A nation in mourning

Jean D'Ormesson in his Académie Française uniform

In Tuesday evening’s news the first 10 minutes were dedicated to Jean D'Ormesson, a member of the Académie Française, a philosopher, former head of Le Figaro and a prolific author, who passed away at the age of 94. President Macron called him "a prince in the world of literature".

As we watched that item on the news, we were impressed that an intellectual giant should get the first 10 minutes, summing up for us the French love of literature and philosophy and how that is engrained into their education system and hence the national character.

But the French also have a love of the performing arts, musicians and actors are held in great respect as well. None more so than Johnny Hallyday who is a national institution.

Rather prophetically we wondered how many minutes the rock star would get when he passes away and the next evening we found out.

Johnny Hallyday on stage

Johnny Hallyday is the biggest rock star France has ever had, was a legend in his own lifetime. Whilst he never made it outside the French speaking world, he was obviously well respected enough in the world-wide business to get the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Peter Frampton to play on his albums.

Even though (or maybe because) he had a “Bad Boy” image, he was loved by everyone. Generation after generation of kids had Johnny as their idol and in an ever changing world where kids grow up rebelling against their parents’ old-fashioned tastes and almost automatically dislike their parents’ idols, that is quite an amazing feet. He managed to change with the times and grow his audience. Helped in no small part by his charismatic performances both on and off the stage, he fell and he picked himself up many times, he failed and he came back and all the time he never stopped working. President Macron summed up Johnny very nicely "There was something of Johnny in all French people….. Across generations, he carved himself into the lives of French people”. He was both an ordinary and an extraordinary man.

The man himself in his iconic leather jacket

So when he passed away, the evening news was not only dedicated entirely to him, but it was extended to last more than an hour. There were no other items. After the “news” there was a two hour documentary on his life and music and that was followed by one of his most recent concerts. That is how big this man was in the French psyche.

So France is a country in mourning. It lost two of its greatest human treasures almost on the same day.

Dancing Cabbage

Tartiflette photo from www.cuisineaz.com

After the long warm evenings of summer have passed, we move into a different time of year where activities are very different as well. Instead of long BBQ evenings with friends, other outdoor activities or concerts in the glorious Romaesque churches that abound here, we move into the season of club events, annual general meetings, livened up with wine and food at the end, “salons”, exhibitions and fundraising dinners.

At our taichi AGM we managed to have about 15 minutes of discussion and voting and then 2 hours worth of wine, food and dancing, that seems to be the right balance to me.

Choucroute photo from www.seriouseats.com

The Tourist Office in St-Gengoux-le-National on the other hand had an extraordinary GM to discuss its future, now that the local government has taken over control of the office. A very lively, but mostly off-topic, debate was had by all then the vote was cast. Contrary to northern European logic, the majority voted to merge with another association and to do something that was not entirely clear to me, but if they are happy that way, so be it. All the arguing and discussions took over 2 hours which didn’t leave us an enormous amount of time to enjoy the very good wine on offer and to have farewell chats with those we have worked with over the last 10 or so years.

After the “salon” of Zen in Sennecey-le-Grand and “salon” of well being in Cluny there was an exhibition of the Cluny photo club which was of a very high standard. The club was touting for new members, so we signed up and have started going to their meetings. We missed out on the light painting night and the mushroom excursion but we are looking forward to next club outings to practise a bit of photography with the group.

Aligot photo from www.marieclaire.fr

And last but not least there are numerous dinners offering autumn/winter delights such as tartiflette which is potatoes cooked in the oven with lardons and onions topped off with Reblochon a special cheese from the French Alps (Savoy) region baked to crispy perfection, aligot an Auvergne delight of melted Tomme (a cheese from the Auvergne), butter, cream and garlic blended into mashed potato, a gooey, elasticy mix of yum often served with just bread, but you can also serve it with sausages. Not to mention Boeuf Bourginon not always that well done and rather a cliché, but what the heck it’s named after our region. Often these meals are an excuse to eat and drink well into the night with the obligatory dancing in between courses so that you do not feel as though you are just pigging out.

Dancing choucroute available in Cluny?

But the best event we have seen advertised this year is the Cluny rugby club’s annual choucroute evening - choucroute being a speciality from the Alsace of sauerkraut topped with heaps and heaps of sausages and chunks of gammon and other meats.

I have a slight suspicion that someone has reworded the poster this year making it sound a little more special than normal. It tickled my sense of humour and if it were to be true, it would be almost worth the 18 Euros to see the choucroute dancing to the Madison - I suspect though that the lump of acidic, fermented cabbage will stubbornly sit on the plate, so I don’t think I’ll be going.

Return to blogging

I haven’t blogged for, what seems to be, an absolute age, I guess I was all blogged out there for a while. Spring turned into a glorious summer, one of the best and driest since we have been here and now, even though the temperature is still tipping 20 degrees, autumn is most definitely in full swing.


It doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy this summer, our days and evenings have been packed with all the usual summer stuff, picnics, visiting the sites to see (eternal tourists that we are) and of course many, many quite superb concerts. All of that will give me loads to write about in the coming weeks of course.

So what are we up to at the moment? With this splendid autumn weather, cool mornings and warm afternoons, we have had a great chance to get on top of some big garden jobs. Cees has been clearing brambles – he is a man with a mission at the moment and I have managed to get ahead with trimming hedges and clearing the lower reed bed which is always a huge task that normally gets left until it is too late. So for once in a long time, our garden is looking very neat indeed. But mostly we have been enjoying going out and about, photographing the tremendous colours that this season brings, taking the opportunity to practise taichi in the garden before it gets too cold to be enjoyable and just generally enjoying life the universe and everything.

The gites are wrapped up for the winter now and the campsite is closed – more on that another time – and the tourists are fewer on the roads, so we are slipping into winter mode, wood fires and mulled wine aah la vie est belle!

LED Lightbulbs

A real light bulb fading into history

Ever since the European Union passed one of the silliest and patronising laws banning the manufacture and sale of “normal” lightbulbs, we have struggled with lights in our house. I’m all for energy saving - just ask Cees how I follow him round the house switching off lights and I had energy saving bulbs long, long before they were compulsory, but I had them where I wanted them and where they were “safe”.

It is totally unsafe to have a system of lighting that you have to wait up to 2 minutes (I kid you not for the ones in our living room) before you can enter a space safely and can actually see where you are.

We have been relying on hand-me downs from Cees’ daughter and the one or two precious bulbs we still have left, to use in places where light is actually needed instantly.

Emergency rations

Finally LED lights have come of age and are available and affordable and wow… it is still a joy to walk into our living room and flip the switch and hey presto there was light. But their price is not a rock-bottom, giveaway prices and our old energy saving lights are still working, so we have only slowly started the replacement process.

One of  the recently removed light bulbs

This process was given a big boost last week when a money-off voucher arrived for our local DIY shop, finally we could replace the lights in the kitchen cum dining room.

At that moment we discovered another reason that you shouldn’t use these horrible energy-saving lights – wasps! We found a wasp’s nest in each of the four energy-saving light bulbs and none in the two proper light bulbs. Not only could we have been stung by these angry beasties, but those nests could have caught fire.

All four had the same problem

We are now "real light bulbs-less" in the house, and almost "energy-saving light bulb-less". I’ll keep the real ones for posterity, they might be worth some money in a few years but those ghastly things are going in the bin, it was almost worth voting Brexit to get rid of them – I said almost...

The Biggest Cattle Market in France

When we were at the Charolais cattle market at St Christophe-en-Brionnais recently, we got chatting to a man who sells cattle feed. It transpired that the “biggest” cattle market in France was just down the road from us in Bourg-en-Bresse and not being able to resist a day out, we went on Tuesday morning to see yet more cows.

Farmers milling around amongst the cattle

Less than an hour from home, we were outside the huge building where all the action takes place.

Nosey cows

Inside the building there are hundreds of pens with each pen containing different types, sizes and ages of cattle. The farmers mill around and chat to one another, business is done on a human scale here. Unlike St-Christophe, the selling is still done on a one to one basis between the buyer and seller for the animals in each pen. To the untrained eye, it looks like a bunch of farmers chatting with each other, but on careful observation you can see some of them writing in little notebooks and then pieces of paper are furtively exchanged.

Isn't she a cutey?

It is a far cry from the cattle markets of my youth with the incoherent shouting of the auctioneer and the market “à la cadran” in St-Christophe which seems just as frenetic. This is really chilled out and apparently just as effective as all animals seem to be sold and all the farmers we saw seemed to be content. The cattle are not marched in and out of an auctioneer’s ring and they seem to be very content.

Depending on the age and type of animal, different times are allocated for the selling and where the bidding is not going on, visitors like us can have free access to the animals. It was lovely just walking around and chatting to the calves.

Sampling the merchandise

The only bad thing about the market is that it is a way out of town, that makes access and parking easy, but you can’t leave the market and wander around the town, soaking up the market day atmosphere and enjoy a leisurely lunch in a restaurant. There is an on-site restaurant but we decided to move on and visit the monastery at Brou. We found a superb restaurant just opposite the monastery and I’ll give you three guesses what we ordered - well what else can you eat on cattle market day?

Christmas Presents

Back to the UK for a late Christmas

This year Christmas was delayed by Cees’ slipped discs and so we didn’t manage to collect our Christmas presents until into January. A part of our trips to the UK is buying essential things like peppermint tea and marmite either not available or so expensive we would have to mortgage the house to get them here. I also bring back black pudding, sausages and an Indian takeaway. But this year I left without the sausages - why? I hear you ask - well my present to myself was a sausage stuffer. Why buy yourself Chanel no5 when you can have something practical?

My present to myself

This week pork was on offer in the supermarket and so it was now or never for the stuffer. I started looking up recipes and they were all a bit too exotic for my taste, what’s wrong with plain Walls’ sausages, nice and pink, not too meaty and bland – very bland.

In desperation I resorted to asking my friends who run a small holding in the Vendee and who run min-courses in self sufficiency skills. They sent me a recipe which also sounded rather exotic – do mace and nutmeg really go in sausages? I trust them, so I decided to try it.

At least they look like sausages

The ancient, noisy meat grinder was my first port of call, twice through the grinder and then I had to take a fist full of aspirin to get rid of the headache. No matter, I was on a mission. After the mixing I was advised to make a small patty, fry it up and taste it – not a bad idea and I was amazed it tasted like Walls’ sausages!

Now on to the sausage stuffer. After a bit of trial and error (read meat mix all over the place and Cees hiding in his room) I managed to get the stuffer to stuff the casings I had bought. And guess what, they actually looked like sausages, which did rather amaze me to be honest.

A real English breakfast

Everything needs to dry for a day or so and so the tasting of the Chazelle sausages couldn’t take place until this morning. What better breakfast can you imagine than bacon, eggs and English sausages? They were scrumptious!

The rest of the batch has gone into the freezer and I will never have to buy additive filled sausages on my trips to England again!

New Year’s Service in a Romanesque Church

The welcoming interior of Taizé's Romanesque church

Every year the vast majority of the brothers and permanents go off to the European meeting over the NewYear (this year in Riga) and Taizé is practically empty. The last service in the big church this year was Christmas morning and then the remaining brothers retreated into the small Romanesque church in the village.

I have promised myself that I would actually go to the Sunday service between Christmas and New Year one year and this year that Sunday fell on the 1st of January - perfect timing.

The stained glass window above
the front door

I arrived well in time and the church, which is usually empty of all but a few wooden kneeling stools scattered around, had been decked out with benches for the older brothers who would be attending and for the older than average congregation that was expected. The church was heated with discrete electric heaters under the side benches which made it warm and cosy inside. It felt so much more welcoming than it does in the summer months when it is packed with the young visitors who make one feel uncomfortable about entering the building.

When I arrived there were “books” stacked at the entrance to the church and on one of the front benches, entitled “Cantique – Avent et nativité”. I have never seen these books before and they gave the full sung mass for the Christmas period and a number of songs I have never heard sung before. Interestingly these songs had verses, only 3 or 4, but still this is something that the modern song book shies away from.

By the time the bells started, there were 12 or 13 brothers and about 50 in the congregation. We all fitted easily into the church.

Sung mass for the Christmas period

I say there were 12 or 13 brothers as I am not entirely convinced that the priest was one of the brothers. The Eucharist is conducted by a priest of which there are a few within the community itself, but visiting priests also perform the task from time to time. Whilst I am sure that I have seen today’s chap before, his whole “way of doing things” didn’t seem to be the way it is normally done. He gave a short sermon, which is very unusual, whilst Brother Alois does that sometimes, I have never heard one on a Sunday morning. I also felt that the silence was shorter than normal, but maybe that was just me. But the real giveaway for me was that he waited at the door to shake the hands of the parting congregation, whilst the brothers snuck out through the side door.

Frère Roger with the original brothers
when this church was used every day

The whole atmosphere during the service was one of a real monastic order - or should I say what I think an old-fashioned monastic order would be about and I can well imagine that the brothers who partake of these days of intense quiet in this little ancient church must have a great sense of stillness that the large church, and certainly its thousand-fold congregations of the summer months, cannot possibly give them. It has been said that the original order sung all its masses from start to finish and that the Sunday mass is the only service that maintains a high level of singing in its content. This short week of the brothers returning to the Romanesque church also sees for them a return to these sung masses - I wonder how many of those present today were among the original brothers who started here so long ago?

After everyone had gone I returned to take pictures, the church still smelled of extinguished candles and even with its grim grey walls, it still felt very welcoming. For these few days a year, the church is returned to its original purpose, the holding of services and singing with acoustics that really zing - it is a pity it isn’t used this way more often.

It's that time of year again!

Week one and we're off

I couldn’t go the whole of December and not blog about the Taizé nativity scene now could I? So here you have it, the 2016 assessment of the Christmas Crib. As every year the nativity scene is managed by the permanents, so it changes each year as a new set of ideas and ideologies inspire its creation.

The whole advent period, there have been real live sheep in attendance next to the church, so no matter what day or what time you visited, there was always something to chat to. I think their last presence must have been Christmas Eve as Christmas morning they had gone. The theme this year was not as outspoken as previous years but was obviously influenced by the terrible situation in Syria. There is some beautiful Arabic calligraphy on the walls of the church, well done to whoever made those.

Week four- everyone is there except one person

Week one showed a near empty stable, a couple of sheep and the ox and ass were there. No sign of the (un)happy couple and no star. By the second week, the shepherds had arrived and the stall was full of sheep and I mean full, there has been some serious sheep creation going on by the permanents to get the numbers up. The star had made its appearance, shining over the stall.

Stunning Arabic calligraphy

The unhappy couple make their entrance in week 3 – oh dear did no one think to change those grimaces? The sheep gone and the ox and ass back - it was starting to look like Christmas. Finally in week four, the whole crowd was there, shepherds, sheep, ox and ass, empty manger and Mary and Joseph.

Finally on Christmas morning I saw the baby Jesus, snuggled in his manger. What I hadn’t realised before is that this is a double of the ox and ass model with the baby Jesus painted into the manger itself. This brought me to thinking of an idea for next year – permanents are you listening to my pearls here? You could make slip over faces or complete doubles of the holy couple giving them a smile after the baby has been born! That would brighten the thing up a bit.

Christmas Day - the main man makes his appearance

All in all, congratulations to this year’s group, you have created a lively story with interest throughout the advent period, thank you for that, it makes my weekly visits up the hill well worth it. I have one little request though, before you put them all to bed for next year’s team to use, please do something on the Mary and Joseph grimace issue. It may be a bit miserable giving birth in a cold stall miles away from home, but Jesus is the son of God and I really think that they should be happy to be the first people to see him.

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Fun on the bus?

Torch bearing stilt walkers heralded the big event

The annual Cluny winter spectacle was held last week, it was freezing cold and foggy and not an evening I wanted to go out in, but as last year had been so spectacular, we felt it was worth braving the cold.

After a misunderstanding on our part about the time of the show, we arrived in Cluny far too early, we quickly saw the light and sound “happening”, visited the Christmas market and treated ourselves to a currywurst and chips from one of the stalls in the market square, which very good indeed. Still with time to spare and with feet that were starting to feel the beginning effects of frostbite, we set off to our favourite bar and quickly warmed up on mulled wine. When we heard the band leading the torch lit procession in the main street, we headed back to the market place for the main show.

Tightrope walking on top of a bus

This year the same performing troupe was being used under a different name, they were called the “Funambus” - a witty French name to show that they were using a bus to do their show. The show itself started off by the bus being “dragged” into the arena by a girl with a long pigtail (a bit bizarre but hey, live and let live) the bus then went totally crazy and started careering around its designated area, not much more than a meter from the audience and then it headed straight for a group of spectators, fortunately the brakes worked and it stopped about 1 foot short of them. Call me a kill-joy, but I felt it was a little irresponsible even without the ice that was present on the ground. It didn’t put me in a mood to really enjoy what was going on after that.

Human figurehead

Fortunately the bus then stopped and the human part of the show started. All of the action took place on a tightrope on top of the bus, it was without a doubt technically very skilful and very well executed, but for more than half an hour with temperatures at about minus 3 it was too much for a lot of the audience and numbers dwindled. We stayed to the bitter end and the finale was quite good with the tightrope walkers walking up and down while the bus was moving and the female performer acting like a ship’s figurehead, hanging on to the front of the bus.

I think that it is great that such a small town as Cluny invests in putting on a show at this time of year. It gets us all out of our houses, enjoying ourselves on a miserable bitter evening and we will certainly be back next year.

The writing’s on the floor

No parking between the 16th and 31st

Traffic in Cormatin has always been a nightmare on the 1st and 16th of the month. Why? Well that is the day the "Great Parking Changeover" takes place. What’s that? I hear you ask. The art of compromise has determined that cars will be parked on one side of the main street for the first half of the month and then on the other side of the road for the second half of the month. This means that no one has to have a line of cars in front of their door on all the days, but it isn’t half confusing for the non-regular parkers in town and most particularly for the tourists, meaning that on 1st and 16th cars are parked on both sides of the road and traffic comes to a standstill.

Someone's been writing on the floor

A couple of weeks ago we were in town buying a newspaper and fresh baguette and we saw some mysterious writing on the tarmac. What could be happening? I duly took a photo for posterity and we went home to contemplate this bit of exciting news. Was Cormatin finally going to have a sensible parking policy?

A few years ago it was decided that something had to be done about this silly parking system. No, we couldn’t all park on just one side of the road (why? – no idea) there had to be a system of alternate-side parking, but not changing twice month, a permanent alternate-side parking.

One car not in an official space..

Much debate in the council meetings has been devoted to this subject, and there has been much argument in town amongst main street and non-main street residents and even though the plans were published two years ago, no one could agree and nothing has been done.

But those little markings on the tarmac, did they mean that something might actually happen?

The diggers moved in the following week and caused a lot of chaos in town, pavements have been torn up and curbs lowered. And then they left….. those daft parking signs were still in place.

Finally last week, the painters turned up and have marked parking spaces and the parking signs have been removed. We now have permanent parking spaces, but we have far fewer than before and nipping in for your newspaper or loaf of bread isn't as easy as it was.

Another car not in an official space.....

But the big question is, has life been improved for the parkers, the residents or the traffic flow - the jury is still out on that one, but I doubt it. Parkers have already taken an anarchistic approach and are ignoring the painted spaces and parking anywhere which is blocking up the road and lorries are still thundering through town at an inappropriate speed. But we will see the real effect next summer when the campervans and caravans start to clog up our main street again. Watch this space for an update!

Parcel Delivery

One big parcel

The other day we had popped out for a few minutes and when we came back we found a note from La Poste telling us that we have a parcel waiting to be delivered. I hadn’t ordered anything, had Cees? It is not our birthdays and still too early for Christmas – a bit of a mystery. Cees was convinced that I had ordered something and forgotten about it, I know I am a bit forgetful, but a parcel??

There is a brilliant system here by which you can go on-line and reschedule your delivery date (next day possible) or have it dropped off at a post office or other accredited shop - newsagent, garage you name it they are all on the list, if I did nothing the parcel would go to Cormatin post office and I could collect it any time after 11.00am the next day. As the next day was Saturday and the post office closes at 11.30, I decided to have the mystery parcel delivered here the next day.

Address "corrected" by Mme La Poste

On a Saturday Madame La Poste comes before 11.00m but at 11.00 there was still no parcel, so at 11.00 I went off to the post office to make sure it had not been delivered there – no, no parcel there either. I then set off on a tour of the villages around here which I know are on her round trying to find her, as we had to go out. After travelling more than 15km I decided to give up and head for home, the parcel would have to wait until after the weekend. What did I nearly bump into as I rounded the last corner on my way home, Madame La Poste’s little yellow van!

She greeted me with a cheery “what a coincidence I have a parcel for you”. I explained that I was driving around the countryside looking for her which caused some amusement. She opened the back of her van to show a huge parcel. “Funny thing though”, she continued, “they put the wrong address on it.”

As I have said before, addresses can be a little vague around in this neck of the woods, everyone who lives in Cormatin has the address Cormatin, no road name or number, just Cormatin, so the postman or woman has to know where everyone lives. We are supposed to have our name on the letterbox, but not everyone complies with that rule and even though we have now been given “proper” addresses with road names and numbers, no one uses them, so even with the modern world encroaching on our little bit of rurality, the postwoman still has to know her stuff.

An added facilitation to post delivery is of course the post code. In the UK and in The Netherlands this postcode will narrow the address down to about 5 houses. Here the postcode narrows it down to about 10 villages.

So with that little bit of background in mind, let’s get back to my parcel. This parcel was indeed addressed to Madame La Tuilerie de Chazelle with our postcode, but there was a road, house number and village name, which were not ours, in fact the house in question is about 10 km from La Tuilerie and not even on our postlady’s round. But at that moment, the mystery was solved.

With its rightful owner

Having a small business, I receive all sorts of offers from suppliers, from paperclips to cars and other useful or semi-useful items. Not so long ago I received an offer for coffee pods. Not using the things, I passed it on to some friends who do buy them. They actually read the offer properly and it wasn’t for cheap pods at all, it was a free coffee pod machine with your next order of pods! As their machine is a few years old and a new one costs in the region of 80 Euros, this was an offer they couldn’t refuse.

So they placed an order in the company name La Tuilerie de Chazelle, with their address but they just happen to have the same post code as us. As I mentioned earlier, Madame La Poste knows darn well where La Tuilerie de Chazelle is, so instead of delivering it to the “wrong” address in a village about 10 km away, she decided to deliver it to its rightful owner ME. What a woman, what a service and what proactivity.

Nuts, nuts and more nuts.

Walnuts to keep us going through the winter

The first full autumn we were in France, a friend and I spent an hour or so collecting walnuts. There had been high winds during the night and she had seen that masses of walnuts had been shaken out of the large tree in her village. Between the two of us we collected 25 kilos. It was only when my back started to tell me enough was enough, that I convinced her we should stop. Offering to drive her home with her share, she promptly told me that she didn’t want any! What was I going to do with that many walnuts??

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.

Misty morning

I returned the following year to the 25 kilos tree only to find that it was gone, it had made way for a car park. But over the years our own trees have started to produce and I have found some great spots in nearby villages where I can get my annual autumnal fix.

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.

Chainsaw art

Having said that, the hazelnut trees in the garden have yielded a bumper crop, instead of the usual zero nuts we have a box full of them, they are a bit on the small side, but yummy none the less. Definitely no where near 25 kilos, so this was going to be a lean nut year - that was until we visited some friends in the Vendée.

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.

I do like to be beside the seaside

A big thank you to our friends Steve and Jane, the owners of a glamping site (if you don’t know what that is check out this link) who allow people who stay with them to learn a few self-sufficiency skills. Not only did we have some lovely totally home grown meals (including one of Flopsy’s offspring reared in one of their rabbit runs) we managed a trip the seaside (something truly lacking in Burgundy) we saw some fantastic Romanesque churches (what is a trip out without one?) and we came home with enough walnuts to keep us going for another year.

Winter can now begin.

Autumn Holiday

View from our accommodation in 's-Hertogenbosch

Just as we thought that summer would never end, we had a sudden heavy frost. Autumn has arrived in style this year.

Even though end of summer always surprises me, I think it is our strange gite season that has really confused my seasonal clock this year. We do not normally have many guests in September, we wind down gently from the busy summer months into the autumn and then we close for the winter. This year the guests have kept coming and coming. The later in the season it became, the more people we have had visiting us. Everything has been so much later this year, including the hot weather and this has all compounded to profoundly confuse me!

Typical "street" scene in Amsterdam

Being fully booked for September (the first time ever in the ten years we have been open) there was no holiday for us during that month, so a two week visit to The Netherlands was planned for October. Nice and relaxed this time, to enable us to visit everyone we wanted to and not have to rush around like lunatics from one place to another. But the gite bookings just kept coming, a couple of days were initially shaved off the end of our holiday and then some more days were shaved off the beginning and so our two weeks ended up as four days.

What is The Netherlands without a windmill.....

... or bicycles and canals?

The great thing about living here is that we can just pop to The Netherlands for four days without too much trouble and now that there are fewer tourists on the road, the journey is really quite relaxed.

So there we were last weekend, as our guests left the gite on Saturday morning, packed and ready to go. We were easily in The Netherlands in time for dinner.

That evening we went to see a light show in 's-Hertogenbosch, part of the year of Hieronymus Bosch. We missed the light show when we visited during the exhibition of his work back in May as one of the buildings it was to be projected on collapsed a few days before we arrived. We were very disappointed at the time and so it was a pleasant surprise to be able to actually see it this time and it and gave a very holidayish feel to start of our short break.

Amsterdam flower market in autumn.

The next day on to Amsterdam and a chance to see old favourites including the Van Gogh museum and just to wander around and enjoy the sites and sounds.

So that’s it for our autumn holiday, hopefully we will have better luck organising our spring holiday, but on the other hand if we fail to do that one, it means we have an excellent start to our renting season – difficult choice!


For information on holiday accommodation within one day's drive of The Netherlands click here.