Last Night Was Special
Nana said, ‘Oh, you must come to the market on Monday evening. You’ll love it!’ She mentions the name of the place where it is held; but that’s a really tiny village in the Col des Chèvres - why would they hold a market there, I wonder? Anyway, there’s not a lot to do...
This is Where I Live
When you visit La Truchère, listen out for the cry of the sigognes blanches. It’s a distinctive, high pitched screech - not beautiful, but immediately recognisable. Look skywards and, if your luck is in, you’ll see these huge birds - storks - circling round and round,...
What’s (not) Cooking in Burgundy?
Boeuf Bourguignon - is essentially a beef stew made with mushrooms and onions and plenty of Burgundy wine. This is a great dish regularly destroyed by participants on the excruciatingly awful UKTV programme, ‘Come Dine With Me’! Or there’s Coq au Vin, another...
A Bit More About Cows
Fascinating creatures - cows! I know just seeing them doing not a lot in fields may not be rivetting stuff but haven't you ever, for instance, idly wondered how it is that they all manage to point in much the same direction when they are eating and why that might be?...
Whimsy and the French
Whimsy is not something that those of Anglo-Saxon extraction are truly comfortable with except when it combines with the sort of monomaniacal madness that only the French seem capable of. Then, even though we don’t quite understand it, we do warm to it. Such as that...
Ahhhh! Bisto!
Bisto? In Burgundy? Surely not! Yet I distinctly heard the word. And, spoken in a crowded market in Tournus, a place that is about as close to the centre of France as you can get. We were threading our way through the crowds, made more dense by the addition of the...
A Perfect day
How many of them are there?Perfect days? Too few just lately.How to recognise one? It is to be transported to another place, another time, another life; where all those niggles that come in the night, the daily irritations, the ceaseless concern about the future are...
My Kind of Day
Super indulgent - definitely! But there we are - someone has to keep up the hedonistic traditions - if only in a fairly mild-ish way; such was our day out last Thursday in the region of Beaujolais. In my head, I always think of ‘Beaujolais’ as a word-picture - one...
Cheese Tart and Champagne
From Calais we head south: first stop, Cambrai. A truly northern French town. Pockmarks of shrapnel still scar the walls of those buildings that survived the onslaught of two World Wars. Yet Cambrai has a feeling of solidity and permanence, its name forever enshrined...
My First Blog
First Blog - phew! And so many directions in which to go. I could come over all sort of philosophical or maybe be a bit ‘preachey’? I could try to guess what you, my small audience, might want to read about and write something upon those lines or I could just get on...
