Tag Archives: chasselas

Tuesday 26th June 2018 – I DON’T KNOW …

… what happened today, but at about 16:30 this afternoon despite having been on the road for about 5 hours, I’d covered just 190 kilometres.

I’d started bright and early too, being up long before the alarm went off, thanks to whoever it was who decided to make a loud noise at 05:00.

When Jacqueline awoke, she baked some bread which was delicious and we had breakfast – home-made bread with home-made cherry jam. And chatted for a while too, but at 10:30 I hit the road. There’s a lot to do.

chateau de chasselas macon franceFirst stop was the Chateau de Chasselas, well-known to all Monty Python fans of course.

Last time that I was here I’d bought a dozen bottles of wine to give as gifts. There are still plenty left but as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I can’t get at them. So I need some more.

And it was quite a hike to get there too as they were resurfacing the driveway and we had to go the long way round.

But this was just one more unnecessary expense. This “relying on friends to return favours” is costing me an arm and a leg. Far cheaper to pay for everything professionally than to go through what I’m going through right now.

milamant café chasselas franceThat building there on the corner used to be the village café of Chasselas.

Jean-Marc’s grandmother was the owner of the place back in 1970 and this is where I stayed for part of the time that I was here back then.

Of course, it didn’t look like that then. It had much more charm back in those days.

I headed into Macon because I had noticed diesel at €1:39 a litre last night, and Caliburn could do with a drink. And from there I headed off through the centre of the town and across the Saone.

And I don’t recognise a thing about Macon these days. I’d be totally lost wandering around there today, it’s changed that much.

The road out was uneventful, but quite slow behind all of these grockles in their mobile homes. And also due to the multitude of roadworks and diversions that interrupted everything. Not to mention The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav who took me on the scenic route through Bourg-en-Bresse.

But at Lons-le-Saunier it all went horribly wrong. Too busy trying to beat a long line of lorries across a roundabout I must have missed my turning and ended up on a road that I’ve never travelled before.

It took me deep into the Jura Mountains and right over the top of a series of mountain passes, at one of which I stopped to make lunch.

lake geneva noyon switzerland june juin 2018We crossed into Switzerland at a frontier post that I never knew existed and round another mountain pass that presented me with this beautiful view of Lake Geneva and what I was expecting to be Lausanne.

And I would certainly have known if I had seen this view before because this really was so stunning. I joined another pile of grockles busily photographing the scene.

But it wasn’t Lausanne at all as I found out as I dropped down to the lake, but Noyon, home of UEFA.

And I couldn’t remember exactly where Noyon was, so I guessed, guessed wrong, and ended up going about half an hour in the wrong direction before I realised.

lake geneva lausanne switzerland june juin 2018So back into Noyon and back out the other side, in plenty of time to hit the 17:00 rush-hour queue at Lausanne, where I could leisurely take photos out of Caliburn’s window while we waited in traffic jams.

I’d been feeling quite ill for the last couple of hours and had been wishing that I could stop. But once I got beyond Lausanne I found my second wind.

Here I could put my foot down and I began to eat up the miles. And it was amazing just how quickly and how far we managed to move.

gasthof sternen koppigen switzerland june juin 2018But another major road-works and diversion meant that there was no time to reach my favourite motel opposite IKEA on the outskirts of Zurich so I pulled up at a guesthouse in a small town off the beaten track.

Switzerland is frightfully expensive so having negotiated a price of €60 cash (I didn’t have any Swiss money – that’s something else stuck back in Virlet) I wasn’t expecting much.

And it’s just as well, because I didn’t get it. This place would have been fine 50 years ago, but they might have changed the carpets and the electrical wiring.

For tea tonight I have a tin of potatoes, a tin of mixed veg, a tin of lentils, some gravy browning and a slow cooker. and furthermore I managed to make it plug in (I forgot about Swiss plugs, didn’t I?) And it was all very delicious too.

I ended the night with a shower, and now I’m having another early night.

It’s been another long day.

Tuesday 19th August 2014 – WELL I’LL BE …

Yes, absolutely!

Just about to go to fetch some cable trunking out of Caliburn this afternoon when a big red Honda motorcycle pulled up just outside here. A lady descended from the rear and smiled at me, which was a surprise – not something that happens every day – and then the driver came over, shook me warmly by the hand (which was also a surprise – regular readers of this rubbish will remember that most people who come here usually shake me warmly by the throat) and said “Jean-Marc”.

Well I am actually Eric, as most of you realise, but it turns out that the motorcycle rider was called Jean-Marc.

You may remember that several weeks ago on the way back from Munich, I called off at a village called Chasselas, near Macon, a village where I had stayed with a French family in my mid-teens. And now Jean-Marc, the son of the family, had come over to repay the compliment.

Yes, it’s totally astonishing. It’s 44 years since we have seen each other. And it was totally unexpected and I wasn’t in the least prepared, with stuff all over the place here. Good job that it was sunny so that we could sit outside. If it were raining, it would have been very embarrassing.

And sunny too – that’s about three days now that we’ve had some sun and I’ve had hot water. Too late to do much about it now – Jean-Marc was telling me that the grape-harvest in Macon will be a total disaster this year.

But this place is even more of a mess than usual. There’s stuff all over the place while I’m working out what to pack to take with me. And I also forgot to charge up the video camera so I had to do that as well.

I’ve also been trying to download off an old dictaphone some soundbytes – one of a Canadian diesel locomotive and and the other about a peal of bells from a Canadian church. But for some unknown reason, the lead that I have to connect the dictaphone to the computer isn’t picking up the sound. I’ll have to look further into this.

After Jean-Marc and his girlfirend left, I still had time to go up onto the scaffolding and throw piles of stuff off the top. That seems to be the usual practice these days and I was up and down the ladder for most of the evening.

But now, I have outside lights underneath the eaves to light up where I usually fall over everything when I’m out after dark. And they work too, much to my (and everyone else’s surprise). And all of the cables are in trunking made from 32mm water pipe and it all looks quite tidy, which doesn’t ‘arf make a change around here.

And no gardening today as I promised?

No, because Rosemary telephoned me to say that she might be round on Thursday. We can pull up the onions and everything else then.

Saturday 5th July 2014 – WHAT A NIGHT

I had something of a disturbed night last night – tossing and turning and trying to get comfortable for much of it. Probably the torrential rain pounding off Caliburn’s roof had much to do with this because there was plenty of that during the night.

Mind you, I wasn’t here for much of it. I was with the daughter of a woman who was at the University where I studied and I was persuading her to elope with me. We ended up fleeing up to Canada, Montreal in fact and I was persuading this girl that we would be fine there. Estate Agents worked on commission from the owners and once they knew what kind of property we were after and what our budget was, they would move heaven and earth to find us somewhere.

We were with Darren and Rachel and at least three other people and telling this agent what we wanted. I explained that we were not expecting to find somewhere at Astoria (did I mean Anjou, my favourite suburb of Montreal?) or in another suburb the name of which I can’t remember but we didn’t want an inner city place and we needed space to park a few cars.

I took this girl on a tour of the suburbs, some of them quite expensive, and I remember our discussion being punctuated by me saying “ohh look, there’s a Ford Consul” and that kind of thing.

So having dealt with these issues I finally managed to wake up and make myself a coffee. Then I hit the road.

camion willeme lorry franceAt least, just as far as Nantua, when a most unusual lorry stopped me in my tracks. A Willeme it is, a marque that I have never heard of before.

The company began just after World War I when a young man bought a job lot of spare parts for American wartime lorries, with the aim of selling them to people who had acquired the wartime lorries. From there he went on to reconditioning the vehicles and then to build his own heavy lorries and tractors for articulated units.

However the company didn’t last all that long. Despite the reputation that his vehicles had for reliability and strength (there was even a tractor unit that could pull 1000 tonnes), the company disappeared in the late 1960s.


I had a pleasant drive through the showers and ended up in Macon. That has a significance for me because in 1970 when I was 16 I spent a summer there as a guest in a French family.

While I was having had a good look around in Macon, I noticed a sign for “Chasselas”. Never mind the “Chateau de Chasselas, hey Josiah?” of the for Yorkshiremen in a Monty Python sketch, Chasselas is a real place and there is a real chateau there with a vinyard and it produces high-quality white wines. And if you want to know how I know, the answer to this is that in 1970 when I was at Macon, I spent a lot of time at the village bar at Chasselas, the home of the aunt of the family with whom I stayed.

pouilly fuisse saone et loire franceThe road up to Chasselas passes through some interesting, if not famous countryside, especially if you are connoisseur of grands crus, and also if you know your wine very well.

Just down there are two villages, once called Pouilly and the other called Fuissé and some of the best white wine in the world comes from there, produced from the grapes that you see in the foreground. Way over in the background is the valley of the Saone and the town of Macon.

village bar cafe chasselas milamant saone et loire franceWe’d been to Chasselas, Nerina and I, in 1992 when we went to the south of France in the old Ford Fiasco. The old bar was still there then but it had been converted into a kind of shop, and I forgot to take a photo of it. Seeing as how I was within about 15kms of the place today, off I went.

It’s now a private house as you can see, and there seems to be a little money about the place. And here’s a surprising thing. A woman walking down the road looked as if she might know a thing or two about the old bar and to my complete and utter surprise sje turned out to be the daughter of the owner of the bar. She was about 12 when I was there and I remember her having a terrible crush on me (although I can’t think why). I’m astonished as to how small the world is these days.

So having caught up on old times I went off to the Chateau and disturbed them at lunch in order to buy a crate of Chateau de Chasselas to share amongst my friends. Yes, it’s something of a myth to say that you can never disturb a Frenchman at his lunch – this guy was keen enough to take my money. We also talked about the rain last night. They had had a hailstorm here and much of the harvest was ruined.

rock of solutre roche de solutre saone et loire franceNot too far from Chasselas is another place of interest. This is La Roche de Solutre – the Rock of Solutre and incredible though it may seem, I’ve climbed that. Or, at least, I did when I was 16. I don’t know what must have come over me but I do recall being with a bunch of French youths at the time so I didn’t want to let the side down, I suppose.

The story goes that prehistoric man used to herd wild beasts up to the top and push them over the top as a way of killing them to collect the meat. The fact that heaps and heaps of prehistoric animal bones have been found at the foot of the drop is thr reason why this theory has been advanced.

So after that I headed for home via the supermarket at Paray le Monial where I did my week’s shopping.

And here I am. And here I’ll stay – for the next few weeks at least.