Back in touch with Durrell

In my earlier post entitled First encounter with Lawrence Durrell [display], I think I made it perfectly clear that this British novelist was truly a hero, for me, when I ran into him in the summer of 1963, in Nîmes, by an amazing stroke of luck. Once upon a time (not so long ago), before my enlightenment by great 21st-century scientists such as David Deutsch and Richard Dawkins, I even used to designate my chance encounter with Lawrence Durrell as an obvious manifestation of the mysterious phenomenon referred to as synchronicity. That's to say, I was convinced that some kind of yet-unexplained convergence of our respective destinies had caused our paths to cross, for an instant, on a sunny morning in Nîmes. With a small additional dose of imagination, I might have even concluded that the magnificent blocks of stone in the ancient Roman arena had surely contributed—in ways yet unknown to science—to the focalization of our itineraries upon that particular point in Alexandria-Quartet space-time: Nîmes, 18 July 1963. It all sounds so nice, in a fuzzy way (of which Durrell himself might well have approved), that I'm a little sad to admit that I no longer believe an iota about so-called synchronicity. Be that as it may, I'm relieved to realize today that there are infinitely many mysteries in the Cosmos that are infinitely more astounding than the silly synchronicity idea... and I take pleasure in deliberately spicing up my sentiments with the "infinitely" adverb.

Immediately after that encounter with Durrell, three major events took place in my life.

(1) I worked for a while as a seaman on a Greek cargo ship [display].

(2) I returned to Paris and started work as an English teacher at the Lycée Henri IV [display].

(3) I met up with my future wife.

Curiously, an indirect but undeniable outcome of these three events was that I totally abandoned my fascination for Durrell and his formerly-exhilarating Alexandria Quartet. Instead of dreaming romantically about the inhabitants of a make-believe city in Egypt, or trying to imagine Durrell's life in places such as Corfu, Rhodes or Cyprus, I became more interested in the realities of modern Greece. In particular, I fell in love with the island of Tinos [display]. But I was rapidly convinced that there was one outstanding nation on the shores of the Mediterranean, and it was neither Greece, Egypt, Spain nor Italy. That nation was France. Its capital was Paris, where I would be spending the next three decades. And its Mediterranean port was the ancient Greek settlement of Massalia (designated by my friend Natacha as Marseille)... the official European capital of culture in 2013.

At this point, if my story is to be meaningful, readers need to know that, in 1965, I married a French girl, Christine, whose maternal ancestors were essentially Provençal. In the summer of 1968, with our 18-month-old daughter Emmanuelle, we drove down to meet up with Christine's grandparents at their home in the village of Saint Sériès, in the Mediterranean département of the Hérault, not far from Nîmes.

This was an excursion of immense joy: my discovery of Christine's marvelous maternal grandparents, and of their Languedoc province.

One day, Christine's grandparents happened to speak to me of a certain British writer who lived nearby, in Sommières. They told me that he had a reputation of spending most of his time as a boisterous drunkard in local taverns. I soon gathered that they were speaking of my former literary hero, Lawrence Durell, whom I had encountered 5 years earlier in Nîmes, when he was living in a stone cabin up in the vicinity, north of Nîmes, indicated by a green bubble in the above map. Needless to say, I set off immediately, to see if I could meet up once again with Durrell in Sommières. I located the property, but Durrell himself was not there. So, I missed him.

Meanwhile, for years, I had started to realize to what extent the mythical novelist of my late teenage years in Sydney had ceased to concern me directly, if at all. Today, retrospectively, I can understand perfectly why this was the case. Durrell had fascinated me at a time, back in Australia, when I still believed in romantic Mediterranean legends. But I had grown up since then, and I realized that Durrell was merely an adept story-teller: no more, no less. But certainly not an authority on authentic present-day Mediterranean society… which was better described to me—devoid of the romantic trappings of literature—by Christine's splendid grandparents. Her grandfather had worked for the French military as a specialist in explosives.

Christine's ancestors were real Provençal individuals, with authentic Mediterranean genealogies, not mere figments of the fuzzy imagination of a British novelist. Consequently, by "the force of things" (a splendid existentialist expression that I've always admired), I ceased to be a dyed-in-the-wool Durrellian (if ever I were). I became, modestly, the Australian-born husband of a lovely Breton girl (born, in fact, in Cognac) whose mother was Arlesian. Besides, incidentally, Christine told me she loved the French translations of Durrell's novels.

Meanwhile, my second face-to-face encounter with Lawrence Durrell took place in the Latin Quarter of Paris, in the early 1970s, when the novelist was exhibiting his talents as a painter, identified as Oscar Epf.

On that evening, I was thrilled to meet up with the 20-something daughter of the writer/painter, Sappho Durrell. Back at the time of my initial encounter with Lawrence Durrell, in Nîmes in 1963, Sappho was a child.

That evening, in Paris, she was an elegant young woman, sporting a magic name: Sappho Durrell. While her father chatted diplomatically with visitors, I preferred to enter in contact with Sappho. I told her, of course, that I had met up with her father for the first at Nîmes in 1963. Then I explained how I had come upon their family mansion in Sommières, in 1968. I half-expected that I would hear the profound reflections of the writer's daughter concerning life in a small Provençal town such as Sommières. Instead, at that instant, I was utterly stupefied by the spontaneous reaction of Sappho Durrell, who replied casually in the style of a mindless suburban brat:

SAPPHO DURRELL: "We refer to my father's place in Sommières as the House of the Addams Family."

I had no idea who might be designated by Sappho's "we", but I was immediately shocked (the term is true) by the fact that this young woman, daughter of a great British novelist, with the privilege of living with her illustrious father in the heart of Provence, might dare to allude to such cheap foreign shit as an American TV series. I concluded immediately (maybe wrongly, but first impressions count) that, intellectually, there was little to be acquired from Sappho… who may or may not have inherited significant genes from her Alexandrian mother Eve Cohen, a victim of depressive schizophrenia.

Years later, Christine's brother Lan Mafart, aware of my interest in Durrell, happened to be traveling around in the south of France, and he sent me a lovely photo of the entrance to Durrell's house in Sommières:

Lan also sent me a postcard from Sommières, with an image of the ancient rectangular keep on a hill above the capricious Vidourle:

Here, on the other side, is the text (in French) of Lan's postcard, written from the Café du Commerce:

Lan wrote: "A pale lightbulb shines upon the entrance to the house of Lawrence Durrell. The flakes of paint are like dead leaves forgotten by the gardener." In a cynical vein, Lan notes the absence of "camping-cars in the driveway", meaning that Durrell's home is no longer, apparently, a place of pilgrimage (if ever it were).

The most striking aspect of Lan's postcard is the date: 17 February 1990. On that day, if I understand correctly, Lawrence Durrell was in fact working inside his great bourgeois home on the manuscript of his final masterpiece: Caesar's Vast Ghost — Aspects of Provence. And the writer himself would be dead before the end of that year.

Today, when I learn that Sappho Durrell hung herself in London in 1985, and that she left papers suggesting (in terribly indirect terms) that her father might have straddled her incestuously, my immediate reaction is: crazy Addams-family talk!

I simply cannot, for a moment, imagine why Larry—surrounded constantly by hordes of seductive females—might have suddenly decided to fornicate with his 15-year-old daughter. Inversely, I can well imagine why Sappho might have decided, later on, that it would be nice if she were to make herself interesting (Durrell's daughter was a budding writer) by injecting make-believe sex into the alleged relationship with her father. After all, wasn't that a bit like what her old man had been doing, for ages, to add spice to his stories?

Abuse victims target Vatican

A complaint was lodged this morning urging the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate Benedict XV and three senior Vatican officials concerning the possible concealment of cases of sexual abuse of children by priests.

The ICC will now have to decide whether it has jurisdiction in this context. Even if the outcome of this preliminary investigation were negative, as is likely, the ICC will be obliged to respond explicitly to the two American advocacy groups that filed the complaint: the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. And the ICC's response will inevitably raise public awareness of these questions.

First encounter with Lawrence Durrell

When I left Australia for Europe in January 1962 on the Greek ship Bretagne, I was traveling light. But I had nevertheless found room in a corner of my two suitcases for The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. I had purchased the four Faber paperback editions at Clay's Bookshop in Macleay Street, near Kings Cross, and it was out of the question to abandon these precious novels in Sydney.

Besides, our ship would soon be sailing alongside Durrell's Mediterranean world of Egypt and Greece, and I had planned on rereading the Quartet during the voyage.

During my first year and a half in Europe, I lived in Paris for 8 months, and then in London for the harsh winter of 1962-63, working in both places with IBM. I carried on reading Durrell, particularly his wonderful books on the Greek islands. Finally, at the start of summer in 1963, I said goodbye to my colleagues in London and set off wandering around as a backpacker, staying in youth hostels. First, I dropped in at Canterbury, where I wanted to visit the tomb of the 14th-century archbishop Simon Mepham, whom I imagined (and still do) as a vague paternal ancestor.

I was amused to think that 14-year-old Lawrence Durrell had once arrived here, in the heart of the superb county of Kent, to study at Saint Edmund's School.

After this rapid pilgrimage, I crossed the Channel by ferry from Dover and hitchhiked from Calais down to Nantes. I then spent a fortnight staying in hostels and moving slowly from Nantes across to Tours and down to Poitiers and Beaulieu-en-Dordogne. At Saint-Brévin-les-Pins, I was fascinated by a French girl who took me out on an excursion to the local market to buy fresh fish, which she then prepared expertly in the simple kitchen of the youth hostel. I've often thought, retrospectively, that it was then that I was charmed, for the first time, by the subtle blend of simple beauty and provincial pragmatism (quite the opposite of sophistication) that characterizes so many young French women.

Meanwhile, I had heard that my hero Durrell was settled in the south of France in the vicinity of Nîmes, which I imagined naively (I was still totally uncultivated in the domain of French geography) as a Provençal village. Early on the morning of Thursday 18 July 1963, a truckdriver took me into Nîmes. I remember being dispirited, as we approached Nîmes, by the sight of clusters of dreary residential buildings, which hardly corresponded to my vision of Durrell's hometown. The truckdriver let me off at an intersection where a signpost indicated the direction of the centre ville. Twenty minutes later, coming upon a huge antique structure (the Roman arena), I realized that I had surely reached the center of Nîmes.

The streets surrounding the arena were quite busy. Most of the pedestrians seemed to be local folk: employees rushing to their jobs in offices and shops, women engaged in early-morning shopping, and adolescents obliged to spend the school vacation in their hometown. There were many tourists, too. Like me, they were clearly overwhelmed by the massive proportions of the ancient Roman structure. The local people, on the other hand, walked past quickly without ever glancing at the stones; they were far more interested in the likelihood of running into friends. For me, this busy scene was far removed from my expected idyllic image of a village square with a tiny church, a stone fountain, and a couple of bistrots whose outdoor tables were shaded by plane trees. The scale alone overpowered me. Nîmes was no village. It was a big town, if not a provincial city. Clearly, this place had nothing to do with the austere Durrellian environment I had imagined on the basis of a few photos I had come across in books and literary magazines.



Feeling somewhat lost, and a little disappointed by the dimensions of the place, I decided to stroll around the stone walls of the Roman arena in Nîmes. On the far side of the vast square, there were several large cafés, where black-uniformed waiters were organizing the rows of tables and chairs out on the pavement.

At this early hour of the morning, there were not many clients, merely a handful of old men reading newspapers. I walked towards the largest café, which was almost empty. A single customer was seated in the sun at one of the tables in the front row. He was sipping a beer and gazing out at the Roman edifice. I recognized him instantly. I had found my novelist. Without hesitating, I walked towards him.

ME: "You're Lawrence Durrell. No?"

DURRELL: "Please be seated. What can I get you to drink?"

I asked for a beer. Durrell got up and walked back up into the café to order my drink. When he returned, I was in a rather confused state of mind, and I attempted to mumble out explanations about why it was totally extraordinary that I should run into him here, of all places, less than an hour after my arrival in Nîmes.

DURRELL: "It's most unusual for me to be sitting in a café in Nîmes at this hour of the morning, but I had to bring my car in for repairs. So, I simply have to wait around until it's ready."

We spent about half an hour together, on that sunny terrasse, talking about various trivial things. I was a naive young man of 22, and that was no doubt the first time in my life that I had found myself in a face-to-face conversation with a celebrity such as Durrell. (Later, during my three or four years in the French TV world, this kind of encounter would become commonplace.) I made a conscious effort to avoid behaving like a wonderstruck fan, but I'm not sure I succeeded. Durrell told me that he had family friends down in Tasmania who had the habit of sending him a crate of home-grown apples every year. That anecdote made me feel more at ease. I sensed immediately that, in the contemporary Tasmanian domain, Durrell's awareness was probably limited, like mine, to that single item of information: they grow apples. Fortunately, I was not yet sufficiently impregnated with all the intricacies and mysteries of the Quartet to be able to raise any interesting questions. So, there was little chance of my boring Durrell at that level. On the other hand, I did make a point of telling him, quite truthfully, that one of the aspects of the masterpiece that had attracted me from the start was the four-dimensional relativity-inspired thing, since I was more-or-less familiar with modern physics. I remember having the impression that Durrell was visibly happy to hear me say this. (I've since learned that various well-intentioned critics were quick to point out that this alleged structural aspect of The Alexandria Quartet does not really stand up to any kind of rigorous scientific analysis.) Durrell spoke of a recent visit of his friend Henry Miller, who was apparently a little ill at ease with the primitive outdoor lavatory at the Mazet Michel. Finally, when Durrell left me to pick up his car, I still had trouble convincing myself that I had actually been chatting with the author of The Alexandria Quartet.

Current activities of my son

For the last week or so, François Skyvington has been involved in the start of the shooting of a new TV series of moped adventures, to be presented next year on the Franco-German channel Arte. The crew has been operating up in the Flemish town of Hazebrouck in northern France, just near the Belgian border.

This afternoon, I received a copy of a short article that appeared in Friday's issue of La Voix du Nord. The photo shows François being filmed as he talks with Domi and Patricia, who run a friterie (mobile stand that sells French fries). Apparently François got off his moped and actually moved behind the counter, where Patricia gave him a lesson on how to cook French fries in the pure Flemish tradition. People who have seen the hugely-popular French film Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis by Dany Boon (translated as Welcome to the Sticks) will be familiar with this kind of traditional eatery in northern France.

Over the next six months, the series—called Détours de mob—will be shot in four French regions: Flanders-Picardy, Brittany, Corsica and Gascony. Then François and his crew will spend six months shooting in four German regions. In each of these eight regions, they intend to produce five half-hour programs. So, all in all, there'll be a total of 40 distinct programs, to be screened in prime time (start of the evening) on successive weekdays. In other words, it's quite a significant TV project.

If I understand correctly, there'll be a blend of organized themes and improvized encounters.

Imagine

Old house in Sommières

[Google Maps image — Click to enlarge]

Route Saussine 15

Only of late have I come to see this house
As something poisoned when I paid for it;
Its beauty was specious and it hid pure grief.
Your absence, dearest, brings it no relief.
We have all died here; one by spurious one
Of indistinct diseases, lack of sun, or fun,
Or just our turn came up, now mine; so be it, none
Decline into oblivion without a guide,
The last of maladies, death, love can provide
The abandoned garden, dried up fountain oozes,
A stagnant fountain full of tiny frogs
Like miniature Muses; say to yourself
No hope of change with death so near.
Days come and sigh and disappear.
Despair camps everywhere and my old blind dog
Though lacking a prostate pisses everywhere.

— Lawrence Durrell, in Caesar's Vast Ghost

The "absence" mentioned by Durrell was that of his wife Claude-Marie, who died on New Year's Day 1967, less than a year after their purchase of the house in Sommières. Durrell himself died in this house on 7 November 1990. He was buried in the graveyard behind the chapel of Saint Julien de Montredon, a few kilometers north-west of Sommières.

Aussie politician sighted in Paris

I've always been intrigued by the enigmatic sad smile of the Aussie polly Craig Thomson. As Craig looks back nostalgically upon his past life, this cynical smile surely hides more than it reveals.

With such an unforgettable regard, it's hard to travel incognito... even when using a valid credit card in a whorehouse.

Assassination of an Afghan hero

With hindsight, we can understand anything and everything. Theoretically, on 9 September 2001, the western world received a clear message that al-Qaeda was about to perpetrate a major criminal happening. On that day, in the isolated northern Afghan province of Takhar, 48-year-old Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated by a pair of al-Qaeda suicide bombers who had been posing as journalists.

Massoud was the hero who, at the head of his mujahideen warriors, had played a major role in driving Soviet troops out of Afghanistan in 1989. When the Taliban appeared on the scene in 1996, Massoud opposed them in his role as chief of the so-called Northern Alliance, a stalwart of western democracy.

Today, we know that the assassination of Massoud had been programmed to take place within a time slot that would end on 9 September 2001. Beyond that date, it would no longer be possible for al-Qaeda to execute stealthily a friend of the West such as Massoud… for the obvious reason (as we now know, with hindsight) that the terrorist organization would be making a spectacular "coming out" two days later, in New York.

To my mind, in the domain of romantic 20th-century guerrilla heroes, Massoud was a far greater figure than Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Massoud was an authentic revolutionary, fighting for causes that we all cherish today. This photo shows Australian vehicles in 2009:

The memory of Massoud symbolizes the combat of young soldiers of the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) [display details] who are still fighting and dying today in Afghanistan.

No poll has ever produced a president

François Hollande is behaving correctly when he draws attention to the fact that his current success in voting-opinion polls is no guarantee that he'll be elected as French president next year.

Lots of things could happen between now and May 2012. Hollande himself could make some gigantic blunder… such as getting randy with a nasty hotel maid, for example. But this is unlikely. One of the other Socialist contenders could pull a white rabbit out of his/her hat and achieve stardom. A more plausible scenario: Nicolas Sarkozy could pull off such-and-such a political stunt leading voters to believe (that's to say, those of them who don't believe this already) that bursts of solar radiation are emitted periodically by the president's posterior orifice.

I invite those of my blog readers who understand French to appreciate the following brilliant and convincing discourse of Hollande, today, in the French National Assembly:

We see here a statesman, with a mastery of socio-economic questions, and we sense the presence of a future French president.

Rally Australia

At Coffs Harbour, over the four days starting next Thursday, this is the Citroën automobile to admire:

Here's a rear view of this vehicle:

And here's the driver, Sébastien Loeb:

For the moment, Loeb is leading the 2011 championship, but he could still be beaten by the other Citroën driver, Sébastien Ogier. Meanwhile, with three rallies remaining after Australia (in France, Spain and the UK), the Finns Mikko Hirvonen and Jari-Matti Latvala, in their Fords, are unlikely to catch up with the Frenchmen.

Click the banner to access the Rally Australia website. I've been looking at the four-day schedule and the various maps, and trying to figure out what I would do if I were a spectator out in New South Wales. On the opening day, it would be good to spend some time at the Jetty Precinct in Coffs Harbour, in the hope of glimpsing the drivers and vehicles before they actually get into action, late in the afternoon. Then, on Sunday afternoon, it would be interesting to watch the final so-called "power stage" up in the vicinity of Wooli and Red Rock.

The rally covers such a big area—of what appears to be bush country (?)—that I have no idea how spectators are expected to move from one place to another. Nor do I know how spectators can actually obtain real-time information on the results of the latest stages. Maybe by means of an iPhone capable of linking to the above-mentioned website?

Early Australian automobile rally

Starting next Thursday, Rally Australia will be taking place near my birthplace: more precisely, in several rural zones in the vicinity of the coastal town of Coffs Harbour.

I shall never forget my first contact with an automobile trial in Australia, in 1956, at a time when I was living with my grandparents at Robinson Avenue in Grafton and preparing my final high-school certificate. I am referring to the 1956 Ampol Around Australia Trial. My grandfather was the Ford dealer in Grafton, and his garage had a gasoline pump alongside the roadway in Fitzroy Street, at the spot where the entrance to an automobile business existed up until recently.

This address was indicated as an official refueling station for the Ampol contestants, who had left Sydney during the day. When the vehicles started to arrive in Fitzroy Street, it was late in the evening. I was there, alongside my grandfather's gasoline pump, participating in the excitement. After all, in quiet old Grafton, we had never before seen anything quite like this. I remember in particular the third car to arrive, with its headlights blazing. It was a charming little MG TF sports car (manufactured by Morris), much like this:

On the local radio, I had heard about this vehicle and its occupants, Les Slaughter and Bill Mayes, no doubt because their vehicle was so much more elegant than most of the typical sedans engaged in the trial: bulky Holdens, Peugeots, Fords, Standard Vanguards, etc. I was so close to the car that I had time, while it was being refueled, to gaze down into the cockpit, where I could see clearly the two drivers, both of whom were wearing woolen bonnets (because it must have been quite cool, of an evening, beneath their flimsy canvas hood). To my innocent eyes, unaccustomed to harsh sporting adventures of this kind, there was something unreal about the vision of these two fellows emerging from the darkness, and waiting impatiently to take off once again. As they drove off into the dark, I had the impression that I was watching a pair of daring pioneers, heroes of a new kind.

The next morning, we learned from news bulletins on the radio that Slaughter and Mayes had never reached the next town, up on the Great Dividing Range. They had disappeared mysteriously somewhere along the mountainous Gwydir Highway between South Grafton and Glen Innes. However nobody in any of the other 31 vehicles, racing through that rugged and sparsely-populated region in the middle of the night, had witnessed anything unusual. Later on in the day, an intrigued automobile specialist, Evan Green, came upon telltale tracks in the gravel, indicating that a vehicle had left the dangerous road. Police found the little MG down at the bottom of a gorge. The two drivers had been ejected by the impact, and they were lying face-down in a creek, side-by-side, where they had in fact drowned. I was no doubt one of the last people to see Slaughter and Mayes alive, in the cockpit of their beautiful little automobile. I've never forgotten that tragedy, which marked me enormously. Curiously, though, I felt that it was almost inevitable that such exotic and intrepid heroes should meet their destiny in this dramatic fashion.

Finally, the trial was won by two Australians—Alan Taylor and Wilf Murrell—driving a run-of-the-mill French car: a Peugeot 403.


POST SCRIPTUM: It's quite possible that this archaic gasoline pump, which apparently still exists today at the Fitzroy Street premises, is the place where Slaughter and Mayes fueled up for the last time.

Postman needs a vacation

This true story about a French thief is similar—on the surface—to the anecdote described in my recent blog post entitled Lovers lanes for an ex-husband [display].

In the city of Moselle (province of Lorraine), over the last ten years, a middle-aged postman has stolen 13,000 items that he was supposed to deliver. Amazingly, he stored all this stolen mail in his attic, where it was discovered in a more-or-less intact state. The most intriguing aspect of the thief's behavior was his predilection for simple postcards, of the trivial kind that tourists send back home to their loved ones.

Not surprisingly, psychiatrists concluded that the postman was a compulsive kleptomaniac, but he's thought to be totally responsible for his acts. In other words, he's by no means clinically crazy. The postman himself is incapable of explaining objectively why he committed all this theft, but he admits that he has always been fascinated by the kinds of simple family letters and postcards that he stole.

The poor guy is likely to be sent away on a three-year vacation for theft, accompanied by another three years for a fuzzy crime described as "violation of the secrecy of private correspondence". I would have imagined that, in our Internet age—where organizations and individuals are constantly sticking their noses into other people's business—the latter concept would have become somewhat obsolete.

I hope the authorities will give us the guy's address in jail, enabling well-wishers to send him friendly postcards.

This story has a happy ending. The postal authorities are in the process of forwarding all the stolen mail to its rightful receivers. Since we live in the best of all possible worlds, I'm sure that many people will be so thrilled to receive this long-overdue mail that they'll spontaneously dash off a thank-you postcard to the postman.

Figs in my yard

My friend Tineke Bot has often claimed that she can distinguish spontaneously and effortlessly dozens of different shades of green. Here in Choranche, this kind of chromatic sensibility is an asset. Without it, an observer would have the impression of looking out on a world that is homogeneously green. In the case of the following photo, for example, I've played around with Photoshop settings in an attempt (not particularly successful) to get the leaves of the fig tree to stand out as much as possible against the background.

[Click to enlarge]

For the first time ever, the tree is covered in figs, and they're truly delicious. This is the tree given to me by my Provençal friends Natacha and Alain. Two years ago, in my blog post entitled Great fig tree, but low yield [display], I said jokingly that the annual yield of the young tree had been one edible fig. Clearly, since then, it has evolved exponentially. They're small dark spheres, firm and sweet: the variety of figs used to produce tarts and cakes.

I take this opportunity of including a link back to my blog post entitled Fabulous fig story [display], in which I referred to fascinating biological information from Richard Dawkins concerning the fig tree.

Fitzroy excavator

This photo, taken this morning on the road just up from my house at Gamone, shows Fitzroy posing proudly in front of a hole that he had dug in the embankment some 24 hours earlier.

[Click to enlarge]

Yesterday, I happened to be located some 20 meters further up the road (but without my Nikon) at the instant when Fitzroy decided to carry out this excavation. I was strolling up the road when I heard a kind of dull rumbling sound behind me. Turning around, I was amazed to see Fitzroy in full action, engulfed in a cloud of dust. His robust front paws were rotating rapidly, gouging out earth and stones that flew over his head. This was the first time I had ever caught Fitzroy in an act of excavation. (Normally he works alone, stealthily, in the early hours of the morning.) The entire operation lasted less than 20 seconds, as if a powerful machine had been set in operation, and then turned off.

What in fact was the purpose of this unexpected excavation? Like any self-respecting fossicker, Fitzroy refrains from revealing details. In the case of potential seams of precious metals or gems, you don't go around town shouting out about what you're doing. You simply shut up, keep quiet about your findings, and continue to dig. I suspect, though, that my marvelous friend Fitzroy might have sighted a tiny lizard.

Gaul with a sudden urge

You probably saw the story in the world media, a few weeks ago, about the French actor Gérard Depardieu at the start of a flight from Dublin to Paris.

He informed the cabin crew that he had an urgent need to pee. Since the plane was taking off, the toilets were out of bounds. So, Depardieu was obliged to pee into a plastic bottle. But this recipient turned out to be far too small for his voluminous production of piss… so you can imagine the uncontrolled splashes and the subsequent mess.

My readers are no doubt familiar with the cunning little Gaul named Asterix, and his bulky but immensely powerful companion Obelix.

Obelix is a hearty eater, with a constant yearning for wild pig. At a single sitting, he's capable of consuming, all on his own, several baked boars. In October last year, I mentioned this meat in my blog post entitled Celtic cooking [display].

Getting back to the Depardieu incident, the actor had been in Ireland for the shooting of a film about these heroic Gauls. As in a previous movie, Depardieu was playing Obelix, and his fellow-actor Edouard Baer was playing Asterix. Well, they've just released a French-language video in which Obelix, at the start of a plane flight, is beset by a sudden urge to eat roast boar (in French, sanglier).

An excellent publicity gimmick for the forthcoming film! Besides, here's a nice CNN interview concerning the notorious Depardieu incident:

In a totally different domain, here's a curious photo that shows a wild boar, on a beach in Brittany (home of Asterix and Obelix), about to be taken for a ride on a quad bike.

Are they about to prepare a Celtic banquet? Not exactly. It's one of a dozen or so dead bodies of wild boars that were no doubt poisoned by toxic hydrogen sulfide gas emitted by a thick layer of decaying seaweeds. The seaweeds thrive at the outlet of a stream that is polluted by nitrates used abundantly by local farmers… many of whom raise domestic pigs.

Standing still requires creative effort

In competitive track cycling, there's a curious technique—in the two-person racing format known as sprinting—that consists of standing still on your bike while hoping that the other person will be forced to head off first. The general idea is that it's preferable to remain in the second position at the start of a sprint, since you can take advantage of the first rider's airstream.

Funnily enough, standing still on a track bicycle consumes quite a lot of physical energy, because the rider has to be constantly pressing back and forth on his pedals to avoid moving forwards down the track (or backwards, in certain situations). I know what I'm talking about because, back in my days of track cycling, I used to master this technique quite successfully… but mainly just for fun. Let us refer to this spent energy as status quo (SQ) energy. In other words, it's the energy you need to spend in order to stay exactly where you are.

In our everyday life, we often encounter people who appear to be spending enormous amounts of SQ energy in order to remain more-or-less immobile. I'm thinking above all of bourgeois folk who are obsessed by their status within such-and-such a peer group to which they belong. Even though the Joneses may in fact evolve imperceptibly at a social level, simply keeping up with them can be a relentless and arduous full-time job for neighbors who make this their mission. Most often, SQ energy is used in the hope of demonstrating that one is perfectly normal with respect to one's particular milieu. Members of social groups such as political parties, civic associations, religious bodies and sporting clubs will often devote a lot of SQ energy towards furthering the impression that they are ordinary trustworthy members of the group in question, with no imaginable reason to be ostracized. In another context, you might say that a young man asking for the hand of the girl he loves is often called upon to expend much SQ energy in the context of his future parents-in-law. In La Cage aux Folles, poor Albin had to exploit with talent a maximum of SQ energy in order to prove that "she" was, as expected, an ordinary and acceptable wife/mother.

It would be a mistake to consider that SQ energy is negative, or wasted, because it might indeed be important—for citizens preoccupied by their social status, no less than for a track cyclist—to remain in the same place, with the same status as before. But we would probably not be too wrong in referring to SQ energy as nonproductive, in the sense that it gives rise to nothing new. That's to say, it's not at all the kind of energy that a society might use in its quest for innovation.

Now, the reason I'm talking about SQ energy is that this question has arisen in one of the many ingenious explanations in The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, in a chapter entitled The Evolution of Creativity. Deutsch set out to explain a puzzling era in human prehistory and history. For countless generations, humanity's progress could be represented by an almost flat graph. That's to say, there was no perceptible social or technical innovation whatsoever. In a general sense (excluding calamities, all too frequent, such as warfare, plagues and natural catastrophes), every day tended to be a copy of the previous day. Then, all of a sudden, at an epoch designated as the Enlightenment, the old world order exploded, and innovation burgeoned. Well, Deutsch envisages the existence of a common force behind the immensely long period of negligible human progress and the prolific age of the Enlightenment, and he designates that common force by an unexpected term: creativity.

• During the preliminary era of near-zero progress, individuals who were sufficiently endowed genetically with creativity were able to expend SQ energy enabling them to survive in primitive so-called static societies that abhorred all forms of innovation.

• When the tide turned with the Enlightenment, this same endowment of creativity enabled the descendants of the static societies to abandon their SQ preoccupations and to promote all kinds of innovation.

Here's the pivotal paragraph from Deutsch:

Hence, paradoxically, it requires creativity to thrive in a static society — creativity that enables one to be less innovative than other people. And that is how primitive, static societies, which contained pitifully little knowledge and existed only by suppressing innovation, constituted environments that strongly favoured the evolution of an ever-greater ability to innovate.
— The Beginning of Infinity, page 414

As in a track-cycling sprint, the same forces that have enabled a rider to stand still can then be unleashed to make him win.

Tidal-power engineering

Electricité de France (EDF), the national French electricity authority, has purchased a series of four giant tidal-energy turbines, which will be towed out into the sea off Brittany, to the north of Paimpol and the Ile-de-Bréhat, and lowered onto the sea floor.

These huge turbines are manufactured by an Irish company in Dublin named OpenHydro.

[Click the image to access their website]

Each circular turbine has a diameter of 16 meters, and will be installed on a tripod posed on the sea floor. The combined weight of a turbine and its base is 850 tons, which means that the structure is unlikely to move around.

For the moment, tidal turbines of this kind remain an experimental technology. On the other hand, France was a world pioneer in a related domain: the installation of tidal turbines in a barrier across the mouth of an estuary.

Opened in November 1966, the Rance tidal-power station in Brittany was the first such system in the world. Today, the station is still perfectly operational, and it produces electricity at three-quarters the cost of nuclear energy.

Obviously, to exploit this source of energy, you need to be located in a part of the world with a powerful tidal system. This is the case in Brittany and Normandy… where there's a well-known local saying about the tide going out "at the speed of a galloping horse". Personally, before becoming acquainted with the coasts of these two French provinces, I had never encountered the phenomenon of ports that simply lose all their water when the tide is out. I was amazed to discover vast beaches of dry sand covered in boats propped up on their sides with wooden poles.

Children's books

Some children's books can be appreciated by readers who ceased, long ago, to be children. No doubt the finest cases of such literature are the works of Lewis Carroll… but one might claim that the author imagined his juvenile readers as intellectually-endowed individuals capable of being intrigued by logical enigmas, linguistic bizarreries and all kinds of puzzling things.

I've always thought of Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows as a splendid example of a children's book that can be enjoyed by adults.

On the other hand, certain books that I found extraordinarily exciting as a child had lost all their charm when I rediscovered them years later. The most disappointing case of this kind, for me, was the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome. When I was about 11 years old, these adventure stories—of a Boy Scout and Girl Guide tone—were the summit of thrilling fiction.

These days, I would imagine that many adults have derived pleasure from reading the Harry Potter books. Personally, having seen some of the movies on TV, I became rapidly bored by all that pointing of magic wands and riding of flying broomsticks. It's definitely not my kettle of fish, but I can understand that many adults might appreciate this kind of stuff.

A new book for children will be coming out on October 4, and I've just put in an advance order for it. I'm referring to The Magic of Reality, the latest book by Richard Dawkins. I'm happy to see that the author is already exploiting this forthcoming event to promote the teaching of evolutionary science in primary schools. That would be a wonderful idea.

We've already seen an excellent specimen of writing from Dawkins for a child. I'm referring to the final chapter of A Devil's Chaplain, entitled A Prayer for My Daughter (first published in 1995), in which Dawkins provides his 10-year-old daughter Juliet with various "good and bad reasons for believing".

How have I been able to walk, drive and climb stairs?

Two months ago, my left leg was pinned to the ground by a branch of a felled walnut tree that I was cutting up with a chainsaw. A few weeks ago, I included in my blog a photo taken by my doctor [display]. I seem to have recovered well and rapidly. However, a month ago, during my first and only medical consultation since the accident, my general practitioner Xavier Limouzin decided that I should obtain further images of my knee (ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging) to make sure that everything was OK. A few weeks ago, the ultrasound image confirmed what the initial X-ray photos had suggested: namely, that there was no fracture anywhere and no thrombosis. Well, this morning, at the hospital in Romans, I was most surprised to learn what MR images revealed.

I've just taken this photo of my legs. I'm still attired as I was for the MRI session: shorts and sandals. Well, although these two rather ordinary knees appear to be fairly similar, there's a big difference. The left knee has in fact been fractured, without my realizing it, for the last two months. (I'll be interested to learn why the X-rays didn't reveal this fracture.) To demonstrate what he was telling me, the friendly specialist at Romans clasped my left kneecap between his fingers and said: "I'm squeezing my fingers at the place where your knee was broken. That's probably painful. No?" I had to tell him that I didn't feel a thing. Maybe I'm becoming an insensitive zombie. I asked him what I should do, to stimulate the healing process. He replied: "Lots of rest. No hard work. Keep off your knees. There's nothing better than long hours stretched out on a sofa watching TV."

While at the hospital, I thought that I might return the brand-new blue splint they had given me on the day of my accident. It's much the same form as the leg-protection worn by cricketers. I only wore this splice on the first night, then never again. So, I imagined that I would be acting as a good citizen in returning it to the hospital. Since the MRI unit is located just alongside the emergency ward, I walked in through the landing where ambulances pull up, and promptly found myself in exactly the same hall where I had waited for treatment two months ago. The staff were handling a fellow whom local firemen had just wheeled in on a trolley, parked just alongside me. It took me a few minutes to realize that the middle-aged fellow, wrapped in a white sheet from which his head and bare feet protruded, and lying limply on his left side, was in fact dead. I was fascinated to realize (for the first time in my life) that the behavior, speech and attitudes of professional people dealing with a corpse are quite unlike situations in which the patient is still alive. Several tiny details (such as the fact, for example, that nobody seemed to be concerned that the fellow's face was pressed hard against the metallic edge of the trolley) sent out messages indicating that the patient was no longer alive. Meanwhile, a secretary informed me that I could hang on to my splint, since they did not seek to recuperate such items. I was happy to jump into my car and drive home.

Jesus walked on the waters of Irene

I can't help loving Americans. [And I promise not to use a single swear-word in this blog post.] They're innocent childlike observers of the calamities of the universe, and they're especially skilled in Biblical stories concerning the Deluge. Jesus Christ is constantly just around the corner. Often, a delightful word seems to describe adequately the attitudes of certain descendants of the Founding Fathers: dumbfounded.

The journalist Jojo deserves deserves some kind of prize for perseverance. He should be sent off immediately to a front-line war zone in Libya. I have a gut feeling that Jojo would rapidly unearth Gaddafi, because Jojo wouldn't be deterred by side-effects and noise. Outstanding US media professionals like Jojo tend to talk well in front of a microphone, but we may not necessarily learn much from what they're saying.

Back to the studio for further last-minute news…