Snow fodder

Winter has hit us earlier than usual in France (the winter solstice only arrives on Tuesday), and we've had exceptionally big snowfalls. At Gamone, I'm reassured to have a good supply of hay for the two donkeys. They only need this fodder, of course, when the snow prevents them from getting at the grass.

I've adopted the convenient solution of storing the hay in dry conditions at a spot (50 meters up beyond the house) that's out-of-bounds for the donkeys. Twice a day, I put a small heap of hay onto a tarpaulin and drag this light load down the road to the donkeys' paddock.

In that way, we waste as little as possible of the precious fodder. Whenever I smell the wonderful aroma of this top-quality hay (which was mowed last spring up on the Vercors plateau near Vassieux), I'm reminded of my childhood days on the farm of my Walker uncles on the outskirts of South Grafton. They used to do their mowing using a pair of draft horses, and the hay was piled up in a single giant heap inside a wooden barn. For hens, the hay stack was a favorite spot for laying eggs. I don't think my uncles were in dire need of winter fodder for their herd of dairy cows, who could generally find enough grass to eat all year round. Maybe it was useful to have this stock of hay in the case of an exceptionally dry spell.

In France, we've inherited a marvelous old recipe from the ancient Gauls: filet mignon of pork roasted slowly on a bed of hay, which adds flavor to the meat. The pork is served up on its steamy wad of hay, accompanied by wild mushrooms, but the hay is not to be eaten.

Moshé and Fanette are now covered in thick fur, like a pair of baby mammoths. They stay out in the open, no matter what the weather's like. There's a shed in which they could be protected from falling snow, rain and sleet, but they never use it.

I intend to construct a small system for holding the hay up off the ground, with a roof. I ordered the four posts of Douglas pine a week or so ago, and they're waiting to be picked up at the sawmill (as soon as the snow disappears, and I can drive into town).

Talking about feeding the animals, I've run into an unexpected hitch. To feed the wild birds, I put sunflower seeds inside the bird house for the tits [mésanges], and I throw other assorted seeds on the ground for the finches [pinsons].

I've been amazed to discover that my dog Fitzroy, who consumes huge quantities of the finest dog foods (pasta and croquettes for pups), likes to round off his meals with bird seeds. He doesn't digest them, since the seeds reappear all over the surface of Fitzroy's turds, which look a little like Oriental pastries covered in sesame seeds.

Julian can go out walking

While still restrained to a certain extent (huge bail and electronic bracelet), Julian Assange will be able to go out walking in the grounds of Ellingham Hall in Bungay (Suffolk). This stately home belongs to the British TV journalist Vaughan Smith, who's a friend and supporter of Assange. Smith is the owner of London's Frontline Club, near Paddington station, whose self-proclaimed mission consists of "championing independent journalism".

Most prisons are not as nice. At present, the grounds are not quite as green, and there's snow on the lawns. In any case, Julian is a special prisoner. A sort of Count of Monte Cristo.

Strictly speaking, he's not a prisoner at all. Not even a clearly-accused suspect of anything less trifling than one-night-stands with groupies that got screwed up... Julian more so than the mindless groupies, who should be able to take better care of themselves.

I was shocked to learn that it was the British, not the Swedes, who had been determined to keep Julian Assange in jail [link]. Were Australian governmental authorities worried about this unexpected behavior on the part of our "motherland"? Well, yes, I have the impression that Kevin Rudd has been trying to do his bit (maybe a rather little bit, as a consequence of his demotion from power) to inject some clarity into this affair. Meanwhile, what is Julia Gillard doing to protect the rights of her limply-accused compatriot? I don't know. Maybe, one of these days, she'll tell us.

FOOTNOTE: Many people have confused the home of Vaughan Smith with another Ellingham Hall located at Chathill up in Northumberland. I myself made this mistake yesterday, for ten minutes or so. This other Ellingham Hall (which, I repeat, has absolutely nothing to do with the place down in Suffolk where Julian Assange is staying) is a luxurious country house located up towards the Scottish border [website], which has become a popular venue for corporate events, weddings and special occasions.

Mélanie's song

For old-timers like me, this remains a memorable song:



Melanie shouldn't complain about what YouTube has done to her song.

If the people are buying tears, I'll be rich some day.

Australian citizen in need of protection

Decades ago, before it became fashionable to joke about the paucity of effective contacts between Australian travelers and our diplomatic services, I used to say jokingly that Australian authorities would never dream of flying in helicopters to assist stranded Aussies. Today, this is no longer a silly joke, but a firm fact. Aussie embassies don't give a fuck about Aussie citizens abroad. They seem to say that, if Aussies are so dimwitted as to step outside of the Wide Brown Land, even for a brief excursion, then they deserve everything that might be coming to them in the way of devastating bolts of disaster from the Heavens. "Shit, mate, we told you not to leave. Yet you ventured into WogLand."

Seriously, we must all come together to protect our precious compatriot Julian Assange, whose Satanic enemy is none other than the fucking USA. Brain-damaged Yanks, acting on false pretenses, would be capable of seeking to eliminate Julian for his excellent deeds. It is the duty of all of us (including, above all, his English prison guards) to protect him from gunshots, poisons, spiders and snakes, evil death-wishes, etc.



We don't want to wake up and hear—in a typical American vein—that the founder of Wikileaks has been assassinated in mysterious circumstances…

Hey, I wonder if Mel Gibson might be thinking of Julian.

Beaten by Oprah and the elephant man

Dismayed by the lousy treatment of Julian Assange in the Australian press (a fleeting phenomenon, since the fascinating and sympathetic lord of Wikileaks has since become a well-represented and defended hero in our native land), I made a solemn resolution to cease reading The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald. It was worse than trying to give up smoking (a problem I solved successfully a couple of decades ago). I realized unexpectedly that the Down Under press is a fabulous source of constant entertainment, like the on-stage acts of a delightfully vicious stand-up comedian… providing laughs, groans, frights and ample themes for reflection. Indeed, if the absurdities that enhance the Aussie media did not exist, one would have to invent them. They constitute a certain way of seeing the world around us… or maybe, rather, of not seeing that world. I imagine a curious pair of hi-tech sunglasses that provide their wearers with an Aussie view of existence.

These days, if you were to put on these magic spectacles, your vision would be crowded out by the broad body of a smiling Afro-American female named Oprah Winfrey (whose celebrity would appear to be largely quantitative, since she seems to have no qualitative claims to fame whatsoever... or else they're well concealed). If I understand correctly, this famous hulk of mediocrity is currently parading around in front of subjugated hordes of dumb Aussies on the site of Sydney's old tram depot, now replaced by an empty shell that will be referred to henceforth as the Oprah House. Why the hell is she there, and what's she supposed to be doing? I have no plausible answers to such questions… which maybe shouldn't even be asked. Oprah has simply been dumped there, on the edge of Sydney Harbour, for better or worse, like a load of transported convicts. God will decide what might become of her. Happily, she hasn't got a life sentence. So, with a bit of luck, she might fuck off sooner or later back to YankeeLand, and leave her mindless Aussie hosts to pick up the bill. Shit, I can't figure out what has come over my compatriots. At times—in their adulation of the pope, or their new saint Mary (not to mention their political agitations)—they seem to have gone stark raving lunatic, hysterical like a cut snake.

Fortunately, I'm reassured by the story of the elephant man in Thailand. The gist of the drama is that an Australian visitor in Bangkok refused to buy a bag of bananas for an elephant. Worse, this tourist from Down Under dared to express his thoughts about touristic attractions (in the same silly way that I just dared to talk about Oprah). The Aussie righter-of-wrongs claimed, as a social moralist, that the elephant's owner was using his beast as a pretext for begging.

Fair enough, the Thai elephant man was indeed begging for bananas. But what we don't know is whether the bananas in question were meant to be consumed by the beast (which would be normal) or by his owner (which would indeed imply a situation that might be likened to illegal gains from prostitution). Be that as it may, the Thai elephant owner hit the ugly tourist in the face, which shut him up just as surely as if an elephant had rammed a banana in the Aussie's mouth. I urge you to read the original article, entitled Aussie 'attacked' by Thai elephant guide [display].

In the presence of all this excellent stuff, I'm a little ashamed to think that I might have envisaged, for an instant, the abandon of such rich and delightful sources of fathomless and inconsequential authentic Aussie nonsense as The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Smart kids can win a cancer

Why is it that almost everything in our modern world—the best of all possible worlds, as Voltaire's optimistic Candide once assured us—seems to backfire? A delightful plastic puzzle for kids is composed of numbered squares, which the child is expected to assemble. What could be better in the way of home training for a prospective Einstein?

The only problem is that babies who play around with this particular variety of plastic shit could well pick up a cancer… which would obviously limit considerably their possibility of formulating new interpretations of the much sought-after Theory of Everything. Their cancer-ridden bodies might, of course, be useful for researchers attempting to combat this plague… but that's not exactly what we generally mean when we talk about bringing up intelligently our children to play a role in the modern world of science and technology.

Unexpected cultural links

I've mentioned already—in my articles entitled History of wine at Choranche [display] and Wine of a kind [display]—my interest in the almost-forgotten history of the vineyards of Choranche. My article on this subject (in French) is due to appear in the forthcoming issue of a Vercors historical journal. This activity as a local historian has led to my being invited, this afternoon, to the annual get-together of the Vercors cultural-heritage authorities. The assembly took place in the ancient convent of the Carmelite monks at Beauvoir-en-Royans, inside the domain of Humbert II [1312-1355], the last prince of the Dauphiné.

The proceedings started with a brilliant 20-minute exposé of the history of the Carmelites by my friend Michel Wullschleger, who's a professor of history and geography at the university of Lyon. Once we were all reminded of the historical background of the splendid building in which we were seated, it was time to tackle the true subject of the day: namely, the genesis and spirit of an entity such as the PNRV [Parc naturel et régional du Vercors: Vercors regional nature park], which is celebrating its 40th anniversary.

You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather when I heard that the guest speaker—a young academic from the university of Saint-Etienne—was going to explain to us how the origins of the concept of our celebrated regional park were profoundly geared to the ideas of Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862]. For me, retrospectively, it's natural that my adolescent fascination for the magnificent story of Thoreau's Walden Pond—which I used to read, fascinated, in Sydney's Mitchell Library, when I would have been better off brushing up on my mathematics—should have led me to my present solitary existence in the mountainous wilderness of the Vercors.

I was elated that a bright young French historian might give a lecture on such links. He explained that, in former British conquests and colonies (USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc), the creation of nature parks usually meant that remnants of indigenous populations were chased away (like Red Indians), so that they wouldn't interfere with environmental issues and tourists (not necessarily in that order of priorities). When I dared suggest that maybe we Australians had created nature parks in which the Aborigines were welcome (to say the least), I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the French speaker mastered all the fine details of the Down Under dossier. He thanked me kindly for bringing up this interesting and pertinent question (about which he knew a lot, following research visits to Australia), then he summarized the Australian Aborigine affair in a brilliant five-minute résumé (typical of French-educated intellectuals, who've been taught to aim at essentials)… and we became instant soul friends. I wondered, for a moment, whether a young Australian academic might be able to summarize in the same style, say, the complex relationship between the French Republic and Corsican autonomists. Meanwhile, I must admit that my neighbors Tineke Bot and Serge Bellier are vastly more "Walden Pond" than me, for the simple reason that they've actually installed several artificial ponds (now vibrant with life, including frogs) on their splendid property, Rochemuse.

Towards the end of the afternoon assembly in the ancient convent, speakers turned to contemporary creative writing about the Vercors. This talk was so stupidly superficial, absurdly urban and artistically empty (from a literary viewpoint) that I got up and left. I had to return to my Vercors wilderness to feed Sophia and Fitzroy.

AFTERTHOUGHTS: Frankly, I'm not at all sure that Thoreau had anything whatsoever to do with the inspiration of nature parks in France. I hardly need to say that, when talking about a return to Nature and such matters, we cannot forget an all-important Geneva-born philosopher named Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1712-1778].

Dressing up

My article of 5 November 2010 entitled Vatican fashions [display] included a few images of the sartorial finery associated with the Vatican these days. Within the ranks of the Church, pedophiliac scandals are continuing as strongly as ever. Yesterday, figures were released concerning an innocent God-fearing nation, Holland, which now has a global tally of nearly 2000 explicit victims. In the sexual crime stakes, Holland is therefore running a close second to Ireland. Naturally, all the recent bad vibes concerning the Church mean that fewer and fewer pious young males dream of becoming cardinals. This has led to a surplus of all kinds of ecclesiastic outfits in the Vatican warehouses. Since the pope needs more and more money to pay off the countless people who are pursuing pedophiliac prelates in various countries throughout the world, he has decided to sell off a lot of the Vatican's excess fashion gear. Here's a very popular item, which is simply a recycled cardinal's robe that has been stitched up along the bottom:

Described in the sales literature as a "TV blanket with sleeves", it's ideal for watching the telly on cold evenings.

Let's move on to another intriguing example of exotic attire (obtained from the French Gallica website). Try to guess why this individual has decked himself out in what looks like a birdsuit:

Believe it or not, this was the uniform of medical doctors operating in the context of the great plague of Marseille in 1720. The long beak, containing aromatic substances, was intended to pierce the pestiferous air and prevent foul vapors from reaching the physician.

Talking of birdsuits, have a look at the exploits of this Russian guy:

Treasonous weasel

The leaked US diplomatic cables reveal that an Aussie senator named Mark Arbib has been supplying a foreign power (the USA) with local intelligence for a long time.

Over the years, in various nations, individuals have been jailed, if not executed, for acts of that kind.

A US citizen named Jonathan Jay Pollard who was caught supplying intelligence to a friendly foreign power, Israel, has been rotting in prison since 1987. I wrote about his case in my article of 30 June 2009 entitled Forgotten US prisoner [display]. Concerning the ridiculously excessive punishment meted out to Pollard, no doubt to "send a message" to all prospective spies, I hope that Barack Obama will soon intervene to free this man… who is now an Israeli citizen. Meanwhile, I trust that the USA would be prepared to give honorary citizenship to their Aussie friend Arbib. Admittedly, Pollard had been passing on vital military information, whereas Arbib's stuff was no doubt more like insipid Facebook chatter, telling the Americans which Aussie pollies were about to screw one of their mates. But treason is treason, no matter what the precise subject matter. And a weasel's a weasel.

Incidentally, there's a language thing that has always intrigued me whenever Arbib's name comes up. He's often described as a "powerbroker", as if this were a recognized and almost honorable profession in my native land, like a police informer, or a pimp. I haven't bothered to look into the question of the training and diplomas that have enabled this smart fellow to accede to such a job. Are the skills of powerbroking taught in universities Down Under? How do candidates apply for this kind of employment? In fact, who exactly (apart from foreign embassies) are the potential employers? And what's the money like?

Dead but they won't lie down

What is there in common between Geneviève de Fontenay (former organizer of the Miss France system) and Laurent Gbagbo (former president of Côte d'Ivoire)?

No, neither of the two answers you propose is correct. Madame de Fontenay is not bald, nor does the West African ex-president get around in the bush wearing a broad-rimmed black-and-white hat. As for your vague suggestion that they might have established some kind of romantic or erotic liaison, I refrain from making any comment whatsoever on the strictly personal aspects of the lives of these two adults. On the other hand, if you had informed me that there was a variety of Ivory Coast potatoes known as the Belle de Gbagbo, I would have been obliged to accept that as a valid answer...

No, their common feature is not so complicated. Each of these two once-important personages has been formally replaced in a clear and democratic fashion, but neither of them is prepared to admit that she/he is dispensable. So, each of them has decided to carry on masquerading as if she/he were still in place. It's funny how certain individuals persist in believing, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary, that nothing should ever—or can ever—be changed in their existence.

Winter images

There's a magic morning moment when the sun is about to creep out from behind the Cournouze, to the right, and strike the frozen landscape with its warm rays.

Meanwhile, the thick blanket of snow on the slopes behind the house indicates that a lot of warming will be needed to make it disappear.

Clearly, the snow will still be present at the end of the day, but the blanket will have been worn much thinner. It's the vegetation, seen at close range, that best reveals the melting power of the solar warming.

Branches that were once drooping under the weight of the snow suddenly spring back into their natural upright stance. Lumps start to appear in the thick layer of snow covering the flower beds, revealing the presence of hidden bushes and clumps of vegetation.

Seen up close, the snow is no longer uniformly smooth and white. It starts to reveal shades of subtle hues and shadows. It now has texture.

But the global aspect of the valley is not going to evolve greatly for many hours to come.

It's a winter morning at Gamone. And winter is never in a hurry to disappear.

Most famous Australian in the world

Poor old John Howard (an Aussie cricketing enthusiast who once found himself heading the nation for far too long) didn't even get more than a fleeting mention in the memoirs of his Texan mate George Bush. Jeez, from a prestige and posterity viewpoint, how much lower can you sink than that?

Google has just stated that "WikiLeaks" is now twice as well known as "Wikipedia".



And the most famous Australian in the world, Julian Assange, has made it onto the cover of Time magazine. The French media are crammed with stories about Assange, WikiLeaks and attempts to censor and capture them in one way or another. Meanwhile, reactions in the two Aussie press organs that I happen to browse through from time to time (The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald) go from dismal down to disgusting… and I'm more determined than ever to cease wasting my time reading the depressing rubbish that comes out of my native land.


The web page named WL Central seems to offer a wide range of the latest relevant articles about this huge planetary affair.

But the best way of keeping up-to-date on the affair is to follow WikiLeaks on Twitter.

The following article provides a good summary of recent happenings:

Getting back to the ugly Aussie prime minister whom I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I would have imagined that Australia would look back with shame upon the way in which our nation once groveled on the ground in front of the USA, when Howard allowed Bush to keep our compatriot David Hicks locked away for years in the Guantanamo concentration camp. Sadly, the groveling goes on...

Diplomatic disaster

Found at Télérama:

New address of WikiLeaks: http://46.59.1.2

Ugly scenario that won't hurt your nose

For a straight guy like me, this scenario might sound somewhat ugly, but other individuals would surely appreciate it differently. Imagine entering a small room and encountering the following fine fellows:

[Thanks to gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine for this story and photo.]

Their spokesman closes the door behind me and explains: "OK, dude, you're going to be a guinea pig in an experiment, because we got something we want to test. Are you ready?"

Of course I'm fucking ready. I'm cornered. What would be the sense of trying to resist? The four guys turn around and bend over, with their asses pointing up at me. At least it's it's them who are bending over, not me. I'm nevertheless starting to get worried, and I cry out stupidly: "What do you want me to do?"

"For Chrissake, just shut up," replies the spokesman, without changing his curious position, "and concentrate on the task that we're preparing for you."

Easier said than done. Concentrate on what, I ask myself? I hear the spokesman's quiet voice, addressing his comrades: "OK, fellows. Ready? One, two, three… FIRE!"

All hell breaks loose at a sound level. It's as if as a bomb had just been detonated inside the tiny closed room. At the same moment that my ears are flattened by the gigantic explosion, I can see curious waves erupting beneath the fine cloth of their underpants stretched across their backsides, and ripples spreading rapidly in various directions. These energetic waves and ripples moving over their underpants, combined with the boom, reminded me of those old TV documentaries showing the first tests of the atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll. In a flash, I suddenly realized that the four gentlemen had farted in harmony… well, let's say rather, in unison, simultaneously. God only knows why.

The four guys are now standing upright, and turned towards me. Spokesman: "So, tell us, what did you perceive?" [This question recalls my earlier blog about the philosophy of George Berkeley.]

Me: "Well, there was some kind of rumbling, and a big bang, and a series of waves and ripples…"

Spokesman: "And what else?"

Me: "Well, nothing else… except, maybe, a kind of enduring numbness in my ears, if you see what I mean."

Spokesman: "No nasal damage?"

Me: "No, my nose is fine. Thanks for asking."

It was only then that I suddenly became aware of the miracle that had just been enacted before my eyes, my ears and my nose. How can I put it? There was absolutely no stench of gunpowder. No smell whatsoever. It had been a totally odorless explosion.

Me: "Hey, that's fantastic. How come my nose got through that ordeal without injuries?"

Spokesman: "Since you've bothered to ask that question, dude, I'll tell you why you didn't smell anything. It's because the four of us are wearing the revolutionary fart-proof 4skins underwear, which soaks up all offensive odors before they invade space."

And you can read all about this amazing product at this website.

First snow for Gamone newcomers

I've had an outage of the Internet and my house telephone for the last couple of days. Funnily, I don't think this breakdown had anything to do with the violent winter weather that hit us at the same time. It's more likely due to a mishap brought about by the armada of earth-moving engines that are working nonstop, down on the road below Gamone, installing a new sewage system for the entire district. These huge renovations (which will prevent us from driving through the main street of Pont-en-Royans for another month) don't concern me personally, because my house was renovated according to the new sanitation legislation in vigor in 1993, and I have an excellent ecological system of sewage disposal—inspected annually by the competent authorities— installed underground on the slopes below my house.

Meanwhile, Fitzroy has had his first in-depth contact with snow… and he loves it.

That's to say, he sees it as a marvelous soft support for his never-ending jousts with Sophia.

The little donkey Fanette has also experienced, for the first time, the slight discomfort brought about by the disappearance of the greenery (grass and weeds) under a 25cm-thick blanket of snow.

I prefer to speak of "slight discomfort" rather than of hunger, because the two donkeys are obscenely fat, after dining regularly on apples and walnuts over the last month or so.

As for the mésanges (wild birds, known in English as tits, which spend the winter months at Gamone), they've been happy to discover a big stock of sunflower seeds in the bird-house, and they swarm around it as a throng of a couple of dozen tiny black-and-gold creatures.

As of this morning, the sun is shining, the snow is melting, the road has been cleared by Frédéric Bourne in his tractor equipped with a giant steel blade… and my Internet is up and running. All is well at Gamone.

Modern Robin Hood

In a world in which most so-called "pollies" (Aussie term for politicians) are in the business for personal grabs, it's fabulous to find a fellow such as Julian Assange who, operating on a shoestring budget, has built a planetary reputation as a righter of wrongs. The following photo is amusing in that Assange seems to be presenting slides while wearing tinted glasses, no doubt to protect his eyes from the harsh lights. The final effect is to give him the sinister appearance of an evil personage from a James Bond movie.

I call this compatriot a 21st-century Robin Hood. Obviously, he's living dangerously, for the high sheriff of Nottingham and his ilk (not his elk, please) are assembling all their bloodhounds, and they're determined to run down Julian and string him up from the bough of a giant oak in the forest.

Meanwhile, I'm making an effort to actually browse through some of the more meaty US cables. Jeez, there's a lot of egg on a lot of faces. The so-called US diplomats imagined that they were eternally immune from eavesdroppers who might record some of their crappy communications. Hillary Clinton, of course, is furious. But so are many of the little guys. It's funny (but nevertheless disgusting, as I said yesterday) that the most bloodthirsty pursuer of our Robin Hood is none other than his fellow Aussie Robert McCelland. I would imagine that it makes the attorney-general feel important on the world stage to express indignantly his condemnation of WikiLeaks and Assange, while knowing full well that he's totally incapable of catching up with, and overpowering, a young guy who's obviously playing in a bigger ballpark than McCelland, with much more in the way of brainpower, technological resources and universal empathy. On the other hand, we're starting to hear absurd comparisons between WikiLeaks and such-and-such a terrorist attack. Soon—if it hasn't happened already—certain dickheads will start referring to this courageous and dynamic young Australian, forced to lead a clandestine existence, as "Osama bin Assange". I prefer Robin Hood.

BREAKING NEWS: China has blocked access to WikiLeaks [display], ostensibly because it "does not wish to see any disturbance in China-US relations". Consequently, WikiLeaks will join a blacklist that already includes YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Observing China's rapid reaction to the Robin Hood threat, Australia, so fond of the concept of censorship, will surely be green with envy.

People and places named Berkeley

When I visited London for the first time, in 1962, I had an account with an Australian bank whose offices were located on Berkeley Square, an elegant tree-shaded corner of Westminster.

At that time, I had no reason to be interested in the fact—if I had known it—that this square used to be the London address of an ancient family named Berkeley whose castle was located over in Gloucestershire, to the north of Bristol.

This was not the first time I had encountered the name Berkeley. As a philosophy student in Australia, I had been greatly intrigued by the weirdly imaginative ideas of the Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley [1685-1753].

He suggested that material objects might not really exist such as we commonly envisage them. When we perceive the presence of such an object, our perceptions of it are indeed quite real, but they don't necessarily prove that there exists, behind these perceptions, a material object that is constantly present, even when it's not being perceived. This way of looking at things raises a problem. If an object only exists when it is being perceived, then what becomes of it as soon as it is no longer being perceived? Imagine a tree in the forest. Does it cease to exist when it's no longer perceived, and then come back into existence as soon as there's somebody to perceive it once again? That doesn't sound like a very reassuring explanation of existence, to say the least. Berkeley appealed to magic to extricate himself from this puzzling situation. He suggested that the tree never really ceases to exist at any instant, no matter whether or not a human viewer is looking at it, since God is on hand permanently to perceive it. Funnily enough, in spite of the weird nature of Berkeley's theory, it receives an echo in modern physics, where commonsense notions of matter have been replaced by abstract constructs. As Bertrand Russell once said about matter: "I should define it as what satisfies the equations of physics."

George Berkeley (who wasn't yet a bishop) spent a few years in America, and he happens to be the author of a celebrated line of poetry: Westward the course of empire takes its way. These words inspired the famous mural painting by Emanuel Leutze representing the arrival of European Americans on the shores of the Pacific.

These words were also the reason why the name of the poet George Berkeley was given to the future university city in California.

It is said that George Berkeley was in fact a descendant of the above-mentioned ancient family from Gloucestershire. This idea amuses me greatly, for I too am a descendant of those folk. The patriarch of that family, Maurice Berkeley [1218-1281], married Isabel de Douvres, daughter of the Fitzroy chap—designated in the following chart as Richard Chilham, a bastard son of King John—after whom I have named my young Border Collie dog.

My findings in this ancient family-history domain are relatively recent (dating from the second half of 2009), and there are still many loose ends that I haven't got around to exploring. Among these loose ends, there have been these two men named Berkeley. I now realize that I shall only have to "plug myself into" the rich and well-documented history of the Berkeley family, and I shall surely be able to enhance rapidly and considerably my existing research results.

Should we listen to Landis?

Since Floyd Landis lied resolutely for four years about his involvement in dope, should we suddenly believe him today when he alleges that other cyclists were fueled by chemical products? When asked this obvious rhetorical question, Landis himself says, somewhat curiously, that he no longer really cares whether people believe him or not.

After seeing a revealing interview on French TV yesterday, I would say that, in my opinion, there's maybe a 20% chance that he's providing the sporting world with explosive facts, and four chances out of five that he's a sick nut case. But, whatever the likelihood of their turning out to be fables (which might never be proved or disproved), his allegations are so enormous that it's hardly surprising that they're being followed up earnestly, particularly in the context of Lance Armstrong, by US dope authorities.

Some of the tales told by Landis have a surrealist flavor, like events in a poorly-conceived script for a crime movie. For example, he explained that blood for later transfusions was collected from riders before the start of the Tour de France, and then stored in Floyd's refrigerator at his country house in Spain. He claimed that the only danger was, not so much the possibility of an intruder discovering all this blood in the kitchen, but rather an electricity outage. Then there's his description of what would happen in the team's bus prior to the start of a race.

Now, I've often observed at close range the huge buses used by professional cycling teams, parked in an enclosure near the starting line of a stage. It's a fact that such a vehicle—with smoked-glass windows and drawn curtains—looks like an opaque impenetrable fortress: the mobile out-of-bounds territory of a foreign embassy, with guards at the door. The scene described by Landis, evoking a military hospital, is truly grotesque. All nine members of the team would sit down and receive a transfusion, lasting a quarter of an hour, of their own blood. This vision of nine athletes, lounging simultaneously on reclining chairs while blood is dripping into their bodies from suspended plastic bags, is quite nightmarish. Landis, retrospectively, considers that this was business as usual. "It was routine, there was no debate to be made, we all knew we would do it. It was part of the job, it was a trivial thing." Frankly, I'm less inclined than ever to imagine that scene as real.

Later on in the interview, Landis makes huge accusations concerning specific individuals. "In the peloton, everyone knows that Pat McQuaid, Hein Verbruggen and other leaders of the UCI [Union Cycliste Internationale] protected some riders and not others during the past 20 years. It was their way of manipulating and creating stars."

We used to see photos of Floyd Landis in the context of his Pennsylvania village of Farmersville, comprised of 200 God-fearing souls who practised the archaic Mennonite religion.

Many observers would say that the religious upbringing of Floyd Landis could not possibly have anything to do with his subsequent behavior in the world of professional cycling.

Others would claim that this upbringing would have normally instilled in him a respect for moral principles and righteousness. My own opinions on communities of this kind (about which I know little) are that there are loose screws somewhere along the line, and that you never know what might happen.

For example, there's a custom known as Rumspringa, concerning Amish and Mennonite youths, which might be described roughly as "fucking around for a few years while you're deciding what to do next, prior to making up your mind about whether you should calm down and enter the fold". In theory, it's not a bad idea… but the effectiveness of this technique depends on how far you run amok, for how long, and with what possibly disastrous consequences. I've often wondered whether Floyd Landis might have descended into a protracted state of Rumspringa, from which he doesn't know how to emerge.