On the Edge
Happy New Year to all our readers, from Terroir North and South!
Our Christmas blog (no. 97 on Christmas landscapes) gave thanks to our forebears for creating a mid-winter festival which broke the monotony of cold and darkness and created hope by welcoming the return of the sun. But why, for much of the world, does the first day of the New Year follow so closely on Christmas celebrations?
For the western world it seems that we can blame the pre-Christian Romans when they overhauled their ten month calendar to be more in tune with the 12 lunar cycles in the solar year. January and February were added and the former, of course, was named after Janus (right), the god of doorways and beginnings. It must have seemed apt, therefore, to move the start of their new calendar year from the vernal equinox in March, to the beginning of January, a portal which was under Janus’ bi-directional supervision.
Less than a thousand years later, the Romans converted to Christianity and December 25th became a significant religious festival. Some Christian countries reverted back to a March New Year, which seems eminently sensible, but many continued with the big winter combo.
As a child, Terroir remembers a clear separation between the excitement of Christmas and the start of the new year. This slack period was a time when fathers went back to work and mothers did their best to entertain offspring before school re-started in early January. Banished to bed long before midnight, the line between the years was something we crossed in our sleep. We went to bed in one year and woke up in another; that was about as exciting as it got. New Year’s Day in England and Wales wasn’t even promoted to bank holiday status until 1974. But today, many Brits consider Christmas-and-New-Year as one extended mid-winter break.
As we manoeuvred ourselves through that colourful, expensive, highly-decorated, time-consuming, alcohol-fuelled, exciting, exhausting and anticipatory period which is known as ‘the-run-up-to-Christmas’ (aka Advent), Terroir started thinking about the very different festival geography of New Year’s Eve. This has a much shorter lead time and is over in the pop of a prosecco bottle as we all cross the temporal line from one year to the next in a geographical sequence westwards from the Pacific Ocean.
Time takes us to the edge of one year and pushes us over to the edge of the next. But, while the seasons march on, the world is full of other lines, edges and boundaries.
Here are some of the edges we spotted over the last 12 months.
And, at the far edge between an extraordinary 2022, we wish you a happy, healthy, stimulating and fulfilling 2023.
Only Lyon
Yes, we’re sorry, our first trip abroad for nearly two and a half years and we only managed to get as far as Lyon.
In fact, this modest and self-deprecating blog title is actually Lyon’s badge of choice to head up its tourism offer. Why has Lyon – usually regarded as France’s third city – chosen such an unassuming logo? Of course ‘only’ is an anagram of Lyon. But it still didn’t make much sense to us. Perhaps we are supposed to think ‘only in Lyon will you find …’? On translating it back into French, however, we came up with ‘Uniquement Lyon’. Loses the anagram but we do feel it sells the destination a whole lot better. Stick with what you know? Translations can land you in trouble.
So what did we find in Only Lyon? Here are some of the quirkier bits.
We arrived by train. No not this station ….
…. but a much newer one where the ‘Sortie’ currently discharges you straight into a chaotic building site .
Only Lyon then delivers you into the modern hell of a Westfield shopping centre.
It was a bad start, but things did improve. Lyon’s plane trees, for instance, are magnificent and, in our view, a really distinguishing feature of the city. Perhaps Plane Lyon instead of Only Lyon? But to British eyes, they do look as though they have been high pruned by the giraffes in the city zoo. There is also a very tall graffiti artist - or a very talented giraffe.
Younger plantings and a greater variety of species are beginning to take their place alongside the plane avenues. The city centre is densely built-up, but the rivers Rhône and Saône do provide opportunities to increase urban greening…
… as do the house boats, which line the river banks (below).
Choice of species can be interesting (Lyon is not alone in that of course). Spring is an exciting time in this Lyon suburb and the photograph (right) really doesn’t do justice to the migraine inducing colour combination. Further up the road, there is also an office block which does a thorough job of obscuring the views of the old town, below.
Labelling of larger new specimen trees appears in some places: usually informative (below left and centre) but not exclusively so (below right) and no, it’s not an avacado tree.
Another thing which Lyon does well is provision for two wheelers. Bicycles and electric scooters whizz around the city, often with children on the back (cycles), or in front (on the scooters). When the speed limit for the whole city drops to 30 k/h (around 20 mph) on the 1st April this year, two wheelers will have even more reason to smile. And again, there are some delightful consequences.
But our favourite quirky surprise, by far, is Ememem and ‘flacking’. Thanks to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ememem) we now know that Ememem are a plural entity, live in Lyon, and go round at dead of night to create mosaics in cracked pavements and facades. ‘Flacking’, apparently derives from ‘flaquer’ (meaning a puddle, presumably linked to the holes in streets which Ememem’s artworks fill). In Lyon, the artist(s) have been dubbed le chirurgien des trottoirs, or the pavement surgeons and ememem refers to the sound of their moped. It’s a great city vibe.
They have also worked in Barcelona, Madrid, Turín, Oslo, Melbourne, Aberdeen and York, so you probably know all about them.
We will return to ‘Only Lyon’ in a future blog but we leave you today with a very Lyonnais poster which made us laugh out loud. Lyon was once a silk town (stand aside Macclesfield and Leek) and is rightly proud of its textile heritage. But it does need some linguistic help.
