In preparation for our bee visit today, we looked up the dos and don’ts of apiary life. Don’t be overly perfumed. Or be smelly. Bit of dilemma there. Don’t wear black socks, as bees sting dark things. Be calm at all times. If they start getting out of hand, blow smoke in their little furry faces. And finally don’t swat them, whatever you do. Oh and don’t run off hysterically.
Jean-Baptiste picked us up at 10am and drove us to a beautiful clearing by a lake, with a dozen hives stacked up amongst the lime trees. We donned our massively oversized suits, which worryingly seeemed to be only top halves. We were tucking our trousers into our white socks, when Debbie noticed the ripped holes in the knees of her jeans. This was a bit of a concern. Wearing surgical gloves made this procedure all the more tricky. Debbie got one of the fingers of her gloves caught in her zip as she tried to tuck her top into her jeans. Nightmare. The suits were so big, they kept falling down over our eyes. It was in this hysterical state that we gingerly approached the first hive.
Julie began recording a solitary bee at the entrance to the hive with our ridiculously over the top microphone. “It looks like cat, they will attack it!” exclaimed Jean-Baptiste. Julie was blissfully unaware that she was blocking the entrance of the hive for all the other bees who began swarming en masse in a great cloud behind her. “Maybe you should turn around Joo-lie,” offered our guide. Julie turned around in horror and bravely continued to capture the audio completely surrounded by bees, her arm shaking. The things you do for art.
To say that Jean-Baptiste is very passionate about bees is an understatement. He gave up his job at IBM to attend to the bees full time and looks after numerous hives dotted all over the area. He was telling us about the use of insecticides and pesticides by the local farmers and how this has adversely affected the bee population. Bees make up his life seven days a week and he says he doesn’t see women very often, which might explain why he has invited us out for a chinese. Don’t mind if we do.
Tonight for tea we had rhubarb from the garden cooked up with a spoonful of honey. Thank goodness for Jean-Baptiste’s honey – the rhubarb bloody needed it.
We spent the afternoon designing the catalogue for the exhibition. This involved lots of swearing and cussing (even in French!) from Debbie as she got to grips with InDesign. Here is the flyer for the private view. In case you wonder what it means, its ‘Listen well to the countryside.’ Bzzz, bzzzz.
OK so today’s post is going to be a bit more on the gentle side compared to our Parisian adventures up to now, for today we stayed in Sacy. We invited Hermine to do a bit of yoga with us. It turns out she is EXTREMELY good at the tree pose. No wonder since she used to be a tightrope walker. In fact she still is. There is a tightrope set up in the barn and apparently it’s “just like riding a bike, you never forget.” That’s a party trick we will try to get to her perform at the BBQ on Friday!
This afternoon was all about completely disastrous sound recording. We set off for the forest to capture some lush woodland sounds only to find the combine harvesters out in force, making a right old racket up and down the wheat fields. Cheers for that. So we ventured off in the other direction to capture the distant church bells. Only to find the sugar beet plant giving off an annoying hum. Then we tried to record the birds tweeting, but they seemed to all bugger off at the sight of our dead cat microphone cover. Scaredy-cats. We did come across a nest of bees on the side of a house so we captured a good bit of buzzing from that – good practice for our upcoming bee encounter tomorrow!
We got back to the chateau to the frightening sight of Hermine wearing goggles and wielding a chainsaw, attacking the bushes. She is trying to get the place looking good for Saturday when the village will descend upon the chateau to hear the British artists bastardise their beautiful language right before their eyes (and ears) at the ‘artist talk.’ Yes, that’s right. Our artist talk, in French. Sacre bleu!
Right, best go. We are currently making ice cubes from rose wine (Debbie) and lager (Julie) in an attempt to endure the upcoming heat wave. We will report back on the success of these tomorrow!
Sorry for the delayed blog post – the internet was down when we got in last night. Either that or Hermine had switched it off as she could “sense a thunderstorm brewing.” We did have a few interesting conversations with Hermine yesterday. She basically wanted to kick Debbie out of her bedroom and move her into a cupboard. The cheek! We have managed to resolve this issue by Debbie agreeing to share rooms with a new woofer arriving from Chile today. Should be interesting! Hermine is planning a barbeque on Friday and apparently the lovely Didier is going to bring along “Bambi” to throw on the fire. Julie, being a sworn vegetarian, is suitably horrified. Hermine also chatted about a cousin of hers who is “both boring and fragile, not a good combination.” This has left us wondering what she says about us to other people!
We got really lost, umpteen times, in Paris yesterday, with a skitzoid sat nav and a sub-standard navigator. We managed to film 30 minutes of Debbie’s lap whilst circling the Arc de Triomphe. But we shot lots more tunnels, having thrown the rice filled cushion out the window since we decided we actually LIKED the shaky footage.
Then we tried to find the cloud towers again. We ended up doing 3 point turns by gangs of youths and police, with a go pro strapped to the roof of the car. A bit dodgy. We eventually found the towers and ventured up to the multi-storey car park that we found before, not in the most salubrious part of town we have to mention. Instead of a deserted roof we found distinct signs of life. There were sofas arranged in groups around a glass coffee table, looking worryingly like everyone had just left. And Julie almost did a wee by what appeared to be someone’s makeshift front door. Oops. We shot the towers as quickly as we could and ran like the chicken shits we are as soon as we heard someone coming. Better safe than sorry. The footage kind of looks alright, which is a relief as we ain’t going back there in a hurry.
Thats it, filming over for now. Its back to the chateau for a few days and onto the important task of capturing suitable audio to match the footage. On that note, brilliant news from Jean-Baptiste, who makes honey in the neighbouring village, in that we can record the sound of his bee hives. He is washing our bee-keeping suits as we speak. Beyond excited!!!
Today we returned to Paris to find the cloud-making chimneys we had spotted yesterday. We parked up where we could, but unfortunately there were 5 motorways between us and said chimneys. How could we get to them? We ended up playing frogger with the traffic and clambering up an elevated section of our favourite road – the Boulevard Peripherique – to get a better view. It was HORRIBLE up there. With the traffic thundering past and the bridge wobbling it was quite disorientating. Clinging onto a traffic sign, Debbie set up the equipment whilst Julie quietly threw up over the railings. This place is definitely not designed with pedestrians in mind. The large number of cars honking at us only served to reinforce this idea. It was overcast and grey today, there weren’t any little fluffy clouds at all, but actually this made the whole thing look rather sinister. Perfect.
Nestled in amongst the intersection of all the motorways, we came across a little makeshift dwelling. There were steps down to it, carpets laid out the front and garden ornaments. Someone was living there permanently, in the middle of the din and fumes. What the actual fuck? This was really unsettling. You could only see his place when you climbed up onto the bridge above, so the only people who know he’s there are lunatics like us that decide to jaywalk on the motorway.
Before returning to the car we filmed from a great vantage point where you could see all 5 sections of the motorway colliding, with cars coming from all directions. This turned out to be a fantastic bit of unexpected footage. Bonza.
We had a picnic in a underground car park then headed to Marcadet Poissoniers metro station. A friend had given us a tip off that it was in a state of disrepair (“like Beirut”) but unfortunately it had recently been given a makeover and was looking rather swish. So looks like the metro idea is on the back-burner for now. It was fun to see the area though – Clignancourt looks proper mental.
It was a relief to get back to the chateau and peace and tranquility. The hot bath was off though as the chateau had run out of hot water. C’est la vie. We are off to bed, grubby but happy.
In the wake of the news of the horrific attacks in Nice, today was rather a sombre affair. We cut short our plans to film in a metro station and spent the morning in a cafe watching the rolling news on TV. Paris is in shock. Yesterday we were getting together with the local community and sharing food and laughter, as was the whole of France, and then that happens. A truly terrible time.
In the afternoon we drove a full circuit of the Boulevard Peripherique, several times as it happens, which felt suitably miserable. We found a particular stretch where there is tunnel after tunnel, only popping out into the light for brief moments. So we drove back and forth along this stretch for a good few hours, filming out the front windscreen. We rested the camera on an old cushion cover filled with rice (sod you Amazon and your £20 photo bean bags) which worked a treat. The footage is stunning and we rather pleased with it.
Feeling a bit better we ventured to the cloud towers to shoot some more footage there. We got a few shots before the sun disappeared behind a massive cloud (ironically) and a friendly old lady suggested we put the camera away in case of hoodlums. The footage is a bit rubbish anyway so nae bother.
When we got back to the chateau we found the other artist had vacated our little flat and we were allowed back in. Oh my days! We are home and it feels good.
Tomorrow we are heading to find some factory chimneys that we spotted from the Boulevard Peripherique. They were pumping out what appeared to be clouds. How lovely. That’s where they come from! We shall capture this on film for all the world to see.
