And Yet More

More

Just more pictures of flowers and no apologies for that because this will almost all be fried and over in a couple of months time.  In the first, the front of the house, you can just see at the top the jasmine hanging down from the balcony which is perfuming the living room (and another is doing the same for the terrace out back). I didn't plant the sunflowers; they are gifts from the messy feeding of the birds on the balcony above.  The second is one of the pelargoniums I managed to keep over the winter and is doing its nut in the front too, along with others.  The third is the balcony in which you can just see towards the top the blue clematis which has clung to the honeysuckle down one side of the balcony and is now in full bloom.

Just About The Garden

 

Just About The Garden

Over a month ago I thought I was just about done with the garden, apart from maintenance. It’s the «just about» that keeps me busy. My attempt to front the long boxes on the balcony with Lobelia failed miserably so I have now replaced them with some climbing nasturtiums I grew from seed. They can climb up the railings on the balcony or drop down from them. Either way they won’t affect the limited space for guests on the balcony. There’s room for two guests and two chairs. Sit on the left for long and you are liable to be crawled over by clematis or honeysuckle; sit on the right and scrambling geraniums will do the same. It’s your choice. 

The photos below are of the view from my bedroom window, the front of the house, the Pilgrim rose in the back garden and the balcony

 

There’s honeysuckle in bloom to the right and left of the balcony so the scent in the evening is great. The one to the right seems to bloom twice a year unless I’ve got one of them in the pots beside the porch below. One I know I stuffed years ago into a hole in concrete that covers one of the spring sources that runs in font of my house. I don’t think there’s another in a pot but honestly can’t remember what I’ve got in the pots now and they are too crowded to see properly, although I do know that there are at least two clematis in them. It’s probably why I am known as the mad English gardener. French pots would have plants metrically spaced and lined up in rows for inspection. Anyway, it uses the lilac tree beside the porch to get up to the vine that grows over the balcony and climbs all over that.

 The honeysuckle on the left goes up to my bedroom window and seems to be trying to climb in (see photo). It has flowers that start as red buds whereas the other is pure white/yellow so must be a different variety. It had started to climb along with the jasmine all over the TV dish above it until I got Carl to risk live and limb pulling it down last year. If you haven’t got much horizontal space but vertical space up to the sky what do you do?

I’ve now got bunches of sage and winter savory drying in the sun on the table on the balcony. I find winter savory («sarriette» here) an intriguing herb since I never encountered it in England and it grows profusely in my herb patch and has even self-seeded on the roadside. I’m sure it must be around in England since it is perennial here to temperatures way below those that England experiences. It seems to be used here mainly with goat cheeses but has potential for stews and casseroles. The scent/flavour is somewhere between oregano and thyme. 

 

The pots of seedlings that were on the balcony are now planted. The climbing nasturtiums as I have said and the morning glory in the pot on the balcony that conatins the jasmine and the rest over the road in the pot against the wash-house. Both are intended to produce flowers later in the year after August has fried nearly everything. Morning glory don’t like being moved, the ground here is not conducive to seeds and I have had limited success with them in the past so I’ve put some more seeds as an insurance in a pot on my kitchen windowsill alongside the two chilli plants, pot of chives and a dahlia tuber starting to sprout. The last is another «just about»…………..

More Flowers

 With the lemon tree now on the balcony there is no room for more than two persons on it. I was especially pleased with myself on getting the lemon tree from the terrace at the back down to the balcony. I couldn't possible lift it in the pot and was confronted with six steepish stairs to navigate.  I'm not usually that imaginative but have copious books in the house and managed to create temporary shallow stairs with books to slide he pot and tree down. It took about half an hour but time is one thing I have a lot of so what the hell.  Here are photos of front and back.

Flowers

 

Flowers

Nearly there! Curtailment of the markets, and length of journeys, at the moment has meant I’ve had to get plants from the couple of local garden centres, which has restricted my choice of what flowers to plant somewhat. That situation is complicated by the fact I tend to get into argumens with myself about what to buy and plant where; and I tend to lose the arguments. However………..the remaining container on the balcony is now planted, as is another of the hanging baskets, the couple of vacant slots in the front have been filled and the rather careworn pansies from the hanging basket have been reansplanted across the road. What remains is to decide what goes in the one remaining hanging basket and then to find spaces in the back garden for whatever is left over. Even I should be able to manage that. I’ve also got climbing nasturtiums and morning glory seeds sprouting on the kitchen windowsill as well as a couple of pots with chilli plants in them. Alongside the existing pot of chives; I’ll worry about where to put the nasturtiums and morning glory later. The chives supplement the sage, mint, oregano and winter savory in the herb patch in front and I’ve planted some ginger among the itises opposite as an experiment. Mad Englishman indeed! It all makes sense to me (sort of).

Also over is my camera problem so here are a couple of photos, of the the back garden and the clematis and rose in the pot beside the wash-house which I’ve decided to take over from the village auuthorities, 10 yards along the road and opposite my house.

 

Early Summer?

 

Early Summer?

in my last post I said it’s spring but now it may be early summer; the two collide here in a very short space of time. Much depends on the cold Mistral wind. If it’s not blowing or if I am out of it and in the sun it’s early summer; in it I regress to thinking it’s still only spring. Locally grown asparagus and strawberries have arrived in the shops and markets and the same goes for melons grown under glass; but maybe it can’t truly be summer until the apricots arrive. The local orchards have been full of bloom, we just have to wait a while for the fruit to follow. I’ve been putting some fruit, mangos, kiwi fruit, into small jars with fruit alcohol, sufficient for a dessert with friends. In fact extending culinary possibilities for meals with friends has become something of an obsession during the confinements. I think that will probably become increasingly important to my social life in the future.

Gardening

My gardening is progressing slowly. Watering has been the main concern as we have come through the principal time for rain here with the number of times it has rained that you could count on one hand. So I have been watering twice a week. One long trough on the balcony has been planted and one hanging basket. I still have two hanging baskets and various empty slots to fill but am struggling to find the plants I want in among the limited variety available in garden centres and markets. Some successes are showing. The clematis and sclimbing rose against the wash-house 10 yards along the road and opposite my house are in bloom as is one clematis directly opposite. At the back the cotonilla is doing its yellow nut as is the climbing rose, white spring in summer is in bloom as is a red potentilla. So far so good.

Royalty

The funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh gave me cause to reflect on what I really thought and felt about the occasion rather than what every Brit was supposed to. It was a sad occasion, obviously, particularly for the Queen, who looked bereft. But I can’t honestly say that I personally mourned. It is always sad for some when someone dies (John Donne’s No Man Is An Island) but for me it was just a stranger dying.

I’m in favour of the UK having royalty as nominal Head of State rather than a President as I think it offers more for a similar price. But I am very glad to have no part in the extensive royal family and would like to see privileges accorded to the extent of it curtailed. The bargain seems to be that royals are privileged and therefore owe a duty to the state. But duty is a cold word, hardly one to live one’s life by, and few people do. A merely dutiful husband/wife is a cold one. Most people live their lives through their emotions, ambitions and necessity. It is this, perhaps, that is at the root of the brouhaha around Harry and Megan and Diana in the past. If you are born privileged, you are supposed to choose duty above how you wish to live your life. In this respect, the royals are more an institution than a family and it is the institution that rules. I think that maybe countries such as Holland and Denmark have found a better arrangement for the modern world.

I find a bizarre contrast in this with my French friends. They always seem to be more au fait with what is happening in the royal family than I am yet would never want a royals as Head of State in France. There is privilege in France, plenty of it, but not associated with royalty and generally resented by those who don’t have it. The «peuple» in France, which can be lossely translated as the working classes, seem to me to be much more conscious of their collective power and jealous of their rights than their English counterparts and much quicker to protest if they think them infringed. The working classes in the UK seem somehow more deferrent to privilege; protest in the U>k is token; in France it is designed to disrupt. History, no doubt, accounts for these differences but my sympathies are with the French version of protest.  Show them that you mean business..

Travelling On Youtube

I’ve mentioned before that during lockdowns I’ve watched a lot more videos on Youtube, on archaeology, politics, and for cooking ideas but also to revisit places from my travelling days. Travelling is on hold for most people now (apart from the thousands coming into Heathrow during the UK lockdown) but I’ve indulged in nostalgia and been hugely disappointed. Not that I’m likely ever to see those places again but now I don’t want to. I stayed for a week on Samosir island in Lake Toba, Sumatra, a primitive paradise among kind, gentle people. There was no running water and no electricity but there were the «cleaner fish» in the lake and it was bliss. Now there are packaged tours there, with all that that implies. I stayed a similar time in a hut on an unspoiled, almost empty beach in Phuket where now there are hotels, swimming pools and loungers. I slept in a cave in Petra and danced the evening away with Bedouin around a camp fire; now it is no longer permissible to sleep in the caves and the Bedouin can no longer graze their camels and goats there. So it has been disappointing to revisit these places, even vicariously, but I am even more glad I visited them when I did.

Spring Is In The Air

 

It’s Spring!

The weather over the past week has been brilliant, warm and sunny with temperatures around 20 degrees in the sun in the middle of the day. Next week is predicted to be cooler but hopefully not too much so. Maybe it will rain, we could certainly do with some. Having decided to start watering a couple of weeks back I’ve found that some plants that I thought were dead have shown new shoots; so if I want to keep them alive, as I do, I have to keep on watering. It turns out that I had very few plants die over the winter so I don’t have a lot to replace.

Gardening 

I’m particularly pleased with my «front garden», the roadside across from my kitchen that I dug up. Only a half-dozen of the 20 or so irises I planted bloomed last year but this year almost all have. Allied to the daffodil and narcissi bulbs I planted last autumn, they have made a great display. I’m now thinking of trying to grow some ginger among them over the summer. It will be an interesting experiment. All my clematis (a dozen or so) bar possibly one seem to have survived and the only significant failure seems to be the grape vine in the back garden. That was very unexpected and as there is a climbing rose and a clematis growing through it I’ll probably have to leave the dead stems where they are. Nick, an English friend who has now departed for pastures new, left me some low rectangular pots, two of which I put on the front of my balcony filled with daffodil bulbs. These have flowered and so I shall replace them with something that shows up from below; marigolds perhaps, or petunias, I’m not sure. When I decide over the next few days the result will be a list of plants to be acquired in the Vaison market next Tuesday. The back garden, my «jungle», is now complete, so all I need is plants for the three pots in front of my bedroom window and the few spaces to be filled elsewhere. I’m looking forward to fulfilling the expectations of the village of the mad English gardener. Photos will doubtless follow.

Clearout

Spring is a time for spring cleaning and although cleaning other than the essential is not my forte I definitely need a clearout. Departing English friends have left me with a plethora of things that I need to sort out. I have also had at the back of my mind for some time the knowledge that I have a ridiculous number of shoes, pants, socks and jackets (many saved because they’re still OK for gardening – well, it’s only got a small hole, tear, stain in it) that have to be culled. The same goes for technical equipment: bits of old computers, cameras no longer functional, superfluous cables, etc. I need to go to the village dump anyway to get rid of garden debris so a major clearout is indicated. I just have to get down to it……...

Boules

The fine weather has got me playing boules regularly again, mostly in Buis. I’ve been playing reasonably well but with only occasional flashes of consistent good form. The problem I find with a flash of good form one day, producing small miracles, is that people get disappointed if you can’t do the same the next day. Anyway, if the village tournament is cancelled this year as it was last year, that will mean I will have been village champon for four years in succession, surely a record for an Englishman anywhere in France.

What Restrictions?

France is still well and truly under the cosh of COVID but Patrique and Valerie at the Bar du Pont epitomise for me the French attitude to restrictions. Public spaces are closed so where to play boules? Patrique opened the Bar’s garden below the Bar by the river so that we could play boules there; it’s private ground. Although restaurants and cafes have to remain closed, apart from for take-aways, the Bar du Pont can be open for 6 hours per day for newspaper and tobacco sales. Since it can also provide take-aways, you can also get a drink there but you have to take it away, at least as far as the terrace outside. Of course the terrace is officially closed but how do you enclose an open space like that especially if, from behind the bar, you can’t see if anybody is on the terrace or not. Business (not quite) as usual.

The Jab And French Attitudes

I’ve now had one anti-Covid jab and the next is scheduled for a month’s time. The system for applying for a jab here is broken. You have to apply for one by pho ning a number that seems permanently engaged. Friend Jo made a breakthrough by suggesting she, Steve and I go to the vaccination centre in Nyons to see what could be done. When we arrived there were notices that no appointments could be made there. However, a kind nurse said that although she couldn’t give us an appointment she could ask the vaccination centre to phone us, rather than us trying to get through to them. This she did, Jo was phoned the next day and bingo!

This aligns with other anecdotal experiences to bring me to the following conclusion. In France, if an official system is broken, the people working within it know it and understand the difficulties Jo Public faces. Remain respectful and polite but dtermined and officials will themselves try to overcome your difficulties. It seems to highlight for me a difference between officials in France and in the UK. In the UK Jobsworthy seems to rule; in France officials seem inclined to regard their duty to the public more important than their duty to their employer.

The Power Of Ignorance

I resolved a while back to just let UK politics go and not comment. It seems obvious to me what is happening politically there and, I arroganlty feel, if others can’t or don’t want to see it or try to do anything about it, too bad. However I still feel a residual loyalty to the country, as a used-to-be beacon of democracy. The great far-right gamble, which was attempted but has been temporarily halted in the USA, is so far succeeding in the UK and may continue to do so. As an article in The Independent recently pointed out, a lot of people in the UK have seen through the obvious shenanigans by the government but feel powerless to do anything about them and are resigned to them continuing, resulting in apathy. Which is exactly what the government wants for it to remain in power. Satire and ridicule are powerless since the government is already itself a parody of good government.

What the government, and its servile elements in the media have done is to harness the power of ignorance. At any one time, most people are ignorant of a lot of aspects of how things work in practice. These are not necessarily stupid people but ignorant, as they must be, of a lot of things; nobody has the time, let alone the intellect to be anything else. Many people in the UK are just now waking up to what Brexit means in practice. Exploit this ignorance and you can expound all types of fantasy and get away with them. With Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in all kinds of disarray, even if you see through the fantasy, what can you do?

Flag waving is all the mode in the UK at present, particularly among the money-grubbing pygmies currently running the country. It needs true patriots to see the danger, to be vocal, to be active and to protest, to prevent the UK’s demise as a country of any worth or standing. The demonstrations of protest in the UK need to continue, if only to combat apathy. Please, Keep Britain Great.

Little Green Men

I never really believed in little green men, even in the depths of lockdown (honestly!). However, a scientifically knowledgeable friend and I have come up with an interesting (for the moment) conjecture. It is known that Einstein was wrong in some aspect of his theories of relativity but not in what aspect. So what if that aspect was the speed of light as a delimiter? The implications would be enormous. Teleporting has been shown to be possible, albeit with only a particle over a matter of yards and the time taken was probably not measurable. No one yet knows whether larger items over longer distances are possible. But what if…………………? Hesienberg said that physics is not only stranger than we think but stranger than we can think. Should be good for a few sessions over aperitifs or digestifs until someone with better knowledge can elucidate.

Update: Hobbyhorsing Around

 

Update: Hobbyhorsing Around

I’mbeing urged to update my last post, so here goes. Some friends accused me of believing in little green men, alien abductions, etc. Well I never really gave much consideration to little green men, although little green robots are still in the possible mix. And I don’t really think I’m going off my trolley but I’m definitely suffering from lockdown; suffering from too much time to think, insufficient evidence and an inadequate brain.

Too much time and idle curiosity have got me delving into unexplained archaeological mysteries. It’s a good subject for curiosity because so little is known for sure if we go back a few thousand years. Let’s dispose of at least one case of the stone carving precision I mentioned previously, at Cusco in Peru. To recap, the mystery is how huge stones in walls were carved in complicated shapes so accurately that they fit tightly together with no mortar, inadequate tools (as far as we know) and without even a paper’s width between them. I’ve found a paper which gives an explanation. The stones were mined and the mining would have produced an acidic slurry. The paper proposes that this slurry was used as mortar between the stones. The stones are of granite with a high silica content and the acid in the mortar would have attacked and softened the silica, itself dissolving in the process. The weight of the upper stones would then have crushed the lower stones together. That explanation seems very likely to me; using mortar between stones in a wall was common practice so now it seems it was perhaps the absence of that that most needed explanation. The rest then follows.

There’s plenty more that needs explaining of course but my curiosity has revealed a few gems. One recent discovery puts back the time at which we think humanoids (not necessarily homo sapiens) made tools by some 100,000 years, which illustrate how little we really know about what was going on tens of thousands of years ago. In fact, on occasion after occasion a finding puts back the time at which the first of whatever happened by a few thousand years. There is significant evidence of the use of electricity that long ago, not that people fully understood it then but that they were able to generate and harness it in limited ways. The same goes for the smelting and use of metals, although how the very high temperatures needed were achieved remains a bit of a mystery. What I think I have learned is that crude technologies were in use much earlier than we have previously thought and that tens of thousands of years ago the earth consisted of relatively sophisticated civilisations existing cheek by jowel with extremely rudimentary ones. Think city building farmers alongside hunter-gathering cave dwellers.

Another thing I think I’ve learned is that widespread travel happened much sooner than we realised. For instance, there is quite strong evidence that the Chinese arrived in north America earlier than anybody else. tens if not hundreds of thousands of years ago, which throws our current reading of the movements of early man into the melting pot. If that is true the spotty nature of the spread of technology seems a bit strange but maybe the traveling adventurers didn’t include technologists. People moved more easily than ideas: that wouldn’t be so strange.

There’s still those aliens to account for. I’ve no idea whether they exist or not and the probability according to astrophysicist seems very low. The counter to that is, as Heisenberg has said, physics is not just more complicated than we think but more complicated than we can think. So…...to the little green robots. What do we send to far planets that we want to investigate? Robots; so they would liely be the first things that any advanced alien civilisation, if it existed, would send to investigate Earth. A general objection to any alien beings visting Earth is the limitation of the speed of light over the distances involved. If nothing can exceed the speed of light, as Einstein’s theory of relativity insists, the time to reach Earth would exceed the lifespan of anything we can conceive of. But…...we know Einstein’s theory of relativity is wrong, maybe only slightly so but possibly fundamentally so. The limitation of the speed of light is essential to the theory of relativity but not to quantum physics; in quantum physics could speeds vastly superior to the speed of light be possible? At the moment, it seems, nobody knows, so that’s another mystery waiting to be solved. Quantum physics in itself is an invitation to fantasy. When a theory is proposed in science, to be of any use, it also has to have an observable test proposed that would demonstrate whether it explained whatever anomaly it sought to resolve. But…….we appear at the moment to have reached the limit of size of particle we can detect; we (think) we know there must be smaller particles but, since we can’t detect them, we can only theorise about their existence and, more damningly, therefore can’t propose an experiment that would demonstrate their existence. Physics, in this sense, seems to have reached the same point as philosophy did with Wittgenstein; put bluntly, it disappears up its own arsehole.

Behind all this thinking and speculation is the little consideration of trying to separate fact from fiction, reality from fantasy, what we (think) we know from what still has to be understood. In popular discussions, scientific facts are often referred to, equally often without the realisation that scientific facts aren’t necessarily true; they merely accord with the available evidence. The only true facts in science are mathematical axioms, which don’t get you far when trying to unravel archaeological conundrums.

All through the writing of this piece I’ve tried to be very careful of my use of language. Facts, truth, reality, fantasy, what we (think) we know……...a dance of the semantics. As an aside, it throws a light on the politically correct crowd who want to control our use of language. I have a friend who has had a stroke and becomes angry if anyone tries to describe him (in French) as of disadvantaged mobility; he insists he’s handicapped. That’s the reality.

All this apart, what’s been happening in the last fortnight? Well, the daylight hours have increased markedly, which suggests gardening. Not much is yet possible but I can get down to some pruning and clearing of dead stuff. I’ve also decided to advance my cooking into the field of desserts. I normally eat fruit of some (any) sort for dessert and just get ice cream for those I invite. However, I made baclava yesterday and it proved an instant hit. My next target is a good rice pudding, with lemon, cream and a covering of nutmeg. And this morning I found some popcorn, my favourite munch whiile watching football, in the local supermarket, mid-size plastic buckets of it. Learning from last year, I bought three of them. They’ll be sold out by next week and that will be it for the year. A UK supermarket would immeduately re-order anything that sold out that quickly; here «it’s great that sold so quickly, now let’s get something that lasts longer on the shelves». There’s no sign of a COVID jab for me yet; my friends Steve and Jo, who should be ahead of me in the queue because of Steve’s handicap (sic) have been offered the possibility of one in June. So for me…….August, September maybe, and I’m in one of the priority categories. Come on France, wake up!