Weather And Charities

Weather

Last autumn and winter were unusually wet and this autumn has been the same so far. The Ouveze is full, fast flowing and discoloured, if not yet in full flood, the consequence of several days of rain over the past week. Today, however, was bright and sunny which gave me the incentive to get out and plant the flowers and bulbs I had bought earlier. There are another 80 narcissi bulbs out front, some replacing those I removed last spring to make way for further planting, but probably about half that number additional to last year. I have also made additional use of cyclamen this year as they seem to like the conditions and bloom more or less continuously. So the front of the house should look good through the winter and into the spring. Unfortunately, cyclamen don't do blue and I'm not keen on pink so I've opted for red and white.

Charities

One of the differences I found when I came here was the absence of the ubiquitous charity shops in the UK. Had there been one nearby I would probably have volunteered, as I did in the Oxfam bookshop in Reading before coming here. So a recent news item caught my attention.

It appears that a book is due to be published very shortly on the charity industry in the UK. It appears not to take any moral stance but is full of facts and figures that would seem to pose some very disturbing questions. For instance, the charity “industry” in the UK has a turnover of £80 billion. That is a staggering figure, making it one of the more important industries in the UK. Indeed, that could be seen as a wonderful feather in the cap of the British, giving so much to charity; but is all that money going where it is intended?

Unfortunately not, it would seem. There is no suggestion of fraud but there would seem to be a huge problem of proliferation of charities. The total number is just short of 200,000 so that, unsurprisingly, the Charity Commission which provides overall governance is struggling to maintain any kind of control. Of that total, nearly 2000 are dedicated to issues concerning children, which most people would agree should be a major focus; but 2000? Other interesting figures are that there are 581 charities devoted to cancer care/cures, 354 devoted to birds and 255 to animals. The obvious question is not whether all these charities are worthy in their own right but whether this is an efficient way of channelling donations to the quite probably worthy, and needy, causes.

Every charity, quite properly, must show that it is appropriately administered and the larger ones must have their accounts professionally audited. Administration costs money and so does auditing; a reasonable estimate of auditing costs for the larger charities has to run into hundreds of millions of pounds. An apparent loophole in declaration of accounts seems to allow such costs, and sundry others, to be allocated as charitable spend. The result is that when charities proudly proclaim that X% of the money they receive goes where the donor expects, that is in fact far from the case. A truer figure would indeed seem to be around half to two thirds of what is officially claimed. Surely that needs legislative attention, of a form that would encourage charities to amalgamate and increase the percentage of donations that actually goes to the front-line operations that donors normally intend.

Bell, Book And Candle

BELL

I went to the Beaumont English Language Library (BELL) (www.beaumontenglishlibrary.com) to hear a presentation by Julia Rothenberg of Harvard University on James Joyce's Ulysses. It proved interesting and revealed an unsuspected fact. Joyce apparently didn't speak Irish, although Ulysses itself was translated into Irish quite late, in 1984.

The visit to the library enabled me to button-hole Julia's husband Albert, who is a professor psychiatry at Harvard on a point that has often intrigued me: concept definition in psychiatry. I have always assumed that defining the concepts psychiatrists use must be a difficult problem in the absence of any clinical indicators. It seems I was only partly right. Concept definition is a problem but psychiatry gets round it by the use of agreed tests and expert consensus. That's hardly ideal and must leave significant room for uncertainty but it would seem to be a case of needs must. However, psychiatry is not depending on advances in clinical indications. I thought it needed better understanding of how the brain works but that turns out to be only partly true. As Albert pointed out, whilst we now know a lot more about areas of the brain that are active when we do certain things or experience various emotions, we still understand next to nothing about what exactly is going on in those active areas. Albert suggested that a much greater understanding of synapses will be needed before any progress is made on that front.

Friend Steve and I have agreed to give a talk some time next year on the origins of popular phrases and sayings. That leaves plenty of time to prepare but has already set me investigating sources and is proving an interesting way to spend otherwise unoccupied hours. One origin I have already found is that of the phrase “nineteen to the dozen”, meaning going all out. Apparently it derives from water pumps used in Cornish mines which were powered by coal and which, at maximum capacity, could pump out 19,000 gallons of water for every 12 bushels of coal consumed. A bushel, for those who left school after the 1960s, is an old volumetric measure of dry goods equivalent to 0.35 cubic metres.

Islam

I find myself with very mixed feelings about the anti-muslim sentiments that I encounter here, in England and among very reasonable friends. In some ways these sentiments are easily understandable given ISIS, Al Quaeda and cases of sexual violence, forced marriages, etc, hitting the headlines in the UK. Outrage must be the normal response for any westerner. My problem is that I understand that to be exactly the response that the extremist groups most want. They want a global war between muslims and the rest of the world and also, it would appear, between muslim factions. Outrage fuels the inferno they want to create.

At root, I can't see this as a struggle between muslims and the rest, as indeed some moderate muslim groups have said it is not or should not be. I see it as a naked struggle for power waged by groups who above all want dominance, want to be able to dictate to the world how it should live. That has happened a number of times in history; all that is new this time around is that Islam has been chosen to provide legitimacy and a constituency. If these groups simply said what they really want, total power, it would be easy to dismiss them; so they seek some form of legitimacy, to gain a following. I find it ironic that we label ISIS et al as mediaeval, which is indeed how their behaviour appears, when muslims in Europe in the Middle Ages were quite the opposite. In muslim-occupied Spain jews, christians and others, whilst excluded from holding office, were otherwise treated as equal citizens, an amazingly liberal approach for those days. When El Cid and the reconquest happened, muslims were offered the choice of conversion to christianity or death. And then came the Spanish inquisition............

The other serious conflict is clearly a clash of cultures which, I believe, has not been helped in England by extremes of political correctness. I firmly believe in tolerance but also that when there is a clash of cultures the predominant national (in this case English) culture must take precedence. And people of other cultures must accept that or face penalties or exclusion from the country. In 90% of countries in the world this would be automatically assumed and I see no reason why England should be different.

The Law

From Matera

My final outing in Matera stay was to the Benedictine Abbey of Michael Angelo in nearby Montescaglioso, nestling in the village at the top of a hill. Reception offered a guided tour, which we took; and just as well. Most of the interest, apart from the main building structure, was behind locked doors which had to be opened by the guide. There were some Greek ruins over which the monastery had been built, starting in the 5^th century and ending in the 12^th. The monks seemed to have lived a fairly plush life when there wasn't a war going on around, the cells being spacious and quite well furnished. I enjoyed the visit.

I was due to fly home on the Monday but the strike by Air France pilots (euphemistically called a “mouvement social” rather than a “grève”) threw a spanner in the works. I am wondering if this interesting change in nomenclature lowers the official statistic for the number of strikes in a year. “No, no, nowhere near 1000; only 300 in fact; the rest were mouvements sociaux or some such.” Anyway, a flight from Bari to Beauvais, a coach from there to the Porte Maillot in Paris, a taxi from there to Roissy and a train from there to Avignon where friend Steve picked me up did the trick, even if it did take 15 hours door-to-door.

I am tempted to express my feelings on Air France but find myself inhibited by a recent court case reported in the papers. A lady who had an unpleasant experience at a restaurant (poor food, service) related the same on her Facebook page, naming the restaurant. The restaurant sued her for defamation and won damages. The court verdict was not based on any inaccuracies in her account but simply on the fact that what she wrote had the potential to damage the restaurant's trade (and so it bloody well should!). Liberté? Whatever happened to freedom of speech in France? And how on earth do you do restaurant reports or critiques of anything else come to that? So all I can really say is that the return flight by Air France didn't go off wonderfully because it didn't go off at all.

Countering Terrorism

France looks as though it could be going to put its foot well and truly in it with a new bill to counter terrorism. The problem of protecting freedom from terrorism without adversely affecting that same freedom too much is well known. However, the new French bill, which proposes blocking websites with terrorist material on them, has obvious and serious flaws.

For one thing it makes a special case of material available over the internet. That's just plain stupid and a refusal to acknowledge lessons that have been learned elsewhere over the years. Material that may be illegal over the internet could therefore be legal if delivered some other way; anomalies here we come. The UK Sale of Goods Act (1979), designed to protect consumers, defined an economic good as something tangible, thus failing to protect consumers from bad services (or computer software). Similarly, the ancient Copyright Act (1911) specifically assumed marks on a page or similar, thus requiring a much later intellectual property rights act. That mistake could at least be excused by changing times and history but there are no excuses now. All media and means of delivery should be covered by any new legislation; surely that lesson must have been learned.

Secondly, and more importantly, although the bill refers to the already legally defined terms provocation and incitement to terrorism, Article 4 also cites justification (apologie) of terrorism. But the bill doesn't give criteria for when a justification should be considered noxious and blocked, neither does it propose a body to define and interpret any such criteria. An explanation, for instance, could easily be interpreted as a justification if someone wanted to take that view. That looks like a free hand for the government to block anything it wants for just about any reason, including any embarrassing criticism it could do without.

NB  I included accents and they have screwed up the text presentation somewhat.  Why can't Blogger deal with accents?

Matera

Matera

I arrived at my cousin’s in Matera without hitch, apart from a rather long hike around Terminal B in Rome’s Fumicino airport.  Having confirmed the gate for my onward flight to Bari, I walked the length of the terminal to present myself at it only to find that it had changed.  And then again………….As my cousin’s son Enrico said when I told him of this: “Ah, Alitalia; welcome to Italy.”

We all (myself, cousin, my daughter, her partner and my cousin’s family) met for lunch at a local hostelry.  The hostelry was on a farm that was part of a scheme in the region whereby a grant could be claimed if the farm served meals consisting of produce 75% grown\made on the premises.  Anyway, the food was excellent and copious.  A starter of types of ham, cheese and salads on a large platter, supplemented by more of the same that wouldn’t fit on the plate, was followed by two courses of pasta, one with mussels and the other with mushrooms.  Then came roast chicken and lamb with salad, again supplemented by more of the same that wouldn’t fit on the plates. Then came two dessert courses, fruit followed by pastry and ice cream, and finally a plate of cheese with which to finish off the dregs of the wine.  We’d started at 1.00 and left at 6.00.

I was fit only for a couch or bed after this but it had been decided that we should go on to visit the vineyard of another of my cousin’s sons, Matteo.  The domain is called Parco Dei Monaci and sits on a south-facing hillside outside the town.  The 20,000 vines are capable of producing the same number of litres of wine but Matteo and his wife carefully choose only half of the harvest to be made into wine.  A very slow fermentation process means that none is bottled until it is three years old.  The result is three wines: a rose made purely from primitivo grapes, a red wine made similarly, and finally a red wine made from a blend of primitivo, cabernet sauvignon and merlot grapes.  The latter has been awarded a gold medal and all three sell for between 15-25 euros a bottle.  Having drunk all three I can testify that they fully justify their price.

An evening at a favoured pizza restaurant produced a surprise.  The chef had found a trick with ice cream.  You place a mound of ice cream on a plate and put it in a very hot oven.  The key has to be in the temperature of the oven and the amount of time (30 seconds?) the ice cream is in it.  The result is a mound of ice cream, cold in the middle with a crust on top and surrounded by a puddle of melted ice cream.  Pretty neat, I thought.

A trip to the Sassi (stones) proved interesting.  The Sassi are part of the old town where there are caves that have been inhabited continuously for 30,000 years, one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites known on earth.  It was easy to see that much more could be made of them but a complex recent legal history apparently prevents that.  Part of the site was blocked off as a film was in the process of being shot.  Its title is “Jesus The Lord” or something like that.  Some 30 films have been shot partly or entirely here so its obviously a popular location.  Mel Gibson starred here in Passion Of The Christ and a remake of Ben Hur is scheduled to be shot there starting some time next year.  It appears there was some fall out from Mel Gibson’s time here at a local restaurant he favoured.  He wanted his pasta done a certain way and pasta alla Mel Gibson now features on the menu.

Boules And A Film

The Unwritten Rules Of Boules

The regulated rules for the game are known to most players but the unwritten rules can be just as important. Here is a guide to the latter

1 You never ever play badly

2 If your boule goes way past the cosh, it must have hit a stone or slipped from your hand.

Shouting “Ah, elle m'a glissé de la main” will confirm that your shot would have been good

3 If your ball falls short, it must have hit an invisible deep patch of dust or gravel

4 NB Since stones, gravel and dust make up all boules terrains, one or other of these explanations must be true

5 If you fail in some other way, such as not spotting the shot that everyone else can see

is required, you have to offer an explanation along the lines of “Ah, but if I had hit that

boule on this side and that boule had ricocheted on to that side of that other boule and....

6 If your opponent throws a ball that appears to stop equidistant from the cosh to yours,

you have to exclaim “Le point est toujours à moi”. If your opponent demands that the

distances be measured and the result is unfavourable to you, you must demand to inspect

the tape and regard it overtly with extreme suspicion. The delay afforded by asking for a

third opinion will help your opponent to forget how he put his boule where it is

7 If your opponent's boule nearly beats yours but just fails to do so, it is only courteous to say “Quel dommage”. The effect on your opponent's game of repeatedly saying this is not your responsibility

8 If you win a game it is only courteous to look sad and say “Désolé “. If you win 13-0 you

could politely add “Vous n'avez pas eu de chance” and suggest a return game

Fortunately, the players in my village are well aware of the unwritten as well as the formal rules and adhere to both.

More Boules

I went to Buis to watch some exhibition games played by players from all around France. Small stands had been erected around the terrains and it was very pleasant sitting in the sun and watching the play. However I was also slightly depressed by seeing a standard of play I couldn't even aspire too, let alone reach. I shall have to be content with being “good enough” for games in and around the village. As it happened, I went to play in the afternoon and played very well, but by my standards not those I had been watching.

A Film

A film is being made in the village. It is apparently exactly 20 years since a group of Dutch youths who were staying in the village decided to walk up Mt Ventoux. On the way down, one of them fell and was killed. The film is to commemorate that event. I shall probably enjoy seeing the film if I get a chance, even if it is in Dutch, but at the moment it is a considerable nuisance. Parts of the village have restricted access and if you are within 100 yards of the action you are told not to talk or only in whispers. I'll be happy when the film crew move off to Mt Ventoux.

Expressions And Attraction

New Expressions

At dinner with friends Rene and Armelle I was asked what I thought of my new neighbour, a woman who has bought the house that used to belong to friends Neville and Liz and which sits just above mine. She had wanted to meet me before she moved in and Neville and Liz had arranged a time but she didn't show up until later. By then I had gone off to play boules. So my answer had to be that I didn't know. Armelle said she had spoken to another of my neighbours, Florence, and Florence said she and the new neighbour were like “cul et chemise”. It wasn't obvious to me what that meant until it was explained (very close, apparently). So, it was good to learn a new expression but I was frustrated to find that I couldn't think of the English equivalent. Later, Steve and Jo suggested “bosom friends/pals” or “being in each others pockets”. Problem solved but I don't want to forget my English.

Weeks ago Daniel had introduced me to the expression “heureux comme un poisson dans l'eau”. That time I could find the somewhat crude but definitely more expressive English equivalent: happy as a pig in shit.

Rules Of Attraction

Over lunch with Daniel he brought up the subject of a common female acquaintance and said how attractive he found her, pointing out her good figure. He has his Marie but said to me why didn't I, as it were, “go for it”. I agreed that she was, in general terms, an attractive woman but said I wasn't attracted to her. I've become used to attempts to pair me off, possibly because of my somewhat haphazard lifestyle or perhaps simply because I am a spare male. My friend Steve's wife Jo thinks I need a wife; I jestingly reply that I've already had one of those and didn't go that much on it. Neighbour Jean-Pierre is also on the job. Whenever I'm introduced to a single woman in his presence he gives me a nudge and says: “Elle est disponible, Yann, vas-y”.

The point is that Daniel seemed to need an explanation of why I didn't find this woman attractive, despite her obvious “assets”, and I struggled to say why. A friend, yes, and someone with whom I could happily pass some time; but attractive to me, no.

What I needed was some description of what attracts me to a woman so I tried to search back in my mind as to what had attracted me to women in the past, not necessarily just those with whom I had had a relationship. Daniel's “bums and tits” approach was certainly part of the picture, perhaps an essential part, but very far from all of it. Physically, I do know that I am attracted to women with slim rather than more generous figures but that is about as far as I could go in terms of general shape. I know that some characteristics of eyes and mouth play an important role but can't define what they are; it's not big/small, it's something else. Gestures too can be important. I remember once sitting in a café watching a woman at another table whose lower arm and hand movements were so flowing and graceful as to be almost a work of art in themselves; they fascinated me.

Of course there's personality as well, when I get to know someone, and I know that positive, happy, outgoing personalities attract me more than introspective morose ones. But saying that reveals little and is probably true for most people. Then there words, words, words. I like irony and studied understatement (I am of English origin, after all) and I often find ruefulness, self-deprecation and perceptive comments attractive, as well as a sense of humour (obviously). And common interests provide cement for a relationship but don't explain that fleeting moment, that “certain sourire” when attraction is first established.

The problem is that all these factors individually, although they all contribute, don't really explain anything. The answer is probably somewhere in my genes but I don't know anyone who carries a map of their genes around with them for comparison. Anyway, the subject is of more interest to my friends than to me at the moment. All I know, and it is enough for me, is that I can tell, usually fairly immediately, if I am attracted to a woman or not. Whether she happens to be “disponible” or not at the time is another question. And whether or why she is attracted to me is also something I can shed little light on.

“ Je suis comme je suis, je ne suis pas là pour plaire” (Prévert)

This And That

Stasis?

It occurs to me that I haven't written anything for over a month and that is longer than I like to leave my blog unmolested. The problem, I think, has been too much of the same enjoyment. The days and evenings of the summer seem to have flown by, cooler than usual, but still warm and sunny. I've enjoyed the fête days, the regular boules sessions, meeting up with the recidivist visitors who come only in the summer months and sharing meals with friends. But all that is as usual and there has been little out of the ordinary to comment on. Am I becoming stuck in a rut?

I don't know but feel I should be doing more. There's a limit to the time I can spend drinking Calvados on my balcony and contemplating my navel. The flower displays front and back just require watering now. All the jobs that needed doing in the house are now essentially done. I've thought about adding another layer of polish to the old hand-made tiles in living room and painting the 150 year-old tiles in my bedroom; the surface of these has really gone so there is no other way to renovate them. But these feel like jobs for the winter.

The job that needs doing and which I have been putting off (there's always one) is to recreate my website on Mollans. It's been offline for too long since I changed the host server. Recreating the pages shouldn't be too arduous from the back-ups I have but I know that redoing the SEO in three languages and declaring it to the search engines is going to be a chore. I really must start on it, though......tomorrow?

I do have trips to Italy in September to see my daughter and cousin and to England in October to see my son, which will break the routine, so maybe they will shake me out of my torpor. Or maybe I'm just becoming a bit neurotic in my old age.

Tenth Anniversary

It's ten years (eleven, actually, bit I forgot to celebrate last year), since the American national computer society (the ACM) gave me in 2003 the grand title of Pioneer of Software Engineering. This was richly undeserved, although the time lapse explains why. The recognition was for work to which I contributed in 1968. In fact, the work was done by some 40 of us at a NATO-sponsored think-tank. The key to my personal recognition was simply my age. I was 26 at the time and most of the participants were in their 40s and 50s; they contributed, with their knowledge and experience, much more than I ever could. The ACM wanted the think-tank commemorated with a paper given by one of the participants in Garmisch, Germany, where the original meeting had been held. But.......35 years had elapsed and most of the original participants were either dead, in their dotage or unable to travel. I was simply the one who was left.

In fact, I was only at the original meeting at all because of a series of coincidences and really shouldn't have been in such exalted company.  Yet the other participants, both at Garmisch and the follow-up meeting in Rome, seemed to value my contributions,which pleased but also puzzled me. One of the participants, Bob Barton, who was then VP Engineering for Burroughs Corp, described my role as that of a catalyst: I led the others to think in directions that they wouldn't otherwise have considered.  This could be explained by my background in languages rather than the maths and engineering backgrounds of the others; plus, I like to think, a certain ability with abstract thinking.  Anyway, it was a privilege for me to get to know and work with the other participants, most of whom were professors or heads of research at the peak of their careers, on what proved to be important fundamental thinking on future directions for software development. Their contributions certainly shaped my future thinking and career.