A Very Good Friday in Canet de Mar

A public holiday. Where to go, when everyone everywhere is looking for an outing? Emily and Miquel chose Canet de Mar, a few miles up the coast. A characterful little town that was the home of Lluís Domènech i Montaner, a Modernist architect whom I hugely admire, and who deserves a post later. A museum visit (the featured photo), a long lazy meal, moments on the beach playing with Anaïs. I call that the perfect day.

Sharp

Here we are in Spain. Between travel fatigue and the fun of a family wedding – all in Catalan – getting an album of Sharp Shots for Denzil’s photo challenge this week has been an unusual one. https://denzilnature.com/2023/03/29/nature-photo-challenge-6-sharp/

But here are a few shots of prickly plants from nearby gardens.

Click on the images to view them full size.

And here’s another sort of sharp.

Four Postcards: Three Designed to Inspire Awe.

From the wonders of nine hundred year old man-made cathedrals…

Reims Cathedral, built between 1211 and 1345

… to the perhaps two hundred and fifty million year old natural wonder which is the Gorges du Tarn (better photos later, I hope. My phone-camera was over-awed) …

The Gorges du Tarn, several million years in the making.

… to the twenty year old wonder which is the Millau Viaduct.

Millau Viaduct, the tallest bridge in the world, with a structural height of 336.4 metres.

The featured photo shows a spot of shock and awe from a weathered statue stacked outside Reims Cathedral and awaiting restoration.

A postcard from Troyes: a Half-timbered City

We’re on our way to Spain to see daughter and family, trundling down through eastern France. Now we’re in the Aube, in Troyes. It’s been a successful city since Roman times, but what you see now is a place that still has hundreds of half-timbered houses. Still lived in, still used as shops and business-places. A few are in bad nick. Some are being renovated. Some lean at impossibly drunken angles. Most are well cared for and entirely habitable, just getting on with life, as they have been for centuries. And a few of them provide a convenient surface for discreet pieces of street art.

Spring in Yellow, Lemon, Gold, Amber

Last week, I offered you a monochrome spring day. Today, because Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge also asks us to celebrate the spring, I’m going for colour. Just one colour though. What shouts ‘spring’ as cheerfully as the many flowers which emerge over these weeks in every shade of yellow? Look at Fountains Abbey in the header photograph – it’s just carpeted with sunny daffodils. But there’s more …

Last news from Laroque revisited

As you read this post, we’re on the road, heading for France, then Spain to see the Spanish branch of the family, and even to attend a wedding. Please expect little in the way of responses to comments, whether on your own blog or this one for the duration. But nine years ago, on 20th March, we were leaving our home in Laroque for the very last time…

Last news from Laroque

23rd March 2014

You’re making your last visit to Laroque today, for the time being.  We left 3 days ago, and now we’re in Ripon.  Those last days were a furore of packing, cleaning, ‘goodbyes’ (though never, never final farewells), and two visits from the removal firm, who couldn’t fit everything in, first time round.  At this moment, perhaps, the person who bought our house is planning his own removal to Laroque.

I never told you, probably out of sheer superstition, the story of the house sale.  The housing market’s incredibly tough in the Ariège just now.  House prices have tumbled 25% since 2008.  Properties remain unsold for one, two, three years, as unhappy owners reduce the price of their homes in hopes of at last attracting a buyer.

Whereas we had nothing but luck.  A man from near Paris, house-hunting here, in the area where he’d grown up, saw our house, arranged to view, and said he liked it.  A week later he came again, showing his ‘coup de cœur’ off to his mum and dad.  He made a low-price offer, as you do.  We refused it, as you do.  But we offered him our non-attached garden, being sold separately, at a generous discount, and said we’d include some of the furniture in the house sale.  Reader, he offered full price, and the rest is history.  Vue-vendue.

We’d just locked the door for the last time. And helping us wave ‘Goodbye’ are Martine, Francis and Anaïs, almost the very first friends we made when we arrived. Nine years on, we have a granddaughter called Anaïs.

So here we are in Ripon, ready to house hunt and begin our new lives here.  Oh, and there’s the Tour de France starting in Yorkshire too, in a couple of months.  We’ll keep you posted.

Our luck continued here in England. The very first property we viewed to rent – as a temporary measure while we house-hunted for somewhere suitable – was the house we are still living in nine years on, with no intentions whatever of leaving.

Fandango’s Flashback Friday

Spring in Black and White

This amateur snapshot-ist has just joined a photographic club, and it’s been a smart move. Although the group has got its share of real talent, members are just as welcoming to those of us who bumble about in the shallow end. There are talks from well-travelled and accomplished photographers: but in between, there are workshops. Last week, a member shared his enthusiasm and lots of tips for monochrome photography, and left me with the resolve to keep my camera strictly on black and white for at least a week or two.

So now I’ve got a bit of a job: This week’s Lens-Artists Challenge is all about Spring. Spring – that season when colour returns after the sombre tones of winter, with bright yellow daffodils, celandines and marsh marigolds; the soft pink of blossoms; vivid grassy greens from leaves that push through the ground or from the swelling buds on twiggy branches, and newly-blue skies. And I’ve gone and made monochrome my rule-of-the-day.

It didn’t help that Sunday was a bit cold, rather grey, somewhat windy and really not very spring like. But rules are rules, even if they’re totally self-imposed. Here we go …

Out of the back door, guarded by spring-time pots, along the lane, edged with tree-blossom, still-wintry trees, and passing a bank of white violets .

The sheep know it’s too early to lamb here. They’re still relying on winter feed.

I wander through the grounds of Old Sleningford Hall, and then along the river bank. There’s twisted hazel thinking of bursting its buds, young wild garlic.

Nearly home. How does this ancient tree, almost completely hollow, continue to live, to sprout new growth?

Back in the garden. The hellebores are – apart from the daffodils – making the best showing. We’ll end our walk by enjoying those.

As well as Sophia’s Lens-Artists Challenge, I’ll pop this post in for Bren’s Mid-week Monochrome. And Jo’s Monday Walk. Why not?