Just before I spent the week in Eymet with Maggie and Mike in September 2008, culminating in agreeing to buy their house in Sigoules, I enjoyed various locations with Mike and Heidi, Emily, Oliver, and Alice. One of these was at
Onesse in Les Landes. Oliver doesn’t seem to be in this family shot from the selection I scanned today from the recently recovered colour slides.
I am not sure where this beach was, but I remember picnicking on the bank in the foreground.
We took a number of walks in the sun-dappled forest with its tall pines, red-brown streams, and sandy banks of bright purple heather.
The farmhouse and its field; the nodding sunflowers; and the village perching above it are all outside Eymet, while the colourful garden and the church spire behind the rooftops are probably inside it. Without notes I am a little hazy after twelve years.
I really regret not being sure where this wonderfully sensitive sculpture of an unknown soldier adorns a war memorial. Maybe someone will enlighten me.
Having read another four chapters of ‘Little Dorrit’ I now present four more of Charles Keeping’s skilful illustrations.
Here we have a ruined uncle well portrayed by the artist;
‘My eldest daughter and my son Mr Clennham.’ The essences of one weak and one haughty captured by the artist’s pen;
‘Oh, Maggy, What a clumsy child you are!’ Drawn to perfection is Dickens’s portrait of this simple soul, including her clothing’s ‘general resemblance to seaweed’;
‘He seemed to have been sitting for his portrait all the days of his life’. Keeping has caught Dickens’s vivid description of the aptly named Tite Barnacle, down to his very clothing.
This evening we dined on a second sitting of Hordle Chinese Take Away’s excellent fare, with which Jackie drank Hoegaarden and I finished the Recital.