Air frost at New Year

This is perhaps my tenth New Year post (I've not checked if I did one the first year), it's something of a custom to commit to doing one. I've always been something of a party-pooper about New Year at the best of times, often tending to a Jeremiah-ish mood, and indeed,  these are not the best of times, in many ways, and it's difficult not to feel lugubrious and apprehensive about the year(s) to come, on all kinds of levels from the personal to the global, including the intersection of the two which I feel has a more ominous reality than it has really had for me before. Likewise, on the personal and wider world spheres, this has been a year of shocks and difficulties. We have hopes and dreams of our own, beyond the shock reactions and urges to flight after the fire, which have calmed down somewhat, yet the path to get to them looks sometimes steep, fraught and uncertain.

As often I woke early after sleeping fitfully; my body and its broken thermostat and other inner chemical workings playing tricks on me I could really do without, lay with a lot of rather dreary thoughts and a few more cheerful ones, counted my blessings backwards alphabetically, (one of a number of devices not quite sovereign but sometimes useful against insomnia and anxiety), dozed a little and waited for the late, late daylight.

When it came, action, affection, tea and toast restored my spirits as they usually do, and it brought what seems to have become rare and lovely thing, as well as a heavy mist, a glorious air frost and light of pink and blue and gold, which prompted me to another rather unusual thing these days, to get the camera out,

though these were taken from the comfort and warmth of the kitchen:

But Elfie and I were eager to get out and get sniffing and looking:

The mist came and went and shrunk the world as it does, so the road out of our village disappeared into oblivion:

But this is the weather that Elfie likes, and so do I:

In the frequent fog we've had I've been nervous about letting her off the lead, as her usual running distance would take her out of sight, but on this occasion I did, and she always kept in sight, and seemed to love the crispness underfoot and good smells.

The frost continued to form as we were out, making fine filaments in the fur round her ears,

and at one point I put my hand to my own hair and found it stiff with ice too, yet it turned to wet as soon as we got indoors again, rushing in, in vain, to show Tom the phenomenon.

Many wonderful things have happened to us this year too, as I'm sure they have everywhere. Tonight it will be guinea fowl pie, the last of Christmas dinner, and a dvd, and I imagine we'll be in bed and asleep before midnight.

Happy New Year.

First frosts and fires

The first real frost we've had and quite a hard one, which doesn't leave the grass all day in places. The pastures look blue with it. Wrapped in Icelandic wool with leggings under jeans and fleece gloves under wool mittens, I'm happy now winter's properly here, and the late afternoon sun is glorious. It's the tipping time of autumn, I realise, that prompts seasonal malaise, that and lightless, cloudy and foggy days.

At the bio shop, along with spelt milk for Elfie (don't ask) we buy small, very purple, fresh figs, a few big Spanish chestnuts - in honour of first fires, I can't bring myself to buy many as to me they should simply be a seasonal free resource - and a big bunch of watercress, which will shortly mostly be soup.

There are fieldfares in larger and larger numbers in the countryside, and groups of noisy migrant blackbirds in the garden. I see a number of wrens flying low and urgently between hedges, and on the road outside Marcel's house a dead one, crushed but perfectly wren-shaped, its speckled markings and cocked tail clear and bright. No doubt it was fuddled with cold and hunger; we must start feeding the birds again now the cold weather's here, but there is little you can do for the ones that eat only insects.

Tom goes outside to break up some stuff, and snags the base of his thumb badly on a wayward screw, leaving a trail of blood spots into the house, where I find him at the sink and patch him up with my usual cartoon style, belt-and-braces first aid dressings. Nevertheless, when we come back from our evening walk, the fire is lit, Elfie's dinner is prepared and the windscreen of the car covered against ice so he can drive me into St Brieuc for a mammogram (just a regular screening check) tomorrow. He gets a glass of sloe gin for his pains.

Fire can be good.

Ten good things today

I fulfil my pledge to clear three barrow loads of hedge cuttings before lunch, and get rid of a handful of nasty brambles into the bargain, with only minimal scratching for my pains.

Last night's baroque concert turned out not to be really a concert at all, but an excruciating, facetious kind of 'educational' programme about the court of Louis XIV, with about ten minutes of talk to every two of music, though the musicians, clavichord, viola de gamba player and singer, were good. Dutch E, her friend S and I slip away early. It was disappointing not to have enjoyed good music, and I do so enjoy the viola de gamba, but so nice to be home having listened to our inclinations rather than timidity and need to be polite. The relief is still with me today.

I don't get to Quessquitricote because my car is in the garage, having expensively failed its controle technique (two-yearly roadworthiness test). Neither of these thing is good news, but with the aforesaid virtuous garden chores, I feel I am justified in spending time this afternoon knitting.

It rains more and more on our afternoon walk. Elfie is the same colour as the autumn leaves and bracken - or her russet-orange bits are anyway - and snuffs the wind and rain with gusto and runs off-leash for much of the way without buggering off once.

Started some mittens with the leftovers of the Icelandic wool (out of which I made this sweater). It's more purple and red than the picture shows. Adding Latvian braids to them. I love Latvian braids. I love Icelandic wool.

Smell of wet dog.

Glass of rosé.

Japanese rice crackers. With one in one hand and the SD card in the other, I narrowly avoid putting the latter in my mouth instead of the former.

The rain and wind is coming from the north, for a change. This makes it cold, and noisy on the bedroom skylight, but means it will not blow in under the doors and windows.

Pork chops and pink onions.

Just talking about the weather

Well, I didn't promise startling original content every day, now did I? And it beats worrying about what might happen on Tuesday and whether anything might be salvaged from the political wreck of 2016.

'What's the weather like today, centurion?'

'Hail, Caesar!'

Hail, possibly my least favourite weather. It always seems so aggressive. It's dangerous to drive in, stings the face to walk in, and is bloody noisy. At about 4 am, as it was hammering harder and harder on the Velux, I wondered how long Elfie would put up with it. Sure enough, I heard her shake her head and then perceived her quietly standing by my side of the bed. No point in trying to get her to settle, in her bed or allowing her onto ours, where she would only spend the remaining hours sitting bolt upright in anxious sentry mode, and anyway, that's the thin end of the wedge. We went downstairs and spent the rest of the night on the sofa, where it was quieter, and Tom sprawled in hearing-aid free, blissful deaf ignorance, so everyone had better sleep.

It continued to throw down hailstones all day, yet we had an impressive walk at the end of the afternoon, where it softened to shiny diamonds of raindrops, low sun making the landscape into luminous coulisses below it and casting an intense double rainbow opposite all the way.

I lose myself in agonising second conditional what-if anxieties - what if the weather had been like this when we had to flee the house? What if such a thing had happened when I'd been away and Tom had had been on his own, deaf and incommunicado? Pointless, of course; the other side of counting blessings, I suppose.

Weather,wood and wool

Having risen early to try to record again the first seven minutes of the seventh chapter of the second book of The Well at the World's End, (alas and alack, I fear I am verily fed up unto the back teeth with it, forsooth), I find that, while I have worked out that it is probably the laptop fan which is causing the interfering whine on the soundtrack, even if I position the mic and myself differently to avoid this, the escalating winds of storm Imogen are really making far too much racket round the house for a quiet recording environment, or at least one in which I can concentrate enough to read aloud. So as I'm up already I'll start a post, since, touch wood, we still have internet connection, power etc.

I dislike high winds. Some of my earliest blog posts, I recall, were expressing anxiety about this meteorological fact of life, it must have been another windy winter nearly ten years ago. Especially I worried about what would happen if Victor's trees blew down on our house, in particular his largest chestnut tree. Changing bedrooms, so I heard the wind less and we were not directly under the predicted downward trajectory of said tree, and accepting the futility of trying to communicate this concern in any effective way to Victor have to some extent alleviated the fears, but the source of them has continued to grow, as trees will.

A week or so ago I encountered his remaining sister in the village, old Hélène, who is 96 and almost totally blind, outside the house, and she entered into her usual tirade against her brother and his trees and how inconsiderate and irresponsible he was to let them grow so near our house. This was one reason I had stopped trying to talk to Victor about them, I knew he had his sisters on his back pleading our case, and he didn't listen to them so why would he listen to me? Or maybe staying on friendly terms with him so he might just be concerned with our welfare might be more effective. One of the reasons Hélène, and their other sister, Marcelle who's in the retraite and Marie-Thérèse who used to live next door, gave for the undesirability of the trees was the amount of leaf litter and the way they blocked the light from the house. The leaves are a minor nuisance to clear up it's true, and make the road untidy, but in fact the effect on the light, which really is more from the screening effect of the coppiced shoots than the big tree, is something I love. The dancing, ever-changing filtered glow and dappled shade that plays through our windows and onto our walls as the sun moves round the house through the year, green in spring and gold in winter, making it into a great seasonal sundial, is a joy to me.

So I agreed with old Hélène but tended to shrug and laugh it off anyway, but then a day or so later, just before these spells of stormy winds moved in on us, two burly blokes with a couple of mighty chain saws and a piece of robust wheeled agricultural plant with a massive extending arm thing arrived. They held the tree in place with the arm and made short work of downing it onto Victor's patch and cutting the thickest part of the trunk into a couple of pieces. This was done in the darkling dusk (hence I didn't photograph the operation), with no ear protection or any other safety gear. Victor watched from a few paces off, and we watched from the window, while I formulated in my head the French for 'the monsieur has been crushed by a tree/cut his hand/arm/leg off/himself in two with a chainsaw', figuring I'd probably be able to get to the phone more quickly than Victor.

The latter, all ninety-four years and four foot eleven of him, has been having a whale of a time with his own chainsaw, axes, wedges etc, chopping the old tree up, as well as clambering about on a flimsy ladder trimming the remaining smaller ones. His daughters try to keep tabs on him but they don't live there, and he's a stubborn old git and will do what he wants anyway. When I told him on my way out to be careful up there he chuckled like a wicked gnome and carried on hanging off the ladder with one arm while sawing at a branch with the other. Tom had just given him a bottle of wine as a thank you for dispatching the tree, I don't know if he'd been drinking it. It was Chilean red not cider or calva so maybe he wasn't really interested, but his daughter looked appreciative anyway.

I clambered up the bank and took a photo of the section of the tree, then enlarged it and tweaked the contrast to count the rings. I've a feeling it wasn't the full bole at the base, so may have been only a coppiced shoot of an even older tree, but even so I make it about thirty-eight rings. It first saw the light when I was doing my O levels, was a mere sapling when I left school, at which time Victor was probably contemplating his retirement, and I've marked some other points:

Interesting to note it must have withstood the 1987 hurricane which flattened swathes of woodland here and took the roofs off most of the houses in the village, and laid low many fine old beeches in the park opposite my parents' house in Brighton, which I remember looking out at for long sad hours the February after when my father died. But then it was still quite a young tree then, and must have bowed but not broken, like the reed in the fable.

~

Changing the subject, my first lopapeysa! The design, called Antipodal, came from a recent book and is quite modern and atypical in some ways (including the rolled turtle neck), though the construction is traditional. You knit a big tube for the body up to the underarms, two small tubes for the arms, then join them all together into one yoke which you decrease in size, changing colours and making the patterned bit, up to the neck. So there's very little making up or sewing to do and all the fun stuff, patterning and shaping, comes near the end, so you have it to look forward to and don't lose interest. They're also fairly inexpensive and quick to make, as the wool is quite bulky, though this is made from the thinner Lopi-lite version.

In fact the yoke is really too deep, so the sleeves join too low and if I wear a jacket over it that pushes it up under the arms a fold appears under the neck. I can now see how this might be avoided, and half-considered unravelling some way back and reshaping it, but decided I'd rather just wear it as it is and go on and make another one, which I have already set about doing, though from other wool than Icelandic, which is something of a come-down since lopi wool is extraordinarily gorgeous: tough, seemingly harsh but luminous, unique and surprisingly warm and comfortable once you're inside, just like Iceland in fact. However, I can't really justify sending away for more of it while I've stacks of stashed stuff already, but then there'll be satisfying possibilities of arithmetical adjustments to allow for the different yarn. The study and perfecting of this form of knitting is much appreciated and has a large and enthusiastic following; I can vouch for how compulsive it is.

Reading up on the history of Icelandic knitting, I've learned that while wool and knitted garments have long been an important part of their culture and economy, the patterned yoke pullover is not so very old, dating from the mid-twentieth century, and they were originally called Greenlandic sweaters, not because they came from Greenland but because the patterned yoke resembled the decorative neck elements of some traditional Greenland folk costumes. 

So there you go.

Late marigolds at Christmas

Last from the summer wildflower patch, scarce, scruffy and storm-battered, but I'm too lazy/softhearted/busy-with-other-things/fairweather-a-gardener to mow them.

The wind and weather finally blew out the internet, and the phone, last night, and they've not that long been back.  Now the lull between storms, and we dry out and try not to worry about what the next lot might bring. But we are so blessed, really, and have so much.

So love and best wishes my dears, hugs and hands outstretched to the friends I make and have made here, thank you for coming, for coming back, for all the things you have brought me; I wish you the very best of Christmases, and peace, love and hope for the coming year.

Arab a capella

Well, I was going to post some pictures of pumpkins from the lovely autumn fête at Coëtmieux where Lyse lives, but then I watched Euronews, and they showed some clips from this video, a version of Bob Marley's No Woman No Cry made relevant for a Saudi Arabian audience: No Woman No Drive.  I looked it up on Youtube, finding myself to be the one million, two hundred thousand-and-something-th person to do so (a couple of hundred thousand more have done so since, as I write).  It made me laugh quite a bit, but I also thought that the chap doing it had rather a lot of charm and talent.  He turns out to be Alaa Wardi (the Saudi ingénue character on the video is part of the spoof, though not many of the commenters there seemed to grasp this), and I spent the time I could have been editing pumpkin photos watching and listening to more of his videos.  He's Persian born, lives in Saudi Arabia, has studies and records in Jordan,and is very popular in India where his maternal uncle runs a restaurant. His music is a wide ranging mixture from Middle Eastern standards, Bollywood songs, soft western-style pop, even a Pink Floyd and a Radiohead cover, a tune played very cleverly, hilariously but also melodiously on Vimto bottles, (with a bonus video where you do this yourself) and his own compositions, some with backing musicians - his band, Hayajan and others, on one song his grandfather plays the violin - and singing in Arabic, English and Hindi, where it seems his diction and expression are remarkably good for a non-native speaker.

Best of all though, for me, are his a capella numbers.  I found it hard to choose between these to post here, but decided on this one because the song sounds lovely but also because of how it breaks down all the parts and shows him making all the sounds and voices, and the quirky names he gives them.

I have to say I was delightedly astonished that anything so joyous, humorous and life-affirming could come out of Saudi Arabia (be my guest to berate me for cultural prejudice), though judging by this one which has a refrain which the subtitles translate as 'for god's sake get me a visa before I go crazy' he might have reservations about the matter himself (it's hard to say, I think it might be another parody of a certain kind of traditional Arabic popular song, it sounds fairly deliberately awful).  There's also this very funny little animation where he introduces himself, telling his story and asking for support, since the independent, on-line route is really the only way for original people like him to make their way in the world. I should imagine he'll probably do all right now, I hope so.

So pumpkins will have to wait until tomorrow, that's if we have any power or any internet.  The storm and gale warnings are so dire for tonight that we've decided to sleep downstairs, where at least we won't hear quite so much of it.

Little to report...

... except today I ate a tangerine,

or perhaps it was a clemenvilla.

 I think it was. I don't think tangerines exist any more.

And now the sun has shone for three whole days.

The former event is not unusual, the latter is.

That's all for now.

Three good things for today

We got invited to visit Jean-Paul, our stonemason, and his girlfriend Huguette.  The live in what was once a fairly ordinary concrete house on the edge of a small town near here, but which JP has entirely covered with salvaged stone, perfectly shaped and pointed.  They ply us with wine and coffee and rather too much sweet stuff, but the best bit it JP's loft, which covers the whole house and is, very tidily, full of his stuff, including a set of toy models: a little house, a yellow crane, a very fine die-cast Manitou (like a JCB), and a fork-lift.  On the day of his sixtieth birthday and so of his retirement, when he would have given up the full-sized versions of these things, he said, he came downstairs to find these laid out on the kitchen table for him.  There was also a figure of a man in working clothes with a shovel, which, I pointed out, was somewhat out-of-scale and too large for the toy vehicles and plant.  Well it's only an imitation, he said.

~

Laying the fire before we went out, so it only needed a fire-lighter and a match when we came home.  The chimney needs sweeping, but an advantage of this windy weather is it's drawing better than usual. (Which doesn't make up for the hammering the south-west of England is taking, I know.)

~

Part of young Eve's bird alphabet, which arrived today by e-mail for the Soup.  The girl is seriously gifted.

Home from the hills

And the hills were truly splendid. 

But they were a long way away from here, and, notwithstanding a stop in a comfortable bed and breakfast run by a very nice English family, the road through Les Landes, currently being made bigger, with its great trains of lorries from every corner of Europe grinding their way down to Spain (what can there be to be taken to and from Spain in such quantity?  Hothouse-grown and out-of-season fruit and veg, I suppose, coming from, but what do they fill up with from Mittel-Europe, the Baltic and Balkans and the old Soviet bloc, going there?), its contraflows and palimpsests of erased, altered and temporary road markings, its pocked and patched and roughened surfaces, was very long. Imagining the shepherds who stalked on stilts across the landscape two centuries ago, communicating in whistles and propped up with their knitting at rest, and wondering at the expanses of pine trees all filling the bricolage stores of France with two-by-one and tongue-and-groove, went only some way to alleviating the dreariness of it. 


But we got there, in time to pick up the flying members of the group from Biarritz, and made our way carrying Australian brother, his hat and an extra backpack or two.  We stopped at a supermarket just short of our destination, bought bread and buns and I tried to 'phone the owner of the house where we were staying.  I eventually spoke to, or tried to, an elderly (-sounding) man with an incomprehensible Basque accent and became thoroughly confused, but we made our way there to find our landlady waiting for us anyway, with the heating on.  When it comes to finding suitable and not too costly accommodation for eight people and a dog, beggars can't really be choosers.  Mme Eyheracher (a good Basque name) did everything she could to make the house comfortable, and was kind and friendly.  There were a couple of washing machines (it was really two separate appartments) and a dishwasher, none of which we used, decent fridges, plenty of crockery and glasses, coffee machines and toasters, and to our pleasant surprise, teapots and mugs with handles - standard French arrangements often include only small coffee cups and large bols without handles, which serve for cereal and hot drinks both; I actually quite like drinking milky coffee out of one of these, but tea isn't quite right.  There were, however, no kettles, so water was boiled in saucepans.  Everything was very clean and smelled of furniture polish, and there was abundant hot water, for which we were thankful.

It was called, it seems, Arrossagarayėnia.  I should have collected some photos of Basque signs and names. We wondered what a Basque Scrabble set would be like, presumably it would contain a lot of zs, xes, ks, and js which would be worth very few points.


However, it was an old and old-fashioned place, square and gloomy, single glazed, lino and formica and ugly patterned wallpapers and endless dark brown wood, shabby-sans-chic.  The central heating was oddly timed, and perhaps needed bleeding, so while those of us accustomed to more rustic conditions were OK, one or two of the family members, softened-up by urban British or sunny antipodean living, and with less flesh on their bones, were a bit chilly at times.  There was a dining area with a big table next to the kitchen, but no comfortable seating, so one was obliged to follow William Morris's injunction: 'If you want to be comfortable, go to bed'.  Unfortunately the beds weren't too comfy either, though they could have been worse. 


In a valley, it was hemmed in somewhat by a river on one side and a road on the other, the one leading up to the pass of Roncevalles.  We had a few hours of fairly sunny weather in the next day or so, and managed a walk up into the hills above the house, where I took a lot of photos of sheep, which perhaps will have  post of their own. 

After that, and as the predicted departure of the pilgrim contingent drew closer, the weather grew wetter and wetter and worse and worse.


We were obliged to make our own indoor entertainment (there was a little television set with French channels but we only used it for weather forecasts). We ate well,

Aussie brother made scrambled eggs most mornings (without the banana, that was just trying to get into the shot)

We chatted and shifted our bottoms on the hard chairs, and took our leftovers down to feed the two poor little half-starved hunting dogs whiling away the eight months of the year when they aren't out hunting ( and presumably terrorising the sheep) cooped up in a small enclosure at the end of the yard, with scant shelter, food or bedding - a fairly typical element of French rural living, very picturesque. I had hoped to get some maquette making done while there, but somehow the time seemed to run away, in cooking and other arrangements.  However, my sister had brought some origami kits at the last minute, so the rough paper and crayons and other things I brought was put to good use.  

(Left to right, twin nieces T and B, their mother my Lovely Sister, and K, the Niece-Who-Makes-Me-Laugh-More-Than-Anyone-Else, all origami-ing.)


At one point the origami took an aeronautical turn, and the room became filled with flying paper aircraft.  As I listened with half an ear in the kitchen to the discussion on 1950s plane design between my brother and Tom, one craft hurtled through the door and landed in Molly's dinner.  We left a row of origami penguins when we left, along with the wild flowers Niece-Who-Makes-Me-Laugh had picked, and the gold foil rose niece B had made from wrappers from the chocolate bunnies her mother had brought,

which caught a rare ray of sunshine just before we left.  


We all survived, and it was a good thing to spend time with my family.  Molly stayed well, and the pilgrims made it over the mountains and into Spain.  But that'll do for now, and I'll do some posts with more photos anon.