Tuesday 9 November 2010

95. T'was a dark and stormy night..

9th November 2010. It's been wet & windy for the last few days - and according to the forecast we're due more of the same today and tomorrow.

There was a tragic accident at St Jean de Luz on Sunday - a young kite surfer was lifted up and carried away off the beach by an exceptionally strong gust of wind up to the top of a 7 storey apartment block from where he fell to his death. 

I was just flicking through YouTube looking for clips of storms at Saint-Jean-de-Luz when I came across this one.. It's not Saint-Jean-de-Luz though. Life has clearly lost its thrill for these two.. (ignore the first 28 seconds) 
The sea front was covered with dense foam banks:

Well, after that review of a damp few days down here in the Pays Basque, what else could I offer you but:
There are a few places I mean to visit in the coming months: the fromagerie Iraty at Mendive, the écomusée de Marquèze at Sabres and the chocolaterie Puyodebat at Cambo.

Regular readers (you can be helped..) will have guessed by now that I'm a Woody Allen fan. Here's one of the more memorable scenes from "Manhattan" - in less than a minute he wraps up the key elements in his personality: his eternal romanticism, his love of New York and the great American standards - in this case, the lush strings of the New York Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta with George Gershwin's 1926 classic "Someone to watch over me":

I must be getting old.. I find I can listen to Ol' Blue Eyes nowadays without wanting to reach for the 'off' button.. which is something of a 'first' for me..
Also - by the standards of any era - Ava Gardner was/is stunningly beautiful. 
Note to self: why has it taken me so long to realise this?

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