OCTOBER

Orange and brown are truly the colours of autumn. The pumpkins, sorghum, the wilting sunflowers and wheat stubble, the drying corn and all the beautiful berries, even the blueberry bushes, are all different shades of orange and brown. The leaves are just starting to change. The poplars are losing their leaves first. They go light yellow before falling, brown and spent. The show is just beginning. The autumn colours only last a few weeks according to the locals so I feel like I must be out there looking at the trees all the time so I can store the beauty. Today we were up at La Soumere, a few kilometres above Seix, and it was spectacular.

This morning we had a huge spider in the bathroom. I told Mahalia to put it in her bedroom to eat the pesky flies and she looked at me strangely until I told her there were no venomous spiders in Europe. “Let’s go to Europe then” said Felix. It’s liberating to walk in the forest without fear of snakes, swim far from shore with no fear of sharks, and spend time in the garden without worrying about spiders.


This month is going to be our hiking month. We have to do the high walks while it’s not too cold, and before the snows come and make it impossible to walk without equipment. Yesterday we went hiking up at the end of our valley, beyond Salau. We started from the old tungsten mine (the Mine d’Anglade) and walked up the eastern side to 2,200 m. The forests were burning with oranges and browns and yellows and the reds are starting now too. It’s all too beautiful. When I come home to the house I can’t wait to get outside again to be amongst all the colours. I have to keep the images behind my eyes and carry them with me.

The Mine d'Anglade and our path up the Mountain

The tungsten mine closed in the 80’s and it was the death knell for the little village of Salau. The mine buildings are empty and broken and the walls inside are covered with graffiti, good and bad. The entrance to the mine shaft is locked up and the bitumen is potholed all the way down to the village. Whenever I ride up to Salau I feel the eeriness and the sadness. There are few traditional villagers left, only those fleeing the cities, seeking a life far from anything, perhaps those running from life. The valley is narrow there and is in shade most of the day. It’s a sombre place. A good place to hide.

A few decades ago there was a move by the government to put a route to Spain through our valley with a tunnel from Salau through to the Spanish side. We’re incredibly lucky that this bilious idea was canned. Even though the tunnel would have assured the viability of the communities here, it would have completely ruined the beauty of the valley, and the life people enjoy here. We were surprised to see 'NO TUNNEL' banners up on the houses in Salau and Couflens on the way up. Is this crazy idea being floated again?


The hike up from the Mine d’Anglade was uplifting. We climbed from 1,100 m to 2,200 m – a challenging walk made all the more challenging by the fact that we lost the track a third of the way up and spent the rest of the climb plodding through heather, blueberry bushes and low rhododendrons on a very, very steep incline. 100 m from the top I called a halt while Ludo carried on to the peak. From there you could see clear into the next valley, where we rode the bikes up to the Crique d’Anglade two weeks ago. My legs were spent, exhausted, couldn’t carry on. So I lay in the grass and felt the sun on my skin and thought that very soon it won’t be possible to expose any skin; it will be suddenly cold. From where I lay I could see clear to the Port de Salau, and so high were we that I could see beyond the Port into Spain. On the next ridge, in the far distance, I could see an old shepherd outside his mountain hut, but no-one else was visible. There were only mountains for miles around. Only the eagles for company.

Middle of October

Another big walk from Salau, this time to the Port de Salau and into Spain. This was hard coming five days after the last big hike. We didn’t see one person from the beginning of the walk to the end – we were far from everyone and everything the whole day. Near the top of the mountain we passed another mine, a very old mine. At 2,000 metres, without road access, on the donkey route between France and Spain, is the Mine de Salau. A significant infrastructure comprising four 50 metre metal pylons marched up the mountain carrying the cable that was attached to the mining car. There the cable was supported by a long building comprising dozens of arches built out of stone from the site, hand hewn. The mine must have been about a hundred years old and it’s amazing to imagine how it was constructed without any machines, and how the workers commuted by foot. The nearest road is some 1,000 metres below, down a very steep track, and is snow-covered in winter.

Col de Portech

Ludo’s Mum came to visit for a week, and apart from a trip to the opera in Toulouse, the week was taken up with walking in the mountains, and enjoying the festival in Seix to celebrate the descent of the cows and sheep from their mountain pastures. The village was full of shepherds and farmers in berets and boots, selling their stock and competing with each other for the best looking horse. The local hall was full to bursting on Saturday night for the big dinner, and there was cow poo all over the place lending the festivities a jolie bouquet. There’s no end to the excuses these villagers can find to liven up country life!

Horse Trading; A Village Character

October 22

Felix has had a monumental fall from his bicycle. He left the house with his helmet on, but hit the ground without it. He’d left it at the library. He was in pretty bad shape and had to have stitches above his eye, and was grazed through his clothes right down the side of his body. Then the sticking plaster on his forehead gave him a nasty rash that had to be treated. No more cycling for him this year, and I hope it was a good lesson to him, and all of you readers, about the necessity of wearing a bike helmet! I think Ludo was almost as shaken as Felix.

I’m reading ‘Les Miserables’ and am now on Book two of five books. The first was the beginning of Jean Valjean’s story, the story of a young man jailed for 19 years for stealing bread, of his redemption from a life of crime through the grace of a priest, his elevation to mayor and businessman, his second descent into gaol and his escape. This second book is about Jean Valjean rescuing 7 year old Cosette from a life of near slavery, and their life running once more from the law. At the moment they have secreted themselves in a convent in Paris, known only to the convent’s gardener.

It’s interesting reading a book in the 21st century that was written at the end of the 18th century, and printed in the middle of the 19th century. It gives you a sense of the continuity of knowledge, of the fact that the big themes of life are always the same, only their interpretation changes according to the social standards of the time. Victor Hugo wrote a half century after the French Revolution, and decades after the defeat of Napolean at Waterloo, events that profoundly changed the order of society in France and in the whole of Europe. In Book 1 Hugo spent an interminable 100 or so pages describing the battle of Waterloo with barely a character in sight, and in Book 2 I’m ploughing through a 50 page section on convent life and why the monastic religious life was no longer relevant at the end of the 19th century. Apart from these diversions it’s a great story and a rollicking read, even in French (which means I must be missing a good 20% of the story!).

One of the first things we bought for the house when we arrived in January was a piano. It stands in the salon, the room at the front of the house that, when I first came here 18 years ago, was like a morgue – cold, dusty, dark and quiet, brown wallpaper, faded artificial flowers and a dead deer rug on the floor. We painted it white, bought a blue lounge and a warm red rug, put my large print “Les 4 Saisons au Salat” on the wall, and put the television and the piano opposite each other. One of the joys of this year has been seeing the piano used far more than the television. Mahalia plays it all the time, Agnes plays frequently, and even the kids’ friends play around on it. And I have picked music up again for the first time in a long time.

It’s been a journey, reacquainting my fingers and hands and wrists and forearms to the physical aspect of playing, and even more challenging retraining my brain to make the quick connection needed between the notes and the movement of the fingers. I see so clearly what I never really realised before: how important music, or more specifically playing a musical instrument, is to a persons development. It makes you think a different way, makes memory work through sound instead of just through sight, and it helps you understand time. Learning a piece of music doesn’t come easily. It requires a substantial investment of time, which I fortunately have in abundance this year. I’ve learned my first jazz piece, am struggling with a few Mozart sonatas, and I’ve accepted that the spread of my fingers is simply not big enough to cope with the digital callisthenics required in the theme to “The Piano”.

October 26

The Metro; Camp Nou

Barcelona!! What a happening, fantastic city! We’ve been here two days and have fallen under its spell. I haven’t been a real fan of all things Spanish, but Barcelona has won me over in a weekend. I’m so glad we’re staying until Friday. We have an apartment in the centre of the old city just off La Rambla, the Champs Elysee of Barcelona, where every man and his dog (and the rest of the family) goes rambling, from the port to the Placa de Catalonya. From the top to the bottom of La Rambla there are street performers dressed in the most perfect costumes and make-up.

Last night we took the metro to the foot of Montjuic to watch the ‘fountain show’, a liquid extravaganza of water, coloured lights and soaring music that the kids loved. There was a long hill with a castle at the top, terraced gardens and long staircases all the way down with a huge circular fountain in the middle. Masses of people perch themselves on every available step and wall to watch as the majestic fountain changes shape and colour in time to Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Freddie Mercury’s ‘Barcelona’.

Fontaine de Montjuic

In true Spanish time, Ludo then took Mahalia and Emile off to the Nou Camp, the 120,000 seat stadium that’s home ground for Barcelona Football Club, for the 10pm kick-off (yes, 10pm) of Barcelona vs. Almeria. I think this was one of the highlights of Ludo’s year.

September 29

Last day in Barcelona! The highlight for me has been the day we spent at the science museum, CosmoCaixa. It’s the best science museum I’ve ever seen, and one of the best museums of any kind I’ve been to. We spent 5 hours there! It had fantastic interactive exhibits explaining complex physical and mathematical principles that were fun and easy to understand. There was an amazing collection of archaeological and natural artefacts, a section on geology, and an aquarium section that was better than the Barcelona Aquarium we saw the day before. It included a huge walk through Amazonian rain forest complete with alligators, birds and metre long river fish that you could see over two stories, from underwater to the tree canopy. In addition to all these goodies, the building was a beautiful design, outside and inside. I thought it was worth the trip to Barcelona just to see this museum. Admittedly, I might be more interested than the average person because of the work I did at the Powerhouse Museum in its infancy, but the kids loved it too.

Felix lost his Rhythm; Emile in Contemplation

We visited the Parc Guell, one of Gaudi’s extravaganzas, on a hill overlooking Barcelona, on a beautiful day. The built part of the park was impressive, with Gaudi’s characteristic organic architecture frequently covered with brightly coloured mosaics, but the natural environment, like a lot of Spain, was dry and dusty and of little interest. Gaudi must have had an amazing imagination. I’d like to live in his head for a day to see how he looked at the world. Catalonia must have an interesting effect on a lot of people – Gaudi, Picasso, Miro and Dali are all from this region, and they all had a huge impact on changing the way we look at reality.

Gaudi's Salamander; Enjoying Gaudi's Amazingly Comfortable Bench

The Picasso Museum was impressive for its collection of Picasso’s early work, which was donated by Picasso’s secretary and lifelong friend, Sabarthes, and because it’s housed in a series of beautiful medieval buildings with a labyrinth of stone arches, winding staircases and carved wooden ceilings. There was a small but superb section on Picasso’s significant impact on printmaking, especially on the one-block linoleum printing technique. I could have spent hours in front of these works.

The Picasso Museum

Local Fashionista; Palau Musica

Barcelona has an incredibly rich cultural life for a city of 3 million people, and we wanted to experience as much of it as possible, so Ludo and I walked through the streets of the old town on Monday night to the beautiful, meticulousy renovated, art deco Palau Musica to see a Sibelius/Nielson concert. Accompanying the Goteborg orchestra of Sweden was the Armenian violinist Kashatrian, who received several standing ovations for an outstanding performance on his Stradivarius.

Do you have to arrange the dog poo? One of the Splendid Shopfronts

Another night we went to a concert in a series by masters of the Spanish guitar. We arrived at the church late, bought our tickets, and were personally accompanied past several hundred patient concertgoers to two seats in the centre front pew. I don’t know who they thought we were, but we felt like pretty damned important! The sound of the sole guitar in the cavernous stone space of the old church was food for the soul. Until the jackhammer started….. How Spanish is that? A jackhammer working at 9.30pm?

Today Ludo took the boys to the zoo, and Mahalia, Agnes and I strolled around the labyrinthine streets of the old town, looking at the shops and eating icecream and tapas. Many of the storefronts feature art deco mosaics, 1930’s curved glass, wonderful woodwork and medieval stonework which made the experience a real discovery.

To finish off our stay here we ate tonight at Los Caracoles, the oldest restaurant in an old city. We walked through the crazy kitchen into a 200 year old wonderland of hanging hams, wooden beams, murals, fireplaces and wells, with every inch of spare wall space hung with signed photos of the rich and famous who had eaten in this venerable establishment. Los Caracoles is big on atmosphere, though a little thin on good cuisine.

Los Caracoles

September 31

Today we drove back to our mountain village, and as always when we return from the cities and plains, we feel particularly blessed to be living here. While we were gone a lot of snow fell on the mountains and we now feel that winter has truly begun. We lit a fire, put the fake blood, witches costumes and hairy, clawed gloves on the children and sent them out into the Halloween night, and then sat down with a cup of tea.


While we were away many of the littlest people in our lives had been going through difficult times. Virginie’s month-old Lucas went to hospital with a bad infection, and so did cousin Gemma’s little Jamie. Worse still was Anne’s little girl Jeanne, who has been suffering for several weeks with a pain in the hips. After an MRI we now know she has an infection in one of her vertebral discs. She is in hospital for a few weeks on antibiotics and yesterday was put in a plaster cast from her neck to her hips, under a general anaesthetic, and will have to stay like that for 3 months.

On a brighter note, Eve and Ben had a healthy baby boy yesterday, as yet unnamed.

That was our October.