Cycling mad?

Just to prove that perhaps France IS mad about cycling, while the Tour de France is going on its way down in the Pyrenees, locally  there was the 4th stage of the Tour du Cantal cadet ( for young riders of 15-16 years) which started in Le Vaulmier this afternoon.
People began gathering just after midday for the 3pm start, until the little place was almost jammed with cars disgorging young cyclists and their bikes. Just after the start the place emptied of cyclists and cars and returned to its usual peace and quiet.

It's supposed to be summer

Although it's almost the end of June, we've had few really warm sunny days here in the Cantal. Today the clouds have descended right into the Vallee du Mars and obliterated the wonderful mountain views completely. And it's fairly cold with all the dampness as well.
The other day we went up to the Buron de Chaussedier for lunch with a group of mostly Auvergnates.  The weather was sunny, but with a strong and cool wind, but once high up , you could see for miles. Lunch was a fairly simple menu, but good, and with all the catching up of gossip and so on, lasted until about 4pm.

Reading round up

To allievate the guilt feeling about not having blogged for a while ( although I've been reading ather blogs and have commented on some ) I'd better do a round -up of some recent reads.

A book about cricket in New York didn't sound too promising when I picked it for a reading group read, but Joseph O'Neill's Netherland was an interesting read. A book about New York, cricket and a marriage. Also about the effects of a catastrophic event on that marriage. At times I wasn't sure I wanted to keep reading this, but perseverd and eventually found i cared enough about the narrator, Hans van den Broek, a Dutchman, to want to find out more.Hans is a commodities analyst, his wife Rachel a lawyer and they are in New York with their young son. It is gradually revealed how their lives were affected by the event of 9/11, as it is known. Rachel and Hans have moved from their damaged apartment to an hotel; Rachel still feels unsafe in New York and decides to return to London, her home, with their son. Hans, left in New York on his own, meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian who invites him for a week-end game of cricket. Most of the other players are also West Indian or Indian immigrants and are very supportive of each other, off the cricket field as well as on it. Although this is partly a story about male friendship, it is also a mystery.

I followed this with another book about men and sport, this time Lloyd Jones  (review here)The Book Of Fame.It is about the 1905 tour of the New Zealand rugby football team, to England, Wales, Scotland, France and home via America.. It is based on notebooks written by members of the team and their management., and describes the games they played, , the huge crowds that went to see them play, the newspaper reports of the events of their successes, until they play Wales and are defeated. The feelings of some of the players as they become famous for their success on the tour are described, as well as their feelings on their eventaul return to their home in New Zealand.


A totally different read , Beth Gutcheon's Still Missing describes the emotions felt by Susan Selky, a divorced mother of Alex, aged almost seven, when he disappears one day on his way to school.Most of the story is about how Susan copes with her feelings of shock, guilt, numbness - a whole range of often conflicting emotions, as well as dealing with the police, the press and other media, all in the hope that Alex will be found. Ssan's relationship with her ex-husband, Alex's father, and his new partner is also a complex area. Some of the story shows the feelings of the police detective, himself the father of a son of Alex's age, and how that fact partly drives him onto keep searching. I found this book personally involving, as my younger son, also called Alex, once disappeared briefly when we were on holiday in France, and  I could fully emphathise with the feelings ascribed to Susan. Merciully we didn't have to call the local police.as our Alex was found in a short while. This story recalled all the mixed emotions felt on that sunny afternoon in a small southern French town, including the kindness of the people who helped us at the time.

Going for variety, another read was C J Sansom's Dissolution., the first in a series of tales featuring Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer and Commissioner of Thomas Cromwell, and set in the turbulent reign of Henry VIII. Matthew is requested by Cromwell to discover who murdered his commissioner Robin Singleton, when on a mission to the abbey of Scarnsea. Shardlake is a  reformer himself, and travels down to Scarnsea, with a companion, Mark Poer to discover what has been going on. More brutal murders are committed while the pair are investigating the first murder. The cold wintry atmosphere of the abbey and its setting in the sea marshes isolated from the nearby town are well described, and the Tudor and late medieval background are well drawn. An interesting , fairly quick read, and also gives another point of view on Thomas Cromwell, after having read Hilary Mante's Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies.

Morels

The other day , our neighbour gave us a handful of fresh morel mushrooms, picked on his land. We had them as a starter for supper, fried with a little butter and garlic. I've seen these dried in jars in local shops and supermarkets at fairly expensive prices, so these fresh ones were a real treat.

Two different worlds

Kyung-Sook Shin's novel Please Look After Mother was a thought-provoking read. The story about an elderly woman who goes missing in Seoul station, not following her husband onto a train, is told in several different voices. The eldest daughter, a writer, starts the story, and we hear from a son, the woman's husband and finally the mother herself. The children and father each reveal different aspects of the mother (we never know her name) and how she lived a life of self-sacrifice for her family. The mother's own voice tells us more, including how she, an illeterate woman, managed to have her daughter's books read to her, so she could understand what her daughter had written.One unusual feature of the writing is the use of the second person singular by several of the narrators, which I felt made for a more personal iand immediate nvolvement in the story The discussion we had at the Reading Group about this book was quite wide -ranging, and we all agreed that we were glad to have read it.. We read it a couple of weeks ago, when North Korea was posturing about war and so on, so it was also a timely read..

Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child, set in Al;aska in the 1920's was a lovely read, and a very accomplished debut novel. The story of Jack and Mabel, who have become homesteaders in Alaska. Jack comes from a family of farmers, Mabel's father was a  university professor. Jack works hard to set up the farm, while mabel works indoors to provide food, clean clothes and so on. Neither of them are very young and find the hard life quite arduous. One winter, following the first snowfall, they build a snow maiden, putting a red scarf and red mittens on her. The next day, she has melted somewhat, but the miitens and scarf are gone, later glimpsed on someone running away through the woods. Mabel and Jack are befriended by a local family, who have three sons, one of whom comes to help Jack work his land. The descriptions of life in the wilds of Alaska are beautifully  well as Jack and Mabel's are thoughtfully brought out. A joy to read, and a complete contrast to Kyung-Sook Shin's novel.

Winter in Spring

We've been here in the Auvergne for a couple of weeks, and so far spring has been slowly getting on with it; trees coming into life, the hillsides becoming gradually greener as the leaves appear. Some days have been warm and sunny, even hot, but this morning we woke up to falling snow, which is beginning to settle a little down here in the valley. Doubtless the mountain tops will covered, at least for a while, until the weather warms up again. The view has disappeared behind white wetness. But all this wetness means the rivers will be full, also the waterfalls, of which there are many along this valley, and several quite large ones in the area.Many of them are not easy to access, being up steep mountain sides and somewhat hidden amongst the forests which cover the hillsides, especially once the trees are in leaf.

While the weather was reasonable, we have amused ourselves by being active, going on a walk or two, and for my OH, going on several longish cycle rides. I've also had a swim in the new indoor pool in Mauriac., which we've watched being built over the last couple of years. It,s very pleasant, although with only two showers in the changing rooms (there are more as you enter the pool area itself) seems a bit odd.

Reading round-up

Don't seem to have posted for a while, and haven't read as much as I'd planned to, either, so will do a quick write-up of those books I have read and enjoyed recently. Two by Alan Bennett are A Life Like Other People's, a biography of his parents marriage and life together, and Smut, two short ish stories which are very funny.
A Life Like Other People's is touching and sad, as well as amusing in part. His parents married very quietly, early in the morning, as his father could not get time off from his job as a butcher to arrange and go to his own wedding, and his mother seemed to be happy to have a very quiet ceremony, with no reception for relatives and friends. All their lives they tried to fit in with other people, but never seemed to quite manage it, not helped by his mother's periods of depression which required treatment in hospital. The nearest mental hospital was 25 miles away from their home, and his father visited every day his wife was there. After his father retired from his butcher's job, Alan Bennett's parents moved to a small village, where they tried to make more of an effort to be like other people, but still with little success.The gradual revelation of past family tragedies is very sad, but also tells of the attitudes to such events by many families in the past, and some still today. A touching read.
Smut is very different, execept for the polished quality of the writing. Two stories, one about a widow who becomes a fakes various illnesses at the local medical school, and takes in lodgers to help pay for the upkeep of her home. When the lodgers fail to keep up-to-date with their rent, an unusual way of paying their debt is revealed. The second story, The Sheilding of Mrs Forbes, concerns her son, an extremely handsome man and his marriage to a very rich but plain girl, and their joint concern to keep the true state of the marriage from Mrs Forbes.   The neatness of the final twists in these tales reminded me a bit of Maupassant, a French master of the short tale.

Grace McCleen's The Land of Decoration is very different. Judith Macpherson, the 10-year old narrator makes a fantasy land in her bedroom from bits and pieces of basically rubbish. She and her father are members of a fundamentalist Christian sect. Judith decides one day that she heard God, and he has given her special powers; she prays for snow and the next morning, there the snow is. Judith is bullied at school, by one particular boy, and when the factory where her father works goes on strike and her father carries on working, both father and daughter are harassed in their home. Despite their troubles, eventually both father and daughter realise that things can change, and the problems which their religion has caused them can be overcome. Although the writing is fairly simple in style, appropriate for Judith's age, this is a fascinating tale and prompted quite a varied discussion in the book club for which I read it.I look forward to other stories by this author.

Geraldine Brooks is a well established author, and a favourite of mine and many others . Her recent   story Caleb's Crossing is set in 17th Century America, on Martha Vineyard, and tells the story of Caleb,  who became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. The narrator of the story is Bethia Mayfield, a young girlwho meets Caleb while exploring the island, which is her and her family's home. The young people manage to teach each other their languages. Bethia's father is a minister who aims to convert the Native Americans to Christianity through teaching; he also is preacher to the local community. He eventually takes Caleb into his own home to prepare him for studying at Harvard; while Bethia was discouraged from getting an education, other than reading the Bible.Her search in life is for an education and a husband who would be a true partner in life. Written as a diary by Bethia, with a finale written as she lies dying in her daughter's house much later.
To end this round up, I recently finished Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies, her Man-Booker winning second part of the story of Thomas Cromwell..Her writing at times recalled for me Dorothy Dunnett's historical novels: there is the same large cast of characters, the position of someone not part of the aristocracy yet holding an important place at court, the intrigue and plotting of those at court, aiming to please royalty. I enjoyed this story, as I did Wolf Hall, as I do like a good historical novel whiich has obviously been well researched. I think, however, some of the hype is a bit overdone.