Photo: http://snej2014.over-blog.com/ Cyclotourisme is big here: our local small town Mur-de-Bretagne is hosting a week of cyclotourisme for a thousand or so young people, plus 200 ‘educators’, from across France. Parked outside the chemist’s to collect a prescription, we find ourselves trapped in supporter role while the whole party cycles past us up the hill. Some of the riders are tiny – eight is the minimum age – and now and then we see a miniature rider given a bit of a helping hand from adults on either side. One small boy sails by on a unicycle. One or two teens manage a wheelie. There’s much good-humoured noise, chanting, greeting and waving and we spot the new mayor on the corner outside the Mairie, looking very French.
Meanwhile I skulk round the garden, sniffing and snapping. The sempervivum is new to me: unremarkable from a distance, when you get down to its level it’s as elaborate as a passion flower, its inner circle of pinheads twinkling in the sun. I have christened it the penis plant, though Di is doubtful – looks painful, she says. Its more common nickname is the houseleek, apparently from the custom of planting them on the house roof to deter lightning strikes. This sounds so unlikely it must be true. The wisteria has launched into a second flowering, and the buddleia outside the cottage is producing huge swollen cones of rather grubby vanilla. There are chaffinches nesting nearby – now I’ve learnt to recognise their song from the twiddly coda, I hear them all the time. There’s a pair of wagtails with a nest in the side wall of the cottage, too – hop hop and scamper – and house martins in and out of the shed. Nick points out a cinnabar moth caterpillar, tiger-striped. One evening I happen upon Nick poking a stuck pellet out of the air rifle, and I’m allowed a try at a target he’s pinned on a tree trunk. It’s the first time I’ve held a gun since my teens. It’s so heavy I have to rest it on the watering can. And my shot? Well, it hits the right tree… Nick has a go, and almost makes the bulls eye; a fluke, he says.
The gun is for rabbits supposedly but they’re not impressed. Actually the livestock is – more noticeable here – I suppose that’s living in the country, really in the country. We surprise a heron one morning on the lake, a kingfisher another day. More butterflies now – lots of small brown, also fritillaries and the odd red admiral, and occasional lemons and blues. The wasps are twice the size of the Cambridge variety, with a disconcerting habit of zooming and diving when you least expect it. And there have been goats at every turn: in numbers in one of the first films, Le Quattro Volte, on our walks, emerging out of Di’s past. The cows – lovely brown and white beasts, always clean and polished – have gone from the back field to have their babies elsewhere, and with them many of the flies, tiny things which hang in the air in droves. Fortunately there is a fine fly-catcher here, in the shape of small tennis racket, with an electrified mesh which frazzles on impact – if you ever manage to hit any. Quite satisfying whacking at the air anyway when the flies get too troublesome. And speaking of trouble, the sad affair of the dancing mouse. We’d already found one in the trap, flat on its back with its legs in the air. The second, a few days later had somehow skated off the worktop onto the floor, complete with trap, performed a few pirouettes no doubt – and there he was in the morning. Aah!
For several days we wake to a forecast of storms but, apart from the odd shower, nothing happens and the days continue hot. Two afternoons walking: a delightful seven kilometres through woodland near Malguénac and a rather punishing one under fearsome sun near to Melrand, the Circuit de St Clément. We do, though, discover his chapel (St Clément’s that is, another of my collection of saints if you go by my maiden name), lovingly restored in 1972 with a gallery of very seventyish photos to prove it. With the promise of a cold beer and a meal in Di & Nick’s favourite restaurant in St-Nicolas-des-Eaux we agree to look at art in two more chapels, including the extraordinary Chapelle Saint-GIldas, at Bieuzy, a tiny 16th century chapel built into the rock above a river, Here our first disappointment: the art work in the windowless inner chamber, Emmanuelle Villard’s Ritournelles, depends on electricity for its ‘scintillement de verroteries multicolores’ and so is not working due to ‘the storms’.
Admittedly the skies are looking pretty menacing as we drive up to St. Nicolas. We sit for half an hour on the terrace of a riverside bar with the long-awaited cold beer, watching the storm gather, and retreat inside when the rain becomes torrential. The storm is remarkable, a constant flickering punctuated with sudden forks. We wait until the worst has passed and scurry through ankle-deep water to Bistro de Pere Nicolas, where we are welcomed by an apologetic chef (not surprisingly, we are the only customers, the rest of the sensible world having sought the relative safety of their own hearths): hot food only a possibility until the first electricity cut (the power goes off as we are looking at the menu) so we feast on a delicious cold starter, followed by a ‘tartine’ of our choice – a sandwich, effectively – by candlelight, of course.
There is more art: in Le Gohazé, for example, Anna Deguelle’s ‘Melancolia’, a reinterpretation of Dürer’s 16th century engraving, inspired by the wooden ladder propped diagonally on the end wall of its Notre-Dame de Joie home. It’s a complex and thought-provoking piece: Deguelle has taken apart the original, separating out its component parts and representing many of these – the measuring tools, the geometric shapes – as objects on a large golden paper spread on the stone floor. There are smaller golden shapes fixed apparently randomly on the white walls – these flutter in the air – and small glass bulbs. Chemical flasks? Teardrops? Deguelle’s huge but deliberately faint re-drawing of Dürer’s original matches the gold rectangle on the floor in size though not orientation, and there are three short videos. Two are on small screen opposite the main exhibit. One of these shows children (from a Pontivy school, we learnt at the Round Table discussion) exploring a life-size version of Dürer’s magic square, the other titled ‘Melancolia Thelma’ follows a young girl – presumably ‘Thelma’? – approaching the chapel, studying the original and, by implication, the nature of melancholy, and finally assuming the pose of the central figure in the engraving, chin on hand. Between these two, a larger projection moves between clouded and night skies and an airport with shadowy figures among the planes. An oddly appropriate fairground version of ‘The Last Waltz’ drifts in through the open door from the fête outside as we watch. Afterwards, ice creams by the river.
We spend days at the beach in Étel under clear skies and fierce sun, with lots of swimming to stay cool, and two-nation refreshments: bread, cheese and wine for lunch and tea and ginger nuts at – well, at tea time. The air is loud with skylarks as we walk through the cotton grass, and sand martins dart in and out of their burrows in the dunes at our backs as we laze in the sunshine. One evening we eat in the tuna restaurant, which offers 80 tuna recipes on a kind of rota system. From those available I pick a tomato-heavy but tasty ceviche – needless to say it doesn’t quite match up to Juana’s Peruvian version.
We are also lucky to coincide again with the annual sardines grillées celebration where the fishermen cook the fish and the wives (yes!) make the desserts and serve at table and hundreds pack into the old criée or auction house to enjoy the feast. After supper we wander back along the quay as the sun goes down and bump into the owner of the chambre d’hôtes where we are staying for the night. It’s a remarkable little house, furnished apparently entirely with antiques and quirky to say the least. She tells us she was born in the house and her sister lives two doors up the street. Her father used to fish out of the front window. She more than matches our enthusiasm for Étel: it’s simpa, she says, très simpa, and the people – Carnac, La Trinité, you can keep ‘em – in Étel les gens sont vrais. We agree.
Photo: Di Clay Sadly we have to leave the seaside early, courtesy of a stray passing bug which picks me out from the crowd and sets my temperature soaring and – well, I’ll spare you the details. So the usual list of last times will have to be next times: the bar (we’re almost regulars now),the Bon Repos Sunday market, the pile of films which grows faster than we can watch, the cycle ride to Caurel to view Sue’s glass work and Val’s new bar. I miss the tree creeper, the humming-bird moth, the first cinnabar. And I haven’t done justice to the way the garden is evolving so beautifully under Nick and Di’s care: there’s a new heuchera, and we enjoy a steady supply of young courgettes and salad leaves, and basil for the tomatoes. At dusk it’s particularly lovely, with lace-caps glowing in the evening light.
Nick Clay: From the 'Women at Work' Series We’ve not made quite as much headway with mapping our memories as we’d hoped: partly the heat, partly illness – and partly the year 1970. I got on quietly enough with mine, but that being the year where ‘everything happened’ for Nick and Di – that made for many discussions and revisions! We’ve talked at length, too, about the process of remembering – Charles Fernyhough is very interesting on this: memory is ‘selective, fragile and easily fooled’, he says, and ‘doesn’t record our lives like a video camera’. Each remembering is a reconstruction, in fact. No wonder it’s so hard. We made some progress, though: thanks to Nick, there’s even evidence of the process at work. And I’m still hoping for a last swim in the silky waters of the lake… We’ve made it to the other side and back a time or two – once more would be nice, to add to the new memories to take back. Thank you Di, Nick – & Brittany.
Kate was staying with friends at Laundroanec, near Mur-de-Bretagne.
She read Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters, Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian and Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North
Films: The Tango Lesson, Aguirre Wrath of God, Pina Bausch Dancing Dreams, Coffee & cigarettes, Le Quattro Volte, Dreams of a Life
Charles Fernyhough wrote Pieces of Light: the New Science of Memory (Profile, 2012)
She read Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters, Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian and Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North
Films: The Tango Lesson, Aguirre Wrath of God, Pina Bausch Dancing Dreams, Coffee & cigarettes, Le Quattro Volte, Dreams of a Life
Charles Fernyhough wrote Pieces of Light: the New Science of Memory (Profile, 2012)
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