End of English excursion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pilgrimage

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

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

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

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

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

Midland ancestors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dorset ancestral anecdotes

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

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

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

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

In Blandford, I stumbled upon a museum:

Inside, an old pump-organ caught my attention:

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

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

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

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

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

Bali bird flu

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

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

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

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

Brain removal

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

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

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

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

Strange skills

In my article of 23 July 2007 entitled Wandering in a spiritual wonderland [display], I indicated that Natacha, Alain and I had visited a fascinating Carthusian site: the spring that has been providing the monastery with water, nonstop, over the last nine centuries. As I pointed out in that post, we were surprised to discover considerable stone vestiges at the place where the water emerged from the ground. There was another anecdotal aspect of Natacha's encounter with the Carthusian spring that I didn't bother to mention in my post. She told us, as soon as she reached the site, that she experienced weird physical sensations, of a distinctly uncomfortable nature. In fact, these sensations were apparently so unpleasant that Natacha left the site almost as soon as she had reached it... which surprised me, because she's the sort of person who normally takes pleasure in observing calmly all the curiosities of such an exceptional place.

A few days after this excursion, Natacha and Alain dropped in for a moment at Gamone, before their return journey to Marseille. Natacha returned to the subject of her curious sensations at the Carthusian spring, shown here [surmounted by a whitish building whose role remains unexplained for the moment] in an 1894 photo:

On the off chance of finding some kind of explanation for her sensations, I asked Natacha if she had heard about the strange and ancient phenomenon of dowsing, which consists of prospecting for subterranean water by means of primitive tools such as metal rods, a Y-shaped branch of a tree, or a metal pendulum.

Shortly after my arrival at Gamone, in 1994, my son François used a pair of thin plastic-covered steel rods, bent in such a way that he held them like a pair of revolvers, to provide me with dubious but nevertheless surprising demonstrations of dowsing.

In particular, François claimed that he had sensed the alignment of the water supply from Pont-en-Royans. I immediately informed him, with a snigger, that his finding was some ten meters off the correct alignment, which I thought I knew. In fact, I was a sneering idiot. Several months later, during a Gamone summer, the exceptional dry-weather vegetation revealed that the apparent alignment of the subterranean water pipes corresponded exactly to the results of my son's dowsing.

Faced with the question of Natacha's strange sensations, I handed her my son's dowsing rods and invited her to wander around my lawn at Gamone, looking for possible sensations. The results were, in fact, sensational! Natacha seemed to function with the precision of an aquatic gauge. Alain, too, seemed to have the same skill, to a lesser degree than his wife, whereas I remained inert, as usual, unresponsive to any sensations whatsoever. Natacha would say [and I'm delighted with this evaluation, evoking one of my French intellectual heroes] that I'm simply too Cartesian.

Ordinary omelette

If I decided to take a photo of this perfectly ordinary ham and cheese omelette I cooked for lunch, it's simply because it's a beautiful sunny day at Gamone, the tiny eggs come from Madeleine's hens, the parsley and chives are from my garden, and I take pleasure in preparing and eating omelettes. If it weren't for the bad cholesterol reputation of eggs, not to mention the big blob of butter in the cooking, I would be happy to survive on an omelette a day.

My grandfather's London

On Tuesday, 31 July 2007, I got off the Eurostar at London's Waterloo station and took the Underground to Finsbury Park in North London, where I had made a hotel booking in Seven Sisters Road.

It was only yesterday that I recalled that the name of this ancient park [originally called Fines-bury, because the heart of a slain English crusader named Sir John Fines was brought back from the Holy Land by a soldier and buried there by the knight's two daughters] has become notorious through the existence of the Finsbury Park mosque [now referred to as the North London Central Mosque], in St Thomas's Road, whose imam was Abu Hamza al-Masri, now in jail. The Al Qaeda terrorists Richard "Shoebomber" Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui both attended Finsbury Park mosque.

My grandfather Ernest Skyvington grew up here in the Finsbury Park neighborhood until his departure for Australia, in 1908, at the age of 17. In this photo, he is wearing his school uniform: straw boater hat, Norfolk jacket with a big white Eton collar (celluloid for week-days, starched linen for Sundays), clip-on bow, knee-breeches, woollen stockings and lace-up boots. [Details found in a book written by a man of my grandfather's generation: C H Rolph, London Particulars, Oxford University Press, 1980.]

I left the hotel, armed with my camera, to explore places associated with my grandfather's childhood. I walked across the railway footbridge from Finsbury Park [which existed in my grandfather's time] to reach his school: the Woodstock Road School, now referred to as the Stroud Green Primary School. It probably looks much the same, today, as it did during my grandfather's school days.

I then wandered down to 65 Evershot Road, where my grandfather was born in 1891. Finally, I tried to find the house at 42 Mount Pleasant Road where my grandfather had been living before he left for Australia. However the street names and house numbering have evolved over the last century, and I'm not yet certain that I've found the right house.

Back home (for a day) after England

Upon returning to Gamone after a five-day excursion to England, I was thrilled to discover that Manya had installed elegant new curtains in the living room.

My dog Sophia was excited to see me once again. In fact, she and Manya apparently got on fine together.

Tomorrow morning, I'll be setting off with Sophia in the train to Marseille for a three-day excursion in Provence with Natacha and Alain. Later on, when I'm back at Gamone, I'll describe my interesting trip to the UK, which was highly worthwhile from a family-history viewpoint.

Aussie bungler of the year

I would like to nominate Kevin Andrews, minister of Immigration, for the Bungler of the Year award. Speaking of the departure for India of liberated Haneef, the bungler is quoted as saying: "If anything, that actually heightens rather than lessens my suspicion." Andrews is a bloody stubborn bungler, too, who doesn't even appear to be aware that he screwed things up. And don't expect him to apologize for his bungling. He summed up his idiotic actions with the following weird words: "I have had to defend this matter with one arm tied behind my back because of protected information." The guy's a nut, and the only decent thing he could do would be to resign.

Tony Abbott, minister of Health, spoke of the bungler as follows: "He's a terrific bloke and he's done a good job." When somebody goes out of his way to describe a mate with rotten egg on his face as a "terrific bloke", this is often a euphemism for saying: "He's not quite the total arsehole you might imagine him to be." OK, fair enough. Abbott seems to be telling us that Andrews is only a minor arsehole.

Short trip to the UK

My three destinations in the UK are purely genealogical, connected to my paternal ancestors:

— London [two days], to take photos of my grandfather's childhood neighborhood in Finsbury Park.

— Dorset [two days], to visit [for the first time] the villages around Blandford Forum, near Poole.

— Skeffington village [one day] in Leicestershire [also for the first time].

I'm amazed at the extent to which I can use the Internet to organize all the transport and accommodation details of a short trip such as this.

Acquiring knowledge

My article of 23 July 2007 entitled Wandering in a spiritual wonderland [display] includes a photo of an iron nugget that Alain discovered during our excursion to the Grande Chartreuse. Since then, Natacha and Alain have shown me several other mineral specimens they found while wandering around in another Carthusian site [which I've never visited personally]: the former monastery of Saint Hugon, about 40 km north-east of Grenoble, alongside the road to Albertville [in the Savoie département]. One of these specimens was a small rectangular fragment of iron whose surface was similar to that of the first nugget. The other day, the three of us sat outside at Gamone, under the linden trees, gazing at the mineral specimens on a table in front of us, and trying to understand their origins.

In this kind of situation, I've often had the impression that, if I were to concentrate sufficiently upon such-and-such an object that intrigues me, it would end up releasing some of its secrets, providing me with a better understanding of its nature. That was how I felt, a couple of years ago, when I tried to seize the nature of this mysterious object that I unearthed in nearby Châtelus, on the other side of the Bourne:

Since I found this object at a place where there's a legend about an ancient Roman settlement, I imagined it immediately as a sculptured fish. But it was equally likely that natural forces had given rise to this form. No doubt, if I were to show this "red fish" [as I call it] to an archaeologist and then a geologist, I would soon learn which of these two hypotheses is correct... but I've never done so. Instead, I've spent a fair amount of time simply gazing intensely at this object, hoping that it might suddenly send me a message revealing its nature. But no such message has ever reached me yet.

Getting back to the iron specimens from the two Chartreux territories, there were two basic questions:

(1) We referred to these specimens as "iron" because they were attracted by a magnet. But what was their exact geological nature?

(2) How come these specimens were lying around in open fields, waiting to be picked up by a passer-by with keen eyesight such as Alain?

In fact, once Natacha and Alain started out "thinking aloud" with me, I soon realized that they already possessed a good deal of information concerning such specimens:

— They had learned that there was a very special kind of iron ore in the vicinity of the monastery of Saint Hugon. What made it so special was the fact that the ore melted at a relatively low temperature, which meant that it could be transformed into iron by means of a simple wood-fueled furnace.

— The monks soon realized that the most profitable approach to marketing this precious raw material consisted of carrying out an elementary smelting process at the exit from their mines, using the ample timber resources they had on hand. Then the resulting crude iron could be brought down into the valley by mules, and subsequently transported to large-scale furnaces for final processing.

Little by little, as we talked about these operations, we started to obtain answers to our queries about the specimens placed on the table in front of us. They were fragments of crudely-smelted iron that had probably dropped off the back of mules on the way down to the valley. The special variety of iron ore found near the Saint Hugon monastery apparently existed also in the vicinity of the Grande Chartreuse. A final query: How come the two specimens have such a lovely smooth brown surface, with no traces of rust, even though they've been lying out in the open for centuries? There again, Natacha and Alain had acquired information that enabled us to obtain an immediate answer to this question. The ore of Saint Hugon contains a certain amount of manganese, which tends to give the resulting iron a kind of "stainless steel" quality. So, there we had a fairly good comprehensive picture of the context in which these two iron specimens had been found.

Now, why am I relating all these trivial anecdotes? It so happens that they take me back to my recent article about the work of David Deutsch entitled Brilliant book [display].

One of the four so-called strands proposed by the author for a future Theory of Everything is inspired by the philosophical ideas of Karl Popper. Scientists used to claim that they acquired knowledge by a famous process known as induction, which consists of examining things in the real world while hoping that the things in question will end up revealing spontaneously their inner secrets. One of the most celebrated examples is that of Isaac Newton watching an apple falling from a tree, and using this observation to induce the laws of gravitation.

Popper pointed out that the time-honored explanation of the creation of scientific principles by induction is a convenient piece of fiction. Nobody can truly acquire knowledge simply by waiting for real-world happenings and things to "reveal their inner secrets". Newton's apple didn't transmit enlightenment into his head. If there was a revelation, it came from Newton's brain, not from the fallen apple.

What really happens in a context of alleged induction is illustrated eloquently by the brainstorming carried out by Natacha, Alain and me concerning the two specimens of Carthusian iron. These objects did not radiate out magically a beam of information about themselves, enabling us to acquire knowledge about their nature. On the contrary, our emerging knowledge concerning the specimens was based upon information that was forged in our brains, and this information came from our reading, our talking, our experiences and our imagination. Rather than stating that the specimens gave rise to a phenomenon of induction, we can conclude that our brains created this knowledge, in much the same way that a writer invents a good story. And, talking of stories, maybe it's time I ended this one, which is becoming long and complicated...

Can Cadel Evans bring it off tomorrow?

On the eve of the penultimate stage of this year's berated Tour de France, there's exactly one minute and thirty seconds between Cadel Evans and the yellow jersey. Theoretically, in tomorrow's 55.5 km time trial between Cognac and Angoulême, Evans should be able to beat Alberto Contador by anything up to two minutes. Now, I don't intend to start selling the bear's skin [as the old French saying goes] before the animal has been shot, but I have a feeling that Australia might indeed be on the verge of obtaining her first global victory in the Tour. Clearly, there are many observers in France who would be very happy if things could happen in this way, because lots of people have serious doubts concerning the case of Contador, and it would be ever so nice if he were to be brushed quietly out of the way.

There was a weird atmosphere in the Tour just prior to Rabobank's decision to fire Michael Rasmussen. Cycling aficionados have been observing the muscly legs of champion bike-riders for the last century, and they've ended up creating a more or less standard image of what is expected in the physical form of a great cyclist. Well, Rasmussen's legs are light years away from the standard picture. When you watch him walking from behind, he looks like a skinny kid who has just got off his toy scooter. Now, this could simply mean that we observers have formed a screwed-up impression of what cyclists should look like from a physical viewpoint. But it's perfectly plausible, on the other hand, that Rasmussen is really nothing more than a lightweight shitbox crammed with explosive chemicals.

Over the last few days, the cycling public in France has witnessed several unexpected examples of the deplorable conflictual relationship between the world body that governs cycling [the Union Cycliste Internationale] and the Tour organizers. I have the impression that the Union is jealous of the huge success of the French event, and is trying to recuperate part of the rich fallout of the Tour.

There has also been a lot of open talk about the doping phenomenon in other sports. Maybe we've simply moved into a high-powered era in which the old-fashioned notions of clean and honest sports can no longer exist. Sometimes I have a nightmare vision of what might happen if the authorities simply gave in, and allowed sporting champions to consume whatever shit they liked. If this were the case, tomorrow's cyclists would glow in the twilight with a bluish halo. Their thighs would be so powerful that bikes would need to be built out of new high-tech materials sufficiently strong to avoid being crumpled. And, when such cyclists stopped for a piss by the roadside, the grass and weeds would cease to grow there for several years.

A couple of days ago, I received an email from the organizers of the Tour Down Under, who are all excited about receiving the visit, next year, of Miguel Indurain. It goes without saying that, for this Australian cycling event, the victory of Evans in the Tour de France would be a gigantic happening.

Judicial examination for former French leader

French legal concepts are rather different to the so-called English common law that forms the basis of Australia's system. I've spoken of the Clearstream affair in two earlier posts, entitled Chirac has some explaining to do [display] and Destruction of computer files [display]. Up until today, in the context of an alleged scheme designed to frame Nicolas Sarkozy, the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin has merely been suspected of playing a role. This morning, the legal system went one step further by announcing that Villepin will be subjected to a so-called judicial examination, to be carried out under the control of a special magistrate referred to as a juge d'instruction [inquiry judge].

For Villepin, this new development means that he and his lawyers will have full access to his legal dossier, which was not the case up until now. Although Villepin is not yet actually charged with violating any law whatsoever, the announcement concerning his judicial examination mentions explicitly no less than four infractions that would figure in the charges that could well be brought against him, at the conclusion of the examination. I shall indicate the French name of each infraction, and try to describe it in English.

— Complicité de dénonciation calomnieuse: The accused was an accomplice in a spontaneous operation that consisted of publicly denouncing the victim by citing facts known to be false. In other words, if Villepin were to be accused [which, I insist, is not yet the case], it would be due to his calumny suggesting that Sarkozy received illicit funds paid through Clearstream.

— Recel de vol: Handling stolen goods. The Clearstream documents at the origin of this affair were indeed stolen.

— Recel d'abus de confiance: The word recel means "concealment", and the expression abus de confiance might be translated as "breach of faith". The charge involves using something that belongs to another individual with the intention of harming the true owner. To be frank, I don't understand exactly what could be involved here. I believe it's the general notion of stealing banking data and falsifying it with intent to harm an individual to whom the original data is supposed to apply. Very complicated!

— Complicité d'usage de faux: Association with accomplices making use of forged documents.

An interesting aspect of this announcement is the possibility that Dominique de Villepin will probably refuse to answer questions from the inquiry judge, and insist that his case be brought before a special jurisdiction known as the Court of Justice of the Republic, created in 1993, whose sole mission concerns charges aimed at a minister who was still in function at the time of the alleged infractions.

Brilliant book

This excellent book by the Oxford physicist David Deutsch came out a decade ago, but I've only just got around to reading it. Seeking to lay the foundations of a vast theory of everything, Deutsch introduces four great domains of knowledge that he refers to as strands:

— Quantum physics

— Epistemology, inspired by the work of Karl Popper

— Theory of computation, inspired by the work of Alan Turing

— Theory of evolution, inspired by the work of Richard Dawkins.

It's rare to find an eclectic author who's prepared to blend such different disciplines into a synthetic whole.

Chicken out

Tomorrow morning [Thursday, 26 July], Michael Rasmussen won't be lined up for the start of the next stage of the Tour de France, which is henceforth in a state of total chaos. His team, Rabobank, asked him to step down. The Danish rider, suspected of doping, had not obeyed the rules of the game. It's a relief, in a way, to know that his frail silhouette will no longer be casting a shadow upon the probity of the Tour. But will this be the last unpleasant surprise of this Tour de France 2007?

Sophia's ninth birthday

My lovely lady dog Sophia, described as a cross-bred Labrador with a golden robe, was born nine years ago.

A few minutes ago, I told her [in our everyday French dog talk] that she's a lovely old lady, and I gave her a fine Saint Marcellin cheese. In her usual discreet style [a little like that of Cécilia Sarkozy], Sophia refrained from making any public statement on this occasion.

I'm reminded of our Skeffington ancestor, the lunatic second Earl of Massereene [1743-1805], who once threw a party for his dog, while insisting that invited animals should be attired for the festivities in dress clothes. I'm fond of that crazy ancestral personage, Clotworthy Skeffington, whose escape from a Parisian prison preceded the storming of the Bastille. I admire him in the same way I love dogs and underdogs in general, and Sophia in particular.

Cloudy shroud

Last Saturday, while visiting the Grande Chartreuse with Natacha and her husband, I was momentarily alarmed when I saw Alain disappearing into an unlit alcove at the monastic gateway. I recall tales in which a guy goes out to buy a box of matches, while waving goodbye to his wife and family... and reappears half a century later on the other side of the globe. I imagined my having to soothe his lovely wife with banal words: "Natacha, I'm sure Alain's not lost for Eternity. Besides, he left with your car keys." In fact, Natacha's husband reappeared almost instantly, with no apparent help from the Holy Ghost. Alain had merely discovered a charming little subterranean chapel for visitors. It was foolish of me to have imagined that he might have decided on the spur of the moment to abandon us and become a monk.

Inside the chapel, somebody [no doubt a creative artist from the nearby Carthusian museum] had installed a splendid cloth replica of the famous Shroud of Turin:

Most people agree today that this piece of medieval cloth is a fabulous hoax, but it keeps a lot of serious people busy in arguing for or against its alleged authenticity. [Click here to see a website on this affair.] Personally, I believe it's a forgery manufactured in the secret Roman laboratories of Leonardo de Vinci based upon on-the-spot forensic data concerning the crucifixion of Jesus supplied by a descendant of Mary Magdalene. I see no other explanation capable of accounting for the perfection of this inspiring artifact.

Incidentally, in a neighboring domain, all those Polish pilgrims who died a few days ago in a terrible coach accident near Grenoble were returning from a nearby place called Our Lady of Salette, where the Virgin apparently appeared and spoke to a couple of local children, named Maximin and Mélanie, about a century and a half ago.

We all know that peasant kids don't necessarily have the expert reactions of professional journalists such as my daughter, for example, but I find it a pity that nobody has thought it worthwhile, on one of these frequent apparitions of the Virgin, to pop the question directly to the divine First Lady: "Is the Shroud of Turin genuine?" Theoretically, she should know... but, then again, she might still be in the dark [which is normal, you might say, in the case of a shroud]. A direct question of this kind might be like having asked Hillary Clinton, not so long ago, for her evaluation of the authenticity of tales about Bill's big cigar. The trouble with shrouds is that they're meant to hide things.