Category: France

The woman in the window

I went to a wine festival a few years ago in a village in south west France and passed this most wonderful shop front.

The shop itself had been closed for some years – or so it seemed – but the faded, beautiful paint on the doors and fascia led into this most marvellous mural.

A thoughtful, serene woman looked back at me. She sat on a flight of stairs, her bare feet pointing at each other in a comfortable, pigeon-toed pose, arms and hands across her knees.

I don’t know who she was but she had the sort of face you felt you’d known for years. A woman with a calm, kind disposition. A friend. In my head, I named her Estelle.

You could share a glass of wine with Estelle outside a laid-back cafe. You could have a moan about something tricky in your life and then both roar with laughter at the sight of a cowboy-hatted passerby dressed in triple denim in a heatwave, trying hard to swagger but looking more a constipated fool than the epitome of cool.

I’ve thought a lot about that woman in the window ever since. When I revisited the village a few weeks ago for another wine festival, I was looking forward to renewing our acquaintance.

Sadly, the shop front is now completely boarded up. The bat above the door has flitted off and Estelle has been erased forever from her staircase perch overlooking the street.

I didn’t take a photo, it was too sad.

I wanted to remember Estelle as she was when we last met.

That’s about it.

Love, Maddie x

Solar eclipse, French-style

The internet today is full of solar eclipse photographs.

Some of the best I’ve seen are not of the sun being eaten by the moon but the mottled crescent-shaped shadows created in the streets, in bedrooms and on furniture.

Here in south west France, we had a great view from the village boulodrome. Folk brought along food to share. Word had clearly got around that this was a good spot. Various groups, mostly French, sat in chairs and on picnic rugs to enjoy the spectacle.

When it came, the special eclipse glasses made it an incredible experience.

There were others using welding masks and goggles, as well as pinhole cameras made out of boxes.

I managed to get the shot below by holding my eclipse glasses over the camera on my phone, early on in the process. Not the best image, but you get the picture.

Unlike in 1999, when the UK had a total eclipse, this one was only partial – about ninety seven or eight per cent for us.

It was humbling to appreciate the sun’s mighty force, even when its battery is drained to the last few percent.

It went a bit darker, but not like in 1999 when the eclipse was in the middle of the day rather than at sunset.

The streetlights didn’t come on this time, nor did the birds suddenly go quiet after coming into roost.

Still, it was shared experience and people in various countries enjoyed this natural phenomenon. Truly awesome, in the absolutely real sense of the word.

Sunset itself was pretty wonderful, too.

And then -much, much later – it wa the turn of the Perseids meteor shower, which was ‘like a movie’ according to one of my friends who just happened to wake at two-thirty in the morning and remembered to go outside and look at the sky.

We saw several shooting stars before we went to bed, but also so many fast-moving satellites, which were never really a part of the night sky when I was a young child in the 1960s.

Anyway, thank you, Sun and Moon, for forgetting your differences and coming together for such a spectacular occasion.

I’m off for a sleep now.

Speak soon.

Love, Maddie x

May Day felicitations

You must wake and call me early, call me early mother dear;
To-morrow’ll be the the happiest time of all the glad new-year,
Of all the glad new-year, mother, the maddest, merriest day;
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

The opening words of The May Queen by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom for much of Queen Victoria’s reign, seem apt on this May Day morning.

I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t up early. Some, I know, were dancing up on Dorset’s Cerne Giant as the sun rose. And possibly bathing in the morning dew in the quest for eternal youth.

I’m usually an early riser during the week, but not today. It’s a Bank Holiday here in France and life is even quieter in this village than usual. So I’ve taken the day off.

Whatever you’re doing over the next few days, here’s to a peaceful, happy May Day weekend.

Incidentally, the pictures come from a brilliant article on the British Newspaper Archive’s blog tracing the traditions behind the May Queen ritual. It’s an absolutely fascinating read and can be found here.