Change

New Season
Boules has been rained off today so I thought it was about time I updated my blog, although nothing of a great deal of interest has happened in the past two weeks. One thing is that the season has changed. It occurs to me that the seasons are barely discernible in England apart, perhaps, from the lack of frosts during the summer. April was apparently brilliant but the weather there since has been indifferent. Here, the mini heat-wave that started as I left for England continued until the last few days of August when a violent storm brought in a change to autumnal weather, which I actually prefer. Temperatures are down to the mid- twenties and the evenings will become increasingly cool. The important constant is the sun. Weather forecasts here are notoriously unreliable, as in England, but here because we are in a border zone between the alpine climate just to the north and the Mediterranean climate just to the south. However, over any sequence of days the weather will conform to that dictated by the season.

It's also a new football season, so one of the real passions of my life can be given its head again.

My summer display of flowers is now over, the remnants looking rather wretched. Neighbors say that what they really appreciate is that there are flowers in front of my house all the year round but that is not quite true. I shan't attempt anything more until November and I'm beginning to think I should hold off doing the summer planting until some time in June. Because spring came early this year, I planted in early May and have had problems keeping the display going even this long. The big success was the jasmine, which flowered continuously for three months. I need changes at the back too; annuals simply don't work there. The ground is so bad that plants take considerable time to establish themselves, which dictates perennials only.

And I've discovered a new ingredient for meals. I always knew that nasturtium leaves were edible but have never really tried them. Now I have and they turn out to be the nearest thing to rocket apart from rocket itself. I shall use the in future instead of buying rocket.

In Memoriam
A good friend and former colleague, Ken Kolence, died at the end of last month. I met Ken at the NATO conference on software engineering in 1968 and subsequently turned down a job offer from him at the Institute fro Software Engineering in Palo Alto on my return from wandering out east. So he came looking for me in London a year later and persuaded me to start a European operation for him. He was brilliant in many ways, the first person to recognise the need for, and produce, tools for computer performance monitoring. He was also what the Americans would call an 'ornery bastard, which probably resulted in his having a less successful career than might have been. IBM (allegedly) tried to take out his relatively modest software operation because it was costing them sales (spurious ones) and, in his own words, he . But he was a good and generous friend to me and the IT industry owes him more than it will probably ever appreciate.

A Depressing Experience

A Depressing Experience
I'm just back from a week in England and have to admit that, apart from the pleasure of seeing my mother and kids, it was a depressing experience. The weather was part of it. I had hoped to get my mother to sit in her garden or to take her out to see a public garden in the vicinity but the weather was simply not suitable; as a final resort, I brought some friends of hers over to see her. I thought that if the weather was like this in mid-August (constant overcast skies, if not too much rain), had I still been living in England, what would I be looking forward to in November through to April? Maybe I'm just becoming a weather freak. The psychological effect, anyway, is considerable.

Then there were the riots. I arrived as they were fizzling out and thus got a week's worth of the aftermath in TV and newspaper coverage. Being somewhat locked up with my mother, I watched a lot of television: Newsnight, Question Time, Horizon, you name it. And the quality of debate I found appalling, even allowing for the inevitable inane point-scoring by the politicians involved. (Why, I ask myself, must we regard this as inevitable? But it seems to be.) Numerous very pertinent points were made almost incidentally in these programmes but none really homed in on and nailed down by the programme presenters.

There was the colleague of the New York cop invited to advise the government on zero-tolerance strategies who stated that crucial to the success of this exercise in New York had been recruitment of an extra 5000 policemen. But the UK government is proposing the exact opposite. Why wasn't this point nailed down and explored? Instead, we had a focus on sterner sentences, most of which will inevitably be reduced on appeal.

The morality aspect was explored with the help of a couple of bishops and, similarly inevitably led nowhere. Morality is much too personal to help in this case, although it did provoke a mention of the role of the banks in creating the economic situation which contributed to the riots.

Another point I thought very pertinent was that of the social infrastructure around many of the kids and areas involved; there is none, apart from the local gangs. So how does that get changed? Nobody, it seemed, really wanted to discuss this; the agenda was sterner policing.

And what about the role of schools? At a time when half of teachers supposedly want out of the profession, wasn't this relevant? Even when the most common reason they want out is a lack of discipline and the means to impose it in schools? Not explored; the focus had to be on sterner policing.

Another interesting point was the role that modern telecommunications played in the organisation of the riots. So what's the most simplistic solution? Shut them down, was the cry. Fortunately a policeman pointed out that these social networking tools were equally important to the police.

There seemed to be almost a conscious collusion between the programmes and politicians that any avenue for a possible way forward that entailed extra resources being provided (even police) was to be mentioned only in passing and then set aside.

There is no denying the government's predicament in providing extra resources, given the economic situation, but this problem is simply not going to go away without them. So, time for some creative thinking, outside the box? Dream on.

I hoped that possibilities such as the use of a volunteer workforce or possible extra pennies for job seekers with suitable skills might be explored. Again, dream on. What we got was tired, old and failed remedies from politicians concerned more with point-scoring and programme presenters with blunt teeth. The overwhelming impression was that the powers that be really did not want to get to grips with this problem, had no idea how to tackle it or simply preferred fatuous populist slogans. And, oh boy, was that depressing. I came away with the impression that England was bankrupt not just in terms of money but also ideas. Brain death is now the criterion for the truly dead.

Dark Thoughts

Dark Thoughts
It's been a lovely day today but one that, to me, has turned out to have curious echoes of the circumstances surrounding the song that almost says the same thing: it's a lovely day tomorrow.

There was a heavy storm over Saturday night and rain fell for most of Sunday; so no watering to be done today. I spent the morning pottering and on the computer, did some shopping, played boules and went to the Bar du Pont for the usual pizza this evening. Friends Steve and Jo have their daughter and family staying with them and I asked how they had spent the day. Similarly peacefully and happily it seemed, grandchildren playing in their pool, adults reading books, etc.

All this contrasted bleakly with the news emanating from England, to where I shall return for a week on Thursday. The episodic, dispersed and mindless violence that appears to be going on there seems to have little rhyme or reason behind it and that is worrying. Riots for a reason are understandable, however outlandish or mistaken the reason might be. Riots for apparently no reason bespeak an underlying malaise, in the society; in Shakespeare's words, something rotten. That is not so surprising in view of the economic conditions, particularly for young people, in the country and the same applies, indeed, for most of Europe; but is worrying nonetheless.

Then, at the end of the pizza evening, I was left talking to Alex, a part-time resident of the village who has spent most of his life working in finance in London. He's never exactly a barrel load of laughs but our discussion on the general economic outlook was even more depressing than usual, against a backdrop of stock markets falling all over the western world. I had to agree with him that it is difficult to see how Greece can stay in the euro zone but equally difficult to see how it can opt out of it. So Europe is in the frying pan alongside the UK.

What worries me most in all this is that all these portents point to a repetition of the political conditions that prevailed in the nineteen thirties and led to a huge swing to the political far right and a swathe of fascist movements. True, the riots in England can doubtless be contained and may prove transient. True also, the US and Europe may print large quantities of money or find some other way of achieving a temporary equilibrium. But, and it is a big but, the underlying widespread economic weakness will certainly not go away easily and the thus neither will the potential for fascist movements.

Racial tension is an ever-present potential tinderbox in most of Europe. If, as seems likely later in the year, Germany is called on again to bail out Greece (France is not in a position to do any more without joining the list of failing European economies) what will the political reaction be there? And what will the popular political reaction be to the austerity measures that will almost inevitably affect the rest of Europe over the next few years? It hardly needs saying that riots, whether in the UK or elsewhere, usually lead to general demands for sterner policing and government. The only way out of this that we could find in the nineteen thirties was to have a world war.

Of course, we are nowhere near that now. And the EU has been created in the meantime with a specific goal of avoiding wars in Europe (but not fascist or neo-fascist governments; Hitler's goal, after all, was to unite Europe). Maybe I am just having a bad evening. But it has made me wonder whether my little corner of paradise in Mollans is something of a fool's paradise. It is certainly sheltered from much that is going on in the rest of the world.

Fruit And Language

Fruit
It's that fruit time of the year and, like a dog with several tails, I'm making my usual mistake of going the rounds and buying too much of it. The problem is that it is all ripe and so lasts only a few days. Since I generally shop seriously only once a week, the fruit tends to go bad before I can eat it all. And all is a lot. This week I discounted apricots, white and yellow peaches, nectarines and melons in favour of the first greengages that are just in, plus some mirabelle plums. Then Steve and Jo came round to eat this evening and brought a kilo of greengages given to them plus a promise of more. I'll probably end up making another load of jam.

This is in addition to my own grape harvest which has been particularly heavy this year. I took a couple of bags full to the pizza evening last Monday and gave another couple of bunches to Patricia, my cleaning lady, today. I'm eating them all the time (as well as greengages, etc) but the trouble is that all my neighbours and friends have their own supply, so it is difficult to give them away. I'm hoping that some will stay unripe for long enough for me to take them back to England when I go in a couple of weeks time.

The Problem Of X
Neville, who came to eat with Steve and Jo this evening, is also a linguist, fundamentally in German but also with good French and Spanish. Conversation got onto Catalan, as Neville previously lived near Valencia. He had the same experience in trying to learn Valenciano as I had in trying to learn to speak Provencal; both are predominantly spoken languages and pronunciation and usage differ widely over quite a small area. So is it worth the trouble? Anyway, both of us, it seems, gave up.

The discussion brought up the problem of X in mediaeval languages. It appears in words with both Latin and Germanic origins and would seem to have been pronounced originally something like the sound of the last two letters in the Scottish word loch. Over time, this proved much too difficult for everyone (except the Scots) and it either hardened or softened to become like a more common g, which has both hard and soft forms in English. Thus the mediaeval (Germanic origin) xwerra softened in English to become shwar, with the opening letters eventually dropped, and guerre in French (guerra in Spanish). X is not now native to Spanish but appears frequently in Catalan (and Provencal) in its soft form. So far so good. The problem is that mediaeval scribes were wont to use X as an abbreviation for any set of letters that could be assumed to be understood. Much as written Arabic omits letters (vowels generally) that are assumed, so mediaeval scribes adopted the same practice, replacing what was assumed with an X. (It made me wonder, incidentally, if there was some cross-cultural connection here, Arabic being a major influence in mediaeval Europe.) Anyway, a problem in tracing back the development of X from mediaeval languages is to know whether, in any instance, you are dealing with a pronounced X or an X that replaces other letters. I've no doubt an expert etymologist could sort most of this out in no time but, meanwhile, it remains a good topic for after-dinner conversation.

Even The French Don't Agree
Yesterday evening I had Daniel, Patricia and Mana with me to eat. Alexis, Daniel's youngest son was due to come to but decided to leave the old fogies to themselves. In talking to Mana, I described Alexis as Daniel's 'fils cadet' (younger, youngest son), with which description Daniel agreed. Mana objected that a 'fils cadet' had to be the second son not the third (as Alexis was) and that therefore Alexis should be described as the 'benjamin'. Daniel backtracked and agreed. However, I was in no doubt that had Mana had not been there Daniel would have been quite happy with 'fils cadet' and that that is now common usage. I asked the obvious question as to what the fourth, fifth, etc son would be called and that led to a discussion which I had a hard time following but which, I think, involves terms that have long gone from common usage.

The Last Ten Days

Computers, Computers
Two failures happened ten days ago. My keyboard started to play up (I've lost several keys on the left-hand side) and I lost my Internet connection. The former means a new machine, I think, as the one I have is five years old and I've already had to replace the DVD R/W. I can get generally get round the lost keys by running CHARMAP, copying and pasting but this is tedious. The Internet connection went out because of a faulty transformer on the wireless box and that is now replaced.

I was surprised by my reliance on the Internet. I've got into the habit of perusing various news aggregator and football gossip sites while drinking my early morning coffee and found that watching news on TV was no substitute. In fact I found that even during the rest of the day I used the Internet far more than I had thought I did. It's been twenty years since my son set up a bulletin board and I first encountered the Internet and in that time my reliance on it has become extreme.

End Of Film
The recording session ten days ago finished my involvement in the film on olive trees. Recording of the English version of the female interviews still has to be done but friend Jo will do that. The final phase of my recording raised one problem and one interesting point.

The problem was that Daniel, when he wrote out the French script, hadn't bothered to write out the interviews word for word but had simply summarised when the interviewee was rambling on a bit. This meant that, when I recorded the English version, it fell woefully short of the length of the French. What we had to do was start the English version a couple of seconds after the interviewee started talking; that is common practice in translation so that worked OK. Then I had to speak slowly and introduce some “ums”, “ers” and pauses until I got the required length. It was actually quite difficult to do.

The interesting point arose when the Head of the Order of Olive Trees in Nyons discussed the celebration of the new year's olive oil. The ceremony is called an “alicoque” after the Provencal words for garlic and bread. Pieces of bread, “coques” in Provencal, are toasted to form croutons, which are then rubbed in garlic, “ali” in Provencal, and then dipped in olive oil and tasted. It was the word “coque” that intrigued me, since “un oeuf à la coque” in French is a boiled egg; i.e. cooked in its shell. But boiled eggs are commonly eaten with pieces of bread, i.e. “coques” in Provencal. So there is this kind of double-entendre. Daniel hadn't made this connection and was intrigued by it.

Water
We have had 4-5 successive days of high heat and humidity. It's caused me to try to find a solution to my problem of finding a long non-alcoholic drink that I really like; effectively, an alternative to beer. Water is fine but gets tedious after a while and I find most fizzy drinks too sweet for me and most cordials not to my liking. After some searching I've decided on a flavoured version of the Badoit mineral water. It tastes as though it's just been exposed to a little lemon zest and is not sweet at all; it's very refreshing.

I normally buy some sparkling mineral water because I like it fizzy and natural fizz is always better than carbonation. However, friend Jo has taught me to be wary of bottled water. I used to drink St Yorre, a water from Vichy, until I found that it contained salts far in excess of the levels allowed in UN tap water regulations. In France, bottled water is regulated to ensure it comes from the spring it is supposed to but not otherwise as to its content (other than it not being overtly toxic). The mineral content of the water has to be stated on the label but is not itself regulated. Caveat emptor.

Wine Tasting
This year for the first time there was a wine-tasting evening in Mollans. There's one every year in nearby Puymeras and also occasionally in other local villages but this was a first for Mollans. The vendors were all from the surrounding area so I was familiar with most of the wine but still managed to find one that was interesting. It was a red, light and fruity wine actually from Mollans that was pleasant rather than really good but notably had a lower alcohol level than most Cotes du Rhones. It's normally difficult to find one that is less than fourteen percent alcohol and this was a couple of percent lower.

The event was well attended, around a couple of hundred people, and provided a good social evening but I find wine-tasting evenings of little practical value. I buy most of my wine in bags-in-boxes as it tends to be cheaper and avoids having half-empty bottles after a meal. Vendors at wine-tasting sessions tend to bring only their bottled wines however, so I have to ask for the closest approximation to their bag-in-boxed offerings and make assumptions from that. Anyway, there was one vendor from Gigondas and, though I wasn't going to buy any, it was good to drink a little of it. It is probably my favourite wine if I'm going to splash out on a bottle for a special occasion.

The Village and DSK

The Village
I blather on about the village and so far have shown no photo of it; so here are two. The one above is taken from the south, from the road between Entrechaux and Buis which by-passes the village. The one below is from the east, from the terrace of my friend Daniel's house. The view from his terrace is at its best when the sun goes down and you can see the lights come on one by one in the houses on the chateau hill across the river.




The DSK Affair
Developments in the case against Strauss-Kahn in the USA have confirmed what all my French friends think: that, one way or another, it was a put-up job. The initial suspicions of Sarkozy's involvement have dissipated but my friends still believe it was a trap. According to Daniel, who considers himself something of an authority on crime literature, you have to look for whoever has the most to gain. However, that would appear to be Francois Hollande, the new hope of the Left, although no one is suggesting he was involved.

Strauss-Kahn is not out of the woods yet. A French writer, Tristane Banon, is accusing him of a similar assault. This complaint goes back some eight years, though, and seems likely to be nothing more than an irritant. However, it militates against what has been suggested as a future career for Strauss-Kahn: as Finance Minister in a Francois Hollande-led government. To have credibility with the electorate, a left of centre coalition would need a strong financial figure among its ministers and Strauss-Kahn would fit the bill. However he will need to keep out of the French courts if this is to happen.

Passing The Time

Film Recording
On Friday I started on the recording of the translation I had done for the commentary on Daniel and Martine's film of the world of the olive tree. The obvious incentive for Martine was to have an English version of the film available for sale when the tourists arrive en masse. So we've just started on it and should have it finished by the time the tourists have all gone home. That's called Provencal marketing nous.

Martine has a studio at the top of her house equipped with a full-blown, modern film-editing system. I was impressed with the fine granularity with which editing could be done, down to the level of individual syllables. The recording was slow at first because it took me time to get the neutral tone and even flow of words right. Also, I found that though I had tried to produce spoken rather than written phraseology when I had done the translation some phrases still seemed awkward when spoken, so I ad-libbed at times. Another problem was to time the spoken English to closely the same length as the French. One of the scenes was of an olive oil expert making points while counting them out on his fingers and so the the English version had to keep in synch with his fingers. It's all new to me and an interesting learning process. We were doing it for a couple of hours and got about a tenth of the commentary done so it will take quite a few more sessions to finish the job. In part of the film there is an interview with a woman and we decided a woman's voice will be preferable so I will ask friend Jo if she will do that.

Saturday Market And Film
The Saturday evening summer markets have now started and will continue through to early September. During the rest of the year there are just a paella stall and a fruit/vegetable stall on Saturday mornings but in the midsummer months a fuller market spreads over both sides of the bridge. I went to get some fruit as my contribution to the street meal which takes place in my road tomorrow. I bought some apricots and melons and a variety of peach that I've never seen anywhere else; it is shaped like a doughnut or bagel, complete with a depresssion in the middle where the former would have a whole; the peaches are delicious. I also noticed a variety of tomato, called “allongé”, that I've never seen anywhere else; it is shaped like an irregular sausage, 4-6 inches long.

My conribution of fruit is now an annual regular. Having had to put up with a lot of extreme feminism in my time, I'm pleased to have found a female prejudice that works in my favour. When I first bought the house and hadn't yet got the kitchen in order I brought a bowl of fruit to the street meal somewhat apologetically. However, I've found that none of the women in the street expects men to cook. It's expected that they will buy something to bring along. In this case,I'm happy to go along with expectations.

In the market I met Mana who said there was an interesting film showing in Buis that evening that had won the Palme D'Or at the last Cannes festival, so I went along with her and Patricia. It was entitled “Tree of Life”. I wondered afterwards why Mana had wanted to see it and, sure enough, she hated it; she is averse to religion in any shape or form. I found the photography and some of the imagery compelling but it was too long and the main argument seemed to be that as the world was such a beautiful place there had to be a God. I suppose it did also pose a number of the questions that Christians must ask themselves from time to time but that had little interest for me. Patricia, on the other hand, found the film wonderful, conforming as it did to her theistic beliefs: there is no God as such but God is in everything. I find that rather vague but it does correspond fairly well with my idea that if we are “greater than we know”, as Wordsworth would have it, then the universe is probably a sub-atomic particle in something so immense we couldn't possibly conceive of it. But I'm not sure what that has to do with religion.

Victorian Pharmacy
I quite often turn on the television when I have my evening meal, usually to watch sport. However, no sport being available the other evening I turned to a programme on Victorian pharmacies on the Yesterday channel and found it highly interesting. The amount of mercury, arsenic and opiates being dished out was horrifying, a case of the cure being more dangerous than the complaint. In fact, apparently it often was. Poor families with multiple children used to go to pharmacies to get a potion to keep the youngest children quiet, a “calmant”. This consisted of opiates which depressed the children's appetites to such an extent that they died of starvation, a principal cause of infant mortality in the era.

The multiplicity of dangerous mixtures reminded me of the time I started chemistry at school and was bought a chemistry set. This reminded my grandmother that my uncle had had one which was in a cupboard under her stairs. She gave it to me to add to my collection of chemicals. In it I found some potassium ferrecyanide with which I tried to make prussic acid (as boys of 12 are wont to do). Fortunately the local chemist would sell me only dilute acids so my experiment didn't work, otherwise I might not be writing this blog.