Warm Barcelona

I haven’t done the Lens Artist Challenge for weeks, what with the busyness of being a granny to the latest granddaughter near Barcelona. But this week, Egidio proposes Warm Colours.

Well, Barcelona is warm at the moment. Here is a photo I snatched on 26th January – January! – of a young girl perfectly adequately dressed for the season.

And of course the weather is not what this challenge is necessarily about. But maybe a bit of fun played out against a hotel wall painted a vibrant shade of coral, on a balmy winter’s day, will not be too much of a cop-out.

Here are vignettes of three snippets of lives lived on the balcony of Hotel Catalonia Catedral, near – of course – the cathedral in Barcelona.

And here is a scene from our bedroom, taken at the beginning – or the end – of the day. Which? Only you can decide.

Lens Artist Challenge #285: Warm Colours

The Back Streets of Tournus

Tournus is a lovely little mediaeval town in Burgundy that we happened upon after a difficult day dodging the farmers’ blockades across the roads of France. Sitting in queues was the order of the day.

I could show you the fabulous abbey dedicated to Saint Philibert. But that’s for another day, maybe. 

Instead, I’m choosing to go low-brow. I’m just offering a miscellany of street art and of enjoyable examples of whimsy that we discovered as we loitered along its ancient streets.

And finally, one curiosity. These doors used to open to reveal the parish pump. You can spot the water pipe on the right, with its handle at the bottom. You’ll find it in Rue de la Pompe. Obviously.

For Dan’s Thursday Doors,

and Natalie the Explorer‘s Public Art. Though whether domestic post boxes count as public art is certainly debatable

and not forgetting Jo’s Monday Walk.

Monday Portraits: Sundry Gulls

The featured image is of a herring gull who paraded obstreperously outside our car – only our car – as we waited to board the ferry at Dover. It was elevenses time-ish, but we displayed no evidence of snacking, so I don’t know what it was all about.

These other gulls are, according to Google Lens, yellow-legged gulls, and closely related to the herring gull. These specimens were loitering on the window ledge of the roof top café from which we were enjoying the view in the centre of Barcelona.

Thank you, everybody who identified last week’s creature as an Egyptian Grasshopper. It is good to know what this impressive creature is.

… And for Bird of the Week L

Six Degrees of Separation: Nine Lessons to The Farmer’s Wife

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

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month, I have to begin where I left off last time, with Nicola Upton‘s Nine Lessons. I described it here, so now I’ll confine myself to saying it’s a detective story set in Cambridge.

So. To another detective story set in Cambridge, and one I read a long time ago. I’m always up for reading Kate Atkinson, but it took me a while to try the Jackson Brodie series. Then I read Case Histories. In many ways I enjoyed this unusual approach, in which several different lives and families from Cambridge are introduced, long before a crime becomes apparent. Yet inexorably and inevitably they come to the attention of private detective Jackson Brodie. I found some of the characters stereotypical: mad-as-a-hatter cat-lady; eccentric middle aged sisters and so on – there are more. Jackson solves everything, inevitably, but more by luck than judgment. There were so many characters I got somewhat muddled. I seem to be damning this book, yet at the time I turned the pages easily.

Let’s try Kate Atkinson in different form in Shrines Of Gaiety. She takes us to 1920s London, to a place of hedonistic gaiety where Nellie Coker is queen of a whole series of nightclubs, each appealing to a different kind of pleasure-seeker. Her family is essential to her enterprise and the story, with two Cambridge educated daughters (a Cambridge link again!) and a twit of a son in the mix of six. Add in a Yorkshire librarian on furlough, two young Yorkshire runaways, police officers who are variously dutiful and bent and you have a complicated and atmospheric Dickensian yarn. I enjoyed it: This is Kate Atkinson after all, but I also found it a little wearisome and forced, with not all the characters well-developed. I read through it quickly and with some enjoyment, but also feeling somewhat cheated of Kate Atkinson at her best.

From one form of public entertainment to another. Kenneth Wilson’s Highway Cello.  It’s an account of Kenneth Wilson’s decision to load a cello onto the back of a trusty old bike and cycle from his home in Cumbria, via England, France and Italy to Rome, playing to impromptu audiences in town squares, and lightly-planned concerts in homes, halls and cafes. In among this part of the tale, he discusses the whys and wherefores of his trip, and always with a light touch. It’s an uplifting, amusing and undemanding book, the perfect accompaniment to a holiday: that’s why I’ve only just read it. Though it’s a couple of months since he came to our local Little Ripon Bookshop, played his cello and read from his book with verve and good humour.

Wilson ends up in Rome.  Another British writer, Matthew Kneale lives in Rome.  And he wrote a pandemic diary, The Rome Plague Diaries.  I loved it. Having many years ago lived in Italy, though not in Rome, this put me back in touch with many aspects of Italian daily life and culture. It also revived memories of Lockdown – not unwelcome ones: I was one of those who actually relished many aspects of it, because of where and how I’m able to live. If you’ve enjoyed Kneale’s writing; if you love Italy, I recommend your reading this vivid account of a resilient city going through yet another test of its mettle.

The only other story I’ve read set during the pandemic is  Sarah Moss’ The Fell.  I read it when I was self-isolating with Covid, probably in early 2021. Kate and her teenage son, living in Cumbrian fell country were quarantined at home. Kate, frustrated, eventually goes out, to get up there on the moors, at a moment when there won’t be a soul about, and be back in time for tea. Except she isn’t. She gets disorientated, and falls … This story is told in stream of consciousness through the voices of Kate herself, her son Matt, her neighbour Alice, and mountain rescuer Rob. And frankly it got as tedious as Lockdown itself. The ending was suitably shocking, inconclusive and cliff-hanging, which redeemed it somewhat, but I doubt if this book will wear well. 

So I’ll finish with another book set in the Cumbrian countryside: Helen Rebanks’ The Farmer’s Wife: My Life in Days.  I met Helen Rebanks (wife of the more famous James, of The Shepherd’s Life fame) at another author-event at the Little Ripon Bookshop and found her sparky and interesting. I didn’t feel the same about her book. She details the hard slog of being a farmer’s wife and a mother in an unforgiving, if beautiful part of England. The book is interspersed with recipes, all of which can easily be found anywhere, and at the end are store cupboard hints which I doubt are of much help to her probable readership. An interesting enough but slightly disappointing read.

I’ve just read through this post, and see it has a slightly grumpy tone. It was slightly hastily thrown together today after our long journey back from Spain and dicing with farmers’ blockades in France, so I can’t claim to have given it too much thought. Next month, when the starter book is Ann Patchett‘s Tom Lake, Must Try Harder.

All images except the one of Kenneth Wilson cycling off with his cello in tow, which comes from the press pack on his own website, are from Unsplash, and are, in order, by Vlah Dumitru; Cajeo Zhang; Spencer Davis; Jonny Gios and George Hiles.

A Very Old Door Indeed

This is a church dedicated to Saint Valerien and built under the auspices of the Abbot of Tournus between 1008 and 1028. It’s still standing, but unused as it waits for a bit of TLC.

Tournus is a charming old town in Southern Burgundy, which we wouldn’t have discovered if not for the farmers’ blockades of roads and motorways throughout France, which it’s fair to say have made travelling here … interesting and boring in equal measure.

For Dan’s Thursday Doors.

Monday Portrait of a … Well, You Tell Me…

The other day, while still with my daughter and family, I went to hang the washing out. And returned with Wildlife attached to my person. Its body, not counting legs, was some 7 centimetres long. I took him/ her outside. Was it a giant grasshopper? Should it have been about in January? Answers gratefully received.

Incidentally, our route home is proving unexpectedly challenging. French farmers are blockading much of our proposed route, as they have been for some days…. It’s just taken us two hours to drive 16 km. ducking and diving. And it’s now 7.40 a m. …

‘Notre fin, votre faim’

I then pressed ‘publish’, and have just discovered nothing happened. Typical for a very difficult day, though it did eventually get somewhat better

In Cod We Trust – in Barcelona

In a city centre back street in Barcelona, somewhere near Las Ramblas, we found this shop. It sells one thing only: blocks of dried salt cod: bacallà (Catalan) bacalau (Spanish). Salting and drying cod changes and deepens the flavour, and means it will keep for a very long time if necessary. Soak it to remove much of the salt and to soften it, and use in your favourite recipe!

For Debbie’s Six Word Saturday.