Garden flowers are back

I'm pleased to discover that I haven't lost a single rose or peony plant since I planted them in 2009. This year, the Gay Paree is splendid, and doesn't appear to be bothered by its position alongside a giant rose bush and a clump of lavender (neither of which are flowering yet).

The Princess Margaret is thriving, but its huge flowers are weighted down by all the recent wetness. (Please disregard all the vegetation in the aisles between the plots, which I haven't had an opportunity of removing.)

On the opposite side of my garden, the Manou Meilland is a rose reflection of the peonies.

But the most glorious flower of all, at this time of the season, is the Don Quichotte, whose aroma is intense.

A month or so ago, in a quite heavy-handed manner, I cut away all the climbing rose branches protruding from the top of the pergola. Today, they've all sprouted even more abundantly.

It's a bit like a scruffy-haired boy whose mother needs to send him to the barber. Notice, on the left, the first small red blossoms of Albertine, whose stalks are also reddish.

Amazing American shit

It's nice and reassuring for an Antipodean European such as me to realize that we can look in on US weirdies as if we were visiting a sociological zoo, housing endangered species, without being expected to feed any of the inmates, let alone call upon funds to nourish them. Here's video testimony concerning an excellent specimen in the crazy American zoo, the pastor Charles Worseley, who considers that gays and lesbians should be herded together into a camp and left to die off.

Nice nasty stuff, to say the least...

Is the Bible good English literature?

I'm surprised — amused, not irritated—to find Richard Dawkins arguing in favor of the idea that the King James Bible is "a great work of literature", deserving a place in the libraries of UK state schools.

We get a better grasp of Dawkins's motivations (likes and dislikes) through his comments concerning the famous words of Ecclesiastes 1:2 evoking the absurd emptiness and fleeting futility of our human existence: "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity." Countless members of my generation in the English-speaking world have been struck by those Biblical words—now replaced, in modern translations, by more down-to-earth terms—but it's not at all certain that we've all understood what the speaker was really saying. In any case, this sentence cannot be looked upon as a sample of fine expression, neither in modern English nor even in old-fashioned words.

First, the all-important word "vanity" means little more these days than excessive and foolish pride in oneself. Admittedly, the expression "in vain" starts to hint at what the unidentifiable speaker (named Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes and, incidentally, not at all a "preacher" in the modern sense of this word) was saying: namely, that our existence is vaporous, a brief gust of wind. Indeed, the Hebrew term הֲבֵל (havel) signifies "a breath". It is not by mere coincidence that this same word appears in Genesis as the name of the first human being to die: Abel, slain by his brother Cain.

The expression "vanity of vanities" is not ordinary English, but we end up understanding what the Bible seems to be saying. In Hebrew, havel havelim (literally "breath of breaths") is a superlative form that might be translated literally as "ultimate vaporousness". In other words, in the context of all that might be thought of as vaporous, Qoheleth evokes a supreme instance, like the terminal value in calculus of a function, expressed as the sum of a series of increasingly-infinitesimal elements, when the number of summations approaches infinity.

In the line of the King James Bible that Dawkins appreciates, the presence of the archaic form "saith" of the verb "to say" is hardly a sign of great English. It's rather obsolete English. Consequently, I can't help wondering whether Dawkins might not be making a donnish attempt to pull our legs when he evokes the alleged literary greatness of the King James Bible.

The explanation, I believe, is more subtle. In the '50s, for the youth named Richard Dawkins, as for me, the "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" declaration was a kind of absurdist slogan, on a par with other attractive existentialist nonsense such as Sartre's "Hell is other people". It conveyed the charming image of frocked but befuddled archbishops (we were Anglicans) who paraded like peacocks, and tried vainly to adjust their faith to science. We liked this kind of language, because we sensed that it was dynamite, and we soon set about investigating its supposed profundity and ramifications.

In the case of Richard Dawkins, the former Anglican lad, a latter-day Qoheleth, metamorphosed into a poet of science, hit upon a fantastic new way of saying that "all is vanity", that we were struck by the fleeting breath of awareness:

The Universe could so easily have remained lifeless and simple -- just physics and chemistry, just the scattered dust of the cosmic explosion that gave birth to time and space. The fact that it did not -- the fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved literally out of nothing -- is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice. And even this is not the end of the matter. Not only did evolution happen: it eventually led to beings capable of comprehending the process, and even of comprehending the process by which they comprehend it.
                                       — The Ancestor's Tale  2005  p 613

Yes, Richard, we must honor the King James Bible. It's an indirect way of honoring your fabulous intellectual path and quest.

Now, were you really serious about promoting the presence of antiquated religious documents in UK school libraries? Or were you joking? And what about Shakespeare?

Turing, that unknown

In a month's time, the computing world will be celebrating the centenary of Alan Turing, who was born in London on 23 June 1912.

Much mystery still surrounds the life and work of this great Englishman, who can truly be considered as the founder of computer science. He designed a marvelous computing device that soon became known as the Turing Machine. It's so powerful and precise that it can perform any calculation whatsoever, no matter how complex, including those that are carried out today by the giant supercomputers used in space engineering, military calculations or meteorological predictions. My book Machina Sapiens, published in 1976, offered French readers (no doubt for the first time ever) a drawing of a Turing Machine, accompanied by demonstrations of how it worked.

But I don't have the impression that anybody went out and actually built such a machine... to handle his office accounting, say. In fact, although a simple Turing Machine can indeed perform any of the computations executed by a modern computer, I have to be truthful and point out that I wouldn't advise anybody to get involved in trying to use a Turing Machine to build a spreadsheet, say, or to carry out some word processing. And I'm even less certain that a Turing Machine would be an efficient tool for tweeting, or sending e-mails, or linking up to Facebook. The problem, you see, is that Turing Machines have to be programmed from scratch, and even the simplest tasks—such as the multiplication of two numbers—would represent a huge programming challenge. What's more, I'm not sure that anybody has ever bothered to actually build an operational Turing Machine. Like the model that illustrated my book, Turing Machines tend to remain on paper, on the pages of textbooks for computer science students.

So, why all the fuss about Alan Turing having invented a machine that is the grand-daddy of all computers, past, present and future? Well, it's a bit like Einstein's E = mC2. This simple equation was the key to understanding that matter can be transformed into energy. But, between understanding the equation and being able to obtain energy from a nuclear reactor, a lot of hard work needs to be carried out. You might say poetically that the Turing Machine defines the "soul" of any imaginable computer in the real world. But, to move from the abstract "soul" to a real "flesh and blood" computer, you have to envisage a huge amount of design, engineering and programming... of both a hardware and a software kind.

Funnily enough, although the Turing Machine can indeed carry out any imaginable task that might be performed by modern computers, it's greatest interest was that it enabled Turing and other logicians to discover that certain tasks could never be carried out by any imaginable computer whatsoever. For example, it is impossible for a computer to determine beforehand, when faced with certain algorithms, that it will indeed be able to reach the intended end of the algorithm and provide an answer. In this way, the Turing Machine appeared on the scene as a mechanical variant of the themes of incompleteness and undecidability elucidated mathematically by Kurt Gödel (seen in the following photo alongside Albert Einstein):

Gödel was still alive in the early '70s when I was visiting the USA in order to organize my future series of TV programs on the subject of men and machines (basically, artificial intelligence and brain research). I spoke on the phone with Gödel for 20 minutes or so, trying vainly to get him to agree to being interviewed for my TV project. But he insisted—no doubt sincerely—that he himself did not consider that his theorems had any significance whatsoever in modern society... that's to say, at the level of ordinary folk who watch TV. Maybe he was right.

Getting back to Turing, his most concrete claim to fame was surely the wizard-level code-breaking operations that he performed for the British government during World War II, at Bletchley Park.

He was a practicing homosexual at a time in the UK when relationships of this kind were branded as criminal. The poor man, suffering no doubt from a form of autism (Asperger Syndrome) that made him socially awkward, was obliged to undergo ignominious chemical castration. In June 1954, a fortnight before his 42nd birthday, Turing was found dead in his laboratory, poisoned by cyanide, and clutching a half-eaten apple.

A British journalist once asked Steve Jobs if the logo of Apple computer was intended as a tribute to Turing. "No, that's not the case," replied Jobs, "but God, we wish it were."

Sophia's stayin' alive

Over the last week, Sophia has been avoiding all meat-based food including, above all, her customary croquettes. She's surviving on raw eggs, fragments of apple and bits of bread.

Last Friday, I described this situation to the veterinarian, who said that my dog's self-imposed diet was indeed unorthodox, but by no means catastrophic.

These days, since the weather has been warm and dry, I've been encouraging Sophia to spend her nights out on the lawn with Fitzroy, instead of on the kitchen floor (her customary bedroom). If she has an urgent need to urinate or defecate, being outside is convenient (rather than barking to wake me up in the middle of the night, to let her out). Well, when I got up yesterday morning, I was surprised to find that Sophia, for the first time ever, had apparently spent the night as a squatter in Fitzroy's kennel.

This unusual behavior alarmed me in that I couldn't help wondering whether Sophia was maybe searching instinctively for a place in which she might doze off into eternal sleep. Twenty minutes later, she emerged from the kennel, did her business up alongside her familiar track, and promptly took off in the wrong direction, sliding down the grassy slopes through the weeds, and ending up in a spot that was too steep for me to access. She continued her descent, guided by Fitzroy, until she reached the road. Then she decided that it would be a good idea to quench her thirst in the creek and to take a bath in a waterhole. I had to go out of my way to persuade her to stroll back up to the house.

Back home, Sophia chose to take a nap in another unusual setting: on a mound of rocky earth at the far end of the ancient cellar behind the house. Normally, she only goes there on exceptionally hot days... which was not the case yesterday. Later on, she decided to spend some time in the most unusual spot of all: a narrow tunnel dug into the hill behind the house, which I've always imagined as an ancient hiding-place back in the days when the prosperous vineyards of Choranche were often attacked by Protestant bandits. When Sophia emerged from the tunnel, I began to wonder whether my dear dog might be the victim of a sudden onslaught of senility. To rule out the possibility that she might wander off down the road in the early hours of the morning, I decided that it would be wise to attach her to Fitzroy's chain alongside the kennel. Meanwhile, I boarded up the entry to the tunnel.

Yesterday evening, I was so enthralled by a TV show that I didn't even realize that it was raining heavily. When I went outside, around midnight, Sophia had left the kennel and was lying down in the wet grass, totally soaked. I rushed the two dogs into the kitchen, put Sophia onto a cotton sheet to dry her out, and turned on the heating. There was a marvelous moment of complicity as Fitzroy started to lick Sophia's wet fur.

This morning, everything seems to have returned to normal... and Fitzroy is still watching over his old aunt. If the two animals appear to be wet, it's because they had just spent 20 minutes on the slopes, in the rain, while Sophia went about her business. With the rain and mud outside, and all the coming and going, the kitchen floor is like a pigpen... but I can't be worried about that. My only aim, in the immediate future, is to take care of Sophia as best I can.

Once again, Sophia downed three raw eggs for breakfast. I remain worried, of course, by the fact that she's unenthusiastic about any other food. Still I'm relieved that she never whimpers, and does not seem to be in pain. Curiously, her nose hasn't been running at all since yesterday... which might (or might not) be a positive sign.

Bee Gees

After endless health problems (some of which were hereditary), Robin Gibb has finally left us, at the age of 62. During the '60s and '70s, Robin's ethereal voice played a major role in the fascination exerted by the three brothers from the Isle of Man... who migrated to Queensland when they were young boys.

Today, only Barry Gibb survives.

Amazing zomby show

Three psychology researchers (including the Queenslander Matthew Thompson) have hit upon one of the most amazing distortion illusions I've ever seen: http://mbthompson.com/research/

While you're gazing at the cross in the middle of the screen, nothing prevents you from taking a brief glimpse at times, to the left or right, just to make sure that the video creators were not cheating.

The viewer's situation reminds me of what a driver might see when he's traveling at night along a narrow mountain road, with his eyes fixed on the road ahead. This was often the case back in 1993, when I resided for three months at St-Pierre-de-Chartreuse, which is separated from the outside world by a treacherous winding trail through dark gorges, between cliffs and ravines.

I can now understand retrospectively why I often imagined, in the darkness, that I was driving along a mountain road inhabited by the medieval ghosts of Saint Bruno and his fellow monks.

Big day in the USA

Between Barack Obama and François Hollande, an introductory exchange of a few words on the theme of US cheeseburgers and French fries might have been interpreted as a lighthearted evocation of the recently-adopted diet of our new French president, who used to be quite a plump little man.

photo pool/AFP — Philippe Wojazer

Ah, if only international diplomacy could be determined solely by smiles!

Apparently Barack Obama told François Hollande that he wasn't obliged to stand out in the "crowd" of G8 members by continuing to wear a necktie. Hollande explained that the necktie was purely for the French media. Are we really as formal as that in old-fashioned France? It's a fact that one of our new ministers, Cécile Duflot (chief of the Greens), was the object of certain criticism when she turned up in jeans, on Thursday, for the first ministerial meeting at the Elysée Palace.

The following White House photo highlights the rapid ascension of François Hollande into the sacrosanct courtyard of the great:

It makes me feel good to see France represented at last, within this assembly, by a fine solid left-wing Frenchman such as François Hollande... as opposed to our recent tiny twitcher, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Socialism is not a dirty word

We've all heard that black is beautiful. It's time now, for the Anglo-Saxon world, to learn that socialism is not a dirty word. Here in France, in a perfectly democratic manner, socialism has become our political credo.

It would be unimaginable that two great defenders of human values such as Barack Obama and François Hollande might not become instant friends, on the same wavelength.

Meanwhile, idiots in my native Antipodes might continue to believe that socialism is the political philosophy behind the welfare state, which encourages so-called bludgers, as opposed to early birds and hard workers who strive mindlessly for decades to amass the tiny nest egg that will take care of their old days. In this perspective, my impression of Aussie "political philosophy" has not changed over the half-century since I left my native land. It's hopelessly dumb!

Comments widget unavailable, replaced by another gadget

For ages, I had a widget in the right-hand column that highlighted recent comments. Recently this widget seemed to break down, and I haven't been able to find any kind of operational version. So, I've replaced it by an amusing widget that highlights the most popular blog posts. It's not obvious why people visit those particular blog posts rather than others.

Day of socialist symbols

I was thrilled by yesterday's presidential happenings. To start the ball rolling at the Elysée Palace, viewers saw Nicolas Sarkozy wearing high heels like those on cowboy boots, producing the impression that he was as tall as his wife Carla Bruni, not to mention the new president. Since Sarkozy always walks with the gait of a roughrider who has just picked himself up after being thrown off a rodeo buckjumper, the global effect was comical.

After the inaugural ceremony, François Hollande was driven up the Champs-Elysées in an open-top Citroën described as hybrid (running simultaneously on conventional fuel and electricity). For the rain gods hovering over the City of Light, this was too good an opportunity to miss. Viewers had excellent closeup views of the wetness extending over the head and shoulders of the newly-elected president. When he got out of his Citroën to "reanimate" the flame above the tomb of the Unknown Warrior under the Arc de Triomphe (technically, it's simply a matter of opening a gas valve to multiply the volume of the flame), Hollande was clearly soaked.

The electoral slogan of François Hollande was "Change is for now". Yesterday, back at the presidential palace, change #1 concerned Hollande's soaked clothes. When he reappeared at a small lunch table in the company of former Socialist prime ministers (Pierre Mauroy, Edith Cresson,  Laurent Fabius and Lionel Jospin), Hollande was dry as a bone.

The first of three major afternoon rendezvous, all highly symbolic, was a wreath-laying ceremony at the foot of the statue of Jules Ferry in the Tuileries park between the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre.

Jules Ferry [1832-1893]

All French children are told that Ferry was the man who invented the republican concept of free and obligatory schooling. Since Hollande has insisted constantly that French youth and education are pillars of his political aspirations, his oration at this place had a high symbolic value. And the rain gods were kind to the mob of school kids who were there to greet the new president.

The second rendezvous, in the Latin Quarter, concerned the great Marie Curie, who might be thought of as the instigator of France's future prowess in the domain of nuclear engineering.

Marie Curie [1867-1934]

At this point in space and time, while Hollande was wandering around alongside the medical research institute, the rain and hail gods decided to get back into action... while crowds of joyous technicians looked down upon the scene from the dry shelter of their laboratories. Change #2, at the town hall in Paris: once again, it was a matter of changing Hollande's soaked clothes.

A marvelous complicity existed between the new president and the Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë, not to mention the crowd of guests invited along to a reception in the vast hall of the Hôtel de Ville. It might be said that delivering an oration in the heart of Paris, inspired by the history of the great city, is an easy task, because there are so many colorful and dramatics themes that can be introduced. It was also an emotional operation. I had the impression that many onlookers were rubbing tears out of their reddened eyes. Me too, for that matter.

François Hollande had already set out towards Germany in a presidential jet when the storm gods intervened once again. The plane was struck by lightning. So, change #3 involved returning to the military airfield on the outskirts of Paris and changing planes.

For François Hollande, if not for France, what a great day of change!

Saving Sophia

Over the last week or so, my lovely 13-year-old dog Sophia has been affected by alarming health problems, and I'm trying desperately to save her.

For ages, she has has been afflicted with a "running nose": that's to say, a daily effusion of greenish mucus from her nostrils, which has never seemed to worry Sophia and which I simply wipe away with absorbent paper. The veterinarian has explained to me that this mucus is no doubt an external symptom of some kind of serious internal problem. Unfortunately, this superficial symptom doesn't indicate automatically any kind of effective medication. And it's a fact that none of the several products suggested by the veterinarian have succeeded in stopping the mucus effusion.

A week or so ago, things became more dramatic when Sophia started to lose her appetite. The veterinarian put her on cortisone tablets, and this seemed to produce a positive reaction. Since yesterday, though, Sophia has refused all food, no matter what appetizing products I've offered her. Worse still, she refuses to eat additional cortisone tablets. So, this evening, I'm terribly anguished...

It's all very well to say that she's an old dog, and that her time is up. Fair enough. But I'll be devastated if and when she goes. Sophia is Gamone, and Gamone is Sophia.

Land

When I was a schoolboy, we were expected to learn an assortment of curious old units of weights and measures. One of the strangest of these obsolete specimens—which came down to Australians as part of our British heritage—was the furlong: a distance of 1/8 of a mile, 220 yards. Initially, the furlong was a medieval term associated with the use of bullocks to plow a field.

The Anglo-Saxon legend is "God Spede ye Plough and send us Korne enow": an invocation to the plow to perform its function efficiently, so as to yield enough corn.

At Waterview in South Grafton, my Walker uncles used a pair of draft horses to plow their land. And their grandfather Charles Walker [1851-1918] was a so-called teamster, in charge of a bullock team that transported timber.

As the original expression "furrow long" suggests, a furlong was the length of a furrow in a plowed field. A wit suggested that, to please nostalgic rural Brits, automobile speeds might be indicated today in furlongs per fortnight. In my native land, the term "furlong" survived in the domain of horse racing, but Australia finally changed to metric distances in 1972.

Over the last week or so, I've been brought back in contact with ancient English units of measure through my work on Skeffington genealogy. Now that I've completed my book whose title is They Sought the Last of Lands [access], I've moved back to the challenge of assembling a greatly-revised version of a document whose new title is Skeffington One-Name Study [access].

It will start with the Norman Conquest and attempt to describe how the patriarchal family from Leicestershire flowed out into several corners of the British Isles, including (in the case of my recent ancestors) Dorset.

Details of the original manor in the settlement of Sceaftinga tûn are available through the Domesday Book, which can now be viewed freely on the web [access]. The settlement is described here on line #6:

The settlement referred to in Domesday (1086) as Sciftitone belonged entirely to King William. It included 12 carucates of plowed land (1440 acres, or some 583 hectares), a mill and 6 square furlongs (24 hectares) of woodland.

I now realize that, before being able to write correctly about the ancient origins of the Skeffington family, I'll need to broaden my technical knowledge, not only of land measures, but of feudalism in general and the old manorial system.

Talking about plowed land, I took this photo today of my neighbor's cousin, who brought his tractor across from Châtelus and spent an hour or so preparing the earth at Gamone for Jackie's vegetable garden.

Thinking back to my childhood in Australia—and my lessons about archaic furlongs, rods, carucates and so forth—I now realize that we were no doubt closer in spirit to the Anglo-Saxon fellow in the drawing at the top of this blog post than to the modern mechanized neighbor in the above photo. Hey, that's a great revelation: I grew up in medieval surroundings!

Eternal Greece

Once upon a time, for ages, I believed that Greece was eternal.

Today, I'm not so sure.

Ever since I left Australia in 1962, I've been in love with this country... to the point of working as a sailor on a Greek tramp steamer, and learning to communicate in Modern Greek.

For ages, I had romantic dreams about the idea of purchasing a property on the island of Tinos, in the vicinity of the ancient Roman Catholic village of Loutra, where I once wandered [evocations] among lost windmills.

Today, for terribly down-to-earth economic reasons, it has become impossible to retain any kind of romantic vision of Greece... maybe for decades to come.

Must we cry? Yes. For the moment, while Europe tries to get adjusted to the realities of the 21st century, that's about all we antiquated philhellenes can do.

Adieu, Sarko

If you happened to be calling upon the French version of Google yesterday, their delightful doodle would have informed you that some kind of electoral event was taking place in France.

And the cover of this morning's Libération would have revealed that an exceptionally normal fellow named François Hollande (yes, these days, being "normal" can, in certain circumstances, be quite exceptional) got elected as the president of the French Republic.

This morning's media reveal the parts of France that are red (leftist) and those that are blue (rightist).

My Isère department (green dot) is part of the red meat in a sandwich between a pack of northern right-wing neighbors (Lyon, Rhône-Alpes, Savoie and Jura) and the lowlands of Provence to the south. It's nice to see that the highlands around Grenoble, and then the vast Alpine territories extending south-east to Italy, are resolutely red.

Future historians are likely to conclude that the Sarkozian episode in France was the outcome of some kind of a political misunderstanding. But the fact that half of France still considers that he was the right man in the right place suggests that our judgment is basically flawed.

Meanwhile, I'm touched by the photo of the victory embrace of the new president and his former wife, Ségolène Royal.

We're all a little sad to think that Ségolène herself was quite close to presidential victory just 5 years ago. Inevitably, many of us will now see Ségolène (a lovely but naive person) as a kind of "shadow first lady".

Red mountain and white blob

This is a recent specimen of a red Cournouze photo (untouched by Photoshop in any way whatsoever), taken from my bathroom window:

[Click to enlarge]

Here, taken on the same day, is a telephoto shot of the white blob in the first photo:

The "blob" is in fact the village of Châtelus. That's their church on the left. The big white building on the right, which shares a common wall with the church, is the municipal office and official residence of the mayor of Châtelus. In fact, since the present mayor has his own house about a kilometer away, the official residence is rented out to ordinary citizens.

Genetic cousins in England today

A couple of months ago, in my blog post titled Ring-ins [display], I evoked the existence of a significant number of out-of-wedlock births among my Dorset ancestors. It goes without saying that my observations were totally devoid of any kind of moralistic dimension. I wasn't scolding posthumously my naughty ancestors for cuddling furtively in the haystacks of Iwerne Courtney and rearing single-parent offspring who carried a surname, Skyvington, which was not in fact that of their biological father.

Cricket ground at Iwerne Courtney (photo David Squire).

My interest in such questions is inspired by two more subtle reasons.

— First, other individuals named Skyvington, living today, are interested in their origins. These people are likely to appreciate my Dorset research into recent Skyvington branches beyond my own direct ancestral line.

— Second, there's the question of our Y chromosomes. Up until now, this subject remains purely theoretical, because I seem to be the only person with a name like Skeffington who has put his Y-chromosome results in the database [access].

Well, a few days ago (on the same day, amazingly, that I heard about the family de Verdun), I was happy to discover that present-day Skyvington individuals in the vicinity of Worcester (named Stephen, Richard, Gary, Robert and Shaun) and Durham (named Robert, John and Graeme) would appear to be authentic genetic cousins, with exactly the same Y chromosome data as me. (For the moment, I don't have the addresses or phone numbers of any of these individuals.) It would be nice if some of these people were to obtain their Y chromosome specifications through, say, the Family Tree DNA company [access]. Incidentally, I believe that the best approach, costwise, is to order a test through the Skeffington group, whose page exists on the Family Tree DNA website.

For readers interested in the precise links between the English Skyvingtons in Worcester/Durham and myself, let me display a couple of genealogical charts. Their ancestor John Skyvington [1857-1901] worked as an agricultural laborer, at the age of 14, in Iwerne Courtney, before becoming a stonemason. But his principal vocation was the army, and he entered the ranks of a distinguished corps: the Royal Horse Artillery. It was no doubt in his role as a dashing mounted trooper that John met up with a young Scottish lady, Jessie Coulie (also spelt as Collie), who became his wife. Later, John was on active service in the Boer War.

Ambush at Sannas Post (Blomenfontein, 1900) by Terence Cuneo.

John is the person mentioned down in the lower left corner of the following chart (where I have retained the baptismal spelling of his surname):

The following chart, of an earlier epoch, mentions John's father George and his elder brother Charles, who was my 3-great-grandfather:

In other words, the couple at the top of this chart, John and Grace, were the most recent common ancestors of the English Skyvingtons in Worcester/Durham and myself.

Getting back to the man who served in the Boer War, there's a family legend concerning the identity of his wife Jessie Coulie. It was said that she was the daughter of a noble family associated with Guthrie Castle near Dundee, and that she was normally destined to wed an equally noble chap from India. To escape this fate, she eloped with John Skivington!

If John's wife never made it to India, his nephew Edwin Skivington (son of the Edwin mentioned in the first chart) ended up there in 1916, as a soldier with the 7th Hampshire Regiment.

A final detail concerning John Skyvington has caused me to meditate upon the quirks of fate. To enter the ranks of the Royal Horse Artillery, John must have been an experienced horseman. And I would imagine that he acquired his skills in that domain as a youth, working as an agricultural laborer in his Dorset village. It appears that John lost his life prematurely through being kicked in the head by a horse. Since it has been said that John was killed in the Boer War, we might imagine that this fatal accident took place in South Africa. But I would suspect that it occurred closer to his home in Somerset, for he was buried in the St Aldhelm's churchyard in Doulting.

Many years later, when I asked my grandfather Ernest Skyvington [1891-1985] why he had been tempted to emigrate to Australia, he told me: "I grew up with romantic ideas of a life connected with horses, cattle and sheep." Living in London, my grandfather looked upon horse-riding as a privilege of the wealthy upper classes, to which he did not belong. Evoking my grandfather's adolescent dream, I have used a splendid photo of horses in Australia on the cover of my paternal genealogical monograph:

If only young Ernest had been brought in contact with his few remaining rural relatives in the West Country, he might have discovered in one way or another, and almost on his doorstep, his mythical universe of horses, cattle and sheep. Instead of that, he sought that world in the Antipodes, in the legendary "last of lands".

They call her a young country, but they lie:

She is the last of lands, the emptiest,

A woman beyond her change of life, a breast

Still tender but within the womb is dry.

Without songs, architecture, history:

The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,

Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,

The river of her immense stupidity

Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.

In them at last the ultimate men arrive

Whose boast is not: ‘we live’ but ‘we survive’,

A type who will inhabit the dying earth.

                                     — A D Hope, Australia

Strauss-Kahn seems to have caught a big fish

When he started to talk surprisingly about a conspiracy theory, Dominique Strauss-Kahn went fishing, for reasons that were not apparent. Well, he seems to have caught immediately a big fish. On the occasion of a public meeting at Clermont-Ferrand, in front of a few thousand supporters, Nicolas Sarkozy declared:

I say to Monsieur Strauss-Kahn: Explain things to the justice and refrain from imposing your comments upon the French. I respect profoundly the presumption of innocence. But, when somebody is accused of what he's accused, he might, with a minimum of dignity, have the modesty to keep quiet, to avoid adding to the indignity. Throughout all those scandalous and shameful episodes—New York, Lille, the Carlton, the Pas-de-Calais—it was honorable on the part of the republican right and the center to not get involved. They didn't exploit these happenings. They plugged their noses and didn't comment upon these happenings, because commenting upon such affairs was as if you "accepted them a little". But, in the middle of the electoral campaign, a week after the first round, when Monsieur Strauss-Kahn starts to give lessons of morality, and indicate that I am the sole person responsible for everything that happened to him, I say that too much is too much!

Well said, Sarko. But you're talking through the top of your hat, and nothing you say proves that there wasn't a conspiracy. Besides, the Sarkozian conception of the principle of presumption of innocence seems to be that everything's fine as long as Sarko himself has not decided personally that the accused individual might be guilty. A twisted interpretation, to say the least.

Personally, I've always believed firmly that there was indeed some kind of DSK conspiracy, whose outlines are impossible to trace yet. The whole idea of a successful conspiracy, after all, is that it should remain as fuzzy as possible for as long as possible. N'est-ce pas ?

Skeffington/Verdun links

Last night, in the excitement of publishing my article about our patriach Bertram de Verdun, I forgot to include a vital element of data: namely, explicit evidence of the existence of a Skeffington/Verdun link. I had mentioned rapidly a celebrated book:

Nichols, John
The History and Antiquities
of the County of Leicester
4 vols (1795–1815) London, Nichols & Son

What was the precise passage in Nichols that mentions explicitly an association between the Skeffingtons and a member of the Verdun family? Here it is (with possible spelling inaccuracies):

In the same year [1273], John lord of Verdun, at his death, held of the king in capite the manors of Cottesbach, Newbold, Skeffington, Tugby, Halifed, Belton, Gracedieu, Sharnford, Bocardescote, Sutton, Naneby, Bariston and Alveton, with their several honours and members; and Theobald de Verdun, his next heir, was then aged 22 years and upwards. This Theobald was afterwards constable of Ireland, and possessed the advowson of Skeffington in 1301, 1310 and 1312.

Here are the arms of the Verdun family:

The expression "in capite" means that, by the laws of England at that time, it was the king himself who gave these manors to John de Verdun. Towards the end of the extract, the term "advowson" indicates the right to recommend a member of the Anglican clergy for a vacant benefice, or to make such an appointment. Clearly, Theobald de Verdun ruled the roost in the village of Skeffington at the start of the 14th century.

Here is the seal of the Verdun family:

But what do we know about the Verdun family earlier on? If a Verdun fellow were so highly placed in the Skeffington village context at the end of the 13th century, then it's highly probable that his ancestors were already there at the time of the Conquest. That's to say, John de Verdun and his son Theobald didn't just appear in the village of Skeffington in the final quarter of the 13th century. Historical facts unmentioned by John Nichols add weight to that conclusion.

Voices from the Socialist past

Throughout the coming week, we can expect some spectacular fireworks (akin to the final five minutes in a yet-undecided rugby match) as Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande move towards the final moment of truth, next Sunday.

Their forthcoming TV debate will be followed by everybody in France. I don't imagine that there'll be a "winner" and a "loser", unless one of the candidates has a fit of madness... which is a perfectly serious possibility that must not be excluded a priori. And, even if one guy succeeded in knocking out his opponent, I'm not sure that this would change French voting opinion enormously. I believe that most people have already made up their minds, and it's Bye-bye Nicolas (along with your glitzy watches, your charming kids and your top-model wife).

The only thing I regret profoundly in the inevitable impending victory of the left is that Sarko was an adept of cycling, whereas Hollande is a dull soccer guy. OK, I'm a cycling snob, but I find it hard to imagine the president François Hollande watching with enthusiasm (necessary madness) a mythical ascension of the Ventoux. Unless Hollande can do something about this weakness (maybe there are training courses in this domain), his incapacity to go crazy about pairs of wheels on mountain slopes could well turn out to be a significant political handicap.

Meanwhile, we've just heard Dominique Strauss-Kahn informing us that his affair in Manhattan was some kind of Sarkozian setup.

Frankly, for the moment, I can't figure out why DSK chose the present crucial moment (between the two rounds of the presidential elections) to make this disturbing revelation. Is there method in his madness? For the moment, it's impossible to say... But who gives a fuck (apart from DSK, who's apparently good at giving that kind of thing)?

As for the opinions of the former presidential candidate Lionel Jospin, they're easier to understand.

Jospin claims that Sarko was using "the weapon of lies" in suggesting that 700 Muslim mosques in France had proclaimed that their flock should vote for François Hollande. Personally, I've never found it difficult to believe, nor even alarming, that Sarko and his friends might be tempted, from time to time, to play around with the truth.

I'm not saying that being a socialist in France today is a permanent cure against telling political lies... but it seems to help at times.