Photos And Sham Solutions

Catching Up On Photos

I haven't been showing many photos lately but I have been taking them so I thought I'd catch up. The first of those below is of friends Steve and Jo receiving their French citizenship in the Prefecture in Valence. The second is of one of my attempts to capture the blue of the sky here, at the boules courts in Buis. It doesn't fully capture the intensity of the blue but shows someof the gradations of shades. The third is of my back garden right now. 

Sham Solutions; The Inherent Conflict In Democracy.

Most countries have problems of one sort or another and Britain has as many or more than the rest. So what are, or may be, the solutions? How do you find them? It sounds simple; rack your brains (and most countries have a fair percentage of very good ones) and look at what solutions other countries have found. It has been baffling to me why the UK hasn't found better solutions to many of its problems, better solutions that friend Steve and I even with our political differences, often find. But I realise that I have been naive; it isn't at all that simple.

From the electorate's point of view the problem is simple to state, even if individual solutions may differ widely. It's much more complex from the politician's point of view. There there is not just the problem itself, there are also the Party line and Whips, convictions and the desire to be re-elected.

Citizens within a country may feel they have a big problem, be concerned about the effectiveness/efficiency of their education systems, their healthcare systems, their (personal) security systems or whatever; a single, perhaps difficult problem but not one difficult to define. But they will need a political solution. Over to the politicians then.

Their big problem, whatever issue the electorate raises with them, is how to get re-elected. So their obvious solution is not necessarily to solve the problem that the electorate has raised but they must appear to have addressed it. Illusion is all, from their perspective. If they can successfully provide the illusion they don't need to address the problem at all. Which is easier?

Democracy, to the slight extent that it has succeeded in the world, has depended on two essentials; education of the electorate and the existence of independent sources of information available to the educated public. Only these can constrain any politician whose major concern is to retain position and power (by no means all politicians). The health of any democracy depends on the respect accorded by politicians, of whatever persuasion, to these two essentials. Subvert them, downgrade education and spread false information and the real victims are not just the electorate, fooled into accepting lies and fantasies and unable to discern them, but the very democracy itself.

Spring And Colours

Spring And Colours

All the evidence says that spring is definitely here now. In the open daffodils, narcissi, muscari, forsythia, japonica and violets are all in bloom and friends Steve and Jo's lawn is carpeted in primroses. My garden is too exposed for primroses to take hold but I have one that has sown itself in the front, nestling in the shade between two pots. In the markets and shops there are local asparagus to be had, expensive for the moment but they will reduce in price by a third over the next two to three weeks.

Spring and Easter always gave me a psychological boost in England and they do even more so here because I know that so many of the things I like here are about to appear. There are already Charentais melons from Morocco, which are good, in the shops and the local ones won't be far behind, followed by apricots, peaches and nectarines. My lilac and roses will start blooming, eating outside will become the norm and there will be warm evenings when I can sit on my balcony with a Calvados to hand.

Spring does, however, seem to be rather late this year, somewhat surprisingly after a mild winter. We have had really cold weather, plus the customary one day of snow, for only a couple of weeks in December, since when temperatures have held up during the day. And most of the flora blooming now would normally have been in bloom a couple of weeks earlier. At the beginning of April the hillsides would normally be blue and yellow, the yellow of coronilla and the blue of irises; but the coronilla is just showing signs of coming into bloom and I haven't yet seen an iris blooming anywhere. Anyway, my back garden and the pots in the front are pretty much ready for lift off so there is much to look forward to.

As for colours, blue is the colour, as every Chelsea fan knows, and I have been trying to capture the blue of the skies here on camera, with little success to date. It's the quality of the light that drew impressionist painters here in the past and that comes from the blue sky. I've been tempted to describe the blues in the sky as deep blue but that is inaccurate as the blue is not necessarily dark. Rather it is an intense blue, light or dark, and it tends to have a slight shade of violet within it. It varies from what I would call a pale Wedgewood blue to an intense violet and the deeper shades are generally apparent when the temperature is at its highest. On some days you can see the gradations increase from early morning as the day heats up. And the intensity of the blue tends to be emphasised by the frequent lack of even a whisp of cloud in the sky. One day, hopefully, I'll capture it in a photo.