Friday, November 20, 2015

Adjectival: between showers; cauli; and Toëno


A newcomer to Quess'quitricote, a petite woman perhaps my age, is fun and lively and bright, and not at all shy. She is wearing a skirt, quite short, made from vivid hued, densely patched crochet squares, and from her bag winks a multicoloured ball of glossy, flossy yarn.

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E brings Bram round on a preliminary visit. The rain clears and we take a turn around the square of fields I used to take with Mol, along the ridge road. It is breezy and splashy with sunlight after rain, and Bram is brisk and alert and a fine dog to walk. E remarks on how very beautiful it is up on our hill, and I realise I had rather stopped appreciating it.

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A good, medium sized cauliflower for just 65 eurocents. I roast half of it with olive oil and cumin seeds to go with a couple of mackerel fillets. 

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The Ile de Toëno, or perhaps it's just a presqu'île: one of those funny sort of causewayed excrescences up on the Pink Granite Coast, with nothing much there but a menhir, a small boatyard, a place to buy oysters and other shellfish, and rather pleasant motel type hotel, where we spent a night back in early October, to attend a concert at the Lanvellec early music festival. The concert was a disappointing washout, which made us cross, but it doesn't seem to matter much now, and I spent a pleasant hour or so scrambling about on scrubby granite pavements and rocks and headlands enjoying the views and the sight and sound of the sea, which one can never have too much of.









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5 comments:

Zhoen said...

Aren't flashy, outgoing, colorful people a delight? The Rules never apply to them, and although they can be hard to work with, they are so much fun in every other context.


There is no such thing as watching the ocean too much. Your photos... oh, my.

Roderick Robinson said...

Only writer-thinkers "take a turn". The rest of us are weighed down by plastic bags marked Tesco, we find mud even on a sunny day, dogs come bounding towards us full of exuberance that nevertheless looks manic. Round every tussock is discreet excreta.

And you can even rise above music that is a wash-out. How do you do that? Any moment you'll be finding sermons in stones.

I've just received a very rare comment from FigMince and it shows.

Ellena said...

I guess you ordered "a pleasant hour on the rocks, please".

Lucy said...

Z - indeed. She was kind of like a little ball of colour herself.

Robbie - in fact the music, luthenist and couter-tenor, wasn't a washout, but very good, just totally ill-suited to the venue, a long, draughty, heavy stone church, badly lit. To add insult to injury, though we paid full price for non-numbered seats and missed dinner to wait around turn up early to get decent places, when we finally got in, at least two thirds of the seats from the front were reserved for 'amicale abonnés', so I heard little well and Tom nothing at all. Then there was the obligatory late start, followed by the self-important twit from the association prattling on about the who knows what beforehand. We left at the interval, went back to our hotel to get warm and have a glass and some more cheese and biscuits which fortunately we'd brought with us. I meant to write a letter of complaint to the relevant persons, but it all takes longer in French and I lost the will after a bit, wouldn't make any difference anyway.

Ellena - oh touché!

the polish chick said...

"obligatory late start" indeed. where does that come from?

sometimes writing letters is a good way to make things happen and to feel useful, but sometimes, as in this case, it'll just dredge up the bad feelings, so you did well to focus on the sea.