Not as stupid (maybe) as I seem to be

Although I've always been bored by the memorization of specific numbers (such as my height and weight, for example, or the distance from Gamone to Grenoble), I can handle arithmetic expertly. And mathematical concepts, too, I believe. I learned long ago, for example, that a sound arithmetic method for making sure that your future garden pergola is not crooked consists of calling upon the wisdom of an ancient Greek philosopher who demonstrated that you can't go wrong by using a triangle whose sides measure 3, 4 and 5 units. Incidentally, I feel sorry for people such as Bob's young companion Christine who needed to look up this kind of information in Wikipedia. For me, Euclid and Pythagoras—more than Aristotle and his dog logic [display]—have always been a basis of scientific culture.

Inundated by comical but alarming emails concerning the avalanche of age and imminent senility from my adolescent friend Bruce Hudson (who, to my way of thinking, is maybe a little too obsessed by this predicament, for reasons I ignore), I've started to worry at times about the state of my neurones. Above all, I would appear to be troubled by the manipulation of these nasty little brown Euro coins:

In a supermarket context, my ancient brain reacts instantaneously to a sum that ends with an odd figure such as, say, seventeen euros. I happen to be a crack at mental arithmetic, and I deduce rapidly that I would rather give the cashier exactly seventeen euros instead of receiving messy change from a larger sum. But that's where the state of my brain makes its ugly appearance. [My friend Bruce Hudson will appreciate this Alzheimer coming-out.] I start to drag a few brass coins out of my purse, and suddenly it's total confusion. Indeed, several things happen simultaneously. First, I'm incapable of supplying the exact coins that are required. Second (almost instantaneously), the cashier, realizing that he/she cannot count upon my exactness, starts to examine my purse, as if I were an aged moron, incapable of sticking a digit into any kind of hole... black, pecuniary, sexual or otherwise. Inevitably, I play the cashier's game, in accordance with the profile of the inarticulate dying specimen that he/she supposes me to be. That's to say, I emit a ridiculous but realistic statement of the kind: "I'm incapable of distinguishing between all these tiny euros." OK, that statement classifies me inexorably as an aged idiot. And I'm ready to be carted off in an ambulance to the nearest home for old-timers.

Reality is simpler, less dramatic. For years, I've used two pairs of glasses: one pair for driving, and the other for reading (as at present, in front of my computer screen). When I drive to a supermarket, I'm equipped with the first pair... which doesn't enable me to distinguish between small coins. If I were a serious customer (which I'm not), I would say to the cashier: "Please excuse me while I change glasses." But, all too often, these employees (particularly chez Leclerc) are delightfully sexy girls who are better observed, in the immediate, through wide-angle spectacles than through closeup lenses.

This morning, at the local Intermarché, I had the chance of being received by a dull male employee in a grey shirt, whose profile disappeared like camouflage into the background. When this male cashier started burrowing into my purse, I wished politely that he would fuck off... but he insisted upon helping me kindly as if I were an aged idiot. Exceptionally, I put on my reading glasses, and gave him exactly the coins that he needed.

Thanks to this guy, I now realize that I need to reexamine globally the domain of diminished eyesight, small coins and visually-delightful supermarket nymphs.

Sinister name

In the following NASA image, the dense white horizontal bars that look like gigantic clouds indicate the shifting location of the Intertropical Convergence Zone [ITCZ], which is the equatorial region where winds of the northern hemisphere clash with those of the southern hemisphere.

Colossal storms rage constantly in these skies, and it's possible that lightning from one such violent eruption resulted in the loss of Air France Flight 447 a few days ago.

Seafarers have always dreaded this zone, where the friendly trade winds often cancel one another, meaning that vessels get stuck there, often in a blanket of dense fog. To designate the unfriendly ITCZ in the Atlantic, between West Africa and the New World, French mariners use the everyday term pot (recipient, as in chamber pot). The zone is referred to as the pot au noir, which might be translated as the black hole. [Click here to see my recent blog article entitled Loose language.] In fact, the origin of the adjective "black" is particularly sinister. During the terrible era of the slave trade, vessels leaving Africa with their human cargoes were often held up in this zone, because of a lack of winds. In such cases, the captain often gave the order to throw overboard any slaves who happened to be sick, because it was considered that the vessel would not have sufficient supplies to keep such individuals alive up until their arrival in America. So, the ITCZ "pot" was black in the sense that the murky depths received the bodies of black-skinned slaves.

Our planet has indeed been an ugly place at times. It's still ugly, today, when a plane full of people disappears without an adieu.

Food time at Gamone

As usual, the following scene is a prelude to my regular bread-making:

That's to say, I never bake bread without a massive proportion of walnuts. Besides, it's a peaceful activity to sit down in the sun and crack open walnuts with a hammer.

Leaves of mint, parsley and coriander (from my small vegetable garden) are a prelude to the preparation of my favorite Thai dish of prawn rissoles. Sophia appreciates this operation, once every week or so, because she gets the prawn heads and shells.

The prawns and herbs look like this when they come out of the mixer:

Then I shape it up into a rectangle and cover it in bread crumbs:

I then leave it overnight in the refrigerator, and cook the rissoles the following day.

The cherry season is in full swing at Gamone. Sophia has developed a taste for this fruit, which she picks up beneath the trees. Usually, she doesn't even bother to spit the seeds out.

My strawberry patch is full of fruit. Curiously, Sophia is not at all attracted to them. I like to eat them straight after they're picked, at garden temperature, with sugar, a little lemon juice and sour cream.

You might have guessed that I eat well here at Gamone. And so does Sophia.

Digging up the past

In Australian military history, the battle at Fromelles, in northern France, on 19 July 1916 was particularly murderous. Before the end of that deadly day, 5,500 Australians were either killed, missing or wounded. In 2008, mass graves of several hundred Australian and British soldiers were discovered here. A few weeks ago, a project was initiated, aimed at excavating the remains and reburying them at an official site.

The following photos are by Michel Spingler (AP Photo). The first one shows French veterans of a later war waiting for the mechanical shovel to get into action, with green tarpaulins separating the scene from a Christian church in the background:

The second photo shows two Australian officers standing on the sidelines as the excavation gets under way:

To my mind, the operation that consists of digging up an amorphous mass of unidentifiable remains of victims of an absurd battle that took place 93 years ago, in order to rebury them elsewhere, is totally senseless, indeed surrealistic. The aims of this curious project do not happen to correspond to any of my personal convictions concerning the sacred nature of human life, the horrors of warfare, or the respect that our societies owe to the descendants of the victims. Are there still naive people who would like to imagine that the war of 1914-18 was, in some macabre sense, "great"? In any case, it is not by dislodging the unrecognizable remains of victims of an ancient war, whom none of us knew personally, that we shall reduce the risk of new conflicts. This energy should be devoted to more urgent challenges.

Garden under construction

Work is continuing on my future garden at Gamone, as seen here:

One of the eight symmetrical 2m x 2m plots is more or less finished. The planks are rough and cheap Douglas Fir, protected by a creosote product. They're partly sunk into the ground. I've placed a lavender plant in the middle of each plot, and sown assorted flowers around it. In the finished plot, I've planted thyme and sage, surrounded by fragments of maritime pine bark to stop weeds. In the photo, you can also see several elements of the future rose pergola, ready to be placed in an upright position in holes that will be filled with concrete. And here are some of my future rose trees, ready to be planted as soon as the pergola is erected:

They are ancient varieties: Albertine, Blush Rambler, Madame Alfred Carrière, Chevy Chase, Lykkefund and Paul Transom. To purchase them last week, my friends Tineke and Serge drove me down to a fabulous rose garden called Berty in Ardèche:

I've always had a few simple roses at Gamone:

A few days ago, I noticed that some of the rose trees I planted behind the house are now in bloom:

In the future garden in front of the house, I should be able to take care of my roses. I'm looking forward to being able to sit and read in my pergola, one of these days, in a haze of exotic fragrance. But there's still a lot of ground work to do before then.

Room for a pig

This is a corner of Gamone that I've never touched since moving into the house in 1994:

Once upon a time, when farmers produced their own pork, this was a pigpen. The door on the left, with hinges at the top, enabled the farmer to feed the animal. I've never wanted to change anything here, because I've always thought it looks just fine the way it is.

Reptile combat

Yesterday afternoon, when I spotted this motionless combat between a snake and a lizard in my garden, I couldn't quite distinguish the contours of the two reptiles, whose hues are similar.

When taking this photo with a long-focal lens, I was leaning over the stone wall in front of my house, whereas the reptiles were located three meters below me. It was late afternoon, and there wasn't much light at the place where the combat was taking place. The yellow cylindrical object that crosses the photo horizontally is a garden hose, exactly 2 cm in diameter. So, the snake and the lizard are quite small creatures. I tiptoed down into the garden, to get a closer look.

Here, we are looking directly at the snake's head and right eye. The snake has turned the lizard over (the yellow zone is the victim's throat), and is pinning it down at the level of the lizard's front "armpits", preventing it from scrambling away. At the instant I took this photo, I did not know whether the snake had already killed the lizard. In fact, the lizard was very much alive, because I now see that the snake had probably not yet got around to planting its tiny fangs in the lizard.

Since the scene was still totally motionless, I decided to get some action by nudging the garden hose. The snake immediately wriggled away from the lizard, which promptly scampered up the stone wall to safety. Having been brought up in rural environment in Australia where the golden rule consists of killing any serpent you encounter, I took a swing or two at the snake with a garden fork. I remember thinking that it was quite unacceptable that the snake should attack one of the nice little lizards that I love to watch when they're basking in the sun. Then, all of a sudden, before delivering a fatal blow, I said to myself: "The poor little snake needs to eat. First, I've deprived him of his meal. And now, I'm trying to kill him." What dastardly behavior on my behalf! Like Abraham hearing God tell him that he should spare the life of Isaac, I held my arm back, and watched the serpent wiggle into the weeds. Back in his hole on the slopes, I can imagine the little snake telling his family that there's a psychopathic protector of lizards up in the garden at Gamone...

And what kind of a snake was it? I've often joked about the criterion for distinguishing between a venomous viper and a harmless grass or water snake, because the experts tell us that you simply have to look the reptile in the eyes and examine the shape of its pupils. Easier said than done... unless you've got a long-focal lens and Photoshop. The pupil of a viper is a vertical slit, whereas that of a non-venomous reptile is round. Here's a closeup view of the eye of the harmless little fellow that I chased away from my garden:

If ever he's brave enough to drop by again, I'll seek forgiveness for my brutality by helping him to catch a lizard.

Loose language

A moment ago, in the French press, I jumped to a one-word headline: Earthquake. I imagined immediately that the ground had probably shaken once again in Italy. No, a dull journalist had simply drawn this term out of his empty head in an article on yesterday's unexpected grounding of Rafael Nadal at Roland-Garros.

Back in the old days, when writers could throw in expressions from the Bible or great authors such as Shakespeare, they were on firm ground. No reader is going to raise questions about the veracity of dust to dust, ashes to ashes, say, or to be or not to be. But nowadays, with culture and language permeated by science, it can be difficult for a journalist to keep his head above water.

Among the greatly misused scientific metaphors, I would say that "Big Bang" deserves first prize. When the English astronomer Fred Hoyle invented the expression in connection with a cosmological theory with which he himself did not agree, he needed a name for an absolutely unique "event" that was totally unlike anything that had ever happened before... since nothing had ever happened "before", because there could be no "before" with respect to this weird happening. The cosmological Big Bang wasn't in any way whatsoever an explosion, so it didn't really "bang". Besides, it wasn't big at all. At the singular instant zero, the so-called ylem—or primordial egg out of which our cosmos was about to spring—was unimaginably tiny and unimaginably dense. Consequently, it's silly to hear journalists evoking latter-day "big bangs" in domains such as economics and politics. Such usage is more than a matter of using bad metaphors; it's an insult to wisdom.

In the same domain, most metaphorical uses of "black hole" evoke what the French refer to as a Turkish toilet: the sort of place where you must be careful not to drop your car keys, otherwise you'll be hitching a ride home. In reality (if we can talk realistically about black holes), they're a far more subtle cosmological concept than a kind of giant sewage tank in the heavens.

One of the silliest metaphorical blunders from a scientific viewpoint consists of using "quantum leap" to designate something akin to Zorro and his steed jumping over the Niagara Falls. In formulating the theory that electromagnetic radiation was quantized into discrete chunks, Max Planck calculated that the energy associated with an electron when it performs a quantum leap from one orbiting shell in an atom to another is infinitesimally small. Not nearly enough energy to prevent a tennis ball from leaping onto the wrong side of the line. Let's hope, in any case, that the psychological shock of yesterday's big bang at Roland-Garros doesn't drag Rafael Nadal into a black hole of despair.

Getting sex right

I don't claim to know the sense of the concept of "getting sex right". We humans, like many living creatures (those that exploit sex to procreate), have always been obliged to take sex seriously. A priest, accompanying tourists to the Holy Sepulcher, was faced with a naive question: "So, the tomb's empty?" He replied: "Madame, if He's in, then we're out." Similarly, in a fabulous creationist Procreation Park, in the midst of joyful evocations of rustic Neanderthals getting sodomized by randy dinosaurs, we might imagine a profound question from a troubled visitor: "Is sex serious?" The guide, if he were truthful, would be obliged to reply: "If sex stops, then so do we."

On the other hand, I know what it means to get sex wrong... and that's apparently what has been happening for decades, according to a damning report, in Catholic-run Irish institutes for children. The situation involved sexual abuse that was so disgusting that I refrain from evoking it explicitly. If you happen to be interested in Ireland (for genealogical reasons, say), I advise you to touch this sad land (which I have never visited), like I do, with antiseptic gloves, with a long pole, or maybe solely through memories... by means of the Internet.

Soon, in a final chapter of my document called A Little Bit of Irish, I'll insert the following anecdote, which I've often related to various friends in emails. Long ago, in Paris, I got to know a charming Irish girl named Marie. This happened during a period of my life in Paris when I used to spend my evenings playing the guitar and singing folksongs in a café called Le Petit Gavroche. I seem to recall that Marie had probably married a French guy, but I forget the details. In any case, during my short but delightful relationship with Marie, she talked to me a lot about her home land, since she realized that I was intrigued by the Ireland of my ancestors. One day, lovely Marie decided to teach me a wonderful lesson, which she prefaced, almost solemnly, in the following terms (approximately, as well as I recall her words, and supplemented by facts):

William, I'm going to give you a little novel: The Poor Mouth. It's the English translation of an Irish novel, An Béal Bocht, written in Gaelic by an Irish journalist named Miles na Gopaleen, who calls himself Flann O'Brien in English. Knowing you a little, William, I'm fairly sure that you'll be thrilled by this little novel. In my opinion, William, you happen to have an Irish sense of humour, and I'm convinced that you'll find The Poor Mouth one of the funniest stories you've ever heard. But I'm not giving you this little novel to amuse you. I want you to read it for far more serious reasons. This novel will tell you, in a way, the story of your ancestors, William. You don't know exactly who exactly these ancestors were, and where they lived. Besides, you'll never be able to know such things. For all traces of them have disappeared forever. Your Irish ancestors have left no records, and their places have disappeared. But The Poor Mouth will tell you exactly how they lived, and how they thought. The novel will tell you everything you need to know about the spirit of your ancestors. One final word: If you're sensitive to The Poor Mouth, as I predict, I hope you'll never make the mistake of wasting your time and energy by setting foot in modern Ireland. That would be totally unnecessary, and it could only have a negative effect upon all that you've learnt from the novel by Miles na Gopaleen.

Marie was a prophet. I lost track of her. But I read the amazing novel. And I learned the nature of my ancestors. I've avoided visiting modern Ireland, because we descendants have nothing to learn there (on the contrary)... because our likes will not be there again.

Ascension

Today is a public holiday in the historically Catholic but formally laic republic of France. Why? Well, believe it or not, we're celebrating an archaic act of magic. At an unspecified date during the first century of the so-called Christian era, a man in flesh and blood named Jesus, who had been recently nailed to a cross until he was assumed to be lifeless, suddenly took off skywards, like a hot-air balloon.

I shall always remember the lovely image of my future wife, when we were innocent students (?) at the Cité universitaire in Paris, trying to communicate with an English friend who couldn't understand why the French nation went suddenly dead for a day, for no obvious reason, in the middle of May. Christine attempted to use her elementary English (which has improved a lot since then) to tell the fellow that France was celebrating a magnificent ascension that took place long ago, but the uncouth Pom simply couldn't understand what she was trying to say. So, Christine turned on her miming talents, and she fluttered her arms in a vain attempt to inform the English numbskull what the sacred aeronautical Ascension was all about. I've often imagined that, after Christine's convincing demonstration of a holy bird taking off from the gardens of the Collège Franco-Britannique in Paris, our English friend no doubt became an awed monk, and spent the rest of his life in a state of Christian sublimity, maybe in charge of the pope's private jet. I really must ask my friend Graeme Henderson, specialized in aeronautical history [display], to look into that question...

Dog logic

My first contact with the intellectual discipline known as logic was in 1957 at the University of Sydney, where I attended the classes of John Anderson, whose overall style and behavior might be described as Victorian. That was probably one of the last occasions in academia for an alleged philosopher to ramble on for an entire year about logic without ever going an inch beyond Aristotle [384-322 BCE].

Retrospectively, I find it preposterous that such a course could have still existed in the second half of the 20th century, and been taken seriously, in a philosophical world that was already impregnated by mathematical logic of the subtle kind invented by thinkers such as Bertrand Russell [1872-1970], Alonzo Church [1903-1995] and the genius Kurt Gödel [1906-1978].

Concerning the latter man, I had the privilege of talking to him on the phone for about ten minutes, when I was visiting the USA in the early '70s, and attempting vainly to persuade him to be interviewed for French TV. Gödel insisted stubbornly that his contribution to mathematics was minimal, and that no TV viewer in his right mind would be interested in watching him. Maybe he was right on the second point, because the celebrated incompleteness theorem is not necessarily ideal stuff for what used to be called (unjustly, to my mind) the idiot box.

Talking about the teaching of philosophy in Australia, I often had the impression that it could be weirdly sex-oriented at times, as if philosophy—in the minds of many observers—were a synonym for sin. While I was at university in Sydney (for two short years), a terrible scandal of a typically wowserish Aussie kind (you might need to look up that adjective in a Down Under dictionary) erupted in Tasmania because the professor of philosophy Sydney Sparkes Orr [1914-1966] had seduced a female student. As for John Anderson himself, biographers inevitably draw attention to trivial anecdotes about his advocacy of so-called "free love" (casual adultery)... which sounds very much like what countless inhabitants of the planet Earth are practicing regularly these days, without even bothering to give it a pompous name.

Concerning the substance of Anderson's courses in philosophy, which I would generally describe as light-weight, I did however appreciate his drawn-out analysis of the trial and execution of Socrates for his allegedly corrupting the youth of Athens.

I often thought that the mumbling old Scotsman, attired in a black academic gown, liked to imagine himself as some kind of latter-day Socrates, persecuted by the straight-thinking citizens of the Antipodes. To me, that sounds like a nice summary of the situation... except that nobody at the old Royal George pub in Sydney's Sussex Street, hangout of a mindless sect known as The Push, ever got around to offering the professor a middy of hemlock. [Click the above image of Socrates to access an excellent Wiki article on beer in Australia.]

As far as Aristotelian logic is concerned, I'm convinced today that it's so trivial that my dog Sophia masters it perfectly... in spite of the fact that she never had an opportunity of studying under Professor Anderson. [She did get involved in free love, long ago... which resulted in the birth of Christine's dear dog named Gamone.]

I'm often impressed by demonstrations of what's going on in Sophia's head. She understands perfectly the logical concept of negation... which was a Big Thing for Aristotle. When Sophia sees me getting dressed and closing doors as if I'm about to go out in the car, she analyzes the situation patiently. If she hears the ritual command "Guard the house" (in French), Sophia realizes instantly that there's no way in the world that she's going to accompany me in the automobile. But, if a certain time has elapsed without this formula being pronounced, Sophia suddenly deduces that the absence of the "Guard the house" command means that I'm indeed inviting my dog to accompany me in the car... and she's already jumping excitedly alongside the door of my archaic Citroën. To my mind, Sophia's capacity of interpreting a non-existent prohibition as a positive incitation is truly remarkable. Once Sophia's brain has calculated the reasonable lapse of time during which the absence of the "Guard the house" command can be interpreted as an invitation to a car excursion, it would of course be unthinkable for me, out of forgetfulness, to attempt stupidly to change Sophia's mind. I don't want to have a schizophrenic dog. In this way, my smart Sophia earned herself car trips when she wasn't supposed to accompany me.

Recently, I've been amused by a new manifestation of Sophia's reasoning power: the ability to count from one to two. I don't know whether I've said already in this blog that I'm a huge consumer of French cheese. It's fine that I should be residing alongside both the Saint-Marcellin and Vercors cheese-production zones. Often, I buy a big chunk of hard creamy cheese manufactured in the neighboring Haute-Savoie region. Each time I cut away a slice for a toasted sandwich, there's a small segment of dry crust at each extremity of the slice. Sophia, of course, loves this stuff. Well, I was intrigued recently by the fact that, when I was preparing a sandwich in front of my toaster, and cutting off the crust of a piece of cheese, Sophia did not pounce immediately upon the first bit of cheese crust that fell to the floor. Instead, she hesitated unexpectedly, leaving the piece of cheese crust untouched on the floor, just in front of her snout. She knew that there's a crust fragment at each extremity of the master's morsel, and she waited for the second bit to fall to the floor before gathering up both off them in one fell swoop. This reaction links up with Sophia's delightfully confused behavior whenever I confront her with a pile of several pieces of meat. Her general plan is always to get that food out onto the lawn as rapidly as possible, where she can consume it in a leisurely manner while lying on the grass. But a terrible existential arises in Sophia's mind: Maybe, a chunk of meat might disappear mysteriously, either on the kitchen floor, or out on the lawn. I can see her performing some kind of canine calculation, trying to decide which piece she should carry out, and which pieces must be left for later. Indeed, the seriousness of a dog's calculations concerning food take us back magically in time to the early eras of Creation, when Sophia's ancestors (and mine, too) had to get their act right about such matters. Otherwise, they starved, and neither Sophia nor I would be here today to talk about such archaic ancestors' tales.

The most amazing instrument in Sophia's anatomy is, of course, her snout: a precision molecule detector of a kind that modern science and engineering would have trouble duplicating. Like any dog, Sophia uses this high-tech tool as a shovel, to bury bones. In this domain, the respective intellectual conclusions of Sophia and me often differ.

First, although we humans realize that a dog's snout is precious and fragile, and we do our maximum to optimize the working environment of this fabulous device (I love to wash mud off Sophia's fine face), it's a canine mistake to imagine that Homo sapiens tills the soil in gardens, for example, in order to facilitate the burying of bones.

Second, although we humans—particularly atheists like me—consider that there's nothing "sacred" in the bodily remains of a dead creature, and that anything of a meaty nature deserves to be eaten, I disagree with my dog when she believes that the bacterial action of the soil in my future medieval garden is likely to transform magically a horn from our dear departed billy-goat Gavroche into something akin to a juicy steak. Apparently Sophia still has a Christian streak in her genetic upbringing, which makes her believe in miracles, whereas I have lost all such superstitions. I try to convince her that she errs, but it's not easy to discuss metaphysics with a dog. In spite of that slight discord, Sophia and I—not to mention the distinguished professor John Anderson—would appear to agree basically on the primitive intellectual processes of Aristotelian logic.

In a forthcoming chapter of this philosophical essay, I shall demonstrate that Sophia is in fact Cartesian. Clearly, she thinks, therefore she is...

Speaker to stop speaking

I don't know whether the Poms actually invented perks for politicians, but they seem to have brought it to a fine art. For example: thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money claimed for the cleaning of one's moat!

As they say in the classics, it's a bloody crying pity that, were it not for a chance investigation, this droopy old Glaswegian named Michael Martin could have carried on eternally walking ceremoniously into the House of Commons behind the woman carrying a mace. He must have gone on a gigantic ego trip every time he waddled in this way into the chamber. Silly old bugger! He should have kept a check on expenses. It's all very well to waddle, but somebody has to weigh the wealth of all those honorable gentlemen sitting in the Commons, and often claiming uncommon personal benefits. And this was Michael Martin's job. As things stand, he's obliged to resign.

The web reveals outrageous financial benefits accorded to British members of parliament. Michael Martin grew up in harsh conditions. Why didn't he remain close to his origins, instead of strutting around in London in golden robes? I have neither pity nor nostalgia for archaic Poms who see themselves as historical fat cats. I'm tremendously proud to be a citizen of the French République!

Hang-gliding history

For years, I've accompanied efforts aimed at demonstrating that the fabulous phenomenon of hang gliding was born in Grafton NSW.

Click the photo to access the John Dickenson website.

Recent experimental tests in England confirm that the famous wing designed by John Dickenson—built with plastic banana bags and towed by a speedboat—could indeed have flown and glided. In the context of the history of Grafton, this is a wonderful story. I shall continue to publish news in this domain, as it emerges... thanks primarily to Graeme Henderson.

Our concestor Ida

Like countless Earth-dwellers, I was moved by the fabulously beautiful image of our concestor Ida.

Even Google got into the act immediately, which proves (if need be) that the discovery and presentation of the fossil is a cosmic happening:

The term "concestor" was introduced into the terminology of tribal history (or genealogy, if you prefer) by Richard Dawkins in his monumental The Ancestor's Tale. It stands for "the (latest) common ancestor". For example, when a Skyvington in Choranche encounters, say, an individual named Skivington over in Canada, it's quite possible that their concestor was a 17th-century farmer named George over in Dorset, England. Researchers concerned with individuals X and Y are interested, above all, in identifying the latest concestor: that's to say, the common ancestor whose offspring split into two forever-separate lines, one of which ended up producing X, and the other, Y.

Juvenile Ida ("lovely Laura in her light green dress") looks a little like a modern lemur:

Let's say that 47-million-year-old Ida was almost a lemur... like our human ancestors, for that matter. But certain telltale features reveal that Ida had jumped onto the human, rather than the lemur, band wagon. She was surely one of us: an ancient member of our human tribe. Welcome aboard, Ida!

Of mountains and men

I would not normally go out of my way, as a tourist, to visit the Mount Rushmore abomination:

But that's because I don't have starry striped blood flowing in my veins.

This giant bust of Ataturk, currently under construction in a suburb of Izmir in Turkey, looks pretty impressive from afar:

Unlike the American kitschfest, Turkey's monstrosity is not carved out of the mountain, but built of concrete on a scaffolding. To my mind, that's worse.

In a nightmare, I see myself waking up one morning, looking out my bedroom window, and discovering with horror that they've carved Sarko's effigy in the limestone cliffs of my beloved Cournouze.

Popular Australian vocalist in France

This is not a particularly flattering photo of the Australian singer Tina Arena, but I had to operate rapidly with my Nikon, while she was being interviewed on national TV today.

Why is she so popular in France? The starting point, I think, is that Tina herself seems to have a quite European personality, and she likes France to the point of having learned the language. French media people automatically pay great attention to visiting celebrities who've gone to the trouble of learning to express themselves in French, because this suggests immediately that the individual in question is likely to have affinities with French culture and the French people. So, here's my advice to the McClymonts, mentioned in my blog of Sunday, April 12, 2009 entitled Country-music sisters in Australia [display]: If ever they wanted to become a hit in France (and why not?), start by learning French!

Sarko-slanted persuasion

The French government has the right, indeed the duty, to persuade citizens that they should take the trouble to visit the polling booths on June 7 for the European elections. And it's normal that they use a video clip to get their persuasive message across. Naturally, any evocation of Europe is going to allude to a long list of legendary political figures who have played a major role in the building of Europe: Robert Schuman, Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Georges Pompidou, Simone Veil, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl, Jacques Delors, Jacques Chirac...

At the end of the video clip, the briefest glimpse of a certain French would-be Euro-historical personage appears to be premature...



The Socialists Harlem Désir and Benoît Hamon have asked France's Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (Audiovisual High Council) to suspend the broadcasting of this video clip, which they see as blatant publicity for candidates from the political party of Nicolas Sarkozy.

School in Paris

At the age of 12, I started secondary school in my native town of Grafton, Australia, and I left for Sydney at the age of 16. Aged 23, on the other side of the planet, I spent two months working as a sailor, first on the Greek cargo Persian Cyrus from London to Kuwait, then back to Rotterdam on the BP tanker British Glory. My basic schooling then took off once again in a totally different context, in Paris, as an assistant teacher of English in one of the most celebrated secondary schools of France: the Lycée Henri IV in the Latin Quarter of Paris. I spent some two academic years there, from November 1963 up until my marriage with a girl from Brittany in May 1965.

Truly, my destiny as a future resident and citizen of France was sealed when I set foot at Henri IV. It was the school of Guy de Maupassant, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Pompidou... In such a high-powered historic and intellectual context, it was unthinkable that a young Australian, fascinated by existentialism and all things French, could resist the attraction of being adopted by this great nation and people. The catalyst was an exceptional individual: Christine. And the rest is the story of our life...

I've spoken already, in this blog, of high points in my life at that time. In a roundabout way, my post entitled Concept "bling-bling" [display] evoked a precious encounter of that epoch with a splendid young man named Benito Italiani, who was my Italian-language counterpart at the Lycée Henri IV. Benito was far more than a colleague. In his subtle Adriatic style, he taught me the meaning of European culture.

Considering Benito as one of my most marvelous friends in those formative days in the City of Light, I was stupefied to be informed by his American wife, in the winter of 1964-1965, that my former colleague at the Lycée Henri IV was no longer in the land of the living. He had been frozen to death in an Abruzzo skiing accident.

Yesterday, I was overjoyed to receive a blog comment [display] from Michael Italiani, Benito's son. Soon, maybe, I hope we shall meet up with one another and become friends...

Megalithic evening

Throughout the afternoon, while working in my future garden, I was aware that my TV evening was likely to be a back-and-forth affair between the acclaimed BBC documentary on Stonehenge [article] and the final of the French soccer cup.

The former was a must, in that Stonehenge has continued to fascinate me ever since the time I was writing Great Britain Today (Jeune Afrique, Paris, 1978).

As for the soccer cup, one of the finalists was the local team in Christine's corner of Brittany, the tiny town of Guingamp.

Finally, I spent a great evening zapping from one channel to the other, and I was able to appreciate two huge upsets. Several millennia ago, Stonehenge was apparently a pole of pilgrimage for people wanting to be healed magically... much like modern-day Lourdes. And this evening, in Paris, Guingamp beat Rennes in a style that reminded spectators of Astérix defeating the Romans... were it not for the fact that both finalists were Breton.


In a distant regional corner of France, the maverick politician François Bayrou, no doubt a serious contender for the next presidential election, has just published a devastating attack upon Nicolas Sarkozy. A journalist asked Bayrou to sum up what was wrong with Sarkozy's handling of the French Republic: "The French have never accepted the domination of the most powerful."

Well they did, in a way, some observers might say, under Philippe Pétain. But we all know today that Vichy was never the authentic République. France has always been Guingamp. And it goes without saying that Rennes has always been France. It's a subtle nation. That's the secret of its grandeur...

Future garden layout

My recent article entitled Spring renaissance [display] included a photo of the freshly-plowed rectangle in front of my house: a future garden of flowers and herbs. Here's an updated photo of this rectangle:


Between the two photos, separated by a fortnight, there are three subtle differences:

• On the left, I've removed the vegetation that grew against the old stone wall below the windows of my house. This was a mixture of archaic grape plants (of no great value) and recently-planted honeysuckle/jasmine vines.

• Following the intervention of Pierrot Faure and his tractor, the soil—comprising bulky clods of earth and grassy tufts—was not yet of homogeneous garden quality. I spent yesterday reworking the earth with a powerful Husqvarna garden tiller.

• In the modified layout, surrounding the future pergola (whose location is not indicated explicitly in the new photo), each of the two garden squares will be composed of four 2m x 2m plots. This means that my future garden will have a very symmetric look: a rough hybrid of familiar entities described as a medieval garden, a clergyman's garden, or simply a geometric so-called French garden. To clarify matters, I intend to name it simply a William's garden.

As for my dog Sophia, who has contributed to my gardening efforts by using the loose soil to bury remnants of the skull and horns of her old companion Gavroche, her layout is constantly beautiful.

Personal defects

People swear that they're prepared to talk openly about their personal defects, but they generally find subtle ways of avoiding to do so. And I'm no exception. So, don't expect to find me revealing the truth about myself, the whole truth, etc. Worse still, whenever I decide to mention one of my weaknesses, it's often just a pretext to hit back with an explanation concerning one of the more positive aspects of my character. I give the impression that I'm opening my front door and welcoming you in... but, meanwhile, I'm sneaking out of the house through a back window.

Let me start with a weakness that is totally undeniable: I would be a lousy worker on a construction site such as that of the Eiffel Tower.

I'm simply scared of heights. Once, when I was holidaying with my children in Bangkok, I was suddenly overcome by vertigo at the top of a stone staircase, just a few meters in height, in a Buddhist temple. My legs were jelly; I was so giddy that I could no longer even stand up straight. Consequently, my children, along with other tourists, were greatly amused to see me bumping down the steps on my backside.

Now, here's the exit window. Many years ago, when I was a student in Sydney, I got a vacation job working as a welder's assistant on a construction site. My boss, a friendly German guy named Horst, was erecting steel staircases and platforms around an industrial boiler. My job consisted of following him around with his tools, and I was generally draped in coils of rubber tubing connected to oxy-acetylene cylinders. At one stage, I told Horst, naively, that he didn't seem to be generous with the amount of welding he was applying to attach the steel platform to the façade of the boiler. He said he was using a rule of thumb that consisted of applying a centimeter of welding for every meter of platform. To me, that rule didn't sound serious, because the weight of the platform clearly varied from one point to another, depending on whether or not it was supporting a section of stairs. I let the matter drop, since I imagined that Horst knew what he was doing. Suddenly an entire ection of the platform dropped to the ground, and I was left dangling in the rubber tubing: my first and last taste of something akin to bungee jumping. I was not injured in any way whatsoever, but Horst and the people handling the site were frightened that I might be wounded internally (which could lead them into a costly damages situation), so they preferred that I should remain seated and do absolutely nothing during my remaining days on that job. Incidentally, a humorous conversation has remained in my memory ever since that experience. With his charming accent, Horst had described to me his attitude towards working as a welder in Australia: "I do it, not because I like welding, but to make money. When I arrive at the factory site in the morning, I deposit my brain with the gatekeeper, and I pick it up when I knock off work in the afternoon." Horst also taught me how to say, in perfect German: "The only rays of sunshine in a worker's life are fornicating and boozing." Needless to say, Horst was happy in Australia...

Getting back to my personal defects, I have no memory for faces. This works in two directions. On the one hand, I can fail to recognize a person I've already encountered. On the other hand, I can imagine that I know somebody who's in fact a total stranger. Let me relate two trivial anecdotes, both of which concern women. Once, at an outdoor Bastille Day ball in Paris, I overheard a girl speaking Greek, and I was immediately convinced that I had met up with her a few months earlier on. So, I started talking with her (in French) as if we were old friends... and we soon did indeed become very close friends. The next morning, in bed, I asked her to remind me where it was that we had initially met up. She was surprised but amused: "Last night was the first time I ever saw you. It's a fact that I found you exceptionally affectionate for a stranger..."

The second anecdote dates from yesterday. For my regular medication (run-of-the-mill stuff for blood pressure and cholesterol), I decided to change to a pharmacy at St-Laurent-en-Royans, a little closer than my usual shop at St-Jean-en-Royans. The female pharmacist welcomed me warmly: "I worked for years in the pharmacy at St-Jean, and I have a wonderful recollection of your visits, because you had the habit of rambling on about all kinds of things, quite unlike most customers in a pharmacy. I always had the impression that my contacts with you were... enriching." Wow! Now, guess how I reacted to these nice words from an attractive young lady. Sadly, you'll see that I've lost my touch since the evenings in Paris when I was capable of picking up an unknown Mediterranean damsel. I said to the pharmacist: "That's funny, I don't remember you at all." What an idiot I am! That's no doubt one of the worst statements a man could ever make to a woman. Fortunately, I have to purchase pills once a month... so I should have time to redeem myself. Meanwhile, let me crawl back into my house through this open window.

By the roadside

The other day, on my way to St-Marcellin, I came upon the scene of an accident on a stretch of country road where there's never much traffic.

In fact, I've often noticed that certain local drivers, taking advantage of the fact that there are hardly any vehicles on this road, step upon the accelerator, ignoring the presence of several tricky little bends where the macadam hasn't been designed for speed.

The scene was a symphony of glaring red, orange and yellow.

Even the crushed automobile was red. I was impressed by the calm behavior of the accident personnel. They moved around in a determined but unhurried fashion, without even the sound of voices. Then the silence was interrupted by the motors of a waiting helicopter, which had just been loaded with a human form on a trolley.

I asked a gendarme what had happened. He told me that a local 32-year-old lady—alone in her little red automobile, and alone on the road—had simply failed to get around a minor bend, no doubt because she was driving too fast. Her vehicle left the road and bounced off the embankment. Apparently she had her seat belt on, and wasn't severely injured. In the future, she'll certainly need to buy a new car, and maybe drive a little more cautiously.

PS I've asked my neighbor Madeleine to obtain the name and address of the injured driver, so I can send her a little souvenir collection of roadside photos in dominant tones of red, orange and yellow.