A lifelong saga describing the joys and sorrows, trials and tribulations, of a not-so-ordinary Englishman from childhood to retirement and his search for true love and the perfect nest.
British doctor awarded for Services to Health and Safety in the Workplace
Dr. I.G.A.Smallpiece, an Anglo-American emigré who is a recognised expert in the field of workplace psychology, today received the coveted Health and Safety Services Medal of Honour from prime minister, Boris Johnston, in recognition of his brilliant achievement in ensuring the future respiratory health of construction workers. I was fortunate enough to catch up with Dr. Smallpiece at St.Katharines Dock in London, as he was about to board his private yacht on which he has been residing ever since the country first learned about the coronavirus scare in China. I asked him what it was that he had done that warranted such an honour. He explained that working in the Health and Safety industry for the past thirty years had left him frustrated and dismayed by the lack of awareness among construction workers of the health dangers from the many dusts and volatile vapours they come into contact with on a daily basis, and their complete lack of interest in wearing the appropriate PPE that was provided by their employers, especially the wearing of face masks. Last December he had been in Washington at a conference of construction industry executives and at dinner one evening he had found himself sitting next to Donald Trump, who also happens to be an old friend of the doctor from when they were both students at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Laughing now he said it was amazing to meet Donald after all these years and described how “The Strumpet”, as his friend Don had been nicknamed at school, was always coming up with weird crazy and outlandish ideas of how he was going to control the world. Apparently the President was still doing the same old routine at that dinner party, gushing on about the most amazing virus he had learnt about from another of their student buddies who was now working in a laboratory in Wuhan, having been forcefully repatriated back to China after being found guilty of a series of sex offences at the university where he was a resident professor of epidemiology. Mr. Trump had told Dr. Smallpiece, and I quote him word for word, “Old Hochoi has found the most amazing germ, a really great germ, a great great germ, that is just what we need to stop these wretched lefties from spouting so much fake news . . .” The conversation between them had then gone on to make lots of very non-PC jokes about the way Asians took so readily to wearing masks in the street at the slightest sign of bad air, and how the masks were also very efficient at cutting down their ability to have meaningful conversations, let alone shout down their opponents.
On the plane coming home from the conference, Dr. Smallpiece had an idea whirling around in his head, a truly eureka moment in fact, which he held in check until he arrived back in London and immediately requested an audience with the prime minister. “I explained to the PM” he continued, “about the terrible lack of awareness of the need to wear face masks on construction sites and the need to find a way of playing on the psyche of the workers so that they would happily accept the idea of wearing face masks all day long.” And the doctor had gone on to explain to Mr. Johnston how the idea of scaring the general public into wearing facemasks would quickly permeate throughout the construction industry, and the introduction of this amazing virus that his friend Don had told him about just might be the answer. Mr. Johnston had initially looked perplexed but had then replied quickly “It sounds reasonable to me. I .. er .. wouldn’t wear a mask myself of course. But . .er . . yes, go on, give it a try, it can’t do any harm.” And thus Dr. Smallpiece had been given the go-ahead, and as we now know his idea was a brilliant success. He seemed totally unconcerned when I asked him if he had expected the fallout that we have all witnessed these last few months. Did he really think it was worth all those lives that had been lost, once COVID19 had got totally out of control. “And what about the ruination of the British economy?” I managed to shout to him as he disappeared into his yacht and a couple of flunkies, wearing bullet-proof vests, carrying powerful looking sidearms and wielding batons, whipped up the gangplank and threatened me menacingly.
An acronymically inspired tale of eyes from the past peering into a worrying future.
We were jarred awake by the unearthly sound of a sudden, short, supernatural low-frequency BUZZ from deep down in the bowels of the earth. Jumping out of bed and staggering bleary-eyed to the bathroom to grab my old red dressing gown from its hook on the wall, not wanting to expose my unadorned family jewels to the originator of this sleep-shattering blast, I did a quick Cook’s Tour of our 1000+ SF of living space and discovered only rare SOCAL rain pattering hard against closed windows and spied palm trees bending their trunks, cowering in the face of a strong SSW wind. Pattering back to our bedroom on my brown woollen sock encased feet, I found not my sleeping bride in our old queen bed, but curled up on an old velveteen couch, a spectral young female with cropped black hair, brown eyes and a slightly snub nose reading a Penguin copy of George Orwell’s “1984”.
Looking up at me she opened those sweet lips from so far back in my past.
“Is the future really going to be like this?”
My hesitation must have unnerved her, for the apparition slowly dissolved away in front of my eyes, and back in the here and now, I glanced over at my beautiful wife who had returned to her own land of dreams and was now curled, foetus-like beneath the flowers of the duvet, a wisp of a smile on her sleepy face. Slipping back into my normal bedtime nakedness, I followed her beneath the covers and quickly returned to my previous somnolent state.
My mind however, continued to race, eager to return to the specter from the past. Very soon I was standing in front of a large bay window, with my back to that same old velveteen couch, remembering the future from which I had returned.
I mused out loud, trying to calm the fear I had heard in her voice, but not wishing to destroy this renewed time lapse relationship we were experiencing.
“I’m not sure about Big Brother watching our every move, but I know the pigs from “Animal Farm” will certainly be taking control”
“Nice segue my love, but try to get real”
“No, it is . . . I mean . . . will be like that, pigs will be presidents and prime ministers” and then getting slightly out of literary context I continued wildly, “monetary matters will rule their thinking processes and people will be mere pawns in their global games.”
All the dire warnings from the WHO and the CDC were rushing through my brain. The uselessness of NATO, the UN, the EEC, and even their predecessor, the League of Nations, was clearly demonstrating the inadequacies of the human race to organise itself and unite its millions of different factions to fight a common enemy. Racking my brain, I sought to warn my pretty young lady friend, that things might get even worse, Cold War would become a threat from the past, weapons would be circling the earth like Sputniks, evil drug lords would make the Heroin Wars seem like gang fights in the playground, and COVID19 would become the threat to beat all threats to humanity.
Reaching over to my bookshelf I pulled out another well-thumbed Penguin edition.
“Here Skolly, read this and you will see another alarming possibility for our future”.
But, as I bent down over the back of the couch, handing her my copy of Albert Camus’ “The Plague”, the beautiful wraith slowly faded into the encircling mist, and I was left with nothing but the sound of water splashing its way down gutters, and the low light from an unusually damp grey South California dawn filtered into the room as my sweet Celine slept on blissfully at my side.
After all those journeys to Europe and a couple of forays into Central and South America, Celine and I thought we should give this great continent of North America at least a chance to show its mettle. Son Number One recently took the bold step of moving his family from south California to South Carolina and my brother-in-law, always on the lookout for value-for-money housing, kept saying how wonderful the Carolinas appeared to be. Then someone else mentioned how popular the little city of Asheville NC was becoming, what a wonderful climate it had and the natural beauty of the surrounding countryside. Thus with the seed of an idea to travel east well and truly sown, an invitation to an 80thbirthday party in my old hometown of Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario gave us just the catalyst we needed to start planning another little jaunt, one week reliving my old memories, and a second week exploring places completely new to both of us.
April beside Lake Ontario was never a guarantee of warm weather and North Carolina was a complete unknown so we packed assuming we might see some snow initially and would perhaps need a little sunblock later on. Climate Change was on our side this time and we were spared that final wintry blast that I remembered of old. Indeed there was sunshine enough to produce a small rainbow in the mist of the Niagara Falls, though small icebergs, remnants of the heavy freeze-up of recent months, were still making the death-defying leap over the edge and a lace of ice and snow decorated the fallen rocks along the gorge below the falls. The city of Niagara Falls continues to grow, with new hotels lining the edge of the escarpment above the never-ending crowds of tourists jostling for position along the railing, each one hoping to catch the perfect selfie to join the millions of other nearly identical pictures on Facebook.
Visiting the past can be painful and I was unsure what emotions I would feel being so close to the house where I had watched my sons grow into manhood, and which still contained so many memories of our past family life together. But when we pulled up outside what had once been my driveway and found no-one at home, we happily wandered around the old estate and admired the changes made since my departure, as I realised that the past is simply a part of what makes me the person I am today and is something I should enjoy without fear. We even had afternoon tea with my old neighbours as if nothing had really changed!
A few days staying in Burlington with old friends also helped to soften the experience and readied us for what was a novelty for me, three days of sightseeing in Toronto. It’s funny how one can live close to a large city for so long only to realise some years later how little one actually knows about the place. My excuse as far as Toronto is concerned is that I was always far too busy trying to make a business work whilst raising a family, looking after a very old house and tending the couple of acres it sat on. But the real truth is I don’t have a great love of cities, full-stop. What I do have however, and share with Celine, is an enjoyment of museums, art galleries and general wandering around new surroundings, and so it was with some surprise that I realised what a nice place Toronto is to do those things. When I lived in Canada people often told me that the city was really a conglomeration of small villages and didn’t seem like a big city at all. Well, times have changed and downtown Toronto most definitely has a big city feel about it, what with the enormous amount of new and very high high-rise building that has taken place in the last few decades. Wanting to be ‘nice and central’ we had found ourselves an AirBnB apartment on the 35thfloor of one of the many ‘little’ skyscrapers that have sprung up, this one being at the junction of Front and John Streets. Living at such a great height was an unusual experience for both of us. The promised wonderful views were fine if you like looking at other tall buildings, though they were indeed rather beautiful when lit up at night; the ‘beautiful lake vista’ however was only visible if you knew exactly where to look and between which buildings it could be sighted; but it was well placed, ten minutes walk from Union Station, five from the Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays were just starting the new baseball season, and even less to the CN Tower from which one does indeed get a superb 360degree vista of the lakeside city. Sadly the Leafs had just got knocked out of the end-of-season playoffs so I didn’t get a chance to stomp and holler my encouragement to that ‘great’ ice-hockey team that we followed with such enthusiasm when the boys were growing up as young Canadians.
Still museums are our thing. To start off our three days as tourists in the city we spent an afternoon enjoying the fine art collection in the Art Gallery of Ontario. I particularly appreciated the works of the Group of Seven, artists who decided that Canada needed its own art to dignify its place in the world; and we both liked the renovated Dundas Street façade designed by Frank Gehry – who went on to design the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao amongst other great buildings. Our walk back from there took us through Toronto’s China Town, an area still dominated by two storey homes with small front and back gardens, where trees flourished and greenery prevailed, enabling us to understand those past comments about the neighbourliness of Toronto life. We stopped in the “Lucky Moose Food Mart” for one or two basics, enjoyed an extremely delicious vegetarian burger at “Fresh”, and then found “Fresh and Wild”, a well-stocked organic grocery which answered all of Celine’s wildest foodie dreams. And thus suitably fortified and our larder replete, we took a ride up to the top of the CN Tower to enjoy the sunset and the lights of the city coming on as darkness fell.
For whatever reason, the next day we decided to forego another museum visit and take ourselves to Toronto’s largest tourist attraction by visitor numbers, namely the Eaton Centre, now no longer owned and operated by the eponymous department store chain started by Timothy Eaton in the 19thcentury, but by the faceless multi-billion dollar commercial real estate operation Cadillac Fairview Corporation. Well I guess everyone has to go shopping sometime and to do so in a building partly inspired by a galleria in Milan, Italy, is a better way to do it than most. And luckily for us, Lucky Brand had a sale on, and they had some different lines from our local store in Long Beach CA, so our shopping expedition was not wasted.
Our third day in Toronto was meant to be our last and we opted to visit Casa Loma, a Gothic Revival style mansion, or faux castle, constructed for financier Sir Henry Pellatt at the start of the 20thcentury, and which eventually helped in that gentleman’s financial downfall when he found how much tax he owed to the city fathers. Totally pretentious, it is nonetheless a fascinating example of one man showing his feathers off to his fellow citizens and then falling out of the tree, and occupied us gainfully for another few hours on what had turned out to be a rather drizzly cold wet day. Thank goodness for Uber when the weather proves uncooperative; in spite of the heavy traffic we were back downtown in plenty of time to collect our bags from the safe hands of the concierge in the International Hotel and to take the UP train to Lester Pearson Airport for our evening flight to Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina.
But it was not to be . . . Bad weather had totally disrupted flights up and down the east coast, including ours, and we found ourselves spending the night in the fairly decent Hampton Inn and Suites Hotel adjacent to the runway we should have been taking off from, and rebooked on a flight for not the following morning but the day after. So Saturday saw us not making our way to our mountain top retreat in Asheville, but with time on our hands to do one more tourist thing in somewhat cooler and much less greener Toronto. We took the UP train back into town and walked the mile or so up to the Royal Ontario Museum where we spent most of our stay fascinated by The “Royal Arts of Jodhpur”. Mainly a history of the Rathore Dynasty, with lots of Indian art through the centuries, this temporary exhibit gave us a marvellous insight into the privileged life of India’s very rich and powerful, aided and abetted by British colonialism of course. Otherwise the Museum was only so-so, not very well organised and nothing of very much interest to a pair of well-travelled Europeans who have already seen, if not all of it, a lot of it. The ride back to the UP station at the end of the afternoon was a less than wonderful experience as the Uber driver seemed to have more interest in his passengers than in watching the road. Still at least we had the cab to ourselves, instead of sharing it, as we did a couple of days previously, with the rather frightening ‘gentleman’ who smelled of goodness knows what, and caused our very dapper driver to apologise profusely for his presence once he had left; a good reason for us to avoid shared rides in the future.
A final journey with UP to the airport and one more night in the Hampton Hotel and the next morning we were safely on our way, flying above the rather cloudy skies of north-eastern USA to explore another state, of which I will tell more in my next post.
At every year’s end we are all encouraged to analyse the year gone by and then make resolutions to do things even better in the coming year. Well I think Celine and I would be hard pressed to have a better year in 2019, but I am quite sure we can have just as much fun!!
2018 was decidedly busy for us with a couple of long trips, one ‘down under’ and the other back ‘across the pond’. There’s no yellow brick road guiding travellers to the Oz we visited, but it is a country with a lot of magic, and being predominantly populated by migrants from the ‘old country’, it is an easy place for Anglo-Saxons – and their English-speaking wives – to find their way and feel at home. Crossing the Atlantic however, is a very different kind of journey and however many times we have both done it, we never cease to be surprised by what we find in dear old continental Europe.
We both enjoy travelling, as much for the adventure of discovering new places as for the enjoyment of returning to old pastures. Or so we thought when we planned our trip to Italy this autumn. “Let’s have a look at those regions of the country we haven’t seen before, for surely they will be every bit as good as the Italy we already know!” Lesson number one: Do not assume, and don’t take the recommendations of others at face value. Lesson number two: There may well be good reasons why one part of a country is so much more popular than another.
Lesson number three is a harder one to swallow. Just because you have enjoyed a country several times before as a tourist, does not automatically justify the corollary “hence it must be a really great place to live”. [If you haven’t already read my previous post “SFTF Italia o Portogallo Pt.5 Decisions, decisions . . .or rather a lack of same!” you may be wondering what leads me to this conclusion.] My migration to Long Beach CA to start a new life with Celine has some relevance to this lesson. My few short visits for various family gatherings prior to taking that step totally failed to educate me about the Californian lifestyle. I followed my heart in making the decision, and have absolutely no regrets in that regard. However, my previous habitats of semi-rural England, lakeside dwelling in Canada, plus a couple of short sojourns in hot dusty Kuwait and tropical Nigeria, in no way prepared me for a life in the seemingly endless megalopolis that surrounds Los Angeles. So I have to admit our recent peregrinations have been prompted by my wish to return to a lifestyle more suited to my ‘needs’ and, happily, Celine has been a more than willing fellow traveller but with slightly different expectations.
Perhaps with the exception of our trip to Australia, which was very much an adventure for its own sake, the journeys we have taken in recent years have all had the underlying goal of finding that perfect place to build our new nest. Unfortunately we have not been as successful as we might have hoped, for a lot of reasons which I do not intend to reiterate here. The result is that we are now having second thoughts about the whole idea of re-establishing ourselves in Europe. Indeed we have resolved to go forego foreign travel for at least the next twelve months and give more consideration to staying in the USA. After all we have family here on both sides of the continent, including especially four delightful grandchildren whose growing pains we enjoy being part of; and its going to be several more years before they will be joining the ranks of young globe-trotters able to visit us in far off places.
So what are we looking for???
Our combined needs and wishes for the perfect nesting site make for a complicated conundrum; collectively they fall into two main categories, location and site features. Location involves geography, climate, the natural environment, access to local shops, markets, cultural pursuits, fitness classes, health facilities, and these days more than ever, local political and social agendas. The features of a site that are relevant to our search are all the usual things, condition, age, size, garden, garage, basement, neighbourhood, and so forth.
As to the specifics of our particular ideal nest specification, we would love to find a well maintained two/three bedroom home with enough space for a “granny annex” and with a view of nature at its most glorious. This should be within a small garden to keep flowers on the table, fresh veggies in the diet and green fingers out of mischief. And to nurture our creative selves we would need space for a studio for my artistic wife, a garage or workshop for yours truly and of course . . . a study . We want to be close by a fair-sized town and yet not surrounded by dreary suburbanisation. Weatherwise we are conscious that advancing years and several decades of living in sunny south California have, between them, made the prospect of us accepting a life with temperatures regularly hovering around freezing point insupportable. At the same time we would like to enjoy once more the beauty of changing seasons, but without the need to shovel snow on anything more than a very occasional and rare basis. Geographically we remain undecided whether mountains or the sea are the more desirable background to a contented life; both have their virtues but an unspoiled view of the ocean nearly always incurs an undesirable financial penalty. The potential for hurricanes, severe flooding and uncomfortably high humidity for prolonged periods in the summer are also things we can do without.
The next question is where on earth, or, now we have for the moment taken Europe out of the bucket, at least where on this vast North American continent, can we find such an ideal place? California is fine in many ways but by virtue of its, in my opinion, highly over-rated climate is on the whole over-priced. Moving further north to Oregon or Washington appeals to the nature-lover in me but the prospect of numerous days of wet rainy and/or misty weather holds no charm for Celine. Continuing up the map and returning to my second homeland of Canada, in particular the coastal areas of British Columbia, ‘God’s Country’ to its devotees, is probably a non-starter for much the same reasons, although the prospect of a better national health service, and an increased pension for me, are quite appealing. Large mountain ranges and barren deserts harbour the extremes of weather that both of us wish to avoid so that would seem to eliminate a few more of the Western states; however, Colorado and perhaps some parts of Arizona stay on our must-visit list. The vast section commonly called ‘middle-America’ is a region about which I know almost nothing, apart from the weather that people experience there, and we don’t see many billboards, or read many articles, suggesting that the place we are looking for might be found there.
So we are left with the Eastern seaboard of which I have some brief experience, having lived on that side of the continent for many years and taken vacations with my family to New England and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I also recently read Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in The Woods” which makes a good case for the Appalachian Mountains, and as I write, my son Tom and his family are considering a move to South Carolina. Keeping well away from Washington DC and New York and all that those two great cities imply in their own fashion, we are left with the pretty countryside of New England – too cold in the winter, Florida, Georgia and perhaps South Carolina – hurricane territory and far too humid in the summer, plus North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and the Virginias, all of which have some beautiful countryside.
I have no idea what all this is leading to, and even less idea about when and where we will find that idyllic nesting ground. So for the next few months we will plan nothing, keep a careful eye on TrustedHousesitters.com and HomeExchange.com and see what, if anything, turns up trumps. It would also be a good time for me to get back to writing my ‘memoirs’, which was, after all, the original reason I set up this blog site. And then at the back of my mind I still have the feeling that we should go and explore a bit deeper into Portugal, though not the Algarve, and have we really rejected Central America in its entirety!!
Any and all suggestions will be gratefully received and carefully considered. Thanks for reading and I will keep writing. See you again soon!
As we prepared to leave Getaria and say “Agur” to Euskal Herria, or Euskadi, the Spanish Basque Country, we realised what a lovely place we were leaving behind, a ‘country’ full of contrasts, surprises, elegance and history, a landscape that offers mountains and valleys, farmland and forest, vineyards, sheep and cows, secluded beaches and golden sands, rocky promontories and wide inviting bays. And yet this is also an industrial area, where steel production was once of prime importance and still leaves behind a legacy of small industrial towns squeezed into valleys between steep hillsides where sheep graze and the countryside prevails. These same small towns are also full of six, seven, even eight storey apartment blocks, the archetypal architectural feature of so much of the Spain we have seen on this trip. The housing style is also a feature of many of the little coastal towns and villages that still support fishing fleets, the other primary industry of this part of Spain for many hundreds of years. Getaria, with a fleet of a dozen or more modern fishing boats, is typical of these communities, though without having lost the charm of its location that continues to make it such an attractive proposition to prospective new residents such as us. Others, such as nearby Orio, make no pretence of their industrial heritage. And then there are the blatant tourist towns and cities, San Sebastian being the most impressive with the charms of its old town, and the splendid beaches around the Bahia de La Concha; and on a much smaller scale, there was our local town of Zarautz. Bilbao, the first great Basque city we visited, is a fine mélange of fading industrial city, seaport, culture, attractive old town and elegant new town, and is in the midst of beautiful rolling farmland, forests of eucalyptus and Spanish oaks down steep hillsides towards the ever-changing and never dull seas of the Bay of Biscay.
And leaving behind Basque Country, also means saying “Au revoir” to Lapurdi or Labourd, the coastal region of Le Pays Basque Français, wherein we discovered the charms of Hendaye and Saint-Jean-de-Luz, together with their hinterland of yet more green, rolling hills and the well-groomed villages of Urrugne and Ascain. And then there is the spa city of Biarritz on the extreme northern edge of Basque Country, where rocky shores give way to a seemingly endless sandy strand, renowned as a seaside resort since the French Revolution when sea-baths became fashionable. Even Napoleon Bonaparte broke long-standing social prejudices to bathe in Basque Country’s coastal waters. And today Biarritz continues to be a fashionable resort for holidaymakers from all levels of society, even if it is not a place that we would choose to plant our roots anew.
So many lovely locales and so many potential nest-building sites to consider on both sides of the French-Spanish divide, ensured that we were going away from Basque Country with a mass of good memories, and at the back of our minds the knowledge that this is one region we could certainly consider as a place to spend our future years. However, we still have to explore La Bella Italia . . . and give Italy a chance, and nor should we dismiss the claimed virtues of a life in little Portugal, bravely facing the enormous Atlantic Ocean along the western edge of the Iberian peninsular!
Canèle, a Bordelaise patisserie, a bit like a mini treacle pudding!
Our visit to Basque Country brought the nest searching aspect of our journey to an end. But never wishing to be in too much of a rush at any time in our travels, we had given ourselves just over a week to make the 850 kilometre drive back to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, and decided to take a couple of breaks on the way to see more of France’s historic gems. Our first stop was at Bordeaux, famed for canèles, as well as the eponymous wine region. Once again through the services of AirBnB, we had found a small studio apartment right in the centre of the city, also with the all-important parking space; remember, we were driving a brand-new, short-term lease car from Peugeot, and, remembering our experience in Montpellier, had no wish to expose it any more than necessary, to the risks of overnight on-street parking in a large city.
Grande Théatre of the Opéra National de Bordeaux
Arriving in the early evening, we were slightly delayed by our GPS, which, seemingly unaware there is a wide city-centre boulevard called Allée de Tourney, had directed us to Passage de Tourney in a much scruffier part of town; still eventually, the correct address achieved, we were met by an ‘agent’ of the apartment’s ‘owner’. As we later came to understand, we were about to experience the not-so-desirable ‘commercial’ side of renting through AirBnB, where you are not staying in somebody’s home, but rather in a purchased-to-rent property, managed by a rental agency. That became even more obvious as we entered and found ourselves in a starkly furnished studio, with a pull-down bed that occupied most of the ‘living area’, and a TV fastened securely to the wall in a position where it could not be viewed comfortably from either the bed or the couch. Unfazed by this slight disappointment, we were, however, delighted to find ourselves staying in a fine old building on the corner of Place de la Comédie and opposite the Grand Théatre of the Opéra National de Bordeaux; we really could not have been better placed to explore this city that proved to be elegant in a Parisian sort of way. Actually the other way around, it is Paris that is elegant in a Bordeaux sort of way, for Baron Haussmann, an 18th century mayor of Bordeaux, supposedly used the city as a model when Emperor Napoleon lll asked him to re-design medieval Paris into the beautiful city we know today.
People and trams share the pedestrianised streets
We had given ourselves four days to ‘do Bordeaux’, thinking that would be plenty of time to also include an out-of-town drive to get a taste of the wine growing commune of Saint-Émilion. Which just goes to show how wrong one can be, for Bordeaux is chock full of stylish streets, museums and historic churches, being home to some 360 ‘monuments historiques’, as well as some fairly smart shopping, had we been so inclined. The city is spacious with lots of broad open Allées, or boulevards, and large plazas; it is also well pedestrianised which always adds to a wanderer’s pleasure, though one does have to watch out for trams, as they still share the roads with pedestrians on several of the main streets. Hardly any of the city is really, really old, with many buildings being in the Neo-Classical style popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the UNESCO World Heritage List credits Bordeaux as being “an outstanding urban and architectural ensemble”.
Cathédrale Saint-André de Bordeaux
For our first day, we chose to head towards Cathédrale Saint-André de Bordeaux, consecrated by Pope Urban ll in 1096. Very little remains of the original Romanesque structure, but the early thirteenth century Portail Royal with its beautiful stone carvings around the portico, is a striking testament to the stonemason’s art of that era. Even in such elegant surroundings, walking the streets is always a tiring process, especially for me with my deteriorating knee joints, and so we made a couple of rest-stops along the way.
Porte Cailhou, one of the few remaining signs of the city’s original fortifications.
The first stop was at a café near to Porte Cailhou, where we sampled our first ‘canelés’, a sweet Bordelaise speciality, a bit like a small suet pudding with a rum flavor and burnt sugar coating; we were only mildly impressed, though your sweet-toothed scribe did feel it necessary to ‘try’ a second one a few days later – and, since getting home, has discovered them being sold on a small scale in our local Peet’s Coffee and Tea! And to complete the day’s peregrinations, we stopped by ‘Any Teas’, a salon de thé hidden in the smart little Passage Sarget, where we whiled away the rest of the daylight hours supping our tea and coffee and enjoying their delicious apple tart and chocolate truffle with strawberries.
Coffee, tea and patisseries at “Any Tea”
Our second day began somewhat frustratingly, as we were unable to unlock the front door, the door handle being about to drop off and the key seemingly jammed into the lock. So we waited awhile for our agent to obtain the services of a locksmith and an hour later we were gratefully on our way. We did have the last laugh however, for when we got back in the evening and found a fine new lock installed, I realized that the problem with the key was actually partly of my own doing; I had got so used to the horizontal orientation of the keyhole in our previous abode that I hadn’t noticed that in this door lock the keyhole was oriented vertically, in a quite normal fashion if I’m honest. Still our landlord can be thankful to us in one way, as the new door lock was a much more substantial affair, offering the sort of high security we had seen in many French city apartments during our travels in the past, and the new door handle showed no more signs of wanting to drop off the door.
Rue Saint Catherine in Bordeaux is a 1250m long pedestrian shopping precinct.
Undeterred by this delay, we still managed to see a lot, starting with a walk along the kilometer-long pedestrianised shopping precinct that is Rue Sainte-Catherine, towards our first destination, the very elegant fifteenth century La Grosse Cloche.
La Grosse Cloche is attached to l’église Saint-Éloi, and it is very handsome! Built on top of the medieval wall, It consists of two 40-metre-high circular towers and a central bell tower.
This impressive bell, weighing 7,800kg, is housed in a belfry built on top of the remains of the thirteenth century Porte Saint-Éloi; on each side of the tower is a clock face, one of which includes a strange semi-circular dial, and the other, the phases of the sun and moon [to find out more about this interesting time piece visit www.invisiblebordeaux.blogspot.com].
Churches always seem to be on our daily itinerary, for even though neither of us are the slightest bit religious, we do appreciate their beautiful architecture. So Basilique Saint-Michel, said to have a splendid, flamboyant Gothic interior was our next planned stop; but we arrived at Place Meynard to find a rather unimpressive, grubby exterior and the doors firmly closed to visitors for some unstated reason. After a consolation ‘café’, we continued our quest for religious splendour along rue Camille Sauvageau to Église Sainte Croix, annexed to a Benedictine Abbey founded in the seventh century. There it seems our luck would fare no better, for we were greeted by the following handwritten note attached to tape across the front of the open doorway, “Fermé: car il y avait eu un incendie dans le batiment”. Luckily the fire had not spread to the outside of the building, so we did get a good look at the very impressive portico around the front door.
The intricately sculptured facade of the Église Sainte-Croix (“Church of the Holy Cross”) built in the late 11th-early 12th centuries. Wow!!!
Built in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries the stone carvings are a mass of intricately carved figures of artisans at their trades mingling with religious characters; yet another feast of the stone-mason’s art.
Vegan dining at Munchies
Our fervor for religious architecture only partially satisfied, we decided to take a different tack and visit what some guides reckon to be the best museum in town, the Musée d’Aquitaine. We were passing through the “garment district” at the cheap end of rue Sainte-Catherine at that stage, when we happened upon an interesting-looking little ‘vegan’ café called Munchies [Facebook page: “@munchiesbordeaux”] on rue des Augustins. I have to admit I approached the fare with some skepticism, but our meal of a large bowl of four or five different salads with sesame rice, washed down with a fiery ginger beer for me and a kombucha for Celine, was one of the tastiest meals we had purchased during our entire six months of travelling! Thus well fuelled up for our museum tour, we arrived at what was indeed, a superb display of the history of Aquitaine, and of Bordeaux in particular, from Paleolithic times – think Lascaux Caves – through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. French museums seem to have a special knack for excellent presentation and easily assimilated, detail of information.
The Bordeaux merchants developed trade with the colonies, particularly slave trading in French Guinea which made them very rich!
However, we were surprised to see so much space devoted to the history of slavery, and, indeed, rather shocked to learn how much of the city’s wealth came from it’s ship-owners’ participation in the Atlantic shipping triangle of the 17th/18th/19th centuries, and the all important slave trade that made those voyages so profitable; fascinating yet very disturbing, even though the concept of slavery itself was not new to either of us.
We saved Saint-Émilion for our last day in Bordeaux and the weather gods saved a damp, foggy, misty day for what should have been a sunny drive in the countryside, for we had, of course, ignored the fact that it was still winter.
The charming village of Saint-Émilion was named after the monk Émilion, a travelling confessor, who settled in a hermitage carved into the rock here in the 8th century.
But what better way to spend a grey day than a visit to a UNESCO World Heritage Site – granted in 1999 to both the village and the surrounding domaine of vineyards, as being “cultural landscapes”.
It is a charming village, sitting on top of a little hill in the middle of fairly flat, uninteresting countryside, unless you like the view of never-ending vineyards; it has lots of old buildings, and has been completely spruced up and the cobbled roads relaid; indeed, everything has been done to make the place pleasing to the thousands of tourist eyes that must view it each year.
One of the steep little streets in Saint-Émilion
Except that every other shop is a ‘wine-boutique’, there isn’t a typical French café or even a salon de thé worthy of the title, the Hotel du Plaisance at the top of the village on Place du Clocher is ridiculously expensive (entrées starting at €65 and above, main courses in three figures and rooms costing around €500 per night), and the whole place seems ‘Disneyfied’, totally twee and rather false, having completely lost the charm of a typical French village.
It does however have one redeeming feature, the hour-long guided tour of the monolithic church and the hermitage of the monk Émilion, a travelling confessor who lived in a cave carved into the rock in the eighth century; it was the monks who followed him who started up commercial wine production in the area, although the first vineyards there were planted by the Romans as early as the second century AD.
The monolithic church in St. Émilion was carved out of ONE solid rock at the beginning of the 12th century. From the outside, it is impossible to imagine the volume of this church.
The hill on which the village is built, is on an outcrop of relatively soft limestone, and the very impressive monolithic church is carved directly into the rock. It is the largest such church in all of Europe, being 38m long, 20m wide and 11m high, and was an important factor in the village gaining its UNESCO recognition. It was therefore somewhat surprising to learn that the whole underground complex is privately owned, in spite of the National Heritage signs everywhere, and disappointing to be told that, as a result, photography was not allowed.
Our ‘Cook’s Tour’ of Bordeaux coming to an end, it was soon time to try to re-pack our suitcases in suitable fashion to satisfy airline weight and size restrictions, something we had enjoyed being without for so many months of travel, and to get on the road again for our last stop, the medieval city of Poitiers.
