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trois: Trainspotting
I WOKE up to the sound of a torrential downpour, huge shafts of
rain blattering against the tent. The noise was terrible, but grimly I
gathered up my towel and everything else and prepared to make a dash
to the washrooms. I unzipped the front of the tent and plunged out
into the uproar -- to be greeted with a very very light drizzle that
wouldn't even make you put a brolly up if you were carrying one.
 "Sounds much louder inside a
tent, doesn't it?" said Jen, busy preparing coffee over the camping
stove.
We drank the coffee all
huddled into Ian's tent. "I think we should go to Trôo," said Stu,
"you can do that even if it's quite wet."
| | The view from the top of Trôo, framed by
vines which be popular in they parts. Click for a bigger image (54K
JPEG).
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Trôo is about five miles from
Montoire, on the other side of the valley. It's a troglodytic village,
which means not that low-foreheaded Newcastle United supporters live
there, but that, like les Roques-d'Évêque, all the houses just turn
into caves at the back. Like Lavardin, this one is worth turning on
image loading for.
At the bottom of Trôo we saw
a sign saying,
Collégiale Butte Puits qui parle
Maisons
troglodytiques |
-- and we could work out what Maisons troglodytiques were,
and perhaps a butte could just be a butte like you get (or more
likely, unlike the ones you get) in Arizona, but even Ian couldn't
figure out what a Puits qui parle was. (Except that "qui
parle" means "which speaks", so whatever it was it was a speaking one
of them.)
We were thus forced to follow
the sign -- it led up past the very pretty houses with their caves, to
the top of the hill. There was a large church, which we reckoned could
maybe be a monastery, which could maybe be what Collégiale
meant; there was a hill, looking much like a motte like Castle Hill in
Cambridge, which could maybe be what Butte was pointing us
towards; but still no sign of Puits qui parle.
We consulted a
thoughtfully-placed tourist noticeboard. Whatever a Puits qui parle
was, it was just round the corner, according to the map.
We got there and it was a
well: an ordinary-looking well with a grating over the top. "It's a
well," I summarised, leaning over it, "but why do they say it speaks?"
I found out almost as soon
as I'd asked (well, maybe 0.5s later). The words I'd spoken echoed
back from the depths, loud and remarkably clear -- as clear as a well,
I mean bell. "Er, this well's rather deep," I said, twice.
We found the tiniest pebble
we could and dropped it through the grating.
And waited.
We'd almost begun turning
round to pick up another one when we heard it -- BLOPP! [WAV file
coming soon] -- some seconds later.
"What a value well!" said
Stu, "these are by far the best echoes I've ever heard! I need some
echo sounds for work and these are better than any synthesised echo.
We must come back here before the end of the holiday, and record some
onto MiniDisc." Not only that, I thought, we could measure from the
samples exactly how long the echoes took, and find out how deep the
well is.
After lunch we set off to
buy some wine. Outside Vendôme we stopped at a large building by the
side of a country lane: a sign announced Cave Cooperative du
Vendômois: Ouvert Open Geöffnen. Despite this, the doors looked
resolutely shuttered and locked, and there was only one other car in
the car park: an old and battered 2CV driven by an old and battered
Frenchman.
We went up to the doors and
discovered that it wasn't open on Sundays at all. Turning to go back
to the cars, though, we were approached by the elderly Frenchman, who
gave vent to a piece of French so rapid and murmury that only Ian
caught any of it. "Ah," said Ian, "this blokey's actually a wine
grower, and he says they don't usually open on Sunday
afternoons until about 3pm."
It was quarter to three.
"Right," said Stu. "Let's go trainspotting."
This was one of Stu's tales
from his previous holidays in France: how one day he and Ian had got
totally wrecked on the local wine and gone to see trains going past
far too fast at Vendôme's TGV station. Rather reluctantly, Jen and I
agreed to go and repeat this experience sober.
We were just approaching
Vendôme station when we saw a long silver train going far too fast
over a bridge some way ahead. "Oh no!" we thought, "it'll be an hour
'til the next one." For some reason, probably connected with who was
driving, we decided to go and wait at the station for the next one
anyway.
The station all looked brand
new and was perfectly clean. It was also perfectly empty, not least
because the next train wasn't due to stop there for four hours.
"Plenty go past that don't stop," assured Stu. We climbed to the long,
long platforms and sat and waited, some of us still much less sure
than others that it was a good idea.
Within five minutes, "What's
that noise?" had become a common topic of conversation; most noises
though were just distant lorries. One, we'd already dismissed as a
distant lorry before we heard the rails starting to hiss.
We leapt out of the shelter
and stared down the track: within seconds it was upon us. Doing, said
Stu, 200mph, it went past us in under a second, barrelling on towards
Paris -- only 42 minutes away according to the many
come-and-live-here-and-commute signs which surrounded Vendôme (I
couldn't really see why they wanted to encourage that sort of
behaviour, but perhaps in France even the commuters are cool). I
glimpsed dimly why Stu uses the simile it goes like a train
to mean it goes very fast indeed...
We hadn't trudged
triumphantly even as far as the exit from the platform before, to our
surprise, murmur-hiss-roar-hurtle another one came past going
the other way.
Afterwards we went back to
the Cave Cooperative. The elderly viniculteur
was inside having a cheery conversation with a younger man. "He's
sorry it was shut earlier on," translated Ian, "but he'd had too much
wine for lunch, and had a bit of a sleep."
| | On the back wall of the Cave Coop were these
petrol-pump affairs -- I didn't believe it at first but Stu assured me
that they really do sell their wine draught, through little meters
that charge you by the litre. And not just the toilet stuff, either:
if you pay 15F per litre instead of 9F you can get very drinkable
stuff indeed. 15F is about £2 per litre -- say £1.45 ($2) per
bottle.
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We tried a couple of reds and
the local gris, which turned out to be rosé. The gris was a
bit grim, but the red (Cuvée St Georges, Coteaux du Vendômois
1993) was a good quaffer so we bought six bottles each. We also
bought a 10-litre box of 1995 red for drinking on the holiday.
"Coteaux du Vendômois isn't an AOC," said Stu, "but that's not because
it's always awful, just because it's very variable. That 1993 was the
business though."
After having found a very
fine well, seen three TGVs and bought some superb wine, we were in the
mood for a celebration when we returned to Alf's.
"Let's see: we could put
some coffee on," said Stu, "or ... or ... or we could have a nice
cup of tea." I raised my head expectantly at that. "Ah, I'm
talking Hartley language now, I see, mentioning cups of tea.
I suppose this must be the longest you've gone in your life without a
cup of tea."
"Well, there was the time I
went to America..."
We had tea.
 All Rites
Reversed -- Copy What You Like
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