My bunyip has broken a leg

In the following photo, I refer to the beige stones on the right, propped up against the wall of my house, as my bunyip. (Some readers might not know that bunyips are mythical Australian beasts respected by Aborigines. These creatures inhabit murky water holes and creeks called billabongs.) To the left of the big bunyip, there's a baby bunyip.

My dog often detects the smell of a lizard hiding in the narrow space between the big slab of rock and the wall.

Sophia is disgusted to think that our bunyip might use its mass and power to protect a cowardly lizard. Besides, if Sophia ever traps such a lizard as it emerges into the open air, she punishes the reptile (the lizard, not the bunyip) with instant death.

Well, this morning, as I was taking these photos, I noticed a wide crack in the bunyip's hind leg. And, when I rolled over the block of rock, I was sad to see that it had split into two fragments.

This local variety of marlstone (called marne in French) is relatively fragile. When moisture in cracks turns to ice, and then melts rapidly as a consequence of a sudden rise in temperature, a rock can split just as cleanly as if it had been struck by a stonemason's chisel.

Talking about bunyips, I've been looking into the idea of using this mythological beast as a metaphor for the countless mysterious "things" in which humans, over the centuries, have believed... without ever coming up with firm evidence for their existence. For a legendary bunyip to earn recognition as a real creature, all that is necessary is a validated sighting. In other words, it's relatively simple to prove empirically that a particular bunyip exists. For example, these photos prove beyond doubt that my marlstone bunyip with a broken leg exists just as truly as Sophia and I exist. On the other hand, it remains logically impossible to ever prove that a particular bunyip—such as God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster—does not exist. And that's why people can continue calmly to believe in bunyips until the end of time.

Life after snow

All good things come to an end. Sooner or later, a dog has to admit that the snow has disappeared at last from Gamone.

The problem, in such abnormal conditions, is deciding where to roll on your back. Although it's not as good as the real white stuff, a thick bed of soft dry grass is an acceptable substitute.

In her usual style, Sophia was using her hind legs as ski poles, to slide downwards. As she slid towards the edge of the grass, I yelled out to draw attention to the risk of toppling down the steep embankment. Sophia jumped up onto her four paws and looked at me with a dazed and puzzled expression. She seemed to be rather proud of having found a good ersatz for snow, and she wondered what the hell I was yelling about. Since it had been no more than a mild danger (maybe even a totally imaginary danger in my mind), I made no attempt to explain things to Sophia. I must be careful, though, because I don't want my dog to think I cry wolf.

Grass dog

I end up thinking that my dog Sophia likes to plant her backside in the scope of my Nikon. Maybe (a more objective observation) my Nikon simply follows Sophia. Be that as it may, Sophia has always been my photographic star. Here, she's showing off the winter grass at Gamone.

In this photo, you get a glimpse of Bob's house, a hundred meters or so up along Gamone Creek.

Sophia's mother

Whenever I find myself reminiscing seriously with Sophia about personal matters, I take pleasure in reminding my dog that, once upon a time, I was a close friend of her dear mother Laïka. This reddish animal of no obvious race, who belonged to my neighbor's daughter Anne-Sophie, was truly the dearest dog I could have ever imagined. I got to know her well, as a visitor and intermittent well-fed guest at Gamone, long before the birth of Sophia. There's a simple anecdote that I adore. When Anne-Marie got married, I was invited to the civil ceremony on a nice spring morning up in the village of Presles. When I arrived, guests were strolling around on the village square, waiting for the mayoress of Presles to call us in to the tiny town hall. Suddenly, I received a thump in the back, as if I had been hit by a football. It was the paws of my friend Laïka, who had recognized me in the crowd, and wanted to welcome me to her mistress's marriage.

Shortly after Laïka's puppy was born, Anne-Sophie phoned me to announce that they had a dog for me. It was a total surprise for me, but Anne-Sophie was aware of my friendship with Laïka, and she had decided unilaterally that I should receive one of Laïka's puppies.

I chose the name Sophia, not because of Anne-Sophie, but because it has always been—in my mind and in my ears—the sweetest Greek word that exists: wisdom as in philosophy (literally, the love of knowledge).

No sooner had I received my puppy than Anne-Sophie ran into some kind of a personal problem, and she asked me to take care of Laïka for a couple of weeks. So, Sophia's earliest days at Gamone were spent in the reassuring presence of her mother.

Finally, Laïka left us, and my puppy became the unique mistress of Gamone. Later, Sophia herself had a splendid daughter, named Gamone, who lives with Christine in Brittany... where she has received Sophia's old kennel (seen above). So, I've been acquainted with a beautiful dynasty of three females: Laïka, Sophia and Gamone.

Supply store raided

After being informed by Tineke and Serge that their wild birds seem to prefer a straight diet of sunflower seeds (rather than the mixture of many seed varieties sold in supermarkets), I adopted that solution for my bird house.

Inside, there's an ample stock of sunflower seeds, while balls of fat and seeds hang on nails around the perimeter of the structure. For the birds, it has become a popular supply store. Funnily, visitors often tend to wait their turn to enter the store. When a rapid flyover detects the presence of an unidentified bird inside the store, a new visitor often perches in the branches of the little tree seen in the lower lefthand corner of the photo. The store has front and rear doors. So, as soon as a bird leaves from one door, another bird enters through the other door.

Early last night, in the darkness, an unexpected intruder raided the birds' store, consuming two balls of fat and seeds. Fortunately, I was able to identify the raider as she was strolling back towards her warm wicker basket in the kitchen, grasping a third ball in her snout, in anticipation of a late-evening supper.

It remains a mystery whether Sophia actually ate the seeds along with the tasty (unidentified) fat, or whether she spat them out, one by one. In any case, my rose pergola has also become a popular meeting-place for birds. So, that would be an ideal dog-proof place to suspend a new stock of balls.

Sophia is back in her natural element

Last night, Tineke and Serge invited me along to their place for New Year's champagne and dinner: a delicious Alsatian sauerkraut prepared with the artistic skills of an extraordinary sculptress. When I left to drive home, shortly after midnight, snow was starting to fall. This morning, Gamone was once again all white... and Sophia was back in her natural element, as happy as a skier out on the Alpine slopes.

After burrowing into the snow with her snout, and rolling on her back, she shot off like a husky.

Admire the aerodynamic form of her ears, like the stabilizing fins of a Formula-1 racing car. Once she got up speed, she started to circle the yard like a greyhound in a racing stadium.

I have the impression that much of the pleasure, for Sophia, comes from the soft texture of the snow beneath her paws. At the seaside, too, she's thrilled by the possibility of racing across sandy beaches. The snow universe has the magical characteristic of wrapping itself softly around her paws, her snout and her body.

You know how we often wonder whether the red color that one person sees is the same as another person's sense of redness. Maybe your red is what I call green or yellow, and vice versa. I often imagine that Sophia sees a field of snow as a great expanse of blue sky. For me, the thing called "warmth" is what I obtain through wriggling my bare toes in front of the fireplace on chilly evenings. In the mind of Sophia, on the other hand, I've always been convinced that "warmth" is that marvelous sensation she experiences through her contact with snow.

The municipal snow plow cleared the road to Gamone in the middle of the morning, and Martine had no trouble in driving up here with the mail... including a huge cardboard box containing the hardware for a new Internet-based satellite TV connection.

The presence of the snow seems to augment the sense of isolation brought about by the fallen rocks and the blocked road to Pont-en-Royans. Martine—who knows everything that's happening in the neighborhood—tells me that the authorities will probably be opening up the road during the day, as of tomorrow, primarily so that the school bus can get through. Apparently, there are still quite a few rocks up on the slopes of the Baret that could come crashing down at any instant of the day or night. A few individuals (including our mayor, Bernard Bourne) are in favor of a so-called purge operation, which could even involve the use of explosives put in place by a helicopter. But that would be a highly delicate approach, which could even go completely wrong. (For example, an attempted purge might cause several rocks to pile up dangerously further down the slopes.) So, the preferred solution would consist of installing bigger and stronger nets, of the sturdy kind used in the vicinity of seaports to block enemy submarines. What an exotic idea: We're at war with the mountain!

Decade dog

I'm told that the most spectacular image on this first night of the new decade is the so-called Blue Moon. It isn't really blue at all, of course, but merely full... like countless New Year drinkers at the present moment. But I found a better photographic subject to symbolize this moment for me: the end of a decade in the constant company of Sophia, and the start of a new one.

Five minutes ago, when I took this photo in the kitchen, not even the flash disturbed the deep slumber of my darling dog. At the present moment, on the contrary, after suddenly waking up and demanding that I open the door, she's racing around and barking on the slopes. I've often said that it takes no more than a farting fox on the crest of a nearby mountain to cause Sophia to spring back into action.

Sophia's latest larder

I put a bag of old walnuts onto the compost heap, because some of them had been attacked by insects.

Not surprisingly, Sophia saw this as wasteful behavior, which she's not prepared to tolerate. So, on wintry afternoons, whenever Sophia feels that she hasn't consumed a sufficient quantity of calories to keep out the cold, she'll have a handy larder.

Sophia recycling

Maybe you've got a surplus wad of insulation material in your attic, and you don't know what to do with it. Well, Sophia can give you an idea for recycling it... as an excellent dog mattress!

Normally, this kind of stuff shouldn't be lying on my kitchen floor. I had taken this wad out of the attic with the intention of stuffing a few strands into a crack on top of an outside door frame. Then, when the tempest started to blow up yesterday, I rapidly collected everything that was scattered around outside. So, overnight, the wad remained on my kitchen floor. This morning, returning from a trip into the village, I found my Sophia stretched out comfortably on top of it. I believe that both cats and dogs have a remarkable intuition for detecting cozy places to lie down. They're surely equipped, in their chromosomes, with some kind of a soft-mattress-detector gene.

White weather

Sophia is a Labrador, and her ancestors came from the island of Newfoundland in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador (marked here by a red pin), up in the vicinity of Greenland:

This means that she has snow in her genes. For Sophia, whenever Gamone is all white, she considers that the weather has returned to its normal state, as it should be all year round.

She rolls in the snow with bliss, as if she were floating in a bath. Motionless, with closed eyes, soaking in the "warmth" of the snow, she looks like a frozen Arctic beast dug up out of the ice.

Then she jumps up and slides down the slopes as if she were skiing.

Meanwhile, Moshé looks down at us with a puzzled expression, as if to ask: "Where has all the green grass gone?"

As for me, I'm wondering whether friends might happen to drop in unexpectedly for tea and biscuits out on the lawn. Funnily, the outside temperature is quite mild, and there's not even the slightest cool breeze.

It's unlikely, because no ordinary vehicle could ever drive up here today. [BREAKING NEWS: At the moment I was writing that last sentence, the village snow plow went by, and Gamone is now perfectly accessible.] Inside the house, of course, a fire is burning non-stop in the living room.

Along with the all-embracing whiteness, the most magical aspects of a Gamone snow scene are the luminosity and the silence.

Happy hound

Late Saturday afternoon, my dog Sophia raced out into the dark and started to bark in the direction of the crest of the hill up behind our house. I could hear a faint tinkling indicating the presence of a hunting dog that had no doubt lost its way, so I started to call out to it with a few typical French terms. I judged by the intensity of the bell sounds, along with the direction of Sophia's regard, that the animal seemed to be zigzagging down the slopes towards us, and I soon glimpsed its shadow moving down along the road from my spring. Meanwhile, Sophia had stopped barking, because she concluded that the situation was hardly threatening. The hairy little gray and beige visitor with long drooping ears continued to sniff around everywhere, searching vainly for a recognizable odor. Finally, I coaxed it towards me and stuck a bowl of water under its snout. Being careful not to make a move that might frighten the dog, I soon got around to stroking its head and inspecting its collar, with a badge informing me of the owner's name. I quickly attached the dog to a chain and offered it a bowl of food... much to the disgust of Sophia, in no way an altruist, who no doubt found it alarming that her master might feed an alien animal. The visitor was not only lost, but thirsty and hungry. And now it had come upon a fellow who was giving it water and food, and attaching it in a way that indicated that he didn't intend to chase the intruder back out into the dark unknown. Consequently, within five minutes, I had made a firm friend. The dog started to wag its tail furiously with warm pleasure, and jump up onto me, licking my hands. As you might imagine, I was charmed into giving my new friend another bowl of food. For the happy hound, this was unexpected good fortune. After all, before then, it had been sniffing around up on the slopes in a place whose only occupants are my donkeys, which is hardly a successful achievement for a hunting dog. It even jumped up towards Sophia, indicating that it wished to play, whereupon Sophia barked gruffly at the intruder, in the harsh style of a stiff old aristocratic lady warning an excited young rural wench that she should mind her manners.

I phoned a local hunter, who then contacted the owners: two brothers from a neighboring village. Twenty minutes later, they arrived at Gamone. Everybody was happy. The joyful hunters and their lost hound were reunited. Meanwhile, the dog and I had become friends, no doubt because it had food in its belly. Even Sophia, stretched out in her big wicker basket in the warm kitchen, was relieved to find this unseemly intrusion being brought to an end.

Yesterday evening, another happy dog story unfolded on French TV. Host Michel Drucker was conducting a show with the immensely popular ex-president Jacques Chirac, celebrating his 77th birthday.

The idea of giving him a dog had emanated from several people in Chirac's circle of family and friends, including his wife Bernadette.

Up in the sky

Over the last few days, when I've been working up at the spring on the slopes above Gamone, my dog Sophia (who usually has the habit of accompanying me everywhere) has preferred to remain at the house. That's because she's wary of getting chased or kicked by the cantankerous donkeys. And, at the end of my work, Sophia is waiting for me down at the house.

I have the impression that she's intrigued to catch sight of me at the top of the embankment, almost up in the sky. Here at Gamone, there's an amazing assortment of levels of all kinds, including even five or six distinct levels inside the house. I often wonder whether Sophia's mind is capable of modeling the environment geometrically, enabling her to deduce the path between two points. I don't think so. I have the impression that she locates me, in these multi-level contexts, by a trial-and-error approach based upon the intensity and direction of my smell. On the other hand, nothing proves that Sophia's not an absolute wizard at geometric model-making. Maybe she's continually saying to herself: "What a terrible pity that poor William has to rely solely upon geometric modeling, without ever being able to use smell to find me."

Atheism in my modern world

Fortunately, most of us are intellectually capable of changing our opinions over time... except, maybe, for politicians who look upon changed opinions as a sign of weakness. The other day, I laughed when I observed Christine's marvelous dog Gamone waiting until our dirty plates were stacked nicely in the dishwasher before she moved in to lick them... much like polite humans wait until everybody is seated and served before tackling their food. Christine pointed out that she was horrified the first time she saw me inviting my dog Sophia to lick clean our plates, as if the dog's saliva were poisonous, infectious. I used to think in that silly way, but nowadays I know that the only way of being infected is to get bitten by an animal with rabies. As for the rest, the dog's saliva contains no harmful bacteria that won't disappear in the dishwasher. Inversely, I'm constantly afraid that my dog might bite into a rodent that has just eaten poison. That's why I prefer to catch mice alive, in the following excellent trap, which I've been using for years:

Whenever I find a mouse snared in the wire-netting cage, I accord him a fighting chance of survival—in a kind of Dalai Lama spirit—by taking the trap and its contents down the road and opening the cage in the presence of Sophia. I look upon what ensues as a kind of physical-alertness exercise for my dog, a little like those books of elementary problems, based upon letters and numbers, that are a popular pastime for elderly folk who prefer this mental stimulus rather than, say, writing blogs. Sophia seems to use her olfactive capacities, rather than her eyesight, to locate the fleeing rodent in the grass. And she soon pounces upon the mouse, generally crushing it beneath her heavy paws... whereupon I take the dead mouse by the tail and hoist it to eternity in the creek bed.

Now what does this have to do with atheism in the modern world? Well, in the same way that Christine has ceased to be disgusted by canine saliva, I've ceased to be anguished by atheism. With the wisdom of my many years spent in France, including in particular the time I've been living alone here at Gamone as a kind of areligious hermit, I've become totally enthralled by atheism... or, rather, by its positive dimension: my profound love of life and scientific knowledge, culminating in a total fascination for all living entities such as dogs, roses and even bacteria (although I haven't got around to domesticating any of the latter, and keeping them as pets). Admittedly, observers might claim that I don't seem to have got up to an acceptable cruising speed as far as admiring and loving my fellow human beings is concerned. But give me time. For the moment, there are attenuating circumstances: I've been watching too many films about the world wars, Hitler, Stalin and company. One day, if I continue my Dalai Lama-like ascension, I'm sure I'll end up accepting humans to the same extent as all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small... such as mice, weeds and viruses. [Don't take me too seriously. Towards the end of that last sentence, I was just joking. But I must be careful. How shall I ever find myself a wife if I start to fall into the trap of using misanthropic language? OK, I heard somebody say that it's already too late. Be that as it may, I should nevertheless take care of my language.]

The truth of the matter is that I had the privilege of growing up in a unique cultural environment—that of Grafton, New South Wales, Australia—which was an excellent breeding ground for future atheists. You see, the municipality was composed, about fifty-fifty, of Catholics and Protestants. Better still, my mother was Catholic whereas my father was Anglican. So, you might say that I had it in my genes to cease believing in God. [No, that last sentence is not really sound genetic talk.] In any case, I was strongly inclined to believe, from an early age, that it was absurd to imagine the peaceful coexistence of a Catholic god and a Protestant god, and this surely meant that both parties were misguided.

As a kid, I must have ridden my bike past this impressive edifice many hundreds of times. It was Saint Patrick's in South Grafton, the official church of my own mother, Kathleen Walker. But neither she nor any other member of my maternal family ever invited me to set foot in that newly-constructed building. I grew up looking upon that church as forbidden territory. As the nun's told my aunt Nancy, my mother was a mortal sinner, since she had married a Protestant. So, I was the offspring of a woman who had sinned, and her iniquity had no doubt rubbed off onto me from the earliest instants of my procreation.

Insofar as I was comfortably accepted into the refined gentlemanly circles of the Anglicans in Grafton, my personal experiences were insipid compared with the delightful tales told by the Irish comedian Dave Allen:



Today, there's a splendid website that deals with both the wonders of atheistic evolution and the stupidity of conventional religions.

Since the publication of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins has become an anti-religious militant. I have the impression that his stance was motivated, less by the traditional conflicts in the British Isles between Catholicism and Protestantism, than by the upsurge of ultra-conservative Judaism and radical Islam. Then, the shock of 9/11 was another terrible indictment of fanatic religion culminating in hatred and horror. The following video is quite long, and some of the images are hard to watch. But they are a striking demonstration of the consequences of madness caused by the God delusion.

Dog know-how

The question I'm trying to answer is: Who taught my dog to swim?

It wasn't me. I have no experience whatsoever in teaching animals to swim. Besides, I wouldn't have the financial means to hire a talented swimming coach to give Sophia lessons... which are no doubt highly expensive. The only plausible answer that comes to mind is that my daughter Manya has gone to the trouble—secretly, without ever informing me—of initiating Sophia into this sporting activity.

To be frank, I find that Sophia's style in the water could be improved considerably. For the moment, it's fairly primitive: a sort of paddling action, like a child. I don't think my dog has ever tackled anything in the way of breaststroke, butterfly or backstroke. But I guess that'll come, if she continues regular training.

Suddenly, I'm reminded of a delightful true story concerning a knowledgeable but eccentric lady in Sydney named Beatrice Miles. She was notorious because of countless amusing and less amusing incidents, often involving city taxis. Although "Bea" (as she was called) had inherited amply financial resources, enabling her to reside in the posh suburb of St Ives, her specialty consisted of often taking lengthy taxi rides, and then refusing to pay the fare... for reasons that were hard to fathom. Whenever she was in need of cash, she would resort to highbrow busking, reciting lengthy extracts of Shakespeare on street corners in Sydney.

The anecdote that just sprung into my mind has nothing to do with taxis or Shakespeare. Miss Miles had decided to visit the famous surfing beach of Bondi with a pet sheep. An inspector complained that it was against the law to bring animals to the beach.

Bea Miles: "The sign says that dogs are prohibited. This is a sheep, not a dog. The sign says nothing about sheep."

Beach inspector: "Lady, this is ridiculous. There's no grass here for your sheep to eat."

Bea Miles: "My sheep hasn't come to Bondi Beach to eat. It merely wants to do some sunbathing."

Getting back to my dog, Manya and I noticed that, after a minimum of swimming and basking in the sun, Sophia definitely likes to visit the Bourne with eating in mind. That's to say, she's likely to forget suddenly the chilly stream and the warm limestone rocks, before disappearing into the riverside weeds and bushes and searching excitedly for scraps of food left there by campers and other visitors. She always seems to be tremendously happy to find a fragment of abandoned food in the wilds, so to speak, as if her archaic hunting genes were getting back into momentary action.

It's a fact that Sophia at Gamone, like Bea's sheep at Bondi, likes to spend a lot her time simply sunbathing. And, these days, there has been a lot of sun around. Then, as soon as her internal temperature has peaked, Sophia dashes into the kitchen to cool off by lying on the cold floor tiles.

Happy birthday

Sophia was born on 25 July 1998. So, today is her 11th birthday.

The "birthday cake" I cooked for her was rather special, but I knew she would find it delicious. Normally, whenever I shell prawns (which is quite often, because I'm fond of several prawn dishes), Sophia waits for the heads and shells. Today, after preparing half a kilo of prawns, I put the heads and shells in a mixer. Then I added an egg and fried the mixture in olive oil. I had the impression that Sophia was pleasantly amazed to find herself being offered such a delicacy.

Happily, she's in perfect physical form. In fact, the only problem with Sophia is that, through living alone with me at Gamone, she seems to have become somewhat antisocial... like me. So, on hot days, when I take her down to the Bourne for a dip, she often growls at unfamiliar dogs that approach her. She leads an extremely regular existence, of a clockwork kind, even to the extent of rolling around on her back, once a day, in exactly the same patch of weeds alongside the house. At another spot, near the main door of the house, there's a corner of bare earth that I've been trying to cover with grass for years. But Sophia has made it clearly known to me that she prefers to lie down there from time to time in a soft heap of thick warm dust. So, I've given up trying to grow grass there. Sophia has won. Funnily, the regularity of Sophia's daily existence (which starts early in the morning when she wanders upstairs to wait alongside my bed until I wake me up) seems to rub off onto me, and exert a kind of reassuring, stabilizing force in my own life.

Hot dog

When I arrived back home after my trip to Valence yesterday, it was so hot at Gamone that I decided to drive Sophia down to Pont-en-Royans for a dip in the Bourne.

Sophia obviously appreciates this kind of excursion. First, of course, she can cool off. More importantly, I think, there's the pleasure of exotic odors and encounters with the vast world beyond Gamone.

Dog logic

My first contact with the intellectual discipline known as logic was in 1957 at the University of Sydney, where I attended the classes of John Anderson, whose overall style and behavior might be described as Victorian. That was probably one of the last occasions in academia for an alleged philosopher to ramble on for an entire year about logic without ever going an inch beyond Aristotle [384-322 BCE].

Retrospectively, I find it preposterous that such a course could have still existed in the second half of the 20th century, and been taken seriously, in a philosophical world that was already impregnated by mathematical logic of the subtle kind invented by thinkers such as Bertrand Russell [1872-1970], Alonzo Church [1903-1995] and the genius Kurt Gödel [1906-1978].

Concerning the latter man, I had the privilege of talking to him on the phone for about ten minutes, when I was visiting the USA in the early '70s, and attempting vainly to persuade him to be interviewed for French TV. Gödel insisted stubbornly that his contribution to mathematics was minimal, and that no TV viewer in his right mind would be interested in watching him. Maybe he was right on the second point, because the celebrated incompleteness theorem is not necessarily ideal stuff for what used to be called (unjustly, to my mind) the idiot box.

Talking about the teaching of philosophy in Australia, I often had the impression that it could be weirdly sex-oriented at times, as if philosophy—in the minds of many observers—were a synonym for sin. While I was at university in Sydney (for two short years), a terrible scandal of a typically wowserish Aussie kind (you might need to look up that adjective in a Down Under dictionary) erupted in Tasmania because the professor of philosophy Sydney Sparkes Orr [1914-1966] had seduced a female student. As for John Anderson himself, biographers inevitably draw attention to trivial anecdotes about his advocacy of so-called "free love" (casual adultery)... which sounds very much like what countless inhabitants of the planet Earth are practicing regularly these days, without even bothering to give it a pompous name.

Concerning the substance of Anderson's courses in philosophy, which I would generally describe as light-weight, I did however appreciate his drawn-out analysis of the trial and execution of Socrates for his allegedly corrupting the youth of Athens.

I often thought that the mumbling old Scotsman, attired in a black academic gown, liked to imagine himself as some kind of latter-day Socrates, persecuted by the straight-thinking citizens of the Antipodes. To me, that sounds like a nice summary of the situation... except that nobody at the old Royal George pub in Sydney's Sussex Street, hangout of a mindless sect known as The Push, ever got around to offering the professor a middy of hemlock. [Click the above image of Socrates to access an excellent Wiki article on beer in Australia.]

As far as Aristotelian logic is concerned, I'm convinced today that it's so trivial that my dog Sophia masters it perfectly... in spite of the fact that she never had an opportunity of studying under Professor Anderson. [She did get involved in free love, long ago... which resulted in the birth of Christine's dear dog named Gamone.]

I'm often impressed by demonstrations of what's going on in Sophia's head. She understands perfectly the logical concept of negation... which was a Big Thing for Aristotle. When Sophia sees me getting dressed and closing doors as if I'm about to go out in the car, she analyzes the situation patiently. If she hears the ritual command "Guard the house" (in French), Sophia realizes instantly that there's no way in the world that she's going to accompany me in the automobile. But, if a certain time has elapsed without this formula being pronounced, Sophia suddenly deduces that the absence of the "Guard the house" command means that I'm indeed inviting my dog to accompany me in the car... and she's already jumping excitedly alongside the door of my archaic Citroën. To my mind, Sophia's capacity of interpreting a non-existent prohibition as a positive incitation is truly remarkable. Once Sophia's brain has calculated the reasonable lapse of time during which the absence of the "Guard the house" command can be interpreted as an invitation to a car excursion, it would of course be unthinkable for me, out of forgetfulness, to attempt stupidly to change Sophia's mind. I don't want to have a schizophrenic dog. In this way, my smart Sophia earned herself car trips when she wasn't supposed to accompany me.

Recently, I've been amused by a new manifestation of Sophia's reasoning power: the ability to count from one to two. I don't know whether I've said already in this blog that I'm a huge consumer of French cheese. It's fine that I should be residing alongside both the Saint-Marcellin and Vercors cheese-production zones. Often, I buy a big chunk of hard creamy cheese manufactured in the neighboring Haute-Savoie region. Each time I cut away a slice for a toasted sandwich, there's a small segment of dry crust at each extremity of the slice. Sophia, of course, loves this stuff. Well, I was intrigued recently by the fact that, when I was preparing a sandwich in front of my toaster, and cutting off the crust of a piece of cheese, Sophia did not pounce immediately upon the first bit of cheese crust that fell to the floor. Instead, she hesitated unexpectedly, leaving the piece of cheese crust untouched on the floor, just in front of her snout. She knew that there's a crust fragment at each extremity of the master's morsel, and she waited for the second bit to fall to the floor before gathering up both off them in one fell swoop. This reaction links up with Sophia's delightfully confused behavior whenever I confront her with a pile of several pieces of meat. Her general plan is always to get that food out onto the lawn as rapidly as possible, where she can consume it in a leisurely manner while lying on the grass. But a terrible existential arises in Sophia's mind: Maybe, a chunk of meat might disappear mysteriously, either on the kitchen floor, or out on the lawn. I can see her performing some kind of canine calculation, trying to decide which piece she should carry out, and which pieces must be left for later. Indeed, the seriousness of a dog's calculations concerning food take us back magically in time to the early eras of Creation, when Sophia's ancestors (and mine, too) had to get their act right about such matters. Otherwise, they starved, and neither Sophia nor I would be here today to talk about such archaic ancestors' tales.

The most amazing instrument in Sophia's anatomy is, of course, her snout: a precision molecule detector of a kind that modern science and engineering would have trouble duplicating. Like any dog, Sophia uses this high-tech tool as a shovel, to bury bones. In this domain, the respective intellectual conclusions of Sophia and me often differ.

First, although we humans realize that a dog's snout is precious and fragile, and we do our maximum to optimize the working environment of this fabulous device (I love to wash mud off Sophia's fine face), it's a canine mistake to imagine that Homo sapiens tills the soil in gardens, for example, in order to facilitate the burying of bones.

Second, although we humans—particularly atheists like me—consider that there's nothing "sacred" in the bodily remains of a dead creature, and that anything of a meaty nature deserves to be eaten, I disagree with my dog when she believes that the bacterial action of the soil in my future medieval garden is likely to transform magically a horn from our dear departed billy-goat Gavroche into something akin to a juicy steak. Apparently Sophia still has a Christian streak in her genetic upbringing, which makes her believe in miracles, whereas I have lost all such superstitions. I try to convince her that she errs, but it's not easy to discuss metaphysics with a dog. In spite of that slight discord, Sophia and I—not to mention the distinguished professor John Anderson—would appear to agree basically on the primitive intellectual processes of Aristotelian logic.

In a forthcoming chapter of this philosophical essay, I shall demonstrate that Sophia is in fact Cartesian. Clearly, she thinks, therefore she is...

A poem lovely as a tree

I think that I shall never blog
A tree lovely as a dog.

Paraphrasing the indelibly wonderful words of the US journalist and poet Alfred Joyce Kilmer [1886-1918], slaughtered on the insane battlefields of France, I would say that blogs—like news dispatches—are made by fools like me, but only Darwinian evolution can make a dog... or a tree, for that matter.

Kilmer, for his valor, was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre (Cross of War) by the French Republic.

Our daily bread

For many months now, I've got into the habit of using constantly the same fixed menu for my bread machine.

The local supermarket sells an ideal whole-grain flour, produced by the Francine company, which also sells the yeast. The recipe is simple: just under a third of a liter of water, a heaped teaspoon of salt, half a kilogram of flour and a packet of yeast. As soon as the machine has been mixing these ingredients for a few minutes, I drop in a plate of walnuts. About three and a half hours later, here's the result:

I find it tastier and better textured than any bread I could buy in a local bakery. It keeps well, too, wrapped in a dish towel in the refrigerator.

My dog Sophia joins me when I'm kneeling down on the floor and using a hammer to crack open the walnuts on a thick wooden chopping block that I bought in Bangkok long ago. She's entitled to every fifth or sixth walnut. During the final thirty minutes, when the bread is baking, a fantastic aroma invades the house. Later, Sophia dashes up to me, in the kitchen, whenever she happens to see me about to cut a thick slice of bread. Needless to say, she's entitled to a chunk from time to time.

POST SCRIPTUM (after tasting, this morning): The abundance of walnuts at Gamone causes me to exaggerate at times. To make my product a little less like cake, it might be good if there were a bit more basic bread with my baked walnuts.

Abundant water

The winter that's drawing to an end hasn't been particularly cold, but it was dominated by several big snowfalls. Today, it's wonderful to see the sunny weather returning to Gamone. For the moment, my spring continues to overflow at a furious rate.

It's a great pity to see all this water being wasted. Ah, if only I could channel it magically out to my sunburnt country. Several years ago, I had imagined the idea of erecting a stone fountain alongside my house. For half the year, though, the spring goes dry, and a stone fountain without water is like a pub with no beer. Sophia appreciates this chilly water, just after it emerges from the earth around the spring.

Most of this abundant water runs into Gamone Creek, a hundred meters down from the spring.

This creek is a joy for my dog. For me too, the soft sound of the water cascading over the limestone rocks is like a lullaby.

When the weather's warm, like today, Sophia is capable of stepping into the creek for a minute or so, to cool off. But it's never more than a minimalist immersion.

Sophia has never been been enthusiastic about getting wet... apart from the special case of rolling around in the snow (influenced, no doubt, by her Labrador genes).

Like me, Sophia is happy to observe the peaceful landscape. What's the sense in running around excitedly? On the other hand, there's a curious ritual activity that she performs every time we wander up near the spring. This consists of rolling on the grass at a certain place, always at exactly the same spot.

Maybe the earth at that spot retains the remote scent of an exotic animal such as a wild boar or a roe deer. Be that as it may, Sophia's favorite place is her basket, in front of the house.

My dear dog will be turning eleven this summer. I'm delighted to see that she appears to be in fine form.