Audrey's Musings

  As I drive through the small villages in the French Countryside near Limoges many houses shut up with no one inside. A beautiful castle all closed with the people all gone. Abandoned? Maybe not. Empty and standing alone for sure, and yet there are homeless so what is wrong. The disconnect from the reality. The problem of the new society now. Who will care for the castles, the houses and farms empty of the people who gave them life before. As we drive through the villages and see how empty they are, the young people gone, looking for a place to work as there is no paid work there or here anymore. There is no trust to allow the work that is evident there to be done by those who have nothing except their youth and energy to give. They could breathe life into neglected spaces and change them into something else, yet these places that are empty stay empty and unloved. Only the rich have enough to manage to stay. Old men and women who live out the rest of their life in distance from th...

My arrival here in France coincides with late Autumn or early Winter. Naturally it means beautiful colours in all the trees and shrubs that lose their leaves when the cold really arrives. The fruit trees that grow locally such as the Brugonon, which is a favourite of the local Catalon people of this area, and which is a cross between a peach and a plum, have almost all lost their leaves with the end of the fruiting season. Photo courtesy of  Helen Parkes Of course in the Southern hemisphere they are experiencing the growth that comes with the late spring and early summer so everything is green and colourful in a very different way. Look at the picture opposite. This is the Pohutukawa or Native Christmas Tree which can be found in the northern coastal areas of Aotearoa, New Zealand.  The flowers are loved by bees and the honey is a creamy white, sweet and delicious. The tree itself offers welcome shade at the beach for those who wish to avoid the damaging rays of a NZ summer su...

  Currently I am overseas in France visiting family who because of Covid restrictions I have been unable to see for the past 4 years. After arriving in Nice from my connection plane in Dubai I drove with Fabrice my partner to a small hamlet of La Clapisse near the city of Sisteron.   Sisteron is a French commune located in the department of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region. In the past the city occupied a privileged and important position because it was close to the confluence or merging of two major waterways-the Buëch  and the  Durance .  The city became important as a bridge site, the only one where a bridge survived in a sustainable way on the Durance river from antiquity to the nineteenth century.   Sisteron has many monuments including its  citadel  , facing the rock of La Baume whose strata are almost vertical, a  12 th century  cathedral   ,  Notre-Dame des Pommiers with its f...