Ouvrir la Creativite

As regular readers with know i have been lacking the blog-writing spark recently. The same has also applied to my photography. I haven't taken many photographs in the last six months. I haven't done anything with those I have taken, bar the few posted in here, and I haven't known why. Phases, lack of inspiration, other things taking your attention, call it what you will. I don't want to force what will come naturally given time. Maybe I have been being all scientific and not needing my arty side... or the art is focused on learning a language. Je ne sais pas!

Today there was a spark of life, wandering along the quayside this morning I spotted several potential 'kodak-moments' to coin a strawberry (frais, phrase....!) from a friend. Not having my camera with me I could do little at the time, but had the opportunity to come back later and with a little pushing decided to head back into town after lunch and see if anything caught my eye. It wasn't going to cost me anything other than time and was worth a wander.

Cathedral major, the sight greeting everyone entering the docks, but not the grandest cathedral in the city

I have wondered if the light in Marseille, being very bright, is putting me off taking photos. Again I don't know, but I decided today to experiment with black and white for a bit. Normally I am a take-it-in-colour-and-I-can-make-it-B&W-later-if-I-want sort of person, but today I didn't care. A few of my images from today should accompany this post. After a while the sun was dropping in the sky and there were a few clouds about and I started taking a few more colour pictures interspersed with the black and white. All in all nothing special, but better than I have been doing and I was quite enjoying being out in the golden hour by the end.

What have you done to my city?

Three statues inside the main arch of Cathedral major

Finally the Mistral is blowing strongly at the moment, preventing the planning diving, so I may have a poddle (pottering-wandering-toddle) tomorrow and see if i can find some moody seas and pretty scenes. Maybe the spark is back for a bit. If I can just shift the backlog of images too.....

French Food continued

As you may know in my move to France I have been exploring aspects of the culture and the nature of food that is available. One of these ways has been to indulge my love of all things dairy and sample some of the available cheeses. When faced with a considerable choice it is hard to know where to begin, but well some methods just work rather nicely. In my case at present I am picking up one or two cheeses a week that are on offer or a block of it is reduced. One could argue that this means the cheese won't be at its best, but then there is always a risk that I won't like said cheese and so I'd also be wasting money. In this way I waste less.

Reportedly the cheese that gets exported from France must have a certain level of pasteurisation to normalise it. This has an impact on its flavour, but in France some cheeses are not pasteurised. Equally the level of mould on a cheese seems to be part of its character and not all moulds actually taste 'bad'. So the quote of the day has to be that "French cheeses only become good when they start to move by themselves". This was in response to a variety of Brie with which I had populated my sandwich... I could smell it through the plastic bag and the waft as I ate it worked its way across the office. The taste was fantastic, but very 'unBritish'!

Cheeses of note: (updated Nov 2011)
Goats cheeses (chevre) are popular down here and are usually very tasty. There is one particular one from the Carmargue region which starts very pungent and then grows a skin after two weeks and changes flavour, assuming you have tolerated it that long!

Emmenthal - a generally boring cheese to just eat, slightly rubbery, but very popular as a grated cheese for cooking and can be bought in huge quantities

Brie - Not just one type of Brie but a whole family of soft cheeses from tasty to very tasty and mellow to pungent. Brie de Maubert appears to be particularly fine ;)

Comte - medium Cheddar with a little extra

Reblochon - THE cheese for Tartiflette, see other post. Slightly salty, sticky and meltable.

Boursin - Creamy and tasty, for spreading on bread

Camembert - actually a type of Brie, this needs a little time to mature into a real stinker. Strong flavour and very good on stuffed mushrooms if you have little nublettes left.

Colomniers - similar to Camembert, not quite as strong flavoured.

Munster/St Auban - Sticky outer shell, matured for several months. Pungent sticky cheese that is quite salty. Not a strong flavour despite its smell.

Anyway I expect I shall return and add further varieties to this as and when I discover them. I frequently return to the Brie and Goats cheese areas.

The cheese course is also a rather good invention and comes either before or after dessert as a little enjoyment. The end of a baguette or a few little biscuits and a choice of tasty morsels is really a lovely way to end a meal. Not every day of course, but I appreciate it all the more when I do.

Well, A beintot and I shall go back to my slab of Frangipane I am munching this evening. :)

Concurrent thinking?

What drives the need to blog? Why blog? What is your reason for blogging or reading blogs?

I suspect that the requirement comes from a need to record things, to write them down, to share. So does that go hand in hand with writing a diary or take the place of it? For me arriving in Marseille was a huge step and the need to write, to record and to to tell people about what I was doing was there. The result was both a diary and multiple blog posts. So why now when I am becoming more settled has the diary dried up and the posts died away? Do I not need to tell people about what I am doing any more? or are there other outlets? Here I seem to be talking to friends online and on the telephone more often. I don't know if this has gone hand in hand with the decline, but this is possible. Just as likely though, is that I have relaxed and so the need for an outlet is not there any more..

Despite the apparent relaxation I am not just drifting along, oh no! In the past week I have undertaken six dives in the sea, my first in France. I have gone deeper than I have ever been, been onto my first wreck (and inside it!), past some stunning scenery (and this is after diving in the Red Sea earlier in the year) and seen my first Seahorse in the wild. Little Nudibranches (search for images to see why!) are getting my attention and the more time I spend down there the more I want to do more! The result is that I am eulogising into my dive log and telling people about what I have been seeing, in French and in English, the former to a certain extent! But they haven't yielded diary entries and this blog is the first for a while.

The mind is a strange thing and inexplicable.

And with that I shall depart trailing a line of ascending bubbles as I head to the next beautiful dive site for another 73 centimes (64p)/minute dive. Its worth it, come and join me!

Gelatinous sampling

As many of you will know I have the luck, or possibly the bad luck(!). to study jellyfish. Among my studies today I came across a quote which I couldn't leave hidden away in the article. I thought it might describe some of the fun and challenges that I go through to find out more about my chosen organisms.

"As Richard Harbison is fond of stating, sampling with plankton nets is akin to flying over London with a grappling hook. You might pick up hats and umbrellas and a few tree branches, but you can only speculate as to where hats belong, and what umbrellas are good for."
Haddock, 2004, A golden age of gelata: past and future research on planktonic ctenophores and cnidarians. Hydrobiologia 530/531: 549-556.

As you might expect, much of my practical research into jellies has been with the ubiquitous plankton net. It is used for its convenience, and often because we are meant to be sampling something more suited to the net, but you are always left scratching your head and wondering what else was in the water and avoided the net.

I hope your work is just as enjoyable as mine and has a smaller element of chance associated with it!
Bonne Chance!

Marseille in only two photos

Windsurfers racing around on a rough day at the beach in Marseille

I've been trying to figure out how to portray Marseille in only a couple of photographs. I don't think I have achieved it yet, but here are two from a wander today for your perusal. Being Bastille Day plenty of people were out and about, hence the proliferation of windsurfers on the water.

Transport, Regeneration and History. Marseille in one picture....

Moving House

Something I have never seen before - a lift from a lorry to a balcony to facilitate removing all the possessions from a n apartment. Genius!

A sign of the times??

No Elephants on the beach, La Ciotat, Provence, France 10/7/11

Is this a sign of our times and the problems people have with weight??
Or simply someone having fun where there was once a dog.
NB. the circus was in the local town and there was a performance of clowns tonight....