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.