209. Rinse Cycle in the Pays Basque

20th November 2013. It's been a wet month so far in the Pays Basque.. and the Nive has had more than its fair share of assorted lumber of all sizes floating down it during the past weeks. Last Saturday I was out in the club's beautiful Filippi wooden shell VIII and we had to be pretty nimble in avoiding some of the larger pieces floating out there as it would have been all too easy to have damaged the thin skinned VIII. There was a whole tree stuck against the river bank higher up the river that will present a problem (as it's too big to pass under the bridges in town) for someone as it slowly makes its way downstream. I remember an outing in a coxless IV about 3 years ago when we had an unscheduled coming together with a floating tree that launched us all - in slow motion - into the river (in January!)..  
It's difficult in words (for me) to capture the appeal of rowing on the river on a calm summer's evening. This image explains it better than I ever could: 
And for those of us who've often wondered what it must be like to soar like an eagle (and who can honestly say they haven't?☺), here's the answer. Someone has fitted an eagle with a lightweight camera.. The scene is the Mer de Glace outside Chamonix..
When I was there in the 60s, the glacier looked like this (below) - not the dirt track that it now appears to have become (above).
Something reminded me the other day of this haunting song by Enya (to be honest I was clearing the garage out of a few centuries-worth of muck and bullets and it came up on the radio).
I found myself humming it all day as I cleared spiders webs from the garage walls and swept up plaster dust, old rusty bolts and other delights. There was an assortment of ancient brackets and other ironmongery bolted to the walls - connected to the tale our neighbor told us that one previous owner of the house had been a butcher (who used the garage for slaughtering pigs). These fittings were attached with massively over-engineered fixings that hadn't been touched for years and which were mostly rusted up. Fortunately I have a set of sockets and a ratchet that made removing all the fittings easier than it might otherwise have been.
But - Rule of Life #17: If you have 12 rusty nuts to unscrew that have been untouched since the Spanish Civil War, 11 will unscrew easily. That's all I'm sayin'!