More Autumn (And Football)

More Autumn

Last week I got the urge to garden, an urge I find difficult to resist. The urge happened to coincide with some quite large blue pots on offer in the local supermarket, so I bought one to go on the wall side of my balcony. Something to climb up the wall, I thought: a clematis, another jasmin; a rose? Why not all three? That was being too ambitious for the size of pot so there was only one solution: another pot. The jasmin and clematis are now installed in one pot; the other pot awaits a suitable rose.

I then decided that there was no way I could make the roadside opposite my kitchen window suitable for growing anything much but noticed that there was room for a large pot beside one of the trees without causing inconvenience to anyone. So I bought a plastic pot large enough to hold a climbing rose which I shall place there.

I also cleared up most of the back garden and bought 50 narcissi bulbs. I'm still rethinking the back, how to get more colour in August and September. Geraniums and bizzie lizzies seem to be the popular options but I'm not keen on either of them. I've planted some lavender but will have to keep thinking. I want all the planting done this autumn so that the plants can become established over the winter and are ready to take off next spring.

The weather continues to be surprisingly mild in the evenings. Early mornings are becoming noticeably dark and misty but the days are still warm and sunny and the warmth continues late into the evenings. Usually, at this time of the year, you need a sweater on after about 7 o'clock but now it's still shirt-sleeves temperature until 9-10 o'clock at night. I love the warm evenings so that is a real bonus.

For the last two Monday evenings we have been eating indoors at the Bar du Pont, although light rather than temperature has dictated that. Roberto has decided on “tartiflette”, a kind of potato, cheese and bacon hotpot, as a regular alternative to pizzas for the winter and that suits me fine as I like it and can never get through a whole pizza.

So, for me, the autumn has started well (and for Chelsea too); the optimists among the local soothsayers are predicting that the weather will hold well into December. I hope they are right.

Racism?

Friend Steve copied me an article by Rod Liddle, a good football journalist, which was a rant on the Football Association finding Chelsea captain John Terry guilty of racism when a criminal law court had found him not guilty of the same charge. I found I agreed with most of the article, even leaving aside the self-evident and long-established ineptness of the FA (not for nothing commonly known among football fans as the sweet FA).

What caught my interest was neither the FA's role nor the question of whether John Terry did utter the attributed remark or not. There were two points that came together in my mind. Firstly, after what was a very fractious match in which the incident occurred, all the players apparently shook hands and agreed to let bygones be bygones; that happens in a lot of matches in most sports. Secondly, Terry grew up in a multi-cultural neighbourhood playing with kids of many colours and currently plays at a club with a similarly mixed ethnicity, counting several black players as his avowed best friends. So it is unlikely that he is racist in any generally accepted sense.

That does not mean to say that he may not have made a racist curse in the heat of the moment and thus offended the thought police. Curses of sublime vileness are frequently made in football and no doubt other sports' matches. On the record are players at one time or another having uttered such sweet nothings as son of a whore, I fucked your sister and your mother's a whore. Zinedine Zidane was famously sent off in the penultimate World Cup final for reacting to one such comment (his opponent officially deemed blameless). So what's the official line on these sweet nothings? Nothing.

One point of view is that much that is regrettable is said and done in most high-adrenaline contact sports that is best settled after the match when tempers have cooled in peer-group reconciliation. And it's not just football; no footballer has yet been accused of biting a lump out of an opposing player's ear. Nor is it just men's games; I have a cherished video of a women's match that out-machoed any men's game I've seen and could easily have been the basis of GBH proceedings.

Another point of view is that racist comments are different; you can say an opponent is a son/daughter of a whore or his/her mother is a whore but not that he/she is the (black) son/daughter of a black whore (or, presumably, a white, yellow or even green whore).

It is into this absurd, legally ambiguous and politically correct minefield that the FA gaily ventured, with the inevitable result that it simply reinforced its reputation for ineptness.

Autumn Reflections

Autumn Reflections

Our long, hot, dry summer ended after the third week of August but it was possible still to believe that summer was with us. Not now. It's still dry but the days, and evenings in particular, are much cooler. Middle of the day temperatures are in the low 20s generally so it's still shirt-sleeves weather for boules but around 9 o'clock a sweater is usually required. I can still leave my balcony door open until after it gets dark but not for much longer, I suspect.

Autumn has come to the fruit stalls too. Apricots are long gone and now we are seeing the very last of the peaches, nectarines and melons. Dessert grapes, have appeared and so have figs and greengages; otherwise it's apples, pears and oranges. Before long, pineapples from La Réunion will be on the shelves.

Grape harvesting is starting. The lack of rain has meant that the crop will not be large but, with all the sun we've had, the grapes should be high in sugar content. The grapes on the vine above my balcony were ripe at the beginning of August but tart; for the last few weeks they have been beautifully sweet. The vineyard owners who make their own wine shouldn't complain too much, although they, like farmers in England, are never happy with the weather. The wine should be good quality so perhaps they'll sell more of it at a higher price. Those who grow grapes but don't make their own wine are at the mercy of a calculation for which I have the parameters but not the values. They get paid on quantity and sugar content. They will lose on the former and should gain on the latter but I have no idea how that balances out. The growers will grumble anyway.

I've been out taking the last few photographs I need for my website. I've also approached one of the village councillors about the village adopting it and his response was positive; but I'm not holding my breath. I will be happy if it remains purely my website. So it's in the public domain now, at www.mon-mollans-sur-ouveze,fr.  There's still quite a bit to do and, now also, the question of getting it seen.  So i'm about to do my homework on key words and phrases and links.

Pronunciation, Blindness and Dreams

English Pronunciation

Serge, a Belgian friend who spends a couple of months a year in Mollans and who plays boules, asked if he could come round to see me and practice his English pronunciation as he was doing a course in English. “No problem”, I said. So he came round with his course books and set to work. However, I ended up as confused as he was in attempting to infer some rules. As far as I can see, there simply aren't any. I could find no reason why “where” and “wear” should be pronounced the same or why in “what” the “h” is silent but in “who” it is the “w” that is silent. The only answer, it would appear, is to spend a lot of time in an “English only” zone and learn by repeated experience but that is simply not practical in many cases. I just felt pity for any foreigner trying to unravel English pronunciation.

Blindness

I seem to remember commenting a year or more ago about progress on curing blindness in the USA in connection with a paper I published in 1971 when I was editor of the Infotech State of the Art reports. It concerned stimulation of the optic nerve to produce patterns of light perceived by the brain. I was therefore interested to see a news item this week on a woman in Australia supposedly having her blindness cured. In fact, the headline greatly overstated the result but the research, being carried out by the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear hospital and a bionics consortium in Australia, was along the same lines as the 1971 paper. The main difference was that instead of electrodes being inserted through the skull to the optic nerve they were inserted through an implant into the retina. In both cases the idea is to stimulate the optic nerve to produce a pattern of light which would correspond roughly to a blank TV screen, onto which images could be imposed via a camera. Key in both the US and Australian research is to understand the pattern of stimulation that would produce the TV screen. In fact the Australian research had got no further than producing flashes of light, a fair way from curing blindness.

The news item caused me to wonder whether the US and Australian researchers were aware of one another and swapping progress reports. I assume, with today's hugely improved international communications, they must do. In the 1970s, though, I was frequently introducing Americans whom I had invited to the UK to one another, who did not know each other or each other's work even though they were researching the same field of activity. It gave me a great kick to do this but I would think that now it might be possible only where an idea in one field of research has as yet undiscovered application in another.

Desserts

In the baker's this morning my eye caught the usual wonderful array of desserts, tarts and flans, on offer and their equally wonderful prices. Small individual tarts retail for 3-5 euros and flans approximately 20cm in diameter and 5cm in depth for 20-30 euros. Would you pay £25 for a dessert for 6-8 people? Sunday lunch in France is traditionally a major meal as in the UK and Sunday morning is when these delights are bought. But why the high prices? I took time today to study the descriptions in detail and the reason becomes obvious. These are culinary works of art. Not only are they individually hand-made but each includes several different ingredients combined in different multiple layers. Thus one, for instance, had a raspberry coulis with flakes of chocolate layered on a hazelnut praline layered on a special type of cream layered in turn on almond biscuit. I rarely make desserts, preferring cheese and fruit to end a meal, and cannot conceive of trying to make anything like these; they are certainly in a different class to most shop-bought desserts in the UK.

A Sad Reflection

I'm not sure why the following occurred to me recently but it did. I had three friends, unconnected, who committed suicide. One was an alcoholic, one dealing with a difficult domestic situation and the other failing at business. But they all had one thing in common. They were all in some respect dreamers, fantasisers. No doubt we all have dreams but we also deal with reality. In their cases, I believe, the dreams, fantasies, had replaced reality and when reality imposed itself they could not deal with it.   

Website (Mostly)

Website

For the last two weeks we have had temperatures of 35-38 degrees. That's the kind of heat that you keep out of after midday until the evening. What's more, we haven't had any rain worth mentioning for two months now. Needless to say, everywhere is looking dried up and dusty, not to say absolutely fried. The hanging baskets and pots on the balcony, despite regular watering, are essentially done for. This evening we actually did have a storm and rain but only for about an hour. We could do with a couple of days solid of that and I suspect that the local vineyards are praying for it; the grape harvest this year should be good quality given the sun we've had but some rain would add volume.

However, fortunately for me, it hasn't been idle time for my interpreters. Stuck indoors to stay cool, they have decided to get translating and so have completed most of the pages in French and Dutch. I'm very grateful to them.

The website still needs a bit of work such as additions to the accommodation and miscellaniae sections and I need to take more photos before I go public. However, I'm feeling that I've definitely made progress. I've shown it to one or two village friends and their reactions have been positive. One thing that I learned through Claudine, who has been doing the French version, is that “miscellaniae” or “miscellany”, which I thought was pretty universal, is not recognised by the French; we discussed this and Claudine suggested “pot pourri”, which I think works well.

If any readers of this blog want to take a look, the site in its current state can be found at http://mollans.teezed.net.

Footnote

When my mother was alive, I used to beat my brains to think of something to say when I phoned her each day. It took quite an effort to stop the conversation stalling. Now I keep thinking a) I haven't phoned my mother yet today, and b) I must remember to tell my mother about this or that.  

Hugo's Law Of Absolute Bureaucracy

Hugo's Law of Absolute Bureaucracy

Even in France, the home of bureaucracy, there is a general revolt against the indefatigable march of the bureaucrats. Enough is enough, everyone says (and who can deny the truth of that?). Yet.......anything else runs counter to Hugo's Law of Absolute Bureaucracy.  Hugo's Law states that the world will always become more bureaucratic, never less.

Now, far be it from me to try to put myself in the same category as the likes of Heisenburg in proposing absolute laws and I must admit a debt to great philosophers such as Parkinson, but I do believe that an absolute law is at play here. It works roughly as follows and the key to its discovery lies in putting yourself on the inside rather than on the outside looking in.

Suppose you are a bureaucrat and have just finished writing the rules that must be used to govern something, be it an action or an object. It doesn't matter which: it could be cheese, bananas, the loading/navigation of ships or the orbits of satellites. Your job is simply to write the rules. What do you do next? You could simply do nothing but that would be to risk redundancy in a time of high unemployment. So that must be unthinkable. What you clearly have to do is to find something, object or action, that is currently unregulated. Then, and only then, can you start to write rules again and thus secure your future employment. By doing so, you not only secure your continuing employment but also, unselfishly, secure the employment of others needed to ensure adherence to the rules you prescribe.

The obvious conclusion would seem to be that, in the long run, almost everyone will work for a bureaucracy. At first glance, that seems an unlikely scenario; but it doesn't necessarily disprove the law. It merely casts doubt on it. Who believed Einstein first time around? So let's explore further.

Firstly, we can discount the rich, who live on a different planet anyway but also, incidentally, will employ increasing numbers of people to deal with the bureaucracy and shield them from it. The same goes for investment bankers, although they will be subject to casino rules. Secondly, we can discount family enterprises who manage a subsistence living from various very local enterprises but who will anyway find their means so reduced by the burden of bureaucracy in the longer term that they will probably give up. Then what we are left with are people who, directly or indirectly, are working for THE BUREAUCRACY.

Now, any proposed law can be disproved by a single counter example. Where can one come from? Well, it can come only from a rule that there can be no more rules. And who would write this rule? Seemingly it can come only from a bureaucrat. Do turkeys vote for Christmas? Are they ever likely to? My case stands. Hugo's Law of Absolute Bureaucracy must be true.

Another Good Evening

The Barbecue

Near neighbours Alain and Margaine had a “méchoui” this evening to which I was invited and which was very enjoyable. “Méchoui” doesn't really translate except as a barbecue but it is specifically a barbecue of a whole animal, in this case a sheep. The invitees were all residents of the rue du Faubourg or other friends of Alain and Margaine. In brief, it was a very convivial occasion but three things struck me in particular.

First was the roasting of the sheep. Alain and Margaine have done the same thing before and had hired the same man to cook the sheep, with his own machine for doing this and it is the machine that is remarkable, a kind of Heath Robinson arrangement. It consists of a an electric motor attached to a bicycle attached in turn to a spit. The motor turns a bicycle wheel and the gearing of the bicycle controls the rate at which the spit, and thus the sheep, turns over the fire. I don't think Heath Robinson ever designed anything like this but I'm sure he would have been proud of it of he had.

The second thing I noticed was the effect of a glitch in the lighting. We were all in Alain and Margaine's garden, lit by a fairy lights and a few candles on tables: a very low level of lighting, just enough by which to find your glass and plate. I remember at one point looking up at the sky, seeing nothing, and thinking that the weather prediction for the next day (stormy) was probably correct. There appeared to be total cloud cover. However, some time later the electricity supply was cut momentarily and, as if by magic, stars appeared all over the sky. What surprised me was that the minimal illumination that there had been was enough to mask what was in the sky. I hadn't realised that even such a low level of light pollution could affect the view of the heavens in that way.

The final point concerned Alain and Margaine's grand-daughter, whose name escapes me. At a guess, she's about seven years old. The challenge for any parent in such a situation is what to do with a child of that age in a gathering of old fogies, apart from sitting her in front of a TV with a DVD or whatever. I think her parents must have told her that she was to help and had given her a pencil torch, of which she appeared to be immensely proud. She spent the evening very self-importantly going round the assembled crowd, shining the torch on everyone and asking if they had everything they needed or whether she could fetch something. She was a star and I would bet that she had a whale of a time, far more enjoyable than being sat in front of a television.

Provencal Marketing

In the Bar du Pont a few nights ago I noticed that none of the booklets on the history of the village (for which I had done the English translation) were on display, in the height of the tourist season. So I said to Daniel, who was there with me, “They haven't got any of the history booklets, you need to give them some more”. Daniel replied: “Yes they have, I know they have; they're just not on display”. So who is going to ask to buy a booklet they don't know exists? And whose job is it to see that more are sold and that, therefore, they are on display....................?

Back To Good Times

A Classic Evening

I invited Steve and Jo and Claudine and Jacques to eat this evening because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that they don't know each other. They should because Claudine and Jacques, who are from St Malo but have a summer residence here, are both very receptive to English and hearing English points of view. I hope that the evening may have made a lasting connection; it went on until after midnight so it may well have done.

Among the things we discussed during the evening were the apparent disappearance of common sense from everyday life (which I've discussed too often to enlarge upon here) and attitudes towards Europe. Jacques in particular seemed to feel that the English didn't appreciate enough the achievements that the EU had made. I think he's probably right; we don't often say publicly how important it is that a war between major European states now seems inconceivable nor how useful are inter-state reciprocity agreements on such matters as residence, free flow of labour, tax and access to medical facilities. What seems to separate us, to some extent, is the EU predilection to legislate everything, down to the shape of a banana or the milk used to make cheese. The French attitude to this seems roughly to be that you have to expect this of bureaucrats and you simply ignore it if you don't like it. The problem in the UK is that we implement the legislation whatever, which to me seems a problem to a large extent of our own making. As in my own first love, football, we have to realise that we don't own the game and have to learn to play it in a different way.

The intractable problem here seems to me to be that administrators will always find something to administer unless you stop them; after all, that is what they do and what their job security depends on. And that, irrespective of other effects, is an enormous cost. Telling them to stop, and create legislation only if absolutely necessary, threatens their very livelihood. But that is what someone, sometime, is going to have to do.

Even within the UK and within UK remits, we badly need some brave politician to say that new legislation can be created only if it removes more legislation than it creates. None has yet been able to do that.

One point that occurred to me subsequently, regarding the UK, had to do with ability to negotiate. In public ownership/privatisation discussions previously with French friends the friends have all insisted that their bureaucrats, maligned as they often are, are very tough negotiators when it comes to a deal with a private company. The UK bureaucrats are clearly not in the same league, as numerous rip-offs testify. The point occurred to me because Jo's daughter, chasing a passport application, had been unable to contact the (privatised) Passport Agency on the advertised number; the number was always engaged for an unacceptable time. It mirrored my experience in contacting privatised utilities after my mother's death. So why, as part of the contract, wasn't there a service agreement that stated, for instance, that all telephone enquiries had to be responded to by a person within, say, 30 seconds? As all such service numbers are only too eager to tell you, calls may be monitored for performance purposes. To me such a service agreement seems elementary, as it does that companies running privatised public services are saving significant costs by choosing to ignore customer service. But maybe it takes an experienced negotiator to spot that and plug the hole.

Service Wooden Spoon

I've already recounted the problems I have had over my mother's death in dealing with Southern Electricity. To add insult to injury, I today received a letter from them stating that they would be delighted to continue their service (?????.....) to me in my new home; in France, where they don't operate. I think I can safely decline their generous offer. But I am inclined to wonder what possible imbecile can be managing Southern Electricity's Customer Services.

Boules

Daniel persuaded me to enter the boules tournament being played in the village this afternoon so I duly went along for the 3.30pm start which, as I had suspected, didn't actually occur until 4.30pm. But I'm glad I let Daniel persuade me because I played well and ended runner-up and 20 euros richer. Hardly a king's ransom I have to admit but 20 euros and a light-weight jacket from my last two tournaments is not a bad return on afternoons spent pleasantly. Last time I won with Daniel, this time I had to beat him in the final game.