News from Nowhere

D. departed from his most recent visit leaving behind him Edith Somerville and Martin Ross's In the vine country. One of the constants of our friendship is that we have very different tastes, often completely misjudge what the other will enjoy, and keep trying, anyway. So, Somerville and Ross? As in that classic of Victorian humour, The Irish RM, which I have not read but remember being ambivalent about the television version in the 1980s? Yes, that Somerville and Ross.

But D.'s edition was published by a specialist wine publisher (it's also available from Project Gutenberg) which was promising: I like old-fashioned travel writing, I'm interested in wine and I have visited (though I don't know it well) the area of France concerned ... How could it fail to be entertaining?

That's only half a rhetorical question. Somerville and Ross have a distinctive flavour: Irish (or is that Anglo-Irish?) ladies, called away from hunting to go to the Médoc, not for their expertise (they claim none) but for their wit and humour - and they oblige, they are resolutely witty, which can be wearing. Their comedy horror at the unhygienic practices of wine making (the peasants treading the grapes) is displayed at length, and the text is liberally sprinkled with "Irishisms", turns of phrase delivered as if they added some comedy value which was invisible to me... I was very conscious of enjoying reading their account of their travels more than I would have enjoyed travelling with them - but I did enjoy reading it.

Then right at the end, it startled me. In the final chapter, on the homeward journey, the cousins spend a day in Paris. They are familiar with the city, they feel at home, they revisit a hotel, a restaurant that they know of old,they make their way to the galleries in the Jardins du Luxembourg (now the Musée du Luxembourg):

When we got out into the gardens again, with their linked battalions of perambulators, and their thousand children courting sea-sickness on the zoological merry-go-rounds, the afternoon was still young. The tops of the tall horse-chestnuts were yellow in the sunshine, and above them, in the blue sky, the Eiffel Tower looked down on us, suggesting absurdly the elongated neck of Alice in Wonderland, when the pigeon accuses her of being a serpent. Its insistent challenge could no longer be resisted; in spite of the needle-cases, yard-measures, and paper-weights that had horridly familiarised us with its outlines, it was decidedly a thing to be done. People who would go to sleep if we talked to them about the vineyards, would wake to active contempt if they heard we had not been to the Eiffel Tower.

I like the Alice reference, and I recognised that sense that it's hardly worth visiting the Eiffel Tower, its image is so inescapable.

But when the travellers got off the tram at the wrong stop, and "consequently had a long crawl through the empty Exhibition buildings and grounds", I thought again: the tower was built as part of the Exposition Universelle, held on the centenary of the French Revolution. It wasn't old and familiar, it was a new intrusion into a well-known townscape. Somerville and Ross visit it almost against their will not because it is hackneyed, a cliché, but because it is a novelty. How could they refuse to visit the tallest tower in the world, when they were so close, and they might not have another chance (it was intended as a temporary structure, to be demolished after 20 years)? Somerville and Ross's account of their visit to the tower is a lovely piece of writing anyway, a mixture of their trademark self-deprecatory humour (they are not keen to enter the life cage) and vivid description ("the girders that looked like all the propositions in Euclid run mad") but this shift of perspective makes it stand out from the rest of the book.

Not for the first time, the Eiffel Tower hogs the limelight. In the vine country as a whole is very much a case of if this is the sort of thing you like, you will like this. But that final chapter has a much wider appeal.

Courtesy of The Guardian, Smailholm Tower all lit up to celebrate.

( It used to go like this ... )

Meanwhile, in Paris, they celebrate a different anniversary: also from The Guardian's picture gallery, marking 150 years since the Commune.

We - by which I mean I, because I'm the one who plans holidays - had two holidays planned for this year. That was Before - in fact it was last year - but some of the news is positive.

Firstly, we had already accepted D.'s invitation to help him celebrate a significant birthday with a houseparty at Auchinleck House, a Landmark Trust mansion in the south of Scotland. A sub-group of that party would then proceed to spend a few more days on the Isle of Bute. I had vague thoughts about stopovers on the way there and back, but this much was fixed well in advance. Restrictions for Scotland are gradually being lifted, and over the last few weeks it has been looking more and more possible that some of this celebration will actually happen: and we have now crossed a threshhold at which the number of people still able to participate no longer exceeds the number of people permitted to gather together indoors. There will be some absences, and I am scaling back ideas of extending the week's break by spending a couple of days exploring on the way there (maybe on the way back?), but some sort of holiday will - barring eventualities, of course - happen.

My other plan was to spend some time in France: for two years running we had taken our holidays in the UK, not because of any plan but just because it had that was how thingshad worked out. This includes two trips to the Northern Isles and a happy week at the seaside with Bears, and I'm not complaining, but we hadn't been in France since a few days in Brittany tacked on to a trip to London, and if not now, when? I wanted to visit Provence, where we have not been for years because it is such a long drive, and had come to the conclusion that pleasant though it is to take the car and fill it with wine, better to go by train than not to go at all. There's a Eurostar direct to Avignon or Nîmes, you don't even have to negotiate Paris, hira a car at the other end and explore - and I was browsing the Michelin green guide and the Routard guide to France when lockdown happened and all bets were off. But we were planning for September or October, and maybe by then ...?

Well, maybe. The more confident I feel about traveling to France, the less likely it seems that France will want to welcome the plague-stricken English (and yes, I mean Englidh). Boris's talk of air bridges just sets me off on another rant, of which the short version is I thought we had fallen out of love with air travel?, and although he doesn't actually mean that it only applies to air travel (when did Boris ever actually mean what he says?), Eurostar have announced that they will not be running the direct train to the south.

Too early to plan for that now, I think. There are, as the Guardian reminds us, less touristy areas of France (with recommendations for hotels in the Auvergne); sorting out photos from previous years reminds me how much I liked Brittany; and there are still trains via Paris - or, indeed, Lille - if we stick to Plan A.

This post has been a process of thinking aloud, and I appreciate that it's not very interesting to anyone but me. My apologies; will try to do better next time.

Once Halloween is past, you can no longer put off thinking about Christmas. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it is the case. We have booked railway tickets to London (we may have mislaid them already, but that's a whole other story); we have fixed several engagements for things to do while we are there (quite apart from the Carol Evening which is the purpose of our visit). I have ordered Christmas cards online. This all feels premature.

D. is with us for a few days. He is here for a conference on Bronze Age archaeology, which is the only looking back element of this post. While he is here, we are making plans for next summer: we have already booked a week on Lindisfarne for midsummer, and a few days in fancy surroundings in Scotland to celebrate D.'s significant birthday in August. Now we are looking for somewhere on the Isle of Bute to recover from that excitement. This too feels - not premature exactly, because we know what we want to do, so let's organise accommodation while we still have some choice: but my inner voice is still saying what, already?.

Further ahead, and altogether more speculatively, the Guardian's Travel section has a feature on Nantes. We usually avoid big cities (which is why, if I'm remembering correctly, we have never been to Nantes, though we may have driven round the bypass!) but I liked the idea of art installations in the Loire estuary: you can admire them, it seems, from a cruise between Nantes and Saint Nazaire (Saint Nazaire is the tein town of Sunderland). The article also tells me that the Machines de l'Île, of which I had heard, are based on an island (a post-industrial island) in Nantes. And of course, there's muscadet...

It's a long time since I've posted any links from the Guardian travel supplement, mostly because it's a while since I found anything in it I wanted to save (though in that case, why are there so many back issues lying around that haven't been discarded? I may have to revisit that question). And last Saturday's issue led on their writers' finds of the year - not entirely promising, though it did also include a quiz, which was quite fun, as a throwaway quiz. Also...

• The photograph which caught my eye, of the Templar stronghold of Tomar, in Portugal - an image which managed to frame both fortress and cloister within an archway (a composition known to my friends as "one of shewhomust"s) - does not appear in the digital edition. Instead, there is a picture of a lake, presumably the one adjacent to the recommended hotel. Mysteriously, a quick (but not that quick) search doesn't turn up any images similar to the missing one - but it does reveal that as well as Templars, Tomar has a seventeenth century aqueduct and a matchbox museum.



• I'd have been glad of a recommendation for a hotel in Saint Malo, ahead of our last visit: as it was, we had only the briefest of strolls around the walled city before heading west to Roscoff. So I'll note the recommendation for Les Charmettes, for next time...



• The readers' recommendations had some interesting suggestions, too. I am not tempted (no. really I'm not) by a lighthouse cottage on Mull, off-grid and a mile along a coastal path. But having enjoyed visiting Bruges and Ghent, I'm happy to add Leuven to my list (though I shall probably continue to think of it as Louvain).



• Praise for Mushkudiani Manor, in Georgia (no website, but easy enough to find on booking sites) across the page from an ad for 'Guardian Holidays' in Georgia, reminds me how much I liked Georgia when we briefly visited, long ago. I have no immediate intention of acting on this...

I have no immediate intention of acting on any of this. For the time being, we have plans for midsummer in Shetland, and that will do nicely. But you never know.

Before we had booked our October break in Brittany, while I was still trying to decide how to play this - very short - holiday, one option I considered was taking one of the shortest Channel crossings and spending a few days in the Somme. It's an area we have enjoyed in the past, as we drove through on the way to and from the ferry, and I'd be happy to look around. In the end we decided that it was worth taking a little longer over the journey, and visiting Brittany.

Almost as soon as we had that settled, the Guardian travel supplement, which must have been reading over my shoulder, published a double page spread on the Somme. And, as proof that we are on the same wavelength here, their recommendations include not only one of the hotels I had been considering (as recommended by my Routard guide, and, indeed, illustrated on its cover) but somewhere we have actually stayed in the past (and for which I had only a broken link). So that's all useful.

No, I'm not having second thoughts - but there will be other trips...

A month ago, I wrote about the last time we were in France, expecting to return to the topic within days, and to tidy away the end of the story not long after. But that was a month ago (to the day). Ah, well.

My notes for the next stage of the joutney say only two things. Firstly, without explanation: Haute-Saône celebrates 20 years twinning with Mexico. This disconcerted me so much that I initially attributed it to the previous post, but on reflection it belongs here, with the record of a night in the department of Haute-Saône (and a quick search doesn't explain how this area came to be twinned with Mexico, but at least confirms that I hadn't imagined it).

We had come to Champlitte without knowing anything about the town, having picked up a list of Logis de France hotels at the tourist office after lunch, and decided that there was only one on our route north and within an afternoon's drive: I think it was this one, which seems to have the right location opposite the town's little château (now museum). This website explains (in French) how historic the place is, and how diminished from its days of glory: click on its postage stamp images to see photos of its most picturesque sites on a sunny day. Which is fortunate: I have the happiest memories of our explorations before dinner that evening, following whichever street looked most tempting, peering into courtyards and taking many, many photos. But when I look through those photos now, the ones I am happiest with show neither the castle nor the river, and the sun isn't shining in any of them. In fact, this is not atypical:



( And there's more where that came from. )

We didn't ask, but returned instead to our hotel, and dined there. With a bottle of organic rosé Pascal HENRIOT VdP Champlitte, although I don't remember anything about the wine, but it's the second thing in my notes. Presumably this winemaker, and we would have chosen it as being the most local option, and I must have liked it, or I wouldn't have made a note of it.

It's a sunny Saturday evening and I feel a little lazy, a little unfocussed - maybe I could tidy up the old travel supplements that are littering my desk: nothing as demanding as making travel plans, but dream a little of places we might go, sometime... And idleness has been rewarded, because underneath the newspapers I found a book I've been meaning to return to A. next time we see her - and we will see her on Monday, and I would have forgotten it was there. Does that in itself make the process worthwhile? No, on with the links:

The Centre de l'Art et du Paysage is on an island in a lake in the plateau de Millevaches, in the Corrèze (a thousand springs, etymologically, it seems, and not a thousand cows): you reach it by crossing a footbridge. Its website is uninviting, but if you read the Guardian article first, you have some idea what you are looking for, and the Bois des Sculptures soundslike my sort of place (there's an Andy Goldsworthy, which is always a good start).

I can't really see us taking a holiday to savour slow food in rural Turkey: but it does sound good...

Why do I have a copy of the books section here? And why do I not have last week's article about wine tourism in Sicily? (Never mind, I found it!)

This isn't much to show for several months worth of weekly supplements. Most of what they publish just isn't for me: skiing holidays, cycling holidays, how to amuse your children, city breaks... And sometimes I may be a bit dismissive of this material. "Hah!" I might say. "Who on earth plans a trip around recommendations for an outdoor cinema?" Let this be a lesson to me not to be so hasty - because the Cromarty Film Festival sounds rather wonderful: outdoor screenings in Scotland in December night be a challenge, but "Join the audience near the shoreline for mulled wine and watch the opening film as it is projected on to the lighthouse..." (mulled wine? the Festival's own website talks of Glen Ord...)

And one that's not from the Guardian: Britain's most northerly accommodation property (it's on Unst).

The process of Moving Stuff About continues. The resultant changes are probably invisible to any eye but my own, but I do have a sense of stuff moving, heaps being dispersed, things finding their place. It won't last, so let me enjoy it - and record it - while I can.

I have a new monitor. I have for some time been saying to durham_rambler that we need to be able to check what our websites look like on a variety of screen widths and devices, and that given modern standards one of us, at least, ought to have a monitor that is wider than the 1024px we were both using (I remember how big that seemed when I finally relinquished my 800px screen). He finally found time to set up desperance's widescreen for me, and I am trying to get used to it. The good news is that I haven't (yet) had any really unpleasant surprises from any of my sites - though I am tweaking margins as I go! The bad news is that some of the software I use results, at this definition, in very small print (I'm using some very old software). As I suspected, my old screen rendered things very dark, even when adjusted to maximum brightness, and the brightness of the new screen is even more disconcerting than its width; I could turn it down, but the risk is then that I underestimate the brightness of my designs and images, so I'd prefer to learn to live with it.

The old monitor sat on a pedestal (alright, then, a box file) on the desk: the new one sits on the desk itself. And did I mention how very wide it is? So there has been some shuffling of things around the desk. Some of them - little jars of paperclips, seashells, a box of postcards, some notebooks - will need new homes, but I have filed and discarded a quantity of paper. Why had I written the name 'Amanda Popham' on a paper bag? The internet tells me that she is a ceramicist: there's a selection of her work here and another piece here. I'm not sure whether I like it or not; I think I'd like to see the real thing, not photographs, and I think this means that I haven't actually seen it. But in that case, where did I get her name from?

No mystery about why I printed off a copy of John Stump's Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz (from 'A Tribute to Zdenko G. Fibich'), an 'unplayable score' with instructions like "Slovenly", "Tune the Uke" and "remove cattle from stage". Even though the paper copy is coffee stained, and I have tracked it down online, I am reluctant to discard it.

Naturally, the paper is fighting back. Last Saturday's travel supplement has made its way onto my desk, open at the page about wine tourism in the Corbières. Not for this year, but next year I want to go to France, and to the wine-producing south-west in particular. I'd been thinking Minervois, Madiran, even Irouléguy, but a few addresses in Corbières might come in handy...

It's the pre-digital equivalent of closing some tabs, disposing of old newspapers I've put aside as containing something of interest. It isn't always obvious what:

Romania, fair enough. But did I really think an article about cycling in the Carpathians would be useful? Apparently I did.

I don't expect ever to visit the salt flats of Bolivia - but isn't this an amazing photograph?

Though I obviously hung on to that issue for this article about wine tourism in Savoie.

(Over the page, their intrepid explorer Kevin Rushby goes looking for wildflowers in Weardale - and very nice, too).

Wales has a Coast Path, it seems; well, I should think so. It has a bilingual website, of course. We never go to Wales, I don't know why. We should...

Why did I save that one? No idea. Next!

Ah, here's Kevin Rushby again, in Yorkshire this time, where Simon Armitage has been carving his poems onto rock faces. Should this sort of high-class cultural graffiti be encouraged in wild places? Don't know. I have a soft spot for graffiti - and a scepticism about the kind of public art that carves poetry on things. Maybe I'd need to visit to find out what I think.

Blue Cabin by the Sea, somewhere totally impractical to stay on the Berwickshire coast - lovely pictures, shame about the website (wouldn't take much to make it function as it's obviously meant to). Or for somewhere totally impractical in the opposite way, how about the house Pugin built for himself in Ramsgate: "The house has a private chapel and a tower, from whose roof Pugin trained his telescope on ships in distress," and which now offers a view of more modern shipping from the freight ferry terminal.

Walking the Rhine gorge

Cycling along the Canal du Midi doesn't sound much fun: the cycling is painful, and the level, tree-lined canal becomes monotonous eventually. But I'd like to see more of the Canal by other means, and the article does suggest some hotels.

The Guardian seems obsessed with bikes: this time it's wine-tasting in Croatia - Istria, to be precise - which sounds good, except for the bit about the bikes. And a couple of days later, more about Croatia, in the news section this time, as they enter the EU.

And that's the last of that pile - but there'll be another supplement in tomorrow's paper (perhaps it won't be very interesting...).