A Janus Moment

For New Year, we spent a few days in Tarragona, Spain. It was sunny and warm, or, at least warmer than it was at home in France.

The first photo was taken while we were waiting to pass through the one-way Bielsa Tunnel through the Pyrenees, looking back towards France.

The second picture was taken inside Spain, looking back at the (barely) snow-clad mountains.

Next comes a shot of one of the Roman gateways of Tarragona which had been the administrative capital of Spain under the Romans.

Finally a photo from the same gateway of the setting sun. It was all so much more impressive at the time!

It’s a miserable day – grey cold and rainy. The day feels dreadful because winter feels endless, the world seems in stasis, and the sky sits on my forehead obstructing my third eye.
The cement mixer is chuntering on here and the compressor gragging on next door.
Next door is a painful eyesore. The adjoining terrain à bâtir – larger than our plot was sold in three p

ieces to a kit-form housing firm. Three little boxy houses have sprung up inside 7 months, each without trees, gardens or any kindnesses right in front of us. They look especially grim now as my garden is shrunken and leafless and doesn’t offer us a screen. They must be endured because they will not go away. I tell myself they will have compensations and they are somebody else’s dreams. I don’t know if I am ashamed of my feelings or of having the houses as neighbours. The house I was born in was the same size and boxiness.
God knows what they are doing next door. There are always 3 or more men inside but no materials ever seem to be taken in with them. By now one imagines that such a small building would be fully insulated, plastered and fitted with electricity, water and kitchen. I am dying of curiosity on two counts. One, to see how the house is constructed inside, and two, to find out if they are just playing poker. They come out now and then to make a pi-pi. They discretely hide from the road and the house to the south, but pee where they are in full view of our house. Strange indeed.
Here John and Eugene are doing a fantastic job of putting down a cement floor in the chai. The area of floor that is to be pantry is nearly complete. John is mixing the cement, standing in the drizzle on the back of the remorque, wearing in my opinion, inadequate winter gear.
It took us the weekend to clear the chai out though most of the work was done by John. All his lumber and tools and junk have been rearranged in the new garden shed and my roulotte. I managed to squeeze the preserves and tinned food into odd places in the kitchen and dining room. It felt good to have the space cleared – it was badly organised because the floor is uneven mud and mould liable to flooding and it’s a dark cold damp space at any time of year. It will improve our lives enormously when it is done. All the shelving used to stagger and slouch propped up with odd bricks and planks under its legs – soon it will stand straight and presumably stored tools won’t be tumbling off it in the same way. It will be progress and progress appears tidier at first.
John has almost finished the grenier which is his study/office and once the floor in the chai is laid, he will begin to sort out the upstairs bathroom. We should be able to use it by March though it won’t be tiled for a while longer.
It is time for me to go to the Supermarché. I decided that the market was out this week. It is far too wet. Must go and make a list!

27e Marathon des Châteaux du Médoc

The story's all in the title.

A marathon where fancy dress is compulsory, where besides the normal water and fruit stations there are wine-tasting stations and which is only two-and-a-half hours' drive from home, must be worth some consideration - that is if you've ever considered running a marathon at all.

The course (26,2 miles of course) is almost a figure-of-8 starting at the village of Pauillac on the Gironde estuary, heading south, to Beychevelle, looping back past Pauillac into St. Estephe and finishing back at Pauillac.

Of the marathons I have run/walked (7 so far) this was probably the most fun. Not necessarily the most prestigious, impressive, challenging etc, but certainly relaxed. It's true about the "oeno-sportif" wine-tasting stations - 20 of them - you do get to taste young wines from some of the most famous chateaux in France but I wasn't quite expecting that people would actually stop and chat around the bar as if they had all the time in the world. It would be very easy to forget that you were running a marathon at all. In fact perhaps some people do forget that. In most marathons there seems to be a drop-out rate of about 5-6% who don't make it to the finish. For the Medoc this figure was about 5% 12 years ago steadily rising to an average of 15% and, last year, to 21%. I guess that because of its light-hearted atmosphere participants think it must be easy and fail to train. It isn't easy and because it is run in early September, it can be hot - especially if you are one of the slower runners. Also, more than a quarter of it is run off-road, on gravel, over bumpy ground in the vineyards and on cart-tracks. There are also hills - and the occasional waits at the bars! All-in-all not a marathon for a Personal Best.

Still, it's behind me now as was a very small number of other runners.

Santé!

(By the way, I'm meant to be a butterfly.)

P.S. It's true! There are oysters and steak en route too!

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Albania - Not as Scary as They Say (Part 1)

When we were doing our tour of Europe (and a little bit of Asia) three years ago, we wanted to visit Albania but the reports we received, mainly that the roads wouldn't be suitable for our mobile home, led us to drive round it instead. So, when we set out for Greece and the Special Olympics World Games, we thought we might give Albania another try on the way back, as we expected that our car would be better able to cope with bad roads.

The advice we got wasn't encouraging. The Foreign Office Advice to Travellers said that 3/4 of Albanian road users carried firearms and warned of 100.000 tonnes of ordnance being buried around the country. The Lonely Planet guide said that "only the foolhardy" would drive there and that it's "a really, really hard place to drive". As we thought we were "the foolhardy", we took that as a green light. A person in Athens told us that Albania was perfectly safe if you never let your car out of your sight. This might have made going to bed difficult, unless you slept in a garage. In Ioannina, on the Greek side of the border we were told not to worry. So we didn't, we decided to pop into southern Albania, drive over the mountains to the coast and, if that was OK, to carry on; if not we could turn round and catch a ferry to Italy from Greece.

Before crossing the border, we filled up with diesel. This was a mistake since fuel was easily available in Albania and cheaper than in Greece (or anywhere else, if it came to that). The filling station was a unique experience. The man running it had no arms. When I asked him which was the diesel pump, he pointed with his foot. To pay, since he obviously couldn't operate a credit card machine, cash was the method. I gave him a €50 note and he invited me to help myself to change from the till.

This is a lot of words. Here's a picture taken from our room at Ksamili.

Saranda, a place described in the guidebook as a fishing village, was filled with high-rise (but cheap) hotels, so we drove on 10 miles to Ksamili, a village with only a few hotels but with many collapsed buildings, e.g.:-

Our first guess (and fear) was "earthquake", but no, it was something more uniquely Albanian. After the collapse of communism a lot of speculative building had been carried out, much without official approval. Rather than embark upon expensive and time-consuming (or "chronophage", as the French say) litigation, the Albanian government went for the quick option - collapse the buildings. We saw more than 30 in a similar state around Ksamili.

TO BE CONTINUED

On the Road Again - Welcome to the Hotel Astoria

We are on our way to help at the Special Olympics World Games in Athens, travelling there by car down through Italy to catch a ferry at Bari. Last night we stayed at a very pleasant small hotel at Cassine, north of Genoa, tonight we are at the Hotel Astoria, Ravenna. Ruth has been wanting to see the mosaics around Ravenna for the last 50 years. They have been waiting to be seen by her since the middle of the 6th. century, so closure has now been reached. The mosaics were made when Ravenna had been briefly the capital of the Roman Empire and was then subsequently part of the Byzantine Empire so the mosaics and the churches in which they are, are a brilliant (literally - they shine with golden tesserae)example of transition both between what were to become the Catholic and Orthodox churches and the end of the Roman Empire.

But another example of multi-culturalism was the meal which we had at the fish restaurant we ate at tonight. My Italian is a bit sketchy (although I hope to ink in between some of the dots in the next few days) and we had aleady eaten our first course before we persuaded the manager to find us a menu. This he did, and gave us one in English and German. This made things a bit difficult as we couldn't explain what it was we thought we wanted from the English menu to the waitress as she didn't speak English and couldn't understand the English menu. Worse, we couldn't understand the English menu either; e.g "some plates in our papers". I sought the help of the German version but that had been translated by the same person who had done the English. I asked for a French menu, so the waitress brought a second German one.(I worked out that "some plates in our papers" meant "our a la carte dishes"). We asked for the Italian menu. We understood that. So did the waitress. After a fairly immense meal, we were given some digestives. Very nice they were too, but I usually expect liqueurs to come in tiny glasses, not in two quarter litre jugs. Good night!

Etape Moto

The Tour de France is a tough challenge to undertake by pedal-power alone. That's why when 3 of our friends made an overnight stop with us in the course of a tour around France, they rather cheated, I think, in making sure that that they had the added support of 1100cc a piece to help them over the hills.

The Chef de Choeur Wonders What to Do Next

In my role as a jobbing joint deputy stand-in under-assistant choir master, I sometimes wonder how committed the choir is to serious choir practices. Like, how come they've got time to take photos?