Two weeks in paradise

I stayed with Nicholas in Candes, in the locale of Comiac, in the Lot region, close to the Dordogne.

Candes is hard to find on a map. It's a tiny hamlet with one permanent resident, Sousou. Since her husband died she has lived alone in the large house next to Nicholas. Her nephew checks up on her and a district nurse calls in morning and evening. On Fridays the butcher comes by in his van. At the turn of the century, there were around 90 people living in Candes. Each house had a barn, nearby land, a bread oven, maybe a pig pen or a hen run. Comiac, 2 km away,  would have had shops, where now there's only the cafe, which sells lunches, a few token supplies and povides postal services. It is subsidised by the state. The Comiac communual bread oven is fired up by the men once a month and there are community gatherings in the town hall. 

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.

These weeks Nicholas has been planting vegetables and digging beds for his potato crop, while I have been pulling out weeds. 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. 

Here are some more photos I took around Candes. It is such a pity many these residential and agricultural buildings are not being cared for.

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Return to Candes after 3 years, April 2019

View from 'my' bedroom in Nicholas's
house 

The front of the house. Wisteria, lilac, clematis, roses - with a kiwi berry vine 

I visited Nicholas three years ago and was very happy to have the opportunity to go back again. He's had the roof retiled recently, completed the bathroom- there's even a flush toilet now - and he's done a lot more planting. He has another old barn now, and some of the stone walls have been repaired.

Candes is a tiny hamlet near Comiac in the Lot Region. Comiac has a cafe but for shopping, it's a trip down the hill to Bretenoux or Saint-Céré, 20 minutes via narrow winding roads.

In a borrowed pair of gumboots, a scavanged men's jumper and think gardening gloves I got to work on the nettles, filling barrow after barrow with them, revealing all the irises along the walls just about ready to flower. I pulled weeds from around the peonies, also just coming into bloom.

Nicholas - in the Japanese maple walled garden.
I cleared a mountain of weeds, but
there's  still so much blackberry in there

On sunny days we'd have lunch in the garden, but it was just as nice on wet days being inside with the fire going and a big pot of soup on the hob. 

The broad beans were up but they were being attacked by moles.
Hence the bottles on stakes - they are meant to vibrate in the ground and keep pests away.

Days out by bus - Shaftesbury

Shaftesbury is a small market town in Dorset with a history going back to Saxon times. The town is one of the highest in the county at the breathtaking altitude of 750 feet, and on a reasonable day you are lucky to enjoy views over Thomas Hardy’s Blackmore Vale. It is an hour on the bus from Salisbury, winding through hamlets along the Chalke valley where most of England's watercress is grown. 

Alfred the Great, later King Alfred, established an abbey here for his daughter. In medieval times the Abbey attracted pilgrims who came for blessings at the shrine of St Edward. It's wealth and power grew, but in 1539 it was closed and completely ransacked, one of the last monastries to be destroyed during Henry VIII's time.

 Now there's a walled garden on the site and a small museum run by volunteers.

Calendars and bread adverts have made one street in Shaftesbury famous - Gold Street. 

In 1973 Ridley Scott used Gold Street in an advertisement for Hovis Bread. This ad was voted as Britain's all-time favorite TV ad. 

Now and Then

I started to dream of Carcassonne during my time in Dunedin when I was obsessed with the idea of living in a boat on the canals of England. Reading everything I could find about canal boat life, I borrowed a random audiobook from the local library called Narrow Dog to Carcassonne

The walled hilltop city of Carcassonne overlooking the Garronne River

It's a laugh-out-loud tale about a couple of pensioners who with their whippet Jim decide to take their narrowboat across the Channel and all the way down through France to the town of Carcassonne on the Canal du Midi.

The Canal du Midi

For now just a couple of pics from the town outside the city walls

Cool!

Easter Monday in Toulouse

First things first. Walnut bread and coffee.

Easter is such a tasteful affair in France. Not a hot cross bun in sight, let alone a goji berry and avocado vegan number. Not a chance that a French choclatier would adulterate their marshmellow with chocolate. Even foil is used discretely. And supermarkets do not even try to sell easter eggs, sensibly leaving it to the experts.

It's all wandering and window shopping in Toulouse on Easter Monday. Churches are about the only places open but even there business seems a bit slow.

The Basilica Saint-Sernin. A way-point on
the chemin de Compostelle, built in the 11th
Century, listed by UNESCO. 

Interior of Saint-Sernin. 

The bike paths along the Canal du Midi are busy. A set of locks seperate the Canal from the Garronne, spanned here by the Pont Neuf.

Toulouse is the home of the Airbus headquarters, Europe's biggest aeronautics manufacturer with an annual revenue that exceeds €60 billion. You can do a tour, but not today.

Instead I go to t the Japanese garden where the cherry blossom was being sripped by the cold wind and the magnolias were just coming out.

What happened to the posts?

So, no posts for a while. I have several in draft ready to go, but they are on my laptop which is in transit back to Australia. As soon as I arrived in Spain the screen gave up and after a couple of weeks of trying different approaches I decided to send it back to Dell Australia. So much for global business. Joys of being a digital nomad.

I'm currently in Montpellier, staying in Nicholas' lovely aparment in the old part of town. The photo is of the courtyard of the seventeenth century building that has been coverted from a Dominication monastry to modern apartments. The living room looks onto this charming view.

Big implies Little

Yes, there is also a Small Wild Goose Pagoda.

Small Wild Goose Pagoda was a lot less crowded than it’s big brother (see previous post). There’s a little craft village with resident artists showcasing some of the regional specialities such as leatherwork, calligraphy, paper cutting, tea arts and jade carving, all clustered around a courtyard with a pond and trees.

I was offered an impromptu tea-tasting and I got to sample some old Puér, a local Dragon Well, and several other teas. The man serving was happy to cut off extra PuEr from a round cake wrapped in rice-paper, which he added to my water bottle with fresh hot water.

The museum beside the Pagoda was excellent, in a light, modern building and far less busy. Thee was no café, but in the little shop, the girls were eating their bowls of noodles, and when I mimed that the lovely smell was making me feel hungry, they insisted on me taking a mooncake. I took it away gracefully even though I didn’t think I’d be able to eat it, but it was packed with walnuts and sesame seeds, only a little bean paste and hardly any sugar. The best mooncake I have ever had, washed down with the old Puér.

The Bell Tower, beside the Pagoda

A lovely museum building - The Pagoda is in fact part of the
Xi’an Museum

Lovely grounds around the Pagoda

I had many such friendly interactions despite almost never coming across anyone who spoke any English. On a particularly slow local bus I took out my book, and caused a great hilarity with the other passengers. The woman beside me couldn’t stop pointing at it and telling the rest of the bus how strange it was that a gweilo would be reading a BOOK. I thought she was saying something along the lines of she doesn’t even have a kindle, isn’t it quaint? How strange and backward the red devils are. Hysterical really. I even used real money, where everyone else was paying for everything including bus fares by waving their phone at a scanner. 

Which brings me to the subject of phones, especially the lack of headphones. If they’re not having robust conversations in ear-splitting voices and in (to my ear) abusive, aggressive tones, people were watching videos or playing games or something. So, on the train or bus or any other place, there are multiple tinny soundtracks filling up the space – public space, folks! And because sometimes they were seated right beside me I could see what some of these folk were watching – a young girl spent her commute scrolling through ads for makeup and watching videos of women unpacking postal packages and admiring the tubes and bottles inside, while the young man with the seat beside mine on the bullet train watched videos of how to undo bits of machinery with various wrenches and spanners – both with mindless endless soundtracks.