lundi 23 mars 2009

Cinema and England

To The Cinema
I went with Mana, a local friend, to see Slumdog Millionaire at the cinema in Buis yesterday evening and was impressed. I found the mixture of realism and fantasy, Bollywood and other genres effectively blended and the whole well acted and photographed. A thoroughly engaging film, if not a great one. Mana was not impressed, having read the book and finding the detail on the poverty from which Jamal had emerged lacking and dismissing the tinseltown episodes as American, although I think they were Bollywood. Plenty to talk about afterwards, anyway.

The film was dubbed into French, which is what happens to most films here that will run on the main cinema circuits (which doesn't include Buis and neighbouring towns). I find the range of films shown locally much better than that I was used to in Reading, primarily because the French seem to accept subtitles easily. Subtitling is what happens to any film that is not going to be a blockbuster on the main cinema circuits. That turns out to be a very important difference. If you can accept subtitles, then you don't have to bulk out cinema programmes with inferior films because you are constrained by a single language. You, literally, have the whole worlds films to choose from. So, since I have been here, I have seem films originated in, for instance, Morocco, Mongolia, Algeria, Spain, and China, all good films that I would never have had the chance to see in Reading.

The cinema in Buis has promoted a debate on whether films in languages other than French should be dubbed or subtitled. The general argument is that dubbing compromises the integrity of the film, whilst subtitling obviously introduces some visual interference, with the inference that purists will opt for subtitles. I suspect the debate is academic; economics rather than aesthetics will determine whether films in other languages are dubbed or subtitled. However, sometimes you can take your pick; Slumdog Millionaire was earlier showing in a subtitled version. The important point for me is that, if you accept subtitles, then a far wider variety, and a greater overall quality, of films becomes available.

And Back To England.............
Tomorrow I fly back to England to see my kids and my mother for a week. I gather that the weather in England, or the southern part, has changed for the worse: lower temperatures and rain. Which is a pity because here the weather is forecast to stay fair for the next several days. However, I love England in the spring (“Oh to be in England.....etc) and so will doubtless find things to please me. And I shall no doubt bring back various plants in my suitcase for my garden here.

Résumé en Français
Je suis conscient de ne pas avoir fait les résumés que j'avais proposés. C'est plus difficile que je ne l'avais pensé: pas le français mais le résumé. Cependant, je les écrirai de temps en temps.

jeudi 19 mars 2009

Gardening, History and a Joke

Gardening and History
The weather has been getting better and better. For the last few days I've been playing boules in temperatures in the low to middle 20s. My car was recording 29 degrees this morning but it's usually optimistic by a few degrees. The days have been spent gardening. I've pinched a couple of inches off the footpath at the back of the house to plant a row of irises given to me by friends Steve and Jo, who have been splitting and replanting theirs. They won't do much this year but should look good next. Have also dug two more holes in the road in front of the house and planted a climbing rose (Iceberg) up against a lime tree on one side and a clematis (Jackmanii) to climb up the honeysuckle on my side. Scraping the paint off the beams in my bedroom will have to wait.

As an alternative to Sudoku over breakfast, I have been reading a history of Pierrelongue, a village 3 km from here along the road to Buis,. It seems there's a still unresolved dispute between Pierrelongue and Mollans over grazing and timber-gathering rights on Mt Bluye, the large hill (3000ft) which spans the two villages. Nothing remarkable in that except that the legal process started in the mid-18th century. There's not a lot that grazes on Mt Bluye now, except a few wild boar, so maybe that's why the case is still unresolved; or maybe everybody just got too tired or forgot what the problem was. Mt Bluye is also the source of many of the springs that bring water to the two villages, which might be more of a problem (viz. Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources) except that there seems to be plenty of water for both. Pierrelongue didn't get its own fountain (i.e. source of fresh water) until as late as 1898. (By contrast, there are eleven fountains in Mollans, dating from ~1770). Before that the villagers of Pierrelongue had to cross the river on a large plank, which occasionally got chopped up for firewood when the weather got cold. Or they could use the river water but the people of Buis had a song that ran along the lines of “we piss in the river and the Pierrelongais drink our piss”. Local villages pissing on one another, or doing something rather more violent, seems to have been all the rage in the 14th and 15th centuries but is a sport that has fortunately died out.

Joke
Here's another of René's stories, which he tells in an Alsatian accent that I could never reproduce. A local yokel introduced himself to a new neighbour and enquired what he did for a job, as he clearly wasn't a farm worker. The newcomer replied that he was a professor of deductive logic at the nearby Strasbourg university. After thinking for a few moments, the yokel asked: “Er....what exactly is that?”.
The professor replied: “ Well, let me give you an example. For instance, I see that you have a kennel in your garden, so I deduce from that you probably have a dog”.
“Yes”, says the yokel.
“I notice also,” says the professor, “that there are toys in your garden and I deduce from that that you have children”.
“Yes”, says the yokel, increasingly impressed.
“Since you have children,” continues the professor, “I conclude that you probably have a wife and that you are heterosexual”.
“Yes again”, says the yokel, now extremely impressed.
A few days later the yokel yokel meets another (yokel) neighbour and tells him about this brilliant professor who has moved into the village. The conversation proceeds as follows.
Yokel 2: “What is this new guy a professor of”?
Yokel 1: “Deductive logic”
Yokel 2; “What exactly is that”?
Yokel 1 (puffing out his chest): “Well, let me give you an example. Have you got a dog kennel in your garden”?
Yokel 2: “No”
Yokel 1: “Homosexual!”

dimanche 15 mars 2009

Cycle Races, Wild Flowers, Rugby and Bobbies

Cyclists and Flowers
Yesterday I went to see the Paris-Nice cycle race go past the village. It's not as big a deal as the Tour de France, obviously, but it is supposed to be one of the big races. It turned out to be a real anti-climax, my having got there far too early. Nothing happened apart from a few sponsor cars racing past until a break-away group of about a dozen cyclists surged past with a couple of support cars behind. They had a lead of about 5 minutes on the main peloton, which then came past with about as many support cars as cyclists. And that was it. No wonder the village didn't turn out for it. Anyway, I'm glad I saw it.

Arriving too early meant I looked around at the herbiage at the edge of the field where I was standing and saw several helianthemums growing. I think one or two of those might end up in the wall at the back of my terrace. The flowers that grow wild here are quite a surprise to me. First, there are irises everywhere, some of which are already blooming at the back of my garden. But they are everywhere in the hillsides around and there is a dwarf variety, very similar to those that grow from bulbs in England, but these have rhizomes: they are blue, yellow or white. Another surprise was to find wild tulips, although these are not yet out, which grow in the lavender fields just to the north of the village. They are all a combination of yellow and red in colour, have a much slimmer form than most cultivated tulips and the petals come to an elongated point at the top. I prefer their shape to that of the cultivated varieties. Plus red violets, one has taken root in my wall, coronilla, the salvia pratensis and numerous varieties of sedum. All wild, all common, and some destined for my back garden.

Rugby and other forms of play
Today, Steve and Jo invited me for lunch and we ate outside in some 23 degrees of sunshine. They have done a good job on the veg.beds and Jo is eager to get started on sowing; indeed, she's already planted a bed and a half of rattes, the small potatoes that are grown here, much like the earlies in England but these grow all the year round. I pruned their roses and then went on to play boules and, after boules, to meet Steve and René in the Bar du Pont to watch the second half of the France-England rugby match. England were already 29-0 ahead so it was an occasion to witness local disgust. Rugby puzzles me, although I have played it (very badly). A player was penalised for putting his hand on the ball at the wrong time; simultaneously, one player was gaily gouging lumps out of another player's midriff and shirt with his studs and yet another was busily trying to stomp an opponent's head into the ground. But that, it seems, is not against the rules. I found myself straining to see, when an object emerged from a scrum, whether it was actually the ball and not some player's head.

In the evening I went to Daniel's to celebrate his finishing the script of La Partie de Boules n'aura pas lieu. A bit prematurely, as it turned out, as he feels he has some final revisions to make. Nonetheless, we drank to the script. We still don't know what to do with it but if any reader wants a copy, I'll happily send it if I have their email address. I happened to notice, on a TV programme guide he had, a mention of les flics. Which reminded me of “going to the flicks” (to see a film) in my youth. The term, now dated, presumably derives from when kaleidoscopes were a popular form of film but where does “les flics” come from? Daniel didn't know either but a search through his etymological dictionary suggested it might derive from the sound of the whips which French policemen had in the early 19th century. It seems the French had their flics before the English had their bobbies, which is something else I didn't know.

jeudi 12 mars 2009

Boules and Giraudoux

Boules and Giraudoux
Three days of glorious weather have meant three afternoons of boules and my form seems to be returning; seven wins in nine matches is not so bad. More importantly, my “feel” of the boules and the piste seems to be better; the force is with me. Just as important have been the afternoons in shirt sleeves and sunshine with pleasant company.

The weather has also meant some more gardening and the purchase and planting of a vine to go at the back, to supplement the one at the front. With luck it will grow along a wire fence at the side of my back garden. I also have a rambling rose and a clematis going along the same fence so, “inshallah”, it should look good and be productive a couple of years from now.

Meanwhile, Daniel has been beavering away at the script for “La Partie de Boules n'aura pas lieu.” It now runs to nearly 20 pages and he has one final scene to write (the 13th, as in 13 points to win a boules game). He should have it finished by the weekend and then it will be time to revise, if necessary, and decide what can be done with it. I think the script is very good. Daniel was a Professor of French literature, specialising in drama and film, and so has a good grasp of how to write a script. I love the way he has managed to marry the eternal elements of classical Greek theatre, some of the characters of Giraudoux's play, and his own personal reflections on man/wife relationships (in the context of the Helen of Troy story) into a mundane game of boules. He has managed this with both the Greek originals and the local boules-playing characters being recognisable. That's quite a feat.

The problem is what to do with the script when it is finished. At a rough estimate, the play would run to 40-50 minutes, which would probably be too long for a skit to be staged at one of the village festivals. Daniel suggested an English translation, which would be possible (although the poetry would be difficult), but that would remove the local character element and necessarily assume an English familiarity with boules. I think that, ideally, it would be played at boules pistes around the area (I'm sure our local characters have their counterparts in local villages) but have no idea how to arrange that. I think, anyway, we should publish the result and see what happens. Maybe I'll do that as an adjunct to this blog.

dimanche 8 mars 2009

Spring and Mairies

Spring
The weather has changed over the last two days and spring seems a genuine prospect. So I've cut down the pentstemons and taken a large number of cuttings, fed handfuls of chicken shit around the hole I dug in the road for my wisteria, hopefully to persuade it to finally reach the underside of my balcony at the front, and surveyed the small back garden. I've thrown hundreds of seeds down there since the autumn, even some from a visit to Wisley in England when I kindly decided to do some dead-heading for them, so I'm anxious to see what will take and not sure what it will look like if and when it sprouts. However, there are some definite weeds so I'll take advantage of the weather, if it continues, to clean the space up a bit. There's no sign yet of the bulbs for which I dug holes in the other side of the road but I got the idea and planted them late so there's still time for them to show. The narcissi in pots at the front of the house are all in bloom, along with the pansies.

I still intend to dig another hole in the road opposite my kitchen and plant a climbing rose to go up one of the lime trees. The neighbours all say this is fine and just to go do it but I wonder what they really think about this mad Englishman who keeps digging holes in the road. I may have to claim officially that I'm doing a public service by calming the traffic (what there is of it).

Mayors
The mayoral system in France is quite different to anything in England. Mayors and Mairies here have a lot more power and the system is certainly open to abuse. However, I think that, on the whole, the system works quite well, certainly within a small village like Mollans; I find it is definitely preferable to the neutered local government in England, which apparently has the most centralised local government in Europe. If I feel strongly about anything, I have absolutely no problem in bending the ear of the mayor or any of the councillors here (most probably in the Bar du Pont). Many people take advantage of this easy access and below I reproduce a sample of extracts from letters received in Mairies in the region, kindly supplied by one of our councillors, Jacques Thibault.

Les ralentisseurs que vous avez mis devant l'école sont trop hauts et ma femme se fait sauter quatres fois par jour.

Depuis que vous avez acheté un ordinateur à la Mairie il n'y a plus moyens de trafiquer les papiers comme vous faisiez avant.

Le cimetière est dans un ètat pas possible et tous ceux qui y habitent pensent comme moi.

Est-ce qu'on ne pourrait pas déplacer le bal du 14 juillet jusqu'au 15 août?

Oui, Monsieur le maire, vous êtes responsable des cacas des chiens même si ce n'est pas vous qui les avez faites personnelllement

Le toit de l'église fuit depuis longtemps et la vierge est toujours mouillée. Faites quelquechose pour elle s'il vous plait, Monsieur le maire

Parce que vous avez fait la route pas assez large mon voisin est obligé de faire pleins de manoeuvres difficiles dans son garage et alors ce qui devait arriver est arrivé. Un matin où il était sûrement bourré, il a fini par réussir à rentrer dans ma femme.

Si c'est le maire qui est chargé d'enlever les ordures, que dois-je faire avec ma femme?


These quotes are reproduced faithfully. The French expression and grammar are not mine.

vendredi 6 mars 2009

Scripts, weather and cooking

Scripts, Weather and Cooking
Daniel has really got the bit between his teeth for the script of “La Partie de Boules n'aura pas lieu”. More than half-a-dozen pages this week and the skit shouldn't run longer than 20 minutes so he's well on the way into it. I sent him an email, in the style of the crazy Démokos character:
Un scénario parfait,
Je veux vous le dire,
Sans doute a-t-on trouvé
Un nouveau Shakespeare


Of course, there will be revisions and second thoughts but it looks like we should have something workable within a month. Then there's the question of the actors..........

The weather the past few days has been......inclement would be the good British term. Unusually for here, a combination of overcast skies, some rain and bitterly cold. Usually, when the Mistral blows, it chases away the clouds and leads to cold but sunny weather. Somehow, the Mistral seems to have chased away the sun this week.

It should have been a week to get on solidly with scraping the beams in my bedroom but the weather seems to have dented my enthusiasm. So I've been cooking (and reading) instead. The flanchet they sell here is the basis for a mean pot au feu so that's one of the dishes I've been preparing. A good chunk is enough for three people so Steve will come round and share it with me on Sunday and I'll have enough over for Tuesday. I've also done a veal, pork, bacon, onion, etc pie which Steve and I shared this evening, Jo being away in the UK.

My real pièce de résistance here though is, surprisingly to me, Shepherds' pie. It's hardly what you would call haute cuisine but the French don't have it and love it. Everyone I've served it to here has asked for the recipe! In particular, it's Daniel's favourite so I'll have to make one to keep him going on the script. Apart from the fact that friends and neighbours like it, it has good potential for jokes. I assume amazement that French laws don't allow the killing of shepherd's to make pies and suppose that some stupid EU health and safety legislation is at the root of it. I made a Shepherds' pie in January after returning from Christmas in England and pointed out that around Christmas was the ideal time to get shepherds. They would all be star gazing, searching the sky for something or other, so it was easy to creep up on them and hit them over the head. One of my other dishes that seems to go down well is petit salé. I can't remember seeing salt pork on sale in England but it's easily available here and adding some onion, poitrine fumé and a whole fistful of thyme to the lentils gives a real zip to the dish.

The weather forecast is hopeful so, with luck, I can move on from this bout of cooking and start to do some things outside (apart from boules).

lundi 2 mars 2009

Ambiance

Ambiance
It was pizza night as usual tonight, although with fewer participants than usual. In all, even with Daniel's son Kevyn (and apologies for spelling his name wrongly in my last posting) and his friends, there were only about ten of us. Nonetheless, it was a good evening.

Before that I had played boules with Daniel and ensemble in the afternoon and played badly; so it was a boules afternoon that I will happily forget. Afterwards, before going on to the pizza evening, I called in on Daniel for an aperitif and was greeted as always by his dog, Gillette, looking for dog treats. I had remembered to bring some in my pocket. What struck me was the ambiance in the house, with Kevyn's friends wandering in and out of the room where Daniel and I were drinking and talking, doing some work on their laptops, talking amongst themselves or into their mobile phones and so on. It reminded me of a time in my late 20s when I would often go on from the local pub in Merton, the Admiral Nelson, to friends' Keith and Janet's house to continue chatting, drink coffee and eat cheese and biscuits. Keith and Janet were half a generation ahead of me, friends of my family. Their adolescent children would bring home friends after their own evenings out and everybody would mix in happily together. I thought then that, if and when I had children, I would like my house to be the one in which the children chose to bring home their friends to congregate, after school, after an evening out or whatever. I think that children are very sensitive to atmosphere and will naturally veer towards a place where they can relax and be themselves without any unduly inhibitive pressure. It never happened for me, whether because of my divorce or for some other reason. But Daniel's house, with Kevyn's friends around, had that same easy, relaxed atmosphere, spanning the generations, that Keith and Janet's had had in my past.

Tomorrow I have invited friend Steve to come round and eat shellfish. His wife, Jo, has gone back to England to see her mother (who is a valiant 95, the epitome of Shakespeare's sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything but game to go on) and Jo is not keen on shellfish. So Steve and I will take advantage of her temporary absence to have a shrimp fest. Jo is an excellent cook but Steve has occasional longings for some shrimp, crab, oysters, etc which can be assuaged during Jo's visits to see her mother.

dimanche 1 mars 2009

Giraudoux, Boules and a French version

Boules and Giraudoux
I played boules today with Daniel, his son Kevin and his sons friends. Daniel mentioned that he has now started on the full text for a skit that I thought of.

When the boules players gather in the summer, there is frequently quite a long wait while the players sort themselves out. Some players don't want to play with others, some don't want to play in teams of two, some haven't brought their boules with them, sometimes there is an odd number of players, etc. These pre-game discussions can go on for so long that I wonder whether we will ever get down to playing. It brought to my mind Jean Giradoux's play “La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu” or rather « La Partie de Boules n'aura pas lieu ». I mentioned the idea to Daniel and did a 3-page sketch of the potential text, which needed fleshing out.

Daniel has picked up the idea and run with it. He wanted first to re-read Giraudoux's play to refresh his memory and try to see which characters (Cassandre, Priam, Hélène, Agamemnon, etc) he could incorporate into the Mollans boules version. But now he has started writing. With decent progress and success it could be staged at the festival of the rue des Granges in the summer. How many of the boules players fancy themselves as actors remains to be seen.

La semaine en français
Bien que ce blog soit écrit en anglais (pour la plupart) j'ai cru qu'il pourrait y avoir des lecteurs français qui aient de la peine à lire l'anglais et qui voudraient bien voir un précis en français. Donc je l'intention d'ajouter à la fin de chaque semaine un résumé en français. Et je compte sur mes amis de m'avertir si je fais des fautes de grammaire ou d'expression. Comme ça, je ferai des progrès en français. Voilà.

La nouvelle la plus importante en fait n'est pas arrivé pendant cette semaine mais pendant la semaine précédente (quand je n'écrivais pas ce blog). C'est que ma fille Natalie et son copain Andy, qui étaient venu me rendre visite, se sont décidés à se fiancer pendant qu'ils faisaient du ski (ou peut-être pas!) sur Mt Ventoux à Mt Serein. J'en suis très heureux. Je devrais peut-être ajouter que ce n'est pas que je suis heureux de me débarrasser de ma fille mais que Andy et Natalie vont très bien ensemble.

Mes autres réflexions pendant la semaine regardaient surtout ce qui m'avait frappé comme différent ici à Mollans, de mon point de vue en anglais du sud de l'Angleterre. Par exemple, l'attitude envers les poutres et les chevrons/lambris qu'on trouve un peu partout ici dans les plafonds. Pour moi, ce bois du 19eme siècle est à chérir. Pour les Mollanais en général, puisque presque tout le monde a des poutres, on peut très bien peindre le bois ou le cacher derrière du plâtre. Donc, dans ma maison, j'ai une quarantaine de poutres/chevrons à décaper. Les conséquences de l'altitude me préoccupe aussi. Des différences de deux ou trois centaines de mètres, telles que l'on trouve au sud de l'Angleterre, n'ont pas d'importance. Ici, tout autour, il y a des différences de plusieurs centaines ou de milliers de mètres d'altitude et les conséquences pour la température, le soleil et l'ombre sont très évidentes. Également en ce qui concerne les droits et les responsabilités pour les propriétaires de maisons de village. En Angleterre normalement, tout est bien documenté et il y a très peu de cas où les droits/responsabilités sont partagés entre propriétaires. Ici, c'est le contraire.

Pour finir, il y a une petite histoire que je dois raconter, bien qu'en moins bon français que mon ami René l'a récitée. L'histoire explique comment Mt Ventoux a eu son nom. Il paraît que, à l'époque où Hannibal et ses troupes traversaient la France pour aller s'amuser en Italie, (il y en a qui croient qu'ils ont pris un pot au Bar du Pont mais ce n'est pas bien documenté) un de ces troupes en revenant vers l'Afrique a grimpé jusqu'au sommet de Mt Ventoux (qui n'était pas encore Mt Ventoux, bien entendu) en portant toutes les dépouilles qu'il avait ramassées pendant sa visite en Italie. Il s'appellait Abou. Il y avait beaucoup d'entre les troupes de Hannibal qui s'appellaient Abou puisque c'est un nom très commun en Afrique. Mais lui, du moins quand il avait atteint le sommet de Mt Ventoux (qui n'etait pas encore.....) s'appelait Abou Tdesouffle (le « t » ne se prononce pas dans le patois de Carthage). Or, il ne voulait pas descendre et continuer jusqu'à l'Afrique avec toutes ces dépouilles donc il les a mises par terre et il a monté un panneau sur lequel il a inscrit « Vends Tout ». Et c'est comme ça que le Mt Ventoux a eu son nom.