#Castle on the coast of france

[dritaposts]

Castle on the coast of france

#Castle on the coast of france trial#

Emilie's warm and friendly personality seemed to be felt even in the hotels/BnB's we stayed at. There was a personal touch to every place we visited. We also knew that Emilie was available had we any questions. Emilie had our tour maps dated and it was beyond easy to follow. Overall the trip was well planned and all we literally had to do was pack our bags and follow our guidebook. The guidebook was great for a little history lesson, and great attractions. This was from making the initial payment, to working together to make our itinerary and budget work. We thought everything was well organized, and easy to follow. This is when I found, France Just for You, and read the amazing reviews on Trip Advisor and decided to book.Įmilie was great! She was thoughtful and paid great attention to detail. I was initially going to plan it however I got busy with work and did not have the time. My friend and I decided to do a trip to Paris and then drive down to Nice. The perfect harmony between garden and architecture results from the collaboration of a trio : Le Nôtre the landscape gardener, Le Vau the architect and Le Brun the painter-decorator. To design the gardens, Fouquet called upon André le Nôtre who was the pioneer of French garden art. Vaux le Vicomte gardens also deserve a long stroll. Upon Louis 14th request, Fouquet was arrested in Nantes by D’Artagnan, captain of the Musketeers.

#Castle on the coast of france trial#

It was built by Nicolas Fouquet, Superintendent of Finances under young King Louis 14th.Ī 17th century masterpiece, Vaux le Vicomte was the backdrop to many major historical events and witnessed the tragic eviction of its creator, Nicolas Fouquet, who was imprisoned following an extraordinary trial about which the writer Voltaire said: “On 17 August at 6 in the evening, Fouquet was King of France at 2 in the morning, he was nobody” . Located about 40 miles away from Paris (on your way to Burgundy), the whole estate reaches nearly 500 hectares. This is one of the most magnificent chateaus in France. Vaux Le Vicomte castle is certainly not as famous as Versailles…however it deserves a visit as much as Versailles does.

[q8q]

Pearl of Normandie

[vintageeurope]

Cannes, France, 1850s

[wfxue]

20240531_F0001: Lovely day to build a sand castle by Wei-Feng Xue Via Flickr: - From a road trip along the coast of Northern France in Brittany over #10YearsAgo. Finally on a nice day in Brittany there were activities on the beach such as sand castle construction.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

The disrespect toward indigenous peoples is what popped put at me today in one of your posts. I wonder how long the English have been looking down on the Welsh. We're the Saxons like that or is it the Normans who really thought they were better than everyone else. Cause it seems like it goes back a long way.

Oh, both, just in different ways. The Normals were imperialist, the Saxons were more theft and landgrab.

Something that makes me want to start hurling knives is the INCREDIBLY COMMON English myth that the Anglo-Saxons were a sweet innocent indigenous British people who were conquered and bullied by those mean nasty Normans (and Vikings), and because the Normans came over via France, that means everything was actually THEIR fault, and the true English i.e. the Anglo-Saxons, were victims too :(

When I say it's incredibly common, by the way, I really mean it. Enormous numbers of modern day English people believe this. I've seen BBC programs about the Viking invasions that claimed without a trace of irony that the Vikings would take slaves from "the native Anglo-Saxons". I've literally had English people comment this shit on posts of mine about Celtophobia and Welsh history. Like I'm there describing how the last Prince of Wales was locked in a wooden cage in Bristol Castle at the age of eight and lived out the remainder of his life there until his fifties so the Welsh would know their place, and some snivelling English cunt will straight up write a message going "Teehee really it was the Normans not the English though and they conquered the poor Anglo-Saxons too, poor England uwu"

Anyway in the dying days of the Roman empire in Britain one of the leading reasons for Rome abandoning Britannia was the constant waves of Anglo-Saxon invaders. There were so many the east coast of Britain became known as the Saxon Shore. There were so many the Romans built a line of forts that were and are literally called Saxon Shore Forts. There were so many that an official, historically documented, paid governmental position in Roman Britain was the Count of the Saxon Shore, i.e. the guy responsible for keeping the bastards out.

Rome had banned native military, of course, so when they then withdrew and took the armies with them, the people left had no defences against the incoming waves of Angles, Saxons and Jutes. England fell pretty quickly, Angles in the north, Saxons in the south, Jutes primarily in the east, I believe. What stopped their westward expansion was the Brythonic Celtic nations living in modern day Wales. And this is the origin of the Welsh dragon - those separate kingdoms needed a banner that united them, and represented Not Saxon. An anti-Saxon force. They chose a red dragon.

This is also the origin of King Arthur. An anti-Saxon king of the Brythons, who would repel these Germanic invaders. (It was several centuries later that England realised they should probably steal the term 'British', because otherwise they were marking themselves as 'not native'.)

Anyway the saving grace of the Anglo-Saxons in the end was actually that they were whiny little bitches who gave up trying to fight in Wales with its difficult mountains and fought each other instead. The whole sorry tale of the Heptarchy is the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms fighting like cats in a bag, while Saxon king Offa built a dyke along the Welsh border and went "WELL YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED OVER HERE" and every Welsh king went "...we literally didn't want to conquer you anyway, you spectacularly sad and stupid man"

Oh, and of course, there's the name 'Wales'. Given to us specifically by the Anglo-Saxons. And translated by centuries of English scholars, mostly very smugly, as 'foreigners'. A fun bit of early propaganda, look - foreigners in our own country that they tried and failed to steal.

All of which is a circuitous way of saying - yeah, it goes way back.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Places

Rivers

We use the before the names of rivers.

We usually write the without a capital letter.

If we use the word river, we usually write it without a capital letter: the river Thames, the river Severn, the Yangtze river.

We don’t always use the word river, especially when it is obvious that we are talking about a river: the Mississippi, the Nile, the Ganges, the Loire.

Mountains and Islands

We use the with the names of some mountains: the Matterhorn, the Jungfrau.

We do not use the if the name includes Mount or Mountain: Mount Olympus, Brokeback Mountain.

We often refer to some mountains just by their name without the: Everest, Kilimanjaro, Snowdon.

We usually use the before the names of ranges of mountains and groups of islands: the Dolomites, the Himalayas, the Rockies, the Bahamas, the Florida Keys, the Canaries.

Deserts, Oceans and Seas

We usually use the before the names of deserts, oceans and seas.

We often leave out the word desert, ocean or sea: the Sahara or the Sahara Desert, the Atlantic or the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean or the Mediterranean Sea.

Cities, Countries and Continents

We don’t use the with the names of cities, countries or continents: Paris, Tokyo, France, Peru, Africa, Asia.

A small number of country names include the: The United Kingdom, The USA, The United Arab Emirates, The Netherlands.

Lakes

We don’t usually use the with the names of lakes.

We often use the word Lake before the name: Lake Como, Lake Michigan, Lake Geneva, Lake Tahoe.

Buildings, Monuments, Cathedrals, etc.

We use the with some names of buildings (we usually write the without a capital letter, the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, the Houses of Parliament, the Pentagon) but not with others:

Stonehenge, Windsor Castle, St Paul’s Cathedral, Chichen Itza.

Roads, Streets, etc.

We use the with the names of major roads in a country: the M6, the A40,

but not with the names of areas, squares, streets and roads in a town or city: Broadway, Covent Garden, Times Square, Princes Street.

Facilities in a Town or City

We usually use the with the names of hotels, cinemas, museums and art galleries: the Marriott, the Louvre, the National Gallery.

When we are referring to buildings or institutions that don’t include the name of a town or city, we use the: the airport, the University Press,

but not when the name of the town or city is included: Gatwick Airport, Cambridge University Press.

But there are some exceptions:

Have you been on the London Eye?

They’ve been on the Eye at least ten times.

We saw ‘Mamma Mia’ at the Bristol Hippodrome. (the name of a theatre)

Have you been to the Hippodrome since they renovated it?

The Sea, the Coast, etc.

When we are referring to general features of a country or its landscape, we use the:

the sea, the countryside, the city, the coast.

Places: Fixed Expressions

There are a lot of common fixed expressions relating to places.

We don’t normally use the with these expressions.

Here are some of them:

to town: I’m going to town this afternoon.

in town: She works in town.

at school/university: They met at university.

from school/university: What time do they get home from school?

in hospital: Linda’s been in hospital since Friday.

in prison: Her husband is in prison, and life is very difficult for her.

Sources: 1 2

[scotianostra]

September 10th 1547 saw the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh.

Fought along the Firth of Forth near Musselburgh, southeast of Edinburgh, this battle is also sometimes called the Battle of Falside.

It marked the beginning of a new phase in the Rough Wooing, the sustained English attempt to compel the Scots to accept a marriage between their queen and the English king. The overwhelming English victory destroyed the main Scots field force, allowed the English to establish garrisons across southern Scotland, and brought the French into the war on the Scottish side.

When the Scottish Parliament refused to ratify the Treaty of Greenwich in December 1543, Henry VIII launched successive invasions of Scotland to force acceptance of the main provision of the treaty, the marriage of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, to Prince Edward, the future Edward VI. At Henry’s death in January 1547, the Scots remained defiant. Because of the king’s youth, control of the English government passed to Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, who, as the king’s eldest uncle, assumed office as lord protector. In Scotland, the government of the even more youthful queen was headed by James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, who worked in uneasy partnership with a pro-French party led by the queen mother, Marie de Guise.

In late August 1547, while massing a force of more than 16,000 on the border at Berwick, Somerset issued a proclamation to the people of Scotland reminding them of the 1543 agreement and of the history and geography they shared with the English. His army, he claimed, was coming not to threaten Scotland, but “to defend and maintain the honour of both the princes and realms” sounds like a previous King eh?!

Crossing the frontier on 31 August, the English marched along the coast toward Edinburgh, supported on their flank by a fleet under Edward Fiennes de Clinton, Lord Clinton. Moving swiftly, the English seized castles along their line of march and dispersed harassing bands of Scots. On 9 September, Somerset encountered the main Scottish force, 20,000 in number, holding a strong position along the river Esk.

Next morning, Somerset ordered his right wing to assault the Scottish line, thereby shifting the entire army toward the Forth and the protection of Clinton’s guns. Arran, in command of the Scottish force, misinterpreted the movement; he believed Somerset was trying to avoid an engagement by taking his men to the coast for embarkation on the fleet. Arran accordingly ordered the Scots to leave their well-prepared defences and attack.

Seeing the Scottish movement, Somerset halted his army and formed line of battle. The Scots, far inferior to the English in cavalry, had no cover for the flanks of their pikemen, the same bristling formations of spearmen that James IV had used so ineffectively at Flodden Field. Slowed by cavalry charges and broken by artillery, the Scottish formations disintegrated, and the battle degenerated into a slaughter as the English infantry pursued the fleeing Scots to the gates of Edinburgh.

While English losses numbered 500 to 600, the Scots, figures vary from 6 to 15 thousand, over 2,000 were captured.

Organised Scottish resistance ceased, and Somerset spent the following months securing southern Scotland by seizing strong points and establishing a web of English garrisons centred on the fortress at Haddington.

Thanks to French inducements- Arran, who was given the title Duke of Chatelherault-and the efforts of the queen mother, the Scots turned in this emergency to their ancient ally, France.

Concluded in July 1548, the Treaty of Haddington promised the Scots French military assistance in return for the marriage of their queen to the eldest son of Henri II. In late July, Mary was spirited into France, there to be raised at Henri’s court. Although a victory for English arms, Pinkie was a defeat for English policy, opening a decade of French dominance in Scotland and ensuring that the Scottish queen would become Catholic in religion and French in sympathy.

Pinkie Cleugh was the last pitched battle between Scotland and England. The Memorial to the battle is at Salters Road near Wallyford.

Members of the Old Musselburgh Club with the Pinkie Cleugh Battlefield Group will,as we I post this,, led by a piper, walk along the battlefield trail, starting from the Roman Bridge in Musselburgh. and meeting at the memorial stone in time for the commemoration at 1pm, where the laying of floral tribute and speeches are made.

Ian Wood, club treasurer, will read 10 of the names out of the 10,000 who lost their lives in the conflict, which will be followed by an act of remembrance.

Pics include a wood cut depiction of the battle from not long after it happened, “The Raising of The Fire Cross for the Assembly of the Highland Clans before the Battle, a depiction of the battle and two of the memorials to the battle, the second is a relatively new one showing two soldiers in combat.

[aretis]

📍Menton,France 🇫🇷

Hey there! Have you ever been to Menton, the Pearl of France? If not, you're in for a treat! Save this reel for your next trip to the French Riviera and explore this unique blend of French and Italian influences. Here are my top picks for an unforgettable visit:

Explore the Old Town: Wander through the narrow, colourful streets and soak up the Mediterranean charm.

Relax at the Beach: Enjoy the crystal-clear waters and the serene atmosphere of Menton's beaches.

Try the lemon-based desserts.

Hike to the Italian Border: Follow the Sentier du Littoral trail from Menton to the Italian town of Ventimiglia. This scenic hike takes you along the stunning coastline, offering breathtaking views of the Mediterranean.

Stroll Through the Gardens: Don't miss the Jardin Serre de la Madone and the Val Rahmeh Botanical Garden, both bursting with unique plants.

Check Out the Lemon Festival: If you're here in February, the Fête du Citron is a must-see!

🍋 Visit St-Agnès: Just a short drive from Menton, St-Agnès is the highest coastal village in Europe. Explore its mediaeval streets, visit the castle ruins, and enjoy panoramic views of the coast.

Visit the Jean Cocteau Museum: Dive into the world of this famous artist in a stunning seaside museum.

🍋Day trips from Menton:Monaco (20min🚈),Eze Village (1h20min🚈🚌),Nice (40min🚈),Ventimiglia (15min🚈),Antibes (1h🚈),Cannes (1h15min🚈),Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat (1h 🚈🚌)

@zenwander

Bonjour France 🇫🇷

[mrschwartz]

Alex Turner opens up about The Car, Arctic Monkeys' 20th anniversary album

The frontman of the British band that performs at Primavera Sound, in São Paulo, invests in more abstract lyrics in new album

Published October 16 2022, by Rodrigo Salem

Alex Turner is not satisfied with the lighting in the room chosen as the setting for our interview. It's a small, cozy hipster hotel in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, one of those above a cafe with tables occupied by young people at the computer, and no lines at cash registers that don't accept cash.

The frontman of Arctic Monkeys, the biggest rock band to come out of the UK in the last 20 years, flips the switches until he finds the perfect balance of light. "Is this okay for you?" he asks, but doesn't seem to care too much about the answer.

Turner likes to have complete control over his environment. "Where do you want to sit? This will be the best place, right?" he asks, coffee in hand, already standing in front of a small beige table below the lamp that insisted on not emanating the adequate light.

Shy to the point of never completing a full sentence, as if his mouth didn't keep up with his fast brain, Turner is acutely aware of his obsession with control and attention to detail, something that has only grown bigger in the last few years at the helm of the band. But the singer, guitarist and songwriter lived something different in the creation of The Car, the group's seventh album, which will be released worldwide this week.

After composing the piano demos alone for much of the pandemic, he was reunited with the rest of the band over the summer of last year, in a secluded house that was part of a 12th-century monastery in Suffolk, on the east coast of England.

"We hadn't done that since the first album. I had extra film rolls and I took my 16mm camera to film everything and keep myself busy during the recording. At first, I just wanted to record the memory, but it seemed to help in the work environment, because I stepped out of the process a bit and gave everyone more space," he says.

"James [Ford, record producer] was delighted, because I wasn't looking over his shoulder all the time and being a twat."

The musician's hobby as a filmmaker was not the only novelty in the three weeks of work in the makeshift studio, complete with a piano borrowed from a resident there and the technological arsenal brought in from London. The period was essential for Arctic Monkeys to remember that they are still a rock group formed by friends.

"We had a lot of laughs and watched the Euro Cup together. It was important to have that band energy again," says Turner, revealing that Body Paint, The Car's latest single, only took its final form because of this camaraderie. "The distorted guitar at the end just came about because I wanted to do that solo with them. It sounds obvious, but being together changes the dynamics of how I play."

Ironically, the album's main theme seems to circle around characters that don't seem to fit the environment they're in. In Body Paint itself, which wouldn't be out of place in one of George Martin's orchestrated productions for The Beatles, Turner sings that he's "keeping on [his] costume and calling it a writing tool."

Jet Skis On The Moat, played on a sultry guitar and with a broken rhythm reminiscent of U2's The Playboy Mansion, brings a Hollywood psychedelic mood—"jet skis on the moat / they filmed everything in CinemaScope, but this is the last time you will ride them, though".

"I was imagining this perception of us living like rock stars in a fantasy castle on a mountain, riding jet skis, disconnected from everything," says Turner.

In I Ain't Quite Where I Think I Am, he seems to describe a strange trip on a luxury yacht off the coast of France, a country where he usually goes with his girlfriend, French singer Louise Verneuil, since he moved back to England from Los Angeles. "I spend less time here, but I love this city. It's where I have my friends," he says.

Extremely protective of his privacy, Alex Turner does not confirm any theories that could refer to his life beyond music. However, he admits that feeling like a fish out of water is one of the themes of the record. "I've definitely written this time about someone who doesn't fit in," he says as he pulls out of his green jacket two folded sheets of paper filled with his lyrics and assorted notes.

I question the reason for keeping this material around and the singer lets his guard down. "I think that this way I can have these conversations more easily, and stay on the same level as other people. You've read the lyrics, listened to the record, and I thought I should do the same to meet you in the middle," he says, soon bringing back up his good-humored defenses. "And it also serves to intimidate people."

Not that he seems to want to intimidate anyone. Turner can barely look up, more concerned with focusing on some object and finding the right words for his answers. Keeping the lyrics in your pocket serves to rediscover the words of the songs.

One of the most brilliant songwriters of modern British rock and someone who has managed to portray the yearnings and feelings of an entire millennial generation, he says his lyrics come out of the space between the conscious and the unconscious.

In The Car, they seem even more abstract. "I love leaving space for lyrics not to be fully understood and to become more interesting as the years go by. I like to explore things that are difficult to talk about."

Does that mean that Alex Turner, who, two decades ago, rehearsed in a garage with Jamie Cook on guitar, Andy Nicholson on bass, later replaced by Nick O'Malley, and Matt Helders on drums, in Sheffield, is finally noticing the inevitable passage of time?

"Funny, it's hard to accept that it's been 20 years," he says. "But we're alive and active. That happens a lot when I'm singing the old songs now. I remember something, not necessarily the lyrics, but the environment, a person and the sensations of the past."

A rich past, we must add. Arctic Monkeys have gone through several phases in these two decades. It began with the confessional hip-hop-enamored rock of the first two albums, a formula that propelled the group into the stratosphere of fame. It gained weight with the stoner rock of Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age on 2009's Humbug and the stadium hard rock of 2013's AM. And it culminated in the journey away from Earth in 2018's jazzy Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.

The Car continues the sonic exploration of their previous work, but brings guitars back to the songs and a Turner interested in using his voice as an instrument. "I don't know if Alex from 20 years ago would like this sound," he wonders. "Secretly, I wanted something along those lines then, but it wasn't within my reach at the time. On second thought, I think he would like it. But if he wouldn't like it, then fuck it," he jokes.

He admits that he changed his way of looking at music and even composing. On previous albums, he wrote the lyrics and then thought of the melody. The music now comes first.

"I made an effort to put the lyrics in sync with a melody that gives me permission to use certain words," says the musician. "I didn't focus on that in the past, I think it started on AM, when I started to change the lyrics as I was influenced by the sound in the studio."

Back on stage since a few weeks ago, Turner believes the pandemic has changed the relationship between band and audience. "The first time we performed was powerful," he says. "There's a new energy that encourages me. I'm trying not to behave the same way on stage. I think some of that comes from the younger crowd."

Brazil is going to feel this in a few days. Arctic Monkeys closes the first day of Primavera Sound, in São Paulo, on November 5th, already oiling the show with a new repertoire. "When we arrive in Brazil, I want to test two new songs and leave some old ones behind," says the singer, who already says that the next album may come out faster than expected after the long gestation of The Car.

Unable to play shows, the group spent a year polishing up the album in post-production. "We had more time to work on the record and I like to think that this had a positive influence on the final result, as we had more space to hone, think and fight for certain ideas", says Turner. "I love the idea of doing something different, like writing, recording and releasing in a week. Maybe it's a fun idea for the next project."

[lizzy-tudor]

La Peregrina, A Queen Among Jewels Pear-shaped and weighing in at a magnificent 223.8 grains of 55.95 carats, Phillip II of Spain's wedding gift surpassed every fantasy his bride, the newly crowned Mary I of England, could have imagined. Baptized La Peregrina (an expression from the groom's native language meaning "female wanderer"), the brilliant pearl was delivered directly to the queen, its priceless value reflecting the inestimable importance that a marriage treaty between England and Spain represented at the time. Found on the coast of Panama in 1513 by an African slave, the pearl went down in history as a fine adornment much appreciated by royalty. In her well-known official portrait of 1554, Mary is depicted adorned with her wedding present, dangling from a bejeweled brooch on her chest. Queen Margaret, wife of Phillip III of Spain, wore it during celebrations of a peace treaty with the English in 1605. Two of the wives of Phillip IV of Portugal and Spain also had the privilege of wearing it — but the jewel would still pilgrimage through Europe and the world, and would end up not just under the possession of princesses and queens, but of other distinguished personalities. After the end of the 16th and 17th centuries, La Peregrina would be mentioned in the annals of history again only in 1813, when Joseph, brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, filched it along with a significant part of the Spanish Crown Jewels, in his flight from Spain back to France. After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, the pearl's new owner moved to the United States, where he would eventually die and leave it to his nephew, Charles Louis, the future Napoleon III. During his own exile, this time in England, the descendant of the Emperor of the French sold it to the second Duke of Abercorn, and it was actually during this period that the family heirloom received its infamous name. The pearl would remain in the Abercorn family for a century, being briefly lost by falling from its setting twice — first, disappearing between the cushions of a sofa in Windsor Castle; then, during a ball at Buckingham Palace. Fortunately, La Peregrina was found and returned to her owners in both occasions. In 1913 the jewel was cleaned and polished, and as a result, lost approximately 203 grams. Yet it still remains today the largest symmetrical pearl of its shape, and in 1969, after being auctioned at Sotheby's, it once again became a husband's gift to his wife. Richard Burton bought it for $37,000 for his wife, the iconic actress Elizabeth Taylor. Interestingly enough, Taylor decided to adorn her gift with a completely new design, one inspired by none other than the regal portrait of Mary I. Other smaller pearls, emeralds and rubies completed the piece, centering around the glorious Peregrina, now displayed as a Tudor styled choker.

[ccohanlon]

how i live

I woke at midnight, last night, to a hard sou’westerly and the floor moving in three directions at once — pitching, rolling, rising-and-falling. Now, six hours later, the wind has moderated. Everything is still. The rest of the world is obscured by grey mist and sporadic showers, as if the sky has fallen across the shore.

I climb up a short ladder to the companionway to check that all is well on deck — it’s the first thing I do every morning — then I return to my bunk to download email and read a couple of news sites on a laptop before my wife wakes and we have a cup of coffee together across the varnished teak table that separates our bunks.

We talk about what we want to do today and waste a minute or two trying to agree a time-table before giving up. For half a decade, we have scraped by with a minimum of routine or planning. We are singularly unadept at making lists or coordinating diaries. We end up doing most things together. Today, we will pick up some paint and shackles at a chandlery and find a local metal fabricator to repair or replicate a damaged stainless steel stanchion. We also have to buy some groceries. But first I want to repair our rubber dinghy.

My wife and I live on a 32-foot sailboat. It is a life-raft of sorts. It is also an island on which we are trying to regain an unsettled but sheltered freedom after several years of being homeless. Most days, we feel like castaways, with no hope of ever being rescued.

It’s hard to explain how we ended up here. Moving aboard was not a ‘lifestyle choice’ but an act of quiet desperation. We had dropped out of a life in which I had somehow ended up running two well-known, medium-sized companies, one of them publicly listed — before those roles, I had been a musician, gambler, seaman, smuggler, photographer, magazine editor, and governmental adviser — and we had taken to wandering slowly across Europe, the UK, and North Africa. After a year holed up on the southern coast of Spain, a few miles east of Gibraltar, riding out the worst of the pandemic, we moved to southern Italy, where we acquired, and set about restoring, a small ruin, part of servants’ quarters attached to a 16th century Spanish castle, in a village not far from Lecce, in Puglia. We had just completed the work, two years later, when the local Questura, the office of the Carabinieri that oversees Italian immigration, rejected our third application for temporary residence and issued a formal instruction to us to leave Italy — and Europe’s Schengen zone.

The boat was not something we thought through in any detail. I had spent a lot of time at sea in my youth and had lived on sailing boats of various sizes on the Channel coasts of England and France, as well as in the Mediterranean. Which is to say, I had an understanding of their discomforts. But the prospect of resuming a life that, before we ended up in southern Italy, involved moving every three months — not just from one temporary accommodation to another but from one country to another, so as not to contravene the terms of our largely visa-less travel — had exhausted us. I made an offer on a cheap, neglected, 45-year-old, fibreglass sloop I had come across online and organised a marine surveyor to look it over for me. He gave it a cautious thumbs up.

I won’t forget my wife’s dolorous expression, a month later, when she saw the boat for the first time. It was in an industrial area of Southampton, on a dreich morning in early spring — bitterly cold, windy, and raining. Around us, the Itchen River’s ebb had revealed swathes of black, foul-smelling mud. Raised far from the sea, on the plains of north-eastern Oklahoma, my wife told me later she had been praying that our journey to this glum backwater was part of some elaborate practical joke.

There is a whole genre of YouTube videos created by those who live on sailboats full-time and voyage all over the world. The most popular, the so-called ‘influencers’, are young(ish) couples or families with capacious, often European-built, plastic catamarans or monohulls. Their videos focus less on the gritty, day-to-day grind of boat maintenance and passage-making and more on sojourns in ancient, stone-built harbours in the Mediterranean, white, sandy beaches and palm-fringed cays in the Caribbean, or improbably blue lagoons and solitary atolls in the South Pacific, where they barbecue fresh fish, paddle-board, kite-surf and practice yoga and aerial silks for the envy of hundreds of thousands of followers. My wife’s and my life aboard together is nothing like any of this.

We are both in our sixties — I am just a year away from seventy — and we have spent more than a decade on the move around the world, at first following eclectic opportunities for employment then, when those opportunities receded, in search of somewhere we might be able to settle with very little money. Four months after moving aboard our boat, we still think of ourselves as vagabond travellers, our boat a shambolic, floating vardo that we haven’t yet managed to turn into a home. We’re not really ‘cruisers’, despite the sense of community we sometimes find among them, but we are seafarers — historically, a marginal existence driven by necessity. A recent, 150-nautical-mile passage westward along the south coast of England was a shakedown during which we learned how to make our aged, shabby vessel more comfortable and easier to handle and to trust her capacity to keep us safe at sea.

She bore the name Endymion when we bought her — after my least favourite poem by John Keats (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever…”) — but we re-named her Wrack. Depending on the source, ‘wrack’ describes seaweeds or seagrasses that wash up along a shore or the scattered traces of a shipwreck, either of which might be metaphors for my wife and me in old age. It is certainly how we feel when we’re not at sea. Life aboard Wrack is spartan — fresh water stored in a dozen polyethylene jerry cans, no hot or cold running water, no refrigeration and when the temperature drops, no heating either — so, from time to time, we concede the cost of berthing in marinas to gain access to on-site laundries, showers, flushing toilets, and wi-fi. Whether we’re berthed or anchored somewhere, we shop for food once a week — mainly vegetables, fruit, bread, pasta, and rice but little dairy and no meat — and eat one meal a day, cooked in the mid-afternoon on a two-burner gas stove.

The days we spend in close proximity to others’ lives ashore remind us how disenfranchised ours have become. We were homeless before we acquired Wrack, but now we are without a legal residence anywhere, even in our ‘home’ countries. We enter and exit borders uneasily as ‘visitors’, our stays limited to 90 or 180 days, depending on where we are. We have no access to banking, insurance, social services or, with a few exceptions, emergency health care. Even the modest Australian pensions we have a right to can only be received if we have been granted residence in countries with which Australia has reciprocal arrangements — and we haven’t. It’s hard even for other live-aboards to understand how deeply we are enmired in this peculiar bureaucratic statelessness. It’s harder for us to deal with it every day.

But life afloat provides consolations. We are ceaselessly attuned to the weather and our boat’s responses to subtle shifts in the sea state, tide and wind even when we are tethered to a dock. We appreciate the shelter — and surprising cosiness — the limited space below decks affords us but the impulse to surrender to the elements and let them propel us elsewhere is insistent. Our best days are offshore, even when the conditions are testing; the world shrinks to just the two of us, our boat and the implacable, mutable sea around us. Whatever problems we face ashore become, at least for the duration of a passage, abstract and insignificant. We sail without a specific destination — ‘towards’ rather than ‘to’, as traditional navigators would have it — and without purpose. Time drifts.

At least half of every day is spent maintaining, repairing, or re-organising the boat, an unavoidable and time-consuming part of our days, especially at sea. When we’re at anchor or berthed in a marina, we do what we can to sustain ourselves. Most afternoons are spent prospecting for drips of income from journalism and crowd-funding — a source inspired by those younger YouTube adventurers — or adding a few hundred words to a manuscript for a non-fiction book commissioned by a Dutch publisher, whose patience has been stretched to breaking point. Because of our visitor visa status, we can’t seek gainful employment ashore, and we have long since lost contact with any of the networks that once provided us with a higher-than-average income as freelancers. Our existence, by any definition, is impoverished and perilously marginal, we have little social life, yet we make the effort to appreciate our circumstances, even if it’s just to sit together in silence and absorb the elemental white noise of wind and sea, to do nothing, to not think.

Our precariousness burdens our four adult children, who have scattered to San Diego, Sydney, Berlin and Rome: “Where are you now?” our youngest asks. “How long will you be there?” We speak to each at least once a week. Not all of them long for fixedness but they do want desperately for us to have a ‘real home’, somewhere we can assemble occasionally as a family. We will be grandparents for the first time, soon. Like our few friends, our children worry that we might become lost — in every sense.

My wife and I are uncomfortably aware of our financial and physical vulnerability but at our ages, we can no longer cling to the faint hope that there’s an end to it. We have committed to an unlikely, reckless voyage. All we can do is maintain a rough dead reckoning of its course and embrace the uncharted and the relentless unexpected.

First published in The Idler, UK, 2023.

[tourdesouthoffrance]

I took my final walk through the old town in Nîmes and took the train to Narbonne. When I arrived, I strolled along the canal into the heart of the city. Narbonne looks like Béziers but it’s a lot busier. This is to be expected as it’s a larger city.

I explored the cathedral and parts of the castle. I didn’t fancy paying anymore to enter museums and to be honest I’m getting a bit fed up of castles. This is a really ignorant thing to say, but I have seen a lot in the past 2 weeks. I strolled around the city and spent some time by the canal before it became too hot and I decided to walk back to the station. I did well, today it has been 34 degrees Celsius and I explored the city on foot.

The journey back to Béziers took 15 minutes and cost €6.50. As you approach the city by train, you get a great view of the cathedral up on the hill.

Béziers is beautiful, but it still feels rough to me. I considered heading back to Montpellier for the evening, but I can’t justify spending that much money on trains and so I did arguably the best thing that there is to do in Béziers, grab a beer and enjoy the sunset from outside the cathedral. The sunset wasn’t as spectacular today. It was nice, but what I experienced on Thursday night was out of this world. It’s my last night in France. It has been an amazing adventure in which I have seen and learnt so much. I want to come back soon and explore other parts of this great country. Travelling down the west coast from Bordeaux to Biarritz is definitely appealing to me at the moment. I also want to come back and visit Montpellier again. In the end, I really began to love its artsy bohemian feel. Although when I visit again, I will book my own private accommodation!

Thankfully my flight isn’t until tomorrow afternoon, which gives me the morning to explore Béziers some more. That is, if I get up…

[dutch-and-flemish-painters]

Adriaen Frans Boudewijns - Landscape with ruins -

Adriaen Frans Boudewijns (Brussels, 3 October 1644 – Brussels, 3 December 1719) was a Flemish landscape painter, draughtsman and etcher. He was known mainly for his landscapes with trees, Italianate landscapes with architecture, rivers and villages, city, coast and country views and architectural scenes.

Adriaen Frans Boudewijns was born in Brussels where he was baptized in the St Nicolas Church on 3 October 1644. He was the son of Nicolas Boudewijns and Françoise Jonquin. He married Louise de Ceul on 5 October 1664. The couple likely remained childless. On 23 November 1665 he was registered at the same time as a pupil and master of the Brussels Guild of Saint Luke. He was a pupil of the landscape painter and engraver Ignatius van der Stock.

On 16 December 1666 Boudewijns is recorded in Paris when he entered into a 3-year contract to work in the service of the Flemish painter Adam Frans van der Meulen. He is recorded as working with van der Meulen on the design of 12 Gobelins representing the months for French King Louis XIV. Van der Meulen executed the smaller figures and part of the landscapes. The remainder of the landscapes was completed by Boudewijns and Abraham Genoels, another Flemish painter active in Paris.

Boudewijns also travelled with Genoels to make sketches of a castle near Brussels for a design of a tapestry for the King of France. While in Paris, Boudewijns engraved many of van der Meulen's compositions. He also made engravings after the work of Genoels, the Dutch artist Jan van Hughtenburgh and his own designs.

Boudewijns married the sister of Adam Frans van der Meulen called Barbe or Barbara on 12 January 1670. The couple had two children of whom the oldest named Frans became a painter. Barbe Boudewijns died on 2 March 1674. Around this time Boudewijns must have returned home. He is documented in Brussels in 1677 when he was present at the baptism of his nephew Adriaen Frans on 4 June 1677. He married a third time in Brussels in 1670.

He had a studio in Brussels where he received in 1682 Andreas Meulebeek as his pupil and the next year Mathys Schoevaerdts. His nephew Adriaen (Frans) became his pupil in 1694. He also trained his son Frans.

It is believed that he was ruined during the bombardment of Brussels, the vicious artillery bombardment of Brussels carried out by French troops on 13, 14 and 15 August 1695 which caused the destruction of a third of the buildings in Brussels.

He died in Brussels on 3 December 1719.

[mybeingthere]

Britain has a long history of beacon lighting spanning many hundreds of years. Beacons have been lit on village greens, castle battlements, church towers, farms, beaches, front gardens, car parks and mountain tops to celebrate Royal Weddings, Jubilees and Coronations.

In 1897 beacons were lit nationally to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. (She reigned for a total of 63 years.) In 1977 and 2002 beacons were lit to celebrate The Queen’s Silver and Golden Jubilees. On Monday 4th June 2012, the aim is to light over 2,012 - perhaps as many as 4,000 – beacons, from Tonga to the Falkland Islands and Malta to Kenya. And the network of beacons that will criss-cross the UK, placed on historic landmarks, hill-top vantage points and famous mountains, will include Ditchling Beacon.

Ditchling Beacon is an Early Iron Age contour hillfort positioned on the Downs just south of the village of Ditchling with commanding views of the Weald to the north. It is one of the 139 original anchor-chain beacons situated around the country and has been used many times for occasions of unity and celebration, but also as a communication tool to warn of impending invasion and coastal attack.

The most notable occasions were in the 16th century when raiders from France regularly struck the Sussex coast and Brighton. These attacks reached their height in June 1514 when the French, led by Admiral Prégnant (nick-named Prior John), set fire to virtually all the buildings in Brighton’s old town, with the exception of St Nicholas’ Church. They were eventually driven off by archers from across the county who were alerted by a warning beacon on the Downs. There were further raids on Brighton in 1545, but as before, the French were repelled by the large numbers who gathered on the cliff, attracted by the beacon. In 1587, Ditchling was part of the same chain of beacons, designed to provide warning of the long anticipated attack by the Spanish.

http://www.thepostmagazine.co.uk/brighto.../ditchling-beacon

[borathae]

Sibiiiiiiiii! Thank you!!! I 💜 you!!! And yes please write the Greece trip/ Kook’s trip and tell us where else these hot vampires own property! 😩😩😩 As if they weren’t hundreds of years old and hot as fuck, they own villas and castles and houses all over?! 😩😩😩 Please give us as many HCs as you want!

Of course they do 😏😩 I mean djsjs not all of them obviously. Hear me out

Jungkook is the BROKEST vampire ever. Because of his curse, he couldn’t ever get a real job which in return meant that he never aquired enough money to invest it in passive income. So that man is as broke as one could get jsjsjs.

Hobi has decent amount of money. He came from a upper middle class family and saved enough money to invest in a small passive income, which has gathered a good amount these days. But because he is still technically only in his sixties, his wealth is very much in human levels still.

Jimin is the third brokest vamp of the bunch. Example given: how he had to live while he was still persumed dead. I mean, one could argue that he was in hiding and didn’t want to risk getting found out, but there is also a good possibility that he is simply broke in vampire terms. Most property he owns, Tae either bought for him or they bought it together. And then there was also the whole part of where he had to live as Namjoon’s slave for centuries, so he didn’t really have alot of opportunity to, you know, buy property. He does have a very healthy sum on his bank accounts though, mostly because of the shared property with Tae and because Tae is tranferring him money on a monthly basis.

I would place Seokjin next. This man was already wealthy when he was still human and had two properties and some factories/warehouses as well as ships in his human years and he also invested in a lot of start-ups which bring in a lot of money these days. He is actually a huge stock holder in the mobile phone market and has his fingers in other techonological fields as well. For properties he owns the one Sanguis spent their "frat years" in, owns a house in South Korea and bought Emma her own shop in town so she could expand her perfume business. He also owns an apartment complex where he gets constant income. Fun fact? OC actually rented an apartment in the complex when she first moved here, which is why she never got in trouble for randomly stopping to pay rent. She and Seokjin laugh about the coincidence these days. He gets most of his money from his countless shares though.

And now this is where it gets hard to talk about because damn those vampires are RICH jdjdjs they're old, they've seen too much and they got way too much money to spend.

Taehyung I'd place third. He's both share holder in many businesses, owner of multiple art galleries and possesses property which is used commercially, as rentals or as his private escapes. So passive income is very much guaranteed on a constant. He owns a homely cottage in the Austrian Alps, owns a chateau at the coast of France and a small farm in the French countryside, owns a little Greek ocean house and invested in apartments in Paris, New York, Hong Kong as well as London. If he spends money he spends it on new property, promising shares and other investments. If he spends fun money he spends it on trips, whatever expensive item suits his taste, art and fashion. He also regularly wires money to Jimin and ever since recently, he opened two separate accounts for Jungkook and OC where he also makes monthly deposites. Trust that this man does not feel any change in his numbers with those new tranfers. And also that he LOVES spending his money most when he can spend it on his darlings.

And then there is Yoongi. Woof woof. I would say that he and Tae aren’t that far apart actually despite their age difference. One must consider though that eventhough Yoongi’s been alive for ages, it was rather difficult to make money which can still be used in the 21st century. You get me? He does own a lot of castles though from the earlier days. The one they all currently live in he bought around the time of the French Revolution, but he owns another castle in Romania and one in Germany. He also owns a town mansion in Geneva and has a penthouse in New York, which he never uses. He won’t ever mention it, but he owns a private island in the Carribbeans and treated himself to a very secluded cottage somewhere in the deepest Canadian forests. He also forgot about it already, but he owns property in South Korea and a villa in Osaka. It brings in money as they are both used as rentals, but Yoongi hasn’t set foot in either of them in decades. He gets most of his passive income through the various rentals he owns as well as being shareholder in some of the biggest markets these days. He also regularly buys property and sells it again to a higher price. Right now he plans on buying a house with OC close to Meredith's place and he also thinks about surprising OC with her own small plant shop in town. He doesn’t transfer to their accounts, but he never says no. If anyone of the family wants something, he'll get it for them no questions asked. He will also regularly hand over his black card with a nonchalant "don't look at the numbers, princess" and he genuinely gets pouty when she wants to pay for something when he’s with her. This man always pays even if she sometimes complains about it. And no sum is ever too big for him. You remember those 100€ he gave her in Paris for a cab? Yeah that was the equivalent to a few cents for him.

I don’t know where to put Namjoon on the list because being stolen of his powers and then hidden from the world kinda just cut him off from his wealth. You know? I do believe though that in his prime, he was the richest. And also the one who spent his money on the most fucked up shit.

[pink-lemonadefairy]

THEY LOOK GORGEOUS

winter is giving east coast (Connecticut) rich yet tasteful socialite who is loved in her community by everyone. she drinks a smoothie every morning, lives on the beach, plays tennis twice a week and spends her sundays at the country club. her children go to private school and play lacrosse and/or soccer. they vacation in the south of France every summer. every fall break they go to nantucket. her house is furnished exclusively with pottery barn, it’s like a rustic French vibe. she owns a trader joes tote bag.

mark is giving the same east coast vibe but he’s in university. he goes on yachts in the summer (mainly near greece and croatia, maybe italy too). he plays polo and golf, and occasionally swims. is in a frat house but a “refined” frat house, only for like the mega ultra rich and their house is like basically a small castle. he’s majoring in something like finance / business. wears loafers like all the time. hmmm and i definitely think most of “his” money goes to elegant restaurants near the beach, and hosting galas and super fancy parties. also shoes.

tl;dr they’re giving Hawthorne vibes, but if they were from the east coast