Rentrée Roll-call

As it's la Rentrée (back to school), I thought I'd just give you the run-down of the current residents of our home!

Youngest first: Wilson the kitten arrived approximately four hours before we left on our Spanish holiday. He mewed and mewed in our neighbours' empty garden (they were already on holiday) until we took pity on him and presented him to our house/garden/animal sitters, who took the adoption of an untrained kitten in their stride! He must have been over 2 months when this photo was taken by them, but we all thought he was younger - he must have been rather malnourished. Lots of kittens get abandoned around here, but young Wilson has landed on his feet - we've already had him vaccinated and chipped, and Raja has adopted him as a playmate! We are all in love with him...

So next up for age must be Son 2's guinea pigs - if I get more time, I will add more photos. His piggies are called Lysandra, Catrina and Hester (well, what else do you call guinea pigs?) and he loves them very much.

The three big hens are next in age - we are getting three eggs a day from them at the moment! Wilson is wary of them...

Then come the two ornamental hens, who were adopted when a friend returned to the USA. One is just a smaller version of our big ones, but China, the white silky bantam, is a sight to behold... they also lay fairly well, but less than the biggies. We eat a lot of omlettes, here!

Chanel the adult cat comes next. He is at least 9 years old and is theoretically an invalid, as he has broken his hip twice. He has calmed down a bit, and we keep him inside a lot, but he still slopes off to visit neighbours, and, I am sure, gets fed by them... Six Dinner Sid! He was most unimpressed when Wilson arrived, particularly as Wilson was missing his mum and tried to get some milk from Chanel!

Raja is a few years older than Chanel. She is Son 1's adopted cocker spaniel, and has changed his life for the better in so many ways. I mentioned 'hen therapy' to Lola Nova a while ago (she agreed it exists) but dog therapy is wonderful, too...

Then comes Son 2 - at 14 he is two years older than Raja! He is in his exam year, the final year of collège. It's all a bit much for a kid who is juggling an enthusiasm for Pokemon with spots and adolescence, but we're confident he'll get through it.

Son 1 is 16 now, and in his second year of lycée. It's a better place than collège. He's specialising in science, with as much history as he can do on the side, but sadly, from his point of view, he still has to read French literature!

There's a really big gap now until you get to the adults in the household. Probably the youngest adult is Achilles the tortoise. I've roughly counted the rings on his shell and he seems to be in his 30s. He's got the wisdom of age, certainly - he gets out of his enclosure and goes for wanders, so now we've written my mobile number on his shell, and we get the occasional phone call from an excited family who've found him chomping through their garden...

And now we come to me, vintage-loving English teacher. You know me!

And finally Ben, who has an adventure of his own starting next week. His work is funding him to do further studies - he'll be off in Lyon during the week for the next nine months, coming home at the weekend to see how his family and other animals are getting on! We're all very pleased that he's got this opportunity (it's to do an MBA) and hope to be reporting on a little bit of life in Lyon, as well as in the Toulouse area, over the coming year.

The Pilgrim Way to Santiago

In 2011 I found myself by accident on the pilgrim route to Santiago. I snapped this photo of a pilgrim's scallop shell in the little shrine on the back road, which is actually only about 20 minutes' drive from our house.

Just over two years later, we headed quite deliberately to the end of the pilgrimage - Santiago de Compostela itself. You can see my photos of the Baroque frontage of the cathedral in my previous post.

Ben and I paid to go up into the museums which take up some of the rooms around the cathedral, and I snapped this photo of pilgrims and tourists together in the square. You can spot the pilgrims because most of them are lying down! They have had to walk at least 100 kilometers to get there, or cycle 200, and most of them had probably done more. You can see a huge pile of rucsacs in the middle of my photo, with a few pilgrims watching them as their fellows head off - maybe into the cathedral, or maybe into the well-stocked city pharmacies, which advertise a great range of foot-care products!

The sense of arrival must be wonderful. The Catholic pilgrims go to confession and mass, and everyone mills around in the cathedral, which has quite a sense of bustle and awe, probably as it has done for the last thousand years. This photo shows you what you can see there:

But this photo gives you a much better feel of the place!

Whisper, crackle, shuffle, bustle, shhhh, shuffle, bustle... it's a fascinating place.

But when you think that you have come to the end of the pilgrim route, it turns out you are wrong. THIS is the end of the road - the end of the world - Finisterre!

Pilgrims traditionally continued walking until they got to the true end of the road, on the blustery cape of Fisterra, or Finisterre.

There they burnt their pilgrim clothes - Son 2 is investigating the site of a very recent fire, composed mostly of boots, he informed us.

Nowadays, as well as pilgrims and tourists, there is a lighthouse and a radio mast.

The sign says 'Do not leave clothes on this radio mast' in many pilgrim languages...



The town of Fisterra is just tucked into a bay behind the cape. Here the pilgrims stopped in medieval times to pick up the scallop shell which would show the world that they had completed their holy travels. And here Son 2 dived in the cold, cold waters of the Atlantic and found...

Ivy-covered Cloisters and Celtic Cathedrals

Not surprisingly, our travels around the northern coast of Spain involved visits to some beautiful churches.

The ivy-draped cloister at Santillana del Mar was one of my favourites.

The outside of the church in that medieval town was also beautiful, but didn't quite compare to the Baroque splendour of Santaigo de Compostela in Celtic Galicia:

We visited the cathedral by day and returned at midnight, when Celtic music was playing and locals or visitors were dancing in the square:

Even on our road-trips between campsites we encountered incredible churches. We parked our car and trailer in front of this edifice when we popped into a small town to find some much-needed toilets!

There are plenty of ancient churches in France, but they are seen more as historic monuments in our secular country. We enjoyed spending time in a country where faith seemed at least as important as tourism!

Coming round the mountain in a vintage skirt!

We did a camping tour of the northern coast of Spain this month - another lovely chance to chill out with the family while visiting some wonderful places.

That's our tent, hiding behind the cornflowers, at the bottom of a high valley in the Cordillera Cantabrica.

This campsite was our favourite - lots of space and free mountain-goat jumping displays at unexpected times!

Both at the campsite (available for rent) and higher up in the valley, these herdsmen's huts called brañas are a feature of the area. They are thatched with dried broom! We saw the local cattle and a lot of farmers, out and about making hay. Choughs flew around us as we walked higher up the valley, and we spotted vultures and eagles on the craggy mountains. The bears and wolves kept their distance, though...

At the high, and rather distant, end of the valley was a beautiful lake. We took a (very quick) dip in it and Ben snapped this rare glimpse of me in this year's walking gear - yes, I was the only walker on that popular route who had combined hiking boots with a vintage floral skirt and a tie-die T-shirt.

Bryony, Brambles and Honeysuckle

Son 1 and I took the increasingly elderly Raja for a walk on the Coulée Verte this evening. After a cool day (not above 25°C) she was full of energy and we had a great time - and the combination of these wild climbers was a beautiful sight.

My mum loved 'things climbing through things' in her garden, and I feel that these three live up well to her philosophy of gardening! They were very high up - we won't be able to pick the blackberries when they come, but they do look like they're going to be juicy...

16!

I just had to make a quick change to my profile - this photo from a month ago shows you why!

Morning Glory

I think this is our second Morning Glory flower this year -  they seff seed enthusiastically and Ben dug these plants out of his veg garden about a month ago and put them

into a planter with an obelisk to climb. They're now at the corner of our above ground swimming pool, hiding the terrible blue plastic! It's a great pool, though, and we are enjoying a daily swim in this heat. How are you all?

Surfacing...

Hello friends!

Oohh, surfacing here, after a long time of busy work and trying to sort difficult things out. I did manage to buy the enamel mug, above, at a rainy Vide Grenier, though! We are all well and enjoying a bit of sunshine, finally... How are you all?

"Un peu spécial..."

If you're an English speaker, I bet you think you know what the title means, but the French give "a bit special" a different spin - here are some lovely variations of its translation, which range from "a little strange" to "a bit unique"... including some positives but frequently putting a more negative spin on the whole concept of  "special".

My family has been having a bit of an interesting, not to say "spécial" month, and there have been moments when I have wondered why we are just all so weird. Surely normal people don't have such a bizarre series of things to deal with?

Well now, of course they may, and the fact that they may deal with them in different ways does't necessarily mean that our way of coping is worse, or that someone else's is better.

I have been forcibly reminded of how parents think that their children's problems are all their fault by a chat with a wonderful mum, whose child is one of my many dyslexic pupils. Without going into too many details, I can tell you her first reaction when she realised that her child was struggling to learn. She told me, "I thought: It's all my fault! I've indulged my child too much and now s/he's too lazy and undisciplined to learn like the other children!" The discovery that the child was in fact trying very hard, but had a genuine block, freed her up to love and help her child - and this is something that I can identify with too.

Then I read this post today - by a mum whose eldest has just turned 18, and who talks with a beautiful, poetic honesty, about the beauty of their life together but also about the hard years. I hope it's OK if I quote her here. She says: "Hard to know I can’t fix any of the times I dented up your heart with my ridiculous white-knuckled steering-wheel control and big Buick idols."

There we are - we think that everything that goes wrong is our fault, and that if only we keep harsh enough control, our children will be "normal", whatever that is, and not "un peu spécial". But actually, I think everyone's child is special, don't you? After all, I am a Special Needs Teacher...

And one rather sweet thing about the "specialness" of my family was brought home to me again today, as we drove to church and the boys and Ben were yet again discussing what colour words and letters are. And the colours of sounds, smells and feelings, too - I didn't even know they saw colourful feelings, even after all these years of living with them! The ability to do this is called synesthesia, and it's certainly quite special! It's inherited from their dad - I really am the odd one out in this family.

Bank Holidays in France

In France, Bank Holidays don't move around to the nearest Monday like they do in the UK. Sometimes, this means they all fall at the weekend, and we get no extra days off.

But sometimes, they fall in the week and we get crazy amounts of time off - hurray! This last week we had VE day (Wednesday 8th May) and Ascension Day (Thursday 9th) - it was a weekend in the middle of the week, and we enjoyed it to the full, despite a bit of rain.

Son 2 and Ben worked together to construct a small hutch for the new guinea pigs. They came with all their accommodation, but we think that the garden they were in before was more sheltered, and we feel happier now that they have a proper bit of 'indoors' to go into at night, when they are in their run on the lawn. They love the new home, and Son 2 is so happy that his work has been appreciated... and it's fantastic for Ben to have shared projects with the boys.