I got the blues….

I had to go and check, and I can confirm that it’s OK. The sea is still blue, as is the sky, with a cleverly contrasting yellow for the ground. Whoever worked that one out is no fool, it gets us every time.

Times change, so I don’t know if parents are still afflicted with the persistent cries of “Are we there yet?” from children, desperate for their first view of the summer sea, as family cars slowly edge towards the end of land for their holidays. I remember uttering that cry and experiencing the excitement engendered by that first view of blue joining blue. In truth, it was often grey joining grey, but anticipation and imagination created the blues, that for once were not a lament but a joyful hymn.

I seem to have lost my cherry..

Winter days start in deep darkness and summer days in bright blankness, two versions of one and the same thing: the empty sheet of paper. I dream a lot which means that my mind has been buzzzzing all night. Sleep comes very easily to me, as do dreams. Like peoples’ names, I never remember them when I need them. Events that I “remembered”, and have recounted in detail, I have later found have not been lived by me awake. At least I don’t think so. I’m full of admiration for auto biographers, in that they have retained enough, clear and detailed, information about themselves to paint a reasonably accurate picture of their passage through time up to the last word of their manuscript. Do they work backwards or  begin from the earliest memory? Since the toil of writing an autobiography is not amongst my wildest dreams – there I go again – maybe I’ve already written a very good one, packed with events that I awake know nothing about, but which has the reader on the edge of their seat. The déja vu may have become the déja lu.

Cherries are on my mind this morning. I read in a blog, yesterday, that the cherry festival takes place in Ceret tomorrow. The only place where I have seen cherries this year is deep in my dreams. 

 

The writing’s on the wall….

And, whatever we think, that is where most writing is to be seen today. Hand writing is on the wane as wall writing waxes. Graffiti scratches the parts fountain pens can’t reach. We are now all writers because, through the gift of the world wide web, people read what we write, be that number much less than the average readership of any well crafted epithet in the stall of a metropolitan public lavatory ( “My mother made me a homosexual. If I give her the wool, will she make me one?” genre or plain ” I love grils”). A massive world wide typing pool clatters away day and night eliminating the need for writing words, save rudimentary shopping lists, whilst reducing the 3R’s to a more manageable R – Reading. Rithmetic and Riting are dealt with by programs that are easier to learn than the real thing, but we still need to Read the screen of phones and computers, which is a bit annoying as a lot of shopping time is wasted in learning to Read. This may well be the time for a renaissance in scribes and readers. I have started a scheme in our local forest to get the creatures reading and writing, and I have no doubt that the wild boars and other other thinking creatures will soon be as literate as any TOWIE ( Tired of writing in English) and a lot more interesting .

The Hound of the Daffodils….

Much as I dislike diminutives, I’m very fond of Trigger and Gypsy. The two eponymous poodles have been in our charge over the last few days, which has meant that I have been drawn away from stove and keyboard and driven out into the wild, at least once a day, walking the dog(s). Like sheep, the poodles get sheared at this time of year. Unlike sheep which, when sheared, just look undressed, poodles become diminutives of themselves. They nearly disappear. Their colour is all that keeps them visible, if risible. The green, or grey, poodle is a perfect spring time predator, but they are scarce on the ground and hard to spot. There is a poodle, in spring time hunting green, in the picture above, not far away from the more obvious black specimen, which is sporting an orange collar to differentiate it from its more elusive kin.

You can tell a book from its cover..

I’ve recently come to the opinion that we’re much more successful at preserving vegetables than we are at preserving youthful looks. In that half land of waking, this morning, the imagined strains of a childhood song, “With a face like a squashed potato….” sung to the tune of “Figgy Pudding”, served as illusory background music to images remembered from a programme on the very wealthy who live in ultra luxurious hotels. The rooms in these hotels and the faces of their inhabitants were similar in their overblown artificiality. Such was the shallowness of the concept of beauty or style, in both face and space, that the surgeon responsible for the facio maxillary work and the interior designer may well have been the same man. It’s bewildering to see such tightly stretched, unresponsive material both living and inanimate.

The preserved lemons, that I used in a version of tonno fagioli for supper yesterday, are not as they were when on the tree. That part is over – the fruit falls or is picked. What they have gained from preservation is an intense and singular taste, that only comes with age and the skill of the preserver: which qualities are missing from the preserved and the preserver in the human version. We make the mistake of trying to put the fruit back on the tree.

The tonno fagioli was the same simple Italian dish, enlivened with capers, anchovies, preserved lemon and flat parsley.

Oh, and this is quite interesting as well - http://petapixel.com/2013/04/25/portraits-of-miss-korea-2013-contestants-spark-discussion-on-plastic-surgery/?utm_source=feedly

Coffee is the cornerstone…..

Unnoticed, the bright, early mornings and long, warm evenings have changed my auto pilot settings. Not every morning is bright, nor every evening warm, but the basis of a plan is there. Coffee is the cornerstone of this plan. As each day dawns, summer or winter, bright or gloomy, the coffee pot kick starts the mechanisms. My consciousness percolates, at a similar rate to the water in the base of the pot, passing slowly through the pile of problems and pleasures that await my attention during that day. Drinking the coffee allows me the time to relish or panic at what lies ahead. Whether I succeed or fail is immaterial because that’s the day that will be. Only at the end of that day can I tally the score and realise once more that I’m sweeping a very large beach, and that’s not a bad place to be.

Ladies who lunch..Chez Papa..

Uncovering treasure is not an accurate science. I say this with an authority that I do not possess, as treasure and I are rarely, if ever, seen together or even spoken of in the same breath. The same can be said of Ikea and good food, which was why we had fled the Mall of Mammon and found ourselves meandering, in our furniture filled, hired white van, through the vineyards of Muscadet. We were searching for the elusive “bonne table” that is so often written and spoken of, yet so rarely eaten at. Time for searching is limited in the French countryside as hospitality at lunchtime only occurs in a two hour window. Outside of that window – well, you’re outside of the window. Disappointment was a hair’s breadth away; my eye was attracted by the sign on a vineyard declaring it to be Domaine de Noë, which was interesting, as the Noë grape is proscribed owing to the amount of methanol it produces, giving it a kick which makes that of absinthe reminiscent of mild cough mixture: and then, there was Chez Papa.

It had the look. It had the look of a place where people would stop to be restored. The car park had a scattering of ordinary family cars but, more interestingly, there were mountainous piles of “sarments”, or vine trimmings, which are a wonderful fuel for an open fire on which to cook. Just inside the front door was a fire on which to cook, next to which was pile of those same “sarments”.

There’s no question but that the good people who run this restaurant are sensibly trying to attract customers, of any and every sort, which would account for the “props” that proliferate. I liked (like) the place so much, that I wouldn’t have minded if the waiters came out singing, dressed like the Seven Dwarves – they didn’t, so I wasn’t tested on that insane declaration.

This is how I like to eat. A good terrine de joue de boeuf en gelee with a glass of local Saumur de Champigny. How often is one presented with a carte des vins written on a piece of paper taped to a small block of wood? Not often enough: this list was small and dealt solely with well priced, delicious wines of the Pays de Loire, which is where we were. On the back of the block of wood was written ” Demandez notre liste de Premiers Crus”. How’s that for understatement. No need to go through the litany of dishes, but it’s worth saying that they were all well cooked and not fucked about. 

France unplugged is where we were. A table of ladies, of a certain age, enjoying oysters and good local Muscadet. Families at table, intent on the pleasure of eating and each other’s company. The care of a kitchen where the grill is fired up, with a bunch of fresh vine cuttings, to cook each single saucisse au Muscadet or boudin that is ordered. Finally, a wonderfully moist ( oh God, I’ve had to use the word) moelleux d’orange with a boule of dark chocolate ice cream. So good – and then the road home with blue skies and soft, white clouds. I was restored.

Gimme a red courgette….

This is a fine example of the failure of language through intonation. One slip of a consonant and the farmer, formerly known as Vince, is staring at the curvy rear end of a rosey courgette cropper rather than the rude front end of a Chevrolet babe magnet.The contrast between the farm sheds of Les Ouilleres, with that peaceful atmosphere that oozes the comfort of a pair of well fitting old shoes, and my memory of the streets of London with their continual procession of very shiny cars driven by very shiny people, could not be clearer. London was my pair of comfy shoes, for the greater part of my life, but as they sit unused, gathering dust, for long periods of time, they become just that little bit tighter and less familiar each time that I put them on. They are resting in the cupboard again, quietly contemplating their next excursion, and hopefully doing a few light callisthenics to ensure some comfort and flexibility for their master on his next venture.

Bottle in a boat…….

I don’t know whether one can have enough of a good thing. Only people with an awful lot of that good thing are in a position to give an answer. Clearly, the state of having had enough of something very pleasurable would not seem to be nearly as good a place to be in as that of wishing one could have just a little bit more of that good thing. The good thing in question was family and friends. Eating, drinking, laughing and loving being with them are all very good things of which I am unlikely to ever have had enough. On the other hand, when it comes to trains and boats and planes, I have had enough of the latter. Planes and body cavity searches go together like a horse and carriage, or a mule and a gross of condoms full of china white. There is a stress about an airport that is absent at a seaport where anticipation replaces anxiety. Even though the deep waters of the sea are quite as deadly to us frail humans as any aerial hazards, it seems that we feel more secure afloat than aloft. Imagery is everywhere, if we look, but being on a ship precludes the problem of looking as it makes itself plain at every turn. The environment is manufactured from heavy steel, but upholstered to prevent us bruising and breaking. Whilst below decks all is fitted carpets, knitted car kits and Noilly Prat, only on deck is the rough beauty of the ship evident. The clarity of the light makes picture making unnervingly easy, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Cart death…..

La Moussiere is slowly dying and I’ve only just noticed. It’s not particularly sad, as everything in our world is doing the same thing at its own rate, but I was disappointed in myself for being so unobservant, so unfeeling. Its current state of health was brought to my attention by a photographic brief for the cover of a psychological thriller. It specified pictures of old, dilapidated farms  and out buildings in a Northern European setting. As chance would have it, fulfilment of this brief entailed going out of our house into the lane, pointing my camera in any direction and pressing the shutter button. I have no reason to believe that my pictures will be the ones that the commissioning art director has in his mind, but they certainly opened my eyes.

A little more than eleven years ago we arrived here from a life in a huge city. This tiny hamlet was made up of two dairy farms, one beef farm,  a small holding, the house we had bought, another ruin (now our current house) and eight souls – the two of us made it ten. Over the years we adapted to this total change of pace and found a new home. This winter, for the first time, the silence became deafening. The animals have gone, save for the dairy herd at the end of the lane. Two farmers have retired and the smallholding lies empty due to the death of the farmer and the subsequent departure of his wife to the bosom of her family, elsewhere.

Buildings that were old, yet fully practical, are now just old. Empty farm buildings have a slightly disturbing nature. The warmth, noise and steam of gentle creatures masks the harsh practicality of these structures, which are no more than holding pens leading to the slaughter house. This desolate feeling is even more apparent on a cold, grey day. I miss the noise of the animals and the farm machinery. What had become our bustling metropolis has fallen silent and we must now adapt to that.