My mother's birthday

I must admit that I tend to talk and think as if everybody in the universe has been enthralled by Kurt Vonnegut [1922-2007] in general and his eye-opening novel Deadeye Dick (1983) in particular. Maybe they have, and I simply haven’t noticed…

Employing Vonnegut talk, I celebrate today the fact that the peephole of my dear mother Enid Kathleen Walker [1918-2003] opened exactly 96 years ago, on January 19, 1918. Here’s a lovely studio portrait of Kath when she was two years old:

If ever it could be said that one’s date of birth is “chosen” (how, and by whom?), then the least I can say is that the occult forces of the universe chose a crazy date for the opening of my mother’s peephole, in the year of the end of the Great War. I find it fascinating to be able to throw a simple argument at Google, such as the date of my mother’s birth [display], and to discover everything that was happening at that moment in the past.

In the posthumous celebration of my mother’s birthday, the best man at the party is surely Wikipedia. And all I can hope is that he’ll be constantly in attendance at my own future birthday celebrations…

Breton moon child on moped

My son François Skyvington has just terminated a whole year of shooting a TV travelogue series, which will soon be broadcast regularly by the Franco-German chain Arte. The shows will start in a week's time, on 3 September 2012, at 18h30 (Monday to Friday). Breton media have just started to roll the publicity ball, with an interview in the prestigious Ouest France daily (incidentally, one of the finest newspapers and media organizations in France).

For French-language readers, here's the start of the article:

[Click to enlarge]

As I see things, my son's burgeoning TV career is a logical outcome of his extraordinary gift for immediate introspection into what makes individual people tick. In my personal case, any such genetic inheritance failed to make itself manifest (I'm totally incapable of evaluating people, places and situations), but I'm convinced that we can identify the ancestors of François who gave him such genes. I'm thinking, of course, of his grandfather Jacques Mafart [1916-2011] and his grandmother Kathleen Walker [1918-2003], who both expressed, differently but amazingly, this exceptional talent. In talking like this, I'm aware that maybe I might be seeking sillily the proverbial origins of the smile of the latest baby in the sepia images of ancestors. But I persist in believing that the exceptional skills of François as an introspective TV interviewer ring a bell in my memories, and that the genealogical associations that I'm evoking enable us (me, in any case) to better appreciate his talents.

POST SCRIPTUM: The French expression "doux dingue" might be translated as "mild eccentric" or "gentle crackpot". Normally, an individual described as a "doux dingue" of something or other would be thought of as a fanatic, who eats and sleeps with the objects of his obsessive adoration. In fact, the relationship between my son and mopeds is not at all of this all-embracing nature. He likes mopeds, I think, in much the same way that I used to like bikes or, more recently, donkeys. But don't expect François to seek election as the president of the French National Society of Moped Lovers (if such an association exists). He simply hit upon an interesting item of sociological data: namely, the fact that, for an entire generation of French youths, starting in the 1980s, the moped was a synonym of liberty, enabling them to escape momentarily and simply from the family cocoon. Then François combined this observation with the obvious fact that this "escape" of the moped rider is strictly slow speed, enabling him to count the roadside daisies on rural roads and, above all, enter into immediate contact with people encountered along the way. So, in my son's mind (if I can speak for him), there emerged this concept of an exceptionally user-friendly old-fashioned vector for personal transport. I wasn't particularly surprised, therefore, when François phoned me excitedly during their shooting in the Cévennes to tell me that he had just met up with a fabulous book, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, written in 1879 by a certain Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-1894].

And nobody, of course, would ever dare to refer to the Scottish author of Treasure Island as a gentle crackpot.