Smitten, as ever was.

On the last day of the year.

It's been a quiet Christmas here, which is fine.  We had good food and drink, mopped up the water that the quite exceptional wind and storms before Christmas drove in, had a modest and manageable amount of social contact, perhaps the best bit of which for me was meeting Iso in Lamballe a week or so before to give her the pullover I'd made her - she'd chosen the wool much earlier in the year but only on-line, and hadn't seen it - and also the scarf and hat which I'd quickly also done for her Pascal and Princeling respectively.  I asked her what she fancied doing; normally tireless, a walk, some window shopping, browsing in the bookshop might have been on the cards, but she just said that in fact she was rather knackered and could we just go and sit in the salon de thé? So we did, for over two hours just drinking hot chocolate and café crème and nattering, and a couple of times our husbands rang, mine to ask advice on making hot lime pickle and hers as to whether she might like and be available to come and see a show with him in Rennes in January. I'd wrapped the knitwear up and made her promise they wouldn't open it till Christmas day, and in the evening of the 25th I got phone pictures of them all posing festively in their garments, looking fairly merry, including this one of Princeling in his striped ear-flap hat with matching cracker:

Way too big, like his jumper which he's now just about emerging from, with the sleeves turned up, poor little waif. I put some matching candy canes in with the hat anyway.  I think that's just water in his glass.

I managed to complete a fair amount of knitting for presents, in fact: at the last count, one pullover, one scarf, two hats (plus one for myself),two pairs of slipper socks, three cowls and four pairs of gloves.  Lest I become one of those sad and tiresome archetypal females of a certain age who embarrass their unfortunate family and acquaintances with ugly and unwanted items of needlework which they then have to go through the misery of wearing so as not to hurt feelings, I enclosed a 'knitted gift pledge and returns policy' in each parcel which read thus:

While I make every effort to observe and remember which styles and colours people like (or perhaps more importantly, don't like), making presents for others is a hit or miss affair.  However, unless requested to do so, I would not generally make you anything which I would not be happy to keep for myself.  So, if you find that you could or would not ever wear or want to keep anything I've made you, you are free to return it to me within an unlimited period, and no umbrage will be taken. Alternatively, feel free to swap it or otherwise pass it on to anyone who likes it better, regardless of whether I might see them in it or not, and likewise, no offence will ensue. You'll just get a jar of jam next year.

The returns policy does not, of course, apply to kids' stuff, since I can't usually wear that and Molly won't either, but as most people with kids know other people with kids then just give it away.

Most of the yarn I knit with is fairly easy care and should wash well on gentle cycle, though some darker colours may run a bit, and drying flat and pulling back into shape while damp is efficacious. But you already knew that.

Hope you like it anyway!

So far no one's taken me up on it; Dutch E and B the German Doctor were both to be seen wearing their cowls (joined-up scarves) on Boxing Day; E e-mailed me more than once to tell me she was wearing hers at that moment and seemed genuinely enthusiastic, B was still wearing hers the next day when I ran into her by chance in Ecomarché when she didn't expect to be seeing me, so that was a good sign.  And since they're Dutch and German they're pretty rubbish at dissembling so I think they must really have been pleased. The Quiet American said his gloves were all right but I didn't seem to have finished them. Ha ha, very funny. They were of course (currently very trendy) fingerless gloves which you can use for reading maps or anything in a chilly environment, using camera or phone, drinking coffee on outside terraces etc.  My stroppy teenage step-grandson Benj, to whom I also sent a pair, didn't get the returns policy but I put in a note saying if he didn't like them not to worry, give them to someone else, but if he did please wear them for anything and everything, they weren't precious or to be saved but used.  This was all the encouragement he needed to wear them throughout Christmas dinner, quoting the permission slip at his sister when she told him to take them off or he'd get food on them.

Other than that, we haven't gone much on presents; we generally don't but some years we order ourselves things and hand them over to the other one as they arrive to exchange on the day, but we didn't much this year. However, I did remember to order a CD I've been meaning to get hold of for a little while.  This is Contratopia's Smitten.

I have no idea whether this group is well known in the US, I'd not heard of them until a while ago when I was googling myself, as you do, in the context of this blog, and I came across a reference to a track on their first album called Lucy's Stroll / Box Elder Stomp.  This was nothing whatever to do with me, the album had been released well before I ever started here.  I chose the name of this blog rather haphazardly; I grew up under a box elder tree, a fairly unusual species to find in a small town garden in the English Home Counties (we didn't even know what it was and simply called it the maple tree) and a fairly large specimen at that, and I was fond of it. In the film Patience: After Sebald I saw recently, based on a work in which connective elements of coincidence and serendipity/synchronicity are fundamental to the structure and content, one of the contributors remarked that one's own coincidences are rather like one's own dreams: meaningful and fascinating to oneself and boring and insignificant to anyone else.* So I don't really expect anyone else to find this event as magical and remarkable as I do, but I had to act on it. I listened to the sample snippets (as you can on the cdbaby website in the link above) and thought it sounded pleasant, and now I have the full album, I quite love it.

Contratopia (their website) are a contra dance band from the Midwest. Contra dance comes from the French contredanse, a kind of dance where two lines of people danced opposite (contre) each other, a false etymology derived from the English 'country dance'.  It went from England to France and back, then to America, then nearly died out... It's a most interesting story and subject and the link wiki link will tell you more. The music, from fiddle, mandolin, piano, oboe and others, is melodious, rich and varied, its repetitions contain swirls and flourishes and grace notes and key changes and all kinds of things I know nothing about and am not sure I'm using the correct terms for but which please me anyway, and it's instrumental so there are no distracting words to worry about. Lucy's Stroll / Box Elder Stomp is a quirky swing number, I'd be happy enough to have it as a theme tune, and there are jigs and reels and airs and waltzes, tunes that make me smile and my feet tap, that make me want to get up and dance (and sometimes I do), and others that are lyrical and poignant and bring tears.  There are tunes you could imagine Emma and Mr Knightly and little Harriet and the obnoxious Eltons dancing to at the ball at the Crown Inn, and others that sound wild and Celtic and mysterious. There are tunes that take you to places in the back hills of America, and others that take you somewhere else entirely.

And not least I love the title, Smitten. Because I realise that I always have been and still am.  Sometimes it's just a passing thing, sometimes, happily, it's for the long haul, but I realise that for better or worse, I've always been smitten by something or someone, and I hope I always will be.

So those are some of the things that have been making me glad at this turn of the year.  There is worry and sadness too, as of course there always is somewhere, but it has come closer; losses and fears are felt keenly, whether our own or others', if one can even clearly make that distinction.

But at this moment, the latest lot of wind and rain has blown over and the sun is shining for a time.


The photos in the video slideshow below were taken earlier this month, the morning of the first real frost of the winter, in the Mayenne.  My brother had been in hospital going stir-crazy, we were about to come home.  He suggested a walk with the camera around the fishing lakes up the road, which their seasonal English neighbours had lately bought, drained and refilled, the same ones where Belle had shown her swimming skills back in the summer.  We left our loved ones, animal and human, at home, and he and I made a long leisurely circuit, with much stopping and looking and chat, ending with some scrambling over chain link fences and sluice gates and concrete ledges where the path ran out.  It was ever my brother's calling to lead his kid sisters clambering in somewhat precipitous places; we had a lovely morning. When we drove home later in low, bright winter light, there were still many autumn leaves on the trees, and they shone as if they'd been burnished. Within a week or so of sudden winter - for this is a year when all such changes have been sudden and surprising, the seasons shocked and hurried into readiness - most of them were gone, but they were lovely while they lasted.

The music is the title track on the Contratopia album, Smitten. (The full set of photos is on a web album here)

~

Happy New Year.

~

* unless transmuted into something worthwhile as art, was the coda.

Belle, the cat from Mayenne

We've lately been at my brother's and sister-in-law's place in the Mayenne, a hundred miles or so east of here. This departure from our general practice of not stirring our stumps to travel and stay anywhere during the winter months was brought about by matters health and hospital related for them, which I hope we've been some help with, so it wasn't a pleasure jaunt.  We were very lucky with the weather, however, which was quite cold but dry and often bright, and the lack of frosts until now has meant that there's still a lot of very beautiful autumn colour about, enhanced by lower and more dramatic wintry light than one normally gets to see it in, so the driving we had to do through the countryside was often a pleasure despite the somewhat anxious reasons for doing it. We're back in Brittany now for the moment.

Another unexpected source of joy and amusement was their latest cat companion. Some years ago my brother wrote a piece which I begged from him as a guest post here, following the decease of the last of the cats they had at that time.  For a long time that post had more page views by far than any other on this blog; I wasn't quite sure what the traffic sources were but it certainly deserved the attention.  As predicted, they didn't stay catless for long: now, as well as three plump tabbies and tortoiseshells and the obligatory skulking tom-cat on the periphery, they have been joined by this enchanting little wisp of smoke:

They call her Belle but she goes by many names, according to who's talking to her.

One of these was Sirène, which was given her by the children of the family up the road who she first presented herself to, because, when she was still quite a small kitten back in the summer, they were messing about in a boat on the fishing lake next to their house when she appeared on the bank, calling plaintively, then jumped into the water and swam out to them.  They would have happily kept her but are only seasonal visitors, so when they had to go back to England she very quickly fetched up at my brother and s-i-l's place. They certainly weren't looking for yet another cat, but she is such a special one, and I think has been a valuable source of company, comfort and amusement to them both at a difficult time. Despite the frequent problems experienced with introducing female cats in particular to one another, she has quite easily found her way to the top of the hierarchy, largely because her nature is almost entirely cheeky, playful and affectionate: everything is a source of potential fun to her, the occasional cuffs which she mostly dishes out to, rather than reeives from, the bigger cats are more of a claws-in game than any serious hostility, and she can run rings round them anyway.

She regarded Molly in a similar light, an opportunity to react melodramatically sometimes,

but really nothing to worry about, and possible a source of more fun and games.

Mol has always been quite fond of cats, having been largely raised by them, but in the past if a fluffy feline high-tailed it away from her she would often give chase.  Now she's really rather too old, deaf and blind to bother, but she enjoys endlessly following cat trails around the site and eating up cat biscuits at every opportunity.  Belle countered by eating her dog croquettes, which made her sick, unless that was the mouse she had for dessert. From time to time, if Mol was sitting with us, her head in Tom's or my s-i-l's lap, the cat would scamper up the arm and along the back of the sofa, onto their shoulders and hop-skip-and-a-jump over the top of the the dog's head before Mol knew what was happening. A couple of times Belle raised her paw and hissed a warning, and Mol seemed foggily to be aware that she should back off; only once was there an aggrieved yelp over the food bowl, but no visibly scratched nose.

When I suggested to her one afternoon of low sun and dancing gnats, golden leave and red berries, that she and I should take a walk around the grounds with a camera, she greeted the idea with enthusiasm, and pranced, posed and struck attitudes with the aplomb of an experienced model on a location shoot.

(yes, she can get through that fence easily)

 One cool cat, I reckon.

Monday 15th August

~ Today was Assumption Day, and a public holiday - this fiercely secular country is remarkably attached to its religious feasts, movable and immovable. I decided to say 'begone dull virus' and take myself out.  In Quessoy, a small town near here, there is an odd little shrine which I've never quite established the status of, one of those  modelled, I suppose, on the grotto at Lourdes. It's in a woody, gated garden and driving past on special days, including Assumption, I've observed candles lit which twinkle among the oak trees and give it the air of a something more ancient, a sacred grove, perhaps.  However, I've never had the camera or been in a position to stop at those moments, so today I decided to make a special expedition and try to look closer and take some photos.. 

But it was not to be, no candles, it looked gloomy and unpromising, so I passed it by.  It remains a mystery, which may be no bad thing.  Mol and I had a good walk in the arboretum, where we met a cheerful group of handicapped people having a picnic, and on the way home stopped at the sawmills, where I filled the car boot up with chunky offcuts of wood for winter fires.

~ Brother Phil has sent me a scan of the 1911 census, just made available, for our dad, who was just three at the time, and his family.  We couldn't work out who the baby of ten months was, I said it didn't look like Victor(known as Dick) or George or Horatio, in fact it didn't look like anything so much as 'Bagins', which I remarked would have been an interesting prefiguring of the spate of Tolkien-inspired names in the Glastonbury area (land of our grandfather's birth) some 60 years later.  Finally we worked out it was probably Bevis, and recalled that Uncle George was originally Bevis George. I remember Bevis as being a popular name of the time, from another children's book.  Phil and I chat by e-mail, recalling bits and pieces told and remembered about long-gone aunts and uncles and the places they lived, and other family lore.  We have become the elders now, I suppose, accruing enough patience and curiosity to pick over the residue of stories and  memories left by the tide of time, which washes away more and more, while leaving other stuff behind in its place, perhaps about us, when we will be the long gone aunts and uncles...

~  Photo - 

I like the exercise of picking out an odd single photo to put on these posts, trying to resist using more and making little series and photo essays. While we have established that flowers and vegetation are fine, it's good to have a change.  This is my sister-in-law A in Mayenne, in the kitchen there.  It's not a flattering portrait, she's very much more beautiful than this shows, so I hope if she sees it she doesn't mind.  But there's something lovely in the light and the atmosphere there, and I like the feel of the photo.

Landing stages, Fontaine Daniel

Across the water, against the oaks and pines

a house stands shuttered and withdrawn,  

a single rowing boat lies beached below.

The landing stages are stranded, torn

adrift from land by time, though

waiting cages hang down still, and bent

wires, angled nails and notches scrawl

their own cyphers, unintelligible lines 

of script where now there are no longer lines.

Rusted, lame and tenuous, they crawl

further away from land, and  make,

year on falling year, a bleached descent, 

into the thickening water of the lake. 

Les Toiles de Mayenne

Les Toiles de Mayenne, at Fontaine Daniel, in the Mayenne, not far from my brother's place.  Textile works since 1806, temple of good taste and subtle colour, antidote to fear and loathing brought on by seeing too many DFS sofa warehouse or similar ads, holy ground and place of pilgrimage to lovely, textile-loving sister.  Great if you're into patchwork.

Been away, came back.

We've been at my brother's and sister-in-law's place,

just sitting around (my brother is probably watching the Tour, hence the drawn curtains),

eating and drinking,

enjoying the light on this and that.

One of the funny dolls my sister makes.

I grew up with those wheel-back chairs, always nice to see them again.

'Where dem cats?'   Mol enjoys her visits here, the resident cats enjoy them rather less.

Mol's in good form again, though she developed a peculiar case of 'broken wag', also known as cold or limp tail (no kidding), ten days or so after her operation, which has now worn off, thankfully.  She couldn't lift her tail, and it hung down at a sad angle, she could only twitch the end of it a bit. It was quite distressing at first, like seeing someone who normally greets you with a warm smile with a frozen face, unable to do so, though she didn't seem to be in any pain, and Emy the vet was quite worried, as she'd not seen such a thing before.  Day by day though, the she was able to raise and move the organ of wag a little more, and now it is back to normal.  Thanks be to the internet, for reassurance about such anomalies.

Sister-in-law made a lovely curry; she went to get the ginger and found it had most curiously sprouted.

We did get out and about too, and I'll sort out some more photos shortly.

~~~

Two of the swallowtail caterpillars were still there when we got back,

  one on the Mexican orange (another we found on that had disappeared), and the other on the parsley.

Then the parsley one made a trek across the thyme and climbed onto the fennel, which I understood was their preferred food crop of all, where I'd tried to put this one in the first place but been unable to make it hold on.  However, rather than moving up to the juicier leaves it seemed inclined to hunker down on the lower twigs.  Then at about the same time both caterpillars disappeared, though I've looked around a bit for them.  It seems unlikely that they've all been eaten at once, so I hope they've tucked themselves away somewhere invisible and are turning into chrysalids.