Another Christmas

Another Christmas

This Christmas will be the first I've spent in France but, apart from the absence of my mother and the ritual lunch-time visit to the pub, probably not that different to other recent Christmases. The French celebrate Christmas very much as we do in the UK, with the focus on family and children.

Two differences are the absence of the ubiquitous turkey in England and the lack of Christmas cards. There doesn't seem to be a standard main course meal here although, if one is more common than others, it would probably be duck; I've no idea if that is local to the south of France or more widespread. And foie gras and smoked salmon seem to feature very commonly as first courses, as also do oysters. I noticed in the supermarkets the sudden appearance of carp, which suggests to me the existence of a sizeable Polish population in the area. In Polish households no one can take a bath for a week before Christmas as that is where the carp is, getting rid of it's muddy flavour before being cooked. Newly in the supermarkets too are “cardes”, stems of a thistle that look like celery on steroids. I haven't seen it growing so can't tell what type of thistle it is; one of my dictionaries suggests teasel but it doesn't look like that to me. I don't know whether it is specific to Christmas or simply just available now as, for instance, are persimmons.

The desert here is traditionally some or all of the 13 prescribed constituents that I think I described last year. That, certainly, is local to Provence. Although dried fruits feature prominently on shop shelves, their combination into Christmas cake or pudding doesn't seem to figure in France. The German Stollen is available in shops but that is as near as it gets.

Christmas cards are virtually unobtainable; the ones I sent this year were left over from those I had in England. It is traditional, although not always practised, to send new year cards. These are pale substitutes for English Christmas cards, generally looking like half-size postcards and mostly poorly designed and executed.. Maybe Hallmark or some similar company should get busy over here.

The group of us who sing carols had been busily rehearsing for the past few weeks and duly performed last evening. The event went off very well, largely due to the efforts of Jo and René, with increased numbers of people attracted to it. Even Steve did a solo, which also went well; he's a brave man. I did my usual growling in the background ( at least I hope it was in the background).

I personally was a bit disappointed that we didn't attract more of the villagers outside of friends; there were a few but most of them were already in the bar. I'm beginning to think that this one of my ambitions may be misplaced. Those of us who sang did so because it was fun. However, carols are religious by nature and I suspect that fun may not be a word that can be associated with religion, at least in this part of France. It could be that religion here is too serious a matter, one way or the other. This area did suffer atrociously during the wars of religion but that seems too long ago to have much resonance now. So maybe it is just the separation of state and religion that is at play.

Levenson, Winter And Passports

Levenson

The Levenson enquiry and its recommendations seems to have been a dominant topic of conversation among my friends here, with very divided opinions expressed. Assuming that some action needs to be taken (a significant assumption, I know) the topic has seemed to me extremely complex. If any rein is to be put on the Press, and leaving aside the question of Internet content, it seemed obvious to me that whistle-blowers had to be protected and also the role of government minimised. Why not pass the problem straight to the judiciary, I thought, with the emphasis of control being on means of acquisition, not content? But there are foreseeable problems there also; the complexity remained.

It should have taken me minutes to see the way out but in fact it took me a week of pondering. Everything in my experience tells me not to mess with complexity; stand back, take a deep breath and look to Occam's Razor. Why the clamour for Press censorship? It's because many people feel that a right to privacy has been infringed. So why not forget all the questions of Press freedom/censorship and simply strengthen the privacy laws? These are reputed to be much stricter in France than in the UK, although I don't know the detail, so why not make a move towards French-style privacy legislation? That, plus possibly suitably heavy penalties for infringement, should resolve the problem and put aside any debate about Press freedom. The Press then remains as it has always been, as free or constrained as any other person or entity within the law.

Winter

Winter arrived today. The temperature is barely above freezing even in the early afternoon and it's caught a succulent plant that Claudine and Jacques gave me and which has been sitting out front on my letter box. Fortunately at least half the plant looks healthy still so I shall put it in my terrace room with the other plants I am trying to keep over winter. And I shall now need to cut back and protect the blue solanums (solana?) I have in the front.

Winter also means beef to me: stews (which the French don't have), casseroles, etc. The French don't have meat pies either and I made one last week when Steve, Jo, Mana and Michèle came to eat. All enjoyed it, especially Michèle, but I got the same initial suspicion from Mana and Michèle that I always get from French friends when they are faced with unfamiliar food. The conservatism that even quite cosmopolitan French people display when it comes to cooking continues to surprise me. The idea that French cooking is not only the best but probably the only way to cook food does seem to be really deeply engrained in them. I'd normally serve mashed potatoes with the pie but, as I had a jar of duck fat, decided on roast potatoes. The French don't have these either; same result.

Passports

Friend Steve commented about paassports in his blog recently and that reminded me of a money-making wheeze for the giovernment which I thought of some time ago but which doesn't seem to have occurred to the UK government.  After all, the government is strapped for cash.  Why not offer organic (or eco-friendly) passports? We aleady have organic alternatives for almost everything else.  As far as I know, passports already are organic, though there may be a question mark against the dyes used.  Eco-cheerleaders would no doubt happily accept a £10-15 surcharge for the cost of maybe just an "organic" sticker on the passport so the extra money goes tsright to the bottom line.  Or maybe it's just that I have too much.time on my hands in winter.

Beaujolais Nouveau Etc

Autumn Colour

The defining characteristics of autumn, for me, are what is all around now. The vines have turned colour and so have the deciduous trees, about half the trees in the area: maples, poplars, lime and plane trees. The shades vary from light yellow to dark brown and there's even some red, vines of I don't know which variety. The other major change is the smell of wood smoke, the smoke spiralling lazily from numerous chimneys. It reminds me always of Afghanistan, northern India and Kashmir. The Clean Air Act largely did away with this in England and, anyway, the normal household fuel years ago was coal or coke. Here wood stoves are prevalent and, in this area at any rate, seem to have little affect on air quality. So I can enjoy the smell.

Beaujolais Nouveau

Beaujolais nouveau arrived here on the 15^th, as no doubt to many other places, the big celebration being a two-day junket in Lyon. I know it is traditional to celebrate it but I find it rather strange that an area so proud of its Côtes du Rhone should celebrate a wine from southern Burgundy. I wonder if they do that in Bordeaux, Burgundy's arch rival?

Anyway, Patrique and Valérie at the Bar du Pont took the initiative to arrange a Beaujolais nouveau evening, making tapas to go with the wine. I thought the wine was much better than previous Beaujolais nouveaus I have tasted, with a fuller flavour and longer after-taste. My earlier experiences had convinced me that the tradition was a lot of fuss about nothing. It seems that weather conditions dictated that the wine was long on quality but short on quantity this year, with a harvest 50% below last year's. It used to be said in England that more Beaujolais was drunk there than was produced in Burgundy so that will probably be even more the case this year. One thing I found out that I didn't know was that 60% of the Beaujolais produced is drunk as Beaujolais nouveau. That must be good for the producers' cash flow.

So, I spent an enjoyable evening in the Bar du Pont with Daniel, Claudine and others. Claudine is still annoyed that I agreed to let the Mairie copy my website but I think I can convince her that it frees us to develop it in other interesting ways.

Gégérines

Gégérines are apparently a type of very hard squash that grow locally and are essentially inedible. Inedible to you and me, that is; to the French they are simply a challenge. I seem to remember remarking before that the French could probably make an interesting sauce for cardboard; so it is with gégérines. Claudine has promised me a jar of gégérine jam, a former local speciality, when she has finished making it. Why it is no longer seen around much is no doubt due to its preparation. Apparently the squash has to be pulverised and boiled for a couple of hours four times over before it can be made into jam. To warrant that amount of effort it must taste good.

Of Death And Acceptance

Right Or Wrong ?

The formalities consequent upon my mother's death seem to have gone on for far too long. I now believe they are at an end but not without a final episode which has left an unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Prior to my mother having state-provided carers she had engaged a lady from a list offered by Age Concern to help her with housework. This engagement continued until her death. The lady did a sterling job and was helpful beyond the strict terms of her engagement. When my mother died I felt that this lady should receive something from my mother's minimal estate and said to her to take £200 from the bank account she was managing for my mother (the account contained only £395). She did this but then claimed I had told her she could have all the money in the account, which I know I did not do (I did not know at the time what bills might be outstanding) and which her subsequent withdrawal of exactly £200 confirmed. As I've said, this lady did a lot for my mother, almost certainly doing extra jobs for which she may not have been paid, so what should I do? I decided that since I had determined that a bequest of £200 was appropriate I was going to stick by that, and did. The result was an unpleasant exchange of emails and a very soured relationship.

Did I do right? On one hand it seemed stupid to argue over a trivial sum which did not matter to me, particularly regarding someone who had effectively befriended my mother. On the other hand, this lady's work is with people who are vulnerable and, if I let this pass, would the same be repeated? Indeed, should I report this “misunderstanding” to Age Concern? I asked myself what my mother would have wished and thought that she probably would have let the lady have the extra money; she wouldn't have wanted what she would have called “bad blood” between her and the lady. However, I stuck by what I knew to be the situation and the £200 bequest. It did, though, leave me with a very unpleasant and unwelcome feeling.

Inheritance

Claudine came round this evening to eat with me and Steve and Jo and the discussion got onto inheritance law. French inheritance law looks at first glance pretty straightforward. Virtually all a deceased's estate has to be left to members of the family and in designated proportions. There appears to be little point in a will so I was surprised, when discussing this with my cleaning lady, that she should comment that it was always best to make a will (which has to be lodged with a notary).

I took the matter up with Claudine. She confirmed that French inheritance law was indeed extremely simple but only in extremely simple cases. That is, for example, if a married person dies who has never been married before and is married to someone who has never been married before and if neither of the couple have any children outside of that marriage. If, however, there has been a divorce somewhere along the line, within the couple or indeed the putative inheritors, or if there are step-children, all hell breaks loose. The previous simple prescriptions for the simple case become Byzantine. The law, as it stands, was simple not encoded to cater for such cases and a will cannot override whatever the law, in any specific non-simple situation, may decide. The result would seem to be a bun-fight for lawyers who will get rich at the expense of putative inheritors. This has convinced me that I need to see a notary soon to sort out what, if anything, I need to do. I don't want to leave my kids with a complex legal situation to resolve in a foreign country and in a foreign language

Acceptance

I have recounted to various friends my interchange with the Mairie over my website, why the Mairie refused my gift of the website but wanted to copy it. There were comments varying from “what do you expect from the Mairie” to surpirse and indignation. I think the Mairie's reaction was to do with acceptance and degrees thereof. I remember Pedro, my roofer, saying to me three years ago, that when he had arrived 28 years earlier from Alsace that, as far as the village was concerned, he might as well have arrived from outer space. At the time, even people who arrived in the village from as nearby as Nyons (20kms) would be regarded as “foreigners”. Time changes perceptions of course but a lot of time is needed to change entrenched ones.

I reckon I'm pretty well accepted in the village now. I remember writing, a couple of years ago, that I felt I was accepted at boules because nobody any longer felt the need to be polite to me; they felt free to swear at me, as they would to anyone else, if I played a couple of bad shots. That has moved on, as my boules playing has improved, to the point where they react with puzzlement if I play badly: what went wrong? I take that as a further degree of acceptance. The villagers who know me even acknowledge, if with some surprise, that an Englishman can cook as well as they can. But there's a limit. Clearly, an Englishman writing about the village in the public domain in French as well as in English was a step too far, for the time being at any rate. The village had to assert itself.

That's fine by me and relations regarding the website are very amicable. They will build their website on the basis of mine and I will develop my site in my own way. The boundaries, for the time being, have been established.

Websites To Trousers And Rocks

Website

The day before yesterday I got a phone call from Frans Oort , whom the Mairie has appointed to help villagers using the PCs in the media centre in the new library. He wanted to discuss my website on the village, it now being in the public domain (www.mon-mollans-sur-ouveze.fr). So I went along to see what he wanted. He said the mayor and councillors were very excited by it; they were amazed at what I had done; it was just the sort of site they wanted.

I said: “Fine, so they can take it over as the official site; I said I would give it to the village if it wanted it”.

“No, no” said Frans, “they have asked me to create a website just like it and I wanted to ask you if I could copy your material; we'll acknowledge it, of course”.

I said: “You can copy what you want but why not just take over the site?”

“The problem”, said Frans, “is that it all has to be approved by the mayor”.

“OK”, I replied, “So let the mayor vet it and just take out what he doesn't want”.

“No”, said Frans, “I have to create a new site and I am not so keen on WordPress for the software; I prefer to use GetSimple. I will do all the updating so that will be fine”.

Clearly, my idea of having several villagers able to maintain the site has gone out of the window, though it does leave hanging the question of what happens if Frans falls under a lorry.

So the village will create a new website, just like mine. I left the meeting assuring Frans I would be willing to help in any way I could but have the feeling that my job is done. I'm not sure whether I hit paranoia, NIH syndrome, xenophobia, more (paid) work for Frans or whatever but I shall continue with my website, worrying less about the practical information that needs to be on a village site and focussing more on what I want to put on it. It sounds crazy to me but it frees me to do what I want.

Trousers

As I was leaving the meeting (several other villagers using computers were in the room), one of them, Geneviève, asked me if I would like to come to lunch the next day. I had had lunch with her a week previously wearing trousers that were slightly too long and she had noticed and said she would fix them for me. I said I would be glad to come to lunch so she called out: “And don't forget to bring your trousers”. Eyebrows raised and giggles all around the room.

Weather

It snowed last Sunday. None of the villagers I know can remember it ever having snowed in October before, although it was only a light covering which had disappeared by the following morning, even from the top of Mont Ventoux. Now, though, Mont Ventoux has a thick white winter coating at the top and that will probably stay until next March or April. I still haven't found it necessary to have any heating in the house apart from in the living room in the evenings but that too will come soon. Winter is definitely approaching.

Crests Of Rock

Geneviève's house has a spectacular view of Mont Ventoux from her dining room. Whilst having lunch with her and admiring the view I noticed a crest of rock rising sharply above the hamlet of Veaux, which lies at the foot of Mont Ventoux. I hadn't noticed it before. This struck me particularly as there is a similar crest above Buis les Baronnies, known locally as the wall of China, and, indeed, a very large one atop a hill that is a local landmark called Les Dentelles de Montmirail. Since the hills around are generally rounded and wooded, these crests of thin, bald, sheer rock stand out noticeably. I'm not enough of a geologist to know whether these are made of a harder rock to withstand the erosion that must have shaped the rounded hills from which they stand out or whether some later seismic event has forced them to the surface (but I would assume the former). Either way I now realise they are a definite feature of the landscape.

Mothers, A House And Flowers

Other Mothers

Last pizza evening I was talking with friend Dany about broken families of one sort or another and the question of step mothers/fathers/etc came up. To my surprise Dany said that the French have no way of distinguishing in-laws from step whatevers except by context. A mother in law is a « belle mère » and so is a step mother. What I found most interesting, on reflection, was the semantic implications of this.

A semantic gap normally implies that the culture behind the language has had no need to make the distinction and the gap therefore introduces no ambiguity. However, I can think of at least one case in which the distinction is pertinent: French inheritance law; and that has been essentially unchanged since the time of Napoleon Bonaparte. Under French inheritance law a mother in law would not inherit from the birth-mother's estate directly, only through her spouse, and she wouldn't enjoy the rights of usu-fruit that a step-mother would. I wonder how the French have coped with this ambiguity, unless context always makes the distinction clear, which is difficult to believe.

So, effectively, “belle mère” means “other mother”: i.e. other than birth mother. Further precision can only be given by context. That was a new on me.

It's usual to link languages to countries but I prefer to link them to cultures. Belgium and Luxembourg are obvious counters to the language-country link. However, it occurred to me, when walking the dog the other day, that there is a problem with synthetic languages such as Arabic and Indonesian, the latter particularly. There are over 400 languages in Indonesia, which is why Indonesian was created as the official language. But how can it possibly properly encompass 400 different cultures, even if these are closely related? There have to be a lot of semantic gaps. Unfortunately I don't know enough about either the languages or the cultures to have an inkling about what the gaps are or how they are circumvented.

Mana's House

Marijka, a Dutch lady who bought Mana's house, invited me a few evenings ago to have a drink and see what she had been doing to the house. I think I must have commented on Mana's house before. It was built around 1730 and has magnificent old features: many original wooden doors, to large wall cupboards as well as rooms, including a front door with a key so big it would never fit into any modern pocket, original floor tiling upstairs and original windows. It served the village in the 19^th century variously as a school, hospital and Mairie.

I felt it was important (although I could do nothing about it) that whoever bought it should be sympathetic to its original features; they weren't protected any way in French law. Fortunately Marijka has done a very sensitive job of modernising the house whilst keeping, and even in some cases accentuating, these features. In one of the (seven) bedrooms she has painted all the walls white and removed everything except a severely designed four-poster bed imported from China, draped with traditional Chinese red cloth. The doors of the wall cupboards either side of the bed, each over seven feet high, therefore stand out as the features they should be and the whole is completed by the traditional French ceiling beams. The room is modern in its starkness but a show case of the old features. Marijka has also greatly improved access to the roof terrace, taking down a ceiling in the room from which access was obtained through a crawl hole at the top, replacing it with a full-size door, retaining the cross-beams from the demolished ceiling below a higher ceiling.

I was really pleased to see the way the house was being sensitively both modernised and restored

Dipladenias

To keep some colour at the front of the house in late summer I bought a couple of Dipladenia. They're not a plant I have encountered before and not one I like especially; they look a bit “plastic” for my taste but their dark green foliage and deep red trumpet-shaped flowers undoubtedly go well together and they are popular here. A search on the RHS website revealed that they are tropical plants, thriving in an all year temperature of 20 degrees and reaching a height of 10 feet. I want to try to keep them over winter so I'll see if they can survive in my (unheated) terrace room; my lemon tree does, against the odds, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed

More Autumn (And Football)

More Autumn

Last week I got the urge to garden, an urge I find difficult to resist. The urge happened to coincide with some quite large blue pots on offer in the local supermarket, so I bought one to go on the wall side of my balcony. Something to climb up the wall, I thought: a clematis, another jasmin; a rose? Why not all three? That was being too ambitious for the size of pot so there was only one solution: another pot. The jasmin and clematis are now installed in one pot; the other pot awaits a suitable rose.

I then decided that there was no way I could make the roadside opposite my kitchen window suitable for growing anything much but noticed that there was room for a large pot beside one of the trees without causing inconvenience to anyone. So I bought a plastic pot large enough to hold a climbing rose which I shall place there.

I also cleared up most of the back garden and bought 50 narcissi bulbs. I'm still rethinking the back, how to get more colour in August and September. Geraniums and bizzie lizzies seem to be the popular options but I'm not keen on either of them. I've planted some lavender but will have to keep thinking. I want all the planting done this autumn so that the plants can become established over the winter and are ready to take off next spring.

The weather continues to be surprisingly mild in the evenings. Early mornings are becoming noticeably dark and misty but the days are still warm and sunny and the warmth continues late into the evenings. Usually, at this time of the year, you need a sweater on after about 7 o'clock but now it's still shirt-sleeves temperature until 9-10 o'clock at night. I love the warm evenings so that is a real bonus.

For the last two Monday evenings we have been eating indoors at the Bar du Pont, although light rather than temperature has dictated that. Roberto has decided on “tartiflette”, a kind of potato, cheese and bacon hotpot, as a regular alternative to pizzas for the winter and that suits me fine as I like it and can never get through a whole pizza.

So, for me, the autumn has started well (and for Chelsea too); the optimists among the local soothsayers are predicting that the weather will hold well into December. I hope they are right.

Racism?

Friend Steve copied me an article by Rod Liddle, a good football journalist, which was a rant on the Football Association finding Chelsea captain John Terry guilty of racism when a criminal law court had found him not guilty of the same charge. I found I agreed with most of the article, even leaving aside the self-evident and long-established ineptness of the FA (not for nothing commonly known among football fans as the sweet FA).

What caught my interest was neither the FA's role nor the question of whether John Terry did utter the attributed remark or not. There were two points that came together in my mind. Firstly, after what was a very fractious match in which the incident occurred, all the players apparently shook hands and agreed to let bygones be bygones; that happens in a lot of matches in most sports. Secondly, Terry grew up in a multi-cultural neighbourhood playing with kids of many colours and currently plays at a club with a similarly mixed ethnicity, counting several black players as his avowed best friends. So it is unlikely that he is racist in any generally accepted sense.

That does not mean to say that he may not have made a racist curse in the heat of the moment and thus offended the thought police. Curses of sublime vileness are frequently made in football and no doubt other sports' matches. On the record are players at one time or another having uttered such sweet nothings as son of a whore, I fucked your sister and your mother's a whore. Zinedine Zidane was famously sent off in the penultimate World Cup final for reacting to one such comment (his opponent officially deemed blameless). So what's the official line on these sweet nothings? Nothing.

One point of view is that much that is regrettable is said and done in most high-adrenaline contact sports that is best settled after the match when tempers have cooled in peer-group reconciliation. And it's not just football; no footballer has yet been accused of biting a lump out of an opposing player's ear. Nor is it just men's games; I have a cherished video of a women's match that out-machoed any men's game I've seen and could easily have been the basis of GBH proceedings.

Another point of view is that racist comments are different; you can say an opponent is a son/daughter of a whore or his/her mother is a whore but not that he/she is the (black) son/daughter of a black whore (or, presumably, a white, yellow or even green whore).

It is into this absurd, legally ambiguous and politically correct minefield that the FA gaily ventured, with the inevitable result that it simply reinforced its reputation for ineptness.

Autumn Reflections

Autumn Reflections

Our long, hot, dry summer ended after the third week of August but it was possible still to believe that summer was with us. Not now. It's still dry but the days, and evenings in particular, are much cooler. Middle of the day temperatures are in the low 20s generally so it's still shirt-sleeves weather for boules but around 9 o'clock a sweater is usually required. I can still leave my balcony door open until after it gets dark but not for much longer, I suspect.

Autumn has come to the fruit stalls too. Apricots are long gone and now we are seeing the very last of the peaches, nectarines and melons. Dessert grapes, have appeared and so have figs and greengages; otherwise it's apples, pears and oranges. Before long, pineapples from La Réunion will be on the shelves.

Grape harvesting is starting. The lack of rain has meant that the crop will not be large but, with all the sun we've had, the grapes should be high in sugar content. The grapes on the vine above my balcony were ripe at the beginning of August but tart; for the last few weeks they have been beautifully sweet. The vineyard owners who make their own wine shouldn't complain too much, although they, like farmers in England, are never happy with the weather. The wine should be good quality so perhaps they'll sell more of it at a higher price. Those who grow grapes but don't make their own wine are at the mercy of a calculation for which I have the parameters but not the values. They get paid on quantity and sugar content. They will lose on the former and should gain on the latter but I have no idea how that balances out. The growers will grumble anyway.

I've been out taking the last few photographs I need for my website. I've also approached one of the village councillors about the village adopting it and his response was positive; but I'm not holding my breath. I will be happy if it remains purely my website. So it's in the public domain now, at www.mon-mollans-sur-ouveze,fr.  There's still quite a bit to do and, now also, the question of getting it seen.  So i'm about to do my homework on key words and phrases and links.

Pronunciation, Blindness and Dreams

English Pronunciation

Serge, a Belgian friend who spends a couple of months a year in Mollans and who plays boules, asked if he could come round to see me and practice his English pronunciation as he was doing a course in English. “No problem”, I said. So he came round with his course books and set to work. However, I ended up as confused as he was in attempting to infer some rules. As far as I can see, there simply aren't any. I could find no reason why “where” and “wear” should be pronounced the same or why in “what” the “h” is silent but in “who” it is the “w” that is silent. The only answer, it would appear, is to spend a lot of time in an “English only” zone and learn by repeated experience but that is simply not practical in many cases. I just felt pity for any foreigner trying to unravel English pronunciation.

Blindness

I seem to remember commenting a year or more ago about progress on curing blindness in the USA in connection with a paper I published in 1971 when I was editor of the Infotech State of the Art reports. It concerned stimulation of the optic nerve to produce patterns of light perceived by the brain. I was therefore interested to see a news item this week on a woman in Australia supposedly having her blindness cured. In fact, the headline greatly overstated the result but the research, being carried out by the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear hospital and a bionics consortium in Australia, was along the same lines as the 1971 paper. The main difference was that instead of electrodes being inserted through the skull to the optic nerve they were inserted through an implant into the retina. In both cases the idea is to stimulate the optic nerve to produce a pattern of light which would correspond roughly to a blank TV screen, onto which images could be imposed via a camera. Key in both the US and Australian research is to understand the pattern of stimulation that would produce the TV screen. In fact the Australian research had got no further than producing flashes of light, a fair way from curing blindness.

The news item caused me to wonder whether the US and Australian researchers were aware of one another and swapping progress reports. I assume, with today's hugely improved international communications, they must do. In the 1970s, though, I was frequently introducing Americans whom I had invited to the UK to one another, who did not know each other or each other's work even though they were researching the same field of activity. It gave me a great kick to do this but I would think that now it might be possible only where an idea in one field of research has as yet undiscovered application in another.

Desserts

In the baker's this morning my eye caught the usual wonderful array of desserts, tarts and flans, on offer and their equally wonderful prices. Small individual tarts retail for 3-5 euros and flans approximately 20cm in diameter and 5cm in depth for 20-30 euros. Would you pay £25 for a dessert for 6-8 people? Sunday lunch in France is traditionally a major meal as in the UK and Sunday morning is when these delights are bought. But why the high prices? I took time today to study the descriptions in detail and the reason becomes obvious. These are culinary works of art. Not only are they individually hand-made but each includes several different ingredients combined in different multiple layers. Thus one, for instance, had a raspberry coulis with flakes of chocolate layered on a hazelnut praline layered on a special type of cream layered in turn on almond biscuit. I rarely make desserts, preferring cheese and fruit to end a meal, and cannot conceive of trying to make anything like these; they are certainly in a different class to most shop-bought desserts in the UK.

A Sad Reflection

I'm not sure why the following occurred to me recently but it did. I had three friends, unconnected, who committed suicide. One was an alcoholic, one dealing with a difficult domestic situation and the other failing at business. But they all had one thing in common. They were all in some respect dreamers, fantasisers. No doubt we all have dreams but we also deal with reality. In their cases, I believe, the dreams, fantasies, had replaced reality and when reality imposed itself they could not deal with it.   

Website (Mostly)

Website

For the last two weeks we have had temperatures of 35-38 degrees. That's the kind of heat that you keep out of after midday until the evening. What's more, we haven't had any rain worth mentioning for two months now. Needless to say, everywhere is looking dried up and dusty, not to say absolutely fried. The hanging baskets and pots on the balcony, despite regular watering, are essentially done for. This evening we actually did have a storm and rain but only for about an hour. We could do with a couple of days solid of that and I suspect that the local vineyards are praying for it; the grape harvest this year should be good quality given the sun we've had but some rain would add volume.

However, fortunately for me, it hasn't been idle time for my interpreters. Stuck indoors to stay cool, they have decided to get translating and so have completed most of the pages in French and Dutch. I'm very grateful to them.

The website still needs a bit of work such as additions to the accommodation and miscellaniae sections and I need to take more photos before I go public. However, I'm feeling that I've definitely made progress. I've shown it to one or two village friends and their reactions have been positive. One thing that I learned through Claudine, who has been doing the French version, is that “miscellaniae” or “miscellany”, which I thought was pretty universal, is not recognised by the French; we discussed this and Claudine suggested “pot pourri”, which I think works well.

If any readers of this blog want to take a look, the site in its current state can be found at http://mollans.teezed.net.

Footnote

When my mother was alive, I used to beat my brains to think of something to say when I phoned her each day. It took quite an effort to stop the conversation stalling. Now I keep thinking a) I haven't phoned my mother yet today, and b) I must remember to tell my mother about this or that.  

Hugo's Law Of Absolute Bureaucracy

Hugo's Law of Absolute Bureaucracy

Even in France, the home of bureaucracy, there is a general revolt against the indefatigable march of the bureaucrats. Enough is enough, everyone says (and who can deny the truth of that?). Yet.......anything else runs counter to Hugo's Law of Absolute Bureaucracy.  Hugo's Law states that the world will always become more bureaucratic, never less.

Now, far be it from me to try to put myself in the same category as the likes of Heisenburg in proposing absolute laws and I must admit a debt to great philosophers such as Parkinson, but I do believe that an absolute law is at play here. It works roughly as follows and the key to its discovery lies in putting yourself on the inside rather than on the outside looking in.

Suppose you are a bureaucrat and have just finished writing the rules that must be used to govern something, be it an action or an object. It doesn't matter which: it could be cheese, bananas, the loading/navigation of ships or the orbits of satellites. Your job is simply to write the rules. What do you do next? You could simply do nothing but that would be to risk redundancy in a time of high unemployment. So that must be unthinkable. What you clearly have to do is to find something, object or action, that is currently unregulated. Then, and only then, can you start to write rules again and thus secure your future employment. By doing so, you not only secure your continuing employment but also, unselfishly, secure the employment of others needed to ensure adherence to the rules you prescribe.

The obvious conclusion would seem to be that, in the long run, almost everyone will work for a bureaucracy. At first glance, that seems an unlikely scenario; but it doesn't necessarily disprove the law. It merely casts doubt on it. Who believed Einstein first time around? So let's explore further.

Firstly, we can discount the rich, who live on a different planet anyway but also, incidentally, will employ increasing numbers of people to deal with the bureaucracy and shield them from it. The same goes for investment bankers, although they will be subject to casino rules. Secondly, we can discount family enterprises who manage a subsistence living from various very local enterprises but who will anyway find their means so reduced by the burden of bureaucracy in the longer term that they will probably give up. Then what we are left with are people who, directly or indirectly, are working for THE BUREAUCRACY.

Now, any proposed law can be disproved by a single counter example. Where can one come from? Well, it can come only from a rule that there can be no more rules. And who would write this rule? Seemingly it can come only from a bureaucrat. Do turkeys vote for Christmas? Are they ever likely to? My case stands. Hugo's Law of Absolute Bureaucracy must be true.

Another Good Evening

The Barbecue

Near neighbours Alain and Margaine had a “méchoui” this evening to which I was invited and which was very enjoyable. “Méchoui” doesn't really translate except as a barbecue but it is specifically a barbecue of a whole animal, in this case a sheep. The invitees were all residents of the rue du Faubourg or other friends of Alain and Margaine. In brief, it was a very convivial occasion but three things struck me in particular.

First was the roasting of the sheep. Alain and Margaine have done the same thing before and had hired the same man to cook the sheep, with his own machine for doing this and it is the machine that is remarkable, a kind of Heath Robinson arrangement. It consists of a an electric motor attached to a bicycle attached in turn to a spit. The motor turns a bicycle wheel and the gearing of the bicycle controls the rate at which the spit, and thus the sheep, turns over the fire. I don't think Heath Robinson ever designed anything like this but I'm sure he would have been proud of it of he had.

The second thing I noticed was the effect of a glitch in the lighting. We were all in Alain and Margaine's garden, lit by a fairy lights and a few candles on tables: a very low level of lighting, just enough by which to find your glass and plate. I remember at one point looking up at the sky, seeing nothing, and thinking that the weather prediction for the next day (stormy) was probably correct. There appeared to be total cloud cover. However, some time later the electricity supply was cut momentarily and, as if by magic, stars appeared all over the sky. What surprised me was that the minimal illumination that there had been was enough to mask what was in the sky. I hadn't realised that even such a low level of light pollution could affect the view of the heavens in that way.

The final point concerned Alain and Margaine's grand-daughter, whose name escapes me. At a guess, she's about seven years old. The challenge for any parent in such a situation is what to do with a child of that age in a gathering of old fogies, apart from sitting her in front of a TV with a DVD or whatever. I think her parents must have told her that she was to help and had given her a pencil torch, of which she appeared to be immensely proud. She spent the evening very self-importantly going round the assembled crowd, shining the torch on everyone and asking if they had everything they needed or whether she could fetch something. She was a star and I would bet that she had a whale of a time, far more enjoyable than being sat in front of a television.

Provencal Marketing

In the Bar du Pont a few nights ago I noticed that none of the booklets on the history of the village (for which I had done the English translation) were on display, in the height of the tourist season. So I said to Daniel, who was there with me, “They haven't got any of the history booklets, you need to give them some more”. Daniel replied: “Yes they have, I know they have; they're just not on display”. So who is going to ask to buy a booklet they don't know exists? And whose job is it to see that more are sold and that, therefore, they are on display....................?

Back To Good Times

A Classic Evening

I invited Steve and Jo and Claudine and Jacques to eat this evening because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that they don't know each other. They should because Claudine and Jacques, who are from St Malo but have a summer residence here, are both very receptive to English and hearing English points of view. I hope that the evening may have made a lasting connection; it went on until after midnight so it may well have done.

Among the things we discussed during the evening were the apparent disappearance of common sense from everyday life (which I've discussed too often to enlarge upon here) and attitudes towards Europe. Jacques in particular seemed to feel that the English didn't appreciate enough the achievements that the EU had made. I think he's probably right; we don't often say publicly how important it is that a war between major European states now seems inconceivable nor how useful are inter-state reciprocity agreements on such matters as residence, free flow of labour, tax and access to medical facilities. What seems to separate us, to some extent, is the EU predilection to legislate everything, down to the shape of a banana or the milk used to make cheese. The French attitude to this seems roughly to be that you have to expect this of bureaucrats and you simply ignore it if you don't like it. The problem in the UK is that we implement the legislation whatever, which to me seems a problem to a large extent of our own making. As in my own first love, football, we have to realise that we don't own the game and have to learn to play it in a different way.

The intractable problem here seems to me to be that administrators will always find something to administer unless you stop them; after all, that is what they do and what their job security depends on. And that, irrespective of other effects, is an enormous cost. Telling them to stop, and create legislation only if absolutely necessary, threatens their very livelihood. But that is what someone, sometime, is going to have to do.

Even within the UK and within UK remits, we badly need some brave politician to say that new legislation can be created only if it removes more legislation than it creates. None has yet been able to do that.

One point that occurred to me subsequently, regarding the UK, had to do with ability to negotiate. In public ownership/privatisation discussions previously with French friends the friends have all insisted that their bureaucrats, maligned as they often are, are very tough negotiators when it comes to a deal with a private company. The UK bureaucrats are clearly not in the same league, as numerous rip-offs testify. The point occurred to me because Jo's daughter, chasing a passport application, had been unable to contact the (privatised) Passport Agency on the advertised number; the number was always engaged for an unacceptable time. It mirrored my experience in contacting privatised utilities after my mother's death. So why, as part of the contract, wasn't there a service agreement that stated, for instance, that all telephone enquiries had to be responded to by a person within, say, 30 seconds? As all such service numbers are only too eager to tell you, calls may be monitored for performance purposes. To me such a service agreement seems elementary, as it does that companies running privatised public services are saving significant costs by choosing to ignore customer service. But maybe it takes an experienced negotiator to spot that and plug the hole.

Service Wooden Spoon

I've already recounted the problems I have had over my mother's death in dealing with Southern Electricity. To add insult to injury, I today received a letter from them stating that they would be delighted to continue their service (?????.....) to me in my new home; in France, where they don't operate. I think I can safely decline their generous offer. But I am inclined to wonder what possible imbecile can be managing Southern Electricity's Customer Services.

Boules

Daniel persuaded me to enter the boules tournament being played in the village this afternoon so I duly went along for the 3.30pm start which, as I had suspected, didn't actually occur until 4.30pm. But I'm glad I let Daniel persuade me because I played well and ended runner-up and 20 euros richer. Hardly a king's ransom I have to admit but 20 euros and a light-weight jacket from my last two tournaments is not a bad return on afternoons spent pleasantly. Last time I won with Daniel, this time I had to beat him in the final game.

Examples

Examples
Examples are normally just a simple illustration of some supposed truth and don't have a great deal of significance. However, the right example can have enormous importance in shedding light on an issue and I've recently come across a few instances of this. I'll try to substantiate my assertion with the following cases (examples).


Argument On Principle
I've mentioned before in this blog that I distrust people who insist on principles. I think I stated something along the lines that principles were in many cases simply bludgeons with which to beat opposing arguments over the head. An instance of this came when my son referred me to a series of comments around the John Terry trial on Facebook. Reading through the comments I was struck by two discrete trains of thought. One was pragmatic, offering various suggestions; the other was based on principle: if he uttered the words........then in principle.......which led to some apparently silly conclusions.

Given my stated position, I tried to think of an example against arguing on principle. It is this. Suppose you find a 10p piece on the ground; what do you do? You could pick it up and put in your pocket, which would be a practical solution, although against principles of honesty and legality. Or, you could ignore it, which would be to dodge the issue. The solution according to principles of honesty and legality would be to hand it in at the nearest police station, have the transaction recorded and the 10p piece kept somewhere safe to await a claimant. Common sense would suggest that was an unnecessary waste of time and resources but not what principles would dictate. Now suppose the money found was not 10p but a bundle of notes to the tune of £10, 000. Both principle and common sense would propose that this find should be handed in. The point of this example is that common sense can easily distinguish between these two cases but argument on principle never can.

The Year 2000 Problem
I spent years working, lecturing and consulting on the date problem affecting computers as the year 2000 approached and became probably the foremost commentator on it in Europe ( I was often called that). Yet during all that time I never came up with a single, simple, clinching example as to why the problem was not only real but had widespread implications. It is only recently that I have been able to formulate it, as follows.

One item of data that is used in countless transactions but never recorded in a computer system is a person's age. It is used frequently and widely in financial, medical and social applications. It is not recorded because it changes every day and would therefore need updating every day. When it is needed it is always calculated and it is calculated by subtracting the person's date of birth, which is recorded, from the current date, which the computer knows(?). Moreover, the result of this calculation is never signed (+ or -) because that is unnecessary; a person can't have a negative age if he/she already exists. So....let's take the situation of a woman born in 1980 in 2001. Her age would be calculated as 01 minus 80, giving -79 (but there would be no minus sign). This woman might be pregnant and looking for a mortgage to buy a house, at a calculated age of 79. It's not difficult to understand the implications of that, financial, medical and social. Why couldn't I have thought of that example in the 1990s?

The UK Postcode
I'm not sure why it has taken me so long to figure out what goes wrong in the use of UK postcodes on websites but I have finally got there. The Post Office created postcodes and so also, I reasonably infer, the code for generating possible addresses from a given postcode. I infer also that this has been made available to websites. The problem is that it has a logical flaw for any organisation that has contact outside the UK. This is an unnecessary consideration for the Post Office, since it is concerned with delivery only to buildings within the UK, so it has been omitted. Organisations that may require to recognise contact outside the UK (after all, the first two “w”s of www stand for worldwide) have slavishly incorporated the code without realising the logical flaw, which requires an escape (or “else”) clause.

It's taken me too long to realise how this has happened but it's clearly taken many UK organisations longer, as the flaw is still prevalent on many UK organisations' websites (government, utilities, hotels, you name it). And they should bloody well wake up and do something about it. In code, it's a simple IF, THEN, ELSE statement. IF UK, THEN Postcode; ELSE ignore Postcode. Please, please copy.

The Practicalities

The Practicalities
 The practicalities left few moments to grieve. My mother had so little that I was spared the hassle of probate; there were enough forms to complete without that. Sharing her few possessions as mementos with friends and family before numerous trips to charity shops and the municipal dump seemed to take ages. Nearly every official I had to deal with was kind and considerate, though.


The Tyranny Of The Postcode
The utilities I had to contact, apart from BT, were a different matter. Unable to hang on to the phone lines for Thames Water and Southern Electricity until, conceivably, my own death might be approaching, I resorted to online contact. Their websites had “moving house” forms, the nearest to my circumstances, but all wanted my contact details and none would allow the completed forms to be submitted without a valid UK postcode and telephone number. So I put in false ones. Fortunately they all also had questionnaires asking me, when the form was completed, to please tell them what I thought of their wonderful website. So I did. I told them about the false contact details, asked if they'd ever wondered what the first two “w”s of www stood for, asked also if they remembered geography lessons at school which suggested there might be other countries in the world than the UK. Do they never have customers who move abroad? But then, if they have any problems contacting me for a final settlement, the problems will be theirs, not mine.

I spent the last night in England before returning to France in a Premier Inn right beside Southampton airport. On checking in I was asked for my name (obviously) and my address and postcode. The hotel's system wouldn't accept the foreign postcode, which had to be over-ridden by the girl at the desk with the help of a supervisor; at an airport?

Since I have already reported the same problem with the HMRC, it appears that the problem is widespread on UK websites. Are UK websites mindlessly copying one another's code and the same logical mistake? I have commented before on the supreme importance of the “else” clause in IT. The UK postcode is an extremely powerful location mechanism which is rightly widely used and which also illustrates beautifully the logical need for the “else” clause.

Thames Water did have the courtesy to reply with a helpful email. Southern Electricity seemed not to comprehend the problem and, in return, sent an email addressed to my dead mother.

Clearing Up
Clearing her small maisonette was a nightmare but, in the end, a fruitful one. She had pitifully few possessions but generally quality ones which should earn useful amounts for the charity shops in Godalming. It's what she would have wished. She also had objects of far greater sentimental value, some of which were adopted by members of the family. Among them were every letter I had written to her since the age of about 18. I even, by chance, came across a local gardening society that maintained the gardens in an old peoples' home and which gratefully took the many beautiful garden pots she had. What distressed me most was what still had simply to be thrown away even though it was still usable, particularly electrical goods, because of stupid restrictions; does “caveat emptor” no longer apply in England? Overall, I hope I did her memory justice. 

While I was in England, I came across two more idiocies. My mother's local council, Waverley, was one that had decided to reduce rubbish collections from weekly to fortnightly, to save costs. The resultant complaints about smell and rat infestations had caused a rethink. So a special collection of food waste had been instituted, weekly. Er......if there are to be weekly collections, why not.......?

The other idiocy concerned a report that passengers arriving at Heathrow had such prolonged waiting times to go through passport control that they had become unruly; so police had been drafted in to control the behaviour of the waiting passengers. So if, because of cost cuts and resultant staff shortages, extra expenditure is incurred and extra staff are drafted in, why not passport controllers rather than police? Because that would solve the problem? Better to keep the problem and, presumably, incur the extra costs on someone else's budget. Are there any brains left running the country or has that been reduced to a matter of political bun fights?

In Memoriam

In Memoriam

And so it's over. My mother died on Wednesday the 27^th of June. I had been forewarned in time and so was able to be at her home with her when she died. Her increasing weakness had long heralded the end. I would merely like to record here what I said at her funeral.

“As most of you here know, Mum looked after me or out for me for all my life. When I was young, she over-protected me, without meaning to. She would say to me then, and continued to say it until I was drawing my pension: have you got a clean handkerchief and have you combed your hair? Because, as she would say, suppose you had an accident and had to be taken to hospital; what would the doctors think if my hair wasn't straight or they found me with a dirty handkerchief? Perhaps there is an NHS warning out to doctors now: before brain surgery, check state of handkerchief. It was something I had to bear, but a token of her love for me, which I never doubted.

When I got to Bristol University I was told a story by one of my tutors there. He said that, a few years previously, he had received a letter from a student's mother asking him to watch over her son especially carefully. Because, she said, he had never been away from home before, apart from five years in the navy. That could have been my mother.

Mum meant the world to me. Not only did she bring me up single-handed, she supported me absolutely when I most needed it. She scrimped and saved to get me through university. After Doreen left, the help she gave me in making a home for Natalie and Carl was immeasurable; I don't know how I would have coped without it. She even, when she wanted to marry Bill, asked my permission; said she wouldn't do it if I didn't like him.

Not only did she support me, she delighted in my successes when I had them. My O level results brought her to tears of joy and she was similarly delighted when I got my degree. She loved my early success at ICL, even if she couldn't understand why I left such a good, safe company; what's a more challenging job and 50% hike in salary, after all?

Mum and I continued with our understandings and misunderstandings throughout her life. But it is to her that I owe my love of nature, the countryside and gardening, and good food and drink, things that have stayed with me throughout my life. That and much, much more. I owe her everything.

I had known for some time that her life was in danger, from at least four years ago when aortic stenosis was diagnosed. She was fully aware that her life might end at any moment but carried on regardless until old age finally weakened her, to the extent that she could no longer continue doing anything she loved. At the beginning of this year it became clear that she could not live much longer. I could not bear the thought of being with her and waiting for her to die but neither could I bear the thought of not being with her when she did die. In the end, I was lucky in coming over when I did. When I saw Mum on the Tuesday evening it was clear she was dying; I knew it and so did she. She couldn't even raise her eyes to watch the birds she so loved outside her window. We managed a little chat, between breaths and sometimes tearfully, about the good times and I got her some strawberries and cream before she went to sleep, apparently happy. The next morning we continued until, around 11 o'clock, she closed her eyes and said: “I'm going now son”. I held her hand and continued talking to her; she died ten hours later.

I was devastated when she finally stopped breathing. But, really, I'm happy, even if I don't look it. On my way across from France I had dreaded the thought of maybe having to persuade her to go into a home. That never happened. Mum had a life that was sometimes hard but she enjoyed it and was always upbeat, cheerful. Finally, she wanted the end and the end was as she wanted. She died peacefully, in her own home, and, I believe, in her own good time. She was totally exhausted and had simply had enough. She will be with me for the rest of my life.”