GRIM REAPING

I have been pretty much ill all week with one of those sicknesses that come on so gradually so you don’t realise that you are ill at all, until you start to feel better.  I blame the aeroplane on which we flew back from Rodez after our visit to Le Moulin du Clout two weeks ago.  They are always full of bugs which incubate for a week or ten days before breaking out into something international.

I begin to know that I am ill when half way through my afternoon's work I feel a compelling urge to pour a glass of whisky and perhaps take a couple of aspirin for good measure.  That makes me feel better in the short and the long term but not in the medium term for the whisky (and aspirin too) ravage my febrile stomach and liver which is ‘le point faible’ of my anatomy and the place for which any bugs that may be circulating head directly and without passing ‘go.’

In this state therefore of more or less perpetual indigestion and general wretchedness, I happened a day or two ago to read an article on the cheerful subject of pancreatic cancer, much in the news recently as the slayer of poor Steve Jobs on the keyboard of one of whose beautiful products I am even now typing .

Apparently, if you get pancreatic cancer, there isn’t much that can be done and you had better start putting your affairs in order and not embark on any long books.  The trouble is that you don’t know that you’ve got it - because the symptoms aren’t obvious - until it has got too much of a hold for anything worthwhile to be done.  This is clear from the survival rates which haven’t improved at all over the years.  The good news is that it is a rare form of cancer and makes up only 3 per cent of all cancers. Statistics are on your side, even though they didn’t help Mr Jobs.

As it happens my dear Mother died of pancreatic cancer.  I was going to write ‘dear old,’ but she wasn’t old at all, being only 54 when she died.  According to the article this isn’t helpful to her offspring for the disease runs in families.  This constituted, said the article, one formal indicator that I, too, might succumb.  It then listed five further indicators: to my horror three of these five might well be said to apply to me.  Oh dear! 

Which is why, of course, if you are a hypochondriac like yours truly, you shouldn’t read about these things as you only end up depressing yourself.   Fortunately, while you can’t do anything about your family, most of the other warning indicators can be avoided or corrected by living and eating in a sensible way and in my case not eating foods and drinking liquids that irritate the nether regions, wonderful though the taste and effect of a glass or two of cold white wine may be on a summer’s day - though surely, I tell myself, one must be able to make the occasional exception - otherwise one simply gives up on life. 

In any case, I remind myself, what really did for Mama was not pancreatic cancer out of the blue but a cancer that just happened to be looking for a home and chose the pancreas faute de mieux.  For unhappy reasons, best known to herself, she developed in the later stages of her life a powerful addiction to alcohol, tobacco, strong coffee and Alka-Seltzer, together with a powerful resistance to exercise and looking after herself.   Living with a ferocious and belligerent Siamese cat called Ohio (one half of Baltimore and Ohio - she had an absurd tendency to name her cats after American Railroads) didn’t help either. 

Nor did the Grim Reaper have to wait too long on the doorstep. In fact she was sitting up in bed, quite merrily, smoking a cigarette only half an hour before she died, leaving me and most of her family half a day’s journey short of wishing her well. 

Still, in the midst of death we are in life, for it is confidently reported that young Theo has a sibling on the way.  Just as he was Topaz before he arrived, so the parcel in the post, as it were, has been called variously Peanut and Butterbean.  Maybe it will turn out to be twins, though I suspect in these days of acute medical advance that we should have known were that to be so.  Grandparents can’t obtain contraception against grandchildren, can they?  Or some other form of home protection and sanity insurance? 

APPLES AND TROUT

The Tumbrel - Pour Encourager Les Autres

I’ve been gardening and feel quite proud.  Yesterday I made six apple grafts taking cuttings that I had made from trees at the Mill and sticking them into stubs of branches on the apple trees here.  I watched a little video on YouTube that showed you how to do it.  Mind you, like so much else, seeing an expert cut, slice and bind with all the right tools and knowing exactly what he is doing, is one thing; doing it yourself without the correct equipment is another.  But still I have six grafts: five on apple trees and one on a pear for I had taken a quince cutting and read somewhere that pears are grown on quince root stocks - so why not vice versa?

Anyway the whole exercise was an experiment, a bit of fun.  I am not overly worried if they grow or not.  For good measure I brought home a quince sucker and that should grow and if it doesn’t produce quinces at some future date I had always graft pears on to it.

It has been so wet that I haven’t had a chance to get on with this grafting job and my cuttings have sat embedded respectively in an apple and a quince since leaving the Mill last Sunday.  At least one had expired, or maybe it was dead before I started; so when the sun came out yesterday I hurried outside to do the job.

Of course I had no suitable grafting goo with which you protect the graft after you have made it.  So I used the first thing that came to hand which was Polycell flexible and waterproof filler, specially for bathrooms.  Apart from being white rather than black it has exactly the same rubbery, gooey look of the stuff in the YouTube film.  It can’t be poisonous, can it? if you use it in bathrooms?  Anyway we shall see come the spring.

An Apple Graft - Perhaps Not a Good One

I blame Rosie for my enthusiasm, plus a restless desire to experiment inherited from long hours alone and unsupervised as a child.  I once tried making cider but found, as you do, that it is remarkably hard to extract juice from an apple unless you first cut it into small pieces, which is hard  unless you have some sort of mechanical device like a great stone wheel in a trough and a horse to pull it.

I must have been about twelve.  Cutting the apples with a knife was boring.  But then I had the wonderful idea of simply squashing the apples that had already fermented and gone brown of which there were a great many in the apple store. What I produced looked like rough cider in every way.  It even tasted like a species of cider.  But it was of course undrinkable, being acid to a degree.

Down in the Cantal they produce with their mountain of apples something that looks very similar to my effort - a muddy, grey, brown brew which tastes infinitely better than it looks and is served in plastic juice bottles at one euro a litre.  They give you a wrap of roasted chestnuts with it as well at no extra cost - chestnuts being another commodity of which nature has delivered an abundance.  The cider isn’t particularly alcoholic and at the little cider festival we attended the hardened drinkers at the bar were all drinking beer.  But you don’t want anything to make you legless when you are sitting out in the sun enjoying the scenery, do you.

The real trouble with going to France of course is that I put on weight at the rate of a quarter of a pound a day.  I have more appetite than at home and of course the food is better.  On this recent holiday I had the best trout I had ever tasted at a little hotel not far from Maurs.  Outside, in the sunshine, stood a tumbrel, looking as though it had just conveyed Marie Antoinette to the guillotine.  Inside the trout were cooking, or maybe even being caught for the hotel Patronne said she kept the fish in a pond. Certainly, they tasted fresher than daisies.  Whether they had been grilled, baked, or deep fried, I wasn’t sure, but anyway they came covered with garlic and cooked to perfection.

I asked the Patronne how she made the loose bones crumble and melt, but she wasn’t telling.  ‘It’s an old Auvergnat recipe.’ she said, smiling mysteriously.

Anyway, whatever she did I don’t think it involved apples.  If my grafts take we shall have here at least some of the dozen or more varieties of apple at the Mill.  And maybe even a Quince too.  We shall need to wait for spring for a result.

D'ARTAGNAN AND THE AUTUMN COLOURS

D'Artagnan's Birthplace near Lupiac (Gers)

'J'adore' said Caro waving her arms, 'les couleurs d'automne.'   We were sitting at table in her great and almost medieval hall, restored to great beauty and perfection and which doubles (or triples or quadruples) as kitchen, dining room, living room and study, all in one elegant space.

We had in fact just come in from the west facing balcony beyond which the sun had set far away over the misty hills leaving the sky filled with the same golden autumn colours as the leaves that tumbled all around.  Even the champagne seemed to take on an autumn hue.

Caro was by now stirring the most wonderful soup.  'It's a universal phrase', she said. 'Whenever you are in difficulty, or don't understand something, you can always reply - with suitable gestures - that you simply love the autumn colours.'  As always, I thought,  the phrase seems to lose something in translation.

Well, there we were. We had just arrived that very afternoon from the grey cloudiness of Britain into the warm autumn sunshine of the Cantal - somewhere, incidentally, that is a little larger than Norfolk but with only 149,000 people, despite having its own respectable ski resort at Le Lioran and being only a couple of fast hours driving from the Mediterranean.  Moreover, the Departemental capital, Aurilliac, even has more sun than Toulouse, according to the weather statistics.  Despite this, the Cantal ranks with the Creuse and the Lozère as one of the three most depopulated French Departements. 

And it was once English around six hundred years ago.  That anyway was the point I hesitantly put to Den who is Caro's other half. (The two of them together are a walking encyclopaedia).  In the boom years for the English Raj in France, after Henry V had done the business at Agincourt.

There's a castle just down the road - just a ruin now - that changed hands, amicably, too, according to Den, with one side marching out and the other side marching in.  But whether it was the French who were quitting or the English, Den didn't know.  For certainly it didn't remain English very long and in a few short years during the disastrous reign of the mad Henry VI all English France was lost (apart from Calais).  The hundred years war won, only promptly to be lost and the loss then triggering the Wars of the Roses.

What you learn from Shakespeare and Phillipa Gregory!  Whose latest fiction 'The Lady of the Rivers' is, to my mind, a great read, particularly if you have Wikipedia beside you.  The book is a fictional life of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Mother of Elizabeth Woodville ('The White Queen') and great-grand-mother of Henry VIII. 

For some reason Den and Caro advise me also to enter the realm of historical fiction, cutting my teeth, as it were, by translating Alexandre Dumas' novel, 'The Three Musketeers,'  which was last translated into English, apparently, 150 years ago and therefore needs reworking for our text speak age.   I have always counted this a wild project but something seems to be telling me it isn't.

You see we visited my other sister, during this stay, who also lives down in the Gers in south west France (where it is not so sunny as in the Cantal).  In fact it rained on only the second day we were there.

'I know,' Sarah said brightly. 'Why don't you go off and visit the D'Artagnan Museum, it's only ten minutes away in Lupiac.'  And so we did.

D'Artagnan must be one of the few people in history to be more famous for his fictional exploits than his real ones.  But yes, he was the Captain General of the King's Musketeers and he did arrest and guard the rogue Finance Minister, Nicolas Fouquet - who some think was the man behind, or rather inside, the Iron Mask, and he did die at the siege of Maastricht in course of a rather unnecessary bit of heroics.  And yes, he was born in a little manor house just outside Lupiac, though sadly this is now privately owned.

The Lupiac museum is in a chapel in the town and is full of film posters and book editions.  The audio commentary is a bit hit or miss, switching alarmingly from one subject to the next.  But still worth seeing on a wet afternoon.  I now have background should the translation ever get off the ground.

Nor was this the last time I met him. For it seems the man is ubiquitous. Opening the Spectator on returning home, I see a picture of Milla Jovovich dressed as Milady de Winter.  Yes, yet another remake of The Three Musketeers is out and showing at cinemas nationwide. This time it includes airships.  Deborah Ross' review is scathing: 'All for one, one for all, but, mostly, one to skip.'

I do wonder whether the world really needs a new translation, with or without airships.  'J'adore les couleurs d'automne,' as D"Artagnan might himself have said pensively.

HYDRAULIC EXPERIMENTS

A Happy Theo and Sand Castle Building Bucket

You know it is autumn, don’t you, when you come out of your front door, or through a garden gate, and blunder straight into a spider’s web.  It only seems to happen at this time of the year and both spiders and webs seem different to those you find at other times.  The webs are finer and only catch the light when it reflects obliquely off their gossamer threads  They look like proper spider’s webs too - as though designed in some Disney studio - and the spiders are brown and camouflaged, not black.

Our grandson Theo, now past two and a half, has a mortal fear not of spiders but of their webs and spots little threads here there and everywhere that have to be removed before he will venture anywhere near.  This can make progress around the garden - or even parts of the home - rather slow.

What he does like are the adventures of Shaun the Sheep, one of Aardman’s comic creations for children.  In one episode Shaun is dancing an Irish jig on top of a washing machine for a reason that need not detain us here. Theo is fascinated and has been attempting to emulate Shaun on top of the ottoman.  To encourage him I showed him a video clip of Riverdance.  Michael Flatley would be a revelation, I thought, and so much more agile than me.   Alas not so.  Young Theo prefers the plasticine sheep while I have become, unlikely as it may seem, a teacher of Irish dancing.  It must be my grandmother’s genes.

The Indian summer has been so beautiful that when I took Theo to the beach yesterday the atmosphere was quite Mediterranean.  The same dry wind, warm light, and featherdown softness to the air, not however set against the parched pines, sand dunes and purple hills of the south of France, but against a peculiarly British backdrop of grassy hills in a new flush of greenery and the magnificent autumn colours of oak and ash leaves.

The sun hangs low now, even in the afternoon, which makes it seem as though this were the evening and we would be shortly returning for a later supper rather than a five o’clock tea.  All most confusing.  Not that it bothered Theo who engaged himself in numerous hydraulic experiments around sandcastles and the power of the incoming tide. Unfortunately, they are lost to posterity for I left my camera at home.

Watching the waves crashing on the rocks and the tide racing up the channel I cannot help wondering why the powers that be stick turbines in the thin air on the tops of our moorlands, where from time to time they stand idle and becalmed and even when the wind is blowing don’t generate much electricity anyway.   Why not put the turbines in the sea? Obviously not the same turbines, but the tide in this channel is heavy and fierce and above all predictable. A few marine turbines could generate more renewable energy than all the white stalked monsters that disfigure our landscape. And, would do so invisibly, too.

The hot weather also means that we haven’t yet had a chance to experiment properly with the new heating system, kindly installed by British Gas recently.  In addition to the central heating we have an open fire in the sitting room which we have never used much because the room promptly fills with smoke.

When we were in Gascony last week my sister told me of the various stratagems she had employed to stop her big open kitchen fire from smoking.  The answer, it seemed, was to eschew grates and large logs and instead to build the fire directly on the floor. Our fireplace is a minnow compared to her great whale of a beast but the idea seemed worth trying and two friends invited for dinner provided a reasonable excuse to despatch the grate and light a fire directly against the fireback.  And yes, it worked.

The papers are full of the collapsing euro and how lucky we are not to have joined the single currency, but I am not sure if this isn’t a question of beams and motes.  Buying euros for our trip I couldn’t help noticing that the external value of sterling has declined by over 20 per cent since the euro’s launch, while our level of inflation is running at twice that of countries like France and Germany.  Personally I’d rather we were in the euro than out of it - it would make Gascony a lot cheaper for one thing -  but the indignity is that whereas once we would have been welcomed with open arms, now we should need a very long period indeed to get ourselves back to that position.  This doesn’t seem like making the right decision (to stay out) to me.

VISIT TO GASCONY

The House

When we stepped out on the tarmac at Toulouse, the heat almost knocked us backwards.  I had dressed as for a damp, autumnal weekend in Wales, my bag filled with warm clothing suddenly it seemed ‘de trop.’

A text arrived from my sister: she had, like some Carthaginian general, just ‘entered’ Toulouse and would arrive shortly.  I collected some euros from the dispenser - in my experience, the cheapest way of buying small amounts of currency - and sat down to wait.  The airport is thankfully well-air conditioned.

Soon we were bowling along country roads, west and south towards the afternoon sun and, as the roads became narrower and the turnings off more frequent, finally arrived at our destination, a journey of nearly 1000 miles accomplished between a late breakfast and an early tea.

Compare this with the mid-eighteenth century when Talleyrand was journeying from Perigord to Paris on the Bordeaux stage coach.  In his memoirs he says the journey took 17 days - but as this works out at a travelling speed of only 4 miles an hour - it seems unlikely.  No doubt it seemed like 17 days though; the EasyJet flight seemed like 17 hours at times.

The Upstairs Gallery running from the back of the house to the front

My sister lives in a French country house of infinite charm and beauty. But the house is a work in progress, indeed has been a work in progress for the last four hundred years. It has grown like topsy from a small farmhouse to resemble the enormous pile of the Mas Lunel, depicted in Rose Tremain’s novel ‘Trespass.’  And of course as soon as one bit is done up another bit falls down.

In the days when it was built people hadn’t heard of bathrooms. Even the Palace of Versailles wasn’t built with bathrooms and guests answered calls of nature in any convenient cupboard or landing.  With luck the servants might clean up.  So getting to the state rooms entailed the negotiation of what was in effect an indoor farmyard.

This being the twentieth century, my sister’s house of course does have a bathroom but the previous owner (who only used the house in the summer), built the bathroom in an annex on the far side of the barn through which - in an echo of Versailles - it is now necessary to traipse avoiding the detritus from pigeons above your head and ducks around your feet.

Lucky it wasn’t winter, I thought to myself, when the snow apparently blows in through the roof tiles and lies thick inside.  Still plans are afoot to change all this.  And if not, well, they say suffering is good for the soul.

But sitting outside in the September sunshine, with the poultry happily milling about, with four pigs in the wood (carefully named Ham, Pork, Bacon and Sausages, lest anyone become too fond of them) and a pair of cows in the meadow (named less carefully Daisy and Bubble though they too are destined for the freezer at some point), I feel only the warmth on my face and bucolic bliss hanging like the famous gardens of Babylon about me.

This is Gascony and Gascony is famous for being a place where you eat largely and well. The kitchen is big enough to take a table for twelve and we were nine when we sat down to lunch on Saturday, the guest of honour being a retired Brussels interpreter with a fund of amusing anecdotes about language.

The Kitchen

Later he told me there was a statue in the next village of Tossaint Louverture, the former Domincan slave who first led one of the few successful slave revolts in history and later became a general in Napoleon’s army.  We went to see it.  History oozes from the villages of France as from the pores of a wet sponge.

On our way there or perhaps to somewhere else, we met the old woman to whom my sister takes her excess of ducks, which breed in the Gascon sunshine with astonishing rapidity and nest in the trees.  She charges 2 euros a duck to do all the nasty work of killing, drawing, feathering etc and even has a little stun machine so that the duck doesn’t know what is happening until it finds itself full of sage and onion.

She asked me, in a broad midi-accent, whether ‘I was in France?’  I think she meant did I live in France, but for some reason I could only answer her literally.  So I told her I really didn’t know; it could be Bulgaria. 

It wasn’t very funny then - indeed it was incomprehensible, neither she nor my sister knew what I was talking about - and it seems even less funny still when written down.  Bear with me.

And then, hardly before we had arrived we were off again and whizzing home where, inevitably, it was pouring with rain.

 

A METAPHYSICAL SANDWICH

As it was a special day, an anniversary, I put my red gilet over my scarlet pullover and sauntered out into the sunshine for my daily ten minute circumnavigation of the neighbourhood.  It's my usual prelude to starting work.  Immediately, an old man in a white sun hat hailed me.  I see this man frequently, usually with a long train of Yorkshire terrier behind him.  He pointed to the sun.

To be fair it was visible, which has not been the case for quite a time.  I like to think that as the day was special it had decided to put in an appearance, as a young lad might saunter into the back of a catering tent in the hope of picking up a cream bun.  It sat there smiling against the blue autumnal sky.

"Is this summer?" my man asked to no-one in particular.  The Yorkie having no answer proceeded to water a pile of fallen leaves on the pavement. The fallen leaves suggested a negative answer. I felt I should hedge my bets. "You never know," I said.

It wasn't exactly a witty discourse.  We both must think of something more original to say.  But it's not always easy at that time of the morning when I would be quite content not to speak to anyone. Some enterprising soul could perhaps make a name by producing a phrase book which gave people a set of handy opening gambits and suitable responses. 

I was thinking of this when later this fine day I was sitting on the bench at the top of the Tump looking out over the flat land that stretches to the sea, beyond which rise the hills of Exmoor.  Above these in turn a line of white clouds floated.

One of those days when you could see everything, when the light is crystal clear - Porlock, Minehead - hard to believe they are further away from me than Calais is from Dover.

The Tump is a copse, I suppose. Beech trees this side, sycamores and chestnuts the other. None very old - a hundred years perhaps at the most.  The leaves are already turning.  As I come up here almost every other day I ask myself when did this happen?  But then autumn comes upon you sneakily, don't you find? I mean as someone said once: one week you are pottering in the garden until nine o'clock and the next it's dark at seven.  One week the leaves are pristine and green, the next they are shrivelled and brown and being shredded in the breeze.

Who planted these trees and why? My guess is there have always been trees here for thousands and thousands of years. A sacred place, a mystical place a junction of Neolithic tracks.  A place to get ones bearing and to eat ones sandwiches - which presumably the Neolithic people ate, too.  Bread and autumn jam and perhaps even butter too.  Not much changes in the basic culinary world. 

As I sit on the bench, still in my scarlet gilet, I eat my own metaphorical sandwich which turns out to be not so much metaphorical as metaphysical.  I am struck with the thought that there seems to be a lot more going on in my mind that is observed by my consciousness and, what's more, the window provided by this consciousness seems to be getting smaller all the time.

It's been a troubling time lately: there's been a death in the family and a lot of stress.  I can consciously feel this stress; I know it is there. If my consciousness were wider I might indeed see it.  Or so I think.

Years ago I could listen to the radio and read the newspaper, but now I can only do one or the other - my consciousness isn't wide enough to embrace both.  And then there's the supernatural - always strong in a place like this, which my consciousness, limited as it is,  can't grasp at all. Yet I can sense this is exactly the sort of place to set pendulums swinging; where you might find a ghost of some fine member of the fairy folk flitting in and out of the beech trees in the gloaming.  Where a rainbow might end and where you might bury your own crock of gold.

There is much we don't see - or some of us don't see.  The mayor told me she once saw a whole group of men dressed in eighteenth century clothes crossing the road, not so far away.  She stopped the car for them to cross, believing them to be actors out for a night's pantomime.  But then they just vanished.  Boom!  There are more things in heaven and earth than are told of in your philosophy, Horatio.

The picture shows the north (inland) side of the Tump.  You'd need to look to your right from where the photographer is taking the picture to see the sea.  He seems more interested in the communications masts.  But you can see also the old Neolithic trackway which continues in a straight line almost to Port Talbot in one direction and Llantrithyd in the other.  I fear the communications masts with their high energy radiations would drive away any passing fairy folk.

WALKING TO MOSCOW

Grave of Jacques Danois at Varengeville

On one of the graves lay a bouquet of fresh flowers, carnations mainly, still in their florists’ wrapping of cellophane.  The card gave the sender’s name as ‘La Légion d’Honneur,’ the French order established by Napoleon in 1802 and still extant, at which time the man inside the tomb would still have been a young man of twenty-two.

He is now a ‘Chevalier’- the lowest rank of the order but still reflecting great merit and he died, so the inscription said, on 20 August.  The flowers had no doubt been left that day as they would have been left most years since Jacques Antoine Danois succumbed to the ravages of time back in 1857. In 154 years that is quite a lot of carnations.

We were in the graveyard of the church at Varengeville-sur-Mer, a sturdy medieval edifice at the edge  of the gigantic line of limestone cliffs that forms the coast of northern Normandy.  The cliffs are unstable, so we are told, and are eroding at the rate of a metre a year. By the 200th anniversary of his death, therefore, Danois may have fallen into the sea, taking his carnations with him.

He wouldn’t fall alone either for a great many other respectable folk are buried in this graveyard, including the painter, Georges Braque.  Indeed, there are so many painters, poets, musicians, writers, soldiers here that the place is beginning to resemble a mini Piere La Chaise, the great Parisian cemetery of the famous. All it lacks is some idol of the modern age, consumed by excess at some pitifully early age.

Danois certainly didn’t die young, though it was hardly for want of trying. In fact he was 77 before he finally packed it all in.  Which considering that he walked all the way to Moscow in the heat and disease of a Russian summer and then all the way back again in the cold and starvation of the Russian winter, is surprising.  Not only that but he hacked his way as an infantry man through many of Napoleon’s greatest victories as well as some of the awful stand-offs and defeats like Borodino and Leipzig. By rights he should have been dead many times over, sliced in two by a cavalry sabre or blown to pieces by an artillery piece, starved or drowned or frozen or diseased.

But somehow he cheated death for 14 years after which he appears to had enough of the business of laying waste to Prussia, Austria and Russia.  No doubt he thought that he had tempted fate enough. Having finally been raised to the rank of sub-lieutenant and granted everlasting status as a ‘Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur,’ he packed it in and became, because I suppose he had to do something, a tax inspector, back in Varengeville, his home town.

How very French, I thought, looking down at the tomb. I don’t suppose that in Britain even the Duke of Wellington still gets flowers on his anniversary.  If he does, I don’t know of it.

But what I really struggle to comprehend, standing there in the sunshine with the blue sea beyond,  is the idea of walking to Moscow, carrying your tent and belongings, firearm, cartridges, clean underwear and sandwiches with you.   The distance - to Moscow and back to Paris - is over 3,000 miles.  That’s like walking from Land’s End to John o’ Groats five times back to back.

Today if you walked from Paris to Moscow, even in relative comfort putting up in bed and breakfasts and with sufficient money to eat a decent cooked meal once a day, you would become a minor celebrity and be invited to appear on Big Brother.  Channel 4 might even give you a documentary.  But to do it as a soldier?  Imagine the number of times his boots must have needed repairing! Incredible!   Danois deserves his flowers, I thought, as I took his picture.  He’s the sort of thing I listen too on Radio 4 while printing labels, but brought to life here and weirder than fiction.

This bank holiday escape from printing and labels to an old university friend in Le Havre continued to Veules-sur-Mer, the next town along the coast and home to the shortest fleuve in all France - all 1,194 metres of it.  (Une fleuve flows into the sea, whereas une rivière flows into a fleuve, my friends tell me).  In this short one kilometre length, engineers managed to build five water mills though only four remain today, none of which are working. To build five mills in a kilometre of river seems almost as incredible as walking to Moscow, if you ask me.

Of course, I may have been dreaming.  For we passed a Statue of Liberty in the middle of a roundabout at Ourville-en-Caux  It was painted sky blue.  Somehow it seemed more improbable still.

Blue Statue of Liberty at Ourville