Rocks in the garden

When people tell you they have rocks in their garden, you normally imagine an idyllic landscape with flowers, shrubs and trees growing on rocky lawns and slopes. The magnificent Rochemuse park of Tineke and Serge at Choranche is a splendid example of this kind of garden.

If, on the other hand, Tineke and Serge had told me that a few rocks had actually fallen into their garden, I would have immediately imagined that the culprit was the gigantic cliff up above Rochemuse, which is perfectly capable of discarding spontaneously a few crumbling fragments of limestone at any hour of the night or day.

That's what they thought, too, when they were woken up in the middle of the night by a huge thud like the bang of a jet fighter aircraft. Planes often fly over Choranche during the day, but not usually at midnight. They soon realized that the origin of the fallen rocks was closer to home.







They had fallen from a rocky outcrop, covered in delicate vegetation, just a few meters from Tineke's kitchen window. Exceptionally and fortunately, during the few seconds it took for the tons of rocks to drop and slide onto the tiny backyard lawn, there were neither people, dogs nor automobiles at that spot. And, once they hit the ground, the porous rocks shattered to a certain extent, but didn't roll any further.

An old map talked to me of trees

I took the following fuzzy photo of an old map with my hand-held camera in poor lighting conditions at the Isère Archives in Grenoble:

Let me point out a few relevant elements in this map. Midway between Grenoble (Isère) and Romans (Drôme), I've drawn a blue rectangle around the town of Saint-Marcellin, and I've marked the location of my homeplace, Gamone (Choranche), with a yellow dot. Now, according to this map, when I drive to the supermarket at Saint-Marcellin, I should normally pass through a vast forest—shown as a green blob—just before crossing the Isère River at La Sône. The truth of the matter is that, if you were to question most drivers concerning this itinerary, they would swear that they didn't drive through any great forest whatsoever. In fact, I've always known that the roads go either along the top of the green blob, or along the bottom of it (corresponding to the location of bridges over the Isère), but not through the middle of it. Consequently, as I said, most people simply don't imagine for a moment that there's a forest here. But there is indeed...

To get a feeling for the presence of this forest—known as the Bois de Claix—you have to find a local hill with a good view, not blocked by buildings or trees... and this is not as easy as it might seem. Finally, last week, my friends Tineke and Serge took me to an ideal observation point: a splendid domain named Combelongue on the edge of a hill above the river at La Sône. In fact, Combelongue is a country estate that is operated as a luxurious guest-house and function center. Here's the main building, set in a wonderful park with ancient cedar trees:

[Click the photo to visit their website. The exquisite Combelongue domain is surely a marvelously romantic place to spend a night or two, and no more expensive than an urban hotel.]

And here, seen from a typical bedroom at Combelongue, is the view out over the valley of the Isère and the hills of the Royans, with the cliffs of the Vercors in the background:

What you see here corresponds to the green blob in the old map. I've labeled the two familiar mountains that I admire daily from my house at Gamone.

Future rose pergola

This morning, when my ex-neighbor Bob dropped in to pick up his mail, he was a little surprised to discover that a curious wooden structure had popped up almost overnight in the garden zone in front of my house.

I explained to Bob that it's an old Australian custom dating back to the days when our ancestors arrived in the Antipodes as convicts: "It was considered politically correct that every respectable homestead should have its own personal gallows." I then went on to explain, a little more seriously, that I was quite proud to have erected, single-handed, this first perfectly-adjusted section of my future rose pergola. Incidentally, apart from the two vertical posts and the horizontal bar at the top, all the other pieces of timber in this photo are temporary struts and props, to keep the structure rigid and in perfect shape. This temporary timber—including the four shorter posts against which the structure is leaning—will be removed once the entire pergola is in place, with its six posts set in concrete.

When I see how some of my old rose bushes are thriving in the limestone soil of Gamone, I'm impatient to finish my pergola and plant the roses I recently purchased.

Work in progress

Yesterday, I finished the initial version, in English, of my movie adaptation of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Today, I started the translation of my movie script into French... since there are many reasons why a film on this subject must be an essentially French affair.

The tentative title of my movie is Adieu, Abelone. In aristocratic late 19th-century Denmark, Malte, the hero of Rilke's novel, has always been totally infatuated by his aunt, the Countess Abel Brahe, some fifteen years older than her romantic nephew. Although Rilke's novel provides no proofs enabling us to make such an assertion explicitly, it would appear that Malte and Abelone became incestuous lovers for a brief moment. Then Malte abandoned forever his native land. Learning of the death of his aunt, Malte suffered a trauma that evolved rapidly into a grave psychosis characterized by hallucinations and paranoia. Finally, after electric shock therapy at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, Malte emerged slowly from his mental afflictions and became a writer, inspired above all by Baudelaire. One might say that his salvation was poetry.

New keyboard

Over the last couple of months, I've noticed various tiny frailties, almost imperceptible, in my faithful Macintosh keyboard. For example, the tail of the comma is wearing away, meaning that I can confuse it with a full stop. And I have the impression that the movement of certain keys might be affected by an accumulation of inaccessible muck. So, when I saw the latest superb Macintosh keyboard at a store in Grenoble a few days ago, I didn't hesitate in purchasing one.

The difference is a matter of day and night! The old keyboard was nice, in an old-fashioned way, but the sleek new one runs rings around it.

I would imagine that inspired authors have already drawn attention to the obvious fact that, for a keen computer user, the keyboard is an extremely sensitive organ of the beast. The user communicates with the machine by running his fingers over the sensitive keys on this device. (Please excuse me for using male language.) On the surface of the keyboard, the rows of keys are ripples (nipples) that the user excites by touch, in the course of his obligatory foreplay with the machine. And a new keyboard is a little like a new woman.

Please excuse me for this blatant sexually-oriented effusion. As I said, I was disturbed to imagine (maybe no more than an anguished illusion) that the tail of the comma seemed to be fading away.

Retired presidents prefer blondes

I don't usually include French-language videos in my blog, but this one is a must, and you don't need to understand French to appreciate what's happening. Jacques Chirac is attending a dull meeting at which his wife Bernadette is to make a speech. Just as Madame Chirac is about to start speaking, Jacques suddenly notices that a young blonde lady has nowhere to sit, so he immediately insists that she be seated next to him.



In turning around at a certain moment, Bernadette was able to pick up the goings-on of her galant husband as if he were the proverbial raw prawn on an Aussie fruit tree. (Apologies to Kevin for borrowing this convenient Antipodean style.] We see the amused reactions of two spectators of the Chirac video: the politician Jean-Louis Borloo and the yachtsman Olivier de Kersauson. The commentator draws attention to the exact moment at which Jacques, whispering in the ear of his young neighbor, is caught out by a stern-faced Bernadette, turning around to see what's going on behind her back. The commentator cries out the slang term gaulé, which is the French verb for fruit picking.

French people love this kind of stuff, which is like a scene from the popular théâtre des boulevards. In the regular popularity polls, I predict that Jacques is going to jump at least five points as a consequence of this delightful video.

Celebration

A week ago, nothing was planned. But this Friday, in my personal circle, turned out to be a day of celebration. In the Antipodes, it was a matter of bidding farewell to my brother Don. Here in the corner of France where I live, my Choranche neighbors Tineke Bot and Serge Bellier invited me to celebrate the spring opening of their floral park, Rochemuse, which had taken place last weekend.

I had written them a small text in French, which I have translated here:

ROCHEMUSE

In the setting of the Rochemuse park, on the slopes of the Royans at Choranche, the terra concept can be declined in several ways. A gardener working the limestone soil of the Vercors might consider that a small error has slipped into Genesis. Surely, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the rocks. Long afterwards, petra gave rise to terra under the effects of time and nature. Then the first farmers arrived on the scene—quite recently here, merely six millennia ago—to plant crops and graze animals upon the earth of Eden.

In the name of the park, Rochemuse, the rock (roche) is the gigantic cliff that overhangs the circus of Choranche. As for the muse, she presides over the poetry of this place, inspiring Tineke Bot in the creation of works of sculpture that visitors encounter in every corner of the park.

The archaic alluvial deposits of the Bourne on the slopes of Choranche and Châtelus, referred to as terraces, were formed in the Quaternary era, when the river burrowed violently into the gorges surrounded by beige-colored limestone cliffs described by geologists, in French, as Urgonien. The soil on the slopes, full of fragments of stones called marne (which gardeners have to remove constantly), is not particularly rich. However the vegetation on this exceptional terrain has been taking advantage, for countless millennia, of the heat energy accumulated and then radiated by the cliffs, which endows the site with a Mediterranean micro-climate that encourages the blooming of wildflowers and shrubs.

Ever since the Middle Ages, the Choranche territory (to use another declension of terra) was dedicated primarily to grapevines, producing a highly-reputed wine.

At the castle in Sassenage, a territorial survey written in medieval Latin in the middle of the 14th century, referred to in modern French as a terrier, describes in detail the ancient vineyards of Choranche. That wine industry declined when the monks were chased away after the French Revolution, then the phylloxera disease ravaged the vineyards in the latter half of the 19th century.

To create Rochemuse, terra had to be accompanied by aqua. Thanks to an archaic spring, the park was able to come into existence. The forms of its creation were inspired, naturally, by the environment, which is magnificent and magic at Choranche.

To thank me for writing this simple evocation of their glorious park, incorporated into their brochure for last weekend's opening, Tineke and Serge insisted upon taking me out for lunch today. I wondered, for a moment, whether they intended to cheer me up after my brother's death... but I believe that the timing was purely serendipitous.

Evocations

The coloring of this portrait of Don and me is simplistic:

That's because the tints were applied manually by me, when I was about eleven, during a period when I liked to fiddle around with photos.




During our childhood at Waterview, South Grafton, Don and I used to listen to country music performed by a fellow named Buddy Williams, who had got around to incorporating a variant of Swiss yodeling into his songs. Today, these songs strike us as rather corny, but we loved to listen to them constantly on our archaic gramophone with a wind-up spring. I've found a few YouTube samples of Buddy Williams songs that Don himself used to imitate, accompanied by his steel-stringed guitar.

Where the White-Faced Cattle Roam



Music in My Pony's Feet



Riding Home at Sundown



Here's an old photo of the cattle saleyards at South Grafton where Don once worked as an auctioneer:

On a nearby corner, in Ryan Street, there was a well-known pub: the Royal Hotel. Bruce Hudson reminded me that, one day, as a prank, a stockman had ridden a horse up the staircase, onto the first floor, and the publican found it impossible to persuade the animal to go back down again. (I can imagine my donkey in such a situation.) Finally, the only way of getting the horse back to ground level consisted of blindfolding it and dragging the poor animal down the stairs. As for the rumor that the stockman in question might have been my brother, I have no idea whatsoever...

I remember Don talking to me about the harsh cattle track along the Diamantina River, north of Birdsville, as if it were an awesome roadway to Paradise. This magnificent ballad by John Williamson is a subtle musical tribute to my brother's memory:



In the following photo showing Don at Wave Hill, the fellow in the white shirt is his friend Sabu Singh, born of Chinese and Aboriginal parents, who went on to become the manager of a large cattle station:

Click the above image to obtain the original scanned photo.

In the next photo, in black-and-white, Don is standing alongside a desolate Outback homestead:

Click the above image to obtain the original scanned photo.

In the following photo, Don is standing alongside his horse:

Click the above image to obtain the original scanned photo.

Finally, here's a photo of Don and our mother at South Grafton:

Click the above image to obtain the original scanned photo.

Donald Charles Skyvington [1941-2009]

Click the above image to obtain the original scanned photo.

After several decades of cerebral problems, difficult to elucidate and apparently impossible to treat, my brother Don died peacefully this evening in Brisbane, Queensland. During our childhood in South Grafton, New South Wales, Don was outstanding in many rural domains. From an early age, he was an exceptional bush horseman. Above all, he had an understanding of beef cattle that enabled him to be employed, when he was still a youth, as a professional auctioneer in the beef-cattle saleyards of South Grafton. It was there, unfortunately, when Don was still a child, that a thoughtless individual had slapped my brother's pony on the rump, causing it slip over and fall on Don's head, no doubt provoking internal lesions that were responsible for problems that reappeared constantly throughout his life. Much later, Don worked as a stockman with Aboriginal drovers on an Outback cattle station, in particularly rough conditions. In a profound Australian sense, Don was an eternal man of the bush, of a rare pioneering kind, like our father. In happier times, when I could communicate with him easily, we got along extremely well together. Among other things, shortly before I left Australia, we shared a flat in Sydney for a short time, and Don taught me how to play the cowboy guitar. A nurse who has been caring for my brother over the years told me recently that Don was very happy to tell people that his brother Billy had a family in France. Meanwhile, Don received regular visits from our three sisters: Anne (living in Coogee, whose evocation of our brother can be found here), Susan (Mullumbimby) and Jill (Woolgoolga).

For the rain never falls on the dusty Diamantina
And a drover finds it hard to change his mind
For the years have surely gone
Like the drays from Old Cork Station
And I won't be back till the drovin's done
— John Williamson

Several old photos of our brother can be found on this brief web page.

Not as stupid (maybe) as I seem to be

Although I've always been bored by the memorization of specific numbers (such as my height and weight, for example, or the distance from Gamone to Grenoble), I can handle arithmetic expertly. And mathematical concepts, too, I believe. I learned long ago, for example, that a sound arithmetic method for making sure that your future garden pergola is not crooked consists of calling upon the wisdom of an ancient Greek philosopher who demonstrated that you can't go wrong by using a triangle whose sides measure 3, 4 and 5 units. Incidentally, I feel sorry for people such as Bob's young companion Christine who needed to look up this kind of information in Wikipedia. For me, Euclid and Pythagoras—more than Aristotle and his dog logic [display]—have always been a basis of scientific culture.

Inundated by comical but alarming emails concerning the avalanche of age and imminent senility from my adolescent friend Bruce Hudson (who, to my way of thinking, is maybe a little too obsessed by this predicament, for reasons I ignore), I've started to worry at times about the state of my neurones. Above all, I would appear to be troubled by the manipulation of these nasty little brown Euro coins:

In a supermarket context, my ancient brain reacts instantaneously to a sum that ends with an odd figure such as, say, seventeen euros. I happen to be a crack at mental arithmetic, and I deduce rapidly that I would rather give the cashier exactly seventeen euros instead of receiving messy change from a larger sum. But that's where the state of my brain makes its ugly appearance. [My friend Bruce Hudson will appreciate this Alzheimer coming-out.] I start to drag a few brass coins out of my purse, and suddenly it's total confusion. Indeed, several things happen simultaneously. First, I'm incapable of supplying the exact coins that are required. Second (almost instantaneously), the cashier, realizing that he/she cannot count upon my exactness, starts to examine my purse, as if I were an aged moron, incapable of sticking a digit into any kind of hole... black, pecuniary, sexual or otherwise. Inevitably, I play the cashier's game, in accordance with the profile of the inarticulate dying specimen that he/she supposes me to be. That's to say, I emit a ridiculous but realistic statement of the kind: "I'm incapable of distinguishing between all these tiny euros." OK, that statement classifies me inexorably as an aged idiot. And I'm ready to be carted off in an ambulance to the nearest home for old-timers.

Reality is simpler, less dramatic. For years, I've used two pairs of glasses: one pair for driving, and the other for reading (as at present, in front of my computer screen). When I drive to a supermarket, I'm equipped with the first pair... which doesn't enable me to distinguish between small coins. If I were a serious customer (which I'm not), I would say to the cashier: "Please excuse me while I change glasses." But, all too often, these employees (particularly chez Leclerc) are delightfully sexy girls who are better observed, in the immediate, through wide-angle spectacles than through closeup lenses.

This morning, at the local Intermarché, I had the chance of being received by a dull male employee in a grey shirt, whose profile disappeared like camouflage into the background. When this male cashier started burrowing into my purse, I wished politely that he would fuck off... but he insisted upon helping me kindly as if I were an aged idiot. Exceptionally, I put on my reading glasses, and gave him exactly the coins that he needed.

Thanks to this guy, I now realize that I need to reexamine globally the domain of diminished eyesight, small coins and visually-delightful supermarket nymphs.

Sinister name

In the following NASA image, the dense white horizontal bars that look like gigantic clouds indicate the shifting location of the Intertropical Convergence Zone [ITCZ], which is the equatorial region where winds of the northern hemisphere clash with those of the southern hemisphere.

Colossal storms rage constantly in these skies, and it's possible that lightning from one such violent eruption resulted in the loss of Air France Flight 447 a few days ago.

Seafarers have always dreaded this zone, where the friendly trade winds often cancel one another, meaning that vessels get stuck there, often in a blanket of dense fog. To designate the unfriendly ITCZ in the Atlantic, between West Africa and the New World, French mariners use the everyday term pot (recipient, as in chamber pot). The zone is referred to as the pot au noir, which might be translated as the black hole. [Click here to see my recent blog article entitled Loose language.] In fact, the origin of the adjective "black" is particularly sinister. During the terrible era of the slave trade, vessels leaving Africa with their human cargoes were often held up in this zone, because of a lack of winds. In such cases, the captain often gave the order to throw overboard any slaves who happened to be sick, because it was considered that the vessel would not have sufficient supplies to keep such individuals alive up until their arrival in America. So, the ITCZ "pot" was black in the sense that the murky depths received the bodies of black-skinned slaves.

Our planet has indeed been an ugly place at times. It's still ugly, today, when a plane full of people disappears without an adieu.

Food time at Gamone

As usual, the following scene is a prelude to my regular bread-making:

That's to say, I never bake bread without a massive proportion of walnuts. Besides, it's a peaceful activity to sit down in the sun and crack open walnuts with a hammer.

Leaves of mint, parsley and coriander (from my small vegetable garden) are a prelude to the preparation of my favorite Thai dish of prawn rissoles. Sophia appreciates this operation, once every week or so, because she gets the prawn heads and shells.

The prawns and herbs look like this when they come out of the mixer:

Then I shape it up into a rectangle and cover it in bread crumbs:

I then leave it overnight in the refrigerator, and cook the rissoles the following day.

The cherry season is in full swing at Gamone. Sophia has developed a taste for this fruit, which she picks up beneath the trees. Usually, she doesn't even bother to spit the seeds out.

My strawberry patch is full of fruit. Curiously, Sophia is not at all attracted to them. I like to eat them straight after they're picked, at garden temperature, with sugar, a little lemon juice and sour cream.

You might have guessed that I eat well here at Gamone. And so does Sophia.

Digging up the past

In Australian military history, the battle at Fromelles, in northern France, on 19 July 1916 was particularly murderous. Before the end of that deadly day, 5,500 Australians were either killed, missing or wounded. In 2008, mass graves of several hundred Australian and British soldiers were discovered here. A few weeks ago, a project was initiated, aimed at excavating the remains and reburying them at an official site.

The following photos are by Michel Spingler (AP Photo). The first one shows French veterans of a later war waiting for the mechanical shovel to get into action, with green tarpaulins separating the scene from a Christian church in the background:

The second photo shows two Australian officers standing on the sidelines as the excavation gets under way:

To my mind, the operation that consists of digging up an amorphous mass of unidentifiable remains of victims of an absurd battle that took place 93 years ago, in order to rebury them elsewhere, is totally senseless, indeed surrealistic. The aims of this curious project do not happen to correspond to any of my personal convictions concerning the sacred nature of human life, the horrors of warfare, or the respect that our societies owe to the descendants of the victims. Are there still naive people who would like to imagine that the war of 1914-18 was, in some macabre sense, "great"? In any case, it is not by dislodging the unrecognizable remains of victims of an ancient war, whom none of us knew personally, that we shall reduce the risk of new conflicts. This energy should be devoted to more urgent challenges.

Garden under construction

Work is continuing on my future garden at Gamone, as seen here:

One of the eight symmetrical 2m x 2m plots is more or less finished. The planks are rough and cheap Douglas Fir, protected by a creosote product. They're partly sunk into the ground. I've placed a lavender plant in the middle of each plot, and sown assorted flowers around it. In the finished plot, I've planted thyme and sage, surrounded by fragments of maritime pine bark to stop weeds. In the photo, you can also see several elements of the future rose pergola, ready to be placed in an upright position in holes that will be filled with concrete. And here are some of my future rose trees, ready to be planted as soon as the pergola is erected:

They are ancient varieties: Albertine, Blush Rambler, Madame Alfred Carrière, Chevy Chase, Lykkefund and Paul Transom. To purchase them last week, my friends Tineke and Serge drove me down to a fabulous rose garden called Berty in Ardèche:

I've always had a few simple roses at Gamone:

A few days ago, I noticed that some of the rose trees I planted behind the house are now in bloom:

In the future garden in front of the house, I should be able to take care of my roses. I'm looking forward to being able to sit and read in my pergola, one of these days, in a haze of exotic fragrance. But there's still a lot of ground work to do before then.

Room for a pig

This is a corner of Gamone that I've never touched since moving into the house in 1994:

Once upon a time, when farmers produced their own pork, this was a pigpen. The door on the left, with hinges at the top, enabled the farmer to feed the animal. I've never wanted to change anything here, because I've always thought it looks just fine the way it is.

Reptile combat

Yesterday afternoon, when I spotted this motionless combat between a snake and a lizard in my garden, I couldn't quite distinguish the contours of the two reptiles, whose hues are similar.

When taking this photo with a long-focal lens, I was leaning over the stone wall in front of my house, whereas the reptiles were located three meters below me. It was late afternoon, and there wasn't much light at the place where the combat was taking place. The yellow cylindrical object that crosses the photo horizontally is a garden hose, exactly 2 cm in diameter. So, the snake and the lizard are quite small creatures. I tiptoed down into the garden, to get a closer look.

Here, we are looking directly at the snake's head and right eye. The snake has turned the lizard over (the yellow zone is the victim's throat), and is pinning it down at the level of the lizard's front "armpits", preventing it from scrambling away. At the instant I took this photo, I did not know whether the snake had already killed the lizard. In fact, the lizard was very much alive, because I now see that the snake had probably not yet got around to planting its tiny fangs in the lizard.

Since the scene was still totally motionless, I decided to get some action by nudging the garden hose. The snake immediately wriggled away from the lizard, which promptly scampered up the stone wall to safety. Having been brought up in rural environment in Australia where the golden rule consists of killing any serpent you encounter, I took a swing or two at the snake with a garden fork. I remember thinking that it was quite unacceptable that the snake should attack one of the nice little lizards that I love to watch when they're basking in the sun. Then, all of a sudden, before delivering a fatal blow, I said to myself: "The poor little snake needs to eat. First, I've deprived him of his meal. And now, I'm trying to kill him." What dastardly behavior on my behalf! Like Abraham hearing God tell him that he should spare the life of Isaac, I held my arm back, and watched the serpent wiggle into the weeds. Back in his hole on the slopes, I can imagine the little snake telling his family that there's a psychopathic protector of lizards up in the garden at Gamone...

And what kind of a snake was it? I've often joked about the criterion for distinguishing between a venomous viper and a harmless grass or water snake, because the experts tell us that you simply have to look the reptile in the eyes and examine the shape of its pupils. Easier said than done... unless you've got a long-focal lens and Photoshop. The pupil of a viper is a vertical slit, whereas that of a non-venomous reptile is round. Here's a closeup view of the eye of the harmless little fellow that I chased away from my garden:

If ever he's brave enough to drop by again, I'll seek forgiveness for my brutality by helping him to catch a lizard.

Loose language

A moment ago, in the French press, I jumped to a one-word headline: Earthquake. I imagined immediately that the ground had probably shaken once again in Italy. No, a dull journalist had simply drawn this term out of his empty head in an article on yesterday's unexpected grounding of Rafael Nadal at Roland-Garros.

Back in the old days, when writers could throw in expressions from the Bible or great authors such as Shakespeare, they were on firm ground. No reader is going to raise questions about the veracity of dust to dust, ashes to ashes, say, or to be or not to be. But nowadays, with culture and language permeated by science, it can be difficult for a journalist to keep his head above water.

Among the greatly misused scientific metaphors, I would say that "Big Bang" deserves first prize. When the English astronomer Fred Hoyle invented the expression in connection with a cosmological theory with which he himself did not agree, he needed a name for an absolutely unique "event" that was totally unlike anything that had ever happened before... since nothing had ever happened "before", because there could be no "before" with respect to this weird happening. The cosmological Big Bang wasn't in any way whatsoever an explosion, so it didn't really "bang". Besides, it wasn't big at all. At the singular instant zero, the so-called ylem—or primordial egg out of which our cosmos was about to spring—was unimaginably tiny and unimaginably dense. Consequently, it's silly to hear journalists evoking latter-day "big bangs" in domains such as economics and politics. Such usage is more than a matter of using bad metaphors; it's an insult to wisdom.

In the same domain, most metaphorical uses of "black hole" evoke what the French refer to as a Turkish toilet: the sort of place where you must be careful not to drop your car keys, otherwise you'll be hitching a ride home. In reality (if we can talk realistically about black holes), they're a far more subtle cosmological concept than a kind of giant sewage tank in the heavens.

One of the silliest metaphorical blunders from a scientific viewpoint consists of using "quantum leap" to designate something akin to Zorro and his steed jumping over the Niagara Falls. In formulating the theory that electromagnetic radiation was quantized into discrete chunks, Max Planck calculated that the energy associated with an electron when it performs a quantum leap from one orbiting shell in an atom to another is infinitesimally small. Not nearly enough energy to prevent a tennis ball from leaping onto the wrong side of the line. Let's hope, in any case, that the psychological shock of yesterday's big bang at Roland-Garros doesn't drag Rafael Nadal into a black hole of despair.

Getting sex right

I don't claim to know the sense of the concept of "getting sex right". We humans, like many living creatures (those that exploit sex to procreate), have always been obliged to take sex seriously. A priest, accompanying tourists to the Holy Sepulcher, was faced with a naive question: "So, the tomb's empty?" He replied: "Madame, if He's in, then we're out." Similarly, in a fabulous creationist Procreation Park, in the midst of joyful evocations of rustic Neanderthals getting sodomized by randy dinosaurs, we might imagine a profound question from a troubled visitor: "Is sex serious?" The guide, if he were truthful, would be obliged to reply: "If sex stops, then so do we."

On the other hand, I know what it means to get sex wrong... and that's apparently what has been happening for decades, according to a damning report, in Catholic-run Irish institutes for children. The situation involved sexual abuse that was so disgusting that I refrain from evoking it explicitly. If you happen to be interested in Ireland (for genealogical reasons, say), I advise you to touch this sad land (which I have never visited), like I do, with antiseptic gloves, with a long pole, or maybe solely through memories... by means of the Internet.

Soon, in a final chapter of my document called A Little Bit of Irish, I'll insert the following anecdote, which I've often related to various friends in emails. Long ago, in Paris, I got to know a charming Irish girl named Marie. This happened during a period of my life in Paris when I used to spend my evenings playing the guitar and singing folksongs in a café called Le Petit Gavroche. I seem to recall that Marie had probably married a French guy, but I forget the details. In any case, during my short but delightful relationship with Marie, she talked to me a lot about her home land, since she realized that I was intrigued by the Ireland of my ancestors. One day, lovely Marie decided to teach me a wonderful lesson, which she prefaced, almost solemnly, in the following terms (approximately, as well as I recall her words, and supplemented by facts):

William, I'm going to give you a little novel: The Poor Mouth. It's the English translation of an Irish novel, An Béal Bocht, written in Gaelic by an Irish journalist named Miles na Gopaleen, who calls himself Flann O'Brien in English. Knowing you a little, William, I'm fairly sure that you'll be thrilled by this little novel. In my opinion, William, you happen to have an Irish sense of humour, and I'm convinced that you'll find The Poor Mouth one of the funniest stories you've ever heard. But I'm not giving you this little novel to amuse you. I want you to read it for far more serious reasons. This novel will tell you, in a way, the story of your ancestors, William. You don't know exactly who exactly these ancestors were, and where they lived. Besides, you'll never be able to know such things. For all traces of them have disappeared forever. Your Irish ancestors have left no records, and their places have disappeared. But The Poor Mouth will tell you exactly how they lived, and how they thought. The novel will tell you everything you need to know about the spirit of your ancestors. One final word: If you're sensitive to The Poor Mouth, as I predict, I hope you'll never make the mistake of wasting your time and energy by setting foot in modern Ireland. That would be totally unnecessary, and it could only have a negative effect upon all that you've learnt from the novel by Miles na Gopaleen.

Marie was a prophet. I lost track of her. But I read the amazing novel. And I learned the nature of my ancestors. I've avoided visiting modern Ireland, because we descendants have nothing to learn there (on the contrary)... because our likes will not be there again.

Ascension

Today is a public holiday in the historically Catholic but formally laic republic of France. Why? Well, believe it or not, we're celebrating an archaic act of magic. At an unspecified date during the first century of the so-called Christian era, a man in flesh and blood named Jesus, who had been recently nailed to a cross until he was assumed to be lifeless, suddenly took off skywards, like a hot-air balloon.

I shall always remember the lovely image of my future wife, when we were innocent students (?) at the Cité universitaire in Paris, trying to communicate with an English friend who couldn't understand why the French nation went suddenly dead for a day, for no obvious reason, in the middle of May. Christine attempted to use her elementary English (which has improved a lot since then) to tell the fellow that France was celebrating a magnificent ascension that took place long ago, but the uncouth Pom simply couldn't understand what she was trying to say. So, Christine turned on her miming talents, and she fluttered her arms in a vain attempt to inform the English numbskull what the sacred aeronautical Ascension was all about. I've often imagined that, after Christine's convincing demonstration of a holy bird taking off from the gardens of the Collège Franco-Britannique in Paris, our English friend no doubt became an awed monk, and spent the rest of his life in a state of Christian sublimity, maybe in charge of the pope's private jet. I really must ask my friend Graeme Henderson, specialized in aeronautical history [display], to look into that question...

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...

Speaker to stop speaking

I don't know whether the Poms actually invented perks for politicians, but they seem to have brought it to a fine art. For example: thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money claimed for the cleaning of one's moat!

As they say in the classics, it's a bloody crying pity that, were it not for a chance investigation, this droopy old Glaswegian named Michael Martin could have carried on eternally walking ceremoniously into the House of Commons behind the woman carrying a mace. He must have gone on a gigantic ego trip every time he waddled in this way into the chamber. Silly old bugger! He should have kept a check on expenses. It's all very well to waddle, but somebody has to weigh the wealth of all those honorable gentlemen sitting in the Commons, and often claiming uncommon personal benefits. And this was Michael Martin's job. As things stand, he's obliged to resign.

The web reveals outrageous financial benefits accorded to British members of parliament. Michael Martin grew up in harsh conditions. Why didn't he remain close to his origins, instead of strutting around in London in golden robes? I have neither pity nor nostalgia for archaic Poms who see themselves as historical fat cats. I'm tremendously proud to be a citizen of the French République!

Hang-gliding history

For years, I've accompanied efforts aimed at demonstrating that the fabulous phenomenon of hang gliding was born in Grafton NSW.

Click the photo to access the John Dickenson website.

Recent experimental tests in England confirm that the famous wing designed by John Dickenson—built with plastic banana bags and towed by a speedboat—could indeed have flown and glided. In the context of the history of Grafton, this is a wonderful story. I shall continue to publish news in this domain, as it emerges... thanks primarily to Graeme Henderson.