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Trinkets of Virtue

So here is a musing on a interview with Ken Kesey for Paris Review. I read it long time ago so no much is left in my memory of it and when I found my little piece in the archives, it sounded ok so I decided to publish it again. I don’t think that many people would have read it before anyway. I wasn’t a part of the Beat generation, neither of its later sprout, the Hippy flower child. On The Road was not yet translated in socialist Bulgaria when I was at school in the late 70s. Fly over the Cuckoo Nest was translated but ‘of course, everybody knew it was written against the Capitalist society’. LSD, mescaline, the Doors, the Byrds and anything of this sort did not even exist in our world – ‘the dust bowl of reality’. My father was arrested for dancing rock&roll on a table and girls with short skirts had stamps put on their hips so they cannot ware them again.Even religion wasn’t there to give some kind of hope to the searching minds.  But both the Beat generation and we, behind t...
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The Chateau de Fosseuse

After a long and very hot drive through France, our party of three - my travel companion Liz, my dog and I - arrived at our guest house. Liz had booked it on the Internet and kept telling me it looked very nice indeed. I took it with a pinch of doubt as nowadays you can make anything look nice if you had a stylish website.

When we got out of the car and looked at it though, we realised that we were going to sleep in a castle. A dignified old building stood in front of us, with a staircase covered in climbers. It had enough little cracks on its face to look old and enough charm to look still attractive.






We were showed around by the owners - a French guy who refused to speak in English in the most charming way, and his wife - an English lady who has been leaving in France for many years but had kept her Englishness very well. We also found out on the next morning that she still could make a decent pot of tea!

We were led to our room, climbing the almost worn out steps, which were partially renovated. Apparently the daughter, who, if I am not mistaken, was a restorer left some untouched so one could see the age of the building.



We stayed in the suite (at the present only three rooms are available for B&B - two rooms and a suite) and when we looked around we realised that everything had been kept very close to the original decor. Even the wallpapers were actually made of fabric. A wonderful restoration indeed!



The light switch was behind a door without a key; a long flayer of steps were leading to who knows where. I was wondering if there were any ghosts in the chateau but my dog slept all night like a log and apart from the ocasional fluttering of bats' wings outside the window the silence was like thunder. It was too peaceful for me to sleep. I was missing the voices of the city. In spite of that I felt quite rested on the next morning and ready for the long drive to Sakya Changloche Ling in the Dordogne.

We will be staying there again in the Chateau on our way back to England so I hope to get to know the place better. Its history is facinating but I will write another post about it later. For more details, here is the Chateau de Fosseuse's website.



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