Frozen Vegetables
It's tempting to say that the French don't have frozen vegetables but clearly some of them do; a more or less full range is available in most supermarkets. However, the only one I've ever seen used, or been served, is frozen chips. Frozen chips work well, as also do frozen peas, which taste, ironically, fresher than fresh peas. The chemistry of that is well understood. I remember thinking years ago, when my children were young, that they should at least once in their lives taste fresh peas. They didn't like them much and I had to agree that frozen peas tasted much better. French peas are invariably of the tinned variety, similar to the ones labelled “petit pois” in England, and do taste good but quite different from frozen ones. The larger marrow-fat peas found in England don't seem to exist in France.
Some vegetables, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, onions and leeks for example, are available fresh in the shops all year round. For the rest, the French will resort to tinned rather than frozen versions. It has to be said that, with the French emphasis on flavour, the way tinned vegetables are prepared does give them a good distinctive flavour. Tinned French beans here, for instance, (which you rarely see in the UK) work better in my opinion than the frozen version.
On the other hand, frozen broad beans and sprouts, which I like, never seem to be used here.
Complacency
Mana and Daniel came to eat with me tonight. I served them tandoori chicken, which they loved. Indian cuisine is a closed book to the French who, despite their devotion to taste, continually surprise me with their conservative approach to cooking. French cooking has a deserved reputation for quality which the French all know and are proud of. But culinary art isn't static and the French seem remarkably reluctant to experiment with flavours outside their domestic experience.
It is a similarly complacent attitude to their view on foreign travel, as explained to me by a French friend in England. She said that the French tend to think that they have all they need for holidays in France: coast, mountains, countryside, lakes, etc. So why travel abroad? This friend was struggling to explain to herself the difference in attitude towards foreign travel that she perceived between the English and the French (Heaven knows what she would have made of the Australians). What it came down to was a more or less complacent attitude among the French that, as Voltaire might have put it, all was for the best in the best of possible countries (France).
Politics and Naivety?
Conversation this evening got around to politics. Both Mana and Daniel are in favour of Hollande but not entirely confident that he will succeed. I ventured to suggest that whoever got power would be constrained by impositions from the world's banks. Daniel said that unemployment was the big issue and then astonished me by saying he thought that Marie Le Penn had some good ideas on that. Marie Le Penn is an unashamed if sometimes slightly disguised fascist and Daniel is nowhere near being a fascist. The links between unemployment and fascism are clear and well demonstrated in very recent history; indeed, they are one of my fears for the future. Yet Daniel seemed unwilling to acknowledge the link and took the attitude that good(?) ideas for resolving the unemployment issue were welcome from anywhere.
As conversation stalled I threw in that I had read that the Court of Human Rights in Brussels had declared that owning a satellite dish was a fundamental human right. I did this is a joke. Daniel and Mana immediately embarked on a discussion of whether satellite dishes should be allowed because they looked so unsightly. From Daniel's terrace there is a view across the village rooftops that, he said, is completely spoiled by satellite dishes. I found their reaction to my interjection surreal. Didn't they see the absurdity? So I appealed to Mana in terms that she above all should appreciate. When millions were starving and falsely jailed, wasn't this ludicrous? Her attitude seemed to be; why not rights to satellite dishes as well? I should have known; Mana has no sense of the ridiculous. To corroborate this I asked her if she enjoyed Jacques Sempé's cartoons. Sempé is for me, along with James Thurber, the master of the ridiculous. Her reply was “No”.
Grammar
A final note on grammar. I think my grasp of French grammar is pretty good; what I'm learning here, apart from occasional extra vocabulary, is the way the French tend to express themselves as distinct from phrasing that is grammatically correct but which they would be unlikely to use. But postings on the Internet often make me unsure. French Internet users are no more grammatical in their postings than are their English counterparts and I frequently find constructions that I'm sure are grammatically wrong. Or am I sure? Daniel, Mana and others to the rescue!
vendredi 27 janvier 2012
vendredi 20 janvier 2012
Reading And Viewing
Reading
The weather over the past couple of weeks has been quite good for January but often cold, even in the sun during the day. So it's been a time mostly for reading and viewing ; only a hardy few of us make it to boules and then only when the sun is out. However, I've received my invitation to the old folks lunch on the 29th and will look forward to that. Last year it was a five-hour event with superb cuisine, decent wines and lots of good company.
A book I have just ploughed through is Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett, a missionary who went to convert the Pirahã tribe in Brazil to Christianity and, instead, himself got converted to their culture. That's not the only intriguing aspect to the book. It defies what I had formerly thought necessarily happens to a primitive language when it comes into contact with a more developed society. Admittedly I have, in global terms, little personal experience of this but the the normal outcome seems to be that the primitive language collapses and becomes a kind of patois or creole, borrowing as necessary from the language of the more developed society.
When I was in Senegal the predominant tribal language, Ouolof, had fallen apart through contact with French. As an example from experience, Ouolof had eight verbs to pour, with the verb including what was poured and into what. In linguistic terms, that's a very synthetic language (many units of meaning – morphemes – per word). It works when there are few nouns associated with the verb; so when the Oulof had only water, camels' milk and calabashes, there was no problem. Bring tea, coffee, wine, scotch, tea cups, mugs and glasses of various kinds into the picture and the structure of the language cannot cope; you'd need a couple of hundred synthetic verbs. The Oulof had reduced their eight verbs to pour to one and borrowed the French nouns, thus reducing the language to a kind of creole.
All this is in line with my perceptions on culture and semantics. You don't necessarily have to look in prisons, as Churchill and Dostoyevsky before him suggested, to understand what kind of society you are dealing with; the semantics of the society's language can often tell you a lot. It reflects the culture. What astonished me was that the Pirahãs' language seems to have survived. It has no counting semantics for example; only the concepts of one or many, which also serve for small and large. The tribe pays a price for this semantic omission, it seems, when they are short-changed for the produce they collect and sell. But they apparently don't care much about that, not enough to change their culture.
The reason the language has survived is that the tribe has rejected all outside cultures and more sophisticated concepts; with the exception, it seems, of plastic cups. No doubt even a very primitive language can accommodate those. The lesson is clear: to retain a language you have to retain the culture it reflects. The more the definitive concepts of a culture are blurred, the more the associated language is “corrupted”.
Of course, this is happening with the French language today. The admittedly miserable efforts of the Académie Française to safeguard the “purety” of French are bound to fail because French culture is changing faster than it can cope. Maybe the Canadians will do a better job. I found echoes of France also in the insularity and mores of the Pirahãs. Pirahã society is distinctly incestuous, a feature that goes hand in hand with insularity.
The book gets quite heavy on linguistics in places and exceeded my interest in that aspect sometimes. But the social aspects, and their link to linguistics, I found fascinating.
Viewing
One of the DVDs I obtained for Christmas was given to me by daughter: it's entitled Spiral. It's a crime series screened on BBC2 in the UK which I somehow missed, probably because I was often here in France at the time it was screened. The production was in conjunction with Canal+ in France and the DVD is in French with English subtitles. I needed those for the frequent use of police/underworld slang (though the swearing was familiar from boules). I found the whole 20+ hours viewing brilliant in very respect, not just the acting and Paris suburb locations but, above all, the characterisation. Everyone is (morally) grey. Even justice, when it is served, requires a little corruption to help it along and comes with a heavy penalty. The whole tale is totally believable, nauseating at times, tender at others, but, above all totally believable. I don't know either of the scriptwriters attributed but the scripts could well have been written by John Le Carré; it's definitely his territory.
Once again there were insights on France, not just on the French legal system, with which I am (fortunately) relatively unfamiliar, but also with respect to the somewhat easy familiarity the French seem to have with corruption in high places and easy acceptance also that power will be in one way or another corrupt. I find that unsettling.
There was also a linguistic aspect. The French title for the seies is “Engrenages”, which corresponds roughly to the English “gearing up”. I had to go to the dictionary for that. Vehicle gears, in French, are “changements de vitesse”, which shows no linguistic similarity to the English word. “Engrenages” does, though, and so do all the other words in French associated with gears. I wonder how “changements de vitesse” happened?
The weather over the past couple of weeks has been quite good for January but often cold, even in the sun during the day. So it's been a time mostly for reading and viewing ; only a hardy few of us make it to boules and then only when the sun is out. However, I've received my invitation to the old folks lunch on the 29th and will look forward to that. Last year it was a five-hour event with superb cuisine, decent wines and lots of good company.
A book I have just ploughed through is Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett, a missionary who went to convert the Pirahã tribe in Brazil to Christianity and, instead, himself got converted to their culture. That's not the only intriguing aspect to the book. It defies what I had formerly thought necessarily happens to a primitive language when it comes into contact with a more developed society. Admittedly I have, in global terms, little personal experience of this but the the normal outcome seems to be that the primitive language collapses and becomes a kind of patois or creole, borrowing as necessary from the language of the more developed society.
When I was in Senegal the predominant tribal language, Ouolof, had fallen apart through contact with French. As an example from experience, Ouolof had eight verbs to pour, with the verb including what was poured and into what. In linguistic terms, that's a very synthetic language (many units of meaning – morphemes – per word). It works when there are few nouns associated with the verb; so when the Oulof had only water, camels' milk and calabashes, there was no problem. Bring tea, coffee, wine, scotch, tea cups, mugs and glasses of various kinds into the picture and the structure of the language cannot cope; you'd need a couple of hundred synthetic verbs. The Oulof had reduced their eight verbs to pour to one and borrowed the French nouns, thus reducing the language to a kind of creole.
All this is in line with my perceptions on culture and semantics. You don't necessarily have to look in prisons, as Churchill and Dostoyevsky before him suggested, to understand what kind of society you are dealing with; the semantics of the society's language can often tell you a lot. It reflects the culture. What astonished me was that the Pirahãs' language seems to have survived. It has no counting semantics for example; only the concepts of one or many, which also serve for small and large. The tribe pays a price for this semantic omission, it seems, when they are short-changed for the produce they collect and sell. But they apparently don't care much about that, not enough to change their culture.
The reason the language has survived is that the tribe has rejected all outside cultures and more sophisticated concepts; with the exception, it seems, of plastic cups. No doubt even a very primitive language can accommodate those. The lesson is clear: to retain a language you have to retain the culture it reflects. The more the definitive concepts of a culture are blurred, the more the associated language is “corrupted”.
Of course, this is happening with the French language today. The admittedly miserable efforts of the Académie Française to safeguard the “purety” of French are bound to fail because French culture is changing faster than it can cope. Maybe the Canadians will do a better job. I found echoes of France also in the insularity and mores of the Pirahãs. Pirahã society is distinctly incestuous, a feature that goes hand in hand with insularity.
The book gets quite heavy on linguistics in places and exceeded my interest in that aspect sometimes. But the social aspects, and their link to linguistics, I found fascinating.
Viewing
One of the DVDs I obtained for Christmas was given to me by daughter: it's entitled Spiral. It's a crime series screened on BBC2 in the UK which I somehow missed, probably because I was often here in France at the time it was screened. The production was in conjunction with Canal+ in France and the DVD is in French with English subtitles. I needed those for the frequent use of police/underworld slang (though the swearing was familiar from boules). I found the whole 20+ hours viewing brilliant in very respect, not just the acting and Paris suburb locations but, above all, the characterisation. Everyone is (morally) grey. Even justice, when it is served, requires a little corruption to help it along and comes with a heavy penalty. The whole tale is totally believable, nauseating at times, tender at others, but, above all totally believable. I don't know either of the scriptwriters attributed but the scripts could well have been written by John Le Carré; it's definitely his territory.
Once again there were insights on France, not just on the French legal system, with which I am (fortunately) relatively unfamiliar, but also with respect to the somewhat easy familiarity the French seem to have with corruption in high places and easy acceptance also that power will be in one way or another corrupt. I find that unsettling.
There was also a linguistic aspect. The French title for the seies is “Engrenages”, which corresponds roughly to the English “gearing up”. I had to go to the dictionary for that. Vehicle gears, in French, are “changements de vitesse”, which shows no linguistic similarity to the English word. “Engrenages” does, though, and so do all the other words in French associated with gears. I wonder how “changements de vitesse” happened?
lundi 9 janvier 2012
Reminiscenses
Reminiscences In England
I had a good festive season in England with my mother. Carl stayed from Christmas eve until the 27th and Natalie came on Boxing Day. There was not a lot to do, though, other than shopping and I thought the selection of TV programmes on offer even worse than usual. So, I read a lot of John Le Carré, did the mind games in the papers and shopped.
Going into the village general store shortly after my arrival in Chiddingfold I noticed a pile of China News among the newspapers. Chiddingfold is hardly a hot-bed of interest in China so I asked the store keeper what they were doing there. He laughed and said his distributor had delivered them and that he'd asked for them to be taken back. Glancing cursorily at the front page I could easily see that the paper was a publicity sheet for China. The papers were still there when I left a fortnight later so the distributor had obviously been paid to leave them there. Presumably it was a PR exercise on the part of the Chinese.
However, it reminded me of my school days in the village. The only village school was C of E affiliated, which meant that every Thursday morning in Lent we had to attend a church service. The vicar at the time was a former missionary in China and known in the village as Old China. He was incapable of speaking in words of less than three syllables and so his sermons passed right over the heads of we school children (I was 9 at the time) and most of the villagers. I remember once being ejected from the church in disgrace for playing marbles behind the pews.
I enjoyed my time at the school but was removed by my mother after she found me, one sunny afternoon, watching cricket during school time on the cricket green adjacent to the school. She wanted to know what I was doing and I said that the headmaster had told me to go and watch the cricket. She accordingly went to see the headmaster who explained that 99% of the kids in the school were going to end up as farm hands and I was so far ahead in class that he thought I might as well get some sun. In retrospect, that was a Summerhill moment for me. My mother was desperate for me to get the 11+ exam and so decided we had to move back to London. I duly got the 11+ a year later in Mitcham at a school called Bond Road, which I thought for ages was called Bombed Road because of the bombed-out houses all along it.
The Inland Revenue
As I remember, last year I reported writing a letter to both Ihornaby and Glasgow offices of the IR to sort out exactly what they wanted me to declare on my self-assessment forms, to avoid a repeat of the misunderstandings of that year. I received no reply, of course. And so attempted a full declaration over the Internet this year. It cannot be done directly by British nationals resident abroad but nowhere is this stated. The first hurdle, as last year, was the requirement for a UK postcode, which I was informed had been fixed. In fact, if the postcode is left blank, the system still flags an error but allows the rest of the form to be completed. However, it refuses to allow the return to be submitted unless the error is removed. I phoned and was told to tick the “foreign” box. There is none. I phoned again and this time was given the following instructions: double-click on the postcode entry and hold down the backs-space key until the box is highlighted in blue, then hold down the delete key until the error flag disappears. I asked where this was explained; the answer (with a giggle) was “nowhere but that is what you have to do”. It worked. The assessment then came up with a large sum of tax due, which, considering the IR had accepted my tax residence in France and repaid me tax paid since 2007, was something of a surprise. I phoned again and was told that this was because I had made a full declaration but not submitted form SA109 for foreign residents. Form SA109 is in PDF format and thus cannot be submitted electronically. This was acknowledged although I was told that it was possible with the purchase of commercial software (which I don't otherwise need). They say they will accept the completed form through the post. The respondent was not in the Glasgow office which I had phoned but in the Liverpool office and the form has to be sent to the Cardiff office.
I still don't know what I should declare and what not. I asked for precise clarification and was told to put “what reflected my circumstances over the year”. How precise can you get?
The IR has clearly given up any hope rectifying its own system and resorted to semi-privatisation to sort out the mess. In fact, I am now convinced, despite the many offices to which I have been referred, it no longer resides in the UK at all but has fled into the imagination of George Orwell.
I had a good festive season in England with my mother. Carl stayed from Christmas eve until the 27th and Natalie came on Boxing Day. There was not a lot to do, though, other than shopping and I thought the selection of TV programmes on offer even worse than usual. So, I read a lot of John Le Carré, did the mind games in the papers and shopped.
Going into the village general store shortly after my arrival in Chiddingfold I noticed a pile of China News among the newspapers. Chiddingfold is hardly a hot-bed of interest in China so I asked the store keeper what they were doing there. He laughed and said his distributor had delivered them and that he'd asked for them to be taken back. Glancing cursorily at the front page I could easily see that the paper was a publicity sheet for China. The papers were still there when I left a fortnight later so the distributor had obviously been paid to leave them there. Presumably it was a PR exercise on the part of the Chinese.
However, it reminded me of my school days in the village. The only village school was C of E affiliated, which meant that every Thursday morning in Lent we had to attend a church service. The vicar at the time was a former missionary in China and known in the village as Old China. He was incapable of speaking in words of less than three syllables and so his sermons passed right over the heads of we school children (I was 9 at the time) and most of the villagers. I remember once being ejected from the church in disgrace for playing marbles behind the pews.
I enjoyed my time at the school but was removed by my mother after she found me, one sunny afternoon, watching cricket during school time on the cricket green adjacent to the school. She wanted to know what I was doing and I said that the headmaster had told me to go and watch the cricket. She accordingly went to see the headmaster who explained that 99% of the kids in the school were going to end up as farm hands and I was so far ahead in class that he thought I might as well get some sun. In retrospect, that was a Summerhill moment for me. My mother was desperate for me to get the 11+ exam and so decided we had to move back to London. I duly got the 11+ a year later in Mitcham at a school called Bond Road, which I thought for ages was called Bombed Road because of the bombed-out houses all along it.
The Inland Revenue
As I remember, last year I reported writing a letter to both Ihornaby and Glasgow offices of the IR to sort out exactly what they wanted me to declare on my self-assessment forms, to avoid a repeat of the misunderstandings of that year. I received no reply, of course. And so attempted a full declaration over the Internet this year. It cannot be done directly by British nationals resident abroad but nowhere is this stated. The first hurdle, as last year, was the requirement for a UK postcode, which I was informed had been fixed. In fact, if the postcode is left blank, the system still flags an error but allows the rest of the form to be completed. However, it refuses to allow the return to be submitted unless the error is removed. I phoned and was told to tick the “foreign” box. There is none. I phoned again and this time was given the following instructions: double-click on the postcode entry and hold down the backs-space key until the box is highlighted in blue, then hold down the delete key until the error flag disappears. I asked where this was explained; the answer (with a giggle) was “nowhere but that is what you have to do”. It worked. The assessment then came up with a large sum of tax due, which, considering the IR had accepted my tax residence in France and repaid me tax paid since 2007, was something of a surprise. I phoned again and was told that this was because I had made a full declaration but not submitted form SA109 for foreign residents. Form SA109 is in PDF format and thus cannot be submitted electronically. This was acknowledged although I was told that it was possible with the purchase of commercial software (which I don't otherwise need). They say they will accept the completed form through the post. The respondent was not in the Glasgow office which I had phoned but in the Liverpool office and the form has to be sent to the Cardiff office.
I still don't know what I should declare and what not. I asked for precise clarification and was told to put “what reflected my circumstances over the year”. How precise can you get?
The IR has clearly given up any hope rectifying its own system and resorted to semi-privatisation to sort out the mess. In fact, I am now convinced, despite the many offices to which I have been referred, it no longer resides in the UK at all but has fled into the imagination of George Orwell.
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