A Perfect February Day
Yesterday I got up, went into the village for bread and had a breakfast of bread, honey and coffee. I've recently renewed my supply of mountain honey, collected from hives high up in the hills. I'm not sure where the bees there get their nectar. There is lots of lavender high up but the hives hadn't been placed in lavender fields or the honey would have been called lavender honey. Anyway, it is quite dark in colour and rich in flavour; my favourite.
Having looked through the news online through various papers and news aggregators I put in an hour staining cross-beams in my bedroom. The bedroom is my last major project in the house (I hope). The walls are currently covered with a horrible custard-coloured wallpaper. I shall paint them, off-white, over the paper if it is firmly fixed as it seems to be. The big job is the cross-beams, 64 in all, laid from a large central beam across to the walls either side. They are covered in white paint which I have been scraping off for quite a long time. It's a three-part process: first, scrape off most of the paint; then dig it out of cracks, knots, and as far as possible from under where the beams overlap with the plaster between them; then go over them with a wire brush to remove the dust and any hanging bits of paint. I've done that for 32 cross-beams and am now staining them. I wanted to be sure I had the tint of stain required and, having now seen it on some beams, I know have: medium oak. When the 32 cross-beams are all stained I shall move the bedroom furniture to the other side of the room and work my way down the remaining 32. Anyway, there is now visible progress so that was satisfying.
Then it was off to Daniel's for lunch. Daniel doesn't cook but gets paella from the man in the village who sells it on Saturdays. Two of his sons were with Daniel so we had a good chat and lunch. It would actually have been warm enough to eat on his balcony but we ate inside. I agreed to meet them on the boules ground at 3.00 and then went home for an hour to let the paella go down and catch a bit of football on the television. At the boules ground it was too warm at first to play with a pullover on. I don't know what the temperature was in the sun but around 22-23 degrees at a guess. And the sky came up trumps, cloudless and a deep shade of blue that must exist elsewhere but which I can't recall seeing outside Provence. We played until 5.30 when I again returned home to finish preparing a meal I'd started the previous day, a “daube provencal”. It's a more or less conventional stew but with bacon and olives added to the beef and vegetables. I thought I'd try it with couscous rather than potatoes or pasta and that worked well. Steve, Jo and Mana were coming to eat and duly arrived around 7.45. So we then had a pleasant evening eating and talking, After which I retired to the living room with a coffee and calvados to watch some more football before bed.
There's nothing dramatic in all this but it was a very satisfying and not untypical day in February. I'm not sure where else I could have had such a day at this time of the year.
Apart from the remaining cross-beams to look forward to(?) I have started on the translation of the text of a film Daniel and Martine (from Pierrelongue) have made on the olive tree and it's role in the life of the region. The translation is not proving difficult so far but I will then have to review it while viewing the film to check timings before recording the English commentary. I get friend Steve to check my English as, somehow, when I get immersed in French I tend to come up with some awkward English phrases. The whole process will be interesting as I haven't done it before. And Daniel and Martine have started making another film, this time on fountains in villages in the area (there are 11 in Mollans).
And then it will be spring............................
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Thursday, 3 February 2011
Mind Your Language
Mind Your Language
I went to Daniel's house to have dinner with him, Patricia, Steve and Jo as it was Patricia's last night before returning to La Réunion for a few months. As seems almost inevitable when the five of us get together, conversation turned to language. For some reason the word “événement” came up. I would have sworn blind the first two “e”s carried an acute and a grave accent respectively; Patricia thought the same. Daniel said that both “e”s had acute accents on them and was proved right by the dictionary. (What hope is there for we English when even the French can't agree among themselves?) I then vaguely recalled the word as being some kind of exception from my school days' French lessons.
However, it then occurred to me that pronunciation of the word should make the spelling clear, since é is a more open sound then è (as I had been taught). I made the point and got the reply: “Oui, mais on ne distingue plus de nos jours”. This really shocked me. I remember Steve asking me why the French had so many ways of writing the same sound “e” and explaining to him at some length that there were three “e” sounds in French (as I had been taught), in fact four if you counted the last syllable of “heureux”. I've frequently chided Steve on this point since but it seems that he was right after all. My (school-based) information was that the most closed “e” sound was as in “le”, the intermediate sound was as in è or an “ais/ait” word ending and the most open sound was é or an “ai” ending. Not so any more, it seems. My old professor of phoentics at Bristol would be turning in his grave, knowing his carefully thought out phonetic graphs were no longer valid. On the other hand, he above all would know that language phonemes change with time. So what if the difference between the two accents is critical to the meaning? The answer is, of course, that some other way is found to make the distinction.
Being an Old Fogey, I find this loss of ability to easily make fine distinctions in meaning somewhat distressing. But the same kind of change can be found happening in English. I have always been very clear about the distinction between uninterested and disinterested. In practice, disinterested is taking the place of uninterested and uninterested is falling out of use (probably,ironically, to be replaced by unbiased). Similarly the use of less and few and most and majority is also becoming corrupted. I remember an old colleague, John Laski, liking to quote the sentence his sister Marghanita had created to illustrate use/misuse of the word “only”. The sentence was: the white swans fly over the black hills. You can place “only” at any point in that sentence but each time producing a slightly different meaning. The British Standards Institution, when I worked there on the definition of Year 2000 compliance, was also very keen on this; definitions, after all, have to be definite and precise.
Well, it's probably time to say goodbye to all that. Does it matter? I have to confess that it often worries and saddens me but I have to recognise that language change is continual. Moreover, the Law of Least Effort is usually the dominant one in language change, and always has been.
Footnote
In my last post I suggested English as an intermediate language for translation purposes, whilst recognising the diplomatic difficulties. The diplomatic solution would be a language like Dutch. Nobody speaks Dutch but the Dutch themselves (almost true, Afrikaans and Flemish are slightly different). So there would be less ego and nationalism involved in its acceptance.
I went to Daniel's house to have dinner with him, Patricia, Steve and Jo as it was Patricia's last night before returning to La Réunion for a few months. As seems almost inevitable when the five of us get together, conversation turned to language. For some reason the word “événement” came up. I would have sworn blind the first two “e”s carried an acute and a grave accent respectively; Patricia thought the same. Daniel said that both “e”s had acute accents on them and was proved right by the dictionary. (What hope is there for we English when even the French can't agree among themselves?) I then vaguely recalled the word as being some kind of exception from my school days' French lessons.
However, it then occurred to me that pronunciation of the word should make the spelling clear, since é is a more open sound then è (as I had been taught). I made the point and got the reply: “Oui, mais on ne distingue plus de nos jours”. This really shocked me. I remember Steve asking me why the French had so many ways of writing the same sound “e” and explaining to him at some length that there were three “e” sounds in French (as I had been taught), in fact four if you counted the last syllable of “heureux”. I've frequently chided Steve on this point since but it seems that he was right after all. My (school-based) information was that the most closed “e” sound was as in “le”, the intermediate sound was as in è or an “ais/ait” word ending and the most open sound was é or an “ai” ending. Not so any more, it seems. My old professor of phoentics at Bristol would be turning in his grave, knowing his carefully thought out phonetic graphs were no longer valid. On the other hand, he above all would know that language phonemes change with time. So what if the difference between the two accents is critical to the meaning? The answer is, of course, that some other way is found to make the distinction.
Being an Old Fogey, I find this loss of ability to easily make fine distinctions in meaning somewhat distressing. But the same kind of change can be found happening in English. I have always been very clear about the distinction between uninterested and disinterested. In practice, disinterested is taking the place of uninterested and uninterested is falling out of use (probably,ironically, to be replaced by unbiased). Similarly the use of less and few and most and majority is also becoming corrupted. I remember an old colleague, John Laski, liking to quote the sentence his sister Marghanita had created to illustrate use/misuse of the word “only”. The sentence was: the white swans fly over the black hills. You can place “only” at any point in that sentence but each time producing a slightly different meaning. The British Standards Institution, when I worked there on the definition of Year 2000 compliance, was also very keen on this; definitions, after all, have to be definite and precise.
Well, it's probably time to say goodbye to all that. Does it matter? I have to confess that it often worries and saddens me but I have to recognise that language change is continual. Moreover, the Law of Least Effort is usually the dominant one in language change, and always has been.
Footnote
In my last post I suggested English as an intermediate language for translation purposes, whilst recognising the diplomatic difficulties. The diplomatic solution would be a language like Dutch. Nobody speaks Dutch but the Dutch themselves (almost true, Afrikaans and Flemish are slightly different). So there would be less ego and nationalism involved in its acceptance.
Monday, 31 January 2011
Pizza Evening Translation
Pizza Evening Translation
It was unusually quiet at the pizza evening today, although this does happen sometimes at this time of the year. There were just the five of us: Alex and Pauline, Anne-Marie and Patrick and myself. Conversation stagnated after a while until Alex started expounding on the virtues of his iPhone and, somewhat unconnected, the prospects for machine translation of natural languages. He ignited my long but now-dormant experience with computer technology and languages.
First things first. Alex had downloaded an edition of The Economist onto his iPhone and I had to admit that the reproduction was impressive. However, some problems were apparent. The amount of text visible at any one time was small and so you probably wouldn't want to read a long article on it. Secondly, illustrations in which detail is significant are a problem. Large tables, for instance, can be seen only part at a time or appear in almost invisible font size. The problem is absolute, for the moment at least. If the device has to fit comfortably into a pocket, the screen size has to be small; some kind of folding screen would be conceivable but would make the device very thick and cumbersome. The iPhone provides an impressive compromise but a compromise nonetheless. I've noticed the same with friends Steve and Jo's Kindle eBooks. They are fine for reading novels (or other text) and excellent as an alternative to packing several such books into a suitcase; but inadequate for many illustrations and very awkward if you need to check cross-references or footnotes. The real answer, at least to the illustration problem, would be some kind of holographic facility (not inconceivable in the future).
Machine translation of natural languages is another kettle of fish: Babel fish in fact. I've never seen a decent machine-generated translation and am aware of the many problems. Turing's test has yet to be passed by a long way. Turing's test, incidentally, was that a human being should be able to have a conversation with a machine without being aware that the other party was a machine. Alex said his boss was excited by the advances in machine generated translations for intelligence (defence) purposes. Admittedly, if a few key words were all that was important in the translation, a machine-generated one might do; anything requiring appreciation of subtle wording, tone, etc, would fail.
However, the discussion turned my mind to the army of interpreters in Brussels and the UN and what had happened in IT in the 1960s and 1970s. In IT, language incompatibility was already a problem by then. Broadly, if you had 4 machines and 4 languages, you needed 16 interpreters/compilers to bridge between them. The idea came about to produce an intermediate language, from and into which each language and machine code was translated, which meant you would need only half the number of interpreters/compilers. There were various attempts at such an intermediate language: UNCOL (Universal Computer Language) was one and BCL (Basic Compiler Language) another but they all failed for technical reasons of levels of machine language and operating systems that I won't go into here. The point is that the idea was basically a good one.
So taking that idea and thinking of the armies of interpreters, I thought: why not take English as a universal intermediate natural language? Excellence in English would be required of every interpreter. If, say, a Russian was speaking at a conference, the Russian interpreter would translate into English; every other interpreter would then translate from English into their own native tongue. The delay in simultaneous translation would be imperceptible. The problems of having enough interpreters to translate between, e.g. Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Spanish, Dutch, etc, would disappear at a stroke and the armies of interpreters and their costs would be decimated. Technically, implementation of this idea would be simple and bring enormous cost savings. It couldn't fail for any of the technical reasons that the analogous IT equivalent had. Indeed, it is already practised in many international commercial situations where interpreters are not available: English is the lingua franca. Diplomatically.......?I wonder what the Académie Française would have to say about it? Incidentally, if machine-generated translations (and Babel fish) are ever to succeed, this is probably the route they will have to take.
It was unusually quiet at the pizza evening today, although this does happen sometimes at this time of the year. There were just the five of us: Alex and Pauline, Anne-Marie and Patrick and myself. Conversation stagnated after a while until Alex started expounding on the virtues of his iPhone and, somewhat unconnected, the prospects for machine translation of natural languages. He ignited my long but now-dormant experience with computer technology and languages.
First things first. Alex had downloaded an edition of The Economist onto his iPhone and I had to admit that the reproduction was impressive. However, some problems were apparent. The amount of text visible at any one time was small and so you probably wouldn't want to read a long article on it. Secondly, illustrations in which detail is significant are a problem. Large tables, for instance, can be seen only part at a time or appear in almost invisible font size. The problem is absolute, for the moment at least. If the device has to fit comfortably into a pocket, the screen size has to be small; some kind of folding screen would be conceivable but would make the device very thick and cumbersome. The iPhone provides an impressive compromise but a compromise nonetheless. I've noticed the same with friends Steve and Jo's Kindle eBooks. They are fine for reading novels (or other text) and excellent as an alternative to packing several such books into a suitcase; but inadequate for many illustrations and very awkward if you need to check cross-references or footnotes. The real answer, at least to the illustration problem, would be some kind of holographic facility (not inconceivable in the future).
Machine translation of natural languages is another kettle of fish: Babel fish in fact. I've never seen a decent machine-generated translation and am aware of the many problems. Turing's test has yet to be passed by a long way. Turing's test, incidentally, was that a human being should be able to have a conversation with a machine without being aware that the other party was a machine. Alex said his boss was excited by the advances in machine generated translations for intelligence (defence) purposes. Admittedly, if a few key words were all that was important in the translation, a machine-generated one might do; anything requiring appreciation of subtle wording, tone, etc, would fail.
However, the discussion turned my mind to the army of interpreters in Brussels and the UN and what had happened in IT in the 1960s and 1970s. In IT, language incompatibility was already a problem by then. Broadly, if you had 4 machines and 4 languages, you needed 16 interpreters/compilers to bridge between them. The idea came about to produce an intermediate language, from and into which each language and machine code was translated, which meant you would need only half the number of interpreters/compilers. There were various attempts at such an intermediate language: UNCOL (Universal Computer Language) was one and BCL (Basic Compiler Language) another but they all failed for technical reasons of levels of machine language and operating systems that I won't go into here. The point is that the idea was basically a good one.
So taking that idea and thinking of the armies of interpreters, I thought: why not take English as a universal intermediate natural language? Excellence in English would be required of every interpreter. If, say, a Russian was speaking at a conference, the Russian interpreter would translate into English; every other interpreter would then translate from English into their own native tongue. The delay in simultaneous translation would be imperceptible. The problems of having enough interpreters to translate between, e.g. Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Spanish, Dutch, etc, would disappear at a stroke and the armies of interpreters and their costs would be decimated. Technically, implementation of this idea would be simple and bring enormous cost savings. It couldn't fail for any of the technical reasons that the analogous IT equivalent had. Indeed, it is already practised in many international commercial situations where interpreters are not available: English is the lingua franca. Diplomatically.......?I wonder what the Académie Française would have to say about it? Incidentally, if machine-generated translations (and Babel fish) are ever to succeed, this is probably the route they will have to take.
Sunday, 30 January 2011
Boules And Birds
Boules And Birds
We have had a fortnight of sunny days, which has meant plenty of afternoons to play boules. The problem has been the starting time. The sun has heat in it from around 11.00 in the morning to just after 4.00 in the afternoon but boules never starts before 3.00. Why? The sacred provencal lunch hour(s). No way is anyone going to start before 2.00 and a slightly less sacred but nonetheless standard observance is for an hour's siesta after lunch. So 3.00 it is, at the earliest. We'll play typically for an hour and a half or two hours and the problem then is that it is starting to get noticeably cold by the time we start the final game. I have tentatively suggested starting earlier but the idea is clearly a non-starter. The problem disappears as the days get longer and, in the summer, we don't start before 4.00, to avoid the heat, but in the meantime I take a jacket to put on for the final game.
I had lunch today at Font Fresque, Steve and Jo's place, and we watching the birds flocking around the feeders that Jo had filled before lunch. There were bramblings sparrows, nuthatches and a wide variety of finches and tits. For some reason it occurred to me that I had not noticed any small nests by the wayside, which should be visible now that the bushes were all bare. The only nests I had noticed were large ones, high in the trees, probably belonging to magpies or jays.
I remembered that when I was a kid, living in Chiddingfold just after the war, my schoolfriends and I could always spot where birds would be nesting. It was a standard game, on the way back from school, to spot a thick holly tree and bet there was a song thrush's or blackbird's nest in it; or we'd go past a hawthorn hedge and bet whether there was a nest of a hedge sparrow, yellow hammer or chaffinch in it. And we'd invariably guess correctly. I remember once spending hours with a friend trying to find a skylark's nest, having seen it plummet down into a field. We knew it would never land close by its nest but would run along the ground to it, which would always be in the ground. The nest could not be that far from where it landed but, however hard we searched, we couldn't find it. I've lost a lot of the country lore I knew then, but I digress.
The question in my mind was: where were all these small birds nesting? Only then did it occur to me that there are virtually no hedges in my area (no holly trees either that I know of). Steve came up with obvious answer. Small birds will find any nook or cranny to build a nest and there are lots of abandoned “cabanons”, the small stone huts that agricultural workers used to use to house their tools (and occasionally animals and themselves overnight) in the fields around. There are also many stone walls and crumbling outbuildings which would afford plenty of opportunities for birds. Birds, like human beings in the past, simply use whatever is to hand.
We have had a fortnight of sunny days, which has meant plenty of afternoons to play boules. The problem has been the starting time. The sun has heat in it from around 11.00 in the morning to just after 4.00 in the afternoon but boules never starts before 3.00. Why? The sacred provencal lunch hour(s). No way is anyone going to start before 2.00 and a slightly less sacred but nonetheless standard observance is for an hour's siesta after lunch. So 3.00 it is, at the earliest. We'll play typically for an hour and a half or two hours and the problem then is that it is starting to get noticeably cold by the time we start the final game. I have tentatively suggested starting earlier but the idea is clearly a non-starter. The problem disappears as the days get longer and, in the summer, we don't start before 4.00, to avoid the heat, but in the meantime I take a jacket to put on for the final game.
I had lunch today at Font Fresque, Steve and Jo's place, and we watching the birds flocking around the feeders that Jo had filled before lunch. There were bramblings sparrows, nuthatches and a wide variety of finches and tits. For some reason it occurred to me that I had not noticed any small nests by the wayside, which should be visible now that the bushes were all bare. The only nests I had noticed were large ones, high in the trees, probably belonging to magpies or jays.
I remembered that when I was a kid, living in Chiddingfold just after the war, my schoolfriends and I could always spot where birds would be nesting. It was a standard game, on the way back from school, to spot a thick holly tree and bet there was a song thrush's or blackbird's nest in it; or we'd go past a hawthorn hedge and bet whether there was a nest of a hedge sparrow, yellow hammer or chaffinch in it. And we'd invariably guess correctly. I remember once spending hours with a friend trying to find a skylark's nest, having seen it plummet down into a field. We knew it would never land close by its nest but would run along the ground to it, which would always be in the ground. The nest could not be that far from where it landed but, however hard we searched, we couldn't find it. I've lost a lot of the country lore I knew then, but I digress.
The question in my mind was: where were all these small birds nesting? Only then did it occur to me that there are virtually no hedges in my area (no holly trees either that I know of). Steve came up with obvious answer. Small birds will find any nook or cranny to build a nest and there are lots of abandoned “cabanons”, the small stone huts that agricultural workers used to use to house their tools (and occasionally animals and themselves overnight) in the fields around. There are also many stone walls and crumbling outbuildings which would afford plenty of opportunities for birds. Birds, like human beings in the past, simply use whatever is to hand.
Sunday, 23 January 2011
Last Of The Winter Wine
Chistmas decorations in the village are now down and the last of the main winter events in the village took place over the past ten days. The Friday before last there was the mayor's aperitif evening for the whole village and today there was the Old Fogies' lunch.
Old Fogies' Lunch
For the first time I went today to the lunch offered annually to all senior citizens (or old fogies, as you prefer) by the village council in the large village public room, the salle bicentennaire. I've witnessed several similar lunches for old people in public halls in England and so did not arrive, at 12.00 as requested, with high expectations. The kind of menu I would have expected from experience in England would have consisted of a Provencal equivalent of tomato soup followed by meat pie and two veg. followed by apple pie and custard or some such; and there's nothing wrong with that but.................. Anyway, I hoped to meet some more people from the village whom I didn't already know as well as many whom I already did. The latter expectation was partially met (I didn't meet anybody new) but the menu...............
The reason for arriving at 12.00 was to have a bun fight over which table to sit on and that had already been sorted out by a foresighted friend. The aperitif to begin the meal was not served until 12.30; and I eventually left at around 5.30, with most of the gathering still there. The menu was as follows: aperitif, foie gras with pear, cold salmon with prawn, the “trou Provencal”, duck leg confit with mushrooms and potatoes, cheeses, baked Alaska, coffee and marc de Provence . Rosé and red wine were freely available throughout and sparkling clairette de Die was served with the dessert. The cooking and presentation were impeccable throughout and we were waited on, equally impeccably, by the members of the village council.
The French like to accompany foie gras with something sweet, typically a muscat white wine, and I find that the sweetness can be overbearing. Pear, by contrast, worked brilliantly, adding just a touch of sweetness. The “trou Provencal” was a local version of the classic trou Normand, a glass of Calvados to dissolve the first part of the meal; in this case it was a scoop of ice cream swimming in the marc de Provence served separately at the end of the meal. Marc is a spirit distilled from the residue in barrels from the first stage of wine-making, like grappa in Italy. I'd estimate the charge in England for such a meal, given the content and quality, at around £100 per head, It was certainly not what I had had experience of in English public halls for old peoples' lunches. And I shall of course go again next year.
In conversations during the lunch Michelle Mouret explained to me how the expectation of cousins within the village had come about, at least in her case. It's a point I have touched on in previous postings. She had four brothers, all of whom had families and had made their lives in the village. She had married a local man who also had four brothers who had proceeded similarly. The result was over 20 cousins in or around the village. It takes only a handful of people with a similar history to seed a village full of cousins.
The Mayor's Cocktail Party
The annual Mayor's aperitif is a chance to catch up on what the village has been spending it's money on and plans for the future. A surprise for me was the amount spent on the new drainage that had disrupted boules in the old station square during the autumn and winter of last year. The need for new drainage wasn't obvious to me but the huge drainage pipes and associated equipment and labour had clearly cost a significant sum; in fact it was a whopping 340,000 euros. It seemed another case of providing much-needed jobs locally but of dubious necessity otherwise, at odds with my English experience.
The main local interest in the mayor's speech was that the village post office, threatened with closure, had been saved, with the exception of the availability of a financial advisor. Since no one appeared to use the financial advisor, who presumably couldn't advise on other than post office savings products, it was a small price to pay. The post office will now no longer be autonomous but a sub post-office of that in neighbouring Buis les Baronnies and will double as a tourist office, which the village hasn't previously had. There were rumours that some horse-trading had gone on to achieve this solution. As I mentioned in a posting a year ago, the village had then reached the mile-stone of having 1000 inhabitants, which entitled it to have a chemist's shop in the village. However, Buis les Baronnies had acquired two such, on the basis of including the inhabitants of Mollans within its catchment area; it didn't have enough people to justify two chemists by itself alone. This is a rule imposed by the national chemists' association. I thought at the time that this situation might lead to some local brouhaha. Well, the rumours are that the village council lent on their counterparts in Buis and traded the right to have a chemist's shop (and to force one of those in Buis to close) in return for Buis' support for the Mollans post office. Who knows? But if it's true it's a deal well done.
I was also interested in possibly getting involved a new village website which I had been told was being proposed; the existing site is woefully inadequate. However, it turns out that the IT work going on in the library at the moment is to provide what is effectively a virtual PC for people in the village who don't have their own. It's obviously beneficial and a higher priority than a new website but I was disappointed that a new website had been put on the back-burner. It made me wonder whether I have the energy to go it alone on a new website.
The other, more personal, rumour circulating was to do with the mayor himself. It turns out he has split up with his long-term mistress Isabelle, apparently a physical double for the wife who had previously left him, and the betting was whether he and his former wife were going to get back together. This is, of course, just village gossip but illustrates again the closely entangled if not literally incestuous relationships that prevail in the village.
BBC iPlayer
I haven't yet downloaded the BBC iPlayer but several friends have and have encountered the problem of BBC programmes not available over the Internet internationally. Of course the BBC has the right to sell its programmes to providers in other countries, which is why availability is restricted. However, the restriction is easily overcome by means of a proxy server, freely available from various sources. My reason for mentioning this is simply that it illustrates the virtual impossibility of restricting information stored electronically. Wikileaks is but another example. I got to know some of the intricacies of this matter through close contact with Bird & Bird, one of the leading legal partnerships on intellectual copyright, during the latter 1990s. The matter poses many questions that can be quite fascinating and for which there are at the moment no clear answers. It's an issue that is going to run and run. While it runs, despite some unfortunate side-effects, it can't be bad news for those of us who really believe in democracy and freedom of information.
Old Fogies' Lunch
For the first time I went today to the lunch offered annually to all senior citizens (or old fogies, as you prefer) by the village council in the large village public room, the salle bicentennaire. I've witnessed several similar lunches for old people in public halls in England and so did not arrive, at 12.00 as requested, with high expectations. The kind of menu I would have expected from experience in England would have consisted of a Provencal equivalent of tomato soup followed by meat pie and two veg. followed by apple pie and custard or some such; and there's nothing wrong with that but.................. Anyway, I hoped to meet some more people from the village whom I didn't already know as well as many whom I already did. The latter expectation was partially met (I didn't meet anybody new) but the menu...............
The reason for arriving at 12.00 was to have a bun fight over which table to sit on and that had already been sorted out by a foresighted friend. The aperitif to begin the meal was not served until 12.30; and I eventually left at around 5.30, with most of the gathering still there. The menu was as follows: aperitif, foie gras with pear, cold salmon with prawn, the “trou Provencal”, duck leg confit with mushrooms and potatoes, cheeses, baked Alaska, coffee and marc de Provence . Rosé and red wine were freely available throughout and sparkling clairette de Die was served with the dessert. The cooking and presentation were impeccable throughout and we were waited on, equally impeccably, by the members of the village council.
The French like to accompany foie gras with something sweet, typically a muscat white wine, and I find that the sweetness can be overbearing. Pear, by contrast, worked brilliantly, adding just a touch of sweetness. The “trou Provencal” was a local version of the classic trou Normand, a glass of Calvados to dissolve the first part of the meal; in this case it was a scoop of ice cream swimming in the marc de Provence served separately at the end of the meal. Marc is a spirit distilled from the residue in barrels from the first stage of wine-making, like grappa in Italy. I'd estimate the charge in England for such a meal, given the content and quality, at around £100 per head, It was certainly not what I had had experience of in English public halls for old peoples' lunches. And I shall of course go again next year.
In conversations during the lunch Michelle Mouret explained to me how the expectation of cousins within the village had come about, at least in her case. It's a point I have touched on in previous postings. She had four brothers, all of whom had families and had made their lives in the village. She had married a local man who also had four brothers who had proceeded similarly. The result was over 20 cousins in or around the village. It takes only a handful of people with a similar history to seed a village full of cousins.
The Mayor's Cocktail Party
The annual Mayor's aperitif is a chance to catch up on what the village has been spending it's money on and plans for the future. A surprise for me was the amount spent on the new drainage that had disrupted boules in the old station square during the autumn and winter of last year. The need for new drainage wasn't obvious to me but the huge drainage pipes and associated equipment and labour had clearly cost a significant sum; in fact it was a whopping 340,000 euros. It seemed another case of providing much-needed jobs locally but of dubious necessity otherwise, at odds with my English experience.
The main local interest in the mayor's speech was that the village post office, threatened with closure, had been saved, with the exception of the availability of a financial advisor. Since no one appeared to use the financial advisor, who presumably couldn't advise on other than post office savings products, it was a small price to pay. The post office will now no longer be autonomous but a sub post-office of that in neighbouring Buis les Baronnies and will double as a tourist office, which the village hasn't previously had. There were rumours that some horse-trading had gone on to achieve this solution. As I mentioned in a posting a year ago, the village had then reached the mile-stone of having 1000 inhabitants, which entitled it to have a chemist's shop in the village. However, Buis les Baronnies had acquired two such, on the basis of including the inhabitants of Mollans within its catchment area; it didn't have enough people to justify two chemists by itself alone. This is a rule imposed by the national chemists' association. I thought at the time that this situation might lead to some local brouhaha. Well, the rumours are that the village council lent on their counterparts in Buis and traded the right to have a chemist's shop (and to force one of those in Buis to close) in return for Buis' support for the Mollans post office. Who knows? But if it's true it's a deal well done.
I was also interested in possibly getting involved a new village website which I had been told was being proposed; the existing site is woefully inadequate. However, it turns out that the IT work going on in the library at the moment is to provide what is effectively a virtual PC for people in the village who don't have their own. It's obviously beneficial and a higher priority than a new website but I was disappointed that a new website had been put on the back-burner. It made me wonder whether I have the energy to go it alone on a new website.
The other, more personal, rumour circulating was to do with the mayor himself. It turns out he has split up with his long-term mistress Isabelle, apparently a physical double for the wife who had previously left him, and the betting was whether he and his former wife were going to get back together. This is, of course, just village gossip but illustrates again the closely entangled if not literally incestuous relationships that prevail in the village.
BBC iPlayer
I haven't yet downloaded the BBC iPlayer but several friends have and have encountered the problem of BBC programmes not available over the Internet internationally. Of course the BBC has the right to sell its programmes to providers in other countries, which is why availability is restricted. However, the restriction is easily overcome by means of a proxy server, freely available from various sources. My reason for mentioning this is simply that it illustrates the virtual impossibility of restricting information stored electronically. Wikileaks is but another example. I got to know some of the intricacies of this matter through close contact with Bird & Bird, one of the leading legal partnerships on intellectual copyright, during the latter 1990s. The matter poses many questions that can be quite fascinating and for which there are at the moment no clear answers. It's an issue that is going to run and run. While it runs, despite some unfortunate side-effects, it can't be bad news for those of us who really believe in democracy and freedom of information.
Friday, 14 January 2011
A Recipe
Recipe
I previously mentioned the BELL cookbook and that has turned my mind to recipes. Here is one I didn't submit (can't think why) but would like to share. It is simple to cook and has stood the test of time since the Middle Ages. The dish was in fact mentioned in one of Shakespeare's plays although it originates from several centuries before. It is a stew, often known at the time as a brew. You just boil up all the ingredients together and the resulting dish is truly bewitching. Make it to warm your friends this winter!
In contrast to the simplicity of cooking, some of the ingredients will be difficult to obtain nowadays. It hardly needs pointing out that much has changed in the intervening centuries and so some ingredients are simply not obtainable in shops nowadays, others present a challenge to the squeamish and yet others are of dubious legality now. However, I have annotated them below to suggest modern alternatives where necessary.
Ingredients
1.1 Toad
2.Poisoned entrails
3.Fillet of fenny snake
4.1 Newt's eye
5.1 Frog's toe
6.Bat's wool
7.1 Dog's tongue
8.Tongues of adder and slow worm (one of each)
9.1 Lizard's leg
10.1 Owl wing
11.1 Dragon's scale
12.1 Wolf's tooth
13.1 Shark's head
14.1 Hemlock root
15.1 Jew's liver
16.1 Goat's gall bladder
17.Yew twigs
18.1 Baby's finger
19.Tiger's entrails
20.Baboon's blood
Notes
It's probably not advisable just to present this list to your favourite local butcher; he is unlikely to have many of the ingredients anyway. I've simplified the ingredients slightly, omitting some that I deemed unnecessary, but the list remains challenging. Items 1,4,5,6,7,8,9,14, and 17 present few problems, other than that of hunting the creatures and gathering. A good Sunday afternoon walk in the countryside should secure many of them. Actually, several healthy Sunday walks may be required. So much the better! However do be careful when collecting item 7; a very strong (and thick) pair of gloves is recommended to avoid a severely bitten hand.
For item 2 we can allow for the fancifulness of the times; focus on the flavour and assume simply that the offal should be rotted a little. For item 3 it is reasonable to assume that most available snakes will taste much the same so any common snake may be substituted. Similarly, for the rather fanciful dragon's scale (sign of the times!) probably any animal scale would do, although fish scales should be avoided. There may be scaled lizards near where you live or a neighbour's tortoise pet may not miss a piece of it's shell (it has rather a lot). Again, for item 12 a dog's tooth would probably do just as well as a wolf's (but do remember those gloves!) and for item 16 we could substitute a sheep's gall bladder, if there are no goats near you, without compromising the integrity of our dish.
Items 10,13,15, 18,19 and 20 do present rather more intractable problems in so far as owls, sharks, tigers, baboons, jews and babies are all to some degree protected species. And you can't blame all of that on the EU. Not all sharks are protected though and the recipe doesn't specify any particular type of shark. (Once again, watch those hands!) For the owl's wing you may be lucky on your Sunday walk and find a dead one or, if you have a cat you may get lucky. Failing that, I suggest you substitute the wing of any fully fledged bird. A cat my be the solution to item 19 too, a tiger being simply a larger species of cat. You may need the entrails of more than one cat, though, to make up the quantity.
Item 20 allows for an easy substitution. As those of you up on your vampirology will know, most red-bloodied mammals' blood tastes similar and so any such mammal can be substituted. No specific quantity is prescribed but I suggest you use the blood as nowadays we would use a good red wine.
Items 15 and 18 may prove the most difficult. It's not obvious why the liver of a jew is specified or why the finger has to be that of a baby, except that it may be assumed to be more tender and the bone more gelatinous. We can discount jewishness but, even so, a human liver will be difficult to obtain. (I keep my eye on the news so know that there is a waiting list for transplants). You may have to substitute sheep's or pig's liver. Similarly, oxtail could be substituted for the baby's finger but will not have the same gelatinous quality. Perhaps a rodent's tail (minus any hair) would do.
Unfortunately, apart from the above substitutions I have little to suggest. If there is an accident black spot near where you live............but perhaps we won't elaborate on that.
There are some specifics in the original recipe that I have discarded as fanciful. For instance, the baby's finger should have been cut from a baby born to a prostitute in a ditch and strangled at birth. Whilst these details were no doubt easy to meet in former times I cannot see how they would affect the flavour and so have discarded them.
Anyway, good luck with collecting the ingredients. Just give them a good rolling boil when you have them all and Bon Appétit.
PS I find this dish goes down particularly well at Halloween party
I previously mentioned the BELL cookbook and that has turned my mind to recipes. Here is one I didn't submit (can't think why) but would like to share. It is simple to cook and has stood the test of time since the Middle Ages. The dish was in fact mentioned in one of Shakespeare's plays although it originates from several centuries before. It is a stew, often known at the time as a brew. You just boil up all the ingredients together and the resulting dish is truly bewitching. Make it to warm your friends this winter!
In contrast to the simplicity of cooking, some of the ingredients will be difficult to obtain nowadays. It hardly needs pointing out that much has changed in the intervening centuries and so some ingredients are simply not obtainable in shops nowadays, others present a challenge to the squeamish and yet others are of dubious legality now. However, I have annotated them below to suggest modern alternatives where necessary.
Ingredients
1.1 Toad
2.Poisoned entrails
3.Fillet of fenny snake
4.1 Newt's eye
5.1 Frog's toe
6.Bat's wool
7.1 Dog's tongue
8.Tongues of adder and slow worm (one of each)
9.1 Lizard's leg
10.1 Owl wing
11.1 Dragon's scale
12.1 Wolf's tooth
13.1 Shark's head
14.1 Hemlock root
15.1 Jew's liver
16.1 Goat's gall bladder
17.Yew twigs
18.1 Baby's finger
19.Tiger's entrails
20.Baboon's blood
Notes
It's probably not advisable just to present this list to your favourite local butcher; he is unlikely to have many of the ingredients anyway. I've simplified the ingredients slightly, omitting some that I deemed unnecessary, but the list remains challenging. Items 1,4,5,6,7,8,9,14, and 17 present few problems, other than that of hunting the creatures and gathering. A good Sunday afternoon walk in the countryside should secure many of them. Actually, several healthy Sunday walks may be required. So much the better! However do be careful when collecting item 7; a very strong (and thick) pair of gloves is recommended to avoid a severely bitten hand.
For item 2 we can allow for the fancifulness of the times; focus on the flavour and assume simply that the offal should be rotted a little. For item 3 it is reasonable to assume that most available snakes will taste much the same so any common snake may be substituted. Similarly, for the rather fanciful dragon's scale (sign of the times!) probably any animal scale would do, although fish scales should be avoided. There may be scaled lizards near where you live or a neighbour's tortoise pet may not miss a piece of it's shell (it has rather a lot). Again, for item 12 a dog's tooth would probably do just as well as a wolf's (but do remember those gloves!) and for item 16 we could substitute a sheep's gall bladder, if there are no goats near you, without compromising the integrity of our dish.
Items 10,13,15, 18,19 and 20 do present rather more intractable problems in so far as owls, sharks, tigers, baboons, jews and babies are all to some degree protected species. And you can't blame all of that on the EU. Not all sharks are protected though and the recipe doesn't specify any particular type of shark. (Once again, watch those hands!) For the owl's wing you may be lucky on your Sunday walk and find a dead one or, if you have a cat you may get lucky. Failing that, I suggest you substitute the wing of any fully fledged bird. A cat my be the solution to item 19 too, a tiger being simply a larger species of cat. You may need the entrails of more than one cat, though, to make up the quantity.
Item 20 allows for an easy substitution. As those of you up on your vampirology will know, most red-bloodied mammals' blood tastes similar and so any such mammal can be substituted. No specific quantity is prescribed but I suggest you use the blood as nowadays we would use a good red wine.
Items 15 and 18 may prove the most difficult. It's not obvious why the liver of a jew is specified or why the finger has to be that of a baby, except that it may be assumed to be more tender and the bone more gelatinous. We can discount jewishness but, even so, a human liver will be difficult to obtain. (I keep my eye on the news so know that there is a waiting list for transplants). You may have to substitute sheep's or pig's liver. Similarly, oxtail could be substituted for the baby's finger but will not have the same gelatinous quality. Perhaps a rodent's tail (minus any hair) would do.
Unfortunately, apart from the above substitutions I have little to suggest. If there is an accident black spot near where you live............but perhaps we won't elaborate on that.
There are some specifics in the original recipe that I have discarded as fanciful. For instance, the baby's finger should have been cut from a baby born to a prostitute in a ditch and strangled at birth. Whilst these details were no doubt easy to meet in former times I cannot see how they would affect the flavour and so have discarded them.
Anyway, good luck with collecting the ingredients. Just give them a good rolling boil when you have them all and Bon Appétit.
PS I find this dish goes down particularly well at Halloween party
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
The Bean and The War
The Bean
I've now consumed numerous pieces of the galette des rois which I mentioned previously and understand it better in its various forms. What I had had before was one of two versions, as it turns out. This year I noticed what looked like rather appetising meat pies in the local bakery. These turned out to be an alternative version of the galette, stuffed with a sweet almond-flavoured filling rather than meat. And the crown that I mentioned can in fact be anything, often ceramic; I found one that was a ceramic face of a circa 18th century nobleman/woman. Whatever it's form, it is referred to as “la fève”,which is a bean, specifically a broad bean. I presume that in former times, when dried beans would have been a staple part of the winter diet, a dried bean was always to hand; though why it should be specifically a broad bean I have no idea. Maybe I'll ask Daniel if he knows.
The War
Montserrat, my neighbour who invited me to lunch just after my operation, invited me again today, with Mana. I think I mentioned then that she had been a refugee from Franco's Spain, her father having been on the republican side in the civil war. Anyway, we got talking about those times again after I asked her how she had felt having escaped from Spain only to find herself confronted by the Nazi invasion of France. She said that the Nazis had never been domiciled in the village but came up occasionally from Orange and Le Barroux searching for maquisards. There's a plaque just north of here in St Auban commemorating some that were caught and shot by the Nazis and, of course, there was the massacre in the Vercors, also just north of here, late in the war. The Nazis had their local headquarters in the chateau at Le Barroux, just south of Malaucène, and blew up the chateau on their departure. It's now been restored to its original state.
Apparently there was a good bush telegraph in operation during the war and, whenever the Nazis came up through the village everybody knew well in advance. When that happened, Montaserrat said she and her parents took a blanket and headed for the woods; had they been discovered, they would have been returned to the tender mercies of Franco or else sent to a concentration camp. Montserrat also said that there were several Nazi sympathisers in the village and one she knew of had had a contract on his head. However, when the maquisards went for the “hit” he was surrounded by a group of neighbours so the hit was called off and other factors prevented it from being planned again. She said that whenever she saw him in the village after that she wondered whether he knew how lucky he was to have survived to die of natural causes. It must have been strange to encounter a “dead man walking” like that.
I also asked Monterrat whether she considered herself to be primarily Catalan (which she is) or Spanish. To my surprise, given her background and friendship with Mana (whose politics are some way to the left of Mao Tse Tung) she replied that she considered herself to be Spanish. She did not agree with the eternal Spanish tendency towards separatism (even the Romans referred to the Spains rather than to Spain).
Monserrat, incidentally, is one of the few neighbours (Elise is another) who still use the wash-house across the road from me, to do some of her washing.
I've now consumed numerous pieces of the galette des rois which I mentioned previously and understand it better in its various forms. What I had had before was one of two versions, as it turns out. This year I noticed what looked like rather appetising meat pies in the local bakery. These turned out to be an alternative version of the galette, stuffed with a sweet almond-flavoured filling rather than meat. And the crown that I mentioned can in fact be anything, often ceramic; I found one that was a ceramic face of a circa 18th century nobleman/woman. Whatever it's form, it is referred to as “la fève”,which is a bean, specifically a broad bean. I presume that in former times, when dried beans would have been a staple part of the winter diet, a dried bean was always to hand; though why it should be specifically a broad bean I have no idea. Maybe I'll ask Daniel if he knows.
The War
Montserrat, my neighbour who invited me to lunch just after my operation, invited me again today, with Mana. I think I mentioned then that she had been a refugee from Franco's Spain, her father having been on the republican side in the civil war. Anyway, we got talking about those times again after I asked her how she had felt having escaped from Spain only to find herself confronted by the Nazi invasion of France. She said that the Nazis had never been domiciled in the village but came up occasionally from Orange and Le Barroux searching for maquisards. There's a plaque just north of here in St Auban commemorating some that were caught and shot by the Nazis and, of course, there was the massacre in the Vercors, also just north of here, late in the war. The Nazis had their local headquarters in the chateau at Le Barroux, just south of Malaucène, and blew up the chateau on their departure. It's now been restored to its original state.
Apparently there was a good bush telegraph in operation during the war and, whenever the Nazis came up through the village everybody knew well in advance. When that happened, Montaserrat said she and her parents took a blanket and headed for the woods; had they been discovered, they would have been returned to the tender mercies of Franco or else sent to a concentration camp. Montserrat also said that there were several Nazi sympathisers in the village and one she knew of had had a contract on his head. However, when the maquisards went for the “hit” he was surrounded by a group of neighbours so the hit was called off and other factors prevented it from being planned again. She said that whenever she saw him in the village after that she wondered whether he knew how lucky he was to have survived to die of natural causes. It must have been strange to encounter a “dead man walking” like that.
I also asked Monterrat whether she considered herself to be primarily Catalan (which she is) or Spanish. To my surprise, given her background and friendship with Mana (whose politics are some way to the left of Mao Tse Tung) she replied that she considered herself to be Spanish. She did not agree with the eternal Spanish tendency towards separatism (even the Romans referred to the Spains rather than to Spain).
Monserrat, incidentally, is one of the few neighbours (Elise is another) who still use the wash-house across the road from me, to do some of her washing.
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