Warming up nicely in Reims

There should have been a post yesterday – but it was very hot, and just as we were chilling out in our deck chairs under a shady tree with a reviving scotch on the rocks, we were joined by three other charming boating couples berthed in the same port – one American, one New Zealand, and one other Brit – bottles and glasses in hand, and we all sat there chatting about this and that – canals, Greece, and life in general – till it was much too late.

To catch up, we finally got the shower fixed at Chalons – costing, as all call-out plumbers do, an arm and a leg. But it works, which is the main thing. It did entail a quick visit to the ATM before we set off for Sillery – a name with much resonance for readers of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time novels. Sillery being the scheming political Oxford don who figures in many of the plot lines. I wonder if this is where Powell found the name.

Anyway, out route was well signed, and took us past champagne vineyards on the hillsides in the distance, and more barges loading from grain silos. We were told later by our new friends that apparently the barges take the grain up to Holland for the beer brewing industry.

Sillery was comfortable, though the walk to the nearby supermarket  (loads more Evian water required) took us past a French national war cemetery. Diana zeroed in by chance on the name on one gravestone in particular– quite a coincidence! We were also struck by seeing Christian and Muslim graves side by side.

After the shopping we made the short hop, a couple of hours, to Reims itself, where the pleasant port is a little close to the motorway, but you get used to the traffic noise. Not idyllic country calm such as we are used to! Despite the heat, we set off after lunch to do our cultural bit: Monet didn’t have to put up with restorers on the façade:

It was wonderfully cool inside, and there seemed to be plenty of tourists chilling out:

We loved the great Rose window, and also the magnificent Chagall triple window.

As we recovered with a nice cool Stella outside in the square, we couldn’t help noticing this group of well-dressed young men at the bar opposite – Mormons perhaps?

Revived by the beer – and iced tea for Diana – we went to the Musee des Beaux Arts, which boasts an impressive collection of 26 Corot paintings. Actually rather somber, all together like that. Some minor works by Impressionists like Matisse, Renoir, Sisley and so on, a pretty good Chagall, and this rather unusual rendering of boating in the 1880s:

By the way, the other morning we saw a cormorant diving for his breakfast as we cruised by, which put me in mind of the Isherwood poem:

The common cormorant (or shag)
Lays eggs inside a paper bag,
You follow the idea, no doubt?
It's to keep the lightning out.

But what these unobservant birds
Have never thought of, is that herds
Of wandering bears might come with buns
And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.