Sculptures in clay

La Consolation des Tempêtes
surrounded by flowers

Anyone who has visited here will have seen the wonderful statue in our front garden. The sculpture is called “La Consolation des Tempêtes” The Comforter of Storms, made by a local artist Monique Dégluaire. The statue has a tumultuous world balanced on her head, which she brings back into equilibrium. You can belief in her or not, but you can't fail to be transfixed by her very tranquil expression and delicate colouring.

Last year I was surprised to receive an invitation to sign up for a course that Monique has started to run - sculpture in clay. It is a three day/weekend session starting usually after lunch on Friday and going through to a Sunday evening. To get you started you begin by shaping a simple form using coils of clay, this gets you used to the modelling medium.

Monique at her outlet in Cormatin

Then you identify the project you are actually going to do. Monique has loads of resources available and you may choose a photo, an existing template or an idea you have had prior to your visit. You sketch out your idea then move on to choosing your clay and preparing it. After making a quick prototype you move on to the real thing. You learn not only how to make the model, but how to scoop out the article to minimise the clay used and minimise the chance of firing problems and how to disassemble your sculpture to optimise firing. There are shared mealtimes, where everyone comes with something they have prepared which gives a break in the day where you can reflect on how your design or work is going. Then as a round up everyone shares what they have learned during their three day experience.

When the sculptures have dried, Monique glazes and fires them for you and you can come and collect them or she can send them on. Her next course is next weekend, from what I have heard there are still a couple of places, which is very unusual, so you could still get in there. Failing that she has new courses in both May and August.

Here's a little video of Monique at work, showing what you could actually try yourself.



It strikes me as a very relaxing and creative way to spend a long weekend. You never know, the next sculpture to appear in our garden may be a Sue Nixon original!

Setting up camp

Dome of the church standing out against the dark sky.

With it being so cold, wet and miserable at the moment, it is very difficult to imagine that Easter is just a few weeks away, but the tell-tale signs of tents going up in Taizé mean that time is moving on and soon there will be thousands of people up on the hill again.

It is a Herculean task to get all the tents up every year and that is just one small part of the impressive organisation that goes on, in and around the Taizé complex, to house and nourish the thousands that turn up every year.

Hawthorn just coming into flower - must be spring

On Sunday we went for a walk to have a look at progress. It is a very pleasant walk from here to Taizé via the forest and then back through Ameugny and Chazelle. It takes us a leisurely 45 minutes to walk to Taizé, just perfect for a Sunday afternoon constitutional, a chance to get out, get some fresh air and enjoy our surroundings. It is always a very peaceful walk, surprisingly few people take that route.

The big church overflow tents are the first to go up

While we were in Taizé, we took the opportunity to have a wander around the old village. We bumped into several groups of Americans and Germans whilst visiting the Romanesque church. We also met quite a large number of very young French people.

It is half-term here and groups of youngsters are encouraged to spend a few days in Taizé. The brothers organise short taster sessions (weekends or mid-week stays) for groups of 14 to 16 year olds - younger than the usual crowd. Their stay is not quite as intense as for the older ones who spend a week here in the summer months and these youngsters are accompanied by a number of adult helpers.

Hundreds of huge accommodation tents
under construction

But the main action, in the community, is the putting up of tents. You can see how large the tents are and how many of them there are, much better when they aren’t covered in canvas, the rows seems to go on forever.

So, it won’t be long now and spring will be here with Easter bringing us warmer, dryer weather. At least I hope so, for all those campers.



For holiday accommodation within walking distance of Taizé click here.

End of the road for the Cluny Stud.

The historical buildings of the Haras in Cluny

Back in November 2009, I reported that the Cluny branch of the Haras (National Stud) was going to be closed down. In May 2010, it was announced that the Haras was saved and had been given a ten year reprieve, but last week we read in the paper that it is finally the end of the road. The buildings are worth more than the income, or the value of the work done at the stud and it is curtains for Cluny.

As it turned out, since 2010, there has been no horse breeding in Cluny anyway and there are only eight horses and 4 employees. How you can have a stud without any studding is a mystery to me, but apparently they have been doing research into a national horse tracing/tracking system - not really worth keeping several millions of Euros worth of buildings open and maintained for.

One of the eight remaining horses

“Living on borrowed time” springs to mind and ten year reprieve or no ten year reprieve, it matters not one jot, Cluny Haras is terminated.

So what will happen now? Well, the council has come up with a fiendishly clever and very French plan.

The council has put a special kind of compulsory purchase order on the property. This is not like an English CPO where the authorities buy the property whether the owners like it or not, oh no, this is far more ingenious. The owners have to pay all the costs to prepare for the sale of the property, they have to find a buyer and then when a price is agreed, the council can step in and trump it!

Fun and games with ponies in the arena

Don’t you just love ‘em? Now who the heck is going to go to all the hassle of attempting to buy the property when they know the council will just step in and take it anyway?

So what does this mean for the buildings and the horses and the employees? What does this mean for the horse spectaculars in the summer and the horse events at the Equivallée? I don’t know, but I will keep my eyes and ears open and keep you posted.

Chinese New Year

Lion dance in Mâcon

I have been a bit lax in blogging the last couple of weeks as we have been very busy practising for Chinese New Year. This year for the first time ever, our Taiji group had been asked to perform during the Mâcon Chinese New Year festivities. So almost every day has been dedicated to practising at home or with our group to make sure we didn’t make complete tiddly-winks of ourselves in front of a big crowd.

Red and gold balloon released to
celebrate the New Year

T-day finally arrived this Saturday. We already suspected that the room we had to perform in wasn’t big enough for our group, so it was with some trepidation that we set off, in convoy, to Mâcon. On arrival we got to see our space. It wasn’t as small as we feared, but cramped none the less and the cable running the length of the room looked destined to trip one or other of us up.

No time to worry, we had to go and see the lion dance, watch hundreds of red and gold balloons being launched and savour the inescapable glass of wine on offer to celebrate the New Year. Not too much mind you, we still had to “do our thing”.

Red Chinese lanterns decorate the planters

After a very non-descript and not very nice lunch (I won’t be recommending this particular culinary outlet) the time arrived to set up and warm up. A quick practise showed that with a bit of a squeeze we wouldn’t end up smashing the glass walls with out sticks, so the show was on!

We had two time slots allocated; in each time slot we would do three demos. I was in all three for the first show (Cees in two) and two of the second show (Cees in only one). Cees set up the video camera and between him and another taijier, they managed to film all six performances.

Forms listed left to right, 24 Beijing, stick, fan

They went really well, no one slipped or tripped or got so muddled up that they fell over, so all that practise had paid off. I won’t bore you with all of them, but this is the video of my favourite. It is the first form I learned with this teacher and is the ,ost commonly practised form in the world - the 24 of Beijing in the yang style. And even though the stick and the fan are fun to do and are more impressive, this form has the simple elegance that taiji is all about, especially when performed by a largish group.



So a big congratulations to our taiji group La Spirale D’Or of Cluny, we did ourselves proud!

Saturday

The mimosa man - wrapped up against the cold

This Saturday morning, in Cluny market, I saw my first sight of spring. The mimosa man was there. After the winter that wasn’t quite yet, we were plunged into freezing weather this week, so it was a big surprise to see this hope of spring brightening up the rather depleted market.

Beautiful flowers - hope of spring

Instead of giving a feeling of hope that the cold is going to leave us, he looked like a rather incongruous misfit. The fact that he still had so many flowers as the market was about to close, shows that not too many people were as optimistic as his display.

Right now it seems that winter is just starting. I have at last had to drain down the gites, a job I nearly always have to do early in December, but this year, the weather has stayed at such ridiculously high temperatures, it hasn’t been necessary to even consider draining out the water.  It has been so warm that in some gardens the fruit trees are starting to blossom and daffodils are starting to flower.

Snow in the forest

It does seem, however, that Mother Nature has other ideas and on returning home, she was determined to show us that winter is not over at all and put on a magical but brief display. This was the view of the forest from my front window.

Tonight’s low is predicted to be -8. So is winter coming or is the mimosa man right and spring is just around the corner?

Life as we know it has changed

Emoticon from Julien's tweet

It is true, life as we know it has changed or to be more precise will change on 20th February.  We found out on Friday. To be fair, we should have suspected something when we received an invitation mid-December to go to Paris in January [Venez assister et découvrir le nouveau plateau en janvier de "Questions pour un Champion"] but we didn’t, we spotted it on the back page of Friday’s edtition of the Journal de Saône-et-Loire.

So what is this dreadful thing? I hear you ask; well, the man who taught us to understand French has been sacked. After 28 years, he has not been given a golden handshake, just told not to come back tomorrow. Some would say, that sounds familiar and welcome to the real world, but this is France, the country of workers’ rights, however, it seems that they can also be very vicious to those who don’t conform.

Me posing with the real contestants

I couldn’t really believe it was true, so I found our daily companion Julien Lepers’ Twitter account and it was confirmed there.

« Grande tristesse de devoir quitter cette émission sans avoir pu saluer les équipes, le public et les téléspectateurs. »

“Great sadness to have to leave this show without being able to say goodbye to the team and the viewers.”

Meeting the man himself

Since then I have found an article in the Huffington Post, written by Julien, in which he gives what would have been his farewell speech had he been allowed to give one. It starts with “I leave Question Pour un Champion against my wishes and with my heart broken.” And then goes on to give a very moving farewell to his team and some good insights into the success of the programme that the new presenter and France TV would do well to read and understand. He finishes this short article by giving homage to his audience. “The viewers that have followed me for a long time are a part of my life. That will continue, with them, and I thank them for that.”

Everyone laughs at us when we tell them not to ring between 6 and half past each evening as we are watching Julien, but it has been our daily routine now for about ten years and he has helped us so much with learning French in a fun way. From 20th February, that will be over.

So that’s it - the end of an era. I for one will miss him.

Village of a 100 Nativity Scenes

Hundreds of miniature African Nativty scenes

And you thought Christmas was over? Well you’re wrong, until 12th night nativity scenes are still de rigueur. So much so that one town in Saône-et-Loire has more than 100 of them on display. Every year they call themselves the town of the nativity scene and every year we say we will go, this year we actually went.

Before going to something of this type in rural France you have to be prepared for amateurism. But to be honest, nativity scenes, just like nativity plays, owe a lot of their charm to the way you can tell that everyone has done their utmost to produce something spot on but which still has that home-made look about it. I love it.

Arty picture - I got the settings wrong!

With that in mind we drove the one and a half hours to Melay to see this year’s exhibition. We arrived to see a strange vision of an African village outside the lavoir and a similar one outside the town hall, not very nativity scene like - this was going to be more weird than I was expecting. On entering the lavoir building we handed over our 3 Euros entrance fee and we were asked if this was the first time we had been to see the nativity scenes or if we were “habitués” – habitual visitors! As newbies we were told how it all worked. But after an immensely complicated explanation, I had no more idea what was going on than before, except that the exhibition in the lavoir had been borrowed from a nativity scene museum in the Lorraine somewhere and the exhibition in the town hall had been borrowed from the artisans of Arles.

I was quite stunned. There were literally hundreds of small beautifully crafted nativity scenes (carved in wood, ivory or made from pottery) mostly from African origins. But my question was, where were the amateur bits and pieces? the ones that showed that someone in town cared enough to build something each year? What about the shepherds with tea towels on their heads and the wonky mangers?

The original Nativity scene that started off the village's quest for more

To say I was disappointed was an understatement. Somewhat irritated at not finding what I had expected, my camera then decided to change all its settings so that none of my photos worked. I then spent the best part of 20 minutes trying to figure out what I had done to upset it so much, however, I did manage one rather arty photo with these weird settings.

We looked for a while, then left for the town hall, at least we would see something French there. In Provence the figures used in nativity scenes are called Santons, originally made out of old bread rolled through your fingers then painted, nowadays they are made by, amongst others, the artisans of Arles.

We opened the door of the town hall to be greeted by more of the same, more and more and more, small, delicately made African nativity scenes. I asked where the santons were, only to be told that these African scenes had been borrowed from the santon makers of Arles from their museum, the santons had been left in Arles.

Even the Dutch got a look in

So what can I say, I am sure it was an absolutely terrific exhibition, but if I had known that I would be driving for a three hour round trip in the fog to see miniature nativity scenes made in Africa, I wouldn’t have gone. On the other hand Cees was really pleased to see such delicate work, so you win some you lose some.

Our decorations are coming down now and so Christmas is finally over. The local nativity scenes are being packed up until next year. Snow White and her 5 dwarfs (two were stolen this year) are being put back into storage, maybe she won’t reappear next year, just like Mary and Jospeh who have stopped coming to Cormatin because Jesus and the sheep were stolen two or three years ago. Maybe we will just be left with the Smurfs.

All that said, I suppose I shouldn’t complain as there will be more than one hundred beautifully crafted real nativity scenes in Melay next year. I just won’t be there to see them.

Christmas time again

Christmas full moon through trees

It is Christmas time again. How quickly it seems to come around each year.

We had Christmas at home this year.  A real Christmas dinner - roast turkey and all the trimmings, I know it’s boring but it just isn’t Christmas without it!

With the lights twinkling on the tree in the living room and a full moon outside shining through the trees, it was a perfect day

A proper Christmas dinner

In the morning I made my final visit to the Taizé crib for this year, baby Jesus had been shoved in behind the sheep, but at least he was actually there. The real sheep had gone back to their farmer and the whole place was deserted. Even though the dream catchers from last year had been stuck on the walls of the church to brighten things up and there were Christmas trees in front of the stable itself, it all seemed rather bare and incredibly sad.

Oh no, not turkey again...

This is a little plea to those planning to be permanents next year, I really love my weekly visits to the crib during advent, so please do something a little bit more exciting than this year’s lot and do something about M and J’s miserable faces - moan over.

So it's onwards and upwards towards the new year and I've only got one week to come up with some resolutions....



Thinking about next year's summer holidays in these cold and dark days? Don't forget to click here for details of a wonderful location in Burgundy!

Pig Racing

A quick visit back to the UK to deliver presents and get in a last bit of shopping and we were delighted to see that Ickenham had its annual Christmas fayre while we were there. All the usual stuff, mulled wine, roasting chestnuts, Santa’s grotto (although I do object to this Americanism – what’s wrong with Father Christmas?) stalls for the local associations offering tombolas and lucky dips and of course, where would a Christmas fayre be without pig racing?

Yes Ickenham hosted a pig race this year of grand proportions and we had to be in the thick of the action of course. My mother and I each bet on a pig, mine was no2 and Mum’s was no 1 and what a piece of thrilling action it was. The pigs were rounded up behind the starting gate and they were off, no 4 made a great leap forward followed by the others, then no 2 dashed into first position, but no 4 was determined to make the end gate and shot ahead again. Much to the annoyance of the little girl who had bet on no 4, it stopped just a hair’s breath from the finish and refused to budge that last millimetre thus allowing the others to catch up.

Under starter's orders

They're off - no.2 leaps out ahead

It was a photo finish. How no 2 was declared a winner is still a mystery to me but who cares I walked away with the prize of a box of English chockies which was great because Cees doesn’t like them so I can scoff them all by myself. Hooray for pig racing!

No 4 stops just short

Photo finish

Light show in Cluny?

Scary start..

A couple of weeks ago we saw a piece in the newspaper that said that there would be a light show in Cluny on Thurs 3rd Dec at 18.00. Not wanting to miss anything, we put the date and time in our diary. Low and behold, last week we saw another notice saying that the aforementioned light show was to start 1 hour earlier than we had previously noted. Don't you just love French organisation? We decided (against our better judgement I might add) to visit the Office de Tourisme in Cluny to ask.

The fire begins

What a waste of time that was. Despite there being 4 staff in the office 1) they only vaguely knew that there was “something” on and 2) they had no idea what time it was. On the other hand they were VERY friendly. They said that they would receive the flyers the next day (BTW it was already the 1st , who receives flyers the day before an event?) and they would phone me with the time. I gave them my email address as well and they promised faithfully to contact me either by phone or by mail. Yer right..

Weds came and went and no contact. Thursday arrived (the day of the show) and it was foggy to the extent that we couldn't even see the hedge at the bottom of the garden by 5 o'clock, so we aborted mission.

Juggling with fire

Friday, Cees found a link to a video on the internet page of the local paper and we watched the superb show that we had missed the evening before. Strangely, in the video, it was not foggy and to be honest it didn't look like Cluny at all. We then read the article and found out that the show was not Thurs 3rd but Tues 8th and this was a video taster of what would happen. To cut a long story short we eventually found out when and where the show would be (no thanks to the OT) and we were there at the barriers long before anyone else, to make sure that we had a good view.

Fireworks and more fire

After waiting about a quarter of an hour, the locals started coming and coming and coming until there was quite a crowd. Then the noise began and smoke and fireworks and finally the “actors” arrived on stage at 7 o'clock and the show began. Wow!

We are often disappointed with things that happen round here, they are always sold as enormous and spectacular and they turn out to be small town and frequently very, very small scale. This was none of those things. It was an acrobatic, fire show par excellence. I wasn't too keen when they dangled loops of fire dripping petrol over my head into the crowd behind me, but it was certainly exciting.

An explosive finale

So marks out of 10 for this one? 15 out of 10 for the show, the actors and the town of Cluny for organising it, but it is 2 out of 10 for the Office de Tourisme and they only get that high a mark because they were very nice. Just in case you are wondering, they still haven't contacted me to tell me when the show is. I'm glad we didn't rely on them or we would have missed it and that would have been a real shame. Oh and why did we have the wrong date to start with? I won't mention names, but someone in this household who wasn't me or the cat noted down the wrong date, but at least it was him who found the real details in the end, so all's well that ends well!

Christmas is coming

Now that Sinterklaas is over, we can talk about Christmas and think about decorations. Getting into the spirit of things, at sundown this afternoon, we decided to get out and about and sample what the local villages have to offer in terms of decorations this year.

Chazelle - looking very Christmassy

I must say that Chazelle looks lovely. It is understated and sophisticated. It doesn’t look too impressive in daylight, but when the sun goes down and the lights come on, I think it looks the best ever.

A good show from Cormatin -
I couldn't resist a bit of long exposure

Cormatin as usual has a superb display of white fairy lights all along the high street which I always like. Those and the different scenes around the village make it all very festive. It is a pity Mary and Joseph have disappeared, but some revellers took a fancy to them a couple of years ago now and they have never been returned.

Taizé has started its annual progression with its nativity scene, but it didn’t look any different to last week, so no photo of that one today.

Taizé could learn a bit from this nativity scene - smile it's Christmas!

However, this year’s prize for sheer silliness, goes to an unnamed village not too far from here. Mary and Joseph have been relegated to a side street – I mean what do they have to do with Christmas anyway? The village’s usual display of penguins, igloos and wigwams have all been relocated to a position even further out of sight than Mary and Joseph. The main attraction this year is – wait for it……. a bunch of Smurfs on a roundabout!

Spaced out Smurfs

Can someone enlighten me about how Smurfs fit into the story of the birth of Jesus please because it is something I must have missed in Sunday school. Not only do these blue things appear on this spaced out Magic Roundabout, but they appear in at least three other villages’ decorations.

So there you have it, Christmas is Burgundy or is it now Burgundy Franche Compté after today’s elections? The times they are a changing my friends...

Rare Birds and Miserable Sheep

Each nest had a caricature of its owner
outside - this is Iris Griot
Como Una Flore

This weekend Les Oiseaux Rares (The Rare Birds) were opening their “nests” for their annual exhibition. The Rare Birds are a group of arts and crafts men and women concentrated in Cormatin and the surrounding area and this year 14 nests were open to the public, housing 28 exhibitors. All the usual suspects were present (Monique Dégluaire, Pacale Ponsard, Patrick Balleriaud, Silvyane Sabato, Jean-louis Choffel just to name a few) along with some other local and not so local talent.

Beautiful basketry made by a visiting bird

As we walked around the nests just after lunch on Saturday afternoon, we soon realised that we couldn’t do them justice in just a couple of hours, so we decided to go back on Sunday as well. OK I’ll admit it, the real reason for returning was to get some soup.

Pierre's bowls waiting for some soup

Sounds odd? Well for 6 Euros you could buy a unique handmade soup bowl. Each one of the 300 available was made with a different design on it by Pierre Arnoud the potter in the high street in Cormatin – a real collector’s item. On purchasing the bowl at any of the nests, it was promptly filled with soup made by the relevant crafts-person and as you moved from nest to nest, you could have your bowl re-filled with the soup available there. On a cold winter’s day, it was a delicious way to stay warm, whilst inspecting the stunning items on display.

The recipes will soon be available to those who have subscribed and I just might share some of those recipes with you, how does carrot, curry and orange sound, or celery, hazelnut and apple - just two of the ones we tasted, all of which were very good by the way, so our village is not only filled with artistic talent, but culinary talent as well.

Oh dear, is it so miserable to be in a stable in Taizé?

After warming up on the soup, I couldn’t resist taking a look at Taizé’s nativity scene which will develop over the weeks of advent. Last year’s Mary and Joseph have been re-used and they, along with the shepherds, sheep and donkeys, have been given an expert new coat of paint, but sadly, they have the same miserable look as last year. I know they are stuck in a grotty, cold stable, but surely they would have been slightly happy as they awaited the birth of their child? Even the two sheep outside, the only live animals this year, managed to look rather miserable as well.

So please permanents, give Mary and Joseph a smile in time for Christmas - this is supposed to be a joyous occasion!

Seeing one of my heroes.

After a couple of false starts (last minute hospital appointment and then an injured arm which stopped me driving) we finally made it to The Netherlands last Saturday, just in time to see one of my heroes.

Ready ------ Boom -------Smoke

Saint Nicholas visits The Netherlands for about two weeks every year. He comes on his steam boat all the way from Spain and he was due to arrive about the same time as us. His official port of entry this year was Meppel, a town in Drenthe, not exactly on the coast, so how his steam boat got there is a mystery that we won’t be exploring in this blog, because I didn’t go there. More importantly, Saint Nicholas was arriving in Den Bosch (where Cees’ daughter has her house ship) the Sunday after we arrived and I was definitely planning to see him there.

Dancing Petes - he is there somewhere

It was rather rainy as I ventured off the ship to wait at the impressive Citadel on the edge of the old city. It appeared that to be present at the “intocht”, grown-ups really need to be accompanied by a child, so I took Cees’ daughter with me (we’ll skip over the fact that she is over 40 and taller than me) and she took me – which is more logical as I am not much taller than a small Dutch child – all that cheese, you know.

The band plays and the Petes greet

We stood in the rain and waited for the 5 gun salute to announce his imminent approach. I nearly jumped out of my skin with the first one, I thought it would be a gentle plop not to scare the kids, but no, it was a full throttled kaboom. Due to unpreparedness and camera shake, the photo shows the second firing when I was a little more ready!

Then the “pakjesboot” (parcel boat) arrived with thousands of his colourfully clothed helpers - all called Pete so you don’t get confused.  The main man was sheltering at the back of the boat. I can’t blame him for not wanting to dance on the roof like his Petes, but still he was a little too incognito for most of the kids near me in the crowd.

Special wave for me - yes he did make my day!

After the band played a few rousing Saint Nicholas songs, he left the boat and mounted his white stallion (the one he uses to ride over the roofs and drop presents down chimney with) and surrounded by multiple bands and hundreds of Petes, he set off on a grand tour of the old city where the Mayor would greet him at the town hall about two hours later.

As you can see, he saw me in the crowd and gave me a special wave; I even got a chocolate letter in my shoe that night. What a hero.

For information on holiday accommodation about a day's drive from where you can see the next intocht, click here.

The whole town is one great big party

Prize Limousin bull

It’s that time of year again, Cluny’s big street party, the day we celebrate the feast of St Martin. There is a competition for the best cow/bull/cart horse with and without foals, displays of all types of farm animals, pigs, chickens and sheep and an array of shiny new tractors and unfathomably complicated farming equipment.

Then there is the real reason that the good citizens of Cluny come every year, there is a street market the whole way down the high street selling tat from all four corners of the planet but, more importantly, also selling some of the best food and wine to be found on this terrestrial globe.

Carthorse and her foal taken through their paces

I was interested to read in the paper that this particular market had been going since the 12th century, one of the few markets that has stood the test of time.  I am not sure they would have been selling Peruvian hats and dream-catchers back then, but the display of animals would have been the same.

Most years, it is the last warm Saturday of the year and an opportunity for us all to get out and about after the tourists have gone home and have the town to ourselves. This year the temperatures soared to 24 degrees which is very unusual, but welcome none-the-less.  It is one last chance to charge up our vitamin D levels to carry us through the winter which will probably be with us in less than a week.

The animal market, in amongst the houses