White and Gold along the Canal...

I finally got off to my first bike ride along the canal... Here I enjoyed the flowers, grasses and trees that all seemed to be enjoying the (long-awaited) sun...

It was the white and yellow that caught my eye this time... and gold!

Although there was the bright red of the poppies, pink from campion and purple from vetch - along with all that green...

Sadly, I can't remember many of the names of flowers and plants any more, or seem to have replaced the English word for a French one, but I did recognize the above as white bladder campion...

And these as oxe-eye daisies, however, after that things started to get more blurred... I initially thought these below were plain white campion, but I'm not so sure of that now...

Meanwhile elderberry flowers were everywhere - like huge luminous discs at a distance...

And yet so intricate up close...

Although I made my usual 'error' of looking too closely at the details and missing the bigger landscape, it did pay off as I came across these wild strawberries... Which I then went on to eat!

 I had no trouble identifying the mustard flowers that had scented the air along the tracks...

And alongside the canal itself...

The water had its 'usual' unusual green/blue colour...

This always reminds me of the water-filled quarries we used to be drawn to as children... And reminds me again that the canal is here for a purpose...

Vital for the transportation of goods, past and present...

Today, as always, the waterway acts as bait to the fishermen but its paths also provide jogging and sport addicts with the means of a convenient fix, and offers escape to the Sunday strollers, skaters and cylists of all shapes and sizes...

But also provides a dose a nature...

Which I always like looking at - up close - and wondering how such simple things can be so beautiful.

Reims - 7th May 2015 - Celebration of Peace

Last night I went to the big commemorative light-and-sound display that took place on Place de la République here in Reims. This was, of course, to remember the end of the WWII and was held on Thursday 7th May as it was on this date, in the early hours of the morning 70 years ago, that the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht was officially signed. Indeed, this historic act was carried out in the Map Room of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force in a school that went on to become today's Lycée Roosevelt and to house the Musée de la Reddition.

The display was projected onto the imposing Monument aux Morts that was erected in 1930 in memory of the ravages of the First World War on Reims, and to commemorate the subsequent reconstruction of the city. The Second War World itself inflicted great damage on the monument, leaving it all the more dramatic in its impact. The lessons supposedly learnt during the Great War seemed to have been swept aside and the message of the monument no longer relevant during this second period of wartime devastation. 

This human tragedy seemed to play itself out on the monument itself, with the left part, symbolizing The Sacrifice of 1914 smashed and shattered, whilst the right part, symbolizing The Lesson of 1918 faired little better. Central in the monument is the figure of Pensée himself “accomplishing his effort of resurrection”. Deep in reflection, this time he seems to be plunged into despair and desolation at the perspective of his city, la Cité des Sacres, devastated yet again by the horrors of war. Reims had, of course, been the symbol of French suffering during the 14-18 years. From the outset, it had been the very real target of enemy forces and victim to the worst atrocities of war. Its cathedral, willfully burnt and battered, represented the wanton cruelty of conflict, bent on the destruction of every form of civilisation.

The whole of last night’s show was moving, but I preferred the very last part, filmed below, which was projected without words. Image and sound seem to convey far more. The spoken part had largely dealt with today’s Peace, but we cannot really appreciate the full sense of that until we reflect over what has been. On the way to the commemoration, my son and I were speaking about this…

All the shop windows leading to Place de la République are currently displaying photos taken during and after these war years. Many of these war-torn streets and buildings are still largely recognizable today, and so we have both enjoyed trying to identify these in order to see what is so familiar to us today from another perspective, in a different light. This vision is quite eerie at times, but not as troubling as the notion that, as my son later confirmed, many young people do not even know why May 8th is a bank holiday. It must be a positive thing that those particular war years are so far behind us that they have fallen into the shadows, but can we really understand what Peace is without an awareness of that dark spectre and the messages that they still need to convey today?

One of the rarest flowers... Klaus Nomi.

Well, yesterday I did get to see the David Bowie Is exhibition, and wasn't disappointed except for the fact that photography was banned. That meant that I never got to take photos of any of those great costumes, and certainly not the one that had so marked Klaus Nomi when he was backing singer to Bowie's performance on the show, Saturday Night Live.

However, I did notice that as fantastic as all these clothes were, a lot of the time more statements and stage props than 'real' garments, they couldn't live up to the image they had created on record covers, posters, videos and my mind. So, in fact, the only thing really missing in the show was a place to dance... It was really hard to contain myself, and above all not hum along tunelessly to the music on the guide headphones!

Well, after three hours' viewing, I went off to the Jardin des Plantes to see what was on show there, in the immense flower beds that stretch out towards the Natural History museum at the far end of the grounds.

The elegance and beauty of the plants give no indication of the fact that the Jardin des Plantes had been transformed into a wind tunnel. I even tried to hold onto the stems of some of these in order to steady them for the photo. However, my favourite flower has to be the one that I have just acquired for my balcony. This plant is equally challenged by the high winds that arise with higher-rise accommodation, but that's another story.


A beautiful purple Passiflora... Here to go with it is a collection of the flowers, set along to some music from Klaus Nomi's unfinished opera Za Bakdaz.

I just wish that in his creative years, Nomi had benefitted from some of the breaks that Bowie had, and especially that he had simply lived longer to create more of his unique music...