Christmas at the Beach

Most Australians will have a family meal on Christmas day and exchange presents. It probably won't be a barbecue, and it is most unlikely to be on the beach. Instead it will be somewhere cool and shaded, indoors with the airconditioning on possibly, but perhaps outside in the garden under a shade sail.

A decorated tree in Manly, a Sydney beach suburb.

Seafoods, salads and sparkling wines are likely to feature strongly on the menu, especially if you are near the coast with access to good prawns and oysters. If your family is of British ancestry, as mine is, then the meal is likely to contain some remarkably similar elements to that which your cousins in the Old Country are enjoying --  a large roast of some sort and a steamed Christmas pud.

Joyeux Noël 

wherever you are and whatever your Chistmas tradition is.

Le Relais du Dolmen

Le Relais du Dolmen is the latest incarnation of the restaurant in Charnizay. When we first bought our house, the restaurant was called Le Gargantua and was a lunch stop of très bon rapport de prix et qualité. Then the lease was sold to someone else, who lasted a couple of years, but didn't really impress the locals. Earlier this year the place abruptly closed. It looked like it had been abandoned, but in the autumn the decorators moved in. Now it has re-opened, with a new name, and a young local woman at the helm.

The new restaurant sign.

Antoinette, who writes Chez Charnizay, thought she should try the place out and invited us and mutual friends Tim and Pauline along to lunch on Friday. We also thought it would be a good idea to try it out and accepted with alacrity.

The meal was a simple, 12€ no choice set menu of paté en croute, chile con carne with salad, cheese, apple and banana cinnamon crumble or moeulleux de chocolat with creme anglaise for dessert and wine. Coffee was extra.

Tim and Niall outside the bar.

The young woman was managing the kitchen, the tables (3 occupied and a total of 11 customers including us) and the bar all on her own. As a result our bread, water and wine were a long time coming, and she clearly needs an assistant. She asked us if chile con carne was OK for mains and assured us it wasn't very spicy. Someone on the next table opted not to have it, and was given something that appeared to be mostly mashed potato (maybe brandade de morue?). 'Not very spicy' turned out to be a considerable overstatement. I think it had been shown a chili in the kitchen, but that none actually came in contact with the carne. It was a perfectly pleasant and satisfying mince and beans dish though, served in big square bowls so you could help yourself.

The cheese platter was a simple offering of camembert and Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine. I thought the camembert was particularly tasty. The crumble was pronounced very good by those that had it, and my moeulleux was good too. The red table wine was soft and black curranty and very drinkable. It went perfectly with the carne sans chilli. A coffee rounded things off nicely.

The restaurant has stiff competition from restaurants serving similarly priced meals at lunchtime in the villages less than 10 minutes either side of Charnizay, so she may struggle to match them for quality. However, it seems a nice place to drop into every now and then, and definitely worth patronising on the grounds that if you don't use it you will lose it.  If you want a quick simple meal, the food isn't bad and I am sure the restaurant will evolve and develop as the new manager gains experience. Or you could just drop into the bar at other times for a coffee, beer or a snifter. I imagine it could be quite convivial.

Pauline, Antoinette, Simon, Tim and Niall, happily installed in the newly refurbed little restaurant.

We hope that the enterprise goes well and that the summer brings a boost in passing traffic. And as a place to be when the world ended it was perfectly adequate.

PS: We thought that next year we might organise a Touraine Bloggers office Christmas party, with a Secret Santa (€5 limit) gift exchange, maybe in Loches. Hands up all those who would be interested?

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There is a Marché aux truffes (Truffle Market)  at Marigny-Marmande on Friday 28, from 9 am to 1 pm. There will be a gourmet market and truffles with everything! Ungraded truffles are affordable, with a walnut sized tuber costing about €20, an egg sized one about €30. If you buy one, do allow the vendor to choose one for you, or take their advice about which one to buy, so that you get the best value for money. Worth going to just for the all pervasive smell of truffles in the air.

Meditation Station

This rest and relaxation station was popular with transit passengers in Beijing airport.

A Chinese Fountain

 This fountain, with its carved stone guardians, sits in the centre of Beijing airport.

It's a Whitewash

We always spend time in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont while we are in Paris. The hotel we stay at is only a couple of blocks away and the park is wonderful. We rounded a corner in September and encountered this whitewashed tree in the dell overlooked by one of the restaurants in the park. The paint job was incredibly neat and thorough. No natural tree colour showed through and there was no evidence of paint or whitewash on the lawn underneath. Extra-ordinary! There was no explanation of why the tree was painted. I presumed it was a temporary work of art and that the white would wash off, maybe in the next rain. But no -- the ghostly tree was still there on 14 December when we arrived back from Australia.

On our original visit I was equally fascinated by the reaction of some small boys passing in a school group. 'Oh look at that! Isn't it pretty? And what pretty flowers too!' I cannot imagine a group of c.8 year old Australian boys having quite the same reaction (or even noticing the flowers in the nearby garden bed -- although I'm sure the tree would have at least got some attention).

UPDATE: It's art and it's whitewash -- the full explanation here (in English and French) thanks to a link provided by Canadian blog reader The Beaver.

Graffiti or Sculpture?

 The local tuffeau stone is so soft, it is inevitable that centuries old buildings are covered in graffiti. Some of the most remarkable is to be found in the Guardroom attached to the Louis XI Tower on the citadel in Loches.

Created by Protestant troops stationed here during the Wars of Religion (16th century) these are more bas relief sculpture than graffiti.  A frieze of lifesize characters stretches around two walls, all soldiers in different poses, with weapons and some detail of costume and facial features.

Staking the Orchids

Orchid markers under the apples.

Yesterday was my birthday, and as a little treat to myself I spent the afternoon in the orchard. I wanted to get the rapidly emerging orchid rosettes marked with sticks. This protects them from being accidentally trodden on (or run over if they are closer to the gate). Later, in the spring it will protect them from being mown off before they have a chance to flower. After they have flowered I leave the markers in until early September, so the orchids are not mown over before the seeds mature and disperse. The species that send their leaves up in the late autumn and winter are not frost tender, so they will survive just about anything the weather sends. If it doesn't rain sufficiently in the spring about a third of them could go dormant again without flowering, but mostly, if they send up leaves they flower.

This is what I was searching for to mark.

It took me 2 hours to methodically work over the orchard grass, searching for rosettes of leaves and sticking a marker in just to the west of each cluster of leaves. In all, 124 orchid plants or clusters of plants of 4 species have sent up leaves so far. This year, the early emergers are those under the apples and to the north of the site, unlike previous years, when the southern side and under the cherries seemed to be the first. I expect the laggards, including the 5th species, will come in due course.

 And this is the reward in April for protecting the orchids so they get to flower.

Hunting Lodge or Palace?

This is the view you get of Chambord as you walk from the carpark. I can't decide if this truly massive building is a hunting lodge masquerading as a palace or a palace masquerading as a hunting lodge. Probably the latter. It was never really intended to be lived in for any longer than a short duration hunting trip though, and as a consequence, those who got lumbered with the responsibility of caring for it, long after its Renaissance construction, probably loathed the place for its huge echoing rooms and inadequate heating arrangements.

Protecting Rural Tracks

 Simon, Anne-Loes and Ingrid admire the view over the Creuse valley in October, coming back from a walk along a chemin rural near Yzeures.

This is an extremely rural area and there are many public roads that are actually just grassy tracks. Local authorities are allowed to restrict access to these chemins ruraux, as they are known, if they feel the route would be damaged by motorised vehicles. One of the reasons for this is because these tracks often form a network that allow otherwise isolated places to be reached. They also link in to forest and fire trails and so it is important they remain in good condition just in case an emergency vehicle needs to use them.

Last year's official notification of the dates motorised vehicles were banned from using the track.

The usual arrangement is to ban vehicles from vulnerable chemins ruraux from the beginning of October to the end of April, but if the commune deems it necessary, they can restrict access at any time of year. Over the winter is when the tracks are most likely to be soft due to rain, and could easily be ruined by vehicles churning up the ground. Some are routinely restricted in the winter as a precautionary measure. Sometimes a compromise solution is to simply ban agricultural machinery, which is heavy and have big tyres that leave dangerous ruts.

Malaysian in Beijing

We had an excellent breakfast (lunch? who knows when you are flying longhaul...) in the Malaysian restaurant in Beijing airport.

Our brunch order appeared in these hatches and was brought over by a waitress.

Pak choy in fish sauce, a fruit smoothie and a banana milkshake. It cost the equivalent of €11.

The view across the restaurant.

 My view out the windows. I'd like to give Beijing the benefit of the doubt and say this was fog. It was very cold and there was snow on the ground, but I suspect the visibility issue may have included some smog.

Keep in Step

This extraordinary file of identically dressed workers marched past us in Beijing airport. I've no idea where they were off to or what their role was.

We're Back!

And I bet you didn't even know we were gone (unless you are a blog reader we also see regularly in person).

We got back on Wednesday from a month in Australia, with a stopover in China. Niall and Antoinette very kindly picked us up from Chatellerault station after our epic return journey (Sydney - Shanghai - Beijing - Great Wall - Beijing - Paris). They also very kindly supplied us with delicious home made leek and potato soup and a loaf of bread for our supper so I didn't have to prepare anything in my travel addled state.

The Great Wall of China.

Our trip was to visit friends and family of course, and we spent time in Canberra, staying with Simon's brother Jon, his wife Rosie and assorted teens and twenty-somethings (an ever shifting configuration of neices, nephews and their boyfriends and girlfriends). Jon and Rosie generously lent us a vehicle -- a great gas guzzling Mercedes 4WD that we had something of a love/hate relationship with. It was much more convenient than hiring a car, and when we went out west we fitted right in (we got lots of friendly waves, as though people knew us -- all those big silver 4WD obviously look the same to more than just me...)

The visit to Canberra was primarily to attend Simon's father's 80th birthday celebrations and my sister's 50th. The weather was a bit variable, but included the hottest November day for a decade (naturally, the day we went out in the bush hunting for orchids...)

Sydney Harbour Bridge.

From Canberra we went to the coast both north and south of Sydney. North to check out where Simon's sister Elizabeth and husband Vic have bought a house and where his parents are planning to move to. South to visit friends Rick and Helen in their new house. They live in an area we've been to several times before (just across the bay from where my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2009). It's somewhere that is fairly high up on our not very long list of places we think we might like to retire to.

Then we went up to south-east Queensland to stay with my parents. This coincided with a heat wave and temperatures in the mid-30s. I caught up with old quilting friends Trish L, Trish O, Margie C, Margie P, Diana and Hilary. Simon went off to Brisbane and hung out with his former band members, Matt and Greg and their mate Andrew (who also lived in London at the same time as us). Heading back to Canberra to return the car we went via Lightning Ridge, an outback opal mining community, dodging emus, kangaroos, sheep, cattle and feral pigs all the way.

A gecko on my parents' kitchen window.

We spent our last weekend in Australia in Sydney, catching up with one of Simon's oldest friends, Alex, and his partner Stefania, as well as our very dear friend Liselle. My sister recommended a block of serviced apartments in central Sydney, and from this ideally situated base we had a great time walking along the beach tracks from Bondi to Coogee, and the next day catching the ferry across the harbour to Manly. Saturday walking along the coast was sweltering, so we all dressed for extreme heat on Sunday, only to freeze as it clouded over and rained. Oh well, the company made up for it, and we survived.

As we had a long wait of 20 hours between flights in Beijing on the way home, Simon booked a hotel (courtesy of Air China) and a guide and driver to take us to the Great Wall. Apart from being slightly wrong-footed by Air China landing us in Shanghai and organising the transit permits there rather than Beijing as we had been expecting, this all worked extremely well. Day time temperatures here were about -3C on the Wall, which is about 1000 metres above sea level, and +3C in Beijing (which is still about 600 masl).

Emus on the roadside, west of Thallon.

And now we are home and very happy indeed to be sleeping in our own bed again -- even if the weather is dismal.

Grape Camouflage

This Great Green Bush-cricket Tettigonia viridissima is perfectly camouflaged in amongst the burgeoning grapes in August. It's not threat to the grapes -- probably the reverse, as it is carnivorous and will catch and eat almost any other insect it can grab in its hook lined legs.

Not a Bee

The creature in the photos is not a bee, but a Drone Fly Eristalis sp, a superb honey bee mimic.

In my experience of newspaper articles about honey bees, about 50% of the time the stock photo used to illustrate the article will be of a fly, not a bee. Usually the not a bee in question is a Drone Fly.

If you want to check out the difference between the two, go to my earlier post about feral honey bees.

Uppers and Unders

 Side view.

This female Wasp Spider Argiope bruennichi set up home in the long grass and Bristly Oxtongue Picris echioides amongst the apple trees in the orchard in August.

  Underneath.

Like most sit-and-wait predators, she positions herself head down. This is the most energy efficient pose she can adopt, as explained in Piotr Naskrecki's The Smaller Majority.

 Above.

You can't do that on the Loire

At least, not on the central Loire where we live. There are many lovely riverside properties on the Loire and its tributaries, but no one owns boats like this -- none of the rivers are navigable to any great extent.

The Charente, on the other hand, where this photo was taken, is navigable from Rochefort on the Atlantic coast where it exits into the sea, right up to Angouleme, 120 km away.

L'Arbre de la laïcité

To shamelessly quote Wikipedia (in translation): 'The Tree of Secularism is a tree planted to commemorate the Law of 9 December 1905 separating the Churches and the State in France and for promoting the notion of secularism. It is inspired by the Tree of Liberty.'

Slate tree label.

Secularism is sometimes described as the 4th pillar of the French Republic (along with Liberty, Equality and Fraternity). Last year many communes, encouraged by a national human rights organisation dedicated to the idea of a secular society, planted a symbolic tree. Many, like Preuilly, chose to position the tree close to the State Primary School.

The tree is planted in the middle of the Champ de foire.

This secular republicanism is part of France's determination that each person should be free to exercise their own conscience in public affairs, and not be obliged to follow a dogmatic religious line. La laïcité does not preclude people from holding a religious belief in private, but it insists that religion has no place in public life. It promotes education as a means of achieving the more well known tenets of the Republic - Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Without education and a secular environment democracy is worthless. The aim of la laïcité is to support the functioning of democracy for the general interest (at the expense of the individual interest if necessary).

Susan

Fungal Fecundity

We encountered this large fungus on a tree stump in a picnic area on the River Charente near Saint Simieux in August. Not only was it producing cushions of white flesh, but it had ejected a dense powdering of brown spores which covered the immediate surrounds.

I've no idea what it is called.

The drinks can isn't litter, by the way. We put it there to try to give some idea of scale.

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Identification: I finally got round to sending these pictures to Paul Leroy to ask for an identification. He came back the same day (11 April 2013) saying (I've translated) -- "Here is the answer for the big hard brown mushroom: Ganoderma lipsiense, formerly called: G. applanatum.
This mushroom is a formidable parasite. It settles on weakened trees, often Poplars, to kill them slowly. In the photo, the surrounding herbacious plants have been coloured brown -- these are the spores, it is a characteristic feature of these mushrooms.
The white mushroom, a little funnel shaped, is: Lentinus tigrinus. This species is common on damp wood, as well as often found near water and especially on Willows."

Many thanks Paul! The tree stump the fungus was growing on was almost certainly poplar. The English name for Ganoderma lipsiense is Artists Bracket Fungus, and Wikipedia has some interesting information about it.

A Lavoir in the Charente

This lavoir (public laundry) is in La Voute, a hamlet near Mosnac in the Charente, to our south-west. It reminded me of some Roman archaeological sites, but that may just be because the whole of the Charente always strikes me as very Roman, with its blocky pink rendered buildings and canal profile terracotta tiles on shallow pitched roofs.

The Plight of the Plane Trees

Plane trees were widely used in France in the early and mid-19th century, first planted along roadsides on the orders Napoleon to provide shade for troops and travellers moving through the country, and by country estate owners to create green cathedral-like grand allées through their landscaped parks. Most famously, they line the entire length of the Canal du Midi, providing shade for the boating community in the sunny south. These mature trees are a considerable size and the style of their planting produces an impressive effect. They are much loved for their aesthetic value and the heritage associated with them.


Ceratocystis platani, known as le chancre coloré in French ('coloured canker') is a fungal disease that for the last 20 years has constituted a serious threat to plane trees and sycamores (Platanus spp) in Europe. The deadly fungal disease was introduced accidentally in 1944 when American troops disembarked in Provence. The wooden munitions boxes made from American Sycamore P. occidentalis that landed with the troops were infected, and the local French plane trees were unable to resist this invader.

Roadside plane trees at Pont de Ruan.

For the first 15 years the parasite remained dormant, but now it is affecting trees in Italy, Switerland, southern Greece and the south of France. Its distribution reaches an ever advancing line from the area around Lyon to Toulouse and along the Canal du Midi. Even the cold does nothing to arrest its continuing expansion of territory.

Plane trees at the entrance to Chenonceau.

Just a few spores introduced into even the most trivial wound is sufficient to entirely infect the tree, which can resist the infection for no longer than 4 - 6 years, depending on where on the tree the contamination began. All chemical treatment trials have now been abandoned, due to the depth the fungus works its way into the trunk. The mechanism by which the fungus develops is remarkably effective. After contact with the parasite the tree defends itself by blocking and closing sap veins in the infected part, to contain the attack. The fungus follows the medullary rays of the wood as well as the sap veins though, and always propogates itself toward the healthy sections of the tree. At the same time it produces extremely damaging toxins which disseminate and poison the upper parts of the tree. The tree redeploys its defense mechanism, leading to its death, from dessication due to the complete blockage of its vascular system and the accumulation of toxins. And to top it all, the fungus is extremely contagious, transferring via the roots, water, infected prunings and contaminated machinery and equipment. In France, over 50 000 trees have already died.

The INRA (National Institute of Agronomy Research) has been working on a solution and have bred a resistant hybrid they have registered and called PLATANOR® Vallis clausa. By crossing American and Oriental plane trees they have achieved resistance not only to chancre coloré, but also other worrisome fungi, cankers and bugs (eg Sycamore Lace Bug Corythuca ciliata, known in French as le tigre de plantane). One of the parents of this new hybrid is the American Sycamore itself, and PLATANOR® retains all of this parent tree's ornamental features.

Plane trees at the entrance to Chenonceau.

Sadly, it's all too late for the plane trees lining the Canal du Midi. The disease has spread particularly rapidly here because the trees are planted very close together, so their root systems intermingle and transfer the fungus. It also leapfrogs, because people tie their boats to the trees (they are not supposed to, but they do). The wet rope can be contaminated and create a wound in the tree which transfers the fungus. A 20 year rolling programme has begun to cut the diseased 182 year old giants down. Happily, they can be replaced, at least in part, by the new resistant variety. However, the INRA continues to work on developing resistant strains and varieties, as the plan is to mix the new planting up genetically, so that there is no monoculture that a disease can take hold of and run wild through.

 Plane trees at the entrance to Chenonceau.

The combined cost of the research, removal, replanting and the potential loss in the interim of tourism income on the popular Canal du Midi will run into hundreds of millions of euros.

Source:  INRA press release.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

Modern Transport Solutions

These days, due to the speed and efficiency of the TGV (Train Grande Vitesse = 'High Speed Train') service it is perfectly possible to commute the 250 km from Tours to Paris for work. You can buy an awful lot of train tickets with the million euros you've saved by buying an apartment in Tours instead of Paris. Cycling to the station makes sense too, as you can dodge the central Tours traffic jams more easily. Plus you get to feel righteous.

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The Ferriere-Larcon Christmas Market is on Sunday 9 December, in the church, from 10.00 to 17.00. 

Classic Chaumont

The Chateau of Chaumont, photographed from the viewing tower on the other side of the river Loire.

God Loves Boules Players

 These gigantic plane trees can be seen from almost anywhere in Preuilly.

God loves boules players because plane tree leaves are perfect for keeping the sun off. I read a quote to this effect earlier in the year on Patti Lecron's blog A French Education.

It made me smile because, sure enough, the boules courts in Preuilly are situated under the most enormous plane trees.

In August it's shady under the plane trees, true enough, but it's still cooler to play at night.

Worst Place Name

Is this the worst place name you've ever seen? You would have thought that the local planners could have come up with something a little more elegant than Marray-sur-D943. What's wrong with Marray-sur-Indre -- all the other villages along this route are named something-sur-Indre, as the road runs parallel with the river. Nearby villages are called lovely lilting names like Preuilly-sur-Claise, Azay-le-Ferron, Chanceaux-pres-Loches or Joué-les-Tours. How come poor little Marray got lumbered with this terrible, unimaginative and unattractive name?

A Blue Moon

But not in June, in early September. I (she announces self-righteously) was putting in my 50 laps of the pool, while Simon was lounging around poolside taking photos of the sky.