The last two weeks

Wow, it is Sunday 1st september and I cannot believe that time has gone so quickly - this time next week I shall be in if not my bed in my house.

The Saturday before my cousins arrived I attended a guitar concert at La Fontenelle - can't say I've ever been a particular fan of the guitar but I am of La Fontenelle and hence I attended. Met some interesting people, mostly Brits. The next day was a get together for the whole village, i.e. La Revenuais, to which I was invited, We all sat on a long table, there was much drinking and laughter. I spoke with a lady whose name is I think Josiane who is a foster parent. The foster children were stitting next to me and one of them, a very young 12, I got talking to and introduced her to my dogs.

Actually this poor little girl was being rather ignored, so I played with her for a bit first with the dogs and then at some board game involving numbers. I left about 7, but as someone pointed out to me the French really love partying and indeed the party went on until midnight, as when the French party they party. She came to see me later that night complaining of boredom and the unselfish thing would have been to play with her for longer.

She visited me the following day with a young companion, a delightful boy called Farid (8) who said he was from Morocca and like Alison, from the ASE, the organization that helps children who have been relieved from their parents. They played with the dogs and were very good. I do hope they are well looked after.


Actually I was out of sequence, because this happened the weekend before my cousins arrived; after they left I went down with a stomach bug (no connection!) on Saturday and rather in dread that i would not be well enough to cope with the next influx of visitors.

However, I was better by Sunday and pleased to see them when they rolled up at lunch time, although they were shaken at having lost three of their cats to Jan's ex via the rather violent behaviour of Craig, Jan's son in law.

On Tuesday, I had to go out early to fetch Miranda from St Malo, so I suggested to Jan and Cathy that they go and explore Fougeres, which they did, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The rest of the time, we made a couple of trips - first to Vitre, and then a whole day trip to Dol de Bretagne, followed by Combourg.

Dol has a lovely cathedral which is very gothic inside and out, with some beautiful carvings and stained glass.

Between Dol and Combourg, we stopped at a rather delightful standing stone (they are called menhirs in this part of the world) which was very talle, very phallic and very surrounded by maize fields.

Dol and Vitre are quite similar in that they are delightful small towns with a medieval centre and fine buildings, a castle at Vitre and a cathedral at Dol. My favourite, though, is Combourg, which is smaller than the other two towns and dominated by a castle dating from the middle ages, but with associations with Chateaubriand, the father of romanticism.

Chateaubriand, the author of Les Memoires D'Outre Tombe, lived at the château as a child; most of his family seem to have died in the French revolution but he conveniently was abroad at the time. He hated the château, mainly because of his very strict father who would spend his evenings pacing about the long gallery whilst insisting that his children remained silent.

There is also a story of a ghost who went about with his cat, when the latter's skeleton was recovered, the ghost was reported to spend his nocturnal wanderings looking for the cat. Poor Chateaubriand and his siblings were sent to bed in rooms as far apart from one another as possible (and very possible in such a large château). Because of the ghost(s), their evening ritual involved searches of all surrounding drapery to ensure that the ghosts had not temporarily occupied their rooms.

Combourg is a very pretty little town, smaller than the other two, and had the distinction of being the birthplace of Honda as well as Romanticism.

Combourg has wonderful views over the surrounding countryside, as is seen in these photos:

Cathy, Jan, Miranda - and dogs - and I spent some lovely evenings sitting out on my terrace eating dinner - as you can see, Honda enjoyed this relaxed atmosphere.

Honda thinks socializing is a thoroughly good thing, especially if she can have some of the food.

She also enjoys just relaxing a deux

Jan and Cathy left in a flurry on the Friday, leaving behind a map which they had brought at Combourg showing Welsh bishops or something. I am supposed to encase this in a cylindrical tube, something i'm not sure I can quite acheive this side of the channel.

Miranda and I made one more excursion, to the Château de Rochers Sevigne, where the extraordinary 17th century writer Mme de Sevigne lived after her husband died in a duel over who was to become mistress of another woman. She wrote beautiful letters to her daughter which were posthumously published. You can only see about one room of the castle which seemed a bit shabby and was approached up some back stairs.  The chapel does not really match the house, being a bit overly flamboyant Baroque, rather giving the impression that they didn't know how to furnish it and so just put in lots of gold and silver and pictures of people swirlng up to heaven.

The gardens, designed by Le Notre, were beautiful and very symetrical.  All the other participants of the guided tour and us ended up in the tea place, and we had a nice conversation in French.

The cousins

Just spent the last three days with my cousin Ann snd her son David, my godson. Ann is my cousin on my father's side (her father was a radiologist, my father's brother), David is her son born just after the death of my first husband. I remember him as a slightly shy, definitely geeky young man who had trouble at university, where I, by the nature of my academic background, naturally encouraged him, but goodness, how he has matured now as a thirty something young man. He is highly intelligent and able to converse on a wide range of subjects, whilst also being very polite and considerate. His main interests apart from his work are music and especially cordon bleu cookery. He is a réal foodie, which makes cooking for him quite a task!

I survived that with a few good-tasting but bad-looking recèpes; I think that the most disastrous was giving them a gallette that broke. (Gallettes are a wonderful Brittany culinary invention: a very thin, buckwheat pancake which can, it seems, include almost anything but is best with egg and bacon (anyone quessed the British influence?) I have had it served to me with the aforesaid ingredients cold, but the pancake beautifully neatly folded; by myself, again with aforesaid ingredients, when the gallete was warm, broken and all tasted very good.

Ann and David came with me to Fougeres and Dinan; in Fougeres, we went to the castle and although it was my third visit, this time I really fell under its spell. They make extensive use of multimédia; there is a preliminary film which sets the picture as far as the land of the marches goes, and various of the towers have their own animation of the lives of the people who lived there, including Melusine, who rather mysteriously seems to have acquired a drangon's tail, which must have put the dampeners on her wedding night but a least made it easier to get away. After that, we repaired up town for lunch, anc then walked down through the public gardens to the château.

Fougeres, if she were a woman, whould have lovely haïr from the back, but a common face seen from the front, or some other combination of very obvious good and very obvious bad features. As you approach it from the west, you drive through the suburb of Lecousse and through a coupls of big roundabout, from where you see one side of the town rising up on a very steep bluff. The vision, as you come up the the first view of the town proper, is of a wall of houses not so much jostling together for space but rather elbowing one another for precedence. It reminded me of some other places where geography and architecture match - San Gimigniano in Northern Italy for example,or Matera in the south.

Go over the hill into the town centre, where you are still in the town centre but the tourist signs have run out, it's a different matter. Roads with concrete post-war buildings accompany graceless streets all of which seem to run into the Place de la Republique, which once prèsumably had fine buildings but now they seem mostly municipal, there is the odd shop and ubiquitous estate agent.

Dinan was also a success, althpugh I could not persuade them to get into any of the muséums. By finding the ramparts and the way down to the river Rance we were able to get a better view of the town:

It's so sweet to see the stone buildings crowd up to one another, down a veritable mish-mash of tiny alleys with just enough room to through your dirty water on the ground, and certainly not enough to let a car pass through. Not to mention the beautify beamed facades of some of the buildings, seen here left.

We had a very nice meal of moules and chips for me (too much); lingustinse for the others. I am reliably informed that they are delicious but I like my food easily accessible.

On the way back, we looked at Combourg, another pretty town which is the birthpace of Honda, here seen trying to launch a raid on the food.

It's more réal claim to faim is the writer Chateaubriant, who had connections with the castle, which was owned by his family. By the 16th century, when I believe the castle was built, even though Europe was still a dangerous place with wars stoked with the flames of religion, which as we all know makes war even more horrible.

However, they seem to have grown a bit more sanguine about being attacked, and you don't see the kind of fortifications you do for earlier castels, involving different spaces for massing the troops, arrow slits, and of course a moat and drawbridge. According to the ads, it actually seemed to have a number of rooms which looked as though they had been preserved as if someone could life in them. This I guess is more my kind of castle: I like to see how people lived, and it's difficult if you are in a place devoid of furniture and décorations.

Neither Ann nor David, however, showed much interest in going inside and it was late, so we just wandered through the gardens, with me looking forward to seeing the house, with its Chateaubriand association.

The following day, David being asked what he wanted to do opted for a long walk of 13k which I was not sure I would be able to do because of the length, and handling Honda, who actually proved herself surprisingly good in the évent. David made clear to us that there were two points at which we could shorten the walk.

The walk was mostly across agricultural lands, field with hedgerows and small patches of woodland, and the paths turned out to be extremely narrow between the wired off field (in some cases electrically so) and the hedgerow, which was sometimes overgrown with brambles. It was a great irritation to the dogs, who could not understand why we couldn't walk on perfectly good ground the other side of the wire fence

We went through some very pretty woods, walked a bit further, had lunch, walked on, right into some bog which we could not avoid, after which David, who led mountain walking trips in Manchester, showed his leadership skills by curtailing the walk so we finished on the road.

Altogether it was a very pleasant visit, and one that enabled me to get to know, and admire, my godson for the person he has become.