On the net

In everyday conversations, the term "Internet" is likely to be replaced by the expression "on the net". Instead of saying "I saw it on TV", people will have more and more opportunities of saying "I saw it on the net" or "I saw you on the net" or even "Did you hear the latest news? William is back on the net!"

Yesterday afternoon I dropped in for my regular three-monthly visit to the local GP. Since I have no apparent health problems, the strictly medical part of our encounter took no more than five minutes, and then we got around to talking about the doctor's latest discovery on the net: a luxury men's shoe shop named Bexley at http://www.bexley.fr. It certainly looks good. Personally, though, I would not be keen about buying shoes on the net. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the net. On the contrary, the problem is my big feet...

Somebody emailed me a remark about the procedure for sending a comment to this blog. At the bottom of each of my articles, there's a button with the word "comments":


If you click this, Google (my blog provider) asks the visitor to identify him/herself, and this means that you must have a so-called Google account. If you don't already have such a free and simple thing, there's a button that enables you to create one:


Why does Google ask visitors to identify themselves before making comments? If they didn't, hordes of vandals would spend their time infecting the blog with four-letter words and other nonsense. The general idea of correct behavior on the net is that you're perfectly free to use nasty words such as "fuck" and "Bush" as long as you first state your identity... which is fair enough.

Besides vandals, there's another category of net visitors that need to be controlled. I'm talking of robots: that's to say, software gadgets that wander around non-stop on the net looking for opportunities of spreading havoc. To prevent robots from opening Google accounts and then sending in blog comments, the sign-up procedure incorporates a robot trap... in the same spirit as those ingenious metal bars set in the road to prevent animals straying through gates on Australian farms. You're asked to look at a graphic thing of the following kind:


You're expected to recognize the term that's displayed, and type in the same series of letters: here, stonimp. The general idea is that it would be highly difficult (but not impossible) for a robot to perform this simple act as successfully as a human being. So, if you get the letters right, Google assumes that it's dealing with a genuine human being who wants to establish an account so that he/she can send in blog comments. And that's about all you have to do. [Well, there's another tiny but essential thing that you should do, whenever you create an Internet account of any kind. Write down your Google sign-in details in a personal logbook that you keep alongside of your computer.]

In later articles, I'll get back to the question of why, in spite of the barrage of negative feedback I received a few days ago from several female friends (within a span of 24 hours), I believe that I must carry on with this blog... maybe with fewer direct references to real-world human beings. For example, you might have noticed that, although I'm fully aware of the stuff my GP purchased on the net in the way of shoes, I'm not going to tell you anything whatsoever: neither the number of shoes he bought (I'll give you a hint though: it was an even number greater than zero), nor their color. All of this vital information will be kept strictly private, as an affair between the doctor and me. So, there's no sense in flooding my blog with tons of comments pleading with me to release this private stuff. I ain't gonna tell yuh nothin... not even the size of my GP's feet.

New York Times blog comment

See my blog comment (number 4) at the New York Times website.

Halt

I've been happy to carry on with this blog over the last few weeks, and I've even had the pleasant feeling that something that might be termed a "style" was emerging and evolving. But I've been disappointed by certain negative reactions expressed by individuals (in France) who are relatively close to me and who should normally know me well enough to respect the integrity of my motivations. One person started the ball rolling by saying that she was shocked by my shamelessness (lack of pudeur) in displaying a medical image of my head and describing a minor health problem that occurred over a year ago. Another person suggested that it's not correct for me to talk about neighbors, and show images of them. That person even went on to state that I didn't have the right to display an image of my daughter in bed. A little later, another person hinted politely at the same kind of criticism, suggesting that my blog style might be acceptable in America or Australia, but not in France. It was suggested that I might use initials to refer to real individuals, and refrain from showing photos of them... unless, of course, they had formally authorized me to do so. The person who made this suggestion added that, as far as she herself was concerned, it was entirely out of the question that I should ever refer to her in my blog by her real name.

Meanwhile, as far as Australian readers are concerned (for whom I first imagined this blog), there hasn't been much feedback, neither as incorporated comments, nor as e-mail. So, it's a little like speaking in an empty room. Incidentally, somebody suggested that the only reason why I have often criticized Bush and his catastrophe in Iraq (based upon lies and stupidity) was merely... to irritate my Australian aunt and uncle! Needless to say, this totally absurd interpretation of my motivations, disregarding my moral convictions on themes such as warfare and torture, sickened me.

For these reasons, I've decided to halt my blog for the time being. Later on, I'll decide whether this halt should be transformed into a definitive termination of the blog and the deletion of existing messages.

Clouds in the wrong place

Often, if I'm quick enough, I can grab my camera and obtain interesting images from my bathroom window or the front yard of my house, as the attached shots show.

This morning, as soon as I noticed spectacular ground-level cloud formations nestled against the cliffs at the end of the valley, I dashed out with my camera and headed up the slopes on foot, with Sophia jogging along beside me. On the way, we ran into the small white Choranche van driven by Pierrot, the municipal employee who looks after all the practical aspects of the commune. Pierrot knows almost everything about almost everybody in Choranche, so I never fail to ask questions whenever I meet up with him. I'm a curious citizen, in all the senses of that adjective.

Me: "Sold your house yet?" After his wife moved on to greener pastures, Pierrot decided to change residences.

Pierrot: "No." I've often told Pierrot that I might be able to help him sell his ideally-located village house through the Internet, but I have the impression that he's in no hurry to find a buyer.

Me: "Has the hotel been sold?"

Pierrot (grinning): "No, we would have heard of any such deal. Whenever they sell their place, they throw a party." That's Pierrot's wry sense of humor. Apparently, when I was out in Australia, the owners of the local hotel-restaurant thought they'd found a buyer. Rashly, they immediately sold a lot of their equipment and invited the village folk along for a farewell drink. Then they learnt that the would-be buyer couldn't get a bank loan. So, the deal fell through.

Me: "I'm on my way up to the top of the ridge to take photos of those fabulous low-lying clouds at the end of the valley. Before I moved here to the mountains, I always imagined that clouds float high in the sky. But here the clouds are often in the wrong place. You can even find them, like today, at ground level. Tell me, Pierrot: Is there a special expression in French for those low-lying clouds?"

Pierrot: "Yes. They're called low clouds." There's no doubt about it: You learn new stuff when you're least expecting it.

Meanwhile, I had lost time through this lofty discussion with Pierrot, and the low clouds had dissolved into the atmosphere, like steam escaping from an oven when you take out a pizza or a cake. So, not wishing to return home empty-handed, I turned my gaze towards my isolated house, which I love so dearly, and took yet another photo of it.

Years ago, when my son and I first discovered the magnificent cloud phenomena at Choranche, we developed a trivial comic routine, inventing remarks as if we were seasoned travelers who had appreciated every square kilometer of China.

Me: "I remember seeing fabulous clouds like that back in the province of Kuang-tung."

François: "No, I would have said that the clouds of Choranche look more like those around Fu-kien."

These days, of course, China has become such an ordinary place for visitors that our cloud jokes would fall flat. François himself went there a month or so ago, merely to take photos for his next book. At present, there's another French visitor in China: presidential candidate Ségolène Royal. Seeing all the media accounts of her trip and encounters with Chinese politicians, one of Ségolène's French opponents made a sour-grapes comment yesterday: "I've never seen so many media people trailing after a tourist."

On Xmas Day, friends in the village of Pont-en-Royans invited me down for a family dinner, followed by the presentation of a video made by two of their children who had recently visited China. Today, faced with images of Ségolène in the context of the Great Wall and the imperial compounds, it's true that I feel I'm watching the same touristic shots I saw at my friends' place the other day. But I'm convinced that this vision of the charming Socialist candidate provides a powerful media message, which will be received perfectly by many French voters. Ségolène is indeed—as her sour-grapes opponent suggested—an ordinary tourist, a normal woman, rather than a baby-kissing vote-collecting political monster. And that image combines with her alacrity, intelligence and political intuition to make her exceptionally attractive... to her Chinese hosts as well as French voters.

In any case, I'm convinced that, for Ségolène Royal, the clouds are floating in exactly the right place. And she too is floating up on them.

Dangers and my dog

On cold damp mornings like today, I'm always amused by Sophia's behavior. She has to make a choice between staying outside in front of the house, where her paws are likely to get wet by raindrops, or remaining on the warm kitchen floor. We humans see this choice solely as a matter of bodily comfort, and so does Sophia to a certain extent. But the huge advantage of staying out in the cold is that Sophia is in direct contact with the universe. From her vantage point in front of the stone wall of the house, Sophia can look out over the valley, towards the slopes and cliffs. In this position, she can instantly detect events such as the return of Hannibal's troops and their elephants from the Italian Alps, or the landing of Martians on the Vercors plateau. Sophia realizes that, inside the kitchen, these happenings could occur and she might not notice them fast enough to take action. Outside, her smell and vision are unimpaired, and Sophia can start barking and spring into action as soon as she detects a danger. So, the cold raindrops really don't matter all that much.

Sophia has never forgotten a terrible wintry evening, a year or so ago, when the Master (that's me) happened to be sitting in front of a log fire and watching a TV show about dinosaurs. As soon as Sophia started to become alarmed by the weird beastly noises filling the living room, I tried to calm her down by explaining that everything was purely virtual, but my dog appeared to disagree with me. She was convinced that there were herds of terrible creatures storming through the valley in the direction of our house, and she barked madly until I opened the door and let her race out into the cold dark night. But a rapid circumnavigation of the house confirmed Sophia's worst fears. The beasts were surely already inside our dwelling, because she could still clearly hear their howls. So, she carried on barking, and I had to take control of the situation by turning off the TV.

Now, did Sophia realize that I had succeeded in eliminating a herd of dinosaurs at the flick of a switch, merely by using my zapper? Of course not. On the contrary, she was convinced that her barking tour of the house had been sufficiently threatening to frighten away the awesome invaders. Basically, as Sophia later explained to me, dinosaurs are cowards. But one must remain constantly vigilant, even on cold damp mornings like today.

Farmers and bandits

As I've pointed out in an earlier blog, I'm a particularly small-time (and unofficial) sheep farmer, even by French standards. If my animals were to wander back to Gamone from my neighbor's slopes (where nobody has sighted them for a fortnight), I believe that my current flock would normally be five head. So Aussie and Kiwi lamb exporters shouldn't see me as a threat to their commerce.

I like sheep, both in the fields and on my dinner table, and I've always been amused by the simple explanation about why the meat of a sheep is called mutton. After the Normans invaded England in 1066, they established a new social order that was reflected in the language of the land. Out in the fields, animals were still looked after by the defeated Saxon shepherds, whose word sceap gave rise to the term sheep. But, at the dinner tables of the Norman landlords, the French word mouton ended up being pronounced as mutton.

I mentioned the confusion that can arise in the minds of Australians when they hear the word farm. From an etymological viewpoint, farm looks like a simple Saxon-based word of the same kind as sheep, ox or pig, but this is an illusion. The sense of our English verb to farm, meaning to grow crops or raise animals, hardly even existed yet in the English language, for example, when my ancestor Charles Walker [1807-1860] arrived in Australia as a steward aboard the vessel Caroline, in 1833, with vague hopes of becoming a sheep farmer. He might have said that he wanted to graze sheep (an old English verb derived from grass), but he probably wouldn't have spoken of farming his land.

The origins of this far-from-simple word farm are in fact French, and they're linked to our English adjective firm, meaning fixed. As early as the Middle Ages, there was a system in France that enabled rural folk to rent land from the local lord at a fixed annual rent, and this came to be known as the ferme (firm) system. Later, in the decades preceding the French Revolution, the men whose job consisted of collecting such annual rents were known as fermiers (farmers). In other words, the original farmers were not at all the men and women who toiled on the land, but a body of immensely wealthy rent collectors.

It was in this context that a flamboyant bandit named Louis Mandrin, of the Robin Hood kind, became a hero in the Dauphiné region of France where I now live. He was born in 1725 in the village of Saint-Étienne de Geoirs, which is now the site of Grenoble's airport. As a young man, he signed a lucrative contract with the tax collectors of the so-called General Farm, which consisted of crossing the Alps with a convoy of about a hundred mules carrying supplies for French troops fighting in Italy. On the return journey, most of Mandrin's mules died, and then the General Farm refused to pay him. To add insult to injury, the General Farmers had Mandrin's brother arrested for a minor matter of counterfeit coins. He himself got mixed up in a bloody brawl and had to go into hiding to avoid being executed. And that was how Louis Mandrin came to declare war upon the General Farmers and became France's most illustrious outlaw.

He recruited hundreds of brigands, forming a band of mounted soldiers, and he organized military campaigns throughout the region in order to acquire tobacco and other merchandise which he then sold to the rural folk in what might be termed "duty free" conditions, thereby making a lot of money, which he then distributed generously.

Alas, in 1755, thirty-year-old Mandrin was cornered by the authorities, and rapidly executed in public in nearby Valence. The bones of his body and members were broken by an executioner with a steel crowbar, and then Mandrin was tied to a coach wheel and hoisted up into the warm May air, so that the crowds of onlookers could witness his agony.

Overnight, Louis Mandrin became a posthumous hero for all the French people who suffered at the hands of the ruthless tax collectors of the General Farm, and this dashing outlaw is considered as a forerunner of the French revolutionaries of 1789.

Today, two and a half centuries after his execution, Louis Mandrin remains an immensely popular figure, and there are touristic references to his tale from one end of the vast Dauphiné region to the other. There's a restaurant up the road from my place called Mandrin's Tavern, and even my neighbor's donkey is named Mandrin. (Mine is Moses.) To compare Mandrin's case with that of Australian bushrangers (such as my ancestor William Hickey), the French bandit is generally considered as an intelligent fighter for a noble political cause rather than as an egoistic and brutal delinquent.

Back in Paris in the '70s and '80s, when I used to play guitar and sing in bars in the Marais, the traditional highlight of a rowdy beer evening was the moment at which we would all break into the celebrated dirge known as Mandrin's Lament (often led by the raucous voice of the poet André Laude), whose nostalgic words—addressed to his companions—are supposed to flow from the scaffold as he is about to be executed.

It sounds silly to say so (and maybe it is), but I get a thrill out of thinking that I live here in the land of Louis Mandrin. When I was out in Australia a few months ago, I would have liked to compare this sentiment with the possible excitement of visiting the ancestral bushranger territory of Braidwood, but I didn't manage to get that far, since the train doesn't stop there yet.

Good winds in Washington

It’s reassuring to see a female Democrat of Italian origins in charge of the US Congress. As soon as she took her stand on Capitol Hill, Nancy Pelosi reminded George W Bush that "it is the responsibility of the president to articulate a new plan for Iraq that makes it clear to the Iraqis that they must defend their own streets and their own security". It was nice too, from a folkloric viewpoint, to see a converted Muslim congressman taking the oath on a copy of the Koran that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson... although I feel that this swearing-in rite, performed using an allegedly sacred document, is a ridiculous concept in the context of US politicians, many of whom have proved themselves to be outright liars.

Yesterday in Paris, speaking to foreign diplomats, Jacques Chirac used exceptionally strong language in his criticism of US policy in Iraq. He referred to the war as "an adventure started in March 2003 by the USA", and he affirmed: "As France foresaw and feared, the war in Iraq has sparked major changes that have not yet unfolded all their effects." In particular, according to Chirac, that war has "offered terrorism a new field for expansion". In simple words that echoed those of Nancy Pelosi, the French president concluded that "the priority, more than ever, is to give back to Iraqis their total responsibility".

In the light of the current situation in Iraq, I look back with interest upon a small satirical website that I started to build in May 2003, at the beginning of the conflict in Iraq. Back in those days, Bush and his friends were talking nonstop about mythical things referred to as WMD (weapons of mass destruction), and this empty talk reminded me of medieval Christian knights in their perpetual search for the Holy Grail. So, I tried to create a modern version of this quest. The website is still sitting there where I started to build it, at http://st.antoine.free.fr/grail, but it wasn't particularly funny (and not even very meaningful unless you happened to be familiar with the legends of the Holy Grail). So, I never publicized it. And today, it probably belongs to the category referred to by a nice-sounding Internet expression: legacy sites.

In the near future, it will be interesting to see how the term "legacy" is applied to events of the Bush era. While awaiting the main dishes, which countless journalists and intellectuals are no doubt starting to cook up, I love the following cocktail item (complete with pretzels): http://st.antoine.free.fr/bush.swf.

Best wishes for eternal health

While I was in Australia a few months ago, my aunt Nancy happened to tell some lady friends that she had a visitor, her nephew (me), who lived on an old farm in south-eastern France. Immediately, the friends asked: “What’s he farming?” Nancy replied naively: “William has four or five sheep.” And everybody burst out laughing. In everyday Down Under thinking, people who live on farms are necessarily serious farmers, and they have huge herds. Consequently, Nancy's nice suburban friends could not possibly imagine spontaneously the case of somebody like me, who has never been a professional farmer, living in an exotic antipodean mountainous setting on an Old-World farm with a few beasts to keep him company and, above all, to eat the weeds.
















At Gamone, my sheep-farming activities came to a symbolic end over a year ago when my herd of a dozen animals happened to be terrified by a glorious dog named Gamone [whose name derives from the fact that this splendid animal was born here: Sophia's daughter, seen in my arms in this photo], who then chased the sheep along the road to my neighbor’s place at Sirouza. Since then, the sheep situation at Gamone has never been quite the same. I exerted a lot of energy in attempting to dislodge my superb Merino ram named Oz from the precarious position into which he had fallen, under a bridge over the Bourne. To do this, I had to place a rope around the animal's neck and topple him down into the swiftly-running river, then paddle/swim alongside him over a distance of twenty or so meters, and finally drag him up onto dry land. A few days later, back at Gamone, the ram died from festering wounds received when he fell. Meanwhile, I tried to coax the remaining members of the flock down from my neighbor’s mountain, which meant my groping around dangerously on a sloping surface of moving pebbles where the sheep had decided to settle.

A day or so after all this excitement, I suffered a mild cerebral attack, for reasons that are fairly easy to imagine. Mechanics would say that I had blown a valve. Now, this is a pretext for publishing an image to which I’m very attached: my skull. I would have liked to show this photo a few days ago, when I was evoking Hamlet and company, but that would have been a bit pretentious. Today, I’m hoping that I can show you my brain in total modesty.

You might be wondering why I’m bringing up all this trivial old stuff...

Well, after being examined by all kinds of brilliant French medical specialists, and sitting (well, lying) for that delightful portrait of my skull [all of which was carried out more-or-less free of charge, because the French Republic has a great public health system], I was invited to take part in a big medical experiment conducted by a government body called Inserm: Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale [National Institute for Health and Medical Research]. My job as a guinea pig consists essentially of consuming, every morning, a first capsule that might be composed of folate vitamins and a second capsule that might be composed of omega-3 stuff. The word “might” indicates, as all guinea pigs know, that we can’t be sure of what our medical masters are feeding us. For all I know, I might have drawn a placebo card, which would mean that I’m consuming every morning, not vitamins and fish, but inert flour. And this daily diet will go on theoretically for the next five years, unless I happen to die before then of a cerebral accident or some such thing. So, it's like a kind of carefree lottery in which the tickets are free, and there are no obvious prizes. Maybe, one day, an Inserm scientist will say to me: "William, you're a nice cooperative guy, and you seem to be in great health, but I'm obliged to reveal that we've been feeding you flour for the last five years." Or maybe, rather: "William, your case disturbs us, because you should normally be dead." Conclusion: We guinea pigs don't really know what's in store for us, but we can't complain, because there's nothing to complain about.

Voilà the circumstances [those who don’t know what the word voilà means might consult a French doctor, or maybe use Google] in which I've just received a friendly New Year’s message from Inserm, which I can’t refrain from publishing here in my blog, because it’s simply so nice and medically charming. It's in French, of course (since it emanates from an official government department), and you might not therefore understand its subtleties. But I can assure you that these best New Year wishes to guinea pigs are nice and colorful and surely sincere, but really nice and colorful above all:


Conclusion: Either they're behaving deceitfully, or they're scientifically dim-witted! The Inserm guys and gals know perfectly well that their famous experiment won’t have any sense whatsoever if all of us guinea pigs remain eternally in perfect health, as they wish us falsely from the corner of their mouth [as they say in French]. If these Inserm folk are good scientists [as they surely are], the first thing they hope [if their huge experiment is to achieve anything at all] is that some of us guinea pigs [in particular, those that are eating flour] are going to die miserably in the scientific gutter as soon as possible. So, the public-relations specialists of Inserm should not really be sending us global wishes of eternal health... which would be equivalent to stating that their experiment is doomed to failure.

Naturally, I would like to send my best New Year wishes for longevity to all the wonderful Inserm folk. If any of these researchers happened to be knocked down by a bus or a lightning strike, the whole future of French medical research could be thrown into jeopardy. So, it's me who should be wishing them a long life, not the inverse.

Fault

Don’t count upon me to praise unduly French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, because I’ve already made it clear that I’m a 100% fan of Ségolène Royal. But I admire Sarko (as his friends call him) for designating the ugly execution of Saddam Hussein as a fault. Based upon a Latin verb evoking deception, faute (fault) is is a tiny but powerful word in French. Sarkozy said:

Even though Saddam Hussein was one of history’s greatest criminals, I believe that Iraq would have made herself greater by refraining from executing the man who made her suffer so much.

Those are the sentiments of a wise statesman. Bravo, Sarko!

Echoes of the past

Everybody who knows me should be aware that I’m especially attracted to history. Not only large-scale History with a capital H, such as the true story of the Bible, or the rise and fall of the Roman empire, but small-time stuff such as legends and anecdotes (along with a few rare facts) about my ancestors. Often, I’m so attracted by the past that I end up tackling history that doesn’t really concern me, such as Christine’s genealogy or olden times in the Royans (my adopted homeplace).

Yesterday morning, I phoned up Madeleine because I’m still obsessed (the word is not too strong) by the question of why there seem to be several legendary castles floating around in the air, as it were, above the neighboring medieval village of Pont-en-Royans... in the style of the celebrated celestial city of Jerusalem, which is thought of as hovering above the real-world place. To account for various references to alleged castles in the vicinity of Pont-en-Royans, I’m constructing a theory (to put it pompously) that involves no less than six or seven former local entities that might have been designated, rightly or wrongly, as castles (including those I mentioned in a previous message on this topic).

When I phoned Madeleine, she was preparing a traditional New Year’s Day contact with her neighbors Bernadette and Dédé (same given name as Madeleine’s own husband), who live on the opposite side of the Bourne. As a consequence of my phone call, I was promptly invited. Social events of this kind, among old-timers, are both simple and rapid, but they often provide me with rare opportunities of getting the lowdown on various happenings, past and present, in the commune. And these facts, too, are local history of a special kind...

For example, I didn’t know until yesterday that the father of a dynamic village personality lost his life many years ago in a terrible fashion. As a foreman in the unique local factory, which manufactured electrical devices, he had developed a bad relationship with a hot-tempered worker. One day, after a violent discussion in the factory, the worker picked up his foreman and dumped him into a bath of acid, where he was promptly dissolved into Eternity. How’s that for local history?

Madeleine also told me a gentler but spicy tale concerning a traditional phenomenon: marriages (arranged through agencies, if I understand correctly) between local rural gentlemen and ladies from the French West Indies. Sometimes, such a union can be highly successful, giving rise to a large family whose members behave as if their ancestors had lived here on the edge of the French Alps since the dawn of time. (After all, for their paternal ancestors, this is more or less true.) But there have been a certain number of notorious cases in which arranged marriages of this kind simply did not work out, since it was an impossible leap for the female partner to abandon the balmy atmosphere of the Antilles and merge into her husband’s damp and cold cow-dung environment, which was a little like basic poverty without the sunshine and the sea. If the worst came to the worst, the lady might even decide that it would surely be preferable for her to return to her distant birthplace. In the eyes of her husband, this was not necessarily an acceptable hypothesis, since he had—as it were—gone to the trouble of acquiring his exotic spouse (a money-based process that might be likened vaguely to the purchase of a valuable farm animal for breeding purpose), and he was determined to prevent her from escaping from the farm compound. Consequently, for a woman in this predicament, escaping necessitated imagination and inventiveness...

In the case of fair-haired Gaston and dark-skinned Flora (those names are fictitious, whereas the real people once existed), their union was fortunately a catastrophe... where the unexpected adverb “fortunately” simply indicates that they had not succeeded in producing offspring, whose presence would have surely complicated Flora’s escape. Gaston was not unduly disturbed when Flora announced that she would be receiving the visit of family friends from Guadeloupe, who were keen on viewing the picturesque setting in which she was now living. Indeed, a car drew up at Gaston’s farm, and several compatriots of Flora (in fact, Parisians) got out, hugged her as if they were old friends, and visited the miserable house and muddy yards. Gaston was surprised that they didn’t stay for long, pretexting that they had other friends in the region whom they wished to see. Now, the rest of this trivial tale is a transcription of Gaston’s shocked account of the ensuing events...

Five minutes after the departure of the West Indians, Gaston heard a vehicle drawing up at the farm. Flora told her husband that her friends had surely forgotten something, and she dashed off to see them. Yes, they had indeed forgotten a key element: Flora herself! Gaston never saw his West Indian wife again. And the real Gaston himself is now dead and gone.

Funnily enough, Madeleine sees me as a goldmine of information about the history of her birthplace. One future day, when I evoke the tale of Flora’s escape from Gaston, Madeleine is going to wonder out loud how I could have ever learnt so many precious stories about her region. She forgets that much of my old-time data comes from Madeleine herself, and the written material she gives me. She thinks that I’m the historical voice of the commune. In fact, I’m merely the echo.

Talking animals

Old school friends from Grafton sent me a photo of wallabies on their lawn. And I promptly took the liberty of transforming their photo into an imaginary conversation.

The great French author Victor Hugo wrote a lengthy poem about an encounter between the philosopher Kant and a talking donkey. It's a known fact—n’est-ce pas?—that donkeys are wise. The tale I like best concerns a little country girl named Bernadette who ran into a friendly talking donkey with whom she struck up a lengthy conversation. Back home in the village, Bernadette related joyfully to her parents and neighbors the story of her encounter with the talking donkey, but nobody believed her tale. Offended by their suggestion that she might have invented this story of a talking donkey, Bernadette said that she would lead everybody out into the country to meet up with her donkey friend, so that they should see for themselves that her story was authentic. They soon came upon the animal, and Bernadette begged it to say a few words, to prove to everybody that it could speak. But the donkey remained stubbornly silent, in spite of Bernadette’s continued pleading. Bernadette’s parents and the bystanders then scolded the little girl, saying that she was crazy to imagine that animals could speak. They were irritated that Bernadette had led them all out into the country on such a senseless mission: to meet up with a talking donkey.

Left all alone with the donkey, Bernadette was heartbroken, and she in turn scolded the animal: “You’ve let me down, and made a fool of me in front of everybody in the village. I thought we were friends, but I now see that you’re a nasty donkey, and you must surely hate me.”

“No, not at all,” replied the donkey. “You’re an exceptional little girl, Bernadette, and I love you very much. And we shall carry on talking to each other whenever you wish. But there was no point in my saying anything whatsoever to your parents and the village people. They are stupid folk, who would never be prepared to imagine that a donkey might be capable of talking. So, why should I waste time in trying to communicate with them?”

Rejoicing

There’s a great annual event in which my antipodean motherland has always starred as the all-time world champion. I’m talking, of course, of New Year festivities. One of my sisters recently took offense at my irritating habit—Mea culpa!—of systematically suggesting that France and the French do most things better than anywhere else in the world. Well, Susan will be pleased to learn that, as far as New Year festivities are concerned, I’m prepared to take off my hat [that is, my French beret] to Australia. In fact, I’ll replace it by my recently-purchased Akubra. No matter what we do here in France with a view to making sure that our ushering in the New Year will be performed lavishly in a spectacular French style, with a little help from such famous friends as the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées, we always learn—on the evening TV news, when countless French citizens are taking steaming pavlovas or lamingtons out of their kitchen ovens [ask my daughter about that], and preparing for the imminent celebrations—that we’ve been licked by the folk Down Under, who are already dancing around on the warm sand of balmy beaches and watching the pagan dawn-bringer Lucifer in the sky with diamonds.

Rejoicing? What a weird festive season! Besides the Jewish Hanukkah, the Christian Xmas and the Islamic Eid ul-Adha, the planet was treated to three other morbid more-or-less unplanned happenings: the passing of a dull US president named Ford, the barbaric US-orchestrated hanging of an Iraqi tyrant and—last but not least—the three-thousandth death of an American soldier in the grotesque conflict initiated by a god-fearing Texan moron (also God-hearing and execution-loving), George Walker Bush, assisted by lapdog buddies named Blair and Howard.

In such circumstances, should we rejoice at the start of this New Year? Or should we rather meditate upon the tragedy of the specimen of Darwinian Nature named Homo Sapiens? For me, the pavlova is flat, and the coconut on the chocolate lamingtons reminds me obscurely—in an inverted (antipodean) sense, meaningful here in my wintry Gamone abode—of fiery drops of dark blood upon the snow.

My daughter at Gamone

I picked up Emmanuelle in Valence (exceptionally, the train from Paris stopped at the old station in the middle of the city) on Wednesday at the beginning of the afternoon. Half an hour later, we were at Gamone, where Manya was looking forward to a couple of relaxed days, away from her busy life as a journalist at Télérama in Paris.

Manya knows how to maximize opportunities for relaxing in an intelligent fashion. Most people would imagine that a computer is for working, a bed for sleeping and that, if you’ve just had a shower and washed your hair, then you might walk around in the sun to dry it. For Manya, operations of this kind can be combined efficiently and pleasantly.

She was amused to see me fiddling around with my recently-purchased machines for making coffee, bread and toasted sandwiches. I realize that I’m like a child with new toys. As my friend O said on the phone the other day, after hearing me describe these new kitchen gadgets: “William, you’ve gone all take-away.” And O, hearing me talk about home-made bread (a tradition at Gamone) and toasted chicken sandwiches (a suggestion picked up during my recent trip to Australia), seemed to be a little disturbed at the idea that I might have abandoned good old-fashioned French cooking of the high-cholesterol kind... which is a fact.

Besides talking in front of the fireplace, my daughter and I went out for several walks, including a climb above Pont-en-Royans to visit the medieval ruins I spoke about in an earlier blog. There are no crowds in this corner of the world. The first morning, my neighbor Dédé dropped in to say hello at breakfast time, but he was the only person other than me that Manya saw during her two days here.

The calm is conducive to relaxation and clear thinking. I believe that Gamone has always been reputed as a good place for a mind-cleansing spell. Manya knows that, here at Gamone, she can wash more than her hair.

The meaning of life

My title is misleading. A reader might imagine that I'm using the expression in the same style, say, as a distraught individual who cries out to a friend (or a priest or a psychiatrist): “Life has no meaning for me; I’ve decided to commit suicide.” There, it’s a question of “to be or not to be”: that's to say, meaning (or rather lack of meaning) à la Hamlet, à la Albert Camus:

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”

I first read those opening words of The Myth of Sisyphus when I was eighteen, out in Australia, and I was so impressed by the French Algerian-born author that I purchased several of his translated works, and even carried these books with me in my suitcases when I came to France in 1962... which was truly a case of bringing coals to Newcastle. Since then, I've totally revised my appreciation of the existentialist Nobel laureate. Like the US physicist Brian Greene [see The Fabric of the Cosmos], I’m no longer on the same wavelength—if ever this were the case—as Albert Camus. I don't, for a moment, consider that the pursuits of scientific research are mere "games" that should be put aside while an individual is deciding artistically (or otherwise) whether or not to blow his brains out. That suggestion, to my mind, is stupid, indeed grotesque. Besides, I'm not—and have never been—in the least bit suicidal. Human life on Earth—like all life in the Cosmos—is such a precious and fragile essence that one should not spill a drop of it.

The meaning of life is a clearcut affair for those who believe in Jesus... or any other divine entity, for that matter. Nonetheless, if a skull is ominously present, holding up the open Bible in this splendid depiction of Bruno in prayer (a curious visual reflection of the monk's own bald skull), this suggests that believers are constantly pursued by the gentle all-pervading presence of death, of human mortality. And this is normal. In extreme cases such as that of the Chartreux monks, whose earthly existence is characterized by a good dose of mortification, it might even be said that the global meaning of a monk’s life is to be found in the expected aftermath of his death.

But I said at the beginning that my title is misleading, since I was not referring to meaning of either the Hamlet/Camus or the Bruno kind. So, we might ask: What’s the meaning of “meaning” in my title? It’s a word whose archaic etymology is linked to the notion of mind. To look for the meaning of X is equivalent to asking: What do we have in mind when we refer to X? More precisely: What do we have in mind when we evoke the notion of living creatures such as plants, animals and Homo Sapiens?

That question found answers of a revolutionary kind in 1859, when Charles Darwin brought out a book with a long-winded title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Living creatures of a successful kind share a dominant feature. [That last sentence contains a hint of a pleonasm. If a creature is living vigorously—thriving, one might say—it is necessarily “of a successful kind”. Creatures that are not successful in life simply die out. Somebody once said that commuters only complain about trains that run late, whereas nobody ever talks about all the trains that run normally on time. On the great railway of life, it’s the opposite. We only meet up with creatures that have managed to get aboard the right train. All the rest disappear during the trip, and never reach their destination.]

As I was about to say, before getting led astray into talking about trains, thriving creatures share a dominant feature: that of being highly successful in the art of procreation. Years ago, when I was working in French TV, I found myself visiting the research laboratory of a French specialist in a bizarre discipline, linked to embryology, known as teratology: the study of monsters. He showed me his vast collection of malformed fetuses and babies, displayed in big jars of formaldehyde lined up on shelves along the walls of his laboratory. A teratologist uses a vocabulary of weird terms to designate the various kinds of monsters. If I remember correctly, “acephalous” indicates that the creature has no brain, and “cyclopean” means that there’s a single eye in the center of the forehead. I was impressed by a curious remark made by the teratologist: “Nature generally ensures that the most extreme kinds of malformations give rise to a creature that cannot survive. Consequently, we don’t normally encounter many striking teratological specimens in the everyday world around us.” Hearing these words, my mind flashed back to a lovely old Anglican hymn that we used to sing in the cathedral at Grafton:

All things bright and beautiful,
all creatures great and small,
all things wise and wonderful,
the Lord God made them all.

[See a quaint presentation of the words and music at http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/a/l/allthing.htm]

I wondered whether the hymn would sound so nice if we changed a line:

all things weird and terrible...

Procreation is essentially a matter of copying genes, which is a process that may or may not be carried out in a two-parent sexual situation. The replicator device at the basis of all life—plants, animals and Homo Sapiens—is the DNA molecule, whose structure was explained by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953.

Shortly before then, a mathematician named John von Neumann, working in the USA, produced operational computer-type models of the replication process, summed up in a famous book that was published posthumously: Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. For those of us who were meeting up with the phenomenon of computers at that time [I first came in contact with IBM in 1957: the year of von Neumann’s death], the great Hungarian-born mathematician was something of a hero, because it was he who actually invented the fundamental concept of a stored computer program. And he also played a pioneering role in the theory of games... which may or may not have concerned the activities that Camus was designating in the quotation at the start of this post. We all felt that, in programming electronic machines to perform all kinds of tasks, we were exploiting an extraordinary art devised by von Neumann.

Today, if you were to ask me about the meaning of life, I would not hesitate in replying that one thing I have in mind (more than suicide or God or any other boring stuff), when I reflect upon the magic of all living things bright and beautiful (and otherwise), is John von Neumann’s work on self-reproducing automata.

Earthmoving

All the Earth is Mine is a yet-unpublished technico-political fable about large-scale earthmoving activities, primarily in Israel. I wrote a first version of this novel some fifteen years ago, before leaving Paris, and I completed this new typescript six months ago. Since then, I’ve been trying to contact literary agents in the US and the UK who might be prepared to read it, but I haven’t found anybody yet. So, up until now, I’m the only person on the planet who has read my novel. What a privilege! US publishing houses inform me that the best way of finding a literary agent is to use the hundreds of names, addresses and descriptions in an annual publication known as the Literary Market Place. Unfortunately, the purchase of a paper copy of this document runs into several hundred dollars, but I’ve noticed that I can pay just twenty dollars for a one-week subscription to an Internet version of this information, which would be an ideal solution for me. So, as soon as the holiday season ends, I intend to do this. In the course of a week, I should be able to download all the names and addresses I need. And after that, I’ll start a massive snail-mail operation aimed at finding an agent who’ll accept me.

This afternoon, I finally got around to discussing an infinitely more modest earthmoving operation with a local contractor, René. I would like to remove the present embankments located at both the northern and southern ends of the house. This would provide me with flat space to build a garage, and it would also eliminate the problem of trying vainly to keep down the weeds that grow on these steep embankments, close to the house. At times in the past, I’ve ventured onto these embankments with a hand-held weed cutter, but it’s a risky operation, to be avoided. At one stage, I used a ladder propped up against the embankments to plant all kinds of shrubs, but few of them survived. I have the impression that Mother Nature thinks you're joking when you try to grow plants on a steep slope. She looks down at me with a cynical smile and says: "Ok, my fine fellow. If you show me that you can lie down at such a spot, I'll do my best to make things grow there. But, if you're not able to lie down there, then plants won't be able to grow there either." In other words, you can't fool plants. They know the meaning of top and bottom, up and down. They know just as much about gravity as you and me and Einstein.

It’s all very well to simply let the grass and weeds grow wildly on these embankments, but this can turn into a fire hazard in summer. So, the ideal solution would consist of removing a lot of earth, starting well behind the house, in order to create more gentler slopes.

If I decide to accept René’s offer (which I should receive within the next few days), I’ll then need to demolish two buildings that I put up, several years ago, with my own hands, both of which would be in the way of the planned earthmoving operations: my wood shed and my hen house (see photos). I would rebuild a more sturdy wood shed alongside my future garage.

As for the hen house, I might be able to drag it further away from the house, and set it up once again... in which case I would use it to house creatures such as geese and peacocks. As part of my anti-cholesterol measures, I've given up eating eggs, and there's little sense in raising my own chooks (Aussie word for hens) for meat in a region such as this, where it's so simple to buy top-quality poultry.

René used a wheel device to measure distances enabling us to calculate the approximate volume of earth that needs to be moved. We reached a figure of about 550 cubic meters. Well, when you think about it, that doesn’t sound like a gigantic quantity of earth. It’s merely a square block, ten meters along each side, rising to a height of five and a half meters. Nevertheless, the visual consequences of scraping up that volume of earth on one side of the house, and depositing it on the other, are not likely to go unnoticed.

And what am I going to do with all that earth? People who live on the slopes of a mountain, as I do, have the wonderful possibility of increasing almost magically the area of flat land around their house... which is something unthinkable when you occupy a block of flat land with roads or neighbors on each side. We slope-dwellers simply use a common-sense method that was devised, at the dawn of agriculture, by people who wished to grow crops on hillsides. They would gouge out the earth and rocks so as to create a horizontal ledge spiraling around the slopes. And the gouged-out material would be used to form the outer rim of the newly-created flat area. In the nearby vineyards of Tain-l’Hermitage on the Rhône, there are splendid examples of this method. What this means, for me at Gamone, is that the 550 cubic meters of earth and rocks that René will gouge out of the hill behind the house will be simply dumped a few meters further on, in the direction of Gamone Creek, thereby augmenting, cubic meter by cubic meter, the area of what might be termed my “front yard”.

I get a tremendous thrill out of calling upon a splendid earthmover such as René (who once lived meagerly with his parents and brothers in the original house at Gamone, long before I arrived here) to reshape the surroundings... as he has already done, timidly, on two separate occasions. To my mind, René possesses the same kind of pioneering skills, aided by his heavy equipment, that enabled our predecessors to build (with a little help from a friend named Nature) a magnificent place such as Gamone.

When is a castle not a castle?

One would imagine that medieval history is a sufficiently serious domain of research to exclude the survival of spurious legends, particularly when it’s relatively easy to demonstrate their falsity. In the nearby medieval village of Pont-en-Royans, on the contrary, a legend concerning the existence of one or more local castles still persists, in spite of clear historical evidence (not to mention topographical realities) demonstrating that this legend is false.

I believe that the origin of this legend is the following drawing by Diodore Rouhault [1819-1874]:










This drawing is titled Pont-en-Royans, le château [the castle], and it certainly seems to depict the ruins of a castle on top of a peak, with a second construction on a lower neighboring hilltop. What’s more, the Napoleonic cadastre of Choranche dated 1832 [which can be examined in my French-language website at http://choranche.free.fr] indicates that the nearby mountain on which these ruins are located—a border zone between the communes of Pont-en-Royans and Choranche—was named Les trois châteaux [the three castles].

Today, fragments of ruins can still be found up there, but they are far less conspicuous than when Rouhault did his drawing, in the 19th century. Tourists who wander up there are surprised by the idea that medieval castles might have once existed up on the crags of rock above Pont-en-Royans.

The explanation for this diehard legend about one or more castles at Pont-en-Royans is simple, but few people seem to know it, or even want to hear it (for reasons I can’t understand). At no point in the medieval history of the village was there ever a full-fledged castle up above Pont-en-Royans. The construction whose ruins we see up there was a fortress comprising a watch-tower enabling soldiers to look out over the vast plains beneath Pont-en-Royans. And what did they see from their watch tower? First and foremost, they saw three splendid medieval castles named La Bâtie, Rochechinard and Flandaines (which no longer exist today). In other words, the place where the watch tower existed was known as Three Castles, not because there were three medieval castles up there (a topographical impossibility), but because you could see three castles from that lookout. In fact, the wealthy proprietor of the first of these neighboring castles, the Lord of Sassenage, paid the soldiers up in the watch tower so that they might take action (along with their numerous companions) if ever they caught sight of an approaching enemy.

I find it amusing that a place should be named, not for what actually exists there, but for what you can see from that spot, and that this naming quirk should confuse people for centuries on end.

There’s another more subtle reason behind the legend that a castle once existed at Pont-en-Royans. In French translations of medieval Latin documents, we find that Pont-en-Royans is designated as a château (castle). Consequently, many people have imagined, over the centuries, that this word was surely a reference to the castle(s) on the hill above the village. In fact, the word simply designated a walled village. So, medieval people who wrote about the local “castle” were simply referring to the walled village of Pont-en-Royans.

There are so many problems in the modern world that it’s almost relieving to turn one’s attention to medieval problems of this kind. Some observers would consider, of course, that I am bringing up questions of the same Byzantine kind as the sex of angels, or the number of these winged beasts that can be assembled on the tip of a pin. OK, maybe I’m getting carried away by the past. But what do I reply to summer tourists in the village, with their guide books open, who ask me: “Can you tell us where the medieval castles are located?”

Disturbing news

You can’t believe everything transmitted by the media. We now know retrospectively (a little too late for anybody to do much about it) that the concept of “embedded journalists” was invented by Bush & Co as a means of ensuring that media representatives would finally set aside their professional deontology and relate only the “news” (not necessarily sound) that US military men wished to disseminate. This diabolical concept was a foundation for media lies and disinformation. In persuading journalists to sell their souls in this way, Bush & Co had produced a weapon of mass deception. [This expression was invented by two witty American authors, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, whose books are presented in an excellent website, which incorporates a video: http://www.prwatch.org/tbwe/index.html]

Today, should we believe the disturbing news revealed yesterday in the French press in connection with a documentary film that will soon be aired on French TV ? The film’s title, translated into English, is Bin Laden — Failures of a Hunt. It is signed by two journalists, Eric de Lavarène and Emmanuel Razavi, and produced by Hamsa Press and Ligne de Front. The rare people who have been invited to view private projections of this hot document say that it includes disturbing accounts by four French soldiers, whose identities were not revealed. Apparently, members of the French forces in Afghanistan had Osama Bin Laden in their gunsights on two separate occasions, in 2003 and 2004, but they nevertheless refrained from trying to capture him. Why not? According to the film’s alleged firsthand witnesses of these close-range encounters with the chief of Al-Qaeda, US military commanders gave no explicit green-light orders to the French soldiers to intercept Bin Laden. So, they did nothing. And Osama Bin Laden walked away, unaware of the fact that he could have been gunned down by French soldiers.

Before being tempted to draw any conclusions whatsoever concerning the strange facts related in this documentary, we must await confirmations that they are indeed authentic. For the moment, the French Ministry of Defense has denied vigorously that French soldiers were ever in a position to capture Bin Laden, and the film’s accounts are described as fabulation. So, we should remain skeptical.

Information of a similar kind was provided some time ago by a 43-year-old French specialist on espionage named Eric Denécé, director of the Centre français de recherche sur le renseignement [French Center for Intelligence Studies]. He claimed that French commandos in Afghanistan had spotted Bin Laden through binoculars during the first fortnight of September 2004, and that US military authorities had asked the bewildered French soldiers to refrain from actually intercepting America’s number-one public enemy.

Anecdote: The above-mentioned Frenchman, Professor Eric Denécé, is a member of the ethical committee in charge of a weird project concerning a so-called Spyland theme park, of the Disneyland kind, which is soon to be set up just twenty minutes away from where I live, alongside the highway to Valence. Near the top of the following website, there’s a button that enables you to download an English-language description of this amazing project:
http://www.cf2r.org/fr/spyland/presentation.php

Nowhere else to go

This often happens to me. I want to talk in English about a newfangled thing whose name I know in French, but not in English. In the present case, this problem has arisen with a woodwork power tool I purchased a couple of months ago. You grasp it in both hands, place it on a piece of wood gripped firmly in a workbench vise (British spelling vice), plunge the tool’s revolving bit down into the wood and draw it towards you. In this way, you can create a long narrow centimeter-deep slot in the wood. The tool is exactly what you need to build cupboard doors composed of a solid framework housing a light plywood panel. Well, up until twenty minutes ago, I had no idea whatsoever of the English name of this tool. Thanks to Google, I now know that it’s called a plunge router. Before then, if you had asked me what a plunge router was (we pronounce the word like rooter in Australian), I would have replied that it’s no doubt a guy who dives stealthily into swimming pools and does naughty underwater things to female bathers.

My plunge router was dirt cheap because (like the tea towels I recently bought in Sydney, with bush scenes about The Man from Snowy River) it’s made in China. Well, yesterday, while building a kitchen cabinet (to hold stuff associated with my recently-acquired espresso coffee machine and sandwich toaster), I dragged the plunge router a little too energetically (I tend to get carried away when routing, and I’m capable of underestimating the strength in my forearms) and the Chinese-steel bit snapped in two. If I make a point of indicating that the bit was made in China, it’s because I think we shouldn’t count too much upon the quality of steel products from certain faraway places. The router itself appears to be pretty solid, but the collection of bits supplied with the machine (all housed in an elegant wooden box) could well be less than perfect. So, I had to set off to a local hardware store that sells high-quality Bosch bits. Sure, the single German bit cost me almost half what I had paid for the entire plunge router, but it probably won’t break so easily.

A happy atmosphere prevailed at the hardware store, where they seemed to be having a Xmas party in the back offices. The charming young woman at the pay desk was all smiles and particularly friendly. The moment I opened my mouth, she questioned me (as often happens in France) on the origins of my spoken accent. As usual, I suggested that she might be able to guess where I came from. By that time, a male employee had joined up with the cashier, and they ran through the list of all the likely countries from which I might have come: UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, etc. Finally, when they turned to Scandinavian and Eastern European lands, I decided that it was time for me to give them the answer. When I said Australia, they seemed to be amazed, as if it were unthinkable that anybody purchasing a plunge router bit in Saint-Marcellin (home of one of the world’s finest cheese) could have possibly found his way there from the Antipodes. Then their amazement was transformed rapidly into typical reactions that I hear inevitably, whenever Australia is mentioned in France. Every French person would appear to have a cousin, an uncle, a brother-in-law or a close friend who now resides in either Sydney or Melbourne (rarely anywhere else in Australia). And details about this emigrant are inevitably followed by a profound personal declaration along the following lines: “My X and I [substitute husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, etc for X] have always dreamed about going out to settle in Australia.” I always feel like asking: “Well, what the hell stopped you? Lack of courage? Fear that you might fall over the edge of the Earth?” Naturally, I’m too well-behaved to ask questions like that, but I think them all the same. Meanwhile, I react by explaining that French people can make a lot of money Down Under by working in restaurants, bakeries, taxis, etc. But I also point out that, personally, I find France in general, and the Vercors region in particular, an absolutely fantastic place to live. Funnily enough, none of these French people who apparently dream about going out to the Antipodes have ever actually asked me if I could maybe give them an address or even a bit of down-to-earth information about how to handle emigration problems. So, I end up believing that their dreams are just that: ethereal dreams rather than concrete here-and-now projects.

I believe that, if an Antipodean dreamworld such as Australia (or New Zealand, or America for that matter) didn’t actually exist, French society would need to invent it. As things turn out, French TV actually reinvents Australia regularly by means of allegedly serious travel documentaries (most of which are produced by French film crews who discover Australia for the first time) that air a host of delightfully false suggestions. In the case of Sydney, for example, the cameramen use images suggesting that the Opera House is located at the end of every imaginable street in the metropolis. Another widespread item of fiction is that most city office-employees change into swimming costumes for a dip in the ocean at the end of their day’s work. (French visitors would be dismayed to discover crowds of dark-clothed workers thronging into Wynyard after the offices shut.) Some TV documentaries give the impression that typical jobs in Australia include caring for koalas, searching for opals, catching exotic seafood, manufacturing excellent wines, flying planes in the Outback, driving road trains, culling kangaroos or delivering mail in an old wooden motor boat. And there’s one professional activity that seems to reappear continuously in documentaries, as if it were a major activity: leading courageous tourists in a climb up the coat-hanger-shaped arch of Sydney’s bridge.

While the French need to have a bottled-up Australian dream filed away in their virtual medical cabinet (to be taken out and consumed only in the case of an emergency), I’m amused to see that Australians themselves do not seem to be accompanied by ever-present dreams of maybe going off to live on the other side of the world. Nobody ever seems to imagine that they might live anywhere else in the world apart from Australia. Indeed, if you were to bring up this question with Australians, I think that most people would reply immediately that Australia, in any case, is the best possible country on the planet. So, why would they ever dream of going elsewhere? In other words, once you’ve got as far as Australia, there’s nowhere else to go. I sometimes wonder whether such dreams have ceased to exist in Australia because it is in fact the finest place on Earth, or whether (more subtle explanation) Australians describe their land as the finest place on Earth simply because they are no longer capable of dreaming...

Predecessors

If I were working on genealogy, I would speak of ancestors. If I were talking about olden days here at Choranche, I would use the French equivalent of an expression such as oldtimers or earlier generations. In general, I adore the word pioneers (which reminds me of 19th-century outback settlers in Australia), and I use it whenever possible to designate hard-working folk who have gone before us and paved the way for us. The generic term for all these people is, of course, predecessors.

A couple of years ago, my neighbor Madeleine lent me a small book about the history of Pont-en-Royans: the village a kilometer down the road from where I live. This book, published in 1961 (a year before I arrived in France), was written by a local schoolteacher named Sylviane Chaussamy. I was so interested in the contents of this history book, and impressed by the author’s enthusiasm about her native village, that I immediately scanned the 150 pages, printed out a copy for myself, and stored the files on a disk. And today, I’m proposing these files (in a PDF format) to interested people who visit my website about Pont-en-Royans.

While preparing these bulky files for downloading, I’ve been tremendously conscious of the fact that Sylviane, when she brought out her book (in her late fifties), was in fact assuming the role of a predecessor with respect to an unknown young man (me) on the other side of the planet, who could hardly read a word of French and who knew absolutely nothing about the magnificent Vercors region in south-east France and the village of Pont-en-Royans. Maybe, instead of designating Sylviane as a predecessor, it would be simpler to say that, in 1961 (when I was starting to think about the idea of maybe working one day in Paris with my current employer in Australia, IBM), I was about to fall into my role as a future successor—an inheritor as well as an admirer—of the devotion and research efforts of a French woman named Sylviane Chaussamy.

I have the impression that Sylviane’s book on Pont-en-Royans was, to a certain extent, a way of celebrating the life of her mother, Marie Ollivier-Pallud, who had been the headmistress in the same school at Pont-en-Royans where Sylviane started her career. In other words, Marie Ollivier-Pallud was not only Sylviane’s mother, but her vocational predecessor. On 29 June 1944, Marie Ollivier-Pallud was killed, along with eight others, in an absurd Nazi bombing raid on the village.

Today, in putting Sylviane’s book on the Internet, I have a profound feeling that I’m simply adding a few minor enhancements to my predecessor’s research and writing. In any case, there is a line of logical and necessary continuity between her work and mine, and I’m sure she would approve of what I’m doing.

Caves of Choranche

Nothing anguishes me more than heights and holes. By heights, I mean mountain ledges and cliffs. By holes, I mean deep gorges and abysses. Well, in settling down in a place such such as Choranche, I struck a jackpot of nightmares. It’s an empire of heights and holes. That’s the main reason why people come here... either to visit the famous limestone caves (like those of Jenolan in Australia) or because they’re keen on rock-climbing or caving.

Concerning the caves of Choranche, it's hoped that these extraordinary geological phenomena will end up being placed on Unesco’s list of World Heritage sites. This would be a godsend for local tourism. Not surprisingly, however, a handful of rural families—nearly all of whom are oldtimers in the region—have expressed opposition to the Unesco project, because they have the impression that they will be subjected to constraints such as no longer being free to erect farm buildings or create tractor paths through the woods.

In the case of caves, the question of property rights and obligations is amusing. To be considered as the legal owner of a vast underground network of caves, you only have to own the property where the unique exit is located. In the case of the local caves, their unique exit is located up in the cliff face above the commune of Choranche, which is why they are referred to as the caves of Choranche. But the kilometers of subterranean passages are actually located beneath the surface of a neighboring commune, Presles. Obviously, the owners of land that lies directly above the network would be targeted by new legislation introduced in the context of the Unesco project. In other words, property-owners in Presles would bear the brunt of constraints, even though the caves are located officially in Choranche. This apparent anomaly is an ideal pretext for kindling animosity between the native families whose ancestors worked in agriculture and newcomers who are more oriented towards touristic activities.

Happily, although I’m a perfect case of a newcomer from a foreign land (where “foreign land” means any geographical region on the planet located more than fifty or so kilometers from the village of Choranche), I find it easy to avoid being dragged into these squabbles. After all, it’s a spontaneous reaction for me to steer clear of anything and everything that’s connected with heights and holes.