,

violet syrup. I was wondering in fact about the alcoholic version, crème de violette, which you come across occasionally, offered as an alternative to crème de cassis in kir and suchlike.  Flower flavours - elderflower, rose, limeflower, orange blossom etc always intrigue me, and the colour of this stuff was especially beguiling, but I have an abiding memory of buying Parma violet sweets as a child, expecting them to be like sherbet or  Refreshers, and being disgusted with them as tasting like soap or talcum powder.  So I thought before shelling out on the boozy stuff I'd try the cheaper non-alcoholic syrup first.  The colour is weird, and does look a little like methylated spirits, but is very appealing all the same, so unusual and delicate.  The flavour? Hmm, still a bit scenty, and improved by the acidity of a slice of lemon, which also adds a wacky bit of lurid complementery colour.  It is rather nice, and goes oddly well with sheep's milk cheese and winter's sweet pickled figs.

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The beeswax candle in the glass candle jar goes into meltdown.  'Quick, before it goes out!' says Tom.

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Nuccio's Pearl.  This camellia, only planted last year, is flowering quite late, but that's all right.

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I saw the first swallow a week or so ago, crossing the field below the house.  I waved to it but saw no more.

Today, sitting out in the warm sun, my hands rough and scratched from dry soil and weeding, I heard a 'kee-wik, kee-wik' overhead, and for a moment I barely noticed it, the combination of summer sensations seemed so normal.  Then I remembered there were no leaves on the trees yet, and it the only flowers were daffodils and hellebores and the brick-red wallflowers,  for the sake of whose spicy perfume, as much as the sunshine, I've been snatching all the time I can to sit outside.

Now the swallows, are clearly back in earnest.  The one above was singing on the old TV ariel, and preening his magnificent tail forks, which have seen him all the way from Africa.  

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In the same spot, in the pitted and uneven soil where the old grease trap used to be, a number of wild bees are nesting, and taking advantage of the wallflowers.  A huge black-and-white-and-orange-jerseyed bumble bee, its legs clad with heavy pollen sacs, buzzes in to its home.  It seems to have trouble sometimes finding the entrance, but once it has disappeared underground it is often there for a long time.  Its food-collecting absences are also lengthy.  Though I am sitting very close to the nest sites the bees show no concern or aggression.  Other bees in the same spot are a small amber orange bumble-type bee, and another like a large honey bee, liberally dusted with bright golden yellow, whether pollen or its own colouring I'm not sure.  If you see a two types of bee going into the same hole one after another, there's a strong possibility they're klepto-parasites.

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Planted the window boxes with orange ranunculus, white double daisies and pansies like big blue ink blots. 

Peas are putting their heads up above ground, the herbs - mint and marjoram, lovage, sweet cicely, chives and fennel - are throwing shoots lustily.  Odds and ends in the cold frame, but I am always slack about writing labels, and now I can't tell my nasturtiums from my sunflowers, as I can't always tell my marmalade from my chutney.  Ah well, the proof of the pudding...

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Enjoying EM Forster out-of-copyright (mostly) on the Kindle.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it's no good moving from place to place to save things, because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you're worth, facing the sunshine.


(A Room with a View)

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