Travelogue Page 5

Then after 3 weeks and 3 days we travelled to France were we visited Fergus's brother Jock.

Jock lives in the southern part of France in the Lot department, near Cahors. It was a lovely warm sunny day and we arrived mid afternoon. His house was full of visitors, plus his daughter Harriet was staying with him and they were expecting her friends to arrive from Sydney that very evening.

We were invited to go and stay with his Scottish friend Sandie who has a lovely house not very far away. It is a converted barn and she was delighted to welcome us. She has a very nice guestroom and we even had our own bathroom and toilet. Very spoilt we were too! Sandy was a display artist in London and her whole house uses style and wonderful ways of displaying one's belongings. Her living room is twice the size of my old studio in Brighton and very light and airy. We really liked Sandie and we had a great time staying with her. Her husband works at sea and is away for 6 weeks and then home again for 6 weeks. This was a time when Sandie was alone and so I think she enjoyed having us.


		We did what one does in France and that is eat and drink too much. Lets say it is very easy to do, as all the food is so fantastically fresh and not that expensive. There is always a local market somewhere selling you the freshest produce anywhere. You can buy fruit, vegetables, meat and cheese of all kinds, herbs and spices and lets not forget there are the wonderful flowers everywhere. There is of course a favourite restaurant called Madame Murat. A simple country restaurant but Madam continues to serve the best food ever. You arrive, sit down on a long table, and basically you get served as many courses as you can eat, all washed down with the free local table wine which gets replaced when the bottle is empty. If there is something you do not eat you simply do not have that course. There is so much that no one goes out staving, unless you are a vegetarian. The French don’t do vegetarian terribly well. However Madam did try, as the Aussies from Sydney were vegetarians. There is always a lovely atmosphere in this place as everyone from farmers to the mayor comes and eats together, no snobbery allowed. It is just great. Naturally it is also the place were all the English, Americans and Aussies reunite when every season they return to their holiday houses. One can hear as much English spoken as French.

Our trip to France ended in Paris, where we stayed with Stathis., who is an ex-pupil of mine. He studied with me as an adult pupil and then after a detour to Paris came back to England and was trained as a dancer at Rambert Ballet School in London. It was fantastic to see him as I had not seen him for ten years and he had achieved such a lot in this intervening time. He is back at University in Paris reading Psychology. Stathis has also become a "Rolfer", and working as a therapist, is supporting his current studies. (Rolfing is a special re-education program to the body to make it work bio mechanically correctly and more easily.) This of course is a simplification of what Rolfing is, but this is not the place to give a fuller explanation. In the evening we visited a special Vietnamese Restaurant and again tasted heavenly food. We had a lovely time with Stathis and he took us to see a dance performance of an acquaintance of his. The lady performed on her own for 45 minutes and has to be the French equivalent of our Liz Aggis. It was simply riveting and very entertaining.

We also had time to wander off on our own and as we stayed close to Montmartre we visited it on foot. That day we walked and walked and when we finally got to the Louvre we were to tired to go in and look around.

On another day we visited Versailles. What a fantastically big and wonderful place! There is so much to see that it would take days to see it all. The imagination they had must have cost a fortune. Seeing all that wealth right in front of me, made me understand why they have had a revolution, someone had to pay for all this luxury. I really enjoyed Versailles but not found any evidence of classical ballet being borne in the baroque age at the court of Versailles. Wonderful buildings, all completely decorated by the world most famous artists of the time, artefacts collected from all over France, more statues than one can imagine and of course wonderful formal gardens with enormous and countless fountains…..


At the end of each day we would return to Stathis and enjoy our evenings together, dining out or going to see a performance. We had a brilliant time with Stathis in Paris and then it was time for us to return to Brighton.