Today has been a spectacularly beautiful day. This afternoon I drove down to Furfooz, on the Lesse river, to join a group of Michel Claes’s friends and family (see this post). As an instructor, Michel and his colleagues brought their charges, young people from troubled backgrounds, to a gite here, where they would holiday with walks, canoeing and rock climbing. As a top notch rock climber and mountaineer, Michel would wind down by scaling the nearby cliffs, overlooking a large oxbow loop in the Lesse. So we walked through the woods to the Aiguilles de Chaloux, shuffled out to the rocky promontory you can see in the picture, and talked about Michel and his life. It was almost as though he was working his way up from below and we were waiting for him to appear over the cliff edge…