A holiday with only small things to be achieved, in a timely way can be very liberating . Two catch ups with friends and a midpoint Airbnb are all we have. Except a trip to a fortified city that has featured in an enjoyed Netflix series. It was the anchor to our first week, Concarneau was our tick box. A little tricky as there was a sea mist making everything a little grey but exploring the fortified city was very atmospheric. Not quite as Netflix has depicted it, but hugely enjoyable. Cinematographers can do wonders with lighting and the hard work of scenery professionals. Except the hard work should actually have been done at home because the filming was actually done in Saint Malo!
Google is a wonderful thing.
So Saint Malo goes on the list for another time and a location, Saint Cado, gets elevated to this current trip. Not only for the Netflix error but also to escape inclement weather.
So far it has worked, better weather and another Saint to ponder. Saint Cado allegedly fought with Satan over the rebuilding of a bridge between two fishing communities and then hoodwinked him by giving him the soul of a cat. The contractual price for the bridge rebuilding was the soul of the first living thing to cross the bridge. Anticipated to be a human it turned out to be a cat. Obviously St Cado’s saints tale has the tissue thin plausibility of many a saints origin story. The bridge however exists and we crossed it today. Nobody lost a soul.
A day of textures, travels with LeClerc and consolidation.
Brittany is fish, I love everything about fish. But fish does not love me and that breaks my heart because even fish in a supermarket here screams eat me, cook me simply and enjoy. So rather than eat fish I must devour with my eyes.
The weather was not with us today and the towns we visited were quiet. Fortunately we could reprovision using a Hypermarket.
Sleepy towns and inclement weather could be a recipe for disaster but slow walks in unknown places are one of the great pleasures of life.
A cottage garden in Loctudy
A bit of street art and the real thing.
Phare La Perdrix at Loctudy
We wandered in old graveyards and found moss like a world map and barely there inscriptions.
And the sadness of a World War 1 military graveyard where young men gave their lives for France. Not something we ever read on British War graves as we are not a Republic. In Britain lives were given for King and Country. I prefer the directness of the French wording.
Young men who would have done useful jobs like transporting wine if they had not been fighting in a pointless war
Women were represented on our little texture hunt by cast iron fixings for shutters.
A Breton flag and Breton jumpers.
And just look at this, freshly caught crabs at our destination of three days time.
Gauthier’s Haul
Life is full of texture today. Especially lovely when we found a tea shop open.
How do you stay motivated when learning something new?
I am lucky that being semi-retired and having stepped away from a full time career, learning something new is pretty much my choice, so I learn with great enthusiasm. But what I have realised is that having to learn things that may not have fully engaged my happy head spaces in the past has given me a bit of a super power of just diligently getting on with it. Recently I had to learn, at speed, the rules and advice for communal space vegetable plot gardening. Not exactly allotments but definitely strip horticulture, something medieval people knew about. I found it fascinating and like a lot of things it is a lot less about the fruit and vegetables and a great deal more about managing people.
So I would say finding fascination is the motivation for learning new things and just being diligent.
Coincidence is a wonderful thing to enhance a tiny ponder. Moments before seeing this rocky outcrop on the coast of Brittany we saw a field with two Percheron horses grazing.
The lovely feeling of mirth bubbling up through absurdities
Another day of domestic and Tennis Club administration loomed yesterday. Embellished by a trip to two different beaches at either end of the day.
My first minor skirmish with authority was with an armed escort as I returned from the tidal pool to home on my morning dog walk. Following hard on the heels of Royal Marines returning from their morning walk.
My next walk of the day was with a friend to explore the historic but hidden walls of our maritime town.
We wandered with our dogs and looked at ancient walls hidden amongst small housing developments. Crenellated walls providing shelter to chickens and an urban orchard.
A much wilder area of bigger walls was inaccessible to us but appears to be being cleared to provide a place for lunch breaks and beehives for a local boatyard. Although local, intrigued historical sleuths were discouraged by the deliberate placing of fallen branches and brambles.
We had to make our way out via a shiny car dealership. Now the trouble with locating historical defensive walls is that they are effective. We couldn’t scramble down a possible rampart.
So we had to make our way through the car dealership. Not under the watchful eyes of keen eyed Archers with poison tipped arrows, aimed at us or our dogs. But CCTV cameras with Cyclops eyes following our every move in case we made off with a new car tucked in our pockets. We had been seen. We carried on our history ramble for maybe twenty minutes or so along the course of a reclaimed river bed.( Once the location of the actual Shit Creek where sailors were trapped without a paddle)
Soon enough we found ourselves back where we started near the car dealership. We may not have caught the flinty eyes of Archers on battlements but we had raised the hackles of Car Salesmen . Two men in bright white shirts, over tight trousers, and trendy, but cheap shoes were fixing hastily created laminated signs to their perimeter fence.
In the search for history we had transgressed. Historically things could have been so much worse!
So that is me done with close encounters with authority but history was not done with me for the day.
For about 8 weeks I have been trying to apply for a postal address and post code for the Tennis Club I help to run.
The on-line form just didn’t work for me. Two failed attempts had disheartened me and earlier this week I took the last chance advice of the website and wrote a snail mail, old school letter to the advice desk of our local council. I won’t bore you with all the complexities of the situation but there have been a lot of boxes to tick and I feel I may have ticked them all and still stumbled.
Less than 24 hours after the snail mail was posted I got a helpful email reply from the council. History has bitten me on the bum! The box I needed to tick for a 100 year old tennis club without an address or postcode was …
New Build.
It really was a day where my funny bone was tickled by the absurdity of modern life clashing with history.
Wembury
A day of admin, absurdity and beaches, with history as the entertainment.
What’s a thing you were completely obsessed with as a kid?
Unsurprisingly as an only child, in a family with only one other child, who was seriously disabled, I was completely obsessed with becoming an adult. The power balance was completely out of whack in my extended family and life experience. Childrens T.V or radio was projected at children by more adults and nursery education did not exist. I was five before I met any more than a handful of children.
I don’t think any of this was particularly negative, I was just fascinated by the adults around me, who lived lives that seemed vivid beyond the boundaries of my small existence. After 5 there was a realisation that real life was not as I had always known it.
Most people remember their first day at school. Mine was memorable because for the first time in my life there were more children than adults in the room.
Now my childish obsession seems rather tame. Just becoming an adult would have happened naturally.
Pirate Weekend in Plymouth. A weekend to celebrate a time when Plymouth was Queen Elizabeth I’s Pirate or Privateer major port for repurposing, recycling and most importantly reusing stolen goods from the high seas.
This year, Pirate weekend was enhanced by 2 days of warm sunshine and large crowds. My photographs were a bit rubbish due to sharp shadows and crowds. But the vibe was brilliant.
Bold bosoms oozing out of basques, laced tight, were de rigueur for lady pirates . While tricorn hats and eyeliner were what any self respecting pirate chap started the day with. What all pirates of any persuasion ended the day with was sunburn and a lot less doubloons in their pouches.
A huge cruise ship moored just off Drakes Island. With guests being brought into the Barbican by small boats.
From thisTo this.
Not quite a regular day trip to Plymouth in 2026. But things might have looked a bit similar in 1566. But then again maybe not.
What’s the most interesting local custom you’ve encountered?
I am interested in local customs and the human need to touch the legacy of previous generations, by doing something that has been done many times in the past. Let’s be honest, some local customs are barbaric, inhuman and fueled by fear. I am intrigued by the little ones that cause no harm. Like nailing a hot cross bun to a pub ceiling every Easter or Maypole dancing in May.
Maypole dancing was my first ever experience of a custom. Normal games classes were suspended late in April at my primary school, for us to be taught to dance round a tall mast with ribbons hanging full length from the top. We were encouraged to skip and dance around the mast, weaving a never ending plait of colour down the length of the pole. Nobody ever explained why we were doing it and as soon as the first blush of May was past, the mast was taken down and games lessons became tuition for the summer game of Rounders, far preferable to me. As an adult I know it is some sort of fertility ritual connected with Spring. But until today I have considered it no further.
Time to head off to Googleland.
I have never photographed a Maypole event , so did a quick little sketch with my travelling art pack.
With the accuracy of an Art App and Ai on my smart phone the header image was produced. One of the dancers even looks like 5 year old me taking the whole thing very seriously. But not hanging on tight enough to my ribbon.
Which gives me great hope for my quick summer , plein air drawings.
They usually sit in the sketch books, only a few ever become a real piece of art. Maypole dancing has shown me a new way of using them. May fertility of the creative mind.
May 2018 Mist and Sunlight reflected off a train going somewhere else
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If you had to describe your ideal life, what would it look like?
What is an ideal life, would be my next question. Human nature would suggest that I should aspire to something better.
I can’t imagine anyone describing a life that was less good as ideal.But wishing for better might not be better. A micro ideal that would not rock the boat too much if it turned out to be less than ideal, sounds ideal.
But I have hundreds if not thousands of those.
Brake discs basking in the sunshine.
Sometimes wishing for better is the enemy of good.
Putting the brakes on better, might well reveal that now is ideal.
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