Our aging president

We've all known for several years that our former president Jacques Chirac is presenting inevitable signs of growing old... like all of us, for that matter.

Few French people would have imagined that this rather ordinary individual would in fact turn out to be the most popular former French president by far, probably for the simple reason that he is truly an ordinary human being.

I remember an amusing event in the Rue Rambuteau, long ago, when the candidate Chirac was moving around in our neighborhood and shaking hands with local people. Our young daughter Emmanuelle, like countless kids, was wandering around on the footpath, waiting to join in the fun of shaking hands with a politician. For some strange reason, she decided that shaking hands once was not good enough. So, she stepped back into the line of people waiting for Chirac. Surprisingly, in spite of the hordes of people standing there, Chirac realized instantly that he had already shaken hands with my daughter, and he made some kind of a trivial remark to that effect, which surprised my daughter.

In that tiny incident, I have the impression that Jacques Chirac had demonstrated to Emmanuelle (and me) that he was indeed a rather personal and attentive kind of political friend.

Back in contact with Queen Victoria

This morning I received an email from an Australian lady named Henty (descendant of the famous family of Australian explorers) who now lives in Paris. Years ago, when she happened to be living in Pont-en-Royans for a while, she asked me to examine an interesting little portrait of the young queen Victoria. My friend had always imagined that this painting was valuable, but it took me little effort to discover that this shoddy unsigned portrait of Victoria, created on a ceramic background, was somewhat pretty, but surely worth nothing at all.

Here's my presentation of four of the lady's ancestors, all artists:

I'm convinced that it was the fourth fellow, Ernest Heath [1867-1945], more an imaginative craftsman than a talented portraitist, who produced the ceramic plaque belonging to my friend. To do so, he simply "borrowed" an existing portrait of the young queen, painted by a portraitist who was probably a friend of one of Ernest Heath's famous ancestors. What interested Ernest was the possibility of creating a copied version of the original portrait on a ceramic plaque. Clearly this was some kind of graphic arts experiment that he carried out in his London school.

A website explains my conclusions: http://nutopia.free.fr/victoria/

Lion beyond trainer's control

Normally, we don't imagine that lions in a circus act might get beyond the control of their trainer. It's rare, but that's what happened a few days ago in the north of France.

"I thought they were going to eat me," explained the shocked trainer, who stated that he no longer intends to work with the white male lion, who had stirred up a fight between the animals that soon got out of control, forcing the trainer to escape from the cage. Onlookers felt certain that they were about to witness a bloody battle between the animals, but the trainer succeeded in coaxing the animals back to their individual cages.

Although I know next to nothing about this field of entertainment (?), I would imagine that the trainer might look into the idea of another professional activity... in the sale of pups and kittens, say.

Just over two days to go

The COP21 president Laurent Fabius is making an all-out attempt to get people to agree.

It's a difficult task. Some people would say it's impossible. I hope he succeeds.

Russian dog ready to discover France

The delightful little dog Dobrynya (German Shepherd race), given by Russia to France, to replace the Raid star Diesel killed at Saint-Denis, has recently been delivered to the French embassy in Moscow.

Click to enlarge

I'm convinced that Dobrynya will be happy to settle down in France, where she'll be loved by everybody.

My grandfather's London

Over the last few years, several members of my Australian family have taken advantage of the addresses of places indicated in my family-history research to visit the area of northern London where our grandfather Ernest Skyvington [1891-1985] lived, before his arrival in Australia on Christmas day 1908. Pop, as we called him, was born and grew up in a comfortable London district that is known today as Stroud Green, located just to the west of lovely Finsbury Park.

My family-history book entitled They Sought the Last of Lands contains lots of references to this pleasant corner of London, which still contains (in spite of World War II, followed by urban development) the totality of places associated with Pop's childhood: the house at 65 Evershot Road where Ernest was born, the house at 16 Marriott Road where his mother died when her son was nine years old, the house at 72 Mount Pleasant Crescent (today's address) where the young boy was brought up by his mother's family, and Ernest's Stroud Green school.

At the web link http://issuu.com/gamone/docs/last, readers can browse through an on-line version of my book, which includes various photos of my grandfather's childhood district of Stroud Green.

Late in life, my grandfather (accompanied by his daughter Yvonne) went on a trip to London, but I don't believe they actually identified and located many (if any at all) of his childhood places. (That trip to London took place before the start of my personal research into my grandfather's personal history.)

An English writer exactly ten years younger than my grandfather lived in that same Stroud Green district. I'm talking of the police officer Cecil Rolph Hewitt [1901-1994], who published books under the name of C. H. Rolph.

As a young boy, at the time that Pop was at school in Stroud Green, "Bill" Hewitt (as he was called) lived in a narrow terrace house at 101 Woodstock Road, just across the road from Pop's school.

So, if any of my readers are interested in obtaining sound facts about Pop's childhood places in Stroud Green, I advise them to purchase (through the Internet) this well-written book: London Particulars - Memories of an Edwardian Boyhood, C. H. Rolph, Oxford Paperbacks, 1980.

Fork in the road

Nations of the planet Earth are moving towards a fork in the road.

Let's take the right direction. The outcome of COP21 will define future life for our descendants.

Brazil mudflow

When I was a boy of 15, in my final year at Grafton High School, somebody encouraged me (?) to enter a competition for the award of a bursary from Australia’s celebrated BHP company. I knew that this gigantic company had obtained its name from a mining town, Broken Hill, in western New South Wales, and that it had a steelworks in Newcastle, to the north of Sydney. But nobody bothered to provide me with information about this potential employer, or to take me on a visit to its sites.

I was awarded the bursary, but I didn’t stay with BHP for more than a year. That was more than enough time for me to learn (often from hands-on experience at their Newcastle site) that I had no desire whatsoever to spend my earthly existence in such an environment. Normally, if my parents and school-teachers had been a little more alert, they would have reached such a conclusion a year or so earlier.

Today, the Australian-registered mining, metals and petroleum company is called BHP Billiton, and their latest revenues class it as the planet’s largest mining company. Can you imagine me still working for such an employer?

A month ago, there was a mudflow in one of their mines, in Brazil. Here’s a photo of the site (which appeared in the context of COP21):

I look upon this photo as a watery and muddy image of Hell on Earth, and I'm relieved to know that I was in no way associated with the folk who create such a hellish environment.

Climate negotiators seem to be making progress

The latest news from COP21 appears to be encouraging. People are apparently engaged in discussions and debates, searching for possible agreement. Nobody seems to be yelling or throwing punches...

The planned timing schedule has been respected. That's both amazing and most reassuring. Ladies and gentlemen, we respect your efforts. Please carry on your good work! Today, Saturday 5 December, after a week of discussions, negotiators have drawn up a rough copy of the text to be proposed next week as the basis of a future agreement.

Tensions existed between negotiators for a while, but they appear to be easing down.

In the context of COP21, today was labeled Action Day. Why not? Hearing that label, negotiators are less likely to stand still. A French lady, Laurence Tubiana, produced a nice conclusion: "We could have done better; we could have done worse. What's important is that we have a text."

As for the conference president, Laurent Fabius, he gave the impression that he was pleased with events.

And a final happy Action Day speech was delivered by the French president François Hollande.

If only Sarko hit the nail on the head

This message from Nicolas Sarkozy fills me with hope: "Voting for the right-wing Front National is a way of making sure that the Left wins the second round."

That would be a great way of making sure that our Socialists remain in power. But we can no longer trust in Sarkozy's beliefs.

In any case, I don't think I'll go out to vote this weekend.

Presidential visit to our aircraft-carrier

Apparently the French president François Hollande is currently visiting the aircraft carrier Charles-de-Gaulle, in service against our Daech enemy at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. I'm pleased to know that the president is visiting our 2000 armed fighters, and that he'll be watching the catapult takeoff of Rafale and Super Etendard aircraft. I'm pleased too that this information is being presented by the media in a low-key fashion, and that we're light years away from the stupid era of the US idiot Bush. Jeez, I'm relieved that we no longer have to deal with idiotic heads of state (and heads of forces) such as George Bush and his UK-Australian cronies. Sure, the survival of our Abbott fellow was a momentary mistake, but I consider that this idiot is henceforth totally out of action.

Everything's right in America

Last Wednesday, in San Bernardino (California), six females and eight males were killed in a typical if not rather ordinary shootout in God's Own Country. Do the people of that nation really wish to put an end to sad events of that kind, or is that their accepted way of life?

At the same moment, a US firm has just announced its launch in January 2016 of a TV-shopping channel called Gun TV, dedicated to the sale of weapons throughout the land.

Violence due to gun conflicts apparently costs the USA some 229 billion dollars a year. That's a lot of money just to stand up for your rights and to protect (?) yourself.

My most successful Australian blog post

This was certainly the most successful (popular) blog post I ever made on the subject of Australia:

http://skyvington.blogspot.fr/2011/01/free-settlers-in-antipodes.html

And so it should be, because this blog post combined several different but related themes, including the amazing idea that the first free settlers in Australia included relatives named Rose from Dorset. This is more than likely, but I never got around to searching for some definite proof... and so I let this interesting question drop.

Young cousins in Australia could look into this subject, if they were motivated. As for me, I promptly inserted a fictitious version of the Rose family into my future Israeli novel All the Earth is Mine... where there were already so many themes of all kinds that this new one didn't bother anybody!

A snake at Gamone

I have some Australian readers, so here's a rare kind of Gamone news item that should interest them.

Yes, we have snakes here! In the case of this fellow, I was so busy taking out my Nikon to get a photo of him, and making sure that my dog didn't try to attack the serpent, that I hardly noticed when the snake turned back towards the reddish door (of a shed attached to my house, which was once upon a time a pig sty) and disappeared under the foundations.

Now what kind of a reptile could it be ? I can hear my Australian friends debating about whether it's some kind of deadly snake. Do these Aussies see me as silly because I didn't dash in with a spade to kill the creature ?

Now, I'm sorry to disappoint my Australian friends. I think that snake specialists would discover rapidly, if they magnified my photo, that the dangerous reptile is no more than a nice old greenish-colored carpet snake (check with Google) of the kind that eats toads and lizards... and wouldn't possibly do me any harm whatsoever.

I must point out to readers that this friendly old snake appeared on the Gamone scene several months ago, just before my accident. I hope he's still around... and ready to return next spring.

A silly thing I did as a genealogy writer

When you're working seriously on family-history research, and attempting to blend all the data together in the form of a pleasant book, it's fair enough that the writer should have a little bit of fun.

That typescript sort of exploded little by little in my face. First, I discovered that a young brother of one of my great-grandfathers said his family name was Latton, and pretended to descend from an ancient nobleman. Then I discovered that another great-grandfather said his family name was Courtenay, and also pretended to descend from an ancient nobleman. In both cases, this crazy make-believe gave rise to genuine offspring bearing the fake family names. Talk about my mad ancestors...

The only bit of innocent fun I had as a researcher/writer consisted of looking for proofs that one of my first-known X-great grandfathers (where the X can be replaced by a few dozen "great" terms) was in fact the Norman fellow known as William the Conqueror. At the time, I truly imagined this as a playful item that wouldn't bother anybody. But readers are inevitably impressed by such trivial facts.

Today, after ages of separation, I've just been brought in contact with a much-appreciated Australian cousin. And the first thing he did was to tell me that he was proud to be related to William the Conqueror. Maybe I should have never even mentioned this Norman war-lord in my otherwise serious family-history study.

Icebergs in Paris

Icebergs in Paris, in front of the elegant church of the Madeleine. Why not ?

That was the corner of Paris where I started work with IBM (in the nearby Cité du Retiro) in February 1962. All that's missing today is a polar bear or even an Eskimo...

Worse than that: I've confused the Panthéon for the Madeleine !

Britain will be helping us

A lot of UK politicians have decided to help France in the combat against Daesh (the most acceptable title of the terrorist organization that carried out terrible attacks in Paris).

We are obliged to realize that a considerable body of politicians did not vote to support the decision. However David Cameron is reassured.

I believe the House has taken the right decision to keep the UK safe - military action in Syria as one part of a broader strategy.

Great Britain has 8 Tornados GR4 stationed in Cyprus, and others will be mobilized shortly.

Blue trams are good for you

It takes a lot of smart thinking to transform our ordinary vision of a tramway into something excessively attractive. In Sydney, when I was a university student, the depot where trams were housed would become the site of the famous opera house, but that didn't make these noisy vehicles any more pleasant and comfortable.

I'm convinced though that everybody will fall in love with this sexy French vehicle called a Bluetram, which is essentially an elegant electric-powered bus.

These superb vehicles are being tested experimentally in Paris on the Champs-Elysées from now until the end of January 2016, along a nine-stop "tram line" between Concorde and Etoile. The only aspect of the Bluetram that makes it differ from an ordinary electric vehicle is the obligation to charge its battery automatically, for 20 seconds, at every "tram stop".

Hydrangea-covered slopes above the sea in Brittany

When my son François first drove me onto these slopes (which can be found in several different places along the coast), and told me the story of this spectacular horticultural entreprise, I was amazed.

It's a relatively recent affair, imagined by a single fellow. He decided that Hydrangea would grow well in such places, and that the flowers could then be picked, packaged and transported economically to various major flower markets. And the rest is a splendid success story. It's the sort of lovely story that makes me wonder: Gee, it's so simple; why didn't I think of that?

Back to good health with my Macintosh

There's no better way of making sure you're in good mental and physical health (of a psychological kind) than to decide to carry out an update to the latest version of the Macintosh operating system. So, as of the end of the afternoon, I've acquired (for free) the latest El Capitan system.

Did I really need this latest version of the Macintosh operating system ? Of course yes, it proves that I've still got basically the same cerebral system (mine, not that of my computer) as before I had my accident.