I was so excited at the market last Saturday when I saw this wonderful shopping trolley. In response to my post on navets (turnips), a reader suggested several expressions including arrête de poireauter from poireau meaning leek. And here is a wonderful example: j’aime pas trop poireauter, which means I don’t like waiting around, very appropriate for the type of trolley that most people take to the market where you often have to wait in a queue.
So what is the connection with leeks which, incidentally, is the national emblem of Wales ?
It was in 1866 that planter son poireau meaning “to plant one’s leek” was first recorded. Although poireau means the male member (I’m using a euphemism to avoid attracting unwanted spam), the expression has no erotic connotations. It simply meant “waiting for a long time”, based on the image of the leek sticking up straight from the ground, and the influence of the expression rester planter (stay planted) meaning immobile or unable to move, like our English expression, “he planted himself next to her”.
About ten years later, the expression faire le poireau appeared as an extension to the one above and with exactly the same meaning. The verbal form – poireauter – was soon formed.
Now I don’t want to dispute this explanation given by expressio.fr, but I’d like to offer my own personal interpretation. We planted leeks this year for the first time. I grew them from seedlings and we then replanted them. They do not stand up straight as you can see from the photo. In fact they are very floppy. They do, however, seem to be taking absolutely ages to grow so maybe that is the origin of poireauter. We certainly seem to be hanging around waiting for them!
An expression mentioned by another reader is qu’il s’occupe de ses oignons meaning that he should mind his own business. I dropped in again at expression.fr which gives two explanations. I prefer the second one because it’s a little more elegant.
In the centre of France, one of the signs of a woman’s independence was her right to cultivate a corner of the garden where she grew onions to sell on the market and make some money of her own. Men were often heard to say to women who wanted to stick their noses in their husbands’ business occupe-toi de tes oignons (go look after your onions) or ce n’est pas tes oignons (they’re not your onions). Considering that you only get one onion for each little bulb you plant, I don’t think they could have made much money …
It’s New Year’s Eve and there are just the two of us, in front of our fireplace. We’re not having anything complicated to celebrate the New Year. I once spent all day making a special dish that took forever and I didn’t think it was worth the trouble so we’re mainly having Christmas leftovers (unfortunately, we’ve finished our homemade foie gras). We’re having champagne though.
Christmas leftovers in front of the fire
I ask Jean Michel if he remembers his resolutions for 2015 and he just looks at me. “I have the bits of paper I wrote them on”, I say. So we have a look. Out of Jean Michel’s six resolutions, only one has come to fruition, but it’s the most important: “finding a better balance after retirement”. The last is also taking shape at the moment, namely improving his English. As we’re off to Australia for a month in mid-February, it’s more than important – it’s essential.
I then take a look at my five and burst out laughing. My score is even worse.
The first was to average 10,000 steps a day. I check it out on my iPhone app – 5,500. I try and console myself that for someone who spends a lot of the day in front of a computer, it isn’t too bad.
The second was to make a video for each Friday’s French post. Well, that’s a laugh! I don’t even write a Friday’s French post every week. I’m lucky if I write one a month though I wrote two recently in the same week J.
Number 3 was to sign up for Italian lessons. Yes, well, that didn’t get very far! January didn’t seem the ideal time to start because the class was already well underway and in September we went away for a month’s holiday. I might wait until I retire!
My fourth resolution was to help Jean Michel improve his English but he was far too busy all summer to be learning another language. However, now that he’s started listening to Michel Thomas again, I’m being very supportive.
Number 5 was to stop complaining and look on the positive side of life. I’m not sure about this one so I ask Jean Michel and Black Cat. They seem to think that I am positive on the whole and don’t complain most of the time so I guess that I can see it’s been mostly achieved.
Spring in our little wood – one of the bright sides of life
So now I’m wondering what resolutions I can put on the agenda this year and, do you know, I can’t think of any so I thought I might make a quick review of the year instead.
The most important thing is Jean Michel’s adjustment to retirement. I’d love to join him but I still have another 3 years and 4 months to go unless I suddenly strike it rich which doesn’t seem likely.
Bird watching from our wonderful window
After all Jean Michel’s hard work, we now have a wonderful kitchen window that looks out onto our little wood and gives us endless pleasure, especially bird watching now that we have outwitted the neighbour’s cat.
I don’t miss my life in Paris even remotely though I do miss my friends. I have been there only four times since we moved at the end of October 2014.
View from the window of thecrêperie during our most recent visit to Chambord on boxing day
We try to make the most of living (almost) in the country and among some of the most beautiful châteaux in the world. Chambord remains our favourite because you can go there any time for a walk, a bike ride, an ice-cream or a crêpe. We have taken full advantage of all the cycling possibilities offered to us.
I don’t blog a lot any more as you may realise. My readership went from 12,000 views a month in December 2014 up to 18,000 in May 2016 then down to 10,000 in December 2015. I lost a few subscribers in December but I quite understand that my reflections on bird feeding and walking in Blois are not nearly as exciting to most people as living in the Palais Royal! My “star” post is still “The Best Area to Stay in Paris”.
My other blog, Loire Daily Photo, dropped from 1200 in December 2014 to 1,100 in December 2015 after climbing to 1,600 in May. I wonder what was going on in May last year? However, despite the small audience, having a daily photo blog makes me much more aware of my surroundings and more interested in local history.
I don’t feel I have quite found my rhythm yet, but I can feel it coming.
Our New Year mistletoe
In any case, I’d like to wish all my readers a wonderful 2016 and thank you for stopping by.
I heard a new expression on France Info this week – “l’entre deux fêtes” – which literally means “between two celebrations”, the first being Christmas and the second New Year. It’s the same construction as ‘l’entre-deux-guerres”, which is what the French call the interwar years.
We’re spending the “trêve des confiseurs” walking off the confectioners’ ware at Chambord
When I mentioned it to Jean Michel, he said it wasn’t new but I checked it out on google and “l’entre deux fêtes” only has 4,000 hits whereas “l’entre-deux-guerres” has 576,000 so it can’t be that popular. Then he told me something much more interesting. The period between Christmas and New Year is also called “la trêve des confiseurs“. “the confectioner’s truce”. Now that’s intriguing!
The expression first appeared in France around 1875 during a period of lively discussion in the National Assembly (lower house of parliament) between the monarchists, Bonapartists and republicans about the future of the constitution of the Third Republic. In December 1874, all the groups in the National Assemblee agreed that the New Year was not a good time for this sort of debate. To promote peace and harmony, they decided to go their separate ways and take a holiday until the New Year.
The confectioners were delighted and business boomed! As a result, the satiric press coined the expression “trêve des confiseurs”.
Today, the expression is also used to describe the traditional period of slack on the stock exchange and on the football field at the end of the year.
There is another meaning as well – the period in teaching hospitals when medical students devote their time entirely to caring for the sick and are dispensed from university classes.
I don’t know any similar expressions in English to describe the period between Christmas and New Year. Do you?
And just in case you didn’t know, there is no Boxing Day in France!
I’m contributing this post to Lou Messugo’s All About France Link-Up. Click here to find out more about Christmas in France!
“What’s a navet?” someone asked on Facebook this week. “It’s a film that’s a flop”, I answered. But a navet is actually a vegetable – a turnip in fact. So how did we get from turnip to a dud film? Good old expressio.fr came to the rescue.
I know these lovey-dovey carrots aren’t turnips but I don’t have any turnip photos and I love this one!
Certain sources say you have to go back to the 13th century when the word was already used figuratively to indicate something that wasn’t worth much, perhaps because turnips are cheap and plentiful.
The meaning was never completely lost. “Des naveaulx”, a variant of the word “navet” in the 16th century, meant “not likely” or “nothing doing” and it was not until the mid 19th century that a bad painting was first called a “navet”. The expression was later extended to plays and films.
The French writer and language historian Duneton gives another explanation that isn’t incompatible with the previous one, at least with regard to its 19th century meaning.
In the Belvedere gardens in Rome, there was a statue of Apollo, that was for a long time considered to be a symbol of perfection.
But at the end of the 18th century, a group of young French artists disagreed and nicknamed it “le navet épluché” (the peeled turnip) due to its paleness and the long, smooth form of the limbs which don’t seem to have any muscles.
When the statue was transferred to Paris by Napoleon in 1798 (it has since been returned to Rome), its nickname followed it. In the mid 19th century the term was applied paintings and drawings that didn’t pass muster.
When the cinema came into vogue, the term “navet” was quite naturally used for films that were slapdash, of little interest or didn’t come up to the audience’s expectations.
Fruit and vegetables are used in a lot of expressions in French. I’ve already talked about prunes and aubergines.
Do you know any metaphorical uses of vegetables in French?
I used to have a German friend and every time she came to my house in Fontenay sous Bois, she would look out the window and say “there’s a blue tit” or “there’s a nuthatch” which always made me very envious so when we came to live in Closerie Falaiseau in Blois I decided that I would learn to recognise the birds in my garden too. I checked with my friend Susan from Days on the Claise whether we should feed them because you’re not supposed to do so in Australia for survival reasons but she reassured me that we could feed them in winter without any problem as long as we did so regularly.
When it’s this cold, garden birds need all the help they can get
So we waited until we came to live here permanently last winter. We bought some bird seed and some fat balls as well as a couple of feeders to put up in our rose of Sharon tree in the front yard. We also put a feeder on the window sill outside the downstairs living room. We already had a bird bath. Soon we had lots of blue tits and great tits, mostly in the rose of Sharon tree.
The rose of Sharon tree is on the right. The nesting boxes are under the eaves above the wisteria in the middle of the photo.
This summer while the new kitchen window was being made, we ate outdoors every day and spent a lot of time watching the tits during mealtime. We were delighted when we saw that they had made a nest in the nesting boxes under the eaves above the wisteria. We soon saw some fledglings poking their little faces out of the holes. I might add that below the wisteria we were surprised to see wheat growing – obviously from the seeds the birds didn’t eat last winter!
The view from the kitchen window in autumn
When we came back from our holiday in Eastern Europe in October we started seeing birds from our new kitchen window although it was too early to feed them. One day I saw a large black and white bird with a red bit under its tail on the tree outside. I was so excited to learn that it was a great spotted woodpecker.
You can see the difference between this photo and the last one. Most of the leaves have gone.
The weather started getting colder so Jean Michel put out the fat balls and some mixed bird seed in a new hanging feeder. We also bought some sunflower seeds that we put in a feeder on the sill in front of the kitchen window. The birds soon discovered the feeder and we started to identify new ones.
We now have blue tits, great tits, marsh tits and crested tits, green woodpeckers and great-spotted woodpeckers, red robins, nuthatches, jays, common chaffinches, magpies and blackbirds. They are so quick that you can’t take photos of them but I discovered that it’s easy to film them.
Our new sunflower seeds turned out to be full of debris – little twigs and such – that the birds throw out of the feeder onto the windowsill. We’re not buying birdseed from Gamm Vert any more! We whiled away many delightful moments watching the antics of our little feathered friends.
Java, sitting at the top of our stairs, pretending she’s not there
Then disaster struck. Our neighbours have a white cat called Java that seems to spend more time at our place than theirs. We suspect that some of our paying guests gave her a little nourishment in September. She is a hunter and loves our little wood where she runs after mice and lizards.
When I saw her face peering over the kitchen windowsill one day, it didn’t occur to me that she might be after the birds. Jean Michel found her pulling apart two blue tits on the ground below the window one morning before I went outside thank goodness. I was devastated when he told me what had happened. Now, I know that’s what cats do but we get a huge amount of pleasure watching these little birds and it was terrible to discover we had inadvertently exposed them to danger.
You can see the netting over the bench under the window
Jean Michel found an excellent solution – he used some wire fencing to cover the stone bench outside the window that the cat was using to spring on the unsuspecting birds Now she has nothing to grip on. After two or three days the birds started coming back, first the blue tits and then the little crested tit who is my favourite.
But Java is no Sylvester and is a lot more cunning. Because she’s white, she can blend perfectly into the stone around the window. Without using the bench, she managed to sit on the window sill, apparently, staying perfectly still until an unsuspecting little blue tit came along and we had another death.
We were reduced to only putting out seed while we could monitor the presence of Java so we looked for another solution. Someone suggested putting a bell round her neck but Jean Michel says we’ll traumatise her (not that I really care!). He doesn’t want to put cat repellent out either because it might frighten away the birds as well and we’ll never get rid of the smell.
New wall solution
On Sunday, we went to Truffaut, the big gardening store and had a look at the options. There was nothing at all suitable but Jean Michel came up with another idea and here it is! Within a very short time the birds were flocking to the feeder and staying longer each time. We really don’t see how it’s possible for a cat to jump that high. I hope not anyway.
Phoebe from Lou Messugo – traveller, francophile, expat, mum and foodie now living in Roquefort les Pins near Nice where she runs a gîte after many years of travelling and living in Asia, Eastern Europe and Australia – has come up with the brilliant idea this year of asking other bloggers what they like about Christmas in France.
Christmas in France, what’s it all about, is it any different to elsewhere and is there anything special to enjoy? I’ve written about it previously describing how the build up is slow and calm even under normal circumstances, but this year we’ve had to contend with tragic terrorist attacks in Paris, the resulting state of emergency nationwide and potentially worrying regional election results as well, meaning it hasn’t been the most festive of times recently. Add to this a sense amongst many expats that Christmas is “better” at “home” surrounded by familiar traditions, sights and sounds and rather than feel happy and excited many find themselves feeling low and missing home. Read more.
There was a time when we used to eat quite a lot of foie gras. In the winter, we would often rent a gîte for a long weekend somewhere in the country within a couple of hours from Paris and set off with a few slices of foie gras from the traiteur, a côte de boeuf, lamb chops, champagne, a vintage red or two, a couple of dozen of spéciale oysters and a bottle of sancerre. However, after we bought Closerie Falaiseau four years ago and renovated our Renaissance fireplace, we started coming down here instead. Now we only eat foie gras in restaurants occasionally and at Christmas. when we make our own.
Simon and Susan from Days on the Claise, Janet, Françoise and Paul
Today, for the second time, we had a “foie gras workshop” with our friends Susan and Simon from Days on the Claise and our neighbours Françoise and Paul. Susan picks up the foie gras (ordered well in advance) from a local farm. Another friend from Amboise joined us this time. Up until now her French mother-in-law has always made the foie gras and she (understandably) didn’t want to compete. But this year, her mother-in-law won’t be present so she thought she’d have a try.
The foie gras in its wooden wine box
The foie gras we make these days doesn’t require cooking. After deveining it and adding spices and vouvray, you wrap it in gauze, put it in a wooden wine box on a layer of coarse salt, cover it with salt and store it in a cool place (10 to 12°C) for 17 hours. You take it out of the salt and gauze, put it in a terrine and keep it in the fridge for at least 10 days. Perfect timing for Christmas. It’s melt-in-the-mouth! If you’d like a full explanation, just click here.
It’s that time again – the anniversary of the day Jean Michel and I met. We’re up to nineteen years. I have friends celebrating their 40th wedding anniversaries but not everyone is lucky enough to meet the right person the first time round. Last year, we tried out some new wave cuisine at Pertica in Vendôme but were not impressed although we did like the pâtisseries at Rodolphe’s. We’d also like to have a little village or a château to visit after lunch which restricts the choice somewhat in winter as lots of places close between All Saints (31st October) and Easter (beginning of April), so we’re starting to realise.
Rodolphe’s which looks as though it might be the best pâtisserie in town
Friends have told us that Lavardin and Chateaudun are worth a visit. The only possible restaurant near Chateaudun (we’re looking for a little gastronomy here, which excludes pizzerias, crêperies and coussousseries) is closed on Sundays and Mondays. Le Manoir de Saint Quentin which isn’t far from Lavardin keeps popping up but the menu on the website doesn’t look very interesting. In the end, all the positive reviews we keep seeing (plus the absence of any other likely restaurant) convince us. We phone and leave a message, backing it up with an email. Next day we receive confirmation.
The church near the restaurant in Saint-Quentin-les-Trôo
The restaurant is in a town with the impossible name of Saint-Quentin-les-Trôo. We rightly assume that it is connected to the word troglodyte as Trôo is the undisputed troglodyte capital of Loir-et-Cher. It turns out that Trôo is derived from the pronunciation of trou (hole) by English occupants during the reign of the Plantagenets in the 12th century.
The traditional mulled wine stall at Blois Christmas market which is probably part of a chain!
As we drive through Lavardin on the way, we see a very large number of cars parked along the road which can only mean some sort of festivity. The fact that it’s the first round of the regional elections today can’t possibly be an explanation. Sure enough, there is a marché de noël this weekend. We don’t know whether that is good or bad. Most of the Christmas markets we’re seen in recent years in Paris and the Loire have been very dismal.
Le Manoir de Saint Quentin
We arrive at the restaurant a bit early – 12.15 (it’s a little less than an hour from Blois) – and there is not a soul in sight. The weather is not conducive to staying outdoors and the door is locked so we ring the bell. A tall, harried looking Asian man answers and we apologise for our early arrival. That’s OK, he says, in heavily accented French, adding apologetically, “we’re not very busy at the moment”.
The minimalist interior
He takes us through to a room where two tables are laid and we choose the one next to the window. That’s when I remember why I bought a woollen pullover a couple of years ago – it’s to put under a woollen jacket and over my Damart when we go to restaurants in the country in winter. Unlike Parisian restaurants, they are not overheated. The large radiator is on though so I assume it will get warmer as time goes by.
Me in front of two of the acrylic paintings
The decor is minimalist. The tablecloths are plastic simili-linen with plastic woven mats and melamine Andy Warhol plates. The serviettes are good-quality fabric. There are several large acrylic paintings on the wall and some more Andy Warhol plates in a niche. There are no menus.
The view from the restaurant window
Jean Michel orders our usual celebratory glass of champagne before I have a chance to remind him that we have decided to always order local bubbly when we eat out in the Loire Valley. Our host/chef/waiter brings back a half bottle of Rothschild which gives me the chance to change the order. I learnt the first time I visited a champagne cellar in Reims that you should never buy half bottles (even though they sell them) because the champagne can’t mature properly and develop good fizz in a half bottle. We ask for a bottle of champenoise method vouvray instead and happily stay with it for the rest of the meal.
The Andy Warhol plate and little amuses-gueules on the right
The chef, who turns out to be from Hong Kong and does not recognise my pronunciation of Cheung Chau island, tells us that he will be serving a dégustation menu. He then describes the different dishes with some difficulty as his French is a little basic. He says that cheese is optional. We say it won’t be necessary considering the rest of the menu which seems to have an amazing number of courses.
To accompany our first glass of vouvray, we are given a little slice of the chef’s own foie gras on a small piece of toast, followed by some little vertical spring rolls that we don’t manage to identify.
The artichoke and guacamole snail
The two amuses-gueules are followed by no fewer than five starters: pumpkin soup, mackerel rillettes, cold prawns with curly lettuce, artichoke hearts topped with guacomole on a smoked salmon bed arranged to look like a snail, and foie gras which isn’t bad but we prefer our own salt-cooked melt-in-the-mouth Christmas foie gras that we’ll be making on Thursday with our friends as we did last year.
Chef’s foie gras
By the time the main course arrives, we know we will have the restaurant to ourselves. A very tender breast of guinea-fowl is served with potato purée, turnip and carrot and a tasty foie gras sauce.
By now, I don’t think I can eat another morsel. We refuse the cheese once again and wait for the dessert. Jean Michel says there are three. Fortunately they all turn out to be on the same plate. First, homemade raspberry ice-cream which we don’t manage to identify because we’ve never had it before. In France, they only have raspberry sorbet. I prefer the ice-cream. Second, a delicious chestnut soft-centred cake. Third, several lightly caramelised slices of apple.
Desert: raspberry ice-cream, soft-centred chestnut cake and caramelised apples
We finish off with an excellent espresso. The bill comes to 97 euro, which we declare is very good value for money (36 euro each for the menu, 20 euro for the Vouvray and 2.50 for the coffee). We’re glad we didn’t have any breakfast and are now going to get a bit of exercise walking around Lavardin.
We both agree that it was an excellent choice for an anniversary lunch due to its originality. All the food is made by the chef and fresh – we even saw him go out in the garden to pick some fresh herbs; there were no strange combinations, but nothing was outstanding.
Christmas market at Lavardin
The sun is starting to come out when we leave the restaurant, which is a relief. We arrive at Lavardin by a back road, which is fortunate, because it means we can park quite close to all the activity instead of miles away on the main road. Lavardin immediately strikes us as being a pretty little town, especially with the ruined castle on the hill, 45 metres above the Loir River (not to be confused with its second cousin, the Loire).
A street in Lavardin
The Christmas market, however, has little to offer. The stalls are spread out through the town, including the castle, which is a good idea, but prevents us from having a proper visit though we do see a bread oven hollowed out from the limestone. There is nothing original at the market and very little is handmade. We are not tempted to buy.
The castle ruins above Lavardin
Founded by the Counts of Vendôme in the 9th century, the feudal castle was rebuilt in the 14th and 15th century by John 1st of Bourbon-Vendôme. After being occupied by members of the Catholic league, it was captured and dismantled on the orders of Henri IV in 1590.
The drawbridge up close
All that is left of the castle is a 26-metre high ectangular keep with flat buttresses topped with crenallations. The only remaining part of the two walls built in the 14th and 15th centuries is the entrance flanked by two circular towers and a drawbridge over a moat.
The promontory with its blow-up Santa
We walk up the hill to the castle and out onto the promontory. Unsurprisingly, the blow-up Santa Claus does not seem to appeal to many of the children present. A couple of teenagers try to hug it while their mother takes a photo.
And somehow, I can’t really imagine that the real one with his terrible white dreadlooks sauntering down the street talking to his mates is very convincing either.
An unconvincing santa
However, Lavardin certainly has potential. We’ll come back on our bikes in the spring and cycle around the area, maybe starting in Vendôme, less than 20 km away, as there are several places to visit, including nearby Montoire-sur-Loir, the manor house where Pierre Ronsard, the Renaissance poet, was born, the historical train station in Montoire where Pétain and Hitler met up during the second world war, the Saint Gilles chapel with its beautiful frescoes and the troglodyte village of Trôo. Perhaps you’d like to join us?
I am an avid reader and being a translator gives me every excuse to indulge my passion. If I didn’t read at least one or two books a week, I could lose my English. Not that I haven’t lost it a bit anyway. Speaking and hearing French all day has a tendency to contaminate my native tongue and I end up writing things like “vigilante” instead of “security men”.
So, I am utterly addicted to my Kindle Paperwhite 3G because it means I am never short of reading material because no matter where I am in the world, I can download another book. It has a built-in dictionary, I can look up Wikipedia and adjust the size of the letters. I finally decided to subscribe to the Kindle Unlimited programme where I pay 9.90 euro a month to borrow an unlimited number of books. Jean Michel, whose Kindle is connected to the same Amazon account, can also benefit from my subscription. Not all books are included – far from it – and it’s not always easy to track down good reading material but every so often I come across a new author whose books I devour.
That is the case of Susie Kelly, who was born in post-war London, grew up in Kenya and has been living near Poitiers since 1995. I started with her biography, “I wish I could say I was sorry”, the fascinating story of a misfit child who suddenly finds herself transported to Kenya with her parents at the age of eight. She loves her new life : “Cinderella must have felt like this when the glass slipper fitted. I was no longer a little bundle in a liberty bodice and leggings, but a princess in pretty cotton frocks in a land of perpetual sunshine.”
Unfortunately it doesn’t last. Cinderella finds herself having to choose between her mother and father after their marriage falls apart. So she chooses the house and the country she loves – and indirectly her father – and doesn’t see her mother for another 17 years. In the meantime, she is sent to live with her paternal grandparents in England, where she is not wanted. When she finally returns to Nairobi, her father has remarried and she has a half sister.
Her stepmother, Helen, is psychologically unfit to be around children of any sort, and Susie finds herself truly in the role of Cinderella. However, when she is 14, another Cinderella provides an escape route, “an Arab-Somali cross … a sparky and unpredictable ride” whom she loved “as I had never loved before, instantly and overwhelmingly”.
I’m not going to tell you any more, because I also want to talk about some of her other books and resuming someone’s life story can’t possibly do it justice. “Bon Voyage” is a good place to start because it is a collection of the first chapters of several books, namely “Travels with Tinkerbelle – 6,000 miles around France in a mechanical wreck”, “Best Foot Forward – A 500-mile walk through hidden France”, “The Valley of Heaven and Hell – Cycling in the Shadow of Marie Antoinette” and “Swallows & Robins – The Guests in my Garden”.
After my appetite had been whetted by “Bon Voyage, I read “Best Foot Forward” and am now nearly finisihed “The Valley of Heaven and Hell”. I could have waited until I had read all Susie’s books before writing this post, but I think it’s a pity not to share my enthusiasm right now. Susie has an inimical way of writing, both poetical and down-to-earth at the same time.
Her factual account of her travels is interspersed with highly readable historical information about people and places. In “Best Foot Forward”, she walks across France by herself, from La Rochelle to Geneva, with a heavy backpack, a tent without a fly (a mistake I once made myself), a set of outdated maps and badly blistered feet despite her excellent boots.
“There was a narrow strip of grass beside the road”, she tells us when she can’t find a hiking path, “and it looked pretty scattered with daisies, 19 buttercups, dandelions already turned to fairy colonies, bluebells and cowslips, cow parsely still green, and purple vetch all struggling not to get onto the tarmac and be crushed. It was just their luck that I came along in the gigantic hiking boots, because I am pretty certain that very few people had ever been stupid or misguided enough to walk on the side of this particular road.”
Her journey takes her through the town of Bresse famous for its chickens, “with their snowy white plumage, blue legs and little golden toenails”. With their red crests, they are highly patriotic. Now that is the sort of little tidbit that I love. I know about and have eaten poulet de Bresse but I did not know about the blue legs.
The aim of the cycling trip recounted in “The Valley of Heaven and Hell”, in the company of her husband Terry, a far more intrepid cyclist than Susie, is to follow the “identical route taken by Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI when they tried to escape from the Revolution, and their journey back to their executions”.
Her account of their trip includes an historical account of the flight of the royal couple who finally come to a standstill when they are recognised by a postman, the famous Mr Drouet.
“The royal family spent the night in the grocery shop of the aptly named M. Sauce. Louis did almost nothing to help himself and his family, accepting his situation stoically, unable to make up his mind, or uninterested enough to take a possible escape route proposed by the Duc de Choisel. He did at least have the presence of mind to ask for a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese. He was not a man to let adversity spoil his appetite.”
Some of her cycling adventures remind me of our own predicaments when cycling paths suddenly disappear, for example. One day, they find themselves too close to the Marne. “Terry was going into the river, with his bike, camera, all our clothes and money. Unable to do anything useful, I shrieked to show moral support. He somehow managed to find a space for his left foot on a sliver of firm ground and gingerly pushed himself to the right, away from the edge, while I held my breath as if doing so would somehow be helpful.”
I’ve nearly reached the end of the book, which ends with a visit to the prison where Marie-Antoinette’s lived her last days in Paris.
Next on the list is “Travels with Tinkerbelle”. Why don’t you join me?
All her books are, of course, available in paperback*.
Oh, and don’t let me forget. Susie also has a blog called No Damn Blog.
All the books can be ordered in paperback from bookstores worldwide, or direct from any Amazon outlet. The ISBNs are as follows:
