Author: margaret21

I'm retired and live in North Yorkshire, where I walk , write, volunteer and travel as often as I can.

Saudade for Our Little Corner of France

Saudade is a Portuguese word, introduced to us by Egidio, who proposes it for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge. Here’s what it means:

... an emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent someone or something. It is a recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events, often elusive, that cause a sense of separation from the exciting, pleasant, or joyous sensations they once caused.

It’s what we both feel so very often about our years in southern France, now some ten years gone. Of course we remember the landscape – the foothills, the Pyrenees themselves, the seasons, the climate , the slower pace of life …

Of course we do. But we remember even more the happy Sundays and Thursdays we had discovering these landscapes with our two local walking groups. We were the only British members, and how different these expeditions were from their English equivalents. After a morning slogging up a mountain, we were rewarded with views, perhaps a stream, a wild-flower strewn meadow. Then Marcel the butcher would produce his own home-cured sausage; Sylvie offered her daughter’s sheep’s milk cheese; someone would bring bread; Yvette and I brought cake; wine was on offer, and an apéro, and after that someone or other would hand out sugar lumps, on which to drip just a little of their grandfather’s special home-confected digestif. After a nice long rest, we’d pack up and find a different path downwards.

Eating was at the heart of so many activities. Here’s another community meal, tables ranged over the town square so everyone could get together and enjoy each other’s company while celebrating some local highlight..

In fact enjoyment came high on everyone’s agenda. Every July, for instance, in a small village a few miles from ours, a group of volunteers spend months devising Le Jardin Extraordinaire. People come from miles around to enjoy strolling through bowers confected from still-growing gourds, and climbing upwards through woodlands with surprises: beautiful, silly, witty – every year was different.

Then there was the annual firework display on the lake at Puivert, which took the concept of fireworks to a whole new level. It reduced the audience of 1000 or more, who’d all come with families, friends and the makings of a fine picnic to astonished silence as the spectacle ended, before simultaneously roaring their tumultuous appeciation of the astonishing creations set before our eyes.

Our French friends taught us about ‘au cas où‘: the need to have with you at all times a bag or similar ‘just in case‘ you found walnuts, wild cherries, sweet chestnuts, mushrooms – all sorts of food-for-free for the thrify householder. I was au cas où–ing only yesterday, finding crab apples, pears, apples, mirabelles all there for the taking, just as our French friends recommended.

I’ll stop there. The feelings of longing, of saudade are strong …

For Egidio’s Lens-Artists Challenge #365: Longing.

Indian Friday: Sri Balaji Hospital, Chennai

My diary, revived from my trip to India back in 2007. Only this bit isn’t my diary. It’s the notes I wrote back home: because diary writing, even if I’d been well enough, would never have been permitted during my hospital stay. Lie back and get better!

Sri Balaji Hospital, Chennai

3rd – 8th December

What picture have you got of an Indian Hospital? I bet it’s wrong. My ward at Sri Balaji Hospital resembled pretty much any hospital ward in an older-style British hospital that you may have come across – only cleaner. It sparkled with clean paint, fresh blue and white candy-striped sheets and general good order. 4 beds in my ward, with 2 nurses by night and 6 by day, all in a smart white jacket and trousers uniform. The nurses, being Tamil, are of quite astonishing physical beauty: I really couldn’t take my eyes of ‘my’ night nurse, Jhoti, whose loveliness extended to her personality. They appeared equally taken with me, and would pat and stroke me, or chuck me under the chin at the least provocation. As I started to get better, they amused themselves teaching me Tamil. With one exception, they didn’t speak much English, but what they did know, they’d learnt at Nursing School. Phrases like ‘Go to the toilet’/’Use the bathroom’ etc. were not understood, until light dawned. ‘Ah! You want pass urine?’

Besides nurses there were:
– nice ladies in saris who appeared to fulfil some kind of auxiliary role.
– doctors – lots.
– men in blue jackets and trousers who seemed to be gophers, called Ward Boys.
– men in brown ditto- porters.

Dili and friends, the Ward Boys at Sri Balaji Hospital

The night nurses did 12 hour shifts and before you feel too sorry for them, they told me that when doing night shift, they work just 10 nights a month.

Medication and tests of all kinds flowed freely – they make the French look amateurs.

No TV, no radio, no nice ladies from the WRVS dispensing sweets, newspapers and library books. No getting up either. You lie in bed until you’re good and better, and meanwhile you do nothing. I was caught attempting to wash on my last day, and was chivvied back to bed and given a bed bath.

The biggest surprise to me was that the wards were mixed-sex. In a country where (at that time at least) it would have been a monumental faux pas for me to have sat down next to a man on a bus, that seemed to me astonishing.

At visiting time, those of us without visitors did not go without attention. Dozens of noses were pressed against the glass wall of the ward as curious onlookers gave us all the once-over. I felt a bit like an inmate of Bedlam in the 18th century.

After 5 days, I was deemed well enough to go home, though I was still feeling pretty ropey. I knew insurance would pay up eventually, but I was terrified at what the bill might be for my stay in hospital, and they woudn’t let me go till I paid up. Would there be enough money in our account? It turned out to be … just a little over £30.00…

Incidentally, the insurance company DID cut up rough. Why hadn’t I rung them to tell them of my indisposition? Well, lots of reasons actually. I was far too ill for such a thing to have entered my head. And on my first day in hospital, because the only phone available was that used by all the doctors and nurses on the ward, I was permitted to make just one call. So I didn’t even ring Malcolm, who was in transit from France to England. It was my son in London whom I called, and he had to contact anyone who needed to know (no, he didn’t ring the insurance company either). I have no idea who took it upon themselves to change my flights, but it wasn’t me. Instead of a direct flight, I had an internal flight to Bangalore, and then a dreadful wait from about midnight to 4.00 a.m. with nowhere to wait but a gloomy hall with no seating, clinging on to my luggage before my connecting journey to London.

And then it was over. We were back in England for a short while before we returned to France. I was by no means the full shilling for a while. Malcolm said I hardly uttered a word for days and days …

My featured photo shows the view from my hospital bed.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is it. My Indian diary. Next week we’ll go to Bradford, where, to ease us gently back to the UK, my post will have at least some Indian connections.

The Eternal Symmetry of the Alhambra

The Alahambra in Granada has a history going back to the 11th century. It was a Zirid fortress, then a 13th and 14th century Nasrid royal palace and fortress complex. Like all Nasrid palaces, it’s a harmonious blend of space, light, and water, featuring intricate decorations and inscriptions, and it’s quite wonderful. Despite the crowds and the selfie-seekers, one of whom is immortalised below. We couldn’t get rid of her.

But in 1492 (the same year, as any English schoolchild knows, that ‘Columbus sailed the ocean blue‘), Catholic monarchs captured Granada, the last bastion of Moorish rule in Spain. It became a royal court for some time before falling into disrepair, was damaged by Napoleon’s troops, and was eventually discovered by 19th century Romantic travellers. Rediscovered, restored, it’s now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Here’s some decorative detail. Also symmetrical.

And so it’s here I’ve come to celebrate symmetry for Leanne’s Monochrome Madness, hosted this week by Dawn of The Day After. We visited in 2019.

A Bench on the Waterfront

Back when I lived in Leeds, its waterfront was emphatically not A Thing. It was certainly not called The Waterfront, being a disregarded area of town rotting behind the station, with long-closed mills and factories collapsing into weed-smothered decay. These dessicated buildings stood alongside ill-repaired streets, deserted except by cars whose owners parked here for free before scurrying off to work or shop in a more salubrious part of town. The River Aire, the Leeds-Liverpool Canal were uninviting, rubbish-clogged. The area wasn’t anybody’s idea of a good day out.

Nowadays, what a surprise! Mills and factories have been restored: repurposed as offices, shops, bars and restaurants. It’s busy day and night with local workers, tourists and pleasure-seekers. Canal boats saunter in and out. Here’s a woman enjoying a quiet moment, probably in her lunch break, on a bench overlooking the canal.

And here are members of a local art group, sketching the area in all its vibrancy one sunny August day. They seem to have commandeered all the benches-for-one.

For Jude’s Bench Challenge.

Indian Friday: Last Day in Chennai

My diary, revived from my trip to India back in 2007. This second part details my solo travels during the last three weeks or so. From now on, increasingly exhausted, my entries become terser and frustratingly light on detail.

Last Day in Chennai

Monday 3rd December

I woke up with a high fever and sore throat, listening to heavy rain outside – and I only had the clothes I stood up in. I’d have liked to have bought a brolly, but no luck.

Heavy rain in Mamallapuram

Finally the Blue Elephant cafe, where I’d been yesterday opened, and the woman in charge, on hearing my voice, wouldn’t hear of my having a coffee – ‘Lemon and ginger for you!’ Mighty delicious – huge chunks of ginger brewing in squeezed lemon juice and hot water. I couldn’t face an Indian breakfast though, so it was eggs and toast. After that it wasn’t too long before I caught the bus back to Chennai, where fever or no fever, there was still shopping to be done, and packing to be done back at The Hotel from Hell.

My rickshaw driver in Chennai

I eventually made it to the station , where I planned to catch a train to the airport  –  a local service with a quick journey time. How was I to know that the train would fill and fill and fill and fill until people were hanging from the doorways in true travel doc. style? With me crushed inside feeling iller by the second? Actually, ‘crushed’ doesn’t begin to cover it: the only reason I didn’t fall to the floor was that it was physically impossible. At a certain point I couldn’t stand it any more, and somehow forced myself and luggage off the train, with everyone shouting behind me ‘No! No! Airport is 2 more stations!’. By then though I was sprawled across the platform, vomiting and vomiting as the train went off. A lovely man tried to help – he brought me water which he poured over me, washing my face and making me drink. A concerned crowd gathered, but by then I had lost all pride as I lay there, being repeatedly sick.

Two police women turned up, at as much of a loss as everyone else. Finally, they made a decision. They manhandled me, extraordinarily roughly, as if I were a somewhat dangerous demonstrator rather than a rather ill female tourist, and tried to bundle me onto a train. By yelling and weeping I managed to avoid the first train (later now, the trains were nearly empty again), but lost the battle in the end as they chucked me onto the floor of the next one.

At the airport station, we were joined by a handsome young male PC, who carried me ‘Gone with the Wind’ style up the stairs (shame I was way too ill to appreciate it) and heaved me into a rickshaw, where they all joined me, together with my luggage. Airport at last – or at least the airport medical centre. Here they finally examined me and decided I needed to go to hospital – I’d been muttering that for at least an hour. An ambulance appeared and I was dumped on a stretcher – bang! The ambulance driver revelled in using his siren – who wouldn’t if it meant actually MOVING in the streets of Chennai? And after arriving at hospital  I don’t remember much of the rest of the day. I think the Consulate was told, and dealt with the fact I could no longer catch my flight home.

It’s rather astonishing to me that I even took two photos that day. But I did: one on the beach at Mamallapuram in the rain, the other of my very last auto-rickshaw driver in Chennai. My featured photo, of the central station at Chennai is courtesy of Unsplash, and taken by Ahamed Sameel.

Quiet Fog

Ours is a land of rivers. Nearby, the Ure, the Skell and the Laver all course through Ripon, and the Ripon Canal peacefully splices the town in two. Local gravel pits end their working lives transformed into watery nature reserves. We’re approaching the time of year when, because of the surrounding water, morning mists envelop the landscape. I relish those early hours when quiet descends with the mist, muffling sound, slowing us down and encouraging us to savour these peaceful moments.

For Ritva’s Lens-Artists Challenge #364: Quiet Moment.

And Leanne’s Monochrome Madness.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Ghost Cities to My Father’s House

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate:  Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t read Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities.  But I’ve read several reviews, and it seems that this novel is inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China, and follows multiple narratives many years apart. In the present day, Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it’s discovered he’s been using Google Translate. This alternates with stories from the past of a dictatorial Imperial Emperor and his escapades.

I immediately thought of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which I read far too long ago to comment on seriously now.  But it begins: ’Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.’  And here begins Italo Calvino’s compilation of fragmentary urban images.

This Italian author made me think of one travel writer’s account of one part of Italy.  Jan Morris’ Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere. I felt a little ambivalent about this book. I wanted to like it more than I actually did. It’s a meditation on, and an exploration of Trieste, a city history has left behind, whose glory days are over, which is top of nobody’s tourist agenda, and which Jan Morris entertains strong feelings for. She discusses its history, its streets, its day-to-day life in a loving, melancholic way, and relates it to her own experience of being outside the mainstream. It’s a book which I’m glad to have read about a part of Italy I don’t know, but which I was happy enough to finish and set aside.

Vigàta in Sicily is another town which time has perhaps forgotten.  It’s also imaginary, and the setting for a series of murder mysteries by Andrea Camilleri. Despite the fact that as a detective series, which therefore concerns murder and other crimes, the Inspector Montalbano books are ones I turn to when I need a bit of relief from weightier tomes. I love to meet the people Camilleri describes. I like to accompany Montalbano as he seeks out delicious meals at home or at neighbourhood restaurants. And I like to observe his relationships with his colleagues. The Voice of the Violin doesn’t disappoint. It’s about a murder which might have taken a very long time to have come to light if the police car in which Montalbano was a passenger hadn’t careered into a car parked outside a villa…. And in due course, Montalbano’s curiosity is piqued … He finds a body, of course. And up to five people might be responsible for the gruesome murder. But who? And you’ll need to read this book to find out why the title it’s been given is so apposite.

From one Italian detective to another. I love Commissario Brunetti, and I love the picture of Venice that Donna Leon, his creator, always conjures up. The alleys between ancient buildings, those palazzi themselves, the little bars Brunetti frequents…. and so on and so on. So even before I get involved in the plot, I’m absorbed by the ambience she creates. Death at la Fenice is, like all Leon’s tales, a good story. This one features the conductor who’s murdered during the interval at a performance at la Fenice. Whodunnit? His wife? That soprano? Her lover? As ever, the result of Brunetti’s investigation is an unexpected one, and convincing. Read it.

We’re staying in Italy for the rest of this chain.  But we’ll leap back several centuries in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait.. Lucrezia, third daughter Cosimo de’ Medici, finds herself betrothed, then married to Alfonso, heir to the Duke of Ferrara when her older sister, his original choice, dies. The story flits between her early life in Florence and her early married life. Underneath, throughout her marriage, her conviction that she will be killed by her apparently loving husband bubbles away. She’s a Duchess now, her father-in-law having died. She’s only 15, more than 10 years younger than her husband. Although she’s been brought up privileged, her new status brings with it loneliness and challenges. Virtually her only constant friend is her maid.

This book links with the two previous ones by being rich in quotidian detail. O’Farrell paints the pictures of her privileged life in such a way that we can hear, see and smell the scenes that surround her: her father’s exotic menagerie; her husband’s castrati singers; the sumptuous clothing; the simple bowls of fruit which she examines with her painterly eye – she is a talented artist.  This rich attention to detail brings an already absorbing story fully to life.

Still Italy, still history, but much more recent in the first volume of Joseph O’Connor‘s Escape Line Trilogy.  My Father’s House is an immersive story, taking as its starting point the fact that while Rome was under German occupation in 1942, there was an Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty, based at the Vatican who was involved in running an escape line for Jews, escaped POWs and resistance fighters during WWII.

The plan is to evacuate scores of refugees and resistance fighters, all separately hidden, out of Rome on Christmas Eve, when perhaps guard is lowered. Plans take place at the rehearsals of a specially convened Chamber Choir: singing drowns out the mutter of whispered instructions to each singer in turn. Each player in the plot has a role, No one knows what any other individual is required to do. Gestapo leader Paul Hauptmann has his suspicions that a plan is afoot, and O’Flaherty is in his sights.

This is a work of fiction, even though heavily indebted to known facts. It’s told in a series of distinct voices, all characters in the book.  Each voice is distinctive, authentic, even funny: Irish, English, Italian, aristocrats and shopkeepers. An often thrilling, always thought-provoking and absorbing story.

My chain seems to owe everything to Italy, and little to the starter book. I won’t do any better next month. I’m unliklely to participate, as we’ll be away, and I don’t like the idea of not responding promptly to comments. But the starter book will be  Dominic Amerena’s novel about authors and publishing, I Want Everything. I think I’ll try to read it anyway.

With thanks to the photographers from Pixabay whose photos I have used: LeoLeo (cities); VBosica (Miremare, Trieste); Gianni Cio 10 (Sicily); Filip Filopovic (Ferrara); Davide Cattini (Rome).  And from Unsplash, Giusi Borrasi (La Fenice, Venice)

Indian Friday: In Which I Make My Escape

My diary, revived from my trip to India back in 2007. This second part details my solo travels during the last three weeks or so. From now on, increasingly exhausted, my entries become terser and frustratingly light on detail.

In Which I Make My Escape

Sunday 2nd December

Night came and endless hours of listening to traffic and my fellow guests noisily throat-clearing and spitting. I dreaded hanging around till 9.00 a.m. to go out with Y and her driver, being driven around and cramming in three Sites of Interest before 4 o’clock, when I’d be free to … return to the hotel.  So at 6.30 I got up, wrote a note excusing myself, delivered it to Y’s house. and got a rickshaw to the Bus Stand. I knew I was being rude, but I was at the end of my tether and beyond caring.

It’s not easy when at the Bus Stand, 3 different people give you 3 different bus numbers, and 3 different stops, and the bus destinations are only in Tamil script, but I was determined to get to my intended destinaton, Mamallapuram, good and early. Chaotic Chennai traffic eventually gave way to palm trees, lagoons, and views of the sea, Finally I was happy.

Mamallapuram struck me as a more congenial place to be. Small seaside town , albeit touristy, With Added Culture. It’s a World Heritage Site with fantastic temple architecture and sculpture. I knew it dated from the 7th and 8th centuries CE, that it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and features intricate stone carvings scattered over a wide area, mainly the beach.

Beach at Mamallapuram with the Shore Temple in the background

Walking down the street, I suddenly thought ‘I don’t HAVE to go back to Chennai tonight’. The first hotel I called at had a room for a mere RS 200, monastically simple, but clean. Outside my room is a shady courtyard, and as I started to talk about Chennai to the American tourist relaxing there, I just burst into tears. I didn’t know just how badly the noise had been affecting me, but I DID know that once I’d decided to stay here, a weight fell from me, and I’ve bounded around feeling I’ve got out of jail free. And of course I only went there in the first place to CouchSurf, which didn’t happen, for reasons that aren’t altogether clear to me.

I sauntered round being a tourist, getting a coffee on a roof terraced cafe, and in a fairly low-key way enjoyed the sculpture all over the place from the beach to sites at the end of town. In among are extraordinary boulders balancing precariously in the manner of Brimham rocks.

I had a salad lunch at an Indo-French cafe before returning to the beach and its treasures. At one destination, I found I’d made the huge mistake of arriving at the same time as 12 coaches worth of local university students. I couldn’t help comparing them with Emily and friends, in the unlikely event that their university course leaders, at her – or any other English seat of learning – would bring upwards of 200 students out on a Sunday afternoon to Do Culture. Instead of distressed jeans, subversive T Shirts and Attitude, the girls were sweetly young, quietly standing in pairs separately from the equally demure young male students. Luckily for me they were all made to wait outside quietly until long after I’d been and gone. Most people seemed to be there to have pictures of themselves and their families taken in front of the more famous sculptures, such as the life-sized elephant, so it was all a bit of a challenge, if entertaining.

I’ll go back to Chennai at the last possible moment to check out of the hell-hole and go to the airport. Luckily there are loads of opportunities to shop here, and I had some fun souvenir shopping – until I came to pay. For some reason, my card has apparently been blocked, which saves money, but could be awkward tomorrow….. Mal rang the bank for me and they say there is no problem, so let’s see.

But I’ve bought a toothbrush for tonight. Sorted. Later, I had a not very exciting meal in the rooftop restaurant above my hotel – in a powercut. My companion was an American/German woman flying home tonight, but she was a bit of a misery. In bed now, writing this, since I couldn’t get to sleep. And actually, I don’t feel very well….

Rummaging Through My Archives

This week, for the Lens-Artists Challenge, Anne has proposed a Scavenger hunt. What fun! Here’s what I’ve come up with, starting with my featured photo exhibiting the soft coats of of those baby ducklings.

Onwards.

Circular. A window at the end of an exhibition space in  Lluís Domènech i Montaner House-Museum, Canet de Mar.

Glass. All kinds of glass here. The plate glass of the shop window itself, and the glass and the bottle within. Each of them reflecting the Barcelona street where the shop is situated.

Shoelaces – usefully stringing up some discarded trainers in a residential district near Park Güell in Barcelona.

Waves. We’ll leave Spain for England, but just fish out our cameras as the ferry leaves Rotterdam, causing a variety of waves as it glides throuh the water.

Shadow. Some discovered in the Valley Gardens in Harrogate.

Wheels. Some old charmers noticed this year at Masham Steam Rally.

Rectangular: lots of rectangles here, from bricks to planks to the battered doors themselves – afarm door near Staveley, North Yorkshire.

Jewellery: my British readers will understand that I entirely approve of the sentiments displayed in this pair of earrings.

And that’s me done for today. An extra post for the week – just for fun.