Travel funnies 2014 – Dordogne and Bordeaux, France

Torrey Orton

June 21, 2014

 

What’s a brand, really?

 

Arriving on the outskirts of the greatest by price/volume wine region in the world - Bordeaux, and specifically St Emilion - I realised that this is what ‘brand’ means. Anything which can have the brand attached legitimately to it has value, no matter what the scale. The scale can mean a few hundred square meters here and there along the road between houses, or, in towns, spaces which elsewhere would be an undeveloped vacant lot or a sign of local decline, here have vines of manicured looks. They are there because they are Bordeaux vines, and some Grand Cru to boot.

 

Think acquiring the brand of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by taking an address in Cambridge (Mass. that is!) for your start-up private tertiary education establishment. There’s an MIT simulacra in Melbourne, branded MIT. This does work for foreigners needing only a brand label to attach to job apps for positions in countries and companies where Cambridge is as common as Villeneuve or Maisonneuf are in France – namely, every town has one of each of these nearby. But everyone knows they are a place name and not a quality drop, whereas the title ‘MIT’ has recognition value way beyond its place in the daily experience of people in, say, Sri Lanka. You won’t get the branded MIT experience or learning in the simulacra, either.

 

Road works, again…

 

I’ve long been a fan of those “Rough Surface” signs all around Melbourne, often signalling to no obvious effect. That is, attending to the expected distortion of our travel experience yields a nil result. The ‘rough’ fails to put in a perceptible appearance. So, too, in France there’s a nanny state competition already mentioned re: limbs and rocks that may fall. In addition there’s the competing duo of “Chaussees deformees” and “Trous en formation”, which roughly mean there’s a bump ahead whose origin may either be lack of attention to weather effects (the said “trous” arising from freezing subsurface water in winter which creates surface bubbles that break down into holes as things warm up) or be a direct effect of intentional deformation of the road surface to improve it. I particularly like the implication that the trous are the result of some naturally productive (en formation) process, while the rough surface of the “Chaussees deformees” are the real effect of efforts to improve things? Nice one.

 

Then there was Freud again…

 

We were being lined up by a waiter for ordering from a flash menu, when he questioned our respective holdings of allergies, since many local, wholly bio and only slightly distressed by preparation treatments (cooking) components were included in the offerings and …suddenly, he was hit with an attack of the sneezes in a setting (overlooking St Emilion township from a roof top terrace) he’s been working for the last weeks with no clear sources for sneezes in the environment…I fell about laughing which he joined easily, but somewhat less fully than my giving over to the moment…BTW, none of us could come up with an allergy to warn the chef about.

 

Jardins for a moment…

 

…we’ve seen a few in the last few days. About four close up in varying degrees of intensity ranging from the very slight Jardins de Sardy in the back blocks 15 ks. east of St Emilion to the extremely rigorous, classical French style a few days before. The others had tended towards the classical with variations for scale, age, and rehabilitation from original plantings and so on. All had an age of a couple of hundred years as a starting place.

 

What struck me viewing the Jardins de Sardy – a somewhat cobbled together anglo-italian melange, with water features of substance and ingenuity, but altogether only about ten hectares of coverage before folding naturally into pasturage - was how embracing the presentation was, containing many specimens of flowering and towering and climbing and crawling vegetation, any one of which might reach out to attract my attention (noticed because this is what was happening at the time). A low demand and high opportunity experience.

 

What we had faced at Eyrignac Manor Garden at Salignac- Eyvigues, Perigord (Dordogne valley) was the reverse: high visual demand and little choice opportunity except to turn away from the demand. The unrelieved designed views required visual submission through their very consistency, formality and persistence in the visual space of the present moment. Most powerfully this effect was achieved by their justifiably acclaimed hornbeam based planting, rigorously sculpted over a hectare or so, with maintenance requirements of monthly hand clippings of 42,000 square meters of shaped facades as the display placards announced with equally imposing formality and precision.

 

What it’s all about is the unnatural, of course, I just realised in a noddingly reflective moment. Plants don’t grow in regular, clipped forms except under duress. So my amazed shock at the achievements of classical topiary is expressing a perceived impossible forced into its boundaries but unremitting human attention…that which only can be supplied by wealth.

 

There is something off-putting in this visual demand which is perhaps somewhat the experience I was having in Paris a few weeks ago. Where everything is designed, everything is predictable and so, intrinsically boring, or reassuring if you have that feeling arise from certainty. I obviously tend to the former, increased by my inclination to see things slightly from a skewed perspective in order to bring peripheral vision to bear on my world… the vision which is highly geared to threats, disturbances, in brief to pre-empting the unexpected.

 

And here comes Freud again, again…

 

Often, if someone is lecturing me about something (which I accept by remaining present to the lecture, or may have requested it in the first place), I will attend to it by not appearing to listen, by letting it flow by, especially if the information novelty is high. With the gardens of more natural pretence, I look at them as I do a forest or a mountain range – a surveying, sweeping look at the whole, seeking the whole? I don’t know, but the perceptual effort seems on the edge of the unconscious and cannot be forced. It can only be allowed, which requires not trying to see, in a way. This is of a kind with insight, intuition, problem-solving…which just comes and cannot be forced.

 

And so, it is not surprising that I only noticed the gazpacho on the menu board of the fourth restaurant we checked out last night, having been disappointed two nights before by its allure on another establishment’s hoarding which we were then denied, once having chosen to eat there on the basis of that allure, by the sad message that it was off, not on at all. I didn’t even know I was looking for it this time and there it was and it was on and it was good, though not a gazpacho we had ever had before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Travel funnies 2014 – Le Mont-Dore, Massif Central, Auvergne, France

Torrey Orton

June 13, 2014

The cuckoo and the cow bell called to us…

Travel funnies* – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, as is Le Mont-Dore in the Massif Central of the Auvergne, where rises the Dordogne River in the Puy de Sancy. We were here for the first time in 1993, so the return is long awaited, though not consciously so over the intervening years before our deciding this revisit.

 

The cuckoo and the cowbell called to us as we were climbing through the forest which clothes the steep slope of the Capuchin at the end of the funicular ride from Mont-Dore to its foot around 1200 metres up…a slightest semblance of the cuckoo which I thought at first was my wishing it to be there as it had been 20 years ago when I heard the first cuckoo in my life in this place. As is often so, I did not then recognise that what it was, was it: a cuckoo. By the time we had emerged from the forested rise at the tree line, the cuckoo was undeniably itself, not my aural phantasm.

The cow bell on the other hand was a decidedly unproven reality and remained agreed so between us until we started our return an hour later. At which point some 100 metres back down the path, I heard the plangent ping of the Reine de la Troupeau, at first a solo note and then the burst of them which means the Reine is moving and munching at the same time. She can sound like a herd when in high move and munch mode. Apart from the joy of a tone recovered, there was the reassurance that not all location has been subsumed by GPS plugins to every being with a bloodstream**.

And the violas and strawberries flowered at us

Being early summer, many of the trees were still just coming into leaf and the earliest ground flowers were about in abandon. I had forgotten strawberries, the wild ones which give the cultivated types we’re accustomed to their deserved repute mostly experienced in its absence in the Coles or Casino pretenders. Jane pointed them out in the midst of other small-flowered upland delicates. Way too early for consumption…and I’m wondering that I forgot them as an opportunity of this trip, which of course they cannot be because the season is too late or dry or something.

I noticed today on another hillside that I have much too good an eye for the small virtues of nature – the obscure bloom or unexpected one in a certain microclimate – to have never cared for bucolic poetry or music, though as I thought it I remembered that there’s a particular poem about the humble bumblebee whose provenance I cannot recall yet it is with me in some vaguely accessible memory recess…strange ways, the mind. A 19^th century English poet? But then, I didn’t know what poetry was verbal music) until I read Gerard Manley Hopkins aged around 20 as an undergraduate. No teacher bothered to mention it. Since when was iambic pentameter music??? Any more than the number one was a convenient fiction of mathematics?

 And a field of daffodils…

…filled the plain of the grassed slopes the cows were yet to munch…striking little natural daffs more delicate than the garden prepared varieties I’m used to at home, yet still briefly, leading me to wonder aloud where the peasants went who had set them out so numerously and successfully as city workers had been doing in soaring numbers in the grounds of Versailles a week ago…leaving trails of little forcing boxes around the place. Nature beats a worker most times in the beauty game.

But the hotel room engineering has a weird hanging space…

At last a traditional funny! The Hotel du Parc in Mont Dore has been recently renovated to good effect, leading the space to bed ratio and bath room swinging a wet towel ratio to desirable levels, but as seen elsewhere in French renovations there’s a glitch. There’s a built-in robe with a foot’s worth of long hanging space – enough for three shirts, a jacket or so and a couple of trousers.

 Now someone created a short-drop hanging space good for hanging pressed shirts and similar, but not trousers or long skirts; neck to belly hanging space. However, whoever did the measures on this had early adolescent sizing in mind, if anything, and so a serious shortage of adult hanging space. I suspect it wasn’t even measured other than to divide the space equally into four levels for some reason of construction simplicity rather than customer need fulfilment. Well, it obviously met the needs of the hotel chain purchasing division’s need for the renovation at best price or whatever, but the end-user?

And the shower starts in reverse…

Discovering new ways to mix cold and warm water in taps is probably one of the most useless endeavours of the plumbing engineer fraternity and here we had another variant which stumped us for 15 minutes. Intuitive it wasn’t. We couldn’t get anything from it for a while, not merely just cold or hot. Once in hand, it was obvious as the newly disclosed often is, but also purposeless. What’s the added value, as the econometricians like to wonder?

 Expectations and experience revisited…

As in Paris, Mont-Dore started out a slight disappointment for me, it never having a hope of measuring up to Alps or Pyrenees, its top most reach being the mere 1889 metres of the Puy de Sancy. But as the days have rolled by and we’ve patrolled the region with persistence the pleasures of very long views over totally green landscapes, rolling up and down many hundreds of metres never failed the danger of repetition …rather gained from it as the same sights were viewed from many perspectives and in many lights, occasionally seasoned by the soft shadows of emerging thunderheads (which threatened but never performed up to their promise, fortunately.)

And we drank about four different local wines we’d never heard of (wines of Auvergne, huh?). Between our traditional port-a-bottle approach to walking lunches for years in Europe and numerous dinners, we never had a bad one and always had viable ones for about 15 Euro or less across the selections, backed by true local delicacies in the sausage and cheese domains supported by bread of reliable consistency.

 The black shower and wash basin material

Not at all funny – amazing! It wasn’t until my third shower that I realised the slightly soft, ambient temperature-neutral material under me was also totally slip proof … as good as slip proof boat shoes of which I have a couple pair. At my age a slip is as good as a broken something which may take months to recover from. Thanks water proof room engineers. I may refloor a bathroom for safety’s sake.

*I am realising that the purpose of Funnies is to describe various arising realities in my life in concrete ways that render them truly for me and maybe so for others. Enjoy, as our culture challenges us to do.

 

**It just occurs to me that probably I can be tracked by my pacemaker if I’m in the right company. I know I can feel its speed up response to an electromagnetic source too near to its hiding place in my shoulder.

Appreciation (33) … Frogal fugue

Appreciation (33) … Frogal fugue
Torrey Orton
Feb.9, 2010

What four different frog families and three different crickets (?) sound like in celebration of the refilling of their water hole.

We've just had 100-150 mm of rain in the last three days in Melbourne…remnants of cyclone Anthony which dumped a small ocean on Queensland three weeks ago (that flood). Under the right conditions these things peter out over central Australia. Their warm, damp leftovers may get sucked down south by a weather system gliding out of the Indian Ocean 3000 ks. away from here. It's clearly visible on national weather maps, the one system sliding along the edge of the other. What doesn't show immediately is what the slider picks up – water!


And this was our first real walk in four weeks due to my recovery from a week incarcerated for acute pancreatitis*. As we started out a small rain shower kicked off and we stepped under some path bordering trees to get out the wet weathers. In the midst of covering up I felt a pinch on my ankle, looked down and spotted a bull ant having a nibble through my walking sock and a small troop of its colleagues wandering up my shoes to get in on the fun. Turned out we had setup the changeover to wets on an ant mound hidden under track gravel. Bitey, indeed!! No harm but the withdrawal took some doing. They stick as well as bite.


Towards the end of our ramble (slight incline over 1500 meters or so) we began to hear a somewhat mechanical noise ahead of us, guessing that the neighbouring quarry was being pumped out after the rain. Another 150 meters and the real sound became very clear to our left in an old fire fighting pond refilled by the rains. It was the frogal fugue…a low thunder of different frogs and crickets and who knows what celebrating the possibility of a late season mating melee. We are quite used to a small version in our garden, the remnant players of an original gene pool established there 25 years ago by a neighbour's child. But they all play the same come hither tune, in near perfect timing. And there's seldom more than 3-4 players.


This was something different – thundering almost, and so many notes played in different volumes and keys; an orchestra in olive drab variations. The attached file will give as good a rendition of the experience as a mobile's note facility can produce. Jack up the volume a bit til you feel slightly overwhelmed and you'll have the feel of it.


Enjoy…we did.

Nuts!!! - I've just discovered audio files cannot be uploaded to the blog!!! If you want one, email and I'll send it by return!!! Worth the effort for us both.


*A not-to-be-recommended event which left me 10kgs lighter (which could have taken months of training to achieve but only a week of nil-by-mouth in hospital). The standard recovery period is 3-6 weeks, of which I am now into the fifth week, restarting moderated work today (therapy) and developing new self-management regimes in eating (no coffee or alcohol, neither of which I miss at all; smaller meals, etc.) and morning relaxation and exercise practices with daily consistency, so far!

Appreciation (29) … Ant flurries, or termites?

Appreciation (29) … Ant flurries, or termites?
Torrey Orton
Oct 5, 2010


We were walking the local hills on the first real day of spring. That is, the first day two plus layers were not required on top by the effects of wind-chill at 15 degrees C or less (which is what we've had at sea level for three months straight). An hour and a half into the ramble, we were on the home stretch of a circle route around what passes for a water course with falls here. It had two virtues: it was 50 minutes from home and there was audible and visible water in it. And, we had not been there for 10 years or so, having given ourselves over to more highly invested (in time and distance) wanders to find ramble-worthy spots. Particularly lately, there are quite a few with major water and falls*.

 
As we were coming down a modest decline I noticed to the left of the path a small flurry of fluttering things which on first look I thought were spring seeds in dispersal flight. They were rising on a slight breeze – not enough to sustain the visible activity. But the numbers were constant and dense enough to seem, in some long unexercised memory of things past, a snowlike event.

 
A silly perception in fact since the temperature was 23C. Less silly in their mimicking the wandering rise and fall of big-flake snow in quiet winter air. The storm effect was intensified be a mid afternoon sun highlighting the individuals in its 45 degree rays.

 
So, I looked more around than up and spotted 10 meters off the track a termite-looking mound on which the storm seemed to centre. Only getting closer did I see the newly winged ones walking up the brownish, one meter mound from its base. They were slowly unlimbering their wings as they climbed, ending with a preparatory flap or two before jumping off on their one-way ticket wedding flights. It was one of those wonders of nature so far from my understanding that I'm still not sure who they were - ants or termites – partly because I did not know to look for the distinguishing differences!


* A week earlier we had visited one of the rivers burned out by the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. Many of these once camping and walking areas are still closed to public use, though one can now drive down the access roads. Along one such we saw one of our favourite cascades on the Murrindindi River running in full flow from the recent rains. But it was unveiled. Where for a couple decades of regular walking in near rainforest conditions along that part of the river yielded varying intensities of rushing waters over tumbled rock surfaces, we now found bare rocks and remnant trunks, everything open to the eye made prying by fire. A new falls, with a waiting period of 20-30 years to get back to 'normal' is probably beyond our allocated time….so we will learn to like the unveiled.

Appreciations (22) … Snake in the path!

Appreciations (22) … Snake in the path!
Torrey Orton
April 8, 2010


Mistaking a snake for a stick? …you might wonder?


Appreciating a snake in the path is a bit odd unless you've done something like this: wandering down a dirt fire track 1 kilometre from our parked car on an early Sunday afternoon three weeks ago talking with Jane about something important we thought and suddenly detecting a fat black tree branch with a strange tip - the head of a snake I eventually realised - only a foot away from my next step…. Not your common garden variety but one of Australia's contributions to the troops of really dangerous fanged foragers…at about 1.3 meters, a well developed specimen...and, it was out in the open in clear light and we had missed it as we walked up onto it from 100 metres away with a clear view all the way until stumbling into the preceding events.


"Aaaah…" I gasped with arms thrown back and drawing myself up from the shoes in retracting my next step, as it was a slight lift into execution, before it fell on the snake's tail emerging into my vision and realising that Jane was a half step in front of me heading for the biter's mid-flank, and also not seeing it, I started saying "Back, back" which stopped her just before she would have been too close not to land a foot on its back…and so it glided off the road and into the edging forest without a backwards glance.


On reflection a few minutes later I noticed that my entire response had been without any palpable rise in heart rate, or tensing of muscles apart from those involved in the rising "Aaaah". Strange ways the body/mind.


Not mistaken, just missed
Or like this: 15 years ago, wandering down an old 1.5 meter deep by 2 meter wide grassy, overarched by light brush and trees, loggers' tramway cutting some K's from another car park in the second or third growth forested outer reaches of Melbourne (60+ K's from the GPO), Jane in front and me two meters behind hearing a stick crunch lightly under boot and sensing, barely seeing, something dark and ropey rise into the air a few feet to my right rear, and responding soundlessly but automatically with a jump myself which got me up to a height equal to the ropey thing, which turned out to be a large black snake, or close enough to scare the whatevers out of me, giving my heart rate a serious lift at the same time!
…a story I'd have told a dozen times, mostly to impressionable foreigners like myself who did not grow up with tiger snakes or their peers in the backyard, as many inhabitants of Australian cities do. I'd never seen a poisonous snake until coming here, though I knew (I thought) they inhabited the woods of Massachusetts (timber rattlers), not that I or anyone I knew or heard of had ever seen one in 1950 or '60!! But then in those days I didn't see racoons, wolves or bears in the woods either. They weren't there to see maybe, but they certainly are now a reliable source has been telling me for years since then.


Outdone, again…
However, someone else always has a better snake story, like this: a friend's wife found herself eyeing a large black snake in their backyard, shouting quietly that the thing was a danger and trying to shoo it away while holding it tightly in place with her left foot which was firmly planted on its tail. She hadn't noticed the tail and so her fear mounted as the snake stayed put and reared up with vengeful non-verbals. Her husband intervened with a strong right hand and pulled her of the offended tail, allowing all to move on into peaceful distances from each other.