Last Post Before Christmas

Wine
Daniel and his son Kevyn came round to eat tonight and, as ever with Kevyn, the talk turned to wine. Kevyn is one of those French people who is passionate about wine and he took issue with my assertion that the Appellation Controlée (AOC) “trademark” is going to disappear, because it has little relation to taste. He agreed with my current perception but said that the trademark could go one of two ways. Either it disappears or, as he thinks likely, it will become much stricter and therefore have useful meaning. I think he's right in suggesting the alternative but think that the democratic vote (i.e.the need to sell wine, whatever) will fudge the issue to the extent that AOC will remain meaningless.

I was trying to explain to him the choices presented to me when I wanted to buy wine, at a reasonable price for everyday drinking, in England. What we both agreed about was the need for some reliable quality/price indicator. It's difficult to see how this can be effected but we both agreed again that, at the current time, the Côtes du Rhone red wines are the best value for money in France; and that is reflected in UK supermarket shelves, where affordable Bordeaux and Burgundy wines of any quality are noticeably absent. But you still have to suck it and see.

Téléthon
The Téléthon, as I've probably remarked previously, is France's answer to the UK Children In Need weekend blitz on TV. Except that this is France's major and only annual, nation-wide, charity money-raising event and it's not specific to any single charity; it raises money for charities local, regional, national or international. Anyway, I went along last Saturday to join in some of the activities, including the boules tournament. As it happened, Daniel and I came runners-up, which earned me a zip-up nylon jacket (plain black on the front but with Téléthon and quad bike riders club(?) emblazoned on the back) and a bag full of apples; the former will be useful in the summer.

Darts
My « kids » bought me a Chelsea dartboard and darts for my birthday and, as I already have a dartboard, I offered the one I had to Patrique and Valérie in the Bar du Pont. Patrique considered my offer and then asked if it was a board for plastic darts. I replied that any kind of normal darts could be used and he then asked about the points ; I said they were steel and he replied that they were now banned in bars in France. Apparently, darts in France (in bars) now has to be an electronic game, with the board sensing where darts with plastic points hit. I often grumble about impositions emanating from HSE in the UK but the French seem to have stolen a march on us here. Patrique said that if darts with steel points were allowed serious injuries would result. The French must be more aggressive than I had thought.

Anyway, I offered the surplus dartboard to Daniel and Kevyn this evening and they gratefully accepted. I think that Daniel's kids will get a deal of pleasure from it; at least, I hope so.

Christmas Readings
The BELL (Beaumont English Language Library) had it's pre-Christmas get-together last Sunday with an invitation to read to the members anything on a Christmas theme. I must admit that Christmas hasn't been high on my literary agenda, the only decent thing I remember reading on the subject being Dicken's Christmas Carol. However, deciding to give some thought to the idea, I found a book on mediaeval festivals in my bookcase and, within it, a useful piece on Christmas then. I had always thought that first-footing was a Scottish and New Year tradition. Not so. In mediaeval England, Christmas festivities could not begin until the high table at any assembly had been first-footed by the Lucky One, who brought the spirit of Christmas into the room with him from outside.

Carols
Thanks to Herculean efforts from Jo, Steve, René and Armelle, the carol-singing evening went very well, with a good audience at both the old folk's home and the Bar du Pont. Thanks to Armelle and René, there were enough French singers and thanks to Steve and Jo there were enough people who could actually sing well to drown out my foghorn voice. We sang in English, French, German and Latin (the Provencal option, which we had considered, was eventually dropped). Everybody had a good time, which was the prime objective of the exercise; and three kids went away with Christmas hats that they hadn't expected and were delighted with. Daniel filmed the whole event and so there should be a visual record of it.

One of the linguistic problems (for the English) which I noticed took me back to my days of scanning French verse at school and university. Words that end in an “e” in French have an extra syllable that is barely noticeable in normal speech but which has to be accounted for when reading/singing verse They therefore affect the flow of the text and that was something that some of we English found slightly difficult when singing. However, I've no doubt the French found the English pronunciations even more difficult, particularly as we rendered “Ding Dong Merrily on High” in its original old English version (e.g bells swungen).

I think that, as the evening was an undoubted succees, we may want to repeat it next year. However, I also think there were lessons to be learned. There's no doubt that this kind of event is not natural to the village. René and Armelle were enthusiastic and supportive because carol singing is as common in Alsace as it is in England; that is clearly not true of Provence. A good crowd was attracted to the Bar du Pont but the audience was mostly the “intelligentsia” of the village and surroundings; there were few real locals there. Patricia, my cleaning lady, was very enthusiastic when I spoke to her on the very morning of the event and said she would be there but did not come, which was sad. However, she felt positively towards the idea and had ideas of her own about walking round the village singing and attracting children to join in. This last point, I think, is something we should take on board. If the children want to come they will bring their parents with them. There was also the question of posters advertising the event, beautifully designed by René, but posted only a week before the event; several people I spoke to said they hadn't noticed them.

If we do the same next year, it's clearly going to take an exceptional effort to get the locals out of their warm houses at 8.00pm on a winter evening and start a new “tradition” for the village. But.....it can be done and, maybe, with the lessons of this year behind us and some more local support, which I feel could be forthcoming, we could do it.

Fingers
There's something I haven't recorded which I've known since being here, probably through friend Steve. I had always interpreted Churchill's famous V sign as being simply V for eventual victory; in fact, its origins go much further back. I had slightly puzzled at the fact that sticking two fingers in the air could be as much of an insult as sticking a single finger up (a kind of two-way version of “up yours”). The explanation, it seems, lies somewhere around the battle of Agincourt. The French, to taunt the English long-bow archers, would stick one finger in the air to signify that any English archer they caught would have a finger cut off to prevent him firing arrows again. The English responded with two fingers up to show that they still had them and would fire on the French. So there was originally a cultural distinction; not so much “up yours” as “over to you”. Incidentally, that would imply that Churchill's V sign during the war was effectively an insult to the French. I wonder if anyone thought of that (or cared about it).

There Should Be A Law.......

There Should Be A Law..........

Steve, Jo and Mana came round to eat tonight and I asked Mana about the origins of the serious divide I perceived between the religious and non-religious in France. Mana didn't see it as I did and thought there were as many people who didn't care much one way or the other in France as in England. Anyway, she and Steve both thought that the church/state divide didn't go back as far as Napoleon but probably had its origins in the Republican governments of the late 19th century. Certainly the divide wasn't enshrined in law until 1905.

I wondered what was the case with the UK military now, the discussion having reminded me of something a friend of my youth had told me. He had joined the Royal Navy and, on signing up, had been asked a lot of questions including his religion, to which he had replied : « none ». So the interviewer duly wrote down C of E ; at that time (the late 1950s) it seemed that you had to have a religion to be in the Armed Forces. God as well as my country, presumably. Steve reckoned that you probably weren't allowed to even ask the question now.

Which led us on to political correctness. We all, other than Mana, had numerous examples of idiocies to recount. Steve and I both being Chelsea supporters discussed the case of John Terry, the Chelsea captain, who allegedly swore at a West Ham player using a racist remark (the West Ham player, incidentally, didn't realise this until after the match.) We both agreed, that for once, Sepp Blatter the EUFA President had got it right. If that had in fact happened then the players should sort it out themselves after the match; many things are said and done in the heat of a moment that are best sorted out between the parties themselves when both are calmer. That's just common sense. Steve reckoned that there wouldn't be any rugby players still playing if the same criteria were applied to rugby. The fact that this is now a case being passed to the Director of Public Prosecutions defies all common sense, if only because the police must have more important calls on their time.

We were discussing the same thing at one of our pizza evenings, partly in the context of the DSK affair, and apparently analogous cases exist in France. Jean Ioannides asked if cases of sexual harassment were common in the UK now and commented that the his wife probably could have had him dismissed if she had not responded to his advances, since he'd met her at work. He added that he would never have dared make the same overtures in the current climate.

Of course all this is a matter of degree and the law is notably bad at dealing with matters of degree except in sentencing, where the punishment can (but won't necessarily) be made to fit the crime. The point of all this preamble is that there should be a law, which it can't be beyond the wit of man to devise, that asserts the pre-eminence of common sense. What, as one judge once put it, the man on the top of the Clapham omnibus would think. Currently, on the contrary, it is principles that have pre-eminence. People of principle are supposed to be admired; I regard them more often as charlatans. Principles, in my experience, are frequently used as a way to avoid discussion; if someone says an opinion is a matter of principle, the you aren't supposed to argue with it. They are inflexible bludgeons with which to hit people over the head, of particular value to bigots and dogmatists. Therein lie many of the idiocies in our society because it is principles that are enshrined and enacted in law, even if in defiance of all common sense.

So who's for a Law of Common Sense that would state that if, in a given situation, a legal principle dictates some course of action that defies all common sense, the Law of Common Sense should prevail?

Onset Of Winter

Onset Of Winter

A lorry with a telescopic arm has been out putting up the Christmas decorations and causing chaos in circulation in the village wherever it stops, as it completely blocks the roads. Ah well, it's only twice a year (once again to take them down) and the decorations themselves are quite restrained. The shops are full of boxes of chocolates, foie gras and ducks. It marks the onset of winter, although the sunny weather has so far remained for most of the time ; boules in shirt sleeves is still possible some days.

The handfuls of bulbs that wouldn't fit into the pots in front of my house have now been planted in three groups in the back. They should make a decent display in the spring, alongside the aubretia and anemone blanda in the terrace wall. There's not much showing out the back now (a clump of chrysanthemums) except for the redcurrant sage, which is a mass of bloom. I haven't known it flower so profusely at this time of the year in England but I noticed that one in Daniel's garden is similarly covered in bloom. In a minor fit of gardening enthusiasm last spring Daniel bought a dozen narcissi bulbs. I told him they wouldn't bloom until the following spring but he didn't care. In fact, to my surprise they are in bloom now. I thought spring bulbs had to be frozen before they would bloom (the trick used by horticulturists to make hyacinths, for example, bloom at Christmas – freeze them in late summer) and Daniel's certainly haven't experienced any frost since last spring. So, another gardening surprise for me out here.

Religion

One of the Christmas carol troupe, Anne-Marie, has pulled out citing her reluctance to sing religious songs. She was less than enthusiastic to start with so that may also have contributed to her decision. However, religion certainly seems to be more significant in France than in England. Nothing like the rather catch-all C of E seems to exist. The minority protestants are very protestant and, muslims apart, the rest of the country seems to divide into serious Catholics and very atheist atheists or agnostics. My friend Mana and neighbour Monserrat don't actually spit at the mention of religion but are not far off doing so. None of the English singers is notably religious, some of us definitely not so, but having to find Christmas carols that weren't in any way religious would be an awful chore. How much of this divide in France is attributable to the wars of religion and how much to the church/state split initiated by Napoleon I don't know but I feel inclined to find out more.

Exchange Rate, Christmas Presents And Sudoku

Having for some time cursed the Pound's tendency to keep steady at about 1:1.2 against the Euro, despite the Euro's troubles, I'm finding that it actually works to my advantage in some marginal cases. As usual in the lead-up to Christmas I've been scouring Amazon and other websites for possible Christmas presents. My mother actually wants nothing that I can give and needs nothing that anyone can give (I'll buy some lavender essence, soap, etc for her) but I troll through DVDs on Amazon for some winter evening entertainment. Last year I bought Lost In Translation and Closer, two films that I enjoyed. This year I shall buy Taxi Driver, Black Swan, Léon and Incendies. What I noticed, flicking between Amazon France and Amazon UK, is that the Pound/Euro prices seem to be calculated at about 1:1.4. The same was true of electronics sites I looked at. Being able to purchase easily in either country, I'm taking advantage of the weak pound by buying in the UK.

One of the ways I pass the time on winter evenings is doing killer sudokus, the version where the opening grid has no numbers except total values for groups of cells. I've thought for some time that these sudokus are an ideal way to teach kids arithmetic. I mentioned this some time ago to Armelle, who teaches maths and gave her some sample puzzles; the easier ones are certainly appropriate for kids of 11-15. However, she has so far done nothing with them. She retires at the end of the school year so that is understandable, although a pity I think.

Chit Chat

Chit Chat

The weather remains clement and there is nothing out of the ordinary going on. My pots out front are now full of bulbs for the spring and I have a few left over which I will plant in the back. I'm waiting for the first severe frosts to hit before cutting down the solanum, plumbago and clematises in the front.

My boules playing is going particularly well at the moment as I seem to have managed to add consistency to my talents(...?). I haven't lost a match for a week, playing with a a range of partners. It has an interesting “double whammy” effect on the opposition in that they seem resigned to losing when I'm opposing them, if I start off OK, and so don't play as well as they could, which makes it easier for me. Interesting game psychology.

Daniel is having problems returning hospitality because he doesn't cook normally and the paella man who used to have a stand on Saturday mornings in the village no longer comes. So Daniel can't buy a round of paella for Saturday lunch-time to thank people who've fed him during the week. Apparently the paella man was refused space for his stand on the weekend of the Painters in the Street, reasonably enough as the centre of the village is crowded with painters, paintings and onlookers then. However, he took umbrage, vowing never to come to Mollans again. That seems to be another Clochemerle moment. Assuming it was profitable for him to come before, and it seemed to be, he is cutting off his nose to spite his face and all for an assumed slight.

Claudine and Jacques are back from Brittany for a month's stay and were insisting at the pizza evening today that I write some more fiction. This is a result of Claudine having finished translating the fourth short story I'd written about the fictional character Cecil Roads I'd invented when doing a creative writing course in England. The character appeals to the French, I think, because he is somewhat anarchistic. Both Claudine and Jacques find the character hilarious and want some more material to translate. The problem is that I find writing fiction extremely difficult. I created Cecil Roads with the idea that I could put him in various situations and perhaps stitch together a short novel; and that provided the necessary material for the creative writing sessions. However, I need to think of more situations with humorous potential and I'm running out of ideas. Maybe that will give me something to think harder about during the winter.

Musings On Government

Musings On Government

I'm just back from a week in England again ; my mother and « kids » all OK. The weather wasn't bad but I didn't get out much except to shop and so had my customary overdose of television while there. News and discussion/documentary programmes were dominated by the Euro and border control, which led me to musing about government more generally. (The useful shopping I did for here consisted of buying jars of mincemeat for Jo to make mince pies, Father Christmas hats and some elegant red lanterns; all for our carol singing session here in December.)

The border control debate centred of course on Teresa May's spat with her civil servants. The spat was of little interest to me; she was “courageous” in Yes Minister terms to take on a very senior member of her Ministry but will no doubt escape with just a few feathers missing even if Brodie Clark wins his case in court. He, incidentally, wrote an article in The Times declaring that border controls were extremely efficient, which surprised me as they show all the symptoms of a buggar's muddle. I can't see how the issues involved can be anything other than extremely complex, enough so to defeat a few geniuses let alone a bunch of civil servants.

Populist concerns always arise when jobs are scarce and services stretched but, although they have to be addressed by politicians who want to stay in power, are generally uninformed or based on bigotry. Significant influxes of immigrants in a short time and security are the issues I muse about.

On the one hand it seems to me that a lack of any discernible immigration policy is at the heart of the problem. There surely has to be some control of immigrant numbers over unit time, if levels of service to the community are to be maintained. I find it difficult to envisage that intra-European migration, which cannot be suppressed, is a problem. There may be temporary imbalances from time to time but the Common Market was designed to allow labour flows to employment areas and, currently, if anywhere is experiencing an overload it can only be Germany. The only danger of a significant overload would be from a country where an outbreak of civil war or some other catastrophe caused large numbers to emigrate from that country (if they could find the means). Such cases shouldn't be difficult to identify although sharing the burden with other stable countries could be problematic.

The question of security strikes me as much more difficult. Any putative Albanian gangster isn't going to come directly to the UK; he will come via Ireland or Italy. That means either iron security for incomers from all destinations, and hence long queues at all border points, or an EU-wide immigration policy. A UK policy alone could not be effective; which rather knocks my idea of a need for a UK policy on its head. Incidentally, the HSE aspect of queues at border points hadn't occurred to me before the current brouhaha. My current movements tend to be between Avignon and Southampton airports and a queue of more than 6 people at Avignon airport would probably merit newspaper headlines.

Of course there are many other aspects to immigration but the idea of the need for a policy that would have to be EU-wide was the one that stuck in my head. It implies a degree of integration with other EU members that does not yet exist and may never do so; certainly it won't happen tomorrow.

The Euro debate has similar implications. I loved the spat that occurred when David Cameron exhorted the Germans to get their act together because the Euro was adversely affecting the UK economy and various Germans ripostes to Cameron to either join the Euro or shut up. I happen to believe that the decision for the UK not to join the Euro (a feather in the cap of Prudence, of all people) was correct. I believe that for all the reasons we are seeing now. Every currency in the world except the Euro has a fiscal system behind it. All the Euro has is a set of rules that were always going to be bent and, indeed, were already being so from its very inception. Whatever the outcome of the present shenanigans I can't see the Euro surviving unless the ECB takes on the full role of a central bank. If it somehow survives the present crisis it will continue to be open to speculative attacks that will cause mayhem unless the Euro is backed by a proper central bank. Whether the Germans like it or not they will have to suck on that one, even if they have to remain the principal contributor to its funds. It's the price of the political dream and they will have to pay most of it.

The most serious aspect of this, to me, is that the future of democracy in Europe is bound in with this issue and that it reinforces the thought that banks rather than politicians are now running western countries. If banks create situations that entail politicians making unelectable policies, who governs? Not only do economies fail but democracy itself does. If Merkel doesn't force the ECB to take on a full central bank role, the Euro fails. If she does, she may well fail at the next elections. France is likely to have a new government next summer, to add to the changes in Greece and Italy. All these changes of government, with the possible exception of France, are likely to be to the right. A military coup is already a possibility in Greece. The very serious underlying question is: if financial institutions hold all the real power now, how do democrats get it back from them? That, I suspect, requires not “simply” an EU-wide policy but a global one.

Autumn This And That

Indian Summer

The clement autumn weather has continued. I've been playng boules in shirt-sleeves in the afternoon and still have no general need of heating in the house, just occasional use of a small radiator in my living room in the evenings. Even when the inevitable couple of windy days arrived the wind was the Sirocco rather than the chilling Mistral. Happily we have had a couple of days of rain, which has reduced the need to water plants. I'm now scouring garden centres and markets for blue pansies so that I can plant my pots for the winter (narcissi bulbs and pansies).

The French At Work

I ate at Steve and Jo's on Sunday and we sat outside on their terrace in the sun. Conversation got around to trying to puzzle out the French attitude to work, which is subtly different from the English attitude. I've already commented that the French seem more pre-occupied with quality of life rather than earning and we teased out another difference: the French focus on “métier”, which translates roughly as “trade” in English. This contrasts subtly with an English focus on career. The French (around here; I mustn't generalise too much) don't seem to think of a career other than as what they did when they were working. If they join a large company their view of themselves seems still to be specialised: accountant, technician, whatever; not a chameleon-like whatever is needed to get on the next rung up the ladder. It's a more static, less flexible view of what they are about. They stick to their “métier”. And the “métiers” seem to be almost classless, which contributes to the quality of life issue. If your trade is to be a chef, what matters is that everybody around recommends your restaurant for having the best cooking. It doesn't matter if your restaurant is stuck in a small town or village with a very small catchment area. And being that best chef implies no compulsion to open more restaurants, put up prices or otherwise exploit market position. It is enough to be that chef and make a living. All this makes for very small enterprises and local specialisation. You could ask in any location around here who was the best confectioner, baker, butcher or whatever and get a reply (perhaps after a debate). In England, if you asked the question, people would probably look at you in askance or give you a brand name.

I recall talking many years ago to a French international sales manager of my acquaintance and being surprised at his relatively intimate knowledge of IBM's MVS operating system. When I asked him why he knew so much of the internals of MVS he replied that the MVS market, into which he sold, was his “métier”. Despite being an extremely successful sales manager, he didn't regard sales management as his trade so much as the MVS market.

Another example. Friend Steve still occasionally goes into raptures about the doors I have had fitted in my kitchen and living room. The doorways are 19^th century non-standard sizes, lower and wider than anything you will find today. Being forced to have them specially and hence expensively made, I decided to go the whole hog and have them made of solid oak with no nails or screws (apart from fittings). The local carpenter in Vaison was very happy to do that, carpentry being his métier; where would you find someone locally to do that in England?

If as Napoleon (I think) said, the English are a nation of shopkeepers, the French are a nation of tradesmen,

Christmas Carols

As I've mentioned before, friend Jo has the idea of a group of us singing Christmas carols this year; neighbours Jean-Marc and Florence have agreed to join the French “team” so we now definitely have enough to do the deed. I learned from Daniel that “carols” translates as “chants” rather than “chansons” and also that he would like to film the event. Knowing Daniel I'm sure he will now be scouring the Internet for graphics of partridges in pear trees or whatever to, in his terms, add value to the film. Daniel also advised that if we could get the Amitiés Mollanaise village club involved they would help with production of posters to publicise the event and maybe even chip in with some eatables at the Bar du Pont. Jo already plans to produce some mince pies and we hope to persuade Patrique in the Bar du Pont to produce some mulled wine (though Heaven knows what the locals will think about adding spices to and “cooking” their precious Côtes du Rhone). We've nominally set the date for the 15^th of December as both Steve, Jo and I will be departing for the UK shortly after. It promises to be a cheerful evening.

Footnote

As can be observed from the above, I've finally figured out how to insert French accents into the text and cut and paste into the blog under Windows 7 and new interfaces. The ways are all very reasonable but it really shouldn't be that difficult to figure them out. Or maybe I should just do a lot more exploring and familiarisation before working on what I really want to do. Hopefully Windows 7 will do me for the next few years and I won't have to relearn again. Knowing IT as I do, I suppose I should accept the need to change habits and adopt new ways of doing the same thing. Maybe I'm getting to old and stodgy but learning for me implies knowing new things rather than new ways of doing the same things.

Rugby

Thoughts On Rugby

During the past couple of weeks I've watched rugby matches three times, which is unusual for me, a bigotted soccer nut. However, when the call came (from friend Steve) two weeks ago to support England against the French I couldn't resist going to the Bar du Pont with him ; I even phoned Neville and Robin to come and join in. Alas, our support was to no avail. England put up a miserable performance from the beginning so there was really no opportunity to wind up our French friends, who were very gracious about hammering us.

The following weekend it was Wales turn to take on the French and, since Dave Flat was visiting and wanted to see the match, we all went along to the Bar du Pont again. This time I took a leek with me and became a surrogate Welshman, brandishing it in front of all and sundry whenever the Welsh caused the French some discomfort, which was quite often. Still to no avail but that was more fun for me.

For the final match, France against New Zealand, the Bar du Pont was closed (annual holidays) but I half-watched it at home. The French played their socks off, which provided some interest, but that was about the extent of it. I'm not a rugby fan and don't know a lot about the game but can enjoy a match if the play is free flowing. Friends Steve, Neville and Daniel are all fans so no doubt I will watch more games in the future but probably reluctantly. I have a few hang-ups about rugby.

I played it at school but was hopeless at it and never had any confidence. I wasn't heavy or strong enough to be a forward and not really fast enough or tricky enough to be a wing back. With a ball at my feet I could sell dummies by the shopful but never managed that with a ball in my hands. With a ball at my feet I had confidence and felt in control ; if I was going to get clobbered, I'd get a free-kick or penalty out of it. I lacked that confidence at rugby and got clobbered for nothing. My problems with rugby were both physical and psychological.

When I arrived at Rutlish Grammar at the age of 10 I was already a soccer nut and a Chelsea supporter. So I wasn't going to take kindly to rugby anyway. Shortly after my arrival, on one afternoon of atrocious weather, we couldn't play and were « treated » instead to a lecture on the traditions of the school. In the Q/A session afterwards I asked the master lecturing us why the school, in the 1930s, had switched from a successful soccer team to an unsuccessful rugby one. He responded : « Let me put it like this ; if we played soccer, what kind of schools would we play against ? » Well the answer could have been « Eton, Harrow, etc » but then they would never have played against us. The school had switched to rugby to differentiate itself not only from secondary schools but county grammars. If the school wasn't exactly upper class it wasn't going to be associated with the lower classes (in its estimation). Years later, when I was in the sixth form, I let slip to a friendly teacher that I was playing soccer for Tooting YMCA. He responded : « I should keep that to yourself if I were you ; there are some here who won't care but some who certainly will. »

I have often told myself that it is silly to let these experiences affect my attitude to rugby but find I have an innate knee-jerk reaction against it, much in the way that I reacted adversely for years to a public school accent. Petty snobbery should never be a part of sport (or anything else, come to that) and I think (hope) that much has changed in that respect over the years. Certainly my friends who love rugby are not in any way snobbish. Maybe I'll manage to get over my hang-ups (but I'll still be a totally unreasonable soccer nut).

Boules And Birthday

Second Boules Tournament

The second boules tournament duly took place last Sunday. The weather decided to play ball (sic) and friend Steve commented that it was much more pleasant in the 20+ degrees of the afternoon than it had been on the previous very hot occasion. This time around there were only 24 participants, half the previous number, but that was to be expected. Once again everybody seemed to enjoy the occasion, so it was another success. But................one unforeseen embarrassment occurred. The two highest scorers were given a gift box of three bottles of wine and the highest scorer as it turned out was Driss: a Moroccan moslem who didn't drink. We'll have to think of an alternative next year, although Idris graciously refused to be offended. The other slight inconvenience I noticed was that Daniel was once again messing around with various bits of paper to note down the scores and points attributable. I'm not sure what is required to get them to use my template but I'll have to think of it before next year.

The tournament was preceded by a lunch for the organisers and members of the Amities Mollanaise committee, about fifteen of us in all. Anne-Marie of the Amities Mollanaise held the lunch at her house, which also happens to be the wholesale fruit depot which her husband runs. She decided to have the lunch in one of the sheds where lorries arrive to unload fruit. Not the most elegant of venues then but the food was great: steaming boules of mussels and chips followed by cheese and three desserts. (Bringing a dessert when you're invited for lunch is traditional, as I think I've mentioned before; I brought a bottle of red wine to have with the cheese.) The location reminded me of the wedding of my late French friend Claude, when the lunch (not the wedding "breakfast", which was in the evening) was in the unloading bay of his wife's parents' shop. Typically French: bugger the decor, focus on the food. I must admit it tallies well with my own priorities. I remember a number of English restaurants where one was obviously paying for the decor rather than the food, much to my disappointment.

Birthday Celebration

I decided to put some bottles of fizz (Clairette de Die) behind the bar at the pizza evening this week to celebrate my birthday on Friday. It turns out I should have done it on the following Monday. As I was enlightened, the French never celebrate birthdays before the event, only at the event or afterwards. I suppose this is logical but it also carries a slightly disturbing (French realism?) connotation at my age: if your birthday hasn't already happened, how do you know you are going to get that far? Anyway, that didn't stop the Clairette getting drunk. Friend Jo very kindly brought some nibbles to eat with the wine as an aperitif and made a birthday cake and also a plate of crispy chocolate flan. The latter got rave reviews from the French who wanted to know if it was an English speciality. Of course I claimed it was; we don't get that many plaudits for our cuisine from the French that I was going to pass up the chance of one. And Roberto refused to accept payment for my pizza (actually a plate of lasagna, which he had as an alternative that evening) and that touched me.

The final advance celebration was that I decided I would treat myself to a very expensive set of professional boules as a birthday present. They are lighter than the ones I normally use (690 as against 730 grams) and made of a softer material. I need something like them if I am ever going to learn to shoot better. The lighter weight makes shooting easier and the softer material reduces the rebound when another boule is hit, increasing the probability that you'll stay somewhere around the cosh. I bought them today and decided to see how I could play with them this afternoon. As it turned out I slaughtered everybody playing so they are worth the money and I am happy with them.

A Good Autumn Evening

The Bar Du Pont
It was pizza evening this evening and we had it sitting outside on the Bar du Pont's terrace.  We've been doing that since May but it's the first time I can remember doing it outside in October; usually, the evenings become too cool after about 9.00 from mid-Septmber onwards.  So we are having the same Indian summer as Engand, with temperatures into the high twenties during the day and the heat continuing into the evening.

There was quite a lot to discuss with the regulars.  Friends Jo and Steve want to try again this year to get some Christmas carols sung out in the street and the one French friend we could find who was enthusiastic and was willing to sing was Rene.  So we decided to task Rene with finding another 7-8 French people who would be willing to sing.  "No problem", he said; and I watched with interest as he encountered the same problem as we had last year.  Christmas carols?  Great idea!  Sing? Oh no, we won't sing.  Going round everyone, Rene eventually came up with 5-6 possibles.  I think, though, we might just make it this year.  The plan is to sing 5-6 carols in English and the same number in French (with maybe one in Provencal), both outside the Bar du Pont and in the local old people's home.

Next item was the England-France rugby match on Saturday.  Rene got Patrique, who runs the Bar du Pont, to agree to have it on the large screen TV on Saturday morning and Steve and I agreed to go and watch the match with him.  Rene immediately started recruiting others to come and watch it together, so Steve and I are going to have to find some more English people to provide the opposition.  I'll start the phone around tomorrow.

Also on the discussion list was the "loi NOME", France's answer to the EU prescription for greater (or even some) competition in th electricity market.  The new law requires that the current EDF monopoly sell 25% of its output to alternative distributors.  I've commented previously that this is simply a nonsense.  However, the   new distribution possibilities require a new meter for which EDF proposed to charge all households 350 euros.  The howls of protest that greeted that proposal were followed by broadcast emails from someone who had discovered that EDF, under French law, had to get you to sign to accept the new meters and that if you didn't sign they couldn't charge you for them.  So EDF has now "graciously" declared that the new meters will be free.  Will they heck; their cost will find its way onto the electricity bills somehow and all for a nonsensical nod at competition.

Finally, it turned out to be the birthday of Valerie, Patrique's wife, although no one had realised (remembered) that it was.  Valeriere celebrated by standing us all coffee and a superb Marc from Chateau Neuf du Pape on the house.  It's touches like that that make me really love the village.

Clematis
Earlier during the day I investigated the hole I had dug a couple of years ago against the tree opposite my kitchen window.  The rose I planted had eventually given up the ghost and I was at first thinking of replacing it.  However, a local supermarket had some cheap clematis plants and I decided that a clematis might stand more chance of surviving in the stony ground.  So I bought one, renewed the hole and planted it; it's a Montana, so fairly hardy.  I'll have to wait until next year to see how it does.

Windows 7
I always hated having to change operating system and Windows 7, on my new laptop, is proving no exception.  The supposedly easy file transfer from XP using Windows Easy File Transfer is a pain and, inevitably, refuses to transfer some non-MS files.  More frustratingly, the presentation of a number of applications has changed, forcing me to change my normal way of working and, in some cases, rendering what I want to do almost impossible.  I have been in the habit of writing postings to this blog in Open Office and cutting and pasting them to the blog.  Now there seems to be no way to paste them.  Moreover, the facilities I had in Open Office to insert French accents aren't available in Blogger.  Rene (above) should have an acute accent on the last "e" and there is no way I can find to insert that.  Maybe, over time, I will discover ways or maybe I'll just have to put up with the lack of facility.  Anyway, for the moment I hate Windows 7.

The Last Three Weeks

Social
Robin and Jill invited me for aperitifs and were clearly relying on me for any interpretation nececssary as all the other invitees were French neighbours from along the road. Afterwards Robin thanked me for coming and said that they wouldn't have had the courage to do it without me. That was nice of them but really reflected a lack of confidence on their part rather than their level of French. I am sure they would have managed quite well without me; I was called on to translate only 3-4 times and then for nothing very important.

I was pleased to have been invited because the evening went extremely well and we decided to have a repeat get-together. As we searched for a date I suggested the 5th of November, the only date in the required period that had any significance for me. That turned out to be somebody's birthday so we decided on that; I've no idea what we will do. The evening introduced me to two new residents who could become friends. The brother of my neighbour Florence and his wife have moved into the village from Tahiti and bought a house just down from the Bar du Pont which they are having completely renovated. The wife, Sylvie, is an A S Neill fan so we had plenty to talk about. They apparently decided that the regime inTahiti was becoming unstable and, as their daughters were approaching university age and also because of the proximity of Florence and Jean-Marc, they have moved here and their daughters are studying in Lyon.

The second village boules day has been decided for the 9th of October so I have lost my battle to have it scrapped for this year. However, I got the others to accept that if there are to be two such days next year they should both be scheduled for the June-August time-frame. I got the others to agree that the deadline for signng up should be on the poster announcing the event and Daniel convinced me that we could draw up beforehand a schedule of "fixtures" for all numbers of registrants; ten will be needed for 20-56 players.

My Mother
I decided on another trip back to England to see my mother and will go yet again before Christmas. She had been giving up on life, depressed and not eating or drinking nearly enough. She is barely mobile at all now and complains that all days are the same. Unfortunately that cannot be denied and I'm at a loss to know what to do about it; I shall try audio books next time over, a suggestion from friend Jo. My mother no longer has the stamina to read or watch TV programmes of any length. The situation is not helped by our having little to say to one another; I do few new things and she, of course, none at all. I make sure she has flowers in her sitting room, blooms in the pots on the patio outside it and food for the birds who visit her bird table but that is about the sum of it. Often I feel guilty about not staying with her longer but can't stand the thought of sitting beside her waiting for her to die, which is effectively what it would be. More frequent trips, which serve to keep her morale up at least, will have to be the solution for now.

I sometimes wonder how we will deal with similar situations in the future, when more of us will live for longer. The extended family of the past, all living in close proximity, was a solution before its time and is not likely to recur. Television is a help but friend Jo has a mother even older and more handicapped than mine, blind and deaf. It's easy to question the point of being able to extend the length of life if quality of life can't be similarly extended but far from easy to think of a solution. I wonder how I will deal with that situation if ever I get to it.

Feminism
I've remarked before that I think the French have a more sensible approach to feminism than their anglo-saxon counterparts, avoiding some of the excesses of the latter (as far as a mere man can be allowed to judge). However, there is now a battle going on here in the matter of titles (Mr, Ms, Mrs). There is no French equivalent to Ms and nobody has been able to invent an acceptable one. So the French feminist intelligentsia(?) has decreed that all females should have the title "madame" and is trying to get this enforced in law. For myself, and most French friends, the idea of addressing a 5-year old girl as madame seems ludicrous but, hey, we may become accustomed to it; who knows? I doubt though whether the issue will occupy much of anyone's attention.

On a similar note I found myself saying a quiet "hurrah" to David Cameron's speech to the UN reported on TV when I was in England, when he said that it was pointless the UN voting any more human rights if it was not prepared to do anything about implementing them. I'm not well know for hurrahs for David Cameron but think he made a very interesting point. Fine notions at the UN are two a penny; significantly changing the way the world works for the better is another matter.

Change

New Season
Boules has been rained off today so I thought it was about time I updated my blog, although nothing of a great deal of interest has happened in the past two weeks. One thing is that the season has changed. It occurs to me that the seasons are barely discernible in England apart, perhaps, from the lack of frosts during the summer. April was apparently brilliant but the weather there since has been indifferent. Here, the mini heat-wave that started as I left for England continued until the last few days of August when a violent storm brought in a change to autumnal weather, which I actually prefer. Temperatures are down to the mid- twenties and the evenings will become increasingly cool. The important constant is the sun. Weather forecasts here are notoriously unreliable, as in England, but here because we are in a border zone between the alpine climate just to the north and the Mediterranean climate just to the south. However, over any sequence of days the weather will conform to that dictated by the season.

It's also a new football season, so one of the real passions of my life can be given its head again.

My summer display of flowers is now over, the remnants looking rather wretched. Neighbors say that what they really appreciate is that there are flowers in front of my house all the year round but that is not quite true. I shan't attempt anything more until November and I'm beginning to think I should hold off doing the summer planting until some time in June. Because spring came early this year, I planted in early May and have had problems keeping the display going even this long. The big success was the jasmine, which flowered continuously for three months. I need changes at the back too; annuals simply don't work there. The ground is so bad that plants take considerable time to establish themselves, which dictates perennials only.

And I've discovered a new ingredient for meals. I always knew that nasturtium leaves were edible but have never really tried them. Now I have and they turn out to be the nearest thing to rocket apart from rocket itself. I shall use the in future instead of buying rocket.

In Memoriam
A good friend and former colleague, Ken Kolence, died at the end of last month. I met Ken at the NATO conference on software engineering in 1968 and subsequently turned down a job offer from him at the Institute fro Software Engineering in Palo Alto on my return from wandering out east. So he came looking for me in London a year later and persuaded me to start a European operation for him. He was brilliant in many ways, the first person to recognise the need for, and produce, tools for computer performance monitoring. He was also what the Americans would call an 'ornery bastard, which probably resulted in his having a less successful career than might have been. IBM (allegedly) tried to take out his relatively modest software operation because it was costing them sales (spurious ones) and, in his own words, he . But he was a good and generous friend to me and the IT industry owes him more than it will probably ever appreciate.

A Depressing Experience

A Depressing Experience
I'm just back from a week in England and have to admit that, apart from the pleasure of seeing my mother and kids, it was a depressing experience. The weather was part of it. I had hoped to get my mother to sit in her garden or to take her out to see a public garden in the vicinity but the weather was simply not suitable; as a final resort, I brought some friends of hers over to see her. I thought that if the weather was like this in mid-August (constant overcast skies, if not too much rain), had I still been living in England, what would I be looking forward to in November through to April? Maybe I'm just becoming a weather freak. The psychological effect, anyway, is considerable.

Then there were the riots. I arrived as they were fizzling out and thus got a week's worth of the aftermath in TV and newspaper coverage. Being somewhat locked up with my mother, I watched a lot of television: Newsnight, Question Time, Horizon, you name it. And the quality of debate I found appalling, even allowing for the inevitable inane point-scoring by the politicians involved. (Why, I ask myself, must we regard this as inevitable? But it seems to be.) Numerous very pertinent points were made almost incidentally in these programmes but none really homed in on and nailed down by the programme presenters.

There was the colleague of the New York cop invited to advise the government on zero-tolerance strategies who stated that crucial to the success of this exercise in New York had been recruitment of an extra 5000 policemen. But the UK government is proposing the exact opposite. Why wasn't this point nailed down and explored? Instead, we had a focus on sterner sentences, most of which will inevitably be reduced on appeal.

The morality aspect was explored with the help of a couple of bishops and, similarly inevitably led nowhere. Morality is much too personal to help in this case, although it did provoke a mention of the role of the banks in creating the economic situation which contributed to the riots.

Another point I thought very pertinent was that of the social infrastructure around many of the kids and areas involved; there is none, apart from the local gangs. So how does that get changed? Nobody, it seemed, really wanted to discuss this; the agenda was sterner policing.

And what about the role of schools? At a time when half of teachers supposedly want out of the profession, wasn't this relevant? Even when the most common reason they want out is a lack of discipline and the means to impose it in schools? Not explored; the focus had to be on sterner policing.

Another interesting point was the role that modern telecommunications played in the organisation of the riots. So what's the most simplistic solution? Shut them down, was the cry. Fortunately a policeman pointed out that these social networking tools were equally important to the police.

There seemed to be almost a conscious collusion between the programmes and politicians that any avenue for a possible way forward that entailed extra resources being provided (even police) was to be mentioned only in passing and then set aside.

There is no denying the government's predicament in providing extra resources, given the economic situation, but this problem is simply not going to go away without them. So, time for some creative thinking, outside the box? Dream on.

I hoped that possibilities such as the use of a volunteer workforce or possible extra pennies for job seekers with suitable skills might be explored. Again, dream on. What we got was tired, old and failed remedies from politicians concerned more with point-scoring and programme presenters with blunt teeth. The overwhelming impression was that the powers that be really did not want to get to grips with this problem, had no idea how to tackle it or simply preferred fatuous populist slogans. And, oh boy, was that depressing. I came away with the impression that England was bankrupt not just in terms of money but also ideas. Brain death is now the criterion for the truly dead.

Dark Thoughts

Dark Thoughts
It's been a lovely day today but one that, to me, has turned out to have curious echoes of the circumstances surrounding the song that almost says the same thing: it's a lovely day tomorrow.

There was a heavy storm over Saturday night and rain fell for most of Sunday; so no watering to be done today. I spent the morning pottering and on the computer, did some shopping, played boules and went to the Bar du Pont for the usual pizza this evening. Friends Steve and Jo have their daughter and family staying with them and I asked how they had spent the day. Similarly peacefully and happily it seemed, grandchildren playing in their pool, adults reading books, etc.

All this contrasted bleakly with the news emanating from England, to where I shall return for a week on Thursday. The episodic, dispersed and mindless violence that appears to be going on there seems to have little rhyme or reason behind it and that is worrying. Riots for a reason are understandable, however outlandish or mistaken the reason might be. Riots for apparently no reason bespeak an underlying malaise, in the society; in Shakespeare's words, something rotten. That is not so surprising in view of the economic conditions, particularly for young people, in the country and the same applies, indeed, for most of Europe; but is worrying nonetheless.

Then, at the end of the pizza evening, I was left talking to Alex, a part-time resident of the village who has spent most of his life working in finance in London. He's never exactly a barrel load of laughs but our discussion on the general economic outlook was even more depressing than usual, against a backdrop of stock markets falling all over the western world. I had to agree with him that it is difficult to see how Greece can stay in the euro zone but equally difficult to see how it can opt out of it. So Europe is in the frying pan alongside the UK.

What worries me most in all this is that all these portents point to a repetition of the political conditions that prevailed in the nineteen thirties and led to a huge swing to the political far right and a swathe of fascist movements. True, the riots in England can doubtless be contained and may prove transient. True also, the US and Europe may print large quantities of money or find some other way of achieving a temporary equilibrium. But, and it is a big but, the underlying widespread economic weakness will certainly not go away easily and the thus neither will the potential for fascist movements.

Racial tension is an ever-present potential tinderbox in most of Europe. If, as seems likely later in the year, Germany is called on again to bail out Greece (France is not in a position to do any more without joining the list of failing European economies) what will the political reaction be there? And what will the popular political reaction be to the austerity measures that will almost inevitably affect the rest of Europe over the next few years? It hardly needs saying that riots, whether in the UK or elsewhere, usually lead to general demands for sterner policing and government. The only way out of this that we could find in the nineteen thirties was to have a world war.

Of course, we are nowhere near that now. And the EU has been created in the meantime with a specific goal of avoiding wars in Europe (but not fascist or neo-fascist governments; Hitler's goal, after all, was to unite Europe). Maybe I am just having a bad evening. But it has made me wonder whether my little corner of paradise in Mollans is something of a fool's paradise. It is certainly sheltered from much that is going on in the rest of the world.

Fruit And Language

Fruit
It's that fruit time of the year and, like a dog with several tails, I'm making my usual mistake of going the rounds and buying too much of it. The problem is that it is all ripe and so lasts only a few days. Since I generally shop seriously only once a week, the fruit tends to go bad before I can eat it all. And all is a lot. This week I discounted apricots, white and yellow peaches, nectarines and melons in favour of the first greengages that are just in, plus some mirabelle plums. Then Steve and Jo came round to eat this evening and brought a kilo of greengages given to them plus a promise of more. I'll probably end up making another load of jam.

This is in addition to my own grape harvest which has been particularly heavy this year. I took a couple of bags full to the pizza evening last Monday and gave another couple of bunches to Patricia, my cleaning lady, today. I'm eating them all the time (as well as greengages, etc) but the trouble is that all my neighbours and friends have their own supply, so it is difficult to give them away. I'm hoping that some will stay unripe for long enough for me to take them back to England when I go in a couple of weeks time.

The Problem Of X
Neville, who came to eat with Steve and Jo this evening, is also a linguist, fundamentally in German but also with good French and Spanish. Conversation got onto Catalan, as Neville previously lived near Valencia. He had the same experience in trying to learn Valenciano as I had in trying to learn to speak Provencal; both are predominantly spoken languages and pronunciation and usage differ widely over quite a small area. So is it worth the trouble? Anyway, both of us, it seems, gave up.

The discussion brought up the problem of X in mediaeval languages. It appears in words with both Latin and Germanic origins and would seem to have been pronounced originally something like the sound of the last two letters in the Scottish word loch. Over time, this proved much too difficult for everyone (except the Scots) and it either hardened or softened to become like a more common g, which has both hard and soft forms in English. Thus the mediaeval (Germanic origin) xwerra softened in English to become shwar, with the opening letters eventually dropped, and guerre in French (guerra in Spanish). X is not now native to Spanish but appears frequently in Catalan (and Provencal) in its soft form. So far so good. The problem is that mediaeval scribes were wont to use X as an abbreviation for any set of letters that could be assumed to be understood. Much as written Arabic omits letters (vowels generally) that are assumed, so mediaeval scribes adopted the same practice, replacing what was assumed with an X. (It made me wonder, incidentally, if there was some cross-cultural connection here, Arabic being a major influence in mediaeval Europe.) Anyway, a problem in tracing back the development of X from mediaeval languages is to know whether, in any instance, you are dealing with a pronounced X or an X that replaces other letters. I've no doubt an expert etymologist could sort most of this out in no time but, meanwhile, it remains a good topic for after-dinner conversation.

Even The French Don't Agree
Yesterday evening I had Daniel, Patricia and Mana with me to eat. Alexis, Daniel's youngest son was due to come to but decided to leave the old fogies to themselves. In talking to Mana, I described Alexis as Daniel's 'fils cadet' (younger, youngest son), with which description Daniel agreed. Mana objected that a 'fils cadet' had to be the second son not the third (as Alexis was) and that therefore Alexis should be described as the 'benjamin'. Daniel backtracked and agreed. However, I was in no doubt that had Mana had not been there Daniel would have been quite happy with 'fils cadet' and that that is now common usage. I asked the obvious question as to what the fourth, fifth, etc son would be called and that led to a discussion which I had a hard time following but which, I think, involves terms that have long gone from common usage.

The Last Ten Days

Computers, Computers
Two failures happened ten days ago. My keyboard started to play up (I've lost several keys on the left-hand side) and I lost my Internet connection. The former means a new machine, I think, as the one I have is five years old and I've already had to replace the DVD R/W. I can get generally get round the lost keys by running CHARMAP, copying and pasting but this is tedious. The Internet connection went out because of a faulty transformer on the wireless box and that is now replaced.

I was surprised by my reliance on the Internet. I've got into the habit of perusing various news aggregator and football gossip sites while drinking my early morning coffee and found that watching news on TV was no substitute. In fact I found that even during the rest of the day I used the Internet far more than I had thought I did. It's been twenty years since my son set up a bulletin board and I first encountered the Internet and in that time my reliance on it has become extreme.

End Of Film
The recording session ten days ago finished my involvement in the film on olive trees. Recording of the English version of the female interviews still has to be done but friend Jo will do that. The final phase of my recording raised one problem and one interesting point.

The problem was that Daniel, when he wrote out the French script, hadn't bothered to write out the interviews word for word but had simply summarised when the interviewee was rambling on a bit. This meant that, when I recorded the English version, it fell woefully short of the length of the French. What we had to do was start the English version a couple of seconds after the interviewee started talking; that is common practice in translation so that worked OK. Then I had to speak slowly and introduce some “ums”, “ers” and pauses until I got the required length. It was actually quite difficult to do.

The interesting point arose when the Head of the Order of Olive Trees in Nyons discussed the celebration of the new year's olive oil. The ceremony is called an “alicoque” after the Provencal words for garlic and bread. Pieces of bread, “coques” in Provencal, are toasted to form croutons, which are then rubbed in garlic, “ali” in Provencal, and then dipped in olive oil and tasted. It was the word “coque” that intrigued me, since “un oeuf à la coque” in French is a boiled egg; i.e. cooked in its shell. But boiled eggs are commonly eaten with pieces of bread, i.e. “coques” in Provencal. So there is this kind of double-entendre. Daniel hadn't made this connection and was intrigued by it.

Water
We have had 4-5 successive days of high heat and humidity. It's caused me to try to find a solution to my problem of finding a long non-alcoholic drink that I really like; effectively, an alternative to beer. Water is fine but gets tedious after a while and I find most fizzy drinks too sweet for me and most cordials not to my liking. After some searching I've decided on a flavoured version of the Badoit mineral water. It tastes as though it's just been exposed to a little lemon zest and is not sweet at all; it's very refreshing.

I normally buy some sparkling mineral water because I like it fizzy and natural fizz is always better than carbonation. However, friend Jo has taught me to be wary of bottled water. I used to drink St Yorre, a water from Vichy, until I found that it contained salts far in excess of the levels allowed in UN tap water regulations. In France, bottled water is regulated to ensure it comes from the spring it is supposed to but not otherwise as to its content (other than it not being overtly toxic). The mineral content of the water has to be stated on the label but is not itself regulated. Caveat emptor.

Wine Tasting
This year for the first time there was a wine-tasting evening in Mollans. There's one every year in nearby Puymeras and also occasionally in other local villages but this was a first for Mollans. The vendors were all from the surrounding area so I was familiar with most of the wine but still managed to find one that was interesting. It was a red, light and fruity wine actually from Mollans that was pleasant rather than really good but notably had a lower alcohol level than most Cotes du Rhones. It's normally difficult to find one that is less than fourteen percent alcohol and this was a couple of percent lower.

The event was well attended, around a couple of hundred people, and provided a good social evening but I find wine-tasting evenings of little practical value. I buy most of my wine in bags-in-boxes as it tends to be cheaper and avoids having half-empty bottles after a meal. Vendors at wine-tasting sessions tend to bring only their bottled wines however, so I have to ask for the closest approximation to their bag-in-boxed offerings and make assumptions from that. Anyway, there was one vendor from Gigondas and, though I wasn't going to buy any, it was good to drink a little of it. It is probably my favourite wine if I'm going to splash out on a bottle for a special occasion.

The Village and DSK

The Village
I blather on about the village and so far have shown no photo of it; so here are two. The one above is taken from the south, from the road between Entrechaux and Buis which by-passes the village. The one below is from the east, from the terrace of my friend Daniel's house. The view from his terrace is at its best when the sun goes down and you can see the lights come on one by one in the houses on the chateau hill across the river.




The DSK Affair
Developments in the case against Strauss-Kahn in the USA have confirmed what all my French friends think: that, one way or another, it was a put-up job. The initial suspicions of Sarkozy's involvement have dissipated but my friends still believe it was a trap. According to Daniel, who considers himself something of an authority on crime literature, you have to look for whoever has the most to gain. However, that would appear to be Francois Hollande, the new hope of the Left, although no one is suggesting he was involved.

Strauss-Kahn is not out of the woods yet. A French writer, Tristane Banon, is accusing him of a similar assault. This complaint goes back some eight years, though, and seems likely to be nothing more than an irritant. However, it militates against what has been suggested as a future career for Strauss-Kahn: as Finance Minister in a Francois Hollande-led government. To have credibility with the electorate, a left of centre coalition would need a strong financial figure among its ministers and Strauss-Kahn would fit the bill. However he will need to keep out of the French courts if this is to happen.

Passing The Time

Film Recording
On Friday I started on the recording of the translation I had done for the commentary on Daniel and Martine's film of the world of the olive tree. The obvious incentive for Martine was to have an English version of the film available for sale when the tourists arrive en masse. So we've just started on it and should have it finished by the time the tourists have all gone home. That's called Provencal marketing nous.

Martine has a studio at the top of her house equipped with a full-blown, modern film-editing system. I was impressed with the fine granularity with which editing could be done, down to the level of individual syllables. The recording was slow at first because it took me time to get the neutral tone and even flow of words right. Also, I found that though I had tried to produce spoken rather than written phraseology when I had done the translation some phrases still seemed awkward when spoken, so I ad-libbed at times. Another problem was to time the spoken English to closely the same length as the French. One of the scenes was of an olive oil expert making points while counting them out on his fingers and so the the English version had to keep in synch with his fingers. It's all new to me and an interesting learning process. We were doing it for a couple of hours and got about a tenth of the commentary done so it will take quite a few more sessions to finish the job. In part of the film there is an interview with a woman and we decided a woman's voice will be preferable so I will ask friend Jo if she will do that.

Saturday Market And Film
The Saturday evening summer markets have now started and will continue through to early September. During the rest of the year there are just a paella stall and a fruit/vegetable stall on Saturday mornings but in the midsummer months a fuller market spreads over both sides of the bridge. I went to get some fruit as my contribution to the street meal which takes place in my road tomorrow. I bought some apricots and melons and a variety of peach that I've never seen anywhere else; it is shaped like a doughnut or bagel, complete with a depresssion in the middle where the former would have a whole; the peaches are delicious. I also noticed a variety of tomato, called “allongé”, that I've never seen anywhere else; it is shaped like an irregular sausage, 4-6 inches long.

My conribution of fruit is now an annual regular. Having had to put up with a lot of extreme feminism in my time, I'm pleased to have found a female prejudice that works in my favour. When I first bought the house and hadn't yet got the kitchen in order I brought a bowl of fruit to the street meal somewhat apologetically. However, I've found that none of the women in the street expects men to cook. It's expected that they will buy something to bring along. In this case,I'm happy to go along with expectations.

In the market I met Mana who said there was an interesting film showing in Buis that evening that had won the Palme D'Or at the last Cannes festival, so I went along with her and Patricia. It was entitled “Tree of Life”. I wondered afterwards why Mana had wanted to see it and, sure enough, she hated it; she is averse to religion in any shape or form. I found the photography and some of the imagery compelling but it was too long and the main argument seemed to be that as the world was such a beautiful place there had to be a God. I suppose it did also pose a number of the questions that Christians must ask themselves from time to time but that had little interest for me. Patricia, on the other hand, found the film wonderful, conforming as it did to her theistic beliefs: there is no God as such but God is in everything. I find that rather vague but it does correspond fairly well with my idea that if we are “greater than we know”, as Wordsworth would have it, then the universe is probably a sub-atomic particle in something so immense we couldn't possibly conceive of it. But I'm not sure what that has to do with religion.

Victorian Pharmacy
I quite often turn on the television when I have my evening meal, usually to watch sport. However, no sport being available the other evening I turned to a programme on Victorian pharmacies on the Yesterday channel and found it highly interesting. The amount of mercury, arsenic and opiates being dished out was horrifying, a case of the cure being more dangerous than the complaint. In fact, apparently it often was. Poor families with multiple children used to go to pharmacies to get a potion to keep the youngest children quiet, a “calmant”. This consisted of opiates which depressed the children's appetites to such an extent that they died of starvation, a principal cause of infant mortality in the era.

The multiplicity of dangerous mixtures reminded me of the time I started chemistry at school and was bought a chemistry set. This reminded my grandmother that my uncle had had one which was in a cupboard under her stairs. She gave it to me to add to my collection of chemicals. In it I found some potassium ferrecyanide with which I tried to make prussic acid (as boys of 12 are wont to do). Fortunately the local chemist would sell me only dilute acids so my experiment didn't work, otherwise I might not be writing this blog.

Musings

Hospital
I had to return to the hospital in Carpentras on Tuesday to have a check-up following my operation for bowel cancer last summer. There's no sign of more cancer so that is a relief. They did, however, find a condition in the colon called “diverticulose sigmoïdienne”; I had to look that one up. It is apparently a common condition in someone my age, common as arse-holes you might say, small hernias that are not serious unless they perforate. When I looked up what it meant I found that the most common cause is a poor diet, lacking in fibre. Which is strange because I eat a fairly high fibre diet, not because I study diet but because the foods I prefer, notably lots of fruit and salads, tend to be the healthy choices.

The nurse who delivered the anesthetic was at pains to say that she was the person who would be “putting me to sleep” and to see that I was comfortable with that. I asked if she could give me a nice dream at the same time ( like Chelsea winning the league next season, to avoid any louche innuendos) and she simply smiled sweetly. I dream, or rather am aware of dreams, very rarely and when I am aware of having dreamt it is usually a nightmare of facing university final exams. When I look back it doesn't seem like a traumatic time but somewhere in my psyche it must have registered as such.

Anyway, I'm glad the business is over for another year. I find taking the purge necessary before the examination a daunting experience because of the sheer amount of foul liquid which has to be drunk to clear the colon beforehand. To add insult to injury, the purge powder is officially not deemed to be a necessary medicine and so is not reimbursable by the State or medical insurance systems. Though why anyone would take a purge if it wasn't absolutely necessary defeats me.

Shopping
I did a big shop today having not shopped for a while and stood wondering at the richness of colour in the supermarket fruit and vegetable section. It all looked much more voluptuous and enticing than the equivalent sections in English supermarkets and i wondered why, since the produce on sale is essentially the same in both cases. The only difference I could identify was that the section in all the supermarkets around here is laid out in flat displays, as in the open markets. You take it all in at a glance, rather than having the total display subdivided by high shelves as in most English supermarkets. That, and the general lack of packaging seems to account for the effect and it certainly makes you want to buy more. That led me to wonder whether the marketing guys here have got one over their English counterparts. It could be but, if so, the marketing people responsible won't be from Provence.

Confirmation Of Boules Success
My cleaning lady came in today and was full of how successful the boules “rencontre” had been. Her friends had all commented to her on what a good time was had by all and she asked if we were going to repeat it. I said I thought we would next year but she was thinking of August. She made the point that I have commented on before, that July is packed with celebrations of one sort or another but August is barren (grandchildren time). (I could have phrased that better.) Anyway, I'll ask the others how they feel but I suspect that once a year will be enough for them.

One reason that Patricia, my cleaning lady, stated for the success was that no-one felt pressured to win; they were just there to enjoy themselves. Daniel, with whom I play a lot, had said when we planned the event that that would be a critical factor. He hates pressure to succeed and, though a very good player, won't take part in regional/national tournaments for that reason. Funnily enough, although the success of the “rencontre” was very important to me, I don't feel that kind of pressure when playing. I worry a little about how I play, and get frustrated if I am not playing well, but don't worry much about the eventual result. Competitiveness is a funny thing.

Chelsea
While I was playing boules today a family came to watch who were chattering away in English. They got all excited watching me play and took a number of photos of me playing. At first I couldn't understand why (despite the obvious brilliance of my shots!!!). Then I realised that it must be because I was wearing a Chelsea shirt. I didn't let on that I was English; fortunately I quickly realised that the photos were going to be the subject of stories about how the family had found an old Frenchman in a little village in the middle of nowhere who was a Chelsea supporter. I didn't want to spoil the story.

The "Rencontre Bouliste"

The Boules “Rencontre”
The planned boules get-together duly took place on Sunday and was generally acclaimed a great success. That was the main thing. There were 48 players and a dozen prizes, which Michèle had managed to extract from local businesses, to distribute. The top and bottom three scorers all got prizes and the rest were distributed through a random draw of the players. The event was officially called a “rencontre bouliste”, a boules get-together, to make it sound as intended less formal than a competition or tournament. At the end of the evening everyone seemed happy so the event will probably become an annual one.

Unfortunately I lost my rag somewhat when registration got underway. We had anticipated various small problems and decided on ways to circumvent them. I had been slightly worried, knowing the way of the world here, that people wouldn't turn up for registration until the event was due to start, at 4.00pm, and that the event would thus drag on into the evening. A game generally takes about 35-40 minutes but can last over an hour if the teams are well-matched; and each player was allocated three games. As it happened, people turned up early so there was no problem there. The idea had been to give each contestant a number and, with that, a slip of paper showing the number of their partners for first, second and third games, so that as soon as they had registered they could look for partners and opponents (who was against whom was on a sheet at the registration desk) and get the show on the road. What actually happened was that people were just given their number at registration so we had to go around afterwards finding people and giving them the appropriate slip. It didn't matter much but was messy and meant that we couldn't get started until over 40 people were registered. Anyway, the “rencontre” finished in good time.

Then we'd decided that as we wanted everyone to meet new people and that couples would quite probably come to registration together, we wouldn't give consecutive registrants consecutive numbers. Knowing this, when I drew up the fixtures I didn't worry about pairing numbers 1 and 2 or 7 and 8, for instance, as I assumed they wouldn't be couples. This seemed to be forgotten at registration so consecutive registrants did get consecutive numbers and consequently several couples played as such (although only for one of their three matches). We'd also noted that the total number of players had to be divisible by four and so, as organisers, we decided we wouldn't register ourselves until the total was known and would then add ourselves as necessary to make up the requisite total. This didn't happen either, resulting in two would-be contestants having to be turned away.

As I saw the decisions we had made being ignored I started to get angry; which was silly really as everyone else seemed to be happy to just muddle through. It was the more silly in that all my anger did was to make people concerned for me and why I wasn't having a great time like the rest of them.
A learning experience for me.........................

Another learning experience was drawing up the list of “fixtures”. The general idea was that each participant should play three matches, each time with a different partner and with as a wide a variation of opponents as possible. It turns out to be a simple matter to draw up the list of matches if, but only if, you know the total number of contestants in advance. Making people register in advance was likely to drive down the numbers playing and thus defeat one of the main objectives of the exercise. We had no idea what the eventual total would be; estimates varied between a conservative 30 and an optimistic 60. Not knowing the total in advance makes the problem absurdly complicated and involves an optimisation. If you plan for a higher total than you actually get the whole plan falls over and is irrecoverable. So you have to plan conservatively. We could have planned for 36, for instance, which would have given a wide variation in partners, but then would have needed an extra plan for a possible additional 4 or 8 players; and the variation possible within 4 or 8 is very limited. We opted to plan for successive groups of 12, with additional plans for 4 or 8 if necessary. Within a group of 12 the variation possible is obviously much more limited than that within a group of 36 but nonetheless greater than that possible within a group of 8. Participants did say that they would have liked more variation but it is not obvious to me how we can achieve that. So be it.

Village Update, Language And Politics

Village Update
The last two scorching days, 29 degrees in the sun, have demonstrated that summer is really here. It always strikes me as slightly ironic that when the sun really gets going, the reason that many of us are here, we immediately try to avoid it: shutters or curtains closed, long siestas, etc. Certainly no one who doesn't have to will do physically hard work in the hot sun but I feel that there should be more elegant ways of avoiding the excess heat but still be enjoying the sun. Fortunately, my kitchen and living room remain relatively cool, protected by thick walls and the lime trees opposite.

The next round of fruit is now in full flood. Strawberries and cherries are past their best but are replaced by melons, nectarines, peaches and apricots. I especially love the apricots both for their colour and flavour. I've heard it said that the small apricots are really the best but I love the large ones, the size of small apples, coloured red and orange, that are full of juice.

This week is the beginning of the summer festivities here. I called in at the Mairie the other day to ask for the calendar of events for the year and, in typical provencal fashion, they haven't got around to producing it yet. Half of the events will be over before it comes out. However, the “feu de la St Jean” is on Friday, officially for some reason the first day of summer here, and will provide a general village get-together and knees-up outside the Bar du Pont. Then will come the fête votive, the 14th of July, painters in the streets and so on, week after week until the end of the month. August is grand-children month, when everyone of about my age who has grand-children gets to look after them for a while.

Next Sunday will see the boules tournament I have been helping to organise take place. I'm meeting Michèle tomorrow to decide on some of the finer details and have worked out the apparently complicated scoring system that Daniel proposed. He insisted on describing it as democratic, which gave me no insight as to its real purpose, which I now understand is to help ensure that no two people will end up with the same number of points. Once I had understood that the rest was easy.

Language And Politics
An Australian friend, Ian Mackay, has been commenting on my blog particularly with respect to language and has contrasted Canadian French with French French. His knowledge of Canadian French is considerably better than mine. In doing so he has raised some interesting points. We both agree that the verb “relooker”, which I commented on earlier, must be about the ugliest word invented in any language. The question is: how does it arise? Ian states that there is a Québecois equivalent to the French Academy that is faster on its feet, quicker to produce a proper French equivalent to new phenomena, and thus avoids the introduction of bastardised English words. He also makes the point that differences in the approach to language in anglophone and francophone countries appear to reflect political differences. The anglophone approach is much more free market: new words come and go, needed or not, and nobody cares very much. The francophone approach is much more state-controlled, at least in intention.

This last insight turned my thoughts to the Common Market and it immediately occurred to me that there was a fundamental difference here also between the British and French approaches. The EU was conceived as both a political and economic body. However, the French are interested almost solely with the former aspect and the British with the latter. Although the French have had to open their borders to EU labour generally they make it as difficult as possible for any foreign qualifications to be accepted. And they have no intention at all of allowing other EU countries to compete with their industries if they can avoid it, whatever Brussels decrees. The British, on the other hand, naively open their industries to competition from other EU countries and fret about admittedly useless EU political appointments such as a President, Foreign Minister, etc, which cause no problem at all to the French. The big insight for me, although I can't understand why I didn't realise it before, is that for the French the Common Market is a non-starter.

Clearing Up And Language

Clearing Up
Today had a lot going for it. Firstly, although the weather was at times overcast it was warm until late in the evening; and I love the warm evenings that we should have from now on until September. Partly as a result of that I played boules for a solid three hours, with mixed success although I was playing consistently well, which was all that really mattered to me.

Secondly, I finished the work in my bedroom, albeit there is still some re-arranging and cleaning to do. However, considering that I first started scraping paint off beams back in last autumn, that is something of a milestone. The cleaning will be a considerable job but not a complicated one. Much more complicated will be persuading myself to get rid of old clothes. I really need to be ruthless on this and am not sure I can be. I've already discovered four sets of clothes for “dirty” jobs and have decided to get rid of two of them; arguably I need only one but..........Then there is the question of what I need here as against my UK wardrobe. I haven't enough presentable shorts and have too much warm/winter clothing. I'll sort that out somehow (?).

Finishing the bedroom has meant finding something to do with my old wardrobe, a self-assembly piece of furniture that was unstable and which I have come to hate. I bought it three years ago, cheaply, to replace a kind of striped tent, of the sort you might find at Henley regatta, which served as a wardrobe for my predecessor. I hated that too, which is why I bought the replacement and now a new wardrobe. Fortunately I met Serge this evening, who's trying to do up a large old house in the village on no money and he wants to take it. It's a much preferable solution to taking it to the local tip.

Thirdly, on the food front, I've now made some apricot jam (the markets are full of apricots) and bottled some cherries in alcohol. That should be it on the preserves front, unless I decide to make more chili jam or pickled shallots, until the figs come along in late summer (more jam). Jam was never important to me in England but but is generally “de rigeur” here for breakfast and I also like to buy unflavoured yoghourts into which I put a dollop of jam. I need a few more cherries to use up the remaining fruit alcohol but that will take only a few minutes.

Fourthly, the warm evening meant that today's pizza get-together, which for a change was mussels and chips, lasted until 10.45pm, an elongated session of chat and jokes with some 40 of us all together. It's one of the things I really look forward to in the summer here, with all of us outside the cafe watching the darkness draw in around us.

A Word A Day
Friend Steve put me on to a website that provides a word a day, it's derivation and usage, and which I have found consistently entertaining, the more enjoyable in that it is free. It can be found at wsmith@wordsmith.org. Surprisingly for me (with my prejudices) it is an American site, proving that there are still Americans who read and take an interest in language. It occasionally produces some unexpected insights, as well as general interest. It has a theme per week and this week's theme is the use of nouns as verbs, a practice I generally dislike when good alternatives already exist. The word today was “friend”, for which the verb to befriend already exists; but to friend someone is apparently being increasingly used on Internet chat-rooms. Instinctively I don't like that. But apparently the verb to befriend is the upstart newcomer, to friend as a verb having been used in English some three centuries earlier than to befriend (13th to 16th centuries). So much for my prejudices.

Sex, Politics and.....Realism?

Sex, Politics and......Realism?
The Strauss-Kahn affair has been filling a lot of news articles here, as elsewhere, and seems also to have spawned some ill-conceived columns in the English press. Broadly, the English press seems to be saying: “Ah, now the French are having to review their relaxed attitude towards sex; it's time for the revenge of English propriety over the French libertines". In fact, it's nothing of the sort.

Judging from the reactions of the pizza crowd and other French friends, the underlying attitude of the French to sex remains very much the same. The first reaction I noted was that several friends were persuaded by the idea that the affair was engineered by Sarkozy. Strauss-Kahn was all set to be the leader of the Left and very likely to inflict a bloody nose on Sarkozy at the forthcoming elections. And the French love a conspiracy theory even more than we English do. The fact that there was not a shred of evidence to support this theory merely dimmed the suspicion slightly.

The other reaction was that Strauss-Kahn was in the wrong because he used coercion. The French may be relaxed about informal sexual encounters but not about coercion. Coercion in such matters is wrong, full stop. For Strauss-Kahn, anyway, the political dream is over, at least until memories fade.

Incidentally, any scandal there has been has been limited to coverage of the story on the Internet. The French printed press has reported the case widely but not any salacious details. In that, it has kept true to its respect for the privacy of the private lives of public figures. And none of my acquaintances has suggested that Strauss-Kahn was wrong to have had a dalliance. Thus the basic difference in French and British attitudes, which the French regard as inclined to be prurient, remains the same.

For me, the general French attitude to both sex and politics is exemplified by realism. There are things which people do which they may not like but they accept that they are part of life and don't get their knickers in a twist about them. I think that that is generally laudable but some aspects do grate against my Anglo-Saxon sensibilities.

A little while ago when Steve and Daniel were eating with me and conversation got around to the Common Market, Steve brought up the case of the order for new trains for Eurostar. Siemens was initially selected as the supplier but a French representative on the selection panel objected and the contract eventually went to Alsthom, a French company. Daniel's reaction was that this wasn't unusual and that Alsthom had obviously increased their bribe. This shocked me. It wasn't simply his suggestion of a bribe that did this but his firm belief that of course a bribe was involved. I have no idea whether this was true but the underlying attitude bothered me.

I do find this aspect of French realism troubling. It is the calm acceptance that people in important positions will, in Anglo-Saxon terms, abuse their power. In French terms, it is a realistic view that there are certain perks, be they women (or men) or money, that go with the job. I have to accept that, in the real grubby world, the French view is indeed realistic. What I find difficult to accept is that, while large financial contracts have no doubt often (always?) been this way, they have to remain that way and nothing can be done to stop them, which seems to be the prevailing French view.

I find I have a different attitude to dalliances in high places and there is, of course, a feminist aspect to this. If bribes in high places shock me, dalliances don't. If power is an aphrodisiac for men and women, then so be it; both parties know, if I may express it this way, what their relative positions are. In Anglo-Saxon feminist terms, women involved in such affairs would be victims of male dominance. That isn't the French feminist view. Several of my female friends regard themselves as feminist and their attitude to such affairs is, if no coercion is involved, that both parties presumably enjoyed themselves so let them get on with it. Here, too, there is a divergence in French and British attitudes. French feminists are very hot on equal pay, opportunities and rights but not on the extreme postures in which their English and American counterparts often indulge. Maybe in this too they are just being more realistic.