One Lovely Blog Award

Surprise!  Today I opened my in-box to discover I’ve been nominated, with several others, for The One Lovely Blog Award.  This is as flattering as it is interesting, because we’re 7 nominees in total, and we’re a mixed bag, including a female soldier serving in Afghanistan, several photographers, a woman sharing her grandmother’s fascinating diary entries from 100 years ago, a couple running  a Bed & Breakfast in the States, and a dog lover.

And this is surely what makes the world of blogging such an interesting one?  We who read a variety of blogs get views and insights into other worlds, other lives, other ways of thinking,  and forge cyber-relationships with people we’d never otherwise come into contact with.

The blogger who nominated me, who writes Thoughts from an American Woman, is very different indeed from me.  She calls herself as ‘an American housewife and Army mom’, and writes about her experience of being the mother of a serving soldier, and shares with her readers her curiosity, her busy life, her love of dogs, her poetry and her Christian faith.  Despite her active days, she finds time to follow very many blogs.  Thank you, Patty, for nominating me and for sending me frequent words of encouragement.

Now, apparently I need to share 7 things about myself:

  • I’m fine with spiders, and snakes, and mice, and bats, and birds, and creepy-crawlies.  But I don’t much care for the scrabbling and rustling noises that are beginning to emerge from behind our kitchen cupboards.
  • I sometimes fear my life is defined by my total inability to get a good night’s sleep.
  • I think I’ve got quite a mixed blood-line.  On my mother’s side, Suffolk and Yorkshire blood, with great grandparents called ‘Pickard’.  Originally from Picardy in France surely?  My father, long dead, took any stories of his Polish family to his grave.
  • For years I’ve been banging on about doing a long stretch of the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostella.  I even have half-baked plans half-talked about with several different friends.  Perhaps going public here will force me to do something about it at last.
  • I can’t begin the day without my fix of coffee. Please don’t expect me to.
  • I can’t end the day without reading myself to sleep.  I normally get an hour or more in during the night as well.  A good way to be fairly well-read.
  • The best stress-buster is to get in the kitchen and cook.  Then relax over the results with easy company and a glass of wine.

And then I need to tell you which blogs I would like to nominate.  Here they are, in alphabetical order.

As a Linguist:  An American teacher comments perceptively and engagingly on language in its many forms.

El Bueno El Malo Y El Feo: Exciting, atmospheric, often gritty photos, mainly taken whilst travelling round Spain.

Mama Clark’s Kitchen and Back Porch Emporium: Leann was our friend and neighbour when we all lived in Harrogate.  Once back in the States she began this blog.  Beautifully and atmospherically written

My Spanish Steps: One of my daughter’s blogs, highlighting things that interest her during her early months teaching in Spain.

Slow Living in the French Pyrenees: Kalba moved to France at much the same time as we did, and we met very early on, so I enjoy her take on France and the French.

The Nelson House Diaries: A bit incestuous this! Sharon is a Francophile and found Kalba’s and my blog – so we found hers.  Hers is the story, among other things, of the challenge of renovating her home to an exacting – and exciting – standard.

The View from the Potting Shed: Gilly gardens with great knowledge and enthusiasm here in the Ariege.  She’s not posted recently, so I hope this may encourage her to resume her useful and inspirational blog.

Welcome Visitor: Another incestuous one.  This American expat, living in Germany, discovered my blog – so I discovered his.  It is, as he says, about his life in Germany – and life in general.

So…. Just eight among thousands and thousands of blogs you could spend 200 hours a day reading.  And to Patty, and all the bloggers who give me such pleasure: thank you.

 The rules for One Lovely Blog are:

  1. Thank the person who nominated you and link back to them.
  2. Share 7 things about yourself.
  3. Nominate  other bloggers for this award.

In search of a druid – or a trout

Mont d’Olmes: local playground for skiers.  You wouldn’t travel any great distance to spend a holiday here, but for locals, it’s the ideal winter sports spot.  It’s a wonderful area for walkers too.  We’ve only just begun to discover the wealth of footpaths, mainly across truly ‘sauvage’ slopes, with views downwards to Montségur, Roquefixade, and northwards almost, it seems, as far as Toulouse.

It’s alright waxing lyrical though.  For many people living in the area many years past, and until the early years of the 20th century, these slopes were the places where they came for long hours each day, working both on the surface and by crawling through narrow airless tunnels, mining talc.

Talc?  Yes, that stuff you sprinkle on babies’ bottoms.  That stuff those Olympic gymnasts plunge their hands into before taking to an overhead bar.  That stuff that apparently still has many industrial uses, notably in the ceramics industry and for plastics paints and coatings.  This soft soapstone was found here on Mont d’Olmes and is still mined in nearby Luzenac.  Here though, all that is left are the gashes in the mountainside where the workings once were, and a few ancient trucks once used to transport the material down to civilisation.

Come and take the path we took last Sunday.  We walked in more or less a straight line, up and down hill after hill, as the path became increasingly rocky and impassable.  Our reward was the occasional handful of raspberries or bilberries, then a lunchtime picnic by l’étang des Druides.  No, sorry, l’étang des Truites.  Whatever.  Nobody seems to know which name is correct.  Some say the person making the first map of the area misheard and wrote ‘truite’ – trout – instead of ‘druide’.  We saw no trout.  We definitely saw no druids.  But we had a jolly nice picnic.  And I paddled.  And then ruined a perfectly good day, in which morning chill and mist had given over to hot sunshine, by falling flat against the rocky path, cutting open my face and chipping three teeth.  I hope the druids weren’t lining me up for some kind of sacrifice.

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Fire in the Pyrénées

Smoke from a forest fire high in the mountains above l’Hospitalet

We’re back in France.  It’s hot.  Very hot.  Humid too. And yesterday we returned Emily to Barcelona, the city she now considers home.  Barcelona was very hot indeed, 38.5 degrees Centigrade actually, which is 101.3 Fahrenheit in old money.

To get to Spain we crossed the  Pyrénées where, for the past month or so, fires caused by the extreme dry conditions have been fairly out of control: mainly in Spanish Catalonia, but spreading through to the Catalan area of France too.

Now though, there are fires near L’Hospitalet-près-l’Andorre.  This little commune is by way of being a frontier settlement between France, Spain and Andorra.  It’s unaccustomed to being newsworthy outside the pages of tourist brochures aimed at those wanting mountain scenery and an energetic walking holiday.

We knew that so far, and thankfully, no human settlements are at risk from the fires.  We knew too that all the walkers’ footpaths have been closed and so have the refuges, which offer basic accommodation and food to roughie-toughie hikers miles from normal civilisation.  We’d heard that more than 25 tourists had been evacuated from deep in the area some days before.  We didn’t expect to see from the road evidence of these fires, which have burnt and ravaged over 400 hectares of the countryside.

A helicopter reconnoitres.

But as we approached the village, traffic slowed.  Bit by bit, we snaked up the mountain road which, as it turned out, had been reduced to a single carriageway. A lay-by outside l’Hospitalet has been commandeered and enlarged by the army and fire services to provide a heli-port.  The fires are in thickly forested areas some 2400 metres high, and inaccessible to land-based fire-fighters.  Trackers (air-borne fire-engines) have come from Carcassonne, and scoop some of the water they need to quench the flames from our nearby reservoir here at Montbel. Expertise and equipment have been borrowed from other areas of southern France, and both army and fire service are on duty 24 hours a day.

Seeing some helicopters temporarily at rest together with their crews, brought home to us the real dangers of fighting these fires: they obstinately refuse to submit to man’s control in isolated and largely unreachable forests.  It was only on our journey home that we noticed, high above us, several fires at altitude, burning the trees and vegetation.  It may be a long time before the fire-fighters can go home, certain in the knowledge that this round of drought-induced danger to man and wildlife is really over.  The rain promised this weekend should help.

Army helicopters ready for action

My photos, by the way, are pretty poor.  This is because they were taken from a moving car

‘I remember, I remember the House where I was born….’ *

The house where I lived in Alne

I don’t actually.  I was only six months old when we moved away from York to Alne, near Easingwold in North Yorkshire.  And today I visited Alne again.

I lived there till I was 4, and my earliest memories come from there.  I remember our house having a long garden, with an espalier apricot tree growing against an ancient brick wall.  I remember my father gardening and growing vegetables towards the bottom of the garden, spending hours doing this hated task because he couldn’t find paid work.  My mother had no choice but to be the only breadwinner, and as a female teacher, earned less than her male counterparts.  Every weekday, she would cycle the 12 mile journey to York, where she taught, with me strapped firmly behind her.
 
My very earliest memory of all dates from the time when, aged about 2, I wanted to pick my mother a bunch of flowers from the garden.  I chose the best tulips, and carefully snapped them off with about an inch of stem attached.  I couldn’t understand my mother’s fury and the hiding that followed from my father.  I must eventually have been forgiven though.  When I came downstairs on my 4th birthday, there was a home-made swing hanging from the branches of the apple tree.  I used to spend hours playing on it, but then, as now, I never learnt to propel myself up and down in a satisfying rhythmic swinging motion.

The back garden today: not so very different from the back garden I remember.
 
We weren’t at all well off, but this house, like so many others in the village is now only affordable by someone with means.  When we found it today, the owners were out, but a painter was tackling the garden gate and invited us to look round the garden.  He assured us the owners wouldn’t mind.  The old stone-flagged kitchen, where my mother had to skin the rabbits my father used to catch must have been re-vamped, and there’s a modern extension at the back of the house.  The fields at the bottom of the garden have been built over.
 
Some things remain.  The Village Hall is still there.  I can just remember that about twice a year, a mobile cinema came to the village.  I was too young to see the films, but I remember everybody turning to to arrange hard wooden benches in the hall so the villagers could gather round the screen.  I remember too the very occasional visit of an ice-cream van.  Cornets or ‘sandwiches’, 2 flavours, vanilla or ‘pink’ (Yes, I do mean ‘pink’.  ‘Strawberry’ doesn’t cover it at all).  There was a wood at the edge of the village, and it’s this wood that to this day illustrates the tales of Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood in my imagination.  I used to half long for, half be scared witless by the prospect of being irrevocably lost in this forest, which I now realise was little more than a glade of trees.
 
Alne’s become quite ‘twee’ commuter country I think.  Back then it was a fairly isolated community offering housing to farm labourers and other country workers.  I’ve just found our old home on Rightmove, because it changed hands some 5 years ago, and there’s not a chance we, or anyone else in our family could afford to think of living there now.
* Thomas Hood

Olympic Fever?

The Thames at sundown

A fortnight ago, our local paper, La Dépêche du Midi had ‘Londres, capitale du monde!’ as its banner headline.  The story was, of course, the Olympics.  We’re unaccustomed to this particular paper taking much notice of anything that occurs outside south-west France, but ‘les  JO’ (Jeux Olympiques) have been big news.

Not as much as in England though. When we arrived in the UK, we were unprepared for Olympic Fever.  Red white and blue banners and flags hang from houses.  Shops have Olympic-themed window displays, and if you want to buy mugs, some paper napkins, or fancy a new cushion, you’d better want them plastered with the Union Flag.

Across the Thames: a view of St. Paul’s Cathedral

Still, we enjoyed staying with Tom and Sarah in Olympic-happy London, and spent an evening round the South Bank area.  Eat near Borough Market and you’re sure of a tasty meal cooked with decent ingredients: the convivial and cheery atmosphere comes free.  Wander along from there to the Festival Hall, and you’ll be in the company of Olympic visitors from just about every country you can think of, as well as locals, just out to enjoy being alongside the Thames and all that this particular stretch of river offers.  Tate Modern and the Globe weren’t open for business at that time of the evening, but there’s still plenty to see.  The National Theatre has a slightly zany pop-up bar, the Propstore, furnished with props from popular productions.  We were aMAZEd by the book maze we found in the South Bank Centre, constructed from some 250,000 books, most of which we found we wanted to read, if we hadn’t already.

The aMAZEing maze of books

And as part of the Festival of Britain retrospective, there was a retro-funfair with fearsomely-clanking roller-coaster as well as all the rides of a traditional 50’s fair.

As night fell, we simply mooched along the Thames-side nightscape.  We felt lucky to be there and  lucky to have shared, if not as excited sports spectators, London’s Olympic August.

Nightfall over the London Eye

“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
— Samuel Johnson

Au cas où ….you find some mirabelles

Mirabelles…there for the taking

I’ve written about the au cas où bag before: that little shopping bag or some such that you tuck into your pocket before any walk, au cas où you find something worth harvesting or talking home.  It was as well we had that bag yesterday.  Walking in the fields above Laroque, we found 2 mirabelle trees, their tiny juicy fruits just turning to golden ripeness.  We harvested what we could, and came home.

Then we remembered the trees we’d seen one previous year on the road between us and Léran.  We went home for another bag and hunted out those mirabelle trees lining the route.

Hundreds of plums, thousands of plums, millions and billions and trillions of plums – to misquote that much loved picture book by Wanda Gagabout rather a lot of cats.  Reader, we picked them – some of them anyway.  We came home.  And this is what we made.  With a few of them, anyway.

Bag not big enough? Find a hat.

Mirabelle and Rosemary Jam

I kg mirabelles

400g high-pectin sugar, or add pectin powder according to pack instructions to granulated sugar.

4 rosemary sprigs, each approx 5 cm long

1/2 vanilla pod.

Directions:

  • Put mirabelles, sugar, rosemary and vanilla pod in a preserving pan and bring slowly to the boil, so the plums have chance to release their juices.
  • Simmer briskly for about 7 minutes.  It’s not necessary to bring it to jam setting temperature as the pectin will do its work, and it’s a fresh flavour you’re aiming for. But the jam won’t keep long outside the fridge.
  • Take from heat and remove rosemary sprigs and vanilla pod.  This is important.  If you leave the herb in, the jam will taste medicinal. The hint of rosemary should remain elusive, and just add that extra Mediterranean je ne sais quoi
  • This is the bad bit.  You could have halved the plums before you started and removed the stones then.  But I think it’s marginally easier to fish them out now.  Only marginally though.  The choice is yours……
  • Add vanilla seeds from the pod and mix.
  • Fill your ready-prepared jars.

Once upon a time, in Benac….. Le Cami des Encantats

Today we visited Benac, one of those  small and almost picture-postcard-pretty  villages outside Foix.  I think it’s unlikely that too many horny-handed sons and daughters of toil live there these days.  Too many freshly painted facades and cheery boxes of geraniums at the windows. Too many sleek and highly-polished cars.

But once upon a time it was a busy working community. For the last few years, every summer the villagers here and in nearby hamlets arrange carefully constructed and dressed figures into appropriate corners of both village and countryside.  These figures celebrate the way of life that persisted here – and throughout France – for centuries, and only died out some time after the First World War.  They call the paths you follow to hunt out all these scenes Le Cami des Encantats: Occitan for something like the Enchanted Pathways.  Come with me and take a look.

Welcome to le Cami des Encantats. Here’s the Garde Champêtre, paid by local farmers to keep local crops and stock safely in one place.
This is a World War 1 poilu (soldier), looking dazed but surprisingly clean after months in the trenches.
A wedding. Always above all a civil ceremony here in France, the mayor is wearing his ceremonial sash.
Retired at last. Why not watch the world go by in the village square?
…. though there’s usually baby-minding to be done as well.
Pudding basin haircuts weren’t just for English children
Then as now, the Tour de France, complete with the wearer of the maillot jaune, might go through the village
Baron Cyprien-Emmanuel-Marie de Bellissen-Bénac. The lord of the manor I think
A colporteur: a hawker, purveyor of books and other good things.
The beekeeper.
The mobile distillery or alambic came round every autumn to distill some of the fruit crops into potent alcohol. It still happens.
As in England, the pig played an important part in keeping the household nourished through the winter months.
An important craftsman: the nail-maker
This man’s work is indoors. He’s at the forge.
The miller.
A woman at the village lavoir, or clothes washing place. Sinks are fed from a natural water source and sheltered by a roof. One of the centres of village life.
Haymaking
Log sawing: always important in this wooded region.
Now the French hunt for pleasure: then it was more sheer necessity.
The postman.
Le pelharot: the rag and bone man.
L’estamarron: the tinker dips worn cutlery to bring it back to life
At the Romanesque church, the bellringer calls the people to worship.
And here’s the priest arriving.
If you work in the fields all day you need water. This young woman brings it to you.
This shepherd will spend the whole summer at high mountain pasture with his sheep.
This woman’s a seed sower.
And he’s preparing the soil for her.
Autumn. This young girl’s off to look for chestnuts and mushrooms to dry and store for winter.
And this is the view from the village.

A Mediaeval picnic

Montségur in the morning mist

Saturday morning dawned damp and misty. This was fine by the 100 or so walkers who gathered bright and early in Lavelanet for the annual Marche du Tisserand. The walk, organised by the town’s Musée du Textile, celebrates the ancient ‘chemin pavé’ used by the cloth workers who lived in Montségur and walked this path to bring their produce down to Lavelanet to be sold. Saturday’s walk, the 27th, was for fun, and nobody would have had more than a light rucksack to carry. The full three hour trek (6 hours both ways of course), steep and stony at times, when laden with goods to sell one way and perhaps provisions for the household the other must have been a slightly different matter.

This time too, there were goodies at the top for the walkers as they finished their ascent. The mayor of Montségur was there with an aperitif for everyone, and we at Découverte de Terres Lointaines were there too, with a mediaeval picnic we’d been preparing .

Who knew chopping coriander could be such fun?

The cooking took several days, but the research, with the help of the Museum at Montségur, took weeks of researching, testing, tasting, rejecting, trying again… Still, eating’s always fun

Though curious, the walkers were suspicious too. What would a mediaeval picnic be like? Heavy, probably, with mountains of flatulence-inducing beans. Tasteless too maybe.

What a surprise then. Here’s the menu:

Spinach tart with lardons: we could have used nettles or any of a whole range of herbs, but settled on the more widely available vegetable option.

Poichichade: this herby chick pea paté, which we served on hunks of organic wholemeal bread, is a close cousin of hummus, but without the tahini. It went down well.

Broussade:  star of the show! A very tasty mix of smoked fish and curd cheeses. This really is one for anybody’s dinner table. Simple too. Recipe below.

Pets de nonne: basically deep fried choux pastry, puffy and light. Here’s the story. Back in the Middle Ages, the bishop of Tours was visiting the Abbey of Marmoutiers to bless a relic. Whilst preparing a meal in his honour, a novice let fly an unfortunate noise of the kind familiar to those of us who’ve eaten far too many beans. To cover her embarrassment, she busied herself dropping the choux paste she’d been making into some handy cooking oil so that it sizzled loudly. The pets de nonne were born.

Fromentée sucrée:  cracked wheat cooked with milk and honey. If you like rice pudding, you’d like this too

Gâteau de fruits secs:  a rich and heavily fruited pain d’epices style cake.

Just before the walkers arrived: The picnic on its thoroughly modern paper plates.

The congratulations when they came – and they came in quantity – were tinted with some astonishment:  ‘It was so good. We never expected it to be so tasty! Well done’.

But after eating, drinking and lots of talking, it was time to dance. Zingazanga had been playing loudly throughout the meal, but they turned their attention to teaching us simple steps and dances from centuries ago. Even I with my two left feet joined in.

Let the dancing begin

Broussade

Ingredients
• A quantity of as many varieties of smoked fish as you can decently lay your hands on: we used smoked salmon, herring and haddock.
• A more-or less equal quantity of brousse. This is a curd cheese made from the milk of sheep, goats or cows. A mixture would be ideal, and failing that, any soft curd cheese.

Broussade in the making

• Paprika
• Chopped dill
• Seasoning.

Process half the fish coarsely, and finely chop the rest. Mix with the other ingredients. That’s all. Enjoy with some good bread and a probably thoroughly un-mediaeval green salad.

A long day: Team UK (Laroque branch) support the Tour de France

The Tour de France 2012 hit Laroque on the Limoux – Foix stage on Sunday 15th July. It was a long day…. and that was just for the supporters.

The day before, passing through Quillan, we passed whole communities of camper vans holed up in prime spots for watching the race.
Unlike the Ariègeoise a fortnight before, there were plenty of signs to stop the poor old riders going wrong
And here at Laroque, we had our own rules and regulations to keep the event running smoothly.
Team UK (Laroque branch) prepare a poster to support the British competitors.
And here’s Brian, chalking all the Brit names across the route. He got a huge cheer from French spectators the whole way down the street. There are more of them than seems likely from this shot.
The pre-Tour caravane begins. They’re selling official merchandise. Everything that follows is free.
But while it was still pretty quiet, we had ‘a nice cup of English tea’ with neighbour Aisha
The LCL float, distributing baseball caps.
The Haribo float. Sarah caught a tiny bag of sweets flung in her general direction.
The Belin Box
Banette. They produce flour for local bakers.
You can have a flutter on the races at a PMU bar. Here’s their float.
Sarah gets a cocktail sausage
Free madeleines when the St. Michel float passed. Not Worth Getting Fat For.
No free tyres when the Kleber float passed
Almost over….. the Nesquick float.
The haul we found we had after everything had passed by, mainly destined as souvenirs for friends in England…. lucky people.
The first riders pass. Sue can identify almost all of them.
Bradley Wiggins passes our front door. No time to stop.
Team support.
Yet more riders…. known to Sue.
With the riders long past, all that’s left are support vehicles, official cars, medical support, press, gendarmes……..

Thanks Sue, thanks Tom for the use of all your photos.

The Tour de France: a dilemma

La Boulangerie Fonquernie at Laroque prepares for the arrival of the Tour de France

We have a few of the family here staying with us.  They claim that they want to see us.  They’ve mentioned walking in and near the mountains.  They certainly want good food and wine – lots of it – whether here at home or in one of the restaurants in the patch.

Really though, they’ve chosen this weekend with some care.  It’s the one when the Tour de France whizzes past our house.

Today then has been a day of careful research in advance of Sunday’s ‘fly past’.  There was a planning meeting at a nearby restaurant, ‘La Maison’, over copious and varied hors d’oeuvres, blanquette d’agneau and bavarois de framboises to decide what we should choose as our vantage point for the action.

We’ll have the planning meeting after we’ve got outside this little lot

Then there was the walk.  This followed the Voie Verte between us and la Bastide sur l’Hers, and closely hugs the route the cyclists will take; and the ridge path between la Bastide and home, which peers down over the same road.  Where to choose to watch?

We’d thought of the land occupied by the old station.  A film crew has moved in for the duration.  We considered looking up towards the race from the old railway line itself.  Too far away.

And the ridge, which we’d thought the perfect answer, turns out not to be.  Certainly we could see many hundreds of metres of road at once, but at a distance that means that we’d be doing no better than sitting at home in front of the TV.

We’ve decided against watching from here.

In the end, we’ll be staying put.  We want to see the riders close up, smell the sweat, and absorb the atmosphere.  There are still decisions to be made.  Upstairs in one of the bedrooms?  If so, which one?  Downstairs on the street, where we’ll be nearer still?

Shall we ham it up and decorate the house in Union flags, and hang banners reading ‘Go Wiggins’ out of the window?  So many decisions, so little time.