As tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the US, I’m reposting this.
No Thanksgiving Day in France. But I will definitely miss the turkey and all its trappings. And the leftovers on the following days! In spirit, I’ll be with my friends Bob and Norma (Norma being a super cook).
Champs-Elysées have dressed up for the Holiday Season
I debated whether I’d cover the din with some music, and decided that I’d be lazy as usual and would let you enjoy the true atmosphere, noise, traffic jams and all.
I was standing at Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées and looking towards the Louvre and Jardin des Tuileries, where they put the Ferris Wheel in the winter.
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This photo was taken thanks to Mrs K. one of my faithful commenters who has become a friend and generously welcomed us in Gateshead. Let her and Joan be thanked.
We had indeed caught sight of The Angel of the North, a huge structure conceived by Anthony Gormley, which can be seen when you drive around Newcastle. Mrs K. made it easy for us and drove us there, then into Newcastle.
You wouldn’t be able to see this photo the way it is if it hadn’t been photoshopped by Leo Reynolds, who “removed” the people 
The original photo is here
More photos of Newcastle and Gateshead here
More to come when I get some time away from walking…
My Weekly Flick has not really been weekly lately, neither has my Wednesday Window. Sorry about this, too much exercise, no doubt.:)
Here’s something I captured a couple of nights ago, crossing the river Seine and walking towards Notre-Dame de Paris. Even at night, while the bridge was rather deserted, there was an accordion playing.
Looking at the river Seine
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I don’t much like being tagged but I do like Matt at SkyMinds a lot. So I am adjusting his tagging to my own ways… 
Yes, Matt, elders tend to do that
The idea was to grab the book you are currently reading and write down the fifth sentence on page 123.
Well, I decided to copy the paragraph I had stopped at. Hope Matt won’t mind too much.
She had one packet remaining, and only after several minutes of irritable raking through her mess did she find it in the pocket of a blue silk dressing gown on her bathroom floor. She lit up as she descended to the hall, knowing that she would not have dared had her father been at home. He had precise ideas about where and when a woman should be seen smoking: not in the street, or any other public place, not on entering a room, not standing up, and only when offered, never from her own supply –notions as self-evident to him as natural justice. Three years among the sophisticated of Girton had not provided her with the courage to confront him. The lighthearted ironies she might have deployed among her friends deserted her in his presence, and she heard her own voice become thin when she attempted some docile contradiction. In fact, being at odds with her father about anything at all, even an insignificant domestic detail, made her uncomfortable, and nothing that great literature might have done to modify her sensibilities , none of the lessons of practical criticism, could quite deliver her from obedience. Smoking on the stairways when her father was installed in his Whitehall ministry was all the revolt her education would allow, and still it cost her some effort.
This is taken out of Atonement, a novel by Ian McEwan.
You may well wonder what led me to that novel. I had never heard of Ian McEwan before, althought he seems quite well-known, but I don’t read much these days. Anyway, last summer, I rented out the video of Atonement, translated in French by Reviens-moi, Come back to me
Fountain in the park of Castle Howard
I rented it because of the name of Vanessa Redgrave in the cast of characters. I must say that I don’t particularly like Keira Knightley, who I only remembered by her inadequate (in my opinion) performance in Pride and Prejudice. Maybe she wasn’t inadequate, it was the adaptation of the novel that was…
But I liked Atonement so much that it made me feel like getting the novel and reading it. Of course, it’s taking me forever as I am taken elsewhere by other “duties”, like ElderExercise –you’ll notice that our elder exercise blog now has its own domain name, which means that although there aren’t that many of us, we are here to stay.
The photo in this page was taken at Castle Howard. Nothing really to do with Atonement, which was filmed in Stokesay Court, but there’s a key scene that takes place in a fountain, and some of the fountains at Castle Howard immediately came to my mind.
