A visit to Lyons

View over Lyons

On our way back from our last visit to the Cantal, we visited Lyons as although we have sped through it on the autoroute in the past, we have never actually stayed there. So we booked an hotel in the centre of the city, near the Place Bellcoeur, which was comfortable and easy to to walk to some of the places we were interested in seeing on a quick visit. Although the weather was mixed, we had enough dry spells to making walking round the city pleasant enough.

A street in old Lyon

Fourviere Basilica

We walked up to the Fourviére basilica on Saturday morning, while it was still fairly cool, and met many joggers running up and down the steep, narrow passages that thread their way through this part of the old city. We didn't manage to follow any of the famous traboules routes, but got a feel for those places on our way up and down. We made our way down and wandered towards the Opera, a magnificent mix of classical and very modern extension on top. By lunchtime it was raining so we found a small bouchon, for lunch, and following that walked to the Musée des Tissus, which houses a collection of beautiful examples of Lyons famous silks, many intended to decorate royal palaces, while the adjoining Musée des Arts Decorative contains many room sets, showing beautiful examples of how the Lyonnaise of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries lived and entertained each other. 

We returned to the same bouchon , Aux 3 Cochons, we had lunch in, for dinner that evening, as it was a fairly short walk from our hotel and was very welcoming, and the food was fairly typical lyonnaise, hearty and very tasty, welcome on a cool damp evening. We left with a small book of their recipes, in English.

 After dinner we walked across to the Rhone side of the city and followed the river for a while , passing a beautiful open-air swimming pool on the riverside, and admiring the lit -up upper old part of the city we had explored in the morning.

 We really enjoyed our brief stay in Lyons and would thoroughly recommend it as an interesting city to visit.

Miss Garnett's Angel

I had somehow missed reading Salley Vickers successful first novel Miss Garnett's Angel when it was initially published in 2000, but a good book will always find new readers. A fairly easy read, as Salley Vickers' writing  and story telling flow beautifully, yet there is a lot to think about in this tale of Julia Garnett's stay in Venice after her retirement.   I felt sympathetic towards Julia Garnett, intrigued by her wishing to live in Venice for six months and interested in the people she meets and in several cases, comes to love during her stay.  
 I loved the descriptions of Venice, which made me recall the couple of visits I've made to that amazing place, the little squares with small bars and trattoria where we had lunch of just a snack and a beer, usually with a church on one side, the water buses, the walks alongside the smaller canals, many, many happy memories.
 The story of Tobias, Raphael, Sara and Tobit  I was a bit hazy on, but Salley Vickers re-tells it clearly and had me hunting out a Bible with the Apocrypha in it, to read it for myself. The comparison of the behaviour of modern day Sara and Toby with that of the story from the Apocrypha is fascinating, showing how human emotions and reactions to them don't change much.

  One message I take from this story is to all retired persons: get out of your no doubt comfortable rut and do something -anything - a bit different. I don't think this is the intended message of the book, but it is one that appeals to me, as I am writing this while sitting in our holiday home in the Cantal department of France, listening to an approaching thunderstorm, the house we bought after our retirement from work ten years ago.

Fingers in the Sparkle Jar

I didn't find Chris Packham's memoir of his early life, Fingers in the Sparkle Jar, a particularly easy at first, with its constant changes from first to third person and the changes in chronology, but it was an interesting one and explains a lot about his character. He describes his obsession with animals and insects starting from a very young age and his despair at the death of the young kestrel he reared. His relationships with his supportive parents and sister are fairly briefly covered but to contrast these, there are very full details of wildlife and nature descriptions as well as a few obviously very special moments in his early life. I did have a slight problem with some of the discussions between Chris Packham and his therapist (shown in italics) as he seemed to be expressing thoughts of the therapist that didn't seem to be spoken- so were these thoughts really the therapists, or the authors interpretation of non-verbal communication? One the whole it was an interesting read about a local boy made good ( I live in Southampton) and gives us readers an insight into the early life of a successful presenter of nature programmes, e.g. Springwatch and its spin-offs. In the end, I didn't find the back-and forth chronology too distracting, as that is often how memory works anyway.

Read in May

I finally got round to reading E F Benson's Mapp and Lucia. I have read the earlier tales about Lucia's life in Riseholme,Volume 1 of  a two volume paperback edition and enjoyed this tale of two socially ambitious women vying for supremacy over one another in a small seaside town, to the amusement of both other characters in the story and the reader. Widowed Lucia decides to take a house in Tilling  for two summer months after making up her mind that after a year of grieving she needs to re-join society. The house is Miss Mapp's and thus Lucia sets in motion the social rivalry between the two ladies.There are several highly amusing set-pieces in the book, such as the fete at Riseholme,  organised by Lucia before the death of her husband; the Art Exhibition at Tilling; the visit of the Italian Countess which revealed Lucia's lack of knowledge of Italian and finally the piece de resistance, the flood and its aftermath.
A clever and enjoyable tale, light-hearted enough, but also exposing the petty snobbery and shallowness of the main characters .


I picked up my copy in a charity bookshop while on a short visit to my brother-in-law, as I had read some interesting reviews of the book, and had also read Francis Spufford's The Child that Books Built, a memoir of his childhood reading after a family tragedy. This is his first novel and for me a really good read. Set in New York in 1746, Richard Smith arrives from London with an order for £1000 in his pocket, but will not say for whom or what purpose the money is intended. Richard Smith has several adventures while waiting for the money to be sorted out: he  is entertained by the important families in New York at the time, a mix of Dutch and English.  He has his purse stolen, leaving without ready cash; he meets Mr Lovell, the banker who is to provide the cash for the money order, and Lovell's daughters, Flora and Tabitha; he gets into a fight, he is called to fight a duel with a man who is apparently friendly to him. Eventually we discover Richard Smith's real reason for his visit to New York. I enjoy historical novels and thought this a good read. The author has clearly done his research thoroughly, although sometimes near the start of the story I did wonder if the style was a pastiche, but the events carried my reading along for an interesting read.

How can a former librarian who worked in public libraries for over 30 years not read a book of this title? The short stories in  this collection all have something to say about the influence of literature, words, phrases, a particular writer on the author. These intriguing stories were interspersed with comments from librarians, library users and other who are and have been influenced by them as well as those affected by library closures that have taken place over the last few years and are still ongoing in many places. Although Ali Smith does not not say it in so many words, one of the contributors does -that closing public libraries affects the most vulnerable in society and that says something not very nice about those doing this - that they don't care about the poor and the vulnerable. Personally I think it is a bit more complicated; that local government who are the providers of most public services have invidious choices to make: do they provide social care for the poor, the vulnerable, the elderly or do they provide public libraries and other public services which have been cut. Their budgets have been slashed and choices have to be made as to how best to spend the money they do have. Nevertheless, it is wrong to close public libraries, as doing so probably contravenes the Public Libraries Act of 1964, which is still in force, but has been ignored by successive government ministers in charge of public libraries. Closure also impacts particularly on the youngest and oldest in society, as a local library is often one of the first places that children can go to on their own, as they are regarded as a safe place to visit. As some older people become unable to drive or travel on their own, so a local library becomes an important source of information and entertainment.
There are details on public library cuts at http://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/ as well as some good news about public libraries.