Angelus at Châtelus

On the slopes of the Cournouze (see the above image in the Antipodes header), on the other side of the Bourne, there's a tiny white blob... which looks like this when photographed with a telephoto lens:

It's the center of the commune of Châtelus: a name that evokes the castellum (fortified residence) of a certain Lucius, maybe a Roman settler. The earliest surviving trace of the name of the commune was the term Castelucii in a document of the year 1100. The left-hand structure is the church of Saint Martin, which lies alongside the municipal building. Apart from that, there's little else in the village of Châtelus. The hundred or so residents of the commune are scattered over isolated properties.

Throughout the countless municipalities of France, there is usually a strict separation—both symbolic and material—between the architectural structures of the Catholic Church and those of the French Republic. At Châtelus, on the contrary, the church and the mayor's offices share a common wall, which suggests that they've always been good neighbors.

The municipal elections took place well over a year ago, but my neighbor Madeleine still speaks of Gilles Rey as the "new mayor" of Châtelus. One of the republican mayor's first operations was to repair the bells of the church.

The bells of Châtelus now ring out the Angelus at three moments of the day: 7.45 in the morning, noon and 7 o'clock in the evening. The chimes reach Gamone almost as clearly as if I were located in Châtelus.

Global view

At the G8 summit meeting in L'Aquila, the world's leaders generally looked upwards, hoping for better days. Exceptionally, to obtain a global view of the situation, they looked downwards.

Dance in France

Two days ago, I was intrigued by a request from a friendly Australian fellow who would like to use an image from my article of 24 June 2007 entitled My old passports [display].

Why not? If I understand correctly, he's launching a Franco-Australian commercial venture, and it appears that this image would make a good background for his business card. I'm happy to think that my ancient passport can be recycled in this way.

To my mind, by way of a comparison, bequeathing old passport images to an Aussie entrepreneur is far more fun than donating body organs... particularly since the fellow in question has already sent me lovely photos of his wife and himself, their son and his French fiancée, and he has promised to send me his future visiting card. Truly, you can't expect to get such feedback when you bequeath a liver or some such meaty thing. Besides, I admire the imagination of a guy who's thought of a way of taking advantage of the passport stamps of a complete stranger such as me, who isn't even a spectacular globetrotter!

In fact, since I've hung on to all my old documents, I can now offer pages of antiquated passport stamps for people who might need business cards for activities in, say, Greece or Israel, not to mention Sweden, the UK and even the Kuwaiti petrol port of Mina Al Ahmadi.

Talking of passports, I have an appointment next Wednesday at the town hall of St-Marcellin (the famous cheese town) to obtain my first French passport, described as biometric... which means that the portrait and finger prints will be digitized. While awaiting next week's appointment, I've sent off an email to the French prime minister requesting the right to include my genealogical DNA data in my future French passport. To my mind, this perfectly public data would be so much more appropriate than a simple trivial mention of the color of my eyes... which, incidentally, I've never fathomed.

Meanwhile, the official website of the French ministry of Foreign Affairs has decided to inform visitors that they can henceforth dance in France in an old-fashioned manner, in riverside establishments known as ginguettes.

[Click the image to visit the French government website, to see what it's all about.]

If ever you were visiting France, and you wanted to dance by the riverside, and you needed some kind of convincing visual document to gain entrance, just drop me a line, and I'll send you images of one of my old passport pages. Normally, it should suffice to tell the guy at the gate of the guinguette that you're a compatriot and a friend of William.

Stendhal revisited

The title of the major work of Grenoble's great novelist Stendhal [1783-1842] was Le Rouge et le noir [Red and Black]. We saw today a fabulous cover-image:

Winning or losing

Cycling is a subtle sport. There has always been only one way of winning: a brilliant performance, combining power and speed, strategy and imagination, along with some help from your friends and a bit of luck. A rider who wins is often the kind of competitor described in French as an attaquant (attacker). But, in cycling, there are two ways of losing: either you do little and don't make progress, or you run into big problems and descend in the results. Once again, the Australian Cadel Evans is settling in to his familiar status quo category, whereas the Russian Denis Menchov has spent the first week of the current Tour moving backwards in a spectacular manner.

So far, Lance Armstrong has impressed us greatly, whereas his team mate (?) Alberto Contador has played a waiting game. A French website says that the Astana team is sitting on a volcano... which might well go into eruption this afternoon, when the riders encounter the first mountain stage.

Once again, it's a huge pleasure to watch the world's third-greatest sporting event (after the Olympic Games and soccer's World Cup) on TV. Commentators on the France 2 channel like to make a subtle verbal distinction between the Tour de France and the Tour de la France. The first expression designates, of course, the cycling race. The second refers to the fabulous helicopter images of French landscapes, villages, castles, etc... not to mention the hordes of spectators lining the roads. It is a popular event, in the etymological sense of this Latin adjective, meaning "of/for the people". But it provides us, above all, with a bird's-eye vision of the beauty of France.

Observing these magnificent visions of the landscape and heritage in France, I'm not all that surprised when I hear that the French are considered (in a well-known poll) as the world's worst tourists. They never stop grumbling. They're perpetually disappointed, unhappy. Wherever they go, they'll always be tempted, inevitably, to compare what they encounter with their homeland.

Outdoor update

At this time of the year, I'm delighted to devote my days to a mixture of three quite different activities: (1) outdoor tasks, such as erecting my rose pergola; (2) computer-based work, such as finishing the French version of my Rilke movie script and pursuing my genealogical research; and (3) watching the Tour de France on TV.

Concerning the future pergola, I'm aware that I'm not exactly breaking any construction-speed records. But I like to savor this kind of job. One of the three basic U-shaped structures is now solidly fixed in the earth by concrete... but I prefer, for the moment, to leave the supporting posts and struts in place. The next step will consist of erecting a similar structure (which is already bolted together, and waiting to be raised) on the left-hand side of the photo. Yesterday afternoon, at about the time that the cyclists were approaching the finishing line, I decided to start digging a pair of holes at places that seemed to be more or less correct. That's to say, instead of measuring things, I took the liberty of using visual guesswork. Well, this morning, when I took a closer look at yesterday's holes, and measured their locations carefully, I was alarmed to discover that visual guesswork of this kind simply doesn't work for me. I was ashamed to discover that my holes were about 25 cm to the right of their correct locations! No great problem: I simply enlarged the holes so that the posts would be positioned correctly.

I was truly amazed, retrospectively, that my visual guesswork could be so hugely off the mark. To be honest, I don't think it's age catching up with my perceptive faculties. I believe that, as far as spatial contexts are concerned, I've always been out of my depth (a nice metaphor). When my son, who's an excellent billiards player, tells me that he's capable of conceptualizing a spatial context in such a way that he knows exactly how and where to hit the ball, I'm most impressed. Maybe it was a waste of resources for God to put me in a three-dimensional world. He could just as well have created me in a flat two-dimensional world, and I probably wouldn't have felt I was missing out on anything. Besides, I wouldn't have ever been anguished by vertigo.

A few years ago, when I planted a little plum tree beneath my bedroom window, I wasn't certain that it would ever grow and bear fruit. Well, this morning, I noticed with joy that the miracle has happened.

Further to the south, the pair of fig trees that Natacha and Alain gave me are thriving, and there might even be a few tiny fruit by the end of summer.

Last night's TV news praised a town in Alsace that has decided to prohibit chemical insecticides and weedkillers, to avoid polluting the groundwater. The municipality in question has decided to promote the novel idea that weeds, to a certain extent, are beautiful. Citizens are being told that it's silly to live in a universe of cropped lawns and smooth green parks and prairies. A few weeds and wildflowers never hurt anybody. On the contrary. It goes without saying that, here at Gamone, I've always been in favor of that kind of thinking.

Snippets and stutters

My title is a fanciful allusion to the two basic entities used in the fascinating domain of family-history research based upon DNA, which has interested me now for several months. There are so many novel concepts and bits of necessary know-how in this field that I've started to set them down in the form of a text, which might one day be of use to other newcomers.

The first thing you discover about this exciting new genealogical tool is that there are two quite different approaches:

-- A female can have her DNA tested to learn about her matriarchal line: that's to say, her mother, her mother's mother, the mother of her mother's mother, and so on. This testing uses mitochondrial DNA, designated in short as mtDNA.

-- A male can have his mtDNA tested in exactly the same way, and the results will be identical to those of his sisters. A male can also have his Y-chromosome tested, to learn about his father, his father's father, the father of his father's father, and so on.

Since a female researcher doesn't have Y-chromosomes, she can't be tested in this second way. But that's not a problem as long as she can call upon either her father, a brother or some other male relative on her paternal side to obtain such Y-chromosome information.

For the moment, personally, I've been tested only at this second level. The results are directly linked to the ancient origins of the Skyvington surname, which is currently being documented.

Let me explain rapidly the sense of my blog title:

-- In a strand of DNA, in a so-called junk region of the molecule (lying outside the coded sections that determine our nature), it can happen that a single letter is suddenly and mysteriously misspelled. For example, a meaningless "word" that has been spelled CAT since time immemorial suddenly reappears, in the DNA of an offspring, with a spelling error: say CGT. An error of this kind is called a single-nucleotide polymorphism [SNP, pronounced snip]. Now, this kind of mutation is extremely rare, but once such a mispelling occurs, the error is reproduced forever after. Some 16 to 18 millennia ago, there was a famous Y-chromosome snip referred to as M343, and one of the fellows with this trivial spelling error in his junk DNA happened to become the great-granddaddy of all of us western Europeans. So, if you find this M343 snip in your DNA, you can be fairly sure that some of your paternal ancestors once spent some time in western Europe.

-- In a strand of DNA, something akin to stuttering takes place when a tiny fragment is repeated several times, for no apparent reason. In a certain individual, a specific instance of such stuttering might involve, say, 14 repetitions, whereas another person might have a count of 13 or maybe 15. This stuttering is called short tandem repeats [STR, pronounced by naming separately each of the three letters: ess-tee-ahr]. Whenever the number of repeats is augmented (suddenly and mysteriously, as for snips, but far more often), the new value is reproduced in descendants of the mutated individual.

Let's leave things there for the moment, because I don't necessarily intend that Antipodes should be transformed into a series of biology lessons. But I'll return rapidly to these subjects, because I've been learning a lot of interesting things, over the last few days, about my paternal snippets and stutters.

Vegetal rock

My Antipodes blog contains so many references to rocks that I must pardon readers who might feel that the author has rocks in his head. Let us admit, in a scientific spirit, that it's a debatable point...

The precise geological name of the rocks that concern me today is calcareous tufa. Here's a specimen from a low wall at Gamone:

Once you scrape away the moss, it's pure calcium carbonate, of the kind that once blocked the ancient ceramic water pipes at Gamone:

Tufa rock forms rapidly in places where highly-calcareous water emerges into the open air and meets up with mossy vegetation, which enters into the production of the rock. That's why I refer to this tufa as vegetal rock. It's a soft substance, easily cut with a saw, which was often used in the construction of houses. Here's an example from the corner of my house at Gamone:

In this photo, you can see fragments of Gamone bluestone (ancient hard rock) interspersed among the blocks of tufa.

The calcareous tufa at Gamone came surely from the domain of the Carthusian monks at Val-Sainte-Marie, Bouvante (Drôme), known for such deposits. But the most famous source of calcareous tufa in the region happens to lie to the north, in Isère, at an equal distance from Choranche. I'm talking of the ancient village of La Sône, which I mentioned in recent blog articles entitled An old map talked to me of trees [display] and Weaving machines [display].

The name of the village, La Sône, comes from its Latin reference: aqua sonus, the sound of water. What a splendid name for a village! Here's an image of the place where that archaic sound was first heard:

Since time immemorial, water filled with 315 mg/liter of limestone (compared to 10 to 50 mg/liter for ordinary mineral water) has been tumbling into the Isère at La Sône, at the following magnificent spot:

And that's what the phenomenon of calcareous tufa is all about. Here's a close-up view of the formation of this vegetal rock:

Today, at La Sône, visitors can admire splendid gardens at the base of these water-falls. Before the calcareous waters disappear into the Isère, they are collected in a series of beautiful ponds.

It would appear that the vegetation and the frogs have had time to get adjusted to the high degree of calcium carbonate.

Needless to say, the hand of humans is omnipresent in these gardens, as it should be, just alongside the place where the hands of weavers once produced a century of silk.

The garden's attractions include weird hand-made inventions that use the falling waters to produce ethereal sounds.

Bamboo-lovers like me are equally enchanted. La Sône is a magic place!

Respectful dog

In a recent issue of the weekly Le Point, the main theme was retirement. This is a highly topical subject in France, where many observers feel that citizens are allowed—indeed obliged, most often—to retire too early from their professional activities.

The weekly includes a short interview with a well-known individual: the celebrated 89-year-old writer Jean Dutourd, who's a member of the Académie Française. Still complaining bitterly about the insolence of the France Soir daily, which asked him to quit as a journalist at the early age of 80, Dutourd warns: "If anybody dares to call me a 'senior', he'll get my fist in his face."

Yesterday, a friendly young couple and their daughter dropped in at Gamone to ask me whether I could inform them about the possibility of purchasing a neighboring property. All I could do was to give them Bob's phone number. They were accompanied by their playful six-months-old dog, who immediately started taking practical lessons in canine behavior from my wise old Sophia (who gave lessons of this kind both to her daughter Gamone and, more recently, to Alison's young dog Pif). In fact, I've always considered that young animals who have had the privilege of learning from Sophia the art of being a dog are quite fortunate. It's the canine equivalent, you might say, of sending your teenage daughter to a finishing school in Switzerland... maybe with a higher dose of snarling and self-defense in the curriculum. The visitors' dog promptly grabbed a huge bone (in fact, the skull of Gavroche), whereupon Sophia's smiling countenance made it clear—contrary to the upbringing of animals that have gone to the wrong schools—that a well-behaved dog should never overreact aggressively, not even to such a blatant case of stealing. As I said, Sophia is wise... in keeping with the meaning of her Greek name.

With the bone in its mouth, the little dog settled down beneath my outstretched legs. The owner said: "That's really weird: Whenever our dog is contented, it immediately decides to lie down under the legs of the most senior individual in the group." I said to myself that this charming little animal could run into problems if it ever got around to visiting Jean Dutourd.

Madame Energy

When I see how hard it is for people to find jobs these days, often as a consequence of globalization, I generally end up thinking that maybe I've been living in a golden employment era that has now disappeared forever. If so, does this mean that our children's children will be obliged to lead a welfare-state existence? Fortunately, several positive thoughts bring me back to a constructive vision of future society.

— The environmental challenges of saving the planet are so huge that there will surely be work enough for all bright people.

— The financial crisis should be (?) teaching a harsh lesson to greedy consumers and financial manipulators. In a nutshell, the global economic system has worn out at the seams, and needs to be replaced.

— Politically, certain evolved societies are realizing that the fundamental responsibility of a good system is to protect weak citizens from those who happen—often through luck or inheritance—to be strong. This theme is an everyday evidence in France, whereas many of my fellow citizens in Australians (where there's still a cult worship of self-made men and overnight millionaires) might find this kind of protection weird or even dodgy.

— In many places in the western world, there will no doubt be rough times ahead, with class actions bordering on bloody revolution.

— In other places, the three great scourges of our planet will cause havoc: starvation, epidemics and warfare.

Concerning the first point I mentioned, there's an international agency called IRENA [International Renewable Energy Agency], with interim headquarters in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates.

The agency's interim director-general is a young Frenchwoman, Hélène Pelosse, who's been a colleague of Jean-Louis Borloo, the French minister for Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development, and Town and Country Planning.

If I were to be transported magically into a situation, today, in which I had to decide upon a professional career, I would still choose computing... but genetics would be hard on its heels as a second choice, with the vast domain of renewable energy in third place.

Summer season at Gamone

When I'm woken up by the noise of a tractor cutting the weeds alongside the road up to Gamone, I know that summer has well and truly reached my home place. And that the Tour de France and Bastille Day are just down the track.

There's a corollary that has never ceased to amaze me. In the heat of summer, with the buzzing of cicadas filling the air at Gamone, it's hard to believe—and "unfair" in a way, to talk stupidly—that the days are already getting shorter!

World library catalogue

A US-based organization named OCLC [Online Computer Library Center] has been grouping together many of the planet's great libraries with the aim of enabling scholars and researchers to know immediately where such-and-such a book is located.

[Click the banner to access their website.]

On its website, this organization defines itself as a "nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purpose of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs".

A fortnight ago, France's great BnF [Bibliothèque nationale de France] signed an agreement enabling OCLC to process an estimated 13.2 million bibliographic records from the catalogue of the national French library, which is considered one of the richest catalogues in the world.

To actually use the OCLC service from your computer, you call upon a software tool called WorldCat.

[Click the banner to access their website.]

I was amused to discover that specimens of my own humble production can be found in 228 libraries across the planet... with my Macintosh book of 1984 largely in top place.

Hot dog

When I arrived back home after my trip to Valence yesterday, it was so hot at Gamone that I decided to drive Sophia down to Pont-en-Royans for a dip in the Bourne.

Sophia obviously appreciates this kind of excursion. First, of course, she can cool off. More importantly, I think, there's the pleasure of exotic odors and encounters with the vast world beyond Gamone.

Famous people linked to Valence

In this photo that I took in Valence yesterday, only the two gendarmes are real. All the others are painted people. On the first-floor balcony, you can recognize Napoléon Bonaparte [1769-1821] who, in 1791, was the first lieutenant of the 4th cavalry regiment in Valence. In the upper left-hand window, you have the future king Louis XI [1423-1483] who founded the university of Valence. In the upper right-hand corner, we have the pope Pius VI [1719-1799] who, after having been chased from Rome, died in Valence.

In the ground-floor window, Jacques Pic [1932-1992] was the founder of a celebrated restaurant in Valence, run now by his daughter Anne-Sophie Pic, who is the only female chef in France with three stars in the Guide Michelin. Anne-Sophie will be turning 40 on Sunday, 12 July.







The drowsy capital of the Drôme appeared to be empty yesterday. Maybe it was the heat that was keeping people off the streets.

Since I had time on my hands while awaiting the replacement of my windscreen, I sat down for a beer at a sidewalk café just opposite the old train station in the center of the city, and watched the rare people and vehicles passing by. At times, doing nothing can become a serious preoccupation. I was happy to feel that my laziness was in perfect harmony with the spirit of the city.

Walking back to pick up my automobile, I was delighted to come across this intersection planted with bamboo, which was an unexpected oasis in the hot city.

Weaving machines

When my ex-wife and I were residing for a while in Brussels in 1966, where our daughter was born, we were able to admire splendid specimens of modern silk cloths produced on a hand-loom by a local craftswoman as a gift for the Belgian royal family. In the hand-weaving domain, it is commonly thought that this archaic activity (which cannot, of course, compete with the industrial production of textiles) merits the exclusive use of noble materials such as silk or hand-spun wool and flax. What I mean to say is that it's silly going to all the trouble of using a hand-loom if you're simply going to weave factory wool or cotton.

The genius who introduced punched-card digital technology into the textile industry was the inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard [1752-1834] from Lyon. Later, his automatic card-reader inspired the Englishman Charles Babbage [1791-1871] who is generally looked upon as the inventor of the computer.

Prior to Jacquard, another brilliant Frenchman had been deeply involved in the early days of the textile industry: Jacques Vaucanson, one of Grenoble's most famous sons (along with Stendhal). It might be said that, without the basic mechanism invented by Vaucanson, Jacquard would not have been able to devise his punched-card apparatus.

Well, much of Vaucanson's experimentation was carried on in La Sône, in that same nearby village from which I recently looked out over ancient woods towards the Vercors... as I explained in my recent article entitled An old map talked to me of trees [display].

Before getting involved in the design of weaving machines, Vaucanson had become famous as a creator of automats, the most spectacular of which was a mechanical duck that bent over to eat food, and then went on to drop a nice little turd. Unfortunately, no traces of Vaucanson's automats (including, beside the duck, a flute-player and a drummer) have survived, but there are ample historical accounts of his achievements.

In my humble personal life, I cannot insist sufficiently upon the profound inspiration provided by these two great French inventors: Vaucanson and Jacquard.

Many years ago, when I was working with French Television and became involved in artificial intelligence (theme of a series of five documentaries that I shot mainly in the USA), a kind colleague gave me this book. At that time, knowing next to nothing about the illustrious creator of automats, I could never have imagined that I would soon be working in a hi-tech computing laboratory, Delphia, in Vaucanson's native city, and that I would end up living not far away from the beautiful castle at La Sône in which he resided, as a guest of the Jubié family, while carrying out the fine tuning of his machine. Today, the privately-owned castle is a patrimonial jewel in the Dauphiné.

These days, all that I've found of the premises of Vaucanson's silk-weaving factory at La Sône is a grim fresco of unknown vintage:

You might say that Vaucanson ushered in the industrial age when he invented his machine for weaving silk. And the inevitable next step consisted of generations of workers who entered that doorway, every morning, under the terrible effigy of a lion with its paws enchained in metal loops. Not exactly an ideal symbol to encourage pride and productivity.

A lot has changed since then. It's highly likely that factory managers no longer think of their workers as enchained lions. Be that as it may, I'm happy to see that the economic worker-lions of our modern society are henceforth hunting as an intelligent pack. They've smelt blood, and their political appetite is huge, as you might imagine.

Forgotten US prisoner

Concerning the 150-year jail sentence for Bernard Madoff, I can understand perfectly well that the entire American system intends to send out a stark message to all would-be designers of Ponzi schemes: "Here's a real-life demonstration of what you'll get." That's the well-documented interpretation of harsh punishment viewed as a dissuasive factor. It's a concept that doesn't apply at all in the case of crimes of passion, blood and sex, and probably little in the arena of bank robberies, but it surely carries weight in the case of criminal projects demanding calm calculation... such as white-collar affairs of the Madoff kind.

When I heard of Madoff's sentence, I thought immediately of a gentle US prisoner, 54-year-old Jonathan Pollard, indicted on a charge of passing classified information to an ally, Israel, without intent to harm the USA. He was motivated, not at all by Madoff-like financial greed, but solely by his ideological admiration for the modern nation that symbolizes the land of Pollard's Jewish ancestors. Contrary to what is often stated, Pollard was never condemned for treason, nor for any other crime, for the simple reason that he was never, at any moment, tried before a US court! As the consequence of a plea agreement—honored by Pollard but not by the American Government—he has been rotting in a US jail now for nearly a quarter of a century. [Click the photo to access Pollard's official website, or Google with his name.]

I first heard of Pollard's sad case long ago, during my initial encounters with the legendary Holy Land: a wonderful experience that I shall always treasure. There's a whole chapter about him in this fine book on Israeli espionage. His case inspired a fascinating French movie, Les Patriotes, by director Éric Rochant.




A silly idea has sprung into my mind. It's totally unrealistic, but I would like to insert it here into my blog. One of the high-profile victims of Madoff, from both an institutional and a personal viewpoint, was the 80-year-old intellectual Elie Wiesel, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 as a "messenger to mankind" through "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps" as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace". Elie Wiesel has no doubt heard of Madoff's sentence, and thought of what it means for a man to receive such a punishment. My silly idea is simple. Maybe Elie Wiesel might use the Madoff event as a pretext for thinking also about the Pollard predicament, which is a blatant case of a forgotten prisoner. Maybe Elie Wiesel could use his weight to talk to both Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu about the case of Jonathan Pollard.

National styles of behavior

For years, one of my favorite innocent pastimes (serving no useful purpose) has consisted of comparing characteristic behavior from three nations that happen to concern me in different ways: Australia (my native land), France (my adoptive home place) and the USA (which hits me in the face every day or so on my TV and computer screens). Hardly a week goes by without my being tempted to write an article entitled It could only happen in X... where X designates one of the three above-mentioned nations. In my title, I've used the term "styles" for such idiosyncrasies. If nations had brains, I wouldn't hesitate in referring to the cases that intrigue me as national neuroses.

In Australia, a couple of weeks ago, the press published an alleged email suggesting that an automobile dealer was receiving favors from Kevin Rudd, maybe because this fellow had once made a gift of a utility vehicle to the prime minister. It was soon revealed that, like countless emails that all of us receive regularly (requesting our personal banking details, for example), this one was an amateurish fake designed to smear Rudd. But this affair is still making front-page news in the Oz media... along with the death of Michael Jackson.

In France, a case of behavior characteristic of a brain-damaged nation was provided by the president Nicolas Sarkozy himself when he used a big bag of taxpayers' money to stage an in-house show for parliamentarians and senators in the ancient royal palace of Versailles, with the aim of spreading the message that the French people will have to accept the fact that times are hard.

And the background to this sermon was a recent audit revealing that never before in the history of the 5th République, from a budget viewpoint, has the president's Elysées Palace lived so extravagantly. As a young queen with her head in the clouds (prior to falling into a basket) might have said: "The people are crying out for a better deal, more jobs, increased purchasing power and overall prosperity? Let them admire us, eat cake and listen to my sweet songs!"

In America (only in America, to use CNN-talk), another story of sinful sex has come to light with the brief disappearance of Mark Sanford, the Republican governor of South Carolina.

Believe it or not, he was down in Argentina with a lady friend, following up on an encounter established during a state-funded economic-development trip. "She's no lady; she's an economical female contact."

I liked a joke from the senator John Kerry, whom we don't normally imagine as the funniest celebrity in the US: "Too bad, if a governor had to go missing, it couldn’t have been the governor of Alaska. You know, Sarah Palin." Meanwhile, we are told that Sanford's dear old mother is praying for him, whereas Sanford's wife didn't give a screw about where he might have been. "Don't pray for me, Argentina." As for Sanford himself, he has promised his electors to reimburse the cost of his fact-finding mission to the land of Evita Peron.

As I said, the common feature of these three trivial happenings is that each one could only ever have occurred in the land where it did in fact take place. Can you imagine Kevin Rudd disappearing for a week in Bali, say, with a mysterious local lass? Or Sarkozy getting into trouble because a friend gave him an old 2-horsepower Citroën? Or Obama renting a palace in Las Vegas to make a down-to-earth policy statement? Who are the idiots who claim that the world has become a more uniform place, where everything's the same?

Work of art signed Tineke

I often mention my friends and Choranche neighbors Tineke Bot and Serge Bellier, creators of the magnificent Rochemuse floral park. Here's a photo of the couple that I took ten days ago, when they invited me to a delightful restaurant, Chez Brun, on the banks of the Isère:

I'm so backward from a social viewpoint that I wasn't even aware that this fine restaurant existed on the river bank, just alongside the road to Romans. The outdoor terrace, shaded by a pair of huge trees—a lime and a plane—is so close to the bottle green waters of the Isère that you could almost go fishing between dishes. And there's a lovely old-fashioned suspension bridge just a few meters upstream, with the Vercors mountains in the background.

Let me get around to a visual presentation of Tineke's latest work of art: a plate of home-made French macaroons.

You might ask: How come this celebrated Dutch sculptress is baking cookies, and offering them to you as a gift?

Well, it all started a fortnight ago when I showed Tineke an irresistible book I had just bought, with "easy" recipes for making macaroons. When I say "irresistible", what I mean is that everybody in France loves macaroons, and everybody knows that they're terribly expensive to buy in top-quality cake shops. So, it's naturally very tempting to discover a nice little book that claims to provide you with the secret of making macaroons in a few easy lessons.

The truth of the matter is that, even with the magic book and all the right ingredients and kitchen devices (including an electronic thermometer), making macaroons remains a highly difficult challenge. My initial results, a month ago, were edible, but not exactly glorious: not sufficiently spectacular, in any case, to merit a blog article. But Tineke's macaroons are a different kettle of fish. She seems to have cracked the secret. As far as I'm concerned, the basic secret is clear: Authors who write books claiming to tell you how "easy" it is to bake macaroons are basically fabulists who should try their hand at writing fairy-tales for kids. Well, no, they shouldn't... because they're no doubt already earning a fortune (enough to purchase gastronomical macaroons in an expensive cake shop) through their recipe books.

Tineke claims that she detected a malicious gleam in my eye, a fortnight ago, when I said to her: "Tineke, you're an artist. Why don't you read this little book and try your hand at making macaroons?" The difference between the artist and me, needless to say, is that Tineke succeeded... and the outcome is truly delicious.