Christmas Day, 2019. Brittany

Sunrise in Brittany at the time of the solstice is not until after 8.00am. I have been in Vannes a week now and this is the first day of sunshine. I go for a long walk with Thomas Cromwell. Sort of. I'm listening to the audiobook of Wolf Hall. I have already read it, and although I usually never reread books, I'm really enjoying this, maybe because it was a little difficult first time around. I have very little knowledge of English history and after finishing Hilary Mantel's followup book, Bring Up the Bodies, I'm better prepared to appreciate the detail, her lightness of touch relative to the import of the historical trajectory.

The Santa even has a little sack on his back, filled with tiny knitted presents.

Vannes is at the tip of the largest harbour in France, the Gulf of Morhiban. My walk starts at the port of Vannes and follows a canal along to the harbour. The tides here are quite huge.


Past the town I follow a waterside path down a peninsula.

At the small bay where I stop for bread and cheese I amuse myself by picking up all the bits of plastic I can find. Bottle tops, plastic corks, straws, sea-worn packets, those stringy bags that I buy onions in.

Shadows are long even at midday.

On the other side of the peninsula there's a wide estuary and church bells are ringing out from the settlement on the other side. Parts of the path are under water, so I cut across though farmland and then follow a quiet road back towards town.

A bit up the road there's a cemetery, the tidiest cemetery and the best-tended graves I have ever seen. What does this say about the people of Vannes?

What it says about me is that I'm a heartless lowlife thief, because I steal some leucodenron flowers from the grave of a beloved departed.

Ah well.

Back at the Port of Vannes and the sun is still shining and the good people of Vannes are out at the only two places open this Christmas afteroon.

I'm trying to read this French thriller about an ageing translator who becomes a drug mule, but there's so much colloquial language I'm struggling with it.

Liberty of London - homage, part 2

Let's go to Liberty

Liberty of London is a place of homage to be visited every time I am in London.

I just wish I'd worn a swishy frock. My cycling shoes and cargo pants let me down for a few hours here.

The summer sale was on. And I managed to not leave entirely empty-handed.

I came  across a trunk of decorator velvet sample swatches though. And I was allowed to take some - enough to make a laptop sleeve if I can manage that by hand.

The  vision for founding the store was for it to be an emporium laden with luxuries and fabrics from distant lands. It was built in the 1920s, at the height of the fashion for all things Tudor. You can see the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement sitting beautifully with the mock-Tudor. 

Not a lot more to say, just more of my photos.

Sauntering around Salisbury

My blog posts are all out of order at the moment and erratic in content as well. Only a bad workman blames the tools so no excuses for not doing better on my tablet, but I'm looking forward to getting my laptop back soon. Bear with, as they say.

At my flouncy and flowery B&B (plastic flowers) I start each day with baked beans, greasy mushrooms and a couple of fried eggs with toast and tea.

That set me up for a walk out to Old Sarum, where the original Salisbury Cathedral was built in the thirteenth century. Little is left but it's a lovely site managed by English Heritage. It is like a Maori hill fort, with circles of fortification around the hilltop. There's a good view from Old Sarum to the current cathedral, which boasts the tallest spire in England.

So I wasn't even going to go in to the Cathedral, being slightly underwhelmed by the exterior and slightly wary of the £6.50 'donation' for admission. C'mon, pay up. Drawn in more by the promise of cloisters than by the opportunity to see a version of the original Magna Carta, in I went. And was nabbed at the door by a pair of enthusiastic greeters, keen to set me off in the right direction while giving me a good earful of details about successive building restorations and which bits of stained glass could be said to original, about which they disagreed between themselves for a while. I extracted myself with some difficulty, only to be caught a bit further on by one of them, who then insisted on explaining the shallow foundations. Apparently the water table is measured daily by plunging a simple dip stick down through a special tile in the floor, and if there's any variation beyond 3 to 4 feet, adjustments are made via a system of gates and weirs on the nearby River Avon. As long as the level is stable, the foundations of the Cathedral are protected from disintegration. Very interesting but distracting. For the clean lines and proportions of the structure itself were arresting enough and I was most happy to prowl around alone. 

The Cathedral clock doesn't have a face. It rings a bell on the hour, but that has been turned off except for ringing out at 11.00am on Tuesdays and Thurdays.

Officially my favorite Cathedral (for now)

As well as the army of Greeters, art installations are a thing here. Currently it is Gaia, which really suits the space.

I was told there's a fifteenth century Library downstairs with over 10,000 books. "We have a wonderful librarian" the Greeter told me. "She's really lovely".

You can do a tour that ends with tea and scones, but at £22.00 I'm passing on that, sadly.

I love cloisters, and Salisbury's didn't disappoint.

Posted while taking tea in the gardens outside the Salisbury Museum, sitting under a sun umbrella with views of the cathedral.

About Candes

At the turn of the century, there were around 90 people living in Candes. Each house had a barn, land, and it's own bread oven. Sometimes these ovens are like an extension on the side of the house. The area where Nicholas is establishing a grove of Japanese maple trees was a free-standing bread oven. There's a similar one in the nearby village of Comiac.  Comiac would have had shops, where now there's only the cafe, which sells lunches, a few token supplies and povides postal services. This venture is sensibly subsidised by the state. The main reason is that workers in the area have somewhere for lunch. Lunch being a meal of great importance across France and heaven forbid having to take a sandwich from home to eat on the job! The communual bread oven is fired up by the men once a month. Men's business.

The add-on with the small roof is the bread oven

Nicholas had done a lot of work to make his house, built in 1780, habitable, but he doesn't stay there over winter. One of the other houses has been beautifully modernised by a Dutch couple who live mostly in Spain and come for the summer. Sadly several other houses are already in danger. The house behind Nicholas' has a steep slate roof. Each of the pieces of slate (lors) is attached with a large plug like a bolt that goes through into the roof beams. Every now and again one of the lors falls off so not a good house to walk past on a windy day. 

One of the barns

Nicholas has added the porch to his house. The building behind is Sousou's place.

Tacked onto the back of Nicholas's house is a room that he uses as a woodshed. This used to be the pigsty. Upstairs (next to my bedroom) previous owners had installed an indoor toilet. It's a little cupboard off the main room with a stone bench that has a hole in it - basically an indoor long-drop. The waste would have dropped down into the area that was the pig pen. Quite an efficient system I guess. 

Village well

These weeks Nicholas has been planting vegetables and digging beds for his potato crop, while I have been pulling out mountains of stinging nettles, and weeding around the irises, baby Japanese maple trres, hydrangeas, rose buses and peonies. For a couple of days we sat inside by the fire, rained out of the garden. We also did some walks around the neighbourhood, following tracks through the woods, often marked by mossy stone walls built who knows how long ago.