Antipodes

I certainly didn't grow up with any particular interest in family history. In my childhood context in Grafton, genealogy was not an ever...

French journalists have had fun with the surname of the Schleck brothers, Fränk and Andy , from Luxembourg, who were the most prominent op...

Sophia was born on 25 July 1998. So, today is her 11th birthday. The "birthday cake" I cooked for her was rather special, but I k...

A few years ago, the price of hard-disk drives started to drop, while their capacities jumped exponentially. That's why I've got thr...

This evening, at the end of the time trial around the beautiful lake at Annecy, Lance Armstrong announced his new team. Almost everybody, t...

Something big and nasty can screw up when you're least expecting it. Incidentally, concerning the title of the present article, click he...

For a few hours after a lengthy plane trip (of the kind, say, between Europe and Australia), I always have a weird intermittent feeling that...

Evian mineral water from a locality of that name in the Haute-Savoie department, marketed by the Danone corporation, is a huge commercial s...

It's only recently that I've fully grasped the fact that there are times, particularly in a media context, when it's preferable ...

The current swine-flu situation provides an opportunity of experiencing the kind of anguish that must have pervaded societies in the olden ...

My pergola is upright, painted dark green, and the six rose bushes have been planted. One of these days, I'll place small diagonal strut...

We might soon have to start thinking about a lovely memorial window that would be installed in the great pagan temple of French politics. [C...

This little book—written by a local priest, Joseph Parsus (aged 84 today)—provides a detailed history of the Résistance in the vicinity of...

Australian media can't, of course, be expected to change their ads as a consequence of current events. And it would be spooky to read th...

On the slopes of the Cournouze (see the above image in the Antipodes header), on the other side of the Bourne, there's a tiny white blo...

At the G8 summit meeting in L'Aquila, the world's leaders generally looked upwards, hoping for better days. Exceptionally, to obtain...

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

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

Cycling is a subtle sport. There has always been only one way of winning: a brilliant performance, combining power and speed, strategy and i...

At this time of the year, I'm delighted to devote my days to a mixture of three quite different activities: (1) outdoor tasks, such as e...