Earlier today, Patrick Crozier and I recorded another of our recorded conversations (by and by it will appear here).  Patrick laid out the agenda which was Christianity, and how, although he could never believe in it, henevertheless regrets the diminution of its influence on our world.

He mentioned the way the Western Roman Empire fell apart after it had been conquered by Christianity (echoing Gibbon, although I didn’t say that; he mentioned ecclesiastical architecture; he mentioned the intimate relationship between Christianity and secular power; and at one point we rather digressed, into the matter of French domestic architecture.

Here are four photos I photoed in Quimper, Brittany, exactly one year ago to the day, which illustrate these various talking points:

Photo 1.1 a history lesson inside Qumper Cathedral which covers the ground Patrick alluded to about the Roman Empire (protected by glass, hence the reflection of the stained glass window)..  Photo 1.2 is a view of one of the towers of Quimper Cathedral, as seen from the other tower.  Photo 2.1 is of an equestrian statue, from the same spot.  And finally, 2.2, also from the same spot, is a photo looking out over the city of Quimper.

The weather could have been a lot brighter, but you are only allowed to the top of Quimper Cathedral on the one day each year, and April 29th 2018 was the day that it was

I will greatly miss Quimper and its Cathedral, now that my friends in France no longer live there.  I won’t be going back on my own, just to see it but not them.

One of the first things I did in France, after I got off the plane and had been driven by my hosts to their home, was to meet up with Oscar again.  Remember Oscar?  Oscar is the cat, who got lost and found, partly thanks to the photos I took of him, but mostly because of GodDaughter2’s social media expertise.  She located him, in France, while not even being in France.

Here is one of the first photos I photoed of Oscar this time around:

I like that photo because it looks like we’re are looking at each other horizontally, but are actually …:

… looking at each other vertically, him upwards and me photoing downwards.  Those being my feet, at the bottom there.  On the right, the light of the south of France on the floor of the balcony outside the bedroom I was in.

The earlier photos I linked back to were taken in their Brittany home, but now my friends are more permanently in Thuir, way down south, near Perpignan.  Oscar doesn’t like car journeys (stuck in a small prison hardly bigger than he is), but he has no objections to actually being in a different house.  Somewhere new to explore.

In the part of France where GodDaughter2’s family live and with whom I recently stayed, there are two ways to make a car journey.  You can take what looks like the long route, along two or even three sides of a motorway rectangle, only travelling on little roads when you have to, to get to and from the motorway.  Or, you can attempt to travel more directly, along little roads, by the scenic route.  The scenic route looks quicker on the map, at first glance.  But the motorways are quicker because they always go straight where they’re going.  They don’t wiggle back and forth up and down mountains, or get stuck in little villages.

I was taken on various car journeys during my stay, of both kinds.  The trips involving airports were on motorways, as were others.  But there were also various journeys along those scenic routes.

Here are a few of the many, many photos I took while on such expeditions: 

The thing is, France is (see above) big.

On one of these expeditions we drove for about four hours, hither and thither, up and down, through kilometre upon kilometre of gorgeous scenery, encountering about three other oncoming vehicles per hour. We crossed over numerous bridges as we switched from going down or up one side of a valley to going up or down the other side of the same valley, often able to see past nearby trees to distant mountains, but often not, passing through and sometimes stopping in towns or villages with orange tiled roofs.

Countryside in England of this desirability, in weather like this, would be swarming with motorists, all making it impossible for each other to have a good time.  In the south of France, where this sort of weather is only average (too cold and windy) and where they have endless supplies of such scenery, we had the entire route pretty much to ourselves.

Also, in England, if you were to drive for half a day at the slowish but steady speed we were able to drive scenically in France, you’d take a visible bite into the map of England.  In France, such a trip doesn’t register, nationally speaking.  You’ve gone from this little place here, to this next little place right next to the first place, here, two milimetres away.  As an exercise in crossing France, forget it.  You have made no progress at all.

It’s not just places like America, Africa and India that are big.  Compared to England, France is big too.

I like how digital photography has replaced killing, as a way to collect wildlife.  In particular (as I learned when preparing a talk I gave about digital photography five years ago), I like how butterfly collectors now collect butterfly photos instead of dead butterflies.

However, although I regularly wander about photoing photos, I have myself never photoed a butterfly.

Until last week, in France, on the same day as and about an hour after I photoed that Death in France photo, I photoed this butterfly:

I know.  Not very impressive.  And is that another butterfly, a dead one, upside down on the floor there?  I rather think it may be.

However, a second later, this happened:

Is that two butterflies shagging?  Do butterflies even do that?  Butterfly necrophilia perhaps?

I have no idea what brand of butterfly this particular butterfly is, but it is rather fine, I think.

A week ago now, I photoed this photo in the graveyard of a little village up in the mountains of southern France called Taulis (already mentioned here).  Today being Good Friday, I thought I’d do a little nod towards Christianity by showing a few crucified Christs, France being very full of these rather gruesome sorts of sculpture.  Everywhere you go in France, or so it seems to me, you see these, and not just in graveyards:

Even more striking, however, in that photo, are the dead body storage units in the background.  Do we have those in England?  Not that I recall seeing.

They remind me of the dead body storage units that you see in TV police dramas.  Every so often there’s a scene where a grieving relative is asked to identify a cadaver, and a drawer is opened, and closed.  We see grief enacted.

Are police dramas on the telly replacing graveyards and crucified Christs as the main means that we now use to contemplate death?

As I get nearer to death, I think about it more and more.  What will it be like?  Will I know I’m dead?  Will I still be “alive” when I am incinerated?  Will there by bright lights in the distance?  Will it hurt?  Will I be reunited with the enemies of my schooldays?  Will I still be able to write about it here, but in a way that is unpublished?  What, historically speaking, will I miss by a whisker?  Or by decades and centuries?

Maybe France is not so full of crucified Christs.  Maybe it’s just that when I now see them, I notice them.

Yes, telling you about how I’ve been in France.

So. where was I?  In France?  Well, to give you an idea, here are some of the excellent places I visited:

Whenever I am in foreign parts, I always photo signs, adverts, and the like.  Every place has its own style for doing such things, so signage photos can be very evocative, when you look back at them.  Also, they tell you where you were, and hence what all the other photos taken at the same time were of.

Click on the above photo-fragments to get some context.  If you are curious about any of these places, well, you now have the words you need to go searching.  Words are already links, in the sense that you don’t need me to turn them into links.

I especially like how, when you leave a French town or village, you get a sign with the name crossed through with a red line (2.3).

I also photo war memorials, keeping a particular eye open for repeated surnames.  In Lagrasse (3.1), Baillat, Fontvieille and Jougla are surnames that each get two mentions.

I also like to photo the stuff in tourist shops, especially the postcards (1.1 and 3.2).  That way, you get what tourists generally consider to be the best views, and are alerted to interesting local things which you otherwise might miss even learning about.  Although, in St Cyprien, I got a bit of aggro from a couple shopkeepers who objected to me photoing their produce instead of buying it.

There you were, waiting for a good time to con your way past the front door of my block of flats by saying you’re the postman, to climb my stairs, to bash in my front door and to plunder my classical CD collection.  All that was stopping you was the fear of me bashing your skull to bits with my cricket bat, which I keep handy for just this sort of eventuality.

So anyway, there you were reading all about how my life for the last week has been complicated.  But, I clean forgot to tell you that the reason for all this complication was that I was off in the south of France.  Silly old me.  I’m getting old, I guess.

Here’s how the south of France was looking:

Those are the Pyrenees at the back there.  In the foreground, lots of little wine trees.

The weather looks slightly better in that than it really was, what with it having been so very windy.  Especially on the final day of my stay, up on this thing.

These are technically terrible photos, but I had a lot of fun photoing them, and I get a lot of pleasure when I stumble upon such photos-from-airplanes in the photo-archives.  What are these exactly?:

Well, I cranked up Google Maps, and also maps like the one here, and set to work.  That photos have exact timings attached to them is very helpful when you are trying to work out what photos from airplanes are of.

And yes, those are the four big-name Channel Islands, TopLeft: Jersey, TopRight: Guernsey, BottomLeft: Alderney, BottomRight: Sark.

I reckon that Alderney, from that angle, looks a bit like a hippo.

But for me, the most intriguing puzzle was this:

What is that?  Turns out, it’s the island of Herm.  Herm’s sales pitch: There’s no place like Herm.  Herm, island of triangular stamps.

Never heard of it, until now.  Photo and learn.  Blog and learn.