Gardening

Gardening
Since I go on about gardening a lot I thought my faithful readers might like to see some of the results. Being one of the verbally rather than visually oriented generation, I tend to neglect pictures. So above is a photo of the back garden behind and above the small terrace.

There will be more in the future. At the moment, the front of the house is between stages: the daffodils and narcissi are starting to die and the summer planting has yet to be done. I'll get down to it when I return from England. The blue pansies though should be good for another month.

More On Translation, etc

More On Translation
It's always words with Daniel. He got me to proof read his series of parodies of La Flèche's speech to Frosine about Harpagon in Molière's play L'Avare. He's written them for the “Lire En Mai” book festival in Nyons in the first week of June, of which he is one of the organisers. It's certainly true that it's always better to have someone else proof read whatever you have written. He wants to publish these himself and also asked me for some help with formatting.

So I duly went to lunch with him today and I had a task for him. I find it difficult to sort out which lines of activity change the word in French according to the gender of the activist and which don't. For instance, a primary teacher, an “instituteur” becomes an “institutrice” if the teacher is a female but a secondary school teacher is always a “professeur”, masculine or feminine. I had a whole list for him to go through and advise me on. Contrary to my expectations, most of the words do change according to the gender of the activist. I didn't know (or expect) that you could have a “bouchère”. Most of the list I was uncertain about; for instance, “électricienne” and “vigneronne”. They turn out to be OK. “Plombier”, it seems, doesn't change but we couldn't think of many others that didn't. One surprise was “chauffeuse” which my trusted dictionary allows as a female chauffeur but Daniel insisted was always and not just also a piece of furniture.

This reminded me of previous scribblings about true/false friends in language and humbling mistakes waiting to be made. Friend Steve had commented at the time that I'd omitted the obvious example, which was “baiser”. I had and it was surprising because I had had a real-life example of this. “Un baiser” is a kiss but the verb “baiser” is rather more. Back in the 1970s I was invited to give a talk at Rennes University by John Laski (brother of Marghanita, another wordsmith), who happened to be teaching there at the time. John's grasp of French was nowhere near as good as his grasp of computing. The computing department at Rennes University had acquired a very pretty new secretary whom John wanted to introduce me to and he did so in his melodramatic manner taking her hand, kissing it and saying: “Comme elle est belle; je veux la baiser”. This was quite possibly what he actually wanted to do but it wasn't what he actually intended to say. The girl fortunately understood the mistake and shrugged off the intended compliment, laughing. “Bises”, even “grosses bises” or bisous” are much safer words in polite company.

Etc
I've been pinching bits of the road again but this time only a few centimetres. There's a kind of concrete box to the side of my front door which has been partly broken by a lilac tree growing though it. I've been looking at a small hole with cracked concrete around for some time, wondering whether I can get a honeysuckle plant in there, So today I removed a piece of the cracked concrete and found the hole is not quite big enough; there's too much lilac tree in it. However, moving the cracked concrete out into the road by just a few centimetres allowed me to get a honeysuckle plant in. So now I have a cementing job for tomorrow to get the concrete pieces reset around the somewhat larger hole. I don't think anyone will notice and, more importantly, I don't think they will care. They'll just enjoy the honeysuckle when it blooms. It will climb up the lilac tree along with a clematis I planted last year and which is already established.

The weather here continues to be mixed, mostly sun (around 20 degrees) with small storms in the late afternoon. The storms dictate when the boules sessions end and I'm not doing so badly now; five straight wins today. It seems the people who put the drains underneath the boules pitch are coming back to fill in a rather large depression under which the drains lie. That should rectify some of the more difficult places to play.

It's back to England next week for my mother's birthday. Spring was always my favourite season in England and I shall go the rounds of the garden centres to get some colour into my mother's garden.

Spring Events

Blossom Time
There's been blossom around for almost a month now. The first trees around to come into bloom are the almond and the winter cherry. They are followed by the peach, fruiting cherry, apricot and plum (and apple) and that is now happening. There aren't so many peach trees locally but all the others are adding their blooms and, within a week or so, the whole area will be ablaze with fruit tree blossom.

I've taken a number of photos of acres of fruit trees in the past but never yet got one that really did justice to the scene. The problem seems to be that you need either to be above the trees looking down or in amongst and under them. Otherwise what you get is a thin line of blossom in a much larger scene. I'll be trying again to capture what the (selective) eye sees. It's strange in a way because I have several shots of fields of poppies that really work and that, on the face of it, is a similar challenge. It probably needs someone much more adept at photography than me to resolve the problem.

Village Events
The Bar du Pont has duly changed hands and the seemingly perennial Jacques and Monique have been replaced by new owners. The ten days the bar was closed were put to good effect as the beer barrels and freezer have now disappeared from view, resulting in much more space in the bar which has been welcome for the last two crowded pizza evenings. Also, a redecoration job has made the bar a lot lighter and a big new TV screen (ready for the World Cup?) and a subscription to Eurosport have added to the new image. And the new owners have been going out of their way to be welcoming.

The change of ownership of the hairdressers doesn't happen until next Saturday (apéro in the Salle de Fêtes that evening) but the library (sorry, médiathèque) was duly officially opened the Saturday before last. This needs some explaining unless you are used to municipal cock-ups.

The inauguration itself was uneventful in the extreme, in that people went into the library and and wandered around it and then were asked to go outside for the official opening and cutting of the ribbon to allow entry. What ensued was some 90 minutes of every conceivable person involved at local, departmental and regional level giving speeches as a result of which I understood what a book was and that the Internet was important too. By the end it was starting to rain and people were disappearing so I think I twigged the purpose of all this. There was a free apéro offered after the speeches and the length of the speeches ensured that few enough people hung on to fit within the free apéro budget.

Budget was certainly a pertinent point. The new building is nothing less than magnificent and apparently cost around 700,000 euros, financed at various levels in the local government hierarchy. It was mentioned during the speeches that alternative projects considered included the possibility of a covered boulodrome, so I'm not sure they got their priorities right; but I suppose that is arguable. However.............there is a remarkable lack of book shelves and books in the library; strange, for a library. Also, the impeccably furnished multimedia room lacks any computers. It appears the budget didn't stretch to such lesser items. These will follow......? It seems crazy but I suspect that, within a year or maybe a year and a bit, there will be a good library here. One thing I've learned here is to trust evolution. It takes time to get things right but they eventually seem to happen. It reminds me rather of a (sarcastic) cartoon that was pinned up in an office I worked in which showed two elephants mating and had the caption: around here things happen at a high level, involve a lot of noise and trumpeting and it takes two years to get a result. There's a follow-on project to put up a good website for the village (with me as official English translator) so we shall see......

Following on from the opening of the library there was a Saturday morning exhibition for the “writers of Mollans”. I duly attended with the (obsolete) computer books I have written and a selection from the hundreds of press articles I have kept. The principal interest seemed to be in the photos of computers in the first book I wrote, machines much less powerful than the modern PC and that would easily have taken up most of the space in the new library building. For anyone unfamiliar with the computing scene in the early 1960s (only 50 years ago), the machines appear antediluvian. Some visitors also tried out their English on my press articles and commented (variously) on the associated photos of me in earlier years. The other writers had mostly written autobiographical accounts of their lives in and around Mollans, some of them very interesting.

Translating Websites
I commented previously on translating the Chateau du Cros website and noticed recently that they had not incorporated my translation. A quick query produced the response that, as a result of being in dispute with the culprits of the original translation, they were having to create a completely new website. Hence the delay.

In the meantime, friend Michèle has managed to incorporate my translation of her gîte website (www.lariaille.com) via her son (an IT worker) and is delighted. So that's one good job done. And I'm now out of Viognier wine and so will have to go to the Rieu Frais vineyard to get some more and, while there, see if they have used my translation of their brochure. Could be worth a discount or a bottle or two more...........................

Happy Times

Phil's Birthday
Friday evening I was invited to Philippe's party to celebrate his 75th birthday, together with his other friends from along the road and one or two strays. It was what is called here an “apéro habillé”, supposedly less than a dinner but food with drinks. We drank a sparkling muscat throughout the evening and were regaled with what in Spain would be called “tapas” but which were definitely French in nature. Brilliant food which Simone, Philippe's wife had organised, and it kept coming and coming.

With everyone replete and well oiled a bit before midnight, Patrique got out his guitar and we got down to singing; Brassens of course (mostly). I tried to think of how a similar evening in England might have ended with songs but couldn't think what the songs might be. True, some English friends and I had ended an evening singing pop tunes of the 1950s (see a January posting) but somehow it wasn't quite the same. Two things were different; Brassens songs are undemanding of the singer. At my previous pop evening we had sung badly (I certainly had) but nobody minded. You can't really sing Brassens badly; all you generally need is a low growl interjected with an occasional high note which you don't have to hit (Brassens himself never did). And the lyrics are totally different. I commented before on the banality of the lyrics in 1950s pop and the lyrics of Brassens' songs are anything but banal: many are taken from poems from the likes of Prévert and Louis Aragon. If I'd been at a similar evening in England, what would we have sung that had any kind of equivalence? Probably the ubiquitously murdered “I Did It My Way”, maybe “On Ilkley Moor Bartat”, maybe some traditional rugby club songs, maybe some old East End favourites like “My Old Man's A Dustman”. These have their own cachet, if you can call it that, and are certainly redolent of a time and place but they don't have anything like the flavour of Brassens. And the French all seem to know their Brassens. If the French had tests of “Frenchness” as a prerequisite for acquiring nationality, as are being proposed in Britain, surely one of them would be the ability to know a Brassens song or two by heart..

Footnote On The Camargue
I forgot to mention salt production in my previous posting on the Camargue. It always was, and still is, a major industry in the area. And with food aficionados getting into different varieties of salt, Camargue salt has its own place amongst the varieties.

Another point I omitted to mention was the “gardians”. These are the people who herd the black bulls of the area. In times past it was mostly children who kept an eye out for where sheep or cattle went and the “gardians” were simply responsible for branding the bulls, a claim on ownership. In more recent times fencing has more or less eliminated the need for both but the branding and “gardians” persist as a tradition. The “gardians” also have a traditional garb that seems to owe more to Spain than France, although there is no evident Spanish influence in the area. Maybe it comes from the Italian workers who were drafted in during the wine bonanza or, perhaps more likely, it is a gypsy influence congruent with the former lifestyle. Whatever, “gardians” is not a French word other than in this special case and the plural “lou gardianoun” even less so. It's pure occitan.

Spring and the Camargue

More Signs Of Spring
Went shopping yesterday and noticed that the supermarket is now selling locally grown strawberries. There have been strawberries occasionally for a few weeks now but here there is not the year-round supply of everything that one finds in UK supermarkets. French supermarkets have to source a high fairly percentage of fresh produce locally and so the produce available tends to be more seasonal. For the past few weeks the strawberries have been from Morocco but now those from Carpentras are appearing, including the “garrigues”, also from Carpentras, smaller and less shapely than their Moroccan counterparts but with much better flavour. Despite the shift towards organic produce, in England as much as in France, I still don't see any acceptance in England of fruit/veg that is discoloured or misshapen even if the flavour is far superior. Also, I saw local asparagus for the first time. The asparagus season here is much earlier than in the UK and goes on for longer; and the asparagus is much cheaper (eventually, if not at first).

Flowers by the wayside and in gardens are much as in the UK at this time. The usual spring bulbs, primroses and violets and forsythia and japonica bushes. Irises aren't showing much bud yet but they won't be far behind and when they do start blooming they appear everywhere in gardens and in the wild. And....... I've turned off the heating other than in the living room and kitchen; that should be it until October.

And So To The Camargue
Friends Steve and Jo and I have been promising ourselves a trip to the coast since Christmas but the prolonged winter delayed the trip. Today we finally went, to Saintes Maries de la Mer, self-styled capital of the Camargue (Arles and Aigues Mortes might have something to say about that). I had assumed that the reality would be different from the romantic image of wild horses dashing through the marshes with manes flying but, even so, the reality was more prosaic than I had thought. There were plenty of white horses and black bulls but the former were corralled into establishments offering horse riding. True, the pink flamingos were there too. But the wild marshes of romance have been pretty much all tamed, probably for a long time.

A visit to the Camargue museum told the story. In the early 19th century the Camargue in France had been viewed very much as Dartmoor in England; far from being a tourist attraction, it was a poor, isolated, bereft and dangerous place to be avoided. Gradually, drainage allowed some of the land to be cultivated for wheat, although it can hardly have been ideal for that, and land was made available for sheep grazing. Some wheat planting is still evident but the sheep seem to have disappeared. A legacy of the sheep rearing is the presence of many long low buildings formerly used to house them in winter that are now put to other purposes. They have a singular style, rounded at the north end to divert the wind, blunt at the southern end and with thatched roofs made from the reeds in the marshes. For some unexplained reason, they normally had nine lateral wooden spars either side to support the roof.

Apparently there was a kind of South Sea Bubble phenomenon at the end of the 19th century when, around 1870, phylloxera killed most French vines. Minimal vine cultivation in the Camargue proved immune to phylloxera, probably because the roots were normally submerged in water and sand. Suddenly, the Camargue became the centre of wine production for France and the land was taken over by vines. However, the area produces only low-alcohol wine which was traditionally cut with wine from north Africa to produce an acceptable table wine. So, when a solution was found to the phylloxera problem, in 1907, the Bubble burst; grape production in the Camargue that year was simply not harvested at all.

A substitute was found in 1942 when some bright spark realised that the area would be suitable for cultivation of rice, which was then in short supply because of the war. Now, Camargue rice commands something of a premium price, although I have to confess I can't discern much difference between it and long grain rice from elsewhere. The area is still marshland, albeit much of it drained, and a haven for birds that thrive in that habitat. So it will be a major attraction for bird enthusiasts.

For myself, I had a great day out in bright warm sunshine with friends and a very enjoyable lunch on a cafe balcony overlooking the sea. I'm glad to have seen something of the Camargue and would like to return, sometime, to see more. But I can't imagine that it will ever be for me an area that I will want to spend any length of time in. It's good to know it's just an hour and a half's drive away so another day trip will be easy.

Village Life

Erratic Jobbing
The boules ground is still not in a playable state although little other than the spreading of some gravel, already on site, needs to be done. The laying of drains under the ground there has been something of a saga, work having been started as early as last October. So it's taken six months (and counting) to lay fewer than 100 metres of drains. Nobody seems surprised, which makes me wonder why.

Extended durations for any kind of building work are very much the norm here and I now understand the reason. My admittedly limited experience of building work in the UK is that a workforce is allotted to the job and basically works at it until the job is finished. Here, a workforce seems always to be allocated multiple jobs at a time and works on one or another for indeterminate periods according to circumstances and convenience. It results in delays often commented on by would-be Peter Mayles writing about their experiences in house renovation in France.

The incredible (to me) time taken to lay the drains under the boules ground has been at least partly explained to me by neighbour Jean-Pierre. What apparently happens is that the builders complete a chunk of the work and then go to the Mairie to ask for payment for the work completed. Getting the payment can take weeks and, while waiting, the workforce moves on to another job. Even if payment is forthcoming within days, they are then engaged elsewhere and stay there until some similar break-off point. Then, if payment has been made, they return to complete another chunk of work. And so on. The typical traditionally British attitude is to assume that the workforce is simply slacking and needs a kick up the jacksie but that, from my observations, is untrue. The workers seem to be hard at it when they are there. The execution time for a job is probably no different from that in the UK, may even be shorter; it is the elapsed time that is far longer.

Boules and Flowers
The recent good weather (typical UK April weather atcually, sunshine and showers) and rise in temperature finally tested the patience of the boules crowd too much and we played for the first time since Christmas, albeit on the “grande terre” next to the Cafe des Sports rather than the usual pitch. I managed to play reasonably well, given that it was my first time out in months. When the new gravel surface is eventually laid on the usual pitch it will be like learning a new ball game, literally. All the slopes, stony areas and “placid” runs we used to know will have changed. Should be fun getting to grips with it.

The good weather has also finally brought into bloom all the bulbs I have in front of the house that have had buds ready to burst for the last two weeks. The terrace is looking good with anemone blanda and scilla siberica showing well in crevices in the terrace wall. I bought a false jasmine to replace the true one that didn't survive the winter so that should be climbing and blooming before long. Like many plants here, I've noticed, it seems to have two flowering periods per year, one in spring/early summer and one in the autumn. The back garden itself is more or less done, apart from a little weeding and the installation of a water feature. Ever since I visited the Alhambra as a student at Madrid University in 1962 I have understood the appeal of running water in a hot environment. Just the sound of running water seems refreshing. The Moors, of course, found that out long before I did.

Anyway, the water feature I brought back with me from the UK after Christmas came without any wall support attachments, despite the wall-mounted illustration in the catalogue that persuaded me to buy it. It sits perfectly adequately on the ground and looks OK there but I really wanted it on the wall; and the prospect of trying to drill holes into the rock terrace walls and the feature itself wasn't inviting. So I asked friends Steve and Jo to come round and give an opinion and they duly did so this evening. As so often seems to happen, extra minds produced a potential solution: a plinth. Why didn't I think of that? I don't know; in retrospect it's a fairly obvious thought but one that my tunneled vision of the moment wouldn't allow. So, in the next few days, it's off to find/build a plinth.

Change In The Village
The Bar du Pont has been changing ownership over the past week and has been closed for stock-taking and renovations, so the normal pizza evening routine was interrupted. Since we couldn't use the Bar, neighbours Jean-Pierre and Monique invited all the usual crowd to get their pizza and come to eat it at their house. Which we duly did. At the Bar, Jacques and Monique (famous for her sense of humour?) are giving way to people I have yet to get to know but who are apparently cousins of Martine Moreau, a neighbour of Steve and Jo. It seems that about a quarter of the population of Mollans have some such slightly indirect relationship to Mme Moreau so that much wasn't surprising and it keeps ownership of the Bar within the village. Incidentally, Martine was bereaved of her husband a few years ago and, as she recounts, got a visit from a local widower the day after her husband's death telling her she needed a man, i.e. him. The former may or may not have been true but the latter wasn't, at least in Martine's opinion. Apparently all available women in the locality get a similar visit but the visitor hasn't had any luck so far so there must be something wrong in his logic. The episode does illustrate though how the French don't muck about in coming to the point in such matters.

During the evening I learned from Anne-Marie that one of the two bakers in town has also changed hands. In this case the new owners are from Merindol, which is at least 10 km from Mollans and therefore foreign territory. Will the foreigners be accepted? Time and the quality of their bread will tell. As Anne-Marie said to me: “Everything is changing in the village”. Well, the new library is opening at the weekend also and the hairdresser is apparently passing over the business to one of her assistants but...............................Maybe only so much change at a time can be properly assimilated in a village such as ours.

Spring Etc

Spring At Lasr?
After a number of false dawns, perhaps spring is at last arriving. Last weekend was reasonable, Monday too, but with a cold wind to accompany the sunshine; the Mistral, as usual. Today, no mistral, sunshine, a temperature in the sun of around 20 degrees and a deep Wedgwood blue sky to die for. I spent the day clearing the winter debris from the back garden and spreading smelly stuff, which will hopefully result in plenty of much sweeter smells later on. The really good news is that this weather is forecast to last for at least another two days so maybe spring is breaking through.

Those who have lived here many years are saying that this year has been the hardest winter they have known. That statement needs to be put in some perspective vis-a-vis my English experience. Since my return after Christmas, the weather has certainly been colder than I have known and with four separate snowfalls. That is what the locals notice; you normally get a day of snow here or maybe two, but that is all. But.......you start counting winter here from December. Until after the first week in December, the weather here was very pleasant. So, with my English background, a long hard winter that lasts only three months (if that is what happens) is something I can put up with.

That said, I am amazed that there is still snow hanging around in odd places in the village. We are talking not micro-climates but mini-mini micro-climates. The remaining snow is in odd ditches and corners that aren't getting the sun. It's a question of where the sun gets too (how high it is) and the effect of the shadow thrown by surrounding hills. This maybe explains why I am so puzzled by plants that are perennial here that aren't in the milder climes of the UK. Oleanders generally won't survive a UK winter without protection but happily do here. The same goes even for marigolds and, quite often, Californian poppies, verbena and diascias.

Whatever, I am now going to work on the assumption that spring is on the way and start planting seeds. I've already taken ~20 cuttings of my blue pentstemons, which should give me a dozen plants. My true jasmine, which struggled through the last two winters hasn't survived this time so I'll replace it with a false one (trachelospermum jasmoinides) and the same may be true of my plumbago, but I'll give that another couple of weeks to show signs of growth. Seems like it's gardening time again.

Anglo-French (Food) Relations
I invited Daniel to eat tonight to save him having to open his usual tin before going off to England. He hasn't been to England since his student days but a neighbour, Christine, who is married to an Englishman and spends most of her time in Worthing, invited him across and he decided to go. The cross-channel links are further supplemented by friend Michèle, who turns out to have a cousin married to an Englishman and is living in Richmond and Mana, who taught English. Michèle, like Daniel, hadn't been back to England since student days but was recently persuaded to do so by her cousin. Mana has never been back since her schooldays, although she spent a couple of subsequent years in America.

What they all have in common is a terror of English food. Given that their last experience of this was in the 1950s, their terror is understandable. However, their assumption that nothing has changed in the intervening half-century is less so, especially as all have eaten both at my house and Steve and Jo's and declared the meals to be good. Daniel's attitude, given that he doesn't cook for himself but simply opens tins, is even more perplexing. I think that their continued perception of English cooking has more to do with perpetuation of a myth than anything else. Having undergone a ghastly experience in the past, they are reluctant to give up on it.

Translating Shakespeare
It wouldn't be a new entry in this blog without some comments on translation, so here they are. Daniel is a Shakespeare devotee and, in the course of some discussion, he said that his favourite play was Hamlet and I said mine was MacBeth. I love the poetry in MacBeth and started to quote MacBeth saying “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day.........”. I know the full speech by heart and, halfway into it, realised that Daniel was lost. So I started to translate. Leave aside the poetry and connotations of the words, what is “creeps” in French? I was stuck, so was Daniel despite my attempts to describe the action. “ A tâtons” only gets part of it. A dictionary finally produced “ramper”. But it's not really the same. “Ramper” is what kids do before they learn to walk. Crawling has some of the connotations of creeping but it's not the same. Anyway, continuing with the attempted translation I decided that the task was impossible (at least for me). Which led me to ask Daniel if he had a French translation of Shakespeare. He has, somewhere, but can't find it for the moment. I think I want to see one and see what the translator has done. God help him/her.

Following on from that, at the last pizza evening Jo asked René if there were any words in French that changed meaning according to their pronunciation, even though the spelling was the same. In English, “close” meaning “shut” and “close” meaning “ near” are spelled the same but mean different things according to how they are pronounced; the same is true of “refuse” meaning “deny/say no to” and “refuse” meaning “rubbish”. None of the assembled French could think of any such equivalent in French. As if English pronunciation wasn't difficult enough in the first place, we have to lumber foreigners with this extra difficulty!

I've always maintained that an English person, with even just a basic grasp of French pronunciation (and the same goes for Spanish and Italian), has a much better chance of getting an explanation of some unknown word than his foreign counterpart trying to get an English word explained. As long as you can say “Que veut dire XXXX?” you have a good chance of pronouncing XXXX sufficiently correctly to get a useful response. Contrast this with, for instance, a foreigner wanting to know what a chough is, confronted by the pronunciation possibilities offered by though, cough, bough, bought, etc, and you can see that the English have a definite advantage.

As a corollary to all this, conversation at the pizza evening turned to English politically correct language. It seems the French don't really have that either (good for them!) apart from words with obviously insulting connotations. Trying to explain why the word handicapped wasn't acceptable (and I don't understand either) proved impossible. As far as they were concerned, if you were “handicappé” you were “handicappé”; there were no sinister implications, it was simply a fact.