Stones

Last weekend suddenly got busy. My niece organised a last minute foot passage to Roscoff for Sunday morning, so we were up and off as early as we could manage to be the first relay to collect her; my brother, her dad, who lives in Mayenne, which is even further east of us than we are of Roscoff, then came and fetched her from our house. They stayed to lunch, where she ate two good helpings of garlic chicken and vegetables ( speciality of the maison), which was probably her first meal for about 36 hours, on account of how her philosophy of travelling light through life involves spending as little money on keeping body and soul together as possible. She regaled us, as ever, with funny stories, such as how, when cycling round the Crozon peninsular in Finisterre, she somehow fetched up in a village hall in a small fishing port in the company of a band of anarcho-punk vegans, who were almost pathetically grateful to meet another anglophone, and who went on to entertain their audience of perplexed Breton fishermen with a number called 'Vegetable Attack' ( the title phrase being repeated loudly and often). We agreed that they might have had a more sympathetic reception had they been playing Roscoff, capital of the onion (pink) and the artichoke, where the performance might have had more artistic resonance.

She was also able to fill me in on the details of the anecdote about the stones' revenge. Since she was quite a young thing, she has had a fascination with standing stones, and has toured most of the megaliths of western Europe. Many years ago she persuaded her less interested parents to take a trip to Morbihan to visit Carnac. This involved a deal of travelling and traipsing, and my brother was making no bones about his weariness with what he saw as a pointless hippy pilgrimage to a collection of stones of no significance. In the middle of his grumbling, he stubbed his toe hard on a concealed stone. As they drove off, a small stone flew up and into the windscreen, cracking it. Later that evening, an anonymously thrown stone broke the window of the gite where they were staying.

So the story goes. I warned Tom about it when he was grumbling about the non-experience of Carnac; don't say it too loud, I admonished, they may exact revenge for your unbelief. But in fact, most people seem to find themselves disappointed with Carnac. Its impressiveness lies in its extent, not in imposing massiveness, and, of course in its unexplained mystery. But that too is a frustration, the enigma blocks rather than beguiles: what is the point of this? one finds oneself asking. I've concluded that where standing stones are concerened, size matters. the bigger specimens were more striking,

than the crowds of indistinguishable toothy-pegs,

and those which could be seen to possess faces, or characteristics, caught the attention more. This one below, with its benign and distant gaze, put me in mind of the episode of Noggin the Nog ( anyone else have a soft spot for Noggin the Nog?), called 'The Firecake', where Olaf the Lofty invents dynamite, and awakens the sleeping stone people, one of whom attaches itself to Little Knut and follows him... (oh do shut up you sad woman, you'll never be taken seriously again!)

This one is, I believe, much beloved by New Age pilgrims for its resemblance to a whale. Very like a whale.




The alignments have been so much frequented by tourists over the years that now they have been fenced in with robust, chest high, plasticised green fencing, else the erosion of all the feet going over the soil around them would cause the stones to fall over, and what is the point of a standing stone no longer standing, especially one which takes it on itself to squash a well-intentioned visitor? The mesh around the burial chamber had been prized apart a little, presumably to make an aperture for a camera lense, which I took advantage of.



It came to me later, though, what the experience brought to mind: walking around a zoo of dispirited and decontextualised animals. The larger ones, the elephants, buffalo, hippopotami, et al, will inevitably impress by their mass, the herds of small unremarkable grazing herbivores soon cease to interest, but with all of them, something is gone out of them. The beautiful and mysterious images of Carnac one sees in books and postcards all appear to have been taken in misty sunrise or sunset. On a chilly afternoon in early May, in the company of a few handfuls of other tourists equally nonplussed as onself, the stones are mute, grey, lifeless things, ungiving, absent. Whatever or whoever the beings or spirits who raised them, they walk here no longer, except, perhaps occasionally, they may pass by fleetingly at those threshold times of half-light and solitude. I wouldn't know.


Ah well, tell them I called and nobody answered.

The evening we walked on the beach, I bent and picked up stones, aimlessly, as you do. Why does one pick the ones one does? Later that night, I took them out of my pockets; just three, unintentionally, one for each of us. The middle one is evidently Molly, small, bright, intense, shot with colour. Close your eyes, I said to Tom, pick one for you. His hand closed over the whiter, rounder bulkier one, slightly damaged and uneven, with a trace of a face in it. That left the flatter, more amorphous, translucent but more coloured one for me. Who's to say stones can't be imbued with spirits, with a touch of light, and imagination?

More on boats

Me, I just like taking pictures of all the kind of bits of miscellaneous,

shabby sea-washed,

frayed and rusted and tangled,

what's-that-for-then,

nylon and plastic and perished,

sand and salt-faded this and that you find on boats. Or near them.

Or something lovely someone else made, on boats, or other subjects: these stained glass windows from the thick-walled little church by the harbour at Locmariaquer, each pane and shard a thick and brittle grozed chunk, like blue and gold and pink and white boiled sugar, broken with a toffee hammer.

Or sometimes I just sit on boats, and let other people take the pictures.

Tom's boats, bubbles and one good tern.

As I mentioned, Tom likes to take pictures of boats. Here are a few of the ones I like best,

...plus this tern, which I would have been pleased to capture,

... and bubbles. He's not having the camera again until September.

Aside

By way of an aside, I wouldn't want anyone to think that I've been too absorbed with stuffing myself with seafood, walking on the beach and photographing snails over the last week to have had any awareness of or opinion on events in the country I'm living in.

Until I can vote in that country, where we live, where I work and where we pay all our taxes, I will always feel a less involved outsider, which is not to say I don't understand that what happens in the national life will nevertheless have a bearing on me, even in this peaceful and peacable backwater I am blessed, lucky and happy enough to call home. Being such a political outsider has advantages: I don't feel quite so obliged to express, conceal or even have an opinion, I less afraid to ask questions and have things explained to me, or to question why other people hold the opinions they do. Appearing ignorant is more permissable.

I don't particularly relish the prospect of living in a country whose leader is held either in fear and loathing or in a fawning and self-abasing admiration for their strength/ruthlessness. I've done that before and I didn't like it then. Ugly and aggressive rhetoric and posturing and actions make for ugly and aggressive reactions, which appear to justify each other endlessly. I could go on but I see little point; it's not what I do here.

I am not certain, though, that the appeal was altogether and only to xenophobia and masochism, but possibly to something closer to a better nature; the desire to be able to work one's way out of the moroseness and haemorrhage of morale that seemed to have gripped the country. I have come to the conclusion, contrary to received ideas and the way I might have been heard banging on about the matter in moments of frustration in the past, that in general, French people are responsible, sober, undemanding and very hard-working, with an admirable capacity for counting their blessings. They just don't tear around chasing their own arses, going nowhere fast, making a lot of noise and heat and very little light, burning vast quantities of fossil fuels in activity of ultimately dubious usefulness, living ludicrous distances from their place of work, putting themselves in hock for ever and ever on their homes, bragging on about their wonderful work ethic and how stressed they are and how they've got no time for anything, drinking themselves stupid in the name of having fun, etc etc. ( yes, I know, it's all right for me, believe me, I never cease to appreciate just how all right...). Or at least not as much, not yet. But they do often feel constrained and frustrated by restrictive policies, practices and attitudes, and a dead weight of intransigent bureaucracy. Time will tell if the possibly good intention of wishing to change that will be really a paving slab on the road to hell, the bargain just made a Faustian one.

Others have spoken from different angles more eloquently on the matter than I can, Lesley, Jonathan and Jean to name but three. And though I am a little wary of extrapolating on the state of the nation from local anecdote, I found the article below moving and apposite; I wanted simply to supply a link to it, but it appears not to be due to be published on the website, so I am very grateful to Michael Taylor, the author, and French News, for their generous permission in allowing me to post it. It was written on the eve of the election, with, in my opinion, wit, compassion and lightness of touch; I only wish I could have written it.

Which way will the vote swing?

Hergé, the 'father' of the Tintin comic strips, was born 100 years ago this month. Though he pioneered a characteristically 20th-century art form, he sometimes fell back on devices invented in that first age of storytelling in picture sequences: the Middle Ages. When one of his characters struggles against temptation, an angel in a nightgown and a devil wielding a pitchfork appear in the space above his head, wrangling like a pair of irate cabdrivers, urging him to yield to, or triumph over, his worst instincts.
These first days of May, as French voters prepare to cast the final vote for their next president, I think of these quaint (but really momentous) little crises of conscience. Not that either of the two candidates in the second round represents a dramatic choice between good and evil, or even, as some of my French friends tell me, worse and less worse. Simply, like most presidential races in these troubled times, the disappointing, lacklustre course à la presidentielle has brought out both the best (a little of it, anyway) and the worst (abundantly) of this admirable and maddening nation. There have been noble declarations about more democracy, greater equality and a reasonable and reasonably generous pride in being French in a world that is fast forgetting the value of reason. But we have also been subjected to the rank belches of the tight-lipped, clenched-jaw kinds of nationalism and national selfishness. To put it in simple terms, as Hergé might have done, it’s been a struggle between the devil of not giving a damn about the next man – especially if he’s not a born Frenchman – and the angel of feeling that we humans are all in the same boat together, lifeboat earth, as it was once fashionable to call it.
In a sense, the hamlet where we live, a cluster of half-a dozen foyers, or hearths, set among fields and woods in a not especially prosperous (though compared to the Darfur incredibly green and bounteous) corner of rural France, is a microcosm of the nation as a whole. It’s a little universe of its own, morally divided, like a fairytale kingdom, between two old men, two grandfathers haloed by the dimming aura of their former stature. Off a sandy lane to the east lives Monsieur Moreau (it is significant that we never think of him by his first name), a podgy, gimp-legged 70-something-year-old who I’ve never seen wearing anything other than his military-looking hunting outfit. His co-patriarch, so to speak, is Albert’s father, Papi Pierre, whose realm is his kitchen, sweltering in winter, cool and dark in summer, and its adjoining vegetable patch on the western side of our hameau.
Both men survived a war, though not the same war, and both are given to reminisce about their times under the bombs, as they were the most eventful years in their otherwise tranquil rural existences. Monsieur Moreau, who is the younger of the two, served under the French flag in Algeria when Algeria was still a French colony and it was the metropolitan soldiers’ job to suppress the Algerians’ struggle for independence. Whatever action Monsieur Moreau saw there (he is vague on this point, either because he spent much of his time in barracks or because it was mostly shameful), his stint south of the Mediterranean has left him with the mentality of a guard dog. This is especially true where foreigners are concerned. My wife and I are all right, at least provisionally, but then we’re a shade lighter than he is, we probably pay more taxes and we’re able to exchange greetings and pleasantries in his own singsong accents.
Albert’s father, on the other hand, was one of the millions of Frenchmen shipped to Nazi Germany to toil as forced labourers – in other words as slaves. One would understand it if he harboured anti-German sentiments, or even anti-British ones, for he lost the hearing in one ear when a RAF bomb struck a direct hit on the factory where he was working in Berlin. Nevertheless, he is one of the kindest men I’ve ever met and perhaps the only one who seems incapable of bearing a grudge against anyone or anything (including the illness which took his wife from him almost 30 years ago). The morning after the first US missiles struck Baghdad in 2003, he came over to our house to apologise for being angry with the Americans. "It’s just that seeing the strikes on the news reminded me of those times." There was no need to ask him what he meant by "those times". "The reason I’m for Europe," he said on the eve of the European referendum (about which he had many reservations but for which he nevertheless voted), "is because I do not want my son or his children or anyone to live through those times again. Not here, ever."
The cherry tree in Monsieur Moreau’s garden has blossomed beautifully this year and the young cherries have formed, green and as hard as the stones inside them. When they ripen, as they soon shall, Monsieur Moreau will station himself in a white plastic armchair in the shade of the tree. He will be wearing his khaki gear and will be holding his shotgun at the ready, and any thrush hardy or hungry enough to venture near it will get, as he puts it with relish, "a taste of lead".
Papi Pierrot, who is half if not three-quarters deaf, will be too far off to notice. He will potter around between the spring onions and lettuce of his potager, his neatly laid-out kitchen garden, which he shares with a trio of cats and a large brown rabbit that escaped from its hutch a couple of weeks ago. Papi Pierrot, who speaks to the creature in patois, claims it is impossible to catch it, but I suspect that he hasn’t the heart to force it back into captivity.

© Michael Taylor, first published in French News, May 2007

"rhododendrons just like your dresses"

I love rhododendrons. Gladioli I can't quite cope with in the big loud flower stakes, but rhodos need make no apologies for themselves. They come in so many vivid colours, the more clashing the better, and they really do look like they're made of some wondrous tissue stuff. These purple ones though, seem to be the prototype, how they revert when they naturalise ( and yes, I know they're a menace when they do that, acidifying the soil etc).

Azaleas are pretty good too, especially the yellow ones that have a perfume like ylang-ylang.

Thanks to Tall Girl for the title. Ekphrasis makes the heart grow fonder.

Quiberon

In fact, I didn't have the camera all that much of the time down in Morbihan. As I said, it is shared property, but Tom relinquishes it to me most of the time, so it seems appropriate to for him to use it more on holiday. Anyway he likes taking pictures of boats and scenery, which I don't especially, so I tend to relax and occupy myself with Mol and the simple experience of being away, taking in an unfamiliar scene; stopping to take pictures can be a distraction, an encumbrance.

However, I did get my hands on it the day we went to Quiberon.

Funny how when you go somewhere, the temptation is always to compare it with somewhere else, to make sense of it in terms of what you know already. Driving down the long spine of causeway into the Presqu'ile, it reminded me of the Isle of Portland ( folk from Portland must have been great travellers and settlers, there seem to be places called Portland all over the English-speaking world), not least because of the great fearsome prison building that lours over the causeway. I wonder if the inmates can see the beach below, and the free and cheerful wetsuited young men who splash about there on sailboards, added salt to the wound of their captivity if they can... The prison's aspect clearly doesn't discourage holidaymakers; in the summer the population of the peninsular can increase sevenfold. Then further on through the long ribbon of settlements, one of us observed that it really is remarkably like the scruffier parts of Torquay. We were unimpressed, despite the lure of the sardine-canning factory, a much heralded tourist attraction.

But then we reached the very tip of the land, and at last here was a place with rocks and shapes and colours.

Where other creatures make their homes.

It was rather wild and windy, so we went for a bracing walk before eating our sandwiches, which, in view of the epicurean indulgences of the fruits of the sea we'd been having, were rather plain and simple, and washed down with fizzy water.

On the return journey, we made our way up the west coast of the peninsular, which is as fierce and lonely as you could wish it to be; you won't find many beach huts here!

And Molly and Tom agreed, Quiberon is a rather good place, to sit on a rock, and look out to sea, with your fur all blown the wrong way.

Purple ( with a whiff of Grand Marnier )

Purple patch, purple prose. There was purple, of a kind, in sea and sky, in the spiny forms of sea holly, in the striations of grass on the dunes, in the reflections in the brackish pools behind them. And there was also blue and blue-green, and dull gold and copper and pink in the sun and sand, and black in the shapes of things; our tangled black dog like a moving part of the tangled clumps of seaweed and flotsam and jetsam.

What colours are there? I asked.

Grey. But not a simple mixture of, a point somewhere between, black and white, but grey that contains every other colour.

But words for colours, whether plain or lyrical, are only cyphers, saying nothing of the experience of colour, which is the experience of light.

We had driven down from the small granite town a mile or two inland, so much more solid, handsome, self-assured than the rough workaday harbour settlement; the more prosperous citizens in former times must have removed themselves from the beatings of the salt winds and the smell of tuna and seaweed. We had eaten fish and shellfish: soft white grainy flesh carefully pulled from the pleated cartilage of skate wings, swallowed with hazelnut brown butter and the green taste of capers; grilled clams hot from their open shells with garlic and brown bread; roundels of scallops, the shell of St James, the pilgrims' ensign, crusted and sweet outside, tender inside, with beurre blanc, unctuous and slightly sharp. We had followed signs simply to les plages, with no more expectation than to walk the dog. The road had ended at a spread of dunes and grassland, a haphazard loose picket fence marked the path to the shore.

No camera, I regretted. But the camera would have probably recorded nothing in essence, only served to remind us of what could not be recorded: a light whose alchemy derived from its tenuous elusiveness and our perception of it. We walked along the path and over the dunes, pulling our light eating-out clothes close about us, as the thin wind off Biscay caught us and set the clouds aslant, and the star Sol hung low over the salt water mass. Sand and shingle got in through the punched holes in my flimsy Indian leather shoes, so I took them off.

The viscous line of sea on shore moved and changed, and two fishermen, the only other humans visible, stood far off, silhouetted against the western light on a high bank of stones. We had seen people fishing on the concrete quayside at the port that afternoon; they had been cheerful and gregarious, but also coarse, irksome. One of them had an artificial hand, a strong, canny pincer of plastic and metal. He pulled out his catch, a starfish, blueish, draggled, shapeless, and unhooked it. " I've even got the baby!" as he prised its arms apart and extracted a tiny, coral-coloured pentagram. " He'll throw it back, I'm sure." I said to Tom's anxiety. But he didn't, or not that we saw, but left it to open its five limbs helplessly in the wind and sun on the bench next to his mate's girlfriend, who paid it the merest cursory attention, before continuing to fiddle with the extending lead of her small white dog. I heard somewhere later that starfish are predators of the farmed oysters which are the economic staple of the region, so perhaps they aren't spared.

Yet the fishermen who stood like statues against the evening sky on the cool and wndswept miles of empty beach had a heroic, nearly sacred air. Far behind them on a headland in the hazy distance stood two great vertical radio masts, seeming to hang in the sky like portents. Their role, doubtless, to spin a few threads in the vast global tissue, from Spain up and down the Atlantic coast, across the bays of Biscay and Quiberon, to laptops and lifeboats and mobiles and meteorologists, but at that moment they, like the fishermen, seemed to be liminal, numinous beings, possessing mystery and meaning in the purple-grey, twilight, salt-misted, mussel-shell and sea holly air of Dis and Whipperginny and a land beyond the waves.

The sand and stones and broken shells pummeled and abraded my feet, we walked just so far then turned back. Partly from the cold, it's true, but also because we'd no wish to put this wild and adorable god, who has cast such momentary magic over this world, to the test.

In the shelter of the car, I held the bottle from the restaurant holding the last two glassfuls (Alsace Tokay; we always ask for the cork ) between the arches of my sandblasted feet. It was cool and smooth. We pointed the car inland, but didn't recognise the roads, they didn't appear to be those we took outwards. But trusting our sense of going home, we soon got there. Home is always temporary.

" And since to look at things in bloom...

... Fifty springs are little room "

( Ragged robin, buttercup and gunnera.)

In Celtic terms at least, it no longer is spring, Beltane is past ( I haven't been jumping over any bonfires or any such pagan naughtiness ), and indeed, their is such abundance of green and gold and bloom that, sadly, one feels glutted, sated, the sharpness of delight in it has abated. It was ever thus. There will be more flowers ( and I daresay a few hearts), but they'll be summer ones, which seem more like a luxurious froth on things than wonderful, great irridiscent bubbles breaking, as the first things did.

We're shortly off to Morbihan, to the southern seaside, for a few days for our wedding anniversary, to look at dolmens and menhirs and cromlechs and perhaps some bronze age rock art (which Marja-Leena might like!). On the other hand, if the weather is awful we may just laze about and go for smaller trips and eat lots of seafood and drink lots of wine in the hotel restaurant. We're staying in an appartment adjacent to said hotel which looks highly comfy and where they charged the princely sum of three euros for Molly to be able to join us, which we thought very reasonable.

We'll have the camera, (which is actually shared property in the marital estate, though poor Tom doesn't get much of a look in, entre nous, this is because when he gets his eye in he takes better pictures than I do, which is a mite disgruntling), but will be off-line. The appartments have wi-fi but we won't avail ourselves of it; a break will do no harm.

I read somewhere that one shouldn't give away on a blog when one is going out of town, so to any potential burglars who may have been able to pinpoint with accuracy our location from the information given here, congratulations, that's more than most of our invited guests can do the first couple of times with a map and instructions, and thank you for reading Box Elder with such close attention, I hope it has been an uplifting experience for you, and may encourage you to turn away from a life of crime, blogging beats burgling, though is doubtless less profitable. But I would discourage you from trying to break in; 4-year-old Sarah and 84-year-old Marie, as well as Gilbert the nosy postman, will have the place under tight surveillance, and the gendarmes will be after you before you can say canif.

For the rest of you, bye for now, see you when I get back.

Rennes: streets and statuary

Another thing about going to Rennes with a dog is that obviously shopping and going inside galleries and museums are limited possibilities. The parking is largely underground (rather more expensive than we're used to ie free or a couple of euros and free over lunchtime in St Brieuc and Dinan, but not in the same league as most British larger towns where a mortgage needs to be arranged), but we don't like to leave her in the car for too long, so she comes around with us. We make sure she's had a run around the fishing lake before we get there. But in truth there is more than enough to look at on and around the buildings of the town. What is here is just a sample; the weather was not always conducive, and we drifted and lingered longer than we meant to in the Thabor, so ended by rushing to get to the new planetarium on the other side of town in an unfamiliar location with a lot of building and road works still going on around , and when we arrived the show we wanted to see - 'The Birth of Stars', with images from Hubble - was all booked up, so we saw the next one, which was a rather tame affair about the solar system. Largely, we agreed, planetariums ( I don't usually care for Latin plurals) are a wasted opportunity; the displays haven't progressed as much as they should have done given the advances in technology. But anyway.

We arrived a little before lunch, walked through town in the rainy wet - it had been beautiful weather the few days before. I was somewhat jittery, anything like an extended journey in wet conditions on any kind of dual carriageway or above, has that effect, ever since many years ago I drove my elderly mini between Gloucestershire and Devon on a torrential day in February in failing light with a failing engine. I was driving behind Tom in the Citroen, a young and sprightly car at the time, who was unaware of my plight, and I was faced time and again with the choice of whether to sit in the backwash of enormous lorries which was driving into the engine and causing it to falter, or to try to get past them, with the risk I wouldn't make it. I wasn't very experienced in motorway driving at all at the time, but not young enough to have the want of imagination that renders such episodes insignificant in terms of trauma.

However, I relaxed after a time, and we picked up some info at the tourist office and decided to eat on the covered terrace of this restaurant, which oddly rejoices in the name 'Queen Mum'. That wasn't why we chose it. There was a lunchtime menu of a main course, glass of wine and coffee which was inexpensive and the terrace looked dry and comfortable, but then the nice young waiter said no, no, bring the dog inside. We hesitated, in enclosed spaces M. has a tendency to dance the maypole with her lead around table and chair legs, bark at people who come too close to the staked out eating territory of the pack, whinge if we take too long and generally be a pain. Outside she's normally OK. But in fact she was fine, even allowing said waiter to make a fuss of her without either barking at him or worse still slobbering on him. I think it was partly because the plate glass window we sat in came down to the floor, so she didn't feel so enclosed and could see movement and the world outside. The steaks were good, served with a lovely light and creamy garlicky gratin lyonnais and dainty morsels in the garnish such as baby artichoke hearts, and so too was the wine, for which the place seemed to have a reasonable reputation, though we only had the house stuff. So relaxed were we that we very easily allowed ourselves to be talked into finishing it with an enormous slice of tarte tatin, which increased the bill quite substantially.

Time to pay. Well, it really was a very good tarte tatin.

Out into the street and the sun was beginning to shine, and we made our way towards the Jardins du Thabor, passing the swinmming pool on the way,

with its ceramic sculpture and mosaics. I've never been inside, I mean to one day.

The decorative work was done by a celebrated family of mosaicists and ceramicists, the Odoricos, who came from Italy in the 1920s to undertake this commission. They also did some rather sumptuous black, red and gold abstract designs on a department store facade over the river, which we didn't pass that day, and sparked a vogue for mosaic shop fronts all over the place, most of which are unfortunately not quite up to their standards.

This very alluring lady is on a public building a little further on; her slightly pollution ravaged features rather add to her charm, I think!

At the exit to the Thabor is a granite and bronze sculpture memorial to Glenmor, a Breton poet and singer about whom I know very little. Glenmor means 'Land and Sea', and there is a beer of the same name. He seems to have been the model for a certain style of bearded, bardic Breton type, fairly prevalent in the region. (He played the Celtic harp, an instrument about which I have reservations; I'm going to see Alan Stivell next week, who also is a harpist amongst other things, but is slight and swart and not bearded, and produces quite a range of different musical sounds, so I shall see if that disposes me more favourably.) His statue is imposing anyway. Come to think, he doesn't look unlike Neptune at the swimming baths.

We never can resist the sight of a roof going on,

or old timber framed houses that always remind me of a very kitsch decorative plate I once had from a junk shop.

or, much as we love the quiet of the country, quite simply, the life in the streets of a town. And Rennes is really a very good town.

Still dews of quietness

Dear lord and father of mankind,

forgive our foolish ways;

reclothe us in our rightful mind,

in purer lives thy service find,

in deeper reverence praise.

O sabbath rest by Galilee!

Oh calm of hills above,

where Jesus knelt to share with thee

the silence of eternity

interpreted by love!

Drop thy still dews of quietness,

till all our strivings cease;

take from our souls the strain and stress,

and let our ordered lives confess

the beauty of thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire

thy coolness and thy balm;

let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;

speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,

O still small voice of calm.

Remarkably, when I came down, the electricity was not only still on, but the cooker clock wasn't flashing, so there had been no power cut at all. I think the worst of the storm was last night while we were watching '2001' on a DVD. The forks and flashes of bruise colour lightning, the sound of rain and hail, hailstones the size of peas, or petit pois anyway, played out a strange counterpoint to the lurid colours, the beautiful but inscrutable changing sunset eye of HAL, the wheezings and whistlings and sussurations that form more a part of the soundtrack than dialogue does. The double glazing is good, and the wind direction unusual, beating at the back of the house so not on our bedroom Velux, and I slept.

I woke from muddled dreams of tenderness and danger; opening the door for Moll, it was foggy, no birds sang, only a solitary frog, a sound I love, brave and dauntless, but the air was mild and still, and I knew the birds wouldn't be long. There was a tiny shred of cellophane in the hymn book, but no, it wasn't my place but Tom's:'Lead Kindly Light', good, but not what I was looking for. I know the words anyway, I sing it often to myself, but I don't like making mistakes, no, I don't like making mistakes.

If all I had to believe in was ' Dear Lord and Father of mankind' I could be a proper Christian. I want it at my funeral, and no, that's not morbid, and doesn't indicate I'm in a perilous mental state, everyone does it. But I want the 'Sabbath rest by Galilee' verse, which is almost always omitted.

And I put on 'Spem in Alium', Hope in all things. I don't know if there is really hope in all things, but there's certainly plenty for me, and on the same disc ( the wonderful Tallis Scholars 'Renaissance Giants'), Taverner's Western Wind Mass:

'Blow, blow thou western wind,

The small rain down can rain...'

I breathed in the scent on lily-of-the-valley, muguet which someone had left on the table in front of the house for Fete de Travail, unfortunately I don't know who to thank for it, thank the wrong person and they'll be embarrassed...

And I went to the blog, and the kindness I found there made me cry, and realise how very minor and unimportant my happily rare but generally self-induced and self-inflicted bouts of lowness really are.

The birds are all up and about now; sadly the double glazing which holds the fearful weather at bay also mutes the birdsong, I'm sure there's a metaphor there.

I've a date to go walking with my friend B. whose husband's away fixing the world, or a small corner of it in the Balkans anyway. I had though it hopeless last night, but I think we'll keep it, and see if she'll mind driving to the lake at Bosmeleac; the mist lifting from the surface of the water might be a treat. Seven o'clock and all's well. Bonne fete de travail, everyone.