News from Nowhere

On the domestic and electrical front, we are reminded both that things fall apart and that sometimes they can be put back together. durham_rambler found an electrician who declined to tamper with the television aerial, but has replaced the light-fittings in the kitchen and in my study. Then the washing machine went dead in mid-wash, but durham_rambler worked out that it had blown a fuse, and replaced said fuse. Ah, but why had the washing machine blown a fuse? It has been astoundingly reliable for twenty-odd years, and each time there's a problem I think it will be the last.

I seem to have done something to displease Google (fair enough - it's mutual) which refuses to show me its doodles on the day; I have to wait until each one is archived. So I saw this tribute to Maurice Sendak the day after the rest of LJ. It is very charming, but the text explanation sounds rather odd: it doesn't seem to know that Sendak died last year (but surely Google knows everything?).

I was complaining that the Guardian's series on wine roads was sticking to very well-trodden routes. This week's is a bit more interesting: where to go in Corsica (For what it's worth, that's just a set of suggested locations, this is a wine road).

Driving into Darlington last night, we passed a notice of which I only had time to read the first line. It said, in large pink letters: BABY NEARLY NEW SALE.

On the subject of signs and portents, seen on the Westray ferry:



The sign on the door (for those whose eyesight is no better than mine) says "Please do NOT tumble dry other people's boiler suits". These mysterious glimpses of other people's lives...

weegoddess has lured me onto PINterest. She makes use of the social networking potential of the site to promote her business making ethical wedding dresses; LJ gives me all the social networking I need, but I was interested in the potential of PINterest as a visual way of saving links, specifically to pretty pictures - the sort of thing I do occasionally post here, but a more suitable way of saving links about which I have nothing more to say than "Ooh! Pretty picture!" Getting the thing set up was a bit of a struggle - all the names I could think of were either taken or invalid, and it insists on connecting to a FaceBook or Twitter profile, which makes me uneasy - but such as it is, this is it, and having trawled through some past LJ posts and pinned the links, this evening I'm working through some back issues of the Guardian travel supplement, experimenting with pinning suggestions for places to visit. Just to be on the safe side, the text version follows (because words are words, and you can't trust pictures).

A slightly irritating article about the Montagne Noire (which we crossed when we visited Minerve) contains the information that Montolieu in the Aude is a book town - or rather, a book village. (Here's the Aude tourist office, just in case.)

I hadn't expected to find much to tempt me in an issue devoted to Turkey, but this article about walking in the north east is magical.

And that's as far as we go, because I seem to have broken it - a pity, because this article on short walks in Corsica (the Not the GR20 option) looks seriously good. Oh, well, another time...

In 1942, commercial artist Raymond Peynet went to Valence, making a delivery in person, waiting by the bandstand in the park for the person he was meeting. He began sketching the bandstand, with a long-haired young man playing the violin, and pretty young woman listening, enraptured. He drew the rest of the band leaving, and the violinist saying "Don't worry, I'll finish on my own."

Peynet titled the drawing 'The Unfinished Symphony'; it was the magazine editor who called it 'Les Amoureux de Peynet' - Peynet's lovers. They were an immediate success. Throughout the 50s and into the 60s, Peynet carried on drawing the lovers: in the rain, in a boat, on a park bench, flying into the blue sky of a Chagall painting; charming, slightly saccharine, France's image of itself as the country of love and of art.

It's a very marketable self-image: A Google image search finds the lovers on headscarves, petit point patterns, postage stamps, certificates to be given as wedding gifts. Not all of these are period pieces: the official website (scroll down) lists such recent products as perfume, and a wedding dress embroidered with one of Peynet's drawings.

You have to sift through this abundance to find the lovers as I first met them, in the early 60s, as a series of dolls: about the size of Barbie and Ken, but made of some soft plastic or rubber, not jointed but bendable. Postcards show some of the many collectable variants: there were brides and grooms, naturally, there were modern young people and couples in retro swimwear, there were couples in the traditional costumes of the regions of France, or representing the signs of the Zodiac - eBay.fr has a fine selection (though if I were actually buying, I'd probably forget about the dolls and go for the set of fèves, charms for baking in the Twelfth Night galette, for the sheer complexity of its cultural import).

I'd say I hadn't thought about them for years, and that's almost true: but in fact the lovers in Georges Brassens's song Les amoureux des bancs publics, who sit kissing on public benches, always takes on in my mind the appearance of Peynet's lovers. I thought that was just me, but no, it seems, they really were the inspiration for the song:



What brings them into my mind now? Who do we know who's in love, in Paris, and sending dispatches home about it?

First, one for samarcand, overheard at the self-service breakfast buffet. Son of English family at the next table, baffled by the variety of teas on offer: "They've got all kinds of tea...
"Dad, is Yellow Label normal tea?"

Dad isn't rushing to answer. "Is Yellow Label normal?"

Dad obviously has no idea. "Yes, it's normal."

Outside the hotel, the floral Eiffel Tower on the roundabout is looking even better than when I last saw it, greener and bushier. But there's better still in store, on the road in to Loon Plage itself:



I spotted - and was charmed by - the beekeeper, on the traffic island as we approached the junction. But it was durham_rambler who noticed his bee, on the roundabout across the way.

I don't really remember how earlier volcanic outbursts from Iceland were reported. I've been thinking that surely there was more coverage of the eruption itself, this extraordinary, fascinating, frightening thing, and less complaining about how inconvenient it is. But that's probably just the tendency to think that things were better in the past. I've seen wonderful footage of volcanoes (some of which, like this report on Surtsey and Heimaey, has ended up on YouTube), but it isn't necessarily news footage.

Perhaps I'm just disproportionately irritated by the refusal of radio and TV even to try to pronounce Eyafjallajökull. The Grauniad, being the Grauniad, can't make up its mind how to spell it, either, but I have more sympathy there. Not that I can pronounce Eyafjallajökull myself, either - I was hoping to learn from the radio. But the BBc has resources I don't have: these are broadcasters who pronounce the names of Sri Lankan cricketers, for crying out loud, with aplomb if not with precision, surely they must be able to do better than "the Icelandic volcano"? Set some researchers onto it! There's something dismissive about the formula "the Icelandic volcano", as if we really can't be expected to concern ourselves with such trivia as what those northern barbarians call their geography. As if Iceland had only one volcano! But then of course they're stymied when they want to report the concern that the eruption of Eyafjallajökull may be followed by a larger one from Katla - because to name Katla would be to admit that these places do have names, we're just afraid to use them. So Katla becomes "another Icelandic volcano". As janni says: "I picture it off in the corner, muttering, 'You want a volcano you can pronounce? I'll give you a volcano you can pronounce ...'"

So thank goodness for the internet which brings us our news: that same post of janni's has some fine links. People are posting photos to Flickr: this set has some great ones. Via makinglight, the Boston Globe's Big Picture collects some more amazing images: I particularly like the one of the farmers working to dust-proof the barn in time for lambing, while the barn door frames a view of the plume of ash rising serenely from the volcano. But there are some dramatic night-time views, too: the National Geographic answers my question: why is there so often lightning in these pictures?

Against this degree of upheaval and risk, the inconvenience of the flight ban is secondary. Which is easy to say, since I've not been personally inconvenienced. It crops up in unexpected places: an author friend reports back from the London Book Fair that it was "very odd this year. Like a ghost town." She had a day's schedule of meetings booked, but only her French editor actually got there. Sad tales of rose-growers in Kenya say something about the madness of the market economy. And the Poet Laureate has written a poem.

I came to the Today programme this morning halfway through an item about a family who had managed to make their way home from holiday - I suspect in Spain, though I missed that. Since they couldn't fly (and, as I say, I only heard half the story) they had hired a car. They'd clearly been unlucky: French railways were on strike, they said, and the main road through the Pyrenees was closed, they'd had to find their own way through. But it had been a revelation: France is a big country, they said, when you're driving through it, much bigger than it seems when you're floating above it. And it would be pleasant to drive through, if you were on holiday and could take your time... Well, yes. I wonder if they will, next year?

A.S. Byatt visits the new ceramics galleries at the V & A (and on the Museum's web site).

Normandy's Route du Cidre including bed and breakfast in a treehouse.

How to obtain maximum publicity for a news story: as durham_rambler posted this morning, employ expensive solicitors to try to prevent publication.

Still in France, two years ago, but by now very much homeward bound. At this stage of the holiday, everything is a last chance: last day, last chance to go shopping, last picnic. When the whole holiday stretches ahead of you, a dull lunch doesn't matter, because tomorrow will be better; now it's... not a catastrophe, even now, but a disappointment, a lost opportunity. And the good things are something unexpected, we may be on our way home, but we are still on holiday and having a good time.

That's my excuse, anyway, for this loving photograph of my lunch:



We had bought bread and goat's cheese and figs, and to wash it down, bernache (a harvest-time treat, grape juice just beginning to ferment; I've met the same thing in Germany as Neuwein). Since I declined to drink the bernache out of the bottle - it is cloudy, and throws a heavy sediment - we had bought cheap tumblers to drink it out of, too (my favourite kind of holiday souvenir). Following the signs to the picnic site brought us into Cinq-Mars-la-Pile. where we spread out our haul on a picnic table half in sun, half in shade and wondered a) what was the Gallo-Romain pile which had given the village its name? and b) what was that brick tower over beyond those houses?

A short after-lunch stroll (past a wall on which lizards scampered away as we passed revealed that, of course, these two questions shared a single answer.

The Guardian's latest attempt to destabilise my holiday plans is this piece about a project in Provence in which Andy Goldsworthy is collaborating with the Musée Gassendi in Digne to construct a series of works linked by some hundred miles of footpaths. (I can't find the text of the article on line, but the video is for once well worth watching). The distances involved sound a bit over my limit, even given that some of the works are designed to sleep in overnight; but this review of the book (in French) describes the project as a 12 day walking route, which is more my pace. And it's a work in progress, so who knows?

(There's a new edition of the book, too.)

An earlier article, which seems to have vanished without trace, described more familiar territory - to me, at any rate, if not to the author, who managed to find herself walking in the Cévennes without ever having heard of the region, even through the intermediary of Robert Louis Stevenson. But the article was illustrated with a very appealing view of Villefort, nestled among the trees along the edge of its lake - not only is the world full of new places to visit, there are familiar regions to revisit, too.

Thank you to desperance and cellio, who encouraged me to stop messing about with the touchpad, and go find a mouse: yes, that's much better. In evidence, have some typing:

In 1910, when the Tour de France first crossed the high Pyrenees, newspaper reporters imagined, half hoping, that marauding bears might affect the outcome of the race by eating some of the riders. The riders flogged themselves across the mountains on rocky roads long since deserted by the bears. At Nîmes, on the seventh stage of the Tour, a frisky dog caused a serious accident, but the only lethal animal attack came from a jelly-fish during the rest day at Nice.

The Discovery of France
Graham Robb

Hand typed, as I am not yet reunited with the computer which talks to the scanner; but we abandoned the never-ending backup after 25 hours and restarted it with some technical modifications (er - plugging it in to the back of the computer instead of the front?) and it is nowrunning much faster.

Last few days of January: this time last year - and this time the year before that - we were on our way home from Angoulême, driving through France, head full of French and comics and what to buy to bring home and prolong those good feelings?

One of the trophies of that last supermarket trolley dash was half a dozen bottles of Bordeaux from the end-of-range bargain bin: Château Monbadon, with a label designed by comics artists Dupuy and Berberian.

The neck tag explained that it was one of a series: six Bordeaux châteaux working with six comics artists (seven if you count Dupuy and Berberian as two, which the French tend not to - but that's a whole other subject) as a fundraiser for the mental health charity UNAPEI. We'd happily have bought others as well, but this was the only one left; we would happily have paid more for the entertainment factor, but it was reduced to €3 (£2, $3). So we bought what they had. And the unexpected bonus was that it was good wine, fruity and well balanced.

And a year later, I shall now tidy the label off my desk; so that's something acheived. A little sorry not to be in France, but hoping to go back soon, and glad not to be missing tonight's launch party.