Je m'appelle Amelie. J'aime voyager en train, les galettes avec caramel du buerre sucre, est les hiboux. Je n'naime pas ... hmmm, I can't think of anything at the moment! That must be because I have arrived in France and am now staying in a beautiful (if slightly dilapidated) 17th century stone farmhouse in the countryside of the Golfe du Morbihan, on a nameless lane between the hamlets of Brindivy and Kerdavid Duchantil. Every time I come to France, I'm reminded of why this country seduces me. It's something about the softness of the evening air and the gentle heat of the sun (so much less harsh than our southern hemisphere orb), and the lush countryside that, even though it is well-farmed, still has many stands of old oak trees and little pockets of forest with mysterious fern-fringed tracks winding into the shadows. The area where I am staying (near Carnac) is well-known as a region covered with megaliths and dolmens that are athousands of years old. When I'm walking through a forest and suddenly come upon a circle of standing stones covered in moss and lichen, I get a certain eerie sense of very deep history that I have not really experienced before.
We have a family of tawny owls nesting in the barn by the house, and I have been privileged to see them a few times, either hanging out on the roof getting the late sun or, last night, swooping down over the garden on a hunting trip. They are such beautiful animals. Somewhat awkward and comical while sitting on a perch, but majestic on the wing. It doesn't get dark here until 10:30 or so at night, so I go for a walk about 9pm and get to watch as all the little night creatures start stirring in the hedges and fields as the sun goes down.
Our little local village of Brindivy is a place where not much ever seems to happen ( though it does have an impressive Calvary and some 12th century relics, which I plan to investigate soon). However, it is the home of a legendary creperie, the Creperie du Puits. On Sunday nights, the carpark of the tiny church is packed with locals who have come to eat there, and I can see why. Tonight, I had a galette with half a dozen enormous, fresh scallops in homemade sauce, a half bottle of good Provencal rose, and a salted caramel crepe (my new love), served up with charm by the son of the owner and all for the princely sum of 15€. We will be back!
Oh, I am also happy to report that my French this trip is so much better than the last time I visited. I can actually have normal conversations (in shops and so on) without having to carefully think everything out and translate it all in my head first.
Showing posts with label wine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wine. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Friday, June 15, 2012
In which I visit the British Library
So, today's adventures in archive-land involved my first visit to the British Library, which is much bigger and plusher than I was expecting. In my head, I'd imagined something along the lines of your basic university library writ large, and given the generally parlous state of funding for enterprises such as archives, museums and libraries, I also expected it would be a bit down-at-heel in the old design department. So I was pleasantly surprised at its 5 floors of glass and marble, recessed lighting, and finely curved staircases. In the reading rooms, the desks and chairs resemble something out of the business centre in an up-market hotel. The best bit, though, is the massive multistory atrium tower of bound manuscripts in a great cube of glass. (I'm not sure if these are purely for show or if this is part of the storage, but all the different coloured leather bindings and gold lettering make quite an impression. Talk about the bookcase of my dreams!)
Anyway, after jumping through the several hoops required to get a Reader's card, I repaired to the Manuscript room and spent the day with a couple of manuscripts from the 15thC (one of which was originally copied for Sir John Paston). They were written in a mixture of English and French /Anglo-Norman, so I was expecting to have to do some work deciphering them, but I had more trouble with the tiny script than with the actual language. Parts of one of them looked like some mad spiders had gotten loose in an inkpot. It took me a while to get my 'eye' in, and clearly, I need a lot more practice reading handwriting! It's odd, but I realised that I very rarely see handwritten text these days (even my own), because pretty much everything is done on computers. For about the first hour, I was freaking out a bit thinking I wouldn't be able to read a damned thing, even of the English texts, but it got better as I went along. And I do enjoy seeing all those marginal notations and doodles from various readers over the centuries ( if you did that now, I believe the BL staff would take you out and pillory you). There is also something very human and tangible about the way the handwriting goes in cycles, from being very neat at the start of a section to getting progressively rattier a few pages in. I can just imagine that the scribe getting a bit fed up towards the end of his working day and letting things go just a bit.
I'm writing this while I'm having dinner (at a classic pub called The Duke in the lovely old town of Richmond) and one of the many benefits of overseas travel just occurred to me as I was reading the menu. That is, at home we take great pride in 'our' wine industry, which is all well and good, but when you eat out, you rarely see many wines from other countries onthe winelist. And when you do, the most common import is Australian (and the odd Chilean wine, but usually of the cheap-and-cheerful rustic red variety). Tonight, my wine options included varieties from all over Europe, South Africa, South America, and even a cab sav from Lebanon (there was also the obligatory New Zealand sauvignon blanc, just to make me feel at home).
Anyway, after jumping through the several hoops required to get a Reader's card, I repaired to the Manuscript room and spent the day with a couple of manuscripts from the 15thC (one of which was originally copied for Sir John Paston). They were written in a mixture of English and French /Anglo-Norman, so I was expecting to have to do some work deciphering them, but I had more trouble with the tiny script than with the actual language. Parts of one of them looked like some mad spiders had gotten loose in an inkpot. It took me a while to get my 'eye' in, and clearly, I need a lot more practice reading handwriting! It's odd, but I realised that I very rarely see handwritten text these days (even my own), because pretty much everything is done on computers. For about the first hour, I was freaking out a bit thinking I wouldn't be able to read a damned thing, even of the English texts, but it got better as I went along. And I do enjoy seeing all those marginal notations and doodles from various readers over the centuries ( if you did that now, I believe the BL staff would take you out and pillory you). There is also something very human and tangible about the way the handwriting goes in cycles, from being very neat at the start of a section to getting progressively rattier a few pages in. I can just imagine that the scribe getting a bit fed up towards the end of his working day and letting things go just a bit.
I'm writing this while I'm having dinner (at a classic pub called The Duke in the lovely old town of Richmond) and one of the many benefits of overseas travel just occurred to me as I was reading the menu. That is, at home we take great pride in 'our' wine industry, which is all well and good, but when you eat out, you rarely see many wines from other countries onthe winelist. And when you do, the most common import is Australian (and the odd Chilean wine, but usually of the cheap-and-cheerful rustic red variety). Tonight, my wine options included varieties from all over Europe, South Africa, South America, and even a cab sav from Lebanon (there was also the obligatory New Zealand sauvignon blanc, just to make me feel at home).
Monday, October 12, 2009
Relic rage
Come on, people, I thought we’d sorted this one already? The latest debunkers of the Shroud of Turin have now demonstrated that given only medieval methods and materials, the relic could have been created inside about a week, backing up the long-standing claim that it was probably a 14th century forgery. Those who still say such an act of fakery would have been unthinkable in this 'age of faith' seriously underestimate the resourcefulness of medieval people when it came to acquiring relics.
Relics, after all, were big business for popular pilgrimage spots, bringing in the punters to make their donations to the shrine itself and then spend up large on tourist trinkets like pilgrimage badges. Competition amongst the various shrines was fierce, and late medieval texts by both religious writers and laymen refer to avaricious monks making forgeries and condemn or mock the proliferation of sham shrines and relics (though most didn’t disavow that miracles that could be produced by the genuine article).
The lengths to which some people were prepared to go to secure a relic could be pretty extreme. One of my favourite stories is that of Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln (later St. Hugh). On a pilgrimage to the abbey of Fécamp in Normandy, he asked for a piece of the arm bone of St. Mary Magdalene – the abbey’s most precious relic – to take back to England with him. His request denied by the monks (you can imagine the haggling: ‘The index finger? No? How about the pinkie? Come on, chaps, I’d settle for the tip’), our quick-witted bishop seizes on the relic and takes a bite – a chunk! – out of the poor lady’s arm. I can just picture the undignified scuffle that must then have ensued, with the monks trying to wrestle the bit of bone out of Hugh’s mouth and the bishop, jaws tightly clamped, fiercely resisting them. (Hugh later tasted a bit of his own medicine when his head was stolen from its shrine in 1364.)
I had my own close encounter with a saintly skeleton at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Pierre d'Hautvillers, which is nestled in a hilltop village overlooking some of the best vineyards of Champagne. Here, boxed up in this somewhat neglected-looking reliquary on one side of the abbey church, are the bones of St. Nivard, Archbishop of Reims (655 – 669) and brother-in-law of the Frankish king Childeric II. He was the founder of the abbey, but we bubbly-quaffing pilgrims now know it much better as the final resting place of friar Dom Pérignon.
Relics, after all, were big business for popular pilgrimage spots, bringing in the punters to make their donations to the shrine itself and then spend up large on tourist trinkets like pilgrimage badges. Competition amongst the various shrines was fierce, and late medieval texts by both religious writers and laymen refer to avaricious monks making forgeries and condemn or mock the proliferation of sham shrines and relics (though most didn’t disavow that miracles that could be produced by the genuine article).
The lengths to which some people were prepared to go to secure a relic could be pretty extreme. One of my favourite stories is that of Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln (later St. Hugh). On a pilgrimage to the abbey of Fécamp in Normandy, he asked for a piece of the arm bone of St. Mary Magdalene – the abbey’s most precious relic – to take back to England with him. His request denied by the monks (you can imagine the haggling: ‘The index finger? No? How about the pinkie? Come on, chaps, I’d settle for the tip’), our quick-witted bishop seizes on the relic and takes a bite – a chunk! – out of the poor lady’s arm. I can just picture the undignified scuffle that must then have ensued, with the monks trying to wrestle the bit of bone out of Hugh’s mouth and the bishop, jaws tightly clamped, fiercely resisting them. (Hugh later tasted a bit of his own medicine when his head was stolen from its shrine in 1364.)
I had my own close encounter with a saintly skeleton at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Pierre d'Hautvillers, which is nestled in a hilltop village overlooking some of the best vineyards of Champagne. Here, boxed up in this somewhat neglected-looking reliquary on one side of the abbey church, are the bones of St. Nivard, Archbishop of Reims (655 – 669) and brother-in-law of the Frankish king Childeric II. He was the founder of the abbey, but we bubbly-quaffing pilgrims now know it much better as the final resting place of friar Dom Pérignon.Monday, May 11, 2009
'Twilight'? No fangs!
Well, that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.
How can the undead be so unutterably dull? Perhaps hanging around in the Pacific Northwest for a couple of hundred years bleaches you of all personality, as well as of skin colour. But it wasn’t the execrable acting, the lousy pacing or the goofy special effects that bugged me the most about this film. In fact, the cheapo effects actually made for some pretty funny moments, including lead vampire dude speed-running on the end of a cable that made him look like a puppet escapee from Team America.
What bothered me most was a barely hidden subtext about the dangers of female sexuality, although I gu
ess it shouldn’t have surprised me as the author is apparently a big-time God-botherer. For what feels like hours, the two protagonists brood at each other and force themselves to resist temptation. Naturally, the human female is weaker and is all ‘damn the torpedoes, let’s go for it’, and vampire-bloke proves his superiority by manfully resisting her. The wages of sin in this case is not just death, but un-death (and losing your mortal soul along with your purity ring). This subtext is even less subtle on the book, which has cover art depicting a woman’s hands hold a shiny red apple. Yes, Eve, we all know what that means.
The other thing that disturbed me was when vampire-dude admitted he’d been hanging out in his girlfriend’s bedroom every night watching her sleep. She seems to think this is sweet. I think it’s stalking. When this sort of creepy male behaviour is portrayed to millions of adolescent girls as normal and even desirable, it’s no wonder they have problems reporting harassment and stalking until things get extreme.
A wicked winter storm is howling through here this evening, so I think I’ll expunge Twilight from my brain with a dose of real vampire action: Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic Dracula, washed down with an appropriately rich, dark and spicy Peter Lehmann shiraz.
How can the undead be so unutterably dull? Perhaps hanging around in the Pacific Northwest for a couple of hundred years bleaches you of all personality, as well as of skin colour. But it wasn’t the execrable acting, the lousy pacing or the goofy special effects that bugged me the most about this film. In fact, the cheapo effects actually made for some pretty funny moments, including lead vampire dude speed-running on the end of a cable that made him look like a puppet escapee from Team America.
What bothered me most was a barely hidden subtext about the dangers of female sexuality, although I gu
ess it shouldn’t have surprised me as the author is apparently a big-time God-botherer. For what feels like hours, the two protagonists brood at each other and force themselves to resist temptation. Naturally, the human female is weaker and is all ‘damn the torpedoes, let’s go for it’, and vampire-bloke proves his superiority by manfully resisting her. The wages of sin in this case is not just death, but un-death (and losing your mortal soul along with your purity ring). This subtext is even less subtle on the book, which has cover art depicting a woman’s hands hold a shiny red apple. Yes, Eve, we all know what that means. The other thing that disturbed me was when vampire-dude admitted he’d been hanging out in his girlfriend’s bedroom every night watching her sleep. She seems to think this is sweet. I think it’s stalking. When this sort of creepy male behaviour is portrayed to millions of adolescent girls as normal and even desirable, it’s no wonder they have problems reporting harassment and stalking until things get extreme.
A wicked winter storm is howling through here this evening, so I think I’ll expunge Twilight from my brain with a dose of real vampire action: Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic Dracula, washed down with an appropriately rich, dark and spicy Peter Lehmann shiraz.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
A rare moment of clarity
I’ve been sweating over a piece of writing for a couple of weeks now. I’ve forced myself to spend hours in the library working on it away from the distractions of home, but after a particularly unproductive four-hour stretch yesterday, I was despairing at ever producing anything half-decent. I eventually gave up in disgust and went home to drown my sorrows in a couple of glasses of TW Black Label chardonnay (a lovely creamy, buttery number with just the right amount of oak).
But as is often the case, all the pieces of the puzzle miraculously fell into place while I was out today on my morni
ng run. I took one of my favourite routes, a path that winds in and out of a dozen small rocky bays strung along a wild stretch of coastline with nothing but ocean between me and Antarctica. The weather here can be brutal, with freezing southerly gales whipped straight off the ice and the sea all roiling, evil-looking grey foam. But today, the air was calm and still held some late-summer warmth, the sea smooth turquoise and so clear I could see a couple of feet down, to the starfish and seaweed that huddle along the shoreline.
So there I was, running along (well, more like trotting), enjoying the views and thinking about precisely nothing when suddenly, the whole structure of this essay just appeared in the front of my brain, as if someone had kindly written it out for me. All those awkward pieces that seemed to belong either everywhere or nowhere found their perfect place in the overall argument and the entire thing came together in a flow that was both logical and lyrical.
Such moments of clarity are a rare gift (and it must be said, they hardly ever eventuate when I’m staring down a deadline). I wish I could figure out exactly what triggers them, but I’ve noticed that they almost always occur when I’m not thinking about anything at all, but doing something repetitively mechanical or physical.
But as is often the case, all the pieces of the puzzle miraculously fell into place while I was out today on my morni
ng run. I took one of my favourite routes, a path that winds in and out of a dozen small rocky bays strung along a wild stretch of coastline with nothing but ocean between me and Antarctica. The weather here can be brutal, with freezing southerly gales whipped straight off the ice and the sea all roiling, evil-looking grey foam. But today, the air was calm and still held some late-summer warmth, the sea smooth turquoise and so clear I could see a couple of feet down, to the starfish and seaweed that huddle along the shoreline.So there I was, running along (well, more like trotting), enjoying the views and thinking about precisely nothing when suddenly, the whole structure of this essay just appeared in the front of my brain, as if someone had kindly written it out for me. All those awkward pieces that seemed to belong either everywhere or nowhere found their perfect place in the overall argument and the entire thing came together in a flow that was both logical and lyrical.
Such moments of clarity are a rare gift (and it must be said, they hardly ever eventuate when I’m staring down a deadline). I wish I could figure out exactly what triggers them, but I’ve noticed that they almost always occur when I’m not thinking about anything at all, but doing something repetitively mechanical or physical.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Word-wrangling
Well, it’s been one of those days, writing-wise. I’ve been working on my essay on the so-called ‘Whig historians’ for my course in Advanced Historiography and at this point, I swear I have written, erased and re-written the same damned paragraph a dozen times and it still doesn’t adequately express the ideas in my head. I’m being painfully reminded of the bit in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life where she reflects on writing for eight hours straight and being lucky to have a couple of usable sentences at the end of it.
I didn’t think this essay would be easy, and indeed it is proving a tough one to wrangle into shape. But not for the reasons I initially expected. To be honest, I went into it assuming that there wouldn’t be much of interest in a bunch of Establishment white guys who’ve been dead for a good 150-odd years, and that I therefore might struggle to put together a decent critical argument for their continued relevance. I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s essays on India give a fascinating insight to how the English political and intellectual elite represented Indian people in ways that justified British colonial projects. And reading Leopold von Ranke’s conceptions of ‘Teutonic peoples’ and the destiny of the German nation is really quite chilling in the wake of WWII.
At times, too, they are just damned funny. I love Macaulay’s depiction in “Lord Clive” of pompous nouveau riche ‘nabobs’ returning from India flush with cash and making themselves unpopular as they “raised the price of everything…from fresh fish to rotten boroughs”. And Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is a delight, his wit and cynicism proving to have enduring appeal for a post-modern sceptic such as myself. I particularly enjoyed his gleeful skewering of religious hypocrisy and corruption, and snarky comments such as “the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church”.
So, I’ve done the reading, accumulated a solid set of notes and identified a number of productive themes to structure my argument, but I still haven’t quite figured out the optimal system to move from a notebook full of quotes, comments and connecting arrows and a head full of ideas to a coherent series of connected paragraphs. I find it difficult to start writing on the computer until things are pretty well advanced, preferring to work out my outlines and rough drafts on paper. Despite my best efforts, the middle stage, between the research and the final writing, always seems to deteriorate into a blizzard of index cards and scattered sheaves of paper covered in disconnected scribblings.
I’m in the middle of that paper whirlwind at the moment, but I know that soon things will fall into place (they always do) and the way forward will suddenly come to me, like a path becoming visible through overgrown scrub. If anyone has any good ideas on how to jumpstart the path-finding process, I’d be glad to hear them. Until then, I’m kicking back with a glass of Mount Dottrel Pinot Noir, a classic soft and fruity Otago pinot.
I didn’t think this essay would be easy, and indeed it is proving a tough one to wrangle into shape. But not for the reasons I initially expected. To be honest, I went into it assuming that there wouldn’t be much of interest in a bunch of Establishment white guys who’ve been dead for a good 150-odd years, and that I therefore might struggle to put together a decent critical argument for their continued relevance. I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s essays on India give a fascinating insight to how the English political and intellectual elite represented Indian people in ways that justified British colonial projects. And reading Leopold von Ranke’s conceptions of ‘Teutonic peoples’ and the destiny of the German nation is really quite chilling in the wake of WWII.
At times, too, they are just damned funny. I love Macaulay’s depiction in “Lord Clive” of pompous nouveau riche ‘nabobs’ returning from India flush with cash and making themselves unpopular as they “raised the price of everything…from fresh fish to rotten boroughs”. And Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is a delight, his wit and cynicism proving to have enduring appeal for a post-modern sceptic such as myself. I particularly enjoyed his gleeful skewering of religious hypocrisy and corruption, and snarky comments such as “the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church”.
So, I’ve done the reading, accumulated a solid set of notes and identified a number of productive themes to structure my argument, but I still haven’t quite figured out the optimal system to move from a notebook full of quotes, comments and connecting arrows and a head full of ideas to a coherent series of connected paragraphs. I find it difficult to start writing on the computer until things are pretty well advanced, preferring to work out my outlines and rough drafts on paper. Despite my best efforts, the middle stage, between the research and the final writing, always seems to deteriorate into a blizzard of index cards and scattered sheaves of paper covered in disconnected scribblings.
I’m in the middle of that paper whirlwind at the moment, but I know that soon things will fall into place (they always do) and the way forward will suddenly come to me, like a path becoming visible through overgrown scrub. If anyone has any good ideas on how to jumpstart the path-finding process, I’d be glad to hear them. Until then, I’m kicking back with a glass of Mount Dottrel Pinot Noir, a classic soft and fruity Otago pinot.
An Easter w(h)ine
It’s Easter Friday and I’ve been working on my essay on nineteenth-century historiography all day. Between the autumnal nip in the air and seven straight hours spent in the company of Messieurs Ranke, Macaulay and Gibbon, I’m craving a big ol’ glass of red (much as Gibbon makes me laugh). My local shop carries a decent selection, including the truly delish Mt. Difficulty Pinot Noir, but can I buy one? Can I hell. Because in this secular, rationalist twenty-first century nation, you still can’t buy booze on Easter Friday in deference to a fable. A charming fable to be sure. Betrayal, torture and human sacrifice – hey, what’s not to like? The irony in this, of course, is that this is a holiday that’s all about the wine (or blood-drinking, depending on which branch of the Christian superstition you happen to support).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
