Cormatin, near Taizé & Cluny in South Burgundy

Bingo and Bugnes

2012-02-01T10:15:00.000+01:00

This weekend was the annual bingo weekend in Cormatin. The Saturday is the day we play all the “external” cards (a BIG thank you to everyone who contributed by buying cards from us) and Sunday is the day of the real bingo, when more than a hundred people, who travel from near and far, come to play for some very nice prizes. It is a big event financially for our little club and one we needed to be a success as our finances are getting quite precarious.

We have had an unusually warm January this year with no snow and precious little frost (only 7 days as opposed to the usual 25), so imagine our thoughts when we awoke on Sunday morning to see it was snowing. Are the weather gods out to destroy our club ? How many people were going to turn up for the bingo if it was snowing ? The prizes cost about 1,700 Euros, the ladies had spent all Saturday afternoon making 1,000 bugnes (small deep fried doughy things, a speciality of Lyon), so you can just imagine how much money we stood to lose. Memories of the October organised walk ran through my mind. Just to remind you of that dreadful event: the day of the walk was the only rainy day in October and instead of 300 people coming as usual, only 23 turned up, which meant we made a huge loss.

Anyway, we took all the prizes over to the bingo hall in the morning as planned and crossed our fingers as the sky went very dark. Fortunately, in the end, the bingo addicts did turn up, not as many as last year, probably only about 90, but we made a healthy profit over the whole weekend.

Interestingly one of the big success stories was the bugnes that we had made. They sold like hot cakes and by the second pause we had run out. All thousand of them went and people kept coming back for more. They actually contributed 50 of the 750 Euros profit we made during the weekend, not bad for a lump of dough !

Michèle our Bugnes Baroness from Lyon has kindly given me the recipe for me to share with you all. Try them covered in lots of icing sugar, the more the better.

For roughly 300 bugnes.
1 kg flour
8 eggs
150g melted butter
120g castor sugar
4 ½ sachets of baking powder (approx 45 grams)
3 sachets of vanilla sugar (20 – 25 grams)
2 pinches of salt
small glass of rum
milk

Mix all ingredients except the milk together, then add milk, whilst kneading, until the whole mix makes a firm, but flexible homogenous ball. Leave the mix overnight at room temperature, in a bowl covered with a tea towel. You will then have a sticky and difficult to handle blobby mix.

Flour a kitchen surface generously and break off about a quarter of the mix and roll it in the flour until you can handle the mix enough to roll it out. Roll it out until it is about 2 – 3 mm thick. Then using a pastry cutter, cut the pastry into diamonds about 8cm long by about 2 cm wide and roll the cutter down the middle of the diamond to cut a hole in the middle.

Deep fry in hot oil until they are golden brown. If they don’t puff up pretty quickly the oil is too cool and if they go brown quickly the oil is too hot.

Let them drain on kitchen paper and serve covered in icing sugar. They can be kept until the next day after frying if required, but if you do that, make sure they are not stacked too densely otherwise they will go a bit soggy.

Now doesn't that punnet look rather yummy? Enjoy !

La Tuilerie Website

The Deed Is Done

2012-01-21T17:40:00.001+01:00

We knew it was going to happen, but it still came as a sad surprise on Thursday when we were travelling in the car to the post office (an unenviable task at the best of times) and we were greeted in Chazelle by men with screwdrivers putting a road name on the wall of a house. They told us that they were on their way and would be at La Tuilerie any minute.

Cees walked home despondently and I went on to the post office with a heavy heart as I knew I would have no time to say goodbye to our beautiful plain concrete gate post.

The men turned up and proceeded to measure and drill and screw and now it is official, we have been “Numbered”.

By the way, please note it took four men to put the number 10 on our gatepost: one to hold, one to drill, one to watch and one to take photos.

Despite my reservations though, they have done a nice job and it does look quite smart I suppose.

Click here for 10 Route de Chazeux Website. Doesn’t have the same ring about it as La Tuilerie, does it ?

Again : a call for help

2012-01-13T15:25:00.000+01:00

This is a copy of Cees' blog, if any of you feel like helping please let us know, a big thank you in advance!

Just like last year we received a number of bingo (or loto) cards from the Amicale de Cormatin, which we were asked to sell. The proceeds of these cards are used to finance the yearly dinner for the aged of Cormatin (April) and for Christmas presents for all kids in Cormatin between 0 and 10 years old.

At the beginning of 2011 I placed a call for help in my blog, begging my readers to donate something to this fund raising event. I got quite a few positive reactions, and we managed to sell our 40 cards quickly to some expats and friends around here, to some guests who stayed previously on the campsite or in the gites and to friends and family abroad (the second prize fell on one of our cards!)

Because over time we have gathered some more friends and acquaintances among the French population of Cormatin, we made the rounds in Cormatin and environs, and we managed to sell all our 40 cards in no time. No call for help on my blog or on Facebook required, or so it seemed...

Until Sue spoke to some less pro-active Amicale members; they had been “unable to sell any cards at all”, and on top of that they possessed a box with more than 60 unsold cards! She will be on the road this afternoon, to try to persuade the shopkeepers in Cormatin to flog off some more cards. At the same time I will try to interest some of my readers in again buying some cards off us through my blog and through Facebook. Who says that social networks are useless?

I ask those who are willing to invest some of their hard earned money for this good cause, to send an e-mail to this address cees.sue@latuileriechazelle.com, specifying the number of cards requested à € 2 (or £ 1.70) a card.

The potential benefactor will receive our bank details; continentals my (Dutch) BIC and IBAN numbers, islanders who want to pay in sterling will receive Sue’s account number and sort code.

On Saturday 28 January half the population of Cormatin will play bingo on your behalf for 3 prizes well worth the money:

1. a Techwood 32 “ flatscreen TV-set (PAL & SECAM)

2. a Life’s Good home cinema

3. a ham

None of these goods will go off shortly!

I hope this call for help will have the same effect as last year; all contributors receive a well meant “thank you very much” in advance.

Do a Good Deed Every Day

2012-01-12T16:40:00.000+01:00

On the way back from shopping on a Tuesday, we normally stop at a friend’s weekend home and put their dustbin in their garden to stop it blowing away or filling up with rain, nothing special, it is not exactly a “good deed” as they look after Fifi very often when we are away and I wouldn’t ordinarily mention it, other than this simple act triggered off a rather unfortunate event. Had we not stopped at their house, then we would not have been stopped by a car with two gentlemen of North African extraction in it as we were pulling away from that house, and then we would never have been asked for directions.

The gentlemen in question explained that they were dreadfully lost, and did we know where “Parlayplay..” was? Ummm, not really. To be honest, thinking back on what happened, it is not a good idea for two foreigners with heavy foreign accents to ask two other foreigners with heavy foreign accents, for directions to anywhere, but that is of course said with hindsight. At that particular moment, I thought I knew what they had said. "Paray-le-Monial?" I asked with my perfect English accent, “Oui” they replied in chorus - phew got that one sorted.

Paray-le-Monial is 60 km from here, it is a lovely place with a superb Basilica and if you can ever get to a concert in there, it is well worth it as the acoustics are magnificent, even just a wander around the town is worth the effort, and for pilgrims it is a “must visit” destination, but I suspect that these chaps had a more mundane appointment than that, so another 60 km was not exactly what they were looking for. Breaking the news to them allowed me to use one of my favourite and very evocative expressions: “Oo la la” I said.

I just love this phrase, it says so much. A plumber arrives and sees a leak, “Oo la la”; an electrician arrives and sees some burned out wiring “Oo la la”; a builder arrives and sees a crack “Oo la la”; it says it all - “disaster!” The gentlemen in the car fully understood the severity of the situation and their faces dropped. We explained how far it was and then we told them how to get there and despite the extra distance, they left with smiles, a wave and a big “merci”.

Driving home, I suggested to Cees that these guys must be really, really lost to end up on our little road en-route from département 42 to Paray-le-Monial - where is département 42 by the way? After unloading the shopping, I checked a map of France. Our département (71, Saône-et-Loire) borders three départements on the south side, 01 (Ain) and 69 (Rhône) near us which I knew, then it borders 42 (Loire) further to the west, which I obviously didn’t know. Interestingly, the closest large town over the border from 42 when travelling into 71 is actually Paray-le-Monial, so these chappies would have already driven through the town once that day to get to Chazelle. I then had a little doubt in my mind, maybe they weren’t looking for Paray-le-Monial after all. Maybe they were looking for Prayes (5km down our little road) or Bray (3km down our little road)?

Whoops ! There goes my good deed for the day.

Ah well, my heart was in the right place, but next time I’ll just stick to dustbins or maybe give up being a Brownie altogether - the uniform doesn’t fit me anymore anyway.

La Tuilerie Website

The World Continues to Change !

2012-01-08T11:16:00.002+01:00

Things are looking different around here. The Christmas decorations (all except the pretty lights) have been removed from Cormatin, the three kings have been and gone, which we celebrated with the traditional Galette des Rois Friday evening. But it is more than that, much, much more than that.

There have been some curious goings on in Cormatin and Chazelle this last week. Things that had never been seen here before have been appearing, unwelcome, insidious things, gnawing away at the very essence of French rural communities. Then, finally on Thursday we saw the men who were behind this act of vandalism. Monsieur G, Monsieur M and Monsieur V. armed with drills, cordless electric screwdrivers, a long stick and a step ladder, were defacing the centuries old properties of Cormatin.

With a jolly “Bonjour, Bonne Année et surtout Bon Santé” and two kisses each, we were proudly told they had done 60 houses already that day and that our house too would be defaced fairly shortly, they are heading our way !

Back in March this year I explained the joys of French addresses, but now that Spitting Image puppet, apology for a president, has finally got his way, the axe has finally fallen and we are all being reduced to numbers. No more need for the complex descriptions to make sure people find your house, just give the road name and number and you’ll get there – very sad indeed.

Having said that, I am not sure that calling us 10 Route de Chazeux will help anyone find us. We are one kilometre from the village where you will find numbers 1 – 9, 11, 13 and 15 and then 200 metres down a tiny farm track off the road itself. Do we really think this is progress ? I think we’ll stick with La Tuilerie, at least everyone knows where that is - even GPS systems.

The World Has Changed !

2012-01-03T18:06:00.000+01:00

Yes, it is 2012 and the world as we know it in South Burgundy has changed.

OK I’ll grant you, the first change we noticed just before the new year but it was just an omen for great things to come. We found PARSNIPS in the Intermarché, not one or two, not manky looking apologies for a vegetable (which have been available every so often in the past) but nice juicy-looking, just-the-right-size parsnips.

I can see you are all very under-whelmed by my news, but today, today the 3rd of January, for the FIRST TIME EVER ANYWHERE WE HAVE EVER BEEN IN FRANCE, we have found red chillies !! Yeh !

Hold on, hold on, don’t get too excited we thought, these could just be sneaky wimpy little chilli-like things that just lead to dreadful disappointment, which has happened before. So we put just one, ever so carefully, in a plastic bag took and it to the checkout. Hoping that this would indeed be a fiery little soul. Before we reached the car Cees was so excited he couldn’t wait any longer and so he ate it. It is a real chilli and a pretty hot one at that. Hooray !

Buoyed up with excitement we went to see how the Nativity scene in Taizé is getting on. The wise men are still on their way, but one of them must have heard about the chillies in the Intermarché, because his umbrella has exploded and he has half fallen off his camel in surprise.

All we need now is for Barclaycard to get my credit card working again and I will truly be able to say “the world has changed”.

Happy New Year to everyone !

Merry Christmas !

2011-12-25T06:52:00.003+01:00

For my Christmas Day blog what else could I write about other than Christmas cribs. I did the constantly changing Taizé Nativity Scene pretty much to death last year, so I thought I would give that one a miss this year.

Where I used to live in The Netherlands, in the Protestant north, Nativity scenes are not at all popular, but where we stayed at the beginning of December, in the Catholic south, they are Big Business. At the beginning of December, we stumbled across this amazing shop, completely dedicated to Nativity scenes. Now isn’t that worthy of a photo?

But the biggest and best was not to be seen by us this year, we were a week too early. The Saint Jan church in Den Bosch has reputedly the biggest Nativity scene in The Netherlands. My photo shows a tantalising glimpse of a star above the stable, but the other two (stolen from the internet) show it in all its full glory.

I must say though that I fail to understand why there is need for a lioness and a Chinese lady, but I am obviously missing the greater meaning behind it all.

That’s it for today it just rests for me to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and enjoy your turkey, I’ll certainly be tucking into mine pretty soon.

La Tuilerie Website

Run-Up to Christmas

2011-12-18T16:20:00.000+01:00

Always a busy time of year, but this year seems to be more hectic than most. I don’t understand it, I have bought all my pressies and sent all my cards, so why, oh why is there so much to do?

Well the truth is that I didn’t realise that being the treasurer of the village committee was going to generate so much work, especially at this time of year. Whilst the village events usually last a day or part of a day, my work before and after each event comprises of ordering, buying and collecting items from local and some not so local suppliers, chasing up invoices, paying invoices, finding stock (where has the president put those 500 plastic cups I gave him for the last event?), counting stock (did we really drink that much wine??) and generally pulling my hair out (why won’t the figures balance?) and that all adds up to several days per event.

December is a heavy month for our little club, there was the Téléthon on 3rd December, the Christmas drinks and dinner for the volunteers on the 16th and the kids Christmas party on the 17th and I now have to get all the bingo cards distributed to the sales people before Tuesday. Making it almost a full-time occupation these last few weeks – good job we don’t have the gîtes up and running at this time of year.

All that doesn’t include the AGM of the Rendez-vous de Cormatin, the AGM for Guitares en Cormatinois and an insy-winsy bit of socialising that we have managed to fit in these last few days - where incidently I met up with someone who follows my blog which was a big wow for me, so here is a special hello to Ann(e) - sorry don't know your spelling.

Anyway, no wonder it feels so hectic !

Fortunately, most people will disappear out of sight by mid-next week, off to their little Christmassy nest to spend time at home with their families and I will sit back with my turkey and enjoy the peace and quiet !

La Tuilerie Website

The Light of Bethlehem

2011-12-12T13:02:00.000+01:00

We heard last week that on Sunday afternoon the “Light of Bethlehem” would be arriving in Taizé. On further investigation it appeared that the Scouts and Guides of France, in cooperation with the Austrian Scouting movement, were bringing a flame from Bethlehem to France. This is the first time the flame has been brought to Taizé and the first time the flame has been in Saône-et-Loire. The flame was flown from Bethlehem to Vienna where it was distributed amongst various Scout and Guide movements in Europe. The French flame then went on to Paris and travelled by TGV to Le Creusot on Sunday afternoon and on by car to Taizé.

It was a chilly afternoon, but at least it didn’t rain while we waited, outside the church, for about an hour for the flame to arrive. While we were waiting we were able to look at the Nativity scene which has appeared again this year. It is a little less “flat” than last year and the wise men have moved out into the area in front of the church with their own little bit of desert,

just next to the live donkeys. Even the shepherds have their own space, appropriately near the live sheep pen.

Quite a crowd had turned up from all over the Département including as far afield as Autun and Paray le Monial, there were also some scouts from Nevers, but the scouts who had come all the way from Lebanon definitely had the longest journey. Before the flame finally arrived there was a little ceremony outside the church, then we followed the brothers in silence into the church itself to await the flame. A small group of young scouts came into the church with the flame and lit a lamp and two large candles at the front.

The little service that followed was a bit chaotic and lacked the slick organisation of the brothers, who I felt were left a little confused as to what was going on at times, but the scouts were very enthusiastic, which made up for it.

The young scouts with the flame then proceeded through the church lighting candles and lamps of the onlookers. Normally when candles are lit in the church, the congregation are given special Taizé self- extinguishing candles, but this time the vast majority of the candles were brought from home and quite frankly they were a bit dangerous to say the least. Can anyone explain to me why someone would get their baby, who can’t even sit up on its own yet, to hold a lit candle? Not to mention the father who had to hit the side of his toddler’s hair when the toddler set light to it with the candle he was wafting about? And why would you put a lit tea-light on the carpet in the church then walk away, leaving your crawling baby within inches of it? Good job someone else was on the ball to take the tea light away as the baby grabbed the side of the container. Do people lose their common sense on this type of occasion?

That aside, it was a nice idea, a sweet little ceremony and it was a different sort of afternoon out, but I don’t think I’ll risk it next time.

La Tuilerie Website

A New Career?

2011-12-10T11:33:00.002+01:00

There is so much to tell about our week in The Netherlands I don’t know where to begin, so I will stick to the highlights. We stayed with Cees’ daughter on her ship in one of the old harbours in Den Bosch, we saw friends and family and we finally visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, something I have been meaning to do for years but never got around to and I must say it was well worth the visit; we did shopping to stock up on essential items impossible to find round here (chillies, sambal, brown beans) and we ate foods we crave when in France (kroketten, Surinaamse broodjes just to name two things); we tried to visit the Nativity Scene in the Saint Jan Church and failed but the highlight, the absolute highlight was something we had not planned at all.

Back in the summer Cluny had an exhibition of pottery in honour of Frère Daniel of Taizé who is 90 this year and those who read my blog will remember the afternoon we made a bowl. Well Cees’ daughter read the blog and she, being a very accomplished, amateur potter herself, decided that we should be shown how to really make a bowl. Saturday morning we were bundled into her car complete with overalls and a huge box of amazing looking tools and off we went through the rain to the pottery studio she goes to, where she had managed to convince them that we should be allowed to use their equipment, even though we were a pair of clay nincompoops.

First of all squeeze all the air out of your lump of clay, ummmm, not so easy as you would think and we haven’t got anywhere near the wheel yet.. I kept kneading it a bit like bread which seemed to be pumping more air in than out. Cees managed quite well but I was a lost cause, so Cees’ daughter did it for me, after all if she had had to wait for me, we would still be there.

Then on to the wheel. Throw your lovely ball of clay into the centre, splat! Wow, mine hit the centre, which anyone who has ever seen me try to throw anything will be amazed at. Then switch the thing on, fortunately it was an electric wheel so no confusion with the feet as well. Try and poke your thumb in the middle, NO, NOT THE SIDE - THE MIDDLE. OK I’ m doing my best, but it keeps wobbling all over the place, it's like trying to get a wiggling cat to swallow a tablet, it kept moving at random and it spat bits out of the side.

Finally I got the hang of it and I must say I am rather proud of my effort (pictured left). Not everyone’s creation was as successful though (someone else's attempt pictured right). I don’t think we will be trying to do this for a living so the local potters can rest easy, but we both had a great time, I can really recommend having a go.

Thanks Ljalja!

La Tuilerie Website

Keep the Home-fires Burning

2011-12-03T08:00:00.001+01:00

Chimneys and wood-burning stoves have been the bane of our lives since we first arrived here in France. Our first chimney needed to be lined prior to use, so we were told - I am not so convinced about that now, but that's a separate issue. Anyway we had it lined and that nearly caused our house to be burned down. The builders at the time who were doing the renovations in the stables laughed and said “Well if you must employ cowboys…” OK so it was done by a friend that was not a builder and didn’t know any better and neither did we, but of course the builders knew how it should be done didn't they.

So when it came to installing chimneys for the stoves we were going to buy for the gîtes and the stove we had bought for our new living room, we asked the builders to install proper chimneys and we would have no worries. The stove installers arrived with the stove and they refused to connect it up. They condemned the whole installation. Not only

was it not conform to standards but incorrect materials (designed for low temperature gas flues not wood burning stoves) had been used, insufficient distances between the chimneys and the woodwork in the roof, lack of or insufficient insulation in the chimneys, horizontal chimney sections that could block and well - it was just pain dangerous. Who’s the cowboy now?

The incorrect materials were exchanged and installed at the builder’s expense, but we have had endless leaks in the roof where the flashing was never quite right around those chimneys and even after that we had a chimney fire which made me always very cautious of using the stove in the living room not helped by the fact that the stove made the room and chimney wall so hot we had to open the windows even in the coldest months.

Last year we got someone to remove the two gite chimney tops on the roof – leaks solved and this year we have bitten the bullet and bought a smaller, less powerful stove and had the remaining problems with the chimney sorted out. We are now nice and snug and safe. So a big thank you to our lovely stove installer and his friend, pictured carrying our old stove out of the house for ever.

Moral of this story although a chimney looks like a simple thing, you have to know what you are doing, as they say: “if you play with fire….”

Farewell to a Daughter of Cluny.

2011-11-26T17:03:00.000+01:00

Today Cluny, along with hundreds of representatives from around the Socialist world, paid tribute to one of her greatest daughters. Danielle Mitterrand was laid to rest in Cluny cemetery this afternoon. Danielle spent her formative years in Cluny where she actively fought in the Résistance, alongside her parents and it was at her parental home that she met the young François Mitterrand, marrying him a couple of years later.

When we heard that the funeral was going to be in Cluny and that it was amazingly open to the public, we just had to go. Large chunks of town were blocked off to traffic from 6 o’clock last night and so we parked at the Intermarché at the top of town and walked down into the town centre past Mrs Mitterrand’s family home.

The funeral itself was held in the open air in the grounds of the ENSAM with the students forming a guard of honour along the long path from the entry to the back of the cloister. I was surprised at how few politicians came to pay their respects, I had expected Sarko or at the very least his wife to turn up, but Mitterrand was the wrong colour politics I suppose. There was talk that several ex-First Ladies would be there, but sadly not one was to be seen. Martine Aubry and François Holland turned up which was to expected and we managed to get a couple of snaps of them, not the best photos in the world, but when Hollande gets elected president next year I can at least say I have seen him in the flesh.

The service concentrated on Mrs Mitterrand’s achievements with France Libertés an organisation she set up 25 years ago. Her support the Kurds seems to have been her biggest achievements which explained the very large Kurdish presence and the singing of a beautiful Kurdish song written especially for the occasion.

After the coffin was carried back down the long path to the gates of the ENSAM, the hearse took over and made its way up the hill to the cemetery with everyone following on foot. At the cemetery only the invited were allowed in for the short service. Halfway up the hill I stopped and took a photo forwards and backwards of the crowds, I am sure the news will tell us how many walked behind the coffin, I have no idea how many were there, but it was a sea of people as far as the eye could see.

A great send-off for a great lady.

New Red Chairs

2011-11-19T10:48:00.000+01:00

We are big fans of Cluny Cinema, they show some really good films. They tend to show the sort of films you can’t see in run of the mill cinemas, films in original language with French sub-titles, which we find much more preferable to films dubbed into French and some old films that no one shows any more.

This summer the cinema came up for a face-lift and lovely new red chairs were installed, so this week when we went to see the 1950s film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, we took along a camera to make some photos and aren’t they really special and worthy of a blog? We arrived especially early to take this photo (5 mins before the film started), so you can see just how popular the film was. Eventually the audience totalled 8 paying viewers and 3 staff, which was a pity as it was rather good !

All regular Cluny cinema goers will know that there was a difference in the chairs in the two sections. The bottom section chairs used to be bigger and a lot more comfortable than the top section chairs. On one occasion when we actually went to a sell-out film (Le Grand Meaulnes) we had to sit in the top section and I can tell you the chairs were horrible. Ever since then we have arrived well in time, just in case. Having said that, our taste in films doesn’t seem to coincide with the rest of the population around here and it has never been necessary since. But following the renovations you don’t have to worry about the top section chairs any more because they are the same as the bottom section, lovely and big, seemingly comfortable and of course red !

We were rather surprised to see the top section cordoned off since the new chairs had been installed, but in never crossed our minds to even question why. But then we received email from Cluny cinema a couple of weeks ago explaining that there was a little (or big?) problem with these chairs and that they would be replaced soon.

So on our visit this week I decided to try and sit on one of the top chairs, to check them out before they disappeared. The seat was lovely and soft and big enough for my bottom, but I agree, the lack of leg room was a little disconcerting. Let’s hope they manage to find a happy medium with the next lot !

La Tuilerie Website

How to Make Your Own Booze

2011-11-14T18:02:00.000+01:00

No this is not a DIY blog about building your own still and making puchine at home, I can get my friend Richard to tell you to do that if you like, he had a cracking business going when we were at university, but I digress. No, this blog is about how to make your own booze legally.

First, get your fruit and put it in a plastic barrel and seal it allowing the fruit to ferment for several weeks or months. About this time of year your fruit should be well fermented and ready to turn it into alcohol. But doing that yourself is of course illegal so what do you do, well you call your local travelling still owner of course (have you no imagination?) He will tell you where and when he will be in a village near you and you turn up with your fruit and hey presto you leave with a few gallons of eau de vie.

This tradition stems from the fact that viticulturists have to pay their taxes in alcohol, yes alcohol. They used to have to go down to the local tax office with several gallons of booze and their taxes were paid. Now it is a little simpler, they just give the nearest distillery the required number of tonnes of grapes and he sorts things out with the tax office. But of course this is France and so the travelling distillery still comes to town tax man or no tax man. Up until 1960 everyone who owned a vineyard could get the distiller to make up to 1000 degrees of alcohol free of any excise duty, nowadays there are few people left with this privilege, but the distiller still comes and will distil your fruit and you just have to pay him for the effort and pay the tax on the booze he produces.

This is something we have been trying to see for a long time and finally this year we got wind that our local travelling distiller was in a village near us and so off we went. You could smell the fermenting fruit and eau de vie from more than 100 meters away, so we knew were in the right place even before we saw rather inauspicious the sign. Not quite as glamorous as I had imagined, a ramshackle concoction of vessels and pipework cobbled together on the back of a trailer, parked in a muddy farmyard surrounded by old codgers testing the produce, but it was enormous fun to watch.

At the end of each session in a village, the distiller uses his still to boil up vegetables (cabbage, whole potatoes in their skins, carrots, turnips you name it) along with huge chunks of bacon and various other pig parts to make what is called an “Assiette Alambic” this meal is then enjoyed by the villagers on the last evening of the still’s presence in their village. We ate Bray’s version at Le Grange Finot the other day for lunch with enough meat (on my plate alone) to feed an army, along with soup to start, cheese or dessert, ¼ litre wine and coffee all for the princely sum of 12.50 Euros, now that’s what I call a meal Burgundy style.

Saint Martin – Who was he?

2011-11-05T16:10:00.000+01:00

The annual Saint Martin fayre took place today in Cluny. The whole town and half the population of Burgundy seems to turn out for this event judging by the crowds. Of course any Saturday in Cluny starts with the game of finding a parking space and as you can imagine it was even more of a nightmare than usual this morning, to add to the chaos the ENSAM had decided to have an open day as well, so it was difficult to find a square inch free let alone room for our car. But being the good girl I have become (since the parking ticket incident this summer) we decided to pay for a parking space. After waiting a while for a paid space to come free we parked and then went to pay. I put my 20 cent coin in the machine and the machine ate it and refused to give me a ticket. Being an engineer and being very au-fait with this type of delicate electronic equipment, I thumped the side of the machine and it gave me a 10 cent coin in return….. Back to the car and we put our pre-printed “the ticket machine is not working” sticker in the window of the car and went to join the fun anyway.

At the top of town there is an old animal market place which is used once in the year to display and trade in horses and some cattle. There were some beautiful carthorses on display when we got there and we enjoyed ourselves wandering around looking at the animals and sampling the local farmers’ produce on display everywhere. The whole main street is turned into one huge market, that combined with the weekly market in the market square and a “vide grenier” (car boot sale) at the other end of town, meant that Cluny was heaving with people.

Anyway, it got me to wondering who Saint Martin was. These things are usually not too difficult to find out, but it does appear that Martin is quite a popular name amongst the saintly community particularly in the month of November. I ruled out all non-November Saint Martins and I was left with, saint Martins for 3rd, 10th, 11th, 12th, 15th, 18th and 27th November. The most popular of these (ie the ones with Wikipedia articles) were for:

Saint St Martin de Porres 3rd November, patron saint of barbers, mixed-race people and all those seeking interracial harmony (pictured on the left) and

St Martin of Tours 11th patron saint of soldiers (pictured on the right).

So you pays your money and you takes your choice, I haven’t a clue who’s day we were celebrating !

In Memory of Lost Friends

2011-10-31T16:28:00.000+01:00

We were invited to a little remembrance service just the other day, when the ashes of a friend, who died a year ago, were to be scattered in Taizé. Our friend Chris passed away last year on 27th October and his wife Linda has made a journey over the last week visiting places they loved, making sure she was in Taizé for the anniversary of his death. After his ashes were scattered (with the brothers’ permission I might add) we had a little ceremony at one of the small shrines. Whilst Linda had said it should be a joyous not a sad occasion, I had my doubts, but it was a very joyous occasion, we were able to remember Chris and think about what he had brought to our lives and then, as I am sure he would have approved of, we went out for a superb lunch accompanied by local wine. Thank you Linda for inviting us and letting us say our last farewell. (BTW the photo has been blatantly stolen from her blog).

Coincidentally this week sees the Jour des Morts – All Souls’ Day (2nd November) which is the day the French remember their family and friends who have passed away, conveniently the day after Toussaint - All Saints Day which is a holiday in France, so that everyone can have the day off to get their chrysanthemums to their family graves in time. It is a lovely tradition as once a year everyone visits the graves of their family and friends giving themselves the time to think about those who have gone before. Graves all over France are decorated with chrysanthemums and other flowers which makes the graveyards a stunning site, not dissimilar to a garden show, at this time of year. Interestingly the tradition of honouring the dead started by St Odilio the abbot of Cluny in 998 and this spread to the rest of the western world yet another demonstration of the influence that the Cluny Abbey had in those days.

La Tuilerie Website

Maintenance

2011-10-24T14:58:00.000+02:00

It has been a beautiful autumn, which has allowed us to get some much needed maintenance done around the place. Well I say “us” quite loosely , let’s just say it has allowed some maintenance to be done. The front shutters were taken down more than a year ago by friends who can cope with ladders and have been waiting to be painted and returned to their rightful position and as has previously been blogged, we have had a TV aerial in our kitchen for a year waiting for someone to attach it to the wall or roof outside. That is not to mention the kitchen window shutters which were desperately in need of a lick of paint and a washing line that needed to be put up on the campsite. So how does on get all this done when you are a couple of weak wimps who can’t go further up a ladder than the second rung?

Well this is where children come in very handy. Not having any myself, it was down to Cees to supply the person-power. Cees’ daughter had said she was coming for a week one of the gites at the beginning of October with her partner who is not afraid of heights ! Now what better opportunity was there?

The last weeks in September were busy with painting shutters and organising a scaffold tower and we were all set for the work. And boy did they work. The shutters were up in a flash and then the TV aerial. Zip off to remove the kitchen shutters, felt the need to paint the window frame too while they were up there, shutters painted and replaced.

What more could one ask? Well…… maybe dig a couple of holes on the campsite for a washing line? Great here we go. The clay on the campsite was so hard and dry they had to use a drill to loosen the soil then dig it out using a trowel. Holiday over, no time to mix the concrete and put up the posts, oh well I suppose we ought to do something ourselves !

So a super big thank you to you two and I am glad you managed a couple of days of cycling, walking and sightseeing while you were here as well, next time……..

La Tuilerie Website

Cormatin Randonnée

2011-10-11T10:26:00.000+02:00

Records have been broken at the Cormatin Randonnée (organised walk) last Sunday. Not records we wanted to be broken, but broken they were none the less.

I’ll just go back a couple of steps first, to explain what this is all about. The annual walks are organised by the Amicale de Cormatin of which we are both active members and this year it was decided that all the walks would be changed. Now that is one heck of a lot of work and we have been walking the highways and byways around here all of August, different groups of us, to sort out and agree on the four new walks, 7 km, 13 km, 20 km and 30 km. We spent all day Friday and Saturday marking the walks on the road with paint arrows (the way to go) and paint crosses (the way not to go) and we have been hammering in posts of coloured indicators and “watch out there are walkers about” signs at junctions, we have done shopping for food and wine to refresh our walkers and we have set up the feeding posts in suitable locations.

In an average year, the walks usually attract about 300 walkers, but we have been known to have more and it is one of the two big events that swell the coffers to pay for the annual pensioners’ lunch.

Sunday dawned and it was raining, well not raining actually, it was pouring down. Not a good start to a walking day after the hottest and most beautiful few weeks we have ever had in September. Off we set to do the final arrangements and then go to our feeding post at La Moutonnier. At eight o’clock on the dot the first walker arrived to sign up for the walk, he was actually going to run the 30 km and as we were feeding the 20 and 30km walkers, we headed off shortly after him to make sure we got there first. It was a bit of a slow cold start to the day, but at 10 o’clock our first mountain-bikers arrived, then our runner and then we waited. A little later two more mountain-bikers. We were expecting 50 people for the 30 km and 100 for the 20 km and had sandwiches and wine for them all, along with dried fruit, chocolate and cake. We waited and waited and it rained and rained and we got colder and colder. To cut a long story short, before we shut up shop, only 16 people had passed our post. It was a good job the farm cat

came to join us or we would have had nothing to do at all. We returned to base camp, a little despondent, to hear how the other walks had gone. The 13 km was as usual the most popular walk, in a normal year this walk would attract 150 walkers but this year only 23 hardy souls made it and the 5 km (very popular with after-lunch walkers) had the grand total of 0 people.

So this is a record year for the fewest walkers ever in the 33 year history of the club and our coffers have not only not been swollen, then have significantly shrunk. Not a good day in the life of our little club, looks like it will be leftover sandwiches for the pensioners' lunch this year...

La Tuilerie Website

Belonging

2011-09-26T14:58:00.000+02:00

One way for us to integrate into our new community has been for us to volunteer to help out at the various events going on around here. This has not been as easy as we thought it would be, to say the least. There are different groups of volunteers involved in each event, each has their own clique and whilst they do need extra help from time to time, they are not screaming out for new regular people to join “their club”. Our attempts at volunteering have been hampered to some extent by our poor French (us misunderstanding what is being said and/or us failing to get our message across) by cultural differences in how things are done and organised in rural France compared to our previous manic Dutch world, but also by a natural suspicion within some in the organisations themselves. For instance when volunteering for one group we were told that we had to be paid-up members for at least a year before we could volunteer, the logic of that escaped me at the time, but the then president said “C’est normal”, well it may be normal in France but it comes across as pretty weird and unfriendly to two foreigners just trying to help. Not living inside the village of Chazelle itself and having no neighbours to point the way and explain what’s going on, hasn’t helped either. So every two steps forward seemed to be met with one step backwards, but over the last 12-18 months all our chickens have come home to roost with a vengeance ! We now seem to have little time to ourselves as we have volunteered or been volunteered for everything going, from helping man the Office de Tourisme in St-Gengoux (OT) and being treasurer of the group that organises Cormatin events (the bingo, the old people’s meal etc) through to moving chairs and manning the entry at Guitar en Cormatinois concerts and building tents for any and every event in Cormatin that wants a 10m, a 12m or a 16m tent built (that one is Cees not me, when I helped out building the tents there was a tangible air of confusion – what is a girl doing this for, she should be preparing food). But now we are accepted into Cormatin life, when we walk down the main street we get stopped every couple of meters or so to kiss one or other acquaintance, complain about the weather (too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet) and talk about what’s going on (did you know a motorbike was clocked doing 140kmph down La Grande Rue in Cormatin yesterday at 5 in the evening and have you seen that ghastly pyramid [*] being built opposite Christophe’s house?) and I am happy to say I feel that at last we really belong here.

* That one is for another blog !

La Tuilerie Website

The Camping Season is Over

2011-09-18T15:18:00.000+02:00

The season is over and so now all that rests is for me to announce the winners of the 2011 championship.

Before I do that, I must say what a successful season it has been this year, with summer starting early this year (at the beginning of April) we had a very long dry season, there was a little wet hiccup for two weeks in July but that didn’t dampen our campers’ spirits too much, which was good news.

For those new to this competition I will briefly recap the categories. Category 1 – the longest stay ever (longest number of consecutive nights); Category 2 – the most cumulative tent nights and Category 3 – the most number of single visits.

Category 1: We have a couple of cracking attempts at this awards in 2011. Sadly both attempts failed, but for different reasons, one misunderstood the difference between cumulative and consecutive and the other took one night out in a hotel just before reaching his target so his run of nights was broken (empty tents don’t count !) but even though both attempts were strategically flawed, it has shown us that with the right approach and with a lot of perseverance this record is definitely beatable. So Marilou and Niek have still managed to hang on to their lead at 25 nights and Cees and Bets remain second with 21 nights both attempts being in 2007 and third place is now shared by Coen and Marja (2009) and Thomas (this year) with 20 nights. Sadly Thomas could so easily could have had 25 or even 26 nights had he not made that serious error.

Category 2: We saw the return of Family H this year after one year’s absence and so in category 2 they are possibly becoming unbeatable, they work well as a team and they

all pull together to make sure that they clock up those nights in a most effective way. Hans and Joke do very well considering there are just two of them, but this year’s real surprise was Janine and Mijntje who charged ahead with great gusto at the beginning of May, they could have done a lot better, but they decided to spend their summer holiday somewhere else (how could they?). So the final score is Family H with a staggering 83 nights, Janine and Mijntje moved up into second place with 56 nights, just pushing Hans and Joke down into third place at 55 nights.

Category 3: Both Bert and Engelien and Kirsty and Angus returned after an absence of two years, so there has been some movement in this category as well. The placings are Hans and Joke at 7 visits remain the leaders, 2nd Janine and Mijnte at 6 visits and Dick and Marijke, Bert and Engelien, Kirsty and Angus share the third place at 5 visits each.

This year the first ever “Judges discretionary award for outstanding achievement in camping near Cormatin and Taizé” was awarded to Janine and Mijntje for their overall camping achievements, their valiant, if flawed, attempt at Category 1 this year and for their amazing leap from 8th place in Category 2 only two years ago right up to second place. So you see with the right effort these seemingly unassailable records can be broken.

The judges are looking for more categories to broaden the championships and to be more inclusive for newcomers, all suggestions are welcome.

Finally a big thank you to all campers past and present for your active participation and we wish you a good non-camping season and we look forward to seeing you again very soon.

For our website with more lovely pictures of the campsite and gites click here.

Noise

2011-09-08T14:37:00.000+02:00

It is quiet here, very quiet, yes we do have noises but they are of the birds in the trees, the frogs in the pond and leaves rustling in the wind. Everyone who visits is struck by the quietness of life here. I am woken up in the morning by the bells of Taizé at 08.15 when they start their 15 minute peel calling the faithful to the morning service. From my bed I look out at the forest of massive oaks and huge hornbeams. However, Saturday was

different. I was woken up at about 07.00 by the noise of mopeds and what seemed to be a dustbin lorry together with shouting Frenchmen clanging metal containers. Cees opened the shutters and I could see the trees and the blue sky, but they weren’t oaks, they were plane trees. Then I woke up enough to remember where I was, not at home at all, I was in Arles in Provence, one of my favourite French towns.

We had decided to go away for a few days and Provence seemed to be the logical place to go, not too far from here, good weather, excellent food and so much to see even if we have seen most of it before. So we went to Arles and from there we visited the Camargue, Avignon, Salon-de-Provence, Tarascon and Orange. We saw things we had never seen before (or couldn’t remember having seen before) and we saw some old favourites. It was nice to be back in that neck of the woods again and just enjoy being on holiday, something we rarely do.

I could never tire of the Roman ruins and beautiful cloisters, the wildness of the Camargue with flamingos and wild bulls or just sitting on a terrace in the Provencal sun soaking up the atmosphere. It was a great couple of days away from our surprisingly busy “real” lives and it recharged our batteries. But by the end of those few days, there was one thing I was longing for and that was - no noise. I had forgotten what life in a town was like and I now see that we sometimes take for granted what we have here. So last night I totally revelled in sitting in the garden, listening to “nothing”.

La Tuilerie Website

Steam Trains

2011-08-31T17:44:00.000+02:00

I love steam trains. As an engineer I love the sheer beauty and impressiveness of the engineering of the things, the power and the mechanics of it all. On a different level however, I love them because the are so “real”. With all their hissing and sissing and chunting and blowing they are like live animals and they are not “just” a piece of machinery. My last house in the UK was at Horsted Keynes Station on the Bluebell steam railway, every weekend throughout the year and every day in the summer, steam trains went past my front door. We got to recognise the sounds of each engine and when we heard a new engine go by, we would rush out to see what it was. Stepney was my favourite, he had such a friendly sound, “pip-pop, pip-pop” and the day he fell off the end of the line (OK the day he was driven off the end of the line by accident or by incompetence) we and the neighbours were out with Land Rovers and tractors helping him to be hoisted back on on to the rails again, and hoping he wasn’t too damaged to be up and running soon. The photo here is of him taken from the Bluebell line website and it is as I remember him. He was overhauled last year and I have seen that he has been repainted in a rather too sophisticated “black with red lines” which in no way matches his homely sound, so I didn't want to use that photo.

Imagine my surprise and excitement when I moved to France, 20 years after leaving the UK, to discover that for the first time in years steam trains had started to run on the national railway lines not too far from here. Well to be honest just one train was running, the 241P-17 which is a huge monster of a steam train built in Le Creusot by Schneider and lovingly restored by volunteers based in and around that town. It was one of the most

prestigious locomotives of its day, capable of travelling at exceptionally high speeds - a running speed of 120 km/hr. When we heard about it, we headed to the nearest vantage point on top of a bridge and watched it rush underneath us, maybe slower than a TGV, but in my opinion much more impressive. This huge powerful engine was charging down the line, literally breathing fire on those standing above it on the bridge.

Today when doing our shopping in Cluny, I saw the headlines of the paper saying there had been a train accident and it was none other than the 241P-17. It appears that there was a sudden leak of steam into the driver’s cabin and 8 of the 10 crew members have been injured, 2 seriously. The locomotive generates steam at 290 psi which will be about 215 degrees Celsius and that is more than enough to kill. It isn’t exactly clear what has happened, one report says a “steam leak” another says a “steam leak caused by over pressure”. The whole story took me back to my time as a chief engineer in industry and to be honest I wouldn’t want to be the one who was responsible for this engine at this very moment - some serious questions will be asked about the weld quality and inspection procedures and rightly so.

In any case the most powerful steam locomotive still in use in Europe is now in dock and is waiting for inspection and repairs. Hopefully the injuries to the crew of volunteers is not too great and hopefully they will recover quickly, but it does bring home the power of these beasts and the might of engineering and to be honest it does slightly make me itch to get my hands on some machinery again. On the other hand , maybe I will just stick with repairs in the gîtes and on the campsite – a lot safer me thinks !

La Tuilerie Website

Water

2011-08-28T10:53:00.001+02:00

My Mum has been with us for the last two weeks, she arrived during a thunder storm and left during a thunder storm with dry, dry days in-between with temperatures up to a suffocating 38 degrees in the shade. The first few days we managed some time in the garden, but then all we could do was find the coolest spot possible and sit and read.

What is better reading material for such hot, dry weather than Jean de Florette. The crux of the story is about water, our need for it, our battle to find it and control it and about the lengths some people will go to, to get hold of this life giving liquid. As the story tumbles to its inevitable conclusion where one man and his family is destroyed by the lack of water, I couldn’t help thinking how lucky we are to live in a place and time where we really don’t have to worry about where the next drop will come from. Yes - water has been scarce this year, yes - we have been banned from washing cars and using hosepipes, but that doesn’t come anywhere near to the struggle some people suffer every day in their search for the stuff. So as I looked out of the train window on my way back from London, whilst passing the water tower in Ameugny and the tents of Taizé drenched by rain, the prospect of having to shut the campsite for a few days, due to it being too wet to drive on, didn’t seem like a hardship any more.

La Tuilerie Website

Making Mandalas

2011-08-22T09:46:00.000+02:00

Last week was the 17th celebration of Himalayan Buddhism in Burgundy. The Temple of a 1000 Buddhas - Dashang Kagyu Ling, just outside the village of La Boulaye, was hosting a visit of some monks from the monastery at Gyuto Tantric University in the Dharamsala home to His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa. These monks had come to take part in the annual mandala making.

Every year we say we will go and see the making of the sand mandala and every year we miss the festival for one reason or another, but this year we were determined and so off we went on the last day of the festival to see the afternoon session. Apart from during the “services”, this is one of the few occasions that you can actually enter the temple itself, the gallery is always open to the public in the afternoons, but the temple remains firmly closed - another reason for getting our skates on and making the visit.

When the gong sounded to open the temple doors, we went in barefooted. Turning to the right we saw the part-made mandala on a slightly raised platform and there we waited for the monks to arrive. Two monks then sat on the platform and prepared to work. They filled long metal cone-like devices with coloured sand and then placed the tip on the mandala where they need that particular colour. Using a metal stick they then rubbed the side of the cone (which seemed to be ridged) to create just enough vibration to deliver grains of sand one by one to the right place. There is little room for error in this task and the concentration was obvious. A third monk chanted gently in the background, most probably blessing the work as it progressed.

The mandala was started on Tuesday morning and was scheduled to be finished in time for

the closing ceremony at 17.00 on Thursday. When the mandala was finished, it would be carried to the banks of the river Arroux and all the sand would be washed into the river. This ceremony is believed to promote happiness and peace in the world, however, I couldn’t help think of how heartbreaking it would be to see three days worth of concentrated work destroyed in minutes.

The temple is always interesting to visit, its incongruity with the Burgundian landscape is fascinating, but the rare opportunity to look around the temple itself and closely inspect the huge Buddhas and other statues, whilst watching the painstakingly detailed work of the monks, made this a very special visit.

La Tuilerie Website

Making Pottery Bowls in Cluny

2011-08-12T14:19:00.000+02:00

In Cluny at the moment there is a pottery exhibition running entitled “A chacun sa créativité” - “To each his own creativity”. The exhibition has been set up by 66 potters to celebrate the 90th birthday of one of their own - Frère Daniel of Taizé. Frère Daniel is a very accomplished potter and led the way for the creation of the Taizé range of pottery as well as branching out and making some quite stunning individual pieces of his own. He is very well respected in the potters’ community round here as well as throughout Europe. Many individuals and groups come from far and wide to follow courses led by him.

The exhibition centres around the thing that all potters will have made at sometime in their life, the bowl. This exhibition is unique in that it shows the work of all 66 potters and their creative approach to making bowls. More than 1000 bowls are on display and are available for sale with each one being a unique piece and each one showing the individual creativity of its maker.

To compliment this exhibition three discussions groups have been organised (one for each month of the exhibition) on the subjects of creativity and the development of personal creativity with both Frère Daniel and Jean Cottraux (a psychiatrist and behavioural psychologist who’s book inspired the title of the exhibition) being present. Over and above the discussion groups, there is the opportunity for anyone to make a bowl themselves, in one of the makeshift potters’ studios.

Well I couldn’t resist the opportunity to make my own bowl. When talking to a friend the other day, I discovered that she had done it the week before and she was very enthusiastic about it. You can’t just walk in to the bowl-making sessions, you have to sign up for them (even though they are free) and after a wait of a couple of weeks, our day came yesterday.

So at five o’clock on the dot, there we were ready to make our bowls. Fully expecting to be shown to a potter’s wheel to throw a lump of clay on it and make a mess, we were to be disappointed - no potter’s wheel in sight. Our first task was to squeeze a lump of damp clay in one hand and a dry sponge in the other and when we released both hands, the sponge returned to its normal shape but the clay was squashed. We were told that this demonstrated the special properties of clay that will be used to create our bowl. Clay can be manipulated into a shape. Now this might go down well with a group of pre-school children but I found it a tad patronising and I will not repeat what Cees said to me in Dutch at that moment !

Sadly I think this kind of event is very dependant on the person guiding you through the process and our potter-guide was tired, bored and not very inspiring, leaving us wondering why we had missed “Question pour un Champion” to do this.

In any case, I made two round bowls one by sticking my thumb in the middle of a lump of clay then squidging the sides to make them grow upwards and one by winding a sausage of clay round in circles until the sides grew. I also made a small square-ish bowl and a butterfly as I too was drifting off into the same bored dream-like state as our “leader” and had totally lost interest in the finer points of clay sausages. My masterpieces have by now been recycled for the next group, but I do have the photos to show for it, which is just as well as I won’t bother to try my hand at pottery again.

Summary - excellent exhibition, some nice bowls on display, the bowl making session could be a lot of fun with the right person in charge, sadly we did not have that person.

La Tuilerie Website

Sunday in Chalon

2011-08-07T17:28:00.000+02:00

When you have visitors to stay what do you do around here on a Sunday? Chalon-sur-Saône has a wonderful market scattered around the old town and it is really worth a visit. On the way to the market Cees’ son had to be shown where his father had stayed for 3 weeks a couple of years ago during the “great pace-maker escape” of 2009, see photo and arrow. By the way, if you ever have to spend time in the cardiac unit of Chalon hospital, make sure you get a west facing room, there are lovely views of the cathedral from that side.

On to the market. The market is centred around the cathedral, but it seems to change streets every time we visit it. This time the market meandered around some streets we have never visited before and culminated in a very attractive small square. There seemed to be a disproportionate number of “organic” vegetable stalls this time, but the usual goats’ cheese, dried sausages and roast chicken stalls were also present in abundance, giving the whole a very appetising aroma. After spending the best part of an hour and half wandering round listening to the street musicians and enjoying the atmosphere, we made our move to lunch at the Indian restaurant Bollywood. Either we are getting less fussy or this restaurant is getting better every time we visit and this time was no exception - now that’s what I call a good Sunday lunch.

Chalon is the birth place of Nicéphore Niépce said to be the inventor of photography and it houses a museum detailing his achievements and housing several exhibitions per year about cameras and/or photography. When we visited this afternoon, there was an exhibition on family albums from the late 1800s up to the 1990s, just random family albums that have somehow come into the hands of the museum. It felt a little voyeuristic looking at family holiday snaps and baby photos from people you do not know and will most probably never meet, but I found them fascinating. Sadly though, the layout was such that it didn’t seem to grab every visitor’s attention.

The second exhibition was of a Swiss photographer (Karlheinz Weinberger) who took pictures of teenage “rebels” in the early 1960s, the photos must have looked intimidating and they would have been shocking to the general Swiss public in their time, but they look rather quaint in the 21st century. Having said that they were well taken and gave an interesting view of these Swiss gangs.

The supposed highlight of the museum was what I can only describe as an excessively long film explaining what was meant by calling Nicéphore Niépce “the inventor of photography”. In fact as far as I could tell from the story, although he never made a penny out of his invention, he was the first person to manage to get an image (be it a copy of a picture, an imprint of a leaf or a “photo” of his back garden) to be reproduced by using light from the sun. He did not produce photos as we know them, he used a chemical layer on a sheet of metal to cause the metal to be etched with the image just using sunlight, this metal sheet was then inked and used in a conventional press creating a reproduction. It could have been a very interesting film, but the length and the repetitiveness of the content left us all yawning.

So all in all I would say that the museum had lots and lots of potential, it had cameras galore, photos galore and information galore, but it didn’t seem to hang together, all in all it was sadly a missed opportunity.

Then it was home to Chazelle for a long sit in the back garden, feet up enjoying a glass of beer. I cannot imagine a better way to spend a Sunday.

La Tuilerie Website

Farmers Cause Traffic Chaos in Saône-et-Loire

2011-07-31T17:03:00.000+02:00

We read in Friday’s paper that 60 tractors had travelled through Saône-et-Loire, grinding the traffic to a halt on Tuesday and Thursday this week. They were escorted by police motorbikes, intent on minimising the inconvenience to other road users, but with such a huge convoy travelling approximately 350 km over normal roads at little more than 30km/hr, the tailbacks were very long indeed, up to km in some places. Fortunately they didn't travel through Cormatin !

Nothing new I thought, obviously the farmers are on the warpath again against something or other, costs too high, income too low, subsidies disappearing, you name it they protest about it. Having lived in Kent for a number of years I got quite sick and tired of the amount of times my route to work (the M20) was used as a parking lot for lorries unable to get on the ferries due to yet another blockade or go-slow on the French side. What intrigued me though, as this is nothing special, why did the local newspaper dedicate a half page article to it?

Actually, this time it was something very special indeed. The terrible drought that has hit France and in particular this area and into l’Ain (the département to the south of us) has left milk producers and other cattle farmers with no feed at all for their animals. Many cows are being sent to slaughter early and even some milking cows are being destroyed as their owners cannot find feed any more. The cereal growing area of Seine-et-Marne 350 km to the north, heard the call for help and have offered their straw. So 60 farmers travelled for a day with empty trailers, spent a day loading at various farms and spent another day returning to their farms with hopefully enough straw to tide them over.

On the return route, as news spread of the convoy, the roads were lined in places with people who had come out specially to be witness to the event. It is not every day something like this happens.

The Mystery of Taizé Candles

2011-07-28T10:39:00.000+02:00

I mentioned in my blog about Easter in Taizé that my candle at Easter burned for longer than the expected 6.5 minutes, but as I do not wear a watch I had no idea how long it was, although my guess was over 10 minutes. I have been asking campers and giters alike ever since, to time their candles for me at the Saturday evening service. To be honest I do not think that they have taken their responsibilities seriously and have been coming back with stories such as “sorry I forgot to look at my watch” and “yes it did seem like a long time” etc etc, all very unscientific and very unsatisfactory. On talking to a set of campers on the subject this week, I discovered that they had taken an extra candle and it was in their tent (I won’t mention that it was Jeanine who did this). On realising the error in their ways at not timing their candles during the service, they gave me their spare candle and we timed it together and it was indeed longer than 6.5 minutes - in fact it burned for 11 minutes.

But that is not the whole story of course. I managed to find some old burnt Taizé candles, one from Before the change and one from After the change. The shorter of the two is from Before.

The length of the unburned candle was 20.5 cm. After burning, the remaining length of the Before candle was 9.5cm and of the After candle was 14cm. The weight of the unburned candle was 6g so the weight of wax burnt with the Before candles was 3.2 g and the After candles was 1.9 g. Using the burn times mentioned before (6.5 mins and 11 mins respectively) this gives burn rates of 0.49g/min and 0.17g/min. So the Before candles burned nearly 3 times faster than the After candles. All very interesting information but what does it all mean ?

From a candle making website I found these remarks:

Wax is the most important ingredient that makes a candle burn faster. Soft wax has a higher oil content and lower melt temperature; therefore, it burns faster. ….. But the wick thickness compared to the candle weight and thickness will also have a serious effect on burn time.

So from these comments one can deduce that the Before candles had much thicker wicks than the After candles and that the wax used now is a harder blend. Funnily enough, I remember having rather greasy hands after burning the Before candles, not so with the After candles, so the problem of the candle ends melting in people’s hands on hot summer evenings has also been eliminated in the change.

Ok that is burn time and greasy hands sorted out, but what about the fact that the candles go out automatically leaving an unburned end that cannot be re-lit? For the sake of safety the candles have been designed to self extinguish and this is very simple indeed to explain. Whilst there is something that goes through the candle right to the bottom to make it look as though the candle has a wick, the “wick” in the lower part of the candle is such that it will not burn - either a different non-flammable material or the wick is impregnated so that it can no longer absorb the liquid wax, I suspect the latter.

So there you have it - all you ever wanted to know about Taizé candles !

La Tuilerie Website for information on accommodation near Taizé

Festival Guitares en Cormatinois

2011-07-24T11:03:00.000+02:00

The Guitares en Cormatinois concert season has ended, all the planning and preparing of flyers and posters, delivering and posting them in strategic places has been done, collecting and putting out chairs, shifting grand pianos and manning the ticket sales is all over and we have our Saturday evenings back ! But we have really enjoyed the last few months of work and in particular the last month of concerts. The series used to be dedicated to bringing guitar music to “the people” but has now moved on to include a wider range of artists playing different instruments. Never-the-less there are always guitars somewhere in the series. This year three out of the five concerts were with guitar.

The first concert was with Alexander Baty who played the trumpet amazingly and at just 27 he has a very promising career ahead of him, he has already landed a job with the Amsterdam Concert Gebouw Orkest one of the top three orchestras in the world. His accompanist Véronique Goudia did a sterling job on the piano, but the acoustics of Cormatin Church let her down and so what should have been echoing sounds coming from the piano were rather tinny. Even so, the concert was excellent and very enjoyable.

On the 2nd July, Emmanuel Rossfelder (who is a yearly crowd-puller) was playing the Concerto d’Aranjuez with a group of 18 flutists. The open air venue of the ruin of St Hippolyte Deanery was a superb backdrop to the concert, but I must agree with Cees’ son when he heard what we were going to see when he said “does anyone need to listen to 18 flute players playing the Concerto d’Arajuez?” A number of the group had difficulty keeping pace with the music and hitting the high notes and this did not bring out the best in Rossfelder who somehow seemed to lose interest during the proceedings – a pity as he is really a superb player.

Adèle Bracco (vocals) and Thierry Moncheny (guitar) were supposed to also have had the open-air venue for their Brazilian Jazz concert but sadly, due to rain, they had to be moved to Bonnay church which had disastrous acoustics. No matter what they did during the sound check they could not get a clear sound beyond the third pillar and as volunteers we seat ourselves at the last minute and way back in the church. Whilst the music I could actually hear wasn’t exactly to my taste, I thought it was a good idea to include a guitar with a different music style to the purely classical that the festival tends towards.

The “local” venue for us was when Gérard Poulet (violin) and Dimitris Saroglou (piano) played Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms sonatas in Chazelle church. Although it is a somewhat scruffy looking church from the inside, the acoustics were sublime and the music was of a world-class standard. Normally towards the end of a concert I am fidgeting because of the ubiquitously un-comfy seats, but this concert kept me enthralled and I forget to even think about my numb bottom ! We were rewarded by two well received encores.

The last concert of the season was last night in Malay church. A lovely little Romanesque church a few minutes outside Cormatin. We have seen a number of concerts there, but we have always been early and sat on the plastic chairs placed at the front of the church or in the first row. Sitting at the back, the pews were absolutely “unsittable” and whilst the sound was still excellent, I had to move and walk around for a bit as the I started to get a serious pain in my back. In the end I found myself a cosy little spot behind a pillar and as I am too short to ever see the performers in a concert unless I am right at the front, it didn’t actually bother me at all not being able to see anything. What was amazing was that even though I was more than 20 meters away from the guitar player with at least two pillar between us, I could actually hear him breathing, so impressive are the acoustics in this venue. In any case Trio Alto (guitar, violin and cello) delighted the audience to an evening of soft classical music that I can only describe as light, romantic chamber-like music. The guitar was strung and played in such a way that it sounded very much like a harpsichord which beautifully accompanied this style of music. Once I had found my comfy spot, I could have listened to them all night.

All in all a good series, 3 out of 5 concerts were out of this world and even though I could have lived without the other two, the St-Hippolyte venue was worth it for the ambiance. Now all we have to do is start the planning and organising for next year !

Our accommodation near Cluny and Taizé: La Tuilerie Website

Night Markets

2011-07-21T13:14:00.000+02:00

Every year in Saint-Gengoux-le-National there are two night markets one is on a Friday in mid-July and the other on a Friday in mid-August. The whole of the mediaeval town is full of stalls run by local artists and artisans selling their wares. Other stalls have local produce or food you can eat as you wander round. You can also join in the communal meal that is organised, shoving up on to the benches to be squashed in with the rest of the population. The markets start at eight in the evening and go on officially until midnight, but in reality they go on until everyone leaves. They are well visited and the quality of the stalls is high, so I was excited to see that this year Cluny has taken up the idea and is running three night markets on Wednesdays mid-June, mid-July and mid-August.

The second Cluny market was yesterday, so we decided to go. They start at five o’clock, but we felt that seven o’clock would be early enough to attend. I don’t know whether it was the cool weather or whether this new type of market will take time to catch on with traders, but there were really not many stalls and the quality of the artisanal work (jewellery, pottery etc) was not of an exceptional quality. Amongst the stalls doing a good trade were some nuns from Rhône-Alpes where they were selling jams and hand cream although I missed the connection between the two. There was a lack of food stalls, in fact all that was on offer were small, thick “bio” pizzas which were certainly

lacking in the topping department so we declined the offer of buying one and sadly being away from the main town, the local restaurants and snack bars couldn’t join in the fun. The beer stall though had two or three interesting beers, so we sat down with a beer and listened to the entertainment, which at that moment consisted of two women doing a rather poor Brecht-style performance accompanied by a barrel organ.

The backdrop of the Flamboyant Gothic town hall on the one side and the view over the Abbey on the other gave a certain ambiance to the event, but the fact that it was not in the hub of the town took away a lot of atmosphere and for me the whole lacked the cosiness and interest of the narrow cobbled streets that you find in Saint-Gengoux which could have been easily created by a more central position in the town.

We’ll keep our eye on this one though, as it does have potential to be an interesting and bustling market with the right setting and the right organisation.

World Record Attempt

2011-07-17T14:26:00.000+02:00

We have had a valiant attempt at the “most number of consecutive nights” camping award class 1. Thomas from Germany who originally booked for 14 nights extended his stay by a week and at 20 nights, when he could see that the award was within his reach, he called for reinforcements by getting his wife to join him for three nights, but his camping rhythm was broken and he was all out of stamina and so he and his wife left after his tent had been on the campsite for 24 nights, one night short of Marilou and Niek’s outstanding performance back in 2007. However Thomas did not realise that the fact that he had an overnight stay in Dijon on night 21, when he went to collect his wife from the bus station, he had in fact broken his consecutive stay, so his real score has to be registered at 20 nights, which drops him down to joint third place. However, this attempt shows that the record is beatable, but forward planning and stamina are needed. So come on all you world-record seekers, there is still time this season to win the award.

For more information on our campsite click here.

Crème Vichyssoise

2011-07-10T10:47:00.000+02:00

I just love cold soups in the summer and ever since I first tasted Crème Vichyssoise at the tender age of 16, I fell in love with it. I can still remember the occasion, it was my parent’s 25th wedding anniversary and the four of us (Mum, Dad, my brother and me) went to a restaurant to celebrate. I ordered the soup and not knowing it was supposed to be cold, I was a little confused to say the least when it arrived in a cold bowl resting in a dish of ice, but just one sip and I was sold and have been ever since.

The soup comes from Vichy as the name suggests (not so far from here) and the story goes that in the 17th century Louis XIV was to be served a normal leak and potato soup but because of all the tasters and hangers-on that had to check out the safety of the food etc, by the time it reach the king himself, the soup had in fact gone cold. The king however, was delighted with this cold soup and so it has forever remained a chilled delicacy. How much more authentically French than that can you get?

Along with most really good stories this one appears to be a bit of a fabrication. Normally when these things come to light they are found to be some sort of marketing ploy, but this one is in fact an anti-marketing ploy. The soup was actually invented in 1917 in New York by Louis Diat the chef at the Ritz-Carlton - it was an instant success however, professional jealousy took hold of yet another Louis (Louis de Gouy) the chef from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. He wanted to take the glory away from his great rival and so he invented the Louis XIV story and spread it far and wide, thus making this recipe forever French, but more importantly allowing him to also serve it in his restaurant !

Why not try it, here's my version of the recipe.

Ingredients.
2 leeks, finely chopped, not too much of the dark green bits
2 shallots, finely chopped
a large knob of butter
4 large potatoes, peeled and chopped into smallish pieces, keep in a bowl of water until use
1 litre chicken stock
Crème fraiche or thick sour cream
Salt and pepper
Chopped chives as garnish

Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan and very gently stew the leeks and shallots until they are completely cooked. Keep the heat very low, the leeks and shallots must not brown at all.
Add the chicken stock and the drained potatoes and simmer for about 20 minutes until the potatoes are cooked right through.
Put the whole mixture into a blender or use a hand blender to blend the soup into a homogenous mix, it should be pretty thick, but a spoon should not stand up in it ! If it is too thick, add some stock, water or milk.
When the soup has cooled to about 40 degrees add two ladles of crème fraiche and stir it through until it is thoroughly mixed in, taste and add “slightly too much” salt and pepper.
Let the whole soup cool in the fridge for several hours then taste again. You will most probably have to add more salt and pepper as cold food needs more flavouring than warm food, so do not be surprised.

Serve in cold bowls with a sprinkling of chopped chives on top.

What could be better on a summer’s evening sitting in the garden eating an authentic French Crème Vichyssoise with a cold glass of the Chardonnay ?

Our gites are near Chardonnay and not too far from Vichy why not click here to see our website.

Prickly Pineapples

2011-07-02T14:40:00.001+02:00

I have been trying to make myself a light shawl for summer evenings ever since last year. My ideal was to use pineapples (a special crochet stitch/pattern that looks like a pineapple or the “eye” on a peacock’s tail) to stretch along the length of a straight shawl, but could I find a pattern for pineapples in a straight line ? All the patterns I could find in books and on the net were all for pineapples in a circle. So I set about trying to draw out my own pattern and even to crochet small pieces to see if I could figure it out. I soon got bored. - so gone was the idea of my lovely shawl.

This spring we treated ourselves to a new sofa and I felt it looked rather plain so I decided to crochet a nice little antimacassar for the back and some arm covers, but what pattern

to use? I stumbled upon an archived version of a site called “Vintage Crochet” which had been taken down a few years ago and although the archive is not complete, many of the chair backs were still available and what did I find? A pattern for straight pineapples ! It looked so pretty as an antimacassar I decided to use that pattern and here are the results, now all I had to do was up the hook size and use wool instead of cotton thread and my long awaited shawl would materialise.

Well the pineapples are proving more tricky than I thought in wool, maybe it is because it is summer and I am not concentrating as much, but whatever it is, I seem to have to keep undoing and re-doing bits of this shawl and the other day I just put it away so that I could chill out for a bit. During my

cooling off period we had some Dutch guests in one of our gîtes and after chatting with them one day I discovered that she was very interested in patchwork, we chatted out this and that, about my crochet and she showed me pictures of her work (amazing I must say) and that was that. A couple of hours later, to my surprise she arrived at our table in the garden with a little pouch. She said she always brought something to keep her hands busy on holiday and this was for me ! It was exactly the right size for my crochet hooks, so I dashed upstairs, put my hooks in it and started back on my shawl. Do you know what? I haven’t made a mistake on this shawl since – thanks Gon for getting me going again !

Vernissage

2011-06-26T12:07:00.000+02:00

I didn’t know what a vernissage was until I was invited by a fellow student of my French teacher to attend the opening of an art exhibition. Cees had been to a few in The Netherlands and he said it was a chance to see the paintings, meet the artist(s) and get a free glass of wine. Well how could I refuse, I mean how could I refuse the opportunity to meet great artists etc etc.

Since we have become more involved with the community and the local artists and artisans, we seem to get more and more of these invites. Sometimes the “art”, if you can even call it that, is dreadful and sometimes it can be very interesting, some are tiny events and some are huge, at one we were even entertained by a small theatre group who had created a piece especially for the occasion, in any case they are always interesting and you get to meet more and more of the local colour.

Friday evening was the first vernissage of a new local talent who was showing his work along with seven other fellow artists. I couldn’t refuse to go, after all ~~don’t forget the free glass of wine~~ don’t forget how interesting it will be to meet all the artists and see their work, well actually I had to supply some of the nibbles, so after making nearly 70 mini-samosas off I went into Cormatin.

The Master of Ceremonies Alain Michaud (a well established artist in his own right who held a vernissage a couple of weeks ago in a lovely old Romanesque church not far from Tournus) introduced the artists one by one, explaining their work and then the chap’s work I had come to see was introduced “And here is the work of a new artist who has been painting for less than a year, Monsieur Cees van Alderen”, lots of oohs and aahs and approving nods from the audience and so they should be impressed, his work is quite amazing for someone who first picked up a brush last September.

Then after our free glass(es) of wine and nibbles we left for home and a takeaway pizza to celebrate a successful evening. Now all we have to do is wait for the millions to roll in !

La Tuilerie Website

Wine Bottles

2011-06-18T17:42:00.001+02:00

Wine is big business round here. Cormatin itself used to have vineyards on the hillside where the Garage de Bougogne now stands, on the road to Saint-Gengoux-le-National,

and the main street in Cormatin used to have wine makers, wine merchants, a wine barrel maker and a distillery which made Marc de Bourgogne out of the leftovers of the grapes after the juice has been pressed out of them. Even La Tuilerie had its own little vineyard on the other side of the Chazelle – Chazeux road. The wine was made using the winepress that still stands in the old tile drying shed. To hear the stories from older neighbours, Monsieur Martin’s wine was legendary round here for being truly undrinkable ! Maybe it is good that his winemaking technique and recipes were not passed on to us with the deeds of the house.

We buy our most of our wine in the Cave Cooperative in Saint-Gengoux-le-National and we even have a loyalty card with them which they stamp every time we spend 30 Euros.

On the fifth lot of 30 Euros you get a bottle of Côte Chalonaise, on the 16th you get a magnum (1.5 litres) of the same and so it goes on with various gifts increasing in value until with the 50th stamp you get 3 bottles of vintage Premier Cru. Just imagine how upset I was when we got within two stamps of this prize and some nasty so and so pinched my purse in Barcelona with the loyalty card in it when we were on holiday a couple of years ago and all that loyalty was lost in one fell swoop and what is more annoying whoever pinched it didn’t even get the wine.

In the cave in Saint-Gengoux they have a number of the larger bottles lined up near the cash desk and I always look at them and wonder what they are called and how big they are, whilst waiting in the queue to pay. When we made a visit to the tiny Musée du Tonnelier (a museum about barrel making) in one of the little cobbled back-streets in Saint Gengoux the other day, I saw on display a row of all the sizes of bottles used around here and I was quite thrilled to finally see all their names and their sizes; so here is the list:

Melchior, Nebuchadnezzar, Balthazar, Salmanazar, Methuselah, Jeroboam, Magnum, Bottle, Fillette, Chopine. Respectively 24, 20, 16, 12, 8, 4, 2, 1, 1/2 , 1/3 of a bottle. How the heck one would pour a Melchior at 18 kg of liquid plus the weight of the bottle is beyond me. When I was checking the English spellings of these bottles, I spotted that Champagne bottles go up even bigger, right up to Melchizedek at 40 bottles or 30 litres, you would need a fork lift truck to get that one off the ground.

I don’t think we will be buying any of the big bottles very soon, although on our next visit we are due to receive a Magnum of some sort or another, but we still have to wait at least another 20 stamps before we finally get to taste the Premier Cru.

For more information about the holiday houses we have to rent see La Tuilerie website.

Lavoirs

2011-06-13T11:52:00.000+02:00

Sunday afternoon we went out on another organised randonée in the nearby village of Chissey-les-Mâcon and it was a themed walk similar to the one in Chapaize, only this time the theme was “lavoirs”. Lavoirs are abundant in this region and they are the places where the womenfolk used to do their washing. They are considered to be part of the national heritage and are mostly well maintained.

There are very big lavoirs like the one in St Gengoux-le-Nationale which could have catered for maybe 80 women at one time and right at the other end of the scale, the tiny one in Chazelle only had space for about four. Each one is unique and a tour of lavoirs is well worth the effort, particularly when you tumble upon ones like the superb little octagonal lavoir in Bissy-sous-Uxelles, quite a gem.

Lavoirs are often used for events like this one. When we first came to Burgundy, one weekend in May, there was a driving tour of local lavoirs organised by “Les Belles de Mai”

(a group of female artisans) who had decorated about 12 of the larger lavoirs around here and they had exhibited and were selling their work - great fun and a pity it was never repeated. Sunday’s walk passed quite a few lavoirs and similar to the other tour, local artists had decorated the lavoirs and were selling their work and amateur gardeners had constructed little gardens near them with descriptions of the plants in the little beds. Quite a lot of forethought and organisation went into this event and it is so nice to see these interesting buildings still being used even if is not for their original purpose.

The walks were rather unusually graded by the amount of time they would take rather than their length in km. The short walk, which was half the length of the medium walk, was said to take 2.5 hours and the medium walk should take 3 hours but in fact it took us only 1.5 hours, obviously we didn’t spend enough time admiring the artwork !

La Tuilerie Website

Walking in Burgundy

2011-06-07T10:16:00.000+02:00

Walking is a very popular sport in this area. There are many small, safe paths, the terrain is not too mountainous that it puts you off starting, the views of the vineyards and the forested areas are well worth any effort you have to put in, but above all else on most Sundays from April to October, there are organised walks. These walks (randonnées) are laid out by the village and they range from the super slick huge walks like Chardonnay, where many thousands take part, to the tiny village walks which probably attracted a dozen or so.

The first walk we did this year was in Chapaize a couple of weeks ago, we were mainly attracted by the fact that it was a walk that went past a number of interesting sites and we were promised a lot of historical detail about those sites en-route. Sure enough when we arrived to start we were given a little booklet filled with lots of interesting information about the things we would see along the way and a map to show the route. The walk was 15km mostly off-road with the farthest point being Chappelle-sous-Brancion and because of the terrain it should not take much more than 4 hours. We started later than we would have liked, meaning we would have to have a very late lunch, but that would be more than compensated by what there was to see. Things started to go wrong less than 1km into the walk when we could not find the correct path into the forest, but we know our way around here and rather than walk up and down the road too many times looking for the hidden entrance, we would just go into the forest, find the lake and go from there. That worked

and we found the trail again. When we reached a T-junction where it was quite clear on our map that we should turn right, the indicators said left. We were confused to say the least. We turned right assuming that the left-hand indicators were for the shorter walk. Not a good move as we ended up in brambles and stinging nettles and even had to crawl on the ground to get under some overhanging branches, it was at that point we decided we might not be going the right way. Back to the T-junction and follow the indicators, which showed no sign of following the map we were given. When we came to the road and the indicators said to turn right (direction Brancion so they were probably correct) we decided to abort mission and go home. We had taken 2 hours to cover about 3km of a 15km walk and had by now lost faith in the indicators, the clinching factors were that it was lunch time and it had started to rain. It appears we were not the only ones who had not found the path into the forest and when I said that the map and the indicators did not match, the guy in charge said “Oh we know that, we decided to change the route”. Ummm. One person had made it back after completing the whole walk but I am not sure how many others did the whole thing.

So when some friends came round and told us they had been setting out new walks for their village walk this weekend, we thought we would give it another a go. With a bit of a giggle we were told that the short walk would surprise some people. The short walk (between 5 and 10km usually) is normally walked by the serious wimps and is a doddle, not so in this case we were told.

So off we set on Sunday morning to see how little of a doddle it was. Well the walk started as it meant to go on, up hill and up hill and up hill with the final haul being the notorious climb near la Moutonnerie that used to be part of the Cormatin 20km walk. As we all know "what goes up must come down" and boy did this walk go down, at one point I thought I would have to go down on my bottom it was so steep ! So we made it to the other side of the hill, yes the OTHER side. That meant we would have to do it all again to get back to our car. Back we went up and up, then down the final haul into town to be rewarded by some absolutely delicious pizza pieces.

We did not get lost once, at no time did we ever feel that we didn’t know which was the right way to go and apart from the road in the village and a small stretch in Blanot, we spent all our time exclusively off-road on some beautiful paths through forests, fields and vineyards. The views were stunning and even though my legs are regretting it today, it was well worth it. Bravo to the Foyer Rural de Cortambert for a superbly organised event and where did you get that pizza ?

La Tuilerie Website

Baby Booties

2011-06-04T07:45:00.000+02:00

We do our supermarket shopping on a Tuesday and then we go on to have lunch in Cluny town centre. The place we have eaten for the last year and a bit, when our favourite Cass' Crout' shut down because the owner retired, is La Petite Auberge run by a relatively young husband and wife team who have managed to come up with a different plat du jour every Tuesday we have been there except on about 3 occasions. Not being too observant, it took us sometime to notice that the usually very slim wife was getting fatter and fatter around the middle and then some more time to figure out she might, just might, be expecting. When the restaurant was shut on a Tuesday a couple of weeks ago with a notice saying it was closed “due to exceptional circumstances” and would reopen in a couple of days, it was not too difficult, even for us, to figure out that a baby had arrived.

We were treated to a visit of mother and child the following Tuesday and given a glass of Crémant to wet the baby’s head.

Well I couldn’t resist it I just had to make some booties, never having had kids of my own so no chance of grandchildren, this was my opportunity!

So here they are the lovely pink booties taken from this website Mon petit Violon crochet and kit designs. So thanks Vita for sharing your pattern, let’s hope they fit.

La Tuilerie Website

It is Official - Cees is Ancient !

2011-05-31T06:00:00.002+02:00

This year Cees received an invitation for the “Repas des Anciens”. A free meal given to all the old folk in town. When you reach a “certain age” your name gets added to the list of participants and Cees’ time had come this year. Interestingly we are members of the group that organise and run this meal (the Amicale de Cormatin) so we were closely involved in all the preparations, but we ducked out when it came to asking for volunteers to do the work on the day.

We had been planning and preparing for weeks, with the usual French style and to us a somewhat chaotic approach, but everything came together on the day despite all the arguments over whether we should have beef or duck and which wine should be bought. As treasurer I was sent out to buy the chosen wine and I was very pleased to note that the white wine brought huge compliments, but the Mayor (sitting opposite me at the dinner) didn’t like the red wine he had personally chosen and insisted we should buy, which made me giggle rather.

We made table arrangements in tune with the time of year and a suitably Easter-ish theme was chosen and doesn’t that little chick that I suggested we buy as a joke look so cute. I really must stop my attempts at humour and sarcasm in French, they really do take me too literally sometimes.

We were treated to an aperitif, terrine de lapin, paupette de saumon (bouchée à la reine for the non-fish eaters like me), trou Bourguignon (cassis sorbet with Marc de Bourgogne the local fire water), cuisse de canette with gratin dauphinois, assiette de fromage or faisselle and Délice de Cormatin a special dessert from one of the bakers in town, all washed down with the appropriate wine. White wine - Mâcon Villagees Clos de Mont-Rachet 2009, red wine - Bourgogne Pinot Noir Buissonnier 2008 and crément - Crément de Bourgogne Blanc de Blancs all from the local cave, Vignerons de Buxy and then of course coffee and digestif.

They know how to do free meals round here.

Even though the meal was a month ago, I waited until today to publish this story because now it is official!

La Tuilerie Website

Parking in Cluny

2011-05-29T14:59:00.000+02:00

Parking in Cluny is a tricky business. They introduced desperately needed new parking areas during 2010 to cater for the expected rise in tourists and then promptly removed them, recovered them or turned them into paid parking as soon as the event was over. The staff of ENSAM (the Grand Ecole for engineers) have taken over about 150 new spaces from April to the end of August while their own car park is being repaired, paid parking has been introduced in the car park where we normally park on a Saturday, the old car park near the Equivallée has been turned into a bus area and the “brand new” car park near the bus area is nothing more than an old car park with new markings and fewer spaces. In total about 250 parking spaces have been lost since the new year and 60 previously free spaces have become paid parking.

So last Saturday when we arrived to go to the now much bigger summer market and a horse championship was in full flight as well as the ENSAM students still in residence (plus the fact that the place was heaving with tourists) there was nowhere to park at all. As we were waiting for a bus to get out of the way (he couldn’t find a space either) we saw someone nip out of a space, in we went. Phew, that’s that sorted. OK yes I knew it was a bus space but all’s fair in love and parking. Well no it isn’t actually, when we had been to the market we returned to find the road cordoned off by the police who were ticketing everyone who had had the audacity to think they could park in these spaces which used to be car spaces but had now been confiscated by the buses. Blocked in at one end by the police and the other end by a bus, we had no escape. In any case we now know how to pay a parking fine.

So just a little word of warning about parking if you go into Cluny, if there is a big sign saying buses only it will cost you 11 Euros the first time you park there, it will cost 35 Euros the second time, 68 Euros for the third offence and 195 Euros for a fourth, that makes 20c an hour for paid parking sound rather cheap.

La Tuilerie Website

How to Wash Your Car in a Drought

2011-05-28T15:19:00.001+02:00

There is officially a drought in France and in Saône-et-Loire water restrictions are now in place. That means no watering

the garden with a hose and no car washing. Just imagine my excitement when it rained a couple of evenings ago ! It was 5mm in total and as the rain came thumping down in great big juicy blobs I had a brainwave, why not use the stuff falling out of the sky to wash the car. So I donned my trusty raincoat and set to work with a sponge and doesn’t our new clean car look all the better for it !

La Tuilerie Website

Le Château de Cormatin

2011-05-25T14:20:00.000+02:00

A common “fact” often quoted around here is that the château in Cormatin is the most visited tourist site in our département (Saône-et-Loire). I don’t know what people base this information on and whilst I have happily passed on this “fact” to others as true, I have always had my doubts about it. Even though you often see a whole row of tourist buses outside the château, if you see the number of tourists hanging around in Cluny it is difficult to imagine that more tourists visit our little town than visit Cluny abbey.

The other day we saw a little article in the paper with the actual figures for 2010 and here you have it:

1 - Touroparc a zoo in Romanèche-Thorins just south of Mâcon : 190,315 visitors.
2 - The Abbey in Cluny : 152,809 visitors
3 - Parc des Combes a fun park in Le Creusot : 137,000 visitors.
4 - Hameau Duboeuf a wine centre in Romanèche-Thorins : 110,517 visitors.
5 - Paray-le-Monial pilgrim centre : 73,283 visitors.
6 - Château de Cormatin : 60,698 visitors.
7 - Bibracte an archeological park in Saint-Léger-sous-Beuvray in the Morvan : 43,179 visitors.

The figures for Cluny are slightly distorted as there were a huge number of visitors who came to Cluny for the 2010 celebrations. In a normal year they have just over 100,000 visitors.

So there you have it folks, our château may not be the most visited tourist site in Saône-et-Loire, but it is certainly the most visited château in Saône-et-Loire.

This got me thinking about how many tourists actually visit our tiny little town each year, let’s forget the hundreds of thousands who walk down from Taizé for a moment and just stick with the château figures. We have a whopping great 120 visitors for every resident - no wonder you have to fight for a seat on a terrace in the summer!

La Tuilerie Website

Visit into the Bresse

2011-05-14T16:56:00.000+02:00

Yesterday we decided to enjoy the wonderful weather and go into the Bresse to visit the monastery at Brou just outside Bourg-en-Bresse. As usual for a Friday morning Cees went off into Cormatin on his bike to get the newspaper and a baguette so that we could enjoy our English breakfast French-style and read the paper before setting off. He did, mention that it was very busy in the newsagent, but further no news from town.

On looking at the front page of the newspaper, I was a little confused about the joyous proclamation that announced that it was Friday 13th. Not something you would see on an English or a Dutch newspaper, there you would read stories of all the awful things that might happen during the coming day unless you were very careful indeed. Not that I am superstitious you understand, but I did think twice about our big day out. On reading further into the article I discovered that there are between one and three Friday 13ths every year and each one is a cause for celebration, all the more exciting this year because there is only one such day. The vast majority of the population in France think that a Friday 13th is a very lucky day indeed, hence the excited article in the newspaper and the queue of people in the newsagent buying lottery tickets on this day, to improve their chances of winning. So maybe our outing was not doomed at all.

In fact we had a tremendous day out, we went to the Musée de la Bresse, Domaine de Planons, part of which is a renovated 15th century farm fully furnished, with all its outbuildings complete, animals in the various pens and vegetables growing in the vegetable plot. We thought we would just “pop in” on our way to Bourg-en-Bresse, but it was so interesting we stayed a long time and we have not even scratched the surface of what there is to see there. We will definitely be going back later this year for a full morning or afternoon to explore the place properly and to see all the exhibits.

After a huge lunch in a Routier restaurant (my first ever!) we went on to the monastery. We had visited this place on our first visit to this area, when we stayed on a camping à la ferme near Villefranche, which must have been 12 – 15 years ago, back in the days when we only dreamed of doing what we now do. We were not disappointed with our return visit. The church is exquisitely decorated and is a perfect textbook example of Flamboyant Gothic. The whole place was built in a record time of less than 20 years, but sadly the commissioner (Margaret of Austria) died whilst living in Belgium three months before it was completed and she never saw the buildings herself. The monastery element (three cloisters and surrounding buildings) are impressive in their size, but they lack the simple elegance of the Romanesque style we are so fond of. But no matter what, this place is really well worth all the Michelin stars it gets.

All in all a very successful day out and a very enjoyable Friday 13th - maybe I will be bit more French about that date now - but it will take a lot more for me to believe that you have to hang horseshoes upside-down for good luck..

La Tuilerie Website

The Camping Gauntlet Has Been Thrown Down !

2011-05-08T10:00:00.001+02:00

The campsite is not yet officially opened for the 2011 season and yet there has been a very brave attempt to smash the record for the longest number of tent nights in one stay! Janine and Mijntje have managed to clock up 31 tent nights by using all of their strategic planning skills. Their record breaking attempt was slightly thwarted by one of their party who dived into a gite at the last minute thus losing them an extra 4 nights and their careless removal of one tent for the last night, lost them another. The way they managed this feat will not be revealed in this blog so that other campers cannot ride on the back of their ingenuity, but it must be said that bribing the judges with corenwijn and peanut butter was a masterstroke of genius. It was however, with great regret that we had to inform Janine and Mijntje that they had slightly misunderstood the rules associated with category 1 of the camping championship, these tent nights need to be consecutive. So the record of 25 consecutive nights set by Marilou and Niek and held by them for 4 years, still stands.

Having said that it was felt that the incredible effort put in by this pair needed to be rewarded, so the first ever “Judges’ Discretionary Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Camping in Cormatin, Taizé and Surroundings” has been presented to Janine and Mijntje! Congratulations!

The judges are a little disappointed that the girls are not building on their success by holidaying in France this summer and in view of the fact that they now only just share the lead for both the most cumulative tent nights (category 2) and the most number of separate visits (category 3), they are unlikely to head either of these categories by the end of the season.

Marlotte, Jan-Luuk, Annaloes, Jeanine and Johan are returning this summer and with their world famous ability to clock up tent nights, they will most probably retain their lead in Category 2 but there are others who could also charge ahead with the right strategy. Category 3 is the most open category at the moment, Hans and Joke were the leaders last year and only have to visit once this summer to re-take the outright lead, however there are others who could move up to pole position with a little effort. So this could be the category to watch this year and records could be broken by the person or persons who really put their mind to it.

In any case the competition is hotting up in 2011 and we are looking forward to seeing new and old campers alike rise to the challenge.

For those interested in the results of last year's competition click here and for more information about the campsite and more pictures go to La Tuilerie Website.

Sarkosy Calls for more Rain

2011-05-03T14:02:00.002+02:00

It rained last night - 5 mm- the first real rain for 28 days, we had half a millimetre fall out of the sky a couple of times last week as thunderstorms rolled by, but no real rain. The ground has cracks the size you normally see in August and France is entering a drought. We shouldn’t get too excited of course this 5mm does not come very close to making up for the 50mm shortfall in April.

Having said that it has been a fantastic April for the tourists to the area and the people in our gîtes have enjoyed sunbathing in temperatures of 27 degrees. I think the campers this morning were less grateful though. But one man is jumping with joy this morning and that is our wonderful leader Mr Sarkosy.

Why? I hear you say, because he is worried about the farmers? because he is worried about water shortages? Of course not – now he can try out his new umbrella. Yes the President has a new umbrella delivered at the end of March and it has hardly rained since.

But this is not just any old umbrella, this one cost €10,000 (yes, ten thousand Euros) and he didn’t just buy one either, he seems to have bought a whole bunch, but who he bought the others for was not reported in the papers.

The umbrella even has a special name to go with the special price it is called a ParaPactum. It weighs in at 2.2kg as opposed to 500g which a normal everyday umbrella weighs and it is made from Kevlar ! It is designed to protect our leader not only from the rain but from “falling rocks, knives, ice-pick blows and acid” according to news sources.

For the moment though, he will just have to be content with our measly 5mm of precipitation.

La Tuilerie Website

The Wedding

2011-05-01T09:58:00.000+02:00

I just can’t miss a royal event, they really know how to put on a show. So as The Wedding approached, I definitely had to find a way to see it and not just a couple of dubbed clips on the news, no I wanted to see the whole thing.

To my amazement, France 2 was dedicating a full day to The Event, so a little piece of England was going to be filtering its way into Cormatin on Friday.

But just watching The Wedding on TV on your own (no, Cees was not going to watch) didn’t seem all that exciting and when I bumped into an Australian family that were in their maison sécondaire in Chazelle for the Easter week, my day was made. I’d supply the crément and cucumber sandwiches and they would supply the Pims jelly. We were all set.

In the lead up to The Big Day, I saw this video clip which inspired my Australian knitting friend. It was sadly too late for the Archbishop, but a couple of corgis would be fine.

So there we were Friday morning and late into the afternoon, all the female members of the Commonwealth present in Chazelle on that day, complete with a couple of corgis, sipping our crément and cheering on the happy couple.

Congratulations to William and Kate !

La Tuilerie Website

Easter in Taizé

2011-04-25T17:16:00.000+02:00

The Easter Sunday service in Taizé is absolutely the biggest of the year, the number of people in the church is overwhelming. On a very full summer’s Sunday morning, there can be 12,000 people in the church, but this Sunday there were significantly more than that. I sat as usual near the emergency exits, but as all the aisles were full of people and the exits were blocked with people and wheelchairs, I didn’t fancy anyone’s chances if something had happened. The brothers must have put in place some sort of emergency plan as the church was constantly being patrolled by Red Cross first aiders in uniform with bags of equipment and there were a number of ambulances waiting outside, thankfully I don’t think they were called into action.

With so many people, the usually slick system did start to show signs of strain, even though I was ¾ hour early for the service I had to queue up at the door to get in and a girl was handing out the reading and extra song sheets, but she forgot to give out the normal song books (or they had run out), she also forgot to give out candles, but I spotted those and took one myself. It might have been easier if she hadn’t been there at all, but she meant well I suppose. Being so early I didn’t have to walk around too long before I found a square inch on the floor that I could worm myself into and wait until things began.

The start of the service saw the Easter candle being lit up by the altar, then it was carried around the church by two monks with the children and some other monks following and lighting the candles of the congregation as they went. I find the lighting of candles a very powerful symbol even if it was a mite dangerous in these over squashed conditions. I don’t know if they have changed their candle supplier, if these were special Easter candles or if my memory is not what it used to be, but the candles burned for much more than the six and a half minutes I mentioned in my Saturday night blog – this needs further investigation I think (wearing a watch might help for one thing.. ) In any case I figured out how the candle went out, but I will keep that secret for a future blog!

After a number of songs (fortunately, having no song book, I knew them all) the services moved into the usual Sunday Eucharist ending with the distribution of the wine and bread and this was where the biggest breakdown in the system took place. No monks came to the front left section of the church which wasn’t noticed for quite some time, so whilst the much larger front right of the church had all been given communion, we had not even started and it was only when some of the older monks were returning from the back that they noticed our lack of communion and they dived in to our rescue. So the distribution of communion took four or five songs instead of the usual two, but hey no one was in a hurry anyway.

We were then greeted in French with “The Lord is Risen” and as we all replied “He is risen indeed” and the bells started to ring out. The monks then continued to read out “The Lord is Risen” in a multitude of languages and the replies came from all the corners of the church, sometimes just one or two voices, sometimes large groups. It was obvious that there was a very large Germans contingent, but what some of the smaller groups lacked in numbers, they made up for in volume!

I finally made it back just before 12 o’clock - nearly 3 hours after having left home, but it was a most enjoyable and uplifting morning.

La Tuilerie Website

Missing Markets and New Monuments.

2011-04-16T16:53:00.000+02:00

As many of my blogs have gone on about markets, my trusty readers will know by now that I love visiting markets, but what I love even more than a normal market is an animal market. The smells and sounds take me back to my summer holidays in South Wales as a child at the cattle market in Camarthen with my maternal grand father. So when we heard that there was a cattle market in Charolles, still in the old style, we just had to go. It took some finding out which day it was on, but eventually we found reference to it being on the second Wednesday of the months January, February, March and April. We had missed the January and February days and I was in the UK in March, so this week was our last chance for the year. Off we went. On entering Charolles, a suspect building was sited just opposite La Maison du Charolais (a “museum” dedicated to this wonderful breed of cattle) but as there was not a farmer or cattle truck in sight, we dismissed it as the wrong location. We asked an elderly couple a little further along the road and they sent us back to aforementioned empty market building. Not one of the people wandering around the building knew anything about a cattle market and although the poster on the wall (dating from several years ago) said the market stated at 10.00 there was nothing there at all.

We went into La Maison du Charolais to find out the truth. The truth is that the market shut down years ago. Being so close to the market in St Christophe en Brionnais one of these markets had to go and it was Charolles. Ah well, it was a nice trip on a sunny day and it was almost time for lunch so we went in search of a restaurant. We knew of one in

Beaubery so that’s where we headed. The fondly remembered restaurant had turned into a café but we had a little stroll around the town any way. The main car park has a spectacular view over the countryside and as the sky had not yet turned hazy we could see literally for miles and miles. We had work in Beaubery a few years ago and had driven through the town on many occasions noticing that there was a monument to the Résistance. As the job entailed trailing a trailer, heading up to the monument was never an option, but today it was possible and as we had all the time in the world that is exactly what we did. What an impressive sight, a huge cross of Lorraine, the symbol of the Résistance dominates a summit way above the town so the views from up there are even more amazing than from the town itself. The names of the local Résistance fighters killed during the war are listed on the memorial along with the words: Croire, Lutter, Vaincre. Believe, struggle, succeed.

Our day was starting to have the theme “views”, so after a superb lunch in another restaurant just outside Beaubery centre, we went to Suin, a place we have heard about but never got round to visiting. Now if you are looking for a 360 degree view, this is it. It was quite mesmerising being that high up and yet still on the ground, it was almost as if you were looking down into the valley from an aeroplane. There is a little non-descript church just below the summit but on the summit itself there is a viewing platform and a very pretty Madonna. This is the place people come to fly in their hang gliders, it was too windy on Wednesday sadly as it must be a real sight when there are people literally just walking off the edge and catching a thermal.

Even though we didn’t see the market, we enjoyed some unexpected sites on our day out.

For details of our holiday accommodation see La Tuilerie Website

Lake Geneva in Cormatin and a Souq in Chalon

2011-04-08T16:08:00.001+02:00

Big excitement in Cormatin this Monday evening as a fountain the size of the one in lake Geneva was spotted on the road to Chapaize next to the old well. Soon a whole lake rapidly getting to the size of Lake Geneva was forming. As it was a warm evening and bedroom windows were open, everyone came out to look and of course discuss the happening. “Ooh look at all that water”, “gosh the water main must have sprung a leak”, “hey we could all collect some free for our gardens”, “I hope my house doesn’t flood” etc etc etc, but not much action. Eventually it was decided that something should be done, well who would you ring if you saw a 5 meter fountain where a road should be? No not someone useful like the water company silly, this is France, it was the Mayor that was telephoned out of bed so that he could have the honour of letting the water company know there was “a bit of a leak”. Sadly I missed the event myself, but I was entertained to all the details by the twins who live next door to, but fortunately up-hill from, the great event.

With the barbeque weather we are having at the moment, my spice cupboard is running a bit low and as most spices are very expensive in the shops around here (basically because it is only the really adventurous that cook food outside of the standard French repertoire) we are always on the lookout for new places to buy - the UK and The Netherlands are a long way to go just for some coriander! So yesterday morning we headed off for

Chalon-sur-Saône where we had heard there was an Arab market “out near the stadium”. Not really expecting too much, we planned the trip to coincide with lunch time so that we could go to the new Indian restaurant we have found.

The market was amazing. There was hardly a European face to be seen and not much French being spoken. It was like being dropped into a market in Marrakech. Arabic music blasting out of the music stalls and with all number of head scarves and long Arab dresses, I felt decidedly underdressed in my shorts and tee-shirt ! The market was big and diverse, in fact it took us nearly an hour just to walk round all the stalls. I found a fantastic spice stall and stocked up at bargain basement prices, for instance I managed to buy 500g of ginger powder for the same price I had paid in Cluny market for only 50g just a couple of weeks ago - having said that when you add the cost of petrol and the price of a lunch, it wasn’t so cheap after all, but it was a great morning out.

Click here for the website about our gites.

Summer has Officially Arrived

2011-04-03T10:33:00.001+02:00

I declare summer open. Our first gite guests arrived yesterday, the streets of Cluny were drenched in sunlight and there were loads of foreign tourists, the brusque man on the vegetable stall in the market gave me a smile (first ever!), we ate our Saturday lunchtime kebab at Le Bosphore on their freshly installed summer terrace, it was 26 degrees in the shade while I was mowing the grass, Fifi did nothing all day except move from one shady sleeping place to another and we had our first barbecue of 2011 last night.

It was lovely to sit in the garden, nice and warm and not wrapped up in our winter woollies, sipping wine whilst eating chicken saté fresh from the barbecue, accompanied by crocking frogs and chirping birds. Paradise in the sun!

La Tuilerie Website

Frère Roger’s Murderess is Murdered?

2011-04-01T10:48:00.000+02:00

On 16th August 2005 Frère Roger, the founder of the Taizé community, was stabbed to death in the Church of Reconciliation by a mentally unstable Romanian woman, during evening prayer. Such a violent death for such a gentle, peaceful man was, and still is, shocking and the news sent ripples across the Christian world.

When I saw the news today I was shocked to learn that Luminiţa Solcan, the lady in question, hangs between life and death having been stabbed by her roommate in the mental hospital ( in Dijon) that she has been confined to since that fateful day.

Some would say that Ms Solcan deserves what she has received, comments on newspaper sites that have run the story go along the lines that she deserved it, that you reap what you sow. But whilst those people are saying “an eye for an eye” I would agree more with Mahatma Gandhi when he said "An-eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye ... ends in making everybody blind". She should be brought to justice, she should be made to accept what she has done no matter her mental state and that she should apologise and ask for forgiveness, she shouldn’t be stabbed to death.

What will be in the minds of the brothers of Taizé as they hear this news, will she be in their prayers at the moment? Will they be able to repeat the prayer spoken by Brother Alois at Frère Roger’s funeral: “God of goodness, we confide to your forgiveness Luminiţa Solcan, who in an act of illness put an end to the life of our Brother Roger. With Christ on the cross we say: Father, forgive her, she does not know what she has done.” I hope so.

The photo is from the Taizé website. Copyright © Ateliers et Presses de Taizé, 71250 Taizé, France.

La Tuilerie Website

Getting ready for our guests

2011-03-28T16:02:00.000+02:00

The season is nearly upon us, every day we notice more and more tourists in Cormatin and Cluny, the big tents have gone up in Taizé as they are preparing for the huge influx of people for Easter and we are busy preparing our gîtes to receive the first guests this coming weekend. The last couple of weeks have seen us plastering and painting, measuring and mending, hoovering and polishing, gardening and making sure that everything is in working order and clean and ready to roll. The septic tank will be emptied on Thursday and then everything is done (I hope).

It is a busy time, but exciting as well, as our sleepy winter life turns into our busy summer life, meeting new people, many of whom will become our friends and greeting returnees to both the gîtes and campsite.

The last few days have been dedicated to digging out the drainage channel alongside the campsite. It is two years since we first cleared it out and there has been a build up of mud again so that the water has not been running off well. The final stretch through the hedge at the bottom was this morning’s job. When you are bald working in a bramble hedge is a painful operation, so we borrowed a hard hat from our friends Chris and Mary and in Cees went to cut through the hedge and clear the last bit. Done and working - bravo !

By the way this is what happens when you drop your glasses in the mud !

La Tuilerie Website

Sunday Drive

2011-03-21T17:55:00.000+01:00

The weather was beautiful on Sunday and combined with receiving two free entries to the “Salon des Vins et Produits Régionaux” (a regional food and wine show) in Paray-le-Monial from our friends Suus and Paula van der Linden, it meant we just had to go out and enjoy the Brionnnais for the day.

First order of the day was to visit the food and wine show where we tasted some superb wines that we could only dream of affording - Pommard, Beaune, Mercurey 1er cru just to name a few and where we sampled dried sausage (pork and bison), tapenade, escargot pâté, exquisite chocolates and of course cheese from our favourite supplier! After spending a small fortune to stock up “essential” regional delicacies, we headed off into town for lunch and a chance to revisit the sites.

Paray-le Monial is a nice smallish market town with a town centre well worth a wander around, a very fine Renaissance town hall and a superb Basilica built in the same style as Cluny’s Maior Ecclesia with a well-preserved cloister attached. It is also a place of pilgrimage and people come from far and wide to visit the place where Saint Margaret-Mary saw her visions of the Sacred Heart and the place where she was under the spiritual guidance of Saint Claude de la Columbière. Pope Jean-Paul II visited Paray-le-Monial in 1986, when he visited Taizé as well as a number of other places in France, but of particular note is that his visit to Paray-le-Monial was announced as a “pilgrimage” not just a simple visit. This injected much needed re-interest in Paray-le-Monial and since then the town has seen (and continues to see) a dramatic increase in visitors. The shops in the town are heavily influenced by this label and almost every other shops sells rosaries, crucifixes and statues of the Madonna, but fortunately the religious memorabilia remains tasteful, unlike some other pilgrim destinations I can think of.

After a couple of hours, we left Paray and went into the Brionnais itself. As anyone who has read our blogs will know, we are Romanesque church fans. We have visited almost all of the churches round here, but the enormous number of Romanesque churches in the Brionnais (more than 100) means that we have had to visit those on a carefully dosed basis to prevent overload. Yesterday we went to Neuilly-en-Donjohn in Allier a super little church and worth the trip, one tip though if you do go, don’t miss the exit off the N79 as we found out that now that the road has been improved there are limited exits off this section and missing the right one adds a 40km roundtrip.… Then on to St-Martin-du-Lac, Baugy, Bourg-le-Comte, Montceaux-l’Etoile, St-Yan and the not to be missed Anzy-le-Duc one of our all-time favourites with its superb tower.

Whilst St-Martin-du-Lac had in my opinion a totally out of place Gothic apse and choir, its outside was lovely and all the rest of the churches we saw were little gems.

All in all we had a fantastic day out. The Brionnais is not that far away (only 45 minutes from Cormatin to Paray-le-Monial) and we still have lots of churches to visit, so it certainly won’t be the last time we will visit the area.

Our website has details of the gites we rent out as holiday ccommodation in Cormatin.

Names and Addresses

2011-03-12T00:15:00.000+01:00

I can remember an advert in the UK in the 1970s for the Royal Mail and the punch-line was “we know all of our customers by name”. Fancy advertising, but of course it wasn’t true. In the UK post is delivered to an address. The first sorting is on the post code which narrows the property down to about half a dozen houses, then the house name or number and road name are used. The village or town and county are just there in case someone has used the wrong postcode. This is in sharp contrast to around here because our post lady really does know everyone by name and she knows where they live and she delivers the post accurately and effectively to probably about 500 people who live in a dozen or so small villages, every day. What’s the big deal? Well French addresses are not all that specific. Our post code narrows the location down to about 34 small towns who all have dependant hamlets, approximately 7, 000 people. OK so the French post code is not that effective at locating an address, but it gets all so much worse. Most places have no

road names, no house numbers and no house names, most people just live in a town (le Bourg) and the person delivering the post has to find out exactly where.

When you visit someone for the first time, you get a long string of instructions as to how to find the relevant house, mentioning the colour of the gates or the shutters or a bend in the road. One of the first couples to stay in one of our gîtes asked us for the road name and the house number so that he could type it into his Tom Tom, after we stopped laughing at the thought of such silly accuracy, we directed him to the detailed instructions on our website so that he could find us. We have since found out through trial an error on the part of family, friends and other visitors, that as our house has a truly unique name in Cormatin, ours is one of the few properties that can actually be found by a Tom Tom without having to fill in the coordinates, you just use La Tuilerie as the road name and Cormatin as the town and you end up in front of our blue gates. Sadly this uniqueness is soon to be over, Monsieur Sarkozy is determined to “modernise” France and has instructed that roads shall be named and houses shall be numbered meaning that one day soon everyone can be found by a Tom Tom. Of course the real reason is that he wants to privatise the postal service and there is no way all those budding entrepreneurs are going to be able to learn 60 million names and then find the right letter box!

Ah well, that’s progress for you. So slowly and surely in each little village and town round here, road names are appearing and house numbers are being attached to gateposts. Cormatin, Ameugny and even Taizé have all fallen and Chazelle is one of the few still not numbered, but for how long? This is bound to have a knock on effect as to the colourfulness of villages round here, no longer the need for orange shutters or purple gates to differentiate yourself, everyone can be the same, how sad…

So our clients are all having to comply by numbering their "maison sécondaires". In fact that means we have been collecting numbers from town halls around the area. One client living in a hamlet asked us to collect their number, number 15. Simple request, just pop into the Town Hall when they are open and collect. Well the Town Hall isn’t open every day, in fact it is only open for about 4 hours a week, so several weeks went by before we could make it at the allotted time. Not here, they said, Monsieur de la B. has the numbers for that hamlet, go and see him, back and forth to the Town Hall eventually yielded a number 15 from the bottom of a hidden drawer in the Town Hall with the irritated Mayor’s assistant muttering away – hopefully she was cursing Monsieur Sarkozy’s daft little plan and not us.

We put the number up this week and it does look very smart indeed, however, I am convinced that our clients' address will remain “la maison des Anglais à côté de Monsieur C”. And rightly so, that has been their address since they bought fifteen years ago and why should some government directive change all that? I was very pleased to be witness to the fact that the Town Hall mentioned earlier is only paying lip-service to this silly directive as well, they didn’t use the road name or number for Monsieur de la B when telling us how to find him (we asked but they didn't know) they gave us his real address and it was very easy to find “he lives half way up the hill in the house with the straight stone stairs and the wrought iron balcony” – thank goodness some sanity is still around!

La Tuilerie Website

Carnival Time

2011-03-05T16:17:00.000+01:00

This weekend is Carnival, celebrated throughout the Catholic Christian world. Everyone is having their last partying fling culminating in Mardi Gras (Tuesday) and then into the fast of Lent starting on Wednesday. Being rather practical the French have an interesting approach to carnival, ie if one village is celebrating this weekend, we will have our party next weekend so we can have two parties even if that does push the second one into Lent - somewhat missing the point I think. I discussed this anomaly with a friend of ours a couple of years ago and she replied that is was in fact allowed to have your carnival celebrations any time up to half way through Lent – very flexible indeed!

Our first Carnival parade was in Chalon in 2006 when we went out in freezing weather to see it, whilst it was quite fun, it was so cold we didn’t stay long. This year the weather was great, still a bit cold but no rain and no frozen feet whilst waiting for the parade. Almost all the same people were there as 5 years ago, they were just in different costumes, but it was fun none the less and we enjoyed our afternoon out.

Chalon-sur-Sâone 2006

Chalon-sur-Sâone 2011

Our second ever carnival was in Cormatin in 2007. It is scheduled so as not to clash with the parade in Chalon (no doubt at the request of the Chalon committee who are afraid it would take away too many spectators) and its timing can vary from two weeks before lent to a couple of weeks into lent, which was the case when we saw the parade in 2007. To make sure we didn’t have problems parking, we walked into town to have lunch before the parade which was due at 2 o’clock. Unfortunately we were a week early, so we had to go back the next week, but at least it gave us two lunches at La Terasse! On the second visit, after lunch, we strolled down to Café de la Poste to bag a road-side table to make sure we had a good view and we waited, and waited, and waited. At about 3 o’clock and getting rather cold, we were still the only spectators waiting in anticipation so I nipped across the road to check one of the posters to make sure we were there on the right day and yes indeed the parade was due and there it was coming down the road ! I will end my description here as my inadequate words cannot do it justice.

Cormatin 2007

We missed the parade this year.

La Tuilerie Website

Saturday Night

2011-02-26T14:40:00.000+01:00

A week in Taizé starts on a Sunday with the huge morning service (Catholic eucharistic with a Taizé twist) and the week ends with the same service the following week. But the last real day of the week is the Saturday and that is the day that prepares people to go home. The final Bible explanation and the final discussion groups are in the morning and the last evening service starts at eight thirty. This service often goes on until very late in the night - as long as there is even just one singer left, some monks will always stay behind to accompany them.

Whilst the Saturday evening services are like all the rest of the evening services in content (songs & silence) they culminate in the lighting of candles, a gesture that has is roots in the lighting of the Paschal candle on Easter Sunday.

For most people who come to spend a week in Taizé, Saturday evening is the last time they will be with their newly found friends, people they have spent a week with, people they have shared their beliefs with and people they come to know and trust. This service is the real end to their week, a parting of the ways - but it is also a new beginning.

At the end of the service the candles of the people at the edge of the central “garden” area are lit and then the light fans out into the whole church as everyone with a lit candle lights the candle of their neighbour thus passing the light on until everyone in the whole church is holding a flickering candle. Whilst as I said, this ceremony has its origins in Easter (the risen Christ as the light of the world) I believe that the act of passing the light on to your neighbour is more about passing the message on, passing the light, that your week has given you, on to your home community when you return to “reality”. For many it is a very moving and emotional end to a week’s stay in Taizé.

It must be said though that the thought of 6 thousand candles burning in such a tightly packed environment put me off attending that service for a long time, what would happen if……….? My factory, engineering and safety background sent chills down my spine at the very thought and when I did pluck up the courage to go to the service, I made sure I was close to an emergency exit. But as ever, the amazing organisation up on top of the hill has come up with a solution - candles that self extinguish. The candles are in fact quite thin (about 6 mm), they are non-drip but more cleverly they can only burn for 6.5 minutes, leaving about 14cm of un-burnt candle, then they go out and they cannot be re-lit. There is enough time for all the candles in the church to be lit and to have a very stilling and stunning effect, but it is not long enough for people to start walking around with lit candles, possibly tripping up or causing some other accident. I did once discuss the safety aspects with one of the brothers and he said that in all the years they have been doing this, there has never been an incident, yet another testimony to the sense of responsibility of the young people that attend.

In any case, it is a very special service to attend, certainly in the darker months when there is no additional light from outside and the church just glows with candle light.

Two of the pictures are from the Taizé website. Copyright © Ateliers et Presses de Taizé, 71250 Taizé, France and the other one is an old postcard also from the Taizé Presse.

Our website describes the accommodation we offer near Taizé. La Tuilerie Website

Spring is in the Air

2011-02-19T17:16:00.006+01:00

France is starting to wake up after its winter sleep, not only will the jonquilles (wild daffodils) be in full bloom soon, this is the weekend of the Mimosa festivals.

Mimosa at Cluny Market

Whilst the mimosa is not native to these parts it didn’t stop Cluny market being full of the stuff this morning. Almost everyone leaving, had a bunch of these fluffy yellow flowers, giving the whole town a yellow spring glow to it.

At this is the time of year, when nature starts to get on the move, it is obviously time for the national agricultural show in Paris. The fact that this most prestigious of shows is held in Paris shows that the French still hold agriculture in high esteem. The president visits the show every year and samples the farmers’ produce from wine to beef to lamb to cheese, jams and jellies, fruit and veg, everything needs to sampled and almost every exhibitor needs to be spoken to. Well that was how it used to be done until a tee-total, almost vegetarian, Spitting Image puppet took over the job that is. The previous president, President Chirac, went every single day of the 9 – 10 day show but President Sarkosy attends for about half an hour, normally on the last day and only if he cannot make an excuse to be somewhere else. Such is his apparent disinterest in the industry that still employs more people than any other in the country.

In 2008 he showed up on the last day and such was the contempt that some of the farmers felt for him, when he tried to shake the hand of one of them he was rebuffed with “Don’t touch me, I’ll never feel clean again”. Being an eloquent man our wonderful president replied with “Casse-toi alors, pauvre con !” not too far from “F.off you bastard” – very presidential and all caught on video. This phrase has since followed him around and was used on a banner last week by a French teacher in Cairo during the demonstrations in Tarhir Square. The teacher claimed that this was the message that Sarkozy should be sending to Mubarak – maybe he did send it, as we all know Mubarak did step down.

This incident is just one of many that has embarrassed Sarkosy since that episode a few years ago, but this year he seems to have set out on a charm offensive regarding the farmers, he has actually officially opened the agricultural show in Paris and has spent a significant amount of time talking to farmers and apparently listening to their concerns. One farmer is even quoted as saying “this was just like a visit à la President Chirac”. A far cry from the headlines in 2008. So it looks like spring fever has come to Sarkosy as well as the rest of us and it really is just a coincidence that there will an election next year.

La Tuilerie Website

Thanksgiving for the Wine

2011-02-12T12:26:00.007+01:00

Saint Vincent of Saragossa is the patron saint of winemakers and his day is 22nd January, he is BIG in Burgundy. His day has been celebrated since the middle ages but for some reason the celebrations gradually dwindled in popularity in the late 19th early 20th centuries. In 1938 la Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin (the Brotherhood of the Knights of the Wine-Tasting Cup) an exclusive Burgundian club for wine connoisseurs decide to revive the tradition. Amongst the aims of their club are:
"To hold in high regard and encourage the use of the products of Burgundy, particularly her great wines and her regional cuisine. To maintain and revive the festivities, customs and traditions of Burgundian folklore".
So thus began La Saint Vincent Tournante. One town in Burgundy is chosen to have the official Saint Vincent party each year, this choice rotates around the great winemaking areas and around the Départements of Burgundy. This year was the turn the Département of Yonne and the Chablis wine area.

But not to miss out on the fun, this area also has its own mini St Vincent Tournante covering 12 villages in the South Chalonnais and North Maconnais winegrowing areas. This year it was to be held in St Ythaire, a village that some friends live in and we have been hearing about the preparations from them for ages. Every Thursday evening since late November they have been making paper flowers. Not just one evening but probably about 10 evenings with the whole village involved. Countless thousands of flowers have been made. Each evening was dedicated to a different flower. Some roses, carnations, daffodils, tulips, wisteria, forsythia, apple blossom, you name it they made it. These flowers were finally used on the weekend of 5th/6th February to decorate the village in preparation for the parade on Sunday morning which we were to attend.

We arrived bright eyed and bushy tailed at 09.30 to find loads of people sampling the local produce. Some where dressed in medieval outfits, some in brightly coloured cloaks and funny hats and then there were the rest of us, dressed suitably against the cold. We set off up the hill for the 15 minute walk to the church with a horse and cart carrying barrels of wine in front of the parade. Each village had their own banner and small statue of Saint Vincent that two men carried on a carrier balanced on their shoulders. It was quite a site as the parade wound its way through the vineyards past hedgerows full of a dazzling array of very realistic paper flowers.

The church was packed leaving standing room only for those at the back of the parade, we fortunately managed to get a pew not realising that we were right by the hunting horns which were to herald the start and finish of the service. They nearly blasted us out through the stained glass windows! (The photo shows how close we were). The parade then continued on to the war memorial where a wreath was laid, I won’t mention the rendition of La Marsaillaise, suffice to say it was very memorable mostly by not really resembling the national anthem – must be all that wine so early in the morning. Then of course on to the Town Hall for more wine and nibbles.

Ah but you can’t just stop there - no the day has only just begun. Everyone jumped into their cars and off to Saint Gengoux le National for lunch. What a lunch !

Pâté de canard avec son foie gras, dôme de sole, queues d’écrevisse sauce du chef avec riz et fleuron, trou Bourguignon, souris de cerf braisé, fromages plateau, mignardises, café. Roughly translated as heavenly food presented beautifully with a different wine for each course all exquisitely matching the flavours of the different dishes and everything efficiently served to 220 people simultaneously. What an organisation!

There were speeches and awards, new Knights were named and each was duly knighted by using a huge corkscrew in place of a sword. By 19.00 the coffee had arrived (don't forget this was a lunch!) and the dancing had begun, at that point we beat a tired retreat back home and left the revellers to it, we heard later that they carried on until midnight when they had soupe à l’oignon and then they carried on some more until the early hours by which time this pair of wimpish foreigners were long in bed!

La Tuilerie Website

Is Winter Over?

2011-02-04T17:12:00.003+01:00

As in most countries, the weather is always a topic of conversation when bumping into friends and neighbours. Not normally noteworthy discussions, but I was intrigued when a neighbour said to me on Tuesday that winter was over because it was a cloudy miserable day. The logic baffled me somewhat and to ascertain how he “knew” this interesting fact, I asked for clarification and he explained that the 2nd February was La Chandleur (Candlemas) and

Si la Chandeleur dégoute, l'hiver est passé sans doute.

Well it was a pretty disgusting day so he may be right.

When I got home I looked around on the Internet and I found an old English saying:

If Candlemas Day is clear and bright, winter will have another bite.
If Candlemas Day brings cloud and rain, winter is gone and will not come again

Over and above that, I was reminded that Candlemas is also “Groundhog Day” and anyone who has ever seen the film with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell will not be able to forget Punxsutawney Phil poking his head out of his burrow to see if he casts a shadow or not. Truly inspired I decided to put all this to the test.

As many will know I have a bit of an obsession with the weather, I write down every day what the weather is in the morning, in the afternoon and during the evening/night. I read off the maximum and minimum temperatures for each day as well as measuring the rainfall. Not extremely scientific but close enough to create an interesting record. So out came my spreadsheet and I set to work.

Weather on 2nd February whilst we have been in France:
2006 misty all day, under zero for another 12 days and snow was lying on the ground for 6 days only 4 days without freezing weather in next 60 days.
2007 cloudy all day, very little frost after this date.
2008 sunny all day, very cold until the end of March.
2009 sunny all day, very cold until the end of March.
2010 sunny all day, very cold until the end of March.
2011 cloudy all day, it has warmed up already but who knows what will happen.

So apart from 2006, which could of course have been a sunny day just trying to break through the mist, it seems like it works!

And with that exciting discovery my mind wandered on to Saint Swithun's day (July 15). The weather on St Swithun's day is said to continue for the next 40 days, so if it rains on that day, 40 days of rain will follow and if it is sunny, we will get 40 days of sun. Well without going into copious boring details, this does not work at all, not one single year whilst we have lived here comes anywhere near meeting the criteria above. However, I then spotted in Wikipedia that in France it is Saint Medard’s day (June 8), that influences the weather not old St Swithun from Winchester, logical really why would an English saint have any effect on French weather? Back to the spreadsheet.

June 8th - July 18th
2006 sunny. Apart from three late evening thunderstorms there was no rain and it was sunny almost every day.
2007 cloudy morning and sunny afternoon. We had changeable weather right through to 11th July then it was sunny.
2008 cloudy morning and sunny afternoon, cool weather. It stayed cool for another 2 weeks then hot and sunny for 2 weeks then cool and rainy.
2009 sunny morning and rain in the afternoon. Amazingly enough half the days until the 18th were very similar.
2010 drizzle all day. It rained for next 12 days, then it was sunny until after the 18th.

So how does St Medard fare? My unscientific analysis of this one is that he only seems to predict the weather for about 2 weeks, then the next 3 – 4 weeks of his prediction time are a bit hit and miss.

Anyway, back to winter - is it over or not? The spring bulbs are all poking out of the ground, Fifi is spending a lot of time outside and there is a lot of chattering of birds and frantic activity in the hedges, so maybe my neighbour is right and winter is in fact over. Time will tell.

La Tuilerie Website

Taxe de séjour

2011-01-29T08:00:00.001+01:00

I am not a great fan of paying tax, taxes and other rather cutely called “social payments” are very high in France as it is, but the “taxe de séjour” (local tourist tax) has a real purpose and we have seen the benefits of it. In theory tourists who come to this area have to pay tourist tax when they stay in registered accommodation. So anyone sleeping on our campsite or renting one of our gîtes has to pay roughly 20 cents per person per night over and above the price we charge. However, the rules around this figure and the way to calculate it, are not as straightforward as one would imagine – this is France after all, why make something simple when you can complicate it? For instance if there are lots of children from the same family, the price per adult goes down according to a non-linear sliding scale, children do not have to pay the tax, it is charged only in the months of May to September, if you are accompanying a youth group you don’t have to pay anything at all and according to the type of accommodation you stay in, the price varies as well.. All in all, if we charged this tax on to our visitors it would be a mathematical nightmare for us every time someone came to pay. So Cees does all the wizardry in the background and we pay the tax out of our profits, not bothering our guests about it and significantly reducing the hassle factor for us.

However, all these little 20 cents add up, this tax generates just short of 20 thousand Euros a year for our “Communauté des Communes entre Grosne et Guye” (the local cluster of communes) and from the beginning, the president promised that the income would only be spent on things to improve the tourist experience in our area. He has really been true to his word. This money has been spent on maintaining the Voie Verte, the cycle path that spans South Burgundy giving easy access to many attractive towns and villages around here, it has been used to put up the signs which mark out the Balades Vertes, local walking routes that get you to some interesting sites in this area and this coming year it is being used to build a climbing “wall” in an old quarry almost at the end of our road.

We have cycled up and down much of the Voie Verte and we have done the local Balades Vertes, so now it is the turn of the climbing wall. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was an old quarry at the end of our road, it is overgrown and hidden by the dense trees and bushes, but the other day we went out to investigate and we were stunned to see quite how high it was in parts. This area is going to be converted into between 12 and 15 “climbs” with a separate area for children which is described as “acrobatic and fun” with a small climb for them too. We can only imagine what it will look like when it is finished but to give an idea Cees took a photo of me in the quarry. For those of you who know how well I do heights, there will be no doubt in your mind as to whether this photo has been “photoshopped” or not. In any case we are looking forward to the creation of yet another attraction for our guests and I will come back with a photo of the real thing as soon as it emerges from the undergrowth.

Having looked at the photo again, I think I might pluck up the courage to climb a ladder and put the TV aerial up now - maybe not.

Baby Boom?

2011-01-22T11:58:00.003+01:00

In 2010, financial crisis or not, France was the most baby-productive nation in Europe, so said the national news last night. The population is growing and that is good news for those of us who will be drawing a pension when these little ones reach in the workplace.

So it was with great disappointment when I read the headlines of today’s newspaper “Pas de Baby-Boom Bourgogne!” Burgundy has traditionally been a big baby production unit, it was one way that money was brought into the region at the turn of the last century (18th - 19th that is) not by selling the babies, who were actually just a by-product of the real industry, but by exporting their mothers’ milk. The Morvan was famous for its wet nurses, they were used by the rich and famous all over Europe. The Jersey cow of the human world, their milk was said to be rich and nutritious, it is a pity their own babies didn’t get much of it. The women would have a baby, leave their baby with an old female relative and go and live with their new family for about 18 months, then they would return to their impoverished life in the Morvan for just enough time to produce another baby, then off again back to civilisation.

Leaving Burgundy seems to be as popular now as it was back then for the young. Which is what explains today’s headline. Work is not abundant and as more young people leave, the average age of the population goes up and the area becomes less and less attractive to the young. Without the young, babies will not be produced and even though the Burgundian women do their best and produce way above the national average, they apparently cannot keep up with this exodus.

Having said that, the women of Cormatin are made of much sterner stuff. The great announcement in the “Bulletin de Cormatin” (the annual review of all things important in our great metropolis) and also at the Mayor’s annual “meet and greet the population” last weekend, was that Cormatin is getting a new school. The infant/junior school which is split over Cormatin and Malay, is too small for the current number of school-age children and the projected numbers are even higher, so a new school is being built.

So our own little Baby Boom is bucking the Burgundy trend and long may it continue.

Visit La Tuilerie Website for more photos of what this area has to offer.

It's Official!

2011-01-16T10:51:00.005+01:00

It is official! I am the new treasurer. I am not sure that the exiting treasurer who has done the job for about 10 – 15 years will be too pleased to see that she is my deputy, but hey all’s fair in love and journalism or maybe it is a case of don’t believe everything you read in the paper.

Here’s a link for all those who want to read the full details and I have stolen Michelle the journalist’s photo as well.

My claim to fame in Cormatin society!

Our website: La Tuilerie de Chazelle gites and camping à la ferme in Cormatin near Taizé and Cluny.

Annual General Meeting Time

2011-01-08T15:59:00.006+01:00

Around the New Year (December and January) all the local clubs and societies have their annual general meetings. One way to fit into the local community is to join these societies, show your face and sooner or later you become part of the scene. From the beginning we wanted to be a part of “Guitares en Cormatinois” (a classical music festival in and around Cormatin) and we also tried to join in with the Amicale (the group that fund raises all year to pay for and organise the old people’s lunch and the kids’ Christmas party) but both of these wishes proved more difficult than one would at first imagine.

For a small community of 552 people (in the 2010 censor), Cormatin has a strong and relatively large group of volunteers and fitting in, when you don’t know how things work or you don’t understand the protocol, can be difficult. We have had a couple of false starts, but I am thrilled to say that we have finally made it into the inner sanctum of both the guitar festival organisation committee and the local Amicale.

The Amicale was the first group to open its arms to the two foreigners from La Tuilerie and we have been heavily involved in all events for the last year, most people “tu” us now and the vast majority can even pronounce Cees’ name! Our acceptance into the “Guitares en Cormatinois” group was finally sealed with us making the “mâchon” (an after meeting small meal) back in October and the samosas, chicory salad, selection of Dutch cheeses from Paula and Suus at Cluny market, the Dutch apple tart and cheesecake must have been up to standard because we were formally voted on to the “Connseil d'Administration” at the annual general meeting just before we disappeared for the Christmas break.

However, having poor French political skills and having a tendency to smile and nod a lot when asked a question can get you into trouble. Last summer Cees inadvertently stumbled into the “tent-putting-up-group” for the theatre festival “Les Rendez-vous de Cormatin” - a large theatre festival held in the Chateau’s two theatres (one open-air).
This honour involved him in hours of tent-putting-up over the space of about two weeks and seemingly endless tent-taking-down over about another week or so. But through that he has made friends in high places, none other than the Secretary and Treasurer of the “Guitares en Cormatinois” who very thoughtfully nominated Cees for a place on to the “Communication” committee and he is now charged with making all the publicity for the festival. I was a little quicker to see what was going on and I managed to just smile and duck at the right moment!

However, after being ambushed one day in November by one of the Amicale committee members when I was out for a walk and then after being almost bludgeoned into submission during the Amicale Christmas dinner in December by some other committee members, I have finally been outmanoeuvred by these French pincer-movement tactics. At the Amicale Annual General meeting last night, I think I have been made the treasurer, I say “I think” because I wasn’t given the books to study or given any explanation of what I would have to do, because I need to be made a formal signatory of the society first. I don’t know whether this will involve me in putting a knotted hanky on my head and rolling up my trouser legs and chanting or not, but I am sure I will find out soon enough. After the compulsory glass of Crémant and Galette des Rois, my photo was taken by the visiting journalist and so I await the newspaper article with interest to find out what I have let myself in for!

For information on the gites we rent out click on La Tuilerie Website.

6th January

2011-01-06T20:01:00.001+01:00

And two of them thoughtfully left their camels outside!

Happy Christmas to all Orthodox Christians.

Latest News

2010-12-31T13:50:00.003+01:00

After a short break with my Mum in London, we missed Christmas at Taizé and we missed catching the events at the crib as they unfolded, but here is the latest news. Just before we left, a chicken and her chicks had arrived in the stall along with a dog, but as predicted Jesus was not there yet. We zipped up the hill yesterday to check out what had been going on and he had arrived and, all wrapped in swaddling clothes, there he lay in the manger. Some more angels had also made it and were hanging from the rafters. The shepherds had not got to the Nativity Scene yet and the wise men are also on their way, so there is still more to look forward to.

Things will be very quiet for the next few days as almost everyone will be in Rotterdam for the European meeting. It is a strange feeling that Taizé has gone to the place I lived in for so long. I wonder how many of the European kids will be staying in my village, perhaps not that many as although the village is a very religious one - at least 5 churches and almost everyone goes to one of them – most of them are staunch Calvinists and Taizé’s open and ecumenical approach to Christianity might be a step too far for them. I always used to think that they were a bit like the Amish with their black clothes and black hats on Sundays, blanking anyone not dressed like them. They don’t have television and they refuse to have their children vaccinated, they follow Calvin’s words literally when he said that God has predestined their fate and have sadly been touched by the polio outbreaks in 1956, 1978 and 1992.

In any case between 25 and 30 thousand youngsters arrived in Rotterdam on the 29th December for 5 days of communal prayer along with the majority of the monks who live in Taizé and a large number of the permanents who will have been working their socks off along with local church groups to get things to go right. They are using the Ahoy which at 30,000 mˆ2 is 6 ½ times as big as the Church of Reconciliation, this is some event to organise.

When they come back to Taizé, the action will restart on the Nativity Scene culminating with the Wise men arriving I assume on the 5th. Even though I missed the action at Christmas itself, my trip home did clear up one or two problems I had in my mind about Nativity Scenes.

At the end of the carol service on Christmas Eve, I saw the Nativity Scene in St Giles, my childhood church, and there it was including the premature baby Jesus. Whilst looking, I overheard one of the church wardens talking about the scene to someone else and to my relief this is (relatively) recent addition to the Christmas celebrations it is only for the last 25 years that they have had a crib in the church, so I am not going senile after all, there wasn’t one when I was a kid, so there was nothing for me to remember about it after all!

La Tuilerie Website

Where has all the turkey gone?

2010-12-25T08:46:00.001+01:00

Reading the paper the other day I was saddened to see that the Turkey Faire in Marcigny (a town in the Brionnais) would not to take place this year. For the first time in 30 years there was to be no Turkey or Gastronomic Faire in the town. The town has lived off the turkey business for generations, there is even a turkey monument at the entrance to the town and the Turkey Faire was big business. Traditionally about 50 or so farmers have sold their birds live to the public. Over the years this developed further to include many other local producers and so the Gastronomic Faire was founded.

Last year however the decline had begun and whilst there was a regional products faire the turkeys were in short supply, but this year there was no faire at all. A sad sign of the times. People want oven-ready cheap food as far from the food chain as possible, but don’t worry about or think about the flavour. Even in these rural parts, buying and preparing a live bird for the table is a step too far for many.

It has been noted that local butchers have stopped buying live birds as well and are now buying their turkeys from abattoirs who are supplied by mass production units, the free-range farm-grown turkey is in decline and the Turkey Capital of France is about to lose its crown. Maybe if they gave the turkeys an AOC that would increase their popularity as has been the case in the Bresse with their chickens. In any case, something dramatic has to be done or a local “industry” will be lost for future generations.

The Mayor is hopeful that the faire will be held next year and hopefully by cancelling this year’s faire it will be an awakening to the locals that something is being lost and they will return in large number.

So when you settle down to your turkey today, leave a thought for those turkey producers around here and make a mental note to buy a Marcigny Turkey next year.

Merry Christmas!

La Tuilerie Website

Crib Update

2010-12-20T11:16:00.007+01:00

Things have been moving very fast up at Taizé. It is just over a week since my last visit and so much has happened while I was not paying attention (blame it on the snow I say!).

Mary and Joseph have arrived in Bethlehem and are settling into the stable, the shepherds are in their field looking after their sheep and the wise men now are heading in this direction.

Above the stall are the words of Zachariah’s prophecy just after the birth of his own son John (the Baptist) “The dawn from on high has come to visit us, to give light to those who sit in darkness, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

We popped up on Sunday morning and we saw that an angel had arrived and the shepherds had turned and were walking towards Bethlehem. There was even a real donkey in a pen outside the church which everyone enjoyed petting, but I think he was just there for the day

There is real building of expectation in the scene and even though we all know what will happen, I have to keep going back just to make sure. Bravo to the lads and lasses who thought this idea up !

La Tuilerie Website

Snowed In.

2010-12-18T15:01:00.006+01:00

Last Saturday when we were at the market in Cluny, Cees commented that he would like one of those Peruvian hat things that seem to be all the rage this year to keep his ears warm in the freezing weather. So I bought some wool and when we were snowed in at the beginning of the week, I set about making one. Not happy with my first creation (too fitted, no silly pointy bit at the back, where are the tassels?) I found a different pattern and managed to make a suitably plonkerish version of the “real thing”. And doesn’t he look lovely in it? Thus confirming him, I think, as a dedicated follower of fashion.

And everyone, who knows me, knows what a fashion addict I am too, so when I received my copy of “The Weekly Stitch” (an email newsletter from Lion Brand about crochet and knitting) a couple of weeks ago and they said:

“The Cowl: A Winter Favorite
We have been watching the cowl take off on the runways as this season’s favorite accessory. They are versatile, practical and fashionable.”

I knew I had to make one, but first I had to look up what a cowl was. Wikipedia says:

“The cowl (from the Latin, cuculla meaning "hood and rope") is a hood worn by members of religious orders. ….. Developed in the Middle Ages, they became the formal garment for those in monastic life. They were worn to give warmth to people who often spent long hours in unheated and drafty churches.”

Ummm, interesting sounds more like something I should be selling to those chaps up on Taizé’s hill rather than a fashion accessory. On to the Lion Brand site itself and things were much clearer a cowl is a

“face-framing neck warmer”

oh I see, a scarf with no end, why didn’t Wiki say that? So I download a couple of patterns and away I went. Cowl no. 1 was almost completed when we were snowed in, in Paris. I say almost, not because of a lack of time, but because of a lack of yarn. At the end of my last ball of yarn, I was short by 9 stitches! Some serious thinking had to be done. This week snowed in again and I had an inspired thought as to how to finish the cowl with not enough yarn and finished it off, I also had time for cowl no. 2 which went much smoother because there was in fact enough wool and as I had done the pattern before I didn’t have to keep looking at the instructions with every new row.

So here are photos of the lovely Mrs Nixon modelling these wonderful creations which are now winging their way to England as a Christmas presents.

With already 13 snow days under our belts this winter when we normally would have had less than 5 and we should not have even been snowed in even once, it looks like it’s going to be a long crochet season this year.

La Tuilerie Website

Christmas Crib Hunt.

2010-12-12T15:13:00.007+01:00

After last week’s blog, the whole of this Nativity Scene thing has got me thinking and looking. I cannot ever remember noticing a Nativity Scene in a church when I was in the UK let alone looking at it closely, but that is more than 20 years ago and maybe my memory has just failed me. In the Netherlands Nativity Scenes are strictly for Catholics only and I lived in staunch Protestant country, so I saw none there either. My friend Deacon Dale reliably informs me that his church only has one cow in the stall at the moment and that the rest of the crowd will arrive during the midnight mass on Christmas Eve. As I never went to midnight mass in the UK, that also does not help in jogging my memory. My only option is to check out as many Nativity Scenes as possible in the coming weeks.

This last week we were in Paris to celebrate Saint Nicholas with Cees’ children, an ideal opportunity to search out Nativity Scenes in the French capital. We were staying in an apartment in Montmartre near the Sacre Coeur. In the Nativity Scene there everyone was there except Jesus, I think that even the wise men had made it which is a little illogical. They were all gathered around an empty manger lined with straw. We couldn’t take a photo because there was a big bouncer stopping people and when one Italian actually had the audacity to take a photo of the scene, she was pulled to one side forced to show all the photos she had taken and made to delete them on the spot ! So I can’t be 100% sure about the wise men. On to the Cathedral Basilica St Denis just north of Paris and this time everyone except the wise men and Jesus was there, which is more what I would have expected.

Our last Nativity Scene in Paris was in the Notre Dame and after queuing for about 20 minutes in the snow we finally got in and what a Nativity Scene it was too. Everyone was there except Jesus and the wise men, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the sheep, the donkeys, the cows and the angels had all made it. The manger in the centre was lined with straw and then with white fur - yes these Parisians know how to look after their babies !

Back home and a trip to Taizé showed no further activity in the stall, still no animals or shepherds and Mary and Joseph were still on their way to Bethlehem. On to Cormatin and there the wise men had arrived, but still no baby Jesus and in Cluny there was a full accompaniment even the baby was there - truly a mixed bag.

So far, I think one can deduce that those who actually know the story, make sure that the appropriate persons are present at the appropriate times - but I am still on the case.

Our accommodation near Taizé is detailed on La Tuilerie Website.

Nativity Scene

2010-12-04T09:32:00.000+01:00

For the first time ever The Taizé Community has built a Nativity Scene. The whole thing is at the road end of the Church of Reconciliation. The stable fits neatly under the roof but when I saw it, I was rather disappointed to see the stable empty. Quite unusual for a Nativity Scene - no nativity…. I stood looking for a few minutes and then I spotted them, Joseph with staff in hand leading a donkey with a very pregnant Mary on top. Logical really, Jesus isn’t due for a few weeks yet. I have never found it odd that the baby Jesus was in the stable for the whole of advent, but obviously the builders of this Nativity Scene had found it odd and had put some thought into their rendition of a Nativity Scene.

To quote from Taizé’s website “It is a sign of the Season of Advent, into which Christians have just entered. The liturgy also underlines this time of waiting.. ” and this novel approach to what is usually seen as just a bit of extra festive “tinsel”, makes us think about the whole story and about the waiting. The quotation from Luke 2 on the wall reads “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. And everyone went to his own town to register.” Reading that and seeing Mary on her donkey did get me thinking.

The distance between Nazareth and Bethlehem is about 130 km as the crow flies, how long would that journey have taken them? Cees and I have been know to do quite a bit of walking and when in form we can clock up to a maximum of 25 km a day so if we were fit and in tip-top condition it would take us about 6 days on the flat. But we are talking about desert here and we are talking about an old man who is leading a donkey with his heavily pregnant wife on it. We should also not forget that to get to Bethlehem, they would have had to travel across Samaria which was hostile bandit country in those days. Some people even suggest that they would not have taken the shortest route but a longer safer route via modern day Jordan. So whilst the bible gives no figures (as far as I can see) it would have been a very long journey more than a couple of weeks, which might explain why they arrived so late in Bethlehem and missed out on all the available rooms.

In any case I will be following events as they unfurl between “Nazareth” and “Bethlehem” and let you know.

Our gites are not very near Bethlehem, but they are near Taizé and they have availability! La Tuilerie Website

Winter's Here

2010-11-27T17:01:00.001+01:00

Well winter has arrived and, as with every year, it comes as a surprise to me. Although we had our first frosts in October as usual, the weather has been very mild the last few weeks, I went to the market in Cluny in my shorts last week, but yesterday we awoke to a fine layer of snow and I had to admit defeat and put long trousers on. The girls who run the Dutch cheese stall in Cluny market even commented on the fact that I wasn’t wearing shorts! After lunch in Cluny (Café du Centre for a change) we came home and Cees went off to his painting classes in Cormatin. I have taken to going for a walk on Saturday afternoons while he is out and today I decided to go up the hill to Taizé and I was treated to a lovely view of La Tuilerie with a light sprinkling of snow. I walked into the shop in Taizé to look at the pottery, browse through the books and cards and warm up a bit before the walk home though the woods. It is lovely circuit, mostly on footpaths, hardly walking on any roads at all and I even bumped into Frère Alois in the woods obviously doing the same walk but in the other direction.

Finally before Cees came back I had to do my chores for the day, drain the water down out of the gîtes. As we don’t rent them out in the winter, we don’t heat them and so there is always the risk of burst pipes. I emptied the water from the campsite a few weeks ago and now with the temperature at –4 degrees last night and no sign of warmer weather in the next week, it is better to be safe than sorry. I even switched the TV on for a few minutes before Cees came back, very unlike me, but after the disaster with the transfer to digital TV, I keep feeling that I need to check that everything is still working. It is so nice to be able to watch the quiz again in the evenings and our favourite documentary “Les Racines et Les Ailes”. Fortunately we have discovered that we can get reception through the single glazed windows in the kitchen, so we don’t have to have the living room (double glazed) windows open to get a signal (a bit chilly to say the least) and even though it looks a bit weird to have the huge new aerial in the kitchen, it isn’t really in the way now that Cees has built a very smart new wooden structure to support it! We will have to come up with a more permanent solution at some stage, but that can wait.

More details about our gites and campsite are on La Tuilerie Website.

A Blog in Pictures

2010-11-23T09:00:00.000+01:00

Dinner With the Mayor – Conspiracy Theory?

2010-11-21T14:09:00.006+01:00

Last night we had dinner with the Mayor, well you are either on the A-List or not as I always say. OK to be fair we actually had dinner with Jean-François and his wife Monique and he happens to live almost next door (well as next door as anyone does around here) and just happens to be the Mayor of our enormous metropolis Cormatin, which in the census this year counted more than 500 inhabitants - yes it is a BIG town.

Along with a couple of other neighbours we were treated to an exquisite meal. After some delicious chorizo and cheese puff-pastry nibbles with Kir Royale we were ushered to the table and an amuse-bouche of warm creamed pumpkin topped with small pieces of foie gras. The entrée was snails (caught and processed by Monique herself) and for the non-snail eaters (eg me as I don’t dare to eat them because of my shell fish allergy) there was a wild boar pâté made by Monique of course and the boar had been shot in the local woods by Jean-François himself. The main course was chicken in a light creamy morel sauce served with rice portioned into ramekins and presented as a little perfectly formed cylinder on the plate. The chicken certainly came from a shop, but whether the morels came from the forest opposite us, is a little bit of a mystery, I must admit we got rather lost in the discussion about the origins of the morels. Whilst their origin may be in doubt, their excellent taste was not. This was followed by the last of the “fresh” goats’ cheese of the season from the lady in La Bergerie and the meal was capped off with homemade lemon sorbet on top of warmed pineapple cubes lightly flavoured with cinnamon placed beautifully next to a small glass of mousse au chocolat and some almond wafer biscuits. Each course was served with the appropriate wine which prompted discussions of flavours and vintages. All I can say is - wow what a meal!

It was fun to have an evening out, discussing local issues, who’s who in Cormatin, amusing past and present stories (Jean-François is a master at story telling) and of course there was the inevitable discussion about the most important event in all our lives since anyone can remember - the transfer to digital TV.

Since my last blog on this topic, Cees and I have been phoning round and visiting anyone we can find who can help us. No one is available until mid-December, the whole change-over has been one huge fiasco. Because no one had had the opportunity to check out their digital receiving equipment prior to cutting off the analogue signal, it would seem that at least 50% of the local population (Cormatin, Cluny, Ameugny, Taizé, Salornay-sur-Guye) have poor reception, partial reception or no reception at all. Every single transmitter in the area was switched over at the same time which is leaving the poor (or soon to be stinkingly rich) aerial installers with more problems than they can possibly deal with. On Saturday morning one chap said: “Why couldn’t they have switched the transmitters off one by one? Then I could have at least made an attempt to keep up with requests for help!” In our tiny village of Chazelle everyone has a problem of one sort or another except one person - the Mayor - he has perfect reception, which is where the conspiracy theory of another friend of ours comes in. No names will be mentioned, but a friend of ours has a thing about Mayors and other persons in positions of authority and it does seem that she might have a point, why out of all the 30 odd houses in our village is he the only one who has perfect reception? Does he have so much power in the locality that those guys at Mont Saint Vincent have redirected our signal to his house? Well no not really, it seems that he is the only one who had the foresight to see the chaos that was on its way and he had a satellite dish fitted a couple of months ago. So should I call that conspiracy theory or strategic planning?

Our gites are in Chazelle, near Cormatin to see more detailsclick here.

The Morning After

2010-11-17T09:35:00.002+01:00

Yesterday morning started hopefully enough our reception equipment worked and at about 10 o’clock we had the tantalising glimpse of a black screen called Fr2 and another one called Fr3, by lunch they had gone and didn’t return all day. By mid-afternoon TF1 had completely lost the plot and was transmitting its afternoon drivel in English but at least the subtitles for the hard of hearing worked in French. Moving down the dial I found another channel transmitting in English (of a sort), it was showing an Australian programme which is a cross between “Changing Rooms” and “Ground Force”.
The French subtitles worked there too and whilst the two Crocodile Dundees were over actingly discussing how to install decking and a pool in two days the subtitles read “Ah oui je t’aime, je t’aime” ummm not a very accurate translation but hey this is France.

All this makes me sound like a telly addict, well I suppose deep down in my heart I am but in reality I only what two programmes 1) a quiz on Fr3 at 6 o’clock and 2) the news on TF1 at 8 o’clock. Well we had to do without Julien Lepers last night, but at least we could see the news. Just before going to bed Cees suggested one last try at tuning the box, to no avail, but at least after transmitting French talk shows all evening I was glad to see that TF1 had reverted to transmitting in English!

Today has not dawned any better, still no Fr2 or Fr3, the website says everything is up and running, if you type in our address it says we cannot receive any form of TNT at all and the help-line is not taking calls although they have promised to ring me back - I won’t hold my breath. Looks like no Julien again tonight.

TNT DAY!!!

2010-11-15T14:25:00.012+01:00

Télévision numérique terrestre (digital TV) has arrived in Burgundy! In wonderful French style all the televsion transmitters in Burgundy were shut down last night en masse and have been starting up one by one today sending digital signals only - analogue died last night. Because of our tricky geographical position with the forest on one side and with hills between us and the rest of the world, there is only one transmitter we can "see", that is Mont Saint Vincent. It was decided, for reasons unknown, that Mont Saint Vincent would be one of the only transmitters in our region not to send out analogue and digital TV simultaneously over the last few months so that we could all tune in and check out our equipment, no Mont Saint Vincent was shut down for analogue last night and no one has been able to tell us whether it would actually send out digital in our direction. So no chance to test out our equipment before TNT Day. My years in industry have taught me that expecting something to work first time is an idiot's approach to technology so we have been counting down to TNT Day for the last 18 months, trying to get more information on how to test the equipment we bought all that time ago, but up until this morning we could do nothing and we just had to wait and see if our equipment was sufficient to receive digital signals, if digital signals would be sent this way.

So are we running for cover or jumping for joy?

Just before 8 o'clock in the morning and we have TV!! Fewer proper channels than before, but at least the aerial and box work and Mont Saint Vincent is transmitting. BTW we had three channels before now we have one and not the one we want!!! We do have lots of pay-for channels that we can't see because the signal is scrambled and at least three shopping channels so that is progress I suppose, let's see what the rest of the day brings...

TNT Day Minus One

2010-11-15T14:06:00.006+01:00

We will watch Question Pour Un Champion this evening, hopefully the junior school teacher will win the cagnotte this evening, will this be the last time we will watch? At midnight all the television transmitters in Burgundy will be shut down and go silent for the first time since 29th March 1945 when television transmissions were reinstated after the Germans left France. Is the end of life as we know it?

TNT Day

2010-11-14T11:45:00.004+01:00

It is TNT Day in Burgundy on Tuesday 16th November..

What will happen? Will we all be blown sky high?

Last Wreath Laying of the Year.

2010-11-13T11:20:00.000+01:00

November 11th, Armistice Day (the end of World War One), is the last and the most well attended of all the wreath layings in Cormatin’s complicated wreath laying year. As all my blog followers will have noted we attend all five with enthusiasm. Each one is different in character, not only because of the different group of people each one attracts, but because of the inevitable confusion surrounding the organisation.

All went very smoothly this time, the flowers were found, the flag was found, a replacement flag carrier was found (our usual flag carrier had broken his leg), the new CD player was found and Monsieur P had been having lessons in its use. He confidently pressed play and we were treated to the trumpet introduction to a tune that wasn’t the Marseillaise. Monsieur P calmly leant down and restarted the CD and we were able to hear the end of the national anthem. There were whispers of “wrong CD” from the chap standing next to me, but further all went well. This time, contrary to what we should have been doing, it was announced that we were all off the Bois Dernier memorial which is a Second World War memorial, no complaints from anyone, no “what does the Mayor think he is doing?”, no "jamais, jamais, jamais" and above all no irritated mutterings between the Mayor and Monsieur P - all was going according to their plan.

Off we went, Cees on his bike got there long before the rest of us had walked to the car park, had complicated discussions about who was going in which car and eventually we made it to the memorial. Again confidence was shown by Monsieur P who this time played a different and full version of the Marseillaise to which he dutifully sang along (we heard one female voice as well, but couldn’t identify where it was coming from). So not only had he been practising with the CD player, but he had found himself two versions of the national anthem, the long and the short version so that we can have a different one at each monument - Bravo Monsieur P!

Still a bit puzzled about the change of venue when all was revealed. Whilst the Mayor reads out the official government speech at the memorial in Cormatin, Monsieur P always gives a speech at the Bois Dernier memorial. We had the usual thank yous, particularly to the children who came and the school teacher who was there for the first time - it is important that they grow up understanding the meaning behind these days of remembrance and that they realise the sacrifices made for their current way of life. The real reason for the visit to the Bois Dernier memorial was then revealed. We were there to mark the 40th anniversary of the death of de Gaulle, who died on 9th November 1970. He was the leader of the Free French Forces from London during the war and he was the inspiration to the French people and the resistance movement during the German occupation.

Back to the Blés d’Or for Kir and nibbles and talk of how the unknown soldier was chosen and the wagon used to sign the German capitulation. A successful morning. I do wonder though what things will be like when Monsieur P is no longer there to talk the youngsters through real living history, how long will these ceremonies carry on when there is no one left who remembers any of it?

La Tuilerie Website.

Rabbit in Mustard Sauce

2010-11-06T08:30:00.001+01:00

Tuesday is our shopping day in Cluny, certain items in the supermarket have 10% off so we do our shopping on a Tuesday to save money – makes sense. However, we always have other chores to do in town and we end up having lunch in Cluny as well, which is of course more than the money we have saved by shopping on a Tuesday, so one could argue what is the point of shopping on a Tuesday at all..

Anyway, Cees has become a big fan of the “plat du jour” for our Tuesday lunches. The plat du jour changes every day and in the year he has been having it at our favourite restaurant (La Petite Auberge) he has only had a repeat dish on two occasions, quite an impressive feat. Due to holiday closures, we had lunch this Tuesday at Café du Centre and Cees’ plat du jour was rabbit in mustard sauce a real speciality around here. Rabbit is also very popular in The Netherlads, many people eat it for Christmas. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the family cat should be kept indoors around that time of year as these creatures have been known to go missing and sold on as rabbits. Seeing the little bones on his plate, Cees commented that now he understood why people could have been fooled into buying a cat. Anyway after shuddering at the thought of Fifi ending up in the pot, Cees went on to enjoy his Lapin à la Moutarde.

On Wednesday morning we woke up to find that Fifi had disappeared, no amount of bell ringing summoned her. The same in the afternoon. As she has never gone missing before, I went out to search the property in case she was trapped in a drain somewhere, I then searched all the ditches within walking distance of here to see if she had been hit by a car and crawled to the edge of the road, but no Fifi. When Thursday morning dawned and still no Fifi and she hadn’t been back to eat anything during the night, we were convinced that she had in fact been killed by a fox or even shot by a hunter and I thought back to Tuesday's lunch and began to think she may have been taken. Thursday afternoon I switched the light off in her little house and faced up to the prospect of packing up her bed and blocking up the door but decided to leave it one day more, miracles could happen. As I pottered around after dinner putting out the rubbish, almost exactly 48 hours after the last sighting of Fifi, I didn't look down as I opened the front door and who shot in like a rocket straight up the stairs to the bedroom, but our little cat. Fifi was home, fit and well and not a mark on her. Welcome home Fifi and please don't do that again!

Anyway, in celebration of her return, here is the afore-mentioned recipe:

Lapin à la Moutarde

1 rabbit chopped in pieces
Mustard
75g butter
2 shallots chopped finely
1 glass of white wine
200g cream (double or crème fraiche)
salt and pepper

Cover the rabbit pieces with a good layer of mustard. Put them in a bowl and cover in the fridge for at least half an hour.
Heat the butter in a large pan, add the shallots and fry until the rabbit pieces are brownish. Sprinkle a small amount of salt and pepper on the rabbit pieces, add the wine and simmer gently for 45 minutes. If the pan goes dry, add a little water.
Remove the rabbit and add the cream, stir well to remove all the bits stuck to the bottom of the pan and when the cream has boiled for a couple of minutes add 1tbs more of mustard, turn off the heat, mix the mustard well into the sauce and pour this sauce over the rabbit pieces.

La Tuilerie Website

Lost Friends

2010-10-30T15:12:00.006+02:00

This week we received the sad news that a friend had passed away. Chris Gulker was a blogger before the word existed and he blogged almost every day since setting up his personal website in 1995. To quote a tribute to him from INMenlo (a hyper-local blog in Silicon Valley):

“Academics have cited gulker.com as one of the earliest weblogs – “the first to propose a network of bloggers.” Chris Gulker also pioneered two of the most effective means through which blogging emerged as a social medium – the blogroll and link attrition.”

So how else could we have met him and his wife Linda but through our blogs. We went on to meet them in person when they were at Taizé for a month earlier this year and we became friends. Little did we or they know at that time, that their proposed visit to Burgundy this September would not go ahead due to the reappearance of tumours in Chris’ brain. Linda and Chris have been an inspiration to many these last few months with their openness with regard to Chris’ illness and their determination to “live each day” to use their own words. Our thoughts are with Linda as she sets off on a new phase of her life and we look forward to celebrating Chris’ life with her when she comes back to Taizé next spring.

I pinched the photo of Chris from the INMenlo site where is it accredited to Anne Knudsen.

A second newly-made friend has left us this week as well, although in happier circumstances. Babette who has run the Cormatin newsagent and tobacconist for the last eleven years, one of the first people around here to be able to pronounce, remember and reproduce Cees’ name and a fellow “conscrit” also with a red hat, has left us to join her husband who moved down to Provence almost two years ago for a new job. There was a huge party last night to say our farewells, the whole town turned up as well as many people from the surrounding villages. Bon Voyage Babette!

A week to make us thankful for the friends we have and a week to make us realise that we should make the most of the time we have with them.

La Tuilerie Website

Strikes and Blockades

2010-10-23T10:22:00.005+02:00

The French love a good strike and demonstration and what better cause but the increase of retirement age by two years. Shocking you may say and ordinarily I would agree but what is more shocking is that the state retirement age in France is only 60 and even younger if you are in a hard or stressful profession like a train driver! So sorry to the citizens of my new homeland, but I have no sympathy for this strike especially when it means we are having difficulty getting petrol due to the blockading of all the country’s oil refineries. So our essential trip to Mâcon to get supplies for Cees’ new painting classes and of course a nice lunch at Palais d’Asie was put in danger today by me not wanting to waste a drop of that precious liquid.

Having said that, many people who have stayed in our gîtes have come by public transport, what better way to spend the day than taking the bus to Mâcon and back and enjoying the autumn sun that has just poked its head from behind the clouds? And seeing as we tell everyone how easy it is, we really should try it one day. So off we went to catch the 10.30 bus, hoping that the bus drivers weren’t on strike as well and we were duly met by the bus which arrived spot on time. Up the hill through Ameugny and Taizé where we picked up a couple of escapees heading for a day out in Cluny, into Cluny past the Equivallée and on to the bus station where the bus emptied and re-filled with those wanting to get to Mâcon itself.

The journey takes you along the tourist route to Mâcon, not via the dual carriageway we always take in the car, through the rolling hills of the Mâconnais with magnificent views of the chateau at Berzé-le-Châtel and into Berzé-la-Ville where the chapel des moines is to be found. Superb views of Roche Solutré and into the vineyards of the Pouilly-Fuissé which produce one of the best white wines around here with a price tag to match! And we were even in Mâcon in time to do all our shopping before the shops shut for lunch then of course our favourite Chinese restaurant.

The walk back to the bus stop after lunch helped the lunch to settle before the trip home which was as equally enjoyable as the trip into Mâcon had been that morning. The vines are yellowing fast, but the trees remain surprisingly green for the time of year and with a beautiful blue sky, quite a treat to be out and about at a slower pace than normal, and all that for 1.50 Euro.

So I may not agree with the reason for the blockades, but just this once I will say thank you to the unions for giving us a surprisingly interesting day out. They can stop the blockades now so that we can go to Cluny this weekend for the biggest horseshow ever seen in the town. On second thoughts we’ll take the bus.

La Tuilerie Website

What Have I Been Doing With my Time?

2010-10-17T14:28:00.006+02:00

Two weeks since my last blog, not my usual style, so apologies to all of you out in Blogland! We have been so busy, a case of chickens coming home to roost I think. As many of you will know, we have tried very hard to fit into the local community and have joined all sorts of societies and volunteer groups, some less successful than others (“No sorry you can’t do any voluntary work for us until you have been a member of our organisation for a whole year” – I kid you not) but now suddenly the locals have cottoned on to the fact that they have willing volunteers who are not doing it for fame and fortune and we have been inundated with requests to help, dinners to say thank you for helping and “by the way you can make the dinner for the next meeting”. So that and a visit of Cees’ daughter and partner have kept me away from usual creative outlet.

We marked out the local Cormatin Randonée (organised walk) last weekend (Saturday) and the weather was superb and had been for days, sadly the day itself (Sunday) was cold and miserable, the sun just did not want to shine so we froze as we stood waiting for walkers to come by and get their coffee and piece of cake. I just love this picture of Cees and a fellow marker putting their tags on the tarmac - bottoms up! - so I couldn't rsist posting it.

Cees’ daughter and partner have kept me on my toes, insisting they help in the garden, they managed to clear two fallen trees and the brambles that have invaded them since they fell when Cees was in hospital nearly two years ago! Of course I had to keep up, by helping (a bit) and then I got the urge to finish off the path I have been making around my birthday statue. Aches in places I had long forgotten I had muscles! All that and visits to Cluny, the shop in Taizé to look at their lovely pottery, walks following the Ballades Vertes, cycle rides on the Voie Verte and into the surrounding countryside to visit local potters, silk painters and sculptors – a busy week for them.

Now I have some time to sit down and reflect and update my blog. I’ll do a better job next week, promise!

The kids stayed in one of our gites, to see details look at our website.

A missed opportunity

2010-10-04T14:02:00.001+02:00

Sitting at my desk yesterday afternoon, I heard the bells of Taizé ringing. Nothing new, I hear them three times a day every day except Sundays when it is only twice. But it was quarter past four in the afternoon! Any Taizé goer knows that Nothing happens at that time on a Sunday, in fact Sunday is dedicated to welcoming new guests and saying farewell to the guests from the previous week. A quick check on the Taizé website revealed nothing exciting, so what was going on? A mystery.

Last week when we visited a client’s home to check on the house, collect their newly issued house number (worthy of a blog in its own right!) and to empty the letter box, we found a magazine called “Le Lien entre Grosne et Guye” . Obviously some local publication (as the next layer up from our commune is the Communauté de Communes entre Grosne et Guye) and we put the magazine on one side eventually to be read or thrown away. A quick flick through revealed an article about Taizé that I wanted to read at my leisure, so the magazine went on to the “to be dealt with” pile. The date at the top of the page of this article must have stuck deep into my subconscious as in the middle of the night, last night, I suddenly thought that this article might give me some insight into the unusual bell ringing.

When he reads this blog, Cees will happily say “you should have read the article when you spotted it!” and on this occasion I will say, “OK you are right” because the little article actually gave details of an open day at Taizé for all the congregations between the river Grosne and the river Guye, culminating with a Catholic Eucharist at four thirty. Four thirty must be the time they allocate to visiting groups as it was mid one Thursday afternoon last summer when the Archbishop of Canterbury was visiting that the Anglicans were allowed to hold their Eucharist.

Yesterday the day in Taizé was themed “hospitality”. Hospitality is one of the key elements of the monastic tradition, chapter 53 in Saint Benedict’s Rule concentrates how the role hospitality plays a key part in the Benedictine order and as anyone who has seen anything of the Taizé order will know, the brothers there are no strangers to hospitality themselves, housing and feeding hundreds of thousands a year.

After the morning service up until lunch was taken up to the study of St Luke chapter 10 which contains amongst other things the parable of the Good Samaritan, but in its totality it concentrates on the meaning of hospitality and the reciprocity of that hospitality. Having now read the article, I am very sorry indeed that I missed the day and the next time this magazine falls into my hands, I will read it from cover to cover to make sure I don’t miss anything like this again. Another lesson learnt!

La Tuilerie Website

I found the mustard in Reims!

2010-09-26T13:52:00.006+02:00

As you can see from the photo, there I am in a supermarket (Petit Casino in Reims - believe me) and yes there is the mustard!! All those Dutch aficionados will understand of course, but for the rest I will explain. It is complicated so bear with me. When a Dutch person says “he knows where Abraham gets the mustard from” it means that that has reached “a certain age”.

The only vaguely logical explanation I have managed to find is that “to get the mustard” is an old fashioned term for “go out and buy something” or “to run an errand” so someone who knows where to get the mustard is someone who has been around a bit and knows a lot about the world. Apparently when this expression was first coined, Abraham was a very common name, so to use some recent statistics one could say in today’s parlance “he knows where Oliver gets the mustard”. However, if that had been the case, you would miss out on a specification of the “certain age” factor which comes from a misconstruction of a verse in the Bible (John 8 v 57) where Jesus is mocked by the Jews commenting on his young age and therefore his lack of knowledge and wisdom by saying “You are not even fifty years old – and you have seen Abraham?”.

So for those of you who can add one and one and make anything other than two, you have the imagination to understand this complex Dutch expression. Yes that’s right I had my Birthday with a big B! and where else should you be on such a day other than the capital of the Champagne world and what better way to spend that day than to sample some of bubbly stuff during a tour of the Champagne cellars of one of the world’s most famous Champagne house.

We had a lovely couple of days in Reims, a small city worth a visit. We had some great food and great wine. Our trip was not of course without event, on the way our car managed to break down on the motorway just outside Troyes and we had to towed off to a local garage. While we waited to be towed, we had plenty of time to look around and enjoy the views and the sunshine and look at the local crops. We were stopped almost next to a field full of yellow flowers, what were they? Was it a coincidence that it was almost my birthday? I’m not sure but one thing I do know for certain is that it was a field of mustard….

Home is in Burgundy see our Website.

Ecumenicalism

2010-09-19T07:30:00.000+02:00

My father was a Congregationalist and my mother is a Welsh Baptist and I was brought up going to church in our local parish church which is affiliated to the Church of England, so to me Christianity is one broad group of people each worshiping in their own different way, but ultimately the same. I have never thought about it at all, ecumenicalism is how it is and how it should be, but not everyone thinks the same and times were not always so.

When Frère Roger first came to Taizé he worshipped alone in a room that he had dedicated for that purpose. When there were other Christians present they would join him in prayer, but as many of the people he was helping were in fact Jewish, he felt that it was totally inappropriate to make the prayer times communal. When he returned with some friends (later the first brothers) after the war with the purpose of setting up a community, they worshipped together in the original room but as the numbers of brothers and Christian visitors increased so did their need for a larger space. What is more logical than to use the small Romanesque church in Taizé, a holy place that had not been used for services for many years. But the Catholic church had other ideas about that. Despite not actually owning the building (all churches were seized during the Revolution and are now state owned) the Catholic church objected to having Protestants worshiping in their, albeit unused, church. An initial local agreement was swiftly rescinded and the request to use the church then went up through the bishop of Autun all the way to Paris where it ended up with Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli who was at that time the papal nuncio. He was a forward thinking man, he had also helped many Jews and other refugees during the war and maybe it was that common ground that helped convince him or maybe not, but he was the man who gave permission in 1948 for the brothers to have permanent non-rescindable use of the church for their daily prayers.

Allowing Protestants to use the church was one thing, but allowing Catholics to join them was another. Despite securing an audience with Pope Pius XII, Frère Roger did not manage to get agreement for ecumenical worship out of him. A big step for a pope to take of course. Ten years passed and the pope died and a new one, Pope John XXIII, was elected. This new pope turned out to be none other than the Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli who had granted permission to use the church in Taizé and despite being old in years, he was still very young and forward thinking in his ways and it was he who supported the community of Taizé and led the way forward for allowing Catholics to take part in ecumenical worship. Maybe it was their common experiences during the war that drew these two men together, who knows, but whatever it was, he paved the way for the close links between the Vatican and the brotherhood that still exist today and it led to real reconciliation between differing Christian groups.

So it saddens me when I read about the bitter row going on in the Anglican movement at the moment. Maybe they should “go back to core business” to quote something from my corporate past, maybe they should concentrate on the business of being Christians. What I find so refreshing about the community in Taizé is that they welcome all, they welcome the differences but more importantly they concentrate on the commonality. It all seems so normal to me, but of course this is not the way everyone sees the world. Just maybe one day all Christians in their churches can look and learn and get back to concentrating on what holds them together and not concentrating on the arguments that are splitting them apart.

La Tuilerie Website

A Squashed Face and White Food.

2010-09-12T17:08:00.008+02:00

This weekend, Cluny has been one great big party. The citizens of Europe answered the call and came to the festivities we invited them to one year ago. The streets were heaving on Saturday night and at seven o’clock there was not a single seat to be found in our favourite evening restaurant (Loup Garou) so we settled for our usual Saturday lunchtime haunt (missed that lunchtime because we had to wait for giters and campers to arrive) and we had an assiette kebab. Suitably fed, we headed off into the market square to join in the Cluny-wide street theatre about to begin at nine o’clock. One of the walls of the ancient abbey church was lit up with the words “Towns like dreams are made up of desires and fears, even if their way of presentation is secret, their rules are absurd and their perspectives are faulty; and everything hides something else.” Very thought provoking and intended to set the scene for the actors to appear and walk around the predetermined route through the streets, gardens and alleyways of Cluny to one of the spots where their little piece of theatre was to be played out, with us amongst the thousands following them eager to discover what secrets were to be revealed.

We were treated to dancing, folk music, recitals and theatre pieces, all intended to reveal the secrets of Cluny’s past, present and future. There were numerous people on top of walls, suspended from ropes or bits of cloth, we tripped over loose cobble stones and fell over low walls, I got my foot trapped between a branch and a step as we stumbled through someone’s garden (now destroyed by the thousands of feet that traipsed over it in the last couple of days), skirts dangerously brushing against the candles lighting the way and all this without a health and Safety officer in sight to put a stop to the fun! In order to dodge a carelessly steered child’s pushchair, Cees climbed over a pile of ivy on the ground, rather than walking round it like the rest of the crowd and narrowly missed the face of a young lady lying there. I think she can claim the award for the most dangerous job of the weekend!

At the end of the tour after having had all of Cluny’s secrets revealed to us, we once again arrived in the market square where the winning entries in the “Cluny letter” competition were being read out – we hadn’t won, in fact Cees pointed out that we had in fact “lost”, but I prefer to take a more “Olympic Games” view about it all..

After listening to speeches in the Abbey gardens from the Mayor of Cluny amongst others, we sang the European “national” anthem Ode to Joy in French, German, English, Italian and Slovakian, then again in French. The English version included the words “All mankind are brothers plighted” which sounded painful to me and even though our friends reminded us that they had once “plighted their troths” and it wasn’t all that bad after all, I still looked the word up when I got home. Finally a film created by the ENSAM students of how the Abbey church Maior Ecclesia had once been, was shown on a huge screen in the gardens, a superb ending to an excellent evening, well done the Gadzarts.

Sunday saw the culmination of the weekend’s activities and the huge closing picnic. As last year (see here) we all brought food to share and sat with our fellow villagers, in our case dressed in white with white food and we had a very convivial meal together. After watching a display of falconry, we headed off home on our bikes down the Voie Verte back to Cormatin. A superb weekend that we will talk about for a long time to come I think.

La Tuilerie Website

Fingerprinted in Lyon

2010-09-06T14:03:00.006+02:00

Lyon, home of Interpol, is where I had to go last week to be fingerprinted. What terrible crime had I committed, that I should be subjected to such treatment? Well it is simple, my passport had expired and I needed a new one. It may be shocking to the Brits, but the Dutch (in accordance with new European legislation so they say) insist on a set of fingerprints to get a new passport. No more “shove the old one in an envelope and a couple of weeks later you get a new one”, no you have to go in person and have your prints taken. I had visions of leaving the Consulate with black fingertips, but it is all much more modern than that, a simple scan was all that was required.

Well if you have to go all the way to Lyon, it pays to make a day of it. Out came the Michelin guide and other information we have and our day was planned. We took the train from Mâcon into Lyon, much more convenient than the car, but a little on the expensive side. When we arrived we bought a one day travel card and we intended to use it to maximum effect, metro, trams, funicular, buses, we used them all moving from one end of Lyon to the other.

Our theme for the day was paintings and our first port of call was the Musée urbain Tony Garnier, reputedly the largest open-air art gallery in the world, dedicated to one of Lyon’s leading architects. The museum is in fact 24 huge paintings drawn on blocks of flats he designed and built in the 1920s and they cover his work in Lyon. The last few paintings are the more interesting in my opinion as they depict various artists views of an ideal city. The one I am showing here is the ideal Mexican city.

The idea of painting on buildings has really caught on in Lyon and the surrounding areas have also taken on this spectacular idea with great gusto. What amazed me was that on all the painted buildings we saw, there was no graffiti, quite unusual for a city the size of Lyon.

Another huge painting (twice the size of anything in the Musée urbain Tony Garnier) was entitled La Fresque de Lyonais in the Croix Russe area, it covered the back side of a building seven stories high and seven windows or balconies wide. At each window or on each balcony is a famous Lyonais including St Exupery with Le Petit Prince, the Lumieres brothers (among the earliest film makers in history), André-Marie Ampère of electricity fame and more recent people like Abbé Pierre the founder of Emmaus and Bernard Pivot a journalist and TV interviewer. The photo I have chosen shows some real and painted by-passers in front of the imaginary shop fronts and building entrance.

The rest of our day was taken up with visiting the Basilique Notre Dame de Fourvière, worth it for the trip in the funicular railway and the view of the city, but the Basilique itself is a bit over the top. Just round the corner was another gem, the Roman theatres. We’ve seen many in our travels around the UK, France, Spain and Italy, but this was truly exceptional. Then into the old town with the St Jean Cathedral (and ex-Taizé organ) and the traboules, a real must for anyone visiting Lyon is to zigzag through the old town using these secret covered walkways through the buildings leading to some very pretty hidden courtyards. In fact we just generally enjoyed our day in the sun soaking up the atmosphere of a very special city.

We won’t be waiting until our passports run out again to revisit, there is still too much to be seen.

La Tuilerie Website.

Camping Championship Results 2010

2010-08-29T11:22:00.004+02:00

Well it’s that time of year again folks when the winners of the annual camping contest are announced! Ooh I can feel the excitement in my readers mounting, so I will not prolong your agony any longer. There is of course always the possibility of a last minute surge from some unexpected source, but I will risk it and I am going to announce the winners today.

For those new to this competition I will briefly recap the categories. Category 1 – the longest stay ever; Category 2 – the most cumulative tent nights and Category 3 – the most number of visits.

This year we had no serious contenders in Category 1 with the longest number of tent nights being a paltry 14 so the world champions remain Marilou and Niek with an outstanding and apparently unbeatable 25 consecutive nights way back in 2007, Cees and Bets remain second with 21 nights also in 2007 and third are Coen and Marja with 20 nights in 2009. We really would like to see some serious contenders in this category, it is as if the stamina has gone out of our campers, so come on potential campers, this is record that is crying out to be broken!

In Category 2 there has been some movement, with last years’ winners sadly not being able to come in 2010 due to family circumstances, it has allowed other campers to get within grasp of the title, however the impressive score of 56 tent nights for Johan, Janine and family still proves to be unbeatable. Hans and Joke have made inroads into their deficit, however, they remain second even though they have now clocked up an admirable 48 tent nights, not far to go! Third place stays with Marijke and Dick who also managed to improve on last years’ total and are now up to 39 tent nights. The most impressive change of position came from Janine and Mijntje who have shot up from 8th position to joint 5th, partly helped by bringing their parents with them this time (maybe that is a tip to others to help improve their rating).

Category 3 has shown the most exciting changes. Whilst Hans and Joke remain the all-time champions now up to 6 visits, Janine and Mijntje are snapping at their heals with 5 visits – it really pays to visit us twice in a season, your scores can leap that way. In joint third position we have Dick and Marijke, Bert and Engelien, Kirsty and Angus and Hans, Anja and family all with 4 visits.

Congratulations to all the winners, you can bask in your glory for another year, but don’t be complacent you never know who or what 2011 will bring.

Finally a big thank you to all our campers from the one nighters to the long stayers, you have made this a good summer, even though it was not a record breaking season!

For more information about the campsite and more pictures go to La Tuilerie Website.

The Tourist Trail

2010-08-22T12:51:00.004+02:00

One of our favourite places around here is Cluny, just 10 minutes down the road from us in Cormatin, but what is has been lacking is a good tourist guide. There are many books available about the town and the information is all there if you look, but no one has taken the trouble to pull it all together in an accessible form. The Tourist Information Office has laid out a trail around town, with the intention of filling this gap. You buy the map and information from their office for one Euro and you follow the route assisted by brass plaques on the ground.

The chosen route is excellent, it gives a good overview of everything that Cluny has to offer. At a slow meander it took us about two hours to complete, with plenty of time to view all the sites and to take another thousand photos. I must say though that the description and detail are rather lacking and the somewhat imaginative use of the English language doesn’t help to make it clear what you should be looking at. Fortunately about two years ago, information boards sprung out of the ground like mushrooms at all the strategic points and these help to supplement the missing information. In fact you could just use the route laid out by the Tourist Information Office and concentrate on the new boards and you will have a very good overview of the town.

At the beginning of this summer little electric buggies suddenly appeared in the market square. They are sort of like golf buggies that can take three passengers. These cars drive tourists around town and give a commentary in English, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish and Slovak. It is a new venture set up and run by Corrine Loron and her husband who own a mediaeval house in the main street with the most magnificent staircase you have ever seen. We have watched these vehicles travelling around town with interest, promising ourselves a ride one day. This morning was fine and not yet too hot to be out and about, so off we went to try it out.

The whole journey lasts about 30 minutes and follows a super route, passing most of the main sites in the town and sneaking down some of the small side streets most tourists just don’t find. The driver was obviously very interested in the town and chipped in with extra details, like the hidden garden you can see through a grill in a wall in the Rue de la Levée and a carved face on the wall of a house in the Rue d’Avril, both things that we have walked past a thousand times and have never seen. Because the cars are electric, they are very quiet and you glide through the hoards of tourists listening to the commentary and gazing out at the lovely buildings. Well worth every penny and fun to be a tourist in your own town!

Our website La Tuilerie de Chazelle describes the accommodation we rent out during the summer months.

Celebration of an Arrival and a Departure

2010-08-16T09:11:00.001+02:00

On 20th August 1940 a young Swiss man arrived in Burgundy on his bike. He came to help those persecuted by the Nazis and he chose a little village near the demarcation line, just inside “Free” France with its puppet regime in Vichy. The village was Taizé and the man Roger Schutz. Not such an amazing event at the time, but it was the start of something very big. Roger stayed helping Jews and Resistance fighters until the Nazis collapsed the Vichy government and occupied the whole of France. Roger then became a target himself and he was advised to leave. He returned after the war with some friends to set up a community dedicated to help those who had suffered during the war, particularly the young people. His sister joined him, to run the children’s house. Roger was a deeply religious young man as were his friends and their vision was to create an monastic order outside of any church. This order was founded officially on Easter day 1949.

The Taizé community was born. Frère Roger led the community from its beginnings of a small group of seven brothers to over 100 brothers, until he was murdered in the Church of Reconciliation itself on 16th August 2005.

Saturday evening there was a celebration of the 70 years since Frère Roger first arrived on the hill and a commemoration of 5 years since his death.

The service was held in the open in a meadow on the edge of Taizé with the buildings belonging to the community and the Romanesque church hung with icons. An area similar to the “garden” inside the community’s church was created for the monks to be together and the service began at a quarter to 8 by singing “The Lord is my Shepherd” in Filipino, courtesy of the Jesuit Music Ministry there. The service followed the usual lines of songs and silence but with Frère Alois also addressing the congregation of about 5,000 and telling them of Frère Roger, his life, his work and the influence he had had on the Christian movement throughout the world.

A special service for a special man.

Our website La Tuilerie.

Glanage

2010-08-08T11:09:00.001+02:00

What a lovely word that is, I shall make it my word of the week! It is round and delicious and it rolls around in your mouth, but what is it? Glanage has been an inalienable right in France since the middle ages. If we do not do it, this right could be lost to future generations, so said our friend Agnès. So with such a call-to-arms, we were up for it. “Come round at 7 o’clock for a quick apéro and we’ll go out when no one is around.” “Pardon me, I thought this was legal?” “Well maybe it is, but the farmers don’t like it!” Thus went our introduction to this fine tradition.

Glanage translates into English as gleaning and “is the act of collecting leftover crops from farmers' fields after they have been commercially harvested” according to Wikipedia. So off we went into the black current fields in Taizé which were harvested a few days ago. Black currents are used to make crème de cassis a blackcurrant liqueur which is mixed with Bourgogne Aligote (white wine) to make the popular aperitif Kir.

It is quite amazing just how much fruit is left to rot and go to waste, apparently it is just not economically viable to collect it. Not so long ago, all harvesting was still done by hand and the pickings were very thin on the ground, now there is enough fruit left for the whole of Chazelle to make enough jam for a year! The same with the vines, seemingly tonnes of grapes are left to go to waste in the vineyards where they use mechanical pickers and Sunday afternoons in September will see hundreds of French in the vineyards collecting these left-over grapes. Seemingly nothing goes to waste, if it’s free and vaguely edible, the locals are out there collecting it.

Agnès is off to collect red and white currents over the next day or two, but Cees has banned me from going due to the fact that we have enough jam in the cupboard to last a lifetime already and if I can’t be bothered to pick my own red currents why would I go out at dusk and raid a farmer’s field - he’s got a point I suppose!

For our website about the gites we rent out click here.

Cluny – Bourg Monastique

2010-08-01T13:50:00.005+02:00

Cluny is the place we do our supermarket shopping on a Tuesday, it’s where we go to the market on a Saturday and the place we generally go to our do everyday things. It is easy to forget the original purpose of the town, to ignore the buildings and to not notice the town's rich civil architecture. Cluny was in fact built by the abbey solely to furnish its needs, before the abbey, there was no Cluny and Cluny only became a “real” town with a town hall and a mayor after the collapse of the abbey, up until that time it was governed by the abbey itself.

The abbey needed blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, wine merchants, butchers, bakers etc etc and so outside the walls of the abbey a town was formed to provide these facilities. The original town is Romanesque in style with some Gothic alterations and some later “disastrous” Renaissance rebuilding. The houses were constructed with the workshop or the shop on the ground floor and the accommodation on the first and second floors. If you look at the buildings in the town you can see how many have a large arched opening on to the street and a small door next to it which originally led to the first floor.

A special architectural feature of the Cluny houses are the claires-voies (clerestories in English) which are a series of windows on the first floor, normally in pairs and always with a window seat so that the residents could sit and show off their finery. The windows have highly decorated columns in the middle of a pair and intricate lintels above them. The strange thing about these windows is their link to status. Apparently the higher your status or the more money you had, the more claires-voies you had in your house. A house with only one pair was very modest indeed and there were houses with up to twelve of these things – someone really trying to show off or impress!

Anyone who has visited Cluny recently could not fail to notice that the abbey and therefore the town, is celebrating 1100 of existence. So just for this year (starting in May and continuing into September) there are walks around Cluny orgainsed by the residents of some of these magnificant medaeval houses. The walks are free but restricted in the number of people who can take part in each one and no one is allowed to follow more than two of the walks. Back in May we followed the walk “secrets d'escaliers” led by Corinne Loron which took us into some magnificant buildings to see their staircases. All of these buildins are someone’s home and so not normally open to the public. In July we followed “secrets de murs” with Jean-Luc Maréchal which led us around the town looking at the architectural features of the walls, including of course the claires-voies. The guides are very enthusiastic and knowledgable about Cluny’s “hidden” architectural treasures and Jean-Luc Maréchal got so carried away about the visit to his house on the first walk we did, he dressed the part.

Now when we walk to the bank or sit on a terrace in town having lunch, we look at the buildings in a very different light.

For information about our gites and campsite less than 15 minutes from Cluny click here.

Water and Guitars

2010-07-26T17:55:00.003+02:00

I am starting to fear Saturdays. They are the busiest and most stressful day of the week, we have to prepare both gites for new guests, clean everywhere, repair any damage and have the gite looking just right in time for the new arrivals. It is intensive work, but if the leaving guests leave on time (before 10.00 am) and the new guests do not appear too early (after 3.00pm) then it can be achieved. Little repairs can knock the day off schedule and the last two Saturdays have been just like that.

Last week, along with the trauma of having to collect Fifi the cat from the vet’s in Cluny, I found out that the sink discharge in one of gites has been leaking for some time, mess everywhere and only a few hours to repair the damage, clean up and dry the walls (yes the water had really been going everywhere!) So the afternoon was spent with my head under the sink with hairdryer in hand pumping hot air on to the wall, all that with 30 degrees outside. This week, it turns out that the sink in our own kitchen has been leaking down into the bathroom below, mess everywhere, call out the plumber - I didn’t dare do it myself, I didn’t know what I would find when I opened up the joint. Monsieur Kotas our trusty plumber was called and he agreed to come out on a Saturday afternoon, what a star. Job done, we now have water again in the house and not pouring down the gite bathroom wall.

The guests arrived on time and fortunately on both occasions they were none the wiser about the frantic activity going on before their arrival.

We had earned an evening enjoying ourselves and that was just what we did. We went to the last concert in the ”Guitares en Cormatinois” series. We went to Saturday’s concert to “cheer ourselves up”, not really expecting much. The group was called Poivre et Celte (a typically French play on words) and they were playing “world music” umm... We have had renditions of how obscure French groups have treated the music from other countries, but it was local and this series is normally good. Much to our great surprise and enjoyment the group were superb! A guitarist, a viola player and a drummer who played what I think was a Makuta drum, he also played an African thumb piano to great effect in one song. The viola player changed instruments a number of times playing at different times the didgeridoo and a recorder and he had a beautiful singing voice. They played music from many countries in their own style and I for one will not forget their punk rendition of “Dirty old Town” in a hurry!

Maybe Saturdays in Cormatin aren’t that bad after all.

For more information on the accommodation here, click here.

July 14th

2010-07-17T15:27:00.003+02:00

July 14th is Bastille day in France, the one really French holiday. Many villages have fireworks on the evening of the 13th which is when the party kicks off. Most villages have something on the 14th and in Cormatin it is the annual Brocante de Qualité (read very expensive) semi-antique fair. The public have to pay to get in and this money goes into the coffers of the Amicale a village organisation that raises funds for the old people’s annual meal and the Christmas party for the kids. This is the biggest event the Amicale organises during the year and all hands are called on to the deck to help. The work starts on the 12th collecting the tents from other villages, the tents are all built on the 13th, taken down on the 14th, then returned to their rightful owners or reconstructed at the Chateau on the 15th ready for the Rendez-Vous de Cormatin, a theatre festival which starts at the end of July.

As usual we were there putting up and taking down the tents as well as taking entrance money off the public. We finally returned home at about 10 o’clock at night completely broken and poor Cees still had another day to go! Fifi, our cat, was feeding the babies when we got home and we sat down in the vide to enjoy a well earned glass of wine. Suddenly Fifi screamed and started hissing at one of the kittens, who was so shocked she ran off and the others froze as well. Is this the way a mother cat tells her young it is time to stop feeding? She has been such a patient and tender mother we couldn’t believe what she had just done. We soon found out why. As she got up to move, it was completely obvious she could hardly move her back legs, one couldn’t be moved at all and she was screaming from the pain. We decided to settle her down on her special chair with a cushion for the night and see how she was in the morning. In the morning she was not really any better, so off to the vet in Cluny.

I left her there in the morning and phoned a couple of hours later to be told she had a smashed pelvis and a broken neck that needed to be operated on, perhaps it would be best if we went in to discuss it. When Cees came back from his tent building at the Chateau, we went off to Cluny to see the vet. We both thought it was going to be a discussion along the lines of maybe we should put her out of her misery and it was not a conversation I was looking forward to. The “neck” that was broken turned out to be the “neck” of the femur, bad enough, but not life threatening and the “chat” was just to reassure us that all would be well and we could take her home on Saturday morning, no more feeding the kittens though, so it is a good job that they have been weaned and don’t really need her milk anymore.

Fifi is now home and she has to stay in a cage for three weeks to stop her jumping around too much. Cees, ever practical, managed to pull together enough old wood to make a cage and we welcomed her home this morning.

This is one Bastille day we won’t forget in a hurry!

La Tuilerie Website

The Silence Garden

2010-07-11T13:50:00.001+02:00

We have had many visitors who have come specifically for Taizé, just to see what it was, to come for one or two services, to follow one service every day or to take part fully in what Taizé has to offer but who were not allowed to stay in Taizé because of their age or those who wanted a bit more comfort and/or privacy. Almost all of these visitors have mentioned the Silence Garden and the natural spring of St. Etienne and all have talked about how special it was.

You can see the garden from the Voie Verte the cycle route we use to go from Cormatin to Cluny and it has never looked very special to me. There is a lake, some trees and a grass area to sit on, big deal give me Wisley or Kew anytime! However, Cees convinced me a couple of weeks ago that we really should visit the garden and see what it was like and when we were on a walk through Taizé to Ameugny to visit some friends, we decided to see what the garden had to offer.

Unless you know where the garden entrance is, finding it is difficult. You walk down past the last building heading towards the “cliff edge” and then you take one of the many windy paths that travel steeply down the hill. Just the walk down itself is worth the effort as you meander through the wooded hillside. At the bottom you come out of the trees and into a lovely grassed area surrounded by trees and you see the lake and you see the real size of it. Further along you come to the waterfall which is where the natural spring of St. Etienne tumbles water down into the lake. There are several bridges that go over the lake to the other side and there are a number of little chalets where you can sit out of the sun (or rain!)

Dotted here and there on the grass and on the bridges were people sitting enjoying the silence, sleeping or reading. Just walking through the garden you get a real feeling of peace, people in groups talk at a whisper, but most people make no sound at all. This is in sharp contrast to the Frisbee games and general noise of the youngsters on top of the hill. I was dreading the hike back up the steep hill (244 steps I have been told), but actually it was not as daunting as I had feared and it certainly is a way to improve your fitness!

The garden in a horticultural sense has little to offer, but I now agree with our visitors, the garden is special, why or how I don’t know, it is just “special”.

More information about the accommodation we have is on La Tuilerie Website.

Slow Food

2010-07-04T10:40:00.004+02:00

The snail hunting season has been officially opened for this year. Not with the trumpets and show of Saint Hubert’s day for the larger animal hunting season, but with plastic carrier bags and sticks at dawn.

There is an amazing variety of snails throughout the planet in terms of size, shape and colour but only one is the hero of the day. In Roman times “escargot” was considered to be a food for the elite (widely documented by Pliny the Elder I will have you know) and this Roman snail was the Helix Pomatia, now more commonly known as the Burgundy snail.

The great popularity of the Helix pomatia and the fact that it is almost impossible to farm, has led to it becoming a protected species. In reality this means that it can only be hunted in France for personal use and not for resale, it can only be hunted from 1st July to mid-February and then only if its shell is more than 3 cm diameter. It remains therefore an expensive delicacy.

As I write this blog, France is in the depths of a snail shortage, snail processing companies can no longer procure sufficient snails on the open market to fulfil the 25,000 tonnes needed to feed the French population every year. Whilst many claim that dry summers are affecting this shortage it is interestingly enough more likely to be the fault of the EU - an institution of which the French are fiercely proud. Extending the borders of the EU has opened up greater financial possibilities for the people of Poland and Hungary than collecting snails ever could. Two thirds of the 700 million snails eaten in France every year, came from Eastern Europe and at a sale’s price of just 2 cents a snail you can see why these people have gone looking for better jobs!

Snail farms have been geared up to cope with the shortages, however the snails that can be farmed are the Helix apersa aspersa (le petit gris) and the Helix aspersa maxima (le grand gris) and the true epicurean can tell the difference between them and the “real thing”. Most shockingly of all, tonnes of Helix lucorum (a significantly inferior creature even than the Helix aspersas) are being imported by unscrupulous traders from the Balkans and Turkey and are being passed of as Burgundy snails.

It must be said though that our local sources are adamant that there is not a shortage of snails in either Burgundy or France, but there is however, a shortage of people who can be bothered to get up at 5 o’clock on a damp summer’s morning, who have the knowledge of which snails to choose and where to find them and who are therefore out there collecting their own. Most snail collectors round here will collect and preserve hundreds in a summer and these home preserved snails still make up one quarter of all the snails eaten in France.

Just for interest, this is how they do it:

Put the live gathered snails in a box with a layer of flour on the bottom and leave them to wander around the box for 3 days or until their droppings are white. They have then been cleaned from the inside. Some people add fresh herbs to the flour on the last day.

Bring a pan of salted water to the boil and drop these cleaned snails into the water (shells and all) and boil for about 10 minutes. Remove the snails from the water and then extract the snail itself from its shell and remove the intestine and any other black parts. These snails then need to be cooked for a further 10 minutes before being preserved either frozen or traditionally place in sterilised jam jars and covered with Burgundy escargot butter.
1kg butter, 3 heads of crushed garlic (note heads not cloves), 3 shallots finely chopped, a large bunch of fresh parsley finely chopped (about 100g), salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly then bring to melting point before pouring over the snails.

The snails should be served hot either on a plate or in their shells which should be sterilised before use.

And you thought a snail was just something that left a slimy trail on your garden path…

La Tuilerie Website