Indelible impressions

Breton stripes

I’ve just realised that my unwavering devotion to stripy jumpers and tops has nothing to do with Cos, but all to to do with the visits to Brittany when I was a teenager which made such a lasting impression on me.

still got it, the pull marin, that is

I first came to Brittany when I was eleven, on the most exciting junior school camping imaginable. Baguettes! Monoprix! Rochers! Standing stones! Then, when I was a teenager and, I hoped, more sophisticated, I did a couple of summer holiday exchanges, staying with families in Saint-Nazaire. This was when I bought my very first chandail breton/pull marin (the iconic navy stripes on cream version, as modelled above in a changing room yesterday) with buttons on the shoulder (never done up), drank café au lait from a bowl, dared myself to eat snails and have never regretted it, understood why all Breton teenagers never went anywhere without a K-Way (cagoule), adored my hosts’ kitchen gardens (so much more useful and interesting than the cult of hybrid tea roses in Stockport), and learned to ride a mobylette. Later still, when I was at university I spent a summer working as a Eurocamp courier and living in a tent on a campsite in Bénodet, and it was there that I picked up a taste for kir, langoustines with fresh mayonnaise, and pains au chocolat, watched the sun set in cinematic glory, saw phosphorescence in the sea for the first time, got soaked/sunburnt/windswept on a daily basis, and laughed more than I’d ever laughed in my life.

The last few days here in Brittany, this time in the north around Paimpol and Saint-Malo, have revealed to me just how much I carry around with me from these and other visits. There are all sorts of things about France that I have loved for years, and which still make me happy/exclaim with delight, inwardly if not always outwardly. These include:

la gare de Paimpol (1894)

small SNCF train stations,

Poste, Télégraphe et Télécommunication (1935) in Tréguier, and its Odorico wall panels with a pattern based on telegraph poles and wires

1930s post offices with grand lettering and PTT in their ironwork,

old-fashioned yellow letterboxes, the solid navy blue and cream enamel road signs on concrete bases which have all but disappeared elsewhere, ghost signs for Dubonnet and Pernod, banks of hydrangeas, rattling Citroën 2CVs,

fields of cabbages, cauliflowers and artichokes, amusingly eccentric seaside architecture, and what I now know are called maisons en meulière.

My catalogue of things to love about Brittany has grown over the years. I discovered Odorico mosaics on a visit to Rennes in 2016; looking for them is a lovely way to structure a little tour of this area (to include post offices, butchers’ shops, hotels, blocks of flats, railway stations, cafes, a grand swimming pool, and a butter shop.*

M. Hulot’s holiday destination, filmed in Saint-Marc-sur-Mer, near Saint-Nazaire

And having watched Les Vacances de M. Hulot (M. Hulot’s Holiday) many times, I look at seaside resorts through his eyes, squinting as I try to imagine how they were in 1953. Which is often still quite easy.

The way Glynn Boyd-Harte appreciated and captured signs, sardine tins, shops and stripes in his book Mr Harte’s Holiday (1991) has also made me reconsider so many things it’s all too easy to take for granted. Blink, and they may have gone, to be replaced with something made out of plastic with a terrible typeface.

This, I think, sums up what Brittany impressed upon me when I was young: the value of good, everyday design and architecture which uses high quality materials and brilliant typography to create a cohesive visual culture for everyone. It’s the William Morris thing about the importance of surrounding yourself with things that are both useful and beautiful, but I’d add ‘long-lasting’ and ‘not needing to be be replaced for the sake of it’.

With that, we are off to find an outdoor market which has been in the same place for centuries.

Bon dimanche!

* Local people are proud of Odorico connections. I was taking photos in the post office in Perros-Guirec when the lady behind the counter told me that there were more 1930s mosaics in the employees’ toilet. She offered to take my phone and photograph them for me. ‘Bien sûr’, I said.