Lunch, La Tribune And The Weather

Old Fogies' Lunch
We duly had the lunch that I had been looking forward to all week, for everyone over 65 in the village, paid for out of village funds. It didn't disappoint. The menu this year was:
Aperitifs
Salad with shrimps and crayfish tails
Fillets of perch in a butter sauce
Trou Provencal (peach sorbet bathed in marc)
Duck breast with mushrooms
Cheese
Baked Alaska flambé
Coffee
The meal was served by the Mayor and village councillors, with red and rose wine throughout and sparkling Clairette de Die with the dessert. I didn't think the cooking this year was quite up to the high standard of last year but it was again a really enjoyable occasion.

One of the gratifying (non-gastronomic) points for we old fogies was the mayor's short introductory speech. This year, as last, he said that the village was as it was was because of contributions to it that we had all made in the past and that was why the village was proud to offer us the lunch.

Two points of interest came out of conversations during the lunch. I mentioned to Daniel that, of the ~150 people there, I probably new only about half-a-dozen apart from the twenty on my table, expecting him to point out others that he knew. But he didn't know any more people than I did, which surprised me.

The other point was that I had taken my new camcorder with me to take some shots of the event and the thought came to me that it would be possible to make a short film of life in the village. Daniel already has footage of the Christmas carol singing; we could take footage of, for instance, the Feu De La St Jean, the Painters in the Streets and the Fête Votive later on, the village team at the regional boules tournament, etc and gradually piece together a snapshot of village activities over a year. I mentioned this thought to Daniel and the Mayor and both seemed supportive; so, we shall see..........The idea is actually beginning to excite me the more I consider the possibilities.

Carol Singing
Our carol singing got a write-up in the local paper, La Tribune. I'm not sure who did the write-up as Guy Tissier, the normal scribe for village events for La Tribune wasn't around at the time. I'm slihjtly puzzled by what I perceive to be a couple of grammatical errors in the text, which I've pointed out below; I'll get these checked. Since the article is short and provides a chance to get some French into my blog I include the write-up below. The article is headed “Chants de Noël en Trois Langues”.




« Sur l'initative d'une poignée de Mollanais auquel se sont greffes des amis du canton, une chorale éphémère est née puisqu'elle n'aura durée que le temps nécessaire a cette journée,

En effet, ces chanteurs ont propose 8 chants de Noël anglais, français et allemand au cours de deux représentations : la première au foyer logement St Louis et la seconde au bar du pont.

Les spectateurs n'en ont pas cru leurs oreilles telle la surprise était de taille ! En effet ce petit concert était de qualité : on était très loin de la chansonnette que l'on chante dans sa salle de bain !

Une soirée très agréable qui s'est terminée devant un buffet de friandises. « 

I think “auquel” in the first line should be “à laquelle”; I also think that “allemand” in the second paragraph should have an “s” on it. As I said, I'll check these points out.

(PS Armelle has kindly confirmed that these are indeed errors, although you could argue that since we sang only one carol in German “allemand” needn't have an “s”. The point hadn't occurred to me and could be a very subtle way of conveying that meaning but I doubt it was intended.)

From The Sublime To The Gor Blimey
Only ten days ago I was happily recording games of boules in 17 degrees of sunshine. Last Tuesday morning it started snowing and continued for most of the day. The snowing has stopped but the snow remains. It has been minus 2 degrees today and was minus 16 overnight,

In these conditions there is a sense of being trapped in the village, under siege by the weather. All the principal roads out of the village describe successions of hairpin bends as they climb, bends that can be liberally covered with black ice and which have a steep drop on one side. They are not an inviting prospect to drive on. Already one villager, Jacques Thibault, has slid off the road, although his upturned car was fortunately arrested before it could plunge into the valley below. Despite this I did drive into Vaison today as I needed a new battery for my watch. But I drove very, very slowly.

From Peas To Politics

Frozen Vegetables
It's tempting to say that the French don't have frozen vegetables but clearly some of them do; a more or less full range is available in most supermarkets. However, the only one I've ever seen used, or been served, is frozen chips. Frozen chips work well, as also do frozen peas, which taste, ironically, fresher than fresh peas. The chemistry of that is well understood. I remember thinking years ago, when my children were young, that they should at least once in their lives taste fresh peas. They didn't like them much and I had to agree that frozen peas tasted much better. French peas are invariably of the tinned variety, similar to the ones labelled “petit pois” in England, and do taste good but quite different from frozen ones. The larger marrow-fat peas found in England don't seem to exist in France.

Some vegetables, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, onions and leeks for example, are available fresh in the shops all year round. For the rest, the French will resort to tinned rather than frozen versions. It has to be said that, with the French emphasis on flavour, the way tinned vegetables are prepared does give them a good distinctive flavour. Tinned French beans here, for instance, (which you rarely see in the UK) work better in my opinion than the frozen version.

On the other hand, frozen broad beans and sprouts, which I like, never seem to be used here.

Complacency
Mana and Daniel came to eat with me tonight. I served them tandoori chicken, which they loved. Indian cuisine is a closed book to the French who, despite their devotion to taste, continually surprise me with their conservative approach to cooking. French cooking has a deserved reputation for quality which the French all know and are proud of. But culinary art isn't static and the French seem remarkably reluctant to experiment with flavours outside their domestic experience.

It is a similarly complacent attitude to their view on foreign travel, as explained to me by a French friend in England. She said that the French tend to think that they have all they need for holidays in France: coast, mountains, countryside, lakes, etc. So why travel abroad? This friend was struggling to explain to herself the difference in attitude towards foreign travel that she perceived between the English and the French (Heaven knows what she would have made of the Australians). What it came down to was a more or less complacent attitude among the French that, as Voltaire might have put it, all was for the best in the best of possible countries (France).

Politics and Naivety?
Conversation this evening got around to politics. Both Mana and Daniel are in favour of Hollande but not entirely confident that he will succeed. I ventured to suggest that whoever got power would be constrained by impositions from the world's banks. Daniel said that unemployment was the big issue and then astonished me by saying he thought that Marie Le Penn had some good ideas on that. Marie Le Penn is an unashamed if sometimes slightly disguised fascist and Daniel is nowhere near being a fascist. The links between unemployment and fascism are clear and well demonstrated in very recent history; indeed, they are one of my fears for the future. Yet Daniel seemed unwilling to acknowledge the link and took the attitude that good(?) ideas for resolving the unemployment issue were welcome from anywhere.

As conversation stalled I threw in that I had read that the Court of Human Rights in Brussels had declared that owning a satellite dish was a fundamental human right. I did this is a joke. Daniel and Mana immediately embarked on a discussion of whether satellite dishes should be allowed because they looked so unsightly. From Daniel's terrace there is a view across the village rooftops that, he said, is completely spoiled by satellite dishes. I found their reaction to my interjection surreal. Didn't they see the absurdity? So I appealed to Mana in terms that she above all should appreciate. When millions were starving and falsely jailed, wasn't this ludicrous? Her attitude seemed to be; why not rights to satellite dishes as well? I should have known; Mana has no sense of the ridiculous. To corroborate this I asked her if she enjoyed Jacques Sempé's cartoons. Sempé is for me, along with James Thurber, the master of the ridiculous. Her reply was “No”.

Grammar
A final note on grammar. I think my grasp of French grammar is pretty good; what I'm learning here, apart from occasional extra vocabulary, is the way the French tend to express themselves as distinct from phrasing that is grammatically correct but which they would be unlikely to use. But postings on the Internet often make me unsure. French Internet users are no more grammatical in their postings than are their English counterparts and I frequently find constructions that I'm sure are grammatically wrong. Or am I sure? Daniel, Mana and others to the rescue!

Reading And Viewing

Reading
The weather over the past couple of weeks has been quite good for January but often cold, even in the sun during the day. So it's been a time mostly for reading and viewing ; only a hardy few of us make it to boules and then only when the sun is out. However, I've received my invitation to the old folks lunch on the 29th and will look forward to that. Last year it was a five-hour event with superb cuisine, decent wines and lots of good company.

A book I have just ploughed through is Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett, a missionary who went to convert the Pirahã tribe in Brazil to Christianity and, instead, himself got converted to their culture. That's not the only intriguing aspect to the book. It defies what I had formerly thought necessarily happens to a primitive language when it comes into contact with a more developed society. Admittedly I have, in global terms, little personal experience of this but the the normal outcome seems to be that the primitive language collapses and becomes a kind of patois or creole, borrowing as necessary from the language of the more developed society.

When I was in Senegal the predominant tribal language, Ouolof, had fallen apart through contact with French. As an example from experience, Ouolof had eight verbs to pour, with the verb including what was poured and into what. In linguistic terms, that's a very synthetic language (many units of meaning – morphemes – per word). It works when there are few nouns associated with the verb; so when the Oulof had only water, camels' milk and calabashes, there was no problem. Bring tea, coffee, wine, scotch, tea cups, mugs and glasses of various kinds into the picture and the structure of the language cannot cope; you'd need a couple of hundred synthetic verbs. The Oulof had reduced their eight verbs to pour to one and borrowed the French nouns, thus reducing the language to a kind of creole.

All this is in line with my perceptions on culture and semantics. You don't necessarily have to look in prisons, as Churchill and Dostoyevsky before him suggested, to understand what kind of society you are dealing with; the semantics of the society's language can often tell you a lot. It reflects the culture. What astonished me was that the Pirahãs' language seems to have survived. It has no counting semantics for example; only the concepts of one or many, which also serve for small and large. The tribe pays a price for this semantic omission, it seems, when they are short-changed for the produce they collect and sell. But they apparently don't care much about that, not enough to change their culture.

The reason the language has survived is that the tribe has rejected all outside cultures and more sophisticated concepts; with the exception, it seems, of plastic cups. No doubt even a very primitive language can accommodate those. The lesson is clear: to retain a language you have to retain the culture it reflects. The more the definitive concepts of a culture are blurred, the more the associated language is “corrupted”.

Of course, this is happening with the French language today. The admittedly miserable efforts of the Académie Française to safeguard the “purety” of French are bound to fail because French culture is changing faster than it can cope. Maybe the Canadians will do a better job. I found echoes of France also in the insularity and mores of the Pirahãs. Pirahã society is distinctly incestuous, a feature that goes hand in hand with insularity.

The book gets quite heavy on linguistics in places and exceeded my interest in that aspect sometimes. But the social aspects, and their link to linguistics, I found fascinating.

Viewing
One of the DVDs I obtained for Christmas was given to me by daughter: it's entitled Spiral. It's a crime series screened on BBC2 in the UK which I somehow missed, probably because I was often here in France at the time it was screened. The production was in conjunction with Canal+ in France and the DVD is in French with English subtitles. I needed those for the frequent use of police/underworld slang (though the swearing was familiar from boules). I found the whole 20+ hours viewing brilliant in very respect, not just the acting and Paris suburb locations but, above all, the characterisation. Everyone is (morally) grey. Even justice, when it is served, requires a little corruption to help it along and comes with a heavy penalty. The whole tale is totally believable, nauseating at times, tender at others, but, above all totally believable. I don't know either of the scriptwriters attributed but the scripts could well have been written by John Le Carré; it's definitely his territory.

Once again there were insights on France, not just on the French legal system, with which I am (fortunately) relatively unfamiliar, but also with respect to the somewhat easy familiarity the French seem to have with corruption in high places and easy acceptance also that power will be in one way or another corrupt. I find that unsettling.

There was also a linguistic aspect. The French title for the seies is “Engrenages”, which corresponds roughly to the English “gearing up”. I had to go to the dictionary for that. Vehicle gears, in French, are “changements de vitesse”, which shows no linguistic similarity to the English word. “Engrenages” does, though, and so do all the other words in French associated with gears. I wonder how “changements de vitesse” happened?

Reminiscenses

Reminiscences In England
I had a good festive season in England with my mother. Carl stayed from Christmas eve until the 27th and Natalie came on Boxing Day. There was not a lot to do, though, other than shopping and I thought the selection of TV programmes on offer even worse than usual. So, I read a lot of John Le Carré, did the mind games in the papers and shopped.

Going into the village general store shortly after my arrival in Chiddingfold I noticed a pile of China News among the newspapers. Chiddingfold is hardly a hot-bed of interest in China so I asked the store keeper what they were doing there. He laughed and said his distributor had delivered them and that he'd asked for them to be taken back. Glancing cursorily at the front page I could easily see that the paper was a publicity sheet for China. The papers were still there when I left a fortnight later so the distributor had obviously been paid to leave them there. Presumably it was a PR exercise on the part of the Chinese.

However, it reminded me of my school days in the village. The only village school was C of E affiliated, which meant that every Thursday morning in Lent we had to attend a church service. The vicar at the time was a former missionary in China and known in the village as Old China. He was incapable of speaking in words of less than three syllables and so his sermons passed right over the heads of we school children (I was 9 at the time) and most of the villagers. I remember once being ejected from the church in disgrace for playing marbles behind the pews.

I enjoyed my time at the school but was removed by my mother after she found me, one sunny afternoon, watching cricket during school time on the cricket green adjacent to the school. She wanted to know what I was doing and I said that the headmaster had told me to go and watch the cricket. She accordingly went to see the headmaster who explained that 99% of the kids in the school were going to end up as farm hands and I was so far ahead in class that he thought I might as well get some sun. In retrospect, that was a Summerhill moment for me. My mother was desperate for me to get the 11+ exam and so decided we had to move back to London. I duly got the 11+ a year later in Mitcham at a school called Bond Road, which I thought for ages was called Bombed Road because of the bombed-out houses all along it.

The Inland Revenue
As I remember, last year I reported writing a letter to both Ihornaby and Glasgow offices of the IR to sort out exactly what they wanted me to declare on my self-assessment forms, to avoid a repeat of the misunderstandings of that year. I received no reply, of course. And so attempted a full declaration over the Internet this year. It cannot be done directly by British nationals resident abroad but nowhere is this stated. The first hurdle, as last year, was the requirement for a UK postcode, which I was informed had been fixed. In fact, if the postcode is left blank, the system still flags an error but allows the rest of the form to be completed. However, it refuses to allow the return to be submitted unless the error is removed. I phoned and was told to tick the “foreign” box. There is none. I phoned again and this time was given the following instructions: double-click on the postcode entry and hold down the backs-space key until the box is highlighted in blue, then hold down the delete key until the error flag disappears. I asked where this was explained; the answer (with a giggle) was “nowhere but that is what you have to do”. It worked. The assessment then came up with a large sum of tax due, which, considering the IR had accepted my tax residence in France and repaid me tax paid since 2007, was something of a surprise. I phoned again and was told that this was because I had made a full declaration but not submitted form SA109 for foreign residents. Form SA109 is in PDF format and thus cannot be submitted electronically. This was acknowledged although I was told that it was possible with the purchase of commercial software (which I don't otherwise need). They say they will accept the completed form through the post. The respondent was not in the Glasgow office which I had phoned but in the Liverpool office and the form has to be sent to the Cardiff office.

I still don't know what I should declare and what not. I asked for precise clarification and was told to put “what reflected my circumstances over the year”. How precise can you get?

The IR has clearly given up any hope rectifying its own system and resorted to semi-privatisation to sort out the mess. In fact, I am now convinced, despite the many offices to which I have been referred, it no longer resides in the UK at all but has fled into the imagination of George Orwell.

Last Post Before Christmas

Wine
Daniel and his son Kevyn came round to eat tonight and, as ever with Kevyn, the talk turned to wine. Kevyn is one of those French people who is passionate about wine and he took issue with my assertion that the Appellation Controlée (AOC) “trademark” is going to disappear, because it has little relation to taste. He agreed with my current perception but said that the trademark could go one of two ways. Either it disappears or, as he thinks likely, it will become much stricter and therefore have useful meaning. I think he's right in suggesting the alternative but think that the democratic vote (i.e.the need to sell wine, whatever) will fudge the issue to the extent that AOC will remain meaningless.

I was trying to explain to him the choices presented to me when I wanted to buy wine, at a reasonable price for everyday drinking, in England. What we both agreed about was the need for some reliable quality/price indicator. It's difficult to see how this can be effected but we both agreed again that, at the current time, the Côtes du Rhone red wines are the best value for money in France; and that is reflected in UK supermarket shelves, where affordable Bordeaux and Burgundy wines of any quality are noticeably absent. But you still have to suck it and see.

Téléthon
The Téléthon, as I've probably remarked previously, is France's answer to the UK Children In Need weekend blitz on TV. Except that this is France's major and only annual, nation-wide, charity money-raising event and it's not specific to any single charity; it raises money for charities local, regional, national or international. Anyway, I went along last Saturday to join in some of the activities, including the boules tournament. As it happened, Daniel and I came runners-up, which earned me a zip-up nylon jacket (plain black on the front but with Téléthon and quad bike riders club(?) emblazoned on the back) and a bag full of apples; the former will be useful in the summer.

Darts
My « kids » bought me a Chelsea dartboard and darts for my birthday and, as I already have a dartboard, I offered the one I had to Patrique and Valérie in the Bar du Pont. Patrique considered my offer and then asked if it was a board for plastic darts. I replied that any kind of normal darts could be used and he then asked about the points ; I said they were steel and he replied that they were now banned in bars in France. Apparently, darts in France (in bars) now has to be an electronic game, with the board sensing where darts with plastic points hit. I often grumble about impositions emanating from HSE in the UK but the French seem to have stolen a march on us here. Patrique said that if darts with steel points were allowed serious injuries would result. The French must be more aggressive than I had thought.

Anyway, I offered the surplus dartboard to Daniel and Kevyn this evening and they gratefully accepted. I think that Daniel's kids will get a deal of pleasure from it; at least, I hope so.

Christmas Readings
The BELL (Beaumont English Language Library) had it's pre-Christmas get-together last Sunday with an invitation to read to the members anything on a Christmas theme. I must admit that Christmas hasn't been high on my literary agenda, the only decent thing I remember reading on the subject being Dicken's Christmas Carol. However, deciding to give some thought to the idea, I found a book on mediaeval festivals in my bookcase and, within it, a useful piece on Christmas then. I had always thought that first-footing was a Scottish and New Year tradition. Not so. In mediaeval England, Christmas festivities could not begin until the high table at any assembly had been first-footed by the Lucky One, who brought the spirit of Christmas into the room with him from outside.

Carols
Thanks to Herculean efforts from Jo, Steve, René and Armelle, the carol-singing evening went very well, with a good audience at both the old folk's home and the Bar du Pont. Thanks to Armelle and René, there were enough French singers and thanks to Steve and Jo there were enough people who could actually sing well to drown out my foghorn voice. We sang in English, French, German and Latin (the Provencal option, which we had considered, was eventually dropped). Everybody had a good time, which was the prime objective of the exercise; and three kids went away with Christmas hats that they hadn't expected and were delighted with. Daniel filmed the whole event and so there should be a visual record of it.

One of the linguistic problems (for the English) which I noticed took me back to my days of scanning French verse at school and university. Words that end in an “e” in French have an extra syllable that is barely noticeable in normal speech but which has to be accounted for when reading/singing verse They therefore affect the flow of the text and that was something that some of we English found slightly difficult when singing. However, I've no doubt the French found the English pronunciations even more difficult, particularly as we rendered “Ding Dong Merrily on High” in its original old English version (e.g bells swungen).

I think that, as the evening was an undoubted succees, we may want to repeat it next year. However, I also think there were lessons to be learned. There's no doubt that this kind of event is not natural to the village. René and Armelle were enthusiastic and supportive because carol singing is as common in Alsace as it is in England; that is clearly not true of Provence. A good crowd was attracted to the Bar du Pont but the audience was mostly the “intelligentsia” of the village and surroundings; there were few real locals there. Patricia, my cleaning lady, was very enthusiastic when I spoke to her on the very morning of the event and said she would be there but did not come, which was sad. However, she felt positively towards the idea and had ideas of her own about walking round the village singing and attracting children to join in. This last point, I think, is something we should take on board. If the children want to come they will bring their parents with them. There was also the question of posters advertising the event, beautifully designed by René, but posted only a week before the event; several people I spoke to said they hadn't noticed them.

If we do the same next year, it's clearly going to take an exceptional effort to get the locals out of their warm houses at 8.00pm on a winter evening and start a new “tradition” for the village. But.....it can be done and, maybe, with the lessons of this year behind us and some more local support, which I feel could be forthcoming, we could do it.

Fingers
There's something I haven't recorded which I've known since being here, probably through friend Steve. I had always interpreted Churchill's famous V sign as being simply V for eventual victory; in fact, its origins go much further back. I had slightly puzzled at the fact that sticking two fingers in the air could be as much of an insult as sticking a single finger up (a kind of two-way version of “up yours”). The explanation, it seems, lies somewhere around the battle of Agincourt. The French, to taunt the English long-bow archers, would stick one finger in the air to signify that any English archer they caught would have a finger cut off to prevent him firing arrows again. The English responded with two fingers up to show that they still had them and would fire on the French. So there was originally a cultural distinction; not so much “up yours” as “over to you”. Incidentally, that would imply that Churchill's V sign during the war was effectively an insult to the French. I wonder if anyone thought of that (or cared about it).

There Should Be A Law.......

There Should Be A Law..........

Steve, Jo and Mana came round to eat tonight and I asked Mana about the origins of the serious divide I perceived between the religious and non-religious in France. Mana didn't see it as I did and thought there were as many people who didn't care much one way or the other in France as in England. Anyway, she and Steve both thought that the church/state divide didn't go back as far as Napoleon but probably had its origins in the Republican governments of the late 19th century. Certainly the divide wasn't enshrined in law until 1905.

I wondered what was the case with the UK military now, the discussion having reminded me of something a friend of my youth had told me. He had joined the Royal Navy and, on signing up, had been asked a lot of questions including his religion, to which he had replied : « none ». So the interviewer duly wrote down C of E ; at that time (the late 1950s) it seemed that you had to have a religion to be in the Armed Forces. God as well as my country, presumably. Steve reckoned that you probably weren't allowed to even ask the question now.

Which led us on to political correctness. We all, other than Mana, had numerous examples of idiocies to recount. Steve and I both being Chelsea supporters discussed the case of John Terry, the Chelsea captain, who allegedly swore at a West Ham player using a racist remark (the West Ham player, incidentally, didn't realise this until after the match.) We both agreed, that for once, Sepp Blatter the EUFA President had got it right. If that had in fact happened then the players should sort it out themselves after the match; many things are said and done in the heat of a moment that are best sorted out between the parties themselves when both are calmer. That's just common sense. Steve reckoned that there wouldn't be any rugby players still playing if the same criteria were applied to rugby. The fact that this is now a case being passed to the Director of Public Prosecutions defies all common sense, if only because the police must have more important calls on their time.

We were discussing the same thing at one of our pizza evenings, partly in the context of the DSK affair, and apparently analogous cases exist in France. Jean Ioannides asked if cases of sexual harassment were common in the UK now and commented that the his wife probably could have had him dismissed if she had not responded to his advances, since he'd met her at work. He added that he would never have dared make the same overtures in the current climate.

Of course all this is a matter of degree and the law is notably bad at dealing with matters of degree except in sentencing, where the punishment can (but won't necessarily) be made to fit the crime. The point of all this preamble is that there should be a law, which it can't be beyond the wit of man to devise, that asserts the pre-eminence of common sense. What, as one judge once put it, the man on the top of the Clapham omnibus would think. Currently, on the contrary, it is principles that have pre-eminence. People of principle are supposed to be admired; I regard them more often as charlatans. Principles, in my experience, are frequently used as a way to avoid discussion; if someone says an opinion is a matter of principle, the you aren't supposed to argue with it. They are inflexible bludgeons with which to hit people over the head, of particular value to bigots and dogmatists. Therein lie many of the idiocies in our society because it is principles that are enshrined and enacted in law, even if in defiance of all common sense.

So who's for a Law of Common Sense that would state that if, in a given situation, a legal principle dictates some course of action that defies all common sense, the Law of Common Sense should prevail?

Onset Of Winter

Onset Of Winter

A lorry with a telescopic arm has been out putting up the Christmas decorations and causing chaos in circulation in the village wherever it stops, as it completely blocks the roads. Ah well, it's only twice a year (once again to take them down) and the decorations themselves are quite restrained. The shops are full of boxes of chocolates, foie gras and ducks. It marks the onset of winter, although the sunny weather has so far remained for most of the time ; boules in shirt sleeves is still possible some days.

The handfuls of bulbs that wouldn't fit into the pots in front of my house have now been planted in three groups in the back. They should make a decent display in the spring, alongside the aubretia and anemone blanda in the terrace wall. There's not much showing out the back now (a clump of chrysanthemums) except for the redcurrant sage, which is a mass of bloom. I haven't known it flower so profusely at this time of the year in England but I noticed that one in Daniel's garden is similarly covered in bloom. In a minor fit of gardening enthusiasm last spring Daniel bought a dozen narcissi bulbs. I told him they wouldn't bloom until the following spring but he didn't care. In fact, to my surprise they are in bloom now. I thought spring bulbs had to be frozen before they would bloom (the trick used by horticulturists to make hyacinths, for example, bloom at Christmas – freeze them in late summer) and Daniel's certainly haven't experienced any frost since last spring. So, another gardening surprise for me out here.

Religion

One of the Christmas carol troupe, Anne-Marie, has pulled out citing her reluctance to sing religious songs. She was less than enthusiastic to start with so that may also have contributed to her decision. However, religion certainly seems to be more significant in France than in England. Nothing like the rather catch-all C of E seems to exist. The minority protestants are very protestant and, muslims apart, the rest of the country seems to divide into serious Catholics and very atheist atheists or agnostics. My friend Mana and neighbour Monserrat don't actually spit at the mention of religion but are not far off doing so. None of the English singers is notably religious, some of us definitely not so, but having to find Christmas carols that weren't in any way religious would be an awful chore. How much of this divide in France is attributable to the wars of religion and how much to the church/state split initiated by Napoleon I don't know but I feel inclined to find out more.

Exchange Rate, Christmas Presents And Sudoku

Having for some time cursed the Pound's tendency to keep steady at about 1:1.2 against the Euro, despite the Euro's troubles, I'm finding that it actually works to my advantage in some marginal cases. As usual in the lead-up to Christmas I've been scouring Amazon and other websites for possible Christmas presents. My mother actually wants nothing that I can give and needs nothing that anyone can give (I'll buy some lavender essence, soap, etc for her) but I troll through DVDs on Amazon for some winter evening entertainment. Last year I bought Lost In Translation and Closer, two films that I enjoyed. This year I shall buy Taxi Driver, Black Swan, Léon and Incendies. What I noticed, flicking between Amazon France and Amazon UK, is that the Pound/Euro prices seem to be calculated at about 1:1.4. The same was true of electronics sites I looked at. Being able to purchase easily in either country, I'm taking advantage of the weak pound by buying in the UK.

One of the ways I pass the time on winter evenings is doing killer sudokus, the version where the opening grid has no numbers except total values for groups of cells. I've thought for some time that these sudokus are an ideal way to teach kids arithmetic. I mentioned this some time ago to Armelle, who teaches maths and gave her some sample puzzles; the easier ones are certainly appropriate for kids of 11-15. However, she has so far done nothing with them. She retires at the end of the school year so that is understandable, although a pity I think.