Tom M. Wilson

This is not a photo of Normandy.

I have started an entry on Normandy with a picture of the opulent shadows of the inside of Opera Garnier in the middle of Paris as I want to highlight the difference between city and country. The zenith of traditional European architectural grandeur: red velvet, towering statues and candelabras. Then I stepped off the train into the countryside of Normandy…

Paris is not all beautiful interiors. All of a sudden I’ve left the heat and the noise and the tourists of the streets of Paris behind.

Fagus silvatica, or the European Beech tree. It has been interesting to see the same symmetrical veins on beech leaves on species in New York, Canada, England, France, New Zealand and Tasmania. Veins of continuity which cross the planet, as I travel eastwards. Beech leaves linking the continents with their slanted striations.

This is Eu, a small town in the north of Normandy. Half-timbered houses are common  around here, with their black beams and wattle and daub walls painted white.  Many of the coastal towns with their old stone buildings, gulls crying, green and rolling hills around and cool and often rainy sky remind me that I am in the France that is so well known and evoked by English literature over the decades and the centuries. This is the France that is just on the other side of the channel from England, a big stone’s throw away. So the landscape is just the same. It is the first foreign bit of land generations of English men and women have seen down through history. Julian Barnes’ ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ springs to mind. It is much easier to feel at home here than if you were English and you’d gone down to Avignon or the south of Europe.

Just outside of Eu…

The first couple of nights I stayed at the house of the parents of a friend. It was an old farm house in a valley with green woods and fields around. Lovely. Waking in the morning and sticking my head out of the window it was beautiful to be surrounded by green hills and forests and fields and no other houses or people. I’d look out after having just woken up, still feeling groggy, and have the invigorating vista of green and outdoor life below and before me, with Austan the Breton Spaniel running across some field to the right, and the cool air brushing against my face. The house still has its exposed oak beams, hundreds of years old, in the kitchen.

Well the digital book that is my blog opens up its pages for the world once more…

This is actually me in the Nobel Museum in Stockholm a few days ago.  Alfred Nobel was, like myself, a man with a keen interest in both science and literature.  Thanks to him we have the Nobel Prize awarded in five categories, which include science and literature.  I knew that Jean-Paul Sartre had rejected his Nobel Prize, but I didn’t know that each one came with 1.5 million U.S. dollars.  Ah the folly of sitting too high on the existentialist’s moral high horse!

I’m in a small coastal town in the north of Normandy, Fecamp.  I’ve found a little bar/cafe with wireless.  To my right is the bar’s counter, with a handful of French men standing and chatting over their morning’s cafe.

Before I mention Normandy, I thought I’d share a few of my photographs of the archipelago off Stockholm.  Four hours on a big ferry winding our way through pretty waterways, and finally we made it to the island of Moja.

Granite is everywhere on these islands…

The runic alphabet of life…

The forests of these islands are full of pines and birches.  They don’t seem to grow very tall though, maybe because of the underlying soils not being deep.  The Swedes often have little cabins, painted red, to retreat to for summer holidays.  This path led to the cabin of my friend Robert.  Lucky soul that he is, he is living there till September, amid the silence and the water and the trees.

Speaking of Swedish retrospectives, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen’s favourite director died a few weeks ago.  I have never seen a Bergman film, and Robert suggested I watch two films from the 1950s that aren’t quite as bleak as many of his works: Wild Strawberries and Smiles of a Summer Night.

I’m sitting in a Starbucks outside Gare St. Lazare in Paris.  Yes, Paris, nowhere else have so many gone about their daily grind with so much ancient and beautiful masonry towering above their shoulders.   It is hot and sunny outside and I was forced into this chain as the classic Parisian cafe does not deign to offer wireless internet to its patrons.  Yesterday I sat on a boulder with a couple of friends in the evening sun on an island in the Swedish archipelago.  Today I’m en route to Normandy.

In just over a week - 15 August - I’ll be back in Australia.  I’m looking forward to the banksia trees and the peppermints, to seeing a few good friends and feeling the sand under my feet as I jog along Leighton beach.  I won’t have much internet access in Normandy, so this blog may have to recommence in a little over a week.  Then I’ll have time to reflect on more of the journey.

I’m hoping to visit St. Mont Michel in the coming days.  Let Providence make Luck be on my side.