Mostly About Photos

The Bench

A couple of years ago I moved a bench from further down the road into the space between two trees on the opposite side of the road opposite my kitchen window. This year I posted two notices on the trees. One quoted Georges Brassens “Les amoureux qui se bécottent sur les bancs publiques …..ont de petites gueules bien sympathiques” and the other quoted John Donne “No man is an island...donc ne cherchez pas à savoir pour qui sonne le glas, le glas sonne pour vous”. I felt that they would give people sitting on the bench something to think about while viewing the scenery. However, I also went to the Mairie to say that the wood on the bench was rotten and needed replacing. So, two months ago, the village council had the bench removed and they have taken two months to replace it. In the meantime I and others went to the Mairie and pointed out that cars were being parked in the space and spoiling the flowers I had planted and that some elderly people who could not walk far came to sit on the bench and could no longer do so. This week, while I was away in the regional boules tournament in Chorges, the bench was replaced. So all is now well again.

Flowers

I'm of a generation that deals in text rather than graphics, which dates me. Everybody now posts photos, and has the means to do so, Thus my blog has been noticeably lacking in graphic content, a point which I'm determined to correct at least to some extent. So here are some photos of flowers in the front of my house and at the back. My house has become known in the village for its floral display and the best way to convey that is to show some photos; no amount of description can do the same in any useful way. Tourists takiing turns to take photos of themselves in front of the house are such a commonplace that my neighbours Florence and Jean-Marc say it is the most photographed house in the village. So photos there shall be.

Chorges

This week the village boules players and I went to Chorges, in the mountains near the Itlaian border, to play in the regional boules tournament. None of us did particularly well (no surprises there) but we all enjoyed ourselves, which was the main objective of the exercise. But, again, a photo is called for and in this posting or the next another will be forthcoming. I'm doing my best to get more graphically and less textually oriented.

Photos

There is a saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words and that can be the case. After all, what greater testament can there be to an event than that you have actually seen it with your own eyes? However…….I recall a class in my sixth form at school in which a teacher was trying to teach us to question everything and think for ourselves. In one lesson he showed a large photograph which could be cropped in different ways to suggest different interpretations of what was happening. In particular I remember a photo of a scene of devastation in a newspaper in which a policeman could be seen grasping a plank of wood which was on top of the head of a man on his knees. So was the policeman brutally beating the man over the head with the plank of wood or taking the plank of wood off the man's head to allow him to stand up? There was no way to know and the newspaper could equally have captioned the photo “police brutality” or “police help”, according to what it wished to convey. So a picture may well convey a thousand words but not necessarily the words you read in its caption.

That should be a caution for the graphically oriented generation, although text also should carry similar cautionary notes. As ever, the distinction will probably be between those who want to jump to conclusions and those who are prepared to say that they are not sure, that they don't really know. And those can be the most difficult words to utter.