On Being Old In Mollans

On Being Old, In Mollans

I’ve just come back from a lunch organised by the Amiriés Mollanases, the old folks organsation in the village, called «un repas gourmand» but which could equally be called a «repas gourmet». The distinction is whether the meal is plentiful or of high quality and this was both. What the organisation does is to invite a delicatessen from smewhere (the Gers region in this case) to put on a spread and advertise and sell its products while providing a good meal for us wrinklies at a low price. The price was 10 euros, around £9. For that princely sum I had an aperitif, half-a-dozen courses of excellent pâtés, sausages and hams (what the delicatessen was mostly selling and a meal in themselves) plus a main course of preserved duck (confit de canard) and beans, cheese, as much wine as I wanted and coffee. I think that is a very good meal and incredibly good value for money. The goods on sale were high quality but relatively expensive; I didn’t have to buy anything but did buy a couple of jars of confit de porc (pork cooked and preserved in its own fat) and a jar of sausages similarly prepared.

At the event leaflets were distributed for the old folks Christmas lunch, something we haven’t had before but organised this year by the Amitiés Mollanaises. It’s a similar deal, a good lunch with wine and coffee for the same 10 euros. In January there will be the old folks lunch organised by the village council, a luxurious 4-hour affair with music and dancing, served by the mayor and village councillors. That is free of all cost to we wrinklies.

Being old, we wrinklies tend to die before long, too frequently. That happens in Mollans as elsewhere but in Mollans at least there is good reason to believe you can die with a smile on your face. You certainly won’t die of starvation.

The event reminded me of a question i was asked at my interview for gaining French nationality in Grenoble: what does «fraternité» mean in the French holy trinity of «liberté, égailté, fraternité»? The key, to the French, is that fraternité you pay your due taxes, which can then be used for the benefit of the community as a whole. It is a crucial distinction between a society in which everyone is supposed to look out for themselves, first and foremost (and devil take the hindmost) and one in which the welfare of the community as a whole takes precedent. Among other things, this means that we wrinklies are looked after here, very well.

 

80th Birthday Etc

80th Birthday

It was one of those birthdats that are deemed to be important but I’m not quite sure why. It marks another decade of survival but so do 20th and 30th birthdays and they are not deemed especially important. My survival thus far has rarely been in doubt. Having escped from being knocked down by a car and appendicitis at age 10 little else has threatened my life until 11 years ago. Then an early diagnosis of bowel cancer thanks to my local doctor and subsequent operation certainly did save me from a lot worse but that is about it. So I have been lucky thus far. Luck has also played a large part in a satisfying career and enjoyable retirement. 

 

I am lucky also to have two very good friends in Steve and Jo who invited myself and several other friends to celebrate my birthday with lunch at their place, as the photo shows. It was a highly enjoyable and memorable occasion and I owe that to them. 

Gardening

The argyranthemum by the front gate is doing me proud but there is not mush colour elsewhere; a few fuchsia and nasturtium flowers are all I have to show. It’s time of the year when I think about which plants I am going to try to save over the winter. The choice has been surtailed by some loirs having eaten pelargoniums and geraniums on my balcony. I don’t think loirs ewist in England and all my dictionary searches can come up with as a translation is dormice, whch they certainly are not although they may be the same species. They look like miniature squirrels and generally nest under roofs. There’s not much I can do about them this year but they are reputed to dislike strong smells so I am going to try camphor capsules, used here to stop moths eating clothes, to deter them from feasting on my plants next year.

 

Getting French Nationality

Next week I have to go to Grenoble for an interview that should be the final step in my obtaining French nationality. Strictly speaking I don’t need it as I have a titre de séjour giving me the permanent right to remain here. However, since that is what I intend to do it makes more sense to be French. Also I think it may help my granddaughter to become European if and when she so desires. At the moment she is a Scot, in the future maybe in an independent Scotland or a possibly much-changed UK. The only problems for me know are the French administration’s insatiable desire for documentation and the normal delay of 12-18 months after the interview to hear whether I have been accepted.

 

Rémuzat

 

Rémuzat

The Amitiés Mollanaises organised a stay in Rémuzat this week with people from around the area, Sarrians, Beaume de Venise, etc, for general relaxation and a boules tournament. Rémuzat is an hour’s drive north of here, in the foothills of the Alps, where vultures were successfully re-introduced a few decades ago. The stay was very enjoyable for everyone, I think, made the more so for me by my winning the boules tournament. During the stay some of us drove up to a small plateau at 2000ft to see the birds in their habitat. It was a magnificent sight. At first there were just 5-6 eagles coasting through the air below us and then, suddenly, a dozen vultures in the sky above us. I had been told that the vultures couldn’t take off until the air had warmed sufficiently to create updrafts and clearly that moment had then come. It was a bit different from the sparrows, nuthatches and tits I see on the bird feeders on my balcony. I took some photos but the vultures, large as they are, came out as mere specks in the sky. Anyway, the scenery allowed itself to be photographed. Must get myself a better camera (or a better photographer).

 

Work And Robots, People And profits

Robots are good, science fiction would have us believe, given a directive no to harm humans. The "no harm' stricture doesn't apply to humans of course. Robots can be very useful, precise in their actions to a degree that mere humans cannot attain.But if they dive, and look increasingly to drive, the manufacturing and mechanical world, do we want them to drive the rest of our world too?

Work is now in my past. In that past I sometimes worked very hard at times, sometimes less hard but generally enjoyed it and had some fun along the way; but I never realised how lucky I was. Recent acquaintance with people doing mundane jobs has made me realise that. In (too) many cases these jobs are simply using people as robots that haven't yet been designed.  The thought shocked me.

Ive done quite a few mundane jobs in holidays to earn money when I was a student. There was never any interest in the job itself but I reckoned that I gave value for money in the effort I put in. And there was the bonus of social interactions with colleagues and the knowledge that I was doing this so that I would never have to do the same for the rest of my life. Others, I also realised, would not be so fortunate but would at least have the social interaction and enough money at the end of the week for a Saturday night out. Not any more it seems.

Around 40% of benefit claimants in the UK are in work, so bang goes that Saturday night out. The effort I put in to woek ws never measured but now it is. Every moment of someone doing a mundane job is now scrutinised to ensure that they are doing the job at the desired (maximum?) pace, through headsets or the clock. So bang goes social interaction. Workers of mundane jobs have simply become robot substitutes. The goal, of course, is profit, ever more profit.

My knowledge of all this is just from the UK and I have no idea how widespread it is in other developed countries. But if people are dehumanised to this extent no one need worry about climate chanage; the human race will destroy itself in the pursuit of profit. If there is such a thing as absolute evil it consists in treating another human being as a thing (John Brunner).

 

Further Late Night Thoughts From My Balcony Over A Calvados

Further Late Night Thoughts From My Balcony Over A Calvados

I have always found anomalies intriguing because they tell you that something that you think you know or your reasoning must be wrong. So you have to rethink. Here’s my latest.

A humanoid skull dated to 200,000BC and attributed to Devonian man was found some time ago. Much more recently DNA has been extracted from it and undergone analysis which proved it identical to current homo sapiens DNA. That surprised no one since Devonian man has for several years been presumed to be homo sapiens prime ancestor, with little bits of Neanderthal and possibly others in the mix. What we don’t and can’t ever knnow is which bits of the DNA were switched on or off. That has some significance because we all now carry the DNA to potentially turn us all into hairy apes, but it is switched off. We don’t know what got switched on or off or when but what we can quite reasonably infer is that Devonian man had the same potential as humans today.

Set that aside for the moment look at the generally agreed picture of human development after 10,000BC, the end of the last ice age. Hairy cavemen (and women) and primitive technology come to mind. Recent discoveries, particularly Gobekli Tepe, have shown that at that time technology in some places at least was more advanced than previously thought. Agriculture and farming, understanding of astronomy and ability with stone carving, for instance, were more advanced albeit still quite primitive. But…..if the ice age and its cause had wiped out all previous technology that would be the case (a big assumption, admittedly). So consider then advances in technology from 10,000BC to today. They are huge and have been developed over a mere 12,000 years. So, if we are to assume that this is the height of human technology development to date we must assume that Devonian man, with the same potential, did nothing with that potential for around 170,000, as against 12,00 years. It’s an equally big assumption. You can choose which assumption you wish to make but I think you must make one of them.

The root problem here is hard evidence, virtually all of which if there was any would have been wiped out by the last ice age. There is, in fact, more evidence for technologically very sophisticated societies existing prior to the last age than there is for only hairy cavemen roaming the planet (the two could co-exist, of course, as they do in effect now).  But none of the evidence is really hard; it’s anecdotal, the stuff of myths and legends. Prior to year AD0 there wasn’t one god but very many different ones who were worshipped all over the globe. So what then constituted a god? Someone/thing with technological capabilities you couldn’t comprehend? Items discovered embedded in coal seams, which must be at least 300 million years old (we currently think), pose further conundrums.It’s all very puzzling but try imagining a man in a pin-stripe suit and a bowler hat carrying an umbrella and brief-case 50,000 years ago and see what that does to your picture of pre-history.

 

What Is Stars?

 

What Is Stars?

The weather being what it is (fine), at around 11 o’clock in the evening after watching football I like to sit on my balcony with a calvados and maybe coffee to hand, smell the jasmine and contemplate some of the unsolved mysteries of the universe. As Sean O’Casey put it in Juno And The Paycock, «what is stars?».

My thoughts have been given sharper focus by the release a couple of days ago of the US government report on UFOs (or UAPs as they prefer to call them: Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon). I’ll stick to UFOs because one thing the report confirms is that these are objects, not tricks of the light: radar and other sensors have detected their solid prescence. Not only that but, as the report also confirms, their oberved movement defies anything we know about locomotion today. The compelling question then is not where they came from or whether they contain little green men but how the hell did they get here?  Time dilation, wormholes between parallel universes or something we've not even been able to imagine? Who knows? Because to do so they would apparently have to defy our current standard model of physics; Einstein eat your heart out. We do currently know that Einstein was wrong in some aspect of his theories of relativity but not in what aspect. The report quite rightly refuses to speculate. 

The other aspect of the report I found interesting (and the published report is only the cdelassified version) is that it takes account only of sightings confirmed by military personnel. There have been some 140 of these in the past two years, about one a week, disregarding any other reports by civilians. So someone or something out there has got something like CCTV on the Earth. A great aspect of the report is that it legitimises reports of UFOs and indeed, suggests that the fear of appearing foolish has suppressed many more reports. That suggests that much more relevant information (as well as wacky fantasies) should become available in the near future. As wacky fantasies go I can foresee a headline in The Sun newspaper(?) «Will Aliens Intervene In The Euros? If England lose to Germany that must surely be the case. I’ve no idea what else to make of the report but it poses enough fundamental questions to fuel many more nights with a calvados on my balcony.

And Yet More

More

Just more pictures of flowers and no apologies for that because this will almost all be fried and over in a couple of months time.  In the first, the front of the house, you can just see at the top the jasmine hanging down from the balcony which is perfuming the living room (and another is doing the same for the terrace out back). I didn't plant the sunflowers; they are gifts from the messy feeding of the birds on the balcony above.  The second is one of the pelargoniums I managed to keep over the winter and is doing its nut in the front too, along with others.  The third is the balcony in which you can just see towards the top the blue clematis which has clung to the honeysuckle down one side of the balcony and is now in full bloom.

Just About The Garden

 

Just About The Garden

Over a month ago I thought I was just about done with the garden, apart from maintenance. It’s the «just about» that keeps me busy. My attempt to front the long boxes on the balcony with Lobelia failed miserably so I have now replaced them with some climbing nasturtiums I grew from seed. They can climb up the railings on the balcony or drop down from them. Either way they won’t affect the limited space for guests on the balcony. There’s room for two guests and two chairs. Sit on the left for long and you are liable to be crawled over by clematis or honeysuckle; sit on the right and scrambling geraniums will do the same. It’s your choice. 

The photos below are of the view from my bedroom window, the front of the house, the Pilgrim rose in the back garden and the balcony

 

There’s honeysuckle in bloom to the right and left of the balcony so the scent in the evening is great. The one to the right seems to bloom twice a year unless I’ve got one of them in the pots beside the porch below. One I know I stuffed years ago into a hole in concrete that covers one of the spring sources that runs in font of my house. I don’t think there’s another in a pot but honestly can’t remember what I’ve got in the pots now and they are too crowded to see properly, although I do know that there are at least two clematis in them. It’s probably why I am known as the mad English gardener. French pots would have plants metrically spaced and lined up in rows for inspection. Anyway, it uses the lilac tree beside the porch to get up to the vine that grows over the balcony and climbs all over that.

 The honeysuckle on the left goes up to my bedroom window and seems to be trying to climb in (see photo). It has flowers that start as red buds whereas the other is pure white/yellow so must be a different variety. It had started to climb along with the jasmine all over the TV dish above it until I got Carl to risk live and limb pulling it down last year. If you haven’t got much horizontal space but vertical space up to the sky what do you do?

I’ve now got bunches of sage and winter savory drying in the sun on the table on the balcony. I find winter savory («sarriette» here) an intriguing herb since I never encountered it in England and it grows profusely in my herb patch and has even self-seeded on the roadside. I’m sure it must be around in England since it is perennial here to temperatures way below those that England experiences. It seems to be used here mainly with goat cheeses but has potential for stews and casseroles. The scent/flavour is somewhere between oregano and thyme. 

 

The pots of seedlings that were on the balcony are now planted. The climbing nasturtiums as I have said and the morning glory in the pot on the balcony that conatins the jasmine and the rest over the road in the pot against the wash-house. Both are intended to produce flowers later in the year after August has fried nearly everything. Morning glory don’t like being moved, the ground here is not conducive to seeds and I have had limited success with them in the past so I’ve put some more seeds as an insurance in a pot on my kitchen windowsill alongside the two chilli plants, pot of chives and a dahlia tuber starting to sprout. The last is another «just about»…………..

More Flowers

 With the lemon tree now on the balcony there is no room for more than two persons on it. I was especially pleased with myself on getting the lemon tree from the terrace at the back down to the balcony. I couldn't possible lift it in the pot and was confronted with six steepish stairs to navigate.  I'm not usually that imaginative but have copious books in the house and managed to create temporary shallow stairs with books to slide he pot and tree down. It took about half an hour but time is one thing I have a lot of so what the hell.  Here are photos of front and back.

Flowers

 

Flowers

Nearly there! Curtailment of the markets, and length of journeys, at the moment has meant I’ve had to get plants from the couple of local garden centres, which has restricted my choice of what flowers to plant somewhat. That situation is complicated by the fact I tend to get into argumens with myself about what to buy and plant where; and I tend to lose the arguments. However………..the remaining container on the balcony is now planted, as is another of the hanging baskets, the couple of vacant slots in the front have been filled and the rather careworn pansies from the hanging basket have been reansplanted across the road. What remains is to decide what goes in the one remaining hanging basket and then to find spaces in the back garden for whatever is left over. Even I should be able to manage that. I’ve also got climbing nasturtiums and morning glory seeds sprouting on the kitchen windowsill as well as a couple of pots with chilli plants in them. Alongside the existing pot of chives; I’ll worry about where to put the nasturtiums and morning glory later. The chives supplement the sage, mint, oregano and winter savory in the herb patch in front and I’ve planted some ginger among the itises opposite as an experiment. Mad Englishman indeed! It all makes sense to me (sort of).

Also over is my camera problem so here are a couple of photos, of the the back garden and the clematis and rose in the pot beside the wash-house which I’ve decided to take over from the village auuthorities, 10 yards along the road and opposite my house.

 

Early Summer?

 

Early Summer?

in my last post I said it’s spring but now it may be early summer; the two collide here in a very short space of time. Much depends on the cold Mistral wind. If it’s not blowing or if I am out of it and in the sun it’s early summer; in it I regress to thinking it’s still only spring. Locally grown asparagus and strawberries have arrived in the shops and markets and the same goes for melons grown under glass; but maybe it can’t truly be summer until the apricots arrive. The local orchards have been full of bloom, we just have to wait a while for the fruit to follow. I’ve been putting some fruit, mangos, kiwi fruit, into small jars with fruit alcohol, sufficient for a dessert with friends. In fact extending culinary possibilities for meals with friends has become something of an obsession during the confinements. I think that will probably become increasingly important to my social life in the future.

Gardening

My gardening is progressing slowly. Watering has been the main concern as we have come through the principal time for rain here with the number of times it has rained that you could count on one hand. So I have been watering twice a week. One long trough on the balcony has been planted and one hanging basket. I still have two hanging baskets and various empty slots to fill but am struggling to find the plants I want in among the limited variety available in garden centres and markets. Some successes are showing. The clematis and sclimbing rose against the wash-house 10 yards along the road and opposite my house are in bloom as is one clematis directly opposite. At the back the cotonilla is doing its yellow nut as is the climbing rose, white spring in summer is in bloom as is a red potentilla. So far so good.

Royalty

The funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh gave me cause to reflect on what I really thought and felt about the occasion rather than what every Brit was supposed to. It was a sad occasion, obviously, particularly for the Queen, who looked bereft. But I can’t honestly say that I personally mourned. It is always sad for some when someone dies (John Donne’s No Man Is An Island) but for me it was just a stranger dying.

I’m in favour of the UK having royalty as nominal Head of State rather than a President as I think it offers more for a similar price. But I am very glad to have no part in the extensive royal family and would like to see privileges accorded to the extent of it curtailed. The bargain seems to be that royals are privileged and therefore owe a duty to the state. But duty is a cold word, hardly one to live one’s life by, and few people do. A merely dutiful husband/wife is a cold one. Most people live their lives through their emotions, ambitions and necessity. It is this, perhaps, that is at the root of the brouhaha around Harry and Megan and Diana in the past. If you are born privileged, you are supposed to choose duty above how you wish to live your life. In this respect, the royals are more an institution than a family and it is the institution that rules. I think that maybe countries such as Holland and Denmark have found a better arrangement for the modern world.

I find a bizarre contrast in this with my French friends. They always seem to be more au fait with what is happening in the royal family than I am yet would never want a royals as Head of State in France. There is privilege in France, plenty of it, but not associated with royalty and generally resented by those who don’t have it. The «peuple» in France, which can be lossely translated as the working classes, seem to me to be much more conscious of their collective power and jealous of their rights than their English counterparts and much quicker to protest if they think them infringed. The working classes in the UK seem somehow more deferrent to privilege; protest in the U>k is token; in France it is designed to disrupt. History, no doubt, accounts for these differences but my sympathies are with the French version of protest.  Show them that you mean business..

Travelling On Youtube

I’ve mentioned before that during lockdowns I’ve watched a lot more videos on Youtube, on archaeology, politics, and for cooking ideas but also to revisit places from my travelling days. Travelling is on hold for most people now (apart from the thousands coming into Heathrow during the UK lockdown) but I’ve indulged in nostalgia and been hugely disappointed. Not that I’m likely ever to see those places again but now I don’t want to. I stayed for a week on Samosir island in Lake Toba, Sumatra, a primitive paradise among kind, gentle people. There was no running water and no electricity but there were the «cleaner fish» in the lake and it was bliss. Now there are packaged tours there, with all that that implies. I stayed a similar time in a hut on an unspoiled, almost empty beach in Phuket where now there are hotels, swimming pools and loungers. I slept in a cave in Petra and danced the evening away with Bedouin around a camp fire; now it is no longer permissible to sleep in the caves and the Bedouin can no longer graze their camels and goats there. So it has been disappointing to revisit these places, even vicariously, but I am even more glad I visited them when I did.

Spring Is In The Air

 

It’s Spring!

The weather over the past week has been brilliant, warm and sunny with temperatures around 20 degrees in the sun in the middle of the day. Next week is predicted to be cooler but hopefully not too much so. Maybe it will rain, we could certainly do with some. Having decided to start watering a couple of weeks back I’ve found that some plants that I thought were dead have shown new shoots; so if I want to keep them alive, as I do, I have to keep on watering. It turns out that I had very few plants die over the winter so I don’t have a lot to replace.

Gardening 

I’m particularly pleased with my «front garden», the roadside across from my kitchen that I dug up. Only a half-dozen of the 20 or so irises I planted bloomed last year but this year almost all have. Allied to the daffodil and narcissi bulbs I planted last autumn, they have made a great display. I’m now thinking of trying to grow some ginger among them over the summer. It will be an interesting experiment. All my clematis (a dozen or so) bar possibly one seem to have survived and the only significant failure seems to be the grape vine in the back garden. That was very unexpected and as there is a climbing rose and a clematis growing through it I’ll probably have to leave the dead stems where they are. Nick, an English friend who has now departed for pastures new, left me some low rectangular pots, two of which I put on the front of my balcony filled with daffodil bulbs. These have flowered and so I shall replace them with something that shows up from below; marigolds perhaps, or petunias, I’m not sure. When I decide over the next few days the result will be a list of plants to be acquired in the Vaison market next Tuesday. The back garden, my «jungle», is now complete, so all I need is plants for the three pots in front of my bedroom window and the few spaces to be filled elsewhere. I’m looking forward to fulfilling the expectations of the village of the mad English gardener. Photos will doubtless follow.

Clearout

Spring is a time for spring cleaning and although cleaning other than the essential is not my forte I definitely need a clearout. Departing English friends have left me with a plethora of things that I need to sort out. I have also had at the back of my mind for some time the knowledge that I have a ridiculous number of shoes, pants, socks and jackets (many saved because they’re still OK for gardening – well, it’s only got a small hole, tear, stain in it) that have to be culled. The same goes for technical equipment: bits of old computers, cameras no longer functional, superfluous cables, etc. I need to go to the village dump anyway to get rid of garden debris so a major clearout is indicated. I just have to get down to it……...

Boules

The fine weather has got me playing boules regularly again, mostly in Buis. I’ve been playing reasonably well but with only occasional flashes of consistent good form. The problem I find with a flash of good form one day, producing small miracles, is that people get disappointed if you can’t do the same the next day. Anyway, if the village tournament is cancelled this year as it was last year, that will mean I will have been village champon for four years in succession, surely a record for an Englishman anywhere in France.

What Restrictions?

France is still well and truly under the cosh of COVID but Patrique and Valerie at the Bar du Pont epitomise for me the French attitude to restrictions. Public spaces are closed so where to play boules? Patrique opened the Bar’s garden below the Bar by the river so that we could play boules there; it’s private ground. Although restaurants and cafes have to remain closed, apart from for take-aways, the Bar du Pont can be open for 6 hours per day for newspaper and tobacco sales. Since it can also provide take-aways, you can also get a drink there but you have to take it away, at least as far as the terrace outside. Of course the terrace is officially closed but how do you enclose an open space like that especially if, from behind the bar, you can’t see if anybody is on the terrace or not. Business (not quite) as usual.

The Jab And French Attitudes

I’ve now had one anti-Covid jab and the next is scheduled for a month’s time. The system for applying for a jab here is broken. You have to apply for one by pho ning a number that seems permanently engaged. Friend Jo made a breakthrough by suggesting she, Steve and I go to the vaccination centre in Nyons to see what could be done. When we arrived there were notices that no appointments could be made there. However, a kind nurse said that although she couldn’t give us an appointment she could ask the vaccination centre to phone us, rather than us trying to get through to them. This she did, Jo was phoned the next day and bingo!

This aligns with other anecdotal experiences to bring me to the following conclusion. In France, if an official system is broken, the people working within it know it and understand the difficulties Jo Public faces. Remain respectful and polite but dtermined and officials will themselves try to overcome your difficulties. It seems to highlight for me a difference between officials in France and in the UK. In the UK Jobsworthy seems to rule; in France officials seem inclined to regard their duty to the public more important than their duty to their employer.

The Power Of Ignorance

I resolved a while back to just let UK politics go and not comment. It seems obvious to me what is happening politically there and, I arroganlty feel, if others can’t or don’t want to see it or try to do anything about it, too bad. However I still feel a residual loyalty to the country, as a used-to-be beacon of democracy. The great far-right gamble, which was attempted but has been temporarily halted in the USA, is so far succeeding in the UK and may continue to do so. As an article in The Independent recently pointed out, a lot of people in the UK have seen through the obvious shenanigans by the government but feel powerless to do anything about them and are resigned to them continuing, resulting in apathy. Which is exactly what the government wants for it to remain in power. Satire and ridicule are powerless since the government is already itself a parody of good government.

What the government, and its servile elements in the media have done is to harness the power of ignorance. At any one time, most people are ignorant of a lot of aspects of how things work in practice. These are not necessarily stupid people but ignorant, as they must be, of a lot of things; nobody has the time, let alone the intellect to be anything else. Many people in the UK are just now waking up to what Brexit means in practice. Exploit this ignorance and you can expound all types of fantasy and get away with them. With Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in all kinds of disarray, even if you see through the fantasy, what can you do?

Flag waving is all the mode in the UK at present, particularly among the money-grubbing pygmies currently running the country. It needs true patriots to see the danger, to be vocal, to be active and to protest, to prevent the UK’s demise as a country of any worth or standing. The demonstrations of protest in the UK need to continue, if only to combat apathy. Please, Keep Britain Great.

Little Green Men

I never really believed in little green men, even in the depths of lockdown (honestly!). However, a scientifically knowledgeable friend and I have come up with an interesting (for the moment) conjecture. It is known that Einstein was wrong in some aspect of his theories of relativity but not in what aspect. So what if that aspect was the speed of light as a delimiter? The implications would be enormous. Teleporting has been shown to be possible, albeit with only a particle over a matter of yards and the time taken was probably not measurable. No one yet knows whether larger items over longer distances are possible. But what if…………………? Hesienberg said that physics is not only stranger than we think but stranger than we can think. Should be good for a few sessions over aperitifs or digestifs until someone with better knowledge can elucidate.

Update: Hobbyhorsing Around

 

Update: Hobbyhorsing Around

I’mbeing urged to update my last post, so here goes. Some friends accused me of believing in little green men, alien abductions, etc. Well I never really gave much consideration to little green men, although little green robots are still in the possible mix. And I don’t really think I’m going off my trolley but I’m definitely suffering from lockdown; suffering from too much time to think, insufficient evidence and an inadequate brain.

Too much time and idle curiosity have got me delving into unexplained archaeological mysteries. It’s a good subject for curiosity because so little is known for sure if we go back a few thousand years. Let’s dispose of at least one case of the stone carving precision I mentioned previously, at Cusco in Peru. To recap, the mystery is how huge stones in walls were carved in complicated shapes so accurately that they fit tightly together with no mortar, inadequate tools (as far as we know) and without even a paper’s width between them. I’ve found a paper which gives an explanation. The stones were mined and the mining would have produced an acidic slurry. The paper proposes that this slurry was used as mortar between the stones. The stones are of granite with a high silica content and the acid in the mortar would have attacked and softened the silica, itself dissolving in the process. The weight of the upper stones would then have crushed the lower stones together. That explanation seems very likely to me; using mortar between stones in a wall was common practice so now it seems it was perhaps the absence of that that most needed explanation. The rest then follows.

There’s plenty more that needs explaining of course but my curiosity has revealed a few gems. One recent discovery puts back the time at which we think humanoids (not necessarily homo sapiens) made tools by some 100,000 years, which illustrate how little we really know about what was going on tens of thousands of years ago. In fact, on occasion after occasion a finding puts back the time at which the first of whatever happened by a few thousand years. There is significant evidence of the use of electricity that long ago, not that people fully understood it then but that they were able to generate and harness it in limited ways. The same goes for the smelting and use of metals, although how the very high temperatures needed were achieved remains a bit of a mystery. What I think I have learned is that crude technologies were in use much earlier than we have previously thought and that tens of thousands of years ago the earth consisted of relatively sophisticated civilisations existing cheek by jowel with extremely rudimentary ones. Think city building farmers alongside hunter-gathering cave dwellers.

Another thing I think I’ve learned is that widespread travel happened much sooner than we realised. For instance, there is quite strong evidence that the Chinese arrived in north America earlier than anybody else. tens if not hundreds of thousands of years ago, which throws our current reading of the movements of early man into the melting pot. If that is true the spotty nature of the spread of technology seems a bit strange but maybe the traveling adventurers didn’t include technologists. People moved more easily than ideas: that wouldn’t be so strange.

There’s still those aliens to account for. I’ve no idea whether they exist or not and the probability according to astrophysicist seems very low. The counter to that is, as Heisenberg has said, physics is not just more complicated than we think but more complicated than we can think. So…...to the little green robots. What do we send to far planets that we want to investigate? Robots; so they would liely be the first things that any advanced alien civilisation, if it existed, would send to investigate Earth. A general objection to any alien beings visting Earth is the limitation of the speed of light over the distances involved. If nothing can exceed the speed of light, as Einstein’s theory of relativity insists, the time to reach Earth would exceed the lifespan of anything we can conceive of. But…...we know Einstein’s theory of relativity is wrong, maybe only slightly so but possibly fundamentally so. The limitation of the speed of light is essential to the theory of relativity but not to quantum physics; in quantum physics could speeds vastly superior to the speed of light be possible? At the moment, it seems, nobody knows, so that’s another mystery waiting to be solved. Quantum physics in itself is an invitation to fantasy. When a theory is proposed in science, to be of any use, it also has to have an observable test proposed that would demonstrate whether it explained whatever anomaly it sought to resolve. But…….we appear at the moment to have reached the limit of size of particle we can detect; we (think) we know there must be smaller particles but, since we can’t detect them, we can only theorise about their existence and, more damningly, therefore can’t propose an experiment that would demonstrate their existence. Physics, in this sense, seems to have reached the same point as philosophy did with Wittgenstein; put bluntly, it disappears up its own arsehole.

Behind all this thinking and speculation is the little consideration of trying to separate fact from fiction, reality from fantasy, what we (think) we know from what still has to be understood. In popular discussions, scientific facts are often referred to, equally often without the realisation that scientific facts aren’t necessarily true; they merely accord with the available evidence. The only true facts in science are mathematical axioms, which don’t get you far when trying to unravel archaeological conundrums.

All through the writing of this piece I’ve tried to be very careful of my use of language. Facts, truth, reality, fantasy, what we (think) we know……...a dance of the semantics. As an aside, it throws a light on the politically correct crowd who want to control our use of language. I have a friend who has had a stroke and becomes angry if anyone tries to describe him (in French) as of disadvantaged mobility; he insists he’s handicapped. That’s the reality.

All this apart, what’s been happening in the last fortnight? Well, the daylight hours have increased markedly, which suggests gardening. Not much is yet possible but I can get down to some pruning and clearing of dead stuff. I’ve also decided to advance my cooking into the field of desserts. I normally eat fruit of some (any) sort for dessert and just get ice cream for those I invite. However, I made baclava yesterday and it proved an instant hit. My next target is a good rice pudding, with lemon, cream and a covering of nutmeg. And this morning I found some popcorn, my favourite munch whiile watching football, in the local supermarket, mid-size plastic buckets of it. Learning from last year, I bought three of them. They’ll be sold out by next week and that will be it for the year. A UK supermarket would immeduately re-order anything that sold out that quickly; here «it’s great that sold so quickly, now let’s get something that lasts longer on the shelves». There’s no sign of a COVID jab for me yet; my friends Steve and Jo, who should be ahead of me in the queue because of Steve’s handicap (sic) have been offered the possibility of one in June. So for me…….August, September maybe, and I’m in one of the priority categories. Come on France, wake up!

Visitations From Outer Space

 

Visitations From Outer Space

OK, maybe it’s just ockdown getting to me but…………………….

 Like most people, I’m sceptical about UFOs and visits from aliens (as well as ghosts, poltergeists, the devil and God in my case). But again……………….

I’m becoming obsessed (oh,oh, lockdown) with recent archaelogical findings relating to 10,000 – 12,000BC that imply the existence of advanced machine tools during that era, and also a map (an actual map, not an implied one. The unexplained phenomena are how rocks weighing up to 150 tons got moved over significant distances and how they were cut/carved with extreme precision, like down to less than a millimetre of variance, showing no signs of having been worked by primitive tools. There are still some puzzles about how the Ehyptian pyramids were built but nothing on this scale. The map from the period has a very accurate depiction of the coastline of Antartica. It’s possible that Antartica wasn’t totally covered in ice then but, even given that, who at the time knew how to draw scale maps of large distances very accurately?

Some of these discoveries are quite recent so archaeologits haven’t had a lot of time to thiink about them. Anyway they would be wary of compromising their credibility in any explanation suggested; my credibility is always in doubt, even with myself. What is needed is a hypothesis that fits the known facts. Is it possible that a human society had reached such an advanced state of sophistication at the time and subsequently disappeared without trace along with its tools? In my view it hardly seems possible so we need an alternative hypothesis. Here is my crazy(?) one. Around 12,000BC or maybe before there was a visitation from outer space. The visitors might have been sentient beings but almost certainly included robots, maybe only robots. They pissed around the planet for a bit doing whatever took their fancy but also precision cutting stones in Europe, South America and Asia, and then got homesick or were recalled. Human beings were around at the time and must almost certainly have bumped into them. So how would these human beings have reacted? Most probably (in my view) they would have created god myths to explain them. There’s something about god and other myths that corroborates this; they nearly all contain a germ of truth (with a lot of doubtful elaboration around that).

There could be questions of accurate dating of these artefacts but archaeologists don’t seem to be raising any and they know more about dating methods than I do (no jokes about dating methods, please). Anyway, even given a millenium or so of variance in dating accuracy the anomalies still hold. Implications for current UFO sightings? Yes, why not? Maybe they just want to know what we did with their stones.

OK, it could just be lockdown and I’m going off my trolley but…….come up with a better hypothesis. And it’s got to conform to Occam’s razor.

What To Do In Lockdown

 

What To Do During Lockdown

This seems to have become the most common conversational topic recently, along with how your morale is doing. So this is a personal take on the questions.

Most of my time has been spent in front of my PC. You can find everything from the sublime to the ridiculous on the Internet and I have been wandering through the offerings, mostly via YouTube. Once I’ve woken up, drunk a coffee, done my wake-up-brain sudoku, looked at emails and perused the news via the news aggregator site I use, newsnow, I go to YouTube; hence my newly found interest in mankind’s early development. That apart I can’t say I have found any new interests. I bounce around between cooking, football, music, some science and linguistics, archaeology/anthropolgy of course, and watching steam trains. I can’t say I have found anything earth-shattering but I have, for instance, got some good new ideas on recipes and also been amazed at the singing abilities of some kids of tender age, 10-14.

What about TV and films, obvious possibilities? I’m not used to watching much on TV other than football and Channel 4 news and, for some reason, that hasn’t changed. French TV, the Arte channel apart, is more trivial even than British TV. Because of football crowd restrictions in the UK, more matches are televised which means I make less use of the dodgy Russian Internet site which tries to sell me Indian brides on which I watch matches I can’t get on TV. I suspect the site is run by the Russian mafia, so they do have their uses, and who cares if the commentary is in Serbo-Croat? I’ve got a second-hand subscription to Netflix but don’t seem to be driven to explore that very much. I haven’t got many DVDs I haven’t already watched but I do have loads that I’d quite like to watch again. But, mostly, I don’t watch them again. And for some reason I can’t get down to reading.

What about the world outside, the bit we are permitted to visit? My exercise has been more limited than it probably should be. Gardening is on hold. I walk frequently to the baker’s to get bread, since I love fresh bread, but the weekly or twice-weekly excursions for shopping don’t really count. And the weather hasn’t yet been conducive to long walks. My excuse is that there are 36 stairs in my house and that helps a bit. I can still invite friends to come to eat and I get invited usually a couple of times a week. That’s about it.

The news is generally depressing so I don’t spend a lot of time on it although I can get hooked on the evolving Brexit situation in Britain and its Teflon government. Whatever happens there with COVID the government can’t be blamed, as a recent survey showed; a quite large majority blame other people rather than the government for any failings. It’s people lacking common sense who are to blame. And neither can the government be blamed for any adverse effects of Brexit; people (lacking common sense?) voted for it. So who determines events, what happens next; who is in charge? It has to be the people lacking common sense. No wonder the country is f*****d.

So how is my morale? I’m not depressed but hardly full of the joys of life either. I feel I’m getting along OK, putting life on hold a bit but looking forward to the spring and, hopefully, less risk to life and fewer restrictions. What puzzles me slightly is that I seem to be feeling some kind of restlessness that shortens my attention span. Is that because life is on hold, lockdown or just advancing age? Maybe I’ll find out later on.

History: A New Perspective For Me

 

History

I’m not a history buff but through watching too much YouTube during lockdown I have become intrigued by some recent archaeological discoveries. There’s an analogy now between archaeology and fishing. Fishing boats no longer go out hoping they will find some fish; they go out, turn the radar on and locate the fish. Similarly, archaelogists no longer rely on a chance find as an indicator of what might be an interesting site; they peruse satellite images and know in advance what sites could be interesting. This greatly speeds the rate at which discoveries are made and there have been some intriguing ones recently. They pose some intriguing questions..

There’s an historical theory that around 3000BC human beings stopped being hunter-gatherers and became farmers, the dawn of agriculture. However, recent finds have shown agriculture being practised in some places around 11,000BC. Even more intruigingly, ruins originating around 3000BC recently investigated in different parts of the world show that a standard measurement was used in their construction that is a precise fraction of the world’s circumference. So somebody before that time had worked out the circumference of Earth. Moreover, this was in several geographically distant regions so it seems likely that this information was shared rather than being calculated separately and simultaneously in different places. So there must have been much more widespread travelling at the time than previously thought. There is evidence, for example, that the Chinese were in north America around 10,000BC There’s also evidence of some relatively sophisticated tools, such as powerful drills, used on hard stones well before 3000BC.

What does all this do to our understanding of humans’ early history? Well, it demolishes the idea of the neolithic revolution for a start. It also demolishes any general idea of stone ages, iron ages, etc. That all varies over time depending on what region and society you are talking about. It’s also clear that very primitive and quite sophisticated societies co-existed in different parts of the world many thousands of years ago, long before we realised. And that poses numerous intriguig questions. For instance, if superior knowledge was sometimes shared across large distances, why didn’t it become generally accepted and used? What happened when a relatively sophisticted society rubbed shoulders with a relatively primitive one? Most interesting for me is what a map of knowledge per century BC would look like. You would likely find, at any one time, a high degree of understanding of maths and engineering and probably town life similar in many aspects to what we know now in odd places in India, Europe and elsewhere, with people in other places living in caves and just learning to create stone tools.

Whatever this does, it smashes any idea of people across the globe progressing uniformly from cavemen hunter-gatherers to agriculture and then some form of more sophisticated society. It just couldn’t have happened like that. It must have been very much a stop-start rocess. It also smashes the notion I was given at school that knowledge discovered by the Greeks and Romans built the foundation of modern European society. Newton said that if he had seen farther than others it was because he had been able to stand on the shoulders of giants. The same must have been true of the Greeks and Romans. And, oh boy, wasn’t the history education I received at school blinkered by European eyes. So…….what exactly was happening and what had (some) people worked out thirteen centuries ago or even before? I guess we’ll have to wait for more archaeological finds.