And I'll take the low road
I cannot recommend the Gite la Mauraude highly enough. It was quite a different atmosphere from any I have experienced before. We were guests, not clients. Indeed, at the price they charged, they would have barely covered their costs.
It rained heavily during the night, but the day promised to be fair. As I walked down the hill to Castillon the birds were singing and the sun was slanting through the trees and catching the mist. The sound of rushing water grew louder as I walked down, and eventually I arrived at a dam, and then the village.
A whiff of the water was a Proustian moment for me. I recalled my early days playing around the Swan River in Perth. Sometimes in the afternoon the water would have a characteristic smell, some would say stink or stench, but to me it was never unpleasant. An older friend would try to catch fish with a kylie, a sharpened metal cross which knifed through the water to impale the fish below. I don't remember him catching anything, though. My mother paid the same friend two bob to teach me to swim. My memory is hazy, but I think he just tossed me off the end of the jetty. I didn't sink.
I have two other Proustian experiences. Smoke from a coal fire will take me back to the era of steam trains which passed close by, and to this day the sight of a castor oil plant will make me feel queezy. When I was seven or eight years old, some of us ate some seeds from the plant, and I vomited all the way back from the top of Waratah Avenue to my grandmother's place in Victoria Ave. where we lived at the time.
I reached the highway and headed west. As I've said before, I'm a purist to the extent that I'll walk every step of the way and not take the bus or tram to avoid the monotonous stretches. But I'm not above taking a short cut along the highway, particularly if the traffic is light. And there are a couple of advantages: the climb is more gradual and the coffee stops more frequent.
Just in case you thought I was making all this up, I took a photo in one of those convex mirrors opposite a blind alley. Perhaps you've already noticed how the weather was changing as the day progressed.
I looked up and saw my friend Monique following the GR high above. I belted out the appropriate song.
I have often wondered why Scottish songs are generally happy and optimistic, while Irish songs are more melancholy. There are no Irish patriotic songs to compare with "Scots wa hae", for example, and the archetypical Irish song, "Danny Boy", is a sad and sentimental piece, appropriately sung in the bar by people of Irish ancestry after a few drinks. Others like "The Rose of Tralee" have the same sad strain.
In "Danny Boy", he's dead, but she's still in love with him. In "The Rose of Tralee", she's dead, but he's still in love with her. In the Scottish "Annie Laurie, he would "lay me down and dee" for her, but he doesn't have to.
Scottish romantic ballads like "Aye Fond Kiss" are profoundly beautiful, and to me, "John Anderson, my Jo" is perhaps the most moving song ever written, especially when sung by Kenneth McKellar. I can't listen to it very often, and even now just hearing the song in my head is enough to bring tears to my eyes. And I'm not a particularly emotional person.
Has the oppression of the Irish by the English and the Church shaped their popular songs while Scottish songs reflect the Scots' rugged independence and optimism?
At Saint-Larry I stopped at a restaurant for one of the best omelets I have ever tasted. Then, although it was less than an hour up the highway to Portet-d'Aspet, I thought about taking the GR for the final stretch. I looked at the signpost at the footpath. "Portet-d'Aspet 3 hours," it said, pointing up at a Mount Everest. What would you do? Take the footpath? You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
This rarely happens, but it is such a good experience when it does: I arrived at the gite before I expected to.
We are staying tonight in a loft above a pub called Chez Jo. The toilet is down below, reached by steep, lethal stairs without a handrail. There is an outdoor exit as well leading to a balcony and stairs going down to a garden and another toilet of the primitive variety. Colder and wetter if it's raining, but safer. I had a shower down there, half outdoors, but with a wooden plank roof which leaked. The water was warm under the shower, and then cold as I raced up the stairs in the rain.
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