Old times, forgotten places

I've often been amused by the fact that few folk around Pont-en-Royans, not even so-called old-timers, have a realistic grasp of the sheer depth of local history. They often reason as if our villages of Le Royans came into existence around the time of the grandparents of the oldest individuals whom they can recall: that's to say, roughly towards the end of the 19th century. Before that period, in the minds of these old-timers, everything was blurry, and no traces remain today.

In the commune of Châtelus, on the opposite side of the Bourne, it has often been said that there may have been a small Roman stronghold at the foot of Mount Barret. A local resident once showed me big cubic blocks of limestone that had been lying in the fields since time immemorial. When I suggested that a vast mound alongside his property might cover traces of the alleged Roman construction, he replied: "No, I don't think so. When my ancestors settled down here, a century or so ago, they would have surely noticed any such vestiges... and I don't recall any family stories of this kind." He seemed to be telling me that his pioneering ancestors, back at the time they decided to start farming at Châtelus, had never been obliged to get into conflict with Roman soldiers.

Here at Gamone, visitors often ask me if I know the origins of a twenty-meter tunnel in the hillside just behind my house. They expect me to explain, say, that the former proprietor Hippolyte Gerin [1884-1957] was probably looking for water. Consequently, when I tell them that I imagine that winegrowers may have started to dig this vault to hide their precious tools and produce during the Wars of Religion in the 16th century, when Protestant marauders devastated the great vineyards of Choranche, my visitors look at me in amazement, as if I had just started to rave on about invaders from the planet Mars.

The following document proves nevertheless, if need be, that our Dauphiné villages have been around for a long, long time:

This extraordinary map, drawn by Jean de Beins [1577-1651], dates from 1631. Click the image to access the French website, Gallica, that displays the entire map. The big river that flows down through Romans is, of course, the Isère. The Bourne tributary, which flows down below Gamone, is seen in the lower right-hand corner of this fragment of the map. Not surprisingly, Choranche was not significant enough to be indicated.

An old map of this kind is doubly fascinating. It indicates not only what has remained over the centuries, but what is no longer there. In my article entitled Neighbors who dwell in castles [display], I mentioned the lovely castle of La Sône, on the road from Pont-en-Royans to St-Marcellin. In the 17th-century map, between the villages of Pont-en-Royans, St-André-en-Royans and "La Saune", there's a vast forest, which appears to extend northwards up until the Dauphin's castle at Beauvoir. Today, I drive through vestiges of this phantom forest whenever I go to the Leclerc supermarket in Chatte, but it's sadly no more than a skeleton.

In the Royans region, the most surprising name in this old map is La Batye, south of the Bourne at Pont-en-Royans. It designates the celebrated castle of the Bérenger family, lords of Sassenage.

Today, the magnificent castle has disappeared, and no more than a mound remains.

The view to the north encompasses the giant mass of the Cournouze [in the upper center of the above photo], with the pointed Mount Barret to the left.

A handful of stones from the ancient castle lay scattered in the grass.

I feel like saying to this venerable witness of glorious centuries: "Tell me please, Old Stone, all that you have seen!" But we all know that old stones don't talk. They prefer to keep their secrets for themselves... and maybe for their ancient human companions, now dead.

It would have been nice to find that 20th-century folk, having stolen all the Sassenage stones [to build their own modern dwellings], might have erected a reminder of the medieval glory of the Bérenger family. On the contrary, in 1944, local folk preferred to erect a stupid Catholic statue, in concrete, evoking the silly story of Mary and her alleged sexless procreation of a child. Once upon a time, the lords of Sassenage were real, all too real. Their memory has been replaced mindlessly and shamefully, at the very site of their great home, by the evocation of a myth.

Road safety fashion

Soon, in France, our automobiles will have to carry, in the trunk, a red plastic triangle and a fluorescent vest.

This promotional photo featuring the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is very French. The text says: "It's yellow. It's ugly. It doesn't go with anything. But it can save your life." I approve of this mild kind of second-degree humor. I believe that most French viewers will get the message, and retain it... which is all that matters.

Hot day in Grenoble

Outsiders normally imagine Grenoble, capital of the French Alps, as a cold city. Today, it was bathed in sunshine, with summer temperatures. The Victor Hugo Square, at the center of the city, was a symphony of greenery and flowers.

Students (no doubt in the middle of their baccalauréat exams) bathed in the enticing fountain.

Between the blocks of buildings in the above photo, on the horizon, you can glimpse snow-covered mountain slopes. That's Grenoble!

The alert marketing folk of the Contrex mineral-water firm realized that this was an ideal day to put their products on the street.

These girls were offering free plastic beakers of icy Contrex to hot passers-by.

At first sight, I imagined that these poor girls wearing Contrex caps and T-shirts were obliged to stroll around in the heat with those huge plastic tanks of beverage on their backs. Not quite. The big yellow and orange "bottles" are empty and lightweight, whereas a nearby vehicle supplied the girls with ordinary bottles of Contrex.

As for me, I was indeed hot, like everybody else, but I was so busy taking photos (and intent upon catching the bus back to St-Marcellin) that I simply forgot about asking the Contrex kids for a drink.

Becoming French

On 18 June in 1940 [my year of birth], Charles de Gaulle broadcast a call from London on BBC radio inviting his compatriots to join his resistance movement in England.

On this morning of 18 June 2008, a letter with a tricolor heading is inviting me to the préfecture in Grenoble on Friday 27 June to receive a decree stating that I've been granted French nationality.

The naturalization ceremony will be taking place in the lovely old building on the Place du Verdun that I walk past whenever I visit the archives in Grenoble to do research on the background of Gamone.

I'm moved to think that I'll be naturalized in the Alpine capital where the great mathematician Joseph Fourier was once the prefect. Grenoble is indeed a moving city, through its history (both ecclesiastic and republican) and its achievements in science and technology. It was also the birthplace of the great novelist Stendhal. Strangely, whenever I set foot in Grenoble, I feel calm and reassured, as if I were entering some kind of protective cocoon. This is no doubt an illusion, but I always feel that, whatever might be happening elsewhere in the universe, the people of Grenoble have surely got their act together, and are mastering their destinies. In any case, to my mind, it's an ideal place in which to become a citizen of France.

The symbol of the modern city is this mass of black steel, located outside the railway station. It's a work by the American sculptor Alexander Calder [1898-1976]. Entitled Three Peaks, this huge sculpture was commissioned for the Winter Olympics of 1968.

Revolutionary euphoria

This pompous painting by Jacques-Louis David [1748-1825] provides us with an absurdly kitsch depiction of Leonidas the Spartan who defeated the huge army of Xerxes the Persian at Thermopylae in Central Greece. In David's time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the memory of Leonidas was celebrated in France in much the same way that young people now worship, rightly or wrongly, intelligently or mindlessly, the theme of Che Guevara.

I insist upon this comparison, because we often tend to think of the French revolutionaries as crazy impassioned dreamers, many of whom were destined to soon lose literally their heads. During their brief period of glory, they transformed provincial churches into so-called Temples of Reason, and planted Trees of Liberty.

This morning, at the archives in Grenoble, I was amused to find that births in Year 2 (around 1793) were recorded on thick lumpy and crackly paper (a sensual pleasure for my fingers, not to mention the delicious old inky smell) marked District des Thermopyles.


Bloody hell ! as the local ladies used to say in my uncouth Australia... and still say, I fear. Did the little town of Saint-Marcellin really liken itself to the scene of the great battle of Antiquity between the Greeks and the Persians? Did my humble village of Choranche once become an authentic outpost of a latter-day Thermopylae?

A year later, the revolutionary crackpots of Saint-Marcellin had descended from their ridiculous pedestal, and they got back to labeling their district in the ordinary old way.

In colloquial French (a truly colorful language, largely more inventive and sparkling than any variety of English), a lovely expression can be applied to the citizens of a small French town who suddenly see themselves as reincarnated warriors on mythological battlefields of Antiquity. This kind of pretentious behavior is decried (pardon my Latin) as farting higher than your asshole.

Limits of democracy

Often, in the wake of a revolution, or maybe after a mere political victory, males like to hoist a waving female into the air, as a kind of victory symbol.

I've often felt that this symbolism is inspired, at least in France, by the famous painting by Eugène Delacroix showing a bare-breasted Marianne on the barricades of Paris after the revolution of 1830.





The Irish girl in the referendum photo is hardly a match for Marianne. Her breasts are securely buttoned down, and the object she's waving in her right hand (an Irish flag?) is too small to be identified. And I can't help wondering if she really understood what she had voted against...

To a large extent, the success of the Irish no was based upon ignorance concerning the detailed content of the treaty proposal. There was a referendum slogan: If you don't know, vote no! Well, that's fair enough. If voters are unable to understand what they're supposed to be voting for (or against), this means that the politicians and communications specialists who organized the referendum didn't do a good didactic job. But this observation leads in turn to a more fundamental interrogation: Is it really possible, in the case of such a complex entity as Europe, to expect ordinary folk to master all the issues at stake? My gut feeling is no. There are limits to the familiar democratic process founded upon voting by the people. It's like organizing a referendum to decide, say, what kind of nuclear reactors should be built in France for future energy supplies. As somebody might have said: You can question some citizens all of the time, and all citizens some of the time, but... there are many highly technical questions that cannot possibly be answered intelligently by a referendum. My conclusion on this affair is that the Irish government was naive [like the French government, a few years ago] in imagining that you can ask the people to decide upon the technicalities of our future Europe. So, Ireland has the responsibility of mending this error.

Splendid role model for French youth

As everywhere, far too many adolescents get into a rut these days, here in France, for one reason or another, or often for multiple reasons, before they've got around to organizing seriously, if at all, their future existence. They get bogged down in all kinds of swamps, caught up in all sorts of traps. Maybe their studies have turned out to be useless, in that they don't enable them to get a good job. Some are led astray by the false paradises of alcohol and drugs, which can easily lead to crime. Others are soon ensnarled in vacuous relationships based solely upon sex, with no thought for marriage and the founding of a family. In the most tragic cases, adolescent losers grow up aimlessly in dull but violent environments where unemployment and strife are the rule, and social harmony and happiness an exception. In the context of all these unfortunate situations, we can meditate fruitfully and joyously upon the case of this young man who has steered clear of all the above-mentioned obstacles, while organizing his future existence in a style that can only be described as brilliant, exemplary.

His name is Jean: the French form of the Christian name of the fourth evangelist, John. Don't be misled by the long hair. Jean is neither a beatnik nor a rugby man. Although he's merely 21 years old, Jean has already set out upon a political career in the suburbs of Paris, and he has just got engaged to a girl from an excellent family with home-appliance stores. So it's more than likely that, straight after their marriage, Jean and his wife will have the pleasure of stepping into a cozy little flat with all the basic modern necessities: stove, fridge, dish-washer, etc.

What a pity that there aren't more young men in France today with the same drive and convictions as Jean. The same appetite for success.

New kid on the block

The neighbors' donkey Mandrin has been residing at my place for so long, with my Moshé, that I now consider him as mine. Their horses Bessie and Aigle are still here as guests, because there's not enough feed for them up at Bob's place, and Alison is too busy (working in the Choranche cave restaurant) to find time to look after them.

Yesterday morning, just after Alison's departure on her noisy scooter (which always causes my Sophia to bark), a new member of her family arrived unexpectedly at my place: a marvelous little male dog, a few months old, named Pif.

Pif promptly started to romp around with Sophia, who seemed to appreciate the presence of this tiny animal climbing all over her.

I had the impression that Pif was greatly awed, at times, by the massive stature of Lady Sophia.

In any case, throughout the entire day, the two dogs got on wonderfully well, and Pif was also extremely friendly with me, often snoozing in my arms and licking my nose. I gave him food and organized a comfortable basket for him alongside Sophia's queen-sized model.

I can't be certain, of course, that Sophia approved entirely of this audacious little dog reposing on her master's door mat. But there were never any squabbles.

At times, Sophia would gallop around the lawn to impress her young companion, and demonstrate her weighty Japanese-style wrestling prowess. On the other hand, there were limits to the amount of ear-biting that Sophia would tolerate from Pif's sharp baby teeth, and Sophia would make things clear at this level with a few ferocious snarls.

Towards the end of the day, I was starting to imagine that Pif might have moved in here as a permanent guest.

But I had not bargained on the magic attraction of the spluttering din of Alison's scooter, as she returned home at the end of her working day. Pif recognized the presence of his mistress as soon as she turned off the main road down in the valley, and he immediately shot off home to wait for her. Consequently, it's quite likely that Alison imagined that her disciplined dog had spent the day patiently in front of their house, awaiting her return. On the other hand, it's possible that Alison might have noticed that Pif's jet black fur was covered in sand-colored hairs from another animal... unless, of course, Pif took precautions to shake off all this telltale evidence on the track back home.

My guess is that I'll be able to use the absence or presence of Pif at my place as a means of knowing whether Alison is, or is not, at home.

Exotic bread and Greek cheese

I have fun with my marvelous bread machine. Making exotic bread falls into the category of creative art. For example, on Saturday afternoon, I tackled a new recipe in order to take along a home-baked loaf to a dinner evening at Linda's place. Basically, it incorporated walnuts (not unusual in our corner of France), but it was considerably more complex than ordinary walnut bread. But, before describing the recipe, I must say a few words about our dinner evening, which was great. Besides Linda, there were two other nurses: my old friends Eveline and Lulu. And I met up for the first time with Eveline's companion, René. Although it wasn't exactly a warm evening, Linda organized her dinner (Hungarian goulash and steamed potatoes) on the lawn outside her old farmhouse, beneath the stars. Well, just as we were starting dessert, the valley was lit up by an unexpected fireworks display: no doubt, some kind of a village celebration down around St-Nazaire-en-Royans. As far as we were concerned, it was as if Linda had organized this show for our dinner evening.

Yesterday, I repeated the bread recipe with slight variations, then I tasted the end result with Greek feta cheese. Delicious! The quantities I indicate in the following instructions are for a loaf of 750 grams. Start out with two tablespoons of butter at the bottom of your bread machine (or cake dish, if you're operating manually). Beat an egg with a fifth of a liter of milk, and pour the mixture onto the butter. Sprinkle 375 grams of ordinary white flour onto the liquid. Next, add the following four ingredients: three teaspoons (referred to as coffee spoons in France) of sugar, two of salt, one of cinnamon and two tablespoons of dried milk powder. I then added ten grams of dried granulated yeast, distributed evenly over the surface of the previous ingredients. Finally, the fruit: 170 grams of dried raisins soaked in water, then 50 to 100 grams of chopped walnuts. [Here at Gamone, I tend to be heavy-handed in my use of walnuts, since I've got big bags of them in various corners of the house.] In my bread machine, when the kneading was terminated and the dough was ready to start rising, I covered the surface with a mixture of dried poppy and sesame seeds. The bread was cooked slowly until the crust was dark brown.

The resulting bread, with a rough nutty texture and spicy aroma, can accompany either salty cheese or sweet stuff such as fig jam. Let's give it a name: Gamone walnut bread.

Things that can blow up in your face

When I was a child aged ten or eleven, one of the craziest things I ever did was to play around with the production of gunpowder. I still remember my formula: a mixture of ground-up charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter (potassium nitrate). The best way of making a big bang was to pack the gunpowder into a metal can. The most difficult part of the operation was the creation of a burning fuse, generally made out of a piece of thick string impregnated in saltpeter (if I remember correctly). Often, when the fuse had burned right up to the metal can, the primitive homemade bomb didn't explode, for one reason or another. This was the kind of situation in which the bomb-maker was capable of moving towards his precious work of art, to see what has prevented it from exploding, only to have the whole thing blow up in his silly face.

Today, I cannot of course be considered as an aging extrapolation of the kid who built bombs back in South Grafton. The intervening years have made me a totally new individual, and I'm quite incapable of suggesting what might have been going on in the head of that kid who once played around with gunpowder. In any case, I survived without injuries: that's to say, without any inadvertent explosions. But I vaguely recall the case of a Grafton youth who wasn't as lucky as me. If I remember correctly, he emerged from this kind of fun with a few missing fingers.

A fortnight ago, an explosion occurred around midnight in a flat in the suburbs of Paris, and a thirty-year-old fellow was severely injured. While being carted away by ambulance people, the victim made a spontaneous confession. He said he was a member of an organization whose goal consisted of blowing up roadside speed cameras.

He was injured while manipulating a bomb that was intended for the forthcoming destruction of yet another speed camera. My article of 2 March 2007 entitled The hosed hoser [display] evokes a famous cinematographic case of something backfiring harmlessly. You might conclude that our speed-camera bomber had it coming to him. Poetic justice, as they say.


On the other hand, he wasn't attacking humans with his bombs, merely machines. The idea of a fellow declaring war upon inanimate contraptions and then getting hurt by his own weapons reminds me of Don Quixote rushing in to attack windmills, only to discover that the windmills seem to be able to launch a counter-attack.

Man at the wheel

Like many of my fellow citizens [that's the first time since my naturalization I've ever used explicitly such a phrase], I watched with interest the lengthy TV evening devoted to the French prime minister François Fillon, born 54 years ago in the city that hosts the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans sports car race... which was just won, incidentally, an hour or so ago, for the 8th time, by Audi and the Danish driver Tom Kristensen. In fact, François Fillon himself knows how to handle the wheel of a Le Mans racing car. Apparently, he once took Nicolas Sarkozy for a lap or two on a circuit, and the French president was green when he got out of the automobile.

As easy as it is to be annoyed by Sarko, if not sickened in extreme cases, it's difficult not to admire his friend Fillon, who has a totally different personality and style to the president. He's quiet and unassuming, with no apparent wish to have stories and pictures of himself, his Welsh wife and their five children appearing in people magazines. He's not flashy ("bling bling") in a nouveau riche style, and he speaks calmly but firmly, without twitches or gesticulations.

Although we must assume that Nicolas Sarkozy and François Fillon share identical viewpoints, and are working together with the same political goals in mind, they come through as quite different individuals. And I'll let you guess which of the two I prefer.

My dog's little joys

I've often noticed that Sophia is not interested in strawberries. She doesn't seem to see their red color and, when I put a few strawberries under her snout, she's not inclined to taste them. Cherries, though, are a different affair, including the tiny specimens that fall from one of my rare roadside trees.

Sophia crunches the cherries, seeds and all, before swallowing them.

In the case of walnuts, of course, the process is different. She crunches the nuts slightly, to break them apart, and then she delicately picks out the edible kernel fragments.

One of Sophia's regular preoccupations consists of searching for mysterious creatures, maybe lizards or mice, under the edge of the old concrete footpath in front of the house.

As soon as she detects an animal odor, Sophia barks a little (maybe to warn me that there's an undesirable alien presence at Gamone) and starts to dig a preliminary hole by scratching out soil and loose pebbles. As soon as the opening is big enough, Sophia sticks her snout in and starts to snort. And this activity can preoccupy her for half an hour.

A day or so later, after Sophia has either captured and destroyed the intruder (?) or forgotten about its presence, all that remains for me is to poke the soil and pebbles back in place.

Views from down in the village

The tiny village of Choranche is located about 3 km down from Gamone. I say "down from", but the difference in altitude between the two places is primarily of a psychological kind. The village is located at the bottom of a gigantic bowl, surrounded by cliffs, whereas Gamone seems to be higher in that it is located on grassy slopes above the Bourne River.

At the top of this blog window, there's a picture of the Cournouze mountain, located above the commune of Châtelus, on the other side of the Bourne. This same stone peninsula, jutting out from the Vercors plateau, has a quite different shape and appearance when you're looking up at it from down in the village of Choranche:

The cliffs above the village, towards Presles to the north (which I always think of as the direction of Paris), are vast and ominous:

To the east (which I think of as the direction of Italy), the village seems to be separated from the Vercors by the following gigantic wall of stone:

For me, the panorama from Gamone is "gentler" than views from the village, but this is no doubt a biased outlook, since Gamone is my home place, whereas the village is a relatively alien territory.

I'm always amazed by the fact that, in a mountainous environment, the aerial perspectives change continually whenever you modify—even slightly—your location on the ground.

A fight to remember

Back in the early '80s [before the existence of the Internet], I succeeded in finding this photo of the steamship Marathon, which took my future grandfather from his native London to Australia, when he was 17 years old.

My grandfather once told me that his ship reached Sydney on the same day—December 26, 1908—that a big boxing match would be taking place, between the white Canadian Tommy Burns and the black American Jack Johnson. This detail intrigued me, because I don't recall my grandfather being attracted to boxing [the only sport he liked was tennis], and I've often wondered why the Burns/Johnson fight [which he didn't even see, because he couldn't afford a ticket] would have stayed in his memory. It was only last night that I finally found an explanation, when I watched a French TV version of the splendid film by Ken Burns entitled Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.

Up until last night's TV show, I had ignored the fact that, prior to the match in Sydney in 1908, no white-skinned boxer had ever deigned to defend his world heavyweight title against a black man. In America, at the start of the 20th century, it would have been unthinkable for such a match to take place. This explains why, although the boxers were from Northern America, their encounter of fourteen rounds could only be organized in a faraway land such as Australia. The match had a shameful ending. When it was clear that Burns was about to be knocked out by the giant son of former slaves, Sydney police officers stepped in and stopped, not only the fight, but the filming of the event... because the White Establishment considered it politically incorrect that the image of a white boxer being thrashed by a black man should be handed down to posterity.

From existentialism to evolution

My article of 25 December 2006 entitled The meaning of life [display] was designed deliberately to be misunderstood. All I really wanted to say was a truism: The presence of life in the Cosmos is an outcome of the existence of organisms capable of reproducing themselves. And I wanted to celebrate the work of the mathematician John von Neumann, who had developed a theory of self-replicating automata. At an anecdotal level, I started out that article by saying that I used to be infatuated by the works of French existentialists, whereas I've never agreed with Albert Camus, at any moment in my life, that suicide is a "truly serious philosophical problem".

Today, I would like to correct, or at least attenuate, the false suggestion that I'm no longer impressed by the work of the French existentialists. When Natacha and Alain were driving me through Lourmarin in the Luberon, I was constantly conscious of the fact that this was the place where the Nobel laureate was buried, after his death in an automobile accident in 1960. His Myth of Sisyphus remains one of the major texts of my adolescent years in Sydney, along with English translations of books by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Camus, above all, was a non-believer (from a religious viewpoint) who nevertheless clung to humanistic values rather than falling into some kind of nihilistic and suicidal despair. "I do not believe in God," he declared, before adding: "And I am not an atheist." Today, I would say that the juxtaposition of these two statements is illogical, but I can understand that Camus did not wish to be thrown into the same ballpark as the notorious Roman emperor Caligula, subject of one of his plays, who imagined that, once God was chased off the cosmic stage, only barbarian infamy could remain.

Jumping ahead to the present day, I was thrilled by a recent appraisal of Richard Dawkins by a US psychologist, David Barash, who places the English writer firmly in the domain of the literature of the absurd, alongside Camus and Beckett... not to mention the late great writer friend of Dawkins named Douglas Adams, author of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The vast verbal vortex of half a century from existentialism à la Camus to evolution as explained by Dawkins has been indeed, for me as a reader, a fabulous trip through our Earth-centered corner of the Cosmos. And the only possible name of that fascinating guided excursion, of course, is Absurdity.

Finding the right foodstuffs

In my articles of 30 December 2006 entitled My daughter at Gamone [display] and 15 January 2007 entitled Show me your machines [display], I mentioned that I had purchased a splendid cooking gadget, which might be described as a multifunction grill and griddle, manufactured by a US firm named Cuisinart.

There's no problem in using it to make delicious toasted sandwiches of the kind that Australians often eat for breakfast. Recently, I've also used it successfully as a hot plate to cook a Thai dish, hotly-spiced prawn rissoles. But I had never succeeded in preparing one of my favorite foodstuffs: the flat panini sandwiches that I buy on the street whenever I visit Grenoble or Valence. The problem was that I had never found the right resource: that's to say, the basic uncooked panini bread roll. Employees in food shops don't necessarily know from whom their boss acquires their raw materials, while those who do imagine that it's a professional supplier with no retail outlets. Most often, they tell me that I can surely find the panini rolls I'm seeking in supermarkets. But, when cooked upon my Cuisinart griddle, the texture and taste of the rectangular panini rolls sold in the sliced-bread section of supermarkets simply don't end up tasting anything like the products I buy on the street in Grenoble and Valence.

This morning, I finally got around to solving the panini problem. The following photo shows the tasteless supermarket product at the top and, underneath it, a big authentic deep-frozen panini roll of the kind used by professionals.

Early this morning, I happened to be in St-Marcellin to get my car repaired, and I stepped into an excellent bakery to buy a couple of croissants. Once again, I popped the panini question, and the baker's kind wife supplied me immediately with the name and address of a wholesale supplier near Romans who nevertheless sells to ordinary clients like me. As soon as my old Citroën was repaired, I hurried off to the place in question. The only minor problem was that I had to purchase a big cardboard box of forty deep-frozen rolls, and then I had to dash home as quickly as possibly to put them in my deep-freezer, where they occupy an entire drawer.

With cold turkey and tomato filling, and served up with fresh Gamone lettuce, sliced cheese and a sprinkling of walnut oil, the culinary result exceeds my most optimistic expectations.

PS Natacha, who considers (quite rightly) that many of the Earth's finest products come from her native Provence, will be happy to learn that the manufacturer of my deep-frozen panini rolls purchased in Romans has his factory in Tarascon.

Cult of Mac

Way back in 1984, I wrote a book about the Macintosh, when this machine was as little known as the Internet concept. But it would be wrong to brand me as an elitist Mac cultist. Some of my best friends still use PCs. But this post is not for them.

Dyed-in-the-wool Macnuts are ordinary-looking folk who feel frustrated around noon if they haven't yet heard something new and spectacular from or about our Favorite Computer Company. For us, there's now a website [display] that enables us to view old images of Steve and hear exiting words that made us salivate with Apple lust back in the days when we were losing, for eternity, our consumer innocence.

Obama can now attack his true opponent

It's great that Barack Obama can now, at last, get to grips with his true opponent: John McCain. However, the time lost in wrangling with Hillary Clinton was not really lost in the sense that America has realized that two amazingly novel hypotheses—that of a female president, or that of a black president—have now become recognized as plausible in the US mentality. It was certainly worthwhile losing a bit of time and energy in order to gain this kind of revolutionary awareness.

Flight pioneers

Over the last year or so, there has been some discussion about the claim that the hang glider was invented by John Dickenson in Grafton, but there now appears to be an international consensus of opinion that he deserves this honor.

Click the photo to access a recently-developed and well-documented website on this question.

When his Dickenson-designed wing soared above the Clarence River on 8 September 1963, the pilot Rod Fuller was in fact being tugged by a speed boat. I've often thought that the presence of this noisy aquatic partner may have diminished the impact of these pioneering flights. Observers tend to associate the mythical dream of Icarus with an aerial and ethereal world of silence, devoid of mechanical monsters such as speedboats. We imagine the god of flight as a giant but quiet bird.

In July 2006, this Japanese aircraft powered by dry-cell batteries took off, ascended to an altitude of five meters, stayed in the air for about a minute and covered a distance of several hundred meters.

In April of this year, the Boeing corporation tested in real flight, in Spain, a tiny plane that runs on hydrogen batteries.

The propeller-driven test aircraft flew at a speed of a hundred kilometers an hour, at an altitude of about a thousand meters, for twenty minutes. Later, a spokesman for the manufacturer suggested that aviation power based upon hydrogen batteries could become a feasible technological and commercial possibility within some twenty years. In my imagination, that would be the authentic dream of Icarus.