(Reuters) – In the 18th century, one Richard Hennessy fled his native County Cork in Ireland to serve in the armies of Louis XV of France before settling in the southwestern town of Cognac.

Once the alarums of battle had faded, he shipped a few barrels of the local tipple home. The rest is history and the Cognac house still bearing the Hennessy name is a world leader.

For visitors to the region, discovering the secrets of its famous double-distilled spirit aged in oak casks is essential to the Cognac experience, but there are other charms.

Following are some tips from a correspondent with local knowledge.

DAY ONE

From Paris, Cognac is a roughly three-hour train journey via Angouleme, around 20 miles from Cognac. You might want to hire a car either from Angouleme, to cut out the slow-train section, or on arrival in Cognac.

From Cognac station, it’s a brisk walk or a short drive to the old town centre.

10:30 a.m. – Drop off your bags and restore yourself with a coffee and perhaps a “pain au chocolate”, known as a “chocolatine” in the Cognacais strain of French.

The Cognacais themselves are affectionately nicknamed cagouillards after the juicy snails that patrol the vineyards.

The main square Place Francois I, named after the French Renaissance king born in Cognac, has a cluster of cafes. It also houses the grand, newly restored Hotel Francois I and a statue of the mighty monarch on horseback.

11 a.m. – Walk down the cobbled streets to the sleepy Charente, the river once used to ship Cognac. Some of the main cognac houses, Hennessy included, line the banks.

Take your pick of which one or ones you would like to visit.

Hennessy has a state-of-the-art visitor centre and throws in a short boat trip, Remy Martin offers a train ride and Otard is housed in the chateau, where Francois I was born at the end of the 15th-century.

All give seductive accounts of the rich history and romance woven around one of France’s most prized products.

France’s luxury conglomerates now dominate ownership, but generations after they were founded, members of the original families still work in the cognac houses and are proud, aristocratic ambassadors of their brands.

via Travel Postcard: 48 hours in and around Cognac, France | Reuters.

Strange Random Cognac Quote:

“The great thing about making cognac is that it teaches you above everything else to wait-man proposes, but time and God and the seasons have got to be on your side.” – Jean Monnet

Related articles

• 1795 Cognac for sale in world’s most valuable drinks collection (telegraph.co.uk)
• New French whiskey adds to that nation’s scope (timesunion.com)
• What Makes A Gourmet Food Store Great? Tasting Cognac Makes It Easy. (yellowflat.wordpress.com)
• French Ambassador Celebrates Cognac (politics.usnews.com)
• Juhles, Local Gourmet Shopping Experience on rue Du Faubourg-Saint-Denis (eveinparis.wordpress.com)
• Cognac Masterclass Live WebTV Show (spittoon.biz)
• Beyond Wine and Beer: 8 Famous Local Drinks to Taste Around the World (bootsnall.com)
• Champagne Cocktail Ideas & Holiday Champagne Cocktail | Pottery Barn (potterybarn.com)
• Why is there cognac in my Sazerac? (cold-glass.com)

To add drama and movement to a photograph, you need a tripod, a shutter release, a big fat f/stop, say greater than f/16 and a time value of around a second or more. And in the case of these three images, you and your model need to be able to count to three! Why? Well…you need to know when she’s gonna start her movement and she needs to know when you’re press the shutter release and she can close her pose.  Simples!

During our workshops and photography courses at Studio Lavalette here in France, I’ll also be demonstrating how to use studio lighting and long exposures to capture that drama of movement.

Take a peak at our course dates and availability for next year, 2013?

In Time - 1

In Time - 2

In Time - 3

This photo  est available in print or under license:
to know our prices and  conditions : contact

Photo copyright Elisabeth Hurtel. All rights reserves

Photos from France on our english website : www.south-images.com

This blue door and handle, (shot near our media centre for photography holidays in France), is the antithesis of the ‘shiny-new’ as it perfectly describes the aging process, or rather the passing of time.   It’s current state of repair, or disrepair, is not what the maker originally intended, as time and the elements have taken its toll.

A photograph of a brand new door and window would look like an advert for a building supplier, as there’s no narrative, whereas this has a separate poetry and tells quite a different story.  I’ve included the “before” to show you that that story is there even before I started to edit it.

Blue Door and Handle - Before

Blue Door and Handle - After

Step 1 – this is the original photo, shot with a 50mm prime Canon lens using a single Speedlite, mounted in a softbox and placed high and to the left. I am also using my secret light diffuser!  If you want to know more, you’ll have to attend one of my photography courses in France at Studio Lavalette!

Step 1

Step 2 – My secret light diffuser has the habit of scrunching-up the histogram, so using a Curves Adjustment Layer I’ve fixed it and it looked like this:

Step 2

Step 3 – Now, using Silver Efx Pro (a Photoshop plug-in) I converted it to monochrome plus an orange filter and with a sepia tone:

Step 3

Step 4 – Here I’ve applied another Curves Adjustment Layer, just to turn-down the sepia effect so that it’s almost, but not quite, a black and white image:

Step 4

Step 5 – In this step I’ve applied an olive/green layer and blended using the Soft Light mode at 15% – it’s hardly visible but it is a very subtle change from Step 4, above:

Step 5

Step 6 – In this final Step, I’ve removed, what I consider to be, the untidy light on her hair.  This has the rather strange effect of now making all her hair look flat and two dimensional, yet the face tells you otherwise….if you follow my drift.  Anyways, here’s the final image:

Step 6

And that’s that really!

We also had lunch there and there is a review of the establishment, Cafe du Commerce, in the page on Restaurant reviews.

The reason it is called Rochefoucauld is because in 980 someone called Fucaldus decided to build a castle on a large rock which was close to the river Tardoire. This he made from timber. Fucaldus or Foucaulds was the younger brother of the Viscount of Limoges and according to Wikipedia, which is not 100% reliable, he was a direct descendant of Charlemagne. In fact it says that the Rochefoucauld family is only one of four French families with a direct lineage to Charlemagne. However somewhere else on the internet I read that by five generations after Charlemagne no direct descendants existed. Apparently it is  possible for every European to be able to trace some line back to Charlemagne. This is true of every famous person if they are far enough back in time so a descendant of William the Conqueror or The Venerable Bede, ( maybe not, he was a monk so no rumpy pumpy for him) or Queen Boudicca - whoever you like can be your ancestor.    It’s a bit like the concept that every breath of air you breathe in will have some molecules of oxygen which were in Hitler’s last breath, or Marylin Monroe’s last breath or whoever you like. It could be Hussain Bolt’s first breath after he won the 100 meters at the last Olympics. Apparently the athletes do not breateh for the 10 seconds it takes to run the race.

Anyway, I digress….quite a lot. Back to the Rochefoucaulds as they became known. Fucaldus’ son replaced the wooden castle  in the 11th century  with a stone structure and it was added to at intervals throughout history always remaining in the Rochefoucauld family.

Francois Le Rochefoucauld also known as Francois VI (1613-1680) was the most famous  as he was a writer and famous for his maxims of which he wrote many and they are much admired. One I selected is “There are few virtuous women who are not tired of their part”

In the 1960′s part of the central keep or donjon collapsed. It is supposed to be being repaired but I did not see much evidence of that when I visited. Part of the castle is still occupied, I believe by Rochefoucaulds, part is a Chambre d’Hote and some is open to the public allegedly open every day of the year but not Tuesdays. See their website

Had  a contact from a lady who lives in Rochefoucauld and has a make up salon which you might like to investigate. Her web site is http://www.careyhawkinsmakeup.com/

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

For posts on other villages and towns in Poitou-Charentes click here.

You book and pay $60 up front and for that you get a Navajo Indian who drives you out to the canyon in a truck acts as your guide. Well, you don’t really need a “guide” as the canyon is more or less in a straight line, but a) you do need a driver, b) someone to co-ordinate with the other tour parties and c) someone who can hide behind a rock and chuck the fine sand up into the shafts of sunlight! See the first photo below.

The canyon has been formed by rainwater flowing through it. There’s something like a 20mile canal at one end of the canyon and when the rains do fall, (and it really really rains), water hurtles through it carving these wonderful shapes out of the canyon walls.

Antelope Canyon - I

Antelope Canyon - II

Antelope Canyon - III

Antelope Canyon - IV

In the parking lot there’s a sign that says, weather conditions can change very rapidly, so if you see lighting or hear thunder get back to your car: and fast!  It was a sunny afternoon, so I started the 1.5mile trek with camera and tripod. With about half a mile to go I heard thunder behind me.  I looked back to see the sky darkening, but it was darkening very quickly.   I made the correct decision to go back.

Well…as I shut the car door the heavens erupted and dust flew all around me. The hire car literally shook and rocked from side to side. Never one to miss a photo opportunity, I positioned the car at various angles and jammed the camera in the bit between doorpost and the window and took over 70 pictures.

These six photographs below tell the story of the final build-up, the main part of the storm and the sky after it passed. In all it took about 90minutes from start to finish – quite an extraordinary event.

As I had to leave early the next day, I never got to shoot Horseshoe Bend….!

Dust Storm at Horseshoe Bend - I

Dust Storm at Horseshoe Bend - II

Dust Storm at Horseshoe Bend - III

Dust Storm at Horseshoe Bend - IV

Dust Storm at Horseshoe Bend - IV

Dust Storm at Horseshoe Bend - VI

Why don’t they have them in the UK?  The best you get are those ghastly wooden trestle tables with bird poo and lichen stuck to them, dumped round the back of the pub beside the other detritus, in what the landlord rather poetically calls his “beer garden”.  Beer, yes; garden, no – well, not with uncut grass that’s intermingled with nettles and thistles.

And having found a table, you then get splinters from the cheap pieces of wood used to make the darn things or worse, there’s chewing gum underneath the table top – don’t you love it when the gum gets stuck to your trousers.  There’s also that pervasive smell of creosote.   You also don’t get table service from a nattily-dressed waiter with a white pinny and a waistcoat with seemingly hundreds of pockets  – no, you have to stand in line inside and if you’re in luck, the bartender might grudgingly offer you a filthy tray to take your drinks outside.  Then the wasps arrive….

No, give me a cane chair and a small round table on the pavement in Ribérac. and I’m sold.

If only the French sold cask conditioned ales, now that would be heaven!

1 Table and 2 Chairs, Riberac, Dordogne.

Me:      Do you use Photoshop?

She:     Yes, use it all the time

Me:      What’s its best feature?

She:     The crop tool  – I use Photoshop for the crop tool.

Me:      What about the layers and ….

She:     I only use the crop tool

Me:      …”only”?….bbbbut it has many other features…

She:     It’s simply the best crop tool around.

Me:      …have you tried usi…

She:     I like the way the bit you’re cropping goes grey before you accept the crop.

Me:      …but there’s a stack of other funct…

She:     Look, it’s the best crop tool and that’s what I use Photoshop for.

Me:      …so are you saying you paid six hundred quid for a crop tool?

She:     Yes and let me tell you, young man, it’s the best crop tool by far.

Then she walked off.

Well dear blogster, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Incroyable – as they say round these parts.

This Step-by-Step Guide might read a bit like the conversation above, but a) I wouldn’t shell-out £600 for piece of software that only offered one feature; and b) I do know how to use all the functions that Photoshop has to offer  However…the Spot Healing Brush Tool, to give it its proper title, is bloody wonderful and as I’ll show here, it got me out of a serious piece of bother for this picture that I wanted to include in my, (successful), RPS Licentiate submission.

Step 1 – Here’s the original photograph of Reckless that I shot in Amble, (Northumberland), in September last year.   It’s got all the ingredients I was looking for.  The rope leads the eye in: there’s the sweeping hull: totally brilliant name for the boat: two yachts under the rope in the middle distance: lots of puffy white clouds: and the landscape is about one-third up the frame etc.

The only fly in the soup of goodies, is the carcass of the blue and white dinghy, bottom right.  It leads the eye straight out of the shot. Not good.

Reckless - 1

Step 2 – I reached for the Clone Stamp Tool and made a big mess – my edits looked too obviously cloned.  I then tried the Spot Healing Brush and set the Brush size to about 275, placed it over the wretched dinghy and clicked.   It didn’t work the first time as the Brush cut into the shoreline; the second time it cloned-in the buoy from the adjoining boat (under the rope); but…several goes later it worked, perfectly….as you can see below.

Gawd bless the Spot Healing Brush.  For the photographer it is one of Photoshop’s more useful tools and I use it more than any other tool it has to offer.  But I’d not pay £600 for just that one single function!

Reckless - 2

Step 3 – Standing back, or rather zooming out, it seemed as if the whole photograph was leaning, ever-so slightly, to the right.  To fix this I simply rotated the image gently to the left using the Transform function. Simples.

Reckless - 3

Step 4 – Using Silver Efx Pro, (a Photoshop plug-in), from those masters of B&W conversion, Nik Software, I turned the photo into a monochrome image I also added a red filter during the conversion process to darken the sky a bit.

Reckless - 4

Step 5 – To end with I used a Level Adjustment Layer, just lighten the overall appearance.

I should point out that when applying for a Licentiate Distinction the RPS Assessors are not looking for anything artsie-fartsie, what they want is a set of 10 technically great photographs, with all the content crisp and sharp.

Reckless - 5

Now there’s nothing wrong with a multi-faith society, it’s what makes the world go round, or not, but it is slightly strange to see a church, let alone a Russian Orthodox one, nestled in the French countryside all by itself.  And that’s the really odd thing, it’s totally alone: there’s no obvious sense of being a part of anything or anybody.  It’s as if it has landed from space and might take off and leave at any moment.

I need to investigate it’s history and report back, in the meantime, here’s three pictures of what Orthodox-World.org calls, Our Lady of Korsun, Grassac.

Our Lady of Korsun - 1

Our Lady of Korsun - 2

Our Lady of Korsun -3

You are allowed to mix black and white prints with colour, so for this year’s entries I’ve sent in, two B&W and three colour.  The B&W’s (Molly at Sixteen and Solitary Tree – Villebois Lavalette) can be found elsewhere on this website.

The three colour ones, however, use a new method of artwork creation that I’ve been honing away at during the winter months.  They take hours and hours to edit but the final result is, for me at least, very satisfying.  Basically each image comprises at least two photographs that in every case have been shot in and around Studio Lavalette.  The backdrop is a wall and the central narrative is of a town or city.   In the pictures below, there are two of Angoulême, (the bottom two), and one of Saint Emilion, (in the middle of the five images).   The original photo of Saint Emilion is here. If you decide to come on one of our advanced photography courses in France, I’ll show you how to achieve these artistic effects.

The competition closed on 21 March 2012 with judging taking place on 14 and 15 April.  You don’t have to be a member of the RPS If you want to enter their contests, so if you want to have a go follow this link.

Molly at Sixteen

Solitary Tree, Villebois Lavalette

St Emilion

Rooftops, chimneys and aerials - Angoulême

Les Remparts, Angoulême

But in the summer months, as you approach the UK, you can get lucky and see some really exotic sunrises.  You only get a few minutes between the sun peeking over the horizon and blazing sunshine.  At first the the sky turns from black to deep blue; then orange; and lastly a rainbow of colours and white light that are simply spectacular.

I’d like to thank the cabin crew of BA 216, who on 1/2 July 2009,  allowed me to hop from one side of the aircraft to the other, whilst I took a bunch of photographs, (on my knees through the porthole-windows), three of which I’ve included below.

BA 216 - 1

BA 216 - 2

BA 216 - 3

Here’s three photos of the outside of the old barn, (soon to be the multimedia Studio downstairs with accommodation upstairs), that I took yesterday afternoon:

Studio Lavalette - 1

Studio Lavalette - 2

Studio Lavalette - 3

Why? Well in past times and now to an extent they were used to provide squabs. Squabs are young pigeons which are good to eat. Some of the larger houses or chateaux would have very large pigeonniers which would also provide the owner with a source of income. One adult pair of pigeons should produce about 15 squabs a year.  There is a very large pigeonnier at the Chateau d’Aulnay which has 2,000 nest places inside, and thus could produce 30,000 squabs a year. Thats about 600 a week, obviously more than they would need for personal consumption.

At the same time as producing squabs,  they inevitably produce quite a lot of quite rich fertiliser and this was used on the land.

A few pigeonniers were used for communication. The large one at Sauze Vaussais was used by La Poste Royale in days gone by. It is in fact a reconstruction of one that had fallen into disrepair and was moved to its present site in the late 1990′s. The reconstruction was completed in 1999.

If you know the whereabouts of any  pigeonniers in this region please let me know, especially if they are a little bit querky or have a special history.

Frank by Chuck Close - 1

Now there are several things to note here.  Chuck Close is one of the world’s best and leading photo-realistic painters, and Frank may look like a photo, but it is in fact a painting.  But what is even more remarkable is that the portrait is huge.  To give you an idea of the scale, here it is again with an on-looker:

Frank by Chuck Close - 2

To ensure that this is in fact no photograph, you have to get very very close – and I do mean very very close. The giveaway signs are the brushstrokes used for the highlights on Frank’s beard.  It is quite brilliantly executed.

For more on Chuck Close, follow this link.

The underground trip on foot takes about 75 minutes and you walk for about 1.25miles.  At its deepest it is 164 feet below ground and the visitor centre boasts that it is “..the biggest cave in the world..” – well… being in America it would be the biggest, wouldn’t it!

I used a tripod and remote shutter release, (as I was taking long exposures), to shoot 62 photographs of some quite extraordinary sights.  The first photo includes people so you can get some idea of the scale and enormity of the cave.  Whether it is the biggest or not I don’t know, but it is a breathtaking place.  The cave has a number of large pools of water and the fifth/last photograph, (below), shows the reflection of the roof.

Luray Cavern - 1

Luray Cavern - 2

Luray Cavern - 3

Luray Cavern - 4

Luray Cavern - 5

The post card above is of a bridge over the Charente River in Civray, see if you can see any changes by looking at my photo taken in 2011. One obvious one is that there were no railings in 1924.

There are various sources of old postcards.  There is a web site called Bid start and they have hundreds of postcards which you can buy for not too much. I did contact them to check if it was OK to feature a couple of their cards and to link to their site, but no reply, So I assumed they were not too bothered about a few of their cards being copied for this post. They do all show their logo CPAPHIL prominently in the middle of the card.

Other sources on the internet are Ebay and Moodys collectibles

Local markets also normally have one or two traders selling postcards. Beware copies, some traders use a high quality photocopy of the card, so what you are getting is not the genuine article. If it has a stamp with post mark on the back then you can be sure it’s not a copy. You may not be too concerned whether it is a copy or not. However if you want to scan the postcard and enlarge it to use it as a picture on your wall then you will get better results by working from the original.

I had such a crush on Ian McCulloch and his debut solo album Candleland is just amazing. As is the album this is taken from. I love a man with back-combed hair, it is true.

Anyway… Spring has sprung. It’s maybe a little later than last year, since this time last year, my ornamental plum had flowers  on March 1st and yesterday it had its first flowers of 2012 and that’s one of the beauties of having a diary or a blog is seeing what you were up to this time last year. I notice my flower garden did not do so well – combination of repeated trips to the UK in May and then again in July – and because it was so dry. Also, I tried a few packets of seeds, but they were very old and came to nothing.

Evening plum blossom

One of the things I love very much about this life is the renewed life that spring gives you. I just didn’t feel it the same in the UK – mainly because there are still arctic breezes that cut through and stick a knife right in your ribs. Yesterday, I got in the car and it said this:

It sank to 22 degrees, but it was still a bit of a shock to see!

I thought as I drove to my afternoon appointments that all the winter cold is forgiven just for one day like this. I can live with it knowing that the landscape goes from one under snow to one bursting with life in a month. And it is true, winter did give me a time of rest, hibernation and a time to earn a little money indoors.

Yesterday's drive to work...

This is what I came here looking for… proper spring, wide-open countryside, empty roads, greens and blues. You can see why I don’t miss the traffic and the M60 and the M61 and the traffic lights through Bolton and the sitting and the waiting for four turns of the lights to actually move up far enough to get through to the next bit. I miss many, many things about the UK, not least that Bolton feels like home and when I need to retreat, this place still feels like somewhere I’m visiting rather than somewhere I know like the back of my hand.

I think that’s partly to do with the fact that in England, by and large, most of my routes involved six or seven main ways to get there. Even when I worked in Clitheroe and had to drive 30 miles from my house to work across some beautiful landscapes, mostly it was fairly bleak – though I always loved the drive across from Preston to Clitheroe – which is a straight, fast road  (not unlike the ones we have here) that slipped through Pendle Vale in the shadow of Longridge Fell and then Pendle Hill. On a good day, you can see all the way up to the Lake District – and yes, I would have loved to have lived in the Lake District and maybe one day I will be able to buy a house in the Lake District – one day when I am a millionaire. One of my great aunts and her husband had a house in the Lake District – I still remember that house. It was amazing. They live outside Penrith now, and I love it up there too, but it’s not the same as having a house in the shadow of a huge hill.

Beautiful photograph from Geoff Rollinson. Click to visit his gallery

So yes, I miss this. I miss those days when we had training up in Cumbria and I had an overnight stay in Grange-over-Sands or Ullswater. I miss our training days in Ambleside. When I was an English teaching consultant, we often had our meetings up around the lakes. My very first one, fresh out of teaching in Clitheroe, was in Grange. It was May – our meeting started at 10:00 and having been used to setting off at 6:50 to make it to school for 7:30, then teaching all day before rolling in back at my house around 6:30, after all the traffic had gone – it was a complete shock to the system. My predecessor, Mary, who had moved to be an English consultant in another county and was thus at the meeting, had been for a run before the meeting. Two ladies sat drinking tea and reading the paper. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

Whilst I think it’s true that you are probably only appreciated in paid employment for about six months (the time it takes for your bosses to grow accustomed to your efficiency and talent and then just to expect it, before, finally, getting frustrated if you do anything remotely human and non-robotic) I think maybe the same is true of jobs. I did work too hard at that job and invested far too much in it. Maybe I should have been a little lazier and enjoyed it a little more? That morning, I’d set off at 7:00 from Bolton to drive up – most people stayed over the night before. I ate in a Little Chef and they had breakfast in the restaurant. I was far too decent to take £15 for a breakfast from the tax payer. More fool me. I still am like that. There are some people in life from whom the tax man makes money just to support those others. I guess that was me.

Our hotel, that first meeting

So there were times I enjoyed my drive to work. There were times my offices were conducive to creativity. For the rest of those times, I had an office at the end of a dark corridor, or in a musty old building, or an office in an under-stairs cupboard formerly used for cleaning materials. Now I always stop to make sure I appreciate what’s around me – and even in the winter, I have the privilege of always finding beauty around me. I could have stopped in fifty places yesterday just for a little look about and to snap a photograph. Perhaps I should.

Romanesque art : modillon, romanesque church in Charente, France

This photo  est available in print or under license:
to know our prices and  conditions : contact

Photo copyright Elisabeth Hurtel. All rights reserves

Photos from France on our english website : www.south-images.com

A French court Monday found US agriculture giant Monsanto legally responsible for the poisoning of a farmer with one of its herbicides in 2004.

Paul François, a cereal farmer in the southwestern department of Charente “Monsanto is responsible for Paul Francois’ suffering after he inhaled the Lasso product… and must entirely compensate him,” said the judgement from the court in the southeastern city of Lyon.

In 2004, Paul François, a cereal farmer in the southwestern department of Charente, opened the tank of his pulveriser machine. He inhaled fumes of Lasso, a weedkiller manufactured by Monsanto, and fainted.

He was taken to hospital and stopped work for almost a year, reports radio station France Info. He suffers from memory loss and often feels faint.

* * *

Reuters is reporting:

A French court on Monday declared U.S. biotech giant Monsanto guilty of chemical poisoning of a French farmer, a judgment that could lend weight to other health claims against pesticides.

Farmer mixing Lasso, a Monsanto herbicideIn the first such case heard in court in France, grain grower Paul Francois says he suffered neurological problems including memory loss, headaches and stammering after inhaling Monsanto’s Lasso weedkiller in 2004.

He blames the agri-business giant for not providing adequate warnings on the product label.

The ruling was given by a court in Lyon, southeast France, which ordered an expert opinion of Francois’s losses to establish the sum of damages. [...]

“I am alive today, but part of the farming population is going to be sacrificed and is going to die because of this,” Francois, 47, told Reuters.

He and other farmers suffering from illness set up an association last year to make a case that their health problems should be linked to their use of crop protection products.

The agricultural branch of the French social security system says that since 1996, it has gathered farmers’ reports of sickness potentially related to pesticides, with about 200 alerts a year.

Now let’s get after Monsanto HERE IN AMERICA!

Related articles

• Monsanto convicted of chemical poisoning in France over Lasso (thebovine.wordpress.com)
• Monsanto Found Guilty of Chemical Poisoning in France (panokroko.wordpress.com)
• Monsanto found guilty of chemical poisoning in France (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
• Holy Moly! Here’s the Real Reason Rich American Conservatives Hate France! (johnhively.wordpress.com)
• Monsanto Attempts to Lockout Socially Responsible Shareholder at Annual Meeting… (underthelobsterscope.wordpress.com)
• 300,000 Organic Family Farmers in lawsuit against Agribusiness Giant Monsanto (stillisstillmoving.com)
• Transcript of the Organic Farmers vs Monsanto court hearing #GMO lawsuit (themomu.wordpress.com)

Fieldfares and Redwings often come in when the weather is bad. They are after fruit and so if you have any old apples or pears now is the time to scatter them in the garden, they will also be appreciated by the Blackbirds.

Others that could turn up are Firecrests and Goldcrests. The Firecrest is more likely in Poitou-Charentes and is the more stunning of the two. These birds are tiny, smaller even than a wren so you will probably need binoculars to really appreciate them.

You may also see some finches that are not normally around. You should get lots of Chafinches Greenfinches and Goldfinches but the one to look out for now are Bramblings. They look a bit like Chafinches but are more brown and orange in colour.

Painted bit of wall.

I like the logo for the department of Vienne, and having a spare bit of wall my house  I decided to paint it on there.

Nut case you may say, but I think it looks OK.

Recently I sold a three-piece suite on Anglo Info (well worth a look if you have not already come across it) and the chap who bought it, English of course, asked me what that painting was on my wall. When I told him, he replied Oh yes I have seen them signs about but did not know what they meant.  This is true so it has prompted me to write this.

• There are 27 French Regions, 22 are in France and 5 are overseas colonies.
• Our region is Poitou-Charentes…… not Poitou-Charente.
• It is made up of 4 departments Vienne, Deux Sevres, Charente and Charente Maritime.
• Each department has a logo, the one for Deux Sevres has recently been changed.
• There are 96 departments in France and each one has a number.
• Surrounding Poitou-Charentes are 4 regions, Pays De La Loire is to the NW, Centre is to the NE, Limousin is to the E and Aquitaine is to the S. There is nothing to the West because it is the sea.
• The numbers for our departments are Vienne, 86, Deux Sevres, 79, Charente, 16, Charente Maritime, 17.
• The capital of Vienne is Poitiers, Deux Sevres is Niort, Charente is Angouleme and Charente Maritime is La Rochelle.
• The president of Vienne is Claude Bertaud, Deux Sevres is Eric Gautier, Charente is Michel Boutant and Charente Maritime is Dominique Bussereau.
• The President of Poitou-Charentes is Segolene Royal         .

There so now you know.