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.
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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Since living here I have however, learned a lot more about wine in this area - where to buy good wine, interesting wine, cheap wine, expensive wine and we send the guests in our gites or from the campsite off to the appropriate wine cave depending on what they are looking for. We know where to go for a good tasting with knowledgeable staff and where to go for a wide range of wines and generally that knowledge is appreciated by our guests.
We asked for a tasting and he set to, collecting bottles for us to savour. The wines were sublime and the chat and local gossip were also very interesting. We had a lesson on making Marc de Bourgogne (the local fire water), he explained how he paid the taxes on his vineyard by giving alcohol to the government - I thought Sarkozy was a teetotaller! He gave us the names and locations of all the expats he knew in the area - he knows of a lot more than us and we chatted about mutual friends. He even let us taste his “homemade” Fine which was delicious, but as he only had enough for his own consumption, we will have to wait until he bottles up the next lot before we can buy any.
The highlight of the wreath laying is the playing of the Marseillaise which always used to be done using a crackly cassette player mounted on the boot of Monsieur P’s car which sounded like the marvellous rendition from Casablanca. But last November a brand new CD player appeared. The Armistice Day ceremony passed off with a perfectly clear well played version and it left us with a very nostalgic feeling of days gone by and the crackly old rendition of the national anthem.
At the Bois Dernier we assumed that things were now in order, the CD machine worked and now Monsieur P knew how to work it. First hitch - at these events Monsieur P likes to play some patriotic songs, but of course when he presented his cassette to the CD player it did not fit. Not to be defeated, he sprinted back to his car opened the doors wide, blocking the road and put the cassette in the in-car player and wound the volume up. All in vain, we really couldn’t hear a thing. So on to the Marseillaise. By now even I could repeat the famous sentence “click up to number 7 then press play”, to no avail, the technology had finally beaten Monsieur P and before poor Monsieur N had a chance to rebalance his flag and get his glasses out, the CD player had been put down and with the French equivalent of “bugger this for game of soldiers” Monsieur P had started singing. It became quite evident that not everyone present knew the words, I think we managed about half of them, the Mayor – none, I’m sure Monsieur P changed key halfway through, but it was a valiant effort, even the Mayor had tears in his eyes by the end and before we went off the Les Blés d’Or for our drinks and nibbles and his final words “I think we need a different flag carrier next time”.
Again we needed to ask a resident for clarification, yes the zone that looked like a cordoned-off crime scene was in fact the Jardin du Fouettin, possibly a wild flower meadow?
The Jardin des Simples is right by where the entrance to the Abbey used to be and is a small well laid-out garden for herbs and medicinal plants with a few trained apple and pear trees. This garden has been growing for a few months now and is looking very good, well worth a little detour to see it. Finally on to the Rosarie.
Anyway, next year this new feature will add a very special splash of colour to the edge of Cluny.
In the Church of Reconciliation at Taizé there is a large pipe organ. I blogged about it last summer when it was installed, but I have come to learn so much more about it and its predecessors and yet now I seem to know so much less! By finding old photographs, I have seen that the organ in Taizé has changed a number of times over the years and it does beg the question why?
Interestingly, I have found information about what is possibly the second organ in Taizé. This organ was built specifically for the church in 1974 by Jürgen Ahrend a German organ builder, however, that had a very short life in the church because it was dismantled and put into storage in the Bressse in 1979. Via a monastery in Switzerland this organ eventually ended up in Lyon Cathedral in 1996, where it still is today. I suspect it was rather too loud for Taizé if it can be used in a cathedral!
However, a friend of mine did find this photo in her collection, rather out of focus, but clearly an organ. Apparently this organ became “unreliable” due to the hot air heating system in the church and so it was removed when the church was refurbished in the winter of 2008/2009.
Also interestingly the organist sits sideways on to the church so that he does not have his back to the congregation. This must make it easier for the organist to still feel part of the community of singing.
“Portes ouvertes” are quite frequent events around here. The words literally mean “open doors” and most businesses choose one weekend a year to open their doors to the public, let the public sample their produce and generally have a good snoop around. It is a nice way to see a business, but usually you can sample their produce any other time so what is the big deal? The Vignerons de Buxy (the place we buy most of our wine) had an open day last weekend. Having worked in the food industry for many years, the thought of seeing lots of stainless steel vessels, pumps and pipework was not something I really needed to do, particularly in a crowd, but Cees persuaded me to go.
As we entered the basement, we were given a piece of paper, which had various questions on it, a bit like a treasure hunt and off we went to find the first answer. The first part of the tour was in the very dark cellars with all the oak caskets, they were massive, I had no idea they would be so big. Then on to the stainless steel tank room. Again all much bigger than I had expected and then on to the grape handling areas, where grapes are crushed, separated, tested and mixed to give the right juice and also where the first fermentation took place. What really made it interesting were the signs that had been put up all over the place explaining what happened when in the process..jpg)
When we had answered all the questions on the treasure hunt form, we posted it in the box at the exit, there was one magnum an hour to be won, but no on has been round with our magnum yet!
For all our Fifi fans out there, we have BIG news. Fifi has been getting rather tubby these last few weeks, but there again she has been tucking into a lot of mice and moles. I had my suspicions that she might have had a secret romantic liaison, but Cees was not convinced at all (typical father). Anyway the last few days she has been very clingy towards us and on Wednesday she did not move more than a few feet away from our front door. I was fairly confident that she was going to produce a couple of Fifiettes and sure enough as the evening wore on, it looked like she had gone into labour. She was insisting on staying our front door mat, not an ideal place to birth her litter, but Mum should know best. At about 7 o’clock after a failed attempt to climb into a removal box full of kindling, she finally moved off to her cubby-hole and into her own bed. One by one she produced her offspring. When we left her at just after 12 o’clock there were three and by Thursday morning there were four squeaking mouse-sized animals to be seen.
She has let us pick them up and stroke them - so much for my worries about not being able to get near the litter. At the moment all is calm around La Tuilerie, Fifi is looking after the little ones in her own house, but who knows what chaos they will cause when they are capable enough and brave enough to walk out and about on their own.
This Ascension Day we went to one of our favourite concerts of the year. There is a Dutch madrigal choir that comes to Chapaize every year where they give a free concert. The standard of the concert is very high indeed and it is difficult to imagine that these are all amateurs. One couple in the group have a holiday home in Chapaize and the concert is given each year to raise money for the renovation of the two churches in the commune of Chapaize, the Chapaize church itself and the church in the hamlet of Lancharre. Whilst the concert is free, you are encouraged to donate money as you leave the church and people donate generously, I didn’t see a single coin go into the collection baskets held by the choir members’ children.
Burgundy is blessed with an enormous number of Romanesque churches. Cluny was the centre of the Christian world for a while and this is one of the main causes. But there were other powerful forces in the area one of which was Brancion and they too built Romanesque churches to ward off the local influence of the Abbey in Cluny. That coupled with the enormous wealth of the area at that time and you end up with a lot of buildings. Chapaize and Lancharre are just two of the churches that fell under Brancion. Now, 1000 years later, Cluny has only part of its abbey left and Brancion doesn’t even have a town hall any more, it is attached one of the villages down the road – how the mighty have fallen! Having said that we still have the beautiful remains of their power struggle.
It was 15th May yesterday and we went to Cluny market to get some tomato, courgette and cucumber plants. Every other stall was selling plants, because NOW is the time to plant. The last of the Ice Saints has had their day and so today I will be in the garden putting my precious plants in the ground.
So it appears that the saints have got it wrong. A little more searching and the mystery is solved. The Ice Saints had it right all along, it is all down to the fiddling of dates by the Catholic church again. Pope Gregory VIII rearranged the calendar in 1582. Cold Sophie was 15th May in the Julian calendar, that date stayed with her, but her day was effectively moved in time. If we were to put Sophie back to her real day (not date) she would have her day on 22nd May, which means that the Saints de Glace are in fact 19th – 22nd May in today's calendar system, corresponding exactly with the meteorological phenomenon of the temperature dip and my Mum’s favourite “clout” warning. 
There was a great sigh of relieve in Town and it has somehow rejuvenated the town’s horse connections. After a lull when the imminient closure was announced, works have restarted on at the Equivallée (the show jumping facility) and have been going on all winter with a fascinating array of different layers being added to the all-weather rings and now there are two fully up and running all-weather rings, the grass ring, which has had some of the pressure taken off it, is in excellent condition and there are two practise rings as well.. 
Last weekend’s event was an auction of thoroughbreds. The auction started at 10.00 according the posters but, as veterans of Cluny events, we decided to arrive about an hour after the published starting time in the hope that things had got going. We were entertained to a number of demonstrations in one of the all-weather rings amongst which there was a cowboy like chap breaking in a young foal. We also saw the officials from the Haras parading round the Haras itself, then into the Equivalée and there were loads of stalls selling all sorts of horsey things including some ghastly 70’s looking horse paintings on velvet. But sadly no auction.
But last week’s guests always keep us on our toes when they are here. I am exhausted after a week with Henk. He can’t sit still for one minute and he is always looking for things to do. He spotted a pile of logs that were too large for our wood burning stove and which we have miserably failed to split into smaller logs and he found a large axe, and with a quick “do you want these spilt?”, he was away. Just one skilful whack with the axe and these stubborn pieces of oak gave way, leaving us to run around and stack our new ready to burn logs.
I think he was rather disappointed that I had managed to keep it going as he had little digging to do, but he was kept happy by setting up a new bed for me, making the garden complete, well at least until next time he comes.
Then one day in December last year there was a little notice popped into our letterbox announcing a pre-meeting to prepare for this event in Cormatin for the conscrits of year zero. This intrigued us. So we started asking questions and it appeared that it had nothing to do with conscription, it was just a party for everyone who was born in a year ending on the same number as the current year. So in 2010 it was the zeros and guess what, my birth year ends on a zero (yes I’m thirty again this year!).
A car in front of us played suitably jolly music to walk to and a car at the back carried a couple of 80 and 90 year-olds who felt they couldn’t make the walk up and down the main street. The traffic was stopped by guys in fluorescent jackets as we did the traditional wave-walk up the street. Each line of people zigzaged across the road right to left, then left to right, creating a “wave of amity” as we flowed up towards the road to Chapaize where we stopped for breath and to let the traffic through. We then turned round and walked back up to the church and the war memorial where a wreath was laid, then on up to Salle St Roch for kir and nibbles, all the time making sure your hat and rosette stayed in place.
I’d warned them of my fish allergy earlier in the week and they coped extremely well, getting me a very similar looking dish at the same time as the other 70 odd guests were fed, very unlike many restaurants who make you feel two inches high for daring to be allergic to anything and making sure everyone notices you have something different. In-between courses there was dancing and then the cabaret act arrived to entertain us. The cheese course (which come before dessert in France) arrived at 6 o’clock and as we had gîte guests arriving, we had to skip dessert and coffee. So who knows what time the coffee arrived! One person we bumped into today said she had left “early” at 3.30 in the morning, maybe the youngsters managed dawn and their onion soup, I don’t know!
Burgundy hibernates in the winter. Even though you can still have tee-shirt weather into mid-November, Burgundy effectively grinds to a halt towards the end of October. The museums, the Château in Cormatin, the caves in Azé and Blanot and other attractions all shut down, the bicycle renter closes his doors and the tourists stay away. That is why our gites are not open after the end of October, very few visitors come and so we drain down the water and tuck up the little houses putting them to bed for the winter.
But on Easter Monday Burgundy is really shaken alive. It is the first Louhans small animal market of the year. The whole area becomes one great big party. The normally sleepy little town is turned into an enormous market place for the whole day and the fair arrives as well. Literally hundreds of thousands of people flock to enjoy this unique day of the year, which always seems to be blessed with beautiful weather. Don’t even think about trying to get a place in a restaurant for lunch, everywhere is booked up, even the kebab shop has a queue that goes half way down the main road. Just buy something off the market and set up your own little picnic. As you arrive and walk into the town centre, you will be met by hundreds of people coming the other way, carrying twittering cardboard boxes tied up with string in which they are carrying their point-of-lay chickens, taking them home to the newly prepared hen-house. The cycle of life has started again. Chickens are bought at this time of year to give eggs, then they are killed in the Autumn to provide meat, when they start their moult and stop laying. The cycle is then complete.
Everything is opening up, Burgundy is bursting with life again, the roads seem to be full of foreign number plates, a sight rarely seen in winter. We are looking forward to a fresh season, meeting new people and welcoming back old friends, sharing stories of the past year and swapping news. The gites are painted up and ready to roll, all the winter maintenance has been done and now life speeds up to a leisurely amble as we stretch our legs and shake off the winter cobwebs.
As readers of this blog will have noticed, the church at Taizé fascinates me. The last time I wrote about it, I wrote how the church expands and contracts with the seasons to accommodate more or fewer people (
After the war, a German Christian movement was set up, by volunteers, to help countries who had suffered under the Nazis. It consisted of a group of architects who’s intention was to build symbols of reconciliation in places where the war had caused great pain. This group was called Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, or Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (ARSP) and it still exists to day. It was in the early 60s that ARSP decided to work with the Taizé community to build the Church of Reconciliation. The monks designed the church and with the assistance of ARSP architects, its volunteer youth workers and other Taizé volunteers, the church rose out of the ground.
The floor area of the Romanesaue church was roughly 90 mˆ2, capable of housing 90 – 100 worshipers and the new Church of Reconciliation was about 1,020 mˆ2, well over ten times the size. It was a huge leap of faith to believe that this new church could ever be filled. But by the early 70s it was obvious that the community had in fact underestimated the size of church needed and in the height of those summers it had to erect circus style tents by the front entrance to increase capacity. 
The tents were one option, but in the early 90s a more permanent structure was conceived and planning permission was then given to increase the size of the new church. The church has been added to over the years with extra length and extra wings so that the church is now not far short of 4,600 mˆ2. It has to be said though that even now in the height of summer the Saturday evening and Sunday morning services attract more people than the church can hold and many of the faithful have to follow the services from outside.
The roads are made unsafe over the two to three weekends spanning the flowering period as loony daff hunters zoom around zigzagging across the countryside heading off to find the best spot to pick as many daffodils as they can carry, preferably not too far from a parking spot and of course as close as possible to a wine selling stall to refortify themselves after their hard labour of plucking these delicate blooms. Even on weekdays, the really canny pickers go out choosing a day that they think is the most likely to yield a good harvest. So the wine stalls are manned almost 24 hours a day to maximise sales during the picking weeks.
So huge lawnmower like machines drive over the fields when all the bulbs have come into flower and the flowers are cut off, leaving only the leaves standing. This allows the bulb itself to strengthen and develop into a saleable product. The flowers are then dumped at the end of the rows as a splash of colour. So maybe what the locals around here are doing, is in fact beneficial to this wild species and not what I would call it - stealing from nature - I don’t know. In any case I couldn’t bring myself to pick even one little flower, it just didn’t seem right. 
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.