Il pleut durant 6 semaines
According to my Almanac, the saying goes, If it rains on Sainte Madeleine (22 July – and it did), it will continue to rain for 6 weeks.
Not so catchy in English, but 6 weeks of rain when you were just getting into summer is never a catchy topic. Most people are resigning themselves to the fact that the 3 weeks of heatwave summer we had back in July is all that summer had to offer.
It’s been a busy month, my mother visited the north for the first time in mid August so that was an excuse to tour around a little – including a trip to the very medieval/modern Dutch style city of Ghent in Northern Belgium. That is to say; castles, ye olde Flemish architecture and omnipresent trams. It felt further away from France than the 70km trip it is from Lille.
We also finally made the effort to visit the museum of art and industry in the Lille-metropole suburb of Roubaix, somewhere that’s been on my to-do list for a while. Formerly a municipal pool designed in an extravagant art deco style, it’s since been transformed into a museum that showcases work from the general period (1920s to 1940s) as well as textiles. Most of the original structure has been left intact, including the old shower cubicles and changing rooms. And the former swimming pool is now dominated by a long shallow basin which shows off the stunning reflection of the dual stained glass semicircular windows at each end to great effect. It’s a stunning must-see of art and architecture tucked away in one of the city’s less interesting suburbs.
Otherwise, it’s the same old routine. I take my blue regional train out to work every morning, passing by numerous little garden allotments, watching the months crops change – pumpkins are starting to make an appearance, tomatoes are still ripening despite the lack of summer warmth. The local produce markets are full of the small producer stalls and I’ve been enjoying new potatoes, freshly picked green beans – so fresh that they squeak a little in your mouth when you eat them. I haven’t eaten beans that fresh since I was a kid and my grandad would give us his surplus. I decided to expand my mushroom repertoire last week and bought a healthy handful of girolles, because I thought the price per 100g was the price per kilo. Those mushrooms better add a couple of years onto my life at that price.
Leave a Reply