Winter Life

Winter
Winter is now here and Christmas is coming. The evenings have been gradually getting colder, although nothing like to the extent they can if they put their minds to it, and the weather has become more mixed. Today was fine again, with the temperature this evening only slightly below zero. The two previous days however were overcast and yesterday brought a lot of rain and high winds. The ground needed the rain so it was not unwelcome. Driving down the Ouvèze valley to Buis this morning, however, I noticed that most of the colour has gone from the hills, not surprisingly as the hills behind Buis were blanketed with snow down to about 1000ft. And the high wind has stripped most of the remaining leaves from the trees and vines. There were also layers of cloud down to not much more than 500ft. Even so, the scenery in that clothing still has a great deal of charm; it certainly beats the view from my former house in Reading.

Christmas is coming because the Christmas lights have been put up in the village. This involves a day in which one street after another becomes blocked off (and each time blocks off access to half the village) because a big chair-lift truck is needed to put them up. However, the village has the good taste to put up lights in Chelsea blue and white colours, which proves I was right to come here.

Life In General
The winter routine has taken on its habitual form. I've been to eat with Daniel and Steve and Jo, they and Mana have been to eat with me. I've been to see two films, one very good and one definitely missable. The Ruban Blanc (a German film whose German title I don't know) was a kind of social study of the repressive social scene in an extremely puritan Germany before the first world war and was very much worth seeing. The other, a Japanese film with the title Une Jeune Fille à La Derive, was supposed to be a landmark in Japanese cinema and may be but didn't seem worth the time. An Iranian film, A Propos d'Elly, promises to be good and I shall see it later this week or early next week. With the variety of films on offer I usually have little idea from the cinema programmes, which have promotional descriptions of course, as to whether a film is worth seeing (or to my taste) or not so I use the imdb.com database to check the films out before deciding whether to go or not.

I've commented previously on French acceptance of sub-titles allowing a far wider range of films to be shown than is the case in the UK. Another factor is that French cinemas are subsidised (at the moment). UK towns similar to Buis, Nyons and even Vaison with its “massive” 6000 population would never be able to support a cinema and the same would be true here without subsidy. To have three within easy driving distance is, in a sense, a luxury, but is an enormous boon in the winter. For as long as that lasts.......The universally derided Sarkozy has removed the wealth tax on companies that helped pay for such luxuries and already the cinema in Buis is asking for volunteers of all sorts (even projectionists) to help the cinema stay afloat. You can argue whether companies should have such an imposition placed on them but you can also ask what has been done in the UK to help keep village communities alive.

The printers have produced the proof of the village guided tour brochure I did the translation for and it looks good, running to some 40 A5 pages. Daniel showed it to me briefly this evening at the pizza get-together and I immediately spotted one mistake I made. Hopefully there won't be too many more; the problem is that as my French becomes more fluent so my English becomes less so. I'll have to practise over Christmas! A new library, now fancily called a “mediatech” (but do you know of any in English villages?), is being opened in the village in January and the brochure is destined to be unveiled at the same time so we should be ready. I shall be interested to be able to get my hands on the village archives, which have been difficult to access previously but will be freely available in the new mediatech. That will give me the incentive to really lobby for a good website for the village in place of the feeble excuse for one which we now have.