Idle ramblings...

Yeah, that's a strange title for a blog post.
It may be the fall out from my time travel book with kids stranded in the 18th century, but it seems the past is coming back at me. Recently, I bought some organic cane sugar lumps that happened to taste just like the ones - not "organic" at the time - my dad used to put in my pocket before I went to school when I was five or six, in case I felt faint from not eating breakfast. I hadn't tasted anything like that since. Same thing happened again last week with a pot of organic honey from Italy - tasted just like the one a friend of my parents got from his bees in the fifties. So these things are still there somewhere, they still exist…
And then, the last couple of Saturdays, I was treated by friends to glimpses of forgotten times.
Last week, in a quaint little roadside inn, I ate the traditional Brittany pancakes with a difference - cooked over an open fire in a huge stone fireplace. It's some work. You have to keep feeding small pieces of wood into the fire to keep the heat just so. That's what grannies here grew up with.
And then today, near Pont-Aven, another friend took me out to visit farmer friends of hers who decided to forego tractors, heavy-noisy-costly mechanical equipment and bank loans to go with. Not only are they organic the whole hog, but they work the way it was done in the olden days.
I'd never seen oxen at work. Its impressive. So powerful and quiet, so calm and slow. So regular. They drag huge things like it was nothing at all, using their own weight against the charge. Here they are at rest.
The ethnic yoke is something too.