The Dauphin Fountain

The Fountain Celebration

This weekend has been a series of celebrations of the 300^th anniversary of the Dauphin fountain, the first source of water in the village other than the river. The fountain is quite famous locally, not only because of its age but because it uses a play on words to have a dolphin sculpted on it (Dauphin being both a dolphin and an heir to the throne) and because it was on the Comtat Venaissin side of the river and was supposed to be cocking a snook at the Dauphiné territory on the other side. The ten other fountains in the village date from around 1878 and piped water didn't arrive until 1964.

The celebrations have included Tahitian dancers (don't ask), a couple of clowns making merry, some lectures in the library, a file of people bringing water from a fountain on the other side of the village, an exhibition of plans of the time to bring water to the village, a photo competition and a choir singing songs about water. I was involved in the last two.

I found the 18^th century plans particularly interesting. The initial construction failed, partly because of broken ceramic pipes but also because those tasked with the construction messed up the slope required for a drop of 9 metres over a kilometre. The Roman engineers who built the Pont du Gard viaduct to Nimes had little more than that drop over some 26 kms and managed to get it right, so some engineering knowledge was clearly lost over the intervening millennium a half.

The choir, suitably dubbed the Voix De La Fontaine, was assembled and rehearsed by friend Jo and we duly sang A la claire fontaine, Au bord de la rivière, Sur le bord de la rivière, L'eau vive, La source and By the rivers of Babylon, this last thought of by Jo after the Charlie Hebdo affair, when the fountain event was being planned. We sang on Friday evening and twice on the Saturday and received an enthusiastic reception. I was particularly pleased for Jo because she had put a lot of work into the choir and we ended up not singing on the Friday where or at the time we thought we were supposed to, which had her tearing her hair. It turned out that the published programme had been written with a typically Provençal cavalier approach to times and locations. The typically Provencale corollary, of course, is that the muddle gets sorted out amicably and all's well that ends well, as they say.

The song La Source intrigued me because it recounts a story that was the subject of an Ingmar Bergman film that I remember seeing in the early 1960s entitled (in French) La Source; the English title was Virgin Spring. I wondered whether there was any connection and was told that the song originated from about 1968, when Isabelle Aubret won some kind of prize for singing it. That suggests that the song writer picked up the Bergman theme rather than vice-versa but it's a strange kind of story to write a song about and the tune is something of a dirge.

The fact that my submission to the photo competition (above) didn't win it I can put down only to blatant prejudice on the part of the judges.

French Sayings

Despite my asking all my French friends and acquaintances for current popular sayings that provide insight into times past, and some of them are scribes or literary cognoscenti themselves, I've only been told of five so far. Pleuvoir à verses is mooted as a reference to emptying chamber pots from upper floors into the street in mediaeval times; tenir le haut du pavé is most probably a reference to walking away from the centre of V-shaped roads in the same era; changer de crèmerie refers to a style of restaurant in the 19^th century; pendre la crémaillère, which I had to think of myself, refers to a style of cooking long gone; and tomber comme à Gravelotte refers to a battle with an inglorious end (for the French). It's a rather disappointing result so far, unless French really does have far fewer of such sayings than English does. I found around 50 sayings in English with origins in times long gone with no difficulty at all.

Rights And Responsibilities

FIFA

Football is not everyone's cup of tea, I know, and certainly not Prime Minister David Cameron's if he thinks there is a national Britain team. But it is mine, more like my elixir of life in fact than a plain old cup of tea. And I have been very pleased with it in recent months through my persona bias as Chelsea drove their way to the Premier League title. The recent FIFA scandal has, however, considerably darkened my mood.

Sepp Blatter, who has just been re-elected as President of FIFA despite disclaiming all responsibility for the alleged corruption of a large number of his underlings, seems to me an unmitigated megalomaniac, a view supported by some of the things he said in his acceptance speech. Whatever the corruption investigations come up with I do not believe he will ever voluntarily resign. The open question is what can be done about a person in his position. I think I have the answer but I doubt whether there is the determination necessary to remove him from his post.

There is no doubt in my mind that UEFA should resign en bloc from FIFA. The consequences would be interesting. For a start, the UEFA Nations Cup would become arguably just as important as, if not more important than, the World Cup. The flow of sponsorship money into FIFA and out into who knows whose hands would be very seriously curtailed. Indeed, since 70+ nations voted against Blatter's reappointment, UEFA could potentially mount a rival World Cup to eclipse FIFA's. There would no doubt be turmoil in world football for 2-3 years but the goal, if realised, would justify that. I see no other way of reforming an undoubtedly corrupt FIFA and removing its President. But........do the European nations collectively, and the sponsors, have the stomach for the fight? I suspect it will take unflinching determination to reform FIFA and remove Blatter.

Tax Return

I've just filled in my annual tax return and want to record how easy it was. In England, as I understand it, you don't have to fill in a tax return unless asked. In France, you automatically have to. It would have taken me a lot of pain the first time I did this in France if I had not been able to make an appointment with an official at the local tax office who kindly did the job for me. That's how I learnt. Tax forms in both countries are extensive and notes to them voluminous. My last efforts in England were plagued with difficulties through my being bounced between various tax offices, none of which seemed to read any correspondence and which certainly didn't in any way communicate with one another.

France is trying to persuade its residents to file tax returns online and, I find, making it beautifully easy to do so. The online system makes a huge but almost certainly warranted assumption that most people's sources of income don't change much from year to year; mine certainly don't. Neither at my age do my personal (family) circumstances. So the online tax system here presents me with a note of the forms I filled in in previous years and simply asks: has anything changed? That, of course, is the key question. However, if anyone is going to falsify a claim then it doesn't much matter what questions are asked. I tick the “no” box and up come not the whole forms on which I entered data but just the boxes into which I entered data. So all I have to do is enter the current data into those boxes. It really couldn't be easier. Hats off to whoever designed the French online income declaration system.

Bill Of Rights

Some time ago I knocked off a not very well thought out comment on the European Human Rights Act. My rather superficial argument was that if it didn't add the freedoms that we already had why should we worry about it? On reflection that was far too glib, a point that was brought home to me in an article that I read suggesting that, although there were obvious faults, these lay with the running of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rather than the Act itself. I now find the subject complex and difficult, as indeed it would seem does the Conservative Party in power, which is committed to producing a UK Bill Of Rights but apparently split over the issue.

For a start there is the question of whether the ECHR should have jurisdiction over the UK courts. My instinctive answer is no but...........UK citizens are technically not free people as we like to believe but subjects of The Crown. And, since several ministries are deemed to be part of The Crown, technically we can't sue them whatever they do to us. I currently have no intention to sue any UK ministry but I I did I'd like to be able to do that through the ECHR.

The nub of the problem seems to be blatant exploitation of the EHA by convicted criminals seeking to avoid any appropriate sentence. Surely this apparent loophole can be closed without ditching the whole EHA. However, at the back of my mind is the feeling that an Act that confers rights without any concomitant responsibilities or requirements for accountability must always be flawed. We curtail freedoms (rights), such as freedom of movement, when we put people in prison; so it seems to me reasonable that other freedoms could be curtailed when responsibilities and accountability requirements are not met, provided that these are associated with rights.

The Liverpool Echo

The newspaper The Liverpool Echo yesterday printed a blank front page, asking its readers what they thought it should contain. In an age when the purpose of the Press seems often to be to mislead, or lead in the direction it wants, rather than to inform, I thought this was a great initiative. I hope they get good ideas and follow them up.