Old Friends

Tags

Birthdays, friendship, Theo Wayte

Theo, one of my oldest – in the sense that I’ve known her for ever – friends is having a big birthday today.  As well as getting her an embarrassingly small birthday present because it was easy to post in Bordeaux I got to thinking how very lucky I am in that I still have two very good friends whom I have known from my earliest childhood.

While it’s true that probably the longest relationship I’ll have with anyone in my life is with my brother, who’s four years older than me, (and to that end I wish he’d give up the cigars), my memories of Celestria and Theo go back nearly of far.  In fact they are much clearer than those of my brother.  He was always around so there’s nothing in particular that stands out, whereas I can remember being taken to play with Celestria when I was three.  My first encounter with Theo when we were both four is even clearer.  We’d been to the pantomime in Nottingham and my parents’ car broke down at her uncle’s house.  Theo and I had to share a bed and we had an energetic kicking session.  She won. I fell out.  You don’t forget something like that.

Funnily enough I can’t find a single picture of Theo and me together, there are lots I’ve taken of her and likewise her of me, so we’ll have to make do with this. Even at 9 Theo would have probably done a fair likeness, she’s a brilliant artist, this is about my level artwise – even now.

Theo and I shared a governess for two energetic years – we showed the boys in the village on several occasions that girl power ruled when it came to fighting, and were at the same boarding school for another two.  Luckily for me I was sent to another establishment where you actually learnt something when I was 13.  It wasn’t that long ago but there was still a distinct feeling amongst our parents’ generation that it wasn’t actually necessary for girls to be anything other than decorative.  We’d see each other occasionally in the holidays, usually at teenage parties, picking up from where we’d left off – and it’s been like that ever since.  We travelled out to Australia together when we were 21, having really not socialised much for the couple of years before, but somehow absolutely confident that we be good travelling companions.  Amazingly enough, I don’t remember one row.

We’ve been living in different countries for twenty years now and months can go by with not a lot of communication then a comment on Facebook will lead to one of those telephone calls that leaves the OH shaking his head and wondering what women can find to talk about.  And at such length. It’s the same with Celestria whom I’ve seen even less of over the years as she lives too far away to make quick visits viable when I am in England, even so when we do meet we drop straight back into that instant familiarity that comes from knowing someone for a long time and having a wealth of shared memories.

Of course if it hadn’t been for our parents knowing each other and thinking that we were ‘suitable’ as playmates our friendships would never have got off the ground.  That’s life when you’re four.  But it’s not just propinquity and our parents’ approval that is responsible for our still being friends; I grew apart from and lost interest in my other childhood companions long ago.

I’ve made some wonderful and very good friends as I got older, especially after we moved to France which give the lie to that gloomy shibboleth that you make all your friends by your late twenties; after that they’re acquaintances.  Happily not so for me, and I trust not for others either because life has changed and I doubt many of the younger generation get the chance to make lifelong friends in the way my generation did.  You need total stability for that with everyone’s parents settled in one place so that you don’t form a tight bond over a shared love of The Worst Witch only to find that Mummy or Daddy’s job means they have to move three hundred miles away.  Children today might have much more exciting lives than I did – “creative boredom” could well be the watchword for my childhood – but there are some advantages to the old days.

Still having friends with whom you shared your early childhood is one of them.

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Pottery and Animation

Tags

ceramics, RAMP ceramics, Roop Johnstone

This is incredible and I’m really proud that the so-talented potters are my nephew and his wife.

http://vimeo.com/82012299

This isn’t the pot in the film but an example of the lovely things Alice and Roop do.

 

A Missed Marketing Opportunity?

Tags

Dalmatians, flatulence filtering pants, Shreddies

Apparently the latest retailing sensation is Shreddies.  No, not the cardboard like substance that you eat for breakfast because it’s supposed to be good for you, but pants.  Special pants.  “Flatulence filtering underwear” to be precise.

I can see a problem here, not because the product isn’t needed, it undoubtedly is, especially amongst people like my mother’s third husband whom she married when she was 81 and he was 83.  We often suspected that much of Ronnie’s forward propulsion was due to wind power.  However, are those who need such garments really going to face going into a shop to buy them?  Can you imagine the suppressed sniggers of the sales assistants as you ask for a, ‘Mixed 5 pack.  No, they aren’t for me, you know, a friend asked me to get them…’?

I can see a booming trade in packages in brown envelopes.

And giving your nearest and dearest a three pack of Shreddies is hardly going to get the same delighted response as a beribboned package from Victoria’s Secret, is it?  It would take a brave person to suggest that the contents might come in useful.  If they’d been around after I’d sat next to my mother at the ballet at the Grand Theatre in Bordeaux I might have been tempted, reckoning that the inevitable disinheriting was worth it.  On second thoughts, as she was staying for several more days and I’d have had to cope with a deeply affronted and reproachful parent, I’d probably have bottled out.

Anyway, it seems to me that the inventors of Shreddies have missed the real target market…

Come off it, more often than not, you’re right to do so, especially in this house.  If they came up with a ‘flatulence filtering’ device for dogs (not a cork) which worked on  Dalmatians, I’d be beating a path to their door, waving my credit card.  Right now.  Flynn keeps visiting something particularly noisome in the woods and having a snack, and boy do we know about it…

Luckily he’s my daughter’s dog and sleeps in her room.  She’s a brave girl.

Holiday Snapshots

I’ve just returned from a glorious week in Sicily visiting my eldest daughter who is working in Palermo.  It’s the second time I’ve been and if anything Sicily was even more beautiful and more stunning than my last trip.  And I know that “here are a few of my holiday photos” is enough to send a shiver of dread down anyone’s spine but even so I’m going to inflict a few of my favourite views…

Palermo

Ortigia

Ortigia

Cheers everyone!

 

 

Coming to a garden near you – perhaps

Tags

World Naked Gardening Day

Tomorrow, Saturday May 3rd is the tenth World Naked Gardening Day.

Anything could happen:

All I ask is that nobody share their photographs with me.

Heath and Safety (not) French style.

Tags

health and safety, Pyrenees

Last week my OH and I headed off towards Perpignan, which neither of us had been to before, for a bit of exploring.  We had lunch in a delightful little town on the edge of the Pyrenees – I have no idea what it’s called because it was on the edge of the map on two pages of our French road atlas, the atlas had kind ly overwritten it with ‘See Page …’ in both places.  Afterwards we’d decided to do a leisurely drive through the Pyrenees via the scenic route, a wise choice since we met a ‘Route barré’ sign about 20 minutes out of ‘See Page…’  and discovered that they don’t seem to sign deviation signs in the Pyrenees.

The sun was out, the scenery was stunning and there weren’t any caravans so that was OK.  Presently, after we’d been around and up several mountains, the OH went, ‘Just look at that!’

That was the Chateau de Peyrepertuse, a Cathar castle perched high on the spine of a mountain.  Very high indeed.  The OH got vertigo in the car park and announced he couldn’t go any further.

To be fair the drop in front of where the car was parked was similar to the drop from the castle above.  I left the OH to take pictures while I walked up to the castle, which a sign said would take about 15 minutes.

Peyrepertuse was never a place for softies, the men who lived in it didn’t bother with anything like roads leading up to the main gate.  Instead you got there by a mule track that went around the back of the mountain, probably much like the path that visitors take now, only easier to navigate.  Mules aren’t that stupid.

The present path is about one mule wide, is made of uneven rocks and earth, goes up and down, has the mountain on one side and on the other – let’s put it this way, there are several places where is you tripped you’d find yourself doing a vertical hundred metres in under ten seconds.  There are no rails, no posts, nothing to help you apart from some bushes which were occasionally very necessary.

This was one of the really easy parts

It was quite slippery too.

The castle itself was fascinating but had its – ahem, interesting moments.  I was following la sens de la visite, came out of the keep and was presented with this to get back down to ground level:

I stopped worrying about looking stupid and descended on my bottom.

The French attitude to places like this is that you should look after yourself.  I suppose it works, I doubt anyone has actually fallen over the edge at Peyrepertuse.  Otherwise  I’m sure there would be the odd warning notice with a bit more than the existing one that states the path is unsuitable for pushchairs and the castle is closed during summer storms because of the risk of lightning strikes.

However it is apparently OK for small children and the infirm.  There is a handicappé entrance.  I kid you not.  It’s a ramp which avoids two wooden steps up to the gift shop and ticket office.  Sadly due to his vertigo, the OH, who has a gammy leg, was still in the car park so we weren’t able to put it to the test and see if they’d have sold him an entrance ticket.

It was getting late so I turned down the chance of climbing up to the Chateau du Queribus

it actually had quite a reasonable gravelled path leading up to it but I’d had enough of drops by then.

Of course we didn’t know what was awaiting us at our chambre d’hotes.

We didn’t get off to a good start.  It had an electric gate, no bell and Madame had switched her mobile off.  Luckily someone living in one of the mobile homes scattered over the property (certainly not visible in the brochure) arrived and let us in.  Madame emerged, full of apologies.

‘Is your husband all right with stairs?’ asked Madame’s daughter, who’d noticed he has a limp.

‘Perfectly,’ I said breezily.

‘Good,’ she said, ‘because you’re up there-‘

‘We did have a rail along the outside but it broke,’  she added cheerfully.  What she didn’t say was the rail on the other side was also cracked and wobbled atrociously if you put any weight on it.

We made it to our room and found it had this-

directly opposite the bed.  The curtain didn’t have an opaque lining either so you had to use the facilities without turning the light on; otherwise whoever was lying on the bed, reading a book, got to see a lot more than they wanted.

We’d thought about having one of those flying loos when we were doing up the house but the OH, who is 6’2″ and not fat but built on a Viking scale, said that he’d always be worried about whether it could bear his weight properly.  This one was set so high up the wall that when I discreetly left him alone after breakfast his feet didn’t touch the ground properly.

There was a general systems failure.

If Madame and the rest of her family hadn’t been so utterly charming we’d have felt justifiied in slapping warnings all over Tripadvisor and the like, but they were delightful and it would be just mean.  So I suppose there’ll be other visitors experiencing the delights of that staircase after an excellent fish dinner and half a bottle of wine… at least it’ll give them more to talk about than when they stayed in a Mercure with a fully functioing lift

Happy Christmas.

 

Kitten 1, Dog Nil..

Catching grasshoppers gets soooo boring.

Tours and Tourists

Tags

Amboise, Chenonceau, photography, tourists, Tours

Last week my daughter had an interview in Le Mans.  She drives but hasn’t had much motorway experience and since a five hour motorway drive probably isn’t the best preparation for an interview I offered to drive her.  Before my halo starts to dazzle all and sundry, I fancied spending a night in Tours, which I’d only ever driven through hurrying to or from Calais, and visiting one or two of the Loire châteaux.

The old part of Tours is very pretty and deserves a much longer visit.  I had no idea there was such a thing as an official list of Les Arbres Remarquable de France, but there is, and one of them is a magnificent cedar in the garden of the Musée des Beaux Arts.  The cathedral alone justifies a visit to Tours, it’s a beautiful gothic structure with a stunning facade and beautiful stained glass windows.  How so much 13th century glass survived the revolution and various wars, heaven only knows, but what really took my breath away was the Rose window described somewhat snottily as ‘dating from 200 years later than the windows in the sanctury.”  OK, so it’s a mere 600 years old but with the setting sun coming through it, it was fabulous.  

We also lost our hearts to this  tomb for the children of Charles VIII and Anne de Bretagne:The next day was spent visiting Châteaux des Amboise and Chenonceau – both gorgeous and both crowded, especially Chenonceau which we went to in the afternoon.

I appreciate that these châteaux cost a fortune to maintain and they need lots of visitors and their entrance fees to keep them going, but, at the risk of sounding like Mrs Grumpy I’ve got to ask, Why do so many of the visitors bring young children with them?  I’ve got children, they were young once, and we went to all sorts of places.  Places I thought all of us would enjoy; the Natural History and Science museums, animal parks and gardens, ruins and woods, I don’t think any of them were dragged around to look at houses, picture galleries or historical interiors until they were at least eight or nine because they’d have been profoundly uninterested.  And an uninterested child is usually a pain in the neck – to their parents and to a lot of the people around them.

At Chenonceau there were children in pushchairs who were being carried up to the first and second floors, while their only slightly older brothers and sisters plodded behind.  They weren’t enjoying themselves, their parents looked at the end of their tethers, it was stinking hot and more than one fractious quarrel between small siblings broke out. You couldn’t help thinking that their parents would have had a much nicer time if they’d taken it in turns to entertain the children in the child-friendly grounds while the other had a look around on their own.

Fair enough, sometimes children do have to tag along with their parents; what got this Mrs Grumpy really hot under her collar were the photographers.  Every viewpoint has a crowd standing there and fiddling with a camera with an extremelylong lens for ages, you get the feeling that some people have lost the ability to see anything with their eyes, they can only view through a camera.  In the cathedral in Tours there were people walking in and up the aisle with their cameras pressed to their faces, clicking away, never stopping to gaze, to admire, to wonder, to be moved; just press, click, frame the next shot.

Chenonceau is famous for the gallery that straddles the river Cher –

and on the far side it opens onto a lovely shady walk along the river.  For the first fifty metres the path was crowded with tourists snapping away, after that there was literally no-one. No-one who felt like seeing the Château from a distance, no-one who thought the woods were part of the experience of the visit, no-one who was simply enjoying the pleasure of walking by a river on a beautiful day.  All they wanted was to take their photos; depressingly you also know that no matter how long the lens was, most of them probably weren’t that good anyway.

The final straw was coming down a narrow stone staircase from the second floor which was only just wide enough to allow two streams of people going in both directions.  A man had stopped on the second step, blocking the way completely, and was focusing his camera on the very ordinary stone ceiling.  I snarled to my daughter, not very sotto voce, ‘Why doesn’t he buy an effing postcard?’  He must have been or understood English for the camera disappeared immediately.

Result!  But not the best one.

My daughter got the job.

No Thank You Very Much.

Tags

school days, School reunions, sleepovers

My former school is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary.  There was a cocktail party ten years ago for its fortieth, which I didn’t go to, and a ball for its something or other.  I didn’t go to that either.  The only times I’ve been back there since I left (a long time ago) was for a reunion which I was dragged to by one of my friends where I didn’t recognise anyone – literally, I’d expunged my schooldays so successfully from my memory that names didn’t ring a bell let alone faces – and when I visited the school as a putative parent.  I got a lot of enjoyment from the amount of fawning over dished out to an Old Girl with three daughters, especially as I’d been distinctly a lower form of pond life in a big pool when I was a school girl.

I wasn’t a success at school.  Not all of that was my fault; I was hopelessly ill-equipped to go to boarding school aged 11.  I’d been educated at home by a governess – my father didn’t see why girls needed to go to school, I’m the youngest and the only girl in the family so I had a vocabulary of someone much older because I spent so much time with adults, we lived on the edge of a village so I was alone a lot of the time, I didn’t even have someone to share my lessons until I was nine and I didn’t belong to the brownies or the Pony Club so basically I had no idea of what girls en masse were like and no social skills for behaving within groups.  And as if I didn’t stand out enough from the crowd already I was also 5 foot 4 inches tall aged just 11, 5 foot 9 1/2 at 13 (luckily I only grew another half inch after that).

If I’d been good at sports I suppose I might have redeemed myself and become one of the marginally popular ones, but I was the one whom in the inter-group netball match didn’t get on the team list at all.  There were 7 players, three reserves and a substitute.  There were 12 in our group…

It wasn’t all bad, I wasn’t bullied, generally just ignored and considered a bit “odd”.  I made a couple of very good friends, both are still close friends, and we spent wonderful long introspective hours discussing ourselves and what we might become or sneaking illegally into the music rooms to play Leonard Cohen and analyse the meaning behind his lyrics.  All the same I got out of there as soon as I could and went to a day school in London to do A levels, feeling very content indeed to put boarding school days behind me.

Then the invitation for the 50th turns up.    It’s for a sleepover.  A sleepover, I kid you not.  You get to relive your school days with a night in a dormitory, you can ask to be put in with certain girls like they used to when I was there and we’ve been promised that there’ll even be the cocoa trolley for a hot drink before lights out (admittedly at 11pm rather than 8.30 as we used to have it).

Amazingly enough, quite a few old girls have already signed up for this form of torture.  What if no-one wanted you in their dormy and you had to settle for the ignominious shame of a single study bedroom (so desirable at one time)?  Or that you found you were the last one in and had been allocated the top bunk in the draughty place by the door which you weren’t even sure you could climb up to any longer?  And when I’m in my last hours I can’t imagine I’ll be thinking, ‘If only I could have one more cup of that cocoa from the trolley, it was really nice that they made sure it wasn’t too strong with lots of water and that thick skin was so delicious.’  Then,  in the morning there’s going to be a rounders match…

At the beginning of this year I made a resolution to push myself and do things I wouldn’t normally but some things are just too much.  Sorry ladies, this is one invitation I find all too easy to refuse.