Christmas Trade

Christmas

And so it's winter. We had some token snow three weeks ago but only an inch at most overnight and it disappeared promptly the following morning. It has been visible on the top of Mont Ventoux for over a month now and on the slopes of the surrounding hills down to about 1000ft.

I find it surprising how easily what has already become routine at this time of the year clicks in. The Christmas carols that a crowd of us have sung for the last two years have been decided for this year and rehearsals are under way. As an attempt to expand the numbers involved one way or another, I made contact with the school and some of the children may participate; for the moment we have to wait and see, participation being entirely voluntary, as it should be.

Arrangements are being made for Christmas day itself. I shall go to friends Steve and Jo, along with Liz, Neville, Jill, Robin and two Australian friends of Steve and Jo who have turned up in this hemisphere unexpectedly. We may be joined by my son, Carl. The whole assembly will come to me on Boxing day, so we'll have two days of no doubt over-eating, over-drinking and chat. I'm sure it will be a very pleasant way to pass the holiday.

The winter lights are up in the village, all blue and white to make a Chelsea supporter feel at home, and there is tinsel on the door of the Bar du Pont. The weather for the past 10 days has been sunny, and warm, during the day but very cold at night. All as usual, all as it should be.

Protectionism In France

I've commented before that the Common Market is just a pipe dream. What now occurs to me is that protectionism may be rife in the internal French economy as well as evident in its international stance, and may indeed be a factor that is seriously slowing any French economic recovery. The only outlet for newspapers in the village, the Bar du Pont, apparently has to use the distributor it does. That indicates a cartel, which would be illegal in England but apparently not in France. Moreover, the distributor not the retail outlet decides how many copies of newspapers are supplied. This minimises wastage but also militates against expansion. Speculative extra copies are not on the agenda.

I'm now wondering if some similar mechanism applies more generally. I've noticed that chain shops, when they gave some popular item that sells out quickly, never know if or when they will get resupplied. Thus near-certain sales are curtailed. I have put this down to the generally dozy approach to marketing in this part of Provence but it may be something else. The other day I went to the local nursery to get some more blue pansies for the pots in front of my house. The owner didn't have any but said he was expecting a delivery at the end of the week. Of blue pansies, or any pansies? He didn't know. In fact he didn't know at all what would be delivered. But he had a secured sale if he got some blue pansies so why not order some from elsewhere? It seems he couldn't, and this was not a chain outlet but a family business so no higher up was telling him what he could do. If what I suspect is true, then the French economy is in even more trouble than I thought.

The UK Civil Service

Friend Steve read an article stating that there was growing suspicion that numerous ex-pats were claiming pensions and other benefits for UK nationals who had died abroad. Apparently, UK and French authorities do not communicate on births and deaths. A proposal is to write to ex-pats asking them to declare if they are still alive. Now, granted this is certainly more intelligent than writing to ask them if they are dead (which I actually don't believe is beyond our Civil Service) but not much more. If any ex-pat is committing fraud by receiving money for someone who has died, they will presumably cheerfully confirm that that person is still alive.

I don't know whether it was part of this same scenario but my heating allowance this year was cut by half because, the Pensions' Team assured me, they had evidence that another claimant was living in my house last September. My house is not that large and I generally know who is living in it so I wrote back to say that they had been misinformed. If another claimant was claiming to have been living in my house at that time, then the Pensions' Team had an attempted fraud on their hands and they should investigate it. I did add that a much more likely explanation was a simple cock-up by someone in their team. I await their reply.

Food And Boules

French And English Food

Friends Steve and Jo have just arrived back from a 3-week trip to England. They brought back a consignment of food for me.

One of the pleasures of being here in France is the good food, particularly the fruit where I am. However, there are still some English foods that reign supreme on my palate; the same goes for friend Steve, who got his fill of bitter and fish and chips while in England.

The problem with English foods here is not generally that they are unobtainable but that they are exorbitantly expensive. The only food I asked Steve and Jo to bring back that I have seen nowhere here is vegetable suet, which I use to make dumplings for a stew. The other food stuffs were much as might be expected: Marmite, kippers, baked beans, brown sauce, cans of bitter, bacon, sausages, pork pies and a gammon. Most of these are obtainable here but at 2-3 times the UK price. I think they are artificially priced up by supermarkets because the supermarkets know that British residents can often be persuaded to pay a premium for them.

English sausages are not obtainable and there really is no French equivalent. French sausages can be very good but not the same. Bacon is a similar case; some winter mornings only a bacon sandwich fits the bill for breakfast. The French “poitrine fume”, similar to smoked streaky bacon, comes close, just not close enough; and there is no equivalent to back bacon. The same goes for pork pies. The gammon is to make a ham for Christmas and I haven't found that here; the French “jambon cru” is cured to be eaten as is rather than cooked. Tea bags, even English breakfast, which should be strong, how I like it, is easily obtainable at reasonable prices but the pieces of tea leaf in the bags would seem to have been counted out individually, so around three bags at a time are needed to make a decent cuppa. The other items are all obtainable but, for instance, a very small jar of Marmite will cost the same as a very large jar in the UK.

Anyway, I am now well stocked for winter

A Boules Problem

Many fewer people play boules in winter than in summer, as might be expected, but even those hardy few have been diminished this winter. The problem is a particular player. At her worst, which is not infrequent, she apparently feels the need always to win and also to tell other players how they should play. The result is, when teams are being drawn up from the players present, she tries blatantly to create teams that are clearly unbalanced in her favour, when everybody else is trying to create balanced sides. She (a pointer) also tries to tell the shooter when to shoot. If others don't do as she says (dictates) she is immediately in a bad temper and often simply throws her boules anywhere. Several of the regular players have said that they come for a good time and don't enjoy playing if she is, so they do not come any more.

That's the problem in a nutshell. I think the answer is to refuse to accept her behaviour, to refuse the team line-ups she proposes and ignore her when she tries to dictate how one plays. That is what I do, in the expectation that she will change her behaviour if she sees it has no effect. Unfortunately, I'm the only one who does that, which makes the dispute one between her and me and I don't want that. The other players grumble but say nothing to her and to me say that it is pointless because she will never change.

So they stay away and are proposing an email list, from which she is excluded, so that teams can be pre-arranged before going to play. This strikes me as difficult, cumbersome and unnecessary but I shall probably go along with it if that is what happens.

What strikes me most is the disruption and unhappiness that can be caused if a single individual who is effectively a bully is not stood up to by the “silent majority”. That is the way dictators come to power; and I suppose that over-statement illustrates how such a minor matter can get blown out of all proportion, as seems to be happening.

The Book

As the winter weather has been creeping in I decided to get down to writing a chapter of my proposed book (see previous postings). It's fine and makes a decent-sized chapter but I've realised that I've used about a quarter of the material I had outlined for the book. In short, I can't now see enough material to make even a modest-sized book. So......it's back to the drawing board or a search for another project for the winter.

Chestnust And Tarts

Old Chestnuts

My last posting provoked an interesting email from my cousin Sarah who lives in the foot of Italy. She pointed out that there is a chestnut festival each year in a village near where she lives (Matera) in which the locals make bread and cakes from chestnut flour and have a general knees-up to go with them, including dancing to bagpipes. She also included an explanation of the difference between “chataigne” and “marron” from her French son-in-law, which was that one denotes two nuts in the casing and one denotes one nut.

There are a couple of points there that I want to comment on but first I want to return to my original point: “chataignes”versus “marrons”. We have two different varieties of tree with two different varieties of fruit so clearly need words to distinguish between them. The only words are “chataigne” and “marron” so these must be the words; what I really wanted to know was which was which but I couldn't, until that pizza evening, get a believable answer. I, too, had been given the one nut versus two story but it doesn't stand up. Firstly, I see no particular reason to distinguish between one nut and two in a casing (other than saying simply one nut or two) and if there were a compelling reason then there should be a word for three nuts, which there isn't. Anyway, my Quillet-Flammarion dictionary confirmed the distinction I had been given: “chataignes” are sweet chestnuts and “marrons” are horse chestnuts. It seems obvious to me that most French people use the words almost interchangeably and either don't know or want to make the distinction.

My cousin's point about her local village festival missed my point partly. My point about the Ardeche was not that they traditionally make cakes and bread from chestnut flour but that chestnuts more than a century ago were an important part of their staple diet throughout the year; the Ardechois used it as their staple filler, rather than wheat, rice, potatoes or whatever.. On reflection, my assertion of the Ardeche's uniqueness in this respect (even if just to my knowledge) was definitely rash. There are quite probably other enclaves in the world which, before transport changed the situation, had chestnuts as the staple filler in their diet.

In the area where I live, a particular variety of wheat called “epautre” was generally used to make bread until improved transport brought flour which made much better bread and so supplanted “epautre”. “Epautre” is now grown only as a health food speciality, of uncertain superior properties except that it is glutin-free, but it sells at far superior prices to the usual wheats for bread.. That's life.

The final point was the bagpipes in southern Italy. I have always associated bagpipes with the Celtic culture and was not aware of any great Celtic influence in the foot of Italy. Coincidentally, I was idly watching a TV programme that had a feature on bagpipes. It turns out that the Celtic connection is a popular misconception. Bagpipes are thought to have originated a couple of millennia ago, somewhere in the Middle East. The Scots, for instance, didn't get them until around the 13^th century. Bagpipes seem to have spread through numerous cultures and are now pretty well endemic throughout the world. For my part, the world is welcome to them.

Tarts

Friends Daniel, his son Kevyn and Marie came to lunch today and, for dessert, I served an apple pie I had made. I called it a “tarte aux pommes” as I had come to believe that the French for a sweet tart was a “tarte” and the word for a savoury tart, or pie, was “tourte”. Marie corrected me. The distinction is not between sweet and savoury but the position of the pastry. A “tarte” has pastry underneath and a “tourte” pastry on top. So, another distinction clarified.

Footnote

I've left the accents off French words in this posting. I put them on on in the last and they caused the point-size of the text to break up, as has happened before. \i've no idea why this happens and can't be bothered to try to find out and correct it. The easy way is to exclude accents.

Boules, Chestnuts And Rain

Ramatuelle

It's a month now since I was in Ramatuelle, at the French national boules championships for rural wrinklies. As two years previously, I had a very enjoyable time: good weather, good company and good food, if not so good boules. We played reasonably well but were inconsistent and finished nowhere. The very hot weather was welcome and once again I was surprised by the big difference in vegetation between Ramatuelle and here. The absence of frost so close to the Mediterranean means that a much larger number of plants thrive and bloom there at this time of the year.

I had decided to don my very English outfit for the tournament, bowler hat and Union Jack T-shirt, and my garb was received very much in the spirit that I intended. It was a source of jokes, anecdotes and other pleasantries and the bowler hat drew particular approval. If we go next year I shall wear it again.

On our day off, as we weren't in the finals, we visited St Tropez and wandered round the old port which, as usual, was full of impressive yachts. This time though there were a number of racing yachts. I hadn't realised how long, sleek and tall they are; it looked as though they couldn't possibly stay upright in full sail but they obviously do.

Chestnuts

Last evening at the pizza get-together Anne-Marie and Patrick brought along some chestnuts that they had collected in a visit to the Auvergne. Roberto duly roasted them in his pizza oven and they were passed around to all and sundry. It made me try again to get some clarification of the French use of both “marrons” and “chataignes” to denote chestnuts. I was sure that one must apply to sweet chestnuts and the other to horse chestnuts but the two words seemed to be used interchangeably.

I still couldn't get any firm clarification until I asked Patrick. He said that if you ate them they were “chataignes”; “marrons” were inedible. That, at least was clear. But what about the “marrons glacés” (crystallised chestnuts) that were in all the shops at Christmas? That, said Patrick, was a misuse of the word “marrons”. When I put this to the other French people present they all agreed. So that's another puzzle solved.

Incidentally, the renowned region for chestnuts is the Ardèche, the area immediately across the Rhône from us. It is unique to my knowledge in being the only place where the main “filler” in food was, in the 19^th century and before, chestnuts. Even bread and cakes were made from chestnut flour. I know that other regions of the world have, variously, potatoes, rice, pasta, tapioca, noodles and types of bread as fillers but I know of no other region that had chestnuts for this purpose.

Rain

It rained on Saturday, and how.......Friend Steve likes to point out that our area has a very similar amount of rain per year as southern England. Here, though, it comes occasionally and generally in large quantities at a time. The Ouvèze became a torrent, ripping up trees from the banks and river bed and carrying them downstream. This is what happened in 1992 but to a much greater extent. Then the river blocked the Roman bridge in Vaison with trees, cars and caravans it had gathered in its flow so that the water had to flow over the bridge at a height of over 30ft. When the “dam” unblocked, the subsequent flood killed nearly a hundred people.

It was of course a very rare event but it makes me wonder why more attention is not paid to keeping the river bed clear of trees and bushes. The bed is very wide in many places so that the river flows in shallow channels and scrub grows up in the drier places. If the same intense rainfall as happened in 1992 happened again there seems every prospect that a similar disaster would again occur.

The kind of rainfall that we had on Saturday always makes me want to go and look at the river bed under the village bridge. Heavy rainfall invariably changes the contours of the stones that cover the bed and thus also the channels along which the river flows. Sometimes it spreads out the stones evenly, giving a shallow flow across the whole bed and sometimes it piles the stones up in hillocks that force a faster, deeper flow between the banks of stones. This time it seems to have formed a hillock in the middle of the bed, forcing the river to flow either side.

Great Expectations

The Generation Gap

A good friend of mine, Barry Knight, once said to me that we were the golden generation, in England at least. We hadn't had to fight a war, jobs were plentiful and the vast majority of us had a standard of living that was relatively comfortable and secure, if very modest. All of that was certainly untrue of the generation that had lived their youth in the 1920s and 1930s rather than the 1950s and 1960s.

It hardly needs saying that things are very different for the youth of today. In fact, almost the reverse is true. But I think there is another important difference which I realised only when it was pointed out to me by friend Rineke at the pizza evening this week. I also think that, in a slightly perverse way, this was another advantage for my generation.

When we started out on life, most of us had little or nothing. Only under 4% of us had a university education. Some had a few O or A level passes to their credit and some had apprenticeships or a secretarial qualification but the vast majority were essentially unqualified. However, most largish organisations had induction and training schemes (because they needed them) and casual work was plentiful. I personally had a miserable university grant (but a grant nonetheless) which I could easily supplement with casual work in the summer and winter holidays. It was “grunt” work, as the Americans call it (you give it only to grunts) and very poorly paid but it was a bonus to my circumstances.

As regards standard of life, few of us went hungry but televisions, even telephones, washing machines, tumble-driers, cars and central heating were something of a rarity. I well remember the temperature differences in even modest-sized rooms, trying to get into a position in front of a fire between burning shins and a freezing bum.

What Rineke pointed out to me is that it is not just the work situation that has changed dramatically but also the personal expectations and many aspects of the standard of life. We started with nothing but the current generation mostly start with quite a lot, including lots of (fairly meaningless) qualifications. All of the appliances mentioned above, cars and central heating are now the norm rather than the exception, plus of course PCs, mobile phones and broadband connections. These now tend to be expectations rather than luxuries to be earned. Compared to our young lives, theirs are often quite comfortable. But what they do not have is a zero starting point and the fear of unemployment and insecurity that the experience of our parents passed on to us. The current generation has a higher starting point and higher expectations to go along with their much more plentiful qualifications. So it is not only facing much harsher times but is also in many ways much less well equipped to deal with them.

Self-confidence

Rineke and I also got to discussing self-confidence and the times when we had had it or lacked it. It reminded me of an experience when I was teaching at Summerhill school.

I was teaching a lad of ten some elementary maths. Having explained the sums, I took him through several examples saying just “how do you start” and “what do you do next” and so on. With just that prompting he was perfectly able to do them. When I left him to do more of the same on his own, however, he could do nothing. I'm not sure how the thought came to me but I thought it must be a question of self- confidence. The lad was quite athletic and, as I played football with the kids, I encouraged him at football. As he grew more confident at football so he did at maths. A few years later, when I returned to the school for a get-together, he came leaping out, jumped on me to give me a hug and said: “You'll never guess what; I just passed O level maths”. That didn't make him a great mathematician but it did do great things for his self-confidence and gave him a platform to build on.

Ever since I have thought it should be a criminal offence to attempt to undermine anyone's self-confidence.

Autumn

Autumn is definitely here now. Leaves aren't turning yet but there is a definite nip in the air in the mornings. After I get up I usually make coffee and take a cup up to my front room, open the door onto the balcony and look at the news on my PC. Now I'm finding I close the door again before long. Last Monday it was still quite comfortable to sit outside for the pizzas until quite late but I suspect that that may be one of the last pizza evenings outside this year. And the grapes I'm trying to sun-dry on my balcony are taking a long time to dry into raisons. I've just bought what will probably be the last two melons of this year but, in compensation, figs are around in the markets and shops; neighbour Liz kindly brought me a bag full.

More Words

More Words

American friends Hallie and Mary arrived back in Mollans recently and came round for aperitifs the other evening. I was commenting on the lime trees in front of my house and Mary interjected that her dictionary gave the “tilleuls” as linden trees, not lime trees. Had I been getting it wrong all this time? So.........I duly searched on the Internet. What I found was that linden and lime are apparently interchangeable names for the same genus of trees, known botanically as “tilia” (from which the French “tilleuls” can easily be derived).. So maybe it was a question of species. I searched that and found that the number of species is indeterminate, lime/linden trees apparently being pretty promiscuous and creating new species at the drop of a hat (or speck of pollen). I left my search there. I have no great desire to know whether the species in front of my house, by comparison of leaves, bark, flowers or fruit, are of a known species or of an as yet unclassified one. I'll continue to call them lime trees but am now better informed on the subject, should.anyone ask.

Miraculous

I commented in my last posting about the problem with “un bébé miraculeux”, duly changed to “un bébé inespéré”. I recounted this to some French friends while playing boules and they said an alternative would have been “un bébé miraculé”. Both “miraculeux” and “miraculé” translate as miraculous, so what's in the difference? It appears that “miraculeux” has to apply to an event, whilst “miraculé” applies to a person. I'm sure there are instances of the same kind of distinction in English but have struggled to think of any. All I could think of was tall rather than high applying to a person but there must be better examples.

Incidentally, in the same last posting I mentioned the mental struggle to come up with fire-proof. My son emailed me to suggest incombustible. Now why couldn't I think of that?

A book?

I'm contemplating writing a book. Why? Believe it or not, it's not so much ego as thinking what to do over the coming winter, to keep me off the streets, hitting old ladies over the head, smashing shop windows, etc. It occurred to me that, having written this blog for 3-4 years, I probably had a third or maybe a half of the material needed for a book of 50-60,000 word-space, adequate if not generous. It could be titled A House In Provence or A House In The Baronnies or some such. For previous books I have written the publishers came to me with proposals, which made it easy; this time I was going to have to find a potential publisher.

If I'm going to take this further than an idle thought, I am resigned to having to write a synopsis, chapter breakdown, target reader spec, brief bio and maybe three sample chapters. No way will I write a whole book on the off chance of finding a publisher. Anyway, I searched on publishers and submissions. My results so far have been disappointing, with failed links and opacity predominant. New submissions are clearly, and understandably, one of publishers' minor concerns. What caught my attention dramatically, though, was the number of publishers that require hard copy (with return postage prepaid). This last I can understand as I know publishers to be very cost-conscious. But hard copy? I mean HARD copy, on paper that is. Haven't the advent of ebooks and Kindle really sunk in or is this just a way to make submissions more difficult? You can bet that final copy will be required in electronic form.

I knew from a period of my career when I was busy creating new magazines, taking chunks out of the big publishers' markets and selling it back to them at a profit, that the big publishers were generally dozy, complacent and marketing neanderthals. Nonetheless the hard copy requirement took me by surprise. Caxton lives on, probably even longer than he thought he would. Ah well, if any publisher reads this it's probably the end of my book project.

Words, Words, Words

Searching For Words

One of the English who have second houses here, Tony, said that his daughter was getting married next week to a Frenchman, in France, and so he had to give a wedding speech in French. Would I go over it for him? Of course I agreed and duly went through it, picking up the odd grammatical error, which probably wouldn't have noticed anyway when spoken, and the occasional translation error. In fact, I found only two and even one of those I wasn't sure of. The obvious one was latest being translated as “le plus tard”, which it could have been but in this case what Tony meant was “plus récent”, exactly the opposite. So much for word for word translation; it's the semantics that count.

The other mistranslation was “annonce” for the speech he had to make. I was sure it should be “discours” but got a sudden doubt; weddings are special occasions and special occasions often have special vocabularies. For instance, the meal after a wedding in England is called a wedding breakfast when it's clearly never a breakfast, unless the couple get married at dawn. “Une annonce” is an announcement, which could be appropriate for an engagement but the couple would be married by the time Tony gave his speech. Anyway, at the last mussels and chips evening at the Bar du Pont I was sitting next to friend Dominique's sister and asked her to go through the speech with me. She cleared up the doubts and improved the phrasing.

I also wanted to pass the speech, with my corrections, through someone French anyway because I am aware that it is only too easy to create a French sentence that is perfectly grammatical but just isn't what the French would say. Dominique's sister pointed out a perfect example of that. Tony had mentioned “un bébé miraculeux”, referring to a grandchild whose mother had previously undergone radiation therapy. That made perfect sense to me but it seems you can't have a miraculous baby in French, at least not without a virgin birth beforehand. The required word in French is “inespéré”, meaning not unhoped for but which you didn't dare hope for.

The chase for words didn't end there. At the pizza evening this week I was chatting with Jacques and Claudine when we somehow got onto the question of fire. The French have the word “ininflammable” and I don't think the word uninflammable exists in English; if it does, it shouldn't because it's too ugly. So what is the word in English? I asked Alex and Pauline, the only other English people there, and they couldn't think of a word. In the end it was Jacques who came up with answer; he remembered seeing “fire-proof” on some packaging.

Gardens

Jacques, Claudine and I got around to chatting about gardens and Claudine, as ever, was very complimentary about mine and said she didn't like the French way or gardening, only the English way. I've remarked before that I don't think the style of gardening in large French châteaus works in small spaces but think it does for the châteaus. It then occurred to me that we don't usually have the French château style in large English country houses. We tend to break up the large landscapes into smaller areas for the gardens and create different types of small gardens, often walled. So we really are a nation of small gardeners.

Midsummer Musings

Back Garden

A storm overnight two days ago and a subequent light breeze have brought blessed relief from the oppresive heat of the previous three weeks; temperatures are down by around 10 degrees and it is pleasant once again to be outdoors. A consequence is a lot more people out and about in the village. I hadn't seen Mana for weeks and assumed she'd gone off to visit friends she has in Greece, as she does most years ; but she turned up at boules yesterday and so I invited her to come and eat on Friday.

The heat fried some flowers I planted in the back garden to give some late season colour before they ever got established and that has prompted me to have a radical rethink of what I do there. It's looking very sad at the moment. I've decided that, despite the 500 litres of compost I've added to the soil, more is needed. Also, the wooden slats I've used to hold the soil in place are beginning to rot. So, I shall turn over the ground to extract more stones and build low walls with those to replace the slats. Even with the soil improved, I think that small bushes are the only answer as regards plants. I've bought a small hibiscus and hope it will stay a manageable size for a few years. Then I'll look for some patio roses, cistus or helianthemums to fill in, with perhaps some more lilies as they seem to do well. The back garden at this time of year seems to be a perennial problem but I still think I can find a solution.

Adjacent is a photo of the front of my house as it is at the moment.  There is in fact more colour there than meets the eye but alo too much green, due in no small part to the shadow cast across the front of the house by the lime trees on the opposite side of the road.  The large sunflower from a seed ropped by birds feeding on my balcony can just about be discerned at the level of the grapevine over the balcony.  But.........I need to do some more rethinking to, once again, get more colour at this time of the year.  Part of the problem is that three blue solanum in pots at the front which bloomed profusely last year have decided not to do so this year, perhap again because of the shade thrown by the lime trees.

Islam

Over lunch a few days ago, Steve, who is a history buff, and I got into conversation about the Moorish invasion of Spain. Steve pointed out that the Moors got as far north as Troyes in France but quickly dropped back again behind the Pyrenees and left little trace of their brief visit further north. In Spain, of course, their influence has been enormous and, I would argue, all of it beneficial. They not only left architecture of great beauty but also created a centre of scholarship in their great library at Cordoba and gave the world a lesson in tolerance. Islam became the official religion, of course, but christians were allowed to practice and were for the most part accepted as more or less equal citizens, although they could not hold office. By contrast, when El Cid and his cronies reconquered Spain, muslims were offered a stark choice: convert to christianity or die. It's almost the converse of what seems to be happening in the religious world today. And the christians effectively tried to ruin the beautiful mosque in Cordoba, a circular representation of the sun, by building a rectangular church in the middle. Someone once said that, if there was a God, religion was a cruel trick he played on humanity.

It's always puzzled me why the Spanish invaders are called Moors. The inference is that they came from Mauretania, which may have been partly true but can't have been the whole story. I met a number of Moors in my time in Senegal and they are a physically distinct race: jet black hair, jet black eyes, relatively pale skin and small in stature, contrasting hugely with the Taureg and very physically distinct from other arabs I have met. Those in Senegal at the time specialised in working with silver and ebony. The invading forces from north Africa may well have included Moors but must have included also many other arab types. So why are they always referred to as Moors? Perhaps scribes of the time knew no better.

PS
Formatting this post I've found again that accents do funny things to blog and website insertions.  The typesize changed after the tonic accent that I originally placed on the first "o" of Cordoba (the correct spelling).  I have deleted the accent but can't get the typesize to revert.  I've found in adding to my website on the village (www.mon-mollan-sur-ouveze.fr) that inclusion of an accent frequently causes the HTML round the following text to go crazy and generate spurious HTML which involves me in hours of extra work.  I can't be bothered to find a way to edit out the spurious HTML here. 

July

July

July is the festive month in Mollans and so our street party was followed by the 14th of July commemoration of the storming of the Bastille. There was a band in front of Bar du Pont but I didn't bother to go as I was eating with friends earlier and felt too lazy.

Hot on the heels of that the Tour de France went along the village by-pass. As I've mentioned before, the Tour is not really a spectator sport on the ground as it's all over in the 20 or so seconds it takes the cyclists to pass. However, it being so close to the village I didn't have to find a place to stand three hours beforehand so I went along. A lot of people had got in position in time for the « caravan », when sponsors pass by and thow freebies at the crowd, about 2 hours before the cyclists arrive. There appears to have been a somewhat unseemly scramble for free caps, newspapers and other trinkets which didn't interest me. Many then left the roadside to return when the cyclists were due. I got in position, about an hour before « the event » and decided I'd put on full regalia as there was the prospect of an English winner: Union Jack T-shirt and black bowler hat got an outing.

The week before, my daughter Natalie and her boyfriend Andy arrived for a few days. It was good to see them both in high spirits. Andy decided to attempt to cycle up Mont Ventoux but made it to only about half-way up before his legs gave out. It's not a challenge to be taken on lightly and he obviously lacked enough practice. Anyway, he didn't seem downhearted and, when he returned, I took him and Natalie on a short wine tour so they had a good selection of the local wines to take back to the UK with them. Waiting for the Tour, I bought an official goody bag from a passing Tour van and have sent it off to them in the post. It could be the inspiration for another attempt.

While doing our wine tour we stopped for lunch in the village of Gigondas, which I hadn't visited before although I've been to various vineyards in the area around. It's very small and the centre is occupied by restaurants and wine cellars. It made me wonder what it would be like in winter. We ate lunch with an inexpensive carafe of the restaurant's house wine. For a house wine, it was very good. I guess they don't make inferior wine in Gigondas; it wouldn't be worth anyone's while. But it might be worth my while looking for wine there that is just outside the officially classified area; there mighy be some bargains to be had.

The weather since the beginning of the month has been summer arriving with a vengeance: hot sunny days with temperatures from the high 20s into the 30s and with storms brewing up in the evenings every few days. I have twice invited people to eat thinking we could hear the fountain on the terrace tinkling in the background only for its sound to be drowned out by a downpour.

And the tourists are here in abundance, many of them posing in front of my house to take photos. I feel quite flattered by that, particularly one evening when I was nursing a calvados on my balcony and one shouted up: « Monsieur, votre maison est magnifique ».

French

It seem the French are officially softening their stance on the positioning of the language. Rather than trying, albeit forlornly, to insist it should be the major language in the world, the French have decided simply to accept that it is just one of many important languages. This change of stance coincides with a proposal from Academia that some courses at French universities should be taught in English. Horror of horrors! It hasn't stopped the inexorable incursion of English words into French. Friend Steve was recently amused to find a notice displayed above PCs in an electronics store exhorting customers to « boostez votre business »; at least « votre » was French. That gave me another couple of words to add to le chat (not a cat, pronounced as in English), le show, le talk, le best of, le test (and the verb tester), etc.

Early Summer

Le Feu de la St Jean

I think the summer proper has at last started. It certainly has officially as the Feu de la St Jean took place as planned on the 24th June. It being a Monday, Roberto was there with his van but offering mussels and chips rather than pizzas. The weather was good, if not as warm as usual, and there was entertainment of a sort, a Basque band that marched through the square rather than staying and playing in it. However, it was a quite enjoyable start to the summer and the weather has since stayed summery, with temperatures well into the 20s and beyond.

Street Party

Our annual street party took place on the first Sunday in July as usual and was once again a thoroughly enjoyable affair. This time I met four people I hadn't previously known and whom I hope may become friends in the future : a Dutch couple who have bought a house at the end of the road and a Franco-American couple who are in the process of a gradual move into a house 50 yards down from mine. They are from Dallas and, it seems, already readers of this blog; I didn't know my readership had got that far!

Stuck In A Rut

I keep thinking I must read more French fiction and keep reverting to re-reading books I have had for years. I asked Mana for some ideas for more recent fiction but the only ones she could come up with were a tranlation from the English and another that didn't appeal. Daniel could only suggest Michel Houellbecq and, in any case, I'm not sure his taste in fiction corresponds to mine. Houellbecq I have already read and like somewhat, although he tends to concentrate on some of the more perverse aspects of human nature.

One problem is that I have found it difficult to define my taste in fiction, since I have liked crime novels, political novels, science fiction and many other genres but don't like any genre as a whole in particular. What it comes down to, I think, is that I like novels that provide me with insights into human nature and the human experience; encapsulated in fact a single title, La Condition Humaine (Man's Estate is the English title) of Malraux. Hence my fixation on, apart from Malraux, Camus, Gide, Sartre, Giraudoux and the other existentialists. I had thought that this fixation was because those were the authors I read in my teens and early twenties when I was studying French but now think it may be more than that. The existentialists were, after all, preoccupied totally with ruminations on human experience. So maybe I'll just have to find some modern existentialists.

Garden Colour In July/August

This year I've had another go at producing a decent floral display at the back in July/August and failed miserably again, though in part due to snail damage to my dahlias. I didn't go for a snail carnage this spring and paid the price. But, having thought about the problem, I may give up. I've concluded that I'm fighting against nature and that's a battle I'm unlikely to win. Looking around, I can't see much colour that is not lavendar, oleanders, hollyhocks or hibiscus. Hollyhocks I have, also lavendar though not in such profusion that it stands out. I also have a small oleandar. The problem for me with oleandars and hibiscus is that they take up too much room in a small garden. And the problem with smaller plants is tha they generally do their blooming earlier. It makes natural sense: if you want the best conditions for blooming, water and sun, it makes natural sense here to do that in the April to June time-frame. In July/August, many plants get scorched and so die back. So maybe I'll just concede that nature knows best.

A Country Bumpkin

Back From England

Arriving in England gave me culture shock. I didn't realise what a village country bumpkin I had become. It's not that long since I was last in London but that was just for an evening. The proliferation of crowds of people, cars, buses and houses all around was simply so unfamiliar. I was well aware that Bow, where my son Carl lives, is something of a Bangladeshi enclave but there were also significant numbers of Chinese, Turks and Caribbeans. There were most probably also many others from origins that I couldn't readily identify, a real racial melting pot.

However, I didn't witness or sense any racial tension, although there may be some. Voltaire once wrote of religion that if one were to have religion it was important to have something like twenty religions rather than just two; two would always be in conflict whilst twenty could live happily together.

Bow, I discovered, is an area of London that is due a makeover and, indeed, in the process of getting it. Whilst many of the main streets could probably do with wome demolition, the side streets were full of Georgian houses that, renovated, would form sublime roads. No doubt the speculators will be in there in force before long.

The shops in the main streets were much better than the dreary line-up of financial outlets and betting and charity shops that is the lot of many high streets in towns where all the best shops have moved into malls. The food shops, most of which proclaimed themselves Food Centres, all seemed to have a very wide selection of fruit, vegetables and « exotic » provisions, reflecting the cultural diversity of the area. They were complemented by a similar variety of retaurants and takeaways, many very good and cheap.

And I discovered the Oyster card, the cheap way of using public transport in London. It works brilliantly as do the buses and tube trains, all cleaner than I remembered them, frequent and the former relatively fast even in areas of traffic congestion.

Wandering around Oxford Street I acquired some garb that I had wanted for a long time: the most garish Union Jack T-shirt I could find and a black bowler hat, garb to wind up my French friends at boules or for England-France games watched in the Bar du Pont. I duly wore them to the first boules game on my return, to laughter and jokes all round.

What didn't go well in England was the weather. I had anticipated spending some time in the many good parks, reading and watching the world go by. But windy, cold and often wet conditions ruled that out. I did manage a trip out to see one of my favourite National Trust gardens, Mottisfont, with friend Margaret, but although the garden still looked beautiful it was a good two weeks away from the peak it should have been at at that time of the year. Mercifully, the rain that fell on the way to it ceased when we got there athough the cold conditions didn't help appreciation of the scents for which it is rightly famous.

What most surprised me about my trip was the realisation that, despite having lived almost all of my life in and around towns, I have quite quickly become a contented villager of southern France. Driving back from the airport I was immediately at peace rediscovering the calm, the wooded hills all around, the sense of space and the sun.

Sport

Boules

We duly went to the regional boules championships for rural wrinklies as planned and this time entered three teams. The championships were held at Roquebrune sur Anges, near Fréjus on the coast, and I was really looking forward to the event. When we went before, a good time was had by all. Unfortunately, that was not to be repeated.

The evening meal when we arrived was possibly the worst I have ever had in France and subsequent meals showed little improvement. One of our party, Dany Sue, called over the head chef at lunch-time on the second day to ask what was going on. The « chef » explained that it was out of his hands: Head Office dictated what was to be served as meals and he just cut it up or heated it up. The organisation running the site was Renouveau, who have a large chain of such sites. I'm not sure whther it was lack of local knowledge or budget considerations that caused that site to be chosen but the discontent was widespread so it is unlikely we'll be going near their sites again.

Disappointment at the food was compounded by my team's performance at boules. The courts were admittedly difficult to play on, a thin coveringof gravel over tarmac, but it was the same for everyone and we'd overcome similar difficulties in the national championships three years previously. None of us played consistently well and we ended up being placed 20th. On the positive side, one of our teams came 6th and the main playing day was blisteringly hot.

We didn't stay for the final lunch but took off and found a good Relais Routier which had a tasty menu for just 13 euros. Around their car park was a hedge with flowers that I thought I recognised and sure enough a twitch of my nose confoirmed it was made up of gardenias. I'd tried a couple of times to grow these in England without any success (they really need a tropical environment) but here was a while hedge of them. Their perfume surpasses anything I know.

Football

My overwhelming and totally irrational support for Chelsea (if they lose I know the ref has been bribed) cheered me up on my return when they won the Europa Cup. My almost lifelong support (an aunt took me to my first game when I was 10) was again justified. The aunt supported Chelsea too from the time she took an interest in football until her death in 1953 but never saw them win a major trophy. I was more fortunate, seeing them win four major trophies over the following 20 years and four more before our Russian saviour arrived. Rather less fortinately I also saw them relegated four times over that period. They have recently won 11 major trophies in 10 years so all is well on that front.

A Spring In The Air?

Spring Weather ?

I realise that I go about the weather rather a lot but then I am still English. The point this time is that English weather, in principle, doesn(t happen here. Specifically, the inconsistency that makes weather such a common topic of conversation in England is normally absent here. However, while England is experiencing untypical weather, we have typical English spring weather here. Over the pat two months the weather has varied from warm, sunny days, with the classically Provencal cloudless deep Wedgwood blue skies, to cool, even cold, days of overcast skies and drizzle. Provencal spring, equivalent to early summer in England, keeps promiing to arrive but is still struggling to manage it.

One welcome side-effect is that spring flowers, such as primroses and violets, which normally appear here only in shaded damp places, are all around in abundance. In that and other ways, this part of Provence is experiencing a typically English spring.

However, in the Wednesday market in Buis this week I found the first local asparagus and strawberries, including some wild asparagus. I haven't tried that before but will do this Friday when Steve, Jo and Nick come to eat. Driving along, I also noticed that the fruit orchards are starting to bloom : cherry, almond and maybe apricot. This is welcome as there hasn't been much colour by the wayside apart from the ubiquitous rosemary, which has been in bloom for some time. Coronilla is also starting to break, including the bush in my back garden. And I can finally say that all the plants I hoped would come through the winter have done, the three solanum in the front all now showing signs of new growth.

Joke

I owe this joke to friend Armelle.

A boy is buying a new car and the salesman is impressing him with one that has the very latest radio technology which reponds to speech commands. You can ask it to play any track and, if your request is not precise enough, it asks you for more information. The salesman invites the boy to try it out for himself.

The boy thinks for a moment and then says : « Halliday ».

The radio responds : « Johnny or David ? »

« Johnny » says the boy and the radio duly plays a track by Johnny Halliday.

Trying again the boy commands : « Iglesias ».

The radio responds : « Julio or Enrique ? »

The boy is so impressed he buys the car and drives off. Alittle later on, driving through town, the boy is carved up by another motorist cutting sharply in front of him.

Indignantly the boy shouts : « Bastard, arse-hole ! »

The radio responds : « Berlusconi or Sarkozy? »

Heavy Stuff

Public/Private Ownership

The current debate in the UK about the apparent partial privatisation of the NHS through the back door prompted me to think about attitudes to private and public ownership in the UK and France. The point is that infrastructure in France seems very largely to work well; in the UK, it seems frequently to work badly. Why?

Their is a definite contrast between the UK and France in this respect. The French seem to have a very clear view of arrangements between private and public ownership. Almost all infrastructure in France is owned and run by the state. Road infrastructure is owned by the state but maintenance is let out to private organisations. Railways are state owned and run. So are electricity (effectively) and gas; a risible 25% of electricity is theoretically liberalised as a sop to EU directives. Telephony is minimally liberalised at the moment but could become more so. The French like it this way and, whatever Brussels decrees, are determined to keep the status quo.

In the UK, I would argue that liberalisation of telephony has been an outstanding success; rates tend to be between a third and a half cheaper than in France. But it is difficult to point to any others. Electricity and gas are arguable, although electricity in France is still cheaper than that in the UK (piped gas is generally available only in sizeable conurbations). Roads and railways in the UK are certainly inferior to those in France.

The health service is interesting, as I have touched on before. In France it is totally privately run, with chargeable rates set by the state; and the service is generally excellent. It is the effect of the state setting chargeable rates that interests me. If you want to see an eminent surgeon or other specialist, he/she will charge more and you will have to pay the difference; but perfectly competent specialists seem to charge much lower rates than do those in the UK. A recent conversation with an ex-hospital consultant friend in England revealed that he had the alternative of waiting some 10 weeks for an appointment or going private, with a £150 fee for a consultation. The cancer specialist I see, gratis, can normally make an appointment within ten days and I know that his charge to the state is around £50. The point is that since the large majority of people can pay only what the state reimburses most medical staff set their fees accordingly. This could, and no doubt will, change in the future but seems a better arrangement than that pertaining in the UK. It seems likely to me that, in France, there will be a growing divergence between what the state will reimburse and actual medical charges, resulting in the patient having to contribute more; but the state reimbursement rates put a useful brake on price rises. The UK expectation of a totally free service means that access to the service, and the quality of that service, has to supply that brake.

Behind all this is the effectiveness of private/public arrangements. Numerous, disastrous so-called PFI initiatives in the UK indicate that the Civil Service has no idea how to negotiate with private enterprise. In France, state bodies are notorious for their hard-nosed negotiations. Therein, perhaps, lies a key difference between approaches to this question in the two countries. Possibly equally key are how and why the two sides get together. In France, there seem to be generally agreed and established roles for each; in the UK, cooperation often seems speculative, arbitrary and designed primarily to cut visible state expenditure (in theory if not in practice). It may be this speculative and arbitrary aspect that militates against the Civil Service's ability to negotiate. Whatever the reasons, the private/public split seems to be better managed in France than in the UK.

Citizenship and Democracy

This Sunday, as I usually do, I had lunch with Steve and Jo and the conversation got around to democracy, citizenship and communities'(see below): big topics, though we've already between us put the world to rights so often I sometimes wonder that it can till be in the mess it in. However, these are topics that simply won't go away and are good conversational fodder to enhance an extended lunch.

We all believe that western democracy, imperfect though it undoubtedly is (made even more so in the case of the UK by the proposed crass press legislation), is a cornerstone of western European society. Which turned my mind to the citizenship commitments proposed for new immigrants and a conviction that a commitment to democracy should be included specifically. That means not simply a commitment to obey the law, which is pretty obvious but too general, but a commitment to uphold democracy. Forget the nonsense about God, the Queen and British history, which are really no more than incidentals in this context, and focus on democracy and language. I don't believe anyone can function usefully in a country without at least a minimal mastery of its language; and overt support for a principle at the very base of its constitution (written or not) is also required. I understand that this assertion can provoke a number of quibbles but believe, if implemented, it would solve far more problems than it creates.

Communities

I've commented before on the great sense of community which I value here. Comments from various friends living elsewhere make me realise jut how valuable this is and also where it does not seem to apply. Large towns always seem capable of it, even if they do not achieve it in all areas, and so do villages, albeit needing some kind of subsidy in many cases. Where it almost never seems to apply is in suburbs or housing estates. Which makes me believe that these are not natural environments in which human beings can thrive. But they exist and countles people live in them.

So what's to be done? Clearly, some kind of catalyst in the form of a community officer is indicated and I know they exist but have little idea of what they do. Clearly also some kind of physical community centre is required, which often does not overtly exist (but underused schools do). Then it is a question of will and cost. I see bits of this picture in areas of the UK that I know but also huge untapped potential. The problems, I suspect, are that the results would not be easily quantifiable or show on sacred government targets and that local government budget is far too centralised in the UK. Against that, the gain in quality of life could be huge with a similarly considerable economic pay-off (reduction of crime, enhanced social care, etc). To me, it seems a small risk for a potantially large gain. It simply (????) needs someone to break the current mould of legislative goals and priorities within which it doesn't fit.

Making Points

Communities Of Communes

This could be another Clochemerle moment. The French government has decided to get rid of some administrative layers, a move that is indirectly making waves in Mollans. The layer affected is the community of communes, which lies between departments, of which there are 95, and communes of which there are thousands. The idea behind communities of communes is that they acquire and share resources that individual communes need or want but which they are too small to afford individually. The general assumption is that communities of communes should become more important and many communes should effectively disappear (i.e. have little or no budget).

The current situation in Mollans is that it is part of the Buis community of communes. This is a collective of 22 communes, 10 ten of which have fewer than 100 inhabitants and one of which has only 26. Whatever the commune's size, it has a mayor, councillors, secretarial support and a budget to match. This looks like obvious administrative overload and so some rationalisation is overdue.

Part of the government's plan is that all communes within a community should be geographically contiguous, to avoid isolated outposts. That seems sensible but creates problems in that communities at the moment are not stacked up in that way. So there has to be a reshuffle. This in itself does not affect Mollans and, at a meeting of commune mayors with the departmental Prefect in 2011, Mollan's mayor voted to stay part of the Buis community.

Two nearby communes affected are Brantes and Savoillans, which are part of a Vaison community but not geographically contiguous with it. So they asked nearby Malaucène to switch to the Vaison community to create land contiguity between them and Vaison. Malaucène declined. So they asked Mollans and Mollans changed its vote and agreed. Thus Mollans is to become part of the Vaison community as of next January. The obvious question is why; and therein lies the rub.

The mayor sent out a letter which failed to mention the change of vote and gave a number of high-sounding but for all practical purposes meaningless reasons. No one took much notice but suspicions were raised that local taxes would go up. Then the Buis community called for public discussion of the issue at a meeting in Mollans which the mayor promptly banned on very flimsy grounds. So the Buis community switched the meeting to Pierrelongue and provided a load of facts and figures explaining what Mollans contributed and got from the community. So where was the equivalent from the Vaison community so that the citizens of Mollans could discuss the issue and make up their minds? Not forthcoming, it seems, although one of my neighbours is planning to ask Vaison for that. From the Mairie there has just been a deafening silence so far, compounding suspicions raised by the failure to mention the change of vote and the banning of the public meeting. Are dark Machiavellian forces at play here? This story could run and run.

As a footnote, although it is inevitable that some communes will disappear, it is also sad. I view the very considerable decentralisation of budget for local government in France as a democratic strength; it means you can go along to see your local mayor personally and demand answers (although you may not always get them, as the current case shows). However, economics will prevail, which means that getting local accountability will become more difficult in the future.

Rewards For Points

I recently decided to use some of the points I had accumulated on my Super U supermarket loyalty card to acquire a toaster on offer as a reward. I was told I would have to wait a fortnight, as is normal when claiming rewards (they might have to order some rewards specially). But they had the toasters on the shelves. OK, I thought, maybe there is a different inventory system for rewards. Then, when I went to claim my toaster a fortnight later, the girl on the reception desk said: “Just a minute; I'll get one from the shelves”. ???????????? It seems that, whatever improved customer service might suggest, you have to wait a fortnight to claim a reward. Rules are rules, after all (and customer service is a minor consideration in supermarkets).

The UK Establishment

The Royal Family

A buzz around the French contingent at the pizza evening this week was the gender and birth date of Kate Middleton's forthcoming baby. I was quizzed but had to confess total ignorance. I haven't been following this new item and, frankly, neither know nor care about it (whilst understanding that it must be very important for the couple concerned). The same clearly can't be said of the French and there is an equally clear assumption on their part that the English should know more than they do. I don't.

Maybe I'm not typically English in this respect but the point reinforces an early perception that the French were more interested in the English royal family than the English. I remember, on only my second visit to France, being quizzed by me friend Claude's family on why an English newspaper was in trouble for reporting that that the current queen was pregnant. I tried (in vain) to explain that protocol at the time dictated that the correct phrasing was that the queen was going to have a baby, not that she was pregnant. They protested; perfectly logically, that if she was going to have a baby then she must be pregnant. I could only agree but.............Anyway, what struck me most was that this working class French family was apparently fascinated by the English royal family; why? And they expected me to know more than they did. Once again, phraseology apart, I didn't.

HMRC

The dear old UK revenue “service” has reared it's head again and I can't work out whether to laugh or cry (hysterically in both cases).

Five years ago I entered the French tax system and attempted to extricate myself from the UK one, via an apparently simple P85 form. It took three years of intricate communications actually to do so. I thought I was finally shot of their shambles. However, my mother's death put the two of us in contact again, since they needed to know details of her estate and to establish her tax position. That I understood.

My mother died three months into the tax year and, given her income, there could never be any question of a tax underpayment, only possibly a very small rebate which I explicitly renounced and said should be given to a charity of HMRC's choice. She had a small pension from NAAFI for which one overpayment had been made and which I immediately reimbursed, with ackowledgement from NAAFI that the matter was closed.. I subsequently received from HMRC a letter stating that I had to inform NAAFI of my mother's death since they were unaware of it and her pension was still being paid; they couldn't close my mother's situation until that was resolved. The letter quoted my mother's NI number as a reference. So, I sent HMRC the documentation from NAAFI. They duly replied saying they couldn't process this as they needed my mother's NI number. I am about to reply with a copy of their own letter quoting the NI number and an assurance to the person dealing with this that, if they ever forget their name, they can rest assured that I can supply the information as I have it on file.  I shall also suggest that any overpayment be donated specifically to Mencap.

I remember, some 30 years ago, my ex-wife being enamoured of Shire Hite at the peak of her feminist fame at the same time that several American universities, in their statistics courses, were using her as a prime example of the abuse of statistics. If ever any universities want an exemplar of extreme administrative incompetence in a developed country, they probably could do no better than study HMRC.

Gardening

The clement weather has enabled me to get to grips with gardening. The plants I expected to come through our very average winter have largely done so, with the jury still out on one of the three solanums which I covered with protective material; I've watered it and will just wait to see. I was very pleased that some of the snowdrops that I took from my mother's garden after she died have flowered; they should be moved only “in the green” (while the leave are still showing) and had got past that stage when I took them. It will be another thing by which to remember her.

There's still some clearing up to be done but a lot to anticipate. I've planted several new roses and am keen to see how they progress. I've also bought several dahlias which I shall start off at the end of the month to provide colour at the back from mid-summer onwards, plus a couple of lavenders which are already planted. Everywhere is manured so it is more or less “all system go”.

Dear Diary

Dear Diary

I feel I need to make a new posting on the blog but there is not a lot that has happened over the past three weeks. The bees that buzz around in my bonnet from time to time have stayed quiet and most aspects of my life here have experienced little change.

Perhaps the most significant event was that my PC went down with an untraceable bug. The local fixer '(and he's good) couldn't identify it and ended up stripping the machine of software and rebuilding it from scratch. Unfortunately he's a man of these parts and so doesn't answer his phone or respond to messages left so it took me a week to track him down. He has just acquired an office and is presumably expanding his business, or hoping to, but the lack of communication doesn't augur well for him. The bug deprived me of Internet access for nearly two weeks and made me realise how much of a drug it has become in my life; I didn't get the shakes or hot flushes but I was definitely twitchy.

I mentioned in a recent posting that the village entertainments' committee was in a mess. It has subsequently been found that, while doing very little in terms of organising entertainment, they managed to spend some money for which they can't account. The result has been a clear out of the whole committee; a new one is being assembled.

Daniel came round to eat one evening and I decided, without any great expectation, to see if he could give me any guidance on the use of prepositions in French. The use of prepositions seems to be almost arbitrary in all languages I am familiar with. For instance, the French say “il est difficile de faire quelque chose” but “quelque chose est difficile à faire”; they also “décident de faire quelque chose” but “se décident à faire quelque chose”. I challenged Daniel to explain this and also pointed out that my French teacher at school had claimed that the French language was a masterpiece of logic. Daniel disclaimed this latter point and could offer no explanation for the former, except to suggest that the answer probably lay somewhere in the upper branches of some Chomsky grammatical trees. I don't think I shall be going there to look.

With luck the winter is now over. We've had two days of snow, about a fortnight apart, with the snow staying around for about a week afterwards, accompanied by some really cold days but interspersed with very warm ones. We're now back with the warm ones and, if the weather runs true to form, that's the winter done and dusted. The earlier warm days stirred me to do some gardening: clearing up, pruning the vines and spreading some general fertiliser. The ground has remained too hard however to do much more. A week of warm days should do the trick and then I should be able to do the rest of the work needed.

I had been doing some search engine optimisation work on my website, which will continue. However, the official village website is now up and running and seems to be almost purely administrative, which gives me a clearer idea of how I can develop mine. I shall exclude administrative material and probably add a section on writing (the Académie Mollanaise?) and put more effort into the accommodation section. I want it to appeal to villagers as well as future visitors.

Apology
In my last post I aid that Jim Sluszny was Polish but Jim has corrected me.  His parents were Polish but he was born in Belgium before going to England and is thus Belgian.  Sorry about that mistake

Lunch, Entertainment and Pi

Old Fogies' Lunch

The annual lunch for old people in the village, given by the village and served by the village councillors, took place on Sunday. It was a close-run thing, it seems, as the usual caterer cried off sick at the last moment. However, the chef from a restaurant in nearby Plasians was able to fill in and did an admirable job.

The restaurant in Plasians is noted for its brawn, which is always served as a first course in its set meals and so brawn was inevitably the first course today. The second course was a salad with foie gras and slices of smoked duck. That was followed by monkfish in a tomato sauce and then the usual selection of cheeses, baked Alaska and coffee, with white red, rosé and sparkling wine as appropriate along the way. The village certainly does its old people proud on these occasions.

I happened to be sitting at a table with two English “refugees”, which got me thinking about the fortunes of war, Mali being much in the news at the moment. One, Alex, had been brought up and educated in England (he was actually at Bristol University at the same time as I, though we never met there) but his family was in Estonia at the outbreak of World War 2. The Nazis were of course greeted as liberators when they entered Estonia, freeing it from the Russian yoke (for a while). He and most of his family escaped to England. The other, Jim, is a Polish Jew who was living in Belgium at about the same time and was sent on a boat of Jewish refugees to England. There were a number of such evacuations at the time but not all countries would accept them and Jim is eternally grateful to England for allowing him in. Such can be the fortunes of war.

The Entertainments' Committee

There was an extraordinary AGM of the village entertainments' committee ( Comité des Fêtes) last week which I decided to attend. Last year some events that were supposed to happen didn't and those that did generally weren't anything like as successful as they should have been. Unsurprisingly, the chairman of the committee came in for strong criticism, lapsed for most of the time into sullen silence and, at one point, offered his resignation. This was refused, with attendees saying that resignation was beside the point; the point was to identify the problems and resolve them. I liked the lack of rancour, the fact that nobody wanted to crucify the chairman but................The problems seemed to be clear; there was no lack of volunteers or resources more generally: what had been lacking was initiative, communication/coordination and project management skills. Unfortunately, it seemed to me, the chairman had clearly demonstrated that he wasn't a person who took the initiative, couldn't communicate and, apparently had few project management skills since he couldn't identify the problems. So, in effect, he was the problem. But he couldn't be allowed to resign.

I put my name down on a list of volunteers to help and will go to the next meeting armed with some bog-standard project management sheets. It strikes me that what this committee most needs is a formal method of project control that would not only help in the current year but would mean that, for future years, it would not be necessary to start from scratch each time; whoever chairs the committee would have records of what has been done, by whom and when, the previous year.

Gay Marriage Again

This Sunday there was another large demonstration in Paris, this time in favour of gay marriage. The numbers weren't as great as for the demonstration a fortnight ago (against gay marriage) but still considerable: 150,000 to 400,000 depending on whom you believe but probably nearer the lower estimate. In the meantime I had had a chance to discuss what all the fuss was about with friend Patrick and, as I suspected, it is to do with the French conception of family, which they hold so dear. Allowing gay couples to marry entitles them up to the rights accorded under the “Code Civil”, including inheritance law. I still can't really see where there are any problems that couldn't be countered by some slight modifications but the issue is certainly a very sensitive one here in France.

Pi and Pizza

This evening I went with Mana to see the film the Life Of Pi. I had suggested it to Mana but we both ended up disappointed. The photography and special effects were admittedly spectacular but the story only of passing interest and the musings on God (or not) left us both cold. Anything on God leaves Mana cold; for my part, if I want any insight on God theory I look to the debate that has been raging for years among astrophysicists, some believers, some not. They deliberately make no mention of God, to leave aside any question of religion, but refer instead to the possibility of a Designer. Was the universe in as far as we know it designed or did it simply evolve? The answer lies somewhere in amongst some very hairy equations and mind-bending assumptions (like how many universes, parallel or contiguous, you want to assume) with a considerable grasp of probability theory required. A lot of this is beyond me but I enjoy the debate and think that this is not only the correct but (probably) the only way to approach the issue.

After the film I went to join the usual pizza evening but went for the mixed grill that Roberto was offering as an alternative. He was very late in delivering it, having started late, but made up for this by refusing to charge for it because of his tardiness. So I had two good meals for free on successive days; can't be bad.

Footnote
My son, Carl, sent me an email saying my house was now on Google Street View; and so it is.  So if any of you want to look up Les Bleus (street numbers promised for next year) in Mollans sur Ouvèze, you can.  Judging by the photo it was taken either last winter or the winter before, so there is greenery but no flowers on show.

Gay Rites And Second-hand Furniture

Gay Rites Surprises

Last Sunday several hundred thousand people took to the streets in Paris to demonstrate against the draft bill to legalise marriage between homosexual partners. Estimates of the number vary between 350-500 thousand but it was clearly a very large demonstration even by French standards (and the French do love a demonstration).

The high number surprised me. The extreme right wing and Catholic participants were to be expected, the Catholic (or any other) church getting it's knickers in a twist over a sexual matter being hardly surprising. But there were apparently large numbers of the less identifiable bourgeoisie also in attendance. Although moral issues are the province of the bourgeoisie (George Bernard Shaw once wrote that only the middle classes had morals because the rich didn't need them and the poor couldn't afford them) that doesn't fit well with the general laissez-faire attitude of the French towards sex. (More generally, the French don't mind much what you do in most activities as long as you do it with style and panache.) And all this was on top of the fact that Hollande had made this bill a specific, supposedly vote-winning plank of his election manifesto; it garnered the homosexual vote for what that was worth.

So how can the size of the demonstration be explained? My only thought is that it could be the French preoccupation with family life and the bill being seen as a threat to it. Family life is paramount in France. Even French income tax is based on families rather than individuals, the reason the draft bill to tax rich individuals was declared unconstitutional. So maybe that was the reason for the size of the demonstration.

The other surprise for me is that gays are apparently so keen to get married. We are in an era when co-habitation is as normal as marriage and common law conveys pretty much the same rights to couples whether married or not. I don't think political correctness, that haven for control freaks, comes into it, so why is there all the fuss? I have to confess that I don't really understand it.

Second-hand Furniture

Friend Jo had found a couple of really good, reasonably priced second-hand furniture shops and so took me for a browse last Friday. There were some beautiful pieces on offer and at low, low prices.

I bought some old wooden chairs for the kitchen for a song.

I have long held the view that second-hand furniture is often much better value for money than new furniture, both in England and France but particularly so in France. Solid wood furniture is especially good value; the wood is often beautiful in itself and the same item new would cost a fortune. Granite slabs also feature a lot and, again, would cost a bomb new. It occurred to me that any second-hand furniture dealer in England with a lorry could make a good business out of buying here and selling in England and it seems that does happen quite frequently. Some friends told me of dealers they know who do just that. I remember, back in the 1980s, when French wood stoves became fashionable in England, there was a very brisk trade with lorries from England buying up every wood stove on offer here.

One of the differences I noted in second-hand furniture here is how much of it is home-made. I know people in England must have made their own furniture in times past but I've never seen much of it on sale. Here it's quite common and often very well made. You can tell when a piece has been home made because it has quirks indicating it could never have come out of a factory. Friends Steve and Jo have a beautiful dresser that is very well made except that one of the carved wooden pillars supporting the top half must have been aimed a bit off-target for the holes it had to fit into and so makes a sudden twist to the right to get connected. It's the only blemish in the piece and in fact does nothing to detract from it but would never have passed any kind of quality control; a factory would simply have made another pillar but whoever made that dresser presumably didn't have another piece of suitable wood or just couldn't be bothered.

I suspect this may come from the French genius for throwing nothing away if some means can be found of making it useful. I've remarked on this before with respect to French food and suspect it applies to furniture too. Rural France has lots of wood and a typical French peasant attitude would be: if you've got wood and the tools to make furniture, why buy it?