Le Plat Pays

Weide in de lente - Veldweg: Albijn Van den Abeele

Waiting in for a carpet to be delivered a few Saturdays ago I caught a fascinating radio programme, Brel et Moi, featuring the Belgian singer/songwriter, Jacques Brel and presented and written by Alastair Campbell (yes, that Alastair Campbell). Such a short life. A serial womaniser in Paris, a demanding paterfamilias in Brussels. Self centred and driven but loved by those he worked with and, heavens, what a talent.

Years ago the Brel song that seduced me was Le Plat Pays (the Flat Land), a love song to his native Flanders. A poem in its own right, lyrical and elegaic. I was born and spent my childhood in a similarly flat land of earth, water and wide skies on the other side of the North Sea and the song stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it. It still does.

Maybe only a Belgian could pull it off. Using each of the four winds Brel celebrates the different moods and seasons of this modest and - nowadays at least - peaceful stretch of land. He opens himself to embrace the rain and cold and the tedium and monotony, as well as warmth and sunlight. Winter. Summer. Everything in between.

The lyrics are below. I'm not attempting a translation. There are a few versions floating around on the web but they don't really reach the level of the original. According to one contributor to the programme there is a view that Brel's work is pretty much untranslatable and it's true that those songs that have made it into English haven't necessarily benefitted. One of the other contributors, Mel Smith, is a Brel devotee who neither reads nor understands French: the ferocious intensity, the sweat and saliva (literally) of Brel's performances were enough to captivate him.

Cue for a video of a mesmerising live performance of Le Plat Pays. Enough of my words. Listen.



Avec la mer du Nord pour dernier terrain vague
Et des vagues de dunes pour arrêter les vagues
Et de vagues rochers que les marées dépassent
Et qui ont à jamais le cœur à marée basse
Avec infiniment de brumes à venir
Avec le vent de l'ouest écoutez-le tenir
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec des cathédrales pour uniques montagnes
Et de noirs clochers comme mâts de cocagne
Où des diables en pierre décrochent les nuages
Avec le fil des jours pour unique voyage
Et des chemins de pluie pour unique bonsoir
Avec le vent de l'est écoutez-le vouloir
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec un ciel si bas qu'un canal s'est perdu
Avec un ciel si bas qu'il fait l'humilité
Avec un ciel si gris qu'un canal s'est pendu
Avec un ciel si gris qu'il faut lui pardonner
Avec le vent du nord qui vient s'écarteler
Avec le vent du nord écoutez-le craquer
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec de l'Italie qui descendrait l'Escaut
Avec Frida la Blonde quand elle devient Margot
Quand les fils de novembre nous reviennent en mai
Quand la plaine est fumante et tremble sous juillet
Quand le vent est au rire quand le vent est au blé
Quand le vent est au sud écoutez-le chanter
Le plat pays qui est le mien.

Jacques Brel

More insight into the inspiration for the song? There's a set of masterly, evocative photographs of Le Plat Pays here, just a click away.

I keep returning to them.

Change of season

I know. It isnt October. I just needed to blog.

This early autumn, with its golden afternoons and cold, clear nights is proving to be a gorgeous one. I stare at the flowers - autumn daisies, fuchsias, dahlias - and the changing leaves, trying to commit those vibrant reds and yellows and oranges to memory, to soak them up. Grey days lie ahead, and these have their own beauty, but I will miss the colours.

I ignore dire warnings about corrupted files, cross my fingers and, once again, switch on the ailing laptop ....

Expiry

The last post for the laptop.

It is expiring. No longer can I type apostrophes and there are other even more worrying symptoms. A computer techie friend tut-tuts and shakes his head as I describe them. Time to give it a decent burial, he says. He advised against using it at all any more but I wanted to write this post.

The laptop has proved an able and willing servant in its five years of life, fitting discreetly into the compact and bijou London flat (anyone remember that Fry and Laurie ad?) and introducing me to blogging and the fascinating and sublimely addictive world of cyberspace. It played havoc though with my trapezius and rhomboids, and I will be replacing it with a "proper" computer. Adjustable screen. Separate keyboard. Two different computer-oriented friends have recommended Dell which surprises me as I seem to remember reading less than wonderful reviews a few years ago.

If anyone has any recommendations, believe me, they will be gratefully received. Just leave a note in the comments.

****

An involuntary hiatus, then, since blogging at work isnt a possibility. Probably till mid-October, given my diary and the schedule of my techie adviser. No bad thing. Life sometimes knows better than I do what I need and it will be salutary perhaps to live for a spell without rating the events of the day, consciously or unconsciously, on their blog potential.

*****

At last a golden September morning:

- Warm sun but the hint of a chill in the air. Hanging out the washing early. The bus into town to get my contribution for the party tonight, listening to two elderly ladies on the seat in front discuss mutual friends. A browse around PC World then a cappucino on the verandah of the arts centre.

- A busker with his guitar, nobly taking up the most insalubrious pitch in town, a dirty, littered underpass smelling of urine, which nonetheless probably has the best accoustics, and belting out a cracking version of After the Gold Rush that would have made Mr Young proud. His voice soared through the filth and tiles and concrete and part of me floated upwards with it. I tossed him a coin, slightly embarrassed, as I tend to be on such occasions.


Well I dreamed I saw the silver
space ships flying
in the yellow haze of the sun.
There were children crying
and colours flying
all around the chosen ones.
All in a dream, all in a dream
the loading had begun.
They were flying Mother Natures
silver seed to a new home
in the sun.


See you here again sometime in October.

Deluge

Compared to the flood-induced misery in other parts of the world, or even just down the road or across the border, this is nothing. Mere inconvenience. But the rain certainly has been tipping down these past two days. Wave after wave of it, sweeping in off the Atlantic.

This morning, a quick bicycle ride to the supermarket.



The usual route was impassable.



His owner and I compared notes on floods and rumours of floods.

After lunch, between downpours, a dash to the fields at the back to check on the river where I meet up with two neighbours doing the same thing. We riparian dwellers (a new adjective to me, h/t the Environment Agency website) keep a close eye on the water levels in our locality. Our little development hasn't flooded yet but ....



... cattle grazed here a few days ago, now it belongs to the ducks. (Apologies for the smudge on the camera lens. A raindrop.) A sudden roll of thunder provided an apocalyptic soundtrack.

****

You can always rely on the BBC to be prepared. An outside broadcast unit was in town yesterday. They had obviously taken note of their own weather forecast.

Reprise

I'm navigating the treacherous waters of French bureaucracy. Next year I become eligible for two small pensions as a result of the years that I worked there. No doubt this partly accounts for the current bout of nostalgia.

Lots of forms to be completed. In French. Amazing that I had the wit to keep all the documents that are being photocopied and sent to Yannick at the Centre Nationale d'Assurance Vieillesse over there in Tours. Twenty years ago the idea that I might ever need a pension simply didn't enter my head. Growing old? Moi?

I went to France looking for a fix. I came back without one. No denouements, just a melancholy petering out. Much of the story isn't for the blog. Yet it was a rich time.

• All that travel. It came - unexpectedly - with the second job and continued into the third and final one. I wrote about one trip here.
  
• The piercing, damp cold. Mornings of freezing fog, the cobbles slippery and treacherous with black ice.
  
• Small children speaking French. Totally delightful. Normally I'm not a huge fan of small children.
• The river on hot summer nights. No wind. The lights from the Ile de la Cite and the Ile St Louis reflected, shimmering. Shouts and laughter echoing faintly across the water.
  
• The local boulangerie, and the seemingly ever-smiling femme du boulanger who served behind the counter.
  
• The question: C'est pour offrir, madame? (Is this a present?) If the answer was yes, the just-purchased flowers, or the chocolates, would be wrapped beautifully, with pride and care, the whole thing finished off with a ribbon. Part of the service.
• The sound of the dustmen in the street below c. 6am. daily. My alarm clock. Jacques Dutronc's Il est cinq heures Paris s'eveille describes these early mornings well. Good song. The lyrics are here.
  
• Jurgen, the Austrian painter. Big and brawny and shy, he drank like a fish and produced light-filled paintings of pale yellow and gold. For a long time I was smitten.
  
• Waterlilies. The vast Monet canvasses at the Musee Marmottan.
  
• The whole beautiful, ugly, achingly lonely, dirty, frightening, marvellous city. Home to an international ragbag of seekers, looking for something we couldn't find where we came from.
  
• Mme R, in her 80s, my voisine d'etage, who took both my hands in hers when I knocked on her door to say goodbye the night before my final departure. The van was loaded and we were leaving for England early the following day. We embraced and her eyes were filled with tears.

I'm just visible in the photo at the window on the second floor of the building on the right hand side of the road above the car parked on the pavement.

A part of this story fades with each day, the memories thin and friable, curling at the edges.

****

This morning, after rain, the scent of lavender hangs in the air. The pale orange berries of the rowan tree are wet and shiny, the leaves a burnished red-brown.

A sense of optimism. In spite of it all. Because of it all. Glad to be here.