Three quarters of a century old

I'm recovering slowly but surely from a nasty fall, and attempting to master details of writing and blogging that had disappeared totally from my mind.

Tomorrow is my 75th birthday. It's a nice opportunity to attempt to open up Antipodes after this long delay.

An Australian seeks refuge in France

Julian Assange has just written an open letter to French president François Hollande asking to be received in France. Click here to access the French-language version of that letter.

As a French-naturalized Australian-born citizen, I would be immensely happy if the French president were to respond positively to this request for asylum. I’ve always been convinced that Assange is an exceptional and exemplary case of a citizen of the world using his state-of-the-art Internet knowledge, political awareness and imagination in a constant combat, often of a spectacular nature, for the betterment of humanity.

French kids can’t really cope with English

There’s an uproar in France today among baccalauréat students because their English exam expected them to discuss the ways in which a certain fictitious personage managed to cope with the horrors of the bombardment of his village. Apparently hordes of students had simply never encountered the verb “to cope”, and they’re now trying to suggest that this is some kind of exotic or antiquated verb. That’s to say, they’re attempting vainly to drown their ignorance in ridicule.

The funniest thing of all is that “cope” is a variant of the French noun “coup” (a blow dealt to an opponent). So, coping with an obstacle means that you’ve managed to deal it a blow.

I reckon that, back in my native Australia, I must have been about five years old when I mastered the verb “to cope”. That’s what our life Down Under was all about: coping with adversity.

I’m convinced that the main reason why the French run into so many problems in trying to master English is that they find it hard to liberate themselves from the powerful attraction of their own native language. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that French readers, running into the verb “cope”, imagine vaguely that it might mean “écoper” (to cop punishment). Consequently, the students were confused by the possibility that they might be expected to talk about the ways in which the fictitious personage copped punishment from the horrors of the bombardment of his village. Or maybe this fellow was intent upon punishing the forces behind the bombardment. Or whatever…

In the domain of foreign languages, the French can be terribly stubborn. For years, I’ve been trying spasmodically to point out that a sad individual who has a constantly negative relationship with the problems of existence should not be designated as a “looser”, because the verb “to lose” and the adjective “loose” have strictly nothing in common. But French people persist in making this error.

These days, I’ve come to sense the kind of English traps that French people fall into. For example, they’re almost incapable of understanding the elementary adverb “solely” in a simple sentence such as “It’s solely a question of taste”. In spite of their adverb “seulement”, they don’t seem to grasp the simple fact that “solely” is a blend of “only” and “uniquely”.

Once, when I worked as a technical writer with a major French software company, their technical genius tried to convince me that standard English is simply a convenient second-class language, useful solely as a communication tool, which doesn’t deserve to be taken too seriously. To Hell with Shakespeare and all the rest! I told my colleague [now a senior Internet administrator] that I didn’t agree. He smiled, as only a smug English-speaking Frenchman might smile.

Cars with a difference

This is a new Renault Kangoo: the same brand-name as mine, with a similar external appearance.

But it’s no ordinary automobile. Judge from the fuel station where this vehicle fills up.

In fact, it’s an ordinary electric version of the Kangoo ZE that has been enhanced by the insertion of a hydrogen fuel cell, located in small compartment behind the front seats. This unit, referred to as a range extender, can be seen in the following photo of one of a fleet of 50 such enhanced Kangoos.

The general idea is that the range extender burns compressed hydrogen, producing electrical energy that is either consumed directly in moving the vehicle or used to recharge the vehicle’s battery.

I happen to be living in the middle of the geographical zone where the two major partners in this fascinating technological adventure have their headquarters. The hydrogen fuel cell has been created by a company named Symbio FCell in Grenoble, founded by Fabio Ferrari, seen in the above photo. [Click here to visit their website] The hydrogen consumed by the cell is produced by the French McPhy company, located in the tiny village of La Motte-Fanjas in the Drôme department, and directed by Pascal Mauberger. I drive past their neat and tidy little production plant every time I go to Valence. [Click here to visit their website.]

It’s interesting to note that these two high-tech businessmen—Ferrari and Mauberger—were recently invited along to the Elysée Palace for a luncheon with François Hollande in the context of planning for the forthcoming COP 21 conference in Paris.

Finally, another prestigious French company, Air Liquide, is playing a downstream role in this fabulous project as the creator of hydrogen refueling stations such as the one seen in the first two photos, located at Sassenage, between Grenoble and the Vercors mountain range.

Readers might be wondering why several major partners in this Renault Kangoo ZE-H2 adventure happen to be located, as I’ve pointed out, in my corner of the Dauphiné region. One significant explanation is the existence, on the outskirts of Grenoble, of a laboratory of the CNRS [Centre national de la recherche scientifique, France’s national science-research organization] that bears the name of Louis Néel [1904-2000], who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 (along with the Swedish astrophysicist Hannes Alfvén). The fundamental research work that is now being exploited by McPhy, concerning the storage of hydrogen in the solid form of magnesium hydride, originated in the laboratory of Daniel Fruchart at the Institut Néel. McPhy was also able to take advantage of the industrial expertise of Michel Jehan, in charge of a company at Romans, MCP Technologies, that had become a specialist in the processing of magnesium. So, the “green hydrogen” of McPhy (or is it rather blue?) provides an exemplary illustration of synergy between basic research and high-tech industrial partners.

The day that England thrashed France

In France, it's a fact, rightly or wrongly, that few folk celebrate the Battle of Waterloo, which took place exactly two centuries ago, on 18 June 1815.

My wife and I used to drive to Waterloo often when we were living in Brussels, but it’s an uninteresting place. Funnily enough, I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that the illustrious Napoléon Bonaparte was defeated by a dull Englishman, Wellington, neither in France nor in England… but on the outskirts of the Belgian capital. That has always appeared to me as what the French call une histoire belge (a Belgian tale, which might be translated as a shaggy dog story).

Maybe we should have made an effort for the second centenary of this terrible defeat… but it’s not easy to rouse enthusiasm for this affair. Besides, France has always had an excellent reason for celebrating a quite different event: the BBC radio speech of Charles de Gaulle on June 18, 1940.

Be that as it may, the French newspaper Le Monde has just reacted to this anniversary by the publication of a moving English-language editorial addressed to our British neighbors:

http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2015/06/18/britain-beware-brexit-could-be-your-waterloo_4657095_3232.html

Paris wall

For centuries, an old-fashioned bank in Paris, the Crédit municipal, has enabled ordinary citizens to deposit valuable stuff such as jewelry and take out low-interest cash loans. Later, if and when clients get back onto their feet financially, they can return to the institution and buy back their deposited goods. After a certain time, if the stuff is not bought back, then the institution, in the time-honored traditions of pawnbrokers, auctions it off and makes a nice profit. So, everybody is happy… except maybe the ghosts of ancestors who see their precious family legacies being dilapidated by cash-strapped descendants.

Click to enlarge

This kind of money-lending institution, referred to in Italian as a Monte de Pietà (Mount of piety), was invented in the 15th century by an Italian monk as a scheme designed to end the monopoly of usurers of the kind that would be stigmatized, a century later, by Shakespeare’s notoriously anti-Semitic portrait of Shylock.

The Italian expression has in fact been misunderstood. Monte de Pietà has nothing to do with mounts. It refers rather to an amount of cash that is offered, allegedly through piety, to people in need.

Since the eve of the French Revolution, the Parisian Mont de pieté has been located in the Marais quarter. Its ancient entrance still exists in the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux.

Meanwhile, the main entrance is located in the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois: the eastern continuation of the Rue Rambuteau, where I lived for many years.

I’ve walked past that door almost daily, for years. Well, I’ve just learnt that this ancient Parisian financial institution is about to be closed down, simply because (like many other old-fashioned social entities) it can’t adjust itself to the digital era. This is weird in a way, because it shouldn’t be too hard to invent an Internet business model for pawnbroking…

I come now to the subject of this blog post: the existence of an ancient wall around Paris. referred to in French as the Enceinte de Philippe Auguste [Wall of Philip II Augustus]. This protective wall around the French capital was erected as a reaction against threats from the nasty English monarch, my ancestor King John, who would be forced at sword-point to sign the Magna Carta on 15 June 1215. Here’s a plan of the wall dating from 1223:

Click to enlarge

Its builder was the king of France, Philip II, commonly referred to in French as Philippe Auguste, primarily because he was born in August, and also because this nickname likened the monarch to a wise ruler of ancient Rome. Be that as it may, the French king appears to have been a nicer sort of a fellow than the abominable English monarch on the other side of the Channel.

Parenthetical comments: From a pragmatic viewpoint, the fact that King John was my 22-times-great-grandfather means little, if anything at all. His genetic contribution is diluted homeopathically today in a chromosomal soup stewed up from the gametes (reproductive cells) of countless other male and female ancestors. He was no more than a single member of the vast cohort of my medieval ancestors, whose number cannot even be vaguely estimated. Realizing that he’s one of my ancestors, I’ve nevertheless made an effort to know more about the man. Sadly, it’s almost impossible to find anything whatsoever of a noble nature in his profile. Consequently, it’s not surprising that no other English king has decided to call himself John.

Let’s get back to the Paris wall. Inside the domain of the Paris pawnbroking institution that is about to become extinct, there’s a fine fragment of the wall of Philippe Auguste.

Observing this tower, I was always impressed by the lovely pink-brick structure at the top… but what counts, in fact, is the relatively dull stone structure at the base, which is a perfectly intact fragment of the wall of Philippe Auguste.

Further to the west, we enconter the address of 16 rue Rambuteau, where Christine and I lived with our children Emmanuelle and François for many years. At the time, we didn’t think much about the fact that our apartment was situated upon the wall of Philippe Auguste. People had told us that this was the case, but this didn’t mean much in the context of our daily existence. In my personal photographic archives, I have countless images of our children on the balcony overlooking the nearby Hôtel de Saint Aignan, seen here:

Today, the elegantly-restored edifice has become (thanks to Jacques Chirac) the Museum of Jewish Art and History.

The balcony of our apartment was located in the upper left-hand corner of the above photo, where there seems to be a video camera. In the middle of the courtyard, there’s a huge statue of the extraordinary man who symbolized French anti-Semitism: Alfred Dreyfus. On the left of the courtyard, directly below our apartment, a stone façade with fake windows has been erected, solely for esthetic reasons, against the ancient wall of Philippe Auguste.

I often wonder what the ghost of the Colonel Dreyfus might think to be depicted here at a spot that I know so well, in the heart of Paris, where he looks out upon a panoramic façade of which the left-hand third, built against the wall of Philippe Auguste, is both archaic and totally false.

In any case, and above all, I'm overcome by a strange and wonderful feeling of warmth and pride every time I reflect upon the fact that our tiny Skyvington-Mafart family came into being here in the ancient inner heart of the fabulous City of Light. At the time, I didn't think that this might be any kind of achievement (maybe Christine did). But today, I realize that Emmanuelle and François grew up on the top of a legendary wall, in a fabulous Old World place that might even be thought of (by people like me, in any case) as the cultural centre of western civilization.

My ancestor King John

Elias Ashmole's suggestion that my Latton ancestors descended from the illustrious Estouteville family was published in 1719, with superficial documentary evidence. In They Sought the Last of Lands, I explored the possible origins of this alleged Estouteville/Latton link, and concluded that it probably came about during the 12th century, in the context of Latton Priory in Essex, through the marriage of Robert de Stuteville with Sibyl de Valognes.

Click to enlarge

Today, 15 June 2015, is the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta by our ancestor King John.

Our descent from this monarch passes through one of his illegitimate sons, Richard Chilham.

Yesterday, I discovered, quite by chance, that Richard’s maternal family, whose French surname was de Warenne, provides us with a link to the original French line of the Estoutevilles. It’s a trivial link between two sisters and their respective husbands, but this information nevertheless adds weight to the Estouteville/Latton hypothesis presented in my book. The starting point of this newly-discovered link is a famous personage, Geoffrey Plantagenêt, Count of Anjou [1113-1151], who reposes peacefully (except for the last 24 hours) in the capital of the ancient French province of Maine, Le Mans.

Geoffrey got his “Plantagenêt” nickname through his habit of decorating his hat with a sprig of the yellow broom shrub [genêt in French].

Geoffrey went down in history as the father of Henry II of England, founder of the Plantagenet dynasty. Not surprisingly, Geoffrey had several illegitimate children. His son Hamelin (nothing to do with the German town of the Pied Piper), of an unidentified mother, was invited by his half-brother King Henry to marry an extremely wealthy English widow, Isabel de Warenne, 4th Countess of Surrey. Young Hamelin was delighted to accept this invitation, even to the extent of adopting the lady’s Warenne name. Consequently, in a flash, the French bastard child became Hamelin de Warenne, Earl of Surrey. 

The couple had several daughters, one of whom was the above-mentioned Suzanne de Warenne, who jumped into the royal bed of her cousin King John and gave birth to my ancestor Richard Chilham. And I have just discovered that, in 1190, her sister Maud (Matilda) de Warenne [1166-1212] married Henri d’Estouteville [1170-1232], lord of Valmont.

This Estouteville/Warenne marriage plays no direct role in my Latton ancestry. That’s to say, the English marriage between Robert de Stuteville and Sibyl de Valognes remains the only explanation I can find for an alleged Estouteville/Latton link. But the Estouteville/Warenne marriage indicates that the French Estouteville family had personal links with ancestors of the Wadham, Stourton and Berkeley families, described in my book. Incidentally, in the context of Hamelin de Warenne, we come upon references to the feudal town of Ambrières in the Mayenne department (mentioned in my book), which played a role in early French Estouteville history.

Heavy heritage

During my wonderful three-year stint with Pierre Schaeffer at the Service de la Recherche de l’ORTF, I had countless encounters with amazing individuals. Some of them were linked, in one way or another, to the sombre period of the Nazi occupation of France, and the glorious French Résistance.

Michel Anthonioz [1947-2009] was a friendly soft-spoken colleague whose major contribution, in the context of our Schaefferian research group, was his fascination with the New World hippies described by our sociologist friend Edgar Morin in his Journal de Californie. I never knew with certainty whether Michel Anthonioz himself had actually been in direct contact with this Californian world (probably not), or whether he was simply fascinated by his contact with Morin.

Once, in a rare moment, Michel explained to me that he would like to create some kind of a documentary film about the life of his mother: Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz [1920-2002]. At the time, I wasn’t yet familiar with the exploits of this woman, but I understood that my friend Michel was faced with some kind of an unspoken creative barrier at the level of his heavy heritage.

Michel is no longer with us… and I can’t even find a photo of my friend on the web. I remember him as a highly emotional person. Tonight, Michel’s mother will enter the Panthéon in Paris. It’s a terrible pity that he won’t be there to witness the events…

Sacred nonsense

I’m disappointed. This outrageous Monty Python sketch should have been censored in every self-respecting god-fearing Christian nation throughout the world. Not only does it contain images of half-naked children; it also has kids pronouncing in song the pornographic word “sperm”… which is really a bit too much.

For optimal viewing, click on YouTube and full screen

This dark video contains more than enough to shock dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church. And I would hope that such mother-fuckers are indeed profoundly shocked.

Yanks in control of an Aussie Eden

If I were still residing out in my native land, I would surely react strongly to this ugly case of a total sell-out to American capitalism. Click here to see what I’m talking about. Settled down in France, far away from this sad situation, I can’t do much, and I no longer really care too much. Australia, after all, has become a total sell-out to global capitalism. Aussie voters—including the much-celebrated social wage-earning class known as battlers—are solely concerned with paying off the mortgage on their dull little homes. So, who gives a brass razoo (or a fuck, for that matter) about the presence of Yankee capitalism on an exotic West Australian island.

All the same, I’m immensely saddened by this story. But there’s surely worse to come…

Hairy hues

The name of this pretty fellow is Nasser Ben Ali al-Anassi. He was proud to claim credit for ordering the Charlie massacres in Paris.

Now that the nasty bastard has been droned, we may never know the intriguing secret of the method he used to obtain a multicolored beard. Was the subtle watercolor effect the result of artistic brushwork? I suspect that he was keen on Yemeni soups with exotic spices.

Registration of a birth in England

Having examined countless BMD records [births, marriages and deaths] in the context of my personal genealogical research, I was delighted to come upon this copy of a quite ordinary birth record, bearing today’s date.

Click to enlarge

The informant was the child’s father, who signed the registration simply by means of his given name: William. He and the baby’s mother, Catherine Middleton, have unusual occupations. The father apparently earns his living as a prince of the United Kingdom. And the mother works in the same kind of job, as a princess of the United Kingdom. As the saying goes, it takes all sorts to make a world. As for the offspring, a girl, she was born 3 days ago in a Westminster hospital. I always feel a little sorry for babies born in the middle of big cities. But I realize they're capable of growing up just as happily as us country kids.

They sound like a nice little family. The only thing that upsets me a little is the terribly complicated name they’ve given to the baby, composed of no less than 9 terms: Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana of Cambridge. What I mean to say is that I know a couple who simply named their little female baby Zoé. I reckon they would have been happy with the single letter Z... except that the registry office wouldn't have agreed. But everybody, of course, has different attitudes towards inventing names for babies.

There’s another minor detail, of a puzzling nature. I’m incapable of fathoming out the family’s simple surname. Concerning the mother, there’s no problem: she was a Middleton. On the other hand, the father’s surname is hard to define. But that’s neither here nor there. I may have already said that it takes all kinds to make a world.

Energy where it's wanted, at home

In France, the production and distribution of electricity have always been handled by a gigantic state-owned monopoly, EDF [Electricité de France]. A decade ago, sensing that private citizens were interested in the installation of solar panels on their rooftops, EDF set up a subsidiary named EDF ENR.

Imaginative graphic designers replaced the first letter of EDF by a lower-case “e”, announcing apparently (somewhat tardily) the start of the monopoly’s Internet era. As for the appended ENR acronym, these three letters designate a clumsy French notion that might be translated as distributed new energies. It’s a clumsy expression in the sense that “renewable” would be a more relevant adjective than “new”, whereas the idea that energy should be distributed (instead of being stored up in a mysterious piggy bank?) seems to be self-evident. Appending an awkward three-letter acronym to an existing long-established three-letter acronym smacks of amateurishness. In a nutshell, there’s simply too much coded data in the new logo for it to be effective.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The proof that this EDF ENR entity is a flop is the fact that it is now being served up to citizens in all sorts of spammish circumstances. Hardly a week goes by without my receiving spam phone calls from mysterious callers who know my name and address, but can’t quite pronounce “Skyvington”. They always start out by claiming that they’re phoning me on behalf of the illustrious old-time EDF monopoly. Claiming that they’re on a technological mission, they say: “If I understand correctly, you’re the owner of a property at Choranche. Is that correct?” And that’s the moment at which I tell them politely to fuck off…

After talking about this situation with my son François Skyvington, I realize that I’m not alone in being pursued by unscrupulous people who would like to make themselves out to be representatives of EDF ENR. François has even invented a panoply of imaginative scenarios for getting fun out of getting rid of these spam merchants. The guiding principle is simple. The callers have your name, address and phone number… but they know nothing more about you. So, you can really have fun in leading them up all kinds of garden paths.

• If you’re really nasty and intrepid, you can of course produce unexpected gasps to simulate an on-line heart attack. But you might have to explain to your local authorities, later on, that you don’t know why an ambulance and a police vehicle have arrived at your house. It's preferable, for local credibility, to avoid such a Cry Wolf event.

• A simple solution is The Man from Snowy River syndrome.

There was movement at the station,
for the word had passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away,
And had joined the wild bush horses—
he was worth a thousand pound,
So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.
All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far
Had mustered at the homestead overnight,
For the bushmen love hard riding
where the wild bush horses are,
And the stockhorse snuffs the battle with delight.

In a nutshell, in the middle of your caller’s explanations about solar panels on your rooftop, you suddenly scream out: “Shit, the stallion has just escaped onto the highway!”

• An amusing variation on this theme of a sudden major happening is what I might refer to as the My friend the pope syndrome, which is quite simple to enact. You start out by explaining calmly to your caller, concerned with solar panels, that you do in fact live at a high altitude, where the sun’s impact would be optimal. That gets your caller excited. You go on to explain to your caller (who, of course, knows fuck all about the true geography of your abode) that your house is located on a mountainous pinnacle that entices all kinds of visitors. Then you scream out: “Hey, I have to interrupt our conversation. My friend the pope promised me that he would drop in today. Holy shit! There’s a papal helicopter hovering over the house. I must leave you, because His Holiness has just landed on my front lawn.”

• My son François is a moralistic fellow, like me (not surprisingly). One of his pet themes (with which my dog Fitzroy and I happen to agree wholeheartedly) is that we should go out of our way, whenever the occasion arises, to establish momentary contacts with unknown individuals whose paths happen to cross ours, even for a fleeting instant. François is therefore the unexpected friend of isolated individuals at autoroute stations, for example, who receive his payment in the middle of the night. Often it's no more than a simple greeting, enhanced by reflections about the weather. He delights in introducing a tiny but real element of human contact into all kinds of otherwise robotic situations. And this is no doubt the exceptional quality of my son that has led to his successful career as a French TV host…

Let me get back to the substance of the present article: the reason why I started out talking about the production and distribution of electric energy. A major earth-shaking announcement has just been made.

Click here to see the explicit details.

Knowing Indonesia

At the start of 1962, when I sailed from Sydney for the Old World, my grandfather was surprised, indeed slightly shocked, that a young Australian might venture out into the Northern Hemisphere without having first visited Outback Australia and our neighboring New Zealand. Today, in a way, I agree with him. But I’ve never, of course, regretted for an instant my profound relationship with France, along with parts of Britain and the Mediterranean (particularly Greece and Israel). For me, travel has always been an almost sacred affair, carried out necessarily in solitude, akin to setting foot in an ancient monastery. Consequently, I’ve never really traveled very much at all, except maybe into my own metaphorical “heart and soul”.

For Australians in general, Indonesia is a very special nation, since they’re our closest northern neighbors. Personally, I’ve never set foot there. As a schoolchild in Grafton, in the 1950s, I was thrilled when my paternal grandparents, in the context of an exchange program, welcomed a male Indonesian student into their home for a short time. (It’s not impossible that his name is going to spring into my mind, one night, in a dream.) He was so intelligent, refined and friendly that we tended to look upon him as an exhibit in a cultural museum. I would love to know what he thought of us.

Click to enlarge

Today, in my native land, everybody is shocked (like me too) because, in the early hours of the morning, Indonesian police dragged a couple of nice Australian fellows out of their beds in Bali, and stood them up for execution in front of firing squads. Needless to say, I disagree entirely with this kind of barbarian manslaughter, which serves no useful purpose. Here in France, on 18 September 1981, the great lawyer Robert Badinter made a moving speech to the National Assembly that culminated in the abolition of the death penalty.

« J'ai l'honneur,
au nom du Gouvernement de la République,
de demander à l'Assemblée nationale
l'abolition de la peine de mort en France... »

It would be marvelous if every civilized nation in the world were to abandon forever the disgusting death penalty… but we’re nowhere near the achievement of this goal. Just look at Texas. Meanwhile, it would be good if Australia were to make an effort in getting to know our northern neighbor, instead of reducing the Indonesian nation to the sole silly low-cost pleasure-ground of Bali.

RIP Myuran Sukumaran & Andrew Chan

video

Centenary of a terrible Turkish crime

The French media are full of in-depth articles about a horrendous crime perpetrated by the precursors of present-day Turkey exactly a century ago, starting on 24 April 1915. But it had nothing to do with the Anzac fiasco at Gallipoli on the following day. The tragedy that concerns European historians, politicians and intellectuals of all kinds was the revolting Armenian Genocide, which resulted in the massacre of between 800,000 and 1.5 million victims.

An Armenian woman kneeling beside a dead child in a field near Aleppo.

The modern state of Turkey refuses stubbornly and stupidly to condone the use of the term “genocide” to designate what happened. To see the list of nations that respect the notion of an Armenian genocide (such as France), alongside those that don’t (such as Australia), click here.

Meanwhile, in my native Clarence River region, they’ve been “celebrating” gaily and naively the Anzac fiasco of 1915 (totally ignored by French media) by means of joyous horseback cavalcades, meant to symbolize the participation of Australia’s Light Horse Brigade. In reality, of course, there were never any Aussie horses at Gallipoli…

Anzac Day madness

Within the forthcoming 48 hours, my native land will be moving massively into a lugubrious funereal mode of existence, incorrectly labeled as a national celebration of soldiery and martyrdom.

Mourning the death of a warrior is meaningful in the special case of relatives who were once in personal contact with the fallen individual. Celebrating the bravery of a military hero is a different affair, which can be meaningful for observers whose knowledge of the heroic individual comes from written records and hearsay. Today, through the simple arithmetic of dates and ages, there are no longer any living Australians who might mourn an ancestral World War I martyr. Consequently, we are faced with the unique possibility of praising the bravery of the precious few who did indeed perform proven acts of bravery.

One such soldier was my father’s uncle Francis Pickering [1897-1945], who was awarded a Military Medal for his “conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty during the attack on the village of Joncourt on the 1st October 1918”.

The exploits of "King" Pickering (whose nickname became my father's official given name) are outlined in my book They Sought the Last of Lands – My Father’s Forebears [Gamone Press, 2014].

I’ve always been nauseated by Australia’s constant attempts to glorify the utter madness of the terrible events that took place in Turkey on 25 April 1915. When I was a youth in Grafton, a pair of ridiculous dates—Anzac Day and, a month later, Empire Day—sickened me constantly by their obvious absurdity. Why should the youth of Australia be expected to celebrate the nasty deeds and archaic illusions of the blood-thirsty old lion on the other side of the planet?

And who was this fragile but pretentious and depressive Victorian dandy named Winston Churchill, a future alcoholic rejected by his father, whose crazy appreciations of military conquest resulted in an entire generation of young Australians being sent to a certain death? Shame on his name!

These days, I’m saddened whenever I see young Aussies falling into the crazy trap of a would-be “celebration” of Anzac Day madness, fueled emotionally but superficially by the senseless romantic lament of a lone bugle and bagpipes at dawn. What utter nonsense! Such Australian visitors would do better to spend their time in Istanbul (ancient Constantinople), admiring the splendors of our Byzantine heritage. And those who are adamant upon visiting the horror sites of the Western Front would do far better, in my humble opinion, to make an effort to establish authentic in-depth contacts with modern France and Europe…

I’m now including the addresses of three interesting but quite different videos that illustrate the negative aspects of Australia’s Anzac Day madness. They’re lengthy (well over an hour) and dense. But I advise you strongly to take time off and settle down comfortably to view them.

Woodpecker drops in for sunflower seeds

I’ve often seen this fellow drumming on a wooden pole alongside the tiled box in which I put sunflower seeds for the flock of great tits [mésanges in French] that spend the winter months at Gamone.

He’s a great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopus major) [pic épeiche in French]. A red patch on the nape of his neck identifies this specimen as a male. Today, I discovered for the first time that he’s interested in the sunflower seeds inside the box.

Clearly, he had realized that the box contained good stuff for birds. He inspected the situation closely for a while, to make sure that it would be perfectly feasible to move inside for a feed. At one stage, he even made an aggressive gesture towards a great tit that had dared to fly into the box from an opening on the other side. Needless to say, the tit was no doubt surprised to encounter the large head of a woodpecker gazing into the seed box, and it promptly darted off to safety in a nearby shrub.

Finally, the woodpecker decided to venture into the box, where it stayed (out of sight) for a minute or so. It returned to its familiar wooden pole to break open the shell of a sunflower seed, but I suspect that it had rapidly opened and consumed seeds during its short stay inside the box. All afternoon, the bird returned regularly to the pole and the seed box to take advantage of its newly-discovered source of food.

Archaic flute

Click to enlarge

Its size suggests a didgeridoo. But the line of holes indicates that we’re faced with a wooden specimen of the flute family. Could this archaic object be a remnant of a flute abandoned by the hairy musician Pan when he was gallivanting around Gamone, many eons ago, in search of maidens who might wish to learn to play his fabulous pipes?

No. It’s simply a branch of one of my giant linden trees, mortally wounded by a woodpecker.

Yvonne Skyvington [1919-2015]

My paternal aunt Yvonne Elizabeth Skyvington was born at the Hillcrest Hospital in Rockhampton (Queensland, Australia) on May 1, 1919. She died at Taree (NSW) on Sunday evening, April 12, 2015.

After an in-depth career in nursing, Yvonne married Reginald Tarrant, and they had three children: Lynne (married name Greenlees), Roger (deceased) and Glenn (married name McMurrich).

The death of my dear aunt (with whom I was in constant contact during the writing of They Sought the Last of Lands, Gamone Press, 2014) means that I am henceforth the senior member of the 19th-century branch of the Skivington family, from the Dorset village of Shroton (also known as Iwerne Courtney), who spelt their name as “Skyvington”.