News from Nowhere

We dragged ourselves away from Paimpol's market having bought nothing more perishable than a jar of honey, and headed east along the coast towards Saint Malo. No hurry, though: we were booked on an evening ferry, which gave us time to take the scenic route (and parts of it were very scenic, and the map in the guide book was just about adequate, but it didn't warn us that we were about to be skirting a wooded estuary, or whatever, so there were pleasant surprises), find somewhere pleasant for lunch and visit the cluster of shops on the Dinan ring road.

Somewhere pleasant turned out to be a little port called Dahouët. Since we came home, I think I've worked out that the marina is part of a larger resort called Pléneuf-Val André, but by following the water rather than the main road we came to a quieter, quirkier area. This is the point at which I demanded we stop:



First and only secondhand bookshop of the trip, and a good one, with quotations pasted along the edges of the shelves. I didn't find much that I wanted to buy, but eventually I found a couple of albums of comics, and as we carried them back to the car I saw the proprietor locking up behind us, and heading off to his lunch. We explored on foot, right down to the end of the road, and a little way beyond, up the footpath to where Notre Dame de la Garde gazes out to sea, and we had a fine view back the way we had come:



The Sentier des Douaniers carried on along the coast. (The French coastal paths always seem to be Customs Officers' paths, just as English ones are always Smugglers' paths; this must say something about our two nations*.) But we returned to a large shed, painted bright yellow, which turned out to be Les Halles de Dahouët, a 'market hall' sheltering a number of small and organic businesses, including a café. The €10.50 lunch gave us quiche and salad, a glass of wine, pear and almond cake and coffee, and the smug sensation of having, for once, made the right choice.

The shop seemed to be deserted, or I'd have done more of my shopping there, but instead we pressed on to Dinan. There's a junction on the ring road where three corners are occupied by a Leclerc hypermarket, an organic supermarket and a wine shop, which covers all our basic shopping needs. Since our last visit all three seemed to have grown bigger, smarter, glitzier - yes, even Leclerc - and as a result harder to navigate. But we shopped, and then, finally, called it a day and headed for the ferry...

Of course, the holidays weren't over yet - we weren't coming home, we were going to London for more jollity. But you knew that already!

*ETA: In another place, desperance asks: "Did anyone ever smuggle anything from England into France? (Excepting wartime, that is: were there commercial goods worth dodging the douaniers for? And if so, what...?)"

The flying visit to Brittany was just a bonus: the real purpose of our journey was that we had been invited to attend the awards ceremony of the Crime Writers' Association, at which our friend and client Ann Cleeves was to be presented with the Diamond Dagger, which is the CWA's lifetime achievement award. I was thrilled and delighted, and also somewhat intimidated: a glittering dinner at a fancy London hotel is way outside my comfort zone. And as the details trickled through, I became more nervous: first it was "dress code: black tie", which was bad enough, then "cocktail dress" - cocktail dress - fortunately qualified by the option of "your own version of smart". durham_rambler threatened to wear his Fair Isle Bird Observatory sweatshirt, and we agreed that this was entirely appropriate (but maybe not all that smart). We packed our party clothes, and told each other it would be fine, and - spoiler alert! - it was.

It was an early evening event, which gave us a little time to do something with the day, and GirlBear suggested we visit a part of Bloomsbury where she had enjoyed lunching with a friend who used to work in the area. For reasons of logistics, she and I set off first, with the promise of interesting shops in Marchmont Street, and durham_rambler joined us later. We pottered happily into a wholefood shop, where GirlBear scored the variety of herbal tea she had been looking for, and I discovered why the name Marchmont Street had been familiar when we stumbled upon Gay's the Word bookshop.



In Tavistock Square we found the perfect landmark for our rendezvous with durham_rambler, and from here it was just a moment's walk to Woburn Walk - London's first pedestrian shopping street, apparently, and so well hidden that it wasn't named on GirlBear's A to Z. We lunched at a deeply retro Italian café, which was excellent, and provided durham_rambler with his preferred lunch, an all-day breakfast. I was tempted by the vegetarian all-day breakfast, but decided on home-made pie and salad, and didn't regret it.

At the other end of Woburn Walk we emerged onto university campus. I've never thought of the London universities as having a campus, but this group of buildings (mostly SOAS, leading through to Senate House and Birkbeck) really gave that impression. I wasn't overly enthusiastic about the statue of Thiruvalluvar as whole, but this detail appealed to me:



- and no, I promise, I did not move that leaf!

We had come to SOAS to visit the Brunei Gallery. The photographic exhibition Moulids - the Sufi Festivals of Egypt occupies the most prominent part of the gallery, and I found it the least interesting: tucked away at the back is a splendid little display of musical instruments and documents from the museum's own collection, illustrating the transmission of musical culture along the silk road. On the way up to the roof garden were more photographs forming another exhibition. That's a Japanese garden, on a rooftop in the middle of Bloomsbury in the October drizzle, in need of a little weeding and raking, but a pleasing place to find - and to have to ourselves - all the same.

Then a scenic bus ride home, and time for a cup of tea and to compare notes on our days with BoyBear, who had been to his martial arts class, before showering and putting on party finery ready to go out again. I felt a bit conspicuous on the tube, in my big Indian print frock, but it was only a step from Tower Hill station to the venue (so close that I didn't realise until our homeward journey that the Tower of London was right there, all lit up, behind us); and although the light coloured print stood out visually among all the lacy black dresses, I didn't feel underdressed, so that was all right.

The most glamourous thing about the evening is probably that I can now claim to have dined with Peter Capaldi - albeit several large tables away, and not to speak to. More significantly, we had interesting conversations with various members of the publishing and marketing team, the after-dinner speaker (Robert Thorogood, who writes the BBC crime series Death in Paradise, which I haven't seen) was entertaining, and CWA Chair Martin Edwards did a fine job of presenting Ann Cleeves with her Diamond Dagger and explaining why she deserved it. Afterwards we had a chance to mill around and talk to people, and admire the actual dagger (no actual diamonds, though) - and get the not-quite-but-very-nearly last train home.

The weather forecast for today was horrible - rain and wind and hail, too. Luckily, we weren't actually planning to visit the Isle de Batz, even though our hotel (for the record, Chez Janie) is right by the jetty. First stop the Tourist Office, which confirmed what we already suspected, that the 'Maison des Johnnies' (information about the onion sellers) is only open in the afternoon - but while that was something we wanted to see, there wasn't any urgency about getting out of the weather, which was bright and breezy. The occasional sharp shower was over as soon as it started. We pottered around the town, browsing the shops which specialise in selling local products to tourists, and yes, we may have done a little light shopping: Algoplus add seaweed to everything, from soaps to soups, and I bought some of each; La Belle-Iloise is a fish cannery, but the really attractive thing about their shops is the colourful design of the tins, and I don't know why their website makes so little of it.

The church (Notre Dame de Croaz-Batz) was a delightful surprise. I knew, because you can see it from all over the town, that it has an impressively ornate spire (Renaissance, it says here, and perhaps unique in Brittany) and my guide book thought it worth mentioning, but only to say that its alabaster panels come from Nottingham, and are yet another sign of Roscoff's maritime history. I thought the best thing about it was its polychrome wooden roof, rich with garlands and figures - and completely renovated at the start of this century, "Ready for the next 500 years.." says the leaflet. But since I'm only going to post one picture, I've chosen a detail of the exterior:



Because the sky is so blue, and because the grey stone and golden lichen is so typically Breton, and because of the creature at the roofline. "Why does that bird have the hind legs of a dog?" I asked, and durham_rambler replied "Because it's a duck-billed platypus!"

We found lunch at Le Bilig de la plage, a little beachside café which offers a very sustaining fish soup, and local cider to go with it. Then on to the 'Maison des Johnnies' the Johnnies being the onion sellers who travelled from Roscoff to England each year to sell the onions which are grown locally - so called because their customers referred to them as 'Onion Johnnies'. There was less to see than I had expected. There's an outdoor shed, with a fine collection of discarded agricultural stuff; there's plenty of promotional material from today's onion-growing business (I scored some recipes); and there's the old house itself, which was inhabited by a family of five generations of onion growers and sellers, and is now a centre for the documentation of the trade, with a display of old photos and a timeline and such, which can't help being pretty superficial. I learned that in 1902 the Johnnies accounted for 2% of Britain's onion imports (but how many of our onions do we import?) and that at the peak individual sellers covered the whole of the UK - one man took onions from Roscoff to the Northern Isles. And I saw some wonderful photos of men with bicycles and strings of onions.

We had been planning to visit the Salon des Arts exhibition anyway - we didn't just duck in because another shower had come on! It was held in the old lifeboathouse, which is unlike most lifeboathouses of my experience in being surrounded by a little garden. It is also constructed parallel to the shoreline, which is not the best idea - and if it now has a door through which you could launch a lifeboat, it is very well hidden. There were four artists exhibiting, and I enjoyed the brightly coloured seascapes by Paul Leone (his lighthouse with aurora had been used for the poster, and you can see why): his technique seems to involve cutting things out with a jig saw and painting the seams white, but I haven't quite worked it out. Most of Catherine Caillaux's sculptures left me unmoved: giant seed and pod shapes, all very decorative. But just one - title 'Bulle something or other' - really appealed, though I can't find it on her website.

Back to the hotel to rest and read and doze and write this - jumping up in the middle of it to photograph the rainbow that had appeared beyond the harbour.

Executive summary: we left a grey and rainy England; we woke up this morning to Breton sunshine.



( In more detail... )

The forecast for tomorrow is terrible. And it is already raining.