THE RED EARTH, THE BLUE SKY, THE TURQUOISE OCEAN

At the end of November last year we went on a 6-day trip to our house in France. My husband, myself, my three daughters, my two granddaughters. Josh - my Australian son-in-law - flew in from Melbourne and met us at Barcelona Airport, where we usually land and drive up to the house in Thuir, near Perpignan. We'd asked for leave from school for our two granddaughters, Julie had come home from Oz for Christmas, not least to help us move house in Oslo, as had Josh.

My husband and I started off in the VIP lounge at Oslo Airport a couple of hours before we joined the others at the gate. Serving ourselves (me serving us) from the buffet where you helped yourself to everything from cocktails to food and wine and beer on tap (!), his comment from the wheelchair was - "They must think you're the greediest person they've ever had in here, moving constantly like a shuttle bus from the buffet to the table! Glad it's not me!"

Selfie at the Airport VIP Lounge - November 2014

Yes, wheelchair. Pushing your loved one around in a wheelchair teaches you a lot. Getting out of the taxi at the airport that day nearly 10 months ago, my husband had to walk with the help of a crutch for about 50 metres by himself into the departure hall and find somewhere to lean on while I fetched a wheelchair for him. As he was struggling with his crutch all by himself - no support from me as I was managing two bags - he tripped on the rubber mat at the entrance and fell. Oh my guilty conscience. Fortunately good people rushed up to assist. I realised then that Oslo Airport provides no seats in the departure hall, except way way in - a far distance to walk even for someone more able.

Pushing that wheelchair up the aisle

Having said this, the disabled service at airports is usually impeccable. Going back to Oslo from Barcelona Airport we entered the plane by the rear emergency entrance - hauled up by a truck lift - I was devastated because we had front seats - completely thrown off as you are when you're vulnerable. But the competent airport guys just went: No worries, we have a wheelchair that fits the aisle. Of course they have wheelchairs the width of a sales trolley! Silly me.

My husband and I bought our house in France in 2002. It was a dream come true for us. We'd been holidaying in the Roussillon with our daughters earlier. As the dream of a house of our own matured, we visited other areas of southern France to compare, but by spring 2002 there was no more doubt - it had to be this area in the southernmost corner of France, squeezed right up to the border of Catalan Spain.

Our plan was to spend more time here as the eve of old age grew closer.

When we left the house in the early morning of November 29 2014 I knew that this had been my husband's final visit.

On September 8 I finally went back to the France house. Nine months and nine days after my last visit. 

I was going back alone - to work, to clear up, to throw away my husband's clothes, to generally get used to being there without him. It would have been madness - I realised this later - and fortunately my friend Grete called me just days before my departure: "I'm coming with you." And I honestly don't know how my stay would have turned out without her there. Constant crying, I suppose. Having her there with me made such a gentle difference - awakening to a day of chatting and laughing instead of silence, walking to the village in step, instead of listening to footsteps that should have been there, echoing between the colourful Catalan style houses - Grete delightfully pointing out the pink, the yellow, the orange and the sand nuances that cover every wall in sight. The colours that reflect the natural hues of the Côte Vermeille and its beautiful light - the turquoise ocean, the blue sky and the red earth.

Our walls are pink!

Collioure

Try this: Throw out the clothes of your loved ones. Because they're old, or worn, or out of fashion. Not a piece of cake perhaps, because you might be attached to old stuff, but still. Out it goes.

Or try this: Get rid of perfect clothes and shoes because they're not needed any more, because the one who wore them is dead. I came to our house in France to throw out my husband's clothes there - the sneakers he's wearing in the photo above, the coat. My handsome husband, always so well dressed, always so cool, and at the same time - so sweet, so incredibly caring. So alive. Always my good looking man. Grete said to me, gently, every so often - shall we do it now? His shoes anyway. I answered yes. But I didn't get around to it. Couldn't.

Next time.

Maybe.

WALKING THE COTSWOLD WAY - AND DRIVING. PART THREE.

Wednesday July 1st was the hottest day in England since the scorching summer of 1976. I remember that summer, spending it in Surrey! Tove decided to take a day off from walking - the stretch from Painswick to Uley measures 24 kilometres, and frankly it would have been very strenuous. I asked her if she wanted to take the bus into Cheltenham with me, as I was going back to my famous osteopath Mark Lester for some more treatment, but she decided to take it easy. I managed to get some shopping done at the sales in Cheltenham - doing my new version of walking the Cotswold Way: Following the worn trail between the clothes stores on the main street.

Meeting up later at the Old Crown Inn in Uley, a 17th century coaching inn with an incredible location - rolling green hills and pastures wherever you turned your eyes - we sat in the shade of the big umbrellas at the Inn terrace. The dogs were cooled down with water and seemed very pleased.

Bull in field

But England is known for quick weather changes, and the following day - my wedding day - the clouds hung heavy over the trail. The trail, you may ask - did I venture out again? Yes, I sure did, deciding to at the last minute and pulling my hiking stuff out of my suitcase before it was collected. The bus for our next destination Wotton-under-Edge, left from a town called Dursley, which I thought I could walk to easily, and besides I felt more mobile after my treatments the previous day.

But I'd forgotten to pull my raincoat out of the suitcase - what a stupid thing to do in England when the sky looks like the above.

Tove

It turned out Dursley was not just around the corner, and of course the 6 kilometres that I walked left my knee swollen and sore again. But Dursley's unexpectedly trendy coffee shop the Bank Café - in yes, an old bank - literally shouted our names and lured us in, and how fantastic it was to sit there for an hour at the old school desk and dry up.

Tove went on her way and I walked around Dursley trying to discover either bus services to Wotton-on-Edge, or taxis, but no luck. The bus connections between these small villages are not always brilliant and the information poor, so basically you have to ask people in the street. Suddenly Tove returned - with a man no less, who had been walking from the opposite direction, and he persuaded her to turn back because the trail had become very wet and muddy with the rain. And we succeeded in catching one of two daily bus routes to Wotton and yet another 17th century coaching inn - the Swan Hotel!

 

Wotton-under-Edge is a very pretty village, with a high sense of community spirit amongst its inhabitants, which was something you could feel straight away. Well, actually one bakery took it a bit far perhaps, by proclaiming in its shop window a text that went something like this: "You say you want small speciality shops, but you can't just say it, you've got to use them too!"

The beautiful weather returned and I installed myself in a rose garden while again Tove walked away on the Cotswold trail. My knee was very swollen from the previous day's walking and it was absolute bliss to sit in the shade with my leg up and my coffee and book within reach.

I called the local taxi service after a few hours, because Tove wanted to be picked up in a village on the way, and before I knew it I found myself in a white van with the friendliest taxi driver I've ever come across - Kathy! She turned out to be an excellent guide as well and told us vivid stories about life in these parts of the Cotswolds. We drove past an idyllic looking farm and she pointed - "That's where the Backhouse murder took place in the 80s!" What a horrible story it was, and she knew most of the gory details, having lived in the village and gone to school with one of the sons of the involved! She was driving us to Chipping Sodbury, via both Little Sodbury and Old Sodbury, and I couldn't help associating it all with the TV-series Midsomer Murders, where quaint old English villages - all having "Midsomer" as part of their names - are infested by the most gruesome murders committed by otherwise normal and sane looking locals.

Ballroom size bedroom at the Whiteways B&B

Kathy's colleague - who looked as if he was a member of ZZ Top - drove me to our second final destination on Saturday July 4th. It was called Cold Ashton on the itinerary, but no - it was actually a tiny place called Nimlet. The front of the Bed and Breakfast looked out on the busy, noisy A46, but the back - where our room was - looked out on the most splendid rural England. A bit Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-ish.

Kathy's long-haired taxi colleague was also a bit of a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - a mixture of irritated and caring, shouting at wobbly cyclists on narrow country lanes one moment and worrying about dropping Tove off on the trail alone the next. Leaving me at the seemingly deserted B&B bothered him seriously, especially when I asked him if there was anywhere I could go and have lunch. "Oh no, there's nothing around here," he fretted, "you're in the sticks now, darlin'."

Sheep and Land Rover in field - how rural can you get?

But Linda the landlady and her friend Jo magically appeared from the beautiful huge bedroom which they had prepared, took one look at my knee and decided that Jo would do lymphatic drainage on me at her house in the afternoon. In the meantime I watched the tennis on TV.

So - lymph drained and bandaged I waited for Tove, who arrived at Whiteways after her last stretch of walking the Cotswold Way. WELL DONE! One of us walking, the other one driving - well, walking a little. It was time for a small celebration, and we were taken to dinner by Tove's childhood friend Andy and his lovely wife Susie. So we weren't completely in the sticks after all, because this was a gourmet pub with the most delicious food. Thank you, generous and open-minded Andy and Susie. We had such a great time, and you became my friends as well!

Phil the B&B landlord joined the long row of welcoming people we had met during the past eleven days and offered to drive us to the nearest commuter bus station so that we could get to Bath on our final day. At breakfast we talked with an elderly couple from New Zealand, who became more and more talkative as the meal proceeded. At first they had seemed very reserved, but at the end I nearly couldn't get away. I knew Phil was waiting outside in his car, eager to get going, but unfortunately I had told the NZ couple that I'd been both there and in Australia and that my daughter lived in Melbourne. "Will you be visiting her?" the wife asked. "Definitely," I replied, trying to wrap up the conversation with one-word answers. "The flies!" she shouted, "The flies! They are everywhere in Melbourne! They're awful!"

As I entered Phil's car I could hear her voice behind me: "Beware of the flies!" Hmm… Is Melbourne the natural location for horror movies, I wonder? I haven't got that impression from my daughter Julie.

Bath Abbey

The Royal Crescent, Bath

The Bamboo Room at Marlborough House, Bath

Beautiful and intriguing Bath was our final destination, and what a fabulous day we had. Hop-on, hop-off buses, shopping, pubs, sightseeing - Bath is so well worth visiting, totally homogeneous with every house and building constructed in the grey Bath stone, well, at least I couldn't spot any other building material anywhere.

Strangely enough neither of us slept very well that last night in the beautiful Bamboo Room at Marlborough House, just down the road from the Royal Crescent. This was a change from all the previous ten nights, when we had both fallen asleep before our heads hit the pillow.

Perhaps it was the thought of a long travelling day back to Norway, perhaps the knowledge that a wonderful and special holiday was over. I think Tove must simply have been over-exhausted, with her fantastic effort of completing the Cotswold Way.

For me it was a holiday with very few associations to my life with my husband, which was good. I have never been on this sort of travel together with him, in fact not many times in England with him at all, so it was an experience just for me. And I knew that if he had been alive he would never have begrudged me this trip with one of my best friends - on the contrary he would have been so happy on my behalf. He might have asked if it was a wise idea to go hiking with a wounded knee though.

Which of course it wasn't. But the Cotswolds welcomed me anyway, hiking or not.

WALKING THE COTSWOLD WAY - AND DRIVING. PART TWO.

When you walk in the Cotswolds or anywhere else in England for that matter you greet your fellow walkers, or even speak with them. Well, come to think of it you do this on trails in other countries too, even in Norway. It's the unwritten rule of hikers. 

Less normal probably is that you befriend your fellow hikers. Tove and I did - we met two American girls who were walking the same distances as us - though only half the total distance - and were staying in more or less the same B&Bs and hotels. Our experiences over the five days that our paths (literally) crossed were exactly the same: Rain or sun, bulls in fields, steepness of hills, walking sticks or not, blisters, sore knee, badly signposted paths but isn't it gorgeous, what's your room like etc, etc. Jan and Tanya from Mississippi became our friends.

I know I talk as if I did walk all the time, which of course is not true! But I did take part in the above conversations with great enthusiasm! On leaving Winchcombe Jan decided to take a day off too (but as opposed to me she'd been walking two whole days), and in pouring rain we got the bus into Cheltenham and a taxi from there to the suburb of Charlton Kings. Jan found her hotel and I found our B&B, Detmore House. Bed and Breakfast? It was more like a hotel, but with only four rooms - called Oak, Beech, Walnut and Maple. Ours was the Maple Room, and it was pure luxury. The snag about arriving early by car was that our accommodation was not usually open for check-in, but I peered through the front door and saw that our bags had arrived. They were collected every morning by 9.30 and driven to the next overnight place. 

The following morning Tove and I were joined at the breakfast table by a middle-aged couple who sounded Scottish. "What shall we do today?" the wife asked her husband. "Well, the same as yesterday," he replied. "Eat and drink."

No hiking there then. 

Detmore House

The Maple Room

Sitting room for the Detmore House guests

The Pittville Pump Room in Cheltenham

I have friends all over the world, so what's more natural for me than boasting of an old friend in the Cotswolds? Because my knee was hurting so much and I still didn't know exactly what was wrong with it, my friend suggested I go see the famous osteopath Mark Lester in Cheltenham. Famous for osteopathy? I think not, though he seemed to know very well what he was doing, taking one look and a feel and proclaiming torn ligament, then covering my knee with suction cups and electricity and sticking pins into me.

Well, as a matter of fact, Mark Lester is famous! For what you may ask. For being a close friend of Michael Jackson's and a child actor and leading star of the musical "Oliver!" from 1968! Lying there on his bench with my David Bowie dress pulled up high I was a bit apprehensive that he would burst into song: "Consider yourself at home, consider yourself one of the family! I've taken to you so strong, it's clear we're going to get along!"

After the superstar treatment in Cheltenham it was back to the next Cotswold village and time for a meal and great conversation in the warm evening sunlight on the terrace of the The Royal George Hotel in Birdlip with Tove, Jan and Tanya, and a good night's sleep. I decided the following day that I'd try a bit of walking again. I was sure that Mark Lester's needles had helped! But this time I had found out where there were bus stations, and an 8 kilometre walk was more than enough!

Again we found that hiking is an excellent way of getting to know people. A bit lost in the woods after Birdlip - the Cotswold Way's characteristic acorn signs were sometimes hidden behind leaves, sometimes a bit bewildering - we met young Jemima sporting the English countryside uniform of summer dress and wellies, walking her beautiful red Hungarian Vizla dog. There really weren't that many people out and about on the trail, so asking for help to find the right way couldn't be taken for granted. But Jemima walked with us for quite a while and in that time we learnt a lot about her and her husband, her two children, their schools, their moving around England because of the husband's military work, their settling in the Cotswolds due to inheriting a house there. "Oooo, lucky you living here," we said. "Yes and no," she replied. "Quiet, dark and boring in winter." Well, yes. In her early thirties probably, I could see her point.

Seeing Tove walk away after the bus stop onto the second half of the trail, I waited 50 minutes for the bus. Arriving at our new destination - the idyllic town of Painswick - I checked into our room at the Falcon Inn only a few minutes before she arrived. Painswick was a wool merchant and weavers' town in the 18th century, but is mentioned as far back as 1086 in the Domesday Book. It's THE typical English village - a postcard basically. So incredibly picturesque! Our lovely room at the Falcon Inn - an inn dating back to 1554 - looked across at the grounds of St Mary's Church and its 99 yew trees. The Devil won't let the 100th one grow, according to legend. 

 

That afternoon in Painswick we could feel the weather changing, becoming warm, no, hot - and we spent hours on the benches in the backyard terrace of the Inn, drinking dry draught cider, watching how the entire owner family pulled together to plant flowers and decorate the outside area beautifully. I think Tove and I covered all the poignant verbs written on the Falcon Inn Wall and I finally cried a bit for my huge loss and my grief and my thirty-second wedding anniversary coming up in just a couple of days. Tove let me cry and I thought - this is what friends are for.

 

After a fantastic dinner and wine - neither of us was walking the following day - we crept into bed and watched the almost full moon throw its eerie magical light on the churchyard and its 99 yew trees and chatted, read a bit, yawned and slept. And I did sleep well in the Cotswolds.

Tove's bed