Boules, Chestnuts And Rain

Ramatuelle

It's a month now since I was in Ramatuelle, at the French national boules championships for rural wrinklies. As two years previously, I had a very enjoyable time: good weather, good company and good food, if not so good boules. We played reasonably well but were inconsistent and finished nowhere. The very hot weather was welcome and once again I was surprised by the big difference in vegetation between Ramatuelle and here. The absence of frost so close to the Mediterranean means that a much larger number of plants thrive and bloom there at this time of the year.

I had decided to don my very English outfit for the tournament, bowler hat and Union Jack T-shirt, and my garb was received very much in the spirit that I intended. It was a source of jokes, anecdotes and other pleasantries and the bowler hat drew particular approval. If we go next year I shall wear it again.

On our day off, as we weren't in the finals, we visited St Tropez and wandered round the old port which, as usual, was full of impressive yachts. This time though there were a number of racing yachts. I hadn't realised how long, sleek and tall they are; it looked as though they couldn't possibly stay upright in full sail but they obviously do.

Chestnuts

Last evening at the pizza get-together Anne-Marie and Patrick brought along some chestnuts that they had collected in a visit to the Auvergne. Roberto duly roasted them in his pizza oven and they were passed around to all and sundry. It made me try again to get some clarification of the French use of both “marrons” and “chataignes” to denote chestnuts. I was sure that one must apply to sweet chestnuts and the other to horse chestnuts but the two words seemed to be used interchangeably.

I still couldn't get any firm clarification until I asked Patrick. He said that if you ate them they were “chataignes”; “marrons” were inedible. That, at least was clear. But what about the “marrons glacés” (crystallised chestnuts) that were in all the shops at Christmas? That, said Patrick, was a misuse of the word “marrons”. When I put this to the other French people present they all agreed. So that's another puzzle solved.

Incidentally, the renowned region for chestnuts is the Ardèche, the area immediately across the Rhône from us. It is unique to my knowledge in being the only place where the main “filler” in food was, in the 19^th century and before, chestnuts. Even bread and cakes were made from chestnut flour. I know that other regions of the world have, variously, potatoes, rice, pasta, tapioca, noodles and types of bread as fillers but I know of no other region that had chestnuts for this purpose.

Rain

It rained on Saturday, and how.......Friend Steve likes to point out that our area has a very similar amount of rain per year as southern England. Here, though, it comes occasionally and generally in large quantities at a time. The Ouvèze became a torrent, ripping up trees from the banks and river bed and carrying them downstream. This is what happened in 1992 but to a much greater extent. Then the river blocked the Roman bridge in Vaison with trees, cars and caravans it had gathered in its flow so that the water had to flow over the bridge at a height of over 30ft. When the “dam” unblocked, the subsequent flood killed nearly a hundred people.

It was of course a very rare event but it makes me wonder why more attention is not paid to keeping the river bed clear of trees and bushes. The bed is very wide in many places so that the river flows in shallow channels and scrub grows up in the drier places. If the same intense rainfall as happened in 1992 happened again there seems every prospect that a similar disaster would again occur.

The kind of rainfall that we had on Saturday always makes me want to go and look at the river bed under the village bridge. Heavy rainfall invariably changes the contours of the stones that cover the bed and thus also the channels along which the river flows. Sometimes it spreads out the stones evenly, giving a shallow flow across the whole bed and sometimes it piles the stones up in hillocks that force a faster, deeper flow between the banks of stones. This time it seems to have formed a hillock in the middle of the bed, forcing the river to flow either side.

Great Expectations

The Generation Gap

A good friend of mine, Barry Knight, once said to me that we were the golden generation, in England at least. We hadn't had to fight a war, jobs were plentiful and the vast majority of us had a standard of living that was relatively comfortable and secure, if very modest. All of that was certainly untrue of the generation that had lived their youth in the 1920s and 1930s rather than the 1950s and 1960s.

It hardly needs saying that things are very different for the youth of today. In fact, almost the reverse is true. But I think there is another important difference which I realised only when it was pointed out to me by friend Rineke at the pizza evening this week. I also think that, in a slightly perverse way, this was another advantage for my generation.

When we started out on life, most of us had little or nothing. Only under 4% of us had a university education. Some had a few O or A level passes to their credit and some had apprenticeships or a secretarial qualification but the vast majority were essentially unqualified. However, most largish organisations had induction and training schemes (because they needed them) and casual work was plentiful. I personally had a miserable university grant (but a grant nonetheless) which I could easily supplement with casual work in the summer and winter holidays. It was “grunt” work, as the Americans call it (you give it only to grunts) and very poorly paid but it was a bonus to my circumstances.

As regards standard of life, few of us went hungry but televisions, even telephones, washing machines, tumble-driers, cars and central heating were something of a rarity. I well remember the temperature differences in even modest-sized rooms, trying to get into a position in front of a fire between burning shins and a freezing bum.

What Rineke pointed out to me is that it is not just the work situation that has changed dramatically but also the personal expectations and many aspects of the standard of life. We started with nothing but the current generation mostly start with quite a lot, including lots of (fairly meaningless) qualifications. All of the appliances mentioned above, cars and central heating are now the norm rather than the exception, plus of course PCs, mobile phones and broadband connections. These now tend to be expectations rather than luxuries to be earned. Compared to our young lives, theirs are often quite comfortable. But what they do not have is a zero starting point and the fear of unemployment and insecurity that the experience of our parents passed on to us. The current generation has a higher starting point and higher expectations to go along with their much more plentiful qualifications. So it is not only facing much harsher times but is also in many ways much less well equipped to deal with them.

Self-confidence

Rineke and I also got to discussing self-confidence and the times when we had had it or lacked it. It reminded me of an experience when I was teaching at Summerhill school.

I was teaching a lad of ten some elementary maths. Having explained the sums, I took him through several examples saying just “how do you start” and “what do you do next” and so on. With just that prompting he was perfectly able to do them. When I left him to do more of the same on his own, however, he could do nothing. I'm not sure how the thought came to me but I thought it must be a question of self- confidence. The lad was quite athletic and, as I played football with the kids, I encouraged him at football. As he grew more confident at football so he did at maths. A few years later, when I returned to the school for a get-together, he came leaping out, jumped on me to give me a hug and said: “You'll never guess what; I just passed O level maths”. That didn't make him a great mathematician but it did do great things for his self-confidence and gave him a platform to build on.

Ever since I have thought it should be a criminal offence to attempt to undermine anyone's self-confidence.

Autumn

Autumn is definitely here now. Leaves aren't turning yet but there is a definite nip in the air in the mornings. After I get up I usually make coffee and take a cup up to my front room, open the door onto the balcony and look at the news on my PC. Now I'm finding I close the door again before long. Last Monday it was still quite comfortable to sit outside for the pizzas until quite late but I suspect that that may be one of the last pizza evenings outside this year. And the grapes I'm trying to sun-dry on my balcony are taking a long time to dry into raisons. I've just bought what will probably be the last two melons of this year but, in compensation, figs are around in the markets and shops; neighbour Liz kindly brought me a bag full.

More Words

More Words

American friends Hallie and Mary arrived back in Mollans recently and came round for aperitifs the other evening. I was commenting on the lime trees in front of my house and Mary interjected that her dictionary gave the “tilleuls” as linden trees, not lime trees. Had I been getting it wrong all this time? So.........I duly searched on the Internet. What I found was that linden and lime are apparently interchangeable names for the same genus of trees, known botanically as “tilia” (from which the French “tilleuls” can easily be derived).. So maybe it was a question of species. I searched that and found that the number of species is indeterminate, lime/linden trees apparently being pretty promiscuous and creating new species at the drop of a hat (or speck of pollen). I left my search there. I have no great desire to know whether the species in front of my house, by comparison of leaves, bark, flowers or fruit, are of a known species or of an as yet unclassified one. I'll continue to call them lime trees but am now better informed on the subject, should.anyone ask.

Miraculous

I commented in my last posting about the problem with “un bébé miraculeux”, duly changed to “un bébé inespéré”. I recounted this to some French friends while playing boules and they said an alternative would have been “un bébé miraculé”. Both “miraculeux” and “miraculé” translate as miraculous, so what's in the difference? It appears that “miraculeux” has to apply to an event, whilst “miraculé” applies to a person. I'm sure there are instances of the same kind of distinction in English but have struggled to think of any. All I could think of was tall rather than high applying to a person but there must be better examples.

Incidentally, in the same last posting I mentioned the mental struggle to come up with fire-proof. My son emailed me to suggest incombustible. Now why couldn't I think of that?

A book?

I'm contemplating writing a book. Why? Believe it or not, it's not so much ego as thinking what to do over the coming winter, to keep me off the streets, hitting old ladies over the head, smashing shop windows, etc. It occurred to me that, having written this blog for 3-4 years, I probably had a third or maybe a half of the material needed for a book of 50-60,000 word-space, adequate if not generous. It could be titled A House In Provence or A House In The Baronnies or some such. For previous books I have written the publishers came to me with proposals, which made it easy; this time I was going to have to find a potential publisher.

If I'm going to take this further than an idle thought, I am resigned to having to write a synopsis, chapter breakdown, target reader spec, brief bio and maybe three sample chapters. No way will I write a whole book on the off chance of finding a publisher. Anyway, I searched on publishers and submissions. My results so far have been disappointing, with failed links and opacity predominant. New submissions are clearly, and understandably, one of publishers' minor concerns. What caught my attention dramatically, though, was the number of publishers that require hard copy (with return postage prepaid). This last I can understand as I know publishers to be very cost-conscious. But hard copy? I mean HARD copy, on paper that is. Haven't the advent of ebooks and Kindle really sunk in or is this just a way to make submissions more difficult? You can bet that final copy will be required in electronic form.

I knew from a period of my career when I was busy creating new magazines, taking chunks out of the big publishers' markets and selling it back to them at a profit, that the big publishers were generally dozy, complacent and marketing neanderthals. Nonetheless the hard copy requirement took me by surprise. Caxton lives on, probably even longer than he thought he would. Ah well, if any publisher reads this it's probably the end of my book project.

Words, Words, Words

Searching For Words

One of the English who have second houses here, Tony, said that his daughter was getting married next week to a Frenchman, in France, and so he had to give a wedding speech in French. Would I go over it for him? Of course I agreed and duly went through it, picking up the odd grammatical error, which probably wouldn't have noticed anyway when spoken, and the occasional translation error. In fact, I found only two and even one of those I wasn't sure of. The obvious one was latest being translated as “le plus tard”, which it could have been but in this case what Tony meant was “plus récent”, exactly the opposite. So much for word for word translation; it's the semantics that count.

The other mistranslation was “annonce” for the speech he had to make. I was sure it should be “discours” but got a sudden doubt; weddings are special occasions and special occasions often have special vocabularies. For instance, the meal after a wedding in England is called a wedding breakfast when it's clearly never a breakfast, unless the couple get married at dawn. “Une annonce” is an announcement, which could be appropriate for an engagement but the couple would be married by the time Tony gave his speech. Anyway, at the last mussels and chips evening at the Bar du Pont I was sitting next to friend Dominique's sister and asked her to go through the speech with me. She cleared up the doubts and improved the phrasing.

I also wanted to pass the speech, with my corrections, through someone French anyway because I am aware that it is only too easy to create a French sentence that is perfectly grammatical but just isn't what the French would say. Dominique's sister pointed out a perfect example of that. Tony had mentioned “un bébé miraculeux”, referring to a grandchild whose mother had previously undergone radiation therapy. That made perfect sense to me but it seems you can't have a miraculous baby in French, at least not without a virgin birth beforehand. The required word in French is “inespéré”, meaning not unhoped for but which you didn't dare hope for.

The chase for words didn't end there. At the pizza evening this week I was chatting with Jacques and Claudine when we somehow got onto the question of fire. The French have the word “ininflammable” and I don't think the word uninflammable exists in English; if it does, it shouldn't because it's too ugly. So what is the word in English? I asked Alex and Pauline, the only other English people there, and they couldn't think of a word. In the end it was Jacques who came up with answer; he remembered seeing “fire-proof” on some packaging.

Gardens

Jacques, Claudine and I got around to chatting about gardens and Claudine, as ever, was very complimentary about mine and said she didn't like the French way or gardening, only the English way. I've remarked before that I don't think the style of gardening in large French châteaus works in small spaces but think it does for the châteaus. It then occurred to me that we don't usually have the French château style in large English country houses. We tend to break up the large landscapes into smaller areas for the gardens and create different types of small gardens, often walled. So we really are a nation of small gardeners.

Midsummer Musings

Back Garden

A storm overnight two days ago and a subequent light breeze have brought blessed relief from the oppresive heat of the previous three weeks; temperatures are down by around 10 degrees and it is pleasant once again to be outdoors. A consequence is a lot more people out and about in the village. I hadn't seen Mana for weeks and assumed she'd gone off to visit friends she has in Greece, as she does most years ; but she turned up at boules yesterday and so I invited her to come and eat on Friday.

The heat fried some flowers I planted in the back garden to give some late season colour before they ever got established and that has prompted me to have a radical rethink of what I do there. It's looking very sad at the moment. I've decided that, despite the 500 litres of compost I've added to the soil, more is needed. Also, the wooden slats I've used to hold the soil in place are beginning to rot. So, I shall turn over the ground to extract more stones and build low walls with those to replace the slats. Even with the soil improved, I think that small bushes are the only answer as regards plants. I've bought a small hibiscus and hope it will stay a manageable size for a few years. Then I'll look for some patio roses, cistus or helianthemums to fill in, with perhaps some more lilies as they seem to do well. The back garden at this time of year seems to be a perennial problem but I still think I can find a solution.

Adjacent is a photo of the front of my house as it is at the moment.  There is in fact more colour there than meets the eye but alo too much green, due in no small part to the shadow cast across the front of the house by the lime trees on the opposite side of the road.  The large sunflower from a seed ropped by birds feeding on my balcony can just about be discerned at the level of the grapevine over the balcony.  But.........I need to do some more rethinking to, once again, get more colour at this time of the year.  Part of the problem is that three blue solanum in pots at the front which bloomed profusely last year have decided not to do so this year, perhap again because of the shade thrown by the lime trees.

Islam

Over lunch a few days ago, Steve, who is a history buff, and I got into conversation about the Moorish invasion of Spain. Steve pointed out that the Moors got as far north as Troyes in France but quickly dropped back again behind the Pyrenees and left little trace of their brief visit further north. In Spain, of course, their influence has been enormous and, I would argue, all of it beneficial. They not only left architecture of great beauty but also created a centre of scholarship in their great library at Cordoba and gave the world a lesson in tolerance. Islam became the official religion, of course, but christians were allowed to practice and were for the most part accepted as more or less equal citizens, although they could not hold office. By contrast, when El Cid and his cronies reconquered Spain, muslims were offered a stark choice: convert to christianity or die. It's almost the converse of what seems to be happening in the religious world today. And the christians effectively tried to ruin the beautiful mosque in Cordoba, a circular representation of the sun, by building a rectangular church in the middle. Someone once said that, if there was a God, religion was a cruel trick he played on humanity.

It's always puzzled me why the Spanish invaders are called Moors. The inference is that they came from Mauretania, which may have been partly true but can't have been the whole story. I met a number of Moors in my time in Senegal and they are a physically distinct race: jet black hair, jet black eyes, relatively pale skin and small in stature, contrasting hugely with the Taureg and very physically distinct from other arabs I have met. Those in Senegal at the time specialised in working with silver and ebony. The invading forces from north Africa may well have included Moors but must have included also many other arab types. So why are they always referred to as Moors? Perhaps scribes of the time knew no better.

PS
Formatting this post I've found again that accents do funny things to blog and website insertions.  The typesize changed after the tonic accent that I originally placed on the first "o" of Cordoba (the correct spelling).  I have deleted the accent but can't get the typesize to revert.  I've found in adding to my website on the village (www.mon-mollan-sur-ouveze.fr) that inclusion of an accent frequently causes the HTML round the following text to go crazy and generate spurious HTML which involves me in hours of extra work.  I can't be bothered to find a way to edit out the spurious HTML here. 

July

July

July is the festive month in Mollans and so our street party was followed by the 14th of July commemoration of the storming of the Bastille. There was a band in front of Bar du Pont but I didn't bother to go as I was eating with friends earlier and felt too lazy.

Hot on the heels of that the Tour de France went along the village by-pass. As I've mentioned before, the Tour is not really a spectator sport on the ground as it's all over in the 20 or so seconds it takes the cyclists to pass. However, it being so close to the village I didn't have to find a place to stand three hours beforehand so I went along. A lot of people had got in position in time for the « caravan », when sponsors pass by and thow freebies at the crowd, about 2 hours before the cyclists arrive. There appears to have been a somewhat unseemly scramble for free caps, newspapers and other trinkets which didn't interest me. Many then left the roadside to return when the cyclists were due. I got in position, about an hour before « the event » and decided I'd put on full regalia as there was the prospect of an English winner: Union Jack T-shirt and black bowler hat got an outing.

The week before, my daughter Natalie and her boyfriend Andy arrived for a few days. It was good to see them both in high spirits. Andy decided to attempt to cycle up Mont Ventoux but made it to only about half-way up before his legs gave out. It's not a challenge to be taken on lightly and he obviously lacked enough practice. Anyway, he didn't seem downhearted and, when he returned, I took him and Natalie on a short wine tour so they had a good selection of the local wines to take back to the UK with them. Waiting for the Tour, I bought an official goody bag from a passing Tour van and have sent it off to them in the post. It could be the inspiration for another attempt.

While doing our wine tour we stopped for lunch in the village of Gigondas, which I hadn't visited before although I've been to various vineyards in the area around. It's very small and the centre is occupied by restaurants and wine cellars. It made me wonder what it would be like in winter. We ate lunch with an inexpensive carafe of the restaurant's house wine. For a house wine, it was very good. I guess they don't make inferior wine in Gigondas; it wouldn't be worth anyone's while. But it might be worth my while looking for wine there that is just outside the officially classified area; there mighy be some bargains to be had.

The weather since the beginning of the month has been summer arriving with a vengeance: hot sunny days with temperatures from the high 20s into the 30s and with storms brewing up in the evenings every few days. I have twice invited people to eat thinking we could hear the fountain on the terrace tinkling in the background only for its sound to be drowned out by a downpour.

And the tourists are here in abundance, many of them posing in front of my house to take photos. I feel quite flattered by that, particularly one evening when I was nursing a calvados on my balcony and one shouted up: « Monsieur, votre maison est magnifique ».

French

It seem the French are officially softening their stance on the positioning of the language. Rather than trying, albeit forlornly, to insist it should be the major language in the world, the French have decided simply to accept that it is just one of many important languages. This change of stance coincides with a proposal from Academia that some courses at French universities should be taught in English. Horror of horrors! It hasn't stopped the inexorable incursion of English words into French. Friend Steve was recently amused to find a notice displayed above PCs in an electronics store exhorting customers to « boostez votre business »; at least « votre » was French. That gave me another couple of words to add to le chat (not a cat, pronounced as in English), le show, le talk, le best of, le test (and the verb tester), etc.

Early Summer

Le Feu de la St Jean

I think the summer proper has at last started. It certainly has officially as the Feu de la St Jean took place as planned on the 24th June. It being a Monday, Roberto was there with his van but offering mussels and chips rather than pizzas. The weather was good, if not as warm as usual, and there was entertainment of a sort, a Basque band that marched through the square rather than staying and playing in it. However, it was a quite enjoyable start to the summer and the weather has since stayed summery, with temperatures well into the 20s and beyond.

Street Party

Our annual street party took place on the first Sunday in July as usual and was once again a thoroughly enjoyable affair. This time I met four people I hadn't previously known and whom I hope may become friends in the future : a Dutch couple who have bought a house at the end of the road and a Franco-American couple who are in the process of a gradual move into a house 50 yards down from mine. They are from Dallas and, it seems, already readers of this blog; I didn't know my readership had got that far!

Stuck In A Rut

I keep thinking I must read more French fiction and keep reverting to re-reading books I have had for years. I asked Mana for some ideas for more recent fiction but the only ones she could come up with were a tranlation from the English and another that didn't appeal. Daniel could only suggest Michel Houellbecq and, in any case, I'm not sure his taste in fiction corresponds to mine. Houellbecq I have already read and like somewhat, although he tends to concentrate on some of the more perverse aspects of human nature.

One problem is that I have found it difficult to define my taste in fiction, since I have liked crime novels, political novels, science fiction and many other genres but don't like any genre as a whole in particular. What it comes down to, I think, is that I like novels that provide me with insights into human nature and the human experience; encapsulated in fact a single title, La Condition Humaine (Man's Estate is the English title) of Malraux. Hence my fixation on, apart from Malraux, Camus, Gide, Sartre, Giraudoux and the other existentialists. I had thought that this fixation was because those were the authors I read in my teens and early twenties when I was studying French but now think it may be more than that. The existentialists were, after all, preoccupied totally with ruminations on human experience. So maybe I'll just have to find some modern existentialists.

Garden Colour In July/August

This year I've had another go at producing a decent floral display at the back in July/August and failed miserably again, though in part due to snail damage to my dahlias. I didn't go for a snail carnage this spring and paid the price. But, having thought about the problem, I may give up. I've concluded that I'm fighting against nature and that's a battle I'm unlikely to win. Looking around, I can't see much colour that is not lavendar, oleanders, hollyhocks or hibiscus. Hollyhocks I have, also lavendar though not in such profusion that it stands out. I also have a small oleandar. The problem for me with oleandars and hibiscus is that they take up too much room in a small garden. And the problem with smaller plants is tha they generally do their blooming earlier. It makes natural sense: if you want the best conditions for blooming, water and sun, it makes natural sense here to do that in the April to June time-frame. In July/August, many plants get scorched and so die back. So maybe I'll just concede that nature knows best.