Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Prince Bonkers

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. And when in Saudi Arabia, put on a costume that makes you look like a desert chief.


When my sister Jill and her family visited me recently, she told me she admires the behavior and style of the future British king. To my Cartesian mind, Charles Windsor has always been quaintly bonkers. And I have the impression that it’s getting worse as he grows older.

An idea that has just sprung into my mind. I think it would be nice if His Royal Highness were to go out to Australia (a land he knows well), strip down to his underpants and participate in a corroboree dance with Aborigines up in Arnhem Land.


He would simply have to take elementary jockstrap precautions to make sure that the royal jewels don’t bounce around too visibly in the red dust.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Primroses popping up at Gamone

Every year, in February, I look forward to the first primroses, harbingers of spring. Well, they started to appear here a few days ago.


It has certainly been an amazingly mild winter at Choranche, with little snow and no freezing weather whatsoever. On the other hand, there has been a lot of rain and several days of strong winds. I certainly appreciated the luxurious presence of my new wood-burning stove, combined with the convenience of my recently-constructed woodshed. Not surprisingly, since the stove burns almost constantly, my woodshed is already half-empty (or half-full for optimists like myself). Fortunately, in a place such as Gamone, acquiring firewood is not a problem.


I certainly can’t complain about recent meteorological conditions here on the edge of the Vercors. Elsewhere in France, particularly in Brittany, there have been tempests and flooding. Christine and François had the impression, for a week or so, that they were being struck by a new tempest every day.

Talking about things popping up like primroses, what are those two brand-new wooden boxes that have suddenly appeared alongside the doorstep of my house?


There must be some kind of an explanation…

Crazy creationists

The short video that you’re about to see provides a brilliant condensed summary of the absurdities of creationism. The opening interview says it all. A guy has the nerve to look us straight in the eye and declare that, if the Bible told him that 2 + 2 = 5 then he would believe it immediately, without asking questions. That’s to say, in that fellow’s fuzzy warped mind, the alleged “word of God” is more powerful than human reason and intelligence. To call a spade a spade, he’s a crackpot, a blithering basket case, a moron.


Then there’s Australia’s gift to the USA: Ken Ham.


I reckon that our nation should make some kind of formal apology (like Kevin Rudd's reconciliation with the Aborigines) for dumping this dumb bugger on our friendly American allies. But the truth of the matter is that countless citizens of God’s Own Country probably see Ham as cute and brilliant. In any case, I would think that most Americans are adults, and we should be able to trust them to take care of themselves.

The person who gave me a laugh is the fat slob who rambled on about humans having been made in God’s image.


The poor sad bastard surely sees himself as a glorious replica of the Godhead: the fourth musketeer, just after the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. I have a comical vision of him dragging his massive body out of bed in the morning and admiring himself in the mirror while shaving. He probably imagines sincerely that he’s looking at a latter-day cousin of Jesus himself. An ugly case of the deity with diabetes, Christ with cholesterol…

It’s the believer in divine arithmetic who worries me most: the “2 + 2 = 5” fuckwit. If ever this fellow were to have a dream in which an angel told him to take a knife and sacrifice his child, there’s a good chance that there would soon be blood.

POST SCRIPTUM: Looking back over the faces in this blog post, and the whole content of the video, I’m struck by the wide-eyed regards and the on-camera presence of these various mixed-up individuals. Although I can’t claim to have ever met up personally with lobotomized patients in old-fashioned psychiatric wards, and even less so with zombies, all the individuals who appear in this delightful little video belong to a category that I’m inclined to label (facetiously, I admit) as “lobotomized zombies”. They seem to have been struck by a blinding light—the “light of God”, of course—that has seemingly destroyed many of their neurones and affected adversely both their vision and their power of speech. In the style of the pathological criminals we often see in crime documentaries on TV, they mumble empty and alarming “explanations” that are devoid of any logical structure or intellectual rigour. I’m aware that the superficial adjective I’m about to employ is terribly ill-defined (like the individuals themselves), but I would say that all these people are, to a greater or lesser degree, mentally sick.

Pickering village flooded

My future great-grandfather William John Pïckering [1843-1914] left London for the Antipodes aboard the Zealandia in 1860, at the age of 17. He got off the ship in Auckland, New Zealand, where he ended up working as a surveyor, planning the layout of the future great city. It wasn’t until a couple of decades later that he decided to step across to Australia, where he purchased an outback sheep property, got married to a local girl, and raised a large family.


Meanwhile, his youngest brother, John Edward Latton Pïckering [1851-1926], remained in London, where he became a librarian at the law courts known as the Inner Temple. He seems to have led a sophisticated existence, residing in an elegant old house called Cedar Cottage in Datchet, on the opposite side of the Thames to Windsor Castle.


Over the last few days, this lovely old village has been on the front page of British news because of the severe flooding.





It was in Datchet that we saw images of the two princes, William and Harry, manipulating sandbags alongside their military comrades.



For a long time, I liked to imagine that my great-grandfather had immigrated to a harsh Down Under environment that provided me with the title of my genealogical writings: They Sought the Last of Lands. Meanwhile, I had the impression that his young brother led a relatively cosy existence in Datchet, enhanced by his unexpected decision to get involved in a bigamous union with a parson’s daughter from Chelsea, enabling them to create a family of five offspring.

Today, I’m no longer sure about the relative environmental harshness of the two places: the dusty plains of  Currabubula Station out beyond Tamworth, or the submerged banks of the Thames.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Darwin Day


This year’s sunny Darwin Day at Gamone seems like the first day of spring… but I might well be a little over-optimistic.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Ugly image

I’ve tweeted my disgust (a drop in the ocean) of this ugly depiction of the victims of an earthquake in the Philippines, which has just received a Picture of the Year award.


To obtain such an award, all you need (apart from a good camera and good lighting) is a bunch of miserable victims, with a long-haired muscly hulk in the foreground, and a mysterious assortment of primitive objects such as Christian crosses and statues. The cunning photographer is banking on the combined human tragedy of poverty, ignorance and naked disaster... with a carefully-chosen background and setting.

As I said in my tweet, this kind of superficial photo-journalism—totally fake and arty—makes me want to vomit. I despise the would-be talents of the arty arsehole who created this nauseating image.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

On the far side of the cover

This is my final cover design for the family history of my mother’s people in Australia, which is about to be published by Gamone Press in the form of a 266-page hard-cover book in Royal Octavo format (15.6 cm wide and 23.4 cm high) with a laminated cover:

Click to enlarge

Readers with an idea of all that is involved in book publishing will be aware that, behind such a simple layout, there are many technical and editorial issues. Then there’s the question, on the back cover, of how a 73-year-old author of a family-history book might refer to himself. As you can see, for the circumstances, I’ve become Waterview “Billy”.

Does such a personage still exist today… or is the present-day old-timer (and blogger) at Gamone named William Skyvington a totally different individual? That’s an interesting and indeed profound philosophical question. To my mind, “Billy” still exists… but in a ferociously new-born fashion, where almost all the Jacarandas and bendy bridges behind him have been burnt.

A single marvelous tree remains. In fact, a frail sapling. A mythical female phantom. I shall refer to her forever, simply (in any case, I never knew her name), as the girl in the fawn dress. Once upon a time, I caught a glimpse of her as I was waiting for the school bus in South Grafton. She was an angel. Unbelievably beautiful, but ethereal and untouchable, beyond the bounds of my contacts. She was a Catholic kid: a pupil of the school run by the nuns of South Grafton. In my mind, there has always been a photographic image of the house where she lived. It was the humble abode of Mary. It was unthinkable, of course, that I might ever dare to knock on that door. Meanwhile, I have spent my life searching for her. The girl in the fawn dress...

Saturday, February 1, 2014

My childhood Eden

As a boy on the rural outskirts of South Grafton, I lived just a stone’s throw away from a pristine paradise: Susan Island, a luxuriant rain-forest Garden of Eden in the middle of the broad and fast-flowing Clarence River.


I was reminded of my childhood Eden by this image displayed by the wonderful Gallica website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France:

Click to enlarge

Susan Island was the ancient home place of a gigantic colony of fruit bats, whose daily excursions (from where to where, I never knew, nor for what reasons?) filled the twilight sky over Waterview with a dark moving cloud. The zoologist Richard Dawkins would have been enchanted—as was I—by this mass movement in the sky.

The Big River flowed just a few hundred yards behind our house in Waterview. Here’s a photo of a family fishing excursion in 1951:


That’s Don on the left, I’m in the middle, Dad’s in the background and Anne and Susan are on the right. I think we were aware that we were being photographed, because we’ve more-or-less struck up poses. We used earthworms as bait. Don and Anne, with bamboo rods, fished for slender Southern Garfish [Hyporhamphus melanochir], which were full of bones but very tasty.


Dad and I, using hand-held lines, were hoping to catch a big Spangled Perch [Leiopotherapon unicolor].


You can see Susan Island—the sleeping ground of the fruit bats—in the background of the fishing photo. But we local residents rarely went there (even though it was easy to find rowing boats), because our island paradise was in fact cursed by a terrible event that had occurred in its vicinity (on the Grafton side) just before Christmas 1943: the drowning of 13 kids who were Cub members of the local Boy Scouts. Not long after this tragedy, I myself would become an active member of this youth organization, and I would never think twice about my drowned forebears. That’s the terrible thing about explicit historical tales. They persuade the living that they belong to the past, and that nothing of their likes will ever reoccur. For me, as a child, the Cubs were drowned… and that’s all I knew about this ancient affair, which ended up irritating me, like a constantly reoccurring news film (without images).

Of the 13 victims, 9 were buried side by side in the South Grafton cemetery.


Today, we have images of their ugly concrete and tiled graves.


Meanwhile, we never see pictures of the tombs of their 4 comrades in Grafton. So much the better. It’s all so sadly desolate, like the memorial on the banks of the Clarence in Grafton, erected through the efforts of a sympathetic police constable named Alan Dahl, mayor of Grafton: a family friend who once taught me the elements of photography.


There’s a recent article on this tragedy in The Daily Examiner [display].

Today, jolted into a state of reminiscences and meditation by the French image of fruit bats, I simply wish to list, once again, in alphabetical order—in the admirable Israeli style that consists of naming out loud their hallowed victims—the drowned Cubs of December 1943. [A precise name is enough, as it were. In Jewish mysticism, a name is often considered to be no less significant than the entity it designates. Many Jews refer to God, for example, as ha Shem : "the name".] In fact, half-a-dozen surnames are those of young siblings or cousins of the victims who went to school with me in South Grafton.

Graeme John Corbett (8), son of John Corbett of 32 Bent Street, South Grafton.

William Robert Dillon (8), son of Frederick R. Dillon of 104 Ryan Street, South Grafton. William was the only son.

Cecil George Lambert (8), son of George Lambert of 90 Hoof Street, Grafton. Cecil’s father was on active service.

Raymond Arthur Morris (8), son of Keith Morris of 127 Ryan Street, South Grafton.

Brian Leonard Munns (9), son of Leonard Munns of 43 Bright Street, Street, South Grafton. Brian’s father was the Deputy Mayor of South Grafton.

Keith James Rennie (8), son of William Rennie of 130 Hoof Street, Grafton. Keith’s father was a munitions worker.

Robert Alexander Rennie (10), brother of the above-mentioned victim.

Edmund James Retchford (8), son of George Retchford of 16 Mary Street, Grafton. Edmund was their only child.

Alvin Adrian Leo Spicer (10), son of Bert Spicer of 193 Ryan Street, South Grafton. When the tragedy occurred, Alvin’s father was apparently on his way home from the AWC in the Northern Territory.

Richard John Steinhour (8), son of George Henry Steinhour and Lillian Margaret of 29 Abbott Street, South Grafton. Richard’s father was a returned digger of World War II.

Dale William Thorsborne (10), son of William August Thorsborne and Iris Sylvia Doris of 106 Ryan Street, South Grafton. Dale was the only child.

Allan Crawford Tobin (9), son of Raymond Tobin of 27 Abbott Street, South Grafton. His father was on active service in New Guinea. Allan had joined the cubs on 8 October 1943.

Robert Walter Wilkes (10), son of Reginald Wilkes of Kelly Street, South Grafton.

There’s no point in mentioning the names of the older fellows who were supposed to be taking care of the Cubs. Meanwhile, the paradise of Susan Island continues to raise its ominous head above the mighty waters of the Clarence. And the squeals of the fruit bats are the music of Eden.


The tragic outing of the Cubs, although totally elucidated, remains in my mind as a kind of mysterious Big River Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Amazon lists my novel

There’s no doubt about it: my novel All the Earth is Mine is now available through Amazon like any ordinary book… and probably right throughout the world (at least, wherever Amazon is accessible).

Click to enlarge

This proves conclusively that my self-publishing adventure has become a concrete reality, and that Gamone Press is indeed an operational publishing house.

The next title to be published by Gamone Press will be A Little Bit of Irish — My Mother's People in Australia.

BREAKING NEWS: A Google search for the expression ALL THE EARTH IS MINE carried out on my home computer here at Gamone (which probably behaves differently to other machines and Internet contexts throughout the planet) brings up a dozen or so references to Exodus (which has always been a top-of-the-charts book, for as long as I remember) followed by links to the present blog post and other stuff related to my novel. I'm up there with the best authors. Watch out, Yahveh, here I come!

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Nice fellow

The more I hear about the encounters of Pope Francis with the modern world, the more I get the impression that this nice fellow (an exceptional compliment in the papal domain) is acquiring inexorably and rapidly the status of a Silly Old Bugger. That’s to say, programmed to lead the existence of a high-ranking Catholic robot, he’s evolving successfully. In any case, Frankie Boy, welcome to the club!


The US magazine Time put a grinning photo of him on their cover, naming him Man of the Year 2013.


Then Rolling Stone presented him on their cover as a “pope star”.


Finally, the Vatican itself (obviously brain-damaged) posted a tweet with a graffiti image of Frankie as Superman.


It's time for somebody to teach him to sing, and to write a song for him, so that the silly old guy can get around to showing himself off on YouTube. Meanwhile, I remain struck by Frankie’s words about the spirit of curiosity, spoken in a homily, three months ago, at the Casa Santa Marta chapel. Here's how Vatican Radio and The Catholic World Report of 14 November 2013 informed us of Frankie’s feelings on this fabulous theme of curiosity… which, to my mind, is the basis of science and philosophy, not to mention human life and love:
The spirit of curiosity distances us from the Spirit of wisdom because all that interests us is the details, the news, the little stories of the day. … And the spirit of curiosity is not a good spirit. It is the spirit of dispersion, of distancing oneself from God, the spirit of talking too much. And Jesus also tells us something interesting: this spirit of curiosity, which is worldly, leads us to confusion.”
Curiosity, the Pope continued, impels us to want to feel that the Lord is here or rather there, or leads us to say: “But I know a visionary, who receives letters from Our Lady, messages from Our Lady”. And the Pope commented: “But look, Our Lady is the Mother of everyone! And she loves all of us. She is not a postmaster, sending messages every day.”
Such responses to these situations, he affirmed, “distance us from the Gospel, from the Holy Spirit, from peace and wisdom, from the glory of God, from the beauty of God.”
“Jesus says that the Kingdom of God does not come in a way that attracts attention: it comes by wisdom.”
“‘The Kingdom of God is among you,’ said Jesus, and it is this action of the Holy Spirit, which gives us wisdom and peace. The Kingdom of God does not come in (a state of) confusion, just as God did not speak to the prophet Elijah in the wind, in the storm (but) he spoke in the soft breeze, the breeze of wisdom.”
“The Kingdom of God is among us: do not seek strange things, do not seek novelties with this worldly curiosity.”
Yes, there’s no doubt about it. A superbly unscientific Silly Old Bugger. Maybe he's a nice fellow... but Man of the Year, Superman, my arse!

Monday, January 27, 2014

Longest European train ever

I suggest that you start the following video immediately. 


Like many people, I love to watch trains go past. I hope you share with me this passion. The merit of the above video is that the pleasure of watching this train go by is made to last for over a quarter of an hour. Your first view of the approaching train is a tiny white dot at the far end of the empty line on the left-hand side of the video. It only appears after you're about a minute and 20 seconds into the video. So stay calm, and wait. You'll recognize it as soon as it appears. Then the dot turns into a whitish blob, and the blob starts to get bigger and bigger. It's terribly exciting, but you've got to be patient.

When the train was in full view, I even had time to go downstairs and make myself a coffee… and, when I got back to my computer screen, the train was still going past. It’s the longest train in French railroad history, or something like that. That’s a great kind of a record, n’est-ce pas ?

I bet that strongmen are already contacting the French railway authorities, hoping to get into the famous Guinness book by showing that they can drag this train with their bare hands and arms over a distance of so many metres. That would be another great kind of a record.

Aussies are always going on about the length of their road trains on Outback roads.


But I reckon they wouldn’t get anywhere near the length of the French train.

Now, if ever you were bored, you don’t have to watch the video right up until the end. If you’re thinking of hitting the stop button, I can tell you what happens later on in the video. Nothing at all ! The train simply keeps on moving past.

POST SCRIPTUM: My son François Skyvington phoned to express certain doubts concerning this train video. In particular, he felt that neither the train nor the products being hauled appeared to be French. So, I’m inserting a few items of information that I discovered on the excellent websites of French TV and Challenge Nouvel Observateur.



The train seen in the video was 1.5 kilometres long and it weighed 4000 tons. As such, it was the longest train that has ever existed up until now in Europe. The experimental excursion whose departure is presented in the video took place on January 18, 2014. The departure was Lyon (Rhône) and the destination Nîmes (Gard). The train was composed by linking together two normal trains, each of a length of 750 metres and with its own pair of locomotives. (This kind of linkage is a standard operation in the case of TGV trains.) For the experimental run seen in the video, this linkage was carried out in a railroad freight zone named Sibelin, on the outskirts of Lyon.

In my title, I've replaced the adjective "French" by "European". The project, named Marathon, is not purely French, but European, guided by the European Commission and involving 16 financial partners. In the experimental train shown in the video, you may have noticed the presence of two French-made Alstom electric locomotives and two German-made Vossloh diesel locomotives. For this first experiment, as my observant son noticed, the rolling stock (wagons and goods) was indeed German, made available by the Kombiverkehr company.

In normal operational circumstances, train-watchers won’t have the luxury of spending a quarter of an hour admiring such a long train, because their cruising speed will be about 100 km/hour. At level crossings, drivers will therefore be held up for an extra 30 seconds. So, make the most of your opportunity to admire the above video. Viewing conditions won’t always be so leisurely once these trains become operational in a few years’ time.

Meanwhile, I thank my son for his keen observations and feedback.

Must change my thinking

In a split second of intense revelation, I was stunned by an amazing video produced by Infinite Circularity Ministries. It convinced me that I must change my thinking.


It’s a fabulous package deal. Every New Believer gets a wonderful free gift: a lovely colorful image of Saraswati (hope I've got the name right).


The message reached me in the nick of time (thanks to a tweet from Richard Dawkins). Up until then, funnily enough, I had been thinking seriously about contacting my Canadian cousins to ask them how I might become a Freemason.

Click to enlarge

I’m still not quite sure about whether we’re allowed to mix together all of this stuff... but I would imagine that it's feasible, mystically speaking.

Friday, January 24, 2014

Chimpanzee returns to the jungle

This moving video contains amazing moments of tenderness between the chimpanzee Wounda, about to be released in the Congo jungle, her carer Rebecca Atencia and Jane Goodall.

Monday, January 20, 2014

Celebrated Dutch painter of Pont-en-Royans

Bob ten Hoope [1920-2014]

One of the most interesting individuals I encountered when I came to live in Choranche in 1994 was the Dutch painter Bob ten Hoope, who had decided to set up his home in Pont-en-Royans back in 1954. In the beginning, I was impressed by his sketches of men playing cards in a local café.



But I soon learned that this was a small domain of his work, which encompassed large oil paintings of nudes and many local landscapes.


It was through her friendship with Bob ten Hoope that the sculptor Tineke Bot discovered this region, and decided to settle down in Choranche.

                        — photo by Roger Latton [2013]

The last time I saw Bob, maybe a decade ago, he had set up his easel and painting material on the Rouillard Bridge, just down the road from my place. He was already afflicted with arthritis in his hands, making it extremely difficult for him to carry on painting. Finally, he decided to move back up to his native land.



And that is where he died, last Saturday, 18 January 2014.

Gamone has been Google-mapped

I’ve just discovered, by chance, that Google Maps apparently carried out a street-view operation at Gamone in May 2013. Here’s the road leading up to my house:

Click to enlarge

Here’s a panoramic view of my house:


The Google vehicle carried on up the road to my neighbors’ house. There’s a nice view of the Cournouze seen from a point just below Jackie’s house:

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Cover for my book on paternal genealogy

I’ll soon be needing a cover image for They Sought the Last of Lands, which describes the paternal dimension of my family history. Here’s a possible maquette:


For the moment, I’m not convinced that this maquette is good. My choice of the theme of wild horses in the Australian Outback (an image that belongs to Les Hiddins and ABC Books) evokes, above all, my grandfather’s childhood dream of leaving London and finding freedom in the Australian bush. Meanwhile, I've contacted ABC Books in the hope of obtaining a high-resolution file of this image.

We’ll see. All suggestions are welcomed. I plan to bring out this title at Gamone Press as soon as possible, shortly after the publication of A Little Bit of Irish.

POSTSCRIPT: I'm aware that a talented graphics artist (highly paid) would solve rapidly my cover-design challenge. But a professional operation of that kind would propulse me out of the self-publishing field, and disrupt the whole friendly common-sense idea of producing and distributing a family-history document without falling into the trap of paying a fortune to vanity-press printers. Please accept my amateurism!

My mother's birthday

I must admit that I tend to talk and think as if everybody in the universe has been enthralled by Kurt Vonnegut [1922-2007] in general and his eye-opening novel Deadeye Dick (1983) in particular. Maybe they have, and I simply haven’t noticed…


Employing Vonnegut talk, I celebrate today the fact that the peephole of my dear mother Enid Kathleen Walker [1918-2003] opened exactly 96 years ago, on January 19, 1918. Here’s a lovely studio portrait of Kath when she was two years old:


If ever it could be said that one’s date of birth is “chosen” (how, and by whom?), then the least I can say is that the occult forces of the universe chose a crazy date for the opening of my mother’s peephole, in the year of the end of the Great War. I find it fascinating to be able to throw a simple argument at Google, such as the date of my mother’s birth [display], and to discover everything that was happening at that moment in the past.

In the posthumous celebration of my mother’s birthday, the best man at the party is surely Wikipedia. And all I can hope is that he’ll be constantly in attendance at my own future birthday celebrations…

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Gamone panorama

My English cousin Roger Latton (on my paternal Pickering line) came to visit me last summer, with his wife Sue. An excellent photographer, he has just sent me this splendid panoramic image of the Bourne Valley at the level of Gamone, taken from the Croix de Toutes Aures (a spot just above my property):

Click to enlarge
On the left, there’s a corner of the cliffs of Presles. In the middle, the Cournouze promontory is crowned by clouds. On the right, the Bourne Valley is closed by the twin mountains of the Barret and the Trois-Châteaux. This is surely the most spectacular photo of my corner of the world that I've ever seen. Bravo, cousin Roger!