From the desk of the editor
Welcome to our shiny new version of the Epistle. Always striving to be on the very bleeding edge of technology, all of our staff here at the Epistle welcomes you to our new format. (Ok, so I work alone, big deal. When I am rich and famous, I will hire minions so I can babble my rants while they dutifully post them online)
I was well aware that the format I was using was choking many friends e-mail boxes and creating a real burden for those interested in what we are up to but couldn’t handle hour long downloads and our hogging their email quotas.
Being a sensitive millennium kind of guy with several friends making good suggestions I got a little help to set up the current format to solve the problem. While not quite ideal but I hope acceptable, the primary advantage of the format is not taking ANY space on your email account and being a simple link that can be opened instantly. I am still trying to figure out how to get rid of the weird code you see between the paragraphs. I am open to any ideas.
Once a month I will email you the link, inviting you to take a peek. Of course this Internet thing is a two-way information highway and we would love to hear about your latest goings on also.
Fort La Latte
Two hours up the road from us lies Fort La Latte. The original fort was built on a much smaller scale in 937 AD. As seen, the existing fort was built around 1350. Over the centuries it has been submitted to a number of unsuccessful sieges, including by the English in 1490. Alas, it has suffered fires, pillaging, plundering and partial dismantling. Only the ‘donjon’ survived.
Not to be confused with a dungeon, a ‘donjon’ is a keep, the last fortified stronghold in the center of the fort (the tall tower looking thing) where the owners could seek refuge when the mongrel hordes (figure of speech) invaded and breached the outer defenses. The fort does have what the French call an “oublier”. Translated, it means, “to forget”. This is a 3-foot wide, 20-foot deep hole in the ground next to the entrance guard’s post where you could keep a prisoner (but most often a disobedient soldier or a guard caught sleeping). It was not wide enough for a man to lie down, had no ‘facilities’ and offered little in entertainment value. It was a place where they would ‘forget’ about you for a while. If the guard remembered, he could lower a pot for you to do your business or toss down some bread scraps.
And my kids thought I was too strict!
In 1793 they built an outdoor oven that looks like a giant bread oven. (It’s the little building at right and above in the large open area that has a chimney at one end) They would get a roaring fire going inside and load cannon balls into several troughs at the high end. The metal balls would take up to 90 minutes to work their way down to the low end of the building where the soldiers would pick them up with metal tongs. Red hot from the heating process they would be loaded into cannons where when fired would not only damage passing ships but also set fire to them to boot.
In 1815 the fort saw it’s last unsuccessful 100-day siege and thus ended it’s warring history. It was later abandoned and decommissioned by the war ministry in 1890. Largely in a state of ruin it was declared a historical monument in 1925. It was bought by a private family in 1931 and has been slowly restored since. The fort has been a movie backdrop for a number of films including “The Vikings” with Kirk Douglass and Tony Curtis.
Still owned by the same family who live within its walls, it is open to the public and is the most visited Fort in Brittany after Nantes.
Michael goes back to school
Always looking for ways to mitigate my poor mothers feeling that I will never amount to anything (Just because I spent 30 years in prison doesn’t mean I am a bad guy), I decided to go back to school. Confounding the theory that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, I thought I would try my hand at blacksmithing.
Last winter I wrote about “Batiste” our village blacksmith. A man straight out of the 9th century, he fits right into what had been his fathers shop. The place looks like the torture chamber in the movie “Nights of the living dead”.
Ok, so my instructor is not certified but he is an artist. We seemed to hit it off last winter when I asked him to do a few things as part of a project I was working on. Soon, I was doing things on my own and this winter I asked him if he would teach me the craft, as I wanted to make some forged objects to take back to Honey Bee.
Enjoying the company, he agreed and started me off by teaching me how to weld. It wasn’t pretty but I soon got the hang of it and realized that my teacher did not like to repeat himself “I showed you that once already, so figure it out”. Next, I graduated to making forged nails, just like in medieval times. The heads looked great even if the points looked a little crooked but I figured no one would see that when I pounded them in the wood. If I were learning to be a mechanic, this would be the equivalent of being allowed to tighten and loosen (but not remove) the lug nuts on the car. Baby steps…
I have not worn a watch since the day I retired (why bother since the only thing I have to do is die) but here it does not matter. I always know when it’s lunchtime as the French version of the factory whistles blow (the village church bells).
In any case, next came my first project. I am forging some seriously bitching looking hinges for the heavy wood door at the Bee. You know, hinges that are almost as wide as the door itself and have scroll work on them, kind of what you would expect to see on a castle door. No sooner had I got started that I almost got myself kicked out of school.
Realizing that red hot metal was quite workable but white hot metal was even easier, I thought to myself: “step aside old man, I have been doing this for a couple of hours and I will show you how this is done”. Pumping the forge as fast as I could, I figured the hotter the better. When I pulled the tongs out of the fire, not only was the piece of metal I was working on gone but half the tongs also. Not the slightest bit amused, he eyed me with that "You are as stupid as you look" look and said, “what happened”?
Instinctively, I wanted to respond like my kids used to in similar circumstances:“Nothing!" Thinking the better of it, I thought I would try to take credit for the feat: Behold! I am a magician who can make solid steel disappear!!! What I didn’t know was that I had heated the metal to over 3200 degrees and like a foundry, melted the steel like water. And so, having temporarily lost the masters trust, I was back to…….making nails. Blacksmithing is hard work and I have discovered a hundred new ways to burn myself. What I came to realize is that if I was working out at the gym I would have to do 900 to a 1000 repetitions of 5 pound curls (right arm only) to replicate what I do with the hammer each session.
This blacksmithing thing is but one of many things I have had stored in the back of my mind for years in the “one of these days” category. It is a real kick to be able to have the time to finally do it.
Church bells are tolling so it’s time to go back to work. Our house is about to become a "husband free zone" for the next several hours.
The River Jaudy
At the edge of our village lies the tidal river ‘Jaudy’. A popular local fishing spot it also has a number of walking paths that run along side. There is a school that teaches kids kayak racing and there are endless places to photograph, sketch and paint.
The real kicker are the tides. Twice a day, the river empties completely right down to the mud flats. Six hours later it refills completely bank to bank. Draining into it are two ponds within Langoat (our village) that also offer walking paths, picnic areas, horseback riding trails and access to roadway remains built by the Romans.
Christmas in Brittany
Last month we mentioned that we were spending the first Christmas in our married life alone without a single kid. We teased about celebrating with a bottle of wine and a night in the Sauna. While we did have mixed emotions about it all we still had a good time. It is a milestone in all our lives that we experience.
Our Christmas was a quiet but busy one with our being invited to and inviting friends here. I am sitting here at the computer writing this on New Years Eve so I guess there won’t be any wild parties here tonight either. We did spend the day at the beach where we had a picnic with friends and we will have friends over tomorrow also.
So how is Janice’s French?
Challenged.
It would be fair to say that she understands quite a bit more than she can speak. Pretty normal for someone attempting a second language I am told. She is quite able to go off on her own (and does) to shop, run errands and manage quite well in the process.
She can make herself understood sufficiently to get and do what she wants although she would not attempt to do serious banking, straighten something out with the insurance company or deal with our Internet service provider. The best way to describe her French language skills is to think of the movie “Borat”, the refugee from Kazakhstan who invites you over: “Mine smile your came for houses to me?” then turns to me proudly to confirm that ‘that was right’.
There is no doubt that there is some linguistic babysitting that occurs while we spend our months here and that we tend to make friends that are at least somewhat bilingual. It is tough for her to be with someone who does not speak a word of English. I end up like a United Nations translator going back and forth with time delays built into the punch lines of any jokes.
Language aside, Janice simply cannot contain her enthusiasm for being in France.
She loves it
Hey, guess who I miss?
