On Being Old In Mollans

On Being Old, In Mollans

I’ve just come back from a lunch organised by the Amiriés Mollanases, the old folks organsation in the village, called «un repas gourmand» but which could equally be called a «repas gourmet». The distinction is whether the meal is plentiful or of high quality and this was both. What the organisation does is to invite a delicatessen from smewhere (the Gers region in this case) to put on a spread and advertise and sell its products while providing a good meal for us wrinklies at a low price. The price was 10 euros, around £9. For that princely sum I had an aperitif, half-a-dozen courses of excellent pâtés, sausages and hams (what the delicatessen was mostly selling and a meal in themselves) plus a main course of preserved duck (confit de canard) and beans, cheese, as much wine as I wanted and coffee. I think that is a very good meal and incredibly good value for money. The goods on sale were high quality but relatively expensive; I didn’t have to buy anything but did buy a couple of jars of confit de porc (pork cooked and preserved in its own fat) and a jar of sausages similarly prepared.

At the event leaflets were distributed for the old folks Christmas lunch, something we haven’t had before but organised this year by the Amitiés Mollanaises. It’s a similar deal, a good lunch with wine and coffee for the same 10 euros. In January there will be the old folks lunch organised by the village council, a luxurious 4-hour affair with music and dancing, served by the mayor and village councillors. That is free of all cost to we wrinklies.

Being old, we wrinklies tend to die before long, too frequently. That happens in Mollans as elsewhere but in Mollans at least there is good reason to believe you can die with a smile on your face. You certainly won’t die of starvation.

The event reminded me of a question i was asked at my interview for gaining French nationality in Grenoble: what does «fraternité» mean in the French holy trinity of «liberté, égailté, fraternité»? The key, to the French, is that fraternité you pay your due taxes, which can then be used for the benefit of the community as a whole. It is a crucial distinction between a society in which everyone is supposed to look out for themselves, first and foremost (and devil take the hindmost) and one in which the welfare of the community as a whole takes precedent. Among other things, this means that we wrinklies are looked after here, very well.

 

80th Birthday Etc

80th Birthday

It was one of those birthdats that are deemed to be important but I’m not quite sure why. It marks another decade of survival but so do 20th and 30th birthdays and they are not deemed especially important. My survival thus far has rarely been in doubt. Having escped from being knocked down by a car and appendicitis at age 10 little else has threatened my life until 11 years ago. Then an early diagnosis of bowel cancer thanks to my local doctor and subsequent operation certainly did save me from a lot worse but that is about it. So I have been lucky thus far. Luck has also played a large part in a satisfying career and enjoyable retirement. 

 

I am lucky also to have two very good friends in Steve and Jo who invited myself and several other friends to celebrate my birthday with lunch at their place, as the photo shows. It was a highly enjoyable and memorable occasion and I owe that to them. 

Gardening

The argyranthemum by the front gate is doing me proud but there is not mush colour elsewhere; a few fuchsia and nasturtium flowers are all I have to show. It’s time of the year when I think about which plants I am going to try to save over the winter. The choice has been surtailed by some loirs having eaten pelargoniums and geraniums on my balcony. I don’t think loirs ewist in England and all my dictionary searches can come up with as a translation is dormice, whch they certainly are not although they may be the same species. They look like miniature squirrels and generally nest under roofs. There’s not much I can do about them this year but they are reputed to dislike strong smells so I am going to try camphor capsules, used here to stop moths eating clothes, to deter them from feasting on my plants next year.

 

Getting French Nationality

Next week I have to go to Grenoble for an interview that should be the final step in my obtaining French nationality. Strictly speaking I don’t need it as I have a titre de séjour giving me the permanent right to remain here. However, since that is what I intend to do it makes more sense to be French. Also I think it may help my granddaughter to become European if and when she so desires. At the moment she is a Scot, in the future maybe in an independent Scotland or a possibly much-changed UK. The only problems for me know are the French administration’s insatiable desire for documentation and the normal delay of 12-18 months after the interview to hear whether I have been accepted.

 

Rémuzat

 

Rémuzat

The Amitiés Mollanaises organised a stay in Rémuzat this week with people from around the area, Sarrians, Beaume de Venise, etc, for general relaxation and a boules tournament. Rémuzat is an hour’s drive north of here, in the foothills of the Alps, where vultures were successfully re-introduced a few decades ago. The stay was very enjoyable for everyone, I think, made the more so for me by my winning the boules tournament. During the stay some of us drove up to a small plateau at 2000ft to see the birds in their habitat. It was a magnificent sight. At first there were just 5-6 eagles coasting through the air below us and then, suddenly, a dozen vultures in the sky above us. I had been told that the vultures couldn’t take off until the air had warmed sufficiently to create updrafts and clearly that moment had then come. It was a bit different from the sparrows, nuthatches and tits I see on the bird feeders on my balcony. I took some photos but the vultures, large as they are, came out as mere specks in the sky. Anyway, the scenery allowed itself to be photographed. Must get myself a better camera (or a better photographer).

 

Work And Robots, People And profits

Robots are good, science fiction would have us believe, given a directive no to harm humans. The "no harm' stricture doesn't apply to humans of course. Robots can be very useful, precise in their actions to a degree that mere humans cannot attain.But if they dive, and look increasingly to drive, the manufacturing and mechanical world, do we want them to drive the rest of our world too?

Work is now in my past. In that past I sometimes worked very hard at times, sometimes less hard but generally enjoyed it and had some fun along the way; but I never realised how lucky I was. Recent acquaintance with people doing mundane jobs has made me realise that. In (too) many cases these jobs are simply using people as robots that haven't yet been designed.  The thought shocked me.

Ive done quite a few mundane jobs in holidays to earn money when I was a student. There was never any interest in the job itself but I reckoned that I gave value for money in the effort I put in. And there was the bonus of social interactions with colleagues and the knowledge that I was doing this so that I would never have to do the same for the rest of my life. Others, I also realised, would not be so fortunate but would at least have the social interaction and enough money at the end of the week for a Saturday night out. Not any more it seems.

Around 40% of benefit claimants in the UK are in work, so bang goes that Saturday night out. The effort I put in to woek ws never measured but now it is. Every moment of someone doing a mundane job is now scrutinised to ensure that they are doing the job at the desired (maximum?) pace, through headsets or the clock. So bang goes social interaction. Workers of mundane jobs have simply become robot substitutes. The goal, of course, is profit, ever more profit.

My knowledge of all this is just from the UK and I have no idea how widespread it is in other developed countries. But if people are dehumanised to this extent no one need worry about climate chanage; the human race will destroy itself in the pursuit of profit. If there is such a thing as absolute evil it consists in treating another human being as a thing (John Brunner).

 

Further Late Night Thoughts From My Balcony Over A Calvados

Further Late Night Thoughts From My Balcony Over A Calvados

I have always found anomalies intriguing because they tell you that something that you think you know or your reasoning must be wrong. So you have to rethink. Here’s my latest.

A humanoid skull dated to 200,000BC and attributed to Devonian man was found some time ago. Much more recently DNA has been extracted from it and undergone analysis which proved it identical to current homo sapiens DNA. That surprised no one since Devonian man has for several years been presumed to be homo sapiens prime ancestor, with little bits of Neanderthal and possibly others in the mix. What we don’t and can’t ever knnow is which bits of the DNA were switched on or off. That has some significance because we all now carry the DNA to potentially turn us all into hairy apes, but it is switched off. We don’t know what got switched on or off or when but what we can quite reasonably infer is that Devonian man had the same potential as humans today.

Set that aside for the moment look at the generally agreed picture of human development after 10,000BC, the end of the last ice age. Hairy cavemen (and women) and primitive technology come to mind. Recent discoveries, particularly Gobekli Tepe, have shown that at that time technology in some places at least was more advanced than previously thought. Agriculture and farming, understanding of astronomy and ability with stone carving, for instance, were more advanced albeit still quite primitive. But…..if the ice age and its cause had wiped out all previous technology that would be the case (a big assumption, admittedly). So consider then advances in technology from 10,000BC to today. They are huge and have been developed over a mere 12,000 years. So, if we are to assume that this is the height of human technology development to date we must assume that Devonian man, with the same potential, did nothing with that potential for around 170,000, as against 12,00 years. It’s an equally big assumption. You can choose which assumption you wish to make but I think you must make one of them.

The root problem here is hard evidence, virtually all of which if there was any would have been wiped out by the last ice age. There is, in fact, more evidence for technologically very sophisticated societies existing prior to the last age than there is for only hairy cavemen roaming the planet (the two could co-exist, of course, as they do in effect now).  But none of the evidence is really hard; it’s anecdotal, the stuff of myths and legends. Prior to year AD0 there wasn’t one god but very many different ones who were worshipped all over the globe. So what then constituted a god? Someone/thing with technological capabilities you couldn’t comprehend? Items discovered embedded in coal seams, which must be at least 300 million years old (we currently think), pose further conundrums.It’s all very puzzling but try imagining a man in a pin-stripe suit and a bowler hat carrying an umbrella and brief-case 50,000 years ago and see what that does to your picture of pre-history.

 

What Is Stars?

 

What Is Stars?

The weather being what it is (fine), at around 11 o’clock in the evening after watching football I like to sit on my balcony with a calvados and maybe coffee to hand, smell the jasmine and contemplate some of the unsolved mysteries of the universe. As Sean O’Casey put it in Juno And The Paycock, «what is stars?».

My thoughts have been given sharper focus by the release a couple of days ago of the US government report on UFOs (or UAPs as they prefer to call them: Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon). I’ll stick to UFOs because one thing the report confirms is that these are objects, not tricks of the light: radar and other sensors have detected their solid prescence. Not only that but, as the report also confirms, their oberved movement defies anything we know about locomotion today. The compelling question then is not where they came from or whether they contain little green men but how the hell did they get here?  Time dilation, wormholes between parallel universes or something we've not even been able to imagine? Who knows? Because to do so they would apparently have to defy our current standard model of physics; Einstein eat your heart out. We do currently know that Einstein was wrong in some aspect of his theories of relativity but not in what aspect. The report quite rightly refuses to speculate. 

The other aspect of the report I found interesting (and the published report is only the cdelassified version) is that it takes account only of sightings confirmed by military personnel. There have been some 140 of these in the past two years, about one a week, disregarding any other reports by civilians. So someone or something out there has got something like CCTV on the Earth. A great aspect of the report is that it legitimises reports of UFOs and indeed, suggests that the fear of appearing foolish has suppressed many more reports. That suggests that much more relevant information (as well as wacky fantasies) should become available in the near future. As wacky fantasies go I can foresee a headline in The Sun newspaper(?) «Will Aliens Intervene In The Euros? If England lose to Germany that must surely be the case. I’ve no idea what else to make of the report but it poses enough fundamental questions to fuel many more nights with a calvados on my balcony.

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.