More snow at Gamone

The nasty stuff called global warming doesn't seem to have hit Gamone yet. This was the view, at midday, from in front of my log fire.

Sophia's Labrador genes take her outside regularly, for short inspections, just to make sure that we're not about to be attacked by polar bears, wild Eskimos or woolly mammoths.

Most of the time, though, she dozes in her basket on the electrically-warmed kitchen tiles.

Notice Emmanuelle's fine idea of giving our dog a pillow. I'm ashamed to realize that I never imagined that Sophia would appreciate such an object, let alone need it to support her heavy head.

Dog's Xmas

Whenever Emmanuelle drops down to Gamone for a few days, as is often the case, she looks after, not only her father (who takes pleasure in cooking for his epicurean daughter), but our dog too. Yesterday, I was attempting to save my virtual yacht in the Vendée Globe regatta from running into a calm zone... unsuccessfully. Meanwhile, Manya took Sophia out for a long walk on the slopes. And I used a long-focal lens to take a photo of them from my bathroom window.

OK, I agree. That's a terribly lazy approach to taking photos of your daughter and your dog. Quick, I need to throw in a few plausible excuses! As everybody knows, I'm getting on in years, and I can no longer step out boldly in the Xmas weather and wander around on the slopes. Besides, that silly computerized regatta is truly exciting but demanding. Ask my son François... who seems to have suddenly decided to pull out of the rat race and visit New Zealand.

For Sophia, apart from strolling around on the slopes of Gamone with Manya, it might be said that happiness is a sunny morning.

Emmanuelle is constantly aware that our dog, like all of us, appreciates acts of kindness... such as a Xmas gift of a soft pillow.

One of the nicest images in the Cosmos is that of a yawning dog leaning on a fat, soft, warm pillow on a sunny morning.

It's the canine equivalent of pulling out of the rat race, and indulging in lazy delicious sleep.

With lessons from my children and my dog (and Christine, too), it's not impossible that I'm slowly acquiring wisdom.

BREAKING NEWS: Over the last twelve hours or so, I've been receiving messages from alarmed observers, virtual skippers in the Vendée Globe regatta, who can't understand the circumstances in which my son suddenly turned his vessel in a northerly direction. Has he gone mad? Did he fall overboard, leaving a phantom vessel with nobody aboard? Is this some kind of a subtle navigational strategy aimed at getting back into the race? To say the least, the behavior of François was disturbing... and many of his fellow navigators have been worried, if not anguished. You know how it is. We round-the-globe sailors are a tightly-knit bunch. Many of us have left our wives, family and friends back in Brittany while we brave the oceans of the world on our computer screens... and we naturally get worried as soon as one of our kin gives the impression that something might have gone wrong. OK, we can always call upon the friendly Royal Australian Navy to intervene, if the worst comes to the worst, to get us out of trouble. But we don't necessarily wish to upset Aussie taxpayers. In any case, the good news is that my son François, on Kerouziel, is back in the race. The bad news is that he's going to miss out on an excellent opportunity of visiting New Zealand. In case readers don't know, that's the land where his paternal ancestor William Pickering [1843-1914], after whom I was named, did the basic surveying for the future city of Auckland. In that same land, more recently, a certain French secret-service agent named Alain Mafart, who happens to be a relative of my son's mother, Christine Mafart, organized the destruction of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior. As they say in the land of Confucius: That's the way the cookie crumbles. In any case, it's a fact that we navigators live in a crazy world where all kinds of exceptional events can happen... including encounters with vast zones where the wind no longer blows. That's sailing. That's life.

Hey! I'm wondering. Are Vendée Globe skippers allowed to sail with a dog aboard?

Smart birds

My dog loves walnuts, which are abundant at Gamone. Periodically, when she's feeling a bit hungry (which is most of the time), Sophia rambles down to the walnut trees and has a small feast. She has no trouble cracking the fruit open with her powerful jaws and then rummaging through the smashed mass for edible fragments. Then she comes back to the house with a single walnut clenched in her mouth, and settles down on the lawn to crack it open and eat it in an almost ritual style, as if there were something special about this particular walnut that she chose to bring back to the house, as a kind of trophy.

It doesn't take much, in Sophia's mind, for a perfectly ordinary act to be elevated to the status of a special event. For example, she can dart off constantly to various places in the vicinity of the house in order to piss and drop her turds. But, whenever Sophia realizes that I'm going to wander up the road and accompany her on such an excursion, our walk is transformed immediately into a Special Event, even though I might accompany her for no more than a hundred meters or so. She leaps around in joy and scrambles across the slopes, as if this were an extraordinary outing, while looking back from time to time to make sure that I'm still participating in our journey.

Although, as I said, Sophia is perfectly capable of breaking open walnuts on her own, she's happy if I can do the job for her. At Gamone, I have a constant stock of orange mesh bags full of fresh walnuts, which I use above all in my bread and cake making. I break the walnuts open using an ordinary steel hammer and a thick wooden cutting block that I brought back from Bangkok, many years ago. As soon as Sophia sees me sitting down alongside a bag of walnuts, the block and a hammer, she joins me, to wait for fallout. On such occasions, the average is one walnut kernel to Sophia for three into William's bowl.

When an animal has neither powerful nut-cracking jaws nor a master with a hammer, it has to rely upon other means, as reveled in this delightful Japanese video:



The other evening, Tineke and Serge evoked enthusiastically a recent TV documentary on the extraordinary cognitive capacities of the native crow from the island of New Caledonia, which has taught itself to find or even build tools (from pine leaves) to catch wood grubs.

[Click the image to visit the Wikipedia page about this fascinating bird.]

Professor Russell Gray, of Auckland, discusses the amazing cognitive talents of this bird in the following two videos:





If I were kind with regard to my lovely dog, I would say that my life with Sophia has made me more and more respectful, over recent years, of the engineering achievements and intellectual qualities of non-human animals. As I said to Tineke and Serge, I have become totally enraptured, on twilight evenings at Gamone, by the spectacle of the flight of bats. Please don't tell Sophia I said this, but I think this evolution in my regard is a consequence, above all, of my intense reading of the brilliant books of Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. To do justice to everybody, let's conclude that I'm under the combined influence of Dawkins, Pinker and Sophia.

Presidential dog stuff

My autumn dog Sophia and I are delighted to learn that one of the major issues facing the Obama family is the choice of an animal for Malia and Sasha.

Ah, if only the problems of the universe could be reduced—as they could and should be—to dog talk!

Fruit season

Sophia's religious convictions surely pass through her belly. At this time of the year, she's certain that God exists, and that He has placed her in a land of plenty, at Gamone, where tasty delicacies such as apples and walnuts fall from the heavens.

My fig trees are still too young to bear fruit, but the next best thing to having your own fig trees is living alongside a neighbor whose fig trees have a plentiful yield... especially when the neighbor in question is not, himself, keen on figs. That's the case with Bob.

I wander up to Bob's place every afternoon to bring back a plate of excellent figs. Sophia, too, has become very keen on over-ripe figs that fall from Bob's trees.

Gamone dogs

Yesterday morning, I went out early to buy some food for the weekend, leaving Sophia inside the cool kitchen. When I returned to Gamone, I was amused to find Alison's dog Pif seated on a mound of earth alongside my mailbox, like the proverbial dog near Gundagai [display], calmly awaiting my return. Descending from my car, I was welcomed by joyous barking by both dogs, for I was literally the key figure who could open the kitchen door and enable the dogs to get engaged in their everyday jousting.

Pif has a size and weight disadvantage, so he tries constantly to imagine the optimal angle of attack.

As for Sophia, she knows that her best strategy is to remain firmly planted on her front paws, with her large jaws wide open. It's a bit like bull-fighting, with Sophia in the role of the matador, while Pif is a tiny black bull.

Pif discovered this efficient attack angle at the very beginning of his contacts with Sophia. By placing his body up against Sophia's bulky frame, Pif can try to get a grip on the furry fat of Sophia's neck, while remaining at a safe distance from Sophia's jaws. It's a tactic that works for a while... up until Sophia simply spins around to meet Pif head-on.

Pif loves the loose dirt on this mound where my old wood shed used to be located. He's capable of scrambling up an almost vertical embankment, such as those alongside the road above my house.

We see here the technique employed by Alison in an attempt to prevent her horses from strolling back down to my place. She has simply blocked the public road by means of a makeshift string "gate", attached on one side to a rubber hose. Apparently the horses imagine that the string is electrified. So do tourists. Yesterday, a middle-aged couple from Marseille, in a small brand-new automobile, were blocked by Alison's gate, and started to back down. But there's a problem in backing down an urban vehicle along a sloped road such as this: The driver simply cannot see the macadam in the rear-vision mirror, which can be quite unnerving! Consequently, fearing that the vehicle might be heading towards the gorge that he detects vaguely through the passenger's window (in the case of the road from my place up towards Bob's house), the driver tends to steer his vehicle into the embankment. This was exactly what was happening when I raced up to help the confused tourists yesterday. Finally, I helped them back down safely into the flat zone alongside my house.

Pif, a constant visitor

As I predicted, right from the start, my neighbor Alison's friendly little black Labrador named Pif has become a constant visitor at my place. I should speak rather of Sophia's place, because Pif comes here daily like a pupil turning up for master lessons from his female guru, Sophia, in the advanced arts of dog behavior. The other day, I awarded him a red collar, which used to belong to Sophia.

Pif spends his time trying to impress Sophia with his attack techniques, but he's a bit on the light side. He tries to get at her from behind, or to jump up onto her and pin her down, but it's like a jockey trying to tackle a sumo wrestler. Most of the time, Sophia stands firmly on her four paws, whereas Pif is dancing non-stop all around his opponent.

Sophia's wide-opened mouth can almost enclose Pif's entire head. Whenever Sophia has had enough of Pif jumping all around her, and pinching her neck with his sharp little teeth, she snarls in an eloquent manner, and the little fellow understands immediately that enough is enough. In spite of all the bared teeth and growling, neither dog ever appears to inflict pain upon the other.

Towards the end of the day, Pif found an old magazine in my kitchen, took it outside, where light rain was falling, and tore it to shreds.

Alison is unhappy to discover that, as soon as she leaves home on her scooter (to work as a waitress at the caves of Choranche), her dog moves down here to my place. And Sophia and I are also becoming a little fed up with these regular visits. Although I generally find Pif adorable, it's definitely not a good thing for a dog to spend so much time away from home.

New kid on the block

The neighbors' donkey Mandrin has been residing at my place for so long, with my Moshé, that I now consider him as mine. Their horses Bessie and Aigle are still here as guests, because there's not enough feed for them up at Bob's place, and Alison is too busy (working in the Choranche cave restaurant) to find time to look after them.

Yesterday morning, just after Alison's departure on her noisy scooter (which always causes my Sophia to bark), a new member of her family arrived unexpectedly at my place: a marvelous little male dog, a few months old, named Pif.

Pif promptly started to romp around with Sophia, who seemed to appreciate the presence of this tiny animal climbing all over her.

I had the impression that Pif was greatly awed, at times, by the massive stature of Lady Sophia.

In any case, throughout the entire day, the two dogs got on wonderfully well, and Pif was also extremely friendly with me, often snoozing in my arms and licking my nose. I gave him food and organized a comfortable basket for him alongside Sophia's queen-sized model.

I can't be certain, of course, that Sophia approved entirely of this audacious little dog reposing on her master's door mat. But there were never any squabbles.

At times, Sophia would gallop around the lawn to impress her young companion, and demonstrate her weighty Japanese-style wrestling prowess. On the other hand, there were limits to the amount of ear-biting that Sophia would tolerate from Pif's sharp baby teeth, and Sophia would make things clear at this level with a few ferocious snarls.

Towards the end of the day, I was starting to imagine that Pif might have moved in here as a permanent guest.

But I had not bargained on the magic attraction of the spluttering din of Alison's scooter, as she returned home at the end of her working day. Pif recognized the presence of his mistress as soon as she turned off the main road down in the valley, and he immediately shot off home to wait for her. Consequently, it's quite likely that Alison imagined that her disciplined dog had spent the day patiently in front of their house, awaiting her return. On the other hand, it's possible that Alison might have noticed that Pif's jet black fur was covered in sand-colored hairs from another animal... unless, of course, Pif took precautions to shake off all this telltale evidence on the track back home.

My guess is that I'll be able to use the absence or presence of Pif at my place as a means of knowing whether Alison is, or is not, at home.

My dog's little joys

I've often noticed that Sophia is not interested in strawberries. She doesn't seem to see their red color and, when I put a few strawberries under her snout, she's not inclined to taste them. Cherries, though, are a different affair, including the tiny specimens that fall from one of my rare roadside trees.

Sophia crunches the cherries, seeds and all, before swallowing them.

In the case of walnuts, of course, the process is different. She crunches the nuts slightly, to break them apart, and then she delicately picks out the edible kernel fragments.

One of Sophia's regular preoccupations consists of searching for mysterious creatures, maybe lizards or mice, under the edge of the old concrete footpath in front of the house.

As soon as she detects an animal odor, Sophia barks a little (maybe to warn me that there's an undesirable alien presence at Gamone) and starts to dig a preliminary hole by scratching out soil and loose pebbles. As soon as the opening is big enough, Sophia sticks her snout in and starts to snort. And this activity can preoccupy her for half an hour.

A day or so later, after Sophia has either captured and destroyed the intruder (?) or forgotten about its presence, all that remains for me is to poke the soil and pebbles back in place.

Official portrait

In Great Britain, where official portraits of royalty and other distinguished folk are a serious business, Cecil Beaton was one of the most celebrated photographers. Even here in the French Republic, the concept of official portraits exists, but solely for one individual: the president. Photos in this category have always amused me. Between an official portrait and an ordinary photo taken by a news photographer, there's the same difference as between the bright smiling face in my blog photo and me in the bathroom mirrror when I get up in the morning.

Now, the reason I've brought up this subject is that I'm happy to publish this photo, taken by Natacha last weekend, that corresponds ideally to what might be termed an official portrait of Sophia.

I have the impression that Sophia, reclining majestically upon her big wickerwork throne, is making an effort to look like a dignified dog. As if she'd just been elected president, or raised to the status of Royal Duchess of Gamone.

Comfortable hollow for Sophia

I've known for ages that there are spots, in front of my house, where it's an exaggeration to speak of soil, because the ground is composed of dust and gravel, and nothing can grow there. So, I decided to intervene by scraping up the stony stuff in order to replace it by good soil.

This morning, in the middle of my work, Sophia made it clearly known to me that there was no point in pursuing the job any further, because she found that the dusty rocky hollow I had created was a perfect place for a dog who wants to bask in the sun.

Above-the-limit Labrador

My daughter Emmanuelle cares for the well-being of our Labrador Sophia with the same kind of intensity and love as for me.

An ad hoc principle is accepted by the world's medical highlights: When a dog's fine, so is the animal's master. And vice versa.

In Austria, a three-year-old Labrador named Dingo was recently found to have 1.6 grammes of alcohol in its blood. The veterinary said that the animal emitted the smell of an alcohol distillery. Normally, it should have been dead. It was merely dead drunk. Why? Dingo had consumed inadvertently—insofar as a dog is capable of devouring anything in a supposedly inadvertent manner—no less than half a kilo of fresh baker's dough, prepared by her master, a baker. And baker's dough, in the belly of a dog, is rapidly transformed into something with the effects of prime whisky. Now, I hope and pray that Dingo survived this ordeal.

Let me be quite clear about this whole problem of canine inebriation. If ever my Sophia, for one reason or another, were to attain the same alcohol reading as Dingo, it goes without saying that there's no way in the world I would allow her to take the wheel of our old Citroën.

Sophia's snow genes

This weekend, after rubble from the demolished rock at Choranche was cleared away [display], the road leading up to the Vercors plateau was finally opened. My daughter and I drove up to Saint-Julien-en-Vercors on Sunday, and gave Sophia her first taste of snow this winter.

My dog's Labrador genes went into action instantly, as it were, in the sense that Sophia was inebriated by the presence of the nice soft snow. She started off by rolling on her back in the snow, and then she got around to making sprints over a distance of fifty meters or so, as if the snow had transformed her into a high-speed husky. As I often say, a wonderful way of attaining happiness, at least for a few precious minutes, consists simply of watching a happy dog.

Dog on a wall

When I cut away the straggly honeysuckle and jasmine shrubs in front of the house, Sophia quickly discovered that she could obtain a slightly better view of happenings down in the valley by jumping up onto the bare wall. So, I put her rug there, whereupon Sophia instantly abandoned her big wicker basket and posed as a sentinel on the wall.

Don't we all like to climb up on top of walls to get a better view of things? I recall the extraordinary experience of walking along the top of the great stone wall around the old city of Jerusalem.

Three males, two females

I like this peaceful pastel photo, taken yesterday, of the three Gamone males: Gavroche, Moshé and Mandrin.

The following photo of two females in the snow, Gamone and her mother Sophia, reached me mysteriously this morning by email:

It was accompanied by a complicated graphic explanation informing me that "a friend" had taken this photo on a portable phone and sent it to me. When I examined the phone number of the sender, I found with astonishment that it was... me! True enough, almost two years ago, after acquiring my Nokia portable, I took a photo of the dogs and tried to send it to one of my websites. The procedure was so awkward and uncertain that I was never tempted to take another photo on the portable phone. As I've often said, I'm an addicted computer user, oriented Apple, but I've never been on the same wavelength as portable phones. [In other words, I'm a perfect future customer for the Apple iPhone, as soon as it reaches France.] In any case, for unknown reasons, the photo of the dogs took nearly two years to reach me. No problem. As everybody knows, dogs are timeless. Fortunately, like God, they're eternal.

Talking of eternal dogs, look at this fabulous photo, sent to me yesterday by Christine, of her lovely Gamone lounging in a fireplace:

What warm and peaceful harmony: an ideal image of a hot dog!

I love my dog

And she seems to love me too. Or rather, she depends upon my presence. In any case, it's a big deal for Sophia when I deign to lead her on an excursion just a few dozen meters away from our house at Gamone. Most of the time, from an objective viewpoint, Sophia doesn't have enough canine perspicacity to imagine visiting such remote places on her own. So, of a morning, she barks frantically, inviting me to step out onto the road alongside our house, so that I can accompany her... or rather she, me. For Sophia, this is exotic tourism! She sniffs around wildly for tiny lizards. My lovely dog has the same camouflaged calcareous colors as the rocky slopes of Gamone. Twenty meters away from the house, Sophia seems to be saying to herself: "What a chance for me to have a Master who's prepared to lead me on voyages to the Antipodes!" Like me, Sophia knows perfectly well that our Antipodes is located, in all simplicity, right here at Gamone. This special place, for my dog and me, is both the zenith and the nadir of the universe. Gamone is not only the Theory, but the daily Practice, of Everything.

Sophia's ninth birthday

My lovely lady dog Sophia, described as a cross-bred Labrador with a golden robe, was born nine years ago.

A few minutes ago, I told her [in our everyday French dog talk] that she's a lovely old lady, and I gave her a fine Saint Marcellin cheese. In her usual discreet style [a little like that of Cécilia Sarkozy], Sophia refrained from making any public statement on this occasion.

I'm reminded of our Skeffington ancestor, the lunatic second Earl of Massereene [1743-1805], who once threw a party for his dog, while insisting that invited animals should be attired for the festivities in dress clothes. I'm fond of that crazy ancestral personage, Clotworthy Skeffington, whose escape from a Parisian prison preceded the storming of the Bastille. I admire him in the same way I love dogs and underdogs in general, and Sophia in particular.

Sophia becomes a video star

This is post #333 in my Antipodes blog, it's Friday 13 [a lucky number for the French cineaste Claude Lelouch... so why not for me too?], and this is my first video [of a simple kind], starring Sophia in a mystery movie. What's the mystery? Simply the fact that neither you nor I nor even Sophia will ever know the nature of the "something" that Sophia has sensed, causing her to look around her and bark. You can hear the birds of Gamone. You can also hear me asking Sophia [with my dog-talk accent]: "Qu'est-ce qu'il y a ?” Click here to see the movie.

Dusty dog

I would have imagined naively that the big wicker basket I purchased recently for Sophia would be the nec plus ultra in the way of canine accommodation. Error!

Sophia has dug up this dust bath in front of the house. The donkeys, too, love to bathe in dust. I end up believing that dust is a primordial element, no less attractive than green grass, water or snow (in the case of a Labrador animal such as my dear Sophia). The biblical oldtimer who came out with the "dust to dust" expression knew what he was talking about.

Doggish behavior

We dog-lovers tend to get carried away by the exceptional intellect of our favorite animal. Not necessarily dogs in general, nor even other dogs, but our dog... who happens to be a unique genius. As the saying goes: The only thing that's missing is the ability to speak. But dogs bark, and that's exactly what Sophia has been doing, non-stop, for the last twenty minutes.

Why? You see the stone slab in the form of a mysterious jungle beast (maybe a petrified bunyip that swum here from Australia back in the age of dinosaurs). Well, Sophia knows that there's a terrified lizard curled up behind it, hiding. I don't know why Sophia's annoyed by the presence of the tiny reptile. It's not as if she wants to eat the lizard, although it's likely that she would smack it with her paw, just for fun, and traumatize the poor lizard. No, Sophia is barking out of sheer silly doggish behavior. However it's reassuring at times to discover such trivial manifestations of canine stupidity. I realize, on such occasions, that I should cease to have a guilt complex about never having sent Sophia to a superior school for exceptionally intelligent dogs.

Now, having taken the liberty of speaking in these derogatory terms about my dear Sophia, I must admit two things:

— I'm impressed by Sophia's ability to smell the presence of a tiny lizard hiding behind a rock. I wouldn't be capable of doing so, even if the lizard farted.

— Back in the days when dangerous reptiles used to hide behind rocks at the entrance to caverns where my ancestors resided, the barking of Sophia's ancestors no doubt saved human lives. Otherwise, one of my potential ancestors would have got gobbled up by a boa, and I wouldn't even be here today to talk to you about Sophia. We must be grateful to barking dogs. Thanks, Sophia. In a moment, I'll go downstairs and move the slab, so that you can have some fun attacking and destroying that lizard.