Dear Diary

Dear Diary

I feel I need to make a new posting on the blog but there is not a lot that has happened over the past three weeks. The bees that buzz around in my bonnet from time to time have stayed quiet and most aspects of my life here have experienced little change.

Perhaps the most significant event was that my PC went down with an untraceable bug. The local fixer '(and he's good) couldn't identify it and ended up stripping the machine of software and rebuilding it from scratch. Unfortunately he's a man of these parts and so doesn't answer his phone or respond to messages left so it took me a week to track him down. He has just acquired an office and is presumably expanding his business, or hoping to, but the lack of communication doesn't augur well for him. The bug deprived me of Internet access for nearly two weeks and made me realise how much of a drug it has become in my life; I didn't get the shakes or hot flushes but I was definitely twitchy.

I mentioned in a recent posting that the village entertainments' committee was in a mess. It has subsequently been found that, while doing very little in terms of organising entertainment, they managed to spend some money for which they can't account. The result has been a clear out of the whole committee; a new one is being assembled.

Daniel came round to eat one evening and I decided, without any great expectation, to see if he could give me any guidance on the use of prepositions in French. The use of prepositions seems to be almost arbitrary in all languages I am familiar with. For instance, the French say “il est difficile de faire quelque chose” but “quelque chose est difficile à faire”; they also “décident de faire quelque chose” but “se décident à faire quelque chose”. I challenged Daniel to explain this and also pointed out that my French teacher at school had claimed that the French language was a masterpiece of logic. Daniel disclaimed this latter point and could offer no explanation for the former, except to suggest that the answer probably lay somewhere in the upper branches of some Chomsky grammatical trees. I don't think I shall be going there to look.

With luck the winter is now over. We've had two days of snow, about a fortnight apart, with the snow staying around for about a week afterwards, accompanied by some really cold days but interspersed with very warm ones. We're now back with the warm ones and, if the weather runs true to form, that's the winter done and dusted. The earlier warm days stirred me to do some gardening: clearing up, pruning the vines and spreading some general fertiliser. The ground has remained too hard however to do much more. A week of warm days should do the trick and then I should be able to do the rest of the work needed.

I had been doing some search engine optimisation work on my website, which will continue. However, the official village website is now up and running and seems to be almost purely administrative, which gives me a clearer idea of how I can develop mine. I shall exclude administrative material and probably add a section on writing (the Académie Mollanaise?) and put more effort into the accommodation section. I want it to appeal to villagers as well as future visitors.

Apology
In my last post I aid that Jim Sluszny was Polish but Jim has corrected me.  His parents were Polish but he was born in Belgium before going to England and is thus Belgian.  Sorry about that mistake

Lunch, Entertainment and Pi

Old Fogies' Lunch

The annual lunch for old people in the village, given by the village and served by the village councillors, took place on Sunday. It was a close-run thing, it seems, as the usual caterer cried off sick at the last moment. However, the chef from a restaurant in nearby Plasians was able to fill in and did an admirable job.

The restaurant in Plasians is noted for its brawn, which is always served as a first course in its set meals and so brawn was inevitably the first course today. The second course was a salad with foie gras and slices of smoked duck. That was followed by monkfish in a tomato sauce and then the usual selection of cheeses, baked Alaska and coffee, with white red, rosé and sparkling wine as appropriate along the way. The village certainly does its old people proud on these occasions.

I happened to be sitting at a table with two English “refugees”, which got me thinking about the fortunes of war, Mali being much in the news at the moment. One, Alex, had been brought up and educated in England (he was actually at Bristol University at the same time as I, though we never met there) but his family was in Estonia at the outbreak of World War 2. The Nazis were of course greeted as liberators when they entered Estonia, freeing it from the Russian yoke (for a while). He and most of his family escaped to England. The other, Jim, is a Polish Jew who was living in Belgium at about the same time and was sent on a boat of Jewish refugees to England. There were a number of such evacuations at the time but not all countries would accept them and Jim is eternally grateful to England for allowing him in. Such can be the fortunes of war.

The Entertainments' Committee

There was an extraordinary AGM of the village entertainments' committee ( Comité des Fêtes) last week which I decided to attend. Last year some events that were supposed to happen didn't and those that did generally weren't anything like as successful as they should have been. Unsurprisingly, the chairman of the committee came in for strong criticism, lapsed for most of the time into sullen silence and, at one point, offered his resignation. This was refused, with attendees saying that resignation was beside the point; the point was to identify the problems and resolve them. I liked the lack of rancour, the fact that nobody wanted to crucify the chairman but................The problems seemed to be clear; there was no lack of volunteers or resources more generally: what had been lacking was initiative, communication/coordination and project management skills. Unfortunately, it seemed to me, the chairman had clearly demonstrated that he wasn't a person who took the initiative, couldn't communicate and, apparently had few project management skills since he couldn't identify the problems. So, in effect, he was the problem. But he couldn't be allowed to resign.

I put my name down on a list of volunteers to help and will go to the next meeting armed with some bog-standard project management sheets. It strikes me that what this committee most needs is a formal method of project control that would not only help in the current year but would mean that, for future years, it would not be necessary to start from scratch each time; whoever chairs the committee would have records of what has been done, by whom and when, the previous year.

Gay Marriage Again

This Sunday there was another large demonstration in Paris, this time in favour of gay marriage. The numbers weren't as great as for the demonstration a fortnight ago (against gay marriage) but still considerable: 150,000 to 400,000 depending on whom you believe but probably nearer the lower estimate. In the meantime I had had a chance to discuss what all the fuss was about with friend Patrick and, as I suspected, it is to do with the French conception of family, which they hold so dear. Allowing gay couples to marry entitles them up to the rights accorded under the “Code Civil”, including inheritance law. I still can't really see where there are any problems that couldn't be countered by some slight modifications but the issue is certainly a very sensitive one here in France.

Pi and Pizza

This evening I went with Mana to see the film the Life Of Pi. I had suggested it to Mana but we both ended up disappointed. The photography and special effects were admittedly spectacular but the story only of passing interest and the musings on God (or not) left us both cold. Anything on God leaves Mana cold; for my part, if I want any insight on God theory I look to the debate that has been raging for years among astrophysicists, some believers, some not. They deliberately make no mention of God, to leave aside any question of religion, but refer instead to the possibility of a Designer. Was the universe in as far as we know it designed or did it simply evolve? The answer lies somewhere in amongst some very hairy equations and mind-bending assumptions (like how many universes, parallel or contiguous, you want to assume) with a considerable grasp of probability theory required. A lot of this is beyond me but I enjoy the debate and think that this is not only the correct but (probably) the only way to approach the issue.

After the film I went to join the usual pizza evening but went for the mixed grill that Roberto was offering as an alternative. He was very late in delivering it, having started late, but made up for this by refusing to charge for it because of his tardiness. So I had two good meals for free on successive days; can't be bad.

Footnote
My son, Carl, sent me an email saying my house was now on Google Street View; and so it is.  So if any of you want to look up Les Bleus (street numbers promised for next year) in Mollans sur Ouvèze, you can.  Judging by the photo it was taken either last winter or the winter before, so there is greenery but no flowers on show.

Gay Rites And Second-hand Furniture

Gay Rites Surprises

Last Sunday several hundred thousand people took to the streets in Paris to demonstrate against the draft bill to legalise marriage between homosexual partners. Estimates of the number vary between 350-500 thousand but it was clearly a very large demonstration even by French standards (and the French do love a demonstration).

The high number surprised me. The extreme right wing and Catholic participants were to be expected, the Catholic (or any other) church getting it's knickers in a twist over a sexual matter being hardly surprising. But there were apparently large numbers of the less identifiable bourgeoisie also in attendance. Although moral issues are the province of the bourgeoisie (George Bernard Shaw once wrote that only the middle classes had morals because the rich didn't need them and the poor couldn't afford them) that doesn't fit well with the general laissez-faire attitude of the French towards sex. (More generally, the French don't mind much what you do in most activities as long as you do it with style and panache.) And all this was on top of the fact that Hollande had made this bill a specific, supposedly vote-winning plank of his election manifesto; it garnered the homosexual vote for what that was worth.

So how can the size of the demonstration be explained? My only thought is that it could be the French preoccupation with family life and the bill being seen as a threat to it. Family life is paramount in France. Even French income tax is based on families rather than individuals, the reason the draft bill to tax rich individuals was declared unconstitutional. So maybe that was the reason for the size of the demonstration.

The other surprise for me is that gays are apparently so keen to get married. We are in an era when co-habitation is as normal as marriage and common law conveys pretty much the same rights to couples whether married or not. I don't think political correctness, that haven for control freaks, comes into it, so why is there all the fuss? I have to confess that I don't really understand it.

Second-hand Furniture

Friend Jo had found a couple of really good, reasonably priced second-hand furniture shops and so took me for a browse last Friday. There were some beautiful pieces on offer and at low, low prices.

I bought some old wooden chairs for the kitchen for a song.

I have long held the view that second-hand furniture is often much better value for money than new furniture, both in England and France but particularly so in France. Solid wood furniture is especially good value; the wood is often beautiful in itself and the same item new would cost a fortune. Granite slabs also feature a lot and, again, would cost a bomb new. It occurred to me that any second-hand furniture dealer in England with a lorry could make a good business out of buying here and selling in England and it seems that does happen quite frequently. Some friends told me of dealers they know who do just that. I remember, back in the 1980s, when French wood stoves became fashionable in England, there was a very brisk trade with lorries from England buying up every wood stove on offer here.

One of the differences I noted in second-hand furniture here is how much of it is home-made. I know people in England must have made their own furniture in times past but I've never seen much of it on sale. Here it's quite common and often very well made. You can tell when a piece has been home made because it has quirks indicating it could never have come out of a factory. Friends Steve and Jo have a beautiful dresser that is very well made except that one of the carved wooden pillars supporting the top half must have been aimed a bit off-target for the holes it had to fit into and so makes a sudden twist to the right to get connected. It's the only blemish in the piece and in fact does nothing to detract from it but would never have passed any kind of quality control; a factory would simply have made another pillar but whoever made that dresser presumably didn't have another piece of suitable wood or just couldn't be bothered.

I suspect this may come from the French genius for throwing nothing away if some means can be found of making it useful. I've remarked on this before with respect to French food and suspect it applies to furniture too. Rural France has lots of wood and a typical French peasant attitude would be: if you've got wood and the tools to make furniture, why buy it?

The Force Be With You

The Force Be With You

This evening was the first pizza evening after the year-end holidays and so there was lots of well-wishing for the new year to be done as well as the inevitable “galette des rois”, in both versions, to be eaten. I know I described this new year cake a year ago so I won't do so again. Also, Patrick retired from his job as a physiotherapist at the turn of the year and that was feted with a glass of marc de Chateauneuf de Pape, about the best marc there is. A good evening and it got me thinking about what I would really like to wish people I know and like for the new year. And it is.........”let the force be with you”.

Crazy as it may seem, I think the old Star Wars film touched on a perhaps universal nerve when it came up with that phrase. Whoever wrote that script and, indeed, embedded the idea deeply in the plot, must have experienced what I am about to try to describe. In fact; so must a great many people if the idea is as universal as I suspect.

There have been three separate manifestations of this in my life: sport, writing and personal relationships. I hope I can describe these so that others can relate the same phenomenon to activities and events in their own lives.

The first and perhaps most trivial (but still important) manifestation has been in my very mediocre career in sports of all kinds: specifically, in football, tennis, darts and boules, in all of which I've played for teams at a very minor level. There have been periods, lasting from some 30 minutes to an hour or two, when I played more or less to perfection. I absolutely knew, when I made a shot, that it was going to go exactly where I wanted it to. These periods of perfection never lasted very long and were not repeatable over days; the next day I might play appallingly. However, they were magic when they happened and, for me, unexplainable. Perhaps a period of perfect body and brain coordination? Or perhaps the force was with me. I'm sure that every other sports player, whatever the sport, must have experienced something similar.

The same thing has occurred to me in writing, which has been a major occupation during my life. Sometimes, writing an article of even a few hundred words has been a real labour; at other times, articles of even several thousand words have flowed from my keyboard or pen without a moment's hesitation and barely needed re-reading, except perhaps to add a comma or eliminate a keying mistake. As Nehru said at Gandhi's funeral, you have to find the words. Yet I've never really attempted to write anything I didn't know I could. Sometimes, it seems, it was just that the force was with me.

More importantly still, the same phenomenon occurred very occasionally with personal relationships. In particular I remember a French girlfriend whom I knew when I was 19 and contacted again when I came to France. Once contact had been established, we talked with a degree of intimacy that seemed at once most natural and at the same time incredible given the intervening 50 years. I have felt this same degree of intimacy, in whatever form, become immediate and almost tangible very few times and with very few people in my life but on each occasion so evidently so on both sides that something powerful had to be at work. The force?

Yet again, with my children when they were very young, I remember meeting them again after as little as a week's absence when the reconnection was clearly overwhelmingly emotional for them and so also for me. They blushed, wouldn't look at me at first as though fearing I was just an apparition and then clung to me so tightly that I couldn't release their grip. The force again?

Maybe all these phenomena are not connected as I suppose. Maybe the personal connections are different from those in work or sport. But, whatever is at play, those moments of magic are what I would most like to wish my friends for the new year.

A Happy New Year?

Happy New Year?

For anyone who writes this is the time to wish « all our readers » a happy new year. And so I do. Incidentally, in Scotland, which seems to have laid the principal marketing claim to be the prime usher-in of the new year, it is deemed unlucky to wish anyone a happy new year before the new year actually arrives ; I'm safe on that count. So my wish is a good wish although one that will inevitably face the test of reality. Predictions aren't my forte but a reality check could be on the cards.

I think the major concerns for the new year have to be economic. Perhaps less for people of my age, who have had the benefit of several decades of general economic growth, and more for younger generations, particularly for our children, for those of us who have them. For these latter, the outlook has to be, at best, challenging. From some 15 years ago it became clear that education and health would have to be paid for privately, at least to a significant extent. That is, of course, in countries that had been accustomed to their being either free or highly subsidised. So well and good but private payment assumes private economic well-being. For most western developed countries, this assumption will be false, certainly for next year and probably for several years hence.

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In France the situation is much as elsewhere in Europe. Unemployment is high, salaries static and inflation above target, with job cuts forecast. President Hollande's trumpeted wealth tax has just been judged unconstitutional by France's highest court. The politicos will amend the tax rules to get round that but the tax will do nothing for the economy even if it sends out generally popular signals.

Life in the village is unlikely to be affected very much. The influx of “foreigners” from anywhere north of Lyon continues and so therefore does the house renovation work that sustains most of the local artisans. There are also several instances locally of new roundabouts, road junctions and road bend eliminations which, although mostly unnecessary, will provide more work. And local agriculture is as ever protected by the Common Agriculture Policy.

Steve, Jo, Edward (Marijke's husband) and Marijke came round for drinks early on new year's eve and we had a discussion on coffee-making, Edward being a designer for Philips' kitchen domestic appliance group. I learned quite a bit from the discussion which I shall try to put into practice. Edward asked me is I had considered taking French nationality, for which I am now eligible. My reply was that I would if the UK left the EU, a possibility that I have never seriously considered before. However, Edward and I agreed that the objectives of the principal EU members were political rapprochement whilst the UK objective was the common market. And Edward and I agreed also that the common market was never going to happen. So, why is the UK in the EU? That question no longer seems to be blue sky in the UK but one that can seriously be asked. Maybe the coming year, and debates on the EU budget, will clarify the point.

At least the weather for the past two days has been brilliant: bright, sunny and with temperatures approaching the 20 degree mark. Long may that continue.

Another Christmas

Another Christmas

This Christmas will be the first I've spent in France but, apart from the absence of my mother and the ritual lunch-time visit to the pub, probably not that different to other recent Christmases. The French celebrate Christmas very much as we do in the UK, with the focus on family and children.

Two differences are the absence of the ubiquitous turkey in England and the lack of Christmas cards. There doesn't seem to be a standard main course meal here although, if one is more common than others, it would probably be duck; I've no idea if that is local to the south of France or more widespread. And foie gras and smoked salmon seem to feature very commonly as first courses, as also do oysters. I noticed in the supermarkets the sudden appearance of carp, which suggests to me the existence of a sizeable Polish population in the area. In Polish households no one can take a bath for a week before Christmas as that is where the carp is, getting rid of it's muddy flavour before being cooked. Newly in the supermarkets too are “cardes”, stems of a thistle that look like celery on steroids. I haven't seen it growing so can't tell what type of thistle it is; one of my dictionaries suggests teasel but it doesn't look like that to me. I don't know whether it is specific to Christmas or simply just available now as, for instance, are persimmons.

The desert here is traditionally some or all of the 13 prescribed constituents that I think I described last year. That, certainly, is local to Provence. Although dried fruits feature prominently on shop shelves, their combination into Christmas cake or pudding doesn't seem to figure in France. The German Stollen is available in shops but that is as near as it gets.

Christmas cards are virtually unobtainable; the ones I sent this year were left over from those I had in England. It is traditional, although not always practised, to send new year cards. These are pale substitutes for English Christmas cards, generally looking like half-size postcards and mostly poorly designed and executed.. Maybe Hallmark or some similar company should get busy over here.

The group of us who sing carols had been busily rehearsing for the past few weeks and duly performed last evening. The event went off very well, largely due to the efforts of Jo and René, with increased numbers of people attracted to it. Even Steve did a solo, which also went well; he's a brave man. I did my usual growling in the background ( at least I hope it was in the background).

I personally was a bit disappointed that we didn't attract more of the villagers outside of friends; there were a few but most of them were already in the bar. I'm beginning to think that this one of my ambitions may be misplaced. Those of us who sang did so because it was fun. However, carols are religious by nature and I suspect that fun may not be a word that can be associated with religion, at least in this part of France. It could be that religion here is too serious a matter, one way or the other. This area did suffer atrociously during the wars of religion but that seems too long ago to have much resonance now. So maybe it is just the separation of state and religion that is at play.

Levenson, Winter And Passports

Levenson

The Levenson enquiry and its recommendations seems to have been a dominant topic of conversation among my friends here, with very divided opinions expressed. Assuming that some action needs to be taken (a significant assumption, I know) the topic has seemed to me extremely complex. If any rein is to be put on the Press, and leaving aside the question of Internet content, it seemed obvious to me that whistle-blowers had to be protected and also the role of government minimised. Why not pass the problem straight to the judiciary, I thought, with the emphasis of control being on means of acquisition, not content? But there are foreseeable problems there also; the complexity remained.

It should have taken me minutes to see the way out but in fact it took me a week of pondering. Everything in my experience tells me not to mess with complexity; stand back, take a deep breath and look to Occam's Razor. Why the clamour for Press censorship? It's because many people feel that a right to privacy has been infringed. So why not forget all the questions of Press freedom/censorship and simply strengthen the privacy laws? These are reputed to be much stricter in France than in the UK, although I don't know the detail, so why not make a move towards French-style privacy legislation? That, plus possibly suitably heavy penalties for infringement, should resolve the problem and put aside any debate about Press freedom. The Press then remains as it has always been, as free or constrained as any other person or entity within the law.

Winter

Winter arrived today. The temperature is barely above freezing even in the early afternoon and it's caught a succulent plant that Claudine and Jacques gave me and which has been sitting out front on my letter box. Fortunately at least half the plant looks healthy still so I shall put it in my terrace room with the other plants I am trying to keep over winter. And I shall now need to cut back and protect the blue solanums (solana?) I have in the front.

Winter also means beef to me: stews (which the French don't have), casseroles, etc. The French don't have meat pies either and I made one last week when Steve, Jo, Mana and Michèle came to eat. All enjoyed it, especially Michèle, but I got the same initial suspicion from Mana and Michèle that I always get from French friends when they are faced with unfamiliar food. The conservatism that even quite cosmopolitan French people display when it comes to cooking continues to surprise me. The idea that French cooking is not only the best but probably the only way to cook food does seem to be really deeply engrained in them. I'd normally serve mashed potatoes with the pie but, as I had a jar of duck fat, decided on roast potatoes. The French don't have these either; same result.

Passports

Friend Steve commented about paassports in his blog recently and that reminded me of a money-making wheeze for the giovernment which I thought of some time ago but which doesn't seem to have occurred to the UK government.  After all, the government is strapped for cash.  Why not offer organic (or eco-friendly) passports? We aleady have organic alternatives for almost everything else.  As far as I know, passports already are organic, though there may be a question mark against the dyes used.  Eco-cheerleaders would no doubt happily accept a £10-15 surcharge for the cost of maybe just an "organic" sticker on the passport so the extra money goes tsright to the bottom line.  Or maybe it's just that I have too much.time on my hands in winter.