Smoked donkeys

This morning, I started to burn some of the dead wood that has been lying around for ages down in the donkeys' paddock.

An hour later, I was surprised to find the donkeys standing out in the sun alongside the smoldering wood, with smoke often wafting over them. I think I know what's happening. The smoke from the dry walnut wood is not particularly acrid: neither for me nor, I suspect, for the donkeys. But it seems to keep flies and other insects away from the donkeys. The proof: they're not even wagging their tails, as they normally do, constantly, to brush away flies and insects. OK, it's surely not an ideal solution, but the donkeys appear to find it efficient, at least for a while.

Wild goats

I dedicate this blog post to the dear memory of my lovable Gavroche, who was immensely smart, anything but wild (he seemed to imagine himself as a male donkey), and whom I miss greatly.

It's probably your smell, Gavroche, that I miss most, because it defined you so beautifully. You were that smell. That smell was you. Who else on Earth would have accepted it, let alone wanted that terrible but wonderful smell? I trust that readers of Antipodes will not be tempted to misunderstand vulgarly my deep sentiments and words when I say that you taught me so much about sexuality, dear Gavroche, in that I soon concluded that it had been terribly cruel of me to bring you to Gamone without also inviting along a female companion of your species. But neighbors warned me that you were such a prolific little sex machine that Gamone would soon be peopled by a horde of your offspring… and I didn't have the courage to face such a demographic challenge (which may or may not have been realistic). So I condemned you to enduring a solitary frustrated existence… which never seemed to attenuate your natural behavior of masturbating grotesquely (sperm jets directed into your own face) and attempting vainly to screw sheep, donkeys and even Sophia. Retrospectively, I'm sure that I should have tried to organize for you a more decent sex life, but I still don't know how. Frankly, Gavroche, at times, your libido astounded and almost frightened me. You were the Primeval Prick.

Today, dear Gavroche, you are dust… but this doesn't stop me from admiring and loving you. I would even say that your dustiness makes me admire and love you more than ever… because I see you as an eternal cosmic goat. The stars above Gamone trace the cosmological form of a galaxy named Gavroche. And I worship you, dear goat.

Today, though, I wish to talk of other goats: your remote cousins. More precisely, specimens of Capra ibex. Here's a fabulous photo of a Slovenian female specimen:

And here's a male—bouquetin in French—in the Vercors:

I'm told that, in the vicinity of Gamone, there's a colony of a few dozen specimens of this ancient animal. Apparently, they live on the summits of the two mountains that I spoke of in a recent blog post: the Baret and the Trois Châteaux.

I took this photo from a spot on the famous chemin du Vert (green path) that runs along the crest above my house at Gamone. This is the ancient public path that the mayor of Choranche is talking about privatizing. In remembrance of Gavroche and his archaic Ibex cousins, I shall do everything that's imaginable (which probably won't amount to much, because everybody agrees with this thinking) to maintain this path as a part of our cultural heritage, since it would appear to be an ideal itinerary for spying upon our wild goats. I must admit that I haven't yet armed myself with a pair of powerful binoculars and set out to investigate this lovely idea, just above my head.

Meanwhile, Gavroche, dear goat of Gamone: Requiescat in pace.

Honey tree at Gamone

One of the linden trees at Gamone blooms about a fortnight later than the others, no doubt because it's a different variety.

Flowers started to appear abundantly a few days ago.

Yesterday, I noticed that a swarm of bees had discovered the tree.

They probably come from hives that a local beekeeper installed, a year or so ago, on the other side of the hill in front of Gamone. As you might guess from reading my recent blog post entitled Basic beverages [display], I've always been so fond of fine tea and coffee that I rarely get around to brewing tisanes, which means that I don't call upon the huge potential supply of flowers from my linden trees. So, I'm happy that the bees take advantage of these flowers.

Constant rain at Gamone

When it's raining at Gamone, I don't usually step outside to take photos. But yesterday, I decided to do so. So, I took this photo of the Cournouze with my Nikon in one hand and an umbrella in the other.

The dogs followed me in the rain, no doubt wondering what the hell I was up to.

If I were a little more courageous, I would take my video camera out in the bad weather, because there's a fascinating sequence that I would love to shoot. I'm talking of the movement of low clouds as they drift rapidly into the Choranche circus (round valley), no more than a hundred meters above the house. The first time I observed this phenomenon, at St-Pierre-de-Chartreuse in 1993, I was amazed. Up until then, I had always imagined that moving clouds are necessarily high in the sky. Here at Gamone, this phenomenon is quite commonplace.

Online clothes

For the first time ever, I've just purchased clothes on the Internet. It wasn't such a big deal: just a few quite ordinary T-shirts, some of them black, and the others white. And not particularly expensive.

It might be thought of as a small step for the blogger in front of his Macintosh, but it'll be a huge step for William parading through the village streets wearing sexy T-shirt gear purchased online through La Redoute. If ever I were to obtain any breathtaking visual scoops on this affair, I would of course let you know.

All the roses at Gamone are blooming

In my garden at Gamone, there are exactly 25 different rose bushes. This morning (probably for the first time ever), all the 25 were blooming… to a greater or lesser extent, of course.

In one square, there are three bushes that I transplanted from odd corners around the house. They certainly appear to be happier here than in their original locations.

The big white bush is thriving particularly well. It's a vigorous shrub variety, whose name I've forgotten, which sprouts out horizontally in the style of ground-cover roses. Here's a closer image:

Its flowers start out as tiny cream-colored buds in large clusters, then they turn white with golden centers, similar to the Lykkefund on the pergola, shown in a recent blog post [display]. Concerning the Lykkefund, I forgot to mention a curious detail: it has no thorns!

The first of the eight square plots in my garden is composed entirely of aromatic herbs. In the center, as in all of the eight plots, there's a lavender shrub, which won't be flowering before summer.

Funnily, when I wander through my garden, I find that the absence of vivid colors in this plot has a soothing effect.

Fitzroy's works of natural art

In my blog post of 11 March 2011 entitled Fitzroy art collector [display], I drew attention to the fact that my dog appears to be a cultivated collector of interesting naturally-occurring wood objects. He's still engaged in this preoccupation, more than ever. Since Fitzroy has now evolved into a powerful animal, accustomed to twilight excursions into remote corners of Gamone Creek, the exceptional objects that he discovers and brings back to the house are becoming more and more sizable and significant.

I refer to them naively, in my inexpert language, as "works of natural art" because these objects appear to have been shaped and textured solely by Nature, with no creative interventions by man or beast. But Fitzroy might not be happy with this terminology, because I have reasons to believe that my dog considers that supernatural cosmic forces of a spiritual kind may have played a role in fashioning the objects that concern him. I would like to glean expert explanations on this vast subject from Fitzroy himself, but he's generally totally enthralled by the delicate handling and contemplation of his precious objects, and prefers not to talk too much about them. He tends to be somewhat elitist, and surely thinks of me as a Philistine. Let's call a spade a spade: Fitzroy's a nice guy, but he's a kind of art snob.

BREAKING NEWS (Thursday midday): My dog seems to be following me (as they say in Internet jargon). No sooner had I started to write this addendum than Fitzroy raced up the stairs, sat down on the floor alongside my desk, and reached up with his left paw and scratched my arm. What I wanted to say was that I had the impression, when I walked outside this morning, that Fitzroy had read the above blog post, and wished to confirm that my opinions were spot on. During the early hours of the morning, he went out on a search expedition and brought back an even bigger stick than the one in the above photo, and laid it down alongside the first one. Then the post woman Martine pulled up, in her little yellow van, and said to me spontaneously (as Fitzroy jumped up on the door of the vehicle to greet her): "I often notice half-burnt sticks in the middle of the road, left there by your little black dog." I really must start looking around for an academy of fine arts (maybe in nearby Provence) that would be prepared to accept my artistically-gifted dog as a student.

Pergola roses

Nearly all the so-called "old roses" on my pergola are in full bloom today and, for some of them, this is the first time they've ever been in such a resplendent state.

Same tree, different seasons

Back in January, when the two horses were residing at Gamone, this was a view of the linden tree with the lower paddock in the background:

And here's the same scene this afternoon:

For those who have the good fortune to live in a rural environment, the seasons are present constantly in our existence, in a visceral fashion. An individual's body and mind is metamorphosed, no doubt, in a comparable manner, without our being totally aware of the current situation at any particular moment.

Tree sawed into firewood

In my recent article about cutting down a dead tree at Gamone [display], I should have pointed out that the tree in question is known in French as a Frêne [Fraxinus excelsior]. In English, it's a European Ash. The latter term has nothing to do with the stuff that remains after a fire. It comes from a Saxon word, æsc, which means spear. Ash wood is indeed hard and dense, and I can well imagine it being used for spears.

Now, this is funny, because my surname, Skyvington, is derived from the Saxon expression Sceaftinga tûn, which can be translated as "the place of Sceaft’s people". Used as a noun, sceaft means a shaft or spear, suggesting that the original settlement (in what we now call Leicestershire) was the home of a Saxon warrior who was a reputed spear-thrower. So, the Saxon words sceaft and æsc are surely related.

This afternoon, I finished the job of cutting up the branches with a chainsaw. And it has provided me with a stock of fine dry firewood.

For the thicker parts of the trunk, I used steel wedges and a sledgehammer to split the wood.

Next winter, when I'm warming my toes in front of a log fire, I'll inevitably think back to the ancient Saxon warrior who was at the origin of my family name. He did this in a rather indirect manner, and grudgingly, because his settlement was simply taken over (maybe after a combat) by the companions of William the Conqueror. One of these Norman invaders was my real ancestor, not the celebrated Saxon spear-thrower. Be that as it may, I'm grateful to the Saxon fellow named Sceaft for participating unwittingly, unwillingly, in my personal genealogy by supplying me with my surname… just as I'll be grateful to the dead ash tree for supplying me with warmth.

Cherry season

The cherry tree alongside the house is loaded with fruit, but it's located on a steep embankment, which makes cherry-picking difficult.

During this activity, the dogs are alongside me constantly, either at the foot of the ladder, or scrounging in the vicinity of a bowl of fruit, waiting for an inevitable handout. Cherries go down their throats whole, of course, including the stones. Sophia would never steal a cherry from a bowl but, as soon as I place a single cherry alongside the bowl, she understands immediately that it's for her.

While they followed me around, I was able to take a few good portraits.

A few days ago, I was slightly alarmed to discover that Fitzroy had mistakenly identified the clay marbles in a flower pot (supposedly useful for keeping the soil loose) as cherries.

That's to say, I found him crunching away at one of these little red balls. I could clearly hear the sound of the clay being ground to powder by Fitzroy's powerful molars. After swallowing it, he looked up at me with a satisfied expression and wiped his lips with his tongue.

State of Gamone garden

Don't imagine for a moment that the present state of my rose pergola and garden at Gamone might be the outcome of my horticultural skills. The causes lie closer to sheer chance than to what I had vaguely in mind when I selected and planted my first rose bushes in the second half of 2009. In any case, the final result, as seen today, pleases me greatly. Here's a view of the pergola from down in the garden:

Here's a top view of the pergola from in front of the house:

It's a subdued and subtle vision of roses. Low-key, you might say, quite the opposite of flashy. The dominant hue is pink, with a touch of bright red.

Elsewhere in the garden, there are several white roses.

The Manou Meilland is one of the more conspicuous roses.

In a far corner, the New Year provides a mixture of several bright hues.

And Paul Bocuse has just appeared timidly on the scene.

From a color viewpoint, peonies steal the show, but they bloom separately, at different times. Let's not blame this spectacular specimen for having a silly name:

I took most of these photos yesterday. Then a violent storm hit Gamone, dropping a huge quantity of much-appreciated water on the slopes. Inevitably, some of the blossoms you see here got damaged by the storm, particularly the peonies. But, as a whole, the garden survived quite well.

Dead tree at Gamone

Normally, dead trees at Gamone don't worry me at all. On the contrary, I see them as attractive havens for wild life, from birds through to insects that thrive on dead wood. The problem with this old fellow—a hundred meters down from my house—was that he might be blown down onto the road, when we were least expecting it, by one of our frequent windstorms.

So, I decided to cut him down. That trivial operation extended over a brief 30 minutes. I climbed up the ladder, positioned my backside firmly against the slopes, and slowly sliced through the dead trunk with my Husqvarna chainsaw. The tree fell across the road, as planned. A few minutes later, my neighbor René Uzel happened to be driving down towards that spot, so he had to halt his four-wheel drive vehicle while I started hacking off the trunk that blocked the road. René noticed that my chainsaw was so blunt that it would have difficulties in slicing through butter. He tapped me on the shoulder, and suggested that I stop sawing. He would simply tow the fallen tree up alongside my house. This he did, in about five minutes. That totally-practical guy, who grew up here at Gamone, has been helping me in similar ways ever since my arrival here in 1993. So, I now have an appreciable stock of firewood just alongside the house.

I had to nudge it around a bit, by means of a chain attached to my Citroën, to remove the risk of a neighbor running into the branches.

Down alongside the road, only the stump now remained.

During these operations, as you can see from the photos, Fitzroy was highly concerned by everything that was taking place. Meanwhile, Sophia simply lounged around in her usual style, waiting for things to calm down. She's Zen, a little like me, and couldn't understand why there was all this noise and agitation at Gamone, because of a dead tree.

Thanks to the chance presence of René, the firewood now awaits my intervention, as soon as my chainsaw is sharpened. I left it with a specialist in St-Marcellin, and I'll have it back next Tuesday.

Grapevines and walnut trees

In my article of 20 November 2010 entitled Wine of a kind [display], I evoked the Herbemont variety of US grapevines, which was one of the six varieties imported into France towards the end of the 19th century, for grafting in the hope of halting the catastrophic Phylloxera invasion. Here at Choranche, cunning landowners got around to using this Vitis americana plant, not for grafting, but to make a would-be "wine", as if it were a genuine variety of Vitis vinifera, which it was not. Today, the production of beverages from these six American "grape weeds" (Herbemont, Noah, Clinton, Jacquez, Isabelle and Othello), thought to be unfit for human consumption, is prohibited by law, and has almost ceased to exist. On the other hand, French authorities concerned with varieties of grapevines informed me last year that they know next to nothing about the exotic Herbemont plant, and they would like to inspect the specimens growing (apparently) at Gamone. I promised them that I would make an effort to prevent my donkeys from devouring the precious vines. So, I fenced of the area where Hippolyte Gerin, half a century ago, planted his famous Herbemont. Here's a first resurgence of the delicate reddish Herbemont leaves:

There are a dozen or so visible plants, and I've started to clean up the ground around some of them:

Meanwhile, the walnut trees of Gamone have donned themselves in colorful leaves, as if to welcome the warmness.

Sometimes, I think of my humble walnuts, not as trees, but as clockwork machines. They obey the seasons precisely, minutely, as if they were programmed… which, of course, they are, like everything else in the Cosmos.

Their hues are tender and fleeting, like the warm phantom of Spring that has deigned to move over Gamone. They are old, too, my Gamone walnut trees… like me. I love and respect them.

Greenness and shadows

Although I continue to spend a huge part of my time in front of the computer screen—where I've been examining the interesting rapidly-evolving question of the inclusion of videos in HTML5 websites (which I will deal with shortly, briefly, in this blog)—I take advantage of the splendid weather to fiddle around out in the garden, where I'm planting a further assortment of perennials. The following photo shows my garden and rose pergola viewed from the northern end (as opposed to the view from the southern end, shown in my earlier article on the garden at Gamone).

The single word that best characterizes Gamone at this time of the year is greenness.

This abundant all-invading greenness came upon us quite suddenly, when we were almost not expecting it. The warmth, too, is surprising at this time of mid-spring. Figuring out that the forthcoming summer will no doubt be hot and dry, I decided to do a bit of preventive burning-off, a week or so ago, on rock-strewn slopes close to the house, between the roadway and the creek.

The dogs are happy to be able to romp around in the long grass.

Sophia is completing her second intensive session of antibiotics and cortisone, and I have the impression that she has been reacting positively. If it's a fact that she has some kind of a tumor in the upper region of the left-hand side of her snout, causing her to breathe audibly from time to time, then it's certainly not visible from the outside.

These days, I'm more concerned by news about Sophia's daughter Gamone, in Brittany. Christine tells me that her marvelous little dog appears to be prone to epileptic fits. Consequently, like her mother Sophia, she's now under constant medication.

As for Fitzroy, who has now been an inhabitant of the planet Earth for three-quarters of a year, the sun's rays have been initiating him into an awareness of a mysterious phenomenon of a new kind (for him): sharp shadows. An hour ago, I saw him dashing around furiously on a patch of bare earth alongside the house, trying vainly to capture the shadow of a butterfly that was hovering a meter above his head. Then we were all treated to a most disturbing big shadow, which flashed across the grassy slopes of Gamone, accompanied by a terrifying noise (enough to drive a dog crazy). It was the rapidly moving shadow of a Mirage 2000, maybe heading back up to the base at Dijon after a stint down in Gaddafi's combat zone. Fitzroy stood on the edge of our terrace, gazing in bewilderment at the point on the north-eastern horizon where the noisy aircraft had disappeared. I would have liked to be able to tell my dear little dog what it was all about, and maybe reassure him. But, before tackling the shadows of jet fighters, it would surely be better to start with butterflies.