The old home town looks the same

Wilson Street Splott 1953 & 2012
I used to think this street was awfully long. I suppose from the perspective of a small girl with short legs, a push of the pram down beyond the boundary of our own lamp-post was a bit dangerous. No cars, notice. In all of the photos from this year, there are no cars in the road. Our 'garage' in the left hand picture housed my dad's motorbike, and the potential for rental of spaces once cars were a more frequent possession by neighbours. It's now a house, quite ugly, and our house next door now has plastic porch doors, plastic windows, a metal fence on the wall (our original ones were taken for the "war effort", we hoped it had become a beloved Spitfire!) and a burglar alarm. In Splott! I wonder who lives there now? The wall looks similar, the edging to the doorway the same...




The house next door, and the one across the road where my great Auntie Maggie lived, still have the encaustic tiles in the pathway, the shiny and sculpted majolica panels in the porch, deep green tiles above. And the chimney stacks are still visible opposite, the houses substantial in a cramped sort of way. It all felt enormous of course!

Below - the Coronation street party

Edgelands

The Pyrénées mark a subtle & mutable boundary between two countries, and nowadays even more so. No barriers to wait for, no huts to shuffle past in a stream of vehicles on the A9, only policemen looking dolefully at what used to be a great job, now is dull and meaningless. On the mountain passes, the sunny side is Spain, the shady side is France, though in this picture there's a bit on both sides. You can just walk between one and the other, or, as in our friends Geoff & Susan's case, step over the rivulet bordering their garden...
The mountains have been the edge between life and death in the recent history of the two countries. Resistants and Refugees have stood on both sides, craning necks to see the border, climbed up what looks so inaccessible but where snowfall shows the secret paths. Suddenly, there is more than talk of ancient rescues and regrets - exhibitions, photographs, books of memoires, old men recounting, women also remembering struggling with their families living on the cold beach in 1939, in the camps de concentration.  Today we went to the Shoah memorial ceremony at the Camp de Rivesaltes. More than 70 years of memory there... over 2000 french jews from the so-called Free Zone were gathered and deported to the deathcamps; also gypsies, more spanish refugees, france's "unwanted undesirables" all interned at some point. Even les Harkis were accomodated - Algerians who had fought for the French and could not go home... a part of its history that France is only now starting to examine and accept. A museum has been long promised - today Bourquin's deputy seemed to indicate it would be funded... at the moment 5 stèles sit along the roadside under the slowly turning wind turbines, and the newly-laid flowers mingle their perfume in the chilly air. Les parliamentaires were each given a memorial pebble with an inscription on it, written and read out by sixthformers from the local town's college.

A Warm Winter in the Conflent

The Eastern Pyrénées, where the border of France & Spain is very close... about halfway between the brown hills and the snowy mountains. In the plain below lies Llivia, a small town that was forgotten in the treaty that transferred land between the 2 countries - it remains a Spanish outpost, with Castillian language, bars & cars, not even the Catalan that the rest of the French in the area uses! The photo was taken in Dorres, a village with outdoor thermal baths that have this view, a sulphurous lavoir (public clothes washing basins), and the jewel of Romanesque chapels, that is only open once a month for mass (3rd sun)  These cloud pictures are from Prades, at about 6pm on the same day. The fiery mass was in the west, and the lenticular plate-like cloud was opposite it in the eastern sky.
My friend Don says it looks like the Starship Enterprise with its cloaking device!

It's been a warm winter, hardly snow enough for skiing, blue sky, 18 degrees... the mimosa is just starting to come out in its yellow cloudy flowers. Pelargoniums from the summer are hanging from our terrace and the bougainvillea has survived!

Conservation: Completion

photo to come...

Conservation: Restauration

Another day, another renovation project. 
Sadly the gorgeous tiled patio of our conservatory is no more :-(    A decade of watering the sumptuous tropical planting has left the underfloor ply in a sorry state, and the tiles lifted or sank... we made
archeological digs into the floor/ceiling junction and the redesign of the surface will make the room a very different place.
And at Orsan, the restauration of the garden sculptures is in train

That's the way to do it

Love Will Tear Us Apart Again

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Holy Moshpits!

October and November - why do all the folk acts come to Brighton in a row? Fantastic but pricy! 

June Tabor and the Oyster Band played at St George's, Kemptown. Lovely band. Lovely venue. Together they do not work. 
We've seen June with Imagined Village, and always seen OB at jump-up-and-move places before, and this, their Reunion Tour, was a really dancey set... but no where to jig, let alone make big swings. Almost as though, if the audience came to their first tour 21 years ago, by now they would be in their dotage. Well maybe we are but we can still bop to the stunning crash-bang-wallop that is Freedom & Rain Revisited Ragged Kingdom


Bellowhead at the Corn Exchange - even stunning-ier! That's the way to do it... dance, dance, dance.
Two hours after the doors opened, the mighty 11 piece we'd all come to see hit the stage and all was well... the opening bars of Jordan, invitations to join in choruses, jumping in unison, wow...
So how come the JT&OB management got it sooo wrong? Same audience, judging by the  number of grey heads, Towersey Tshirts and ability to pay-a-lot-of-money. Average age was 45+, a lot of free bus passes.

...six fiddlers jumping...

Jon Boden imploring...

I love the way the sons of famous folk(wo)men get to carry on playing the chord structures that made their school fees possible.

Sunshine came softly...

November Sun at 9am, still coming into our east-facing conservatory, and with a gentler quality to it, raising the temperature gradually to a comfortable-enough-to-drink-tea-in 18 degrees (C).
At night it's about 10 degs, and the plants seem OK about it. The Lemon Tree (Eureka!) and the little stripey Orange are hardy to -10, so we're hoping it won't get down to that.
As a buffer zone this little suntrap is maintaining the inside of the house at a relatively stable 16 or 17, especially if we remember to close the door at night. It's quite nice, though, to walk on it barefoot, like when a quick trip to the bathroom is needed at 4am!