Walking into the wind

The mistral is blowing. No, not blowing, but howling, wailing, screaming through the rigging we have all around us (the night view below is taken from our apartment). In the loud parts, when the wind builds up speed, the clanking, rapping, tinkling, clanging and clacking of wire and metal sounds like a percussion section going hammer and tongs.

Port Napoleon from the road leading to the beach

The weather started to change yesterday, cloud blowing in from the north and humidity building. We were intending to drive to St Maries de la Mer, in the heart  of the Camargue national park,  but we missed the turning to the car ferry  across the Rhone  (below) and ended up driving alongside the river to Arles on a small road bordered by huge sunflower fields.  Going to town wasn’t a bad thing, not bad at all. I am prone to cabin fever, anywhere really but particularly in marinas.

  

  

It’s not only Avignon which is buzzing with artistes this summer. Every town in Provence seems to have its special festival. Even Martigues, a smallish town a bit east of here, with lovely watery light and several canals (hence the Venice of Provence tag), gets in on the festival act. Nothing much out of the ordinary was happening when we strolled through Martigues last Sunday afternoon, but because this is France, we wandered into a small museum, with a few Impressionist paintings, a startling contemporary exhibition, a few cases of pre-historic shards and vessels…Musee Ziem is dedicated to a prolific and long-lived minor painter called Felix Zeim who,  in the late 19^th century, took it into his head to add a mosque and a minaret to his house in Martigues.  Van Gogh liked the way Ziem painted blue, apparently. 

Tourist in Martigues 

Not quite Venice, but it's a canal

Back in Arles, they are going for music and photography festivals. I loved the way this exhibition  (below) was hung in the street, and the images too. 

There’s a big photo symposium happening in the union building. We loitered for an hour or so in there, and considered the multitude of questions being asked under the heading What Next?, (how the Europeans do love to work an idea down to the bone).  It’s good to focus the mind on what digital photography and the internet are doing and might yet do to and with the medium of Capa, Adams, Cartier Bresson and Kertesz - and Nemeth.

Also in Arles this week there’s a kind of world music festival, Les Suds, happening. I  had expected more people, more singing in the streets, but Arles is probably more sober than Avignon. Next week Bryan Ferry is coming to town (another festival, called Les Escales du Cargo).  I couldn’t work out the on-line rigmarole so we found the Cargo office, and bought paper tickets to Ferry’s show and also to see Angus and Julia Stone, from our part of the world, three nights later. The concerts are in the Antique Theatre which seats only 2500. All going well, and we are making small steps forward most days, we’ll have bought Enki by then. If that's so, we’ll take her cockpit cushions to put between our aged bottoms and the ancient stone terraces built by the Romans.

Enki in limbo

As a postscript, take a look at the beach nearest us, Plage Napoleon.  People drive here from miles away. It’s not quite Bondi, but there’s a lot of sand, and the sea is warm. It’s the backdrop which is so exotic – the gigantic seaport in the Gulf of Fos, which stretches around from Marseille.