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| Walnuts to keep us going through the winter |
Well times have changed and now every year I go scavenging. We have grown used to having walnuts available all year round – for free. We put walnuts in salad, I make walnut tart, we eat walnuts in all sorts of yummy dishes or we just nibble at walnuts straight from the shell.
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| Misty morning |
This year it has been a different story, I have searched everywhere. The trees in our garden yielded a total of 6 nuts (we have 6 trees but all the nuts came from just one of them) and my usual trees only yielded a few more. So this year, instead of 25 kilos we got about 25 nuts.
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| Chainsaw art |
As we parked our car at their house, we immediately spotted a huge quantity of walnuts on the ground and we joked with them that we would pinch a few. Their response was, take as many as you like, we have enough. Looking in their store, we saw that they had already harvested about 25 kilos and so we set to.
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| I do like to be beside the seaside |
Winter can now begin.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is the middle of March and as is usual around here, the season has changed from the depths of winter to nearly summer. Some people call it spring, but spring is really an unknown season here in Burgundy, the weather changes like a light switching on and off. Tuesday night was minus 4 degrees and Thursday it was 18 degrees in the shade. That is not to say we won’t get any more frosts, the old saying “ne’er cast a clout till May be out” is just as true here as it is in the UK, but it looks like the summer is arriving. The birds are going crazy, all the trees have sprung new green life, the herbaceous plants are shooting out of the ground and Cees has got our bikes out of the shed.
I thought my cycling days were over when I left the Netherlands to come and live here (I only do flat) but the Voie Verte which runs very close to our house, is an old railway line that has been converted into a cycling path. It is safe and almost flat. The path travels from near Chalon-sur-Saône to Mâcon in almost one smooth ride. A bit of a warning about Cluny to Mâcon though, whilst there is the interesting Tunnel du Bois Clair, the path is very steep in places, far more than I can do. Having said that, we have had campers or people in the gites here that have even managed to do it on a normal bike however, a mountain bike and strong legs would be more appropriate. 
There are a number of boucles off the Voie Verte, they are graded signposted tours that give you access to the many interesting villages around here. The grading goes from one spot which is easy up to four spots which is very difficult (the trip to the tunnel for instance). So we chose an easy boucle for our first outing. This particular one goes up through the forest to Lys with its assortment of artisans (pottery, blacksmith, tapestry maker) and of course the adorable little church with relatively well-preserved wall frescos and then on to Chapaize with a church tower that can be seen for miles around but when viewed from the village itself definitely seems out of proportion and finally, all the way downhill, back into Cormatin. About 15km in all and it took us less than one and half hours after stopping to see the churches and having a beer in Cormatin to fortify us for the final leg back home.
Le Tour is a national institution if ever there was one. The whole country gets excited as it winds its way through the highways and byways of this great country. The original Tour was done by a group of sixty young men in 1903 who set off on their bikes from Montgeron (just outside Paris) for a six stage 2428 km race round France, but only 21 arrived back in Paris 19 days later. They had no back-up teams, no following trailers, no spare bikes, you feel hungry, you stop and eat the sandwiches which you have prepared yourself that morning, you get a puncture you sit down at the side of the road and fix it, now that is real racing!
Le Tour starts in a different place each year, but for many years has ended in the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The journey is not a continuous one around the roads of France anymore, Le Tour hops and jumps from place to place, sometimes the riders are bussed and sometimes flown between the finish of one day and the start of the next, thus allowing a number of different routes to be chosen each year. But everywhere they go there is a BIG party. Le Tour transforms the French roads and villages it passes through for a brief but exciting moment in time.
To travel in a circle around France it is almost impossible not to travel through Burgundy. In 2006, Le Tour came to Mâcon and turned the city upside down as the riders raced up and down the main boulevard in a very exciting finish to the 18th stage. In 2007 Le Tour came even closer to us by passing through Cormatin itself in the 6th stage and in 2010 Le Tour will be just down the road starting the 7th stage on July 10th in Tournus. We have some trusty campers who come every year to stay with us when Le Tour is nearby and who knows maybe we will see all of you guys and gals again and possibly some new faithful followers next summer!
Each one of these events has its own committee and sturdy group of followers that are needed to organise the event and make it a success. We volunteered to help out with the randonnée and were taken up on that challenge this weekend. So at seven thirty Saturday morning, before the sun was up, we were at St Roch hall, the gathering place for the organisers. Fresh brioche arrived from the baker and small strong coffees were served to fortify us for our task. There were five different walks, 7, 13, 20 & 30 km and each walk had its own colour. To complete the walk you follow the arrows on the ground and as long as you stay alert, you end up back where you started. Some randonnées are marked out better than others, on some we have been horribly lost, but the Cormatin walk is always done well. We had a big responsibility on our shoulders as we were split up into teams, armed with cans of different coloured spray paint and we were driven to our respective starting points. We had ten kilometres to mark-up with yellow and orange paint. So on this damp morning, there we were, spraying the roads of the villages around Cormatin with arrows to show the right way to go and crosses to show where not to go, all done for the walkers who might or might not turn up on what was predicted to be a very wet Sunday.
For starters, the mayor’s wife had made a delicious salad of chicory leaves with walnuts, ham and cheese cut up into small blocks all covered in a delicious vinaigrette sauce (maybe I’ll be able to get the recipe for the vinaigrette if it is not a family secret). When I saw that Cees was tempted into taking a second helping, I whispered that this was just the starter and not to take too much, he whispered back that I shouldn’t be silly as this was all we were getting. That’s men for you! His eyes popped out of his head when a huge casserole full of venison was placed on the table. The deer had been shot the previous weekend by none other than the mayor himself and donated generously to the randonnée workers for this lunch. It turns out later that the mayor doesn’t eat game, so he was grateful for some enthusiastic consumers. This casserole, not much more complicated than venison cooked for hours in red wine with some herbs, onion and garlic, was absolutely amazing, served very simply with boiled potatoes. Lunch them continued with cheese and finally pears poached in red wine with brioche. All of this liberally washed down with the local brew. The meal started at twelve o’clock and us ladies were finishing the washing-up at three while the men were finishing their coffees. Food is not something to be rushed, it is to be discussed and above all, enjoyed in the company of others. It is a time to swap gossip, get the latest news and to hear stories and what stories! As the wine flowed the stories got better, the ones about the mayor shooting an eighty four kilo wild boar and the funeral with the missing body will have to wait for another blog..
We arrived at the refreshments post at the half-way point and were greeted with baguettes and ham or sausage, cheese and chocolate and of course wine. That boosted our resolve and off we headed for the second half of the walk. We finally staggered back to St Roch at about two o’clock wishing we had trained better. We were then invited to join the rest of the workers for supper at seven that evening. I must admit I felt a bit guilty about saying yes after the wonderful lunch the previous day and the fact that we hadn’t helped out at all on the Sunday, but why not. The evening was a much simpler affair than Saturday’s lunch, bits of pizza from Pizz’a Marco round the corner, quiche from one of the boulangeries in the high street and left-over bread, ham, cheese and wine from the walk’s refreshment posts. There was lots of chat about the day’s events, despite the dreadful predictions, the weather had been kind, cool and cloudy in the morning and cool but sunny in the afternoon, that brought the locals out and just under 500 had participated in the various walks, all in all not bad. We chatted about the organisation and it looks like we might be on the hit-list for doing more work for the village events. A great way to meet people and get involved, and also a great way to enjoy French food at its best, in the convivial company of our neighbours.
The name Cluny is synonymous with the spiritualism of the Middle Ages. The Cluny order exercised a considerable influence on the religious, intellectual, political and artistic lives in the whole of the western world at that time. Guillaume d’Aquitaine founded the Benedictine abbey in 910. The abbey’s growth in both size and power was very rapid. In the 12th century there were about 460 monks in the abbey and Cluny controlled 2500 other abbeys throughout the west.
Next year 2010 it is the 1100th anniversary of the foundation of this once great and influential abbey and this anniversary is being celebrated throughout Europe at various Clunisien sites. The start of the celebrations was “Ouvrez les portes” held last Sunday where the twelve ancient gates of Cluny were reconstructed. Each gate was given a different colour of the rainbow and these coloured segments were radiated out on a map of Europe symbolically showing Cluny as it was in ancient times as "La Lumière du Monde". Each village or town in the area was allocated to a gate according to which coloured segment they fell under. We in Cormatin were assigned the Porte de la Chanaise, which was the white gate, the most important gate, the one that included all the colours of the spectrum. We all had to dress in white and bring a picnic to share with our neighbours based on the theme of white. The street leading into town from the gate was decorated in white and was filled with tables ready for the picnic. There were opening speeches, an aperitif with white snacks during which time we all had to sign a letter to be sent out to the countries in our segment (Belgium, The Netherlands and Norway) inviting them to the closing party next September. Then we all walked through the gate symbolising the opening up of the gates to the city and thus opening the 2010 celebrations. Then on to more important and less symbolic things. Picnic time had arrived and all the Cormatinois sat together at the tables we had brought and we shared vast amounts of white food and white wine. After this enormous picnic, cavaliers arrived at each gate to collect our letters and take them out into the world. Then everyone from all the gates formed a multi-coloured human chain around the city. A helicopter zoomed overhead registering the event for posterity. The day went on with more speeches, music and dancing in the Abbey park, but we were too tired after a long day and we cycled home along the Voie Verte.
These are the vineyards that use machines to harvest. These machines are often co-owned and rotate around the fields at harvest time. Most will only take one pass at their vines which means that after harvesting is over there are plenty of grapes to be had free of charge from the vines. The machines only pick ripe bunches and so late developing bunches and bunches too deep in the foliage to be caught, remain on the vines for the birds and other (human) scavengers. If you want to make your own wine, you can certainly do that with free grapes if you have the time and patience to go searching.
This new flexibility in picking times means that the pickers will have more work as they can move between vineyards in the same area and also all vineyards will have enough pickers. It is not badly paid (up to about 200 Euros a day) but picking is really hard work, not for the faint-hearted and not for those with a dodgy back! Apart from the pay, a full-blown meal at lunch time is included and accommodation is often also part of the deal.
A couple of months ago, the tourist information office approached us to see if we would like to host the so called “vin d’amité” and we were delighted to show off La Tuilerie to a group of walkers. The wine, water, squash and buns arrived in the morning and the walkers duly arrived, almost on time, at half past four. We split the group of twenty walkers into two groups and I gave a guided tour. We do a tour for people who stay in the gites or on the campsite very regularly, so that is not a problem. We have researched how Tuileries worked when ours was in its prime and we know a lot on the subject so we can field most questions with confidence. Before the walkers arrived I was brushing up on my vocabulary and I did my best to give a good story and in the end I was quite pleased with how it went.
If I made a mistake of tense or conjugation of a verb, I was gently corrected but I was a bit thrown by the correction of a word I used. The heart of the tuilerie is the oven and this was filled with the bricks and tiles covered by a layer of lime which partially acted as insulation but it also needed to be “cooked” itself to be used in mortar. The whole oven was heated up to one thousand degrees Celsius. On the second tour around the tuilerie, when I was describing the layer of lime (chaux) I was corrected by one of the walkers and he told that the word I should use was “chaume”. 
Fair enough, they are French, they speak the language better than me. So for the rest of the tour there was a layer of chaume on top of these very hot bricks. We later looked up the words, because both Cees and I were a bit baffled by this correction. We then discovered that chaume is a rather obscure word for straw! So we now have a bunch of French people wandering around telling their friends that a layer of straw was used to top the oven working at one thousand degrees. What was in the guy’s head when he corrected me? Ah well, we’ll know better next time!
Sunday morning and it is randonnée time. Every week from mid-April to the end of June and all during September and October, there are organised walks in the area around here. I must say that “organised walks” kind of put me off from trying them, the very thought of having to walk with a bunch of other people didn’t thrill me to bits, but we tried one anyway and now we are hooked. There are basically two types of walk, the ones that are set out and which you walk at your own speed and those where you walk in a group. The groups walks are not our cup-of-tea. You have to walk at the speed of the slowest and you have to stop every time someone wants to pick flowers! The one time we did a group walk, it took us nearly 4 hours to do about 10 km, I was EXHAUSTED, never again.
They have been watching the goings on in a little house on the Voie Verte very near here. The house in question has been in the throws of renovation ever since we came to live here. The last two weeks, under Eric’s watchful eye, there have been strange comings and goings at that house. Firstly a large upright fridge with a glass front arrived, then a huge chest freezer and then (most suspicious of all) a large box, that Eric was convinced was full of parasols, arrived yesterday. On Eric’s outing this morning, the truth was revealed, a gravelled patio with tables chairs and parasols and a sign saying that L’Annexe was open for business! Now all those thirsty cyclists that travel up and down the Voie Verte can stop and enjoy a hot or cold drink and a snack. 