Spring Etc

Spring At Lasr?
After a number of false dawns, perhaps spring is at last arriving. Last weekend was reasonable, Monday too, but with a cold wind to accompany the sunshine; the Mistral, as usual. Today, no mistral, sunshine, a temperature in the sun of around 20 degrees and a deep Wedgwood blue sky to die for. I spent the day clearing the winter debris from the back garden and spreading smelly stuff, which will hopefully result in plenty of much sweeter smells later on. The really good news is that this weather is forecast to last for at least another two days so maybe spring is breaking through.

Those who have lived here many years are saying that this year has been the hardest winter they have known. That statement needs to be put in some perspective vis-a-vis my English experience. Since my return after Christmas, the weather has certainly been colder than I have known and with four separate snowfalls. That is what the locals notice; you normally get a day of snow here or maybe two, but that is all. But.......you start counting winter here from December. Until after the first week in December, the weather here was very pleasant. So, with my English background, a long hard winter that lasts only three months (if that is what happens) is something I can put up with.

That said, I am amazed that there is still snow hanging around in odd places in the village. We are talking not micro-climates but mini-mini micro-climates. The remaining snow is in odd ditches and corners that aren't getting the sun. It's a question of where the sun gets too (how high it is) and the effect of the shadow thrown by surrounding hills. This maybe explains why I am so puzzled by plants that are perennial here that aren't in the milder climes of the UK. Oleanders generally won't survive a UK winter without protection but happily do here. The same goes even for marigolds and, quite often, Californian poppies, verbena and diascias.

Whatever, I am now going to work on the assumption that spring is on the way and start planting seeds. I've already taken ~20 cuttings of my blue pentstemons, which should give me a dozen plants. My true jasmine, which struggled through the last two winters hasn't survived this time so I'll replace it with a false one (trachelospermum jasmoinides) and the same may be true of my plumbago, but I'll give that another couple of weeks to show signs of growth. Seems like it's gardening time again.

Anglo-French (Food) Relations
I invited Daniel to eat tonight to save him having to open his usual tin before going off to England. He hasn't been to England since his student days but a neighbour, Christine, who is married to an Englishman and spends most of her time in Worthing, invited him across and he decided to go. The cross-channel links are further supplemented by friend Michèle, who turns out to have a cousin married to an Englishman and is living in Richmond and Mana, who taught English. Michèle, like Daniel, hadn't been back to England since student days but was recently persuaded to do so by her cousin. Mana has never been back since her schooldays, although she spent a couple of subsequent years in America.

What they all have in common is a terror of English food. Given that their last experience of this was in the 1950s, their terror is understandable. However, their assumption that nothing has changed in the intervening half-century is less so, especially as all have eaten both at my house and Steve and Jo's and declared the meals to be good. Daniel's attitude, given that he doesn't cook for himself but simply opens tins, is even more perplexing. I think that their continued perception of English cooking has more to do with perpetuation of a myth than anything else. Having undergone a ghastly experience in the past, they are reluctant to give up on it.

Translating Shakespeare
It wouldn't be a new entry in this blog without some comments on translation, so here they are. Daniel is a Shakespeare devotee and, in the course of some discussion, he said that his favourite play was Hamlet and I said mine was MacBeth. I love the poetry in MacBeth and started to quote MacBeth saying “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day.........”. I know the full speech by heart and, halfway into it, realised that Daniel was lost. So I started to translate. Leave aside the poetry and connotations of the words, what is “creeps” in French? I was stuck, so was Daniel despite my attempts to describe the action. “ A tâtons” only gets part of it. A dictionary finally produced “ramper”. But it's not really the same. “Ramper” is what kids do before they learn to walk. Crawling has some of the connotations of creeping but it's not the same. Anyway, continuing with the attempted translation I decided that the task was impossible (at least for me). Which led me to ask Daniel if he had a French translation of Shakespeare. He has, somewhere, but can't find it for the moment. I think I want to see one and see what the translator has done. God help him/her.

Following on from that, at the last pizza evening Jo asked René if there were any words in French that changed meaning according to their pronunciation, even though the spelling was the same. In English, “close” meaning “shut” and “close” meaning “ near” are spelled the same but mean different things according to how they are pronounced; the same is true of “refuse” meaning “deny/say no to” and “refuse” meaning “rubbish”. None of the assembled French could think of any such equivalent in French. As if English pronunciation wasn't difficult enough in the first place, we have to lumber foreigners with this extra difficulty!

I've always maintained that an English person, with even just a basic grasp of French pronunciation (and the same goes for Spanish and Italian), has a much better chance of getting an explanation of some unknown word than his foreign counterpart trying to get an English word explained. As long as you can say “Que veut dire XXXX?” you have a good chance of pronouncing XXXX sufficiently correctly to get a useful response. Contrast this with, for instance, a foreigner wanting to know what a chough is, confronted by the pronunciation possibilities offered by though, cough, bough, bought, etc, and you can see that the English have a definite advantage.

As a corollary to all this, conversation at the pizza evening turned to English politically correct language. It seems the French don't really have that either (good for them!) apart from words with obviously insulting connotations. Trying to explain why the word handicapped wasn't acceptable (and I don't understand either) proved impossible. As far as they were concerned, if you were “handicappé” you were “handicappé”; there were no sinister implications, it was simply a fact.