Autumn Watch

Autumn Watch
The autumn colours this year are really doing us proud. It's not an obvious area for autumn colour as there must be at least one evergreen tree for each deciduous one; the vines make the difference. They turn every shade between light yellow to gold, brown and red. Interestingly, I would have thought that the hue they change to would probably depend on the vine variety. Indeed, blocks of vines do change all together to the same colour but, in a sizable minority of cases, there is considerable variation within one block of vines. I've no idea why this is. The whole panorama is enhanced with the many pyrocanthas in the hedge rows. I've been meaning to take my camera out and get some photos but autumn colour is one of those situations where I find getting a really good photo difficult. The problem seems to be that a panoramic view, for one reason or another, doesn't really work and getting a good focal point, with a panorama behind to get the variety of colour, is absurdly difficult.

The weather we have been having is unusual in that it seems to be changing in slots of four days. Ten days ago we had three days solid rain (unusual in itself) followed by an overcast day and then 3-4 days in which the midday temperature reached 24-26 degrees in the sun. I was eating outside at lunchtime and playing boules in just a T-shirt in early November! Now the rain has returned, albeit not as intensely as before, and is predicted to last for the next three days. Anyway, I got the last of my spring bulbs planted, the blue pansies are in place, and the roses have had a dose of slow-action fertilizer so that's about it for the front of the house until next spring. There's still some work to be done at the back.

One of the part-time English residents here, a guy called Alex, turns out to have been at Bristol University at exactly the same time as I was. He was doing economics whereas I did modern languages so perhaps it isn't surprising that I never knew him at Bristol, amongst some 4000 other students at the time. Also, he went there from a public school whereas I did from a state school and there was a very noticeable public/state divide in social life there at the time. Bristol was a dumping ground for public school kids who didn't make it into Oxbridge, so nearly half the students were from public schools, which lent itself to a tendency to a class divide in social life. That was also partly based on how much money one had to spend but that tended merely to reinforce the divide. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that, given our proximity in the past, we should meet up subsequently in a small and somewhat remote French village.

And another interesting statement from the book The Discovery of France (Graham Robb). Around 1860 the average life expectancy from birth of a French person was 38 years, increasing to 55 if you lived through your first five years. That's probably not too different from other major European countries at the time. However, the biggest single cause of death then in France was not starvation or disease but a kind of death wish. In the winter here social life tends to seize up unless you are determined to be active. As mornings and evenings become darker, there are fewer people on the streets and they retreat behind shutters for much of the day. So it's not difficult to perceive that in earlier and harder times this isolation would be accentuated; apparently, inactive peasant farmers rarely sought out an alternative form of labour (e.g. making artefacts) during the winter months. There's even a suggestion that there was a biological reason for this. Inactivity slowed the body's metabolism and made winter stocks of food last longer. However, if a member of a peasant farmer family got sick, they would apparently take to their bed and expect to die, perhaps even as a relief from the hard life that they led. This kind of death wish was reinforced by the family's understanding that a mouth less to feed would make the winter supplies go further. It all sounds rather fanciful in our times but it seems to have had a powerful effect. Assuming that that went on for centuries before 1860, it would have become ingrained and would help to explain some underlying attitudes in the peasant farmer population now.