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| Lauren! |
Nice photos. What a lovely tree to wake up to. Very pretty. Glad to
see Maggie have the run of the house like our cat! They certainly know
what side their bread is buttered on. I usually wake up with Spuddy at
my head meowing! Or I should say he wakes
me up!
Another beautiful day today. I sacrificed my bike ride to walk with
Gayle! Such a martyr! We took a circular walk at a place called Fowey
which is situated on the river Fowey. It's about a three hour walk and
has some lovely scenery on route. We drove
to the town of Fowey, which is about 18 miles from here. We then took a
foot ferry across the river to a village called Polruan. There is then a
short walk up the hill from the village to a path which runs above the
river and eventually runs down to the mouth
of the Fowey river.
From here we climbed up a path through a wooded
area to a lovely late 13th early 14th century parish church called St
Winnow. The walk carries on up a farm lane then over a farmers field to
the Atlantic coast and Lantic Bay. We then carried
on walking the coastline and finally arrived back at Polruan where we
took another foot ferry across the river to Fowey and a walk through the
town back to our car. Have attached a few photos I took on the walk to
give you a taste. Perhaps if we have the time
while you are here the four of us can do it. I think Cora Lee mentioned
she likes walking. The weather is supposed to start changing tomorrow afternoon, rain!
Going to try to get Gayle to cycle into Truro tomorrow morning for a
coffee and pain au raisin for breakfast. Bye for now Derek
Hello all, This is our final communique from Pezenas:
April 4 – it was insane, we went to Spain, in the rain.
Actually, once we got to Spain, the rain eased off.
Took the freeway to a place called Figueres, then headed to the coast.
Stopped for lunch along a beach in the resort town of Llanca.
This whole stretch of coastline is one resort after another.
It is spectacular – somewhat reminiscent of the Big Sur in California.
Went through Portbou and crossed back into France near Cerbere.
From there it was on to Banyuls-sur-Mer, where we went to the Cellier des Templiers for another degustation.
They have unique wine, like a port, but different.
The vineyards are planted in gravely terraced hillsides. They have been growing grapes here for over 2500 years.
Then it was on to Collioure, Argeles-sur-Mer, Canet-Plage, St. Laurent-de-la-Salanque on our way to Narbonne. This was done to see the sights (back roads are always more interesting than freeways), avoid road construction around Perpignan, and to avoid tolls. From Narbonne, it was a quick trip back past Beziers to Pezenas. Finished the day with a Domaine Cavailles 2009 Cuvee Coralie Minervois from Minerve and a light supper.
April 5 – took off towards Roujan and saw the old abbey there – dates back to 906 – time of Charlemagne.
Then on to Faugeres, Bedarieux, le Boousquet d’Orb (where we stopped for lunch)
and Avene, a spa town. From there we went through Roqueredonde and Lodeve on the way back to Pezenas.
It was an interesting drive – a variety of landscapes in a small area.
Plains, hilly country with terraced vineyards, nature parks, forested mountainous areas, grazing lands, and then back to vineyards.
Finished off the day with a dinner of cassoulet de Castelnaudary and a Chateau les Eyquem Hautes Graves 2010 Margaux Grand Vin de Bordeaux. WOW!!!
It was great.
April 6 – market day in Pezenas.
Also clean-up and packing day, as tomorrow we leave for Paris.
After packing we will enjoy another dinner of cassoulet and salad with a Saint-Emilion 2011 Artus des Moines Grand Vin de Bordeaux, followed by a cheese plate featuring Roquefort.
Then to bed for an early start to tomorrow’s travelling.
There's just one week left for you to get your tickets to the SLAIS Alumni Association’s 2013 Meet the SLAIS Grads Event. The event will take place at the Alice Mackay Room, lower level VPL
Central Branch, 350 West Georgia St., Vancouver, on Friday, April 12th
from 5:30-8 p.m. To purchase tickets and sponsor one or more graduating students, please visit:
http://www.eventbrite.ca/event/3172873149#
Tickets are still available for A Dram Come True, the Vancouver Writers Fest’s annual scotch tasting fundraiser. It will be an evening of good fun and great spirits celebrating uisce beatha—the water of life—at five whisky tasting bars curated by the President of the West Coast Whisky Society. We’ve got something for everyone at A Dram Come True—even those of you who want to whet your whistle with something other than whisky. The event will feature a fabulous silent auction, a wine bar, and BC’s own Pemberton Distillery will help you get in the “spirit” with a tasting bar featuring vodka, gin and brandy.
Cask Masters, an innovative program inviting fans of Scotland's Favorite Single Malt Scotch Whisky around the world to help shape a brand new Glenmorangie limited edition. Your opinions and votes will determine the development of the new single malt scotch whisky for release in late 2014.
Jura whisky has revived its
Writers’ Retreat, which celebrates the island’s storytelling
heritage by inviting eminent authors to spend time on Jura and write a
short story inspired by the island, featuring a character and genre for
which they are most famous.
2012 Festival author John Burnside was a
writer in residence at Jura. He describes his time on the Island and the
beauty of the lush landscape in a
series of blog posts.
John Burnside's Jura Diary
Lyrics from a Lush Landscape 26 August
It’s been a while since Scottish Book Trust told me that I was going to the Jura Malt Whisky Writer Retreat for some precious writing time between mid-August and mid-September, and I knew I was looking forward to it, but I didn’t know how much was going on at the back of my mind. So, when I finally got here - after a three day sojourn on Islay, because the Jura car ferry had broken down - I had so much work - so many promising notions - to be getting on with, I didn’t know where to start.
What I do know is that a beautiful place gives rise to beautiful place names - and when Catriona Mack, the housekeeper of Jura Lodge, brought me a pile of local interest books, the one I seized upon was Place Names of Jura: A Guide, by Calum McArthur. It’s not a big book - sixteen pages, in fact - but it’s full of treasures. Beinn nan Capull, for example, which means ‘peak of the horses’ , or Tom na Pioghaide, which translates as ‘hillock of the jackdaws’.
The one that really caught my eye, though, was Leac Fhola, which means ledge of blood - and, perhaps because my recent poetry has been much preoccupied with blood, and hunting and with such very physical matters, it set me thinking. I’ve actually set down a couple of poems since I got here - not my plan at all, I came to write some stories that I’ve been carrying around in my head for months - and I think there may be another on the way.
31 August
Having spent a few hours copying out place names with my reed pens, I begin to see the extraordinary patience of people who did this kind of thing for a living. It’s something that has been so carefully eradicated from our lives, this close-in, scrupulous patience.The writer’s first concern is attention to sound. Not to marks on a page, and - for the poet at least - not to questions of meaning. It might seem mystical to say so, but I do think meaning emerges from the sound. Sound comes first, and then, sometimes much later, a posteriori, one sees the meaning - or, often, a complex of meaning, in the piece. To begin with, however, you are working, not with an idea, but a notion, not with a set of specifics, but with an atmosphere, and the only thing you have to guide you is sound.
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| Here’s the view from my window |
The name ‘Jura’ could originate in old Norse, (meaning something like deer island) and the Vikings certainly were a presence here. What they left behind included the fort at An Dùnan
(though not, perhaps, the eerily familiar, Bates-Motel-in-pink edifice beyond).
The island is full of voices. All islands are. Everyone who passed by, or passed through, left a voice behind, their own individual sound, indelible, among the rocks and rivers and hill trails.
It’s been an intensive week or so. I’ve managed to do much more work than even the optimist in me was hoping form, and it’s much more varied, too, than I had planned.
One of the possible projects of the retreat was a collaborative work with David Faithfull. Nothing was very closely defined, the idea was to spend some time together on Jura and see what came out of it. Yet, by the time David got off the ferry, I was already buzzing with ideas and notions that had come out of the land, and the place names - in fact, I’d already written a few lines and I could feel there were more on the way.
David is a great walking companion. Infinitely curious and almost blithely optimistic, he’s a little like Kendal Mint Cake on legs when the weather turns and, standing on a beach at the end of a long walk through mud, water and midge-infested bracken, big, penny-sized drops of rain start bouncing off the tip of your nose. For three days, we explored the island and there is much to explore: Beinn Shiantaidh in the mist, the waterfalls on the Evans Walk, the old fort at An Dùnan, the raised beaches around Inver, the gardens at Ardfin.
All this walking and looking and sometimes seeing things from someone else’s perspective really got me started and I put aside the fiction I’d been working on for two days and set down a sequence of short, impressionistic poems that came all in a rush and just seemed to know how to organise themselves on the page without any interference from me. It happens like that sometimes: as Robert Frost liked to say, the work of the poet is to not get in the way of the poems.
Now David is back on the mainland, and I am back with my stories. I have just about a week left on this island - which is truly full of voices - and I want to make every moment count. Yet I am always fighting the temptation to put the pencil down and go out and just walk up and down the road in Craighouse, or pop into Jura Stores for a chat with Steve - the best book critic I’ve met in a long time - or maybe wander over to the hotel to see if there’s music tonight - real music, impromptu, just a group of friends and neighbours, with maybe a visitor or two sitting in, just jamming, making it up as they go along, the way it should be done.
My last few days in Jura have been extraordinarily productive – if that is the right word – and, now that the last day has come, it is hard to be driving off to the early ferry to Islay. I’ve been missing the family pretty hard recently too, so it will be good to return.
I thought I was leaving with something of a mystery hanging over me. I had written what I thought was a sequence of poems coming out of my walks and talks on the island, both alone and with David, for our collaboration – or rather, a sequence minus one part, which seemed the be there, somewhere, but wasn’t coming. It wasn’t until I got on to the ferry - alone, on the early boat to Islay, and then later, far from alone on the crossing from Port Askaig to Kennacraig – and stood looking out at Jura receding into the distance – and, for me, into the past – that I realized the last piece has to be about the journey.
I hadn’t seen that on the way over, because I met some friends and spent that crossing talking and catching, so didn’t really notice that sense I have, on such journeys, of a kind of innate longing for the archipelago, for ferry crossings and quiet piers on tidewashed islands, for the sound of the water slapping against the wood of the dock and for the intimation of some bright interior, bees swaying through walled gardens or a stand of Himalayan balsam by a dark burn, patient deer waiting to repossess an orchard. In other words, a piece about anticipation, on the one hand, when every island is an Elysium of expectation, and on the other, about the transformation into the land of the true self that memory performs. Any island could be this place.
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| Stuart MacBride |
When you write, there are no goodbyes. Everything stays in your veins, and it might be years before it bleeds out – as ink, as memories, and always transformed, though hopefully not distorted. The Holy Grail, I suppose, is a process of distillation. Cask strength, at its best. Surely the right metaphor to end on, after a month of living and working next to a distillery. At night, or in the early morning, when I was about my business, the people who worked over there – a yard’s width away – were at theirs. Found that heartening, reassuring. We were both engaged in the business of making something – hopefully, what I was making might warm somebody, or inspire a good conversation, or close out a solitary evening by the fire almost, though not quite, as well as the water of life. So no goodbye to Jura – and one day, I trust, a return.
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