November 11

The initial November 11 was in 1918, when the Armistice was signed on a cold wet day [like today at Gamone] in a railway carriage at Rethondes in the forest of Compiègne, to the north-east of Paris. Towards the end of that afternoon, in the Chamber of Deputies, French prime minister Georges Clemenceau read out the terms of Germany's surrender. The citizens of Paris started to dance in the streets, while watching a parade of captured cannons.

During more than four years of warfare, 1.4 million French soldiers had died, and 600 thousand had been wounded.

At the start of 1916, troops from the other side of the planet had moved to France to take part in the combats.

Referred to globally as the Anzac [Australian and New Zealand Army Corps], they were immediately hurled into the hell of the Somme. By the time the Armistice had been signed, 60 thousand Anzac troops had died on the combined fronts of the so-called Great War. Today, an Australian memorial is located at Villers-Bretonneux, up in Picardy, just to the east of Amiens.

While driving around in my Citroën this morning [looking in vain for a pharmacy, to obtain medicine for a severe cold], I discovered that commemoration services were taking place around the cenotaph of every town and village on my route.

I wish to conclude this evocation of the terrible events of 1914-1918 with this photo of a young Anzac soldier named Francis Pickering who succeeded in returning home safely to the family cattle station at Breeza in New South Wales:

As I've already explained on several occasions, this Pickering lad was the family hero whose nickname "King" (reflecting his prowess in various domains, including sport) was given as an official Christian name, in a spurt of zeal, to my father, born in 1917... who was embarrassed throughout his entire life by this silly regal name. Fortunately, the nurses in the maternity clinic at Rockhampton (Queensland) had a sense of humor, and they associated the new baby with a local Aboriginal celebrity known as King Billy. So, my father ended up being referred to by this nickname, soon shortened to Bill.

Approaching weather seen from a distance

Not long ago, this was the splendid vision from my bedroom window:

This afternoon, the situation at the far end of the Bourne Valley [also known as the Cirque de Choranche] was somewhat different:

The furthest slopes, covered in pine trees, are only 8 kilometers to the east of Gamone, and one has the impression that they're at more or less the same level as my house. But they rise, in fact, to over 1,000 meters, whereas the altitude here at Gamone is only about 350 m. Consequently, it can be snowing at the far end of the valley at the same time that my house is bathed in sunshine. Often, for me, the conditions observed from my bedroom window are a little like watching tomorrow's weather prognostics on TV. So, there's a fair chance that a bit of snow might be falling here in the next day or so. In any case, the temperatures have dropped considerably over the last few days, and I keep a log fire burning constantly in my living room.

Fortunately, there's some excellent TV these days, including a lavish four-part production of Tolstoy's War and Peace [budget of 28 million euros, 15,000 extras, 1,800 stunts, 1,500 horses, 105 shooting locations, 2,400 costumes, etc], a rerun of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon [trailer] and a couple of fine documentaries on the epoch of Charles de Gaulle. This evening, while toasting my feet, I'm looking forward to watching a recent French documentary about a great kitsch tenor whom I used to hear on the radio when I was a kid in South Grafton: Mario Lanza. Tears of nostalgia guaranteed!

Magic port of Sydney

I've only left Sydney once aboard an ocean liner, the Bretagne, which sailed from the Pyrmont terminal (now amalgamated into the modernized quarter of Darling Harbour) in the early hours of the first morning of January 1962. Everything about that departure was magic, and remains legendary, indeed mythical, in my memory today. In the context of that departure, there were several signs of imminent events that would shape my life. However, as a naive 21-year-old country lad [whose only significant achievement was three or four years of serious professional experience as a computer programmer with IBM], it was unthinkable that I might have recognized any of these positive omens in the port of Sydney on that final evening of 1961.

The vessel itself had been built a decade earlier for a French company named SGTM based in Marseille. [In the name, Société générale de Transports maritimes, notice the amusing spelling fault: the first r in Transports has been omitted.] Besides, the Bretagne had an almost identical sister ship named the Provence. The Greek company Chandris had purchased and refitted the Bretagne a few months before I sailed from Sydney. This Greek ownership meant that, towards the end of the voyage, we were offered a splendid encounter with Athens. Little did I know that, within a couple of years, I myself would be employed as a sailor and helmsman on a Greek ship, the Persian Cyrus, which stopped for a memorable day or so in the great French port of Marseille. I could not have imagined, either, that I would soon be falling in love with, and marrying, a girl from the French province named Bretagne.

Here's a postcard of the Bretagne under French colors:

Under Greek colors, as I knew her, the vessel was painted white:

Shortly after my trip aboard the Bretagne, the Greeks decided to anglicize her name to Brittany. This must have been an ill omen, for the ship was burnt out in April 1963 at its home port of Piraeus.

I've often thought that stepping aboard a great ship and sailing to foreign lands is one of the greatest experiences I can imagine. Today, I was interested to see that a newly refitted liner, the Pacific Dawn, has just been launched from Sydney.

She's viewed here from the Opera House corner of Circular Quay:

As a child, when I was anguished by dark thoughts of death and the futility of our existence, I often forced myself to conjure up in my imagination the image of a giant ship plowing through the seas, to restore me instantly to a peaceful state of mind. Even today, I still ignore the origins or profound sense of this tactic, not to mention the reasons why it generally worked.

Neurons

In memoriam: Christian L

For the last couple of years, I've been participating as a guinea pig in a project conducted by the French medical-research organization named Inserm [Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale] aimed at determining whether a regular supplement of folates and omega-3 might have a positive effect upon the incidence of vascular accidents. In concrete terms, this means that I consume a couple of big tablets every morning... without knowing whether they might contain folates, omega-3 or simply placebo junk. Then, once a year, at the hospital in nearby Romans, I meet up with a Parisian nurse who tests me in one way or another for half an hour. Besides taking a blood specimen, she has a nice little test for seeing whether or not I might be developing advanced signs of something terrible like Alzheimer's disease. The test consists of asking me to name, say, every kind of animal (or country or color, etc) that springs into my mind in the space of thirty or so seconds. Now, to be quite honest, this kind of test scares shit out me... for the simple reason that it never fails to evoke the most nightmarish situation that I can possibly imagine. I'm referring to the idea that I might wake up one day and find that, for one reason or another, I no longer possess the most fabulous but fragile baggage that I've been acquiring over the last half a century: my mastery of French. I would like to imagine that my acquaintance with the language of Molière has infiltrated my brain to such an extent that my neurons now reek of it, as if they were eggs left to rot in a charming old French hen house, alongside a pig pen.

I imagine my brain, when I'm optimistic, as an aging Camembert cheese abandoned in one of those primitive fly-proof containers that we used to call safes back in Waterview, South Grafton, NSW, Australia. In the best of cases, if I wished to appear modern, in a technological spirit, my cerebral apparatus might be likened to the motor of an aging automobile, which seems to be branded Citroën, but which might well have been assembled imperfectly out in Australia. My soul is surely impregnated with the image of Notre-Dame de Paris, in the same way that the Shroud of Turin seems to convey a shadow of Christ... but I fear that my spiritual photo might simply be that of the humble redbrick church—referred to pompously as a "cathedral"—in my birthplace, Grafton.

In any case, I'm in no way opposed to the idea of exercising my brain.

"You are old, father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head —
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

Links through images

Back on 25 March 2007, in an article entitled Half the local Aussie population is leaving! [display], I described the departure from the nearby village of Pont-en-Royans of an Australian expatriate friend named Sheridan Henty, who is a direct descendant of the celebrated Australian pioneers known as the Henty brothers. When I was in London last August, I went along to both Sotheby's and Bonhams to seek information concerning Sheridan's ceramic plaque with a portrait of the young Queen Victoria. Experts pointed out that my closeup photos of the object reveal that, for a miniature painting, it is rather crudely executed in certain places, as if the painter were not particularly skilled in this art form, or as if he had not in fact finished his painting job. This imperfect craftsmanship, combined with the fact that the portrait is unsigned, means that the commercial value of the plaque on the art market is next to nothing... which is a pity in the sense that it's a delightful portrait.

My attempts to discover the origins of this portrait caused me to look closely into the genealogy of Sheridan's Heath ancestors in England. One of her key ancestors was a wealthy shipping merchant, Miles Heath [1710-1777], who built a town house in the Strand, London, named Three Cocks Court. Sheridan has a plate bearing her ancestor's arms.

At the top, above a plate-armor helmet, a stubby round tower has erupted in flames. Inside the shield, there are three cocks. This ancient coat of arms originated in the context of a 16th-century Kentish ancestor named Henry Crow.

When carrying out genealogical research concerning a common name such as Heath, one encounters individuals who, at first sight, appear to lie outside the researcher's domain.

One such person was a baronet, Sir James Heath [1852-1942], of whom I know little. His bookplate [an image on paper, to be glued in books] appears to contain a few of the same elements as in the earlier coat of arms [except for the flames]. This makes me wonder whether James Heath might be a descendant, like Sheridan, of Miles Heath. In any case, this is a line of research I intend to pursue.

If such a link were to be established, this would make Sheridan a distant relative, through marriage, of a celebrated British dynasty that I've heard about ever since I was child: the Fitzroy family, whose chiefs have been for centuries the dukes of Grafton. Indeed, it was Sir Charles Fitzroy [1796-1858], governor of New South Wales, who in 1851 gave the name of his late grandfather, Augustus Henry Fitzroy [1735-1811], the 3rd Duke of Grafton and a former British prime minister, to the country town in New South Wales in which I would be born, nearly a century later.

In 1918, Hylda Madeleine Heath, the daughter of Sir James Heath, married Major Cecil Robert Bates [builder of the Cunard and White Star shipping lines], and their son, Sir Geoffrey Voltelin Bates, in 1957, married into the Fitzroy clan.

Whenever I phone up Sheridan to tell her such stuff, akin to family gossip, I get the impression that I bring a little sunshine into her life.

Caring for my machines

Ever since I've been living here at Gamone, I've had problems with machines driven by combustion motors... with the exception of my antiquated Citroën automobile, which has never given me the slightest trouble, in spite of its 235,000 kilometers. [I refuse to even think about replacing my Citroën before building a garage at Gamone.] Fortunately, my Honda transporter is back in service now, as good as new, and I'm finally able to cart my stock of firewood up into a corner of the house.

Everybody has encountered this basic problem: When you leave a machine unused during the winter months, it's often impossible to start it up in spring. My initial reaction has often consisted of thinking that the motor might be damp, or that the spark plug might have been corroded by the wintry conditions.

In fact, the basic problem stems from the use of unleaded gasoline, which forms a gluey caramel if you leave it in the fuel tank or the carburetor for a few cold months. As a local lumberjack [my Choranche neighbor Gérard Magnat] put it, in referring to chainsaws, weed-cutters and my Honda transporter: "All these machines need lead." To keep warm, you might say! In more precise terms, we have to mix a little additive with the unleaded gasoline, to keep it stable through the cold season.

A few weeks ago, I purchased a new chainsaw, because I imagined [wrongly, as it turned out] that I would need such a tool to demolish my old wood shed.

The guy who sold me the chainsaw didn't have time to assemble it. I imagined that I would be able to do so, by following precisely the instructions in the user guide. After ten minutes of cutting, however, the chain came off, and it was impossible to fit it back into the slotted chain guide. When I took it back to the hardware store, a new employee—who didn't seem to know much about chainsaws, and even reassembled the chain guide upside-down [as seen in the photo, but of no consequence]—informed me that I had no doubt hit a nail, and that my chain would have to be replaced, because it would no longer slide freely in the chain guide. I was furious, because I knew perfectly well that I had been sawing small logs that could not possibly contain nails.

Fortunately, I happened to tell this sorry tale to my lumberjack neighbor Gérard... who first reprimanded me mildly for purchasing a chainsaw in an ordinary hardware store [instead of obtaining his expert advice]. He told me that the chain on a new saw expands after five minutes of use. Consequently, in using the chainsaw for ten minutes, the chain would have become slack, and likely to come off... which is exactly what happened. As for the idea that the chain would no longer slide freely in the guide, Gérard warned me: "Don't worry if you see a few sparks." Then he dragged the chain back and forth over a log, throttling a little all the time, until it suddenly started to turn freely. My chainsaw was resuscitated! Gérard—a fascinating and colorful old-fashioned character of a kind that can only be encountered these days in la France profonde [deep France]—said to me, with a friendly grin: "William, we're all specialists in one way or another. If I needed advice about computers, I would call in on you. On the other hand, if you need help with your chainsaw, I'm your man."

Bad pizzas

Just as a glass of wine can be envisaged as either half-full or rather half-empty, there are two ways of reacting to the following news item concerning products of the US company General Mills:

— On the one hand, a positive-minded observer would say that it's great to see that a big company is prepared to accept publicly the onus of recalling all that bad food.

— On the other hand, a negative-minded observer [such as me] would say that it's alarming to discover that such an astronomical quantity of shit can be produced and distributed to buyers. In other words, it would have been far more reassuring if the factory had discovered all these bad pizzas while they were still sitting in their Ohio warehouse, well before their shipment to stores.

I've been tempted to try out supermarket pizzas two or three times, but they're invariably either hard or rubbery, and generally tasteless. To my mind, feasting on a pizza should be a special eating event, of an almost solemn nature: quite the opposite of stuffing down rubbish to avoid feeling hungry. That's why I recall many of my most memorable pizzas. For example, one of the latest delicious pizzas that comes to mind was served up in an Italian restaurant in South Kensington last August. Down in Marseille, Natacha's parents have found an outstanding pizza delivery service. Once upon a time, my friend Georges used to prepare fine pizzas in the wood oven of his restaurant Le Jorjane in Choranche. Last but not least, some of the best pizzas I've ever eaten were made in my kitchen at Gamone. Hey, it'll soon be lunch time, and I happened to buy a cube of yeast yesterday at Nathalie's bakery in Pont-en-Royans. Thanks to the pretext of that article about shit food in Ohio, I've just found an answer to the trivial but pleasant question of deciding what to eat for my next meal.

PS Since finishing this article, I've seen that another US company, Cargill Inc, is voluntarily recalling more than 840,000 pounds [381,360 kilograms] of ground beef patties, after four children who ate their product developed an E. coli affliction. Recently, another US company, Topps Meat, recalled 21.7 million pounds [9,851,800 kilograms] of ground beef amid E. coli concerns, which caused the company to announce that it's going out of business. These figures are monstrous: literally, enough to make you sick.

New Mac system

The much-awaited new version of the Macintosh operating system, known as Leopard, became available a week ago, but I had to wait for a few days to receive my copy by special delivery from Grenoble to my house at Gamone. I had no problems in installing the new system on both my iMac and my MacBook.

Before upgrading to the new system, I spent a fair amount of time cleaning up my machines and testing them in every imaginable way, and I even added a big chunk of memory to the iMac. A minor surprise of a negative nature is the impossibility of using obsolescent software applications from the era preceding Mac OS X. Often, as the old saying goes, we don't miss something until it's no longer there. For me, in a Macintosh context, the thing that's no longer there is a splendid word processor named FrameMaker. I used this writing tool for years, up until Adobe suddenly decided—for reasons that most Mac aficionados never understood, let alone appreciated—that they no longer wished to support the Mac version of this product. My computer still houses all kinds of FrameMaker fragments, alongside loads of texts that I've translated from their original FrameMaker implementation into either Pages or Indesign. Whenever I wished to read a particular fragment, I could always open it with my version of FrameMaker that ran on the ancient Mac system. Well, since upgrading to Leopard, I'm no longer capable of opening and reading any of these old FrameMaker fragments... and this impossibility frustrates me a little from time to time. What it means is that I can henceforth only extract their essential raw content by means of a text tool such as TextEdit.

Talking about word processing, I'm amazed when I look back at this book, entitled Videotex in Europe, that I co-edited for the European Commission—in liaison with an employee, Carlo Vernimb—back in 1979: that's to say, before the start of the personal computing era. To produce the typescript of this document, I used a word-processing system that I had designed and implemented in Basic on a small IBM computer. Since the machine did not incorporate a display screen, the only way of materializing a man-machine dialogue consisted of using the keyboard and printer. Consequently, my word-processing system—called IRMA [Intelligent Rewriting Machine for Authors]—used extra wide sheets of paper. Communications between the author and the machine appeared on the left-hand side of the paper, and the final document was printed on the right-and side. This was an exceptionally clumsy approach to word processing, but my IRMA enabled me to produce this important document on the subject of videotex [a primitive ancestor of the Internet] for the European Commission. Today, admiring the Leopard system on my Mac, I realize that we've come a long way since then.

Deadly collapse of rocks in Choranche

This afternoon, while installing a new lamp on the façade of my house, I heard sirens down on the road that runs alongside the Bourne. A few hours later, Natacha phoned me from Marseille saying that she had heard news on TV of an automobile crushed by rocks at Choranche, a few kilometers up beyond the village, on the road that runs along the cliffs in the direction of Rencurel.

A 47-year-old man and his 13-year-old son were killed instantly by the big rectangular block seen in the above photo, while his wife and two other children were wounded. Four years ago, a similar accident occurred at the same place, crushing two people in an automobile.

I've driven along that awesome road on countless occasions, and I always feel relieved when I get through the sections with overhanging rocks. The authorities often talk of purging and reinforcing the crumbly zones, but everybody knows that it's impossible to guarantee total security. Roads of this kind in the Vercors, often designed by the adjective "aerial", were cut into the faces of the cliffs over a century ago, which means that there has been time for dangerous fissures to grow. When I see the way in which freezing conditions can burst a copper water pipe, I'm not surprised that abrupt temperature variations (such as the onslaught of wintry conditions at Choranche over the last week) can dislodge a huge chunk of overhanging rock. Personally, ever since the first catastrophe of this kind, I've tended to avoid this risky but otherwise spectacular road. And I feel that, after this second accident, more and more travelers will prefer alternative routes. On the other hand, if you look at the situation calmly and evaluate it in terms of statistics, there are far fewer accidents on this road than down on the busy highways through the valley. But statistics don't attenuate the anguish of driving underneath those gigantic blocks of rock, which appear to be suspended precariously and capable of losing their grip on the face of the limestone cliffs and sliding down onto the road.

Visual telecom

Today is my daughter's birthday. She phoned me up this morning and suggested that we should get in contact through the free visual telecom system called Skype. I was rather surprised to find that it was so easy to use. Since my son François had dropped in at Emmanuelle's flat, I talked with both of them.

For anybody who's interested, my Skype name (that's to say, the address for linking up to me) is skyvington. It's preferable to contact me beforehand, by phone or email, to let me know the time at which I should activate the Skype system on my Macintosh.

My children provided me with a real-time visit of Emmanuelle's residence in Paris, which I had never seen before. At my end of the line, the tiny built-in camera on my Macintosh points in the direction of my bed, at the back of where I'm sitting. François commented upon the fact that, when they phoned me, around noon, I hadn't yet made my bed. This is likely to be the case quite often. If it were easy to do so, I would change the position of my desk so that the camera points out through a window in the direction of the mountains, which never look unmade.

Fabulous educational project

This 64-year-old American intellectual and administrator, Nicholas Negroponte, of Greek origins, is a visionary, of the same kind as Apple's Steve Jobs. A former member of MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and the kid brother of the "other" Negroponte [John, US Deputy Secretary of State], he is promoting an exciting international project known as One Laptop Per Child, which consists of designing a low-cost basic computer for children in developing nations. [Click here to view an interesting video on this subject.]

The machine, manufactured in Taiwan by Quanta Computer Inc, has a nice Martian look:

Initially planned to have a sales price of a hundred US dollars, the laptop will in fact be marketed at twice that price... which is still remarkably cheap. Up-to-date information on the project can be found at their website:

Not surprisingly, this kind of daring technological and educational project needs to gain momentum before it can be evaluated in meaningful terms. For the moment, only three nations have signed up to acquire machines: Peru, Uruguay and Mongolia. These initial orders amount to a "mere" 200 thousand machines, but it is to be hoped that enthusiasm for the laptop will escalate as soon as the bush telegraph [in default of the Internet] spreads the news that it's a great deal.

Anecdote. When I first heard of the grand project of Nicholas Negroponte [who, incidentally, helped me personally when I was in Boston, in the early '70s, preparing and shooting my TV documentaries on artificial intelligence and the brain], I was intrigued by the presence of a crank handle, making it possible to power up the computer in villages without electricity.

Cyclists are familiar with a device called the home trainer:

I imagined that it would be a great idea, in remote places, to install home trainers along with Negroponte's laptops. If that were done, then the organizers of the Tour de France would have a superb system for punishing cyclists full of illegal pharmaceutical products. Instead of fining them and banning them from pedaling, they could be sentenced to Club Med vacations in exotic villages that are about to discover computing. I reckon that a single sufficiently-doped cyclist, in the course of a few dozen sessions (the equivalent of stages in the Tour de France), could generate enough electricity to initiate an entire community into the joys of computing. And, if there were any power left over, it could be used to warm up an evening meal for the village folk.

Gay God

Throughout the Cosmos, and beyond, members of the Harry Potter sect were astounded—to say the least—to hear author J K Rowling saying recently that she had always imagined Merlin-like Dumbledore as a homosexual.

That's like suggesting that God might be gay and non-Caucasian. But when you think about it: How do we know She isn't?

Rugby trainer turned to politics

French TV viewers are so accustomed to images of Bernard Laporte, former trainer of the national rugby team, either observing a match or delivering a fiery sermon to his players that it's funny to see him attired in a suit and seated on the red-upholstered front bench of the French parliament.

I hope we'll be able to see Laporte in all kinds of future political settings. To be frank, though, there's a chance that this might not be the case. Some observers imagined that the aura of popularity concerning Laporte might be dulled by the poor performance of France in the recent world cup, and that even his mate Sarkozy might end up having second thoughts about the wisdom of having offered Laporte—on a silver platter—a top political post in the sporting domain. But Laporte's image has been darkened recently by business and financial affairs that have nothing to do with rugby. Since most of these imbroglios have already found their way into courtrooms, it would be out of place to attempt to say too much about them, even if we disposed of firm facts (which does not appear to be the case). All I can say is that a referee might well jump into the picture, one of these days, and pull out a card whose color matches the upholstery of those elegant ministerial benches.

Saving the planet

She's not in the same heavyweight category as Al Gore, but Australian star Cate Blanchett has just revealed that she's making a personal effort to save the planet's natural resources.

"I really love a refreshing shower. But I'm careful about how much water I use. So, I've just had a shower timer fitted, which means I don't have more than four-minute showers."

On the other hand, she denied a rumor about no longer washing her hair at all. And she ended her interview in the UK's Daily Express by a curious evocation of her home land.

"I do live in a desert called Australia, you know!''

We're all familiar with the "sunburnt country" image invented by Dorothea Mackellar [1885-1968]. But I feel that Cate Blanchett has parched us out excessively when she refers to the Australian continent as a desert. Although I know it's wrong to judge an individual from her physical appearance, Cate doesn't strike me as an expert on deserts. I have no idea whether she spends much time Googling about the environment. Besides, I wonder what kind of a computer she uses.

Mac user

Who is this middle-aged Macintosh user, in a cluttered office, whose personal computing comfort apparently necesitates the simultaneous use of no less than three giant 30-inch high-definition screens? Hint: For over three years, this American has been a member of the board of directors of Apple Computer. Other hints: He recently made a highly successful movie, and the existence of this movie no doubt influenced the folk who award Nobel prizes... because they gave him a shared Peace Prize! It's Al Gore, of course, who happens to be one of the planet's most high-profile Mac enthusiasts.

As the old saying goes (well, more or less): "Tell me what computer you use, and I'll tell you what sort of a person you are." We've evolved a lot since the time when the French Socialist politician Laurent Fabius, asked whether he used a computer, replied: "Yes, I have a Minitel." The Minitel was the primitive little gadget (now obsolete) built by French Telecom, in pre-Internet days, which enabled ordinary citizens to access various databases. Here in France, I'm surprised that journalists don't seem to have got around to producing an in-depth report on the daily down-to-earth personal relationships between prominent politicians and computing... as distinct from the things they pay specialists to do for them. Let me lay my head on the block. I would bet that Sarkozy does not have a personal Macintosh, and that he knows next to nothing about the technicalities of using a computer and the Internet. I don't know why, but he strikes me as that kind of individual.

Undoing the past

There's a common French understatement for situations in which you're mildly ashamed of yourself because of a negative action for which you were responsible, maybe inadvertently. Suppose, for example, that you drive alongside an old lady standing on the sidewalk, and you discover in your rear-vision mirror that you've splashed mud over her. The expression is: "I wasn't proud of myself..."

Over the last few days, my ongoing demolition of the remaining vestiges of an ancient stone water trough at Gamone has often made me say that I'm not particularly proud of myself. I have the constant impression that I'm devoting a lot of time and energy to the destruction of a man-made object that was simply designed to last, as it were, for ever. I feel at times that I'm undoing the past like a vandal. In reality, I shouldn't have any such qualms, because the structure I'm demolishing has been, for ages, an amorphous mass of half-broken boulders of so-called marne (poor-quality brittle stone) held together by dusty mortar. When I first set my eyes upon the ancient trough, which once collected water from the spring up behind my house, I immediately hosed tap water into it, to see if it could still be used. Within five minutes, all the water had seeped away between the boulders. Besides, the front side of the trough was largely ruined, and the global appearance of the decrepit boulders and mortar was in no way aesthetic. All in all, it was not the kind of structure that I was tempted to try to restore. Besides, I was convinced that it was beyond restoration, and I could see no reason for treating it as a precious object. So, I removed the boulders that were about to fall, and I used the remaining walls, built against the embankment, to support a corner of a wood shed.

Since demolishing this wood shed, to make way for a big yard between the road and the house, with room for a new wood shed up against the hill, I've started to remove the final vestiges of the old trough: a pair of low walls, each one about a meter high and a meter wide, firmly embedded in the embankment. And, when I discover the massive nature and solidity of the construction, I'm a little ashamed to find myself destroying it.

Using a crowbar and a sledgehammer, I've been unearthing dozens of big boulders that formed the buried background against which the trough was built. To my mind, this style of construction is a thing of the past, quite unlike work that might be performed by a peasant or an ordinary farmer who decided to build a trough in a rough and ready fashion. That's to say, I'm convinced that this trough was constructed back in the time when the Chartreux monks were making wine at Choranche. It was almost certainly built by expert craftsmen who would have been hired to perform this task. And they built it to last. But they could hardly imagine that many of the boulders would end up splitting in the cold, and that the mortar would, in time, turn to dust. Be that as it may, I'm not particularly proud of myself, today, to be demolishing this ancient trough. With every blow of my sledgehammer, or every time I throw my weight upon the crowbar to dislodge a boulder, I have the impression that the phantoms of the craftsmen are looking over my shoulder with a sad expression on their faces.

Mediterranean Union

In the same way that General de Gaulle used to dream of a European Union that would stretch from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains in western Russia, Nicolas Sarkozy has been starting to evoke the concept of a Mediterranean Union that would encompass all the nations on the edge of the legendary "middle of the Earth", from Beirut in the Levant to the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Sun sets over the Atlantic, and from the European Riviera down to the Maghreb, the Sahara and the primordial motherland of Judeo-Christian culture: Egypt.

It's certainly a grand idea, which stirs the imagination. After all, this is where a lot of human and social action has been taking place since the dawn of civilization. For the moment, though, it's little more than a vague dream... in spite of the fact that the French president threw this idea into a major speech delivered in Tangier during his recent state visit to Morocco. Faced with this concept, certain media in the Maghreb are frankly hostile, considering such French ideas as a resurgence of colonialist thinking.

Concerning the creation of the European Union, the challenge involved nations located within a single continent. A hypothetical Mediterranean Union, on the other hand, would involve at least two continents, Europe and Africa... not to mention Turkey and the edge of the Middle East. And it would seek to associate peoples of the three great monotheistic faiths. At a political level, the creation of such a heterogeneous entity would be a Herculean task, akin to landing on the Moon. But it's exciting, if not encouraging, to see that a French bulldog such as Sarkozy dares to dream of such a project. One never knows what might happen...

Olé!

[This is my 500th Antipodes post.]

Tomorrow, at the Vatican, 498 ecclesiastic "martyrs" of the Spanish Civil War [1936-1939] will be beatified. In quantitative terms, this must be a record of eternal bliss, suggesting that members of the Church in Spain have been the most saintly men and women on Earth.

By whom were these individuals martyrized? Mostly by anarchists and Communists. Does that mean that, in the context of this terrible and bloody conflict, these "martyrs" were on the side of the Fascist dictator Franco? That would be a rather stark way of putting things. Let's say that they were on God's side...

Not used to Europe

Yesterday morning, Sophia started to bark, the bell rang and, when I scrambled downstairs, I found a fellow delivering the new phone directories. He spoke to me immediately in English, which is unusual in this corner of the world:

Fellow: "Mister Skyvington? Here are the new phone directories."

Me: "Thanks. But tell me: How come you speak such good English?"

Fellow: "My mother taught me. I'm English. Born and brought up in the UK."

I liked the subtle humor in the bit about being taught English by his mother. This anecdote makes me realize that I'm not yet fully accustomed to everyday possibilities opened up in recent times by the creation of Europe. Indeed, it's perfectly simple and banal for an English guy to decide that he's going to live in the south of France and earn his living working for the French postal service... particularly with a short-duration job contract for the delivery of phone books.

In the future, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find an English fellow coming along here to read the electricity meter... which is not exactly one of the most sought-after jobs in France. Here at Gamone, first of all, the electricity employee has to locate the meter. If I don't happen to be here to inform him of its whereabouts (attached to the far side of an electricity post about twenty meters down from the house), it's quite possible for a newcomer to conclude that there's no meter at Gamone. And the employees who come here to read the electricity meter are inevitably newcomers, because few people would ever wish to retain such a job from one period to the next. The employee then has to figure out how to make his way down the slopes to the post with the meter. Finally, he has to struggle through the thorny blackberry bushes that usually surround the meter. I cut them back whenever I have time, and think of doing so, but they always seem to have grown back in all their thorny glory by the time the electricity employee arrives here.

Incidentally, French people often congratulate me on my fluent French [which I speak, nevertheless, with a strong foreign accent, which is often a mystery for my hearers]. Inspired by the English guy this morning, I really must get into the habit of explaining, simply and truthfully: "My ex-wife taught me." I've often recalled her first lesson. I had just informed my future wife, in faulty French: "Je veux te marier. [I want to marry you.]" She replied: "Two problems. First, only a priest or a mayor can use the verb 'to marry' in a transitive fashion when they say, for example, that they married Peter and Jane. As for Peter, he would use the verb in a reflexive fashion, and say in French: 'I married himself with Jane'... if you see what I mean. The second problem, Willy [as she called me], is that I'm not at all sure that I wish to marry myself with you."

Keepers of French treasures

Concerning state-owned buildings in which people either work or reside, or both [as in the case of a foreign embassy, for example], the French language draws a top-level distinction between assets of a mobile nature, such as the furniture, and the building itself, associated with the land on which it is located, which are obviously of an immobile nature. The former objects are referred to as mobilier (goods and chattels), whereas the latter are called immobilier (real estate).

On Wednesday evening, I was fascinated by a TV documentary concerning the mobilier national: that's to say, the vast state-owned stocks of splendid furniture and miscellaneous objects that are distributed out to all kinds of official buildings such as the Château de Fontainebleau or the palatial French embassy in Rome. The documentary revealed, above all, the extraordinary amount of skilled restoration work that is being carried out non-stop behind the scenes, by the nation's finest craftsmen and women, in order to maintain all these goods and chattels in a perfect state, capable of representing the prestigious and elegant image of France.

Every outstanding item of furniture is referenced in such a way that a researcher can go along to the National Archives in Paris [just down the street from where I lived for a quarter of a century] in order to obtain a detailed description of the nature and background of the object.

The anecdote that most impressed me involved crockery at the French embassy in a foreign city: Switzerland, if I remember correctly. The lady from the Quai d'Orsay [the famous Parisian address of France's ministry of Foreign Affairs] who's in charge of this aspect of embassy mobilier dragged out all the crockery for a global inspection, and she found that four dinner plates had tiny chips on the edge. The damaged items were wrapped up and taken back to the national porcelain factory at Sèvres, on the western edge of Paris. [Click here to see an English version of their website.] There, an amazing process was set in motion, with the final goal of replacing the four plates. First, the chipped crockery was soaked in an acidic mixture enabling the etched gold to be recuperated. Next, the unique mold of the Swiss embassy plates had to be located in their vast reserves.

A potter then used a traditional wheel to produce four roughly-shaped plates, and his colleagues referred to the mold to attain the exact form and dimensions of the original crockery. An expert then demonstrated his technique for whisking each new plate through a cold bath of enameling liquid. He's maybe one of the only fellows in France with this manual skill, which involves balancing an item of crockery on the tips of three fingers as it swirls through the bath.

The gold-etching technique involves placing a set of mysterious gluey black stencils on the middle and circumference of each plate and then sprinkling gold dust over it. Somewhere along the line, the new plates were baked in an oven. It goes without saying that all the techniques employed at Sèvres are ancient and secret, so the documentary was in no way a do-it-yourself introduction to the manufacture of fine personalized crockery. In any case, by the time the sparkling new hand-crafted plates reached the embassy, the replacement operation had no doubt cost a small fortune: the price of prestige.

Extrapolating from what the TV documentary seemed to say, I'm led to believe that, every time an embassy guest uses a knife on the food in such a plate, an infinitesimal quantity of gold is consumed along with the foodstuffs. I wondered: Would that be the secret of the legendary excellence of French diplomacy? Whenever a foreign diplomat leaves the ambassador's dining table, after an exquisite taste of France, he has a warm glowing feeling in his stomach...