Sainte Foy Tarentaise
Day 43: Sunday 26 April 2020
Most people think of Sundays as being quiet and peaceful, but every day is quiet and peaceful at the moment. For all those little jobs which need doing around the chalet, April has certainly been a month of Sundays!
Day 44: Monday 27 April 2020
We are required to stay indoors, thus not spreading any virus that we may or may not have. We are lucky that there isn’t much Covid-19 here. Bourg Saint Maurice is the last stop at the end of the railway line. After Bourg you rise up the mountains until the roads end. One of these end points is half an hour away in Sainte Foy. After that, you have several mountains and several kilometres of unpopulated mother earth, before you get to Italy.
This is part of the attraction of Sainte Foy. The peace and tranquility of allowing yourself to slow down and appreciate the beauty of raw nature.
Where the tarmac ends, dirt tracks continue, and from these you can access narrow trails in the forests. However at this time of year you will find them blocked by fallen trees which haven’t survived the winter storms, and parts of the trail are missing, where they have given way to the power of gravity.
The trails need reinstating ready for summer and work is already well underway removing fallen trees, and felling others which look like they won’t make through another storm. Some will live again, forever as the framework in new buildings, and some will keep us warm next winter.
There is something called ‘affluage’ whereby locals who want one, can have a tree to chop up for firewood. These have to be allocated by the mairie and woe betide anyone choosing their own tree without going through the system!
Day 45: Tuesday 28 April 2020
Emmanuel Macron’s Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, spoke to the nation this evening. After much speculation over recent days, he set out his ‘plan de déconfinement’, his plan for loosening the restrictions and giving us back our freedom.
There is a red, amber, green traffic light system in place and only those départements in the green zone when the assessment takes place on 07 May, will have their restrictions lifted. To be green, we need that:
- the number of new Covid-19 cases isn’t too high
- here is enough spare hospital bed capacity
- there is an adequate local testing system
Then on 11 May, we will have the restrictions eased. We will be able to meet in groups of up to ten people and travel up to 100km from home, provided we don’t leave our département. Most importantly, we will be able to hit the running trails again, so long as we continue to respect the two metre social distancing rule.
These new rules will stay in place until 02 June, by which time further assessments and decisions will have been made.
Day 46: Wednesday 29 April 2020
With a strange irony, the news of a potential relaxing of the restrictions has encouraged lots of mountain precipitation. It is snowing in Sainte Foy, higher up of course, (20cm at the bottom of La Marquise chairlift overnight), but lower down the valley it is raining ‘quelques gouts de pluie’, and as the old boys say “c’est bon pour le potager”, it’s good for the vegetable patch.
Day 47: Thursday 30 April 2020
I did one of my favourite things today, running along a forest track in the snow. Snowflakes are so quiet and give the air a visual texture which is very special, and magical to run through. The darkness of the trees makes the flakes stand out, and the trees draw up around you, encouraging you to follow the lighter clearing of the path where the snow tumbles gently, and seemingly forever. Runners talk about feeling ‘the flow’, that special place where you are running with your subconscious mind, and totally in the zone. This is where to find it!
Day 48: Friday 01 May 2020
On this day in 1561, so legend has it, someone (possibly an admirer) gave the young King Charles IX of France ‘un brin de muguet’ a sprig of Lily of the Valley as a lucky charm. King Charles IX was so enamoured with the gesture that he developed the tradition, offering sprigs of ‘muguet’ to all the ladies in his court.
May Day is also ‘Workers day in France, and during the 1890s workers started wearing a red triangle in their buttonholes. The Left then took over the custom but not the symbol, and replaced the red triangle with the wearing of an Eglantine Rose as the symbol of the left. Then, during the early Pétain years when the French government moved to Vichy in the unoccupied ‘Free Zone’ of southern France, they started wearing Lily of the Valley again as the symbol for expressing your French-ness.
Custom dictates that you should give ‘un brin de muguet’ to at least one person on May Day. It is wonderfully uplifting to give and receive a symbol of good luck, and most appropriate that this gesture was reborn amongst the dark and difficult days of WW2.
This year, as dictated by the constraints of my social life in a digital world, I both gave and received a sprig virtually this year.
Day 49: Saturday 02 May 2020
It feels like a lot has happened this week, this month, these first four months of 2020. I wonder what May has in store for us?
