Friday 19 July 2013

En France profonde

In deepest France.  Which is a bit of an exaggeration as we are only going to Normandy, almost the closest part of France to England.

I was saying the other day how I had discovered that a cardboard box which I thought contained an old computer, actually held (amongst other things) several hundred 35mm slides which I had optimistically left with a photographic agency.  The agency never did sell any reproduction rights to my photos - or if they did, I never saw any royalties.  Maybe that's why they went bust.  Among those slides were a few I had taken on our first family holiday in France.  It would have been about 1980 when I drove our Morris Marina estate car off the ferry at Cherbourg and on past St Lô to the village of St Romphaire, near to which village was the farm where I had arranged to rent a gîte.

Boy, was it hot!  We visited Mont St Michel one day, taking with us a packed lunch of cheese sandwiches.  When we undid the package we found the cheese had melted.  After a day or two, we had a thunderstorm at almost exactly 4.30 every afternoon.  The storms only lasted for about 10 or 15 minutes and 15 minutes later, everything was bone dry once again.

The farmer and his wife who were our hosts still milked their cows by hand in the field - and this was only about 30 years ago.  I daresay things have changed a bit since then.


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