Midland ancestors

My Norman ancestors, arriving in England in 1066 with William the Conqueror, settled at the Saxon site of Sceaftinga tûn, the place of Sceaft's people, which became the village of Skeffington in Leicestershire. A few centuries later, a branch of their descendants became celebrated as Tudor lords, one of whom was in charge of Ireland. And that main branch of the family, after settling in Northern Ireland, has been headed by Viscount Massereene.

I now believe that my Skyvington/Skivington branch of the family was formed shortly before the epoch of the Tudor Skeffington lords. My ancestors were probably farmers, in Bedfordshire, where they spelt their family name with a "v" instead of "ff": Skevington. Consequently, during my recent rapid excursion to England, I decided at the last minute to visit Bedfordshire rather than the Leicestershire village of Skeffington. The departure station was St Pancras, which is being vastly modernized so that Eurostar trains will terminate here, in the heart of London, from next November.

I arrived in the charming city of Bedford on Wednesday afternoon, 1 August 2007, and booked into a modern hotel in a tall building on the far side of the bridge over the River Great Ouse.

In the center of the city, I came upon a statue with a familiar name.

The busy town markets were closing, so it wouldn't have been possible for me to buy a bouquet of flowers to place at the foot of the pedestal.

Early the next morning, I took a bus to the village of Turvey, about a dozen kilometers to the west of Bedford, which is one of a cluster of half-a-dozen villages, near the border between Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, where there was a presence of Skevington people, recorded in the archives, from as far back as the early 16th century.

The splendid old parish church is located in the center of the village.

In the genealogical domain, I'm particularly interested in a Turvey man described in the Mormon archives as George husbandman Skevington [1562-1608], younger brother of Thomas yeoman Skevington [1560-1615]. At that epoch, well before the appearance of the Hanoverian monarchs named George, this was a relatively uncommon firstname, inspired no doubt by the legendary saint of that name. Well, my earliest Dorset ancestor was a George Skivington [1670-1711], and I've often imagined that these two Georges might be linked. There are tombstones all around the church, but time and the elements have rendered them faceless.

On a wall inside the church, there's a map of around 1785 which indicates the property of a William Skevington.

This William Skevington [1734-1784] is indeed mentioned in the Mormon archives, along with his wife Elizabeth Skevington [1736-1770]. At that same epoch, just a few kilometers away from Turvey, in the Buckinghamshire villages of Lavendon and Cold Brayfield, the Mormon archives reveal the presence of individuals who actually spelt their name as Skyvington, like me, whereas in Bedford itself, others had got around to using the Skivington spelling. Consequently, there are strong reasons to believe that this corner of the Midlands—often designated by a nice expression: the Home Counties—might have been our ancestral home place prior to the Dorset phase.

Inside the church, there are several tombs of members of the 15th-century noble family named Mordaunt.

It is sobering to compare these magnificent alabaster effigies of these local lords and ladies, in a perfect state of conservation, with the faceless tombstones outside. But neither alabaster nor stone are as permanent for posterity, of course, as data of the kind stored in the computerized Mormon archives... or ordinary words of the kind I am writing now.

Dorset ancestral anecdotes

On Thursday afternoon, 2 August 2007, I took the train from London Waterloo to Poole [Dorset]. I'm surely not the first traveler to point out that British trains are old-fashioned and uncomfortable, but the emotional thrill of moving towards my ancestral Dorset negated both the physical discomfort and the constantly-repeated idiotic train messages: "Passengers are informed that, to travel on this train, they must have a ticket. If not, they may be penalized by our inspectors."

To be truthful, I spent a good part of the journey admiring the intense beauty of a veiled Moslem girl on the other side of the aisle, who was constantly consulting a portable computer, taking phone calls and listening to an Apple iPod. I was intrigued by the way she would brush aside delicately her Moslem veil in order to insert or remove an earplug. Indeed, her whole vestimentary interdiction, in counterpoint with her exquisite physical features and modernity, made this girl terribly beautiful and desirable. [Those spontaneous sentiments should be enough to earn me a fatwah from the Finsbury Park fools in London.]

After a night in a charming bed-and-breakfast on the remote north-eastern side of Poole Park Lake, far from the city [an error due to my haste in Internet booking, without the necessary examination of maps], I took a bus to the northern Dorset village of Blandford.

In a British double-decker bus on such a country road, you are hurtled through a sort of rectangular tunnel cut through the trees. You have an ideal chance of realizing that today's roads are simply an extension of yesterday's tracks. There's no such thing as a municipal no-man's-land between the road and the adjoining properties. Here in France, a motorist on a country road can usually pull over for a piss, or any reason whatsoever. This would be unthinkable in the English environment I'm describing. Sometimes I conclude that this is why many English drivers have superb new vehicles [not necessarily made in the UK]. It would be suicidal to set forth on an English road with an old vehicle that might have hiccups along the way. In certain places, it would take a helicopter to drag a stalled automobile out of the way. To put it bluntly, southern England is a travelers' nightmare. I knew that already, a quarter of a century ago, when I wrote my guidebook on Great Britain. If you're thinking of visiting this part of England, the only common-sense way of doing things consists of renting a small automobile and establishing a tightly-planned hotel schedule.

In Blandford, I stumbled upon a museum:

Inside, an old pump-organ caught my attention:

Its label had a familiar name, of the Blandford music store that sold this instrument:

The museum curator showed me publicity concerning the Skivington music shop in Blandford:

Then he invited me to play the old organ. This demanded a lot of effort, because the "lungs" of the antiquated organ were no doubt leaking, and I had to pedal like hell to produce the least sound. Still, it was an emotional performance, which seemed to move the Blandford curator, who immediately started to inundate me with copies of old documents about local Skivingtons. If I can say so, without appearing to be pretentious, I already knew more about this subject than the curator did, and he was thrilled to receive my gift of the pile of printed pages on Dorset Skivingtons that I had brought with me.

Finally, I hardly surprised the Blandford curator by pointing out to him that we Dorset Skyvingtons were issued from ancestors named Rose:

Thereupon, it was the curator who surprised me by indicating an amazing fact. He informed me that my ancestral Blandford relatives Thomas Rose [1749-1833] and his wife Jane Topp [1757-1827] were in fact the first free settlers to arrive in Port Jackson, New South Wales, aboard the Bellona, on 15 January 1793. In the heart of Dorset, on a warm day of August 2007, that fragment of information made me feel rightly more Aussie than ever.

Bali bird flu

Last year in February, a Sydney-based think tank named the Lowy Institute succeeded in scaring shit out of everybody by announcing the theoretical worst-case scenario of a bird-flu pandemic capable of taking 142 million lives. [Click here or on the image to display the CNN article.]

At that time, we Europeans shuddered most, because the mortal H5N1 virus had been detected here in migrating wild fowl. French authorities reacted to this threat in a draconian fashion by outlawing outdoor chicken yards. Meanwhile, people feared that the celebrated recipe of Poule au pot farcie Henri IV might soon become a thing of the past, like roast pheasant. [Click here to display the recipe in French.]

Today, alas, the action has shifted to Australia's playground: the tiny Indonesian island of Bali. Now, I hasten to add that I've never set foot in Bali, and have no immediate plans to go there. Besides, I've never understood what draws young Australian tourists to this place. Wouldn't it be a relatively simple affair, for filthy-rich developers, to create an exotic but safe Bali-like atmosphere in delightful local places such as Bondi or Byron Bay? Or even Yamba or Woolgoolga?

Judging from this morning's press, there's no panic yet in Australia. At the moment I'm writing, Australian health and tourism authorities don't seem to have issued any directives concerning Australian citizens who are already holidaying in Bali, or those who might be preparing to go there. Is this absence of official declarations an indication of calm and clear thinking, or rather a sign of negligence?

Brain removal

Karl Rove, referred to by critics of the US administration as "Bush's Brain", has decided to stop prancing for the president. The guru's resignation was announced soon after the Bush family picnic at Kennebunkport attended by a French vacationer named Nicolas Sarkozy (whose wife Cécilia didn't turn up, because she had a cold).

I've been wondering whether there might be some kind of causal relationship between these happenings. Maybe the Brain concluded that, if the wife of a foreign head of state can find a polite way of saying no to Dubya, then it was time for him to behave similarly. There are other conjectures. It's possible that the Brain was shocked to see his protégé behaving in a cool friendly fashion towards a Frenchman. Or maybe the vision of a French president saying he likes America was simply too much, convincing Karl Rove that he no longer understands anything whatsoever about politics.

In any case, the Brain's neurons have been been flickering alarmingly ever since 2003, when he earned notoriety by leaking the name of ex-CIA spy Valerie Plame. Sure, you might say that mere notoriety is better than a spell in jail, but it must have been a minor cerebral trauma for Rove to see his colleague Scooter Libby condemned in place of Dick Cheney and himself. More recently, there has been another nasty affair about Rove's involvement in the firing of federal judges who weren't sufficiently loyal to Dubya. And the backdrop to this fall from grace is of course the recent Republican electoral defeat.

The sole pertinent question is: Can George W Bush, deprived of his Brain, pursue his presidential mandate? What a silly question! Of course he can. Like weightlessness for seasoned astronauts, brainlessness is a state that Dubya knows well. The US president is an experienced idiot.

Strange skills

In my article of 23 July 2007 entitled Wandering in a spiritual wonderland [display], I indicated that Natacha, Alain and I had visited a fascinating Carthusian site: the spring that has been providing the monastery with water, nonstop, over the last nine centuries. As I pointed out in that post, we were surprised to discover considerable stone vestiges at the place where the water emerged from the ground. There was another anecdotal aspect of Natacha's encounter with the Carthusian spring that I didn't bother to mention in my post. She told us, as soon as she reached the site, that she experienced weird physical sensations, of a distinctly uncomfortable nature. In fact, these sensations were apparently so unpleasant that Natacha left the site almost as soon as she had reached it... which surprised me, because she's the sort of person who normally takes pleasure in observing calmly all the curiosities of such an exceptional place.

A few days after this excursion, Natacha and Alain dropped in for a moment at Gamone, before their return journey to Marseille. Natacha returned to the subject of her curious sensations at the Carthusian spring, shown here [surmounted by a whitish building whose role remains unexplained for the moment] in an 1894 photo:

On the off chance of finding some kind of explanation for her sensations, I asked Natacha if she had heard about the strange and ancient phenomenon of dowsing, which consists of prospecting for subterranean water by means of primitive tools such as metal rods, a Y-shaped branch of a tree, or a metal pendulum.

Shortly after my arrival at Gamone, in 1994, my son François used a pair of thin plastic-covered steel rods, bent in such a way that he held them like a pair of revolvers, to provide me with dubious but nevertheless surprising demonstrations of dowsing.

In particular, François claimed that he had sensed the alignment of the water supply from Pont-en-Royans. I immediately informed him, with a snigger, that his finding was some ten meters off the correct alignment, which I thought I knew. In fact, I was a sneering idiot. Several months later, during a Gamone summer, the exceptional dry-weather vegetation revealed that the apparent alignment of the subterranean water pipes corresponded exactly to the results of my son's dowsing.

Faced with the question of Natacha's strange sensations, I handed her my son's dowsing rods and invited her to wander around my lawn at Gamone, looking for possible sensations. The results were, in fact, sensational! Natacha seemed to function with the precision of an aquatic gauge. Alain, too, seemed to have the same skill, to a lesser degree than his wife, whereas I remained inert, as usual, unresponsive to any sensations whatsoever. Natacha would say [and I'm delighted with this evaluation, evoking one of my French intellectual heroes] that I'm simply too Cartesian.

Ordinary omelette

If I decided to take a photo of this perfectly ordinary ham and cheese omelette I cooked for lunch, it's simply because it's a beautiful sunny day at Gamone, the tiny eggs come from Madeleine's hens, the parsley and chives are from my garden, and I take pleasure in preparing and eating omelettes. If it weren't for the bad cholesterol reputation of eggs, not to mention the big blob of butter in the cooking, I would be happy to survive on an omelette a day.

My grandfather's London

On Tuesday, 31 July 2007, I got off the Eurostar at London's Waterloo station and took the Underground to Finsbury Park in North London, where I had made a hotel booking in Seven Sisters Road.

It was only yesterday that I recalled that the name of this ancient park [originally called Fines-bury, because the heart of a slain English crusader named Sir John Fines was brought back from the Holy Land by a soldier and buried there by the knight's two daughters] has become notorious through the existence of the Finsbury Park mosque [now referred to as the North London Central Mosque], in St Thomas's Road, whose imam was Abu Hamza al-Masri, now in jail. The Al Qaeda terrorists Richard "Shoebomber" Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui both attended Finsbury Park mosque.

My grandfather Ernest Skyvington grew up here in the Finsbury Park neighborhood until his departure for Australia, in 1908, at the age of 17. In this photo, he is wearing his school uniform: straw boater hat, Norfolk jacket with a big white Eton collar (celluloid for week-days, starched linen for Sundays), clip-on bow, knee-breeches, woollen stockings and lace-up boots. [Details found in a book written by a man of my grandfather's generation: C H Rolph, London Particulars, Oxford University Press, 1980.]

I left the hotel, armed with my camera, to explore places associated with my grandfather's childhood. I walked across the railway footbridge from Finsbury Park [which existed in my grandfather's time] to reach his school: the Woodstock Road School, now referred to as the Stroud Green Primary School. It probably looks much the same, today, as it did during my grandfather's school days.

I then wandered down to 65 Evershot Road, where my grandfather was born in 1891. Finally, I tried to find the house at 42 Mount Pleasant Road where my grandfather had been living before he left for Australia. However the street names and house numbering have evolved over the last century, and I'm not yet certain that I've found the right house.

Back home (for a day) after England

Upon returning to Gamone after a five-day excursion to England, I was thrilled to discover that Manya had installed elegant new curtains in the living room.

My dog Sophia was excited to see me once again. In fact, she and Manya apparently got on fine together.

Tomorrow morning, I'll be setting off with Sophia in the train to Marseille for a three-day excursion in Provence with Natacha and Alain. Later on, when I'm back at Gamone, I'll describe my interesting trip to the UK, which was highly worthwhile from a family-history viewpoint.

Aussie bungler of the year

I would like to nominate Kevin Andrews, minister of Immigration, for the Bungler of the Year award. Speaking of the departure for India of liberated Haneef, the bungler is quoted as saying: "If anything, that actually heightens rather than lessens my suspicion." Andrews is a bloody stubborn bungler, too, who doesn't even appear to be aware that he screwed things up. And don't expect him to apologize for his bungling. He summed up his idiotic actions with the following weird words: "I have had to defend this matter with one arm tied behind my back because of protected information." The guy's a nut, and the only decent thing he could do would be to resign.

Tony Abbott, minister of Health, spoke of the bungler as follows: "He's a terrific bloke and he's done a good job." When somebody goes out of his way to describe a mate with rotten egg on his face as a "terrific bloke", this is often a euphemism for saying: "He's not quite the total arsehole you might imagine him to be." OK, fair enough. Abbott seems to be telling us that Andrews is only a minor arsehole.

Short trip to the UK

My three destinations in the UK are purely genealogical, connected to my paternal ancestors:

— London [two days], to take photos of my grandfather's childhood neighborhood in Finsbury Park.

— Dorset [two days], to visit [for the first time] the villages around Blandford Forum, near Poole.

— Skeffington village [one day] in Leicestershire [also for the first time].

I'm amazed at the extent to which I can use the Internet to organize all the transport and accommodation details of a short trip such as this.

Acquiring knowledge

My article of 23 July 2007 entitled Wandering in a spiritual wonderland [display] includes a photo of an iron nugget that Alain discovered during our excursion to the Grande Chartreuse. Since then, Natacha and Alain have shown me several other mineral specimens they found while wandering around in another Carthusian site [which I've never visited personally]: the former monastery of Saint Hugon, about 40 km north-east of Grenoble, alongside the road to Albertville [in the Savoie département]. One of these specimens was a small rectangular fragment of iron whose surface was similar to that of the first nugget. The other day, the three of us sat outside at Gamone, under the linden trees, gazing at the mineral specimens on a table in front of us, and trying to understand their origins.

In this kind of situation, I've often had the impression that, if I were to concentrate sufficiently upon such-and-such an object that intrigues me, it would end up releasing some of its secrets, providing me with a better understanding of its nature. That was how I felt, a couple of years ago, when I tried to seize the nature of this mysterious object that I unearthed in nearby Châtelus, on the other side of the Bourne:

Since I found this object at a place where there's a legend about an ancient Roman settlement, I imagined it immediately as a sculptured fish. But it was equally likely that natural forces had given rise to this form. No doubt, if I were to show this "red fish" [as I call it] to an archaeologist and then a geologist, I would soon learn which of these two hypotheses is correct... but I've never done so. Instead, I've spent a fair amount of time simply gazing intensely at this object, hoping that it might suddenly send me a message revealing its nature. But no such message has ever reached me yet.

Getting back to the iron specimens from the two Chartreux territories, there were two basic questions:

(1) We referred to these specimens as "iron" because they were attracted by a magnet. But what was their exact geological nature?

(2) How come these specimens were lying around in open fields, waiting to be picked up by a passer-by with keen eyesight such as Alain?

In fact, once Natacha and Alain started out "thinking aloud" with me, I soon realized that they already possessed a good deal of information concerning such specimens:

— They had learned that there was a very special kind of iron ore in the vicinity of the monastery of Saint Hugon. What made it so special was the fact that the ore melted at a relatively low temperature, which meant that it could be transformed into iron by means of a simple wood-fueled furnace.

— The monks soon realized that the most profitable approach to marketing this precious raw material consisted of carrying out an elementary smelting process at the exit from their mines, using the ample timber resources they had on hand. Then the resulting crude iron could be brought down into the valley by mules, and subsequently transported to large-scale furnaces for final processing.

Little by little, as we talked about these operations, we started to obtain answers to our queries about the specimens placed on the table in front of us. They were fragments of crudely-smelted iron that had probably dropped off the back of mules on the way down to the valley. The special variety of iron ore found near the Saint Hugon monastery apparently existed also in the vicinity of the Grande Chartreuse. A final query: How come the two specimens have such a lovely smooth brown surface, with no traces of rust, even though they've been lying out in the open for centuries? There again, Natacha and Alain had acquired information that enabled us to obtain an immediate answer to this question. The ore of Saint Hugon contains a certain amount of manganese, which tends to give the resulting iron a kind of "stainless steel" quality. So, there we had a fairly good comprehensive picture of the context in which these two iron specimens had been found.

Now, why am I relating all these trivial anecdotes? It so happens that they take me back to my recent article about the work of David Deutsch entitled Brilliant book [display].

One of the four so-called strands proposed by the author for a future Theory of Everything is inspired by the philosophical ideas of Karl Popper. Scientists used to claim that they acquired knowledge by a famous process known as induction, which consists of examining things in the real world while hoping that the things in question will end up revealing spontaneously their inner secrets. One of the most celebrated examples is that of Isaac Newton watching an apple falling from a tree, and using this observation to induce the laws of gravitation.

Popper pointed out that the time-honored explanation of the creation of scientific principles by induction is a convenient piece of fiction. Nobody can truly acquire knowledge simply by waiting for real-world happenings and things to "reveal their inner secrets". Newton's apple didn't transmit enlightenment into his head. If there was a revelation, it came from Newton's brain, not from the fallen apple.

What really happens in a context of alleged induction is illustrated eloquently by the brainstorming carried out by Natacha, Alain and me concerning the two specimens of Carthusian iron. These objects did not radiate out magically a beam of information about themselves, enabling us to acquire knowledge about their nature. On the contrary, our emerging knowledge concerning the specimens was based upon information that was forged in our brains, and this information came from our reading, our talking, our experiences and our imagination. Rather than stating that the specimens gave rise to a phenomenon of induction, we can conclude that our brains created this knowledge, in much the same way that a writer invents a good story. And, talking of stories, maybe it's time I ended this one, which is becoming long and complicated...

Can Cadel Evans bring it off tomorrow?

On the eve of the penultimate stage of this year's berated Tour de France, there's exactly one minute and thirty seconds between Cadel Evans and the yellow jersey. Theoretically, in tomorrow's 55.5 km time trial between Cognac and Angoulême, Evans should be able to beat Alberto Contador by anything up to two minutes. Now, I don't intend to start selling the bear's skin [as the old French saying goes] before the animal has been shot, but I have a feeling that Australia might indeed be on the verge of obtaining her first global victory in the Tour. Clearly, there are many observers in France who would be very happy if things could happen in this way, because lots of people have serious doubts concerning the case of Contador, and it would be ever so nice if he were to be brushed quietly out of the way.

There was a weird atmosphere in the Tour just prior to Rabobank's decision to fire Michael Rasmussen. Cycling aficionados have been observing the muscly legs of champion bike-riders for the last century, and they've ended up creating a more or less standard image of what is expected in the physical form of a great cyclist. Well, Rasmussen's legs are light years away from the standard picture. When you watch him walking from behind, he looks like a skinny kid who has just got off his toy scooter. Now, this could simply mean that we observers have formed a screwed-up impression of what cyclists should look like from a physical viewpoint. But it's perfectly plausible, on the other hand, that Rasmussen is really nothing more than a lightweight shitbox crammed with explosive chemicals.

Over the last few days, the cycling public in France has witnessed several unexpected examples of the deplorable conflictual relationship between the world body that governs cycling [the Union Cycliste Internationale] and the Tour organizers. I have the impression that the Union is jealous of the huge success of the French event, and is trying to recuperate part of the rich fallout of the Tour.

There has also been a lot of open talk about the doping phenomenon in other sports. Maybe we've simply moved into a high-powered era in which the old-fashioned notions of clean and honest sports can no longer exist. Sometimes I have a nightmare vision of what might happen if the authorities simply gave in, and allowed sporting champions to consume whatever shit they liked. If this were the case, tomorrow's cyclists would glow in the twilight with a bluish halo. Their thighs would be so powerful that bikes would need to be built out of new high-tech materials sufficiently strong to avoid being crumpled. And, when such cyclists stopped for a piss by the roadside, the grass and weeds would cease to grow there for several years.

A couple of days ago, I received an email from the organizers of the Tour Down Under, who are all excited about receiving the visit, next year, of Miguel Indurain. It goes without saying that, for this Australian cycling event, the victory of Evans in the Tour de France would be a gigantic happening.

Judicial examination for former French leader

French legal concepts are rather different to the so-called English common law that forms the basis of Australia's system. I've spoken of the Clearstream affair in two earlier posts, entitled Chirac has some explaining to do [display] and Destruction of computer files [display]. Up until today, in the context of an alleged scheme designed to frame Nicolas Sarkozy, the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin has merely been suspected of playing a role. This morning, the legal system went one step further by announcing that Villepin will be subjected to a so-called judicial examination, to be carried out under the control of a special magistrate referred to as a juge d'instruction [inquiry judge].

For Villepin, this new development means that he and his lawyers will have full access to his legal dossier, which was not the case up until now. Although Villepin is not yet actually charged with violating any law whatsoever, the announcement concerning his judicial examination mentions explicitly no less than four infractions that would figure in the charges that could well be brought against him, at the conclusion of the examination. I shall indicate the French name of each infraction, and try to describe it in English.

— Complicité de dénonciation calomnieuse: The accused was an accomplice in a spontaneous operation that consisted of publicly denouncing the victim by citing facts known to be false. In other words, if Villepin were to be accused [which, I insist, is not yet the case], it would be due to his calumny suggesting that Sarkozy received illicit funds paid through Clearstream.

— Recel de vol: Handling stolen goods. The Clearstream documents at the origin of this affair were indeed stolen.

— Recel d'abus de confiance: The word recel means "concealment", and the expression abus de confiance might be translated as "breach of faith". The charge involves using something that belongs to another individual with the intention of harming the true owner. To be frank, I don't understand exactly what could be involved here. I believe it's the general notion of stealing banking data and falsifying it with intent to harm an individual to whom the original data is supposed to apply. Very complicated!

— Complicité d'usage de faux: Association with accomplices making use of forged documents.

An interesting aspect of this announcement is the possibility that Dominique de Villepin will probably refuse to answer questions from the inquiry judge, and insist that his case be brought before a special jurisdiction known as the Court of Justice of the Republic, created in 1993, whose sole mission concerns charges aimed at a minister who was still in function at the time of the alleged infractions.

Brilliant book

This excellent book by the Oxford physicist David Deutsch came out a decade ago, but I've only just got around to reading it. Seeking to lay the foundations of a vast theory of everything, Deutsch introduces four great domains of knowledge that he refers to as strands:

— Quantum physics

— Epistemology, inspired by the work of Karl Popper

— Theory of computation, inspired by the work of Alan Turing

— Theory of evolution, inspired by the work of Richard Dawkins.

It's rare to find an eclectic author who's prepared to blend such different disciplines into a synthetic whole.

Chicken out

Tomorrow morning [Thursday, 26 July], Michael Rasmussen won't be lined up for the start of the next stage of the Tour de France, which is henceforth in a state of total chaos. His team, Rabobank, asked him to step down. The Danish rider, suspected of doping, had not obeyed the rules of the game. It's a relief, in a way, to know that his frail silhouette will no longer be casting a shadow upon the probity of the Tour. But will this be the last unpleasant surprise of this Tour de France 2007?

Sophia's ninth birthday

My lovely lady dog Sophia, described as a cross-bred Labrador with a golden robe, was born nine years ago.

A few minutes ago, I told her [in our everyday French dog talk] that she's a lovely old lady, and I gave her a fine Saint Marcellin cheese. In her usual discreet style [a little like that of Cécilia Sarkozy], Sophia refrained from making any public statement on this occasion.

I'm reminded of our Skeffington ancestor, the lunatic second Earl of Massereene [1743-1805], who once threw a party for his dog, while insisting that invited animals should be attired for the festivities in dress clothes. I'm fond of that crazy ancestral personage, Clotworthy Skeffington, whose escape from a Parisian prison preceded the storming of the Bastille. I admire him in the same way I love dogs and underdogs in general, and Sophia in particular.

Cloudy shroud

Last Saturday, while visiting the Grande Chartreuse with Natacha and her husband, I was momentarily alarmed when I saw Alain disappearing into an unlit alcove at the monastic gateway. I recall tales in which a guy goes out to buy a box of matches, while waving goodbye to his wife and family... and reappears half a century later on the other side of the globe. I imagined my having to soothe his lovely wife with banal words: "Natacha, I'm sure Alain's not lost for Eternity. Besides, he left with your car keys." In fact, Natacha's husband reappeared almost instantly, with no apparent help from the Holy Ghost. Alain had merely discovered a charming little subterranean chapel for visitors. It was foolish of me to have imagined that he might have decided on the spur of the moment to abandon us and become a monk.

Inside the chapel, somebody [no doubt a creative artist from the nearby Carthusian museum] had installed a splendid cloth replica of the famous Shroud of Turin:

Most people agree today that this piece of medieval cloth is a fabulous hoax, but it keeps a lot of serious people busy in arguing for or against its alleged authenticity. [Click here to see a website on this affair.] Personally, I believe it's a forgery manufactured in the secret Roman laboratories of Leonardo de Vinci based upon on-the-spot forensic data concerning the crucifixion of Jesus supplied by a descendant of Mary Magdalene. I see no other explanation capable of accounting for the perfection of this inspiring artifact.

Incidentally, in a neighboring domain, all those Polish pilgrims who died a few days ago in a terrible coach accident near Grenoble were returning from a nearby place called Our Lady of Salette, where the Virgin apparently appeared and spoke to a couple of local children, named Maximin and Mélanie, about a century and a half ago.

We all know that peasant kids don't necessarily have the expert reactions of professional journalists such as my daughter, for example, but I find it a pity that nobody has thought it worthwhile, on one of these frequent apparitions of the Virgin, to pop the question directly to the divine First Lady: "Is the Shroud of Turin genuine?" Theoretically, she should know... but, then again, she might still be in the dark [which is normal, you might say, in the case of a shroud]. A direct question of this kind might be like having asked Hillary Clinton, not so long ago, for her evaluation of the authenticity of tales about Bill's big cigar. The trouble with shrouds is that they're meant to hide things.

Turd France

I'm not too proud of that pun, on a par with the title of a rugby guide just published by my celebrated compatriot Ross Steele... whom I first met when he and I were members of the school debating teams, respectively, of Casino and Grafton. [French readers might be intrigued to hear of the existence of an Australian country town named Casino... which doesn't look like Monte Carlo.]

The expression "Turd France" sounds a little like "Tour de France" pronounced by Australians who don't speak French. But it's spot on for designating the shitty stuff we're seeing at the moment I write. This morning, at the start of the third grueling Pyrenées stage, Michael Rasmussen's yellow jersey evoked merde in the minds of spectators who booed him: an unbelievable incident in the annals [double-n] of the Tour. As for the positive test of the heroic Alexander Vinokourov [where the adjective "positive" really means the exact opposite], that's the last straw on the camel's back. As they might say in French, it's the drop of urine or blood that causes the test tube to overflow.

Yesterday, on TV, we saw a charming public-relations lady attached to the Astana team informing us with a smile that their coach [vehicle] had been halted and searched—to no avail—by customs authorities. This morning, the following photo of a hotel visit by gendarmes suggests that the search for incriminating evidence is still under way.

On the one hand, it's great to see that the police, customs and Tour authorities are vigilant in a severe and successful style, because they'll inevitably clean up this dirty sport. But, if the mythical image of the Tour is stupidly destroyed by its own would-be heroes, and the financial sponsors back off, will there still be any sport left to clean up?

Land of law?

From my antipodean observational outpost here in France, I'm frankly alarmed by the way in which my native land is handling the case—or rather the lack of a case—against the accused terrorism supporter Mohamed Haneef. Clearly, the police investigation up in Queensland got screwed up, which explains why a federal law-enforcement directorate is now called upon to review the fiasco. My first reaction is positive: Thank God Australia employs a so-called Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions!

I don't know why Queensland premier Peter Beattie, in criticizing the methods of his police force, had to resort to the foreign [Hollywood] image of the Keystone Cops. Homegrown anecdotes of idiotic police blunders abound, notably in the bushranger domain.

The thing that worries me, when I observe what has happened in the case of Haneef, is a lurking suspicion that Australia might no longer be what we commonly refer to as a land of law. Sure, it's a land of politics, with a lowercase "p", and a land of Dollars, with an uppercase "D". But it appears to be a land in which an Indian doctor can find himself involved, overnight, in a frightening imbroglio, as indicated by the following extract from today's The Australian:

Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty was also forced to deny reports police had written the names of overseas terror suspects on Haneef's personal diary, and that Haneef was being investigated for plotting to bomb a Gold Coast skyscraper.

Many years ago, when I saw customs officials in the port of Fremantle confiscating jars of baby food that my wife was bringing ashore to feed our Emmanuelle during our brief stopover in Western Australia, I formed the vague opinion that certain Australians in authority often tend to be excessively zealous, as if their credibility depended upon their obtaining outstanding results. I witnessed this same behavior twenty years later, in exactly the same city, when I saw WA cops taking pleasure in arresting drivers leaving places of revelry associated with the America's Cup regattas.

If all the events surrounding Haneef were to mean that the threats of terrorism in Australia will henceforth be diminished, one might conclude that it's worthwhile. But that's like saying that the invasion of Iraq could be justified a posteriori if it had reduced the outlaw phenomenon in that land. In my view, in their sunny microcosm, Queensland cops are surely just as dumb as George W Bush.

French president speaks of his wife

This photo records the joyous homecoming of the Bulgarian nurses from a weird and frightening place, Qaddafi Land, whose reigning principles don't necessarily include logic, law and humanity:

This later photo reveals a star participant in the event, an airliner labeled République française:

Don't look around in the crowd for a French lady named Cécilia Sarkozy, described this morning by a French newspaper as "distant, cold, reserved, rebellious, independent, elegant, and today conquering and celebrated". She didn't want to stay in Sofia for the inevitable hollow praise. Soon after the nurses came home, accompanied by their Palestinian doctor friend [now a citizen of Bulgaria], Cécilia Sarkozy took French leave of everybody.

The wag who said that François Hollande looks and behaves like a delicatessen proprietor was unkind—not only, you might say, to delicatessen proprietors—because he's really quite a smart and likable guy... otherwise the Socialist party wouldn't have made him their chief, and Ségolène Royal wouldn't have made him her companion. Be that as it may, François Hollande couldn't find words bitter enough to express his horror at the idea that the legitimate wife of President Sarkozy might have played a significant role in the release of Qaddafi's hostages. But, instead of examining Hollande's dull gibes, let's listen to the words of Cécilia's proud husband.

A problem has been solved. Full stop. There's no point in theorizing about a new organization of French diplomacy, or the status of the wife of the chief of state, or some other reasoning. They had to be evacuated. We evacuated them. That's the only thing that counts. It's time to inject pragmatism into international problems, as in purely national problems. Cécilia did a remarkable job. It was a question of women. A humanitarian problem. I felt that Cécilia would be capable of performing a useful act. She did so with lots of courage, lots of sincerity, lots of humanity and lots of brio, by understanding immediately that a key to success was our capacity to take into account the sufferings of everybody: those of the nurses, of course, but also those of the fifty families who had lost a child. Cécilia's sensitivity enabled her to perceive the situation perfectly.

Interesting illustration

A few minutes ago, in the recently-created French news website called Rue89 [a curious blend of the word for "street" and the year of the French Revolution], I accessed an article concerning the disturbing demand made by the German minister of Culture in the Hesse Land to include so-called "intelligent design" themes in high-school biology courses. I was intrigued to discover that the article is illustrated by an image that appears to have no connection whatsoever with what is related in the article. [Click here to display the article.]

I suspect that a prankster has found a way of hacking the Rue89 server. This doesn't surprise me, because I was struck by the technical naivety of the folk behind the Rue89 project [redundant journalists from Libération] when they described publicly the structure of their future website, shortly before it was launched. I remember saying to myself that it was inevitable they would get screwed in one way or another.

It's quite possible that my interpretation of the situation is totally off the mark. Perhaps the author of the article, a certain Pierre Rouchaléou, actually chose this image to illustrate his account of the conflict between serious science and the so-called "creationist" movement, whose members believe that Genesis provides a factual description of the creation of the universe and living creatures. After all, if you were seeking a striking image that is intimately connected with the creation of human life, it's harder to imagine a better choice than a close-up of a hairy vagina. In any case, it's a perfect strategy for luring people (like me) into reading attentively every word of the article. Maybe it's an image of Eve stretched out under an apple tree in the Garden of Eden.

My guess, though, is that it's a prank. Maybe the prankster is using this image to point out that he regards the minister of Culture in the Hesse Land as a [expletive linked to female genitals]. If I find further information concerning the use of this image, I'll include it immediately in my blog. After all, the article and the image seem to form a truly antipodean duo.

Last-minute news: Mea culpa! Straight after publishing the present post, it took me a few minutes to discover that I'm an ignorant philistine. The huge closeup image is a well-known painting (well-known, that is, to everybody except me) by Gustave Courbet [1819-1877] entitled The Origin of the World, which hangs in the Orsay Museum in Paris. So, it's an appropriate, if not ideal, illustration for the article, in that this image and its title should be acceptable for both scientists and Genesis nuts.

Wandering in a spiritual wonderland

The ancient inhabitants called it Cartusia. I've always been fond of that Latin name. Bruno and his six companions entered this spiritual wonderland in 1084, in search of God. Today, the French name of this magnificent Alpine territory is Chartreuse. The peak in the middle of the photo is Chamechaude, which means "bald head". Bruno's descendants are called Chartreux [or Carthusians, if you prefer a more English-sounding term]. Ever since arriving in the Dauphiné, I've admired the tale of Bruno, with whom I sense a vague affinity. A few years ago, I made a small website on the theme of this hermit [display].

This morning, Natacha, Alain and I set out from the Grande Chartreuse monastery in order to climb up to the primordial spring whose waters have enabled generations of monks, over the last nine centuries, to survive and indeed thrive in this rugged wilderness.

The stacks of wood in front of the quaint old sawmill will be keeping the monks warm during next winter. In fact, the immense timber riches of the Grande Chartreuse belong now to the French Republic.

Alain found an iron nugget. What is this specimen of iron doing in such an unlikely place? My unpublished novel entitled God's Metal answers that question in a roundabout conjectural way.

Curiously, Bruno's superb spring is hardly mentioned in Carthusian literature. Natacha and I don't understand the reasons for this absence.

The splendid limestone fountain is full of icy water and fat tadpoles.

The ruins above the spot where the water comes to the surface resemble those of an ancient Greek temple. For the moment, we ignore the nature and purpose of the edifice that once existed here.

Walking upwards beyond the spring, we approached the aerial summits of the cliffs surrounding Bruno's great valley. The wind blowing up from the valley was focussed here into a gale-force blast that almost knocked me over from time to time.

This sign says that we're in the so-called desert of the Chartreux monks, where silence is the rule.

On the way back down, we passed alongside Carthusian settlements of an economic nature: the old farming installations that once enabled the monks to earn an income as graziers.

At the end of this lovely day, I was intrigued by the same questions that arise every time I visit Bruno's exotic wilderness, which is extraordinarily beautiful but harsh, particularly in winter. Why and how did a renowned middle-aged scholar [from the great medieval city of Reims] settle down as a religious hermit in such a remote place?

Trains

On this sunny Sunday morning, I decided to drive to the Valence train station to buy a return ticket to England for five days in August. It's a splendid new station out in the countryside, catering primarily for TGV [high-speed train] links.

I've become accustomed to using the Internet to make purchases of all kinds, but I prefer a person-to-person contact in the case of train tickets. I have the impression [but I may be wrong] that the human operator in a train station has access to more information than an Internet user, and knows how to find an optimal solution to queries in a minimum of time. Above all, I guess I'm old-fashioned, since I simply like the idea of dropping in at a railway station to buy train tickets from a human employee. Besides, in the special case of the Valence TGV station, I get a kick out of visiting such a nice place, whether it's a matter of buying tickets, catching a train or picking up visitors.

On the other side of the planet, in my native New South Wales, people don't seem to have such a positive attitude towards trains as they do here in France. A few days ago, in The Sydney Morning Herald, there was a derogatory but well-written article entitled The curse of CityRail [read], which started out as follows:

Sydney is supposed to be a major global city. We're constantly telling ourselves how world-class we are, and major surveys keep agreeing - most recently we were ranked fifth best city in the world to visit. And we are the largest city in a wealthy, highly developed nation. So can someone explain to me, in extremely simple terms, why our train system is reminiscent of a third world country - or, worse still, England?

Last year, I spent no more than a month out in Australia, but that was more than sufficient to provide me with ample evidence concerning the antiquated train system. First, I wasn't able to visit Braidwood by train, because the railway doesn't even go there! Second, one afternoon, I spent over an hour in a halted Sydney north-shore suburban train, for reasons I never learned. Third, my trip up to Grafton and back provided me—without my asking—with old memories of my adolescence, because the train system doesn't seem to have evolved in any noticeable fashion since then. But I wouldn't go out of my way to complain about anything, because I have the impression that this antiquated railway system corresponds to my overall conception of my native land and its people. Australia is a place where nothing much has ever happened, and probably never will. Maybe the constant humid heat provokes torpidity, preventing people from being creative. In any case, every country has the trains it deserves.

The above-mentioned article in The Sydney Morning Herald includes a significant reflection: We're constantly telling ourselves how world-class we are... To my mind, most praise of Sydney is indeed locally-produced hype. I'm not so sure that many non-Australians are convinced that Sydney is "world-class", whatever that might mean. For European visitors, Sydney is definitely not a charming city. Once you've had a beer in one of the few surviving pubs at the Rocks, strolled through the Botanic Gardens, wandered around the Darling Harbour area and taken a ferry to Manly, you've "done" Sydney. There's truly nothing more to be seen there... unless, of course, you're a native-born Australian, like me, who finds it meaningful to visit the place where Braidwood bushrangers were hanged, and to drive with one of my sisters to the shoreline of La Pérouse, where the vessels of the French navigator were seen for the last time. In other words, Australia is a great place for Australians, who are sensitive to its interest and charms, and don't necessarily mind if the train system is shitty. Things only start to go haywire if you're tempted to make silly and unnecessary comparisons between Sydney and great cities such as London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Jerusalem...

The author of the article in The Sydney Morning Herald mentions a recent ranking of Sydney as the "fifth best city in the world to visit". To appreciate correctly the significance of such a judgment, one would need to know more about its origins. If, for example, we're talking of a poll conducted by a travel magazine that caters essentially for globe-trotting Florida widows, then we should view its findings with a certain relativity. In any case, visitors of that kind don't catch trains, neither in New South Wales nor anywhere else.

Having said all this, I do believe that the fellow in charge of trains in New South Wales [whose identity I ignore] should pull his finger out, and look around for ideas about improvements and evolution. And I'm sure I'm not the only Australian with this opinion.

Prefects

When I was a youth at high school in Grafton, I disliked the concept of so-called prefects. They were a group of elected senior students charged with minimal duties such as making sure that pupils marched into their classrooms in straight lines. The thing I disliked about the prefects concept was that most of us got elected to this silly position, which meant that the few outsiders who weren't sufficiently popular to be chosen as prefects were automatically looked upon as social outcasts. I think, for example, of my classmate Tom Mogan, whose father was the governor of Grafton's notorious jail. Tom was a quiet introspective individual. I got to know him a little through the fact that we were among the few members of a Latin class run by a great teacher named Robert Sinclair [with whom I met up a year ago, when I was out in Sydney]. Tom was not the sort of person who would get elected as a prefect, because he didn't seem to be concerned with all the trivial aspects of school life [such as sport, for example] that provide a context for becoming a popular student. I learned recently that Tom became a Catholic priest, and spent the final years of his life working with destitute Aborigines over in Western Australia.

Here in France, the term préfet [prefect, from the Latin praefectus] is a Napoleonic title bestowed upon individuals who are placed in charge of a region or a département. French prefects are distinguished individuals who have generally been educated in the finest schools of France. Their job consists of representing the authorities of the French republic at a tangible local level, a little like the role of a governor in an imperial colony. It's a fact that French prefects wear exotic old-fashioned military-style uniforms that give them a very serious look. Although their role appears at times to be largely honorific, the work of a French prefect can be difficult and hazardous in certain situations, particularly in the case of local catastrophes, when they have the personal responsibility of managing events. In a nutshell, if something goes hugely wrong [such as a local officially-approved garbage-disposal facility giving out lethal fumes, for example], the entire blame can fall upon the poor prefect.

Funnily enough, soon after my arrival here in the Dauphiné, I discovered that the Isère prefect was a second cousin of my ex-wife, and that the prefect of a neighboring département was a fellow I used to know back at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris, when I was an English assistant. In both cases, these former acquaintances had risen to such a superior social status that it was quite out of the question—if ever I had wished to do so—of simply dropping in on them to say hello. [There might be some kind of Shakespearean philosophical implication in that last statement, but I don't know what it is.]

Talking of French prefects, one of the very first fellows to get such a job, here in the Isère département where I live, was a certain Joseph Fourier. From a modest background, this scientist caught the attention of Napoléon within the context of the Emperor's exploratory mission in Egypt. Then, in 1801, Napoléon put him in charge of the tumultuous region around Grenoble in which the flames of the French Revolution had been kindled just fourteen years previously, at the castle of Vizille. At that time, a Grenoble librarian named Jacques-Joseph Champollion [who did a lot of work in cataloging the confiscated library of the Chartreux monks] succeeded in becoming a close acquaintance of the prefect Fourier. This Champollion fellow had a young brother who went on to crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics... but that's another fabulous story, to which I shall certainly return, one of these days, in my blog. Getting back to Fourier, I would suppose that he led a rather hectic life, representing the authorities of the newly-created French Republic in the headstrong Alpine city of Grenoble. We might imagine that this arduous and no doubt messy administrative job left the young prefect [33 years old when he arrived in Grenoble] little time for personal activities.

Well, that was not quite the case. The prefect of whom I am talking was of course none other than the celebrated mathematician Joseph Fourier, whose work still remains the daily sustenance of scientists all over the planet. At Sydney University, I was brought up on a basic mathematical diet of Fourier series. Soon, I learned to manipulate the famous Fourier transform, which might be described superficially as a mathematical method for investigating all kinds of marvelous phenomena. For example, back in the early '70s, when I became interested in the themes of music and machines, in an article by a certain James Beauchamp [University of Illinois], I came upon the following exciting assertion: We may now be at the threshold of the discovery of mathematical descriptions for beautiful tones, as they are commonly termed in conventional music. The rest of the article might be described as a celebration of the power of the Fourier transform, executed on a computer, as a means of putting some order into audio data. In his prefectoral offices in Grenoble, Fourier actually carried out physics experiments concerning the propagation of heat that resulted in his formulation of a theory of thermodynamics.

Since the epoch of the prefect Fourier, the world has heard of the clerk named Einstein in a patents office who invented the theory of relativity. Today, we still have cases of extraordinary individuals who exploit their time in mundane jobs to invent marvelous theories [more about that later on]. Meanwhile, a silly speculation: If Joseph Fourier had been a student in my high school in Grafton, like my quiet mate Tom Mogan, would he have been popular enough to get elected as a prefect? Yes, certainly, for one of Fourier's major gifts was his eloquence. The Champollion brothers gave him a nickname, Chrysostom, recalling the illustrious 4th-century Greek saint whose name evokes his legendary golden mouth.