France, Brittatany, Summer 2011, Chapters 9 to 11

Liz and I worked a season for a UK holiday company in Brittany.To jazz up our reception area I wrote a series of "off line blogs chronicling our days off. Meant to be a sanitised travelogue, of the sort you find in an in-flight magazine, it didn’t always turn out that way

SUMMER 2011

 

Pete and Liz’s off line blog 9

Today we went to Roscoff. To quote the Brittany Ferries in-voyage magazine, “it is always a surprise for first time visitors, its charming old town, and quirky shops contrasting with the wide waters”… a sentence unlikely to win any travel writer’s award, nevertheless, true enough. You can catch a boat to the Isle de Batz, ride a road train around the town, or wonder why there appears to be a bridge from the harbour to an apparently random point mid channel. My theory for this seemingly pointless construction centred on concrete fatigue, but it turns out the walkway leads to the deep water ferry. We avoided the bars and cafés on the front, obviously installed to trap one visit travellers and infiltrated the Boulangerie Centrale only one street back and favoured by the French. A winner.

          I have always thought eating out should be an experience, a mini adventure, and involve more than just having a plate of food plonked in front of you. In Thailand, in a small town called Bang Saphan Yai such an eatery thrives. On each table sits a small cooking machine. This is stoked by a man wondering amongst the chairs and scampering children with a long handled shovel filled with glowing red hot coals. Meat, stock, eggs and leaves are brought to the forum and knowledgeable diners concoct a soup in the cauldron atop the cooker before grilling the meat. Apart from the health and safety implications of transporting high temperature cooking fuel in a crowded hospitality venue this is a most agreeable way of dinning. Is this a random excursion into the irrelevant? Not at all, should you choose to seek out an establishment hidden away in the back streets of Quimperlé a similar but considerably less hazardous experience awaits. The wonderfully named Tête du Lard, which translates into fathead, offers a Brasérade ~ a table top barbecue ~ a platter of raw meat, very moorish sauces, sautéed potatoes, salad and quite to lot to do.  But for those who feel the cooking should be done for them, the restaurant will happily plonk exquisite dishes on the table. Marinated lamb with thinly sliced sautéed roasted peppers and tomatoes, divine darling. Good tucker in stylish surroundings, recommended, highly.

 

 

          A small side street (Rue Ellé) leads off from behind the church, on the right if coming from the town bridge, follow this up over another very picturesque little bridge and turn left. Follow this road until you feel you can go further and you will have arrived. 

  

Pete and Liz’s off line blog 10



Herman

Melville

(1819-1891)

         Funny how things turn out, the wheel of life, the  interconnectedness of things, serendipity perhaps. I have recently finished reading Moby Dick which I humbly submit to the committee as the greatest book of all time. Today we decided for no better reason other than it was raining to go to the Museum of Fishing in Concarneau. And there they have models of New Bedford whalers, the very ships Ishmael would have set sail in and a lovingly preserved skiff, the ridiculously small rowing boat in which they pursued sperm whales, 18^th whaling was not for the fainthearted. Seeing the little wooden craft they dropped over the side, in the middle of the ocean, as far from land as it possible to get, into waters which could turn from mill pond to maelstrom in minutes leaves quite an impression. Whalemen endured incalculable perils without hope of salvation should the whale turn too suddenly or a rope snag. And there in front of you is one of these vessels where men of supreme courage battled the fates and in the case of this surviving exhibit, presumably lived to tell the tale. This was one of the very boats in which, and I quote, “we rowed for several hours”. One short sentence that says so much.  Not just steamed timbers and caulked planks, a once spume soaked, blood caked tool of the trade. This is what museums are for!!!    
      The museum is an interesting way of spending a couple of hours or so, much to look at and absorb and although most of the explanatory signs are in French there are a few English translations. These though tend to the bland and ineffectual. A nod to a multi lingual audience without much thought to content.

   The museum is also an astounding display of the model builder’s craft with numerous miniature ships, and dioramas of sea and shore showing different trawling methods. There is a ¹/₆ ^th scale model of a small sail equipped fishing vessel, which took 5 people 5 years to complete, a work of art in itself.

  There are no interactive displays and one video, in French, so small children may not fully appreciate the richness of the experience but you do get to go round a real trawler, a small one perhaps but it needed 10 crew or so and is an intriguing glimpse into the world behind the fish finger.

 

  

We enjoyed it, felt culturally improved and learnt a thing or two. Worth the €6.50 entrance fee, definitely, no doubt about it.

 

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This Tuesday we thought we would be cultural and set out for Port Louis, across the bay from Lorient to the Museum of the Indies Company, the French equivalent of the British East India Company, who between then shamelessly exploited the “New World”. We took in the centre of Port Louis on the way, a pretty little town worthy of a stroll down the main street. Interesting shops slowed our progress until we found somewhere for morning coffee. 

 

            It’s not often you pass llama and two thirds of a push-me-pull-you grazing laconically beside the road, not often, in fact hardly ever, just this once in fact. Either that or they put something in the coffee.

             

Although the motivation for our visit was the Indies Museum, having just read “The Prize of All the Oceans” by Glyn Williams an account of dastardly seafaring by the British government of the mid 1700’s the €6 entrance fee turns out to include the National Maritime Museum and access to the place where it is all housed, “one of the most beautiful citadels on the French coast”.  A walk around the ramparts, dated 1616, 48 years before lager was invented, offers some spectacular views of the harbour and to quote the English translation in the museum’s brochure “the roadstead to the l’île de Groix”. For roadstead read sea lane??

 

The guardroom, an empty chamber under the castle is just that until you wonder what it must have been like, filled with men without access to power showers, Imperial Leather or DVDs in winter clustered around the fire, doing their best to stave off the cold and boredom of life in the Duke’s service.

 

We moved on through the Powder Room and an exhibition of munitions and maritime artillery to the Naval Museum a section of which is dedicated to the Sauvetage de la Mer, the French lifeboat service and if you’ve ever thought your cross channel ferry was a bit wobbly, think again. Would you go out in mountainous seas sweeping over the superstructure of massive cargo vessels to stand on the aft of a rescue tug to haul listing freighters to safety? Personally, no but it’s a good job there are men with the intestinal fortitude to brave the ocean’s worst tantrums otherwise that container of Taiwanese Christmas decorations might never make the shelves. 

     We are in awe of the sea and its potential to wreak havoc on man’s best laid plans. This is a place to appreciate just what power it can unleash and the professionalism and courage of those men and woman work with it.  

 

Another section is dedicated to underwater archaeology and is a fascinating glimpse into a world that we mere leisure divers limited to 40 meters or so will never encounter. Deep under the ocean at depths where a leak in a submersible can produce a jet of water powerful enough to cut a man in half, wearing t shirts and looking more like actors in an Alien film scientists unearth and recover long lost cargo’s, china plates, a ship’s bell. And after watching the film you can see the objects themselves. Wonderful!

 

We moved on to the original reason for the trip, the museum of the Indies Company. Despite the spin, these weren’t on the whole very nice people, they traded in slaves, press ganged the unwary onto ships crews, and didn’t particularly mind if a few hapless souls fell out of the rigging. This museum features impressive models of the vessels of the era, showing in detail the stowing of the cargos, that the porcelain went to the lowest point and so on, but curiously no holds of ensnared humanity enduring the indifference of a morally bankrupt trading system. There is a passing reference to slavery it has to be said but on the whole this is a heavily sanitised view of a barbaric enterprise.  

 Finally there is the “Memories of the Elephant” exhibition,  a themed display revolving loosely around the “fascination and exoticism”  of this “emblematic figure”.  Or stuff with elephants on, ceramics, clothing, paintings and suchlike.

 

An enjoyable few hours, lots to see and to think about although in places it is more interesting for what it doesn’t say. There is unfortunately little in English to read, all the films and audio interviews are in French. Nevertheless if any of these subjects light your fire or you are a museum junkie recommended.

 

By the way a push-me-pull-you is a friend of Dr Doolittle. The picture is a Bactrian camel originally from south-western Mongolia and north-western China.

In 2005 there were less than a 1000 left in the wild.  

 

 

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Off- Line Blog 11, What a Wonderful World

I have made a startling discovery. Trees, can instantly relocate themselves without warning. I know this because I backed our car into one, and irretrievably damaged the tailgate, so much so that we couldn’t open it and had to tape a plastic bag over the place where the rear window should have been.

            So, last Tuesday, a day off, the project was finding a new one. The cost of a new rear door from a dealer would have been astronomical, so much in fact that we didn’t even bother asking the question. Instead we went to a local Casse or scrap-yard. These are it seems big business in France and run much like an Argos. We entered through the electric sliding doors, (name one scrap-yard in England so equipped) and moseyed up to the counter, “Have you got?” I enquired in my very best French, “a tailgate for this car”. “Which car?” he replied waving in the direction of the parking. We nipped outside and he popped around to the back of the vehicle for maybe a quarter of a second. “I have one in red” he said.  Back inside I looked around at the shelves towering to the ceiling of the enormous warehouse, and out through the window at a yard big enough for several simultaneous games of polo. How, I wondered did he instantly know he had one in red?  A few moments a couple of mechanics appeared carrying a tailgate, exactly and precisely a copy of the one forlornly clinging to the back of our car, except for the colour. First asking price €150, a muttered “C’est un plus cher”, “that’s a little expensive” and the price dropped to €120. Deal struck the door was carried outside. The problem, which if you have being reading carefully will come as no surprise is that it is very difficult to load a tailgate into an estate car when the tailgate on the car will not open. I climbed inside, moving aside the detritus of a travellers life and gave the inside of the door a hefty kick. Problem solved and our new acquisition was loaded in.

       

 

             We stopped on the way back to ask the local garage if they could fit it. Not today he replied. Tomorrow, come back tomorrow. When was the last time a garage in England even admitted it had that word in its vocabulary? Getting an appointment in a British garage is like trying to meet the pope. So I went back tomorrow. Once he had ripped off the temporary plastic bag window, the trim on the inside of the tailgate and hit something inside with a hammer the boot popped open and we were able to extract the shiny new tailgate. The wiring loom that modern cars demand of its doors had been chopped off on the new door and this discovery by the mechanic produced a number of sounds that any customer of a UK mending business knows equates directly into years of debt. He handed me a screwdriver and pointed at the inside of the now raised “porte arrière grand”, big back door, and walked away. I started to unplug the loom at the various connectors prising them apart with my penknife. He wondered back out and said, in French, of course, something along the lines of “if you need any tools go and help yourself”. The surprise of being given the run of a stranger’s expensive range of specialist tools and the trust he was showing was astounding. Give me something vaguely technical to fiddle with though and I am as happy as pig in manure. So I just got on with it, wandering into his workshop to find the various odd screwdrivers and ratchet bits needed to strip the electrics from a Vauxhall tailgate. Once all the motors, latches and locks were off I strolled back in to find this extraordinary man and discover what he had planned as the next move. He called his colleague over and they adroitly removed the old tailgate and fitted the new one, dealing with the gas struts and all in less than 5 minutes. He then took a roll of tape from his pocket, grabbed a wire coat hanger lying in the back of the car and in a few deft moves worthy of the finest of close up magicians pulled the new loom into place. It was left to me to reconnect it. During this delicate process the company mobile rang. Please know gentle reader, that I had intended to drop the car off and spend a leisurely hour in a local bar, (drinking coffee) before collecting my restored vehicle and returning to Le Camping. At this point in the proceeding I had been away for 2½ hours or so. It turns out I was need back at work. Why I wondered did things happen the one time I was away from site and engaged in complicated vital war work? I went to find my new mentor. His reply was approximately, “it is lunchtime we are going to eat, come back at two”, he strolled out with me, and closed the tailgate, the first time this had been possible for some weeks. I started to climb into the car but he stopped me, opened the tailgate (first time for that too) and took out the number plate. I screwed it back on and drove off suddenly realising I had quite a collection of his tools still in the back of the car.  Back on site I dealt with the customer’s problem and actually had time to eat something before venturing back to the garage. The work was nearly done, it turns out, and 45 minutes later I was screwing the last of the trim back in place and scouring the boot to make sure that none of his tools had wedged themselves in. I went to a dark and distant corner of his cluttered garage to sort out payment.

 

 

      I had realised early on in the proceedings that he was probably trying to save me money, and getting me to do the easy bits freed him up to do work he had booked in. The village garage proprietor was doubtless friends with the campsite owner and one his best customers.  I was though unprepared for what happened next. “Merci monsieur, c’est fini, toute marche, c’est combien?  That may not be perfect French for “thanks sir, everything is working, how much do I owe you?”  but he clearly got the gist of my Franglais. I do not remember his exact reply, but it was in précis, “nothing”. I looked at him, unable to say anything in English, let alone form a coherent French sentence. I managed a “Vous étés sur?” which might or might not mean “are you sure?” I shook his wrist, and here may I impart a small piece of protocol I learnt that day, you don’t shake a French mechanic by the hand when his hands are covered with the soil of toil, the wrist is considered an acceptable alternative. With lost of mercis and au revoirs I departed.

            This was by all accounts an extraordinary and uplifting experience, a day and a man who will forever have a place in a corner of my mind. Why he trusted me with his tools, why he chose to offer his years of professional experience for no payment I still don’t know, that he did was of course a result, not just because I saved a few quid, always a bonus, but far more than that, he was a genuinely nice guy, a formidable engineer and according to Le Camping, the last honest motor mechanic in France, somebody who changed the way I look at the world, somebody it was a privilege to have briefly encountered. And the tragedy is, I don’t know his name, his workshop bears no signboards, why would he need them, legends don’t need to advertise.  Not just another day, but one which makes you glad you took the job and almost makes you glad you broke the car in the first place, a dented bumper and two tone bodywork a small price to pay for the richness of such an experience. I can’t wait for a customer’s car to break down; there is only one possible recommendation.