V is for Vaches: 'a lunettes' in Normandy

Famous Normandy cows - vache a lunettes 

Ratisfaite, the statue in Vimoutiers, celebrating the Norman breed of cows whose rich milk makes the famous Camembert cheese.

There was no question I had to find one of these fabulous brown and white Normandy cows milked for Camembert!

So Sally spent an hour driving up and down little rural roads to find the perfect 'vaches a lunettes' for Fred to photograph.
Cows with glasses! Yay!

The real thing in a field near Friardel.

C is for Camembert: a Normandy village with a story

Visiting Camembert, a village, cheese legends and the museum "Maison du Camembert"

The tiny village of Camembert is not far from John and Sally so we spent an afternoon learning all about this iconic French cheese.
According to legend, Marie Harel, a farmer in the village developed the definitive recipe in 1791! Such an interesting story linking a priest from the region of Brie who she sheltered and from whom she learnt about cheese, to the role of Napoleon III in making camembert famous and then during WWI, a million boxes a month sent to the French soldiers. And now the most famous of all French cheeses.
We tasted, bought gold award 'lait cru' camenbert for dinner, so yummy.

M is for Memories; time with John and Sally.

"Excepts from Memory by David Whyte:

Memory is not just a then, recalled in a now, the past is never just the past, memory is a pulse passing through all created life, a waveform, a then continually becoming other thens, all the while creating a continual but almost untouchable now. 

Memory is an invitation to the source of our life, to a fuller participation in the now, to a future about to happen, but ultimately to a frontier identity that holds them all at once. Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.

The genius of human memory is firstly its very creation through experience, and then the way it is laid down in the mind according to the identity we inhabited when we first decided to remember, then its outward radiating effect and then all its possible future outcomes, occurring all at the same time...how we live the story we have inherited. 

We can be equal to the story we have inherited, no matter its difficulty, by stepping into its very centre."

One of my letters from France written to my mother in 1986 - Sally is fetching me to take me across to Mme Brimaud, we rented her home in Marly-le-Roi. Sally features in so many of my memories of those years we lived here in France.

Here I am, visiting John and Sally, friends from our years here in France.

John and Fred had met through Telemecanique while Fred still worked for the firm in South Africa, so when we arrived in Paris in 1986, John and Sally helped us through the settling in and we got to know each other well.

How I love the flow of memories from our times together and also the story telling to bridge all these years and how life has played out for all of us.

Friendships, 30 year memory, Paris - Andrea, me and Sally, 1986.

And here we are today, around a lunch table, in a quiet corner of Normandy, how lovely: