Beans And Nature

A Bean By Any Other Name.....

After all these years I'm still learning a significant amount of French. Having lunch with Daniel and Marie today, when we got to the coffee stage, it occurred to me to ask what a coffee bean was in French. I couldn't believe that the obvious “haricot de café” could be right but couldn't think what else to call it. The answer was “grain de café”. So I said: “Why not “graine de café”, since a “graine” is a seed? The answer was that “graines” are for sowing and “grains” are for eating, a nice distinction. Then I thought what bags of haricot beans were called in the shops and remembered they were called “haricots secs”. So why not “grains de haricots”? Because you wouldn't say that; you could say “haricots en grains”. Why? Don't ask.

Nature Red In Tooth And Claw

I've learned that it is dangerous to drive with the car window down. I much prefer that when driving around the countryside to keeping the window shut and using the air conditioning. However, driving back from Carpentras on Friday I was hit in he face by a wasp, bee or some other flying insect. Instinctively protecting my face, I swerved off the road and into a ditch. That would have been bad enough but a few yards from were I went off the road was a concrete pipe continuing the ditch under a driveway, which I duly hit at around 40mph. I escaped with a few cuts and bruises but the car is written off. That was an expensive flying insect.

Chelsea

I've not often mentioned my life-long and fanatical support for Chelsea football club (great restraint!) but have to say something now.  I'm tempted to say that what the team achieved in the last third of the season defied all belief (even mine) were it not for the fact that it was sheer belief, doggedness, obstinacy or what you will that enabled the team to achieve it.  Chelsea now have the ultimate European crown and, whilst the team won't be remembered for their elegant play in winning it, it will be long remembered for repeatedly defying all the odds.

My Mother

My mother is not eating and so is increasingly weak. So I shall go back to England on Thursday to see if I can improve matters. Is this nature's way of saying that when you've had enough you've had enough? 

Government Changes

A Change

Holland has been promising changes and we got the first of these on Sunday: himself as President. Since his electoral programme called for change without specifying what, when, how or where, we have to wait to see what other changes there will be. He has precious little room for manoeuvre and Merkel is already making noises to the effect that the agreed fiscal straightjacket is sacrosanct, so they are likely to be minimal. No doubt there will be some small concessions to be made as a thank-you to the electorate but the only large change I've seen suggested (from outside France), freeing up sections of the economy from government ownership/control, is completely alien to the French psyche.

Whatever measures Hollande decides on he will probably be able to enact quite easily. Parliamentary elections are due in a month and the polls point to a sizable majority for the centre-left parties. The Senate (equivalent to the House of Lords) already has a centre-left majority. Members of the Senate, incidentally, are all elected, by people who hold elected positions (mayors, councillors, etc). Now there's a thought for House of Lords reformists.

It turned out there were enough people who simply wanted to get rid of Sarkozy to do just that, just: a majority of a mere ~3%. Sarkozy's crime was not his handling of the economy, which generally met with favourable comments, nor his despicable swerve towards extreme right racism when the polls turned against him. It was rather his lack of taste. Outside France it is difficult to appreciate just how important “le bon goût” is to the French. It pervades the whole of life. Perceptions of food, drink, dress, relationships, public behaviour and just about everything else are governed by it. What matters is not so much what you eat or drink but always taking a little at a time, not piling up your plate or overfilling your glass. It is not what you wear but the cut of it, not whether you are faithful domestically or have a string of lovers but how you go about it. Style is all and Sakozy lacked style. He was generally perceived as brash and vulgar. He might have got away with it in more affluent times, if the economy had been booming and there was little unemployment. But ostentatious displays of enjoying a celebrity life-style when most of the population was having to tighten belts wasn't a bright move by any standards. However, it was the perceived vulgarity of his life-style that seems to have done for him. It is no accident that the “modesty” of Hollande's celebrations of his victory has been highlighted in the press.

Language

It wasn't necessary to know much French to follow what was going on pre-election. There were a number of “interviews” and we also had “le talk” and "un talk-show", in particular about the possibility of the socialists making “un come-back”.


 Which takes me more humorously to names.  I have to admit not being able to repress a giggle when my attention was drawn to an actor playing in a musical in Paris called Yvan Le Bolloc'h.  The French get their own back, of course, with Sean Connery (connerie = stupidity).

Moving Department

Mollans administratively is a kind of peninsula at the lower end of the Drôme Department, surrounded on most sides by the Vaucluse. The road signs have always amused me in that going almost anywhere means leaving the Drôme (Merci de votre visite), going into the Vaucluse (Bienvenu) and then coming back into the Drôme (Bienvenu again). Well, that's about to change.

For one thing, Departments, which have been a major part of the French administrative infrastructure for some 200 years, are being phased out. Within Departments there have been “communities of communes”, collectives that pool the resources of several communes to provide services that it doesn't make sense for communes to provide individually. Garbage collection, water and school facilities are examples. In future, these collectives will assume many of the powers currently invested in Departments.

Well, Mollans village council has decided to jump ship, leaving a collective centred on Buis (in the Drôme) and joining one centred on Vaison (in the Vaucluse). The main difference I can discern is that the former collective had a more or less low-rates, low-spend ethic and the new one has the opposite. The obvious attraction for village council is that it will get a bigger budget but there is some dissent among villagers at the prospect of garbage collection and water bills rising. It's probably the cost of changing all the road signs.

Reflections From England

Water, Water Everywhere......

I've just spent 10 days in England visiting my mother for her 95^th birthday and, of course, had to arrive in the middle of the wetest April for over a century. England must be the only country in Europe that can have a drought and floods simultaneously. I suppose that is unlikely to change until more leaky pipes are repaired. It's becoming clearer to me that infrastructure cannot be successfully privatised. This is something the UK has got wrong and the rest of Europe right. It's hard enough to get a government to focus on infrastructure, given 5-year tenures; private industry will always see more profit in short-term fixes.

I read an article while in England noting that some places have three water systems: added to the usual drinking water and foul sewer systems is a dirty water system, essentially a rain run-off system. Cleaned of sediment and debris, it provides a supply suitable for most purposes other than drinking and reduces the risk of floods at the same time. Given the amount of concrete now covering much of England, there must be numerous opportunities to put this in place. It's definitely needed and will be more so in future; but whether it makes economic sense for privatised water companies is another matter.

There seems to have been a mood swing generally in Europe away from focusing primarily on reducing deficits and towards a focus on growth. The big financial authorities seem to concur. Unless some measure can impel the banks to open their purses the obvious action is a touch of Keynesian government injection. But in what, if infrastructure is privatised?

The Countryside

Needless to say, the English countryside looked only mournful in the rain, which was a pity as I think it looks at its best in the spring. I was a bit late for daffodils and narcissi but caught some bluebells on my perambulations.  One thing that struck me was that the roadsides were covered in yellow, as here. But in England the yellow was gorse in bloom, not coronilla and broom. On reflection I'm surprised that gorse does not grow here. It's made for a harsher climate and should thrive in the garrigue undergrowth, yet I've never seen any.

Back here, it's poppies, euphorbia and purple salvias along all the roadsides; and the asparagus and strawberry season is in full flood, not just in shops but in small-holdings all around the village.

My Mother

My mother had a fall, not a serious one, but one that entailed a short spell in hospital and which has weakened her further; she now weighs just 4.5 stone (33 kgms). That, and her increasing loss of short-term memory, have made me wonder how long she can continue in her own home. It hurts me to see her exhausted making the small slow movements necessary even in a little well-designed maisonette. Although I now go over for a week every couple of months, I feel guilty about not spending more time with her, the more so in that she is so delighted and grateful when she sees me. Yet she remains cheerful much of the time, taking pleasure in the birds that flock to her feeding tables and the stocks and freesias I bought for her sitting room.

The rain did stop for enough hours for me to plant flowers in the pots on her patio and to re-arrange the pots to allow for a garden chair. I bought two, one for the front and one for the back, in the hope that some warm sunny spells will arrive to allow her to sit outside.

Website

My son, Carl, came on the Saturday and we started to get to grips with WordPress. Carl installed the incipient site on his server in the “cloud” and we had time to upload some of the text I had prepared. The software is powerful and it's clearly going to take me some time to become familiar with it. Also, the multi-language facility is more complicated than I had anticipated. I'm going to have to consider the design of the site carefully if potential third and possibly fourth languages are to be added easily, without having to change the structure of the site.

Fortunately Carl is very adept and friend Steve provided some useful comments on my original text, so I'm confident that more progress will be made soon. In the meantime I can send the improved text to Claudine to get it translated into French.