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Hello there
Happy new year to you!
It may be hard, after the one that has just passed, to muster the sort of anticipation the start of another year merits. Nevertheless, once we accept that few of us have any bearing on world events we can just enjoy the things we do have control over and relish the company of the people we love. Leave a little space, too, to dream, and the energy to do your best to realise those dreams. Amongst ours are to get a mainstream publisher to pick up Charlotte’s Travels With My Cake Tins, almost half of which is written and which you will be able to buy, at least, in e-book form by the end of March. Watch out publishing agents: we’ll be banging on your door sometime soon.
With our best wishes
Charlotte and Niall
Looking forward to 2026
Newfoundland recce.
With funding from the Newfoundland and Labrador Tourist Board and Light and Land, I (Niall) will be travelling to Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula in late May, early June. I first visited in February 2003 to write a story about the island in the 10 years since the cod moratorium and although taken with the place, I haven’t since returned. In that time, photo tour companies have
been slowly describing a North Atlantic arc - starting with the Shetlands, then Norway, Iceland, back to the Faeroes then over to Greenland. The last piece in the arc, Newfoundland, is missing in most European tour company offerings and we want to change that. I plan to run our first tour there for Light and Land in June 2027. Watch this space!
Working with bee eaters.
Now that I have discovered one, of no doubt many, small colonies of bee eaters (4 km along our lane), I’ll get to work in earnest this spring before they are back by installing perches and probably a hide (although working a remote camera is another possibility). I have a lot to learn about these super-charismatic birds before we invite you to work them too, but this year, that work begins in earnest.
More meetings with the black shouldered kites.
Last week when I was looking for cranes along the Loire, I saw a pale coloured bird of prey perched atop a fairly distant hawthorn. Assuming it was one of the pale morph buzzards that are common here, I raised my lens to get a better look. And what a gorgeous bird I saw- a black shouldered kite! There’s no mistaking this raptor. Yes, certainly smaller than a buzzard, but noticeably bigger than a kestrel. And so pale, with that contrasting black forewing. I wasn’t close enough to see, but I believe their irises are a devilish shade of red.. Unlike many raptors, this one is undergoing a major range expansion at the moment, having originated as a sub-Saharan species. When I was young, it only just had a foothold in the south of Spain. Now, I heard from Willi Rolfes, they are even nesting in northern Germany. Apparently, half a dozen or so pairs are breeding on the floodplain of the Loire south of Decize, where I met this bird. More (and closer) meetings, please!
Discovering more D and D (Dereliction and Decay) sites
I haven’t got the D and D bug out of my system yet. And neither, it seems, have many of our guests. I’ve found that some localities are time-limited offers - they get redeveloped, or just too decrepit and unsafe to enter. Sometimes, I’ve mined them for all the pictures I can see. It’s unlikely this one will be demolished any time soon; it’s the General Hospital of Decize, 58. In spite of its shabby appearance, it remains fully functional and is a pillar of health provision for over 50 000 people in the area. It’s, no doubt originally contemporary, design and colour scheme looks a little embarrassing now, in the same way as platform clogs, overlarge collars and kaftan dresses. But there are more pictures to be had of the outside.
Visit more limestone
Annoyingly, given that much of France is built on limestone, the Morvan’s foundations are of granite instead. That has yielded acidic soils and as we know, all the best plants are found on limestone in! I’ve been tracking down local pockets of it - plants like purging flax and salad burnet are a giveaway - but this spring I will visit a site known, encouragingly, as Orchid Hill, an hour-and-a-half north west of us. It’s a bit of a stretch to include in our Chez-nous Retreats - but that depends on how generous the hill is.
Check out new white stork locations
Now the leaves are off the trees, it’s easier to spot storks‘ nests that are normally screened. I’ve found two recently, one of which has a nearby embankment, offering the possibility of a more eye-level view. Still, we’ll need to see if it’s occupied in spring. Either way, we still have our canal-side colony (above) to keep us busy .
Kick some…donkeys
Deference is not necessarily a bad thing; it allows you to save energy for the battles that really matter. But when other people use my work to make money, with no recompense, that’s maybe something not to take lying down. The two barn owl pictures are a case in point. Above is my photograph, below, the “original oil painting” of the same. I’ve had at least one other photograph I know about used and recognise pictures by colleagues in the “artist’s” galleries. Whether its copyists using our pictures to make paintings for sale or our images being scraped for AI training, it’s time to, well, not defer.
Travels With My Cake Tins - preface
Here’s a taster if where we’re going with our new book:
AT ITS HEART, this is a book about living a life less ordinary - of daring to follow a path that feels “right”, rather than “correct”. It’s a choice most of us face daily and, wisely perhaps, we normally choose the path of least resistance, of what is expected of us or what is considered responsible. “Safe” is a comfortable place to be, for a while at least. But, in our forties, we grew weary of it, and cast off on a very uncertain journey.
Don’t get the impression that Charlotte and I are natural-born rebels. We’re not comfortable “sticking it to the Man” and we enjoy security as much as anyone else. It’s just that those things that drive us - the need to make things, to share new ideas, to extend hospitality, to gulp down new experiences in different parts of the world and pass on knowledge - these desires aren’t readily compatible with a conventional way of living and working. These are not just things we like doing; they are deeply-seated needs that have to be satisfied through daily practice so we don’t live Thoreauvian lives of “quiet desperation”: they define us - and we ignore them at our peril.
If social-media posts are to be believed, we can all follow our dreams simply by having faith in ourselves and working hard. While that may work out for a few lucky individuals, I suspect that, for most, it’s a short-cut to disappointment and a return to a more ordinary life. I’ve worked as a photographer and writer for over thirty years now and with Charlotte in our business, for fifteen of these and it has never been easy, never felt secure nor had a certain future. Not unlike many jobs. But if the alternative is a lack of autonomy and limited opportunity to do the work that really means something to me, then I think we have chosen the right path and not being bound by convention. Nevertheless, “following your dreams”, for most, is a charter for failure. What you actually need is a good, flexible plan. And for us, that plan has always centred round food, photography and hospitality.
In the world, it seems, there are those whose main concern is with destruction in all its forms and those who devote themselves, instead, to making things, material or experiential. The best of these things are made by people with their hands - or souls - and with love of their craft and care for the user or audience. We belong in this camp and much of our work consists of finding ways to making things that is self-sustaining, that allows us to continue the process of creation. So it was that we founded our business, Food and Photography Retreats Ltd, to do work that meant something to us and gave benefit and pleasure to others.
That cooking and sharing food should be part of our plan is hardly surprising. Few other staple human activities offer so much scope for combining creativity with pleasure, the expression of love and embodiment of place. Yet in industrialised societies, too many of us seem willing to see our daily bread as little more than fuel and governments have succumbed to pressure to skew the system in favour of multi-national food corporations and the “convenience” and “value” they offer. Now, with a new understanding about the true nature of ultra-processed foods emerging, it’s clearer than ever that these corporations have long ceased to be interested in preserving good food for us to eat safely in favour of selling us cheap substitutes dressed up to look like the real thing. It’s a scandal, some believe, that could be as egregious as Big Oil’s cover-up of its role in global heating or Big Tobaco’s bare-faced lies about the danger of its products. In our own tiny way, we would like to be part of the recalibration of the West’s relationship with food, putting nourishment front and centre of our activities.
As it happens, we live in a country that still has a healthy respect for good food and strong local food cultures. Compared to the UK, France was relatively late to industrialise and to this day has a large percentage of the population living in small towns and villages, close to the land. Street markets are still filled with locally produced fruit, vegetables, beef and poultry. Fresh food is expensive compared to its supermarket alternatives but enough people still value the connection with the producer and place to pay a premium.
Follow our journey now, from the the wilds of Iceland to our home in France, via the Norwegian fjords and Scottish islands. It’s one full of adventure, awful weather, wildlife encounters and sharing food with our guests. Ultimately, it’s about finding home - and having a life a little less ordinary.
We’ll let you know when the e-book version is ready.😊
2026 Chez-nous brochures out now
click on the image to see the brochure
Our 2026 brochures for Reteats with us in Burgundy are out. If you want to progress your photography - and be treated like kings and queens - there really is nothing else like it. Let’s have a Zoom call to see what we can do for you.
Bonus footage: Magpie (and church), Reine, Norway
Like so many highly photogenic locations, the Lofoten’s popularity has surged since I first visited in February 2002. Then, there were no other tourists about in Reine, perhaps the prettiest of the villages. It also has the most congested two square metres of roadside pavement in Norway. There is just one spot on the bridge, barring the unpopular use of a drone, to get the perfect balance of mountain and rorbuer. It was odd then that my favourite photograph from Reine, perhaps because it could encapsulate so much of Norway, is of a magpie, with other elements conveniently arranged around it. Every landscape needs some life - and that’s a new year’s resolution!
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