Salagon: a magnificent site in Provence

On the third day of my recent excursion in Provence, Natacha and Alain took me to a fabulous site in the Alpes de Haute-Provence: a simple stone structure in the middle of the fields, once a Benedictine priory, named Salagon, which was recently transformed into an ethnological museum. The buildings are surrounded by a set of thematic gardens, including a conservatorium of cereals and a medieval garden.

I was stunned by the beauty of the place, and impressed by the efforts of the various public authorities who have reinjected a cultural and pedagogical purpose into this site. Natacha [who took the above photo with the flowers] caught me in a pensive mood:

She also caught me taking photos, but my shots don't do justice to this splendid place... which was surprisingly free of tourists.

I was intrigued by the following external stone staircase, in a part of the priory that once housed farm animals:

Apparently the steps were deliberately designed in such a way that a monk and his donkey could walk up the stairs together: the man on the narrow steps to the left, and the donkey on the wider steps to the right.

Pop's epoch

We always referred to our paternal grandfather, Ernest Skyvington [1891-1985], as Pop. That was a nice name for a grandfather back in the days when the word "pop" had not yet become a banal adjective as in "pop music". Today, if children were to refer to their grandfather as Pop, people would immediately imagine the old man as a Beatle.

If the younger generations of Pop's descendants were asked to put an adjective upon the 17 years he spent in his London birthplace before setting sail for Australia, some might be tempted to say Victorian, or even Dickensian. The latter term is rather anachronistic, since the image of Oliver Twist had disappeared from the London scene—except for special cases such as the poor London urchin who would become Charlie Chaplin [1889-1977]—long before my grandfather's birth in a well-to-do northern neighborhood of the city, Finsbury Park. As for saying that Pop's London days were Victorian, this is not wrong, since the great queen died in 1901, when Pop was ten years old [two years after the death of his own mother]. But, to describe the few adolescent years that Pop spent in London before leaving for the Antipodes, the most appropriate adjective is surely Edwardian. Besides, the atmosphere of his youth is excellently described in this delightful book [which can be purchased through Amazon], written by a former London policeman, slightly younger than Pop, who went to the same school as Pop in Woodstock Road, Hornsey:

The title of Rolph's book comes from a quaint "pea soup" passage of Bleak House by Charles Dickens [1812-1870]:

I asked him whether there was a great fire anywhere, for the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen. "Oh dear no, Miss," he said. "This is a London particular." I had never heard of such a thing. "A fog, Miss," said the young gentleman. "Oh, indeed," said I.

London is indeed a particular city. It is a great and moving place, like Paris or New York. But nothing, in that metropolis, is as elsewhere. Everything in London is particular.

Secret river

I'm fascinated by the story, related in The Australian, of the discovery of a so-called secret river called the Kallakoopah in the heart of Australia. [Click here to read the story.]

To remain geared to the universe, we humans need to discover things constantly, where the word "things" denotes both intellectual and material entities. One can imagine no more inspiring discovery than that of an ancient river.

Ordinary village, extraordinary bookshop

When you arrive in Banon, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, it looks like a rather ordinary village, which hasn't yet been beautified by wealthy outsiders. It's not crowded with tourists, and there's a delightful bistrot in the middle of the village where you can sit in the sun and watch people and vehicles going past... which is surely a perfectly honorable occupation for a lazy visitor such as me.

But Banon has an extraordinary bookshop, called Le Bleuet. It's charming and enormous, with every kind of book you could imagine.

My children would surely appreciate the Banon bookshop, because the first thing I noticed upon entering Le Bleuet was the moped book created by François and Emmanuelle.

[Click here to visit the French-language website on this book. You might also like to click here to visit my son's emerging photographic website. For the moment, only the billiards theme has been completed.]

In the fabulous Banon bookshop, I bought a little book full of recipes for making herbal tea and infusions.

Intriguing Google findings

In the domain of Googling gurus, I think my friend Natacha must be some sort of a world champion. She's constantly discovering all kinds of weird things, including stuff about myself that I wouldn't even think of looking for. Latest example. There's a Google menu indicated as more, shown here, that puts you in contact with a tool called Books:

If you type in my name, you'll find a list of published documents that refer to me in one way or another. Well, I was amazed to see that the UK subsidiary of Amazon surrounds my name by stars and stripes and considers me as the author of a book on Iran, published in 1983!

Consequently, it would be perfectly plausible for George W Bush to consult me, one of these days, as a specialist on this complex corner of the globe, before he decides to attack Iran. Meanwhile, I'm starting to understand why I used to get interrogated and searched at length by security officials during my visits to Israel, because they might have imagined me as an Iranian agent. [No, on second thoughts, that couldn't possibly be the case, because the Internet and Amazon didn't even exist back in the days when I used to visit the Holy Land.]

There's only one minor discrepancy. It ain't me who wrote a book about Iran, but rather my former friend Jean Hureau, founder of the Jeune Afrique publishing house in Paris, which once employed me to write a relatively successful book about Great Britain. But, thanks to the diligence of Google and Amazon, this erroneous information will no doubt be recorded permanently on computers for posterity.

Juxtaposed excursions

It was weird to visit England and then Provence in the space of a fortnight. For those who are used to packing a lot of varied tourism into short periods (as in the case of Australian visitors, for example, on a global tour of the Old World), I suppose there's nothing unusual in visiting several countries in rapid succession. I was struck by an experience of this kind during my initial voyage to Europe, when our Greek liner Bretagne brought us into brief contact with Singapore, the Suez Canal and Athens, before dropping us off in Southampton. But, since then, I had lost the habit of changing almost overnight from one society and culture to another. To be more explicit, I've been leading an isolated lifestyle at Gamone for such a long time [with the exception of last year's Australian interlude] that I was unprepared for the shock of returning to noisy crowded London. Then, this shock was rapidly attenuated—like cold water poured onto a pressure cooker—by the relaxed three days down in Provence with Natacha and Alain. I should mention, though, that I didn't actually plan to juxtapose these two excursions, so that they might produce a counterpoint effect. It was simply the chance outcome of available dates.

On Tuesday, 7 August 2007, I was thrilled to find myself traveling down to meet up once again with my friends in Marseille. The following words, dashed off on my portable computer, reveal my excitement: "I'm writing this article in the high-speed train from Valence to Marseille, at eight o'clock on a sunny morning, with Sophia stretched out on the carpet at my feet. There's only one other passenger in the luxurious first-class carriage: a young woman seated on the other side of the aisle, who's also working on a portable computer. The train is speeding along through a dark-green wonderland of wooded hills, vineyards, agricultural fields, orchards, timber forests, streams, rocky ridges, silvery scrubs and low hills. The sun is still low in the eastern sky, which is pale blue and cloudy. From time to time, we pass alongside a Provençal village. At the moment I was writing that last sentence, the train crossed over the broad Rhône, and the conductor announced that we were about to stop for three minutes at Avignon. What a crazily frustrating idea: three minutes at Avignon! In fact, the modern train station is far out in the Provençal wilderness, several kilometers away from the celebrated bridge and the Palace of Popes."

Natacha and Alain took me first to an amazing cave in the mountains near Marseille, one of the holiest sites in Christendom: the Sainte-Baume, associated with an ancient legend according to which the New Testament personage known as Mary Magdalene once lived in the Marseille region.

She would have traveled from the Holy Land to southern France—accompanied by others, including her brother Lazarus and a saintly friend named Maximin—in a miraculous boat with neither a sail nor a rudder. After evangelizing the people of Marseille, Mary lived as a hermit in a cave on the face of a cliff of the nearby mountain range that is now known as the Sainte-Baume. And that's the place we visited last week, with my pilgrim dog Sophia leading the way up the ancient stony pathway.

After a strenuous climb, terminating in countless stone steps, we reached the vast cave, which has been transformed into a sanctuary, with a splendid panoramic view out over the surrounding flat countryside.

In the context of local legends concerning this venerated site, relics still have a role to play, even today. Here, inside the cave, is a large bone alleged to have belonged to Mary Magdalene:

When Natacha and I reached the cave, leaving Alain to stay with Sophia at the foot of the steps, the place was swarming with pilgrims, accompanied by members of the clergy, getting prepared for some kind of a service. A little girl in ribbons and bows pointed to the relic and asked Natacha what it was.

Natacha: "It's a bone of Mary Magdalene."

Little girl: "C'est dégueulasse ! " [How disgusting! That's the slang adjective made famous by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg at the end of Godard's 1959 New Wave film Breathless.]

After scrambling back down the rocky path, we drove to the nearby basilica that honors both saints, Mary Magdalene and Maximin, whose façade looks as if it might have been hit by a bomb.

This is where the alleged sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene was discovered in the 13th century, and her skull is displayed in the crypt.

The legends of Mary Magdalene in Provence might not be particularly plausible from a historical viewpoint, but they are rich and profound. As somebody said, the most convenient attitude consists of "accepting" these legends, at least while you're in Provence, even if this means discarding temporarily the notion that more than one Biblical individual might be concealed behind the generic name of Mary Magdalene, that her bones might have been transferred to Vézelay, or maybe that her tomb(s) might in fact be located in the Holy Land...

End of English excursion

In my article entitled Dorset ancestral anecdotes [display], I described my delightful Friday, 3 August 2007, in the sunny village of Blandford. There, while downing a pint of Guinness in a local pub, and feeling far away from France, I picked up a newspaper with an amusing story on the relationship of the English with France, or rather, with the French language:

According to a recent BBC survey, it was found that French remains the most frequently studied foreign language in British schools [taken by 85 per cent of students]. But it would appear that most adults, following five years of foreign language classes, remember an average of no more than seven words from a language studied at school. In the case of French, this means that an average Brit remembers how to say bonjour, au revoir, s'il vous plaît and merci. They can count, but only up to three: un, deux, trois. And they can ask French people: Parlez-vous anglais? Funnily enough, the average Brit knows the French word for beer (bière), but not wine (vin).

Within the relatively narrow confines of my genealogical research, I've developed the habit of referring to the Dorset region to the south of Shaftesbury as "Skivington country". For all lovers of the work of Thomas Hardy [1840-1928], author of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, this region is better known, of course, as "Hardy country". These rolling pastures of rural Dorset are designated geographically as the Blackmore Vale. Well, as the author of a former tourist guide book on Great Britain, I was disappointed to discover a surprising news item on the front page of the local Blackmore Vale Magazine, hot off the Blanford press that very morning (3 August 2007):

The acronym TIC stands for Tourist Information Centre. In other words, on that very morning when I encountered for the first time my ancestral village of Blandford, the local press was announcing that their tourist infrastructure would soon be closing down, apparently because there wasn't sufficient local funding to keep it in business.

While regretting that I was unable to visit the surrounding villages of my "Skivington country" (which would have necessitated an automobile and more time), I took the bus back to Poole. The weather was exceptionally warm, and my feet were sore from walking all around Blandford. Since the shops were still open in Poole, I decided to purchase a pair of sandals with cushion soles and a pair of shorts. Changing from my walking boots to the lightweight sandals was a pleasure, which encouraged me to spend the warm evening on the Poole waterfront. Meanwhile, I was amused to think that an Australian residing in the south of France would find himself tempted to purchase sandals and shorts in England.

For the second evening in a row, I was tempted (nostalgia of childhood gastronomy) to eat fish and chips, seated on the wharf. Finishing my meal with beer outside a waterfront pub, I said to myself that it wouldn't take me long, in Britain, to increase both my weight and my cholesterol level. In fact, during the four days since my arrival in the UK, I had often imagined that a big proportion of Brits, including young girls, seemed to be overweight. Back in London, a prominent newspaper had in fact confirmed, with the following stark headlines, that this impression wasn't apparently a mere figment of my imagination:

According to the WHO [World Health Organization], one in four Brits is obese. In the newspaper article, the head of the BMA [British Medical Association], a certain Dr Hamish Meldrum, is quoted as making the following claims, concerning the way we talk of fat folk: "We are saying 'This patient has a hyper-appetite problem', rather than 'They are just greedy'. People like to put fancy labels that suggest things are a medical problem." I wouldn't be surprised if a few offended fat guys, reading those comments, were to decide to roll on Hamish Meldrum.

On the roadway in front of the pubs at Poole, the municipality had organized a display of elegant old sports cars, parked in a long line alongside the wharf. Personally, I was less intrigued by these automobiles than by the stunts performed by a few youths on curious circus bikes, with no saddles, who spent their time hopping between the stone walls and concrete pillars.

Don't forget that, stuck away in my Gamone wilderness, I haven't had many opportunities, over the last decade or so, of seeing how urban kids amuse themselves. Who knows? Maybe I'll end up buying myself such a bike, one of these sunny days, and introducing such stunts to Pont-en-Royans, on the parapet above the River Bourne, opposite the hanging houses [preferably after I'm naturalized, so that the authorities won't be tempted to expel me as a crazy old alien].

On the walk back home, as the sun was going down, I strolled alongside graceful birds on the lake in Poole Park, in a beautifully calm and typically English environment.

The next morning, I attempted to use my portable computer to book a hotel room in London, but I stupidly forgot to note down the name and address of the hotel. Consequently, when I finally arrived back in the vicinity of Russell Square in London, a kind Underground employee used his computer and phone to find me an excellent cheap hotel within a few minutes. There's no doubt about it that English people are basically kind, helpful and apparently altruistic, even in the noisy swarming ambience of London on a Saturday afternoon. Once settled in at the hotel [where the lady at the desk went out of her way to make sure that I knew which buses to take], I transformed myself, for the rest of the day, into a typical tourist. For example, I took a photo of the big ferris wheel on the other side of the Thames:

Then I joined a crowd of hundreds of other tourists to take a photo of Big Ben striking six:

Deciding to stop acting like the herd, I took the Underground across to the South Kensington neighborhood where I used to live for a few months [my only lengthy stay in England] during the 1964-65 winter, in a flat in Onslow Gardens.

Suddenly, a vague memory appeared in my mind. I decided to try to locate the local pub where I used to drink in 1964-65, called the Anglesea Arms. I was overjoyed to find that it's look and atmosphere had not changed one iota over the last forty or so years.

The next morning, I strolled through Hyde Park, where I was intrigued by the following recently-constructed monument:

At first site, I had the impression that the curious white crosses glistening in the sunlight at the top of the black pillars suggested that it was some kind of Christian thing, maybe memorials of British churches destroyed during the Blitz.

Well, it turned out, when I got up closer, that I was completely off the mark. This is a spectacular New Zealand memorial, evoking early conflicts between colonists and Maoris, and I would imagine that the white crosses are meant to reproduce the pattern of four stars found on their flag.

Finally, I was impressed by a dramatic monument dedicated to animals who have given up their lives in warfare.

I started to think of my donkey Moshé, back at Gamone [who, I hope, is rather unlikely to lose his life in a war]. One thing led to another, and I became frankly homesick when I imagined my dog Sophia waiting for me back in France, in the company of my daughter Emmanuelle. After four or five days on the far side of the stretch of sea that the British call the English Channel, it was time for me to return home.

Pilgrimage

This morning, Sophia started to bark furiously, announcing that I had visitors: a woman about fifty and two attractive blond girls around twenty. They told me they had walked up to Gamone "on a pilgrimage"... which made me wonder for a moment if their excursion had something to do with the August 15 Assumption feast.

"You might remember me once dropping in here with my father," explained one of the girls, with a diamond stud in her nose, wearing tiny shorts and a plunging black T-shirt. Now, I wouldn't normally forget a visit to Gamone by such a stunning female, but it took me a little while to understand that she must have been about seven years old at the time of that previous visit. And I didn't need to tell her that she had changed a lot since then.

When I collected my thoughts, and after a few additional explanations, I realized that the lady was the daughter of the man named Marcel Gauthier who sold me the Gamone property back in 1993. The blond girl with the diamond [a hairdresser in Briançon] was her niece: one of the two daughters of the lady's brother, Maurice Gauthier, whom I used to know well. And the other girl was a friend. Their visit to Gamone was a "pilgrimage" in the sense that the lady used to stay here from time to time, when Marcel used the property to raise animals, back in the '70s. Although I had never seen the lady before, I once happened to meet up with her husband, a sawmill operator in a neighboring village who supplied me with the beautiful walnut slabs for the table on which my computer rests.

It was weird but wonderful to hear this lady, sixteen years younger than me, talking about her childhood recollections of Gamone. In particular, she could recall the exact situation of springs in the vicinity of the house, since this was a vital question before the property was linked to the municipal water supply. She told me that her father Marcel had called upon a dowser whose nickname was "Marseille" (no doubt because he came from that city), to find a spring on the slopes on the other side of Gamone Creek. Apparently this "Marseille" was a flamboyant personage with a huge white beard, who operated with dowsing rods, branches and a pendulum. Having located the spring, "Marseille" gave his forked branch to Marcel, then he took hold of Marcel's wrists, whereupon the branch turned earthwards. And the dowser declared joyfully: "See, Marcel, your hands can transmit the force just as well as mine. In fact, every human being is capable of transmitting these forces, but they don't realize they have this gift, and they refuse to accept it." [It goes without saying that I was greatly interested to hear this anecdote—which had clearly made an impression upon Marcel's daughter—in the recent context of Natacha's discovery of her dowsing skills.]

The most amazing aspect of this friendly encounter with Marcel's daughter and granddaughter was the fact that they were unaware [because of family communication ruptures] that the Gauthier patriarch is still the owner of land on the slopes opposite my house, including the spot where "Marseille" once found a spring. In fact, I never understood why Marcel had decided to hang on to those few acres of rugged land on the other side of the creek, instead of including them in the sales proposal that I received from him. This morning's anecdote about the dowser "Marseille" finding a spring makes things clearer in my mind. It's a fact that, for people like Marcel, the existence of a spring [whose exact location I ignore] was thought of as a valuable asset. But it's unlikely, today, that the municipality of Choranche would consider the existence of such a source of water as a justification for authorizing the construction of a dwelling at the site.

Midland ancestors

My Norman ancestors, arriving in England in 1066 with William the Conqueror, settled at the Saxon site of Sceaftinga tûn, the place of Sceaft's people, which became the village of Skeffington in Leicestershire. A few centuries later, a branch of their descendants became celebrated as Tudor lords, one of whom was in charge of Ireland. And that main branch of the family, after settling in Northern Ireland, has been headed by Viscount Massereene.

I now believe that my Skyvington/Skivington branch of the family was formed shortly before the epoch of the Tudor Skeffington lords. My ancestors were probably farmers, in Bedfordshire, where they spelt their family name with a "v" instead of "ff": Skevington. Consequently, during my recent rapid excursion to England, I decided at the last minute to visit Bedfordshire rather than the Leicestershire village of Skeffington. The departure station was St Pancras, which is being vastly modernized so that Eurostar trains will terminate here, in the heart of London, from next November.

I arrived in the charming city of Bedford on Wednesday afternoon, 1 August 2007, and booked into a modern hotel in a tall building on the far side of the bridge over the River Great Ouse.

In the center of the city, I came upon a statue with a familiar name.

The busy town markets were closing, so it wouldn't have been possible for me to buy a bouquet of flowers to place at the foot of the pedestal.

Early the next morning, I took a bus to the village of Turvey, about a dozen kilometers to the west of Bedford, which is one of a cluster of half-a-dozen villages, near the border between Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, where there was a presence of Skevington people, recorded in the archives, from as far back as the early 16th century.

The splendid old parish church is located in the center of the village.

In the genealogical domain, I'm particularly interested in a Turvey man described in the Mormon archives as George husbandman Skevington [1562-1608], younger brother of Thomas yeoman Skevington [1560-1615]. At that epoch, well before the appearance of the Hanoverian monarchs named George, this was a relatively uncommon firstname, inspired no doubt by the legendary saint of that name. Well, my earliest Dorset ancestor was a George Skivington [1670-1711], and I've often imagined that these two Georges might be linked. There are tombstones all around the church, but time and the elements have rendered them faceless.

On a wall inside the church, there's a map of around 1785 which indicates the property of a William Skevington.

This William Skevington [1734-1784] is indeed mentioned in the Mormon archives, along with his wife Elizabeth Skevington [1736-1770]. At that same epoch, just a few kilometers away from Turvey, in the Buckinghamshire villages of Lavendon and Cold Brayfield, the Mormon archives reveal the presence of individuals who actually spelt their name as Skyvington, like me, whereas in Bedford itself, others had got around to using the Skivington spelling. Consequently, there are strong reasons to believe that this corner of the Midlands—often designated by a nice expression: the Home Counties—might have been our ancestral home place prior to the Dorset phase.

Inside the church, there are several tombs of members of the 15th-century noble family named Mordaunt.

It is sobering to compare these magnificent alabaster effigies of these local lords and ladies, in a perfect state of conservation, with the faceless tombstones outside. But neither alabaster nor stone are as permanent for posterity, of course, as data of the kind stored in the computerized Mormon archives... or ordinary words of the kind I am writing now.

Dorset ancestral anecdotes

On Thursday afternoon, 2 August 2007, I took the train from London Waterloo to Poole [Dorset]. I'm surely not the first traveler to point out that British trains are old-fashioned and uncomfortable, but the emotional thrill of moving towards my ancestral Dorset negated both the physical discomfort and the constantly-repeated idiotic train messages: "Passengers are informed that, to travel on this train, they must have a ticket. If not, they may be penalized by our inspectors."

To be truthful, I spent a good part of the journey admiring the intense beauty of a veiled Moslem girl on the other side of the aisle, who was constantly consulting a portable computer, taking phone calls and listening to an Apple iPod. I was intrigued by the way she would brush aside delicately her Moslem veil in order to insert or remove an earplug. Indeed, her whole vestimentary interdiction, in counterpoint with her exquisite physical features and modernity, made this girl terribly beautiful and desirable. [Those spontaneous sentiments should be enough to earn me a fatwah from the Finsbury Park fools in London.]

After a night in a charming bed-and-breakfast on the remote north-eastern side of Poole Park Lake, far from the city [an error due to my haste in Internet booking, without the necessary examination of maps], I took a bus to the northern Dorset village of Blandford.

In a British double-decker bus on such a country road, you are hurtled through a sort of rectangular tunnel cut through the trees. You have an ideal chance of realizing that today's roads are simply an extension of yesterday's tracks. There's no such thing as a municipal no-man's-land between the road and the adjoining properties. Here in France, a motorist on a country road can usually pull over for a piss, or any reason whatsoever. This would be unthinkable in the English environment I'm describing. Sometimes I conclude that this is why many English drivers have superb new vehicles [not necessarily made in the UK]. It would be suicidal to set forth on an English road with an old vehicle that might have hiccups along the way. In certain places, it would take a helicopter to drag a stalled automobile out of the way. To put it bluntly, southern England is a travelers' nightmare. I knew that already, a quarter of a century ago, when I wrote my guidebook on Great Britain. If you're thinking of visiting this part of England, the only common-sense way of doing things consists of renting a small automobile and establishing a tightly-planned hotel schedule.

In Blandford, I stumbled upon a museum:

Inside, an old pump-organ caught my attention:

Its label had a familiar name, of the Blandford music store that sold this instrument:

The museum curator showed me publicity concerning the Skivington music shop in Blandford:

Then he invited me to play the old organ. This demanded a lot of effort, because the "lungs" of the antiquated organ were no doubt leaking, and I had to pedal like hell to produce the least sound. Still, it was an emotional performance, which seemed to move the Blandford curator, who immediately started to inundate me with copies of old documents about local Skivingtons. If I can say so, without appearing to be pretentious, I already knew more about this subject than the curator did, and he was thrilled to receive my gift of the pile of printed pages on Dorset Skivingtons that I had brought with me.

Finally, I hardly surprised the Blandford curator by pointing out to him that we Dorset Skyvingtons were issued from ancestors named Rose:

Thereupon, it was the curator who surprised me by indicating an amazing fact. He informed me that my ancestral Blandford relatives Thomas Rose [1749-1833] and his wife Jane Topp [1757-1827] were in fact the first free settlers to arrive in Port Jackson, New South Wales, aboard the Bellona, on 15 January 1793. In the heart of Dorset, on a warm day of August 2007, that fragment of information made me feel rightly more Aussie than ever.

Bali bird flu

Last year in February, a Sydney-based think tank named the Lowy Institute succeeded in scaring shit out of everybody by announcing the theoretical worst-case scenario of a bird-flu pandemic capable of taking 142 million lives. [Click here or on the image to display the CNN article.]

At that time, we Europeans shuddered most, because the mortal H5N1 virus had been detected here in migrating wild fowl. French authorities reacted to this threat in a draconian fashion by outlawing outdoor chicken yards. Meanwhile, people feared that the celebrated recipe of Poule au pot farcie Henri IV might soon become a thing of the past, like roast pheasant. [Click here to display the recipe in French.]

Today, alas, the action has shifted to Australia's playground: the tiny Indonesian island of Bali. Now, I hasten to add that I've never set foot in Bali, and have no immediate plans to go there. Besides, I've never understood what draws young Australian tourists to this place. Wouldn't it be a relatively simple affair, for filthy-rich developers, to create an exotic but safe Bali-like atmosphere in delightful local places such as Bondi or Byron Bay? Or even Yamba or Woolgoolga?

Judging from this morning's press, there's no panic yet in Australia. At the moment I'm writing, Australian health and tourism authorities don't seem to have issued any directives concerning Australian citizens who are already holidaying in Bali, or those who might be preparing to go there. Is this absence of official declarations an indication of calm and clear thinking, or rather a sign of negligence?

Brain removal

Karl Rove, referred to by critics of the US administration as "Bush's Brain", has decided to stop prancing for the president. The guru's resignation was announced soon after the Bush family picnic at Kennebunkport attended by a French vacationer named Nicolas Sarkozy (whose wife Cécilia didn't turn up, because she had a cold).

I've been wondering whether there might be some kind of causal relationship between these happenings. Maybe the Brain concluded that, if the wife of a foreign head of state can find a polite way of saying no to Dubya, then it was time for him to behave similarly. There are other conjectures. It's possible that the Brain was shocked to see his protégé behaving in a cool friendly fashion towards a Frenchman. Or maybe the vision of a French president saying he likes America was simply too much, convincing Karl Rove that he no longer understands anything whatsoever about politics.

In any case, the Brain's neurons have been been flickering alarmingly ever since 2003, when he earned notoriety by leaking the name of ex-CIA spy Valerie Plame. Sure, you might say that mere notoriety is better than a spell in jail, but it must have been a minor cerebral trauma for Rove to see his colleague Scooter Libby condemned in place of Dick Cheney and himself. More recently, there has been another nasty affair about Rove's involvement in the firing of federal judges who weren't sufficiently loyal to Dubya. And the backdrop to this fall from grace is of course the recent Republican electoral defeat.

The sole pertinent question is: Can George W Bush, deprived of his Brain, pursue his presidential mandate? What a silly question! Of course he can. Like weightlessness for seasoned astronauts, brainlessness is a state that Dubya knows well. The US president is an experienced idiot.