Mothers, A House And Flowers

Other Mothers

Last pizza evening I was talking with friend Dany about broken families of one sort or another and the question of step mothers/fathers/etc came up. To my surprise Dany said that the French have no way of distinguishing in-laws from step whatevers except by context. A mother in law is a « belle mère » and so is a step mother. What I found most interesting, on reflection, was the semantic implications of this.

A semantic gap normally implies that the culture behind the language has had no need to make the distinction and the gap therefore introduces no ambiguity. However, I can think of at least one case in which the distinction is pertinent: French inheritance law; and that has been essentially unchanged since the time of Napoleon Bonaparte. Under French inheritance law a mother in law would not inherit from the birth-mother's estate directly, only through her spouse, and she wouldn't enjoy the rights of usu-fruit that a step-mother would. I wonder how the French have coped with this ambiguity, unless context always makes the distinction clear, which is difficult to believe.

So, effectively, “belle mère” means “other mother”: i.e. other than birth mother. Further precision can only be given by context. That was a new on me.

It's usual to link languages to countries but I prefer to link them to cultures. Belgium and Luxembourg are obvious counters to the language-country link. However, it occurred to me, when walking the dog the other day, that there is a problem with synthetic languages such as Arabic and Indonesian, the latter particularly. There are over 400 languages in Indonesia, which is why Indonesian was created as the official language. But how can it possibly properly encompass 400 different cultures, even if these are closely related? There have to be a lot of semantic gaps. Unfortunately I don't know enough about either the languages or the cultures to have an inkling about what the gaps are or how they are circumvented.

Mana's House

Marijka, a Dutch lady who bought Mana's house, invited me a few evenings ago to have a drink and see what she had been doing to the house. I think I must have commented on Mana's house before. It was built around 1730 and has magnificent old features: many original wooden doors, to large wall cupboards as well as rooms, including a front door with a key so big it would never fit into any modern pocket, original floor tiling upstairs and original windows. It served the village in the 19^th century variously as a school, hospital and Mairie.

I felt it was important (although I could do nothing about it) that whoever bought it should be sympathetic to its original features; they weren't protected any way in French law. Fortunately Marijka has done a very sensitive job of modernising the house whilst keeping, and even in some cases accentuating, these features. In one of the (seven) bedrooms she has painted all the walls white and removed everything except a severely designed four-poster bed imported from China, draped with traditional Chinese red cloth. The doors of the wall cupboards either side of the bed, each over seven feet high, therefore stand out as the features they should be and the whole is completed by the traditional French ceiling beams. The room is modern in its starkness but a show case of the old features. Marijka has also greatly improved access to the roof terrace, taking down a ceiling in the room from which access was obtained through a crawl hole at the top, replacing it with a full-size door, retaining the cross-beams from the demolished ceiling below a higher ceiling.

I was really pleased to see the way the house was being sensitively both modernised and restored

Dipladenias

To keep some colour at the front of the house in late summer I bought a couple of Dipladenia. They're not a plant I have encountered before and not one I like especially; they look a bit “plastic” for my taste but their dark green foliage and deep red trumpet-shaped flowers undoubtedly go well together and they are popular here. A search on the RHS website revealed that they are tropical plants, thriving in an all year temperature of 20 degrees and reaching a height of 10 feet. I want to try to keep them over winter so I'll see if they can survive in my (unheated) terrace room; my lemon tree does, against the odds, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed

More Autumn (And Football)

More Autumn

Last week I got the urge to garden, an urge I find difficult to resist. The urge happened to coincide with some quite large blue pots on offer in the local supermarket, so I bought one to go on the wall side of my balcony. Something to climb up the wall, I thought: a clematis, another jasmin; a rose? Why not all three? That was being too ambitious for the size of pot so there was only one solution: another pot. The jasmin and clematis are now installed in one pot; the other pot awaits a suitable rose.

I then decided that there was no way I could make the roadside opposite my kitchen window suitable for growing anything much but noticed that there was room for a large pot beside one of the trees without causing inconvenience to anyone. So I bought a plastic pot large enough to hold a climbing rose which I shall place there.

I also cleared up most of the back garden and bought 50 narcissi bulbs. I'm still rethinking the back, how to get more colour in August and September. Geraniums and bizzie lizzies seem to be the popular options but I'm not keen on either of them. I've planted some lavender but will have to keep thinking. I want all the planting done this autumn so that the plants can become established over the winter and are ready to take off next spring.

The weather continues to be surprisingly mild in the evenings. Early mornings are becoming noticeably dark and misty but the days are still warm and sunny and the warmth continues late into the evenings. Usually, at this time of the year, you need a sweater on after about 7 o'clock but now it's still shirt-sleeves temperature until 9-10 o'clock at night. I love the warm evenings so that is a real bonus.

For the last two Monday evenings we have been eating indoors at the Bar du Pont, although light rather than temperature has dictated that. Roberto has decided on “tartiflette”, a kind of potato, cheese and bacon hotpot, as a regular alternative to pizzas for the winter and that suits me fine as I like it and can never get through a whole pizza.

So, for me, the autumn has started well (and for Chelsea too); the optimists among the local soothsayers are predicting that the weather will hold well into December. I hope they are right.

Racism?

Friend Steve copied me an article by Rod Liddle, a good football journalist, which was a rant on the Football Association finding Chelsea captain John Terry guilty of racism when a criminal law court had found him not guilty of the same charge. I found I agreed with most of the article, even leaving aside the self-evident and long-established ineptness of the FA (not for nothing commonly known among football fans as the sweet FA).

What caught my interest was neither the FA's role nor the question of whether John Terry did utter the attributed remark or not. There were two points that came together in my mind. Firstly, after what was a very fractious match in which the incident occurred, all the players apparently shook hands and agreed to let bygones be bygones; that happens in a lot of matches in most sports. Secondly, Terry grew up in a multi-cultural neighbourhood playing with kids of many colours and currently plays at a club with a similarly mixed ethnicity, counting several black players as his avowed best friends. So it is unlikely that he is racist in any generally accepted sense.

That does not mean to say that he may not have made a racist curse in the heat of the moment and thus offended the thought police. Curses of sublime vileness are frequently made in football and no doubt other sports' matches. On the record are players at one time or another having uttered such sweet nothings as son of a whore, I fucked your sister and your mother's a whore. Zinedine Zidane was famously sent off in the penultimate World Cup final for reacting to one such comment (his opponent officially deemed blameless). So what's the official line on these sweet nothings? Nothing.

One point of view is that much that is regrettable is said and done in most high-adrenaline contact sports that is best settled after the match when tempers have cooled in peer-group reconciliation. And it's not just football; no footballer has yet been accused of biting a lump out of an opposing player's ear. Nor is it just men's games; I have a cherished video of a women's match that out-machoed any men's game I've seen and could easily have been the basis of GBH proceedings.

Another point of view is that racist comments are different; you can say an opponent is a son/daughter of a whore or his/her mother is a whore but not that he/she is the (black) son/daughter of a black whore (or, presumably, a white, yellow or even green whore).

It is into this absurd, legally ambiguous and politically correct minefield that the FA gaily ventured, with the inevitable result that it simply reinforced its reputation for ineptness.