There are a wealth Romanesque churches around here, you could spend days visiting them all. A middle-aged couple renting one of our gites two years ago, spent a full two weeks visiting churches and they hadn’t seen them all before they left.
However, for me a church benefits from being put into “context”. Churches are places of worship and places of music and are best visited when one or other is taking place.After the French Revolution Napolean took over ownership of all the churches. They say it was to remove the links between the church and the state, that logic is lost on me as it seems to increase those links, but who am I? I really think that it was to reduce the power of the church and strangle their financial hold over the community. Interestingly what that means today is that the church no longer has the financial burden of maintaining these ageing buildings but it also no longer has their exclusive use. These two facts combined mean that the local communities have to use the churches to provide income to maintain them. Very beneficial to the many visitors here, as the main use of these beautiful buildings is for concerts. In my humble opinion, there is no better acoustical venue than a church.
I’ve mentioned the “formal” concerts before in this blog and will undoubtedly mention them again when I go to another one, but there are other types of concerts here, the walk-in ones. Visiting a church when music is being played by a musician (as opposed to a tape recorder) adds so much to the atmosphere of the place.Both Chapaize and Brancion have these walk-in concerts and although both churches are worth a visit in their own right live music adds just that little bit extra. Visitors are asked to make a small contribution which they are more likely to do under the watchful eye of the artist and so everyone is a winner!
Every Thursday afternoon in the summer from 17.00 to 18.00 there is an organ recital in the church at Chapaize. The organist Paul Chambers comes up with an interesting selection of organ pieces every year, which he has transcribed to fit the peculiarities of the organ in that church.
It is a very pleasant way to spend an hour or just wander round the church while he is playing, if you want to stop and listen, bring a cushion, the seats are murderous.Most afternoons in the summer from 14.00 until 18.00 Didier Kugel plays the harp either alone or with a flute player or a violinist, in the church in Brancion. Some of the compositions are his own and some are traditional music, but all add a gentle atmosphere to these churches. His music fills the whole place and spills outside so that you can also enjoy his music when you are looking at the stunning views over the valley, it adds a certain “je ne sais quoi” to a visit to Brancion.
For pictures of more churches in the area click here.
We left that exciting story at the point that Poepie, our new lovely white cat with a black tail, had adopted us and had settled into life at La Tuilerie. She had discovered moles and was learning to stalk and catch them, not successful as yet, but she is only young. We have been feeding her, initially we rattled two cans together to attract her attention which worked very well but then we moved over to ringing a lovely Buddhist bell I bought at the Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery (Bright Hill temple) in Singapore. 
At this time of year the stole is green which it is for most of the year. All the clergy wear the same outfits except for their head gear. Orthodox priests wear their traditional hats, not dissimilar to a mitre and Catholic Cardinals wear their red calotte (small cap). This morning in Taizé there were two cardinals which for some reason I always find rather exciting even though I am not a catholic myself.
However, the visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury has been announced, he is coming to Taizé from the 6th to the 9th of August. As the head of the Anglican church his visit is considered to be very prestigious to the Communauté. I have never heard him in a service so I will definitely be there on Sunday the 9th and hopefully he will conduct the service. As an Anglican, that will be for me a very special moment indeed.
As always with Cees being rather deaf, he said I was imagining things, but I was certain I heard something and so I kept looking. It was however another week or so before I saw a beautiful little kitten walking around on top of the lock-up. For several days I watched and I was convinced that there were more than one, but how many I didn’t know. The area is totally inaccessible for us, so we could just climb up and see what was going on. Gradually we realised that we had three kittens, being fed by their mother who went off every day returning to feed them. We went out and bought cat food and put that down for the mother, which she gobbled up every morning. However, we couldn’t get near any of the cats and so they grew up shy of people.
I was thrilled to bits, at last a cat (or four to be precise!), no responsibility regarding days away or holidays (we bought an automatic feeder for those occasions) and none in the house to upset my asthma as they were real outdoor cats. Sadly though Mummy cat left for good one day in July and took the kittens with her trotting behind in a little row (see the photo). Funnily enough after two weeks the kittens came back, three stayed until mid-August when one disappeared, another disappeared at the end of September and the third one last ate from the food on Christmas Eve. Since then no cats. They must have found somewhere warmer to live or somewhere where they got better food.
The other evening, we heard meowing again, just as some campers returned from a walk. They had been followed by a little cat. The cat is very friendly and immediately made herself at home in the shower block of the campsite. Where she comes from we don’t know, but she has adopted us. Since then we have been feeding her and playing with her, I hope she stays, I’ve missed having cats around.
A couple of months ago, the tourist information office approached us to see if we would like to host the so called “vin d’amité” and we were delighted to show off La Tuilerie to a group of walkers. The wine, water, squash and buns arrived in the morning and the walkers duly arrived, almost on time, at half past four. We split the group of twenty walkers into two groups and I gave a guided tour. We do a tour for people who stay in the gites or on the campsite very regularly, so that is not a problem. We have researched how Tuileries worked when ours was in its prime and we know a lot on the subject so we can field most questions with confidence. Before the walkers arrived I was brushing up on my vocabulary and I did my best to give a good story and in the end I was quite pleased with how it went.
If I made a mistake of tense or conjugation of a verb, I was gently corrected but I was a bit thrown by the correction of a word I used. The heart of the tuilerie is the oven and this was filled with the bricks and tiles covered by a layer of lime which partially acted as insulation but it also needed to be “cooked” itself to be used in mortar. The whole oven was heated up to one thousand degrees Celsius. On the second tour around the tuilerie, when I was describing the layer of lime (chaux) I was corrected by one of the walkers and he told that the word I should use was “chaume”. 
Fair enough, they are French, they speak the language better than me. So for the rest of the tour there was a layer of chaume on top of these very hot bricks. We later looked up the words, because both Cees and I were a bit baffled by this correction. We then discovered that chaume is a rather obscure word for straw! So we now have a bunch of French people wandering around telling their friends that a layer of straw was used to top the oven working at one thousand degrees. What was in the guy’s head when he corrected me? Ah well, we’ll know better next time!
Driving through Taizé is almost impossible at this time of year, outside of the church service or activity times, as the whole lot of them swarm over the road. That is not to mention the numerous bus loads of tourists who go to see what it Taizé is. They are greeted by eager, earnest youngsters in the welcome centre who are more than happy to explain what Taizé is all about. They come to look and be amazed at the numbers, they come for the beautiful pottery the monks sell to fund their life in Taizé and they come to attend a service.
The Church of Reconciliation was built with just this idea in mind. The “core” church, remains a church all year long and all day long. According to the number of people who have signed up to attend a week at Taizé, and according to the service (some are more popular than others) the church expands and contracts to make sure that it is always full. The church building is in fact a series of smaller rooms with vertical roller partitions.
During the day these rooms can be used for discussion groups and during the services the rooms disappear and they become part of the church.
It appears from the bumph that the lead oboist is a woodwind teacher at the music school in Montceau-les-Mines and that the bulk of the players were students. The brass section looked too old to be students, which may explain the difference in quality of playing between them and the rest.
asked us if we would do a long weekend. Great for us and just what they wanted! What I am also very impressed with is that they have been analysing the photos and spotted that the large double bed in L’Etable (the gite with the bedroom upstairs) can be converted into two singles (spot the legs!). So even better for them, two single beds and no need to put the son in a blow up bed on the floor. All they had to do was bring their own duvet and hey presto.
After Easter in 2006 we went to Taizé to have a look around and we were amazed at the number of young people milling around. We didn’t go to a service as that seemed inappropriate, with all these kids around it seemed like a young person’s thing. I wanted to go to a service, but I didn’t know how it worked, so I didn’t dare go alone. In July some campers (Ans and Simon) arrived, she had been to Taizé for the first time that spring and wanted to camp nearby to take in a few services and tempt her husband to go too. He however wasn’t interested and she didn’t dare go alone. At last my chance to go to a service, so on a Friday evening Ans and I went up the hill to Taizé.
Sunday morning and it is randonnée time. Every week from mid-April to the end of June and all during September and October, there are organised walks in the area around here. I must say that “organised walks” kind of put me off from trying them, the very thought of having to walk with a bunch of other people didn’t thrill me to bits, but we tried one anyway and now we are hooked. There are basically two types of walk, the ones that are set out and which you walk at your own speed and those where you walk in a group. The groups walks are not our cup-of-tea. You have to walk at the speed of the slowest and you have to stop every time someone wants to pick flowers! The one time we did a group walk, it took us nearly 4 hours to do about 10 km, I was EXHAUSTED, never again.
