This way, that way

My brother and I were urban brats, townie children.  Consequently, our playground was the largish back garden and then the pavements and alleys of the streets around our house.  Although I have no accurate recollection of doing so, I am sure that at some time one or other of us would have laid a trail for the other to follow, a trail of arrows chalked on the pavement, arrows about a foot long and generally no further apart than about four feet.  Not exactly a challenge for a nine-year-old boy let alone a North American Indian tracker.

The next time I had any experience of tracking was after I had joined the Scouts.  One of the tests to be passed before a boy could be awarded the Second Class badge (the one a step up from a tenderfoot) he had to follow a half-mile trail made from natural materials.  The signs might be an arrow made by lying three sticks in the appropriate shape, a bunch of grass tied in a knot, an oak leaf spiked on a beech tree.  All sorts of things, some of which were difficult to see anyway and some of which might or might not have been deliberately placed.

Very much easier to see and follow are the public footpath signs found around England.  The design varies according to which authority has paid for them and they have a nasty habit of disappearing completely after one has followed the footpath across two ploughed fields and through a copse.  An Ordnance Survey map is a good stand-by in places not well known to the walker, or perhaps I should say the serious walker.

The Old Bat and I have, in the past, walked many miles while on our holidays, especially when we have been on smallish islands.  We walked practically the whole of the coastline of Guernsey in one day and spent many happy hours wandering the coastal paths and green lanes of Jersey.  Malta we found surprisingly barren and completely void of bird-life. (We were, however, surprised to see a Brighton dustcart tucked away in an odd corner of the island.)  Madeira we loved.  The levadas, canals to bring water from the wet north to irrigate the banana groves of the sunny south of the island, each have a narrow footpath alongside and we especially liked following these through those banana groves and stands of eucalyptus trees.



And then there is France.  When we first started going there regularly we bought a book detailing various walks in the area where we stayed.  The French don't go in for signposts as much as we do in England, although those they do have are usually much more elaborately decorated than ours, but they do waymark the footpaths.  It's a very simple system, but great fun to follow.  The signs are painted on trees, lamp-posts, walls - anywhere usueful.  They will consist of two horizontal bars, one above the other, to indicate "you're on the right path"

or a similar sign quite obviously indicating to turn left or right.  In case the walker misses the turn sign, a cross will be painted a little further on.

They might be in a single colour or they might be a mixture as shown here.   Unfortunately, we are no longer able to follow these paths and stroll the green lanes like this one not far from our house.

Will you buy any milk today, Mistress?

I know I'm old but I'm not old enough to have heard any of the old cries of London like the one in the title.  I do remember the milkmen having little electric carts they pulled behind them and steered with a long shaft at the front.  The milk, in those days, was in pint and half-pint bottles which were sealed with cardboard discs.  At school, each pupil was given a third of a pint every day, drunk straight from the special-size bottle with or without the intervention of a straw.  I cold weather the bottles would be placed on the heating pipes running round the classroom to warm up the milk.  I was never that keen on milk but the warm stuff was horrible!

It is still possible to have milk delivered to the door - usually on three days a week - but most people buy their milk at the supermarket.  Even my cousin does that now.  When they first took over the farm 25+ years ago they bought two Jersey cows for their milk.  The cows were milked twice a day by hand and the milk was placed in the farm dairy to settle.  After a while the cream could be skimmed off the top.  This was churned into butter: I spent what seemed like many hours turning the handle on that churn!  The remaining milk was thick and rich and our "silver top" always seemed thin and watery after a stay on the farm.

So nowadays we have whole milk with blue bottle tops, semi-skimmed with green and skimmed with (I think) red tops.  There are a few other options like organic.  But in France it is all different.  Most French people buy UHT milk.  In their supermarkets there is very little shelf space in the chiller cabinet given over to fresh milk but there will be a complete aisle of the UHT.  And just to add to the confusion, whole fresh milk has red bottle tops.

~~~~~

The view from the bedroom was good again this morning when I woke, though the sky was a paler, more English blue.  This time I did have the camera.

Lehargy rules

Indeed, lethargy rules so much that I can't be bothered to correct the typo in the title of this post.  There are numerous jobs from before our trip to France that are still waiting to be done.  Admittedly, some have been started.  I shall have to dredge up some energy from somewhere as several of those unfinished jobs need to be completed by tomorrow evening.

For both the Old Bat and me, one of the pleasures of returning to sunny Brighton is the first sight of the South Downs as we descend Bolney hill on the A23.  Even at night the "line of the Downs so noble and so bare" (Hilaire Belloc) is visible against the light pollution spilling out of the coastal conurbation.  Friday, however, was slightly misty and it was just a little difficult to make out the Downs in the dusk.  This morning, Sunday, I threw open the bedroom curtains and was rewarded by the sight of a magnificent blue sky and sun shining on the sheep and cattle pastures and on the ripening barley.  My camera was not immediately to hand and I decided to wait a while to take a series of photos that I could merge into a panoramic shot with Photoshop.  During breakfast the cloud cover increased and the photo opportunity was lost.  Halfway to the park with the dog, the heavens opened.

Over in the Loire valley, the farmers were working flat out last week and by the time we came home the wheat, barley and oats were all harvested and safely in.  There was still some straw waiting to be baled and some hay was still being turned but otherwise it was almost time to wind down a little before the maize and sunflowers are ready for harvesting in a few weeks.  There were fewer sunflowers in evidence this year but I did manage to get this picture:

Back to Blighty

We are back in Brighton after a very restful week at our house in France.  Too restful, really.  I did manage to put a coat of emulsion on the walls of the shower room and trimmed the wisteria threatening to invade the upstairs bedroom.  For us wimpish English it was just too hot for much of the time to do anything outside so we lounged indoors and read.  OK, so the temperature never exceeded 35 celsius as far as I am aware (that's 95 to my American readers) - in the shade - but that's way too hot for us to spend more than about 20 minutes in the sun.  Fortunately, our two-foot-thick walls keep the inside considerably cooler.  The arthritis didn't help matters either.

I'm not sorry that we seem to come back these days to less mail, fewer messages on the answering machine and generally fewer emails as well.  But there is still the little matter of the washing and catching upwith the blogs I follow!  So I'll just leave you with a couple of pictures of the local village restaurant where we passed a very pleasant evening during the week.

Our table:

 The view across the garden:

Meet the neighbours

I'm not at all sure that Jacques got a very good impression of me the first time we met. It was in the late spring of the year we bought the house, during the period when I was spending one week in France and one in England. I was standing in the kitchen one evening, cooking myself a meal. That in itself is most unusual since I am not a cook. Mrs S has even been known to complain that I don't know where the kitchen is, let alone how to use any of the implements in it. But be that as it may, I was cooking a meal that evening. Probably something very simple, like sausages, oven chips and frozen peas or baked beans, which is why I suspect that Jacques' first impression of me was not terribly good.

As I said, I was in the kitchen when Jacques appeared at the window with a large bowl in his hands. My first thought was that he was begging, but he introduced himself and told me he had been picking cherries and thought I might like a few. I invited him in and was astonished to find that what he called a few cherries was actually a couple of kilograms of them. All I could find to hold them was a tatty plastic carrier bag from a supermarket. I offered him a drink (coffee, tea, wine or scotch?) and, while Jacques was explaining that he doesn't drink coffee or tea, and that he was rather partial to scotch, the smoke alarm went off. I have virtually no sense of smell and had not noticed that the sausages were burning.

Jacques, I have since discovered, is one of those infuriating people who seem to be able to do everything, and to do it well. He also has a large range of tools that would arouse the envy of a combination of a professional builder, electrician and plumber - and he knows how to use them. He speaks very good English although he said he had never been to England. Jacques' job is something to do with wine-making equipment and he has quite frequently to travel abroad to oversee the installation of it. He has visited Australia, South Africa and the USA, so he found it useful to learn English.

It was Jacques who solved for us the problem of our garage. We had from time to time smiled at the recollection of Monsieur Detroit's little quip that the garage/shed was suitable for a very little car, but otherwise had really thought nothing about the fact that the estate agent's particulars showed that the house had a garage.

Monsieur Detroit had told us that the garden had been sold separately. At least, we thought that was what he said: maybe he had actually said that it was to be sold separately.

It was some three years after we had bought the house that Jacques told us he had just bought a patch of spare land across the road, at one corner of which stood a ramshackle garage built in corrugated iron. Apparently, the land had at one time been the garden of out house - and that was our garage!

"Our" garden stretched from the fence to those trees!

Bank robbers or royalist plotters?

If the mysterious Lionel could be found at No 13, what was it that drew people to him?

Every so often a group of two, three, four or - very occasionally - five people would walk past our house from the direction of the village, staring curiously at the house, the courtyard, the car and us (if we happened to be in the courtyard at the time) as they went. They would reach the end of the pavement just beside our well, turn around and walk back towards the village, staring at us once again just as though we were animals behind a fence in a zoo. We never seemed to see the same people twice, so we guessed that they could not all be villagers we had yet to meet. Could they come from the mysterious number 13? Or was somebody organising coach tours to see the mad rosbifs?

My curiosity became too much for me and I determined to track down the source of these mysterious passers-by. The next time it happened while I was in the courtyard, I went out onto the pavement and pretended to rearrange the clematis on the fence as the group returned. I had thought of hiding behind the gatepost and peeping out from waist height, but that seemed just a little too melodramatic. From the corner of my eye I watched the group of four as they passed Mr & Mrs Onions, giving the house barely a glance. I could see no tourist coach parked in the village, so I wasn't really surprised to see the interlopers disappear into number 13. But why should the parish room of a sleepy little village attract so many visitors? Furthermore, they were, many of them, visitors from other départements according to the registration numbers of the many cars that were parked outside the house.

One evening, while eating at the village restaurant, we asked Jean-Paul if number 13 was a parish room. He told us it wasn't, and bustled away as only Jean-Paul can before we had a chance to ask him the next question: what is it, and who are the people who go there? We speculated wildly. Could they be witches? One who had come to the door had looked very much as though she could be. Or could they be a secret society plotting the reinstatement of the French monarchy? Could number 13 be a thieves' kitchen where they met to plan the next bank job?

It was a letter from one of our visitors that told us how wide of the mark we were - or how close, depending on your point of view. The people who meet at number 13 are spiritualists.  But can't they see the place is about to fall down?

Still looking for Lionel

By the time the alarm clock did ring I had pretty well forgotten the incident, but I was reminded of it a month or so later. Once again there was a ring at the door and once again a woman on the doorstep asked for Lionel. This was mid-morning, so I was in a much better state than on the earlier occasion that somebody was looking for Lionel. I explained that I didn't know Lionel.

"The last house in the village," said the lady, as if that explained everything. She had one thing right: ours is the last house in the village. But there is another last house in the village if one is travelling in the opposite direction and I was about to send her there when I remembered: that house is occupied by an English couple and neither he nor she is called Lionel.

Once again I explained that I knew nobody called Lionel. As I did so a thought struck me. I asked the lady if she wanted number 13, this being the number of the parish room.

"Oui, oui," she replied enthusiastically, so I directed her past our neighbours, past the vegetable garden, to the falling-down house which was number 13, and off she trotted like a spaniel that has just been given a ball. I could have sworn I saw her tail wagging, she was so happy.

~~~~~

Our first impression of the nearby twon of Pouance was not good.  It looked a scruffy sort of a place then but somehow it has grown on us and we now like the place despite - or maybe because of - its warts.  But there are some attractive little corners like this one.