News from Nowhere

I thought I had written about the food fair in Bishop Auckland, but maybe not. Ah, well. Anyway, one of the things I bought there was some stewing veal, and yesterday I took it out of the freezer and made a blanquette de veau. It's a dish I haven't made in a long time (I don't manage to buy veal very often) and I was pleased with how it came out, the sauce all lemony and buttery, the meat sweet and tender. Since it's classic old fashioned French cuisine, I wanted a classic French wine to drink with it, and chose a bottle that we had bought at the Maison des Vins in Gaillac: the Domaine Philémon Perlé (information about the producer in English, and I wish I'd known about their Jurançon Noir, I don't remember seeing that). My only hesitation was that it might be too light, and I'm glad I didn't check the website which recommends serving it as an aperitif or with fish, or I might have been dissuaded from serving it with the veal. It was light and fresh, and the almost-fizz indicated by the name 'Perlé' accentuated that, but it had enough flavour, a good balance of fruit and acidity, to go well with the veal and its sauce.

Sometimes I wish I had asked the internet before deciding which wine to serve with what. D. brought us a bottle of Brana's Harri Gorri, which was particularly welcome as we had not been very successful in buying Irouléguy when we were there (short version: the domain we wanted to buy from was harvesting on the day we called, and too busy to sell; the local supermarket doesn't sell local wine and the Cave Co-op's wines are unimpressive. We bought some, but grudgingly). Harri Gorri (can't say that name too often) is much more elegant than we are accustomed to in an Irouléguy (I don't know how it manages that when it's 50% tannat, but it does), and would have been much happier with the following night's lamb stew, as the Wine Society's website suggests, than with whatever I served it with (don't remember). Then again, the Brana website says serve with game or grilled meat, which suggests something chunkier. It also uses the word "empyreumatique" which was new to me, and I had to look it up (show-off winespeak for the toasty flavours associated with oak, it says here).

One more bottle of Basque wine, this one from the other side of the Pyrenees, On the last day of our holiday we had made the most of our last chance to stock up at a Spanish supermarket. Choosing a last few bottles of wine with no better guidance than whether I liked the label, I picked an elegant little bottle of Beldui txacoli. All the text on the label was in Basque, so there were no clues about how to serve it. Eventually I opened the bottle and tasted it. At cellar temperature it was a little flat, almost musty, and I opened a bottle of red to drink with the chicken. But served chilled to accompany cheese and grapes for dessert, the txacoli's dullness was transformed into a subtle oxidation, an almost sherry-like edge. So that was all right. And oh, look, you can visit the vineyard...

After our diversion to Gaillac, we returned to the motorway towards Pau, our next destination. Having successfully negotiated the Toulouse ring road, we felt entitled to leave the motorway in search of lunch, so we headed into the next town we came to, which happened to be Muret. Parked, strolled up and down the street considering the options, and settled for Chez Fanny, on a noisy corner by the bridge, giving its pavement tables a fine view of the traffic, the building works, the lethal motorcycles.

The establishment had an old-fashioned vibe: the menu was decorated with stills from the 1932 film. It was old-fashioned enough that when we had finished our first course:



our server, clearing the plates, returned the cutlery to us to eat our main course - in my case, andouillette de canard, accompanied by flat disks of potato and (very well-done, but still tasty) sprouts, the first of the season.

At the next table, between us an the traffic, were two smartly dressed young men: you can just see one of them in the corner of the photo. One sprawled at his ease, talking intently to his phone, while his companion methodically demolished a café gourmand, coffee and three not-so-mini desserts.

Meanwhile, in the background music, a sweet-voiced woman tackled some classic tracks. I was a bit startled to realise she was now singing:

Please allow me to introduce myself:
I'm a man of wealth and fame...

And now for something completely different: a holiday post to cheer me up, featuring sunshine, a town which values its historic buildings (including at least one really successful integration of new and old), old buildings which it is not my responsibility to maintain...

( A walk round Figeac, with lots of photos )

I've been posting about last summer's holiday in France all out of order, as it suited me. Time to pick up the threads, and progress a little. Where were we?

We spent two very happy days in Bordeaux, Sunday and Monday. On Tuesday we set off to our rendezvous with Helen, and ran into the transhumance in Saint Justin en route. Wednesday was the day we spent as guests of the Producteurs de Plaimont, learning about the wines of southwest France.

Thursday morning was fresh, bright and clear, and we could see the Pyrenees in the distance as we set off from the Relais du Bastidou. We weren't going that way, yet. Our schedule had brought us further south faster than we would otherwise have travelled; now we wanted to double back, to visit the wines of the Côtes de Brulhois, and maybe of Cahors, too. But first, we wanted to shop for some of the wines we had tasted the previous day. The Cave de Plaisance didn't stock Moonseng, but they did have, newly arrived, partly fermented grape juice from the current harvest ('bourrel?', say my notes, but I can't verify that name), pale and slightly cloudy, sweet but not cloying.

We drove along a ridge road between two green valleys, seeing no vines - but as we rose higher, so did the distant mountains. A signpost pointed to Bassoues reminded us that we had passed this way several times the previous day, so we detoured up to the hilltop village and admired its timber market hall, its quince trees, its 'donjon':



At the time it was a delightful morning's break, one last pleasure offered by a region we were about to leave. In retrospect, it was only the first of a series of beautiful old villages, any one of which would have been an extraordinary survival.

After the previous day's excesses, I wasn't expecting to want much for lunch, but the Routard guide recommended a restaurant, Le Florida in Verduzan, which was pretty much on our way. That recommendation alone was worth the price of the guide book.

( Lunch break )

And onwards, through the sunflower aftermath, the single plants self-seeded after the harvest, multiple flowers branching exuberant from the stalk, unconstrained by whatever limits the main crop to a single flat disk per tall stem. A brief stop at the Cave de Donzac, and on to La Borde Grande for the night.

By rights, the next holiday post ought to be about our second day in Bordeaux. But we drank a bottle of Gaillac the other night, and enjoyed it, and wanted to make a note of it, so here's a brief post about Gaillac instead.

It was the briefest of visits: durham_rambler has good memories of a walking holiday in the region, and when he saw how close we would pass on our way from A to B (Figeac to Pau, in fact, but that's another story) he demanded a detour to buy some wine. Gaillac has a Maison des Vins, an organisation whose function is to promote the wine produced locally. You'd think this would be usual in a wine-producing area, but no, and it can be quite difficult to get a general idea of what is available: Irouléguy, I am looking at you. In Gaillac you head for the former Abbey of Saint Michel: it's very central, by the river, which is just as well, because the roads into town were busy, and some streets were closed - I was distracted by the site of a tanker parked outside one wine shop, blazoned with the description 'liquide alimentaire' - but we found the abbey (it's quite a landmark) and parking right across the way. Inside, we mooched around and looked at bottles and tried to guess from the labels what we would like - and there were some wines on offer for tasting, too.

I don't think we tasted the Mas de Grouze (it was this one, in fact, although ours was the 2012). So it must have been just luck. I'd have been attracted by the presence of local grapes (braucol and duras) alongside the usual suspects (syrah, merlot and cabernet sauvignon), and the price (5€) made it worth a try - though by this stage I was more concerned about where we would pack all these bottles!

durham_rambler didn't think this would be a problem, so I left him to sort it out, and dived into the secondhand bookshop which was having a clearance sale: everything was 60% off, but as soon as you started to look the staff rushed up and warned you not to move anything. This was unnerving, but I still bought several very large and very cheap picture books. And there was enough of our two hours parking left for a quick stroll around town (which was mainly closed, because it was Monday.



Gaillac was the first place we had seen these pink umbrellas (a regional promotion about screening for breast cancer) and they looked particularly well against the red brick of which the old town is built. We could have stayed a lot longer, but we had to move on. Just one more photo:

Given the warnings about rough weather in the Bay of Biscay on the day we were to sail home from Bilbao, we both took seasickness tablets (warning: may cause drowsiness) and, whether for this or other reasons, both dozed through much of the day, in our little cabin full of sunshine.

Our last day in Spain had been heavy and overcast, but naturally the sun came out to let us know what we were leaving behind; we reached Portsmouth under grey skies, and a fine drizzle - ah, England! We spent the morning visiting the Mary Rose in Portsmoth's Historic Dockyard - and stayed altogether too long, and could happily have lingered all day. The museum has conventional galleries displaying a veriety of finds, but the most interesting part is divided in two by a stack of walkways, with windows on one side showing individual areas of the ship, complete with their contents: guns, a great stack of rope, the surgeon's cabin with his chest and jars of who knows what mixtures and remedies. On the other side, openings look out onto the great space of the ship's carcass, her timbers and decks run through with the great snakes of the conservation process - because thirty-odd years since the Mary Rose was raised from the seabed, conservation is still a work in progress, and by the next time we visit Portsmouth will have moved on to the next stage.

After this, the long drive home. Autumn has definitely arrived, and some of the foliage colours lit a flame on the motorway borders; the timing and the clouds conspired to give us a lingering sunset all the way up through Derbyshire and into Yorkshire, rosy and undramatic. Signs threatened a road closure because of floods, but by the time we reached it, the road was open again, so we abandoned our planned diversion and ploughed on into the roadworks. Oh, well...

And now we're home, doing autumnal things: Durham is buzzing with students (every night is party night), there are pumpkins in the shops, and it is Book Festival time. Both suitcases are unpacked and put away, and I can get the lid on the laundry basket. Excelsior!

We spent a wonderful day last week in the company of of our friend, wine-writer Helen Savage, as guests of the Producteurs de Plaimont wine co-operative.

( Cut for length, wine neepery and the odd picture. )

We continue to enjoy ourselves visiting and revisiting south-west France. I haven't posted for a day or so for a series of reasons: inconvenience of internet, being caught up in a long post which is still a work in progress, or just doing other things. But I couldn't resist sharing this view from our hotel window:



We put in some serious motorway driving today, and relocated to Pau, within sight of the Pyrenees. I cannot believe how central our hotel is, overlooking the place Clemenceau with all the fountains (and the underground car park, where we have stashed our car).

And that's all I have to say right now.

For the last two days karinmollberg has been shepherding us around Bordeaux, showing us her list of things worth seeing, being patient with us when we dashed off down side streets or into shops or down holes in the ground - and when I lagged behind because I had stopped to take a photograph, which was often. I've had a wonderful time, culminating in a gourmet dinner with fireworks, and I look forward to writing all about it with many, many photos. But I think that will have to wait until I have more bandwidth, and better picture-editing software.

While we're waiting, have a book post. I have been reading Sisters of Fortune by Frances McNeil, which will be reissued next summer as Halfpenny Dreams by Frances Brody (the name under which Frances publishes her Kate Shackleton murder mysteries).

Frances is a friend and a client: here's the page I made about the forthcoming reissues for her website. She was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the original edition because I enjoy her writing, so this isn't going to be an unbiaised review. But I wanted to write about the book, because it was such a great read and because I think it deserves a signal boost.

If you followed those links, you'll see that it's being marketed as a saga, a genre which has its readers but probably meets even more snobbery than the crime and F&SF which are my genre staples. It is not a multigenerational family history, it is not sentimental and although it is set in the past (the 1930s) it treats the period with a sharp-eyed sense of history, of how things worked and how people felt about that.

It follows the lives of two girls, who are not in fact sisters. Each of them could be described as a 'daughter of the Bank' Lydia because her mother abandons a repertory theatre company to marry the owner of Thackrey's Bank, Sophie because she lives in the slums of Leeds's Bank district. Their lives too are overshadowed by Thackrey's Bank. Lydia and Rosa narrate alternate chapters, at first as children and then as spirited young women. If you are looking for books with strong female characters in a historical setting, this one is full of them: not only Lydia and Sophie, and her sister Rosa, but Lydia's actress mother Phoebe and her friend Ada, May who runs a second hand shop, even walk-on parts like Rosa's friend Fenella.

Terrible things happen to both Lydia and Sophie, and they are not brushed off lightly. But there's so much verve and so much life in the telling, that the result is not grim and dark. If anything, the sequence of events, one blow after another and the heroines' response to them, has the heightened colour of melodrama - in a good way.

If we must classify books into genres, I can see why both publishers felt that the depiction of life at a certain place and time would appeal to saga readers. If you aren't one of those, consider it as a novel - or maybe a historical novel. But given the strength of characterisation of team Sophie and Lydia, I wonder whether Piatkus considered targeting the Young Adult market - I think it could have great appeal there, too.

It's a long time since we visited the Mont Saint Michel, and there have been changes in the interim: not on the Mont itself, but in the way you approach it. I had heard about this, and assumed it was all about relieving the pressure of ridiculous numbers of visitors, but there is more to it than that: the old causeway had been creating a build-up of silt in the bay, which was supporting the spread of vegetation and stabilising the resulting terrain. At this rate the Mont would soon cease to be an island.

So now you park well inland, and either take a free shuttle bus or walk or pay to ride the horse drawn shuttle (they have a name for this, but I've forgotten it). We walked the mile or so, along a track bordered with a forest of fennel, then detoured to admire the dam which regulates the flow of the river Couesnon to clear the sediment from the bay, and incidentally provides a new viewpoint of the Mont rising above the waters of the Couesnon. From here it's an agreeable walk along the causeway, with plenty of photo opportunities as the walkway curves round in the foreground, and the sun comes and goes on the face of the abbey.



What you can't see in this photo is the young woman who rushed past us, wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and waving her selfie stick, so that she could take a similar shot, but with herself and her friends in front of it.

We walked up the central street, as thronged with tourists and crammed with things for them to buy as it was when we first visited, and presumably for eight centuries before that. We didn't go into the abbey, but veered off at that level for a walk around the ramparts, lost ourselves in a quiet corner but found the way back down to the main drag through an alley that narrowed to such an extent that we took the last ten yards or so sideways. We picked one of the tourist-trap restaurants for lunch, and were impressed to find it skilled at delivering exactly what it promised, a classic 'formule brasserie' served by three tall thin waiters with speed, precision and charm. durham_rambler had moules marinières, and pronounced them acceptable; I had the omelette du Mont, as described by Elizabeth David, cooked firm and dry outside, but all soft foam of whipped egg within. This is more palatable than the conventional, runny omelette but sorry, desperance, I still prefer my omelettes cooked through.

Time to move on. We've spent all afternoon on the road, heading south. Memorable in a bad way: the Nantes ring road. Hitting it at five o' clock on Friday didn't help, but it was a slow and painful circuit, with only one highlight, the first sighting of a vineyard this trip. Memorable in a good way: after a shower, driving through the edges of the Vendée accompanied by rainbows: full arches, almost horizontal swathes high in the clouds, bright little stubs, hazy remnants, double bows, one stretch that seemed wide enough to work through the statutory seven colours and start again...

We are spending the night at the Hôtel au Marais in Coulon, near Niort, and very happy to be here.