cross in Brittany

Sad news. The Long Thought is no more. The title, that is. Whilst I understand the marketing and promotional reasons for this change, for me it means giving up the true name of my new book. It is now to be Crossing Brittany - well, yipppeeeedoo :-(

Monday's Megalith

Part of the Neocropolis at Menez Dregan. There is also a paleolithic site on the cliffside just below.

American Historical Trail?

And I've also got plenty of ideas for an American tourist trail in Brittany. Apart from the obvious WWI & WWII sites, there's Benjamin Franklin's visit in 1776 (before he was president), when he landed at Auray's exceptionally picturesque port of St-Goustan; Fulton's testing of the first submarine at Camaret in 1801; Jack Kerouac's family origins at Huelgoat - all fortunately highly attractive places to visit. And there are many more I'll keep to myself for now.

Briton/Breton Historical Trail (1)

The trail is developing well. I've just spent a day on the island of Molène, in the Atlantic between the continent and Ouessant (Ushant). It's a small place of 100 hectares and only 250 regular year-round inhabitants. It makes a pleasant change from the Celtic saints and Hundred Years War incidents to be researching an event, albeit a tragic one, from the Victorian era for my Briton/Breton historical trail. On June 16, 1896 the steamship Drummond Castle hit the rocks (Pierres Vertes) west of Molène on the last night of its voyage from South Africa to England, and sank within minutes. Fishermen saved two sailors and one passenger early the next morning, but the other 244 people on board perished. 29 of the bodies recovered were buried in a special corner of the churchyard on Molène. The islanders received thanks both practical and spiritual, with Queen Victoria putting up the cost of a cistern, which still stands near the church, to relieve the perennial freshwater problem, and the Guild of All Souls sending a jewelled chalice and plate to the priest in acknowledgement of the Christian burials accorded to the victims.

in praise of the pringle

I am going through an obsessive phase of Pringles. I bought my first tube on impulse a year ago in a little shop in the Monts d'Arrée as I drove back from Quimper. I have a strange history with the crisp: as a child I used to save up and buy small cardboard boxes of Chipples salted potato sticks from an old-fashioned grocer's shop in the Gloucestershire village where I grew up. I always ate these secretly in my room: comfort food and an a early type of protection ritual. When they stopped making them, I never made the step to that poor substitute for the potato stick, the common and ubiquitous crisp. As an adult in London I discovered that M&S had the goods, but in large packets so that the salt intake meant borderline hospitalisation if eaten all in one go (and how else could they be eaten?). In Somerset I had a similar relationship with tesco potato sticks, but all this was in my pre-thyroid days and once that hereditary menace emerged I gave up such indulgence.
So here in France where crisps are foolishly called chips and so loaded with salt that wrinkles appear as you eat, there has been nothing comparable to tempt me until now. What is it about Pringles? Partly the perfect light texture and seasoning, partly the challenge of the shape: it tantalises the mouth and requires, for the greatest oral satisfaction, two bites, the first of which must be clean enough to avoid shattering the second half into fragments. Then there is the effort required to plunge one's hand further and further into the tube, and the test of how many days you can make one lot last. I can't do better than four. But the whole process has all the fulfilment of a ritual beyond physical gratification.

sunday afternoon

How I hate Sunday afternoons and their inherent purposelessness. How do normal people manage to pass those world-without-end hours? I spend all week walking and reading and writing - what else is there to do? Today I can't seem to find any task to lift the dreary energy so I try to match it by using time to delete hundreds of photos from the laptop as the new XP update tells me I am running out of space. Several thousand pictures of the Nantes-Brest canal have just flashed past my eyes, reviving old passions, but it seems a fitting moment to get rid of many now that my active love-affair with the canal is very nearly over - although I hope we will remain good friends.
The puppy, from his bed on the windowsill next to my desk, has just been sick in spectacular fashion all over the final maunscript changes to The Long Thought and over my diary. Whatever I was going to do in October has lost its appeal, and I will need another updated manuscript, but hey, I have something purposeful to do at last - pass the mop and bucket, Alice.

covers up

The cover of The Long Thought is evolving slowly. These are the front-runners.

Megaliths & the Monts d'Arrée

Preparing for an association event next week, and had a good walk on the Landes de Cragou, where Dartmoor ponies graze and buzzards wheel. The theme is both landscape and the earliest traces of man.

viaduct views

Morlaix is famous for its viaduct, built in the early 1860s to carry the Paris/Brest railway. It was an obvious target for allied bombing in WWII to break the Germans' vital communication line. A raid in January 1943 succeeded in knocking out part of one arch, as well as destroying a primary school, killing all the pupils and a teacher. 12 days later the Germans had the line repaired.

cover pic

The Long Thought will going to press in a month or so and I'm starting work on the covers. I'm torn between symbolic wintry pictures or June splendour showing the canal at its best. This picture is my current favourite: it also connects to the opening scene of my new novel, which would be a neat transitional image. The infinite variety of the Nantes-Brest canal requires a whole book of photos to do it justice, but I've decided to do without pictures in the text, which can stand up for itself well enough, I hope.

bloody journalists - Ouest France

A reporter from Ouest-France, the main daily paper here, accompanied a Morlaix town walk I guided last week. He was a young man who admitted he did not know the history of the town. All the more reason for him to listen? Not a chance, he's a journalist after all. The next day he sent me a PDF of the article - full of errors and misquotations, but I expect that after long experience of being interviewed by the French press. You accept these colourful diversions from the truth in return for publicity.
I was just about to file the article and think no more of it when I spotted the photo caption: there I am, on the bandstand in the Place des Otages, explaining the tragic fate of 60 Morlaisiens taken hostage and then transported like cattle to the death camps in reprisal for a resistance attack. What does the caption say - that I am describing the hostages being SHOT. Now not only is this a nasty slur on my reputation, but it is pretty unpleasant for the families of these poor men - Morlaix is a small town and this terrible event features large in many memories.
So I send an email at once to the journalist, Morgan Bourven. No reply. After brooding all weekend, I write a letter of complaint to the editors. Shortly after the journalist sends a brief email of apology and says a retraction will be published in the paper the following day. It isn't, so I write to him again, this time in anger. He replies blaming a secretarial error (!) and promises the text will appear tomorrow. Half an hour later he sends me the text to see if I approve. Frankly I think it is very little, but it includes a public apology to me as well as a correction of the facts, so I say OK.
Today, the retraction appears, but lo and behold! the apology has mysteriously disappeared and only a bald statement of fact remains. Anyone reading without significant attention might still have the impression that the mistake was mine. I am seriously upset by this - by their stupidity and ignorance in the first place (no-one in the Morlaix office of Ouest-France noticed such an appalling error before the paper went to press) and then the apparent play-acting that followed.
I think the best thing to do with Ouest-France in future is to stuff it in my walking boots to help the drying process.

POSTSCRIPT I have just received a message from the journalist saying that it is an 'apology to history not to Wendy Mewes' - there you are, folks - NOW they care about history, but they don't give a shit about my professional reputation. If I was French it would be a very different story.............. but at least this shows them in their true light.

ADDENDUM: after reading Laurent's comment and receiving another message from the journalist, let me say that he, Morgan Bourven, tried to do the right thing but was overruled by more senior staff who did not feel I was important enough to merit an apology.

Portrait of the Young Dog

Painted by animal artist Debs, here's my young chap Tex, now eight months old and of wide vocabulary.

on the trail

Personal reasons have kept me off-blog lately, but I'm getting going again this month. Starting work on a new novel, Walking for the Broken-Hearted, which in its embryonic state appears to be a strange amalgam of fiction and reality. Also working on the development of an historic trail throughout Brittany, tracing the Briton/Breton connection over centuries. This is essentially a tourist project, concentrating on places and remains, but I expect a guidebook will accompany the basic leaflet information.

Otherwise BWs association business takes much of my time, with new walks to research and a programme of events for the autumn/winter to plan. There can't be many Morris dancing workshops on offer this December in Brittany. Plus the total reworking of the Brittany Walks website, which is going to be a big step forward for anglophone walking over here, and a major task for me.

incapacity

Nearly two months ago I knocked my hand awkwardly against the car. A minor irritation, not especially painful at the time. Now that hand is almost useless. My old bugbear of arthritis has set into the virgin joints with the grip of a terrier. After twelve years free of the crippling pains that ruined my thirties when walking was often too painful to contemplate, the nightmare returns with a vengeance. It is my left hand and I am left-handed: writing, cooking, any normal everyday action is now an ordeal. Perhaps I should be thankful that the savage pain in one finger that kept me awake night after night has at least faded to a constant dull ache - but the slightest pressure on the hand brings out that blast of agony only too quickly. My world has shrunk swiftly into limited actions and strategic movement, a way of living I thought was well buried in my past. Funny how quickly the old patterns return - I find myself instinctively guarding my knees and feet from potential trauma and moving with the gait of a cripple that once came so naturally. And yet there is nothing wrong with those joints. Yet.

puppy brain

Never, never try finishing a manuscript with a new puppy in the house. I am exhausted and Tex is obliviously exuberant. My office is a mass of shredded cardboard and decimated broom twigs. As well as the coastal book to complete by the end of January, I have a talk to give next week in central Brittany and cycle routes in pays bigouden to prepare for an English travel company. Actually, I'm quite enjoying it all, although whether I'll be able to remember details of the Seven Years War or the history of the seaweed industry when questioned is quite another matter.

new puppy

New puppy able to come home today.

Bonne année, etc

2008 at last - I've been looking forward to it. This is a year of change.

Finally finished coastal book walking on December 31st, only two months behind schedule. Most of the text is written, however, so I'll still hope to bring it in on time. Have been distracted by doing some research work for a travel company and giving talks about this and that, as well as spending two weeks in England. For the first time since coming to live in France I enjoyed my trip back over the water, and had an excellent time in Glastonbury, Shropshire and London.

tarot competition win

A highly original and exciting new deck - The Maroon Tarot - has recently been published (Majors only so far). What endears it to me especially is that it is a deck from Poland, a place with which I have great affinity. Part of the publicity is a competition for work inspired by one of the cards - I have had a win with this poem on the Judgement card shown above.

Judgement

I have heard this call before,
Deep in my green thoughts,
On lost nights
In a wrong place

I hid my face.
Past failures hold me
New fears enfold me
In the sadness of space.

Call me again

How high is wall?
How far is the fall?

Call me again

Is that the time?
The blast insists.
My mind resists
Such a step
From dark to light,
The distance of knowing.

But I’m on my way
I’m going

My spirit flies before.


©Wendy Mewes
2007

here's the cover

never-ending coast

Only about 130kms to go now to complete walking for the coastal book. Then the real work will begin. Have just endured a few days on the high cliffs of Cap Sizun and some very scary paths. Recent week staying in a mobile home north of Brest to complete the north-west section was more enjoyable - photos here from that trip. Fortifications from 17th to WWII for the Rade de Brest are extensive in this area - the Fort de Bertheaume in the picture is where Napoleon's commander was holed up by the English navy blocking the goulet.