I enjoyed sounding the gong to announce meals at Barmeath in my childhood. Under my grandmother’s instruction my technique improved from loud bashing (think Top Cat summoning the gang) to a subtler, gradually increasing crescendo, beating around the edge of the gong, culminating in a final stroke, fortissimo, to the centre.
I took this gong picture where I am staying in the Gers. The ivory content is impressive. It is not a recent acquisition having been passed down a few generations but it’s probably a safe guess that the tusks are a late 19th century trophy. I am enjoying sounding it before meals, not brekker natch.
Walking through Gascony provides unalloyed pleasure. These pictures were taken on a section of a Grande Randonnée called the Heart of Gascony. Above is a field of flax in the valley. The wild flowers are beautiful. Here are a gladioli and a bee orchid.
Continuing the bee theme, we passed this cheerful terrace of beehives.
At this point I’d thought of quoting a poem by WB Yeats but why not listen to it from the lips of the man himself. His diction reminds me of John Laurie playing Private Frazer in Dad’s Army.
I sounded the gong for luncheon to herald a starter of globe artichokes grown in the garden, accompanied by melted butter, crusty bread and cold white wine from Gascony; it’s summertime and the living is easy, as George Gershwin wrote in 1934 for Porgy and Bess.
The oldest building on the demesne is the pigeonnière, perhaps 17th century. One of the farm buildings has an interesting window which may have been added when it was converted from agricultural use to human habitation. (I’m straying into the Irish Aesthete’s territory here.)
I have been cycling through Gascony….beautiful country and towns. the locals are very pleasant
In Arcadia ego……the colourful beehives are interesting. Bees have a highly developed sense of colour and continental apiarists like to decorate each hive to assist the ladies returning home giddy with nectar. There has been a very interesting experiment recently in a German university. Bees were presented with a Monet and a Picasso. The ones who flew to the Picasso were rewarded with syrup. Soon all of them were flying to the Picasso. The pictures were then changed for a different Picasso and a different Monet and the positions were changed. The bees immediately flew to the new Picasso. I wonder if, after four years at the University of St Andrews studying Fine Art, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge would have made the right choice?
“From the direction of the hall there came a new sound, faint at first but swelling and swelling to a frenzied blare, seeming to throb through the air with a note of passionate appeal like woman waiting for her demon lover. It was that tocsin of the soul, that muezzin of the country house, the dressing -for-dinner gong”.
Christopher was doing his stuff at Barmeath.
Summer Lightning by P.G.Wodehouse ( Irish edition)