The New Normal

You may have noticed from the news that it has been hot and there have been fires in France. None of this is fake news. 

Thankfully it has now cooled down, and maximum temperatures have returned to only 3°C above average, rather than the 11°C above average of a week ago. It has even been cooling down overnight, allowing us to open some windows. This morning it it 20°C inside the house, a relief, as yesterday the temperature had built to over 25°C indoors.

Thankfully also the fires have subsided. The fire near Bordeaux is under control having burnt out 42,000 hectares, and now there are only 582 pompiers (firefighters) on the mopping up exercise. A week ago the France wide situation looked like this:

 ...and the situation near Bordeaux was this:

▪️ Resources deployed:

3,300 firefighters;

24 aircraft;

1,500 military personnel supporting operations;

1,400 members of the internal security forces, including the deployment of 10 Centaure vehicles from the gendarmerie to prevent burglaries in evacuated areas.

 ▪️ Casualty figures:230 firefighters have been injured since the start of this crisis. No new serious injuries have been reported this evening.

▪️ Preliminary property damage assessment: 240 homes are still listed as destroyed. This figure may change as field assessments continue.

(From  https://feuxdeforet.fr/en/gironde-33/saumos-22-07-2026-4367/)

When the fire was at it's worse the clouds over Preuilly-sur-Claise were a dirty red colour, and the air absolutely stank. So much so that we had to keep all the windows firmly closed. This meant we didn't lose heat overnight.

Anyway. We shouldn't complain. The pessimist in me says that this is the coolest summer for the rest of our lives. We should make the most of it.

Back to Basics

This is my Profile Silhouette fretless bass. It's a very accurate copy of an early (1960) Fender Precision Bass, made in Japan. Basically, what happened is that Fender had new owners, the quality control on their very expensive instruments slipped, and Japanese musical instrument manufacturers realised there was a gap in the market for good quality, inexpensive instruments.

The Profile Silhouette range of instruments were a special order for an Australian distributor, made just before a series of lawsuits kicked in. There is some discussion online about who made the the Profile instruments, but I'm under the impression that two years later Fender ordered a load of them and labelled them as "Fender Squier Vintage Reissue". The swamp that is AI suggests a company called Fujigen of Matsumoto City were the actual manufacturers. It's made of solid wood, with a maple neck, and lighter than the tree planks that Fender were doing at that time.

I'm not posting it to boast, but because I realised today that I have owned it for 40 years. I bought it new from Better Music in Canberra in 1986, and for many years it was my goto bass. It has seen me through thousands of gigs: jazz, pop, folk, rock, pit orchestras, and metal. The only thing that's been changed is the pickguard - it arrived with a plain white, which I swapped for black/white/black.

I'm stunned to think that when I bought it there was no such thing as a 40 year old Fender bass guitar - they were first made in 1951, and by the time I bought my copy an early Fender bass cost more than a normal house. Mine isn't worth that much, it's priceless to me.

Who is This Saint?

 Rather than a 'what is this thing?' I'm going for a 'who is this?' post.

This statue in the medieval church of Saint Martin in Prissac is clearly old and looked like it had potential to be interesting. I reckoned it was 17th century, but couldn't immediately identify the saint.

It turns out to be 15th century, so contemporary with much of the church decor, and represents Sainte Radegonde. She's a very common female saint to be featured in these parts, so I should have noticed that this nun was wearing a crown and guessed who she was. The statue has had quite a life but has been treasured in this church for centuries. Radegonde was a popular saint at the French Court, especially during the Hundred Years War, as Poitiers remained loyal to the French King and there are sites dedicated to her in several places from Tours to Poitiers. Charles VII was particularly attached to her cult and named his eldest daughter after her. 

The statue was made by an unknown artist from stone and painted. She was restored in 2017. Anyone who knew her from before this date will barely recognise her. She used to be multicoloured, and I suspect, spent quite a few decades being mistaken for the Virgin Mary (due to the crown).

She came to the attention of the Regional Curator for  Historic Monuments in the course of a major restoration project focused on the wall paintings in the church, which started in 2013. At that time she was in a very degraded state and restoration was recommended, although she was outside the scope of the original project.

Luckily, there was a qualified sculpture conservator, Delphine Bienvenut, who came from the village. The statue was sent to her workshop in Tours.

Sainte Radegonde de Poitiers was a Thuringian princess who married a Frankish king in 536. She died in Poitiers in 587 at the age of about 67. We spent a few days in Thuringia in June, around Wartburg. It's a small centrally located State in modern Germany, once part of the GDR (ie Communist East Germany). Radegonde set up her court in Poitiers and lived as a simple nun, known for her piety and humility. She was sanctified by popular acclaim very quickly after her death.

The Church of Saint Radegonde in Poitiers, where she is buried.

It's thought the sculpture was probably made from a single block of stone originally, but it is now divided into three pieces -- the head, the chest, and the rest of the body and arms. There would have originally been hands too of course, one holding either a sceptre or an abbess' cross. Each of these pieces have been joined at some point using wooden dowels about 2 cm in diameter.

Upon studying the sculpture the conservator discovered that there had been three layers of overpainting covering the first layer. The original paint scheme had been applied over a preparatory base coat of smooth white. The saint's gown was a layer of blue-grey applied very thinly to the preparatory coat. This coat is quite scrappy and slapdash, and is now almost impossible to separate from the layers above and below. The cloak is richly decorated with gold leaf and red lacquer. The crown is quite blingy and also covered in gold leaf, with elements of green and red lacquer. The rosy cheeks on the face are well done and seem well preserved. The eyes are green and the wimple is white.

The first layer of overpainting is strongly adhered to the layer below, making its removal practically impossible. In this layer the gown is a sombre grey-green, but the cloak has become azure blue, decorated with a gold motif. The crown was redone, but repeating the original, as was the face and wimple.

The second layer of overpainting was easy to remove. It had been applied in a slightly thicker coat. The colours are less contrasting, but of very good quality. The veil and cloak were painted in very dark green and the gown in an even more sombre shade of green, virtually black. The wimple was white and the crown ochre and gold. Once again the face has been nicely rendered, but the eye colour has been darkened.

A third layer of overpainting was then applied but it was poor quality and noticeably modified the appearance of the statue. It became a riot of clashing colour and I suspect mistaken at this point for the Virgin Mary.

The conservator opted to remove the most recent overpaint to reveal the finer details of the carving and colouring. She found that the statue was of very good quality, which given its appearance when she received it was a bit of a surprise. Personally, I'm a bit sad that due to the difficulty of taking the paint back to the earliest layer the sculpture has ended up very sombre, rather than the jewel like colours of the original.

Further reading: I wrote about the Chapelle Sainte Radegonde in Chinon some years ago and you can read it here https://daysontheclaise.blogspot.com/2021/09/chapelle-sainte-radegonde-chinon.html

Not a Chateau

In the land of châteaux, this isn't a château. In fact it is hardly even a building any more, just an end wall. I imagine it is pretty old, but we've never managed to find out how old.

It is within 1.6km (1 mile) of la Poste in Preuilly-sur-Claise, and right on the border of the commune. Do you know where it is?

The History of the Brand Family

My father was singularly uninterested in his ancestry. Not just disinterested, uninterested to the point that you could see him switch off when you tried to get him to talk about it. He had his reasons, and to him they were totally valid, so we let it be. Occasionally (and always out of the blue) he would tell something of his past, but he never mentioned his parent's background.

Luckily for those of us who are interested we have my cousin Linda who is Officer in Charge: Family History. She has chased the Brands back to the 17th century, and my paternal grandmother's family tree back to the 16th century. Which is remarkable because it's all in German. This is how Susan and I had the knowledge to be able visit the places we did in Germany.

The house in which my great grandfather was born, Fritzlar.

On the 25th of August Linda will be giving a talk at the Fritzlar Local History Museum about tracing her German roots. If you're in the area, I'm sure she'll have a couple of copies of the talk in english.

Homes for Bees and Wasps

The town hall (rathaus) in Schrozberg has a wildflower meadow which was created to provide a habitat for insects and other small wildlife, including butterflies, wild bees and bumble bees. The idea is to provide food, shelter and breeding areas, helping many species to thrive while also supporting plant biodiversity. To protect this delicate ecosystem, the meadow is mown only twice a year, allowing flowers and grasses to grow naturally. A mixture of different grass heights provides additional shelter and food for wildlife, while seeds and plant stems continue to benefit animals and birds throughout winter.

That's not the most fun part: what really excited Susan was the sandpit for wild bees and solitary bees to nest in. It's right in the middle of the municipal flowerbeds in front of the town hall building.

It can be done, and Susan is pushing for something similar to be done in Preuilly-sur-Claise.