Horses spotted underground

Written 29May13

Even though rain was still tumbling down today, we ventured from our warm accommodation, intent on driving west downstream along the valley of the Cele, which runs through Figeac, to its confluence with its larger neighbour the Lot, and then follow the Lot valley upstream back to just south of Figeac. In this area these streams are bounded by limestone hills, in many places worn away into spectacular cliffs to which homes and villages cling.

Cele valley. Examine the pics carefully and you’ll see the buildings use the cliff as their back walls.

In many places the road runs very close to the cliffs, with the river on the road’s southern flank. Here the roadmakers have resorted to tunnelling into the cliff.

Note the scallop shell motif on the backpack. Pilgrims headed for Santiago de Compostella, in Spain, in the rain, Cele valley.

We were headed for Pech Merle…

In the millenia before the latest Ice Age began to thaw (around 15,000 years ago) to today’s “normal” temperatures, much of the animal population, including humans, of what is now western Europe, had found some refuge from the cold in the fertile valleys of the Cele and Lot rivers not far from Figeac. Britain and Ireland and much of the continent were covered by a sheet of ice and were one land mass with few if any land animals surviving on the ice sheet. The humans in the valleys south of the ice sheet were hunter gatherers but were thoroughly modern in that their brains were as large and as well developed as ours are now. Evidence? Among other, the wonderful cave paintings which they left behind.

Spotted horses gallery, Pech Merle caves, France. This is not my image, but has been borrowed from a very few images on this subject publicly available on the Internet.

Back in 1922 a couple of youngsters with a keen interest in such things discovered a small cave near where they lived, just near the junction of the Cele with the Lot. In the process of exploring this find, they hit the explorer jackpot. Their small cave led downward into a much larger series of natural galleries and in these galleries were unmistakeable signs of use by earlier humans. This site, Pech Merle, is one of the very few such sites which are open to the public. Visitor numbers are restricted to 700 per day and all must visit as part of a guided tour.

The natural galleries are spectacular enough in their own right, but the early human artworks and evidence of human presence, all exceeding 20,000 years in age (using credible dating technology) put the natural stuff in the shade. Bare footprints left by a youth or child in what was then mud on the floor of the cave were for me the most interesting. If I’d stumbled across such prints in mud today I’d assess them as recent and attribute them to a barefooted child. Sprayed prints of human hands, much like those at ancient Australian aboriginal art sites were also present.

The galleries were entombed at least 10,000 years ago when land slippage closed the entrance which had been used by early humans and animals such as cave bears, which hibernated in the cave. This left the interiors frozen in time until the young twentieth century explorers found their way in.

After our underground stint at Pech Merle, the rain still dribbling down, we ate our picnic lunch while huddled in the car and then headed back east, this time along the Lot valley, stopping off at Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, a very steep-streeted village huddled on high ground on the left bank of the Lot.

Saint-Cirq-Lapopie. Picturesque but cold and wet and a hell of a climb from the carpark.

By this time our cosy apartment was working on us like home port does for a sailor so we commanded our navigator to point the way and were home within the hour, just as another heavy rain shower struck.

We’re gradually working our way through the local restuarants, aiming for a different one each night, all within a short walk from home. Tonight we tried number five, and just like the others, it was excellent and very reasonably priced. We find we can get a very good meal for the two of us, with drinks, for under €50, and sometimes much lower. Two nights and two restaurants to go before we move on, down toward the Spanish border.

Thanks for reading

Kev

Figeac, Conques, Champollion.

Written 27May13

Figeac (pronounced Fijak) has been a real “find”. We’d never heard of anyone who’d been here and didn’t even know it existed before about four months ago. But when we discovered that there was a suitable self-catering apartment available here we did some quick research and found many positive aspects so booked it.

On arrival on Saturday, after a 500km drive, we settled in quickly and strolled all of 300m to the central pedestrianised square where we discovered a vibrant impromptu jazz session by young people using only wind instruments was underway. This set the mood and the more we saw of Figeac as we wandered around its narrow picturesque streets the more we liked it, even though the weather was gloomy that first day.

Jazz concert. Pic by Mary

The apartment is essentially what was a single large high-ceilinged room in a very old mansion. A bedroom has been created by adding a mezzanine floor and dual-direction staircase; a modern bathroom has been built in to the ground floor space under the bedroom. The remaining space has been devoted to a kitchen, sitting and dining area. Best of all, the room opens directly via French windows (what else?) onto a substantial garden shared by the whole household. This is where, at 6:00 pm tonight, I’m writing this under a brilliant blue sky.

Our apartment is in this building.

Apartment viewed from the garden, afternoon of arrival. Mary in the doorway, flanked by the French windows.

Sunday was sunny. Somehow we used up this beautiful sunny day in doing the laundry at a laundromat, wandering around fascinating Figeac and spending the last couple of daylight hours in glorious sunshine in the main square, Place Champollion, enjoying beers with many locals and a few visitors. Not once did we hear English spoken.

This being France, the Tourist Office was not open on Sunday, so that was our first port of call on Monday, also a beautiful sunny morning. Here we got the answers to the several questions we'd saved up because the online info wasn’t quite up to the mark. Always worth visiting the Tourist Office and usually there's an English speaker present!

The information gleaned there led us to first visit the Champollion museum then to take a drive to Conques, about one hour east. Based on the info provided we also reserved a couple of days later in the week for a visit to the Pech Merl caves and a visit to a market in a town further south (Figeac market is on Saturday, so was impossible to fit into our schedule).

Champollion

Jean-Francois Champollion is Figeac's greatest son, so far. Anyone who has been to Egypt may recall that he was the guy who finally cracked the code of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, using the Rosetta Stone inscriptions. His was a fine mind which was reduced to rubble by a fatal stroke at age 42. The museum is housed in his birthplace.

Conques

Conques, which I'd never heard of before today, is a World Heritage listed village whose main claim to fame is that its abbey houses a priceless medieval collection of reliquary and other religious artifacts. The homes and other buildings there are tastefully preserved in an ancient construction style so it inevitably draws quite a few tourists, including us. Among the people who pass through are many who are walking to Santiago de Compostella, as they have done for at least a thousand years.

Interestingly, the story goes that the monks in the abbey at Conques, being peeved at the lack of visitors to their part of the world, undertook to do something about it by acquiring the remains of one or more saints. Their chosen means of acquisition were decidely un-Christian: theft. Nor were they much good at that until one of their number had spent ten years inveigling himself with the monks who were the custodians of the remains of Saint Foy at a distant monkery. Once he’d gained their trust he shot through with the bones, getting them to Conques where they allegedly still remain. The pilgrims trekking toward Santiago de Compostella having heard that Saint Foy’s bits and pieces were at Conques, made a beeline for that fair town and the rest, as they say, is history. Conques made a bomb out of it and continues to thrive on it to this day. Even we spent money there.

Around Conques

Mary in Conques

Reliquary of Saint Foy, one of the main reasons that the trail to Santiago de Compostella passes through Conques. The reliquary has been added to over the years, the latest being the bronze boots, added a couple of hundred years ago. Bizarre!

The weather was perfect today. As Mary drove back from Conques toward Figeac along the winding road running alongside rivers most of the way, we decided we'd go back to the sunlit outdoor spot we’d spent beer time in the day before. And so we did. We soaked up the sun and just watched life in Figeac’s main square happen.

Mary with her preferred dark sweet beer.

The venue, pic taken just as we walked away.

Thanks for reading

Kev

24/25 May 13. Snow surprise.

Written 26May13, in Figeac

Finding the way in a strange country seems to me almost unbelievably easier now than just a few years ago; I’ll tell you why later. But first, we want to tell you about our last day in Flavigny, Friday 24 May.

By chance the day before, I’d found that the local Farm Restaurant “Auberge Ferme”, in the heart of the village, and a two minute walk from home, was to be open on that day for a big lunch and I’d managed with a little bit of persistence to have the boss lady accept Mary and me as paying guests (she had thought they were “complet” but did a recalculation and decided two more could just fit in). So this was all we’d scheduled for the day. Easily filling in the morning with masterly low level activity we turned up at 12:30 to find the barn-like structure set with about 100 places, with between four and 20 seating spots set on each of eight or ten tables, completely filling the available floor space. On most of the tables were already placed large bowls of sliced bread sticks. Clearly, some serious eating was planned.

The venue. Cooking and dining was conducted on the ground floor only. All guests entered and departed by the single door on the right. Nice to have some sunshine, eh?

In all of the space there were only two guests present when we walked in and they were at a table for four tucked away in a corner, already onto their first course. As you’d expect, these were our dining companions, a couple of Parisians about our age who were just driving around Burgundy for a few days and happened to stumble on this eating opportunity, eating being a favourite pastime of the French. Neither our table companions nor the staff knew more than the odd word of English; Mary and I have no French to speak of or with.

The barn was beautifully warm inside and reeked with the odours of freshly-cooked wholesome produce, all local as we discovered. After the customary initial confusion as to exactly how guests obtain their food we saw a pile of trays and twigged that it was self service, except that a fair bit of “conversation” had to occur for every dish selected, and, as we found, some selected dishes were actually delivered to the table as soon as they were ready, regardless of the situation with the previous course. As our native French table guests explained apologetically “Tres difficult”, but we loved it. A red wine occasion it surely was, and I breasted the counter to take charge of that particular need. “Superior au ordinaire?” Ahhh, vin ordinaire of course, and I returned to the table with an unlabelled bottle which almost certainly had been filled from a barrel, five minutes ago.

Barely had we started on the entree when the door opened and in charged a party of 20 or so, mainly young women, chatting excitedly in north American. Ushered to a couple of tables next to us they explained they were college students from Vermont, with their professor, and expressed amazement when we explained that we were from Australia. Within another five minutes the whole place was full, mainly of French, and the dining experience was in full cry with steaming bowls of beef borguignon and accompaniments being conveyed efficiently by the village ladies to the starving hordes.

Taken without flash, so some motion blurring, but they give some impression of the hubbub. Notice the portrait of the cow on the mantlepiece in the second pic! Classic!

For Mary and me no evening meal was needed. Enough said!

Our attention now turned to our next destination, the town of Figeac, in the Lot region, just over 500km south west. As the iPad and later the TomTom told me, this journey would require seven to eight hours driving. In the event, these predictions were amazingly accurate, given that we were going across the main traffic flow of France and encountering numerous villages and uncountable roundabouts in the process.

For this journey we were relying mainly on the car’s built-in TomTom for navigation. By 8:00 am Saturday we were packed and in our seats in Flavigny. Mary had commanded the TomTom, via the hand held wireless remote control, to show us the way. Given the option by TomTom, we chose to avoid toll roads.

The previous day I'd emailed the contact person for our Figeac accommodation telling him that I expected to be at the rendezvous in Figeac at 4:00pm, basing this on iPad’s assessment of the journey time and a guess at our probable departure time. Now, in the car, at 8:00am at Flavigny in drizzling rain, at the start of a 500km jouney, the TomTom predicted that we’d be in Figeac at 3:23 pm. This predicted time is continually updated on the display so I intended to monitor it as we went along.

The weather was dreadful, mostly, but the trip went smoothly. We took a short lunch and refuel break after 300km and later stopped for about ten minutes at an Intermarché supermarket for some essential supplies, delays which TomTom could presumably not predict. Our actual arrival time at Figeac was 3:50pm, only 27 minutes longer than the original predicted journey time and which was almost exactly the time we spent not driving. Remarkable, I think.

About 300km into the trip we started to see snow on the high ground to the SW, where we were headed. Now this is France in late May, and snow was unexpected even though the weather had been uncomfortably cold since our arrival. Our journey took us over one of the higher passes in the Massif Central and here we encountered falling snow, the first we’d seen for many years.

Note the snow piled on the roofs of the approaching cars. Pic by Mary, while we were driving.

We found a safe pull-off spot and I was briefly snow-flaked. Our car.

Cattle in a snow covered field. Pic by Mary.

Coming in to Figeac

Google Streetview had shown me that it would be unlikely that we’d get our car right to the door of our accommodation. This assessment was reinforced by our landlord’s assertion that we could park “nearby” so I examined the satellite view of Figeac and found a likely car parking place a short walk from the known location of our accommodation. Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted, as the Army adage goes, and this was reconnaissance from afar. Even so, an eerie feeling of deja vu cropped up as we drove toward this car parking spot, while watching our progress on a satellite view of the town on the iPad. Back at home I’d used Streetview to actually take a ground-level look at some of the trickier intersections which I could see in the satellite view. Now I was seeing those places again, but this time on the ground. This advance knowledge meant I could drive without guidance straight to the carpark where we found and grabbed the single space available. The time was 3:55pm. At 4:01pm I was at our landlord’s door.

Figeac (pronounced Fijeac) seems a great town. We have a week here before moving on.

Thanks for reading

Kev and Mary

Cutting the mustard at Dijon

Thursday, 23May13

Dijon (famous for mustard) is only 60km away, accessible by numerous roads. As we had no social or indeed any other commitments today, a visit to that fair city was agreed.

Mary had done some research and identified that a self-guided tour of the pedestrianised old centre was available. All we had to do was get to the Tourist Office, pay a couple of euros for an explanatory brochure and follow the “owls” path, with numbered stops along the way which were explained in English, in the brochure.

Clearly we’d have to park the car near the centre and walk to the Tourist Office, and back to the car later. We quickly found and bookmarked the Tourist Office and embarked in the Clio with its Tom Tom commanded to direct us to Dijon City Centre.

An hour or so later we’d parked the car, about a kilometre from the Tourist Office, as close as we could reasonably get, marked the car location and set off for the target on foot, as directed by iPad. This all went easily, even in drizzling rain (yes, still raining). Brass pointers inscribed with Dijon’s owl symbol and embedded in the paving pointed the way. Fully one hundred metres from the start we’d interrupted the trek having succumbed to the temptation of hot chocolate in a brasserie housed in a largely intact 14th century building. Some pics from the walk:

Typical. Kev at left, the one with the smaller nose. Pic by Mary

More, great roof tiling job in the background. Pic by Mary

Mary wondering… On the huge semi-circular plaza facing the Duke’s palace.

Mannequins hoping to attract customers to a ladies clothing shop along the way.

A late lunch was taken at a small bistro named after a French Admiral after which we agreed that, as we had a dinner reservation back in Flavigny, perhaps we'd better hit the road. Again the iPad showed the way on foot, guiding us unerringly to the multi-level carpark we'd used. Having chosen to return to Flavigny by a different route we spent more time than we expected trying to exit the centre by following the Tom Tom spoken instructions (in English). The problem appeared to be that Tom Tom was unaware that certain streets we were told to use could not in fact be entered. I just kept driving, following any “Toutes Directions” signs and eventually the TT settled down once we cleared the centre. Mary drove a good part of the way home to get her hand in as she fully expects to be driving more in the next few weeks. At last we could give the windscreen wipers a rest as the sky started to clear.

Back in Flavigny the weather was still fine, for a while, so we took the opportunity to get outdoors on foot with the camera.

Our back yard, sunny version. Pic by Mary.

Flavigny cemetery. Memorial to five local members of the French Resistance, killed in combat nearby on 30 March 1944, about ten weeks before the Allies invaded via the Normandy beaches. Their ages: 17, 17, 19, 20, 20.

Flavigny cemetery. View to the east.

Written on morning of Friday 24 May, and the sun is out again. We're off to the local (a large barn-like structure next to the church) for a traditional lunch, apparently there's a crowd expected and we’re lucky to have got a reservation. Boning up on our French right now.

Thanks for reading.

Kev and Mary

Semur en Auxois, new hat, great lunch spot

Day 3, Wednesday 22May13

Our morning cup of coffee in bed, made by me in the kitchen downstairs for both of us, has already become de rigeur. Conquering the stairs while holding two hot cups of coffee has become our equivalent of Everest without oxygen. Not a drop spilt, so far.

View from our bed (pic by Mary)

On Tuesday, on our third passage through the nearby town of Semur-en-Auxois (pop 4,500) we'd decided that a visit there would be worthwhile. Today seemed suitable, so onto the day’s itinerary it went, the single entry so far.

Arriving there mid morning, after a ten minute drive from Flavigny, we noticed that the temperature was at least as low as that at our base. Although we were both rugged up, only one of us had a warm hat (beanie), Mary having failed to anticipate that such an item of clothing might be needed. So a search of the few local shops was instigated to remedy that oversight. After several failures because it’s spring and the boutiques no longer stock winter items, Mary was presented with a choice of two woollen hats, one, hand knitted and multi-coloured with four little peaks on top, was deemed suitable and so I got my black beanie back. Our exploration of the medieval centre of the village and its immediate approaches could now start.

Satellite view of Semur centre, annotated (pic by Google, annotations by Photogene)

The shopping area, Semur-en-Auxois. That's me in the bottom left corner, in the black beanie. (pic by Mary)

Meat delivery to boucherie, French style. (pic by Mary)

The cracked tower. Crack appeared suddenly over 400 years ago. Still being investigated…

Crack zoomed

View from bridge toward east. River slightly flooded. (pic by Mary)

View to south from the bridge. (pic by Mary)

Mary in her new hat, looking west from the bridge.

By now, hunger pangs and the temperature were indicating a hot lunch was needed. While we could have eaten in Semur, we opted to try our luck at a different village, warming ourselves up in the car as we went. Veneray-les-Laumes loomed out of the misty rain after about 20 minutes. The Maps App was indicating that a couple of restaurants were here, but on-ground foot recce found that they had long ago closed, but the wreckage was still obvious. Then we stumbled upon a footpath advertisement for Louise’s Bistro. Relying on instinct to figure out where it might be, we got lucky and found it within a couple of minutes. It was packed with locals, from genteel oldies like us, to workers having an extended lunch. And there was a vacancy for us.

The main choices. We chose the €13.50 menu. Fantastic! The four courses were mavellous and we washed them down with a half litre (between us) of local vin rouge. €27, total; about $40 Aust/US!

Well contented, we were home by mid afternoon for a nap and awoke to find the sun trying to peep through at around 6:00pm. Looks like the weather’s on the improve.

Thanks for reading

Kev and Mary

Googling pea soup, 21May13

Our first morning in France for quite a few years. This year the May weather is different than on previous; drizzle was still drifting around outside but we were cosy in our cottage and not in any hurry to do anything much. According to the weather forecasts, delivered by the in-cottage WiFi, we could expect more of the same.

Breakfast over, we had two missions today: (1) work out how to use the in-car navigation system; (2) acquire a local SIM card to insert in our iPad to give us mobile Internet access for our month in France. A journey to the town of Avallon, about 50km west, would provide an opportunity to knock over both.

Mission One was easy and we very soon came to like the Tom Tom system built in to the Renault Clio. The iPad has a great built-in navigation system which can be used in cars, trains and on foot, but there's little doubt that the car-dedicated system is better, in the car. On the other hand, if your car doesn’t have a built in navigation system, or you want to navigate on foot, the iPad will fill the bill admirably, although ideally you need a mobile Internet connection.

Our safe and hassle free arrival in Avallon delivered us Mission Two for I had previously discovered the location of the SFR store (SIM card supplier) and checked its opening hours. We parked the car as close as we could to the shop, about two or three hundred metres away, and used the iPad to guide us through the convoluted streets, straight to the shop. In a few minutes the deal was done and we were soon getting the Internet-delivered lowdown on Vezelay, a hilltop village further west, which we decided we'd visit since we'd come most of the way already.

Parked the car in a parking area outside the village walls in drizzling rain, air temperature about 7°C. Payment was required but pay machine broken (I recognized the word “hors” on the display). Decided to chance it and save €3, as had every other car parked nearby. We started the climb up the main street which, as you’d expect for a touristy village like this, is lined with boutiques hoping to attract the tourists, of which there were precious few today.

We were cold and it was almost lunchtime and we’d only got about 200m when we saw this sign on the footpath outside a shop with a very enticing and warm looking interior.

There was only one other customer and the shopkeeper’s eyes lit up when he saw we were inbound for his door. On the way up from the car Mary and I had been jointly fantasising about hot soup with bread and as we sat down in the brasserie with its menu we hoped to find such listed. No sign of it! Mary had given up and was about to order a croque monsieur when I thought I'd ask about the soup anyway. Problem: no English spoken there, no decent French spoken at our end. Time to resort to the iPad, on which I have installed Google Translate. The shopkeeper looked over my shoulder with great curiosity as I tapped in “Soup?” then tapped for the French word. “Soupé?” came the written response, delivered by the Internet, instantly. “Oui, oui, legume!” this from the Frenchman, getting more excited by the second. Marvellous, pea soup! Now for the coup de grace. I typed in “with bread” and tapped the magic button. From the ether appeared the words “avec du pain” and this time I tapped the “speak” option and the machine blurted out the words as spoken by a sexy French lady. “Mon dieu!”, our new friend marvelled, then dashed out to the kitchen to personally make two big bowls of thick pea soup and a large bowl filled with fresh and crusty bread broken into bite-sized pieces. Best soup we’ve ever had!

Mary wandering up to the Abbey at Vezelay after the soup.

Brass rendition of scallop shell embedded in the road at Vezelay. This symbol marks the various routes which pilgrims tread, and have done for hundreds of years, on their pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella.

Later… on the way home

We came upon this remarkable structure, no longer used for its original purpose, or Mary wouldn’t have got as close to it as shown here.

It’s a pigeonnier, sort of a high rise accommodation option for pigeons. This one has 3000 pigeon holes inside… Several hundred years ago pigeons were farmed using these structures.

The pigeon holes line the interior of the walls and the pigeons enter and exit the pigeonnier via the "windows" higher up.

More info.

Here in Flavigny until Saturday

Kev and Mary

House with wooden curtains

21May13. First morning after arrival

It's cosy here in our big double bed in the roof space bedroom, especially when you can hear the raindrops hitting the transparent roof of the spacious terrace just through that back door over there. At least we hope that's where the raindrop noises are coming from as no skylight or similar is visible from under the continental doona. It’s still pre-dawn, and very dark. Never mind, we should get a bit of daylight by 0630am, in an hour or so (daylight savings invoked, here, at 47 degrees north of the equator).

Mary and I crashed into our bed yesterday several hours before sunset. We were starting to recognize the first signs of incoherence in each other, and besides, we could hardly keep our eyes open. That long haul from eastern Australia to France doesn’t get any easier. And the 300km high speed drive down the Autoroute de Soleil, in driving rain, to a place we'd never been before added to the drain on our brains. Now we've had an enormous, delicious, dream-filled sleep and maybe I’ll go down the stairs soon and make us both a cup of coffee.

Ah, those stairs! In strong contrast to the rest of the structure of our rented semi-detached, the stairs are obviously modern, possibly made by Ikea and possibly assembled by Melanie, our resourceful, charming and youthful landlady, from a flatpack (assembly instructions on her iPhone). The stairs rise steeply from the lower floor to our upper floor bedroom, and seemingly descend twice as steeply in the opposite direction. They creak, or maybe it’s our joints, as we ascend and descend with great care holding on to the single ancient steel banister bolted to the stone wall shared with Melanie’s place.

The stairs.

There’s no way this house would have a twin anywhere. Its thick stone outer walls stood here long before the French Revolution, and windows and doors were created or filled in as successive owners saw the need and found the money. Melanie’s home, which shares a wall with ours, is doubtless similar on the inside, as are the numerous other homes in Flavigny sur Ozeraine. While our temporary home has no twin, it obviously has numerous siblings and they all stand around, stony-faced, side by side or staring at each other along the narrow winding streets.

The houses, nearby. Our front door is open and it’s accessed by the stairs on the left.

That’s our bedroom window at the top centre.

While our bedroom is upstairs, it opens at the back of the house onto a terrace which is at ground level, giving us a small garden, with views across a jumble of the fronts and backs of some siblings plus the stand-out church spire, 100m away as WiFi travels, but 200 metres or so on foot. So the lower floor of the house is at ground level at the front while the upper floor is at ground level at the back. Astute readers will gather that we’re on sloping ground, which is why the village is here, but that’s another story.

View from the terrace toward the church.

Where our bedroom is, on the upper floor, is easily identified as roof space because its ceiling is far from horizontal; so far from horizontal that I’ve already bumped my head on it three times and I’m no basketball player. Mostly clinging to the inside of the roof, the ceiling ascends rapidly the further it gets from the front and back of the house and it also showcases the roof’s eroded oak beams which run parallel with the street and are embedded in the ceiling plaster. These are the sorts of timber features you’d hide if they were in a modern house, in fear that prospective buyers would otherwise shy away. Here, they’re proud of them, and rightly so, just as an old person is proud of obvious longevity, even though it is a little battered.

Downstairs, where I've just made two coffees and done battle with the stairs in the process, has no rear door, as you’d guess if you’re keeping track. Where the rear door in a “normal” house would be there’s a modern, seemingly brand new, bathroom. The rear wall of the bathroom, being underground, doubtless conceals the remains of previous human activity on the village site. Who knows, even JC, here in BC (52, to be precise) to defeat the Gauls nearby, may have left reminders of his presence. If you’re keeping up you’ve probably anticipated, correctly as it turns out, that the bathroom has no windows.

Our main room, the first encountered upon entering from the single formal entrance facing the street, having given up some space to the Ikea stairs, is mainly devoted to cooking and eating activities. If you’re hoping that the cooking equipment is as ancient as the walls, be prepared to be disappointed. The open fire has long gone, thanks to Melanie. Fire is now delivered by cables which can occasionally be spotted in places where they can’t reasonably be hidden within the stones of the walls. Tidy it’s not, but making compromises across centuries seldom is, so there.

Here in the kitchen are many electrical devices, but two caught my attention and piqued my interest. Both of these devices carry the Ikea brand and blend perfectly into the kitchen cabinets and benches which carry the same brand and the unmistakeable signs of user assembly characteristic of that Swedish manufacturer. Is it possible that refrigerators and dishwashers come in flatpacks these days in the modern Europe? And, like other Ikea products, are they constructed by the owners themselves inside their homes using a single, simple tool?

The Ikea kitchen. Ikea fridge at left; Ikea dishwasher at right. Breadsticks, French wine, tomatoes, all genuine and likely consumed by the time you read this.

Oh and the windows all have wooden curtains, which are hinged horizontally and fold out to cover the glass when privacy is needed or outdoor light isn’t. A better idea than the more common outdoor shutters, perhaps, which are much more difficult to close and open.

So far, so good.

Kev