Every two years there’s a big quilt show in Biarritz, which, unlike most around here, has lots of contemporary work on display. There was a competition, the theme of which was Tracy Chevalier’s book “the last runaway”, which a friend and I decided to enter. We worked for weeks on a quilt that combined traditional and contemporary techniques to make our art quilt, stitching by hand and machine, burning organza with a hot air stripper (it goes all crinkly) and machine embroidering extracts of letters on organza, before sending off photos and crossing our fingers that we’d make the grade. We were thrilled to hear that our quilt had been selected and would be on display at the show.

There was some amazing work on show, from quilts that just made you wonder how on earth anyone can find that many hours and do such perfect work to the truly bizarre; a dress made of tree bark, another made of plastic food wrappings, and vases made of felt. Some very inspiring ideas.

Nick and I took the camper to Biarritz for the weekend, where I spent two days at the show, while he went cycling.

The walking club was walking from the Marais d’Orx on the Sunday, just up the coast from Biarritz, so we found a campsite at Ondres plage, which as the name suggests, was right on the beach. What had begun as an extremely wet weekend had by now turned beautiful, so we had a walk along the beach, watching the huge waves breaking and collecting shells.

On the Sunday I walked, while Nick cycled along the cycle tracks that run through the forests up and down the coast, till we met up for lunch. We followed the bus hired by the walking club to the restaurant on a camp site, where some ate in while others had a picnic, then those of us silly enough hired 3-seater canoes for a paddle up and down the river. Nick, Christiane and I were in one canoe, which must have been faulty as it insisted on veering from one riverbank to the other, landing Christiane in the brambles on more than one occasion as she frantically yelled “Nick redresse; redresse Nick”, which I think means straighten up. She couldn’t get the hang of paddling away from the direction you want to go in, which made it quite difficult for Nick to do much to help at all, quite apart from the fact that Christiane and I were laughing too hard to do much to help him, poor lad! Nobody actually fell in, but we were all fairly drenched by the end of it, a good job it was so warm.