shewhomust | Armchair travels

My current thinking about holidays is purely theoretical: with the exception, that is, of midsummer week on Lindisfarne, which is quite imminent, and for which I have started planning some practicalities (we have just ordered some wine). After that come the wide open spaces of whatever Boris's roadmap brings, and then the school holiday season not to mention the uncertainties of August weather. But maybe by autumn we'll be ready to think about another break ... We are overdue a trip to France: lockdown last spring made me put aside plans for going to Avignon or Nîmes by rail and hiring a car, but even if the traffic lights permit it, I'm not ready to pick that up where I left off. Maybe something less ambitious, within easy reach of a Channel port - or maybe somewhere in the UK, even somewhere in England. We'll see what the autumn brings, but I hope it will take me somewhere new. Meanwhile, I continue to accumulate links to places I am, with the passing years, less and less likely to see.

That set out to be a contextual preamble, a warning that what follows should not be read as evidence of actual holiday plans. It was not intended to become so gloomy. Never mind, have some pretty pictures:

Courtesy of The Guardian, A virtual tour of Leonora Carrington's studio

Courtesy of Flickr, which presented me almost randomly with this pretty picture, and then through a search on the name of the village to a whole gallery of painted doors. This was an initiative to rescue a dying municipality, it seems, and there's more about Valloria on the towns website. Indeed, there seems to be a whole accociation of painted villages, but their website but doesn't offer many pictures...

Courtesy of the Lit & Phil, we zoomed a talk about Newcastles of the World. This is a town twinning organisation, with all the municipal virtues that that implies, but instead of bringing together towns of similar size or industries, given the charm of randomness by associating towns by name. Those whose name os litterally Newcastle, in English, may be named for a landowner, or by homesick Geordies mining Australia's coal; more interesting are those named in the local language for a 'new castle' (which, the world over, os usually an old castle by now). It's not enough to be a Newcastle, of course, you have to want to join in, which adds a further level of arbitrariness: the initiative was launched from Shinshiro, Japan, and France is substantially absent - there's no sign of the first place I thought of, Châteauneuf-du-Pape. (Though I remember pulling into a layby somewhere, probably in France and certainly francophone, to read about an alliance of Neuchâtels and Châteauxneufs - a rival oeganisation, perhaps?). Anyway, the most intriguing locations of the bunch were Akhaltsikhe in Georgia as desctibed by Lonely Planet (I'd love to revisit Georgia) and Jaunpils in Latvia (ditto to see more of the Baltic countries). Oh, and Nyborg - but then I've never been to Denmark at all, which is ridiculous ...