THE MOURJOU CHESTNUT FESTIVAL

They roasted the chestnuts on iron grills two metres or more in length and perhaps a metre in width. Two of these monsters sat in the field with what looked like old wooden fencing posts burning beneath. After a time the chestnuts were raked off and tipped into giant bins, the sort that you might use for cattle feed, and then manhandled up the slope to the festival.

Eager hands then scooped the steaming mass into those little plastic trays that you find in take-away restaurants. An incongruous, if useful, blending of ancient and modern ways. We paid our two euros or whatever and tucked in: the chestnuts, hot, sweet and woody, the essence of autumn. In the background bagpipers wailed.

To wash down your chestnuts, the festival offered a choice. Apple juice or cider - sold in one or two litre bottles. Both looked identical, the thick smudgy, amber colour of freshly pressed apple. We chose the juice. The stock of bottles flew off the shelves as fast as the chestnuts. More bottles arrived. From where, we wondered.

At the back of the stall stood a large rectangular trailer. From the back extended two pipes, each with a tap. And from these ran the supply of juice and cider. A man sat on the towbar, filling the bottles. How practical! But enough, surely, to give apoplexy to those whose heart’s desire is to keep the population secure behind racks of regulations.



As we ate, the wailing bagpipers materialised and performed a little dance. Their pipes were medieval, the sort you see in early paintings of people enjoying themselves, by people like Brueghel.

The pipers were not trying to be medieval. It was just, I suppose, that in these Auverne recesses things have not changed much in 600 years. Apart from the plastic trays the chestnuts were then as they are now. The only thing that might have changed was the language.

Then the people in these parts spoke Occitan and by the attempts made to write things (the labels on the cider bottles for instance) in Occitan, it appears that it is due for a comeback. We even picked up a freesheet in English telling us how to pronounce Occitan words.

On a casual acquaintance the language seems to bear the same relation to French as Catalan does to Spanish, that is a sort of half-way house between the two, but leaning a little more to the one than the other. Once this language was spoken pretty much everywhere south of Bordeaux and Montlucon, except for the area round Perpignan, where presumably they spoke Catalan. Anyway it is an enormous area.

And in this little part, down at the bottom of the Auverne in the Departement of the Cantal (otherwise only famous for being the spot from which hailed Georges Pompidou, the French President who grandly let Britain join ‘Europe’ in 1972) they grow chestnuts. That is, you might say, their ‘raison d’etre.’ Or was.

Did you know that in 1920, La Chataignerie (The Chestnutery) produced half a million tons of chestnuts, which were consumed up and down the land? No doubt, after the First World War had eliminated much of the young farming workforce, there wasn’t much else to eat but half a million tons is a lot of chestnuts.

Eighty years later this has fallen to a mere 10,000 tons, a fifty- old decline. Most of the chestnuts today are simply left to rot or be eaten by wild boar.



Still, at Morjou the object is to make you consume chestnuts. I noted that the organising committee limited their stall holders to a maximum purchase of two tons. This seemed a triumph of optimism. However delicious they may be, there is a limit to the number of roast chestnuts one can eat.

I estimate it would take 16,000 people to eat their way through two tons. Mind you, you would be amazed at to just how many uses the chestnut can be put. Ground into flour it finds its way into all sorts of breads, cakes, pastries, pancakes. You find chestnut honey and chestnut jam and chestnut preserves of every kind. There are decorations made of chestnuts, candles, ornaments....there are cosmetics.

And after eating you can visit the chestnut museum and demonstrations of the superb qualities of chestnut wood (it is straight-grained and so splits evenly, comes with is own preservative to resist attack by wood boring insects and spiders; if you look at a chestnut roof you will find no cobwebs.)

Earlier we bumped into Nigel, an Englishman married to Susy Atkins an American potter who runs the superb Don pottery, now in a brand new exhibition centre high on a hill, just over the Cantal border. Until a couple of years ago the pottery inhabited an achingly beautiful eighteenth century mansion, all windows and turrets and covered with lovely scalloped blue grey slates, in a deep Auverngnat cleft. The house remained unsold, he said ruefully, though the price had come down.

I suggested he sought out a lingerie manufacturer.

“A lingerie manufacturer - why?”

“Thongs of the Auverne.”

Candles and Pink Sugar

We decided to celebrate Di’s birthday with a shopping trip. She came over and we set out en masse for Bath, losing ourselves in the recesses of the Charlotte Street long stay car park whence Elder Daughter appeared, glued to her mobile giving us Sat Nav instructions of which exit to take and where to cross the road. Where would we be without mobiles? Lost, clearly.

No matter, a marching band comes up the street, wearing strange uniforms reminiscent, it seems to me, of the IRA. They are playing all the usual brass instruments including xylophones arranged vertically, which look very pretty, but as they are tall I would have thought must rather obstruct the forward vision of the marcher.

When they get closer I see they all look about fourteen. This is confirmed when one stops and spends five minutes doing up his shoe lace. he is trying to figure out whether left goes under right or over it. Bless!

No sooner does this band disappear round the corner than another one hoves into view. Bath is obviously pulling out the stops for us. We hurry round the corner and out of the envelope of clashing sound.

First stop then, Marks and Spencers, for a mild, mid-morning, carbohydrate overdose washed down by cappuccino, or in the Di and Elder Daughter conspiracy, a frozen latte. Suitably fortified we embark on the serious business of clocking stores. M & S, certainly, then Gap, Monsoon, Country Casuals, Hampstead Bazaar, Rossiters pausing only to admire the new Bath spa.

Here you can swim, apparently, ‘sous les belles étoiles’ in water heated in the bowels of the earth. You lie on your back and float as the steam rises into the blackness of the night; the sensation being made even weirder by placing the pool on the third floor of the building so that the effect is, so says Elder Daughter, as if you are floating above the town like something out of Peter Pan. I must say it did seem excellent value for £20 the two hours.

A final flurry into Waitrose, buying a little bit of this and that so I can justify some cash back to replenish the reserves, sorely pressed on account of the past couple of hours. Actually I haven’t bought much - a Bridgewater cereal bowl, just to show willing, but then I found myself passing the tempting Julian Graves shop crammed with every kind of dried fruit and nut and ginger and chocolate that you can imagine. And all in sensible kilo or half-kilo bags. So I feared that I should be stranded on the wrong side of the Severn Bridge without a top-up.

They are always so nice in Waitrose about cash back that you feel positively embarrassed about asking. I wonder each time what is the most tactful way of approaching the subject. Should I go to pay with cash, pull out a battered fiver and exclaim, ‘Oh dear I thought I had more than that?’ How much can you ask for without seeming greedy?

Still we are now fully loaded and struggle to the car park where of course we have lost the car. It is starting to rain and we are hungry. Elder Daughter saves the day and she was not even there when we parked. We head southwards towards Frome, making a diversion on the outskirts to the Frome Farm Shop for even more stocking up with fresh organic comestibles and esoteric bread flour. Surreptitiously, I buy a Victoria Sponge Cake.

We arrive after taking the scenic route down the hill into Frome Town centre and the up the other side. Frome is a town where no-one has a heart condition. Those that did have one have long since been accounted for by those hills; the remainder are fitter than anyone else in the country. It’s the visitors like us I worry about.

Elder Daughter’s husband has made vegetable soup. We produce a bottle of wine. There is home-made bread and then cheese and fruit. It is time to produce the cake. “Find some candles, I tell ED, in my most parental manner.

“I haven’t any,” she says, returning empty handed.

“Have you a scented candle, I say becoming desperate, “or a even a night light?”

She rummages furiously among the kitchen drawers, finally finding what look like three night lights. They are a fetching blue, pink and green and without their aluminium holders.

They’ll do. We put them on the cake and light them. They burn at a great pace. Di takes a big breath and collapses with laughter. “I can’t remember the last time I had a cake with candles,” she pleads.

“Blow,” we command imperiously. “Then we shall sing.”

She blew, we sang Happy Birthday and then we all laughed. And then it as time to go and, yes, thanks to Waitrose, we even had money for the Severn Bridge.

Photo shows ED and Di

Ins and Outs of Football (and Norwegians)

“So why aren’t all football teams composed of 19-20 years olds?” I ask Elder Daughter on the way back from the Cheese Festival.

She and Web Wizard are home for the weekend, tempted by the great British Cheese Week Fair at Cardiff Castle. They have desperately been trying to recoup the £8 entry fee by eating large quantities of free samples. Web Wizard declares he has now got a ‘cheese headache.’ I as usual am on taxi-duty, dutiful parent that I am.

Elder Daughter is a bit of an Arsenal fan, this having been the only term in the pre-nuptial agreement with Web Wizard. In consequence we, in the wider family, are now also all conscripted Arsenal fans, even though we know next to nothing about football. I decided this needed rectifying.

I have this weird theory that, after a few years of kicking a ball about, surely a promising footballer should know how to play and what to do? Why then would you need a manager? Why then do you need ‘experience.’ Just what more is there to learn, I ask innocently?

Elder Daughter is patience personified. When she and her sister were little they used to sit one each side of me on the bed at night and we would have ‘interesting chats.’ They would ask naive questions - why does the light come on when we turn the switch? Why do countries go to war? What is the moon made off? Where does dust come from? And I would attempt a half-competent answer, usually boring them into early drowsiness.

Maybe however I am losing my touch. The other day, sitting in the garden of a friend’s house I tried the same thing with their four year old red-headed grandchild, who for some reason wanted to know where Americans came from. I started on Columbus and then Madoc and then - with one eye on the red hair - the Vikings.

“Where do Vikings come from?” came the inevitable question.

“Norway” I answered boldly, thinking on the spur of the moment that in terms of the countries she had heard about Norway might beat Denmark by a short head, while Scandinavia would trail in a poor third, if indeed it finished at all.

So I told her about Vikings and Longboats and the Beserkers and, carefully skating around the rape and pillage bit, told her that many Vikings had settled in Britain and that for all we knew we might both be descended from Vikings ourselves.

“Does that mean you are Norwegian?” I winced at her lack of inclusivity.

“Well, yes. I suppose it does. In a manner of speaking.” I waited eagerly for the next question. Instead there came an unexpected put down.....

“I’m bored with Norwegians,” she announced crushingly, and marched off to play tug of war with the dog.

As a result I have decided to give up (at least until Younger Daughter’s mite, Topaz, is toddling) giving random interesting chats to the rising generation. Instead, I am practicing, in preparation for my dotage, being on the receiving end of such pearls of wisdom. Hence this chat in the car about football and my suitably naive questions.

Elder Daughter explains that although 19 and 20 years olds can whiz about the pitch they don’t always run to the right places, nor to they always know what best to do with the ball should they find themselves in its way. Older players know better what they are doing.

“Theo Walcott was only 17 when he played for England,” I chirp up, desperate to show my knowledge of at least one Arsenal player.

“Walcott is exceptional,” came the somewhat lame reply.

This was, I felt, a knock-out blow. Convincing proof of my argument.

But then she went on to suggest that while the then seventeen year old Walcott might have taken the correct decision about playing the ball two times out of three, give him a few more years of careful attention to his betters and he would be taking the right decision all the time.

“But why then when you have got all these experienced players, who always take the right decision when the ball lands at their feet, do you need a manager? Can’t you just nominate a captain and a vice-captain (in case the captain is injured) and get them to pick a team and then let the team decide the best strategy according to their skills and their opponents’ weaknesses? Why pay some lantern-jawed Italian vast sums of money when our own lads could do the job themselves?"

This brought a long lecture about the skills of Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal Manager, which I shall not bore you with. Words like strategy, analysis, tactics, encouragement, discipline, selection and development, figured prominently. Had I been a mere 58 years younger I should have long since fallen asleep, as indeed despite his Cheese Headache had Web Wizard. Instead I had roundabouts to attend to. I listened attentively, as Elder Daughter's bullets of wisdom struck home

Should I ever be called upon to manage a football team, I shall know just what to do.

I NEED LUISA’S SPIRIT TO STOP A ROAD

A lovely story meandered across the meadows of the broadsheet newspapers this week and even found time to look in at the hallowed portals of the ‘Today’ programme on Radio 4.

It might, with reasonable accuracy, have been entitled ‘Plus ca Change, Plus c’est la Meme Chose,’ for it concerned a seventeenth century Spanish noblewoman - Luisa de Carvajal - whose observations of an enforced sojourn in London some three hundred years ago have turned up, faithfully recorded in 150 letters, in the attic of a Madrid convent.

Which only goes to show that nuns, holy though they may be, are, in the earthly respect of housekeeping, no better than the rest of us when it comes to de-cluttering the loft. No doubt convent attics are built especially large for this purpose, which makes me wonder what else might be up there, steeped in that institutionally religious smell of incense, floor polish and boiled cabbage.

For what Luisa de Carvajal wrote might have been written about Londoners at any time, I suppose, in the intervening centuries. At least what we have been told she wrote; for it seems that from the 150 letters dealing with every aspect of the capital’s ‘mode de vie,’ from lavatories to executions, we are being asked to judge her work from a single short paragraph which happens to deal with cooking. She damns viciously with faint praise, does Luisa.

“The food looks good,” she writes, “but has no smell and almost no taste.” Well, what did she expect? Isn’t our cuisine reputed the world over for its blandness? Is that not why those clever people from ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ were able to write a beautifully satirical sketch about a group of Indians going for ‘An English’ and demanding ‘the blandest dish on the menu?’

Poor Luisa! One wonders why she didn’t send out for a packet of salt. Instead she wrote long and elegant letters castigating the barbarity of the neighbours, the thin walled houses, the rowdiness (always worse on Fridays) and the twenty-five thieves regularly hanged every month. And while we ourselves may no longer hang miscreants, they themselves seem determined to ensure that the quantity violent death available on the capital’s streets remains at levels sufficient to aggravate modern day Luisas into writing any amount of minatory missives home.

Still, it is not everyone who is privileged to have a name that would sound respectable even when attached to a Persian cat. And like a Persian cat Luisa emerges as a most superior being: someone accustomed to the highest standards and who had no time for nonsense. Her writing also shows her to be a woman of action. She may have been a Mrs Tittlemouse figure, used to order and neatness, now plunged into a London cess pool populated by so many Mr Jackson’s, but she was determined to do something about it.

Writing was her escape from this dungeon as it has been for so many before and since. The sheer joy of having in front of one a blank page on which to marshal thoughts and sentences, words and phrases as though they were troops ready for battle.

Sadly, though it is a joy that is being heavily discounted. Fewer and fewer people these days take any joy in writing at all. Even what is written is ‘dumbed-down’ to the point where it no longer exercises the brain so much as sends it to sleep.

Besides, a good letter not only demands a certain elegance and power of observation, but in a library or vault or attic, it will survive for 300 years. More in fact, for hardly a week goes by without some new archeological dig turning up this fragment or that, telling us about who was doing what to whom in the days of some long forgotten empire and enjoining us to remember to pay Sextus three denarii for the dogfood. No amount of convent attics will I fear do anything to preserve our electronic scribblings.

But the joy of scribbling also brings burdens. The other day I found myself enjoined to attend a public meeting in a neighbouring village through which, or rather around which, our dear Assembly government may be building a new road for the purpose of arriving marginally more quickly at a very much under-used airport.

No sooner had I been introduced to the meeting’s beautiful and erudite secretary, who had been allocated the job of committing our thoughts to paper and preparing a report for the great and the good, than I found myself urgently propelled into her shoes, so to speak, as she herself has had precipitously to depart on rather sad family business on a distant continent.

Oh dear! I have until Monday to read and digest the consultant’s report and then try to rustle up a little of the Luisa spirit to explain, carefully and calmly, why it is somewhat less than a good idea - with predictions of environmental catastrophe as frequent as bland cooking - to spend a ridiculous amount of money to build a major road to get to a minor airport.

I need Luisa’s spirit for it is obvious that the powers that be take little account of rationality. The statistics on which the report is based are five years and a $100 dollars an oil barrel adrift for one thing. I fear that in their minds the decision to build a new road is already taken. We are now just going through the motions. Facts, in the minds of the proposers, only exist to be rebutted.

What is needed is a little spark, a key phrase, arrowed where the mind is vulnerable; a convenient ladder from which a minister may easily disengage himself from a petard and climb down from his hook; that will disarm this countryside despoiling time bomb. And I have until Monday evening.

WHENCE COMES THE BANKER'S BONUS?

The other day Matthew Parris was writing in the Spectator about the collapse of the market in llamas. If I remember rightly, he called the piece ‘First the housing market collapsed. Now I fear the trade in llamas will be next.’ Of course, as things have turned out it has been not so much the trade in llamas as the trade in merchant banks that has gone squiffy. All those people in the City making fortunes quite literally beyond the dreams of avarice who now find themselves discomfited, much the same as us ordinary folk who have to fetch our own coal.

Now I always thought that that colourful expression ‘beyond the dreams of avarice’ came from the Bible. It has a suitably chilling ring of satanic temptation about it. But, no, I find that its origins lie with that obscure eighteenth century English dramatist, Edward Moore, with whose works you are no doubt horribly familiar, if only because they include ‘Fables of the Female Sex,’ which he wrote in 1744. A few years later he wrote the play called ‘The Gamester’ and it is there that he penned his immortal line.

In fact he was quite a dab hand at immortal lines, For he also wrote the one about adding insult to injuries which is, I suppose, what he might have felt about the fact that dear old Samuel Johnson seems to have appropriated his avarice quip and is consequently credited with it in some publications despite Johnson writing - or rather in this case speaking - some 37 years later in 1781.

Johnson on that occasion was assisting at the sale of a Thrale’s brewery, for some reason, and quipped to Boswell (standing guard in much the same relationship as Baldrick had with Blackadder), that “we are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.” And, he might have added, making a tidy profit for the bankers, too, who have gone on buying and selling money long after the breweries have withered on the vine, if you don’t mind me mixing a metaphor along with the hops.

Because it is bankers and breweries that I want to write about - or rather why it is that bankers are able to make money when there are no longer any real breweries to sell.

Permit me to illustrate with a parable. Let us return to the glorious eighteenth century again and to the first races at Epsom. Two brothers - let’s call them Ed and Sam - owned a village brewery and one of them had the bright idea of sprucing up their local trade by brewing a barrel of special ale and taking it to the Epsom races there to slake the thirst of eager punters.

The barrel was duly brewed and Ed and Sam set out on their way. Evidently trade could not have been brilliant for they had no cart and so were obliged to roll the barrel along the high road. Not long after they had set out, Ed says to Sam. ‘I’s a thirst. Give me a pint o’ yon beer. I’ll pay ye threepence for it.’ And Sam duly pours him a glass of finest ale and receives the threepence. Then, a little further on, Sam says the same thing to Ed. Another pint of ale is poured and the threepence is transferred from the pocket of Sam to the pocket of Ed.

Well, what with the summers being considerable hotter in the 1780s, and the roads considerably more dusty, this trade between two brothers with its accompanying exchange of threepences occurred more than once on the long road to Epsom - so much so, in fact that long before the brothers came in sight of the race course the barrel had been emptied and its contents duly recycled along the hedgerows.

“We mustn’t worry” says Sam. “A’ter all, we paid for the beer.” And so, in a manner of speaking they had. But no matter how hard they searched their pockets they could not find more than a single threepenny bit.

And that strikes me as the problem with merchant banking. A whole lot of people in skyscrapers are exchanging their threepences, betting on things going up or going down, but no one is actually doing anything even as useful as brewing a barrel of beer, still less actually putting any new money into the system. Whence then do the bankers’ bonuses come?

It is no wonder that the whole shebang comes crashing about our ears like a 51 card house. Meanwhile, with bankers out of work, there is no money to buy llamas, which, according to Matthew Parris, do a much better job of keeping down the grass than do sheep. Young male llamas are worth so little now, I understand him to say, that llama owners are giving them away to good homes, though the girls (who breed once a year, punctually and without fuss) still command a respectable price.

But even this depends on people who reason that if they buy a female llama (or two as they are herd animals) they will be able to sell the offspring. And that depends on people with unmown paddocks and those people are (or were) the bankers. It’s enough to add insult to injury.

A KAFKAESQUE MOMENT

Do you ever have one of those moments when you find yourself asking suddenly ‘what am I doing here?’ as if you had just woken up and found yourself at the bottom of some very deep rabbit hole? You do? Well then, let me join you, for I experienced just such a surreal and Kafkaesque moment on Wednesday of this week, an inoffensive sort of a day otherwise, when normally I should have been sitting quietly at this desk bashing out invoices for the labels that had been ordered that day, or sticking stamps on parcels, or just possibly operating our little printer and reeling up labels for some last minute order.

Instead I found myself in seat 451 of the European Parliament in Brussels, part of a great hemi-cycle, and desperately trying to stay awake as I listened to a French Minister droning bravely on about immigration and asylum.

I was surrounded by MPs and MEPs of all nations - regrouped in this chamber for an inter-parliamentary session on just those subjects. It’s a chance for the European Parliament to make friends with members of national parliaments and this particular session was organised by the French Presidency of the European Union as part of its efforts in the direction of Inter-cultural dialogue. All very worthy. And useful, too, in its own way.

But of course I am neither an MP, nor an MEP, though I might indeed have been one at one time had the voters in various places and various times been rather less careless in the placing of their crosses. That is a story that I have yet to tell. So there I was, seated in a row marked ‘Press’ - which wasn’t really helpful either as although I do contribute articles to a European journal, to describe myself as ‘Press,’ seemed not so much as being economical as vastly extravagant with the truth.

Nevertheless, there I was, with a glossy white photographic badge to prove my entitlement while I listened to the slow buzz of amplified and oddly stressed voices coming over the headphones from the interpreters’ cubicles while with my eyes I counted the myriad down lighters recessed into the ceiling. And after becoming bored with counting the lights I started this blog, reasoning that I would at least look as if I were being attentive even if I still felt I had fallen down a rabbit hole into somebody else’s existence - and, like Alice, I started to wonder who might have been the previous occupant whose legislative posterior had warmed the cushions of seat 451.

Of course, I did have a proper reason to be there to do with the communications project that I am working on with a team in Brussels and on which I endeavour to play some small part for the United Kingdom, which being a Big Country in the scale of these things, gives me rather more clout than were I to be representing a Small Country like Malta or Cyprus. I had an hour or two before catching the Eurostar back home and as some colleagues whose speciality was immigration were attending this Parliamentary meeting, they suggested I join them. “Why not,” I replied reasoning that one never knows who one is going to meet at the European Parliament.

Indeed I prefer watching people rather than listening to them and looking at the body language. I like absorbing the atmosphere too. Mostly this is languid and dull, but it quickens every now and then when, occasionally, someone says something original or interesting or even rehearses some tired old cliché with a bit of passion.

Here there is an atmosphere very different indeed to our Parliament in Westminster. It has something to do with the melting pot of languages, something to do with the vast amount of space - you could fit a respectable size tennis court in some of the corridors - so that the place resembles the terminal of an international airport rather than a quiet corner of contemplative deliberation.

Anyway, I soon had to escape my rabbit hole and my counting of downlighters and the immigration and asylum concerns of the various members and sneak back across Brussels, first to the Belgian chocolate shop - an obligatory stop on the way home - and then to Eurostar and so back to London in two hours or so.

I was fortunate that not to be staying an extra day, for had I been twenty-four hours later I could have found myself delayed by the fire that broke out the following day in the Channel Tunnel and was still raging this morning, fortunately hurting no-one. For such small mercies we must be thankful.

NORMANDY SPIRIT

Last weekend I went to Normandy, again. I say again for I have been there before to stay with old friends who live just outside Le Havre and blogged about it in this space, as they say in the newspapers. Just a quick visit, there and back, but a welcome breath of fresh air and a chance to see new sights.

Normandy is often held to be a poor relation to French provinces further to the south or west. It is the place that one hurries through after disembarking from a rough Channel crossing and hurrying towards Paris or Nantes. Perhaps it is slightly more romantic than Picardy through which one hurries even faster unless one is homesick for grey skies and stops to look in at Amiens or Arras.

Indeed, from a tourist perspective, one could imagine Normandy as a kind of Middle Class province, looking down on Picardy to the north, but looking up to Brittany to its west, though perhaps the Bretons themselves would never understand the allusion as they labour firmly under the belief that they are looked down upon by the rest of France to whom they feel themselves attached only in the most fragile manner.

Normandy of course is a province of two halves - lower and upper divided by the Seine. My friend, Chantal, who so kindly put me up this weekend and who has lived in Normandy all her life, hisses that upper Normandy is not really Normandy at all despite boasting the birthplace of William the Conqueror and the town with the shortest name in France - Eu.

Only when you cross the Seine are you in what she would regard as Normandy proper - the Normandy of the picture postcard, all dappled cows and orchards full of apple laden trees at this time of year. Thatched farmhouses, abound - all pleasingly shaped to delight the eye and almost like the orchards themselves with their vertical timber framing springing at angles from the ground to bury itself under the thatch.

Their visual beauty lifts the spirit, particularly when the houses are covered in flowers as so many of them are and when there are no ugly visual intrusions - modern concrete structures, or garish advertising - that it seems we in Britain have no control over and which most people do not even seem to notice.

We stopped in Gatteville (Eure) - there is more than one - to look at the small remains of an eleventh century castle, built by one of the Normans who crossed the Channel with William but didn’t immediately take to the grey weather of Sussex. After doing his bit at Hastings, William sent him (I’m afraid I have forgotten his name) home with a grant of land on which to build a castle and here was its remains.

I would have taken its photograph had I remembered my camera, which sadly I didn’t, and I would have photographed, too the beautiful farmhouse that sat next to it, long and low with a great overhanging roof at one end that sheltered an overhanging staircase. I am told this is known as a ‘Jay’s Bottom’ - but why is another matter.

When I did recover my camera, it was only to show that the weather was no better there than here, as you can see from the ship.