From Pyrenees to Pennines

The house in Laroque, 10 years on

I was going to post some photos of the bathroom, now it’s done. But I seem to be unable to take good shots – not only of the bathroom, but of any room in the house. Whether it’s the gloomy weather, or the fact that I have taken on the local failure to offer convincing visual ‘marketing’ of any house advertised courtesy of an estate agent I don’t know. The fact remains I’m not pleased with a single shot.

Inadequate as they are, however, I’ll post a few, together with a selection of photos taken in the very early days of our ownership. We bought this house exactly 10 years ago, though we’ve lived here only six. When you look at the ‘before’ shots, you’ll wonder why we ever bought it.

It was, quite simply, a ‘coup de cœur’. We loved the old woodwork, the spacious rooms, and the way the house had evolved, higgledy-piggledy, over the years as the needs of its owners changed.

This was the back yard and the atelier.

And this was the back of the house.

Museum piece toilet.

Once a lumber room. Now a study.

The kitchen. Note the massive – and heavy – tank high up on the wall. That took some getting down.

One of the bedrooms. We love those windows: so there’s a positive.

And you may understand why getting to the ‘after’ has taken so very long. We do have more photos of the really bad old days. I’ll dig them out and post them one day soon. They may horrify you.

But back to the bathroom again. It’s maybe 5 years since we enlisted the help of a local plumber to get the ancient cast-iron bath out. As he chipped and broke tiling in a whole lot of places besides the bathroom, he’s not been asked back. Getting off tiling that had been cemented to the walls was a whole other saga. So was straightening the walls. So was dealing with the fact that the ancient steel pipework was deeply – deeply – embedded in inches of concrete that several friends and two different sets of plumbers, all with heavy-duty drills, failed to excavate. Continuing to use it was not an option, as it had got lined with decades of detritus, and emptying so much as a washbasin could take an hour or more. Eventually, we had new piping constructed alongside, and had to box it in.

One way or another, as real life got in the way, there were long pauses between each phase of bathroom construction, and it’s only today we can finally declare it officially open (though in the manner of all such official openings, we’ve actually been using it for some weeks, slightly unfinished).

In among we: refurbished 4 bedrooms and the living room; made a study from a lumber room with rough-plastered walls that had never been used as living space; made a shower room from a nasty corridor housing a museum-piece toilet; refurbished a kitchen; arted up the atelier; knocked down storage huts in the yard and created a ‘relaxing outdoor living environment’, as a certain Harrogate estate agent prefers to call a garden; made the roof terrace another pleasant place to idle away an afternoon or evening; made two storage rooms from the old shop cold rooms; smartened up the garage: re-worked the downstairs washroom – all with or without the great help of friends, neighbours, professionals.

Sort of view of the new bathroom

Kitchen

That once museum-piece toilet, now a shower room.

Our bedroom.

A rather shadowy view of a guest bedroom.

Study from a lumber room.

Living room ready for another make-over.

The garden.

Time for a rest then? Nope. Games room next, we think. Unless it’s time really to get to grips with the atelier.

Cherries gone wrong.

It was my twin grandsons’ birthdays yesterday. One way for us to celebrate it here is to gather in the very last of the cherry harvest. In this topsy-turvy year, 14th June marked our first, not our last chance for us to harvest this year’s crop, helping friends in a village just down the road.

Oh, they looked good, those cherries! The tree was weighed down with luscious ruby fruits. Max got out a ladder for us to reach the ones way up towards the top, but even before we got to work, we could see that all was not as it seemed. Many cherries – most cherries – were turning brown and nasty or had already grow a furry coat, even before they’d fully ripened. As we harvested, we discarded more than we dropped into our buckets. After we’d done all we could, we only had two small buckets’ worth.

A tree. A ladder. Christine and I discuss a picking strategy

I pick.

Max picks.

Not easy, this picking lark.

And if you’re serious, you’ll need a rope safety harness.

And here’s Malcolm picking too. At ground level.

Then we went through our haul again: quality control. Our two buckets-worth became one. Christine complained that she couldn’t foresee getting more than a single clafoutis out of this lot. Normally she makes cherry jam, cherry liqueur, bottled cherries, cherry clafoutis and cherry pies till she’s sick of the sight of them. And what was worse, those cherries didn’t even taste of much. Engorged with water, the flavour was diluted and thin somehow.

They gave the lot to us.

Good cherries.

Bad cherries. And discarded stones.

Messy cherries. That’s the kitchen after a sorting and stoning session.

This morning, I got our cherries out of the fridge to pick them over before tackling that clafoutis. Overnight, almost half of them had gone bad. Saint Nigel, my unfailing kitchen guide, suggested an improvement on the traditional clafoutis recipe, and I followed it. The recipe was not a success. The batter was solid and heavy, and complemented by wishy-washy flavourless cherries, it was not a pudding to write home about.

Uncooked clafoutis.

Cooked clafoutis.

Clafoutis for lunch.

By the way, do you know the French for ‘it’s nothing to write home about‘? It’s ‘Il ne casse pas trois pattes à un canard‘. It doesn’t break the three feet of a duck. In other words, it’s nothing extraordinary, as a three-legged duck would certainly be.

A walk gone wrong

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Yesterday was gorgeous. Hot and sunny until long into the evening. We ate outside and stayed on the roof terrace till 10 o’clock. Today seemed to promise more of the same. We should know better. This year, getting even two days on the trot where the weather is hot and clear all day is asking a bit much.

And so it proved. Today, our walking group met to share lifts to where our walk was to begin. We set off in the sunshine, watching our in-car thermometers climb steadily to 27 degrees as we drove ever upwards, beyond Villeneuve d’Olmes, beyond Montferrier, up a road which became narrower and less well maintained, to Frémis, a tiny hamlet. We parked there, in a flower-spangled meadow offered by a local farmer. We peeled off our fleeces, applied suncream and set off towards the peak, Coulobre. Sometimes the upward-going was tough and quite a scramble, but we were encouraged by looking across to the still snow-capped tops, and the thought that we’d be having our picnic at the top there, the Ariège spread below us with views, views and more views. We met a herd of black Mérens horses sheltering in a copse from the already-hot sun. A donkey befriended us. And still we climbed.

Towards midday, walking through the forest, we suddenly realised things were changing. Didn’t it suddenly feel cooler? And weren’t those little scraps of mist swirling round those peaks? Apparently yes. The mist descended. The ‘cool’ became ‘chilly’. With 20 minutes to go to arrive at our lunch spot, Micheline, who had developed a gammy knee, announced she could go no further. It didn’t take much for us to decide that it was not only friendly to remain with her and have our lunch, it made sense. The mist was swirling around us, the views up there wouldn’t be up to much, and it was obvious that rain or worse was on its way.

We found logs to sit on, got our fleeces out again, ate our lunch with little ceremony, and scuttled down. The climb up had taken nearly three hours. Scurrying down took not much more than an hour. And as we reached Frémis, the rain started. It’s not stopped since. And those in-car thermometers on the way home? 15 degrees.

June is the new May: a springtime nosegay

We’ve all had it. Months and months of horrible weather. Especially rain. Even now, when things are slowly picking up here, we expect to have all kinds of weather within a single day. Beautifully hot skin-warming sun may be followed by lashing winds, summer showers, or deluging heavy downpours. Glance up at the sky, and it will be in turn a cloudless azure, or bright blue patched with blowsy puffs of white cumulus. Or it may be grey, or even black. If the clouds aren’t coursing lazily across the heavens, they may be tearing across the sky so swiftly that they’ll have disappeared from view if you glance away only for a few moments. The rivers are still full to overflowing.

Farmers are in a mess. They’ve only just begun to cut their hay, when normally they’d be onto their second harvest. Seeds have failed to germinate in the cold and wet. Often they haven’t been planted at all in the sodden and waterlogged fields. Preparations to take cattle and sheep up into the highland summer pastures have had to be postponed, with snow still on the ground at higher levels.

At last though, we walkers are once more getting out and about. We choose our routes with care, because thick sticky mud has made some of our favourite walks unuseable. Where we can walk though, spring has at last sprung. Familiar paths have become narrow passages edged by massed armies of knee-high grasses, shocking in their vibrant greenness. And our favourite spring flowers that by now should be sun-shrivelled and long past their best romp across meadows and pastureland, and spread across their favourite sun-warmed stones. Here are a few that we’ve enjoyed finding in the last days and weeks.

A springtime meadow

Can anybody tell me what these purple rock-clinging pom-poms are called?

Is this an Alpine aven? Anybody?

An Englishman in quest of that perfect flower portait. Tim did get some great shots on his visit.

I believe this to be a type of gentian, more delicate and solitary than its earlier gaudy cousins

A lesser butterfly orchid – I think.

A delicate potentilla.

Alpine willowherb – maybe?

I was practising with my zoom: this was yards above us – a type of campanula?

A type of saxifrage?

A flower-strewn meadow to you is a tasty salad to a sheep.

What a find in June! A daffodil, still fresh and bright.

UPDATE: After she’d read this post, a kind friend, AnnA, wrote to a botanist friend of hers enlisting help in identifying the flowers I’ve shown. Here’s some of what she said. Reading from the top, left to right:

2. Globulaire rampante – Globularia repens (Creeping Globularia)

3. Hélianthème – Helianthemum Alpestre (Alpine rock rose)

5. Perhaps from the Linacée family. She needs a photo of the leaves. Watch this space

6. Céphalanthère à longues feuilles – Cephalanthera longifolia (Sword-leaved Helleborine)

8. Oeillet – Dianthus – (Dianthus). She needs more info. to help her be more precise.

She’s asked to see more of the leaves, and to be told as well where the flowers were found and at what altitude. There’s such a lot to it. I had no idea and am so grateful for all this help.

Fête at Laroque

‘Laroque d’Olmes, below Montaillou, was a small market town which produced cloth. At the local fair, which in the fourteenth century was held on 16^th June, local cloth was sold, together with wood, fish, sheep, pottery and blankets from the Couserans.’ That’s what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie says in ‘Montaillou’, his wonderful examination of Catharism in the Ariège village of Montaillou at the turn of the 14^th century.

Laroque’s June fair had already been a long-established event by then, and over the years it’s evolved. Our contemporaries in town remember when it was still a hugely important event in the agricultural calendar, something like the fair that’s still held every year in nearby Tarascon. There were animals everywhere. One area was given over to cattle, another to sheep and others to all the usual farmyard creatures. And at night there was dancing. Bands belted out dance music on both Place de la Cabanette, and Place de la Republique. It was quite a party, both for the Laroquais and for villagers from miles around.

This is the kind of sheep we'd have had at Laroque Fête: our local Tarascon sheep. Photo courtesy of La Dépêche du Midi. — This is the kind of sheep we’d have had at Laroque Fête: our local Tarascon sheep. Photo courtesy of La Dépêche du Midi.

At some point in the fairly distant past, the Fête became associated not with 16^th June, but with the Catholic festival of Corpus Christi. So it’s still called Festo del Corpus, though there are no religious ceremonies.

We love the idea that this fair has an unbroken history going back nearly1000 years. If only we could love the fair itself.

No animals or shepherds now. It all begins during the week beforehand. Fairground caravans arrive and make the open ground near the river their home for the week. In the car park just along from our back garden, municipal workmen clang and clatter all day long, erecting a stage and a marquee for the various performers who’ll be on duty for much of the weekend. The locals look on, unimpressed. For scores and scores of us, the weekend means three nights of little sleep as the bands on stage boom their way through a noisy repertoire lasting from early evening, when they start to limber up, to two or three o’clock next morning. Wander round to watch the dancing on those nights, and you’ll not find many locals. It’s mainly out-of-towners, and we’ve learnt not to trust them all. Two years running, our window boxes at the front of our house were stolen: now we remove them for the duration.

We leave town for the Fête. This year, we only went 7 miles to stay with friends, though often we’ll try to take a short holiday. Popping back briefly at 11 o’clock on Saturday night, I found the town as busy as Oxford Street in the January Sales, and our bedroom windows vibrating in time to the boom of the bass notes thundering from the stage. Some years though, there are only a few hardy types twirling around in time to the music.

During the day, there’s the fun fair, majorettes, bands. But they say the fair’s expensive, and while most people enjoy a stroll round to people-watch and chat to friends, there’s little sense that this event is a focus for the community.

I wouldn’t like Laroque Fête to disappear. But perhaps it’s time to take stock and look at how it can become again what it once was: a summer event for everyone in town and to a lesser extent the villages beyond. It seems that too many people at the moment actively avoid it or at best are unenthusiastic and uninvolved. And that’s the way for an event that’s happened every year for many hundreds of years to wither and die: which would be sad.

Fairground prizes: the same the world over.

Now THAT looks fun.

‘If you think you’re going out dressed like that, young lady, you can think on. No, wait, you’re going to Majoretttes’

Blog alert

This isn’t a post from me today. Not here. Not really. But there is one from me somewhere. It’s just a question of looking for it. You could try HERE

This is what happens when you start blogging. You start to read other blogs. If you’re not careful, blog-following could even take over your life, there’s so much stuff being posted: all day, every day. Other bloggers start reading what you write. They comment on your posts, you comment on theirs.

This doesn't need a caption - does it? — This doesn’t need a caption – does it?

And that’s where the trouble starts.

About 18 months ago, I noticed a post that struck a chord with me. As a schoolgirl I must have been scarred for life because a post on a blog now called ‘renée a schuls-jacobson’s blog : because life doesn’t fit in a file folder’ set me thinking about that day when…. oh it doesn’t matter now, but I revealed all when I commented. And lo, I was invited to be a guest blogger, for one day only…….

….. as one of a series called ‘So wrong’.

Renée says: ‘In 2013, I asked a few of my blogging buddies to share their most embarrassing moments from which they learned. . . something.‘ Oddly, it was quite hard to decide what to write about, but Renée never seems to have a problem choosing material. She writes because she loves to write, loves her family and friends, loves life, and no subject is off limits: words, family life, Jewish stuff, Tingo Tuesday (Just look it up. Follow the link). For her, blogging is a conversation with everyone who reads what she has to say. She puts a lot of energy too into bringing together an eclectic bunch of people as guest-writers, so I’m very flattered to have the chance to join this select club.

Renée always hopes that her readers will leave comments – they often do and she always replies. As I do. It’s good to talk, and I enjoy the relationships I’ve made with regular commenters whom I’ve yet to meet. If you haven’t yet done so…why not join in?

PS. What you may not say when you read my post on Renée’s blog is ‘I’ve read the first part of this before’. Yes. You have, if you’ve been here for the long haul. But only the first part.

PPS. Message from Renée: ‘Hey friends of Margaret! You can click on my name and be magically transported to just the right place!’ She’s right you know…..

An English Country Garden – in France

Peek through the chain link fence. There – an expanse of grass. Perhaps two or three trees, organised in a line or some geometric shape. Over in the corner, a vegetable patch. If you’re lucky, there may be a bed of flowers near the house or down at the end there. That’s the standard garden in our corner of France, even though you’ll find plenty of gorgeous gardens too, in hidden corners.

So different from its typical English cousin. Herbaceous borders in the gardens of stately homes and the average garden of the average semi all owe something to the informal planting and glorious mixed colours of the traditional cottage garden.

Gill and Ken, English friends of ours, have created a wonderful outdoor area around their French home, full of year-round interest with an always-changing canvas of flowers and shrubs . Last Saturday they invited the members of the French gardening group they belong to, Graines des Jardiniers, to look around. Gill (whose garden this really is – Ken is her labourer and gopher) was to have her Chelsea Flower Show moment.

It was one of those grim days we’ve become accustomed to this year: moments of driving rain and whirling gusty winds alternated with sunny intervals. Chilly too, and their guests turned up in winter coats with fur-trimmed hoods. But enthusiasm for the pleasure of sauntering round the garden soon took over. Winding gravelled paths encouraged exploration. Flowers everywhere filled irregular-sized beds and scrambled up hilly banks and round convenient tree trunks. There were seats under pergolas and arbours, on which you could rest whilst admiring the garden itself and the hilly countryside beyond: a pond to discover too.

And for her French guests, Gill had laid on a proper English afternoon tea. Scones with butter and jam (no clotted cream though), rock cakes, ginger cakes, drenched lemon cake and date loaf, all washed down with a ‘nice cup of tea’.

The group, whose members must have gardens very different from the French stereotype, had come with plants to swap and ideas to share. They were keen on Gill’s garden. We were keen on them. We think , like Gill and Ken, that this is a group we’d like to join.

Plant swap time.

An uninvited guest

When the Saints go marching in

Arrive in Calais, and all you have to do is drive about 700 miles south, as straight a route as you can, to find our house. En route you’ll pass scores of towns and villages dedicated to saints you’ve never heard of. Holy men and women such as:

Aignan
Cyr
Inglevert
Mesmin
Outrille
Pardoux
Pryvé
Sulpice
Ybard

I thought it was time to unearth a story or two. So I dug out our dictionary of saints, which dates from my student days when I needed to know about such things, and then I put Google to work. Nothing. Almost nothing. Not even on the websites of the communes themselves. There was the odd reference to a bishop who’d led a blameless life, but positively no ripping yarns. Where’s the fun in that?

The story of St. Wilgefort was the kind of thing I had in mind. In England we know her as St. Uncumber (you knew that, didn’t you?). Her father, a Portuguese nobleman, wanted to marry her off to some pagan king. As she’d taken a vow of virginity, she was not inclined to fall in with the plan. Her prayers to become repulsive to her suitor were answered when she grew a beard. Enraged, her father had her crucified. For many years during the Middle Ages, she was venerated by people seeking solace from tribulation, and particularly by women who wanted to be liberated – unencumbered – from their abusive husbands.

St. Wilgefort in the church of St. Étienne, Beauvais

If you have any stories of forgotten French saints, I’d love to hear them.

The Lakes with additional rain, cloud … and sheep

One of the sheep who were our constant companions

The Lake Distict: English holiday destination par excellence, and favourite subject for armies of painters and poets. Wordsworth, who wandered ‘lonely as a cloud’, Coleridge, Southey – they’re known as the Lake Poets – drew inspiration from the area. Peter Rabbit’s stamping grounds, including Mr. McGregor’s vegetable patch, must have been near Windermere, where his creator, Beatrix Potter lived. JMW Turner’s one of thousands of painters who’ve been inspired by views of the Lakes. Batallions of holiday-makers, especially walkers, arrive in the area every week of the year.

In short, everyone loves the Lake District. Except me. I arrive under banks of mist and bucket-loads of rain (like everyone else). I tramp round pretty towns looking for evidence of ordinary every day life, and find nothing but outdoor shops, craft galleries and tea shops. I’m one of a crowd in an area I’d prefer to enjoy in solitude. So I tend to avoid it in favour of the Yorkshire Dales, Northumberland or the Peak District. Still, there we were last week, first for a magnificent birthday celebration, and then for a family weekend. And for the first time, despite lots of rain and even more mist, I enjoyed being there. I learnt to distinguish Swaledale sheep from their Herdwick cousins, who have black lambs: I enjoyed briskly walking with friends and family in the bracing cold, and finding daffodils and blossom, despite its being May: and at last I learnt to appreciate the famous scenery. An excellent holiday.

Rain: our constant companion

Buttermere: looking for ospreys

A walk near Buttermere

Ullswater

Twin lambs with mum

Landscape near Shap

Hen at Shap Abbey

Hens climb the wall at Shap Abbey

Shap Abbey – isolated among the hills

Shap Abbey glimpsed from the river

More sheep

Dry stone walls in Cumbria

Rouen: our day out

An ancient doorway of one of those half-timbered houses.

The spire of Saint Ouen, glimpsed down a narrow street.

What is this mysterious and mythical creature?

Skyscape.

Saint Maclou,its spire clean and restored, but still not re-opened for business.

The Aitre de Saint Maclou. Once filled with wretched corpses, it’s now an art school.

Another ginnel.

Outside the modern, and slightly wacky church dedicated to St. Joan of Arc. The ruins of the church of St. Vincent are just visible in the foreground..

Inside the church of St. Joan of Arc. The stained glass comes from the destroyed church of St. Vincent.

Glance upwards when visiting the cathedral of Notre Dame, and this is what you’ll see.

Notre Dame. Looking towards the high altar, then ever upwards.

A ravaged Old Testament prophet in the Cathedral.

Au revoir Rouen. A plus tard.

Time for another trip to England (purpose of visit: to attend several 60th birthday celebrations). We generally try to visit somewhere new to us on our journey back, but this time, we decided to spend time in a town we’ve passed through maybe dozens of times, without spending time in anything more exciting than a traffic jam. Rouen was to be our mini-break destination.

Though inland, it’s still a thriving river port, and once it derived its wealth not simply from this industry, but from textiles. Even today, the city symbol is a sheep, a reminder that Rouen once owed its opulence to working with wool.

We really were on a very mini-break, so decided to focus on a Rouen which Joan of Arc and anyone living there up till about the 16th or 17th centuries would have recognised. We knew we’d find a few ancient streets. But we were totally unprepared for a city centre where street after street consists of half-timbered houses and buildings, the oldest of which date from the 13th century. There amongst them were glorious Gothic churches: the cathedral of Notre Dame, the abbey church of Saint-Ouen (sadly closed, because it was a Monday), Saint Maclou church (sadly closed because it’s coming to the end of a massive restoration programme). In among, though, were modern quarters, woven into the ancient fabric of the town in a way that reminded us that Rouen suffered terrible damage in the 2nd World War, when bombing tore irreparable holes through the city.

This was was not the first time that Rouen witnessed death and destruction. It was here that folk-hero and later saint, Joan of Arc died. She was a simple peasant girl who, claiming divine guidance, led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years War, But after being tried for heresy by the pro-English Bishop of Beauvais she was burnt to death in 1431.

Then there are the grounds of the Aitre de St. Maclou. They had been used as burial grounds since Roman times. However, during the Black Death of 1348 when three quarters of the area’s inhabitants died, the site became somewhere to throw the hundreds of corpses to whom an overwhelmed and diminishing population could no longer give decent Christian burial.

But we were there on a glorious spring day. We took away memories of a wonderful lunch eaten in the sunshine, walks along those characterful streets, and unexpected blossom of trees and flowers to lift our spirits. Rouen, we know there’s so much more of you to discover. We’ll be back.