226. Step forward 2016

31st January. We went to see "45 Years" this afternoon at Biarritz.. Reading the reviews (The Guardian, the New York Times and TIME) after having seen the film had me wondering if I'd seen the same film as the critics. Say no more.

I was down at the beach at Anglet again this morning - and as I approached it I could hear a constant basso profundo roar (similar to an airliner during its take-off roll). My first sight of the sea took my breath away.. it was high tide with an on-shore wind and the waves were molto spettacolare.. I wouldn't have liked to have been out in the Bay of Biscay in a yacht.. or indeed any kind of boat.

I thought I'd wind up January with a visit to a favourite restaurant of ours.. it's La Ferme Ostalapia, at Ahetze (just outside Biarritz). It's set in an old farmhouse, with an interesting menu (spoilt for choice) and the atmosphere is stylish yet relaxed. Highly recommended.  

Fortunately for you, it was featured in a programme by TV presenter Julie Andrieu. Don't worry if your French isn't up to it - just enjoy the scenery. (I'll draw a veil over the group's singing of "Hegoak" as they ascend La Rhune..) When a group of Basques get together, it's never long before Hegoak is dusted off! 

Take a look and see for yourself:

Here's Julie having a first flight in a paramotor.. This is something that's been on my "to do" list for some time.. There's a school in nearby Saint Pée sur Nivelles..

28th January. I forgot to mention that the final piece of Christmas pudding disappeared on Sunday.. I might have mentioned before that, for me, the rich taste of this peculiarly Anglo-Saxon Christmas ingredient evokes so many nostalgic memories of Christmasses past. In keeping with tradition, it was dutifully flamed (with a drop of whisky) and savoured. Lips were smacked.. and smacked again! Another 11 months to wait before your correspondent sees its like again!<sob!>

   

24th January. Ever wondered how to say such useful phrases in Basque such as "Please speak more slowly" or (good luck with needing this next one!☺) "This lady will pay for everything"? Look here. Actually, there is a phrase in Basque for that last one - "Emakume honek guztia ordainduko du"..

The forecast for today is for 23°C (73°F).. Apologies to readers in and around Washington DC. We went to Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the afternoon - it was like summer.. the car was indicating 24°.. there were people swimming and all the usual parking spaces were occupied. The town was crowded with people and the cafés were bursting at the seams. As welcome as the heat was, I find it worrying.. what's happening?

This clip I found shows Saint-Jean-de-Luz as it was earlier today.. and funnily enough, the clifftops were exactly where we were.. I think this was filmed later in the afternoon.

18th January. A favourite TV programme of ours is "Les escapades de Petitrenaud” (France 5) and yesterday's edition was set in Cahors, in the Lot, and it had our mouths watering! The programme is presented by Jean-Luc Petitrenaud (yes, I agree, he is a bit precious!) and it featured Le Balandre* - a family-run restaurant (6 generations) which is now firmly pencilled in on our "to visit" list. * Now 'Bistrot 1911'..

And here's Jean-Luc Petitrenaud in the Pays Basque:

   

12th January. The other day I mentioned that we were subject to the occasional violent winter storm here. Last night, I was awakened in the wee small hours by what sounded like a bomb going off directly above the house as a thunderstorm blew in from the sea. I lay there for a few minutes listening to the crash and rumble of thunder mixed in with the west wind shrieking around the house, rattling the shutters as a deluge of water lashed down on the roof. I was glad we'd had the roof seen to not long ago - we replaced all the tiles, flashing and gutters. And so back to sleep!☺

11th January. I won't pretend to have been a massive fan of his work but here are two of his songs that I liked. He was an original.. and there are precious few of those around today. David Bowie RIP

Here he is with "Heroes" version français.. and an organ tribute here.

I came across this next one by accident.. it was always a favourite of mine.. It's the Edwin Hawkins Singers with their great no-holds-barred gospel version of "Oh Happy Day" from 1969. 1969! 47 years ago.. (how did that happen?)

  

The chattering classes have picked up on the black pudding story ('flavour of the month' news story) mentioned below and are now running with the ball.. (more here and here) Over the last few years, I think a major imbalance has grown up between the amount of rolling news media coverage we have versus the amount of news available to fill it.

I'm told that the forecast for the week after next weekend is for sub zero cold..

9th January. Up early this morning and down to the river for the first time in 4 months. I went out in a double sculler and pushed myself a bit to see if I'd have any after-effects around the base of my thumbs.. (I've had a nagging twinge there for months) We did 14km more or less non-stop. If there had been, then that would have been the end of my rowing days. Fortunately, there was no reaction and so next week I'll pay my subs for the remainder of the year. I have to admit to being relieved to see the clubhouse again! (added later: Creaking a bit this evening!)

It was a misty morning on the river with no more than 100 yards visibility - plus we had to keep an eye open for the occasional dead tree that was stuck in the river bed. Colliding with one of these is not fun. The low sun was directly behind us in our wake and it dazzled like liquid gold.

I came across some photos taken by a drone (not today) above the Nive.. The Nive is one of the most beautiful rivers I've ever rowed on - with the added bonus of the Pyrenees as a backdrop.. It's right up there with the Dee at Chester. I think it's worth clicking on these photos to see them at their best.

Ladies VIII

A "yolette"

A "pair oar" in the foreground

8th January. In case anyone imagines that it's all one jolly round of lotus-eating down here, in winter we are often at the wet end of violent storms that blow in from the Golfe de Gascogne (Bay of Biscay). At times like that, I like to get down to the coast to watch things as they unfurl..

Just a few kilometers south of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, an underwater reef causes this monster wave known as Belharra to be thrown up..

Meanwhile, here's a view of what it means to be Basque from "l'autre côté"..(across the border)

7th January. I see that black pudding (left) is now being touted by the chattering classes in the UK media as a "superfood".. I've long been a black pudding fan but all this "flavour of the month" hype leaves me cold.

The equivalent here is boudin noir - aka a dark-hued blood sausage (above). I can't speak for the rest of France but I find the boudin noir in the Pays Basque to be less appetising than its Lancashire (UK) counterpart. There's something about the consistency and texture of the Basque variety that makes me suspect that it contains more blood and less cereal than its Lancashire equivalent that, according to Wiki, "is generally made from pork fat or beef suet, pork blood and a relatively high proportion of oatmeal, in some recipes mixed with grits (oat groats) and sometimes even barley groats." We've had boudin noir several times in the Pays Basque but there's something about its high "wobble factor" (a technical term, m'lud) that I find off-putting. By contrast, your correspondent finds the firmer Lancashire variety infinitely preferable. I suppose it all depends on what you are used to.

All this talk of the boudin noir leads us neatly on to the boudin blanc - a completely different animal entirely. France being France, each region has its own local variation on the theme - as here:

Avranches: Onions, lard, chicken breast, cream, bread crumbs, pork, eggs, salt, pepper. 

(Avranches is in the Manche department, Normandy, on the Mont St-Michel Bay)

Castres, Tarn: Half lean pork, half egg panade flavoured with herbs, wrapped in caul, baked in oven.

Catalan or Pyrénées: Greyish white, added eggs and a good deal of herbs

Classic (made throughout France): White lean meat from pork and veal or chicken, pork fat, milk, eggs, sometimes truffles, in pork intestines, 5 to 6 inches (12 to 15 cm) long.

Havre and Normandy style: Light yellow, lots of pork fat with no lean, very fatty, often milk, eggs, bread crumbs, a starch of some kind or rice flour

Mazamet, Tarn: Half pork rind and half panade mixture based on egg, poached in water.

Rethel, Ardennes: Lean meat, pork fat, milk, eggs, no starch or bread crumbs. Has IGP status since October 2001. A "boudin blanc" festival is held each April in Rethel.

Richelieu (made throughout France): Chicken. Sometimes truffles. rich, formed into balls, wrapped in caul fat.

South-West: Pork, breadcrumbs, starch, eggs, a good deal of herbs, beef intestines. about 1½ inches in diameter.

Watch it being made.. (look away if you're of a nervous disposition!☺)

Of course, where there's a great food product in France, it's a fair bet that a Confrérie won't be far behind.. Enter la Confrérie des Compagnons du Boudin Blanc..

Montauzer at Biarritz

Montauzer, Bayonne

The best local exponent of the boudin blanc (in my opinion) is Maison Montauzer. There's a shop in the centre of Bayonne and also a stand at the indoor market at Biarritz.

Former President Sarkozy

Here's former President Nicolas Sarkozy enjoying himself (left) at the small Montauzer shop in Bayonne with MAM. For reasons that are unclear to me, the boudin blanc is only available at Montauzer around Christmas time. We had some on Christmas Eve served with sautéed apple.. (recipe here) A simple dish but one that's incredibly tasty.. maybe because Monsieur Montauzer adds some black truffle to his boudins. Yes, you can find 'industrial' boudin blanc in the supermarkets all through the year, but those of Maison Montauzer are worth waiting for. This dish is one of the gastronomic highlights of the year as far as your scribe is concerned.

4th January 2016. First of all, a Happy New Year / Bonne année / Urte berri on to all my reader(s).. I'm about to commit my New Year's resolutions to print. To be honest, my list has a familiar look about it!

1. Improve my French..

2. Practice my banjo..

3. Use my bike more.

4. Keep my desk tidy (or failing that - tidier)
5. Improve my French..
(file these under 'Fiction')

68. Defecting to Aviron Bayonnais

3rd July 2010. Yesterday, I was aware all day that the date held some significance for me but for long enough I just couldn't make the connection. Until suddenly voilà!* I realised that it was 38 years ago to the day that I joined the RAF. It's no good asking myself where had the years gone because they've gone, and very enjoyable they were too for the most part. Pas de regrets. 

* Or viola as one of my friends used to spell it! "Until suddenly a stringed instrument..."? Naa, it doesn't work does it?

Setting the breakfast table this morning, I had another rare moment of lucidity! I remembered setting the table as a kid - it would be the cloth, then the cutlery and then the salt and pepper cruets. I suddenly realised that I no longer automatically set out the cruets. This is one of the ways in which living here has changed me. I can remember my father showering his food with salt and pepper (I think this was an old army habit from the war) and so we grew up doing likewise. Madame always used to flinch when I did it.. It's one of those habits which is very hard to break but somehow I've managed it.

This morning I went down to the Aviron Bayonnais - the other rowing club in town - for an outing. For the last couple of years I'd been sculling (although they call it rowing in French) and I don't really derive much satisfaction from it. Rowing - or "ramer en pointe" - is with one oar - and it's what I grew up with. It's easier if I let Wikipedia explain the difference!

There are two forms of rowing:

In sweep or sweep-oar rowing, each rower has one oar, held with both hands. This can be done in pairs, fours and eights. Each rower in a sweep boat is referred to either as port or starboard, depending on which side of the boat the rower's oar extends to. Usually the port side is referred to as stroke side, and the starboard side as bow side; this applies even if the stroke oarsman is rowing on bow side and/or the bow oarsman on stroke side.

In sculling each rower has two oars (or sculls), one in each hand. Sculling is usually done without a coxswain, in quads, doubles or singles. The oar in the sculler's right hand extends to port (stroke side)(babord in French), and the oar in the left hand extends to starboard (bow side)(tribord in French).

We took an eight out - it's so long since I've rowed I could hardly remember if I was bow side or stroke side - I guessed stroke side but after a while it didn't feel right so I guess I must have rowed bow side. What a pleasure it was to row again.. We had a good long hard outing - first up the Nive and then back down again and through town (as above) and then on until we reached the Adour where we rowed downriver as far as the "Skat", the stealth gin palace (mentioned in Post #67).

I came back to the clubhouse with my t-shirt wringing wet. We then had a quick apero! And blisters in different places on my hands with the change to rowing. I think I'm going to enjoy this club!

I've often wondered if hydrofoil technology could be applied to rowing and/or sculling and here it is:

4th July 2010. Happy birthday America! And, as a small tribute to that most American of art forms, here's a link to TSF Jazz, an FM station in Paris that plays nothing but cool jazz 24/7. I've just tried it this morning but there appears to be a minor snaggette with their streaming. If you can't get it to work, it's definitely worth coming back to to try again in a day or two's time. If not, this will give you a patriotic fix!

Meanwhile, for all the readers of this blog in the US - this is for you.. the band of the Coldstream Guards playing the Star Spangled Banner outside Buckingham Place in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (sorry about the poor quality):

And if that doesn't do it for you, then this clip of 150+ kilted porridge wogs (as they were affectionately known in the RAF in those far-off non-politically correct days!) surely will: 

The Duke of Wellington said: "I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me."

 I love that little flourish at the end!

62. Summer's here

23rd May 2010. Up early (just after 6am) to savour the peace and quiet of a summer's morning. The window is wide open, the birds are tweeting, a church bell in town is calling the faithful to church and the early morning shadows are slowly sinking down the walls of the big white Basque house across the avenue as the sun climbs up. It's going to be a hot one today.  

I went down to the rowing club yesterday for an outing for the first time in 6 months. It wasn't a long outing - I'd guess only about 8-9k - but as far as my knees were concerned, it went fine. That is, apart from when we returned to the pontoon and I couldn't stand up in the boat to get out! I had to flop out in an undignified heap! We opened up the bar afterwards for an apéro to mark my return.. Some things don't change! It was good to see them all again. Tomorrow I'm signed up for the final day of the Trois Rivieres event organised by the other rowing club in Bayonne - Aviron Bayonnais.

Four of us from our club are going to take a 'yolette' for a 20k row up the Nive as far as Ustaritz. It's my old cycling route so at least I'll know where we are in terms of how much more pain to go.. And, of course, being France, all this will be followed by a 'pot' from midday to 1pm and then lunch till 3pm.. then a wobbly ride home on my bike..

Speaking of which, Madame and I went out this morning on our bikes up the Nive.. With it being such a beautiful morning, all of Bayonne was out there.. There were quite a few boats out on the slow moving green waters of the river too - single sculls, pair scullers, fours and a couple of eights.. in perfect weather. It wasn't all confined to the river - it was also happening on the towpath - there were trendy mamans on  inline skates swishing along at high speed with their babes in hi-tech push chairs, Mums & Dads & offspring various on bikes of all sizes.. walkers, power walkers, joggers, every variety of cyclist, fishermen, etc etc.

I've been reading up on Le Réseau Comète (known as the Comet Line in English) which was set up by Andrée De Jongh, a 24 year old Belgian woman. She established a network that helped hundreds of Allied soldiers and airmen to escape, evade and return safely to the UK. It stretched from Belgium in the north, down through occupied France, over the Pyrenees to Spain and hence to Gibraltar and home. By sheer coincidence, Villa Voisin, one of the safe houses at the south western end of the line in France, is in Anglet which is but a 5 minutes car ride from Piperade Towers and I'll be taking a look at it very shortly.. There were two other safe houses in Bayonne and I'll be looking at those too.

The safe houses in the Pays Basque at the south western end of the Comet Line are shown here:

It struck me forcibly this morning that I wouldn't be experiencing the pleasure of living down here in my retirement were it not for the heroism of those involved in the Comet Line. It would have been all too easy for them to have kept their heads down and just got on with daily life as many chose to. Choosing active participation in the Resistance was an extremely fraught occupation and the penalty for being caught was the absolute certainty of being subjected to barbaric methods of interrogation and punishment of the kind last seen in Europe in medieval times. I have the utmost respect and admiration for the courage of those unsung heroes who stepped forward to fight tyranny when it became a reality in their own country. To all those brave men and women of the Resistance who died lonely deaths in nameless cellars across Europe - we owe an eternal debt of gratitude. 

56. Re cycling

13th April 2010. I took my bike out for a ride yesterday for a couple of hours along the banks of the river Nive.. With it being a river, there are no hills - which suited me fine! I went as far as Ustaritz - which, looking at the map, is 14kms by road from home and so taking all the river bends into account, I think I must have done upwards of 30km. There weren't many people out - just a few dog walkers and other cyclists. The Pyrenees were a misty blue mass against the horizon. I think I'll start doing this regularly.. it's a stress-free ride - no traffic or hills.

This next is a song I've liked for a long while but without really knowing what it was called.. only hearing snatches of it in the background. I don't listen to pop music stations much so when I finally found out today what the song was, I was surprised to find that it had been released as long ago as 1994! Called "Seven Seconds Away", it was recorded by Youssou N'Dour and Neneh Cherry and it's sung in Senegalese, French and English.

26. River bank tales

25th October 2009. We enjoyed a lip-smacking dinner on Friday evening. J-Y, the husband of D (Madame’s painting teacher), had prepared a superb five course meal for all the class at the workshop/studio in the heart of Bayonne. He’d trained as a chef but found that he didn’t enjoy being shouted at by choleric chefs and so he abandoned cuisine as a career. However, thankfully, he’s continued cooking as an amateur. He and his wife are an extremely creative couple – we went to a soirée there about a month ago held to raise public awareness of foreign ‘jobless’ & students in Bayonne. There was a wide range of nationalities reflected in those present and they each presented themselves in their own language, with the aid of an interpreter if necessary. It was very well done and it succeeded in turning each one from the “jobless scrounger” stereotype into an individual.

As October draws to a close, the temps are bouncing around. Large leathery brown leaves from the chestnut trees are starting to drift down from on high in the avenue. The other morning it was down to 3C but this afternoon according to the thermometer in the car it was 25.. so we decided to go for a walk with the pooch along the Nive.

The Nive

We discovered this walk a few months ago and it’s become one of our favourites as the path is tarmac which helps keep the dog fairly clean. We’d originally planned on turning around at a small footbridge about 12km from Bayonne but having got there we realised that the village of our gite was just nearby. We carried on, only stopping at a farm shop to pick up a gateau Basque to offer M et Mme D. It was great to see them again and we sat outside in the sunshine before deciding to move inside as it was just too hot out there in the sun.. We had a couple of glasses of wine with the cake before heading back along the Nive to where we’d left the car.

One of the guys down at the rowing club has managed to find me a ticket for the Bayonne-Toulon game at the weekend.. Unfortunately Jonny Wilkinson won't be playing as he's joining up with the England squad for a month.

I started reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes today. Think I'd like to follow in his footsteps and bring the story up to date. He wrote it in 1878 when he was 28. The following year he travelled across the US to California before returning to Scotland. He went back to the US and then on to Australia before finally settling in Samoa. He was only 44 when he died.

I'd better start writing..!

Friday 30th October 2009: Just returned from soaking up the sun on the beach at Anglet.. where it was a warm 26 this afternoon. Our last visit for 2009? Who knows.. but I'm keeping a knotted hanky in the car just in case..