Pastry, Petitions, and Politics Part III I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it. - Thomas Jefferson Summer arrives in Chinon on the first wave of tourists; bicycles clog the courtyard; buses disgorge bedraggled groups weary from travel yet pleased to be in such a charming ...
Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade. - Rudyard Kipling, Complete Verse It was a tangle of brambles and ivy, a wilderness of sticks and dried grass and odd and unknown stalks of something or other sticking heavenward willy-nilly across the landscape. The old wooden gate pushed open to ...
O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind? - Percy Bysshe Shelley Winter rolls in on a wave of misty white, the fog hanging heavy and cruel over the city. The icy chill penetrates every pore of one’s body and no matter what one does, no matter how many blankets or pairs of socks, ...
The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugarplums. - Anthony Trollope I’ve had an unexpected windfall of greengage plums. It rained hard for most of the summer, summer not arriving in the Loire Valley until mid-July. It rained hard and long and the chill ...
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. - Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg Spring has finally arrived in Chinon. Wild winds, grey skies, spattering rain are interspersed with flashes of bright sunlight filtering through hazy skies and lighting up the courtyard, brushing against the windows and warming the breakfast room. ...
It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees. - George Eliot The magnolia tree is covered in blossoms the color of plum jam. Sprays of bright yellow daffodils astonish the eye, bursting forth from the wintry brown dirt of the garden, daffodils gathered in clumps where they ...
I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians. - Charles de Gaulle The Hôtel Diderot is on the edge of old Chinon, tucked away at the end of a quiet street behind an elegant, tarnished white ironwork gate. Serenity in a tranquil town. Days in ...
Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them. – Nancy Mitford I sit next to Jane comfortably and convivially at the white plastic picnic table in the shade of the overhang, a tangle of branches heaped upon the table. We each have a plastic ...
A small town is a place where there's no place to go where you shouldn't. - Burt Bacharach I like the small-townness of Chinon. Everyone seems to know one another but not in an American small-town way; the knowing is very discreet, a restrained nod of the head in passing, a simple acknowledgement of recognition, of ...
Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace. - Eugene O'Neill A stroll through the beautiful city of Chinon, and the fairytale of living in France returned and ignited my esprit. Each afternoon ramble through the narrow medieval streets of this picturesque village with its swags of roses ...
I'm Jamie; welcome to the new Life's a Feast!
I run a hotel in Chinon, France, and write about life, culture, modern day living and food.
My passion is to create vibrant and unique experiences.
