Midsummer Musings

Back Garden

A storm overnight two days ago and a subequent light breeze have brought blessed relief from the oppresive heat of the previous three weeks; temperatures are down by around 10 degrees and it is pleasant once again to be outdoors. A consequence is a lot more people out and about in the village. I hadn't seen Mana for weeks and assumed she'd gone off to visit friends she has in Greece, as she does most years ; but she turned up at boules yesterday and so I invited her to come and eat on Friday.

The heat fried some flowers I planted in the back garden to give some late season colour before they ever got established and that has prompted me to have a radical rethink of what I do there. It's looking very sad at the moment. I've decided that, despite the 500 litres of compost I've added to the soil, more is needed. Also, the wooden slats I've used to hold the soil in place are beginning to rot. So, I shall turn over the ground to extract more stones and build low walls with those to replace the slats. Even with the soil improved, I think that small bushes are the only answer as regards plants. I've bought a small hibiscus and hope it will stay a manageable size for a few years. Then I'll look for some patio roses, cistus or helianthemums to fill in, with perhaps some more lilies as they seem to do well. The back garden at this time of year seems to be a perennial problem but I still think I can find a solution.

Adjacent is a photo of the front of my house as it is at the moment.  There is in fact more colour there than meets the eye but alo too much green, due in no small part to the shadow cast across the front of the house by the lime trees on the opposite side of the road.  The large sunflower from a seed ropped by birds feeding on my balcony can just about be discerned at the level of the grapevine over the balcony.  But.........I need to do some more rethinking to, once again, get more colour at this time of the year.  Part of the problem is that three blue solanum in pots at the front which bloomed profusely last year have decided not to do so this year, perhap again because of the shade thrown by the lime trees.

Islam

Over lunch a few days ago, Steve, who is a history buff, and I got into conversation about the Moorish invasion of Spain. Steve pointed out that the Moors got as far north as Troyes in France but quickly dropped back again behind the Pyrenees and left little trace of their brief visit further north. In Spain, of course, their influence has been enormous and, I would argue, all of it beneficial. They not only left architecture of great beauty but also created a centre of scholarship in their great library at Cordoba and gave the world a lesson in tolerance. Islam became the official religion, of course, but christians were allowed to practice and were for the most part accepted as more or less equal citizens, although they could not hold office. By contrast, when El Cid and his cronies reconquered Spain, muslims were offered a stark choice: convert to christianity or die. It's almost the converse of what seems to be happening in the religious world today. And the christians effectively tried to ruin the beautiful mosque in Cordoba, a circular representation of the sun, by building a rectangular church in the middle. Someone once said that, if there was a God, religion was a cruel trick he played on humanity.

It's always puzzled me why the Spanish invaders are called Moors. The inference is that they came from Mauretania, which may have been partly true but can't have been the whole story. I met a number of Moors in my time in Senegal and they are a physically distinct race: jet black hair, jet black eyes, relatively pale skin and small in stature, contrasting hugely with the Taureg and very physically distinct from other arabs I have met. Those in Senegal at the time specialised in working with silver and ebony. The invading forces from north Africa may well have included Moors but must have included also many other arab types. So why are they always referred to as Moors? Perhaps scribes of the time knew no better.

PS
Formatting this post I've found again that accents do funny things to blog and website insertions.  The typesize changed after the tonic accent that I originally placed on the first "o" of Cordoba (the correct spelling).  I have deleted the accent but can't get the typesize to revert.  I've found in adding to my website on the village (www.mon-mollan-sur-ouveze.fr) that inclusion of an accent frequently causes the HTML round the following text to go crazy and generate spurious HTML which involves me in hours of extra work.  I can't be bothered to find a way to edit out the spurious HTML here.