Sailing home to normal life and a day of domestic admin without the excitement of a foreign language. Lola went to.be groomed and we went to the opticians. Some very dull shopping was also a pre planned task. Although perked up no end by some tiny pumpkins that forced us to bring five of them home. I will in turn force them to pose for me as I love painting autumnal and harvest still life.
Let Autumn commence.
Our last evening in Morbihan watching the sun set, before a supper of raclette. A meal so wintery and comforting that we forgot all about harvest moons and skinny dipping. Thank goodness the bobbers back in Plymouth were more diligent during their Full Moony Skinny Dip.
Which enabled me to create a ph(f)antasy, meddled image of a reclining boat illuminated by a Harvest Moon.
Which just goes to prove that an excellent sleep fueled by potatoes, cheese, and good company can be quite a creative space.
Monday morning however means Ferry time in Finisterre. Lola’s last beach walk on French sand for a little while.
theoldmortuary takes a swim in a boat graveyard. Yes, there were warnings not to swim too close to the the slumbering hulks. But how close is too close? The sun was up, the water was clear and this was serendipity at its finest. A chance encounter that was just too good to pass up by following instructions about safety.
in the hunt for some flaking paint and rust we found the chance to swim with old wooden boats, resting up on a beach until tide and time erase them.
Fading away with such stark beauty is not a bad way to go when your number is up.
Swimming amongst them was a moment. A very fine moment
Here we are having a casual lunch in a cafe/Brasserie in the Gulf of Morbihan. Shade, good food, great ambiance. Exactly as you might expect from a holiday travelogue. Every picture tells a story…
But what is the story?
Domestic admin on our holidays! Yesterday was an Industrial Estate day. Our second such excursion on this trip. The first was caused by a lack of communication. We left our first overnight stop over , driving south to the sun without taking our steps… They remain near Roskoff in an Aire, cheap overnight camping for those on the move. For many people this would not be a deal breaker but we all have short legs and it is a stretch too far to keep going in and out of the van. First essential stop of the holiday was Mr Bricolage and a very robust set of steps were purchased. You would never have heard of this minor catastrophe if there has not been another and more pressing one.
Yesterday our travelling toilet failed. It has been failing unnoticed by us for a couple of days. That could be the opening sentence of a murky story but as luck would have it, it was the clean flushing water reservoir component that failed.
Our campervan toilet is only an overnight or infrequent daytime facility. There are rules. No Solids!
We had both noticed that when doing an overnight wee the sound of our flow did not quite match the physical sensation. We did not discuss this until yesterday morning. Our camping toilet lives in its own waterproof box, but when we went to empty it yesterday the waterproof box was full of bright pink fluid, smelling of roses! Yes actually smelling of roses. One of the seals of the clean water reservoirs had degraded. Every time we sat on the loo the additional weght and pressure had forced water through the faulty seal and it had gathered in the waterproof box. We could have resolved this by emptying the reservoir and using bottled water to flush. But when one old seal fails there has to be a risk of the other, murkier reservoir seal, failing. For additional info that one would have smelled of lavender.Masking less innocent fluid. The campervan loo has met its Waterloo.More than ten years service to the overnight cause.
The internet is a wonderful thing. A new camperloo was tracked down and we were off to another industrial estate.
Now all that somewhat dull domestic admin may have passed unnoticed by the blog were it not for the rather marvelous Industrial Estate Cafe.
A place where it was more than possible to sit for a few hours listening to very cool Mancunian Jazz by GoGo Penguin, playing scrabble whilst enjoying charcuterie, cheeses and vegetable dips and excellent coffee overlooking trees and fields.
Brasserie de l’Hermine – Discover our Belgian-Breton beers! http://www.brasseriedelhermine.fr/
Brasserie de l’Hermine a stop off in an industrial estate has never been so tasty.
How do you write what people actually want to read?
The sun sets on the Autumn Equinox. When day and night are equal. Daylight wise it is all downhill from here untill the Winter Solstice. We filled our twelve hours of daylight wisely, finding a camping pitch with an excellent sunset and swimming in a big sea pool in the heat of the day.
This sea pool was the main reason for us to want to visit Etél.The pool is so big I couldn’t fit it into one shot.
Unlike my, almost daily swims, this summer at Tranquilty Bay, there is almost nothing to consider when swimming in the peace and warmth of Etél. No waves, no currents, no rips and, protected by a lock, no massive tide height changes. But all the challenges of Tranquilty Bay have trained my swimming head to just let go and be in the moment which is still entirely doable in an ultra safe environment.
Swimming at Conleau Sea Pool yesterday. Caught in a sunbeam…
So back to the question. How do I write what people actually want to read?
Do I even do that?
Most people who read this blog are completely unknown to me and have stumbled on it. Some have had it reccomended to them. Others know me in real life and a few know of me from arty meetings. I must presume all of these people like that I write a blog about hyperlocal ordinary life.
This blog would not suit anyone who enjoys sea fishing, mixed martial arts or crosswords paricularly, but it might, you never know.
I jusr witter on about normal, often mundane life. Some people seem to enjoy that. To be honest I dont really try too hard, this is a diary of sorts. It is what any reader wants it to be.
What’s the most thing spontaneous you’ve ever done?
Spontaneousness and serendipity have been a constant in my life. Which is odd because I am also quite risk averse. If spontaneous action has a good result I almost forget that it was spontaneous and consider it a good decision or plan even, forgetting that there was no planning involved. If spontaniety turns out not so well I will judge it as a poor decision. A long winded was of saying my spontaneous acts are not judged and graded.
This current holiday was planned to only have spontaneous decisions. To travel on a whim and the hunt for a week or so enjoying a French Indian summer. Camp site owners however had their own ideas of enjoying Indian Summer without guests. Many of them closing on the 20th of September. Like a massive and motorised game of musical chairs, huge numbers of campervanners are chasing down less and less camping spots.
Booking is off line and in person. Luck has been on our side for three nights of glorious camping by a beach. But last night we failed epically and could only manage a dull roadside Aire. This morning we put on our competive heads and have again scored 3 nights by a beach. Not much ‘entente cordiale’ it must be said, wiry old Frenchmen sending out their ferocious female companions to bang on any part of our van to point out the perceived error of our ways in the queuing system. Believing, as some men do, that size matters and if that fails to impress then knuckles can reiterate the message. Our little brown van knew she was not doing anything wrong and the men, their womens knuckles and their behemoth vehicles just had to remain behind us. We are, after all, from the nation that knows how to queue and even in difficult unruly gatherings know the exactly who we are behind and who should follow us.
So most spontaneous of the day, join a queue, know our rightful place and stick with it.
Regular readers will know that some things will always interest me. Empty outdoor seating in beautiful places and colours. This picture represents two loves, an old style deckchair and an acidy yellow green, mist commonly described as Chartreuse. Rather cute that I found such a chair on a beach in the Gulf of Morbian. I also found a fairy tale castle/ chateau. Chateau du Suscino. The heatwaves of 2026 have scorched and parched the greenery around the chateau. All the publicity shots suggest lush and verdant greenery, but yesterday I could use one of my favourite colours to suggest greenery that is in bright recovery.
All made entirely possible by having such a packable sketch box which can easily make its way into essential packing for a camper van.
On a hugely positive note Google Lens recognised my painting as Chateau Suscino rather than any other beautiful old French Chateau. I will take that as a huge vote of confidence.
Yesterday was a lot of things. A dive back 6,000 years in history, a trip to a modern Marina and Moules ( not for me). A good bit of research is needed to write a blog about the deep dive into history, I am on very limited Wi-Fi so that will have to wait, but yesterday was all about colour matching too. My archived picture of a different marina exactly matched the gorgeous bowl of moules served to our table for lunch.
And it is not every day at a 6,000 year old historic site that you meet someone who could well be directly descended from the original occupants. This Fox Moth Caterpillar was casually going about his business in the entrance to the Petit-Mont cairn.
As moths are many millions of years old it is a certainty his many, many times great grandparents would have been doing much the same thing when the cairn was a building site, or a burial chamber or even a defensive German Bunker in World War II. Just Caterpillaring about trying not to be trodden on whilst searching for food to prepare for the great metamorphosis.Unaware that he was actually just a really good colour match for this blog.
What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?
Not so much me as an individual but my birth family as a whole. I wish I had had holidays with my grandparents and foreign holidays with my parents. I am just being whimsical really, but this morning’s dawn picture is from a campsite founded in 1963. It is obvious that people have been coming here for many years. Some of them from the day it opened. The small beach bar buzzes with conversations that bounce from table to table. Not pretentious Bar Fly type boasts and swaggers. Just people catching up with people they have known in this particular holiday spot for many years. We are here on the last week of the holiday season but nothing feels like it is winding down. A fishmonger arrived last night selling freshly harvested oysters, there was no announcement and yet there were queues of people, both campers and locals excitedly buying oysters for their supper. Maybe that has always happened on a Friday night.
The toilet and shower block is very modern and high tech. A tree has been preserved in the atrium entrance and there is recorded birdsong. Presumably the new building replaces a smaller one that was more open to the elements. Birdsong whilst abluting is curiously relaxing. I think having this location as a regular holiday destination would be fabulous.
This was our second choice of camp site. Our original choice had excellent on-line reviews. But just driving into the reception area made us reconsider. It was very busy, full of people bustling about and doing performative activities, bikes, kayaks and alpine walking sticks were everywhere. Strangely and worrisomely like a cartoon version of a camp site. A lot of Lycra. I don’t need lycra to do not very much, although for the good of other peoples holidays and nostalgia, I am not skinny dipping near the convivial beach bar. A little lycra was a good thing in that instance.
A new dawn in some ways. We woke up this morning in France. Deliberately not accidentally. I had planned to swim some of the way by making use of the ferry swimming pool. Alas it has no water so that plan was scuppered. Instead I spent the 6 hour journey doing some digital housework and homework on my website. There have been a few glitches recently, some of my own making, I suspect, and others associated with software upgrades.
The homework section of my journey was to find a way to sign my digital work with an image of my artisan crafted neon light. Which was our house name when we lived in an old mortuary and was also the name I chose for my small art and design studio.
I have puzzled how to do this for some time. Strangely but not unusually the answer came to me during the twighlight zone of sleep/slumbering/pondering. Relaxed nocturnal, creative pondering is often very productive. Sometimes it keeps me awake. I have no problem with this sort of insomnia. Unlike the doom scrolling type which I am not a fan of.
As you can see from the Header image my sleepy musings came up trumps.
The housework part of my digital tidy up revealed that about a year ago I misnumbered the blog. ( Again!!) To make good the error I have added 100 to the title numbers. 1407 has jumped to 1508 I am sure I am the only person this matters to.
In other French news we have done the first supermarket shop. The fresh fish posed beautifully.
I may no longer be able to eat these gorgeous creatures but I will most certainly lovingly paint them.
