Bechard Calissons, Aix

September 8, 2024September 9, 20241 Comment

The last of the drawings I did when I got back from our trip was not a London one at all, but a drawing of the Béchard Patissier on the Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence. They make and sell ‘Calissons’, a small diamond-lozenge shaped candy made of marzipan that is a famous local delicacy of Aix. I like them, not everyone’s cup of tea, but I always make a bee-line for this place when I visit Aix. Other places do nice ones, but I think Béchard’s calissons are very tasty and well presented, usually in those big white calisson-shaped boxes. I just really like the way the store looks too, and it hasn’t changed at all in all these years. I did draw it when I visited back in 2015, but this time I just took a photo intending on a more detailed drawing later to hang on the wall, which is what I have done. It’s up on the wall now next to those London ones. You can see me there reflected in the doorway, wearing my striped Red Star Paris football shirt (I didn’t bring a Marseille one on this trip). I was going to put this drawing into the Pence’s Art Auction hut I liked looking at it too much, it reminded me of walking up Cours Mirabeau all those years ago, usually on the way to see something at the cinema, I saw the Fellowship of the Ring in there when that first came out and dive right into reading the books afterwards, so I always associate those stories with walking those cobbled streets of Aix at night. I am actually re-listening to the audiobooks of The Lord of the Rings now, and I really love the Rings of Power show. The buildings here in this part of Aix, the Quartier Mazarin, are a particularly golden ochre, especially in the sun, going back to the 17th century. The red and white displays go well against that stonework. Even though I drew this after I got back home to Davis (I have sketched this on site nine years ago already), I enjoyed drawing this and thinking back to those days and nights in Aix twenty-odd years ago.

nice to see you, to see you nice

July 28, 2024July 26, 2024Leave a comment

We took the TGV from Aix to Nice. I do like taking the train in France, and the TGV – I mean, the ‘Ouigo’? – took us through Marseille’s mean quarters and along the rocky coast, which was a lot more grey than azure due to that weather we’d been having. I didn’t mind so much. The previous times I’d been to Nice I had taken a direct coach from Aix, because the regular trains were so slow, taking most of the day stopping at all those Riviera towns. We arrived in Nice in the early afternoon. I had forgotten just how big Nice is, it’s a huge bustling city with a lot of shops. We stayed near the old town a few blocks from the sea. I love being near the sea. The beach at Nice is pebbly, but wide and full of people enjoying the evening. We walked along the long Promenade des Anglais, the traffic intersections were a bit scary when we had to cross over, but it was nice being somewhere so different. I drew the scene above after the family had gone back to the flat, the daylight was still good even quite late, and I sat on the stone steps and sketched.

Before that, we were walking through the old town and saw that the England vs Denmark game was about to start on a big screen outside a tapas bar. Good place to grab some food and drinks and watch the football, it should be exciting. Well, the football may have been one of the most boring games I had ever seen (that is, until the first 94 minutes of England v Slovakia), but it was nice to sit and eat and sketch and listen to the people around us, there was a Danish couple who kept giggling whenever I would complain about how Højbjerg’s shooting and passing was, knowing him from Spurs (and yet, he got man of the match in this game, fair play to him, everyone else was terrible). Occasionally a few drops of Mediterranean rain splashed onto us, but it was fun sketching this and with the lettering at the top it reminded me of a comic book. England would be ‘The Fantastic Bore’. The old town was busy, but much busier on the second night, the same night France were playing against the Netherlands in a game that was equally if not even more boring. We didn’t watch that one out anywhere, not really wanting to be in a big crowd that went crazy after a goal, so we put that one on the TV in our flat in the background. We need not have worried, it ended 0-0. These Euros group stages, man.

I got up in the mornings and went for my usual walk-sketch-boulangerie routine. It was still cloudy on Nice, and I walked down to the old town and drew this pink clock tower, the Tour de l’Horloge, dating from 1718. One thing we were going to do but didn’t was to go up to the big hill with the castle on it, looking over the city and coastline from a great height. The views up there are breathtaking, but so is the walk up the steep staircase, and since the elevator was closed we said, nah we did that in 2002. We walked about the base of the big cliff though, got the same view but from lower down, and saw all the signage for the upcoming Tour de France which was to be ending in Nice this year (Paris being a little preoccupied with Olympics preparations). The sun was out by now, we took some photos and finally the sea was that shimmering azure.

I did get up early on the final day and walk over to that blue sea. The pink dome of the Negresco hotel looked lovely. I want to stay there some day. It’s very expensive, and I’ve stayed in some very nice hotels now but this one is classy. There are a lot of places along the Cote d’Azur I’d like to visit, or return to such as Villefranche sur Mer which I always loved, a short bus ride away. But Nice is far away from California, so who knows when next we will be back. It was easy to get to the airport on the tram, although the experience of waiting in the impossibly slow Ryanair check in line at Nice airport put us off flying through there for a while. I’m not done with my Riviera sketches though, as we did visit one other place on this short trip, somewhere that we as Formula 1 fans have wanted to got to for the longest time – Monaco!

the return to aix

July 24, 2024July 24, 20241 Comment

We took a few days away from London in the south of France. We went first to Aix-en-Provence, the very city where my wife and I met each other, 22 years ago. This was the first time we had been back there together in 21 years, and the first time our son ever went there. The last time I was in Aix was in 2015, I came here before my trip to Strasbourg, but it was great to finally come back here together, after all this time. The world is a different place now, though Aix hasn’t changed that much, give or take an Apple store and a lot less dog poo. It’s still a busy place, especially in summer, and we stayed in an apartment which overlooked the same street my wife used to live on when we first met, another flat up a steep narrow staircase. We ate dinner at our favourite old place, La Pizza, still there and still delicious, although the nearby Place d’Albertas has lost some of its charm, the little old fountain now looking clean and sterile. Aix still has a lot of character though. On our first morning I woke up early, as I always do when travelling, and went out to do some sketching. We were right by the Place de l’Hotel de Ville, and I had to sketch it, of course. It was here in Aix that I rediscovered my love of going out drawing, all those years ago before blogs and social media and Urban Sketchers. I remember doing a sketch of this on a trip back in the year after we left, 2003, and then again in 2015 on that last trip. An almost unchanging view. One day I’ll actually finish a sketch I do there! The town was setting up as I sketched, vans would occasionally park right in front of me, cops (‘les flics’) from the police station would greet each other with the little pecks on the cheek, restaurateurs would start slowly opening up their shades and putting out chairs. And then it was time for me to go and pick up pastries for the family, seemingly the one thing untouched by the beats of inflation, still the cheapest breakfast there is, and nothing tastes as good as freshly baked French pastry. When I lived in Aix, I lived above a bakery and the smell would waft up to my window.

The drawing from 2003, that was drawn in a Canson sketchbook I got from my favourite shop in Aix, Papeterie Michel. They always had the absolute best selection of art materials and sketchbooks, as well as everything I needed to make masks and costumes for the extremely silly play I directed. I am pleased to report, Michel is still there and even better than I remember. We all spent a long time in there, and I fought the urge to buy everything. I did buy new pens, many postcards, and a beautiful set of placemats. Elsewhere we bought a couple of new tablecloths, because we always loved the Provence tablecloths. Michel is on the Cours Mirabeau, the regal thoroughfare of Aix that separates the old town from the also old Quartier Mazarin. We walked around there, memories bouncing around those dusty old orange walls. The cinemas where we watched so many films; the first time I saw Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and of course where my wife took me to see Attack of the Clones on the opening night, playing only in French (VF) at the Cezanne because it wasn’t playing in English (VO) at the other place. People were dressed as Jedi and fighting with lightsabres (sabre-laser) in the aisles, we’d only been dating for a couple of months and she got me the tickets as a surprise. The music from that film still reminds me so much of those early days together in Aix. We walked down to the old Parc Jourdan, where we’d often hang out as it was halfway between centre-ville and the university where I worked as a ‘lecteur’. I didn’t walk down to the old Fac des Lettres building, I heard that it was knocked down and replaced with something more modern (and presumably, hopefully, a lot better). I also didn’t walk out to where my old flat was, our time was short in Aix, there were only so many memory lanes. I hoped to see some old men playing pétanque in the park but not today. So we walked back up to the Cours, mooched around Monoprix, and wrote postcards over cold drinks at a cafe. La vie can be pretty belle sometimes.

Our lunch was the thing I’d been wanting most of all, the fabled Poulet Frites, which I got from a very busy little kiosk called Le Regal which has been operating there since I lived there, although it’s across the street now and looks much changed. The poulet frites were still amazing though, fresh and hot, although my favourite ones back in the day were from a little place by where I lived. This one is by the Place de la Rotonde, which circles around a huge fountain, which I drew above. I did not quite finish the sketch, but didn’t need to. It actually started raining while I was sketching; it had been doing so on and off, very lightly, for a little while once the morning sunshine had, er, dried up. This rain though was not like normal rain, as you can see from the little orange splotches on the page, made by sand carried all the way from the Sahara. I remembered this would happen occasionally, either through warm sticky rain or just blown up on winds from the south (winds that were not as fierce as the fabled Mistral). It didn’t deter me for long. There were a lot of tourists in town, many being herded around by guides telling stories of the great figures of Aix, the capital of Provence and once ruled by a king called Roi Rene, whose statue stands at the end of the Cours Mirabeau. The entrance to the Cours is marked by two statues, one dedicated to the Arts and Sciences (which I sketched below), the other dedicated to literature or maths or something (if I didn’t draw it, I don’t remember it). Aix is a big university town, packed with scholars and students, a bit like Davis (but otherwise nothing like Davis whatsoever). Between 2001 and 2002 I taught English there, more a learning experience for me than any of the students in my classes. I wonder sometimes about all the people I met that year, though I’ve not been in contact with any for years (except of course my wife!). As I walked about the streets I remembered people I had not thought about in two decades, but that’s all part of life, the scenes and characters change and you’re in a new play. Now I’m a man pushing 50 who wanders about with a sketchbook trying to catch the places while I can.

The Cours Mirabeau has these odd little fountains on it, covered in thick green moss, that sit slap bang in the middle of the street. Aix has been called the City of a Thousand Fountains; I don’t know if there are exactly that many, it seems a bit specific, but there are a lot around here. Aix is built on a thermal spring – its name comes from the ‘Aquae Sextiae’, which means ‘sexy waters’ in Latin. Ok fine it doesn’t mean that, it means the waters of Sextius, who was a Roman consul back when they were beating up the local Gauls and founding the city in 123 BCE. This fountain comes right up from those hot springs, and is very old indeed, dating from 1667. It’s older than St. Paul’s Cathedral. It’s older than the USA. It’s older than (weak jokes about how old) Joe Biden (is). It’s called the Mossy Fountain (Fontaine Moussue) which I think you’ll agree is a good name. I drew it while my family were looking at clothes in Monoprix.

The most famous Aixois was definitely 100% without a shadow of a doubt the painter Paul Cézanne. Aix is wall to wall Cezanne obsessed. His studio was at the top of the town, uphill with a nice view of the big mountain, Mont St. Victoire, which I have climbed up twice, I never fail to tell people whenever we see one of his painting. “See that? Mont St. Victoire, I went up there, yeah easy, no sweat. Had to run down to catch the bus before it got dark though.” I make it sound like I rock-climbed up the face like that Free Solo guy, as opposed to just walk up the path along the less steep side, and peered over the edge. Cézanne loved that mountain though, he couldn’t get enough of it, drawing and painting it over and over again. I can’t relate to that at all, eh (Bike Barn, Varsity Theatre, Silo, these are all my Mont St. Victoires). Other famous people lived in Aix over the years, while I was there everyone kept going on about John Malkovich, “oh I saw John Malkovich at the market the other day”, “oh I sat next to John Malkovich at the cafe the other day”, “Oh I stood behind John Malkovich in the line for the toilet at the Red Clover the other day”, like let it go, Malkovich fans. I didn’t even know what he looked like, so I wouldn’t have known him from Paul Cézanne, but everyone had a Malkovich story. I was more impressed that the legend Nina Simone lived in Aix when we did, though she died in 2003. There should be a statue of her there. This statue of Cézanne though is nice, standing by the Rotonde outside where the old casino used to be, now knocked down and turned into a fancy shopping district. He’s there with his bushy beard and walking stick, and backpack full of art materials, so I had to draw him (though I did have to check I wasn’t unexpectedly drawing a statue of Malkovich). As a few more drops of sandy rain plopped on my page, I moved along. I have some more Aix sketches to show, even rainier ones, but that will be in the next post.

un p’tit peu plus de Paris

January 21, 2023January 18, 20231 Comment

Here’s the final batch of Paris sketches from last July’s visit. We really covered a lot of ground, but there’s a lot left to explore in future years. The thing about travel, I want to go everywhere. Well, maybe not everywhere, I don’t really fancy places like Swindon, or Fallujah, or Minsk. I’m sure they have their charms, but they are a bit further down the wish list. I feel like you could explore Paris forever with a sketchbook. The above panorama was another morning walk across the Seine, pre-breakfast, I had a bit of time. I did most of the linework there and then, but had to add in that truck and a lot of the windows later, as well as colour it in. My tummy was rumbling, you know. This is the Pont au Change, looking across to the Île de la Cité and the impressive Palais de Justice and Conciergerie. This is the heart of historic Paris right here. Right next to where I sketched was a stone marker that said on the 19th August 1944, Jem Harrix, ‘Gardien de la Paix’, died for the liberation of Paris. Harrix was a fighter in the Resistance, although I couldn’t find out much more than that. I walked off to get the usual selection of morning pastries, and got ready for our day of sightseeing.

There was one day where we visited the Musée D’Orsay. My wife had been telling me about the Musée D’Orsay for years, she loved that place when she first visited it back in the late 90s. It really is one of the most impressive art museums in the world. Built into the building of a train station, which features giant clock faces that you can look out of to heart-stopping views across Paris. I loved seeing all the paintings by your Renoirs and your Monets, and enjoyed all the sculptures by your Rodins and your Degas, but it was the architecture of the space itself that inspired me the most. I would love to go back; you can never spend too much time in a museum though, because museum fatigue is a real thing.

While taking a sitting down break, I sketched some of the sculptures quickly. It looked like a couple of them were almost doing a ‘Brucie’, that is, the Bruce Forsyth pose. More on the Brucie in another post perhaps, but it’s become one of those traditions now that when I go somewhere, I get a picture of me doing a ‘Brucie’. I got quite a few Brucies on this trip. I even got a Brucie at the Louvre in front of one of those massive paintings by David, though it was too crowded for a Brucie in front of the Mona Lisa. I got a Brucie at the Eiffel Tower, a Brucie at the Mont St Michel, a Brucie by the Seine, a Brucie in front of Van Gogh. You can only do one at each place, you don’t get nothing for a pair, not in this game. Anyway, I thought Rodin’s ‘Penseur’ had a touch of the Forsyth about him. This sculpture is from 1881! That’s a year older than Tottenham Hotspur. Rodin probably won more trophies too, yeah yeah.

After leaving the museum we went down to the seine and grabbed some lunch by the river, some Breton food. We didn’t stay too long in our seat though, as were were harassed by loads of wasps. Big horrible wasps too that wouldn’t take buzz-off for an answer, and made me spill my drink. I was going to ask to see the wasps’ manager and complain about their behaviour, but it turns out wasps don’t care about your stupid lunchtime and just want to get all over everything you are trying to eat and threaten you with their stingers. They know you’ll give up, and they were right. So we gave up, and walked through the city towards the Eiffel Tower. I’m not sure why we didn’t get the bus, but we thought the walk would do us good. it was a nice walk, but our feet didn’t half need a rest by the time we reached the Champ de Mars. We took a good long rest there and enjoyed the view and the pleasant wasp-free weather, and sketched the scene below. We walked closer to the Tower, recreated a photo we took of our son ten years before, and crossed the Seine to walk up the Trocadero (where I managed to sneak in a quick Brucie). We didn’t go up the Tower this time. I’ve been to the top before. What is interesting is that nowadays it is not possible to just walk beneath the Eiffel Tower, you are rerouted around it, which is disappointing. I do love the Eiffel Tower though, as far as iconic buildings go, this is up there in the top three.

We visited the Louvre too, but not on the same day as the Musee d’Orsay. My wife was surprised when I told her that I’d never been to the Louvre, in fact I’d never really been to any of the big Museums in Paris. In fact, none of the small ones either. I’ve not been to Paris that many times, and I usually wander about enjoying the streets. The Louvre was absolutely massive though. It’s big from the outside, but inside it feels even more gigantic. We did see the Mona Lisa of course, in that jam-packed little space (no Brucie; no room). I get it, it’s famous, but it’s not all that. You just have to say that you saw it and be done with it. It didn’t exactly have any impact on me such as when I saw Guernica in Madrid. Still, you got to see the famous thing, and anything by Leonardo da Vinci is worth taking a look at.

After the Louvre, we rested those tired feet by going up to Montmartre and walking around that hilly neighbourhood, getting out at Abbesses Metro station and climbing a ridiculous spiral staircase that went on forever, I thought we’d end up on the Moon or somewhere. Despite being packed with people, I really like Montmartre and had a nice afternoon there in 2019 (see: https://petescully.com/2020/02/02/une-journee-breve-a-paris/). We took the Funicular up to Sacre Coeur, enjoyed the views, despaired at the stupid amount of those little padlocks on all the fences. Seriously everyone, stop doing that. Padlock peddlers walk around selling those little “love-locks” at silly prices. But honestly, are you going to come back in years to come with your spouse and look for your little padlock with your initials on them on that fence with thousands of others and go, yay, we were here before, wow. No, don’t be silly. There was that one bridge over the Seine, the Pont des Arts, where so many of these things had been placed by silly lovers, throwing their keys into the river like idiots, that the city actually tried to stop it, because there were so many that the bridge started suffer damage under the weight. So people, please give up the love-lock thing. Love is all you need, not a bloody padlock on a bridge or fence in some city miles away. Anyway. We went inside Sacre Coeur, I had never been in there before, and it’s really nice. From inside, we did notice that the building is distinctly, um, booby-shaped. We wlaked about the streets and squares, found a very cool shop called ‘Merde’ run by an artist selling his artwork along with lots of things that say ‘Merde’ on it; we got some stickers and stuff. I did a very quick outline sketch of the view of Le Consulat restaurant, but we were ready to go home, so I took a picture and did most of it later on. The Metro ride home was long and sleepy. We were flying back to America the next day, which was an eventful journey in itself. We loved our time in Paris, and I can’t wait to come back again.

Evening Strolls in Paris

January 20, 2023January 17, 2023Leave a comment

I like my early morning wandering and sketching when we have family trips away, out by myself when the others are still sleeping. But I also enjoy the evening stroll as well, a good way to work off a long day’s walking and sightseeing. I’m just so keen to explore and to look, and of course to sketch. So much life was within walking distance of our apartment. I ambled over to Shakespeare and Company, the famous English bookstore by the Seine that everyone has heard of. We came by earlier, but didn’t go in because the line to enter was ridiculous. I’ve seen long lines to get into bookstores before; the Livraria Lello in Porto, for example, where you actually had to buy a ticket to go in, it’s that famous; bookstores everywhere on the night the last Harry Potter book came out; and of course, Faculty Books on the Middlesex University campus, where I used to work twenty years ago, there was always a line on the first day of term so people could get their massively overpriced Pearsons textbooks for their Econometrics class. the line for Shakespeare and Company, while moving, was too long for us to consider. It’s not like Shakespeare himself was in there signing copies of Much Ado About Nothing. No, it’s just a really famous bookshop. Loads of famous writers have been involved with this place. Loads of them. Loads. It’s not the same Shakespeare and Company that Hemingway and Joyce are associated with, but it’s named after it, and it’s really famous in its own right. I went back in the evening, knowing it would still be open, which it was, but there was still a long line outside. Well, I thought, perfect time for a sketch. I drew the panorama pretty quickly, and drew people even more quickly. The great thing about sketching people in line is that they will be there for a while, but because they don’t want to lose their spot you never get them coming up to you to see why you are sketching. Not that anyone would, this is Paris, it’s full of artists. I never got to go inside the store, as it closed up while I was finishing up the drawing, but I’ve been in before. I think it was in about 1999, one evening down by the river, came across this shop, there was no line outside in those days. It was interesting, in an old bookshop kind of way. I’m glad I got my sketch this time. I am a sucker for old bookshops, and for new bookshops too. I like the smell of certain French bookshops, very clean and tidy, with so many of those particular books with the white spines, and always with a huge BD (bande dessinee) section.

We were located very close to the church of Saint Séverin, and having passed by earlier in the day I earmarked that one for a sketch on my evening walk. I drew the rear (the apse) from the busy intersection where Rue Saint-Jacques joins up with the Rue du Petit Pont. The setting sky was cinematic. Restaurants buzzed with life. Nearby at a cafe a lady was belting out Edith Piaf tunes. One of those motorcycle delivery drivers nearly knocked someone over shortcutting up the pavement. It was like being in a movie, and just like being at a movie, I really needed the toilet so I went back to the apartment.

I loved our apartment for hanging out in. My son and I had our ukuleles on this trip, so I would sit by the window strumming to all the noise of the traffic. It was just like being in a Netflix show. Just like when I’m watching a Netflix show, eventually I left the room and did something else. I walked a bit further afield on this night, crossing the Seine twice and heading for the wonderful Hotel de Ville. I’m drawing the Hotel de Ville alright, I said to myself. I love the Hotel de Ville. I’ve always been impressed with it, but I especially love how the summer evening light hits it and appears to turn it different colours as the sun sets. Or at least I did before I tried to sketch it. Conscious of time, I decided to zoom my poor ageing eyes in to some details on part of the roof (it’s a really big building), and draw backwards as it were. I always add the colour last, this time I was like no, I am laying down this golden colour now. A lot of sketchers work this way and they love it, they say it’s the best and you should do it, but here’s the thing – no it’s not. At least not for me. I suppose the technique just doesn’t fit how I draw, or maybe my paints are often a bit dry so don’t always produce the most vibrant colours (I usually prefer the more toned down colours), or maybe I just tried to get the colour I saw and then it bloody changed into something else. The sunlight was slowly slowly oh wait now quickly fading, so I had to draw quickly. I still like it though, it’s a story in itself. It was nice out, people passed by and said “très jolie!” and “bellissimo!” and “das ist so cool!” and “hmm yeah that’s quite nice”.

The Hotel de Ville holds one of my favourite memories of Paris though. In 1998, on the first night of my five-week twelve-country train-trip, after a day walking about Paris I went to the Place de l’Hotel de Ville to watch the World Cup Semi-Final on a big screen in a penned-off area with thousands of dancing Brazilians and chanting Dutch. Ronaldo’s Brazil up against Bergkamp’s Netherlands, being beamed up from the Velodrome in Marseille. I camped in with the Brazilians, of course they would be the most fun to spend this warm evening with. And the the game kicked off, and they were all very quiet, a bit nervous, none of the singing and samba I’d expected. I looked across to the Dutch fans, as you would expect it was a sea of orange, and they would not stop singing. They were having a great old time. The game was a bit tense, not a lot happening, so at half time I decided to switch sides and join the Dutch. The grass is always more orange I guess; a minute into the second half, Ronaldo scored for Brazil. Yet the Dutch kept on singing and having a great time, so I stuck with them. It was a long old second half too. It looked like a Brazil win; ok so, I had a night train to catch anyway from Gare de L’Est, heading to Strasbourg, I didn’t want to miss it. And then, shortly before full-time, Kluivert equalized for the Netherlands. The Place de l’Hotel de Ville erupted in a volcano or orange facepaint. We were going to extra time; I still had time to catch my train, yeah? The Dutch camp was the place to be, momentum was with them, and maybe this would not be Ronaldo’s World Cup after all? Looking anxiously at my watch, it went to penalties. For the Netherlands, it was not to be, as the Brazilian goalie Taffarel pulled off a couple of great saves. As soon as Brazil won, I immediately switched sides again and went back to the dancing samba party, a carnival of yellow wigs and plastic whistles. Everyone was hugging and dancing and cheering (well, not the Dutch I guess) but I didn’t have long to party, I dashed to the nearest Metro and just about made it to that last train to Alsace. This was 1998, Brazil were in the Final, this really was Ronaldo’s World Cup. (Narrator’s voice: it wasn’t). The next day I watched France beat Croatia, at my friend Roland’s house in Strasbourg, and Zidane and Company went on to beat Brazil 3-0 at the Stade de France.

Anyway with those memories in mind, I walked back to the apartment. A couple of nights before on the TV we had watched England women beat Sweden 4-0 in the semi-final of the Euros (they went on to win it of course!) and the night after, France were beaten by Germany. On this evening though we were just packing for our flight back to the US the next morning. this isn’t all my Paris sketching though, there’s one more post to come…

At the Corner of St. Germain, Paris

January 18, 2023January 17, 2023Leave a comment

We took the train from Normandy to Paris, where we would spend a few days of Parisian touristing, museums, walking, people watching, and dodging people zipping along the road in the wrong direction on those hoverboard platform things. I like Paris, I really like Paris; I don’t know if I love Paris, but I really enjoy spending time there and it’s a place I love to wander about in. Actually I think I do love Paris. I don’t know; these days if say you don’t love a place it means you hate it, and wow no, I definitely don’t. Give me a chance to spend time in Paris, I’m there man, especially with my sketchbooks. So yeah, I love Paris. It’s just I still feel I don’t know it well enough. I’ve been quite a few times now, but most of my time in France has usually been in other places. Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner; Paris is our sister city. It’s pretty great though. We stayed in an apartment just off the Boulevard St.Germain in the Quartier Latin, on the corner of a pedestrianized street and next to a pretty nice brasserie called Le Corner. That is where I would stop off of an evening and sit outside with a nice big cold beer, with the sketchbook, looking out at the Parisians, and if my wife or son were up in the apartment they could just call down out of the window. The apartment was nice, and more often than not we’d get food out and bring it back there, or cook up what we got from the supermarché. As always I would get up early to wander and sketch, and bring back pastries (I think my wife was getting a bit sick of all the pastries). I drew Le Corner, stood outside on the busy street after a day of exploring with the family, while they rested upstairs. That’s the Paris I love, busy not not too busy, vibrant and close by to stuff, and with a little table and a cold beer (or a wine, or an Orangina) always very close by. The sketch below was done on the first evening here, just sat down and drawing the world going by.

We last visited Paris altogether back in 2012, when my son was only four, and we also stayed in the Latin Quarter, though a bit further south, near Rue Mouffetard. We loved that short trip. I was last in Paris in 2019 when I flew in for the day before heading to Brussels, and wandered about Montmartre; we all went to Disneyland Paris at the end of that trip, but not into the big city itself. I went a couple of times in the 90s on short trips, plus of course I went at the start and end of my 1998 European rail journey, and saw some of the World Cup there. I guess I have been quite a few times now, but perhaps because there is always more, I’m always left feeling like I barely saw it. Well, on this trip we checked off quite a few boxes and really saw a lot of the city, so it was a good trip. I’m glad we had this spot to come back to and relax though. While it was a family touristy trip, I still did a lot of sketching, in those moments when we needed a rest.

A Day at the D-Day Beaches

January 17, 2023January 16, 2023Leave a comment

One of the other main reasons for wanting to visit Normandy was to see and explore Les Plages de Débarquement, the Normandy Landing Beaches. My son had been learning about D-Day at school since a couple of years before and had been fascinated by this period of history, and had been reading lots of of books and watching the films and footage. Early in the pandemic we all watched Band of Brothers (which was amazing, but very graphic) so we all started learning a bit more. Of course we all grew up knowing the story, and D-Day was celebrated in the UK every year on June 6th almost more than VE Day. In 1066 the Normans sailed across the Channel (no mean feat by the way, it’s a treacherous body of water) to subjugate England; in 1944 their descendants made the return trip to liberate not only Normandy, or France, but Europe and the free world from the Nazis. One of the great moments in world history, bought with a great many lives. It was an on-off rainy day when we went, and we started out at Utah Beach, one of the more prominent of the landing sites, and one of the most successful. This was led by the Americans, and along with Omaha Beach this will always be a little piece of America in northern France. We arrived and walked out to the wide expanse of the beach itself, and it’s good that it was a more overcast day than we’d had. There was a statue of some soldiers disembarking from a Higgins Boat landing craft (I sketched above, with the Museum in the background. The Museum at Utah Beach itself (https://utah-beach.com/en/) was really fascinating and well worth a visit. I sketched the large warbird “Dinah Might”, a B-26 Marauder, in the expansive hangar. I do love those old war planes.

Outside, I drew the Sherman Tank guarding the entrance. I didn’t have long to draw this so I did mostly just the outline and a few details and drew the rest on the plan coming home. So many details in those treads, they really were mighty little machines. I didn’t do any more sketching on our tour of the sites, due to time, but we still packed in a few more places on our way back to Bayeux.

We drove through towns we knew from the history documentaries, Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, Carentan, Grandcamp-Maisy, imagining what it was like during that horrifying time. We can’t imagine it. We went on to La Pointe du Hoc, a high point jutting into the sea on the other side of the river mouth to Utah Beach, full of German bunkers and artillery that saw a famous battle on D-Day, a victory for the Allies led by the US Army Rangers. We went on to Omaha Beach, a name that brings a bit of a chill. The other main US landing point, Omaha looks like a beautiful place today, but saw some of the most terrifying fighting of the landings with thousands of soldiers killed. Nearby was our next destination, the American Cemetery, at Colville-sur-Mer. This was incredibly moving, I knew it would be but to be there among all those pristine graves, all those names of all those young soldiers, stretching out for what feels like miles, it was overwhelming. 9,388 people are buried there, of which 307 are unknown. The bugle from a memorial service echoed over the stones, and the rain switched on and off. We moved on to Gold Beach, at Arromanches-les-Bains, which was the main landing point of the British forces, spent a bit of time around Arromanches itself, and went up onto the cliffs to see some of the memorial spots. You could still see the artifical harbour installed by the British troops on D-Day to faciliate the landings. We had an ice cream and looked out over the channel.

We started toward Juno Beach, the main Canadian forces landing point, but the day was getting late so we headed back to Bayeux, which was very close by. That was a day of seeing some of our most important history spots, for sure. We left Normandy the next day for Paris, but we left wanting more, there is a lot more to see and learn about in this part of the world, and it feels like it’s all our history.

Mont St Michel

January 16, 2023January 15, 20235 Comments

A couple of years ago at the beginning of 2021 I started another Virtual Tour sketchbook, this time around France, a much bigger prospect than my tour of Britain. I only got as far as Le Mans before I stalled, probably because I have now been to France in real life twice since I started it. Still, I’ll get back to it. I didn’t even get around to posting half the drawings on here yet. One of the ones I drew was Mont St. Michel, a place I’d never been to but always wanted to see, and now I have. We drove from Bayeux down to the very edge of Normandy, to the place where it meets Brittany, one of the most beautiful spots in France. Mont St. Michel is a rocky outcrop in the sands of the English Channel (the French don’t call it the English Channel, they just call it La Manche), and a shiver runs down the spine when you first see it out there in the sea, rising like a fantasy island. The tides rise and recede around it, and the long beaches are known for quicksand, but much of the area is made up of salt marsh meadows upon which sheep graze (and get very salty wool). We parked by the visitor’s center, and then there is a shuttle bus ride out there for about a kilometre or so, dropping us off on the long elevated causeway that leads to the Mont. Great place for the photos, and also where I sketched the above (though I actually stood slightly underneath the bridge on the sands, to stay in the shade). It was a pretty hot day, and there is a lot of climbing once you get into the Mont itself. We walked about the narrow winding streets with all the usual kitschy touristy souvenir shops, and made our way up to the Abbey, which was quite a hike. It’s pretty labyrinthine inside, but the views once you get to the windy top are amazing, out over the bay. We couldn’t see England, but I thought I could see the Channel Islands, though my eyesight is so bad it was probably a smudge on my glasses. I did attempt a sketch looking up to the abbey’s spire, with the golden Archangel Gabriel looking back towards France, but it was a difficult angle so that’s as much as I could do. There were many seagulls. Mont St. Michel appeared in the Bayeux Tapestry actually, in a scene where a bunch of people got stuck on the sands. There is an equivalent place in England, in Cornwall actually, called St. Michael’s Mount, which is smaller but still pretty impressive. This place reminded me of Minas Tirith from the Lord of the Rings, partly because I have no imagination, partly because the film-makers were inspired by the Mont when designing it. Picturesque place though, well worth the trip.

We had a nice day out at the Mont, and the drive through the Norman countryside was a big bonus. My phone’s navigator was having fun trying to say all the French names. “Street L-O-Circumflex” was an interesting one it kept repeating for St-Lô. We passed through little villages and down hedgerowed lanes, and near one farm we stopped as there was a little cat in the road that was not in any hurry to move along, so my son got out and gently led it it the side, where it sprawled out expecting a belly rub. We looked out for the cat on the way home, and sure enough there it was again, so this time we parked up and my son got out to say hello again. A little moment we’ll always remember from this trip.

Bonjour Bayeux

January 15, 20237 Comments

We spent a few nights staying in the little city of Bayeux, a good base to explore Normandy. There are a lot of places in Normandy we didn’t get to that we’d like to have seen – Rouen, Honfleur, Giverny, I mean it’s a big place – but for what we were going to see Bayeux was perfect, especially being so very close to the D-Day Beaches. For me though Bayeux was the place for the thing I’ve wanted to see forever, the Bayeux Tapestry. It did not disappoint! It has its own museum, and while we went when it was early and not yet too crowded, the line has to keep moving along it. It’s long – about 70 metres – and while I’ve learned about it for many years there’s nothing like the experience of seeing it all in one go, and constantly moving along, with the commentary in the headphones explaining it, made it feel like watching a long comic strip, a cartoon about the Norman Invasion of England. And it was funny, too. There were a lot of willies. The inventiveness and use of colours is incredible, and the sense of movement you get in the horses and the battle scenes is something a few modern movie directors could learn from. The Bayeux Tapestry was made sometime in the 1070s with the Conquest still fresh, is of course, neither a tapestry (it’s an embroidery) nor from Bayeux (Made In England, by Nuns in Barking and Canterbury, likely under the instruction of Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent) but so what, as Macca would say, it’s the bloody Bayeux Tapestry, it sold, shut up. It wasn’t about Peace and Love though. A brilliant piece of Norman propaganda, perhaps, but as I said to my wife, for me this is like going to see the US Declaration if Independence or something (but in reverse, I guess), 1066 being such a crucial moment in British history and in the history of the English language. If it wasn’t for William the Bastard getting all Conqueror on our medieval asses, we’d probably be speaking a language much closer to Dutch and German than the way it looks today. Either way, the gist of the story is that the Normans totally stitched up the Anglo-Saxons.

The Bayeux Tapestry used to be kept in the cathedral but isn’t any more. The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Bayeux (above) is pretty massive and as in many French towns you can orient yourself by looking up and seeing where the spire is, and it’s visible for miles around. While we didn’t get a chance to go inside, I did sketch it on one of my morning walks, though it started to rain so I finished it off inside. It was consecrated in 1077 with William the Conqueror there, so it fits into the timeline of the Tapestry. It was supposed to be here that William got his promise from Harold that he would support him to be King after Edward the Confessor died, starting that whole thing. The little courtyard in front of the cathedral’s main entrance is very pretty, I stood at the rear a little way down the hill where the view was pretty magnificent. Even when looking at this, I keep thinking, I must go and get a pain aux amandes for breakfast.

The narrow street we stayed on, Rue Saint-Patrice, was full of little shops (many closed on both Sunday and Monday, when we were there) and many very old looking buildings. I don’t recall what this building was called, on the corner of Rue Franche, but I drew it on my evening walk after we had eaten dinner and had a busy day touristing somewhere else. There are flags lining the streets in Bayeux. I love a timber-frame building, it’s like a puzzle when drawing to make sure you get all the bits in the right place, but a little personality goes a long way and you don’t want too many straight lines. The weather was nice, the sky had dappled clouds and of course the sun set so much later, so after this I went further into town and drew another scene, below. This pretty postcard view is across the little river Aure, that trickles through Bayeux with the Cathedral in the background. Every evening we would take a walk down this way, and around the corner we ate some nice Norman food at a restaurant, though on one evening I walked up to a little store about a mile up the road (the supermarket in the centre-ville being already closed) to buy some dinner supplies, and was brought back to living in France years ago, standing in line in a small shop for about 20 minutes and then carrying heavy bags up and down streets and up a narrow staircase, it was like going back 20 years. I really liked Bayeux, and my family loved it, we had no ‘Bayeux remorse’. Bit quiet, but a good base to explore.

And of course, I drew a hydrant! More Normandy sketches to come…

Norman Style

January 14, 2023Leave a comment

In July 2022, we finally visited Normandy! My wife had actually been talking about visiting Normandy since we first met twenty years ago, to see Mont St Michel and the D-Day Beaches among other places, but France became so much further away after we moved to America. I’ve wanted to go to Normandy for many years, mostly to see the Bayeux Tapestry, but also those other places. I’ve always liked the idea of the Normandy cuisine as well, hearty and full of apples. We loved it there, a land of green rolling hills and white cliffs, not unlike the south of England but everything was in French, and the towns were more charming. We stayed in Bayeux itself, taking the train out there from Paris, and we rented a car and explored for a few days. Normandy is big, and we could have spent a lot longer there, trying all the cheeses, and we got our fair taste of history. I also did a good bit of sketching, especially around Bayeux. I would wake up early and leave our little apartment in the centre of Bayeux to wander about with my sketchbook before my family woke up, bringing back the pains au chocolat and other pastries for breakfast when I’d return.

Our SNCF train ride to Normandy was pretty pleasant. We had taken the Eurostar down from London, easy enough from St.Pancras. We had to take the Metro to connect to a different station for the train to Normandy, and there was a bit of a wait, so we went out and had a nice lunch outside, got a bit of the busy Parisian urban ambience before our quieter time in Normandy. I did have a run-in with a weirdo in Paris Nord station while my son and I were waiting for my wife who was in the bathroom, just one of those odd people who come up and start acting weird that you get in stations. Initially ignoring him, I asked him in French to please leave us be. I don’t think he was French because he said something in Dutch, maybe he thought we were Dutch. Then he started growling aggressive swear words in English at me and getting in a bit close, so I stepped forward and in my best Burnt Oak told him to F off out of it, and F off out of it he did. “Welcome to Paris,” I said to my son. “Not my first time here.” We didn’t meet any other train station characters, though we kept awake for them, and there were a lot of police around prowling for pickpockets and occasionally grabbing people in the act. I remember my first trip to Paris as a kid with my school, and we first saw a Paris policeman outside a Metro station, carrying a gun. We kids from London had of course never seen such a thing before, except on the A-Team (where of course nobody actually got shot). I remember a few years in the 90s later seeing some French armed soldiers with machine guns on the Metro, just patrolling in case of terror threats, and being a bit gobsmacked having never seen a machine gun in my life, let alone one being carried by soldiers on the underground, except at the start of the A-Team, when the only thing that gets shot is the title card. Of course now I live in America. anyway, I knew that Paris stations might have their train station troublemakers, but were pretty well defended. That first school day trip to Paris though back in 1989 or 1990 was pretty brief, but the other thing I remember that stood out to me the most was the very particular smell of the Metro itself. Not a bad smell, more a particular flavour of industrial that you don’t get on the London Underground, and was specifically Paris. Every time I’ve been back and been on the Metro that smell has always brought me back. It’s funny, I don’t remember smelling it as much on this trip. Many of the trains are so modern now, and the stations pretty well kept, and the occasional whiff of it here and there was maybe all in my head.

Speaking of the A-Team, did you know that in the French dub of the show, they added words to the theme tune? No word of a lie, they gave the A-Team tune lyrics. They call it “L’Agence Tous Risques” and you can see it here. Magnifique.

So after our late lunch we caught our train from Gare St Lazare, a beautiful historic station that I may draw one day if I’m back, and was basically a luxury shopping mall inside. The train zipped through the city centre, the suburbs, and the green French countryside with occasional glimpses of the Seine as it accompanied us on our way. Our neighbour across the table on the train was carrying a very very small rabbit in a plastic case, which was sat on the table and we just adored. I sketched the scene on the train, while my wife and son watched France whizz by, and my son listened out at all the French language, absorbing it all since he is learning it at school, before we reached the small station in Bayeux. I’ll add my sketches from Normandy over the next few posts. Bon Voyage!