Let the summer commence!

Snow in Ickenham - England

The Burgundian winter of 2018 will not enter the history books as one of the coldest winters ever. On the contrary; our winter this year was a real sluggish winter. Even though we had a few days with temperatures not far above the freezing point, a strong wind coming from the north combined with a high air humidity made us feeling cold to the bone.

Snow in the harbour of Den Bosch (the Netherlands)

I prefer one of these sunny bone-dry days, no wind, and temperatures well below zero. That feels a lot better, but we have hardly seen any days like that. Snow was also not very visible in Burgundy. The advantage of the lack of snow and real cold weather is that we had no black ice on the roads, nor slippery roads due to well compacted snow, and as a result we also had no problem with the mud-like layer of half-melted snow that can stay on the roads for quite a while after it started thawing.

Cité de la Musique - Paris

The only substantial snow we have seen we experienced during a short holiday in England just before Christmas, during a short visit to the Netherlands and while we had a short holiday in Paris, both in March. Here we had some sleet, but that did not produce a nice white blanket on the fields.

Sleet - Chazelle

As the summer is supposed to break out any day now, we sincerely hope that we will soon have a long period of dry, sunny and hence warm weather; that would at least make us forget the sluggish winter we have had.

A Christmas Carol

Unwrapping presents

Ever since I have an English partner we spend Christmas in England. Since I am from a country where traditionally one part of the population celebrates only Saint-Nicholas (I was part of that group), another part celebrates only Christmas, and still another, greedier part celebrates both, I look, compared to the Brits, at Christmas in quite a different way.
I will make a concise list of things that, in the eyes of a stranger, are characteristic for an English Christmas.

Yummy, Brussel's sprouts!

The first thing that draws a stranger's attention are the overfull shops with frantic shoppers until seconds before the shops close on Christmas eve, and the often ghastly Christmas decorations displayed in gardens and against the facades of houses.

Ymmy, turkey!

And then there is the stress obviously indispensable in order to prepare a meal which is the same year in, year out, in every household from the Orkney Islands to the Isle of Wight.

The Christmas crackers

Then one eats this food (which I do not particularly like, but that is my personal problem) whilst wearing a silly paper hat; listen to and laugh about Christmas cracker jokes so boring and stupid that one wonders how a country that has produced Monty Python's Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers can come up with "humour" like this, and finally listen to the Queen's speech.

The Christmas lunch

And when one thinks to taste a bit of culture in London after Christmas, forget it! Between Christmas and New Year not only most restaurants and shops are closed, also the vast majority of the Museums do not open their doors during this week. My partner calls me Bah Humbug; I wonder why?

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Air pollution

A haze over Parijs

Air pollution is a worldwide problem, something also France is confronted with from time to time. During our yearly holiday in Paris we have twice experienced that the Eiffel Tower, normally clearly visible from Montmartre, was hidden from view by what looked like a dark blanket. The only advantage for us tourists was that the Metro in Paris was for a number of days free of charge, just to reduce the amount of CO2 producing vehicles.

Free public transport

One of the measures taken by the French President Sarkozy at the time was a ban on burning garden waste. However, thinking of the amount of gardens in a city like Paris the effect of this ban would not have been very impressive.
This ban of burning garden waste however is also valid in the country side, with the exception of agricultural "garden" waste. As I have described in my previous blog we ended up with huge quantities of green waste after a day of cutting brambles. So what to do?

Our modest contribution to the problem

Fortunately laws in France are not always implemented to the letter. When we noticed that one of our village's officials was happily lighting bonfires every so often, we decided to follow his example. And why not? Sarkozy will certainly not return to politics in the near future to tell us off for it…

For our own website click here.

Our new website (part 2 of 2)

Re-writing the code to allow it to manage phones, tablets and PC's did not turn out to be a sinecure, however, we plodded on and got there at the end. Depending on which hardware is used to display the website, what exactly shows on the screen is quite different. The PC screen seems to be the least different, but the smaller the screen becomes, the more different it looks.

This is what the new site looks like

The concept of the top menu bar with drop-down menus had to disappear, because they work fine on mouse operated screens, but not on touch-screen devices.

And this sees an I-phone 5 user

In short: the PC-screen works until the screen becomes smaller than a tablet screen. The text stays legible because we are now using a fixed fontsize. Reducing the screens further (phone format) gets rid of menus on the right hand side of the text block. Only the most interesting links from the side menus have been transferred to the top menu on the telephones. By definition phones have now less links than PC's and/or tablets. However, the links that are skipped are less relevant: we assumed that phone users will not shed many tears because they cannot approach our personal Blogs from their phone. That seems to be more something for someone behind a PC screen.We also have shortened the Tourist Information for all versions, which gives all web pages a reasonable length without excessively long pages here and there.
However, since we know from experience that those pages were appreciated and used by some of our guests, we have incorporated this "superfluous" information in our existing Blog with Tourist information. It also gave us the opportunity the get rid of the endless stream of external links. There are nowadays search engines galore that will find the required and the most up-to-date information within no time. And with this last change my regular, and very boring checking exercises are a thing of the past.

For our own (completely overhauled) website click here.

Our new website (part 1 of 2)

The weeks around Christmas we normally reserve for patching up our own website.

This is what our website (previous version) looked like on a PC screen

Most of the time we just check out the external links which are convenient for the visitors of our site, e.g. the links to the arrival and departure times of public transport from and to our property. Those links are provided by others, and we do not have any influence on the validity of those links. It is amazing how many sites are changing URL addresses throughout the year – without providing a new link connecting the obsolete URL with the new one. And it is even more amazing how many external links we actually are providing on our own pages.

And this is what it looked like on an I-phone 5

However, before we started on our regular (2 to 3 times a year!) check of external links we thought it might be a better idea to redo the whole website. There was a good reason for that: some customers actually had made remarks in the past about the user-unfriendliness of our site for those opening the site on a mobile phone. In hindsight I must say that those people had been extremely polite in their addressing this "flaw"…
Because we are not I-phone, I-pad or tablet users ourselves, these sort of remarks were registered with us, but that was about it. Fortunately, we discovered that Chrome (among others) could provide us with an application that simulates a wide range of hardware. With this application one sees on the screen of a PC, on scale 1:1, what an I-phone or tablet user sees on his or her screen. And that gave us a scare! We chose, for checking purposes, to simulate an I-phone 5, one of the smallest available models.
To be continued.

For our own website click here.

A quick trip to the Netherlands

I knew that my Dutch passport was running out somewhere in January, but that was no problem….., so we thought.
We had it all done before: making an appointment with the consulate in Lyon, find the one photographer there who produces recognised Dutch passport photographs, have our fingerprints taken, do some sightseeing in Lyon and then wait for the passport to arrive by registered mail. Easy peasy…., so we thought.

Bergeijk

In five years things can change considerably, we found out. The passport facilities were taken away from the consulates (cost cutting), and a passport could be obtained from the embassy in Paris where the Champs Elysées boasted an authorised photographer as well. The passport had to be collected in person, after at least a week. Price tag attached : 4 trips to and from Paris @ approx. € 100 pp., or 2 trips and an expensive stay in a Parisian hotel, plus the cost of a passport, also over € 100 pp. Quite a costly affair, when one thinks about it.

The centre of the universe

However we found a better solution.
One can also apply for a passport in the Netherlands, in The Hague, but also in a number of Hicksvilles, such as Haarlemmermeer, Enschede, Maastricht, Bergeijk, Echt-Susteren, Oldambt, Bergen op Zoom en Montferland. To find some of these places I had to resort to Google maps…. Now of course a trip to the Netherlands is not free of charge (here the passport has to be collected in person as well), but at least it can be combined with a lightning visit to family that lives not far from Bergeijk and with a shopping expedition to stock up on necessities unobtainable in France, as there are Indonesian sweet soy sauce, Indonesian chilly paste and real Dutch gin.

Townhall, or passport printing office?

We made an appointment at the earliest possible date in Bergeijk on a Monday, drove the Saturday before to Den Bosch, had photographs taken there, and walked into Bergeijk’s townhall at the agreed time. There we were told that the passports could be collected the next Monday. Fortunately the civil servant gave us a phone number we could phone from Thursday onwards. And on Thursday the passport was indeed ready, so on Friday we could drive home, the car filled up to the brim with Indonesian and Dutch goodies, including a Surinamese take-away for two people that lasted us three days, and armed with brand new legal documents.

Old and new

Right after crossing the French border we were overtaken by a French customs car, which summoned us to stop. However, after we had solemnly sworn that we would smoke all the cannabis in the car ourselves, including the 400 cartons of cigarettes and the 12 kg of heroine, we could continue our journey, without having to show our brand new passports!

Arrêter, s'il vous plaît!

The link to the website of La Tuilerie de Chazelle can be found here.

Christmas decorations

Like each year at the end of November / beginning of December we are looking forward to the local Christmas decorations.

La Grande Rue - Cormatin

De big hit each year is the illumination of Cormatin’s High Street. People flock from far and wide to Cormatin to see these wonders. Far is in this case not restricted to far-away places like La Bergerie and Chazelle; no, for this special occasion people from Ameugny, Taizé, malay and even from Saint-Gengoux come to gaze at these decorations.

Epicerie Berger - Cormatin

Also worth seeing is the yearly display in the Epicerie in Cormatin’s Main Street. In December it is virtually impossible to enter the shop because of the amount of spectators. For this special occasion the shop also opens its doors on Sundays, the whole month of December!

Nativity Scene - Notre-Dame de l'assomption Cormatin

And finally there is the traditional nativity scene, looking different each year, and each year again a sight for sore eyes. For those who like to visit: it is extremely difficult to find a parking space in the vicinity of the church; the SNCF however deplies special (free) buses.
La Tuilerie de Chazelle sends you its Season’s Greetings!

Tai chi and I

Tai chi and I never really got on well together.

Tai chi demonstation

Even though I have always (and still do!) watched groups or individuals doing the tai chi form in the open with pleasure and admiration, and having tried to master the form myself at several occasions, I have never succeeded in completing a tai chi course. I started my first course in Singapore with a Chinese master, just before I had to leave Singapore for good. My second attempt was in the Netherlands, with a colleague from work who taught on Saturday mornings in Leiden. I had to give that course up in an unpleasant way. During the lessons the teacher often demonstrated how tai chi could be used in proper combat. One morning I was asked to play the “victim”, I consented, and only seconds later I found myself completely unexpectedly flying through the air, landing with my head against a bench that stood on the side of the classroom.

Qigong demonstration

I think that the teacher was even more surprised and shocked than I was; he had expected some sort of resistance, and instead he encountered a burst balloon. That was the end of my Leiden carreer. We have tried another group in Cluny/Lournand for a short while, but that turned out te be 50% chatting, 40% qigong and 10% tai chi. Needless to say that I did not learn much there either.
Sue is a bit more fanatic then I am when it comes to searching. She found a different group in Cluny, and although she did not really like the way they were teaching there either, she only started looking for yet another group when this group left Cluny for a different location direction Joncy. And now she found what she has been looking for for a long time. After she had started her 2nd year, whereby she got hooked on a form of tai chi using a fighting stick, she convinced me that this group might just be the thing for me.

2nd year group - taichi with stick

And despite the fact that I stepped in half way through the first year, I finally have the impression that this time I will manage to do the whole form. Not that my memory became better over the years (one of my problems in the past), but the way my Miss conducts her lessons, combined with the fact that I have been practicing also outside class under supervision of the Mistress, helped tremendously. Now I know the whole form more or less by heart, albeit when I do it I still need time to think, ask questions, stop and resume, but at least I get through the form without pulling out my last hairs.
Next year the emphasis will be more on the finesses of the individual movements, because that is a weak point (and not only with me!). But at least, the foundation has been laid!

Tai chi group with fan

La Tuilerie de Chazelle offers space enough to practice the whole form outside.

Renovating your church?

For our yearly Guitar Festival we utilize since 2012 the church of Chazelle.

De floor around the altar - Chazelle

That is a very nice Romanesque church, however, as is the case with a lot of old churches around here, the floor is rather uneven. And because the Theatre Festival “Les Rendez-Vous de Cormatin” became defunct, and the boards and beams used to build temporary stages were still somewhere in storage, it seemed a good idea to use that material to build a stage in front of the altar. That should make playing more comfortable for the musicians; no more sitting on a wobbly chair!

Nixon & Co - for all your transport problems

However, the material was stored in a barn in Cormatin, and had to be transported to Chazelle. Fortunately we are the proud owners of a trailer big enough to transport the pieces of board, and since we are heavily involved in the organisation of the Festival it seemed logical to offer our services in the form of our trailer. There was no lack of manpower. The commune can mobilize at will a group of volunteers, who if necessary will fix street signs and house numbers to the walls, set up the Christmas decorations, refresh the village’s plant pots and plant flowers in them, give the village hall a lick of paint, in a word, they could also built a platform or stage for a concert.

Nixon & Co - for all your church renovations

The whole installation did not cost more than one day. Inside the church, in front and partially next to the altar, there is now a nice flat and even stage. However, when the mayor in a meeting offered to cover the stage with carpet, the artistic director of the festival almost suffered a heart attack. Because carpet would ruin the (indeed excellent) acoustics of the church! As a compromise the platform is now covered with linoleum in a neutral grey colour. The stage stays in the church, that is if the parish counsel agrees. That way a future female priest would not ruin her stilettoes getting caught in the joint between the uneven floor tiles….

The new floor around the altar - Chazelle

La Tuilerie de Chazelle : for all your transport problems, and for small renovations!

Our shop comes to you!

If one needs something, but one hasn't the foggiest where to buy it, here one can always wait until "the" brochure lands in the letterbox.

Spring-cleaning

"The" brochure is in this particular case a small brochure (A5 format) for a shop on wheels. They sell a lot of garden utensils, but also car accessories, tools, shoes, household utensils, etc., etc. The brochure tells you when the "camion" (there are a couple of firms operating like this) visits your town or village.
For a while now we have been looking for a jack which we can use to tilt the lawnmower to clean the underside of it. This, in our opinion, seemed something that one of those shops on wheels might sell. And lo and behold, the next time we received 'the" brochure, the jack was there, and it was on special offer as well.
So on the big day we went to the Place de l'école in Cormatin with the idea of finding a big lorry. Well, we were not disappointed, even though the lorry was slightly bigger than we had expected.... But at least we have found our jack!

Shop on wheels

La Tuilerie de Chazelle uses the mower to maintain gardens of second home owners.

Finally!

Cormatin has finally its own, big flea market. Although the village hosts each year, on the 14th of July, a Brocante de Qualité, where one has to pay an entrance fee only to browse, it has always been lacking in the free flea market department. And that is something each self-respecting village around here has, at least once a year. For the very first time this year the Amicale de Cormatin (the village committee) had organised a flea market at the Plan d'Eau (on the green around a big fish pond), under ideal circumstances. It turned out to be a beautiful day, with a calm breeze, every so often a light veil of clouds, hence not too hot and not too cool. The public interest from sellers and buyers alike was so overwhelming, that by 3 o'clock all hot dogs had been sold out, and the members of the Amicale had to pick up their own personal wine stock from home because otherwise there would be no decent drinks available.
Because who can imagine a Burgundian flee market where one could not also enjoy a good glass of wine?

Plan d'Eau - Cormatin

La Tuilerie de Chazelle is an excellent base of operations for a search of brocantes and flea markets.

A distorted picture

Gregorius

As a child I was a great fan of Jean Dulieu, a writer and illustrator who was the spiritual father of Paulus the Gnome, a character who lived in the woods and had various animal friends. One of those friends was Gregorius the Badger, a rather stupid animal who spoke dyslexic. This writer later read his stories on radio, in a weekly broadcast, where he was doing a different voice for every character in his stories; Paulus, Gregorius, Salomo the Raven, Uhuburu the Owl, Eucalypta the witch, etc.






Apart from Paulus, I occasionally read the Dutch translation of Rupert Bear, where Bill Badger was playing a role as one of Rupert's friends. However, I never really got the hang of Rupert, and stuck with Paulus.
When comparing both badgers not the likeness is striking, but the difference.

Bill Badger

As a great believer in Dulieu's knowledge on the subjest of gnomes, witches and badgers, I discarded Bill Badger as a phony character; real badgers should look like Gregorius.
Until .... we saw a dead animal on the soft shoulder whilst driving down the road . We often find dead copyus or river rats alongside that stretch of road. Not entirely convinced it was a river rat, we stopped on the way back to have a good look. And lo and behold, it was a dead young badger. Unnecessary to say that my trust and belief in Dulieu has suffered a severe blow...

Een echte das

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Lost in translation

In the Netherlands there is an expression for doing something in a slapdash way, “doing something the French way”. That is the title of the simultaneous Dutch blog about the same subject, but using that here seems a bit out of place, hence the alternative title. Why the Dutch associate the French with working sloppy must go back a long time, probably to 1795 when the Dutch revolted against the Oranges and installed a Dutch version of the French Republic and after that were annexed by Napoleon to become the Kingdom Holland under his brother, Louis Napoleon.
Expats here tend to comment a lot on the French way of working, mainly because it is different from the way English or Dutch are doing it. It is debatable whether different is necessarily worse, but that seems to be the general opinion among most expats. That is why I would like to break a lance for “a company we have had excellent experience with”. If they work “the French way”, give me “the French way” anytime!
We had a rather big project on our hands, building a modern filter to treat our waste water in the back garden.

On the designated day a crew arrived, varying in size per day between 2 and 5 men, with diggers, a tractor, trucks, materials and tools. At the end of each day, but also during breaks, they meticulously cleaned their tools (shovels, spades, etc.). When they had to install a membrane white as snow in a filter, they took their dirty boots off before stepping on the filter cloth. Maybe a bit over the top, because after that the filter was covered with gravel, but at least the pores did not get clogged up with clay from dirty boots.

When the whole project neared completion, some small pieces of wood, beautifully cut to suit, were used to cover some joints in the beams. After a few months these bits of wood should be invisible because of the reed plants that are planted in the filter, but it certainly shows how neat and tidy these people work. Before the men left, the whole orchard had been turned into a World war I battlefield by tractor and digger movements.
At the end of the day, before the men left the premises, they levelled everything as good as possible with a digger, rakes and shovels, sowed in grass, and although the next day it was very well visible that works had taken place here, they had certainly done everything they could to bring the orchard back to its original state. And finally they finished a day earlier than planned to our full satisfaction and had turned up whenever they promised to do so.
For those who are interested in gardening work on a big scale, or in installing a modern water treatment system, “this is the link to their website”.

I would not be able to name a Dutch contractor who could have done a better job doing it the Dutch way...

For our own website click here.

The circus is in town!

Some time ago we noticed three red trucks driving between Cluny and Cormatin. Nothing spectacular, but for the fact that one truck was pulling three trailers. How this sort of concoction can safely reverse more then 6 feet is beyond me. Anyway, when we overtook them, we noticed that it was a circus obviously heading for some village in the neighbourhood. I must confess that I am not really a circus fiend. The only live performance I ever saw was in Singapore, by a small Malaysian (Indian) family circus. The father, mother and children acted as jugglers, acrobats, contortionists, etc., but the whole performance was of a charming simplicity, possibly helped by the natural grace of these Indian people.

The only other experience I have with circuses are the five minutes I could keep my eyes open whenever there was a circus on TV.
Accidentally we stumbled on some posters, where Circus Azurias was announced to perform in Massilly, Saint-Gengoux and with two shows in Cormatin. Since we had in those days a lot of work going on around the house, we decided to treat ourselves to a night on the town. The circus was located by the Plan d’Eau, hence we parked our car somewhere near and walked past the tent and the livestock roaming around the tent and bought tickets for € 7.00 each. Children paid € 5.00. The livestock consisted of a horse, a pony, some chickens, a cat, a dog, a llama and a cow with enormous horns, possibly of Ugandan extraction. We went inside and turned out to be the only grownups not accompanying children.

The show went on for 45 minutes with a 5 minute break in which sweets were sold. The balance : 10 adults, 19 children, gross income of the evening € 445. The attractions: two kids who did handstands, a horse walking in a circle ending with its front legs on a table, a llama idem, a pony idem, a poodle idem, 3 ferrets doing slaloms on a shelf with vertical sticks nailed to it, a cat idem, and finally the inevitable clown’s act. This circus was also run by a family, most likely parents, children and grandchildren, just like the Malaysian circus. Unfortunately the French people missed the elegance of the Asians, and I think this is a very kind way of putting it.
What I am wondering about is this: how can a family of at least 7 persons survive on an income of this scale; it would not surprise me if the maintenance of the trucks costs more than the revenue of one evening.

Anyway, since these sort of attractions are normally held in winter, we now know what we can do on a long, cold boring winter evening; see an even more boring circus!



For our own website click here.

Birds of a feather?

Regularly, throughout the season, we notice campers as well as gîte guests going for a walk, armed with a pair of binoculars. Others are staying on the premises, pointing their binoculars at trees and listen very attentively to the surrounding sounds. No doubt these people are bird watchers, who keep an eye and an ear out for everything that warbles and flies or flutters.
I am a total nitwit when it comes to nature, and I have asked some of these people what exactly they were looking for, and what they found. Bird names like red-backed shrike, a tiny little bird, several types of woodpeckers that hammer our trees, red kites and a variety of song birds were mentioned. I think I myself might have spotted a golden oriole, I certainly have been woken up by nightingales, and I had a number of brief encounters with hoopoes.

However, I am more excited about encounters with in my eyes more exotic species. In winter, and only then, I have seen a white heron around here. It stands in various fields around here, flies off very elegantly, and I assume it is every time the same bird I have seen around here. Last winter I drove through Chazelle, and there it stood, on a weir in the Grosne, close to the lavoir. Fortunately I had my camera ready, hence I could have a good picture of him before he flew off. An internet search revealed that it might have been a great egret, but having said that, an expert could come up wit a better determination.
Last summer a pair of storks took residence in Cormatin. We spotted them for the first time in a field near Cormatin, pecking the ground in search of, I believe, worms or frogs. They build a nest on a chimney of the Cormatin château. I know that storks are not exactly rare; in the Alsace, but also in Southern France and in Spain almost every bell tower is crowned with a stork’s nest. But the whole population of Cormatin, all 503 of them, find the storks a fascinating phenomenon.

My last spotting was a rather strange one. Towards one September evening I was looking out over the fields from our sitting room, when I noticed a swarm of birds landing on the telephone cable running to our house. I saw them with the sun aslant behind them, hence I could not see them very clearly; still they did not seem ordinary birds. When I looked at them through a pair of binoculars, I noticed they were beautifully coloured birds. I managed to catch one with my camera just before the swarm took off again. With the help of a small bird book for laymen and some internet research, I suspected these had been European bee-eaters. Checking this with a birdwatcher confirmed this suspicion. The swarm was migrating, and obviously landed in Chazelle for a short break.

And then I thought how to close off this blog? The answer came the same day. We drove through Saint-Gengoux on our way to the local cave to get some wine, when we saw, sitting on a gate post in the middle of the day, a tawny owl. They normally live in the woods, and although Saint-Gengoux is not exactly a metropolis, it is also not that rural that tawny owls would nest in the town itself. The owl looked a bit sleepy, and I suspect it somehow got lost and mistook the gate post for a tree.
The moral of this story: to see interesting birds, it pays off to keep your eyes open in stead of investing in expensive equipment!

For our own website click here.