Update
This is proving to be a wonderful time
of the year here. Spring seems to have arrived a couple of weeks
early. We've had a prolonged spell of good weather, locally produced
asparagus and strawberries have been in the shops for a couple of
weeks and the second round of flowers after bulbs are doing their
thing. The coronilla in my back garden, which I cut back severely
last autumn because it had grown so large, is covered in perfumed
bloom with some of it already starting to die off. Several irises
have bloomed and faded away already and the first blooms are out on
my roses, one on the Dublin Bay in front of the house and one on the
Shropshire Lad at the back.I've been busy. All the plants I took inside to over-winter are outside now. Two of the three Dilapidenia I brought in survived and are now outside my bedroom window. The geraniums are also outside now in their pots, so the summer planting is coming together. A clematis I planted in one of the pots against the wash-house opposite has produced its first blooms and the climbing rose seems to have established itself. Also, my “front garden”, the plants I've put in the edge of the road opposite together with the move of the bench there seems to be attracting some regular customers, which is gratifying. People come and sit there in the afternoon so that initiative seems to be being appreciated. It's tempting to start the flowering baskets but I shall hold off until mid-May.
In the house I've started to improve the terrace room. It doesn't feel “lived in”, naturally enough since it's not lived in except during the summer but it should feel better than it does. One factor is the lack of anything on the expanse of white walls. I've hesitated to put photos in picture frames on the walls as any thing small will get lost. However, at the recent car boot sale in the village I managed to buy some relatively large frames for a couple of euros each so I went to the photography shop in Vaison and got some photos enlarged to A3 size, plus some others to A4. They are now in frames and, together, should break up the too sterile white space on the walls. I've also decided to use the terrace room more this summer. I tend to think of it as the overflow room for when I want to invite more than four people to eat, neglecting the possibility of having aperitifs there. So I shall do more aperitif invitations this summer; they are a lot less work than a meal.
Structure And Chaos
The good weather has meant that I have
been able to spend time in the evenings sitting on my balcony with a
Calvados to hand (or a Genever that friend Marjolaine kindly gave me)
and muse about whatever comes to mind. Recently I seem to have found
myself musing about the role of structure and chaos or randomness in
the world and our lives. Having worked in IT for most of my life I
understand quite well the significance of structure and the
possibilities and limitations of various defined structures
(hierarchies, networks, lattices, stacks, circles, hybrids, etc) but
chaos, randomness and concepts such as infinity (Russell's paradox)
and negative zero have also intrigued me. It was one reason I
decided to take a brief course in chaos theory at Reading University
before I left England. And, of course, given my linguistic
background, I tend to relate these concepts to language.Even a cursory perusal of the Internet demonstrates that very few people have any mastery of language. I could understand why, in England, the myth that one's native language was learned parrot fashion arose but never why the myth held sway for so long. Even 50 years ago the idea was demonstrably false. And I never understood either why knowledge of grammar should be deemed to curtail creativity; the implication is that creativity can come only from chaos or randomness which, again, is demonstrably false. Michaelangelo is the perfect counter example. Language, any living language, is always in a state of evolution and evolutionary changes can result from (random?) mistakes apart from other factors. But that happens only very occasionally and I don't regard that as a reason to neglect grammar. The result, in England, has been a couple of generations of people who haven't been taught grammar and who clearly don't understand how to use language (and a generation of teachers who can't teach grammar because they have never been taught it). I blame dogmatists, as always; will we ever be free of this scourge?
Scottish Independence
Scottish independence is making a lot
of the news headlines but I really can't find it in myself to take an
interest. A lot of the brouhaha seems to me to be the well known
Westminster game of overgrown schoolboys throwing bread rolls at each
other. An American, Bob McClure of the Southern Methodist university
in Texas, taught me back in 1968 that Texas was really an independent
state in America. At the NATO-sponsored IT think-tank in Garmisch,
anyone who got up to speak had to announce their name and
nationality. All the Americans there duly gave their names followed
by USA or United States. Bob didn't; he was McClure, Texas. Maybe
that is the way Scotland should be independent.