Category: France

It was never my intention that this should be a travel blog, but I’ve only written one post since our trip up the length of the Outer Hebrides this May and now we are in Brittany and I have things I would like to say.

It’s not that there hasn’t been a lot going on and, potentially, to write about; more a question of being overwhelmed by the seriousness of those events, at home and in the world, and the fact that they are written about so copiously already.

Travelogues are safe, fun, provide a useful record for me, and possibly provide interest and entertainment for others – or even, it would be nice to think, useful information. After all, my daily posts from our Golden Wedding anniversary trip up the West Coast of North America were by far the most ‘liked’ pages in this entire blog, and the recent Hebridean ones are not that far behind.

The contemporary assaults on objective truth, public morality, and climate science, just for starters, are infinitely more important, and I will probably have another shot at making a contribution some time when I have the strength/inspiration. But for the moment, let’s stick to recreation, and my and my wife’s incredible good fortune in having such opportunities open to us.

So, as I start this piece, we are here in South Brittany, France. Bretagne to the French, hence Grande Bretagne, hence GB or ‘Great Britain’, which therefore has nothing to do with boasting about ‘greatness’, much as Last Night of the Proms flag-wavers might imagine, it is more that when the Normans arrived, a thousand years ago, and brought with them their language, the new Britain was bigger than the Bretagne they came from. (Not that it is bigger than France, needless to say; in that case it is the other way round.)

So here we are, in our little gîte. Gîtes, by the way, are privately-rented holiday cottages situated all over France. Long pre-dating AirB&B and the internet, they are typically quite basic conversions of old farm buildings in rural situations.