Home sweet home

I’m home. Seeing everyone I’ve missed is lovely, and the unusual heat and spring beauty of the garden makes it easier not to pine for Corsica. I like knowing the names of plants here: lacking vocabulary stunts my speech and thoughts in French and it soothes me to name things again: the acid yellow of laburnums, the same yellow as Corsican mimosa, waxy deep pink peonies shedding their petals already, fragile scarlet poppies, forget-me-nots taking over the whole herb garden, the last of the lilac, indigo tulips shrivelled into themselves in dry black curls, clouds of irises in violet and pale chalky blue.

Being away is strange: nothing seems to have changed without me, but it all seems foreign. The French don’t really have a phrase for ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’, but characteristically they have something more elegant and complex: if love is a flame then absence, like the wind, fans great fires but snuffs out candles.

‘L'absence est à l'amour ce qu'est au feu le vent;
Il éteint le petit, il allume le grand.’

Bussy-Rabutin

Saint-Florent

On my last day in Corsica Ellen’s family dropped me and Emily off in Saint-Florent, a little spa town on the Cap Corse, the promontory thumb that rises from Corsica’s fist. We walked up to the Genoese citadel which was surrounded by banks of shoulder-high yellow flowers and palm trees, and carved with lovers’ names. The town must be hellish in summer, but the tourists were only just arriving and the restaurants along the quay were half empty.




We sat looking at the gin-palaces and feeding breadcrumbs to sparrows and collared doves, and then wandered up a deserted street out of the town in search of the Cathédrale du Nebbiu. One of only two surviving Pisan cathedrals in Corsica, it was abandoned because of the malarial swamp it sits in, and now stands aloof outside the town, surrounded by fields. It is blocky and spare, with a slate roof, warm limestone walls and crisp Romanesque capitals with a snake and what looked like a boar, but was probably a lion, above the west door. They are restoring the roof and apse, but as it was a Sunday it was empty and we went in.






A swallow was flitting through the gloom and we were temporarily blinded by the glare from outside. It was like a mirror image of Bede’s sparrow:

‘Oh King, when we compare the present life of man with that time which is unknown to us, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall where you sit at supper in winter with your thegns and counsellors. In the midst there is a good fire; outside, the storms of rain and snow are raging. The sparrow flies swiftly in at one door and out at another. Whilst he is within, he is safe from the wintry storm; but after a few moments of comfort he vanishes from sight into the dark winter from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we know nothing.’
Βede, Ecclesiastical History, II.13

There was some upsetting baroque stuff going on in the sanctuary, but I averted my eyes and looked at the lovely twelfth-century capitals: my pictures didn’t come out in the dark, but one was a coil like an ammonite, with a toothed, maned beast on the other side. Just as we were leaving we saw a glass coffin in the corner, with a reclining corpse leering blindly out, dressed in hilarious eighteenth-century pantaloons. There was no indication of who he might be, but the internet has since told me that in 1770 the Bishop of Nebbiu got in a sulk about his church’s lack of relics and got the pope to dredge up a Roman corpse from the catacombs to baptise as St. Flor and display in the church. Every three years, on Pentecost Monday, the villagers process around the town with him. Even for a relic afficionado like me, he was quite frightening: Emily has obviously not been in enough Catholic churches to appreciate desiccated corpses and she left rather swiftly.



We spent the rest of the day eating a huge lunch (brocciu fritters, brocciu-stuffed sardines and profiteroles for Emily, gambas with chestnuts, rigatoni with langoustines and lobster sauce, and fiadone - the delicious brocciu baked cheesecake and national dessert of Corsica - for me) and reading on the beach. A perfect Corsican day to end my time here: good company, close encounters with Catholicism, sun, sea and sand, and huge quantities of food.

Bits and bobs

Final space invaders in Bastia, my favourite pharmacy mosaic in Corte, the moor's head, an old hairdressers.

Grimaldi

On my valedictory tour of Corte, we went to Grimaldi, the best chocolate shop in Corsica. I would happily work there for free for my entire life.

They sell all the normal pâtisseries, brightly coloured macarons, gâteaux with worms of crème de marron drizzled over, slabs and slices of nut-studded nougat, falculella, the flat Corsican cakes baked on leaves, sprigs of plastic lily of the valley in chocolate pots for May day, calissons d’Aix, melon biscuits shaped like a madonna’s mandorla, cubes of frosted pâte de fruit which they arrange in pyramids in the window, and, of course, chocolates. The smell from the chocolates is incredible. You know that warm, peppery smell that rises from a ripe tomato, showing the difference between a fruit that will be white, woolly and tasteless and one dripping with sweet juice? Real chocolate gives off a smell like that, rich, almost spiced and alcoholic.





I would have to take out a mortgage to buy everything I want in this shop, and I restricted myself to a pack of Corsican chocolates to share with Jonny at home. Fourteen little squares, seven flavours, each decorated to show its interior: the clementine one has been imprinted with the skin of the fruit, the thyme has a printed sprig on it, the dark ganache with chestnut honey has little chestnuts on it, the olive oil just says Grimaldi. If you ever go to Corsica, there is no excuse to miss this place: there are branches in Bastia and Ajaccio too, but Corte is the best. Ellen, Emily, Ellen’s aunt and sister, Stella and I sat out on the street and I indulged in a last Italian hot chocolate: thick, lustrous melted chocolate with a glass of chantilly to spoon into it.

Scraps, Snippets, Squeers

I’m home now, but little things keep occurring to me and I want to write them down before I forget. I was always scared of the headmaster: he is irascible and deaf and almost dying of swine flu with cardiac complications failed to improve his mood. The school is built round a horseshoe-shaped corridor, so sound carries and I would usually hide when I heard his ranting approach. Children who are sent to stand in the corridor shrink back into alcoves, hoping he won’t notice them as he prowls past. He was always polite to me and seemed genuinely interested in York and Cistercians, but I could tell he wasn’t one to cross.

One of the teachers asked me round to dinner just before I left Ile Rousse, and I heard the whole story: apparently the headmaster regularly pulls the children’s ears, hard enough that one had to get stitches afterwards. He has also come to blows with three of the teachers, and will come up the next day and do the bises as if he hadn’t thrown a punch the day before. I find it funny that in a country so thick with bureaucracy, anxiety and policy documents surrounding every aspect of education, Wackford Squeers can still be pulling ears.

Comical

Our trip with Stephane in comic form: he had a whole library of comic books so I drew this for him as a thank you card.




The ticket for the toilets in Bonifacio was hilarious: a women sat in the toilets, which had two cubicles, and you paid 50 cents for a ticket which said 'Keep this ticket in case of checks during your visit'.

'L'eau de ton zizi' was not anything dubious: Stephane wrang his wet swimming shorts out on me and that was my comment, but he found it very funny. I feel more like myself when I manage to make inappropriate double entendres in French.

Néflier

Hiroshige: Bird with Loquats




Turns out that the mystery tree outside my window is a loquat tree. The fruit are annoyingly just out of reach, but I bought some in the supermarket: they are called nèfles (japonaise) in French, and it was strange to eat them because as soon as I tasted them I remembered that me and my brother gorged on wild loquats in Australia once; I think we ate so many that we got diarrhoea. The taste is hard to describe: something like tart apricots. Ellen, with her freakish knowledge of French idioms, knew that nèfles used to mean nothing of value: colloquially you could say, for example, ‘avoir quelque chose pour des nèfles’. But that nèfle was the medlar, which is nothing like as nice as a loquat, and is also called a ‘cul de chien’, so fair enough.

My other favourite food related idioms, since we’re here:

‘Tomber dans les pommes’: to fall in the apples: to faint
‘Poser un lapin’: to place a rabbit: to stand someone up
‘Avoir des oursins dans les poches’: to have sea urchins in the pockets: to be stingy

Corsican strawberries are in season too: I find it odd to eat them with loquats in May when to me they mean high summer, cream and meringues.

Hallucinant

The two days we spent with Stephane were ‘hallucinant’. Used to travelling by foot and living in a little space - my flat, a few streets that I walk up and down each day, the beach – I was whisked off in his car and saw more in two days than I have seen in weeks, and almost all of it terribly beautiful.

First we went to Bonifacio and walked along clifftops carpeted with wildflowers. Blue sea and sky, towering white clouds and towers of white stones, buffeting wind and the scent of the maquis.







Flower centres the same saffron as lichen - almost too perfect.







Then Bonifacio town: winding streets and the cemetery, a little village of white tombs, at the end of the promontory on the edge of a cliff so that it feels like the edge of the world.



Then a long drive through green hills to a rock shaped like a lion, looking out to sea.

Then Sartène, a dour, vertical town of tall grey houses with closed shutters, ‘peopled by demons’ according to a nineteenth-century German writer.

Then Cuccuruzzu. We walked through the woods, holm oaks with spiralling trunks wrapped in moss, streams snaking down the path and weaving past granite boulders as big as houses. The sun was getting low and slanting through the trees, casting ribbons of shadow onto the rocks and lighting up the wild cyclamen that grew everywhere like little violet flames. The three colours were so improbable: the emerald of the moss, the lurid violet flowers and bright orange rings and ovals of cut branches, and the slightly duller orange of the grazing cows. It was magical, and we were all alone there.









In the end we came to the bronze-age white granite tower, ruined and crouching in the forest. It looked out over the valley to the Bavella needles, a row of red granite teeth on the horizon.

The next day we went to the sea, to Tamaricciu beach, named after the tamarisk trees there. You walk to the shore down a winding sandy path through maquis thick with flowers and emerge to see white sand, a long curve of pale blue sea, rocky islets, tamarisks and parasol pines. We lay there, Stephane and Helen swam, and then we went home for courgette cream sauce with rice. I don’t want to leave Corsica – I feel like I’ve not scratched the surface and I only have a few days left.

Getting hitched

So me and Helen decided to hitchhike down from Bastia to Porto Vecchio to stay with some men we met on the internet. It’s always nice when that sort of plan works out well, since quite a lot could have gone wrong. I like hitching: you linger in places where people were never meant to, and notice the litter, wildflowers and textures of concrete, tarmac and dirt by the side of the road. And instead of getting on the bus, plugging yourself into your ipod and watching the scenery rush by in a cocoon of foreign noise, you make eye contact with people, wonder whether they are potential murderers, chat and then never see them again. These are the people we who were kind enough to pick us up:

A woman, alone in her big maroon car, with two bras on the back seat, driving out to her parents’ village to pick up her daughters.

Dumé: a fat, twenty-something guy with a thick Corsican accent and fairly ripe body odour. His golden retriever was in the boot, and when we asked its name, he said it was ‘Killer’. Then he told us that he was a mechanic, and that the car we were in had recently been ‘decapitated’ in an accident. Sure enough, the dashboard was covered in scratches from the car that had ploughed through the windscreen, and he pointed nonchalantly to some stains on the roof: ‘there’s the blood’. He claimed that the drivers hadn’t died. We were not hugely reassured.

A middle-aged man in a smart suit and a dilapidated little car whose doors didn’t close. He worked for Air France and had lived all over the world.

Pierre, a pale, amphibious redhead with a pickup that only had one seat free up front. We crushed ourselves into it and once he had established that we were English, he turned on the CD which was already in his CD player and asked us to listen to his music to see if there were any mistakes in the English. Turns out he was a successful French country and Western singer with an improbably bass voice. We tried not to giggle at the fact that we couldn’t distinguish a single word of the song except for ‘all my dreams come true’. We assured him that there weren’t any mistakes, which was true in the sense that there weren’t any recognisable English lyrics except for one correct phrase. He was a little creepy, told Helen she was beautiful, asked us for coffee and gave her his number, but nothing serious.

Then we spent to night with Benoît, who was charming and cooked us huge plates of delicious food. He has worked on farms in Brazil, Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and India, and has now transplanted himself to Corsica.

The next morning we set out again. The first person to stop was a middle-aged man who asked ‘parlez-vous anglais’ in a strange accent – it transpired that he was Irish, and called Paddy! He drove us down to the apartment block he owned by the beach and we ate oranges, looked out over the sea and saw the pink bedrooms of his three daughters. He told us about the transvestites who hang out on the beach nearby, and the mafiosi dealings that had allowed his apartment block to be built right on the beach, despite the law banning houses within a hundred metres of the sea, to avoid la bétonisation des côtes (the concretisation of the coast).

Paddy dropped us back on the route nationale next to the Roman ruins at Aléria, where the landscape is very English: wide river, green fields and rolling hills. We eventually got picked up by two chain-smoking lycee students called Maxim and Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul told us that Maxim hadn’t wanted to pick us up, and they didn’t speak much, just drove very fast in a fug of smoke through the sudden downpour. The rain cleared, and they left us at a beach next to a Genoese watchtower. The sand was white, shaded by tamarisk trees, and we sunbathed.

Our final ride was with a middle-aged man who spent most of the journey shouting down his hands-free phone at various colleagues and public service representatives. He also told us about how he had lived for years in New York, and how we ought to go to Porto Vecchio’s huge open air nightclub, Via Notte. He left us at the supermarket where we met our second couchsurfing host, Stephane…

The hyperbole of children

It's sad to have finished work, and strangely dislocating to still be here as they go back to school after two weeks of holiday. Here are some of the cards they made me. It was interesting to see what they wrote. An awful lot of them said 'tu es la plus belle' - leaving aside the veracity of that, it's just not something we'd say in England, to a teacher.

I like to think that this demonstrates Britain's geopolitical superiority over France, Ireland and China.



I love this one: monkey/donkey: endless amusement ensued.




I like how the kid has misspelled both 'cath' and 'doc' here. I'm a great English teacher!



This is the most amusing one: I am beautiful like lilac, and I smell of roses. Damn straight. I was always particularly sweaty and dishevelled in this class because it was after lunch so I had to climb up the hill in the midday heat. The kids remarked on my sweatiness most days - so maybe this whole thing is veiled sarcasm? I particularly like the fact that she explains what a rose is, despite it being the major component of my name, but not what lilac is.





Oh Charles and Roch...if you liked me so much, why did you behave so badly? I do fondly remember the time when we were learning body parts and you drew monsters which sprouted huge penises all over their bodies and, reluctant to miss a rare occasion when you actually wanted to know an English word, I taught you how to say 'He has seven big purple penises'. I'm going to miss teaching.