Maintenance

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

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

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

The Camping Season is Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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