Today was planned to be our first big walk, but my back was
very uncomfortable so we just headed out to see how far we got. We went up the
back of Céret, up to Le Balcon de Céret, a viewpoint looking back over the
town, having first picked up a baguette to make a picnic lunch. You can buy
bread from the multiple boulangers
pretty much any time any day, except of course at lunchtime which is sacrosanct
here. My back was sort of OK, but not great, but we managed to find our way up
to an orientation table well above town.
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| The centre of our village, with St Pierre |
It gave us a good idea of where Céret is positioned in the
area, with Canigou to the south all covered in cloud today, and looking like it
was snowing.
It has been unseasonably cold, with temperatures in the mid-single
figures overnight, though further north in France it has got to zero. Virtually
every night the weather shows here (probably Perpignan) the warmest place in
France, often with Cannes/Nice the same or one degree cooler. Up on the hill it
was pretty bleak with a good southerly coming from the snows of the Pyrenees.
Céret is tucked into the valley of the Tech River, with hills to the east and
west, mountains to the south, and the plains of Roussillon and Perpignan to the
north. From the lookout we can easily see the Mediterranean and the taller
buildings of Perpignan.
We were back by mid-afternoon, and read until our concert in
the church below at 5:30pm. Entry was a miracle of disorganisation with far too
few ushers getting things sorted, so the concert took a while to get underway.
I have never heard an orchestra take so long tuning up. They were at it for 20
minutes before it all started, then walked the 50m to the stage where they
tuned up all over again. The orchestra was from Barcelona, the choir from up
the Tet Valley and the soloists from Barcelona too. The concert was good, but
not quite as good as we had hoped. Perhaps the orchestra was a little small for
the church, but it didn’t seem to fill it with sound. A big break halfway
through, another serious tuning session, and then the second half. At the end a
huge ovation from the audience, and a repeat of the Magnificat to another
ovation. We don’t know whether the audience was local, or perhaps from
Perpignan too, but it was mostly French. “Titanic” was on TV after, and we
enjoyed watching it, again with subtitles on which made good sense of the
dubbed dialogue.
