We drove from Arras to Beaune today, having seen almost nothing of Arras, because my evening stroll yesterday in atrocious rain left me with a coat I actually had to wring out. Today was little better. In fact the vanishing point on the motorway planned as today’s contribution vanished itself in a welter of sleet, rain, fog and thoroughly English style bad weather.
Anyway, later we spotted some (sorry to be pretentious, but I genuinely can’t remember the English word) geometric éoliennes. Here.
So that’s two squares today, and the weather improves tomorrow! We hope …
It’s time for Squares again. It’s a month when Becky takes up her place on the Blogging Podium to orchestrate photographic offerings from all over the blogosphere. Just two rules. The photo must be square, and this month, its theme must be Geometry.
I’m scheduling my post. As you read it, we’re probably battling extremely high winds as we drive to the south coast on the first leg of our journey to Daughter-and-her-Family-in-Spain.
We should be travelling by cross-channel ferry. But even if it sails, I don’t want to be on it, so we’re going instead by train under the Channel, courtesy of Le Shuttle. I’ve picked a shot taken on a different ferry journey, crossing the North Sea from Rotterdam to Hull. Those decks look suitably angular to me. And the day wasn’t even a little bit stormy.
WP again! I was careful to tick all the right boxes in order to schedule this post: something I’ve done many times before. As you may have realised, good old WP published it anyway, immediately. And I deleted it, immediately. Here it is again. Grrr. Sorry.
In 2010, we were living in France, and often made the trip back and forth between our home there and England courtesy of the cross-channel ferry from Boulogne to Dover. One April, in 2010, we had a Bad Experience. This week, we’re off to Spain, by the same route (well, Dunkerque rather than Boulogne). And the forecast is beyond awful. By the time we arrive in Dover, there will have been 50 mph + winds for more than 24 hours, rising to 70 mph as we arrive. Reader, we have cancelled the ferry (but lost our money) and booked the Chunnel instead. Why don’t you sit in front of a cosy fire and read about our Bad Experience?
Life on the Ocean Wave?
We generally cross the English Channel by ferry. Neither of us is keen on the Tunnel, and a nice breezy trip on a boat always seems a cheery, day-out-by-the-seaside way of travelling between England and France.
Not that Dover’s much fun. Despite having some elegant and interesting buildings, Dover always seems a dingy, down at heel and down-on-its-luck sort of place. And this time, it looked as if we’d have longer than usual time to kill there, because LD lines sent a late text saying our ferry would have to leave at 1.30 p.m., not midday, and we’d arrived in town just before 10.00.
Why not go down to the port, then, and see if the ship before had been delayed, and whether it could perhaps squeeze us in? Down at the booking office, the news was that because of atrocious weather, the 6.30 a.m. sailing still hadn’t been able to leave. But it was loading, but if we hurried, we could go too.
We hurried. We caught the ferry. We regretted it. Even behind the harbour walls, the ship was pitching and tossing. As we started our voyage, the well-named tug DHB Doughty struggled to keep us on some kind of suitable path between the harbour walls. Out among the waves and spray of the open sea, the ship immediately started to lunge, roll, and sway, and kept up this uneasy surging throughout the trip.
I’ve always been a rotten sailor, but told myself firmly that this time it would be different: it was just a case of mind over matter. Less than 10 minutes later I was sick for the first time.
Nearly an hour and a half into our hour and a half journey, the French coast was nowhere near. Then the captain announced that some cargo had come adrift, and we’d have to stop till it was sorted out. Half an hour passed. Then yet again it was Our Captain Speaking. There was, he said, a Force 10 gale going on. He didn’t propose to risk getting into the harbour in Boulogne in these conditions. We’d just have to sit it out. I went green. I went yellow. I went glassy eyed. I used up several sick bags. So did half the passengers. The other half (including Malcolm) only had boredom and ailing partners to contend with, but they weren’t having a lot of fun either. Malcolm struggled off to find water for me, and found broken crockery all over the cafeteria, books and souvenirs strewn over the shop floor, and the toilets awash. He lurched back empty handed, though stewards came round with water and sympathy later on.
And we sat, hunched miserably in our seats, until finally, the captain reckoned there was a slight change in the weather. At last the French tug Obstiné brought us into port . Those tugs with those inspired names were the cheeriest things about the whole journey.
The photos show the sea hitting the harbour in Boulogne. That’s the sea as it lost power and hit the coast, not the raging sea we’d been putting up with in what felt like mid ocean. For six long hours.
Next time there’s a storm, I ain’t sailing. I’ll just sit it out on dry land.
Thanks everyone for commenting about the Featured Photo debacle. It looks as if the problem may lie with our phone settings (particularly for Android users), and sorting this out is currently beyond me. As reading your posts and commenting either on them, or on my own posts may be too – for the rest of the week – as we plan for and embark on our 1800 km journey in less than ideal conditions.
Back in 2012, we were living in France. And if we’d believed the doomsayers, not for very much longer. Here’s the story as I told it on my blog, after we’d spent the day with our walking group near the Pic de Bugarach.
Bugarach: ‘Doomsday Destination’
December 15th 2012
The castle at Coustassa glimpsed through the mist
Cold. Pale thin fog baffles the contours of the hillsides, and those of the distant castle at Coustassa. Glimmering frost bristles the short maquis grass beneath our feet. A watered lemony sun high above us attempts to burn winter away, and eventually does so.
The mists begin to clear
That’s when we have our first view of Bugarach – shown in the featured photo – the imposing thick-set mountain which dominates this part of the Aude, because it stands alone, rather than as part of a range, and today is pretty much thatched in snow.
‘According to an ancient Mayan calendar, at some point towards the end of 2012, the world will come to an end.
It is not clear how that will happen, but apparently humanity does not stand a chance – except for those who seek shelter in the area surrounding Bugarach.
Just 200 people live there all year round, but doomsday believers and spiritual groups are convinced the village has magical powers, thanks to the local mountain – the Pic de Bugarach.
For years, rumours have circulated on the internet that extra-terrestrials live in the mountain, and come the apocalypse, the top will open and they will emerge with spaceships, and rescue the local inhabitants.’
Although it’s quite hard to entertain the idea that the mountain might have some sort of underground UFO car park, there are plenty of people who have done so, and with great fervour. Here’s today’s Daily Mail, which has been talking to Jean-Pierre Delord, Mayor of the tiny village of Bugarach (pop. 176).
‘On Wednesday, he will close the village for five days to anyone who doesn’t live here or isn’t already booked to stay, and draft in hundreds of police, military, firemen and Red Cross to ban any gatherings, shut off the mountain and arrest anyone silly enough to try flying over it.
‘What if tens of thousands of people turn up?’ he says, throwing his arms up in the air. ‘I have no way of knowing what will happen. I have no crystal ball! I don’t care if people want to chant naked or talk to the trees, but I have to protect my villagers. I am responsible for them.’’
He’s not over-reacting. Local house-owners have been able to rent out their homes for the period in question for astronomical prices, and even camping spots are going for 400 euros a night. For most locals though, the whole thing is at best a nuisance, at worst a real headache. The nearer we get to December 21st, the more people descend on the area, and the police and army are already involved in keeping order.
We enjoyed our views of Bugarach, as ever. We spent time pretending to look for UFOs and generally mocking the New-Agers who are so convinced by the end of the world as we know it. Then we got on with the business of enjoying our walk in the here-and-now. Here are a couple of photos showing what else we saw that day
This is a walk past dozens of capitelles: shelter for sheep farmers & vineyard workers in former times.Glance away from Bugarach, and you’ll see the Pyrenees.
Update: December 14th, 2024. As you see, we’re still here. And so are you.
Here in the UK, we know a lot about clouds. And at this time of year, we know a lot about grey clouds. Looking out of the window just now yields an unending vista of smoky grey, darkening over Mickley way to gunmetal and slate. No cotton-wool puffs of cumulus for us.
So let me whisk you to a day in June, when the plane transporting me from Barcelona to Leeds offered me a constantly changing cloudscape below me, with tantalising glimpses of beaches, landscapes and the Pyrenees, the Atlantic coast, and then crowded old England. The featured photo shows us just leaving Barcelona – hardly a cloud in the sky. And then …
Mist rather than cloud, to start with.The foothills of the PyreneesWell, who can tell?Cresting the Pyrennean peaksOver the French coast now…Here too.Still FranceNearly homeEven more nearly home.
Although generally a big fan of monochrome, on a grey day like this, I’m not sure I like these clouds and vistas in black and white. My memory of that summer day was of clear bright and optimistic colours. But needs must. This is for Monochrome Madness, and hosted this week by Brian, of Bushboy’s World.
So said Mick Maslen, Yorkshire artist and teacher. And perhaps none is more energetic than the Leading Line: the one that draws you insistently into an image to discover what lies at the other end. And which may leave you wondering, because you often never reach it.
My header image is from Cádiz, and is a bit of a text book classic. Pavement, road, seawall, cars, kerb-side buildings – even to a lesser extent the wispy clouds- all lead you on and drop you outside the city’s cathedral.
In other examples, it’s the journey along the lines, rather than the destination that commands our notice. Here’s one from Chalons-en-Champagne: the wall paintings rather than the chap at the end, are the story. Just as the couple in the underpass in Premià de Mar attract less attention than the graffiti they’ve just walked past.
Other leading lines have no destination that we can see. The Chirk Aqueduct, with viaduct behind is going somewhere. We just don’t know where. The same with the Rolling English Road in the Yorkshire Dales, and the track in another part of the Dales whose path has been enveloped by fog.
Chirk Aqueduct: from Shropshire to Wales.
Just one more image today. The astonishing Millau Viaduct in France, some two and a half km. long, sweeps majestically about 35 metres above the River Tarn and the landscape and communities beneath- sometimes (and oh how I’d love to see it then!) even above the clouds.
It’s not been a great week, has it? The American election has come and gone, and anxious nail-biting has been replaced by the new reality. I’m going to distract myself by looking through an old blog post, first posted in November 2009 – gosh – 15 years ago, when I was a fairly new blogger, recording our day-to-day life in the French Pyrenees.
Down on the Farm
Well, I mentioned Patrimoine in my last post. Yesterday we had Our Farming Heritage, an event organised by Pays d’art et d’histoire des Pyrénées Cathares. 20 or so of us turned up at a nearby village, Troye d’Ariège, to have a look round a traditionally run sheep farm.
The event was immediately hi-jacked by an unscheduled event – the birth of a lamb. Out in a field, a mother sheep heaved herself up, plonked herself down, then up again, baahing loudly, until suddenly, quite suddenly, there was the front half of a lamb hanging out of her. A bit more wriggling and fussing, and there was the lamb, out on the grass, while the mother flopped beside it. A few minutes later, both were standing again. No shelter, no farmer in attendance – no need to worry apparently. These sheep are Tarasconnais, ‘The 2 CV of the sheep world’ said the farmer: rough and ready sheep who can turn their hooves to anything – wool production, milk and meat production, surviving on their own: molly-coddling is not required. They even get on with delivering their lambs regularly all the year round, somehow producing between them a steady crop of young, without human intervention.
Very pregnant sheep out in the fields.
Over to the lambing sheds then, where the mothers, having delivered, come inside for a while with their lambs. The noise! Dozens of lambs constantly baahing in their high-pitched tones, while the mothers hit more melodious lower notes. Hopeless to try to follow all that the farmer, Marcel, was telling us.
Supper time.
Marcel runs his farm of 800 sheep by himself, helped only by an apprentice (who has to go to College in among, of course) and occasional visits from a retired farm hand. He grows their feed – hay, beets & maize, keeps the animals fed and watered, dips them against insects monthly, de-parasites them every 3 months, regularly cuts 800 sets of hooves (he’s devised various metal narrow bus-shelter-style contraptions to make it easier to queue the animals up take their turns for these various procedures). He’s not organic, but many of his practices are, and he certainly usually chooses, for example, organic treatments if his beasts fall ill, believing them to be better.
View from the ‘treatment shed’.
Every summer, about 400 of his sheep go off to the mountains with a shepherd, following the ancient tradition of transhumance. The old, the young and the weak remain behind.
This maize is a winter treat. And here’s the cage where it is dried and stored.
As the sun went down, it got colder and colder. Time for the next part of the evening, an Apéritif dinatoire. What this meant was that everyone from the farm walk and most of the village inhabitants got together to choose and share plates of local sausage, hams, pâtés, cheeses, bread, wine, apple croustades and fruit, mainly sourced from no more than 10 miles away.
Apéritif dinatoire over, time to clear the tables.
The atmosphere got merrier and merrier, and yet, come half past eight, the tables were cleared, and we all sat down for a lecture (this is Saturday evening we’re talking about…..). Eric Fabre, a university lecturer specialising in the farming history of our area painted a picture of 19th century life in which most people farmed tiny patches of land: only the Church and a very few landowners had substantial holdings. People grew what they and their few animals needed, and the sheep they had were valued for the manure they produced, and secondly for their wool. The meat got eaten, of course, but it only became a marketable product following urbanisation, when town based workers no longer had land of their own. The farmers listening to all this were even more interested then we were, and question time was lively. But it was late and we were tired, and in the end, we were glad to go. 11 o’clock seems well past bedtime when you’ve had a day down on the farm.
What did I let myself in for? Rebecca, of Fake Flamenco fame, sets a monthly poetry challenge. Here’s what she’s decided on this month: ‘For October, we will each create a poem about a place we love. Write a poem in free verse (unrhyming) of fewer than 50 words about a favorite location.’ Rebecca’s own poem uses only words beginning with ‘s’. I had to join in.
I knew I wanted to write something about our years in France, when we lived in a small town in the foothills of the Pyrenees (hence the name of my blog). Our own town’s name is a bit cumbersome for the purpose – Laroque d’Olmes. So I chose a hamlet nearby, a bit higher up the mountains than us, simply because it begins with a P. Don’t ask me why P seemed a good idea. You can decide when you’ve read my offering.
Péreille Picturesque Péreille - prettily placed. Population? Puny. Previously peopled by productive peasants - potatoes, peas, poultry, a pig, pastureland….
Presently preferred by Parisian pleasure-seekers. Pourquoi pas? Pastoral, perfectly peaceful Péreille: proximate prominent peaks - a Pyrenean playground. Plateaux, peaks & pinnacles!
This week’s Lens-Artists Challenge from Ann-Christine asks us to focus on gardens. We’re out and about travelling, so new posts are beyond me. But at this time of year, I always remember the annual garden extravaganza that took place a few miles away from where we lived in France: Le Jardin Extraordinaire. Here’s why …
This week, for the Lens-Artists Challenge, PR invites us to present balconies we’ve met. I love leaning over a balcony, with the chance to relish a bit of sunshine whilst enjoying some people -watching. But it turns out that I haven’t got a single shot of residents enjoying their bit of outdoor urban space.
Lots of apartment-owners turn their balconies into gardens. Although the resident in my first shot hasn’t allowed a lack of an existing one to thwart plans. How about repurposing a few chairs? And the second one earns a place to show how so many Spanish and Portuguese balconies are tiled on the underside. Such a good idea!
Then – obviously – there’s Balcony as Washing Line. Here are two from Spain.
Vic, CataloniaSants, Barcelona
Sometimes a balcony is ideal for posting a protest. Here the citizens of Berga demanded Independence from Spain for Catalonia. Five years on, the cries don’t seem to be quite so strident. And in the adjacent images, citizens in a run-down neighbourhood in Seville sought a touch of cultural revival, accompanied by lively illustrations.
Sometimes it’s just about cheering up the neighbourhood. Here we are, first in Berlin, then in Málaga.
And sometimes, balaconies just wish to speak for themselves. Here are two fine examples.
This building is now the Tourist Office in Manises, a town near Valencia which was formerly one of the most important producers of ceramics in Spain. Sadly, its glory days are over.
A fine Modernista building in Mataróby Josep Puig i Cadafalch, the Casa Coll i Regàs.
And some people just don’t have a balcony. So they have to paint one instead.
Two examples of trompe-l’œil in Tournus, Saône-et-Loire, France
My feature photo is of an ordinary street in Argentona, Catalonia – where every house is sporting a balcony.
Thanks, PR – this was an inspired post to set us in the mood for summer travels, and mooching around to find balconies to admire.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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