The bride's veil

Once upon a time in Corsica there lived a beautiful queen and a wicked lord who was known as the ogre of Canapale. The queen’s wrist had been mutilated long before, and she had asked all the wise men in the land to find a cure. At last, one old man told her to go to the sacred fountain and bathe her wrist there, so that it would grow whole again before her wedding.

The queen went up into the mountains to the source, all alone and dressed in white with a long white veil. She dipped her arm in the icy water and her wrist was healed, but as she turned to leave she saw the ogre watching her with covetous eyes from among the trees.

Turning to run her veil caught on a branch and, enraged, the ogre took hold of great rocks from around the lake and flung them after her. With a deafening rush the water spilled through the breach he had made and the wicked lord was tangled in the veil and carried away by the deluge. The queen watched safely from beside the new waterfall, which ever afterwards took the shape of her bridal veil.



According to the information sign, this is the legend of the waterfall in the mountains near Bocognano. We walked up towards the sound of falling water through the forest and came across wild pigs foraging on the steep slopes, slipping quietly through the trees except for when they truffled too enthusiastically and caused little avalanches. Then we had bread and cheese, admired the tadpoles in the pools at the base of the waterfall and walked back to the car, damp with mist.

20, 21, 23

Three birthday girls this weekend: Lija, Emily and Cyrielle. Lots of wine, chocolate guinness cake, Black Books and beach lazing. It's so nice to be underemployed and have all the time in the world to blow up balloons and make carpal tunnel inducing birthday cards.

Jellyfish

Sailing this Saturday, it looked as if the sea was covered in silvery bubbles. They were shoals of jellyfish, the most beautiful I’ve ever seen: inch long ovals with a little sail set diagonally across their bodies, silver concentric rings and blueish lilac tentacles. They don’t sting and there were thousands of them, washing into the harbour in neat ranks that caught the light.

Nest egg

The end of a perfect Easter weekend: baked an enormous sickly chocolate cake and dyed eggs with onion skins. I lived off cake and hardboiled eggs for the rest of the week.

The hitchhiker's guide to Corsican trains

Don’t assume that when you go to the train station and buy a ticket, you’ll actually be getting on a train. Don’t assume that even if you have done a journey many times, you know which legs of it will be on trains, and which on buses. Don’t assume that there will be any screens or announcements to help you find the right train or bus. Don’t expect station staff to tell you that the train is delayed by an hour. Don’t expect even a hint of apology when it is. Don’t expect timetables to be correct: they change every few months, but not on the dates specified on the timetables, because digging up the tracks takes longer than expected, every time.

I quite like Corsican trains. This year, one thing I’m not short of is time, so it’s nice to relax and not worry when your scheduled one hour wait at a tiny station turns into 2 and a half hours. I sit and read and wander down to a café for a chausson aux blettes to satisfy my new passion for chard, while the couple who need to catch their flight finally find out that the train is late and forlornly wander down the road with their cases to hitch a lift.



That said, on Easter Saturday we had an unusually farcical train experience. Me, Lija, Emily, Dan and James went to Vizzavona to walk to the cascade des anglais, a series of waterfalls in the forest about 30 km south of Corte. It was empty and idyllic. There was a ruined nineteenth century hotel watching over the hamlet of Vizzavona, once frequented by Victorian English tourists, and we only saw six other people on the trail all day. Snow-topped mountains peeked through the silver trunks of the beech trees and the few leaves which had clung on all winter were bleached to a pale gold, backlit by low spring sun. There were wooden bridges, moss-covered rocks and lizards. We sat on a boulder in the middle of the waterfall to eat our lunch, and I fell asleep on the rock dreaming of applause because of the splashing water.









The train was due to leave at 6 and we got back to the station with 45 minutes to spare. There was also an Italian man with his son and puppy and we all waited on the platform, in full view of the station-master in his office. Once the train was about ten minutes late, the station-master came out and told the Italian, in Italian, that there was no train: it had been a bus, up on the main road five minutes walk away through the forest, and we had missed it. He then went back into his office without bothering to say anything to us in French, English, or any other language. When I knocked on the door to ask him what he advised, he laughed, shrugged, and said we’d have to hitch. I can understand resenting tourists, and taking pleasure in their clueless failures. But at the very start of the season there isn’t much excuse to be jaded, so I suppose he was just a bastard.

We wandered up to the road which winds through steep pine forest, hugging the curves of the hill. In the end we split up and, after receiving an assortment of obscene hand gestures, the Italians and me, Lija and James got lifts. We were with two Italian men who talked to us in a mixture of Italian, French and English, and said that they had picked us up because of the solidarity of hikers, and the solidarity of foreigners. Poor Dan and Emily were stuck in the dark of the forest until they conceded failure and Stella drove out to pick them up. It was fun, since we knew that Stella would come eventually, even if she had to make two trips to fit us all in. But there was nowhere with a hotel within feasible walking distance, it was dark with fog rolling in, and it would have been hard not to panic if we hadn’t had her to rely on.

U Catenacciu di Corti

We went off to Corte for the four day Easter weekend. On Good Friday, Emily and Dan were on a nine hour death hike, so me and Lija wandered down to the river with a picnic and sat on the white granite boulders, round as speckled eggs, which were picturesque but uncomfortable. Her sandwich was made with unadvertised hazelnuts, which thankfully she noticed before taking a bite, as I don’t think the afternoon would have turned out well if anaphylactic shock, epipens, a scramble up a steep river bank and a mile’s walk back to the town had been involved. We read our books, sunbathed, wandered barefoot along the bank to a demolished bridge and wondered how much excrement ended up in the river, given the vicinity of the sewage farm.

That night we went to the town centre to see the Good Friday procession, on the recommendation of the cashier in Spar, who said that it was ‘très beau’. Like everything in Corsica it started late, with people milling around the statue of Pascal Paoli and Emily being greeted by lots of her pupils. At last we heard a metallic ringing sound, like Morris dancers’ bells, and hooded men approached singing a dirge. The first thing I saw was the black-clad figure of Mary carried on the shoulders of the penitents, and it took some time to realise that the bright ringing was a chain, dragging behind one of the men. It was sinister and comical all at once: the men and boys were in white robes and KKK style hoods, but several hoods were clearly made out of pillowcases and the eyeholes were sometimes reinforced with a double layer of fabric in the shape of the mask of Zorro. As the procession moved down through the town the hoods flopped like melting Mr Whippies, and many folded them back so that the white cotton stood out from their heads like the starched cornettes of the Daughters of Charity. Mary seemed to hobble like a crone, and Jesus in his glass sepulchre again reminded me of Snow White, this time with the wicked stepmother in attendance.

The men in their white robes and short black capes were from the Cunfraterna di San Teofalu, a 17th century Corsican Franciscan who was born in Corte. Corte is the most politicised city in Corsica, with slogans scrawled on every wall telling the French, Arabs, foreign developers and drug dealers to get out, and French place names are coated in black paint on road signs. It seems another interesting example of the convergence of Catholicism and Corsican nationalism, and how nationalist solidarity breathes new life into old traditions: Théophile was only canonised in 1930, when he became the patron saint of Corsica, and this confraternity was only founded in 1980. This catenacciu procession (it means the chained one, referring to the main penitent who carries the cross while dragging chains from his ankle) is not a new tradition - the more elaborate version in Sartène was apparently brought there by the Aragonese who founded the city in the 15th century - but I would guess that the nationalism adds another layer to the emotions of the participants.


We trailed behind the cross in a great crowd down the main road, and then up a narrow cobbled backstreet towards the church. The cobbles must be agony for the barefooted penitents. The way was lit by candles in red glass holders that flickered from behind the shutters of the tall, austere buildings, their flaking plaster facades speckled with bullet holes. Niches with plaster virgins were lit by candles from within, people leaned out of windows, smoking and watching, and a little old woman in a housecoat stood in her doorway letting the procession flow past. The rhythmic singing continued; I don’t know whether it was Latin or old Italian, or even Corsican, and all I could catch was ‘peccati, peccati’ at the end of the verse. Even without carrying a cross it felt like a long climb to the church, whose bell tower was lit gold. When we reached it, the priest went to a first floor window and preached to the crowd, with an altar boy holding the tinny, miniature amp beside him. In a niche above the church door, Mary stood, crowned and holding her child, and below her, Christ lay dead and Mary mourned.

If you would like to see pictures and a video of the procession from a previous year, this site has lots of information.

The kids are alright

The school children were all disarmingly sweet today, mellowed by the four day Easter weekend perhaps. It’s like being with a toddler, when your world shrinks down to knee height but becomes innately fascinating – they are so easily amused that I felt I was spending most of the day just laughing, in rooms full of laughing children.

One class laughed because the paper people we were sticking in the house that I’d drawn on the board were smaller than the flowers in the garden, small enough to slip under the bathtub and too small to climb onto the chairs. Another class, the class from hell in fact, good-naturedly mimicked my accent and became hysterical when Louis managed to make his pen explode by chewing it and had to run out of the room, spitting out ink. The class for kids with learning disabilities sang the rainbow song ten times with improvised dance moves and told me they loved it, and we all laughed along with Mathieu, who for unknown reasons minced about in a hilariously camp manner. My last class of the day didn’t laugh exactly, but we played animal charades and they behaved beautifully, drew fanciful zoos full of snails and singing birds, and then whined in disappointment when I said I had to go.

Even on exhausting days when they all act up there is usually one moment of brightness, but today I loved teaching, and felt so sad that I only have two weeks left with these kids.

Poisson d'avril

I spent all day with children trying to stick paper fish on my back. They were not particularly stealthy. This lovely chocolate fish was a guilt-induced gift from Emily after she accidentally kicked tea over me. The burn was definitely worth it…he is delicious.