Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

  Foto: Niels Halds Fabelverden There are fantastically gifted and fantastically  productive artists who never sell anything in their lifetime. This is usually considered a tragedy. We are not so sure. On a recent visit to one of our oldest friends, we noticed some strange glazed creatures on her shelf - half mythology and half joke, lined up as if waiting for someone to ask. She told us there were maybe a thousand more in a house and garden up in Thy, in northern Jutland. All made by her younger brother, Niels. And he never sold a single one. Niels Hald started drawing almost as soon as he could hold a pencil, and his parents recognized the talent early and never once tried to talk him out of it. He had no formal training, but was inspired by long stays in India, Nepal, and Central America, before he eventually settled in Thy - a stretch of Jutland known mostly for its wind, its emptiness, and its refusal to be picturesque about either. Here he took over an old c...

The view is entirely different now, though the gray, as it happens, is exactly the same. The apartment on Ile Saint Louis - and the elusive agents immobiliers we argued with for months - have receded into the blurry mental space reserved for unfinished things.  We were so close this time finding our Parisian pied-a-terre. It was a small glass-roofed studio in an inner courtyard of a 17th century mansion, just steps from the Seine, where the noon light fell straight down through the panes and made you feel as if you would be living inside a lantern in the very heart of Paris.  We had practically measured the walls for books. But the dream of that apartment did not end because of a failed negotiation. It dissolved the moment the phone rang on a Tuesday morning, pulling us twelve hundred kilometers north to this corner of Jutland. Now we are in Strandby - in the house belonging to Rita's mother. She is ninety-five, and she lives here alone - or she did, until a few d...

There is something almost embarrassingly predictable about loving Paris. Everyone does. Tourists swarm it, Instagram has colonized every corner, and here we are again - Rita and I - walking the Paris streets in early April with the giddiness of people who really ought to know better. We have long since lost count of our visits. At some point the city stopped being a destination and turned into something more like a habit. A good one. Not a growth journey, not an opportunity to discover who we really are at depth - just a place where we reliably feel more like ourselves than we do most other places.   This spring we have rented an apartment in the 14th and early today we went by one of our local boulangeries, Fournil Didot, where a baker named Sithamparappillai Jegatheepan - who came to France from Sri Lanka, spent years making macarons, and somehow ended up making the best french bread. In 2026 he has demonstrated his abilities by winning the Grand Prix de la Baguette, which ...

  Can an entire cathedral be a secret? The Cathedrale de Jean Linard sits hidden in the rolling Berry countryside, near a village so small - Neuvy-Deux-Clochers - that most people drive straight past it without knowing either exists. Jean Linard was a potter. Then he became a sculptor, an engraver, a painter.  When he bought an old flint quarry in 1961, he did what any reasonable person would do: he started building a cathedral in his back garden, ad he kept building it for nearly fifty years, until he died in 2010 He'd been inspired by the Facteur Cheval, a postman in the Drôme who spent thirty-three years constructing a fantastical palace because he tripped over a stone one day and liked its shape. And by Gaudí, who started the Sagrada Família in 1882 and whose church - as you may have noticed - still isn't quite finished. What connected these three men - Linard, Cheval, Gaudi - was simple: they had an idea, and they didn't stop. The stubbornness became the point. Af...

   We live, we are frequently told, in an age of unprecedented connectivity. Platforms connect us. Networks connect us. A man in Copenhagen can, in a matter of a splitsecond, reach a man in Sao Paulo even though he might not have anything particular urgent to say. This is considered progress and a part of modernity. But Rita and I had yesterday the occasion in the Burgundian village Rogny-les-Sept-Ecluses to stand next to a staircase of stone and water which showed that we moderns have of course not invented the idea of connecting stuff. Someone back in the 17th century dreamt of connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel by making a passageway from the Loire river to the Seine. And here on this hill in Burgundy, at the watershed between the two mighty rivers, is the result of that thought.   By building seven locks pressed together in a staircase up a hillside in Rogny, the boats could ascend the twenty-four metres up from the Loire valley.   Twelv...

  The plan was to escape. This is important context! Nordic winters are long and grey and self-serious, and by the end of February Rita and I had reached the point where the darkness stops feeling atmospheric and starts feeling personal. France, we reasoned, would be different. France in early March would be spring. There would be light. There would be warmth. There would be outdoor tables and wine and the specific looseness that comes from sitting in the sun in a country that takes lunch seriously. And then we rented a small house in the town of Sancerre Sancerre sits on a hill in the Loire Valley and is known, globally, for one thing: its white wine. Sauvignon blanc of considerable reputation. Writers have praised it. Sommeliers have wept over it. Restaurants in Copenhagen, London and New York charge serious money for a glass of it. We looked forward to be living at the source.  Now we are, and all is grey. It is cold. It rains every day. Not the dramatic Nordic cold that...

Selling a house should be regarded as just a transaction. That, at least, is what one of our more unsentimental friends told us.  He is probably right, actually. Yet, as we packed up our now-sold townhouse in the mountain village of Antraigues-Sur-Volane in Southern France, we found that the cardboard boxes stacked in our living room were not really enough for the task. They were meant to transport objects, but we were trying to pack something else as well - almost twenty years of life lived in this place. The real estate listing described our house as "a charming two-bedroom property with traditional features." It was not wrong, exactly. But it also did not come close. This has not just been our vacation house. Over the years it became something more - a real home away from home, if that is not too strange a phrase.    The rhythm of returning each summer made us feel, somehow, that we belonged here, at least a little. Though we were never full-time residents, the vi...