Naturally I am buying it while I can. I also bought some gorgeous Spanish tomatoes from another market stall (still too early for local tomatoes) and made a loaf of bread to go with the cheese.
The botanical outing on 1 April was primarily to look at mosses. Our first stop was the ruisseau de Truyes, a stream that runs down the side of a lane behind the church. It must come from a source up on the hill where the chateau sits overlooking the church. The water is absolutely crystal clear and on a sunny day creates a beautiful sparkling background to a host of mosses, liverworts and aquatic plants.
The stream is covered in a vault of rough stones for part of its length, then open with the sloping platforms of the lavoir (public laundry) at the side, before broadening into a shallow pool which is home to a dozen or so mallards (all clearly expecting treats).
Everyone got down to business, spotting mosses, lichens, liverworts and some interesting plants. On this short length of wall along the stream there are 6 species of moss and a liverwort, as well as Common Cornsalad and Fools Watercress. Our moss expert was Corinne, a stalwart of the club, and I was very interested that her recommended field guide was in English, published by the British Bryological Society and available online or in print. Typical of European naturalists, most of the group knew enough English (and probably German and Italian) to work their way through a technical key to identify a species. This is not like being fluent in these languages, but because the technical words tend to be the same, you only need to learn a limited vocabulary to understand most of the key. Good keys these days are well illustrated too and this helps a lot. One of the other women, who had a copy of the book, said to me that she actually finds it easier to use than most French guides. Her comment was that British field guides get the tone and level of technical language just right so that everyone can understand them, whereas French guides either vulgarise (ie only use common names and dumb the information down, to the frustration of serious amateurs) or are so academic as to be unuseable by these same serious amateurs.
So...now I know slightly more about mosses and have been introduced to a fantastic resource should I wish to identify mosses on my own in the future.
Susan
On Wednesday we mave have been out-blinged.
What impressed our clients is that I identified this car as a Delahaye as I was driving past the car park I don't park in. What won't impress the owner of this car is when he tries to remove a billion sticky handprints from the people off the coaches it was parked near - which is why I don't park there any more.
The population of Truyes is around 2000 people, but like many towns along this river it forms a larger urban area by being directly across the river from the town of Cormery. They have separate administrations, but you simply cross the bridge over the Indre and you have crossed from one to the other. The towns grew up because this is the site of an ancient ford, but remained separate because the rivers often served as territorial boundaries in the medieval past.
Truyes isn't somewhere you will find in many tourist guides, but it is attractive enough for all that. I suspect a lot of people miss Truyes because it is not obvious from the main road how much of the village, including the real centre, is off to the east. You could easily spend the day wandering about Cormery and Truyes, popping in for an artisan beer at the brasserie in Cormery and walking along the ancient pilgrim path around Truyes. If you visit at the right time in August the Fete de Cochon will be in full swing too.
I didn't get much of a chance to look around or to find out a lot about Truyes when I visited for a botanical outing, but I thought the area around the Eglise Saint Martin was lovely.
Immediately after lunch yesterday (ie at 5 past 2) three fire brigade vehicles came roaring up the driveway and parked in front of our garage. The firemen got out and started heading down the street. 'Qu'est-ce que se passe ? Y a-t-il un probleme ?' 'Hello Madam, no, there isn't a problem. We are on a training exercise. Are the trucks OK there?'
They were happy for me to take photos and so I followed them down the street to Patrice's paint workshop. Like last year they had set a smoke bomb off in the paint store and were 'rescuing' someone.
Susan
Another good word is bougies, which are spark plugs (unless you're very English or from the 1930's and call them sparking plugs). Bougies translates as candles, which are usually translated into French as chandelles, except that chandelles are what some people call headlight bulbs.
The other word I have learned is roue de secours - spare wheel, or literally "the wheel of help". This is a lot easier than talking about having a trou in your pneu.
To learn more about this lovely butterfly, please go to the species account post on Loire Valley Nature. This is always the first of the Fritillary butterflies to be on the wing, and we should be seeing it here any day now.
Other Wildflowers - look out for the intense blues - Long-leaved Lungwort, Purple Gromwell and Common Columbine. Most years you could add Sweet Violets and Grape Hyacinth to this list but they have been flowering for much of the previous month already. The violets will continue but the Grape Hyacinths are coming to an end. Another very striking spring flower that has started early in places is the Greater Star of Bethelehem, pure white stars with a green midrib running down the underside of each petal, on every roadside bank.
Beetles - it's big bomber chafer time in April, with Rose Chafers and Cockchafers lumbering about or munching their way through the stamens on your roses and paeonies.
Flies - yes, Flies! Some of the most attractive of the craneflies, Ctenophora and Nephrotoma, will appear, resting on vegetation with their absurdly long legs dangling all over the place. The adults are completely harmless and whilst the leatherjacket larvae might eat plant roots, they also provide a significant source of nourishment for farmland birds. Prepare to be surrounded by the curiously misnamed March flies in April too - species in this family such as the Saint Mark's Fly emerge traditionally around the Saint's Day (otherwise known as Anzac Day...). And of course there is everybody's little fuzzy friend, the Dark-edged Beefly, who has already been with us in good numbers this year from mid-March.
Happy wildlife watching. I've got no idea what the weather is going to be like - let's hope it rains a bit, but sunny days are always nice too.
It turns out that lait ribot is indeed a type of buttermilk. In the old days it was the traditional product, which was the creamy but low fat liquid left in the churn after you have made butter, deliberately fermented to increase its keeping qualities. (Lait is the French word for milk and ribot from the Breton word for a churn). These days the by-products of industrial scale butter making go into industrial scale 'not butter' spread making, along with various vegetable oils. Cultured buttermilk, or lait ribot, is now manufactured in its own right by adding a lactobacillus to milk to lightly ferment it, making it go slightly sour and curdled ie essentially, drinking yoghurt. Many French people would dry retch at the thought of drinking a glass of milk, but they adore a glass of lait ribot, especially if they are holidaying in Brittany.
Making sure it's all square
First task for me (once the concrete had set, the weather had improved, and I actually left winter's torpor behind) was fixing the cabinet to the wall. Drilling the holes through the brick was easy, as was the placement of the wooden block behind the bricks to receive the screws. Unfortunately I tried to overtighten the second of the screws, resulting in tearing out the hole so the screw wouldn't fasten. I got around this problem by applying method 2, one of the hammer in screws that we bought to fit the back door. This is holding admirably, but next time I am in a hardware store I will buy a very long and quite thick screw so I can put it through the brick and into the frame, rather than relying on what was previously an unreliable wall.
... and it works!!
Captain Haddock, Tintin and Milou (Snowy) are walking towards Moulinsart (Marlinspike Hall). 'What's this?!' exclaims Captain Haddock. 'Billions of blistering blue barnacles! What bashi-bazouk has added two wings to my chateau?' 'Ah yes, Captain', says Tintin, 'So you didn't know that the chateau of Cheverny served as Hergé's model for your ancestral chateau?' Off to the side a smugly superior Snowy mutters 'What an ignoramus the captain is. Even I knew that!' and over on the right the detectives Dupont et Dupond (Thomson and Thompson) are saying 'They said Cheverny', 'Not only that: they said Moulinsart.'
Playing around in Photoshop (in this case that means upping the contrast) you get all sorts of photo noise, but you also get a lot more stars. You can also see the track of an aircraft as it flies over.
I have drawn in the lines that makes this a hunter. All I can think is that 5,000 years ago it was all more obvious.
To learn more about this lovely day flying moth, go to the Burnet moths page on Loire Valley Nature.
This will come as a great disappointment to CFTST - Le Chemin de Fer Touristique Sud Touraine, who were hoping to open at least a part of the line for a tourist train. It also comes as a disappointment to me, because I would love a tourist train in the area - especially as the line between Le Grand Pressigny and Tournon is particularly scenic, following the Claise river for quite some distance before diving off through forest between Bossay sur Claise and Tournan.
I hope this doesn't mean the end of the railway, but I fear it might.
Snakeshead Fritillary Fritillaris meleagris, known as la fritillaire pintade in French, survives in a few dozen places along the Loire and its tributaries, and another dozen in the Brenne. It is a plant of old fashioned water meadows, that is to say, rich pasture along riverbanks which flood annually in the winter. This is a very rare habitat nowadays, and so the plant is also very rare in the wild.
The distinctive chequerboard patterned petals look as if they have been folded into some sort of origami box. If you see one there is no mistaking it for anything else. Our chance discovery of them on the islands in the river at Pont de Ruan is our first sighting of them in the wild. They are available as a garden plant and I have grown them, but sadly lily beetles are very partial to them and they have not survived in our garden.
Susan
