The unique nature of greatness

We visited Vernon a few days back. It's quite a nice French town, with some good half-timber houses, a Gothic church, and the Seine flowing past, but nothing special.

The museum isn't anything special either. An exhibition of paintings on the theme of the Seine had a couple of nice Bonnards, but pretty little else; a lot of daubs, a good view of 20th century schools of painting (impressionist, Cubist) and lots of picturesque views that would do for a painting, but really not an inspiring collection.

Then I walked into a room and saw a painting positive glowing. A circular canvas covered in light green water and white waterlilies. The painting seemed to be lit from behind, actually emitting light. The water was moving with that slow, sinister rippling of deep, deep water.

Nothing picturesque about this painting. No self-conscious composition, with the lilies framed by an artfully disposed tree branch or the mossy edge of a pool. Just pure essence of water and waterlilies.

It was a Monet, of course.

Another painting beckoned to me. A headland, fuzzy brown, and a sunset of shimmering pinks and oranges, that seemed to be shining as if the real sun were hidden behind the canvas. The glitter and pulse of the sunlit sea.

I've seen paintings like this - in fact there was one next to it - that dissolve into slabs of palette-knifed colour when you get up close, ruining the effect. But however close I came to this painting, the shimmering was still there; I couldn't see the paint just as paint alone, so strong was the illusion.

Another Monet. Of course.

Now I do play that little game of going into a room in an art gallery and looking round to see what grabs me - and then seeing whether I've found a really good painting or just a flakily noisy one. About eighty percent of the time 'what grabs me' is a genuine masterpiece.

But in Vernon I wasn't playing the game. And those two Monets reached out and stole the show.

That's what great art does.

An army marches on its stomach

Stretching the dough out till you can almost see through it; till the white floured surface is streaked with dark patches where the earthenware bowl underneath shows through.

Folding it over. And over and over. And over and over again.

And stretching it. Delicate fingers stretched out in a Vulcan salute to push the dough out to the edges. No rolling pin, no flat of the hand, the whole trick of making this dough is in the fingers.

Slapping oil on the sides. More and more oil. I'm surprised how much the dough can take. It starts to glisten; sinister, in a way.

Then you fry eat. Then you eat it. M'semmen, Moroccan pancake.

I'd eaten m'semmen before - it was one of our breakfast staples, together with the thick besara, bean soup. (Mornings in Fez always started with a bowl of besara in the main street of Fes el-Jdid, in a rough brown-glazed earthenware bowl. Sitting at a table in the street, still in the shade of the buildings before the sun was high enough to shine down into the road, I hit the spices hard - crackly crystals of salt, earthy cumin powder, shocking paprika the colour of blood, from the communal bowls. The blast of spice as effective a way of waking up as a double espresso.)

But I hadn't seen how these things were made. Joining the hostess of our B&B in her kitchen, watching her fold and push, fold and push, the m'semmen into its little squares, I realised what patience, what rhythms lie behind much of Moroccan cuisine.

Nobody nowadays makes couscous the old way, rolling tiny grains of paste in their hands and spreading them out to dry. Couscous comes in boxes just as it does in Sainsbury's or Carrefour. But look at a tagine bubbling slowly, or a huge round of harsha coming off the stove, and you realise this is a cuisine made for slow cooking, for long days, for a house where somebody is always around and time passes slowly like the dripping of water.

I learned a lot about Morocco that evening.

A secret at Chartres

I've known Chartres cathedral for five or six years now, visiting it several times a year, in all seasons, early and late. And it still surprises me, from time to time.

It can be just a trick of the light throwing a new accent on to a moulding, or illuminating a window I've not seen so clearly before. It can be a different approach, a slight angle that shows something new.

Yesterday, it was a real secret though.

The North Porch is supported on columns which are ornamented with tiny scenes - David and Goliath, Jubal and his lyre, the Ark of the Covenant. Supporting the columns are lovely plinths carved with fresh springtime leaves; except for one column, which rests on a polygonal foot pierced with little holes. Look inside these holes, and you can see a marvellous bestiary - including this little toad or frog.

Sorry, Belgium

I'm really, really sorry. The ridiculous, posturing Nigel Farage used his status as an MEP last week to launch a tirade of abuse at the EU President, Mr van Rompuy - and at Belgium generally.

I just hope Belgians (whether Fleming or Walloon - but that's a distinction Mr Farage probably doesn't grasp) realise that this view of Belgium is not commonly shared in England.

Coming from Norwich, which in the 15th century was part of a cosmopolitan northern European trading network and in the 16th century accepted a large number of immigrants from the Spanish Netherlands, I feel Belgium is in some ways part of my own culture - the paths of Holland, Belgium and Norfolk have always been linked.

And if Belgium is a 'non-country' because it was for years colonised byv the Spanish, that presumably means India is a non-country - and so is the United States. Heck, the States belonged to three separate owners - France, Britain and Spain - how much more of a non-country can you get?

So: what did the Belgians ever do for us?

• Frites. The humble chip, in Belgian hands, becomes a gastronomic delight, with a choice of mayonnaise or up to twenty different sauces. For a full meal, just add mussels - moules frites is one of the great classic dishes of the world.


• Beer. While it's possible to spend your time in Belgium drinking Stella or Jupiler, head for the good beer houses to explore the artisanal traditions of lambic, oud bruin, and saison beers. I particularly like my lambics - beers like Rodenbach Grand Cru and Duchesse de Bourgogne have a sweet-and-sour character and strong flavour that makes them rival a really good pint of porter in my affections.


• Chocolate. Now I have to tread carefully here because of my French partner who will no doubt tell me that the best chocolate in the world is French. But the Belgians really don't do chocolate badly.


• Speculoos. Snappy crackly little ginger biscuits with your coffee.


• Tintin, the boy reporter. I can imagine the world without Tintin - but I can't imagine it without Captain Haddock or Madame Castafiore, or Snowy the little dog (Milou, in French). Hergé's Tintin has afforded generations of children, and adults, immense delight. Belgium is still one of those nations where le BD - bande dessinée, comic, graphic novel - is treated seriously; it has a comics museum, even. And if you haven't discovered the amazingly strange comics, fantastic architectures and perverse worldview of Schuiten & Peeters, you must - Piranesi's prisons updated to the 21st century.


• Simenon's Maigret, a brooding, intuitive detective who knocks the faux-Belge Poirot into a cocked hat. Excellent, moody books. As for the crimes, they're a bit darker than you find in Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers .


• Marvellous art nouveau architecture - Brussels is one of the best places in the world to see it. You can mix great Belgian beer with art noov if you visit the Mort Subite brasserie - drink your faro and see yourself reflected into infinity in the huge mirrors.


• Rubens - a great baroque artist, perhaps the greatest working north of the Alps. Mr Farage really ought to be told that Britain owes this great Belgian painter a debt of thanks for creating the paintings of the Banqueting House in Whitehall - not far from the Houses of Parliament. (Van Dyck, another Belgian, pretty much created the seventeenth-century English portrait school - as well as the preferred royal iconography of Charles I.)


• Gothic Belgium - you will never see a greater Gothic city than Bruges, with its chivalric culture, its canals, its great churches, its paintings, the quiet alleyways where ivy and wisteria grow, the busy market square, the little fish market under tall trees. If Belgium had only given us Bruges, and nothing else, it would still be memorable.


• Mr van Rompuy. A politician who writes haiku; and in the proper Japanese tradition, writes them all the time (the ones on his website are this year's; so far, a good handful).  My Flemish isn't good enough to say how good they are, but what I have managed to read, I liked. Maybe what Mr Farage needs is to go off and sit in a Zen garden for a while, and learn to write haiku instead of making speeches.

So thank you, Belgium. An odd country, for sure, but not a 'non-country' by any means.

Cries of the heart

While I was trying to find the clip for Gibbons's 'Cries of London' I found the youtube channel for 'I Fagiolini', a fine group of singers who specialise in Renaissance music.

Their 'Tallis in Wonderland' takes the usual mellifluous world of chordal harmony, the cathedral acoustic which drains the voices of humanity and roughness and creates a sound with the distance and enchantment of singing bowls, and it busts it apart.

This is Renaissance music sung for the passion. Sung for the words, which are somehow things that get forgotten in the big cathedral acoustic. It's Renaissance music close up and personal.

Doubly close up because it uses speakers throughout the audience to distribute the sound. Nothing distanced.

Dynamic music. The singers move, act, speak. They display the characters of the melodic lines and the words they're singing.

Now, would I want to live with this all the time? Maybe not. But when I go back to some of my recordings of Tallis sung in that nice English way, everything absolutely right and exactly in tune with the soaring boy trebles and the chunky chords, and no suspicion at all that Tallis was actually setting (the shock of it!) words that might mean something... I find it rather lacking.

Another revolutionary revision: Allegri's Miserere. I learned to love this piece of music when I was at King's; for me, the Nine Lessons and Carols is kitsch, it's Ash Wednesday that is the musical highlight of the liturgical year. Monumental, a fauxbourdon that's left the ground and found wings, a marvellous mixture of block chord solidity and swooping descant.

Then I discovered A Sei Voci's remix, with baroque ornamentation. You can only do this with a talented singer, of course - with a singer well trained enough to feel their way through the harmonies, to trace a staggering, drunken, swirling path around the notes, creating a gossamer of fleeting suspensions and discords, tiny messe di voce, mordents and apoggiature. Not for boys. (The Sistine castrati had trained for years in the art of ornamentation, of course.)

Here it is without the ornaments.

On a personal note, I've found ornamentation is a never failing delight for the singer. I particularly love singing Handel; for some reason, his melodic patterns seem wired into me, in a way that Vivaldi's or Bach's aren't. (The only other composer I have that deeply intimate relationship with is Reynaldo Hahn.)

But what's purely lovely in singing Handel is the room he gives you for ornamentation. Cadenzas, simple descending cadences that just need to be ornamented, the da capo of an aria as a ground for experimentation, improvisation, spontaneity.

If you have any tendency to control freakery, to a concern with  'the right notes', to freezing up your emotional response to the music, the da capo aria will sort you out. Suddenly you're free, soaring with the wings of pure risk. You know how to do that cadenza, you've sort of worked out a way of approaching it, you know where you started and what pitch you need to find at the end - but you let your voice go, and suddenly it's all a dare, you've let go, hang-gliding way above the figured bass in pure freedom.

And that, for a singer, is sublime.

Street cries

'Agadir-agadir-agadi-i-i-r! Agadir-agadir-agadi-i-i-r!'

'Fas-fas-fas-fas-fasss!'

'Agadir-agadir-agadir!'

This was Meknes bus station. As we approached, the tongues of the ticket salesmen were loosened; like gaudy parrots in their football shirts, two of them seemed to be shouting in a repetitive duet. We could hardly hear the murmur of 'Marrakesh, marrakesh' in the background, coming from the old man in the brown jellaba.

I used to read about the street cries of London without really understanding. 'Who'll buy my sweet lavender'... It didn't ring true. Now I've heard the noise of a Moroccan bus station, I understand what London must have been like in the seventeenth or eighteenth century - a cacophony of shouting, of rhythm, of words yammered out or repeated like the blows of a club.

Orlando Gibbons's 'Cries of London' sounds quaint now, but I wonder if in its day it didn't have the shock value of, say, Stockhausen's Stimmung.

Then the other day I was at Lynn Mart - an amazing event, a full scale funfair in the Tuesday Market Place, overlooked by fine Georgian houses and inns - and I realised that the fairground is the one place street cries can still be heard. Even though some of them - 'Are you rea-dyyy?' and 'Are you brave enough for the Extr-e-e-e-e-me?' - are now recorded in sepulchral furry tones and played on speakers, rather than shouted as they might have been twenty years ago by the barkers.

Street traders still sometimes have a good line in patter. The guy at Brick Lane who used to advise 'Ladies, get a new tool for yer husband!' But it's patter - it's a spiel - not really the same thing as the street cry with its formal, ritual conversion of the word into a thing, a melodic or rhythmic tag.

For days after Meknes, Jacques and I would start up like the two parrot-bus-men; 'Agadir-agadir-agadir', 'Fas-fas-fas-fas' - and then burst out laughing. No one else ever got the joke.

Safari chez soi; the Vallée des Cailles

Sometimes strangeness awaits you through a door you've always passed by on the way to work, a little byway whose name you always knew but that you'd never taken.

We pass through Boncourt every time we drive to Anet. We've known about the Vallé des Cailles - a local nature reserve - for ages, but never bothered to explore. Then last week, the sun finally came out after days of lowering gray skies, and we decided to go for a walk.

The other side of Rouvres, where we've often walked, there are chalk downs with extensive views, long lazy slopes above the valley of the Avre and its villages. Everywhere you see the slate spires of village churches or isolated chapels.

But from the moment we entered the ghost orchard, a raised platform of dead apple trees, barkless and whitened by time, we realised the Vallée des Cailles was different. From the moment we turned a corner, and we could no longer see that acute junction where the road from Bu and the road from Rouvres join, we were in one of those hidden folds of the landscape that seems to take you away from all the places you know - from which you can't hear the noise of the traffic, or see the familiar landmarks.

The Vallée des Cailles is so called from the 'cailles', the flint nodules that are found in the fertile land of the valley bottom. The word might come from 'caillou', a pebble, or from the fact that the stones cluster as thickly as quails (cailles).  In the ploughed land, I found a perfect fossilised sea urchin; when I got it home and cleaned it up, I could see fine details, the base of its spines, even the reticulations of its shell, their impression caught in the hard flint.

As soon as we'd turned the corner from the ghost orchard, we found ourselves walking the fringe of the forest; tall, straight oaks on one side, the fields of the valley bottom on the other. On the whitened slopes of the opposite side of the valley fell the long shadows of the forest trees, bristling grey patterns on the frosted furrows. Below, the bare thistledown on the creepers that edged the fields caught the sunlight, glowing white.

Further up the valley, you enter the forest, with its long, straight forest drives, and sudden steep ascents and descents. Each sector of forest seems different; one part with young coppices, slender branches rising straight up or fanned out gently from a single trunk. Here the light was crisp, the forest opening and welcoming. Later on, older trees darkened the forest floor, their trunks massive, their heads gnarled, and huge brambles reared arches across the path.

It was almost silent in the forest; but whenever we stopped, we could hear rustling around us, little scurries and sudden starts.

Coming back, we took the bottom of the valley; another world entirely it seemed, long and level and open, the ruts in the track filled with icy puddles, the forest black and forbidding on one side, gentle and welcoming on the other.  And yet you couldn't see out of the valley - couldn't see the houses of Boncourt, or the road, or a hill beyond the immediate crest of the slope. It was a perfectly enclosed world, silent with frost in the pale light of winter sun.

Finally, as we were coming back to the village, we saw the first walkers we'd passed all day; two French ladies out with their three tiny terriers, smart little creatures I suppose before they'd started their walk, but now bedraggled, wet, and filthy with mud. The smallest had to be picked up and towelled dry.

I've done a lot of walking around Eure-et-Loir, but this is a special walk. It's not in the guides, it's not on a GR route (though it's an optional extra on the GR22 from Paris to Mont Saint Michel), even the local tourist office won't tell you much about it. But if you're a hiker, and you're anywhere nearby, the Vallée des Cailles is a rather special seven or eight kilometres.

Reaching the Vallée des Cailles: Coming into Boncourt from the direction of Rouvres, take the road that forks back and left about a hundred yards after the village sign. (You can park along here - alternatively, there's a car park in the village opposite the church; park there and walk back, it's not far.) Keep along the track till you find a sign for the 'boucle', a 4 km loop. The walk can easily be extended into the forest, and if you care to walk a much larger circle, you can walk all the way round, through Anet and then back up the Eure valley.