Clémentine

This is Clémentine l'Oie, a gosling, at four days old.  When I went round last week to see C, who is fourteen and who I help with her English, Clémentine was nesting in a plastic bowl lined with a towel on the kitchen floor.

'A duck!' I said
'A goose,' C corrected me.
'Where did you get her?' I asked.
'From a neighbour,' C answered.
'Um, is she for food or for company?' (it's as well not to make assumptions...)
'Company! And eggs...' she added.
'Ah, big eggs. Is it a girl or a boy?'
'It's too soon to know.'

Clémentine thinks that C is her mother.  You can understand this because C is very beautiful and very kind. Clémentine spent our English lesson snuggled on C's lap making happy little cheeping noises, but C was very good and always concentrated on her work.

I asked her to send me a photo to show to Tom, because he especially loves geese (which is an irregular plural, of course).  I asked if I could put the photo on my blog.

'C'est quoi votre blog?' came the reply.

When I explained what manner of truc my blog was, C was more than happy for Clémentine to appear.  She has grown already, I'm told, so when I see them next week she'll probably be flying around the kitchen.

Saint Michiel de la Mer del Peril...

... St Michael in peril from the sea, as it became known in the Middle Ages, sea-girt and tenuously connected to the land, a connection which could be severed at any time.  Yet it wasn't always so; in our hotel restaurant, one wall was taken up by this map:

a reconstruction of how the shape of land and sea was over thirteen hundred years ago.  The Mont of that time is the little triangular point standing alone towards the bottom right of the image.  The land was marshy and prone to flooding from sea and rivers, but nevertheless the island of today was inland; the Forêt de Scissy no longer exists, having been entirely inundated, and the peninsular of Scissy at the top of the map is now the islands of Chausey (though this seems uncertain).  The forest in question was a desert; an old Roman road just about cut through it, and a few lonely monks and hermits lived there somehow.  It was all swept away by a series of monster tides in the eighth century and later; the known history and wild legends of abbots and angelic visitations are all mixed up together. I love the dark ages.

And now, despite the high tides which have been known to wash away cars from the car park, it is not so much in peril of the sea, but in danger of becoming landlocked again, hence the massive changes and works that are now taking place.  The factors of geology and sedimentation that have led to this, the reclamation of land by the engineers of the last couple of hundred years, the building of dam and dykes and polders and the natural changes in coastal geography - which are not always those of erosion and destruction even in these times of climate change and rising sea levels - are complex, and actually quite fascinating, but rather than attempt to go into them here, I'd recommend this excellent article, on the blog of a professional geologist whose lifelong specialism has been sand and what it does, he's even written a book all about it.

It contains many interesting maps and pictures, of which I've pinched one, showing the way the Mont has looked until very recently, with the causeway and car park (left) running alongside the mouth of the Couesnon river,

and on the right, how it will appear in about 2025, when the sea has been allowed to take back so much more of the space around it, and the only access will be a new road - open only to pedestrians and the electric shuttles - suspended on pillars over the water.

This road will end on a sandy ford which will, at times of the highest tides, be covered with water, so the Mont becomes, momentarily, truly an island again.  The projections above are from this document (an on-line PDF) in a reasonable English translation, and this site, in a somewhat quaint but rather endearing translation (don't they ever think to get a native English speaker to check them? I'd do it...) which explain more about this impressive project, and why it is considered necessary - they're worth browsing around for some of the videos and fly-through simulations.

One goes to le Mont St Michel, of course, to marvel. That is why it is called la Merveille, though originally that referred only to the structure on the north face, built in the 14th century on top of the original 11th century church building, which was a marvel in itself.  Henry Adams in his (rather marvellous) book Mont St Michel and Chartres describes how


instead of cutting the summit away to give his church a secure rock foundation, which would have sacrificed about thirty feet of height, the Abbot took the apex of the rock for his level, and on all sides built out foundations of masonry to support the walls of his church. The apex of the rock is the floor of the croisée, the intersection of nave and transept. On this solid foundation the Abbot rested the chief weight of the church, which was the central tower, supported by the four great piers which still stand; but from the croisée in the centre westward to the parapet of the platform, the Abbot filled the whole space with masonry, and his successors built out still farther, until some two hundred feet of stonework ends now in a perpendicular wall of eighty feet or more.


It was always a place of pilgrimage - indeed one of the places, for a trip there could let you off many years of purgatory - and one could marvel at God there; the mediaeval pilgrims shouted for joy at their first sight of it from Montjoie, and the sight of it hanging in the sea haze like a vision still never fails to make the heart leap, even a glimpse of it, tiny through the clouds, from the cross-channel plane makes one start with wonder. We look out at the blue and silver beauty of the sea and sands and their patterns and we marvel at nature for sure, but chiefly, we marvel at the works of man*, and of so very long ago.  Looking up at the sheer walls of the abbey and its culminating angel, defying gravity, the sea and the weather, one marvels 'how did they do that?'

But we mustn't forget to wonder at the works of our own times.  We were not alone in spending as much time gazing and marvelling at the new constructions taking shape as at the ancient ones already there.

The road on pillars;

busy machines shifting sand and silt;

the road nearing its end on the beach under the Mont;

men at work with noisy kit;

view from further up on the Mont.  On the right are a party of horses and riders, about to set off across the sands, a popular activity, inspired perhaps by Victor Hugo, who pleaded for the site to be valued for the treasure it is when it was still a neglected prison in the 19th century, and who said that the tides came in across the Bay with the speed of a galloping horse, possibly a slight exaggeration.

The knowledge of how to navigate the sands safely on foot or horseback is a special one; the dangers of the tides and quicksands are not exaggerated. I've not been able to find out how the re-shaping of the bay and the water-flow will affect this, but it seems the guides and experts were consulted with.

The other major element is the new barrage across the mouth of the river. This is certainly an imposing bit of gear and tackle,

but is hailed as a thing of beauty too, so the trim's not bad either: heavy bronze parapets and hubs and hatchway covers which are already taking on a rich verdigris hue.  The parapet rail is engraved with script from the four alphabets - Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic - represented in the mediaeval manuscripts from the abbey's scriptorium, and the hatchways are numbered in the same scripts:

Zero, of course, only existed in Arabic and Hebrew at those times.

Postscript correction: It has been pointed out to me (see comments) that the above is not strictly true: the concept of, and a figure for, zero had long been in use in Indian mathematical notation, from which it was transmitted into Arabic, and hence into the European system.  I would argue though, that this does not necessarily, as was asserted, make the term 'Arabic numerals' a misnomer; French bread originated with techniques acquired from Austria  (as I understand, unless this is another 'urban myth' better called a 'popular misconception' to my mind!),  we can still call it French bread. In any case, the scripts used in the bronze work of the barrage were the four to be found in the mediaeval manuscripts in the scriptorium of the abbey, of which there were presumably no Sanskrit or Jain ones...

I should have taken more note and more photos of the barrage and its details, instead of having to do much of this research afterwards.

However, after all our adventures and foot-slogging, our tongues were hanging out, so like the other changes which have still to be realised - the new road will be brought into commission and the old one finally demolished and flooded over next year - we'll have to go back and have another look at a future time.

1st, 4th, 5th, 7th, 9th and 13th photos (I think) in this series taken by Tom. Thanks dearie!

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* and it is man, I'm prepared to go with Adams on that: the guardian spirit of the Archangel and his church is masculine, as was the Norman 11th century that raised them, while the animating, embracing soul of Chartres, blue and black Madonnas, Blanche of Castille and the 12th century, is feminine; it may sound flaky and I'm wary of such glib, romantically sexist distinctions, but to me it still has a ring of truth.

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Molly and more at Mont St Michel

Mol and my legs, ready to mount the Mont

Molly is in fact something of a Mont St Michel veteran.  The first time we went there was some years ago when she was much younger, with no grey in her muzzle.  We met up with some friends, quite early in the day, and we all wound our way to the top, where we discovered that we couldn't take her into the abbey itself, so she and I raced down to the bottom again, I put her in the car in the car park at the foot of the Mont, and raced - yes I did - up again, while Tom and our friends watched me from above.  I must have been quite a bit younger then too, to have done that.

Now, on account of all the massive earth- and water-moving works going on there, on which I will post more later, you can no longer leave your car at the foot, but must park quite some way inland, walk about a kilometre, and catch one of the new electric shuttle buses - or you can walk all the way.

I failed to get a good picture of the full-sized passenger buses, but this is one of the small La Montoise versions laid on for people who work on the Mont, which I feel can only be described as cute.

Later in the year you will  be able to take one drawn by beautiful Percheron horses, but these are still on their test drives.

We cheerfully hopped on board the bus, which then became so crowded that the ubiquitous Japanese tourists must have felt quite at home as if on the Tokyo metro, then noticed the sign in the window saying that dogs weren't allowed on board.  Mol was astonishingly good, stayed firmly between my feet, didn't flinch, whine or tremble, and by a mercy didn't get trodden on, though a small girl whose eye-level was not very much above hers, offered to tickle her with the feather she was carrying, then noticed the no-dogs sign and spent the rest of the trip  telling the world the dog shouldn't be on the bus, despite her mother's assurances that the lady hadn't seen the sign and the dog was surely très gentil... On the way back a friendly young operative smiled and waved us on, but asked that we carry her while on board, which for the few minutes it takes, with kindly Japanese faces peering into hers and making sympathetic 'aww!' noises and expressions, wasn't too onerous.

Anyway, dogs are expected to frequent the crowded cobbled paths and streets of the citadelle.  So Mol was able to avail herself of refreshment:

This clever device was the tou-tou bar, the doggie's bar, which meant fresh(er) water not easily knocked over.  And now, when you get to the abbey and want to go in but tou-tou can't, for seven euros there's even a kennelling service where you can leave them, though I'm afraid our Molly wouldn't tolerate that.

And while we were there saw met some other non-human habitués:

a sparrow and a unicorn,

an arrangment of gulls,

and some kitties on a rooftop (rooftops are often seen from above here).  When we were re-roofing our house, we bought some triangular ventilator fixtures, which were called chatières.  No cat could have passed through them, and neither could any bird, bat or even larger than average spider, since they were covered with a kind of slatted mesh, but the name evidently dated from a time when cats were expected to live and come and go on and just under the roof space of buildings, and these two had their own purpose-made chatière by having some slates dislodged for their ease of access.

We enjoyed looking out at sky and sands and the distant landforms of the Cotentin peninsular,

and the rocky islet of Tombelaine, the Mont's little sister.

I always enjoy these views framed by the arrow loops and their embrasures in the walls:

We didn't go right up to the abbey, but walked around much of the path around the ramparts, and Moll managed most of the steep stone steps without help.  We were very glad to stop, and picked a restaurant terrace that was cool and shady and which we had to ourselves.

Though it wasn't much after 10 am, the tables were laid for lunch, but they didn't mind just bringing us hot chocolate, and another drink of fresh water for Molly in an ash tray

It was almost certainly the most expensive hot chocolate we have ever tasted,

but surely the most restorative, and worth every eurocent, for the space and the cool shade and the views.

Then we made our way out by archway and causeway, shuttle bus and barrage ready for our next adventure, which I seem to remember was a bottle of cider and a brioche and our feet up for the afternoon... So taxing.

More MStM stuff later, though I've written and photographed better about it here, here, here and here. Oh I did love that old Canon Powershot.

(Tom took some of these, obviously, the ones with me in, and one or two of the others, 8 and 13, I think.)

Returning

Just a quick one on landing.  We've been spending a couple of days at Pontorson, near le Mont St Michel, the trip we were meant to have done on my 50th birthday, which we booked a couple of weeks ago.  We viewed all the amazing engineering works that have been going on around the Mont, travelled on the new electric shuttle buses to the foot of it, walked quite a bit of the way up it despite saying we'd done it before and didn't  need to again, because once you get there you just have to.  Took quite a few photos which I haven't downloaded yet.  And we lounged and read and consumed large amounts of delicious food and drink remarkably cheaply in a very simple but friendly hotel.  I mulled a lot but didn't mope. The weather, the light, the flowers and the colours of sea and land and sky were miraculously beautiful, and it felt like a gift, not to be squandered.

We left on Sunday, Heather's funeral had been on the Saturday, a long day and a demanding one and a lot of driving.  The mass part was in the church of St Michel in St Brieuc, a building which has long tended to give me the horrors, though of more recent times I often parked near to it when I visited her, and came to rather like the quartier. It was very cold in there.  Then we made our way up to Paimpol to join the boat which was taking her to be buried on the Île de Bréhat.  There are no cars there, and the tiny cemetery, where her eldest daughter is also buried, is at the top of the town.  The image of the little red tractor pulling the trailer with the velvet-draped coffin, and a motley band of reasonably solemn but lively people (and one dog, Molly came too) following along behind through the diminutive streets of the island, with its pink rocks and houses, strange warm air, clouds of perfumed flowers and crowds of wondering tourists, is one that will stay with me for a long time.

I'll sort out some photos of the Mont St Michel trip shortly.

Sad news

I just learned of the passing of my friend Heather Dohollau, peacefully and gracefully at home last night at the age of 88.  She only came into my life some three years ago, but quickly became a very important part of it, and it seems very strange just now quite to imagine the world without her. Through memory, her words and her books her presence will remain, I know, but I will miss her greatly, and I won't be the only one.

Heather on the Island of Bréhat, where she lived for many years and which she wrote about often, and where she will be buried.

It was a joy and a privilege to know her, I could say a great deal more, but feel a little too sad and overwhelmed, and it is perhaps not the moment.  She could always speak better for herself: you can read and hear her reading some of her poems, in English and in French, here at Qarrtsiluni, and below I'm embedding a film (it seems to be playable here, though there's a warning some of the content is restricted) made about her a few years ago, in which she revisits South Wales where she grew up, and speaks from her home in St Brieuc about her life and writing.  It's all in French and just under an hour, but is very well-made and it's lovely to have it available, to be able to see and hear her again in her magical home and garden.

A great soul passes.

Last Sunday # 2 - Puppets, and Princeling in love

Then in the afternoon, I set off, all alone, no dog, no husband (and also no camera, since I wanted to enjoy the company and the shows unencumbered) to meet Iso, who had also decamped, no Princeling, no husband, so that we could take in the sea air and a couple of puppet shows at the Marionnet'ic puppet festival in Binic. Turns out the festival has been going for fifteen years already, but we've only really been aware of it for the last couple; we couldn't make it last year but spent the day there two years ago, which I posted briefly about here.

While it may seem odd to leave one's small child at home to go and watch puppet shows, in fact they really were for grown-ups.  The first was Crash de là, by the Belgian company, Les Royales Marionnettes (that page is in English), a gritty tale of social dysfunction, family crisis, adolescent angst and anger set against a background of industrial decay and blight in a small Belgian town.  The manner of performance, the voices and movements, were abrasive, the puppets - which were more stiff mannequins, representations of the characters with fixed expressions and attitudes - deliberately ugly, and I struggled with it at first and didn't understand all of it, especially the songs which punctuated it (near-bilingual Iso said she didn't either so that made me feel better). Yet it wasn't without humour, and in the end I was quite moved by it; the story of an angry, unhappy and unpleasant boy who is saved by a friendship with a stubborn, curmudgeonly old man, a former resistance fighter, despite his lashing out at and hurting him too. As the story develops, by the end, the single performer has more and more assumed the role of the boy, so you wonder to what extent it is his own story.  Whatever, it's a story.

The second was from Theatre des Alberts, based in the Île de Réunion, and was called Accidents - that link is to the page of their website about the show, including a short promotional video for it, which gives a general impression of the show.  It was very good, though desperately sad, bitter and savage in places, as the write-up says, 'cruel as life but also as funny'.  And it was very funny, even for someone like me, who usually just see the black in black humour and not much of the humour.

These shows, like much puppetry now, don't involve classic string or hand puppets, but figures which are manipulated by visible operators who are also narrators and at times participants in the narrative, continually stretching, fracturing and generally subverting the relationship between puppet, puppeteer and audience.  Interesting stuff.

There was also an exhibition, a number of actual pieces and many more photos, by a maker of more traditional string puppets, made by Nadine Delannoy who calls her company Âmes Imaginaires, 'Imaginary Souls'. The link is to the gallery page of her website, and I do recommend having a good look around there - the English translation is unusually good and her story and ideas are quite fascinating.  I think (as in I'm not absolutely sure, rather than 'in my opinion') her work is beautiful, though not always comfortable, but there is something truly alive about much of it.  Of the making of her 'souls' (they aren't all puppets though many are) she describes how she always begins with the head, and

every new head is inspired by a mix of several emotions. The ambiguous expression that results from this mix produces the impression of true presence in the character.

I was particularly drawn to Mortelune,

initially because she reminded me of Maggie Smith, but the more I look at her the more I see she isn't quite like.  Her maker says of her - like many of the pieces she has her own page on the site with a remark about her character - this woman hides a heavy secret. 

I also liked Jean-Baptiste:

I've long had an affection for Molière, albeit one based on pretty scant acquaintance.  With this figure, as with many of them, as Iso remarked, much life is conferred by the lightness and softness of the hair, which, again slightly uncomfortably, is often made from real fur or real or fake human hair for extensions and wigs.

Anyway, we had quite a bit of time for a long saunter by the waterside and along the harbour wall in Binic, drink a hot chocolate which wasn't very hot by the time we got it, and truly the World and Her Husband were out and about, sitting on the terraces of restaurants and cafés and bars and crêperies, getting ripped off at the funfair in the car park, watching the giant African dancing puppets that were ambulating about the town, and despite the really rather chilly wind, there was a queue for the ice cream parlour all the way down the street.  As Joe said on his blog recently, people seem to be regarding the sun 'as though it were an extraordinary new phenomenon', so starved we've been of it.

We rather guiltily remarked that much as we loved the company of all our dear ones, and to do things with them, it was rather nice to be out on the loose for a few hours without having to worry about dogs in cars, or the boredom threshold and attention spans of small boys and husbands.  It was nice to get news of Princeling though, and Iso told me that one day recently when she met him out of school, instead of erupting from the premises with his usual noise and boy-energy, he emerged rather quiet and pensive.  After a little he asked her if she was in love with anyone (amoreux - often he still speaks French to her, especially when he's just been in a French speaking environment, though she resolutely speaks only English to him).  Well, yes, she said, daddy... After a time, though, and a bit more hedging around the subject, she twigged that she was meant to ask him the question:

'Ilan, are you in love with someone?'

'Yes. Gladys.'

'How do you know?'

'She kissed me in the playground.'

'And is she nice?'

(perhaps a little hesitant) 'Yes.'

'Good. Because if she isn't nice to you, you don't have to be in love with her, and you can just say crotte to her and go away.'

Since then he has been somewhat preoccupied with the matter of being amoureux. He asked his mum if he could be in love with her, and she said well no,  because she was his mum, though she loved him very much, but also because little people could only be in love with other little people and big people with other big people, which I thought was a lovely light-handed way of helping to explaining a delicate subject.

So we made our way home cheerful and well-aired.  The evening had turned cold, Molly had been cross and fed-up that I'd driven out without her, but Tom had lit the fire when I got home, and we ate a late supper of sausage and beans to finish our exceptional Sunday.

Last Sunday # 1 - stargazers

Sunday wasn't a typical Sunday.  We don't generally go anywhere much on Sundays, and not much opens here, not because this is a God-fearing country or anything, but there's a likeable disinclination to make Sunday like every other day of the week. Smaller town shops do open on Sunday mornings sometimes, and pâtisseries always have done so, so you can take a nice tart along when you go on your Sunday afternoon visit to your family.  But les grandes surfaces, the supermarkets and big DIY stores and the out of town retail estates are dead as dodos. The exception is garden centres, some of which do open for restricted hours on Sundays.

We rather try to keep away from the garden centre these days, it's too easy to get beguiled into spending lots of money on unnecessary and often unsuitable new plants, when really looking after and propagating the one's we've already got is more important and less expensive.  And there's the danger of depression arising from the inevitable disconnect between the glossy, brilliant, larger-and-more-colourful-than-life nursery and greenhouse raised specimens they dangle before you and the scruffy, demanding and often problematic reality of actual gardening here. However,  since Tom has done heroic work ridding the azalea bed of creeping buttercup, couch grass, chickweed and the like, if his labours were not to be in vain we really did need some more bark mulch, so off to La Domaine des Fleurs we went.

And it is a seductive and enjoyable experience, as you walk in, channelled past the orchids and other exotica, into vast the perspex roofed area where all the bedding plants are.  It is open on one side to the air, but on a nice day warm from the sun, and there is always a balmy mist rising from the brick floor and the constant watering.  And they always cannily put the most fragrant plants right by the entrance, at this time of year these are the stargazer lilies.

We were a total and rapid pushover, and as well as our bark mulch, some modest French marigolds and a couple of small rosemary plants - we'd grown fed up with the coarse, woody old rosemary bush bullying everything around it and chopped it down, but I grieved at Easter when there was none for the roast lamb, and I won't be doing with dried - we carried home a couple of pots of the big maroon-pink orientals.

In fact they didn't cost us any more than a single bouquet of them cut from the florists, will last considerably longer, even if they only do one season, and they have more than sung for their supper already, since Tom planted them in the big terrace tubs ting them to the tree peonies, which are only just emerging into leaf, as supports (and with a few of the marigolds round the bottom - we don't care about clashes, and love red and pink and orange together, so there!)

Instant height and colour, and the most opulent, almost pungent perfume ever, that envelopes us every time we cross the terrace.  They need plenty of room for this; in fact I'm not a great fan of them as cut flowers since in a confined space it can be too much.  I once ate in a pub restaurant where there was a bunch of them on the windowsill behind me and truly they quite put me off my food, but in the garden just now, between the complementary notes of the remaining berberis hedge and the wallflowers, they are pure pleasure.

They also seem to change colour with the time of day, from quite pink in the height of the day to wine to purple when the sun is lower, though the camera has trouble conveying this.  Like everything else on that side of the house, they look best in the early morning.

Well worth the trip and the money, and that was only half the fun I had on Sunday.

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Three spring haiku

Down the road, evening,
wearing Joseph's Crocs again,
red points of sorrel.

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Golden girls and lads...
pulling up dandelions.
Oh for a rabbit.

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So sweet to get by
on more than mere fortitude.
Spring's here, at long last.

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New blogger, Brit cuisine, and hares

Who said blogging was a dying medium? Egged on by one or two of you, Tom has decided to make the transition from being a principle protagonist here and set one up of his own.  He's always been very supportive of my efforts, and has long enjoyed reading and occasionally commenting on other people's, and he's suddenly quite enthusiastic about doing it for himself, so with some encouragement might even stick with it.  His blog, called simply 'Gwynt' (you can find out why if you visit), can be found here, so far with only an opening post but I'm sure there will be more. (I was somewhat tickled to learn from his profile that I was one of his interests.  In this he proves to be unique, though there are twenty others on Blogger who cite 'my dog Molly' among theirs!)

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Having dealt with certain aspects of British cuisine here recently, by coincidence, last night we were invited along by the Quiet American and B the German doctor to le Bistrot du Marin* at le Légué, the very workaday port and docks end of St Brieuc, which I had already heard about from our Dutch friend E as serving good fish and chips.  While perhaps these were not quite typical of a lower end UK chippy, they were authentic, with good crisp, light batter and thick chips (fries, in American, but not the same, oh no), and the whole place (reputedly an Irish foundation) was a bright and lively delight, with deep red painted walls, chequered table cloths, blackboards and pictures and curios everywhere.  There was even malt vinegar on the table - though we did get salad, mayonnaise and home made tartar sauce as well, and my dessert was the best ever île flottante, a huge slab of meringue stuff floating in custard and caramel, smothered in speculoos biscuit crumbs and served in a sort of 1950s design cereal bowl.  

Best of all, it was packed and buzzing with noisy, happy French folk all enthusiastically tucking into 'les fish and chips', billed as such on the menu and not translated.  Result.

* link to French Tripadvisor, there's an English one too but the French one's interesting. There's a photo there too.

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And finally, some hares from my eponymous Pinterest board

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