North and south on a plate

Boles de picolat

It seems almost impossible that only just over a week ago, the days were still sunny and hot, with humid nights.

It’s perfectly possible that such weather could return to grant us an Indian summer, but at present, it feels very much autumnal.

The nights are lengthening and the days shortening. The tipping point cannot be far away.

As we emerged from the British Museum on Friday evening at around 7.20pm, it was already pretty much dark, and rain was pitching down.

It didn’t stop until the following morning, yet there was something comforting in hearing the rhythmic pattering outside as I curled up in bed later.

The temperature has dropped and, while it’s not actually cold, it’s a lot cooler. The weekend saw more rain and some pretty blustery wind, largely grey skies, and the first signs of yellowing leaves on the two tall, slender silver birches in the carpark.

When all this is happening, the last thing you want to eat is salad.

I had already contacted Longwood Farm early last week, deciding that a slow Sunday afternoon cook was perfect and could easily be done again.

This time, it was shin of beef and beef kidney for a Vlaamse Stoverij, the Flemish dish that we first ate in Bruges 18 months ago.

The meats are diced and sautéed, followed by onion, carrot and celery. Everything goes into the big Le Creuset pot and is topped with three bay leaves, a sprig of thyme and a slice of bread, spread on one side with mustard.

Then it’s all covered with beer, lidded, and popped into the oven.

I stuck with the 160˚C (fan) from last week’s casserole and cooked it for approximately four hours.

Shin has to be cooked for a long time so that all the connective tissue beaks down, but it’s a cheap and tasty cut – and not one you’ll easily find in a supermarket.

And that was pretty much that.

But if Sunday’s dish evoked northern Europe, and that fluid region where the northernmost part of France meets the south of Belgium, Saturday’s food was all of the south.

I have cooked Boles de Picolat before, but only from that sort of point where you’ve never tasted a dish and are, ultimately, guessing what it should be like.

After our experience at Le Marinade, I decided to give it another whirl.

As with so much traditional food, there is no one cast-in-stone way of doing it.

Between French-language Catalan recipe books and a recipe postcard, I have five recipes – and all are different. One even calls for a small cup of coffee to be added.

The nearest coffee came to my version was the mug beside me as I spent an amiable hour or so studying the recipes on Saturday morning. After that, the books were put away and I worked from the memory of that meal in Collioure, taking a general sense of all the written recipes I’d looked at and combining it with the fact that meatballs are something I consider myself rather good at.

Figs, raspberries, blackberries, cream

So, for two of us, I used 400g of mince.

Now it should have been a mixture of beef and pork (some recipes also use sausage meat or substitute it for the pork), but since no pork mince was forthcoming, I stuck with beef, without too much sense of major loss.

Two small slices of bread were soaked in a small amount of milk and then added to the meat, together with an egg.

Normally, I don't add milky bread or eggs to meatballs – they do not need it to bind – but these ingredients do help to make a particularly light meatball, and the Le Marinade experience suggested that this is what you want for Boles de Picolat.

The flavourings that were added were a good shake of smoky paprika, a little cinnamon and slightly less ginger. You just want a hint of spice to come through.

Once thoroughly mixed together and shaped into balls, these are rolled in plain flour and browned in olive oil.

Okay, I don’t usually flour my meatballs either, but when the mixture is this soft, it helps with the initial cooking. One of the recipes, clearly aimed at rather inexperienced cooks, offered a ‘tip’ in a sidebar, explaining how to four your meatballs by rolling them on a plate of flour. Rocket science.

Once browned, set the balls to one side.

Add a little more oil if you need, and soften a diced onion and some finely chopped garlic. I added a stick of finely chopped celery too.

Give it a very, very large squeeze of tomato purée – we’re probably talking half a 100g tube here – and stir gently into a little warm stock (I had a small jar of defrosted homemade chicken stock that was perfectly okay).

To all that, add some dried mushrooms, a cinnamon stick, some ground black pepper and some finely-chopped flat leaf parsley. Pop the meatballs back, lid it and cook gently for about half an hour.

At this point, test for seasoning and add salt if needed, then add a drained and rinsed tin of haricot or cannellini beans, and some drained green olives. Pop the lid back on and give it a further 30 minutes.

Serve in bowls with the broth, and top with more finely-chopped flat leaf parsley.

And that is that: easy and very tasty.

I might not seem as obviously ‘southern’ as, say, a ratatouille or a bourride, but it is every bit as much indicative of a region that includes mountain country as well as the coast and the plain.

Perfect Sunday brunch

As a fusion of north and south though, a quick Nigel Slater dessert of figs, served with clotted cream and a scatter of raspberries would take some beating – perfect at this time of year, and you could easily substitute blackberries for the raspberries depending on taste and availability.

The final food note for an autumnal weekend that is worth a mention is the joys of a decent home-cooked English brunch late on a Sunday morning, after a delicious doze snuggled beneath the covers.

Downland’s marmalade sausages and a huge, halved tomato were grilled, while tinned (sorry) mushrooms were cooked in butter.

Three eggs were scrambled in more butter and were served on real fried bread – cooked in lard, in other words.

The only other addition was HP sauce.

North or south, it’s good to remember that, even as you mourn the passing of summer, autumn has many glories and pleasures to offer.

Fortifying food – and another fort

Forteresse de Salses: light and shade

After a few days on the beach, the beginning of the week seemed like the perfect time to take another day trip and see something more of the region.

So in the late morning, we headed up to the railway station and caught a train north, to Salses.

Just two stops beyond Perpignan, it was like walking into an entirely different world. Spoiled by spending time in busy tourist towns, this was real rural France. And when we arrived, it was pretty much deserted for lunch.

Talking of lunch, by that time we needed some ourselves.

We sat down outside what appeared to be the lone open eatery, but after a lengthy wait in which nobody appeared, we wandered away in search of somewhere – anywhere – else.

Eventually, we managed to find a café-sports bar, Cafe de la Paix, which we’d actually walked within a few metres of to start with.

Café de la Paix

There was a limited available menu – sandwiches – so we ordered that. In the event, a ‘sandwich American’ turned out to be a quite a meal.

They arrived wrapped tightly in foil; a hulking big bun, toasted, with two steak hachés inside, plus thick slices of tomato and onion and, in my case, two varieties of cheese and some mayo.

The burgers were delicious: cooked to still be pink in the middle – and most certainly not something that had come out of the freezer.

These sandwiches hit the spot completely.

It was clearly a working class bar and they probably don’t get many holidaymakers – which might explain why the woman behind the bar wondered whether we were Australian!

But she was delighted when I commented on all the Catalans Dragons flags around the place and said that the team was good.

Now this is a sandwich

We were made very welcome – indeed, when two young lads popped in to pick up their own sandwiches for lunch, as they left, they waved and wished us a ‘bon appetite!’

Opposite was an old church, that, amazingly, seemed to have a building that had been attached to it demolished. The space was acting as a carpark, and young lads were playing boules there.

But we hadn’t ventured to Salses on the off chance of finding something: there was a specific motive in mind.

And after that supremely satisfying lunch, we ambled off to find what we made the trip for: the Forteresse de Salses.

Church, Salses

One the way, we spotted a fascinating flower with yellow flowers and along, red stamens – entirely appropriate for Catalan country.

Its scientific name is caesalpinia gilliesii but it’s also known, rather poetically, as ‘oiseau de paradis jaune’: ‘yellow bird of paradise’.

And so on to the fort, which can be seen from both the train to the east and the main road on the other side.

Its positioning is no accident. To the east lie the Corbières hills and to the west, the Etang de Leucate. The fort was intended to guard the narrow strip of land between the two, on what, in Roman times, had been the Via Domitia between France and Spain.

'Yellow bird of paradise'

The region has a turbulent history. Roussillon was conquered by the Arabs in 720, then passed to Carolingian France in 759 when it was liberated by the delightfully-named Pepin the Short.

The first mention of a castle on the site goes back to 1007, and it was rebuilt in 1192 for Chevalier Raymond de Saint-Luarent.

Suffice it to say that it has had as long and fascinating a history as the region: it was partially destroyed in 1496 by the French, but under the following year’s treaty that ended the first Franco-Spanish War, it was returned to Spain.

In June 1497, work began to rebuild the fort. The architect – only recently discovered by historians – was Francisco Ramiro López.

It was to be a revolution in design and withstood three sieges – one coming before it was even complete.

Fort entrance: Other Half waiting

In 1685, when its role had passed into history, Vauban was amongst various people who considered razing Salses to the ground, but that would have been too costly, so instead, he made a small number of improvements.

In 1886, it was listed as an historic monument and, in recent years, the Historic Buildings Department has been painstakingly restoring it.

It’s deceptive to approach, being partly below ground, surrounded by a vast moat, which disguises its real scale.

There are two gate houses to pass through, and then a main gate, before you come into the central courtyard, with its well at the centre, a chapel (dedicated to St Sebastien) on one side, barracks and stables on another, and the main keep to the left.

There’s also the complete oddity of a baroque clock above the barracks – for which I can find no explanation.

We went on the tour around the keep (donjon). Unsurprisingly, they don’t let you wander around it on your own – not least because it’s labyrinthine. For me, it brought to mind the castle/library in the film of The Name of the Rose.

Fort courtyard from the keep

Then we were able to wander freely. The barracks used to be on three floors, but is now one vast, cavernous room that seems almost Roman. The stables are down ramps below.

There’s a starkness to it that is quite unlike anything else I’ve seen. If you want to see the extremes of Mediterranean dark shadow and bright light, against an incredibly simply background of sand-coloured stone and blue sky, then you can do so at Salses in the right weather.

Well in the foreground. Barracks, stables & baroque clock

The scale is astonishing; the state of repair is remarkable (and yes, they’re still very obviously working on it) and the sense you start to get of how it was designed to work in a military sense is every bit as fascinating.

There are something like 400 ‘loopholes’ – holes where soldiers could train a weapon on the exterior. There are a fair few more that would have allowed soldiers to train arms on the interior too, should enemy troops break through.

Once outside, we took the time to stroll around the entire exterior, above the moat.

And here we spotted something entirely different and quite unexpected: vast numbers of small snails on the stems of fennel.

Snails on fennel

As any schoolchild knows, the French word for ‘snail’ is escargot. In Occitan country (not far to the west of where we are) it’s escagaròl and in Pays Catalan it’s cargol – hence a cargolade is a Catalan speciality of barbequed snails, which are served with assorted regional meats, such as saucisse Catalan, the regional sausage.

The most common snail used is theba pisana – sometimes known simply as the Mediterranean snail – which can be spotted aestivating: or in essence, having a lengthy doze during hot periods.

And that was what we spotted: hundreds – no, thousands – of small, pale snails clinging, in utter stillness, to fennel stalks.

Every bit as much a pest as the common or garden British variety that hides away and loves the wet, this little bugger at least has a gastronomic virtue.

In just a few weeks, after the grape harvest, a large number of them will be found vine leaves on grills over open fires, doused with hot fat.

It’s a rather nice thought.

The journey back to Collioure

Etangs between Narbonne and Perpignan

It was just before 8am when the train pulled into Collioure. The journey from London had taken around 16 hours, but you hardly notice it when most of that is overnight.

We Brits might have almost forgotten about sleeper trains, but they’re a boon. In this case, it means that we don’t lose the first day of our holiday traveling.

We left work in the afternoon, walked the short distance to St Pancras, and after relaxing in the lounge for a while, boarded the Eurostar to Paris.

It’s approximately 30 minutes to the coast – whipped out of central London in no time, through tunnels, then past Rochester and on into Kent – before a further 30 minutes, at a somewhat slower pace, takes you under the Channel and lands you firmly on the Continent.

From there, it’s little more than an hour to the French capital.

There was blue above, and green and burnished gold below; trees and grass, bushes and scrub; hedgerows and harvested fields.

And occasionally, girded by a copse, the immaculate stone teeth of a war cemetery; some tiny, some larger, and serried ranks of clouds, grey shadow below pure white, marching into the distance, as far as the eye can see.

Rows of poplars started in the middle of nowhere and finished as abruptly as they’d begun. Small villages rushed past, arranged neatly around stocky, simple church towers topped with simple, stocky spires.

Modernity and industry have broken through in places, but these are the characteristics that dominate this landscape as you pass through northern France.

Once we’d disembarked at Gare du Nord, the main question was what to do with the time before our sleeper departed, just before 10, from Gare d’sAusterlitz.

We got a cab across the city and decided to wander into a nearby park that we hadn’t spotted when making the same trip last year.

It turned out to be le Jardin des Plantes, which is France’s main botanical garden, with four science museums – entomology, paleontology, mineralogy and evolution.

We strolled along one of the main walks – well, as much as one can ‘stroll’ when dragging bags behind through the sandy gravel.

The restaurant, though, was closed. So we sat down for a few minutes, only to find a park warden making his way to everyone still in the gardens to warn them that it would be shutting within four minutes.

Up again and out of one gate, we spotted a potager alongside one of the buildings, between the main gate.

A potager – not a bit of a flower bed in a carpark, but a real, live French potager, tightly packed with a vast array of fruits and vegetables.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to examine it in detail. That will have to wait for another day.

Determined to take things easy, we then found ourselves slogging up inclined streets before we found our way back to the main road to the station.

Still with two hours to go, we spotted a small Italian restaurant – a trattoria, in effect – and decided that, since locals seemed to be dining there, it was a far better option than the row of brasseries opposite the station itself, which, as we discovered last year, are not providers of the finest Parisian cuisine.

Il Vero turned out to be very nice indeed, although it was a good thing that we had plenty of time, because they really, really do believe in taking everything slowly – even getting your bill.

I opted for a puttanesca, never having had one actually cooked for me before.

Colloquially known as ‘tart’s spaghetti’ – possibly because it’s hearty and simple – it was an absolute delight.

It’s a tomato sauce with anchovies melted in to it, and olives and capers added. Gutsy, big flavours. Mine came with finely chopped parsley as a garnish, and I added a sprinkling of grated Parmesan.

The waiter/patron/maître d’ was a character who was happily joking with all his diners. In our case, he was deeply suspicious of The Other Half for requesting a mushroom risotto – and then asking that there be no cheese near it. I understand this sentiment entirely.

Later, he was equally suspicious when neither of us could finish the huge portions placed on the table – and I really do mean huge. In my case, it won’t have been less than 300g of pasta. The Other Half estimated that there was half a pound of rice on his plate.

Both dishes were fabulous to taste, and we enjoyed a small jug of a sparkling rosé that was recommended by a fellow diner and which was light and refreshing.

It left us enough time to comfortably make the train and get our bags up and onto the racks. We’d been given the top bunks in a cabin for four. At this time of year, you don’t get to have a cabin to yourself, even for a supplement – it’s too busy.

Not that that was a problem last year. A very quiet couple boarded just after us (we were on the lower bunks) and left at Narbonne.

Yesterday, we set off from Paris, with dark having just descended and with nobody else in the cabin.

About an hour later, we pulled into a station – my guess is that we were at Orléans. What sounded like a veritable hoard of small children came aboard and then spent the next half hour or so being bedded down by adults dealing with the excitement of a late night and a bed – on a train!

Your berth comes with a packet containing earplugs – kept for home, where they’re of far more use when some nearby residents decide to party late – and a very valuable bottle of water.

A knock on our door alerted us to the fact that we were not going to be alone for the entire journey. A man crept in quietly and went to bed with barely a sound.

He left at Narbonne in the dark, but the stop was long enough for dawn to brush past.

An apricot glow blossomed behind lilac clouds as we passed the first etangs. Hills in the background showed purple. The water was like metallic mirrors. It is a magical landscape that leaves me breathless every time in see it.

Morning over the Mediterranean, Roussillon

A couple of stops and we were in Perpignan. Just 20 minutes left. Elne first, then Argelès-sur-Mer. And five minutes later, you pass through a tunnel bored into the foothills of the Pyrénées and pull to a halt at Collioure itself.

We piled out of the train, almost mad with delight.

Down the hill and into the centre of the village, with a first stop for coffee while Aux Délice Catalans opened for business.

Then more coffee – and the butteriest, lightest croissants you can dream of, after we’d been welcomed by the man of the house, who shook our hands and welcomed us.

Tiny, delicate clouds scudded out to sea, and simply disappeared. Whitecaps were visible out beyond the harbour. The sky was as blue as could be and the light reminded you why Matisse loved the place so much.

After breakfast, it was on around past the chateau and to Port D’Avall beach, where Cyril and Vincent host the Bora Bora Beach Club – café, sun loungers (transats), pedalos and kayaks (give it a few days and I’ll be out in one).

Kisses and handshakes abounded: Cyril, quite wonderfully, lets us stash our bags at the back of the café until we can get into our rented home, while we get to start lounging around in the sun – by just 9am.

And so it is: Collioure – we’re back.

Le petit trainspotting

The view from St Vincent plage.

With the weather in a downward spiral (at least until we leave, according to Meteo France) and hints of the Tramontane forecast, there’s a sense of relief that we managed at least two days on St Vincent beach.

It’s just gone nine in the morning. There’s thunder overhead and rain is making runs past in little surges. Everything else is blissfully peaceful.

Sitting at the dining room table, with a steady flow of coffee, the long, narrow window lets in the light and the cool air and the sound of the weather.

The view beyond the tiny, wrought iron balcony encompasses a deep apricot painted gable end with blue shuttered windows and terracotta-tiled roof. Beyond, there’s a glimpse of the lower foothills of the Pyrenees as they slope down to the sea.

Stand on the balcony and there is the moulin and Fort Elme to the left; to the right, as the hills rise away over the rooftops, the fortifications built to bombard the Elme are visible, and then the Tour de la Madeloc.

Erected in 1285 by James II of Majorca, to guard his Roussillon territories against attacks from the north by the French and from the south by the Aragonese, it was tarted up by Vauban in the 17^th century.

At 656m, it can seem to follow you around. A very good place in which to build such a tower, in other words – although it must have been a nightmare getting the men and materials up there.

But before the weather cooled, we spent two days on St Vincent plage, staring at just that view, but from across the bay.

It has almost become one of our habits when sitting there to see if either of us can spot Le Petit Train on its slow progress up the hills, through the vineyards and up to Fort Elme, before it disappears from view for the descent to Port Vendres.

Made up of three yellow ‘carriages’, pulled by an ‘engine’, you see such tourist vehicles all over the place. But this is the one we’ve been on – and this is the one we sit and try to spot and we catch the rays.

And there is also, of course, Au Casot at the back of the beach. A ‘casot’, I now know, is a small, stone hut in the vineyards.

Day one, and I ate gambas: big, meaty things, perfect with aioli on the side.

Day two, and it was a hulking slab of tuna, cooked ‘bleu’, just as I had asked. Divinely moist and tasty, with a drizzle of syrupy Banyuls vinegar as a perfect compliment: a real treat.

Their ice cream is always perfection too. There is nothing complicated about what you eat  at Au Casot, but the cooking is perfection and it never disappoints.

And this year, they have a new little poster on one piece of wall, making it plain that they simply do NOT do mussels.

In between times, I bathed. More to the point, I stuck the goggles on and the snorkel in, and popped my head below the water to look at an utterly different world.

Fish swam around my legs. Now usually, they swim away when you’re near them. But by using a foot to rummage around in the pebbles and sand on the bottom, I could keep their attention – obviously they were wondering if there was any food in the offing.

It was fascinating. The water is so clear you can see them in such detail: the astonishing construction of their almost clear fins (and how they use them) and the colours of their lithe bodies shimmering as the sunlight pierces the water.

There were elongated fish with a single go-faster stripe; others, the shape of gurnards (that’s not what they were), nosing into rocks and disturbing the sea bed to find food; and baby versions of these too.

Shoals of something that looked like small bass, shoals of small fish with delicate yellow mouths; and others that looked like small dorade – or not so small, in some cases, and the more the size of your dinner plate.

It was charming and delightful – and not without a certain awe.

I really must learn to swim better, so that I can do more of this.

And then I’d sit again, drying in the sun, and watching to see if I could spot Le Petit Train once more, and casting an eye over the pebbled beach that holds such fascinating wonders itself – like this dead dragonfly; just look at the delicacy of the wings.

They all came to Elne

In this part of the world, they talk of having 27 centuries worth of history.

Now most places have lengthy histories, but if that sounds like an exaggeration, it isn’t.

And nothing could have made that clearer than a board charting those centuries in timeline form, which hangs in a small room off the cloister at the Cathédrale in Elne.

Originally under the control of the Ibéres, the town was first known as Pyréne, then Illibéris, during which time, in 218 BCE, Hannibal dropped in for a break after crossing the Pyrenees.

The Romans liked it so much that they came, saw, conquered and stayed around for a while, from 118 BCE to 414 CE, during which Elne became Castrum Helenae.

Then the Visigoths came, replaced by the Arabs for around 70 years, and followed by the Carolingians for just over a century.

By the time the Catalans took over in 873, it was Elna. Then the French popped over in 1473 before the Spanish arrived in 1494, to be replaced by the French again in 1642 when they realised they rather liked the place and would keep it. And so the town became Elne.

It was the bishopric of Roussillon from the 6^th century, but as nearby Perpignan prospered, Elne declined. In the late Middle Ages, the counts of Roussillon moved their seat there, with a papal bull seeing the Episcopal seat follow in 1601.

The Cathédrale Sainte-Eulalie-et-Sainte-Julie was founded in 1060 and consecrated nine years later, a lasting monument to the Roman style of architecture, with its two towers soaring above the town from the old ville haute.

The cloister is one of the finest examples of the Roman style – and now, centuries later, is one of the major drawing points for tourists, as Elne slowly starts to benefit from the rise in tourism – and the development of an area that, not that long ago, was considered the poor man of France.

And that cloister is astonishing.

It isn’t exaggerating to say that one could almost sense monks walking around, their habits rustling almost imperceptibly. The more imaginative could even be forgiven for thinking they hear the sound of chant on the breeze that brushes the lavender in the quadrangle.

The cloister developed from the Greek and Roman peristyle, or open porch, frequently surrounding an internal garden, and here, the colonnaded shade and the Mediterranean sun present sharp contrasts.

The carvings that decorate columns and walls run from the Romanesque to the Gothic, and besides showing Biblical scenes, also include flowers and patterns, together with mythical creatures, including griffins and mermaids.

The church itself is interesting too, with its Romanesque vaulted ceiling – rounded, not rising to a point. There are the usual side chapels and statues and candles, but nothing quite to equal the cloister.

Carvings of griffins.

We had taken the bus from to Elne and wandered upward, into the haute ville, the oldest and highest parts of the town, which surround the Cathédrale.

This small area offers extraordinary views across the plain to the Pyrenees as they slope gently down to the sea at Collioure, and to Perpignan and the Corbières hills in the other direction.

There were geographic advantages to Elne as a point from which to rule.

Next to the tourist information office was an old building that housed the gallery and glass-blowing workshop for Sylvain Magney and Veronique Carvalho.

Heaven alone knows what the heat would have been like if there had been any glass being blown when we were there, but the artist was having a day’s rest.

The glass was lovely. I came away with earrings and a pendant, in a sea green, with bubbles in them, like air rising to the surface. Unique pieces.

Little Zazou.

Artisanal crafts are a part of Elne’s revival and, a short while later, as we ambled among to apparent jumble of Roman walls and later housing, we found a little artists’ enclave with a café serving regional items – even up to Catalan cola.

As we sat amongst the palms, we saw a little cat. A sweet-faced thing, with a touch of mange and very dodgy back legs, one of the craftsmen (he makes harps) told us that this was Zazou.

At 14, she had been abandoned by her owner for being ‘too old’. Apologising for his language, he said how disgusting he thought this was. The artists and craftsmen and women in the café were all making sure that she had food and water.

“She’s not ready to die yet,” he added, looking fondly in her direction, as she lay on the step outside his workshop.

Such selfishness on the one hand and kindness on the other.

After the Cathédrale, we headed for lunch, and found ourselves at the very nearby Au Remp’Arts.

There we both had jambon and melon for a starter; vast portions of sweet, ripe fruit and glorious ham, served on little wooden pallets.

There’s a reason that this is such a classic combination: with quality ingredients, it’s superb.

The Other Half opted for a steak to follow, while I hunted the menu for the fish.

Spotting something called ‘cabillaud’, the fact that it was grilled and coming with aioli suggested that this was in the right area.

Indeed, it was cod. And very nicely done too, arriving on a bed of garlicky potato purée, with a piece of crisped skin and two chives as a garnish, and piles of a sort of julienned version of ratatouille on either side.

With a three-course deal for €26, desserts were a bit of a letdown. The Other Half’s crema catalana was closer to scrambled egg than it should have been – Hurrah! I’m not the only one who can scramble a custard!

My peach melba was simply chopped peach with a little vanilla ice cream and a pile of chantilly cream on top.

But after two excellent courses, at such a reasonable price, it would have been churlish to complain.

We ambled some more as clouds threatened a downpour, and eventually found our way, via a circuit, back to a gallery that contained a number of works by local artist, Ètienne Terrus.

The great advantage of such galleries, as with individual exhibitions of a single artist, is that get a sense of that artist’s journey.

And Terrus had certainly been on a massive journey, artistically speaking.

Looking at works from the late 19^th century, there was nothing to suggest what would follow.

Elne, by Ètienne Terrus, 1900.

Technically excellent, but two still lives (of oysters and of a fish with pan) were reminiscent of Gustave Courbet, in terms of the light and use of colour.

But then Terrus discovered Impressionism and, with it, a vastly increased palette of colour.

And where his work went from there sees him now regarded as a precursor to the Fauves – the likes of Matisse (a friend) and Derain and Dufy, many of whom spent much time in Collioure, with which they and their art movement remain inextricably linked.

After a combination of religion, food and art, we made our way back to Collioure, via the hubbub of Argèles sur Mer (great beaches, town built up as the archetypal resort).

It had been a fascinating day.