From Pyrenees to Pennines

The Pronunciation Unit

The Chorale at Laroque. We’re limbering up for a Christmas concert, and for one of the numbers, I’ve been put in charge of Pronunciation Studies.

‘Amezzing gress, ’ow sweet zuh soond….’. Every week, we practise sticking out tongues between our teeth in a thoroughly exaggerated way to get that dreaded ‘th’ sound out of our mouths, but it’s so hard for the French to remember, even harder to do….

I’m not mocking here: I’m all too well aware how difficult it is for us English to get certain sounds right as we mangle the French language in our turn.

How can it be that we’re all born with the same vocal equipment and ears, and yet only a few short years after we first learn to speak, seem unable either to hear or reproduce the sounds and inflections of any other language? The ‘r’ sound is often especially problematical.

We have a young English friend here. She’s eight, and has been here since she was three. To our ears, she’s utterly French as she chatters away to her friends, but apparently, if you listen carefully, she gives her origins away. It’s lucky that most of us, wherever we come from, find that our own language spoken in a less-than-perfect accent can sound both charming, and on occasion, even sexy.

Postcards from Catalonia

We’ve just got back from our weekend on the other side of the Pyrénées, and I’ve decided to post these ‘postcards’ to show a few happy days in Sant Cugat del Vallès, the very attractive town where Emily is now working; the not-Hallowe’en-but- la Castañada festivities; and a relaxing weekend.

Eating and drinking were important. Straight away, as we drove across the mist and rain shrouded Pyrénées from France, there was a decision to be made. Lunch on this side of the border? You can’t get fed much later than 12.30 here. Or wait till Spain? Nothing there is open much before 2.00 p.m.

We arrived in Catalonia just in time for la Castañada. Instead of Hallowe’en, they commemorate All Souls’ Tide. Roasted chestnuts are sold wrapped in cones of newspaper with roasted sweet potatoes and peddled from impromptu stalls, or by excited groups of children. Panellets are mashed potato, sugar syrup and ground almonds – maybe cocoa or dried fruits too, rolled in pine nuts and briefly baked till the nuts turn golden. It sounds odd, but they’re delicious accompanied by a shot of strong black coffee.

Coffee shops, with tables outside so you can enjoy the late October heat seem to be in every street, and we adjusted our bodies to Spain’s very different rhythms. Food generally seems cheaper in Spain. A pleasant pause for breakfast, after taking the children to school, after shopping or work, or just because it’s a nice idea and the sun is shining is an affordable treat, and cafés don’t seem to struggle for custom. Nor do lunch-stops. As in France, the 3 course lunch with wine and coffee is on offer in most restaurants, but cheaper here. And it’s a leisurely affair. We found ourselves spending an hour or two every day that we were there over the lunch table, eating, talking and simply people-watching.

Shopping seems less anonymous too. Whether in St. Cugat, or city-centre Barcelona, greengrocers and grocers, wine merchants and bakers – especially bakers – all seemed to be doing brisk business. The out-of-town supermarkets are there alright, but so far, they don’t seem to have won.

So here are my postcards. Have a glance at them over a lazy cup of coffee.

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Season of pumpkins and mellow fruitfulness

mushrooms and TSSBOct2010 072 — A few pumpkins on display last year at Belesta’s annual Fête de la Citrouille

Go to any veg. stall on a French market just now, and there’ll be at least one giant pumpkin. The stall holder will sell you a portion if you like, using a hefty cleaver to wrest a kilo or so of orange flesh from this magnificent vegetable. The market’s probably got at least one stall devoted to nothing but pumpkins: Turk’s head, musque de Provence, butternut, red kuri, rouge vif d’Etampes………

It’s not so very long ago in England that I’d be doing the rounds of all the supermarkets, the day after Hallowe’en, gathering up the last few Jack o’Lantern pumpkins at bargain-basement prices.

Jack-o'-Lantern — Jack o’Lantern dressed up for Hallowe’en

They’d been stocked for everyone to make their scarey Hallowe’en pumpkin faces with and that was all.

Hardly anybody used them to cook with (presumably not even the many Americans who live in Harrogate, with their apparent love of pumpkin pie), and Hallowe’en over, the unsold ones would be junked.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall et al have put paid to that, and now the English love pumpkins as much as the French always have.

Here’s an easy and long-established soupy stew from round these parts (though I learned about it from Nigel Slater) to warm you up after a chilly day in the Great Winter Outdoors.

Food Oct2011 005 — Hmm. We made short work of that.

When we first tasted it, we thought it nice enough, not earth-shattering though. It’s grown on us, and now we think it’s comfort food par excellence: especially those pillows of bread, soaked in scalding hot flavoursome juices.

Garbure Catalane

Toast thick slices of bread- preferably sourdough, and layer them up in a casserole or slow cooker with fried onions, garlic, marjoram, sliced skinned tomatoes, and thin slices of pumpkin. Top the dish up with seasoned water and olive oil and bake for an hour or two in a slow oven (or most of the day in a slow cooker). Take the lid off the dish for the last half hour or so and return to the oven with a crust of grated cheeses (parmesan is good to include in the mix, as it provides a welcome crispiness) for the last half hour or so. Or grill for a few minutes if you’ve been using a slow cooker.

School dinners

I often stop outside the local primary schools in Lavelanet and Laroque as I pass by, to read the week’s menus posted on the notice board: I think I’d really like an invitation to eat there at midday. There’s always an entrée, a main dish, a pudding and cheese or fruit, and it often sounds quite appetising stuff: roast turkey with sauce forestière, chicken wings à la dijonnais, stuffed tomatoes, velouté de legumes…..

But today I was horrified. What am I to make of the British Day they’re planning one day next month?

Betteraves* et raisins

Fish stick

Petits pois à l’anglaise

Crème anglaise

Crumble.

*beetroot

Apart from the crumble, the latest must-eat pudding in France, it all looks pretty dire. What exactly is this beetroot dish they’re starting with? Google doesn’t have a clue. No wonder the French think we English don’t have any good food.

Food Oct2011 007 — Beetrooot waiting for a good recipe to come along

To travel – slowly – is a better thing than to arrive – quickly…..

Robert Louis Stevenson knew a thing or two about travelling slowly – and hopefully – what with hiking round the Cevennes with only a donkey for company.

But yesterday, arriving back in Laroque rather quickly having left Bolton only a few hours before, I felt he’d got it right. Our usual way of travelling between England and France is by car. We can’t claim it’s particularly slow, not with maximum speeds of 130 k.p.h on motorways. But it does take the best part of 3 days to do the pretty-much-exactly 1000 miles between Laroque and Ripon, and that’s fine.

We detour to take in delightful towns like Cahors or Vendôme, and make sure we have time to explore a little. Early morning starts may find us startling deer in the still misty fields, while at lunchtime we’ll be on the look out for a ‘menu ouvrier’, or a rural picnic spot to have a lengthy break. We’ll enjoy a night at a chambre d’hôtes, and usually have an interesting time chatting to the owners or a fellow guest. Breakfast with home made jams and maybe breads and cakes comes as standard. A trip on a channel ferry. A night in London with son-and daughter-in-law. And finally, back up north.

And all this time, we’ll be adjusting between a life in France and a life in England: watching the scenery gradually flatten as we drive north, then begin to undulate again as it passes through Normandy and the Pas de Calais, linking with the similarly gently rolling hills of Kent.

This trip to England though was by plane each way. It’s quicker and it’s cheaper too.

But the whole business of packing luggage into the required dimensions, checking the weight, hunting for a clear plastic bag for those creams and liquids: then at the airport emptying pockets, removing shoes, belts, is just a bit stressful.

Airport-Security — Airport security: an image from the Guardian

And somehow it addles my brain. Three hours ago I was in a traffic jam on the outskirts of industrial Liverpool, and now we’re driving through vineyards in the Aude? The clothes which worked in the morning don’t do in the afternoon, and I’m having trouble adjusting the language coming out of my mouth. I’m all discombobulated.

We’re lucky we have the time to be more leisurely. I’m not against taking it even more slowly and walking some of the way down, maybe along one of the pilgrimage routes towards St. Jaques de Compostelle. Anyone want to come too? Barbara? Sue K?

‘So British’. A French view of life in England.

Well, our French friends have been and gone. It was a busy week full of discovery for us all. Despite the almost unrelievedly awful weather, Yorkshire’s sights, both rural and urban, gave a good account of themselves. But here are one or two of the more unexpected discoveries our friends made.

Harvest Festival. Saturday evening found us in church for a very special concert by the St. Paulinus Singers, a Ripon Chamber choir. As we entered, our friends were struck by the celebratory pile of pumpkins, cabbages, carrots and Autumn fruits assembled for harvest-time celebrations in church. They’d never heard of such a thing. Oh, and the concert began dead on time too. Another first for them.

Charity shops. The French have little other than away-from-town-centre large warehouses given over to the sale of donated goods and run by Emmaus. The often carefully dressed shops we’re so accustomed to on the British high street are unknown to them.

St. Michael's hospice shop — St. Michael’s Hospice shop, Ripon

Closed for business: open for business. As we know, shops here tend to be open through the day. But what a surprise for our French friends to see them closing for the day at 5.30 p.m. rather than around 7.00 p.m! To find supermarkets open in some cases 24/7 was even more astonishing.

Houses without shutters. Evenings walking round town fascinated them. Instead of shutters there were curtains, which might or might not be drawn. How exciting to have glimpses of another set of lives! This is denied to them in France as shutters are usually firmly closed there as night falls.

Buttered bread. As born-and-bred Ariègeoises, our guests were unused to the idea of having butter AND cheese or ham or whatever on their bread. They rather felt it was gilding the lily. But they weren’t keen on the fact that bread is not produced routinely at the average British dinner table. It’s odd, we too have come to expect bread as part of a meal in France, but never in the UK

Milky coffee and tea. The default position for both in France is black (strong coffee, weak tea)

At the butcher’s. Of course our guests wanted to cook a slap-up meal for us. We all struggled a bit with this one, as French and English butchers cut their beasts up in different ways. As a recently-lapsed vegetarian, I’m re-learning slowly all I ever thought I knew, and starting at page 1 in French butcher’s shops.

friesian cow — A Friesian: until recently, these were the cows I most frequently saw in England

BookCrossing

I like BookCrossing. I love the idea of ‘releasing books into the wild’ for some lucky reader to find, and I love finding books in the same way. It brings me face to face with choices I wouldn’t normally consider when I’m browsing the shelves of my local bookshop, library or charity shop. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at releasing books. If I leave one in a café, an anxious waitress will scurry after me waving my latest offering. Leave them on a park bench, and the heavens open. And so on.

But I do have 3 outlets. The first was McQueen’s coffee shop in Knaresborough. For the first and only time in my history of BookCrossing, I heard from someone who’d found and enjoyed a book I’d left. She was writing to me from France. Result.

The next place is Le Rendezvous in Léran, a village near our house in Laroque. The bar is not an official BookCrossing site, but owners Marek and Shirley encourage people to browse the shelves of the overflowing bookcase and choose a book or two, leave a book or two. It’s a great resource of both English and French reading matter.

My third place is new to me. It’s in the adjacent block of flats to ours in Ripon. Calling on a friend there, I discovered a bookcase in the entrance hall to the block. Unofficial BookCrossing again: the great idea of one of my friend’s neighbours. I met her at his party on Friday and she told me her ideas of encouraging neighbours to share books has become popular, with paperbacks changing on an almost daily basis.

So now I’m deep in a gritty ‘policier’, set in Portsmouth, a town I thought until this weekend that I knew quite well. I’d never heard of Graham Hurley, or of ‘Angels passing’. Glad I have now.

From the Pyrénées to the Pennines: Chapter 1

Today, three friends from Lavelanet are coming to stay in Ripon (with friends of ours: we can’t cram them into our tiny flat). They’re members of Découverte Terres Lointaines coming to Discover Yorkshire in Six Days. Over the next few months, you’ll find out why.

But Yorkshire in 6 days? That’s quite a challenge isn’t it? Especially as it would be good to show something of what the Ariège and Yorkshire have in common: dairy and sheep farming, a textile industry long past its glory days, mining and quarrying ditto, a religious past coloured by conflict…. If you were Tour Guide, what would YOU choose?

York: The Romans, the Vikings have all been here: a day won’t be long enough

The Dales? Swaledale, Wharfedale, Nidderdale….etc. Which is your favourite?

Hawarth: A chance to see a bit of the wonderfully bleak landscape, and visit the home of the Brontë family.

Bradford: its textile industry brought the workers from Pakistan and India who are now such a significant part of the town’s population

textile machinery — Textile Machinery at Bradford Industrial Museum

Saltaire: a model village built by philanthropist Titus Salt in the 19^thcentury as a decent place for workers to live. Philanthropists like Salt built others in the UK – such as Port Sunlight on the Wirral and New Earswick inYork.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — Salt’s Mill, Saltaire

North York Moors:

we’ll see the views on our way to……………

Whitby: fishing port and holiday resort

Leeds: the city centre – a mix of Victorian civic pride and modern business district.

leeds arcades — Many of the Victorian Arcades are now an up-market shopping destination

Harrogate Turkish Baths: time for us to relax and re-charge our batteries.

Fountains Abbey: this Cistercian monastery is, like Saltaire, a World Heritage site. And a beautiful and peaceful place.

We’ll need to include a pub, fish and chips, preferably eaten on the seafront out of soggy paper. Curry too. But why is the totally inauthentic chicken tikka masala apparently now our national dish?

I’m so looking forward to being a tourist in my own birth county. I hope our friends enjoy it too.

Bon viatge! Emily’s off to Barcelona….

When my generation graduated, back in the early 1970s, it never occurred to any of us that we wouldn’t get a half-way decent job in a field that interested us. By 2010, it was a different story. Emily’s first taste of work, post graduation, was as casual bar staff for a national pub chain. Mind you, these posts now seem to be exclusively reserved for young graduates and the occasional favoured undergraduate.

Emily all checked in and ready to go at Leeds-Bradford airport

After that, it was a bank: that was pretty soul-destroying too. Because all the time, what she really wanted to do was train as a teacher. And these days, you need lots of voluntary experience before they’ll even consider you. How do you get that alongside a day-job?

Then she had a lucky break. She spotted an advert from CAPS, an organisation supplying English Language Assistants to schools in Barcelona. She applied. She was accepted. And today – she went. She’s flying over, and she and the other successful candidates will spend a day (and a night) together, being briefed, before going tomorrow to meet the families they’ll be staying with. School on Monday.

She’s looking forward to meeting the people she’s staying with. She’ll be trading spending time with her six year old boy twin nephews, for staying with another family with 6 year old twins – girls this time. She’s wondering if the Spanish she’s managed to learn over the last few weeks will be any help at all – or whether only Catalan will do. She’s looking forward to being in Spain, to finding out if teaching really is for her, but most of all to the Big Barcelona Adventure she’s already started writing about in her blog

And we’re looking forward to a few excuses to go and visit her there.

sagrada familia — Sagrada Familia: bound to be on Emily's visiting list

A guide to tiling for the cack-handed

The floor tiling on the roof terrace. It’s finished. It’s usable. It’s looking rather good: ready to be kitted out with garden furniture and a few well-chosen plants. All that’s for sure. The other thing that’s certain is that neither of us will willingly do floor tiling ever again. Never. And Vicki and Marc aren’t all that keen either.

After cleaning the surface carefully, there’s the tile cement to mix. Even with a mixer attachment on the electric drill, this is punishing work. Ask Malcolm. In the manner of Goldilocks’ porridge, the mix must be not too thick, not too thin, but Just Right.

Then the laying of the tiles themselves. This involves long hours on creaking knees and dermatitis from the cement: gloves and tile laying don’t mix. Is the tile level? The spirit level says ‘no’. Yank it up and start again. Keep it the right distance from its neighbours with spacers which somehow get clarted up with cement. Work quickly! The sun is getting high in the sky, and soon we’ll have to knock off and erect complicated shelters so the cement doesn’t dry too quickly and crack.

Are the tiles clean of cement? No? Get it off quickly, before it sets and resists all attempts to shift it. Stop! Don’t press too hard – you’re de-stabilising the tiles! Oh. Too late.

Finished at last. Now we can uncurl our protesting bodies, clean the tools, and knock off for a couple of days while the cement sets good and hard.

Noooooo. Unexpected rain threatens. Quick! Improvise plastic sheeting, lengths of wood to prevent water getting under those tiles……

But now, 48 hours later, we’re ready to do the grouting. Same story. Grout mix is difficult to get Just Right, and it goes off in about 2 hours. Get the team going – one to force grout between the tiles, the other to clear, clean and check there are no air bubbles, troughs, mounds…..

By now, we feel as if we’ve been on a long pilgrimage on our knees in the manner of a medieval penitent, weary, sore and with aching and crippled backs as well.

Anyway, it’s done. Are we suffused with a satisfied glow of pleasure at a job well done? No, we’re simply relieved. Next time we come across a floor tiling job chez nous, we might just have to settle for lino.