Almost like spring

The sun was shining, yesterday, at Gamone. It was almost like a warm spring day. So, I went out walking with the dogs.

As usual, Fitzroy takes advantage of every opportunity to joust with his senior companion. As for Sophia, she remains alert and slim as a result of all this unsolicited exercise.

Fitzroy was visibly impressed by the cascades in Gamone Creek.

I had some work to do there. Just below my house, the creek runs through a big pipe under the road. A fortnight ago, when a thick blanket of snow covered every detail of the landscape at Gamone, the municipal snow plow appears to have bumped into a few big blocks of stone that formed an irregular wall around the upper extremity of this pipe. Broken fragments rolled over into the hole in the creek bed where the underground pipe starts, blocking it. I first noticed this problem a few days ago, when creek water started running over the road instead of through the pipe. Yesterday afternoon, I decided that the best solution would be to solve the problem myself, instead of waiting for the municipality (made aware of the situation) to get into action. It's amazing how a few chains, a block-and-tackle and a conveniently-located tree can be used to dislodge huge blocks of stone. (I believe the Ancient Egyptians made a discovery of that kind, long before I did.)

The water is now cascading perfectly, once again, down Gamone Creek.

Wiped-out generation

In my recent post entitled Latest deductions from Skyvington research [display], I explained that I've been grouping together all the Mormon references concerning surnames such as Skeffington, Skevington, Skivington, etc, and painstakingly sorting them by year. The immediate goal of all this work is to home in on individuals who might have been the immediate ancestors of my earliest clearly-identified patriarch: George Skivington, born in Belchalwell (Dorset) in 1670. I've often imagined that there might have been some kind of rupture not long before the birth of this "Belchalwell George" (as I call him). On the one hand, George's parents had no doubt moved to Dorset from a neighboring region. And, in so doing, they had probably replaced the old Skevington spelling by Skivington. Since George was a relatively uncommon given name in 17th-century England, I would imagine that my "Belchalwell George" probably descended from a family context in which that name existed already. Now, that set of likely constraints helps to narrow down the domain in which I'm searching.



In my article of 15 August 2007 entitled Midland ancestors [display], I spoke of my excursion to a charming little town called Turvey in Bedfordshire, which was the home of a big family named Skevington in the second half of the 16th century. I've always been persuaded that these folk were the ancestors of my "Belchalwell George", and this is my main line of research at present. Besides, there were Turvey individuals named George Skevington. Finally, at the end of my recent processing, when I was able to sort all the Skevington records by date, I was surprised to discover a big packet of Skevington burial records in Turvey for the year 1608. It's a finding that would have never struck me previously, when I was dealing with records in a casual manner. It was only when I had grouped together all existing records, and sorted them, that this observation suddenly hit me in the face.


Clearly, for almost an entire generation of a family to be wiped out in the space of a single year, there was only one possible explanation: the Black Death, or bubonic plague. I spoke already, in my article entitled Dressing up [display], of the beak outfit worn by plague physicians in the 17th and 18th centuries.

I have reasons to believe that this plague calamity played a role in causing a handful of young Skevington survivors to move away from Turvey, maybe down towards Dorset. And, in so doing, their links with the past were no doubt weakened. In the turmoil of this upheaval, it would not have been unusual that the spelling of our ancestral name should change, in certain cases, from Skevington to Skivington.

Flood tourists

Peter Nicholson has kindly allowed me to reproduce the following cartoon which appeared in The Australian a few days ago:

We see here the wet and windswept lady Anna Bligh terminating her speech about the legendary toughness of Queenslanders [display]. Behind her, a tourist from Canberra, Julia Gillard, is sticking her massive nose into a camera. The other day, when Gillard loitered alongside Bligh at a press conference, the prime minister looked like a decorative table-lamp in an old-fashioned drawing room. She was posed there, waiting to be turned on, if ever anybody thought that her presence might light up the scene. But nobody seemed to think so. As for Kevin Rudd, I did in fact see video images of him wandering around in the water with a suitcase on his head, and mumbling something about lending a hand to students.

Here's another of Peter Nicholson's touristic visions of Brisbane:

Meanwhile, down in New South Wales, the flooded town of Grafton (my birthplace) received the visit of an American tourist, the premier Kristina Keneally.

Click the photo to access an article on this subject in The Daily Examiner by local journalist Terry Deefholts, who reached the rather obvious conclusion that the premier's excursion was a "public relations stunt". In any case, we could hardly expect any of the Anna Bligh style of rhetoric from such a mediocre woman. Terry Deefholts attempted vainly to persuade Keneally to talk about the notorious local road that I mentioned in my article entitled Highway called Pacific [display]. Her parting gibe to the insistent journalist was particularly condescending: "You could live in Sydney, you’ve got enough grunt for it." Those words sound like something from an old American movie: "What's a smart guy like you doing in this one-horse town?"

The following photo by Lynne Mowbray shows Terry (in the boat) accompanying the editor David Bancroft in the delivery of their newspaper to residents of flooded Maclean.

Another of their many flood photos caught my attention:

The two drovers taking cattle to higher grounds could have come straight out of my childhood memories of floods at South Grafton.

Mediterranean revolution!

It has happened, at last, in Tunisia!

Nobody was expecting that things would unfold so rapidly…


Eva Joly has just requested the financial freezing of the assets of Ben Ali and his family.

Dawkins talks to us informally

This is a great video. Towards the end, we discover Richard Dawkins reposing on a sofa in front of a fireplace and reading out his hate mail, full of four-letter words and all sorts of marvelous expletives. It's amusing entertainment!



After the entertainment, I encourage you to return to the opening questions in order to fully appreciate Richard's amazing didactic skills, particularly when he explains his major reason for believing in Darwinian evolution. There's a wonderful afterthought. If a divine creator had indeed planted, in myriad animals, all the genes that find there these days, then it could be truly claimed that God had manifested a devilish desire to trick us. If this were so, then what a bastard!

Let's get aboard a dream

Click the image to access a video that presents a project for the construction of a luxury liner that would be named France.

The project is the brainchild of a young Parisian entrepreneur named Didier Spade, whose ancestors used to build luxurious furniture for great ocean liners such as the former France (now demolished). Click the photo to visit the website of Spade's Paris Yacht Marina.

The people that they breed tough

Since March 2009, Anna Bligh has been the state premier of Queensland. Although this has been a prestigious title and task (she's one of the rare Australian politicians who doesn't seem to be playing a role when wearing a worker's hat), I'm tempted to say that, up until now, she has been "merely" the state premier. In the space of a few terrifying days, as flood waters covered Queensland and moved into Brisbane, Anna Bligh has become a stateswoman. In her words today, there were overtones of Winston Churchill in May 1940, when he said to the House of Commons: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

My grandfather and my father, who were both Queenslanders in a way, would have surely been moved by Bligh's words, as I was:

As we weep for what we have lost
And as we grieve for family and friends
And we confront the challenge that is before us,
I want us to remember who we are.
We are Queenslanders.
We're the people that they breed tough, north of the border.
We're the ones that they knock down, and we get up again.
I said earlier this week that this weather may break our hearts,
and it is doing that. But it will not break our will.
And, in the coming weeks and the coming months,
we are going to prove that beyond any doubt.
Together we can pull through this,
and that's what I'm determined to do.
With your help, we can achieve it.



The heroic spirit of Anna Bligh's emotional declaration reminds me of the poem Australia by A D Hope, which has provided me with a title, They Sought the Last of Lands, for my monograph on my paternal ancestors.

They call her a young country, but they lie:

She is the last of lands, the emptiest,

A woman beyond her change of life, a breast

Still tender but within the womb is dry.

Without songs, architecture, history:

The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,

Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,

The river of her immense stupidity

Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.

In them at last the ultimate men arrive

Whose boast is not: 'we live' but 'we survive',

A type who will inhabit the dying earth.

Talking of "immense stupidity", I hope that Anna Bligh's authentic words will replace the ridiculous slogan that Queenslanders have got into the habit of throwing around: "Beautiful today, perfect tomorrow."

ADDENDUM: I attempted to bring the present blog post to the attention of The Australian (primarily for reasons that might be designated as poetic) through a comment to a relevant article on Anna Bligh. Besides, it was normal, out of elementary politeness, that I indicate my use of their video of the famous Bligh declaration. Unfortunately, my comment has not been published. This is not the first time that I've noticed a kind of xenophobic (technical?) rejection, on the part of The Australian, to comments from beyond the borders of our sunburnt country… notably from France. What the fuck!

Two singers, two different versions of a song

Here's the original version of Fuck You from the US singer whose stage name is Cee Lo Green:



Click the following image of a 22-year-old student named Anna to watch her performing a sign-language version of this song in playback:

Apparently Anna is not at all speech-impaired or deaf. She simply decided to learn sign language as a personal endeavor, to enhance her communication skills and to broaden her contacts with others.

Radio news on Australian flooding

Thanks to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, excellent media coverage of the flooding is available here in France.
[Click the banner to access their streamed site.]

We're hearing an awesome new expression, "evacuation centers", which didn't exist back in my childhood days in Australia. In general, the news is reassuring in the sense that the authorities, citizens and media people all appear to be acting calmly and firmly, with no signs of excessive consternation or panic. The only thing that surprises me in the many flood images I've seen is that people often appear to be half-naked, barefoot and generally "under-dressed" for such an emergency. Why don't they at least wear rubber boots (to prevent them wounding their feet in the muddy waters)?

BREAKING NEWS: By tomorrow morning (Wednesday, local time)—according to a forecast in Tuesday's Daily Examiner—the swollen Clarence will have reached a maximum height of 7 meters at Grafton, which is just 1.2 meters beneath the top of the levee at Prince Street. Everything should be OK as long as there's no more rain, and the embankment holds.

Queensland tragedy

French TV and the Internet enable me to follow closely the terrible tragedy that is unfolding in Queensland. Everything seems to be happening on a vastly greater and more violent scale than anything I recall from my childhood experience of floods on the Clarence River at Grafton. The case of Toowoomba is terrifying.

On the French TV news this evening, we saw a video of a half-naked half-frozen guy being dragged to safety after hanging onto a tree.

One of the most frightening aspects of this whole tragedy is the fact that the waters are likely to hang around for quite some time. That would appear to be a completely new aspect of flooding in Australia.

I can't help wondering whether the state and federal authorities are capable of handling this disaster in an optimal manner...

Isn't it just loo-vely!

Some people can get infatuated about the most unexpected themes. Just click the door and you can step inside.

There are some fine sites in France that this refined lady should visit, or at least admire from the outside. Here's a historic place in Grenoble:

At Gamone, the nec plus ultra (as far as I'm concerned) is pissing in the open air while admiring the landscape. For indoor operations, my upstairs loo is positioned in such a way that you can enjoy a magnificent view of the slopes on the other side of Gamone Creek, crowned by the cliffs of Presles.

New bird will soon be flying in

Although I'm not an obsessive tweeter, I remind readers that you can communicate with me at the address

@Skyvington

Yesterday, I was amused to find that I could use Twitter to comment upon the poor communications of a senior French political figure (the Socialist mayor of Nantes) concerning the death of two French hostages in Niger… and receive a friendly reaction a minute later.

Consequently, one must be extremely cautious of the power of such a communications device.

Crosshairs

In my recent article entitled Shot stupidly for truffles [display], I evoked the banal subject of rural people here in France who own shotguns. Over the last week, I've returned to the interesting challenge of writing an autobiographical document tracing my personal itinerary since my initial contacts with computer programming, as an adolescent in Australia, up to my present infatuation with the vast domain of DNA. (This is the document that used to be called Digital Me. It now bears a nicer title, which I'm keeping private for the moment, while retaining the former title as its public code name.) In the context of my childhood ramblings, I well remember the everyday phenomenon of guns. My father had the habit of shooting rabbits with a rifle every now and again, while my uncles used a shotgun to kill ducks in their swamp. That was all there was to it at Waterview. The last bushrangers had disappeared a century earlier, and I have no personal recollections of anybody in my adolescent context ever using a gun as an offensive weapon.

In the USA, the relationship with firearms appears to be quite different to anything I've ever experienced in Australia or France. It's utterly unbelievable that, in March 2010, a website associated with Sarah Palin could react to the Democrats' legislation on health care by publishing the following map, in which weaponry crosshairs indicate places where Palin's political accomplices felt that action was needed.

Then Palin expressed herself on Twitter in an even more explicit style:

Commonsense Conservatives & Lovers of America:
Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!

In the case of the guy who has just shot a Democratic personality in Arizona, I sense already that smart lawyers will certainly end up demonstrating that he was demented, and that his act had nothing to do with political hatred. Nevertheless, certain folk in God's Own Country have weird and dangerous ways of expressing themselves "politically".


BREAKING NEWS: A positive vision of the USA reappears rapidly through the murky stuff. Admire the reassuring professional style of this Tucson surgeon:



Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is married to the US astronaut Mark Kelly.

Latest deductions from Skyvington research

As every genealogical adept knows, the quality of the Mormon IGI database [International Genealogical Index] is truly amazing… particularly when we realize that the faith-based research efforts of the members of the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are motivated by beliefs that most of us look upon as totally ridiculous. Insofar as I see things in this way, should I therefore consider myself as a perfidiously dishonest double-dealer when using the Mormons' data to pursue my own kind of research?

No, not at all. If each citizen, in his daily preoccupations and activities, were to make a point of refraining from exploiting resources that had been created or obtained in ways that didn't necessarily conform to his personal convictions, then he would be condemned to sitting passively on his backside and waiting for events in the world to metamorphose magically into his ideal vision of reality.

There has always, however, been a curious weakness in the style of presentation of IGI entries. [I haven't checked whether this weakness has been corrected in the latest version of their search tool.]

The problem—unless I'm dumb—is that it doesn't seem to be possible to obtain a list of all entries sorted by date. This was annoying in that I wanted to know at what dates we start to find church records for individuals named Skeffington, Skevington, Skivington, etc. So, I decided to play around manually with the various Mormon IGI entries, using the excellent BBEdit text editor, with the intention of processing and examining all the available data... which has taken much time. My findings are summarized in the following chart:

After primitive Latin-inspired versions of the name—such as Sciftitone (Domesday Book of 1086) and Sceftinton (Leicestershire Survey of 1125 and Leicestershire Pipe Rolls of 1165 and 1192)—the earliest "modern" spelling was undoubtedly Skeffington, which appears in a Mormon IGI record dated 1315. The spelling with "ev" instead of "eff" appears a century and a half later, in 1478, and the "e" vowel is replaced by an "i" for the first time in 1563. The respective volumes of the various spellings present in the Mormon IGI are no doubt significant in a rough way. As you can see, there's a large package of Skevington entries, particularly for the 17th and 18th centuries, whereas the volume of Skivington spellings remains relatively low.

At a concrete level, what these deductions mean is that I might expect to find a Y-chromosome match, one of these days, with a fellow whose surname is Skevington. As for a match with a Skeffington, I've already more-or-less ruled out that likelihood, because I'm convinced that all the ancient male lines of that name ran aground (if I can be allowed to express myself in that fuzzy manner). In any case, for the moment, I would appear to be the only male individual with a Skeffington-based surname who has had his DNA tested.

Natural catastrophes over the last year

A few days ago, Channel 2 of the national French TV system aired an awesome program on natural catastrophes that have taken place all over the planet during the last twelve months. The splendid documentary by David Korn-Brzoza was based upon a simple but brilliant idea. He presented with few comments, month by month, the most spectacular and deadly catastrophes of the year 2010.

In some cases, such as the earthquake in Haïti, we remember above all the huge death toll.

In other cases, such as the Icelandic volcano whose smoke blocked international air traffic, we recall extraordinary images and an exotic geographical name that few people could pronounce.

In one case—the fires in Russia—the catastrophe concerned such a vast territory that nobody knew how to handle it. The same could be said in the case of the explosion of an oil platform off the US coast. If the year had not ended already, the great flooding in Queensland would have surely deserved a spot in this tragic documentary.

In the context of this kind of movie, scriptwriters are wont to get carried away with the poetic theme of the colossal inhuman forces wielded by our planet Earth, in the face of which we remain almost powerless. In the Korn-Brzoza documentary, fortunately, there was no insipid poetry, but rather a constant series of questions concerning the alarming hypothesis that global warming caused by human activities might be largely responsible for much of this suffering and terror. I find it appalling that certain bone-headed observers (often calling themselves "professors" of this or that) persist in rejecting this hypothesis.

Learning a thing or two about horses

Yesterday morning, as planned, my Welsh neighbor Will Walters came down here from Presles and we spent a good part of the day enlarging the electrified paddock for my donkeys and his horses. While awaiting his arrival, I distributed fragments of stale bread to the animals. While doing so, I became alarmed by the behavior of the black horse, which appeared to be exceptionally lethargic. To my inexperienced eye, the animal was drowsy. Instead of eating bread, it simply rolled over onto its side as if it were weak and sick. I was most alarmed, because I had the sudden impression that the horse might be agonizing… maybe poisoned by toxic weeds, or something like that. I put a bucket of water in front of its nose, but the animal continued to drowse, as if in a troubled coma. I tried several times to phone Will, urgently, to inform him of what was happening. Thankfully, he arrived soon after in his big 4x4 vehicle, with his three dogs (Fitzroy's family). I yelled out to him to come quickly, because I was persuaded that his beautiful black horse was on the verge of death.

"Let me look into his eyes," said Will, calmly, "and I'll tell you whether there's anything wrong." He did so, promptly, and the horse even got up onto its four legs. Will is one of those rare individuals who knows how to whisper into the ears of horses, and see what's in their eyes. He started to laugh. "William, the horse was simply sleeping. Deeply and serenely, in a state of bliss." When I pressed him to explain, Will adopted the stance of a professor of veterinary science… then his clear and concise explanations enabled me to learn a thing or two about these animals. "Horses have always belonged to the category of prey rather than predators. So, they sleep standing up, while locking their knee bones so that they won't fall over. In that way, if a predator such as a saber-toothed tiger were to arrive on the scene, the horse would wake up instantly and gallop away to save its skin." For the moment, I couldn't quite see what Will was trying to tell me, because I had been convinced that his glorious black horse had been in a state of somnolence, on the verge of death. Will carried on his explanations. "On rare occasions, a horse can find itself in an exceptionally positive and totally comfortable frame of mind. This can happen when it has eaten to its heart's content, and when it's located in a totally friendly and reassuring atmosphere, surrounded by familiar entities. In such an exceptional situation, instead of dozing while remaining upright, the horse is capable of suddenly lying down on its side and falling into a joyful state of sleep… which is exactly what just happened to the black animal. In other words, William, the horse was simply expressing its joy at being here in the friendly surroundings of Gamone."

This morning, observing the black horse grazing contentedly in a sea of apples, I thought about Will's wise words. Later on in the day, the two horses stood calmly upon the slopes of Gamone and gazed down at me as if this were their new home… as it is, for the moment.

I'm looking forward to the next time one of these huge beasts rolls over onto its side and falls asleep.

Shot stupidly for truffles

Rural people in the nearby Drôme region are upset by a regrettable incident that occurred recently on the property of a producer of truffles… which, as everybody knows, are a variety of underground fungus, used in fine cooking, which can be sold for a high price. On the other hand, a producer of truffles doesn't necessarily become a millionaire, because these fungi remain rare and hard to find.

A local 32-year-old producer, fed up with repeated thefts of his precious truffles, went out in the night, armed with a pump-action shotgun, to make sure there were no intruders. Suddenly, in the shadows, he saw an individual who appeared to be wielding some kind of weapon. So, he fired twice in the direction of the shadowy form. Alas, he soon realized that he had just killed an intruder who was wielding nothing more dangerous than a small trowel used to unearth truffles. In other words, he had in fact come face-to-face with a truffle-thief, but the killing of this defenseless intruder with two cartridges fired from a pump-action shotgun amounted to premeditated murder. At that moment, the killer made a second stupid mistake. He asked his father to hide the pump-action weapon, and to replace it by an ordinary hunting shotgun. When the gendarmes arrived on the scene, they lost no time in concluding that the killing had been carried out by means of a pump-action gun, rather than the standard gun that the alleged murderer was holding. Furthermore, tests are being performed to ascertain that traces of the victim's DNA can be found on the trowel, to make sure that this tool wasn't simply placed subsequently alongside the corpse of the victim. So, the accused man will be tried for murder, while his father will be charged with deliberate modification of a crime scene. Insofar as the 43-year-old victim was reputed to be a regular truffle thief, all the local folk are on the side of the producer, as is usual in this kind of rural affair.

I've been using the French-language pages of Wikipedia to examine the precise legislation concerning the ownership and use of a pump-action shotgun. In this context, I was intrigued to come upon this photo of a US soldier in Iraq in 2004 armed with a variant of the famous pump-action Mossberg 500 shotgun, manufactured in Connecticut.

Today, I don't have details on the kind of weapon used by the truffles producer in France, but it may well have been a less expensive 12-gauge arm, based upon the soldier's weapon (and superficially identical to a casual observer), known as the Mossberg Maverick 88. This easy-to-use pump-action shotgun (which I know quite well), manufactured in Texas and popular in France, is blue-finished, with a synthetic stock (rather than wood) and a cross-bolt safety lock. Ownership of this self-protection arm (which can be loaded with rubber-ball cartridges, nevertheless lethal at close range) is legal in France, but it goes without saying that you don't go out parading at night with such a device… and you don't point it and fire at anything that moves in the dark.

Once the barking of dogs indicates the presence of intruders, the general idea (which I've rehearsed mentally on countless occasions) is that you immediately phone the gendarmes by means of your mobile, while using an upper-floor lamp to cast light upon the visitors. Then, after a brief but all-important act known as a verbal injunction (sommation in French), you can start firing rubber balls, noisily but calmly, with both your bedside pistol and pump-action shotgun, above the heads of the supposed intruders. Here at Gamone, for example, that would be quite fun. (I'm joking, of course. I don't wish to find myself in a shoot-out reminiscent of the Clarke brothers in Braidwood.) But you must never aim to kill. Elementary, my dear Skyvington...

In a totally different context, over the last few days, a delightfully-crazy second-rate French comedian named Michaël Youn has been on the front pages of French news media because his Parisian apartment was robbed recently, and even his cherished Hummer was included in the stolen objects. It appears that this guy talked so much on the social media (Twitter and Facebook) about himself and his Parisian residence that it was almost inevitable that thieves might decide to pay him a visit. What is far more surprising (indeed almost unbelievable) is that the comedian used these same social media to ask the thieves to kindly return all his personal stuff, including the Hummer… and they did! For the moment, I'm not at all sure that I should believe this tale, which sounds like a publicity stunt. On the other hand, in the case of anybody who has got into the habit of talking a lot about himself on the Internet, I think it's vital to weigh one's words, and to transmit significant messages... which is what I've tried to do, between the lines, in the present blog post.

Efficient fake

I like this trivial news item, which provides us with a fine demonstration of innovative imagination and private enterprise. Down in the city of Fréjus on the French Riviera, a retired gentleman was fed up with motorists disregarding the speed limit on the bend in the road where his house is located. There's a sign stating that the limit is 30 km/hour, but most drivers dash around the corner at more than twice that speed. And there are never any gendarmes at this spot to catch speeders. So, the guy decided to take the matter into his own hands. He did this by building an empty wooden box that he set up on his front fence.

At a glance, it looks a little like the familiar radar machines installed on the edge of highways.

But the rectangular openings are quite different, and the black-and-yellow stripes around the edge of the empty box are not slanted. The fake radar nevertheless had the desired effect. Vehicles now rounded the corner at 20 km/hour. The local gendarmes were impressed by the efficiency of this device, but they could hardly be expected to condone its use, particularly since many tourists were now stopping their cars on the corner to take photos of the fake radar. So, they asked the fellow to remove it.

Meanwhile, the authorities have promised to ask the gendarmes to increase their checks for speeding offenders at this spot. And there's already talk about placing a genuine radar machine on this corner.

What keeps me at Gamone

It's dark and damp here, but the daylight arrives daily. I persist in loving Gamone because of the persistent abstract force of this property, which you might like to designate as "energy".

I worship the great goddess Gamone—day in, day out—just as I celebrate constantly the Cournouze. Don't bore me with stupid questions in this domain. If you must know: Gamone is indeed divine, and the Cournouze (like the Holy Ghost) is her messenger, her spirit.

Watery but stony memories

Yesterday, exceptionally (largely by personal inadvertence), I happened to be invited to two fine dinners: first, at noon, by Will Walters and Sylvie Rozans at Presles.

Then, in the evening, I was invited by Serge Bellier and Tineke Bot at Choranche. In fact, it turned out to be too much… and I was ashamed to admit gastronomic defeat before Tineke's fabulous truffle-based dishes. The most marvelous aspect of the first rendezvous, in the frighteningly Siberian conditions of Presles, was the encounter of Fitzroy's family of Border Collies.

Returning home in the damp dark, I tried to unfathom sympathetic but disappearing Internet transmissions from my sister Anne Skyvington in Australia… who finally explained this mess, curiously, by saying that she hoped for a "spiritual awakening" on my my part. As if this were not enough, a friendly fellow took offense at my blog article in which I referred to the alleged Shroud of Turin as bullshit… which remains, of course, my (perfectly uninteresting) opinion.

In the midst of all this, there were nice friends who happened to express their agreement with the most fabulous "scientific" imposture of recent times in France: the suggestion by Jacques Benveniste that water might retain some kind of "memory". This notion is so empty and totally crazy—and rejected by the entire scientific community in France and elsewhere— that I don't wish to waste time talking about it.

I dare not mention what my former God-fearing friend Natacha (with whom I no longer have any significant communications) might or might believe about all these hallucinations. To reply to all these apparent friends who surround me, I would need to get down on my knees and crawl up the stony parched track to Lourdes. I wonder at times whether they might be bearing water or rather whips…

Meanwhile, moved and immensely motivated by this strangely huge wall of misunderstanding (which could well mean, sadly, that I have fuck-all to do with the idea—in permanent question—of residing here in the wilderness of Gamone), I'm suddenly and intensely motivated by the idea of getting stuck into (at last) my autobiography: Digital Me.

What can we talk about in 2011?

Critics might say that my last blog post, entitled Highway called Pacific [display], concerning an ordinary road accident in Australia, belongs to the category of things we write about when we're not smart enough to imagine any better subjects. Maybe that criticism is justified… although I hasten to reassure my readers that I never feel as if I'm running out of stuff to talk about in my Antipodes blog. On the contrary, the constant problem consists of determining to what extent my readers will, or will not, be interested by my reflections on the various domains that concern me: life at Gamone, computing (my life-long profession), the Richard Dawkins world-view, genealogy, creative writing, etc.

In France, journalism on a par with my blog article about the tanker accident on the Pacific Highway, is designated as "crushed dog" reporting. Young journalists, upon joining a rural newspaper, are asked to cover events such as dogs that got run over on the local roads… and, by extension, all sorts of local accidents. I hasten to add that my Pacific Highway article deals with the spectacular death, not of an animal, but of an anonymous truck-driver. And, when his identity emerges, I would like to mention it on an updated version of my blog post. His accident affects me in that he died, at the commands of his B-double monster, on a rural road—described stupidly as a "highway"—that is strictly fit (by today's safety standards) for bikes only.

Meanwhile, there's another animal that often jumps onto the pages of newspapers at this season every year, when most honest Christian citizens are gorging themselves with exotic foodstuffs and getting drunk. The animal in question is the Loch Ness Monster.

This fabulous beast spends most of its prehistoric time down at the bottom of the dark waters, but it emerges during periods of media inactivity at the surface of Loch Ness. In other words, if you see an article about the Loch Ness Monster, chances are that there's fuck-all to talk about in the media.

During the present days of journalistic lassitude, another terrifying monster has emerged in the French press: the Shroud of Turin, alleged to have been wrapped around the sacred body of Jesus.

Serious historians have known for ages that this medieval cloth, with its curious symmetrical stains, is no doubt a clever piece of skulduggery that could have been produced by myriad techniques, known and unknown. Meanwhile, it's utterly ridiculous to imagine that this cloth might have received some kind of photographic imprint of the crucified body of a certain Jesus of Nazareth. One would have to be crazy to accept such tripe. But there exist indeed hordes of crazy individuals—known as Roman Catholics—who are prepared to believe in such bullshit. And lazy journalists, in this empty season, can easily tune in to such folk to create superficial media buzz.

Highway called Pacific

In Australia, the major coastal route between Sydney and Brisbane has always been known as the Pacific Highway. As a youth, I used to ride my bicycle along this highway in the vicinity of Grafton. Maybe, these days, it should be nicknamed the RIP (Rest-in-Pacific) Highway, because the antiquated state of this old road has transformed it into a killing field.

Seated comfortably and safely in front of my computer screen in my bedroom at Gamone, I can call upon the amazing Google Maps tool to give me a realistic idea of what it must feel like to be driving along this so-called "highway" in the vicinity, say, of Tintenbar, near Ballina.

In Australia, people drive, of course (because our dominant forefathers were English), on the left-hand side of the road. The typical section of the road seen in the photo is pleasant enough, but it's a bit frightening to see that there's a single lane on that curved descent, and that the road is only visible for a couple of hundred meters.

Let's imagine that the vehicle you're driving looks like this:

That's what they refer to, in Australia, as a B-double tanker. There are lots of them on Australian roads, and a vehicle of this type can carry some 40,000 liters of fuel.

A few days ago, around noon, a tanker of this kind was hurtling along the highway, heading south, in the vicinity of Tintenbar. Imagine that you're sitting in the passenger's seat as the driver dives into that curved descent shown in the top photo. A witness says he heard the vehicle hitting the guard rail. Within a few seconds, the tanker crossed the road and burst into flames that shot 30 meters into the sky.

Hours later, after the intervention of a hundred fire fighters, fuel was still burning in the vicinity of the accident. Police suspected that the driver had disappeared in the holocaust.

Normally, there's more than enough mineral wealth in Australia to supply the nation with superb modern highways, which would surely reduce the likelihood of spectacular accidents of this kind. But the use of that mineral wealth to build decent roads for the people is a political eventuality that is not likely to arise for some time to come. Waiting for the revolution…

ADDENDUM: No sooner had I written that last word, revolution, than I found it highlighted in an amusing and perspicacious Bill Bleak cartoon [display]. Clearly, I'm not the only Australian observer who imagines that the nation needs to break out, politically, of a system of vicious circles. Recently, here in France, our celebrated minister of the Economy, Christine Lagarde, said that Sarkozy's new government was "totally revolutionary", because of its accent on "solidity and professionalism". She went on to explain, bizarrely, that the principle of a revolution consists of turning through a complete circle of 360°. In the great novel entitled The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa [1896-1957], the hero refers to the ongoing Italian "revolution" in the following terms: "If we want things to remain as they've always been, then everything will have to change." Maybe that's not a bad definition for the kind of revolution I have in mind in the context of my native land.

Snow's still here

My daughter Emmanuelle would be arriving by train at Valence at 12.30. At 11 o'clock in the morning, I was still putting snow tires on the Citroën and using the relatively warm water from my spring to melt the ice where the car had been stuck for several days. Finally, I managed to drive slowly down the icy road and get to Valence more-or-less on time.

Back at Gamone, I noticed that my car had ice stalactites attached to the body. My daughter met up with Fitzroy. After lunch, Sylvie and William turned up here, to see how the horses were getting along.

They were accompanied by Fitzroy's sister, mother and grandmother. (With all four black-and-white Collies darting around in the snow, I found it hard to distinguish who was who.) So, within an hour or so of her arrival at Gamone, my daughter had met up with everybody. Also, it was the first time ever that Emmanuelle had seen the property covered in snow.

The dogs were so excited (animated above all by Fitzroy) that they appeared at times to be on the brink of getting involved in a giant brawl. At one stage, Fitzroy and his sister got stuck into one another. There was a marvelous moment when Sophia stepped in and pushed back Fitzroy, as if she were reprimanding him for fighting with his sister.