French families

An association named Familles de France [Families of France] and a group of family associations in the rural département of Ardèche [not far from where I live] recently used the law court in Paris in an attempt to gag the US Internet website called Second Life. More precisely, they wanted the editor of this famous website, named Linden Research, to introduce some kind of filtering device (?) that would prevent the under-age youth of France from viewing stuff they described as "pornographic, scatological and zoophilic". They also declared that the website contained publicity for tobacco, liquor and drugs.

In France, there's a time-honored profession of huissier. Such individuals—who might be designated in old-fashioned English as bailiffs or sheriff's officers—perform legal tasks such as notifying people who are pursued by the law, and making official circumstantial recordings of various situations, to be used as evidence in future legal affairs. Well, the above-mentioned associations hired such a huissier to produce evidence backing up their charges against Second Life. Intrigued by this task, I'm trying to imagine how a little bespectacled and balding man in a gray suit [that's how I imagine a huissier: much like myself when I'm dressed up for mass of a Sunday morning] would go about the challenge of demonstrating that Second Life displays stuff that's pornographic, scatological and zoophilic. Obviously, he would need to be an expert in the art of screen captures. But how would he then go on to prove that the captured screen shots had been corrupting the moral fiber of French youth? That challenge reminds me of one of the greatest texts of all time, Plato's Apology of Socrates.


Half a century ago, I had the privilege of studying this momentous text under the great Scottish-born professor of philosophy John Anderson at the University of Sydney. Socrates had been accused of corrupting the youth of Athens [in much the same way that Anderson himself would be accused, two millennia later on, of corrupting the youth of Sydney... like me in 1957]. Today, I look back with nostalgia to my sitting in that Sydney lecture theater [whose walls were adorned with classical frescos] and listening to the aging professor talking about Socrates and his alleged crimes. During that year, the boy named Billy from South Grafton became an adult... and a philosopher.

Let's get back to Second Life. A wise French judge threw out the whole affair, and demanded that the plaintiffs foot the legal bill. Will this judgment discourage other antiquated French moralists from trying to attack the Internet? Surely, as they say in French... at roughly the same time that hens start to be born with teeth.

When is an Apple store not an Apple store?

The answer to that apparent metaphysical question is simple: In France, when it's an outlet of the celebrated chain of retail stores named Fnac [pronounced as two syllables: feu-nac].

The Fnac's so-called Apple Shop in the Latin Quarter of Paris, named Fnac Digitale Odéon, with an area of over 300 square meters, certainly appears to look and taste and feel like an Apple store... except that it ain't. This shop is part of an ordinary retail chain, founded half-a-century ago by French Marxist militants named André Essel and Max Théret. The latter gentleman was even a personal bodyguard of Trotsky. How's that for professional reconversion?

Personally, as a Macintosh enthusiast and a Fnac customer, I look back with delectation upon all that has been happening in the Apple domain ever since that delightful day in the early '80s when Jean-Louis Gassée, the charismatic chief of Apple France, placed a personal computer in my hands and told me prophetically: "William, this machine is going to change your life."

Friends have often thought that I like Apple in the simple way that a French automobile owner such as me might prefer Citroen to Renault. No, my association with Apple is far deeper than that. It started when I was confronted with a bulky paper document containing instructions to software developers. I was enthralled to discover that the Apple company was determined to enforce principles concerning the quality of human interfaces with their computers. In other words, if a would-be creator proposed software with a shitty user interface, Apple would simply disallow it. Under the inspired guidance of Steve Jobs, all the rest followed. Shitty software was simply prohibited. A nice simple idea. That's Apple.

Today, I'm immensely proud of my three antiquated Apple books:

They demonstrate retrospectively that I'm not simply climbing onto a bandwagon. I really believed in this firm right from the start. And I still do, more than ever. Apple thinks differently and knows how to get computing right.

Parisian girl in the Vercors

A few years ago, the nearby mountain range was the setting of a charming film about a girl, fed up with life in Paris, who decides to move to an isolated farmhouse in the Vercors and live off the land, caring for goats and transforming her property into a rural guesthouse.

People in the vicinity of Choranche are familiar with this film, and they're aware of the various nearby sites where it was shot, because many of us have friends who participated in the creation of the film in one way or another. For example, a guy I know well was commissioned to prepare a vegetable garden that is seen in the film, and this same fellow acted as the personal chauffeur of the great actor Michel Serrault during his stay in the region.

If I were certain that the English-language DVD would be accepted by Australian devices, I would willingly send a copy out to my relatives in Australia. Although the events of the film are far removed from my personal story, there are various subtle associations with my own flight from Paris to the Vercors in 1993.

The opening scene of the film shows a fellow killing a huge pig, in an old-fashioned rural fashion. The actor in question is a friend named Luc. He knew what he was doing in the film, because he used to rear pigs in a property just up the road from my place. Later on, Luc abandoned pig farming and became a ULM pilot, and I built him a website [display], on an unpaid friend-to-friend basis, concerning his commercial operations in this domain. Well, I was astounded to learn, a few days ago, that Luc has switched jobs once again. Having graduated from the French Institute of Ericksonian Hypnosis [look that up with Google], my friend is now advertising his activities as a professional hypno-analyst. I'm half-expecting to get a phone call from him, one of these days, asking if it would be possible to transform the ULM website into some kind of a hypnosis thing. If so, I fear there could be problems. We'll see.

Meat balls

I love the tragicomic song by Calvin Russell called One Meat Ball.

Here are the words:

Little man walked up and down,
To find an eatin' place in town.
He looked the menu thru and thru,
To see what a dollar bill might do.

chorus:

One meat ball,
One meat ball,
One meat ball,
All he could get was one meat ball.

He told that waiter near at hand,
The simple dinner he had planned.
The guests were startled one and all,
To hear that waiter loudly call.

repeat chorus

Little man felt so ill at ease,
He said: "Some bread Sir, if you please."
The waiter hollered down the hall:
You get no bread with your one meat ball.

Little man felt so very bad,
One meat ball is all he had.
And in his dreams he can still hear that call
You get no bread with your one meat ball.

Maybe I was inspired by this song, today, when I decided to prepare an experimental dish of meat balls. It's more likely that I was thinking of a Greek restaurant in Sydney—called simply The Greeks—that proposed this delicacy back at the time I was a student. In any case, my experiment was conclusive, and future visitors at Gamone are likely to be served this dish.

One would imagine that meat balls and tomato sauce are a simple dish. In fact, they require some twenty ingredients. And their preparation and cooking, from start to finish, take about an hour of fiddling around. The quantities of ingredients indicated here are for two people.

Meat balls

— 350 grams minced steak

— 30 grams breadcrumbs

— 1 medium-sized onion, chopped finely

— 1 clove garlic, crushed

— 1 tablespoon dried thyme leaves

— 1 tablespoon dried oregano leaves

— 1 teaspoon caraway powder

— 1 egg, slightly beaten

Sauce

— 2 tablespoons olive oil

— 1 medium-sized onion, chopped finely

— 2 cloves garlic, crushed

— 100 ml red wine

— 400 grams tomato pulp [can]

— 50 grams tomato concentrate [can or tube]

— 150 ml chicken stock [commercial soup cube]

— 1 tablespoon dried oregano leaves

— 1 teaspoon sugar

— 1 pinch cinnamon

Preparation

Mix together the ingredients for the meat balls, then form eight balls about the size of eggs. Don't start to cook them until the sauce is ready. Start the preparation of the sauce by cooking the onion and garlic in oil. Cover with wine and let it simmer until reduced to about half its volume. Add the other ingredients for the sauce, along with salt and pepper, and let it simmer, without covering the pan, for ten minutes. Meanwhile, start to fry the flattened meat balls, on both sides, in a non-stick pan. Cover the meat balls with the sauce, and let them cook gently for another ten minutes. Sprinkle finely-chopped fresh mint on the meat balls, and serve with saffron rice.

Naturally, if unexpected guests arrive, you can always be inspired by Calvin Russell and only give one meat ball to each person... with or without bread, depending on your attitude to such guests.

Case against religion

There are several major religions, and different kinds of charges can be brought against each of them. So, maybe I should have put my title in the plural: Cases against religions. But I prefer to generalize by affirming that something is basically wrong with religion, globally.

No intelligent person would designate the destruction of the Twin Towers as a religious act. On the other hand, an upsurge in anti-religious expression of all kinds has been taking place throughout the Western World since 9/11 and the subsequent God-driven decision of George W Bush and his Anglo-Saxon allies to wreak havoc upon Iraq. I first evoked this anti-religious sentiment in my message of 9 December 2006 entitled God bashing [display].

Concerning Christianity, it often seems to be coming apart at the seams. Many will say, of course, that Christianity has been like that for centuries, and it's still surviving. However I don't go along with the argument that, since a building is still standing, it will stand forever. Behind all the superficialities of the papacy, the Catholic church appears to me today as an empty chrysalis, and the butterfly is likely to soon disappear forever. In my blog, I've alluded to fascinating findings such as the Nag Hammadi Scriptures and the tomb at Talpiot, which often appear like Joshua blowing his horn alongside the walls of Jericho. How long will it be before the walls of Christianity fall down? I don't know. I'm not a prophet. But I'm convinced that the phenomenon we call Christianity today has been reduced to a largely ceremonial thing, which exerts little or no effect upon the course of worldly events... except in notorious cases such as that of the current US president. And, in talking like that, I feel that I'm throwing my weight against a door that is already open.

Often, throughout my life, I've felt that the fabulous stories and lessons of the Old Testament retain all their ancient nobility, and that this dimension of Judeo-Christian reality remains, as it were, intact.


Today, alas, we know that this is no longer the case. The extraordinary research and scholarship of Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, brilliantly exposed recently in both a book and a DVD set entitled The Bible Unearthed, shatter every illusion we might have retained in this domain. In a nutshell, all the stories of the Torah and the Prophets are neither more nor less than that: enthralling but perfectly fabricated stories. For years to come, Israelis and Palestinians will still be capable of killing one another in their respective determination to administer the tombs of the alleged patriarchs, in the cave of Machpelah at Hebron. But we know now that there were no patriarchs. Neither an Abraham, nor an Isaac nor a Jacob. They were literary constructions: personages invented by scribes in Jerusalem writing in the 7th century BCE [before the start of the so-called Common Era: that's to say, the year zero, which Christians used to associate approximately with the birth of Jesus].

It goes without saying that you don't need to become familiar with archaeological findings in the Holy Land [I remain fond of that expression] or the land of the Pharaohs [and that one, too] to form an opinion concerning the case against religion. As Richard Dawkins makes it perfectly clear, not only in The God Delusion but in his celebrated books about genes and evolution, science has truly advanced to a point at which there is simply no longer any tiny place whatsoever for any kind of divinity. This is a conclusion that imposes itself naturally upon any serious inquirer equipped with a minimum of scientific culture. Indeed, this atheistic awareness has become an essential cornerstone of contemporary culture in general. So, the case against religion might be summed up, not surprisingly, in a single word: Science.

All-purpose hi-tech gadget

Seriously, the initial iPhone feedback from US technical journalists [which I won't attempt to summarize here, since it's all on the Google news] is not bad at all.

Furthermore, I have the impression that we Europeans might be in on a good thing, as the saying goes. During the forthcoming months, US users of the iPhone will be faced with inevitable teething problems. Hopefully, Apple engineers will clean up these problems, as they become known, and the iPhone model that will be offered to us Europeans towards the end of the year will be faultless! Normally, the future European iPhone should be more rapid than the initial US version. There are even rumors that we might have a GPS dimension.

I'm disappointed to learn that the iPhone doesn't run Flash stuff, because most of my web work over the last few years has been based upon this approach. So, you won't be seeing my websites on your iPhones. Happily, though, the iPhone doesn't aim to replace the time-honored phenomenon of ordinary computers connected to the Internet, no more than the iPod has replaced music blaring out on a hifi system in the living room...

Blasphemy in Europe

From a geographical viewpoint, Europe is a vaguely-defined entity, but the political body called the European Union is perfectly clear. It is composed at present of 27 member nations whose union is concretized by various institutions: above all, the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the European Parliament.

Many people are confused by the fact that another organization, called the Council of Europe, has nothing to do with any of the above-mentioned entities. The CE [Council of Europe], whose seat is in Strasbourg (France), is much older than the EU [European Union], since it was founded in 1949 by the Treaty of London. Today, the CE has far more members (47, including Turkey, Russia and many former Communist states) than the EU.

An important institution of the CE is its Parliamentary Assembly, referred to as the PACE. Today, the summer session of the PACE made two interesting recommendations concerning religion, which I summarize roughly as follows:

— When they conflict, human rights must ultimately take precedence over religious principles. States should welcome and respect religions, in all their plurality, as a form of ethical, moral, ideological and spiritual expression by citizens, and should protect individuals’ freedom to worship. But there should also be a clear separation of church and state.

— Religious groups must tolerate criticism and debate about their activities, provided it does not amount to gratuitous insult. On the other hand, hate speech—inciting discrimination or violence against people of a particular religion—should be penalized. Meanwhile, blasphemy laws—which often result from the dominant position of one particular religion—should be reviewed. In particular, blasphemy should not be considered as a penal infraction.

The explicit use of the term "blasphemy" in the second recommendation is particularly interesting. This recommendation has probably been inspired by recent conflicts concerning allegedly blasphemous references to the prophet Muhammad in political cartoons.

Unesco World Heritage update

The Unesco committee that selects World Heritage sites, meeting in Christchurch (New Zealand) from 23 June until next Sunday, has added the Sydney Opera House to Unesco's list of prestigious cultural sites. In France, a similar honor was bestowed upon the city of Bordeaux.

The classified parts of the city add up to nearly four and a half thousand acres, representing almost 50% of the area of Bordeaux. This is the first time that Unesco has ever classified such a vast urban area. The most striking aspects of the ancient capital of the French wine world are the quays and 18th-century stone façades alongside the Garonne River. Since 1998, three religious buildings in Bordeaux were already World Heritage sites because of their inclusion in the pilgrims' routes to Saint James of Compostella.

Countdown iPhone minus one

Unless you're living like a Neanderthal in a limestone cave at the foot of the cliffs in a remote place such as Choranche, you're aware of two front-page media items: first, Paris Hilton is out of jail (for the moment), and second, Apple's iPhone is coming (at least to US customers) tomorrow, Friday. The excitement generated by these two events means that poor old Gordon Brown has chosen a difficult week (in reality, the poor bugger didn't choose anything; the choosing was done for him by friends) to hit the headlines with stories about his ascension to the top job in the UK. Fortunately, neither the Kiwis nor the Swiss can win the five required America's Cup match races until a forthcoming day in the AiP (after the iPhone) era: at some time between AiP 2 (next Sunday) and AiP 5 (next Wednesday). So, there's no danger of that victory interfering with AiP 0 (tomorrow). There's also little likelihood that George W Bush will be choosing one of the early AiP days to announce a withdrawal of troops from Iraq, because he wouldn't want to be forced to share his limelight with Steve Jobs. So, apart from the coming-out of the iPhone, I think we can safely say that nothing important is likely to happen in the universe in the next few days. On the other hand, we are indeed likely to see TV footage of the glamorous ex-jailbird using her new iPhone to talk to her boyfriend about the respective hardships and joys of life as an inmate. Meanwhile, I strongly recommend Apple's excellent guided tour of the functionality of the future beast, which you can see by clicking on the following banner:

Business as usual

There's an everyday expression in French, fond de commerce, whose literal meaning is "business assets". But it's often used in the case of small shopkeepers to designate the particular commercial setting and customers that enable them to earn their living. For example, I recall the prolific and popular French novelist Frédéric Dard [1921-2000] talking about his childhood on a radio program. At one stage, his mother had a small shop that sold merchandise designated in French as farces-attrapes, which means trivial objects used for practical jokes, tricks and party gags. [I'm not sure I ever saw such a shop back in Australia... or anywhere outside of France, for that matter.] Well, Frédéric Dard explained with glee that his mother's commercial operations meant, for example, that she had to stock an assortment of the finest imitation dog turds made out of rubber. In other words, her fond de commerce included these objects and, by the same token, the people who buy such stuff. She therefore had to maintain constant contacts with the wholesalers who produced these objects. So, whenever a manufacturer's representative called in at her shop, she would ask to be brought up to date: "Please show me a few samples of this year's creations in the field of dog shit."

In a totally different domain, I've always felt that former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is like a small shopkeeper whose constant business preoccupation is terrorism.

As a consequence of September 11, 2001, Rudy nows knows more about how to deal with terrorists than anyone else in the world... including Bill Clinton, of course, and maybe even George W Bush. Rudy is a specialist in terrorist threats just like the mother of Frédéric Dard was a specialist in imitation dog turds. It's Giuliani's business, and nobody should dare to tell him how to run his business, particularly if they're Democrats. Above all, Rudy doesn't want to listen to anybody talking about bringing the troops home from Iraq.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee made it clear, tersely, that Rudy's establishment is not at all the best little shop in town: "Rudy's arrogance has gotten the best of him. How can a man who failed to prepare New York City for a second attack after the first one, who sent firefighters and emergency workers into Ground Zero without respirators and quit the Iraq Study Group to raise money keep America safe?"

Will those negative remarks slow down Rudy's operations? Not at all. Business as usual.

Songs and singers

At the time the Six-Day War [click here to display my recent article on this subject], the Israeli composer Naomi Shemer created a magnificent song, whose English title was Jerusalem of gold, which rapidly become an anthem associated with Israel's recovery of the Western Wall. I've always loved this song, which became for me a symbol of my encounter with Israel in 1989. In Paris, when I was learning Hebrew with the help of a lovely Israeli girl named Mihal, she taught me to appreciate the beautiful metaphors in Naomi Shemer's poem dedicated to the Holy City. Here's a version of this splendid song performed by Ofra Haza:

A few years ago, a special program on French TV celebrated the 50th anniversary of the creation of the modern state of Israel. A major musical event of the evening was a live performance of Naomi Shemer's famous song. Alas, the French performer selected for this task, a popular jazz-oriented singer named Michel Jonasz, did not speak Hebrew. No problem, he learned the words of the song phonetically! I was disappointed to think that anybody would dare to fake a rendition of this sacred song by mouthing the words phonetically. In my mind (in my ears, too, no doubt), this was akin to getting a computer to churn out the song using a synthetic voice.

Towards the end of her life, Naomi Shemer realized that she had in fact "borrowed" unwittingly the music of her song from a Basque lullaby named Pello Joxepe [Peter Joseph] sung by Paco Ibanez. She was terribly affected by this discovery, even to the point of considering that her terminal illness was a divine punishment for this plagiarism.

Getting back to the theme of phonetic singing, one of the most fascinating cases in France concerned an Israeli fellow named Moshé Brand, born in 1947, who arrived in Paris at the age of 22 and rose to sudden fame under the name of Mike Brant.

At the start of his career, managed by talented producers and musicians, Mike knew so little French that he had to reproduce each song phonetically, but his female fans were scarcely worried about the fact that Mike didn't really understand the sense of the songs he was being told to sing. Unfortunately, at the height of his huge success, he was out of his depth in the constant ambience of adulation and riches into which he had been projected, and in 1975 Mike Brant jumped to his death from an apartment building in Paris.

Tony Blair's new job

The least that can be said is that Tony Blair has not found himself in the same predicament as laid-off workers who have to spend ages looking for employment. He hasn't even handed over the reins of Britain to Gordon Brown yet, and we're already hearing about his new job: international envoy to the Middle East, employed by the so-called Quartet—the US, Europe, the UN and Russia—faced with the challenge of inventing a solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Blair is fortunate in being able to count upon the services of a dynamic employment agent: George W Bush, who has always been efficient in finding jobs for friends. It goes without saying that everybody would be immensely pleased if Tony Blair were able to play a role in solving the enormous and longstanding problems of the Middle East, but I have a gut feeling that, for this work, he's not really the right man in the right place. How could Arab people ever accept suggestions from the man who helped Bush invade Iraq? I hope I'm wrong, and that Blair manages to drag a white rabbit of peace out of his magician's hat. But acts of magic, to me, are like God and miracles. They would be fabulous... if only they existed.

Dusty dog

I would have imagined naively that the big wicker basket I purchased recently for Sophia would be the nec plus ultra in the way of canine accommodation. Error!

Sophia has dug up this dust bath in front of the house. The donkeys, too, love to bathe in dust. I end up believing that dust is a primordial element, no less attractive than green grass, water or snow (in the case of a Labrador animal such as my dear Sophia). The biblical oldtimer who came out with the "dust to dust" expression knew what he was talking about.

Glimmer of hope

This colorful photo of female Darfur refugees is in stark contrast with the obscure reality: a UN estimate of over two million displaced persons, and maybe 200 thousand deaths since the start of ethnic violence in that region of Sudan, in north-eastern Africa.

No sooner had Bernard Kouchner (of "French Doctors" fame) been named minister of foreign affairs by Nicolas Sarkozy than he visited Khartoum, on 11 June 2007, and launched the idea of an international conference on the Darfur tragedy. And that conference took place today, offering a glimmer of hope.


"Silence kills," said Sarkozy, assuming fully his new role as an international statesman. And Kouchner evoked "a tiny glimmer of light in the depths of this darkness". The Paris conference obtained Khartoum's authorization to deploy more than 20 thousand peace-keeping soldiers supplied conjointly by the African Union and the UN.

Awards

These awards concern achievements around my home in the Royans.

In the category of beautiful homes, the winner is:

The vomit-hued stone wall has been there since time immemorial, but I have the impression that a new cement lion appears in the garden, alongside a naked Venus, every year or so. Village-level kitsch paradise.

In the category of municipal fountains, the winner is:

I've been convinced for ages that this construction, in the middle of St-Jean-en-Royans, will look much better when water starts to flow in the basins. Meanwhile, the metal cabinet on the left informs us that the whole artificial affair will be run (one of these days) by electricity. Committee-designed art.

In the category of staircases and balconies, the winner is:

I've driven past this place for years, and it appears to be still intact. I've often imagined myself residing in the upper-level cubic habitation on the left, and wishing to step down into the garden for my customary midnight moonlit pee. The consequences of the operation would depend upon whether or not I'd been imbibing no more than water.

Finally, in the prestigious category of dare-devil shit-houses, the winner is:

Friends at Pont-en-Royans tell me that this outdoor cliff-hanging "powder room" (as Americans say) is perfectly safe, since the big horizontal beams at the base of the construction are well fastened into the rocks. OK, but I'm obsessed by the image of leaning on the fragile wall while I'm putting my pants back on, and finding myself—a few seconds later—swimming naked in the Bourne alongside wooden debris and other floating objects. Here's the topographical context (viewed from above) of this much-photographed Pont-en-Royans shit-house:

Flight symbols

In my previous post, My old passports [display], I mentioned that, in May 1962, I flew out of Paris, for London, from the airport at Le Bourget. Charles Lindbergh had landed here in the Spirit of Saint Louis, 35 years previously, after crossing the Atlantic.

Today, few flights use this quaint old airport, but Le Bourget has become internationally renowned as the site of the biennial Paris Air Show, which started in 1909.

For me personally, Le Bourget was a symbol of my flight to London in 1962 to obtain a long-overdue French visa, regularizing my de facto status as an employee of IBM in Paris. Much later, Le Bourget was also a symbol of my "flight" from Paris to the provinces, in that I attended the Paris Air Show with my daughter in 1993 on the eve of my departure. I recall every moment of that delightful sunny day, during which we watched acrobatic flyers, and had our ears pounded by the latest Dassault jets. The day ended at a Moroccan restaurant in the Marais quarter of Paris, not far from where we lived. My daughter, on the other hand, retains a quite different symbol of my departure from Paris: an antiquated crammed red Renault, which I had just purchased from a friend in the Marais, which had to be pushed manually to get me started on my route to the south. Not at all "Paris Air Show".

Le Bourget is an airport of the past, overtaken first by Orly and then Roissy (Charles de Gaulle). Today, as the one-week 47th Paris Air Show was drawing to a close, with a record-breaking attendance of 480,000 visitors, French TV presented the new installations at Roissy for forthcoming flights of the Airbus A380. Gigantic, like the aircraft itself!

My old passports

Pages in an old passport can have a similar nostalgic value to old letters or photos. Even the covers can tell a story.

In the old model, there was a crown on the cover, above the word Australia, and the expression British passport appeared beneath our coat of arms. Inside, to describe the bearer's nationality, complicated verbiage was required: Australian citizen and a British subject. Then, in the '80s, for reasons I never bothered to try to understand, we Australian expatriates residing in the Old World suddenly found ourselves queuing up with Eskimos and Americans to get into Britain, while the British queues were full of people wearing turbans and djellabas, and speaking among themselves in exotic languages. Personally, I had become so accustomed to thinking of Britain as the ancestral motherland of Australians that I never quite got over the shock of being considered there as an alien. And I'm still irritated when I find Australian dignitaries groveling in front of members of Britain's royal family.

The following page of my first passport has traces of my first sea, land and air voyages outside of Australia:

And here's my first French visa, delivered in London, enabling me to work officially in France:

Today, one has the impression that 4,000 French francs was a hell of a lot of money to pay for a visa. They were, of course, so-called "old francs". In present-day monetary terms, my visa wasn't particularly expensive: a few dozen euros.

While I'm aware that it's rather silly to remain attached to obsolete passports, these documents symbolize precious moments in my early life. They're a modern equivalent of the old family bibles in which our ancestors recorded dates of baptisms and first communions.

Around the house

The surrounding slopes are a jungle of greenery at present. An observer could well imagine that Gamone is a natural Garden of Eden, but this is an illusion, for the limestone soil is not rich at all. Thick wisteria leaves and rose bushes conceal the southern half of the façade of the house.

A local craftsman will be coming here in August to renovate this façade by replacing all the ancient mortar between the hunks of stone. Prior to his arrival, I'll have to cut back all these wisteria and rose branches.

On a sunny window sill at the southern end of the house, my miniature Jacaranda Avenue is coming along well:

Natacha gave me seeds from the Mediterranean coast for the two plants on the left, whereas the three smaller plants are grown from seeds I picked up last year in my native South Grafton. Unfortunately I'm unlikely to ever see these tropical American trees growing outside on the slopes of Gamone, because they only thrive in hot humid climates.

My strawberry, lettuce and tomato patches are coming along slowly but well, now that I've fenced them off so that my billy goat Gavroche doesn't wreak havoc upon the tender plants.

This morning, Sophia came back from our customary morning excursion up along the track beyond the house with a gigantic bone.

I have no idea where it was hidden, but I believe it's a bone she brought back from a walk over on the other side of the valley a few years ago. If I were conscientious, I would try to determine from what kind of a beast it comes. But Sophia doesn't need to know that. And neither, for that matter, do I. So, let's simply assume that it was some kind of a big non-human creature that died lawfully and as peacefully as possible. That's more than what can be said, these days, for many poor men, women and children.

Backstage

Antipodes post #300

I still dream (thankfully, you might say), whether I wish to or not. But I no longer pay much attention to my dreams (if ever I did), because I don't think they play a significant role in my earthly existence. In the matinal clarity, when I stroll up the road behind the house, accompanied by my faithful Sophia (wisdom), maybe in the fuzzy hope of extruding a little vital energy for the oncoming day from the giant mass of the Cornouze on the other side of the valley, I have an opportunity of reflecting upon my dream objects of the previous night... with no particular goal in mind. I have the impression that there's a kind of one-to-one correspondence (as mathematicians say) between my dream objects and the concrete events of the previous day or so. I insist upon the adjective "concrete". What I mean to say is that my dreaming apparatus seems to hook on to things that happened during my day, often of a superficial nature, but it never bothers to get involved (or so it seems) with my profound thoughts. In other words, my dreaming apparatus is like a horde of vulgar paparazzi who shoot everything they see, obsessively, without worrying too much about the fundamental substrate of events, of thoughts, of our human existence. In fact, if I could get rid of them, I probably would... because their images of alleged reality no longer amuse me. But I'm like Princess Diana. I can't get the bastards off my back.So, I dream.

And what do I dream about? Yesterday, it was a backstage theater. This was weird, because I've never been concerned with stage theater, at any moment of my life, and I can't even recall having ever wandered around on a theater stage behind the curtains. In fact, my theatrical career is a little like that of my dear father. As a child, he had a one-line response in a play, performed in front of proud parents. But he also had whooping cough. Consequently, at the moment that a Shakespearean personage in the play asked my father a question necessitating a Shakespearean yes/no reply such as "Yes, my lord, it is I", my father coughed tempestuously... which brought the house down, and stopped the performance.

In my dream, I was wandering through an extraordinary backstage environment, crowded with fascinating artists and their theatrical constructions. Funnily, there was no hint whatsoever of the probable presence of spectators, theater-goers, until the end of my dream. Up until then, the only subject of interest was the construction of stage decors. And the least that can be said is that this was a gigantic preoccupation in my dreamworld. Everything was luxuriously executed, by expert stage designers, but it was constantly and totally false... as if the desire to escape from reality was no less important than the aim of recreating it. As a dreamer, seated in the first spectator lounges, I was astounded by the attention to detail manifested by the set designers and their craftsmen. But i was puzzled by their obvious desire to create a setting that remained totally make-believe, false.

On the sunny morning slopes of Gamone, it took me a little while to see what this dream was all about. My nocturnal musings reverted to the idea of a gigantic and intricate hidden world behind our "ordinary" world. And this virtual world is described in technical terms by great contemporary thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, Brian Greene and Seth Lloyd. Before meeting up with these new analysts of the Cosmos, I was fascinated by an ancient genius: William Shakespeare. The other day, while searching for significant things to say about James Joyce in my article entitled Bloomsday [display], I was troubled by the fact that I wanted to talk, not so much about Joyce, but about Shakespeare. About the dreamworld of The Tempest, for example.

In my own strange dream [pleonasm: Can a dream be otherwise than strange?], I had been wandering through the backstage region of a vast theater, where a great play had just been performed.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Sarko, top of the class

The world might prefer (and so do I) the lovely image of Jose Manuel Barroso kissing Angela Merkel and offering her a splendid bouquet of flowers... but our Sarko was in top form last night in Brussels. And not drunk at all... except, as usual, upon his personal success.