A new page opens in France

An encouraging aspect of the final round of the French presidential elections was the massive turnout of voters (in a nation where voting is not compulsory): some 84% of eligible citizens. Clearly, few people heeded the instructions of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme rightwing ex-candidate who had asked his followers to abstain from voting.

The left, behind Ségolène Royal, was soundly thrashed. Most people who voted for François Bayrou in the first round did not choose the Socialist candidate in the second round. Will the left succeed in getting its act together before the parliamentary elections in five weeks' time? This is not at all obvious, because many Socialists will be tempted to blame Ségolène Royal for the present defeat, and this will tend to destabilize the left during the forthcoming campaign.

As for Sarkozy, he'll be literally going out of circulation from now until his investiture on 16 May. His speech this evening, after the announcement of his victory, was forceful and relatively reassuring, in that he underlined the need for national reconciliation and union. In words addressed to the USA, he insisted upon the fact that humanity's major challenge is the planetary combat against global warming. He also referred to the interesting theme of a Mediterranean Union, which would be a link between Europe and Africa.

In 1983, at the age of 28, Sarkozy became the mayor of Neuilly, an upper-class residential suburb to the west of Paris. Ten years later, by which time he had become an elected parliamentarian, Sarkozy broke into the news for his courageous role in handling negotiations with a crazy armed guy, calling himself Human Bomb, who had entered a kindergarten in Neuilly and taken 21 kids as hostages. I remember listening to news on this dramatic affair on my car radio as I crossed France in the summer of 1993, to start work in Grenoble. Finally, the elite police force known as the RAID [Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion] burst into the kindergarten while Human Bomb was dozing, and filled his skull with lead. I've always imagined that this affair symbolized the start of Sarkozy's ascension in the world of politics and police.

Death of a singer, birth of a legend

Popular French singer Grégory Lemarchal was 23 years old when he died a week ago of a terrible hereditary disease, cystic fibrosis, for which there is not yet any permanent remedy. In 2004 he was the winner of a French TV talent quest called Star Academy.

The sudden death of this angel-faced youth, which could well transform his brief glory into a legend, will hopefully play a positive role in the constant quest for body-organ donors, not to mention the collection of financial donations to aid in the on-going research in the domain of cystic fibrosis. [Click here to visit the Grégory Lemarchal website.]

Clean car, dirty thoughts

I seem to recall that a political leader stated recently that small business is the backbone of Australia's prosperity. In Queensland, the proprietor of a strip-tease joint concocted the brilliant idea of a car-wash service carried out by semi-nude women.

Car owner: "I'll just hang around while you're washing my car to make sure you don't run into any problems."

Washerwoman: "Yeah, if you hang around, you might be able to give me a hand."

Car owner: "No sweat. It's so bloody hot, I wouldn't mind a wash job for myself."

Washerwoman: "Yeah, I'll see what we can do. Just hang around."

The service is ecologically correct, since it uses recycled water. Besides, since the washing operations are performed in a closed shed, there's no problem of what is referred to in Australia as "public decency".

In Victorian London, there was an unwritten law that gave citizens the freedom to do almost anything they felt like doing, even if it infringed morality, provided they didn't do their naughty stuff in public, in the streets... "where it might frighten the horses".

That backside vision of the washerwoman astride her stick horse could indeed arouse the senses of nearby beasts.

Influencing people

During my trip out to Australia last year, I was thrilled to receive an unexpected gift from my young sister Jill. In an outdoor market, probably in the vicinity of her home town of Woolgoolga, she had come upon a copy of a book that fascinated me when I was a teenager: Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was surprised that Jill, who's much younger than me, would have remembered that her brother had come in contact with Carnegie's famous book. Retrospectively, I imagine that my interest in this book stemmed from the fact that the very idea of trying deliberately to win friends and influence people was most exotic in the backwoods environment in which I had grown up, where quiet timidity, reticence and inhibition were our primary social qualities. My discovery of Carnegie's advice was akin to the parson's daughter opening stealthily a copy of Sex Manual for the Single Girl.

I've already pointed out in this blog [click here to see my Therapy post] that I'm an unconditional fan of the Dilbert comic strip, whose creator, Scott Adams, runs a marvelous blog. From time to time, Scott has alluded with enthusiasm to a book by Robert Cialdini, Influence — The Psychology of Persuasion, whose first edition appeared almost a quarter of a century ago.

Normally, these days, I'm no longer keen on this kind of psychological literature, since I've become more interested in science, computers and dogs than in people. But, based upon my assumption that anything that's good for the creator of Dilbert is good for me too, I ordered the revised edition from Amazon. It arrived yesterday, and my rapid reading confirms that this is indeed Dale Carnegie in overdrive: choice intellectual fodder, in fact a gourmet dinner, for a social critic such as Scott Adams. Cialdini's book is in the same heavyweight category as The Peter Principle. It reveals the ways in which smart individuals have unearthed rules of conduct enabling them to impose their will upon others, thereby achieving power of an economic, political or even religious kind.

If this blog were penned by an out-of-phase literary critic who waits a quarter of a century before deciding that a book deserves to be read, I would say that Cialdini's Influence is a must. In Carnegie's country, the cover says it's a National Bestseller. With a bit of time and perseverance, it could even become an international bestseller.

Time for Tzipi?

This 48-year-old woman (an Israeli lawyer, former Mossad agent, and a Likud member elected to the Knesset in 1999) has always impressed me greatly. I would describe her in Middle East parlance as a pragmatic dove. In the context of the current leadership crisis that has struck Israel abruptly (after the findings of the Winograd report on the misconduct of last year's war in Lebanon), observers suggest that Tzipi Livni is of the same mettle as the great Golda Meir [1898-1978].

Clearly, sooner or later, Ehud Olmert must leave the scene. The sooner the better (in my modest opinion). And Livni has had the courage to say so, even though it must have hurt her morally to speak out against her former political colleague.

These days, few people would be audacious enough to predict a great future (whatever that might mean) for the Israeli nation and the Palestinians, for there are so many gigantic problems that have not yet found even the beginning of a solution. But I would not hesitate in predicting a great future for this exceptional lady named Tzipi Livni.

Risk of turbulence ahead

I've already stated my opinion that the "tough guy" image of Nicolas Sarkozy could become a provocation for countless individuals in France, with nothing to win or lose, who would simply wish to stir up trouble in the streets. For many years, these people have been referred to by a vague generic term: the casseurs (literally, the "smashers"). They're well-organized. Often, they assemble on the fringe of authentic political demonstrations and go into action when everybody, including the police, is least expecting it. There's no sense in hiding the fact that these individuals exist, and that they see Nicolas Sarkozy almost as a sporting opponent, whom they're "out to get". As depicted in the following graffiti in a nearby village, Sarko is often relegated (unjustly, it must be said) to the role of a diabolical Fascist:

This morning, Ségolène Royal stated that Nicolas Sarkozy is "a risk" for France. She refers to her opponent as "the candidate of the hard right-wing", and warns that, if Sarkozy were victorious next Sunday, "there will be very strong tensions throughout the country". She added that Sarkozy's bid for power was "dangerous in terms of a concentration of power, of brutality, of lies".

The former Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin has been equally explicit on the question of Sarkozy. He denounced "the violence of some of his words, his tendency towards demagogy and clientélisme (patronage), and the impression he gives of being constantly in overdrive".

There's no guaranty, of course, that "smashers" would be more conciliatory with Ségolène Royal, if she were elected. After all, she has been quite outspoken on youthful delinquency, and has even evoked the strange idea of calling upon the army to force some civic common-sense into the behavior of offenders. The big difference between Ségo and Sarko is that the lady is not generally looked upon explicitly as a symbol of provocation.

Rebirth of a new old nation?

Tony Blair has had no more luck in his bid to achieve a political victory in Scotland than in dealing militarily with Iraq. And the Scottish Nationalist Party of Alex Salmond, committed to national independence, appears to have made a giant breakthrough.

When you think about it, if Scotland were to gain independence, there would be fabulous retirement jobs in Edinburgh for Bush, Blair and Howard: respectively US, UK and Australian ambassadors to the new nation... unless, of course, by that time, they had already accepted similar posts in Iraq.

Eating nostalgically

From time to time, memories of dishes from my adolescence spring into my mind, and I try to recreate them. When I was working with IBM in Sydney, I often used to have lunch on my own in a Chinese restaurant at the corner of Castlereagh Street and Martin Place. In those days, I was unfamiliar with Chinese cooking, and I always ordered the same dish: curried prawns, served with celery. The other day, seeing a huge pile of prawns in the local supermarket, I decided to prepare this dish.

The result was quite tasty, although it's unlikely that my Indian curry paste (produced in the UK) is the same kind of product they used back in the Chinese restaurant in Sydney.

The next morning, in the sunshine, I was intrigued to discover orange stains on my fingernails, even though I had taken a shower. Worse, there were even small patches of orange on the towel that I had used, the previous day, to dry my hands after shelling the prawns. I phoned my daughter to ask her whether she thought it feasible that prawns might be colored artificially. And Manya suggested that I should look up this question on the Internet.

The Wikipedia results enlightened me, but they'll no doubt discourage me from getting back to curried prawns for a while. A chemical product named astaxanthin is responsible for the red color of flamingos, certain fish and cooked prawns. Synthetic astaxanthin is a food coloring, indicated as E161 in the European Union's numbering system. Unfortunately, I wasn't sufficiently well-trained in organic chemistry to conclude, as a result of this reading, whether the cause of my orange fingernails was natural and harmless, or whether there might be cause for alarm. In any case, I learn that my fingernails are nothing compared to the pinkish down of seagulls in the vicinity of salmon farms.

When I was a kid, I used to ride my bike out to my friend Keith Weatherstone's place at Eatonsville, to spend the weekend on their farm. Keith's mother told me that their hens used to eat a peppery weed growing on their property, and the effect of this was that boiled eggs we ate for breakfast were automatically peppered. I saw that as a fabulous concept, capable of revolutionizing the food industry. If only we could find the right weeds to feed to our hens, they might get around to laying us eggs for cooking cheese or bacon-flavored omelettes. If I understand correctly through my rapid reading about astaxanthin (which belongs to the large family of organic pigments called carotenoids), the food industry is probably already capable of providing interested customers with eggs to make salmon-flavored mayonnaise. How about prawn-flavored candy? Ideally, it should be able to glow in the dark. That will soon be happening to us humans, I reckon.

Shopping in Manhattan

I bought this gadget back in 1971, during my first visit to the USA, when I was making plans to shoot a series of TV specials in the domain of artificial intelligence and brain research. The day before my return flight to France, I wandered into a sleazy-looking shop on Times Square and purchased this device without knowing much about what it might be capable of doing. As far as I knew, it was a relatively sophisticated pocket calculator, with the possibility of loading mathematical functions from a plastic card. [Clive Sinclair's primitive ZX computers were still a decade away in the future.]

Now, a funny thing happened in that Times Square shop, at exactly the moment I had paid for my calculator, which was being wrapped up by a friendly young salesman. Four New York police officers (one of whom was female) strolled into the shop, walked behind the counter, drew out their pistols and promptly handcuffed an older member of the shop staff. All this happened so rapidly that I didn't have time to imagine what might be taking place, and why. I had been about to leave the shop, and the sudden irruption of the police wasn't a pretext for hanging around like a naive tourist. So, I walked out onto Times Square, doomed to remain ignorant of the reasons why the shopkeeper had been arrested.

Back in Paris, I tried to get my Times Square calculator to work. Impossible! I could get it to light up, but I couldn't coax it do anything whatsoever in the way of calculations. Little by little, I started to realize retrospectively why the shopkeeper in faraway Manhattan might have run into problems with the authorities. I soon got around to concluding that he had probably sold me a make-believe calculator: no more than a plastic box with a battery inside to make it light up. As for calculating mathematical functions, I imagined that it was no more capable of such tasks than a pocket lamp.

You might be wondering why I've never tried to elucidate this mystery, either by contacting the alleged manufacturer, or by simply smashing the thing with a hammer and taking a peek inside. In fact, I keep it intact as a personal souvenir of my first and last shopping excursion in Manhattan.

Now, why have I dragged this old story out of mothballs today? Well, a year ago, I bought an Epson color laser printer through the Internet, and I've never succeeded in making it work correctly. It prints stuff, but the results are deplorable. Besides, the documentation looks as if it has been written by a Zen poet. It refers to buttons that simply do not exist, and menus that seem to go around in circles. At times, I've been tempted to imagine that the Times Square dealer might have moved to France and started up an Internet business selling printers.

Finally, this afternoon, I found the address of an Epson repair shop in Grenoble. I phoned them, and I'm going to take the printer along to them tomorrow to see if they can fix it. Now, wouldn't it be weird, tomorrow, if a squad of French gendarmes were to burst into that repair shop just after I've left my printer there...

Electoral debate

To my way of thinking (which is biased, of course), Ségolène Royal was a far better performer than Nicolas Sarkozy in last night's grand TV debate.

She stared defiantly into the eyes of her opponent, and spoke with passion, whereas Sarkozy was often drooped over his notes, or glancing sideways at the journalist PPDA [Patrick Poivre d'Arvor].

Although polls maintain that Sarkozy is likely to win next Sunday, there are several positive signs in favor of Ségolène Royal. First, the Centrist ex-candidate François Bayrou has stated that he will not vote for Sarkozy... although he refrains from saying explicitly that he will vote for Ségolène. Today, Jean-Marie Colombani, director of the prestigious daily Le Monde, stated that Ségolène Royal was his preferred candidate. Colombani writes that Sarkozy's vision of politics is "American", and this adjective is interpreted by many of his readers as a condemnation. It's a fact that Sarkozy is on good terms with leading French capitalists such as Martin Bouygues, Arnaud Lagardère and Serge Dassault, who have high stakes in French media. As Colombani explains, Sarkozy appeals simultaneously to those at the top of society and to many of those at the bottom. He wants to make it easier for those at the top to invest their financial resources to create employment for those at the bottom. Sarkozy believes greatly in the old-fashioned work ethic according to which those who get up early in the morning will be winners, whereas society's jobless whiners are generally lazy losers. Needless to say, up until now, that kind of thinking has never been particularly widespread in France. Over the last week or so, Sarkozy has even dared to attack outrightly the social values associated with the legendary upheavals of May 1968. If Sarkozy wins on Sunday, I fear there'll be a lot of social turmoil just around the corner.

Trivial stuff

Often, I spend a good part of the day trying to solve some kind of computing problem. Subsequently, if somebody were to ask me, on the phone, what I've been doing all day, I find it hard to produce a plausible answer. Today has been one of those days. In fact, the day got off to the kind of start that might have suggested that there wouldn't be a lot of action. This morning, the sky at Gamone was overcast, and the weather was wet and chilly. I got into my car to drive to St-Jean. Fifty meters down the road from my house, I slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a creature that was crossing the road. Readers will think I'm crazy. It was a big Burgundy snail. A few years ago, I used to collect such snails and prepare them for eating. Maybe that's what causes me to respect these creatures to the point of not squashing them with my automobile. It's a fact, too, that I make an effort not to run over toads on the road at Gamone. In that case, it's simply because I'm fond of these big clumsy animals, and I don't like to see them killed stupidly. You might say there's a little bit of Dalai Lama sensitivity in my attitude. A hundred meters further down the road, I slammed on the brakes a second time. This time, it was not for a snail or a toad but so that I could get out of the car and remove a football-sized rock that had fallen onto the road. So, I probably earned a few Brownie points before I got on the way to St-Jean. [In French, they talk of the "good actions" carried out by Scouts and Guides.]

The pharmacy in St-Jean is surely one of the nicest and friendliest pharmacies in France. (Well, at least that's how I've always seen it.) But, whenever I try to talk about anything serious with the pharmacist, I quickly put my foot in my mouth. This morning, I wanted to tell him that I sometimes feel that my GP [general practitioner] tends to be over-zealous by getting me tested for potential ailments that almost certainly don't exist. For example, a year ago, he took me through all the messy prostate tests, which turned out to be totally negative. And now I have the impression that he's itching to get me to go through it all once again. Trying to appear smart, I told the pharmacist (because I'd just read it on the Internet) that the current protocol concerning the possible presence of prostate cancer is flawed, resulting in an exaggerated number of unnecessary biopsies. When I mentioned that a new US protocol was about to go into action (frontpage Google news last week), the pharmacist naturally wanted to know all about it. But he might just as well have asked me to give him a rundown on the latest news about pig-farming in China. I promised to send him an e-mail.

Later on in the morning, at the supermarket parking zone near Romans, I was fascinated by a stunt pilot performing his acrobatics directly above me. When I saw he was making a big low circle in order to land, I decided to drive to the nearby airfield (less than a kilometer from the supermarket) simply to see what kind of a plane and pilot had been carrying out these amazing stunts. As I parked alongside the clubhouse, a female stunt pilot was about to take off, in an exotic blue machine, and the guy I had been watching was getting out of his equally exotic red plane. There are all kinds of people with whom I should never be tempted to strike up a conversation, because I never have anything intelligent to say to them. For example, apart from pharmacists: veterinary doctors (my attitude to animals is too sentimental, and vets must think I'm brain-damaged), farmers (they take one look at me and see I'm not one of them), police officers, priests, etc. Well, you can add stunt pilots to that list.

Me: "I've been watching you from over in front of the supermarket. I guess you're a professional pilot."

Pilot: "No, we simply like that kind of flying. [The "we" encompassed the lady who had just taken off.] But we don't get paid for it."

Me: "Is acrobatics a specialty of this aero club?"

Pilot: "No, we're from a club in Montpellier. I grew up here in Romans. I know the club well. We've just dropped in for a while."

Me: "Ah, so you've come all the way up here from Montpellier to say hello to old friends."

Pilot: "Well, it didn't take us long to get here."

Thankfully, an intelligent conversationalist turned up, enabling him to say goodbye to me, in the polite style of a stunt pilot.

On the way home, I dropped in at a farm to buy asparagus from a young farmer's wife who was busy tying up one-kilo bunches of this excellent vegetable. Now, you might add farmers' wives, particularly asparagus farmers' wives, to my list of bad conversational partners.

Me (after purchasing two kilos): "Maybe you'll give me expert advice on preparing them."

Farmer's wife: "Well, after you've peeled them..."

Me (in my seasoned journalistic style): "Ah, so they have to be peeled?"

Farmer's wife (realizing that she was dealing with an idiot): "Yes, it's best to use a little peeler [called, funnily, an économe in French]. You start at the top and you peel downwards to the bottom. Then you throw them into boiling water that has been salted."

Me: "How long do you let them boil?"

Farmer's wife: "Oh, about a quarter of an hour. Not too long, though, otherwise they turn yellow."

I was about to ask her what's wrong with the idea of eating yellow asparagus, if they're well-cooked, but I decided instantly that this question would be excessive.

Back home in front of my computer, I said to myself that it was reassuring (for me, in any case) to realize that my day had been well spent in solving a few technical problems concerning the creation of websites. What I mean to say is that, if the global worth of my day's efforts had been measured exclusively in terms of removing obstacles from the Gamone road and talking with a pharmacist, a stunt flier and an asparagus farmer's wife, then maybe I should have stayed in bed. The truth of the matter is that I've spent the day looking forward to this evening's debate between Ségo and Sarko. So, let's forget about my conversational inadequacies, and let me tune in to the Serious Stuff that's about to happen.

Dope in sport

In this dismal domain (primarily, dope in cycling), much has happened over the last year, and new events are still being revealed.

First, Floyd Landis is likely to lose his Tour de France title, because the presence of synthetic testosterone in his urine has apparently been confirmed.

Above all, we're still in the middle of the gigantic fallout from the so-called Puerto affair of May 2006, when Spanish police arrested sporting director Manolo Sainz and the doctor Fuentes, whose trial will be starting next June. [Click here to see a French-language website with the names of cyclists involved in this affair, or simply Google with the expression "puerto affair".]

The Italian rider Ivan Basso has just severed his links with Discovery Channel, and he has been summoned for a confrontation tomorrow with the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI). In the near future, he could well be caught out, like Jan Ullrich, by DNA testing.

Furthermore, the Italian Gazzetta dello Sport has just announced that 49 additional cyclists (whose names have not yet been revealed) must be added to the list of 58 already involved in the Puerto Affair. That makes a grand total of 107 professional cyclists who are indirectly suspected of using dope. So, it's not just a marginal phenomenon. It sounds as if a great part of the professional cycling system is rotten, but it's still too early to know what global effects this conclusion might have upon the sport, and the outlook of the general public.

When I read the nasty blood-bag tales of doping in cyclism, I'm nauseated. It's truly sickening, enough to make me want to put away in the attic all my spontaneous enthusiasm for the grand summer ritual of the Tour de France. Will this ugly medical mess ever be cleaned up?

Village festival

A month ago, I wrote a post about the pagan Plowmen's Festival in the nearby village of St-Jean-en-Royans. [Click here to see this post.] Last weekend, in the neighboring village of St-Laurent-en-Royans, there was a similar annual event known as the Reinage. Few French people understand this curious term. It sounds like the French word reine, which means "queen". So, people imagine that the word reinage simply designates a village festival during which a queen is elected... much like the annual Jacaranda Queen in my native Grafton. This is almost true, but not quite. In fact, the origin of reinage is the Latin term regalis (royal). It's not a purely feminine affair. In pagan times, both a "king" and a "queen", surrounded by "acolytes", were elevated to a brief state of glory in the village. It's not very clear why these fleeting honors were bestowed upon certain adolescents in the community, but it probably had something to do with the celebrated concepts of youth, fertility and (to call a spade a spade) sex, if not debauchery.

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when the Roman Church got around to edulcorating such pagan rites, the reinage concept was dealt with in a typically efficient religious style. The youthful "king", "queen" and their "court" were named either through merit, or because their parents had paid the Church for this privilege, much like present-day members of the aristocracy financing the coming-out of their daughters at balls for débutantes. Then these charming adolescents were expected to parade around the village collecting money, in the style of today's kids who participate in fund-raising days for charities. Normally, it was planned that this money should find its way up into the coffers of the Church, where it would be used for all kinds of noble purposes. But that's where things often got screwed up. The randy kids, with their hot grubby hands full of filthy lucre, would often redirect a tiny portion of their wealth to the purchase of liquor, just to cool off and sooth themselves after all their regal collecting efforts. And it could happen that things would get out of hand, and the reinage could be transformed into its archaic debauchery.

Be that as it may, at St-Laurent-en-Royans last Sunday, everything was sedate and ecclesiastically correct. The above float was manned by inmates from a local mental asylum. Initially, I thought that the two personages were Caesar and Cleopatra, but I wouldn't swear to that. It's a fact that the gentleman in the male role would often rise from his throne, while I was trying to photograph him, and hurl out "Ave Caesar!" As for his female companion, she was simply thrilled to realize that an unknown guy with a Nikon was intent upon photographing her. Incidentally, my former neighbor Bob, who works in this institution, was dressed for the Reinage parade as a Roman centurion. This was fine, since Bob, in real life, is a massive former rugby champion.

My daughter (who knows much more about France than I do, primarily because she's French) informed me that, nowadays, French youth don't actually give a screw about the cultural references I've brought into the present article (pagan rituals, Christianization, etc). Manya says they were brought up on three cultural pillars, which happen to be comic-strip characters: Astérix and Obélix, Lucky Luke and Tintin. Really, somebody should make me a king or a crazy emperor for a weekend, so that I can catch up on culture...

The maestro has left the stage

This striking photo has the formal beauty of an image from Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. We first encounter the finely-chiseled features of the dead man: his wide mouth and thin lips, almost smiling, and his pointed nose. At the same time, our eyes are attracted by the pastel-hued hippy-like band around his brow. Then our comprehension of the scene is puzzled by the four fine red-nailed fingers, which seem for an instant, weirdly, to belong to the deceased. An instant later, we realize that the face hovering above the coffin is that of a woman, and that the fingers are hers. She is clutching the edge of the cloth-lined coffin as a support enabling her to move within breathing space of the sleeping personage... if only he still breathed. Maybe she might kiss his dead lips. Maybe she won't. We do not need to know. The virtual embrace is already there, fixed by the form of their pose, forever present.

During my youthful years in Sydney — from my contact with university in 1957, then with computing at IBM, up until my departure for Europe at the end of 1961 — I often attended symphonic concerts at the town hall. In 1960, when he was not yet an international celebrity, Mstislav Rostropovich performed in Australia under the direction of the Ukrainian composer and conductor Igor Markevitch. One morning, when I happened to be strolling idly through the sunny streets of the city, I wandered into the town hall to buy a ticket for the cellist's forthcoming concert. Hearing music, and seeing that all the doors were wide open, I ventured into the almost empty concert hall. Rostropovich was alone on the stage, crouched over his frail instrument in a pose like a gawky peasant milking a goat. The solemn sounds filling the town hall were not however those of a beast, but of a divine creature: the cello of Mstislav Rostropovich. I was transfixed in awe, since I had not imagined for an instant that I might come upon the great artist in these almost private circumstances. I remember feeling vaguely that my presence there was slightly improper, as if I had stepped by chance into the backstage room of a lovely actress when she was changing costumes. I had the terrible apprehension that the cellist might suddenly halt in the middle of a bar, to admonish me: "Young man, what are you doing here? Can't you see that your presence is preventing me from concentrating on my practice? Please leave immediately!" Rostropovich never pronounced any such words, but I nevertheless left the concert hall rather rapidly, because I had the distinct feeling that my presence there was incorrect. It was strange, indeed troubling, to hear this great musician "making mistakes" (in his judgment, not mine), and then repeating a few bars several times over, to get them right. That sunny Sydney morning, I was in the presence of rare ethereal sounds, which I have never forgotten.

Exponential movement

Without wishing to transform my blog into a commercial affair (an unlikely predicament), I would be glad if readers of this post were to take a look at the real estate proposition in Pont-en-Royans that I've recently advertised. It's for a friend. [Click here to display this affair.]

Naturally, your readership would automatically kick up the Google rating, making the website more effective. Having said this, I advise interested would-be purchasers to phone me to obtain the hard facts. It's cheap, but the affair is also a little messy. To put it bluntly, the business was almost swept away, a few years ago, by a tremendous mountain storm. And almost everything in the restaurant needs to be redone, rebuilt, rethought... But it's an amazing site.

My blog statistics are augmenting exponentially, which is great.

It would be lovely, of course, if readers were to send in comments and maybe even reveal their identities... but that's asking for too much. So, thanks for looking in!

Sporting language in politics

The TV encounter between Ségolène Royal and François Bayrou turned out to be extremely polite and friendly, with no rudeness, aggressiveness nor even raised voices. In describing the show, French media used the fencing expression "fleuret moucheté". This is a foil without cutting edges whose tip is covered by a round button, so that nobody gets hurt.

A fortnight ago, an amusing Nicholson animation appeared on the website of The Australian, on a theme called sledging, which probably comes from cricket. [Click here to see it.] In a cricket match between political parties, John Howard is the batsman and Kevin Rudd the bowler. The commentator, Ritchie Benaud, has invited along a talkative guest: Paul Keating. The match gets off to a quiet almost gentlemanly start:

Bowler Rudd [to the batsman]: "You spineless sycophantic nitwit!"

Batsman Howard [to the bowler]: "Pull your head in, you useless nong!"

Then the great mud-slinger Keating takes over, with comments of the following kind about the batsman: "Howard's got a brain like a sparrow's nest: all shit and sticks. You know, when they circumcised him, they threw away the wrong bit. He's a dead carcass swinging in the breeze, and nobody's got the balls to cut him down. Etc, etc."

Naturally, at the end of this quaint animation, the Sledging Cup is awarded to Keating. [Click here for an anthology of authentic Keating sayings, some of which have been used in Nicholson's sledging animation.] Personally, my favorite Keatingism is his description of Treasurer Peter Costello as "all tip and no iceberg".

Jumping from one thing to another, I was impressed by the sporting language used in the female entourage of the Melbourne underworld personage Carl Williams. A typical specimen, quoted in the Australian press, consists of one of Carl's ladies referring to another lady as a "trashy piece of fucking carnage". The journalist in The Australian used (invented?) a nice expression to designate this kind of language: trash talk.

Getting back to French politics, I see that Nicolas Sarkozy is resorting more and more to sporting metaphors in his combat for the presidency. The other day, when he heard that Ségolène Royal would be debating with François Bayrou, Sarkozy turned to soccer language. In the days preceding a cup final, he stated, it would be weird if one of the teams that was already eliminated wanted to replay a match with one of the finalists. Today, Sarko (as he's nicknamed) has turned to cycling, in referring to next Wednesday's debate with Ségolène Royal as an Alpe-d'Huez stage in the Tour de France culminating in next Sunday's election. As for me, in boxing terms, I hope that Sarko gets KO'd by Ségo next Sunday.

I need words to express my gut-level aversion to Nicolas Sarkozy. Paul Keating is surely a kind of poet, like Barry Humphries, and it goes without saying that I don't share their rare quality of linguistic imagination. I don't know how you would say "mangy maggot" in French... mainly because I'm not quite sure what a mangy maggot would look like. But, if I did, that might just be the right expression for Sarko. However I shouldn't talk that way, at least not before I get naturalized. Sarkozy has a good chance of being elected. In sporting language, I would then stand the risk of receiving a red card and getting sent off the field.

TV debate of a novel political style

At the moment I'm writing (eleven o'clock in the morning), the TV is turned on and I'm waiting, like countless French viewers, to watch the 90-minute debate between Ségolène Royal and François Bayrou.

This is a new kind of happening, in that Bayrou is no longer a presidential candidate, but the huge packet of votes he collected in the first round will be redistributed in the second round, and will no doubt determine the final winner.

Gamone greenery

In this photo I took this morning, my neighbor Dédé, with his chestnut walking-stick, is standing in front of my white-flowered wisteria. Nearly every morning around seven o'clock, Dédé leaves their place (a couple of hundred meters below Gamone) and strolls up past my house and further up the track beyond Bob's property. If I happen to be up and about, my dog Sophia barks to let me know that Dédé's in the vicinity, and I go out to chat with him for ten minutes or so. Usually, our conversations don't evolve much from one morning to the next. Our first subject, of course, is the weather, then the various animals at Gamone. Dédé knows everything about everybody in the surroundings, but he doesn't talk readily about other people's affairs unless I ask specific direct questions. So, our morning chats are not at all what you would call gossip. On the other hand, concerning inanimate objects at Gamone, he has a remarkable attention to details. Whenever I mention such-and-such an aspect of the house or property that might be modified and improved, I usually find that Dédé has already done some serious thinking about the question I've brought up. Before my recent excursion to Marseilles, I happened to inform Dédé that I would need to purchase a small metal pin to fix the hinged back of my metal trailer. When I returned from Marseilles, I discovered that Dédé had come up to my place, during my absence, and done the job for me. This morning, when I told Dédé that I was thinking about devising a technique for encasing two big steel girders with wood in the façade of my house, I discovered that Dédé had obviouly already thought about this problem, for he immediately described a solution...

On the left, the giant linden tree between my house and the road is now covered in leaves. Funnily, another linden tree, to the right, still has its wintry look. Dédé told me that they, too, have a linden tree of this kind, which doesn't grow leaves until late spring. This morning, looking at all the tall grass that has shot up over the last fortnight around my house, Dédé asked a pointed question: "What's happened to the hand-held weed cutter you used to operate?" I understood, of course, that Dédé was not really asking me a question. It was his subtle way of suggesting that I should move my arse and cut the grass.

Rugby cup: worth its weight in gold for France

The main French campus of the prestigious Essec Business School is located less than an hour away from the heart of Paris, at a place named Cergy-Pontoise. [Click here to see their English-language website.] Recently, this beehive of bright business experts received an interesting assignment: calculate the likely global income, for France, resulting from the forthcoming World Rugby Cup. Well, the result is huge: some 8 000 million euros! In US currency, that's roughly 11 billion dollars. In Australian currency, nearly 13 000 million dollars.

Where is all this money coming from? Let's carry on the discussion in euros, using the US definition of a billion as a thousand millions.

— The Essec wizards inform us that half the estimated income, 4 billion euros, will be deposited in cash before the end of the matches, which will be taking place in September and October. More than 350 thousand foreign visitors will be arriving in France for the rugby festivities, accounting for income of 1.5 billion euros. The matches will ne watched on TV by 260 million viewers, generating revenue of 2 billion euros, whereas ticket sales for live spectators will have generated a non-negligible income of 250 million euros.

— The other half of the projected revenues are of a more ethereal nature. The French "rugby economy" will receive a huge boost, estimated at 417 million euros a year, from the presence of the World Cup. And French tourism, as a consequence of the World Cup, will receive a boost of some 625 million euros a year. So, if you carry out the multiplications, that gives us, for a period of four years, 4 billion euros.

In old-fashioned French village talk, there's a celebrated dictum: Un sou est un sou. In US English: A dime's a dime. In other words, we should respect frugally every penny we might earn or possess, and not spend money lavishly.

Economic and political experts have pointed out that money from the forthcoming World Rugby Cup can be seen already as a fabulous welcome gift to the future president of the French Republic. The funny thing about this whole affair is that the Essec people don't seem to give a screw about who might or might not actually win the golden trophy.

Gnostic discoveries

Recently, I started to talk about an Egyptian Christian named Pachomius [292-348], who is thought of as the inventor of the concept of monastic communities described as cenobitic, which means that the monks lived together, sharing their possessions, under the guidance of an abbot. Some twenty years after the death of their first abbot, a strange event took place. The Pachomian monks assembled many of the papyrus books in their monastic library and carefully buried them at the foot of the cliffs of Jabal al-Tarif, near the city of Nag Hammadi. Curiously, the monks conducted this book burying, not to destroy them, but as if they wanted their books to be preserved.

In 1945, the buried books of the Pachomian monks were unearthed. Today, an observer might say: "Show me the books they used to read, and I'll tell you who they were." In any case, the books of the so-called Nag Hammadi Library are totally different to what we now think of as "ordinary" Christian reading, and it can be said that the Proto-Christianity of Pachomius and his monks was indeed a very strange affair.

Researchers believe that the monks buried their books as a reaction to a ruling laid down in a festal letter by Athanasius in 367. The archbishop of Alexandria had made a basically unilateral decision concerning his choice of the canonical books of the Christian scriptures, including above all the 27 books of what would later be named the New Testament. As for all the rest, it was declared by Athanasius to be heretical, and this adjective designates most of the books buried by the Pachomian monks.

Today, for us 21st-century citizens who can buy all kinds of books through the Internet, it's a fabulous privilege to be able to read the authentic Proto-Christian books, designated by the mysterious term Gnostic, that were surely part of the everyday "bible" of Pachomius and his monks. In any case, it's an amazing shock for us, since the brand of Christianity revealed by these books of Nag Hammadi appears, at times, to have little to do with our ordinary concepts of the Christian religion.