France: John Ward on DIY, "Deliverance" and dog days

We’ve reached that time down here where the very ground beneath you pulsates with heat. Being alone here this year, I’ve taken now and then to dropping into the local Bar Portuguese for a beer. It’s full of swarthy latins – as always cheerful – discussing what they now see as an unavoidable disaster for their homeland. I can walk in and – with my hair and eyes – easily be mistaken for a German. There is an awkwardness, until they realise I’m British – and then everything changes: I am bought obscure Portuguese liquor, and given the sort of welcome usually reserved for Eusebio forty years ago, or Ronaldo today. I mention my passion for Manchester United, and more rounds are bought.

The main problem this consumption could pose is how I get home again. But luckily, there is a short-cut back to the house: I can use it to weave unsteadily back there legally on foot…unless under French law you can be found drunk in charge of yourself. I’d imagine you can’t be.

When it gets this hot and water is in short supply, more make do and mend comes into play. I collect all my bottled water packs and chop off the top and bottom. The main residue is then wrapped around new tree stems, and thus protects them from the attentions of deer…who are buggers for rubbing up against the bark and nibbling at it. If they nibble all the way round, then the young sapling dies in short order.

The top bit of the plastic bottle can be inverted to create a simple channel by the side of herbs and vegetables, and so massively reduce wastage of the water being applied to keep them going. The chopped-off bottom I fill with any stale beer knocking about. Snails are born beerheads and can’t resist it. They get legless, and then drown. Not that they have legs anyway. It’s a figure of speech.

At the top eastern end of the property is the real (as opposed to metaphorical) Slogger’s Roost. There I recycled a couple of pallets from the roof renovation two years ago, using them to create raised beds of flat-leaf parsley the rabbits can’t reach. I’ve also been gradually planting lavender, a rose, and a few shrubs up there. These represent a hopeful attempt to give some fragrance to an area whose main advantage is that first, it’s a long way from the house and offers me peace in which to write; and second, it is sheltered from the wind that can bite in mid-Spring and late Autumn here.

The main point of my little respite is that I achieved an aim in making it: to do so without spending one centime. Everything that went into its creation was recycled and reformed in a new role. But just before midday today, I noticed my least likeable farming neighbours using a crane-grab and chainsaw to slash back the high hedge behind the Roost. To one side of the site I’ve constructed a permanent windbreak out of old tongue and groove we ripped out when renovating the upper floor. In their enthusiasm, the chain saw artists looked about to massacre one of my better creations.

This farming family is, to say the least of it, a bit odd. None of the locals here like them. They have that beaky-nosed, eyes close together appearance of the sinister hillbillies in Deliverance, and there’s a very good reason for this: they’re the product of incest. Try not to be shocked: it’s more common in remote rural areas than you’d imagine. Their mum killed herself five years ago; I remember being horrified when I asked the Mayor why, and he replied with a shrug meant to be self-explanatory, “She drank”.

It’s amazing how often our species thinks that an observation of a symptom is somehow a diagnosis. It didn’t seem to occur to the Mayor that maybe she drank because of depression, or guilt about the incestual sex, or both. But either way, it was with some trepidation that I legged it up to Slogger’s Roost to see if her sons knew of my tongue and groove genius. Yes, they did was the answer…and then five minutes later they demolished the right-hand end of it.

It didn’t take long to fix, so I shouldn’t make a drama out of it. But deepest darkest France consists of far more than the starry-eyed bollocks you see on A Place in the Sun.

Tonight, the Andy Murray syndrome was at work again. The Wimbledon authorities closed the Centre Court roof – after to a lot of Polish whine. It was a fearsome struggle afterwards, but Murray came through in the end. Here by contrast, it is now cooling a little. The fire of late afternoon has dimmed to a mid-evening kissing the skin rather than burning it. The sun makes love to you here in a hundred different ways throughout the day. I’m always grateful for its variety…as every appreciative lover should be.

I may well have to pay in a future life for the good fortune of having a place like this. But as I have grave doubts about reincarnation, I’m not about to get upset about that. I did work very hard to get the house; but then, I know lots of equally talented folks who worked even harder, and didn’t. Humility in such matters is never a bad thing.

By John Ward. Republished by kind permission of the author.

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Pic of the day: V&A

The spiral staircase in the Jewellery Collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 04 July 2013. (Photo: author.)

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Human history vs Earth's history

 

If we wrote the entire history of Earth on A4 paper at 1,000 years per page, the stack would reach up a bit over 1,533 feet - higher than the top of the antenna on the Empire State Building.

 

Of the 9,200 reams of paper, only the top 5 would have anything about humanoid creatures; the last ream (thinner than the top line of the column in this diagram) would contain the entire history of homo sapiens, and the uppermost 0.8 inches would record modern man (homo sapiens sapiens).

 

The final 10 leaves tell of what happened since the end of the last Ice Age, and the first writing by Man himself (in Sumerian) appears on the fifth-to-last page.

 

As you float in the air above, you reach out and pick up the top sheet, which is written in the language of the time. In the British edition, the first half of the page is unintelligible to the ordinary reader, as it's a mixture of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Norse, Norman French and Middle English. Even the early part of the second half, in Modern English, can be confusing, as it may contain words no longer used, and others whose meaning has since changed.

 

A standard A4 sheet contains 46 lines at 8 - 9 words per line, so the history of the globe since 1900 is covered in the last 5 lines - about 40 words. There are only 8 people in the world still alive who were born before then; all of them are female.

 

The last dinosaurs - wiped out by the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, 66 million years ago - are to be found 22 feet further down the stack - still nearly 40 feet above the top of the antenna on the Empire State.

 

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Peasants

I recently ploughed through a collection of Chekhov’s short stories – 209 of them on my Kindle, although a few were duplicated – possibly alternative translations. Did he write more than 209 minus the duplicates? I don’t know, but by gum they’re good. 

I hadn’t read much Chekhov up until then, but what a writer! He found time to be a doctor too. Here he is writing a fictional, but one suspects all too real account of peasant life in late nineteenth century Russia :-

Only the well-to-do peasants were afraid of death; the richer they were the less they believed in God, and in the salvation of souls, and only through fear of the end of the world put up candles and had services said for them, to be on the safe side.

The peasants who were rather poorer were not afraid of death. The old father and Granny were told to their faces that they had lived too long, that it was time they were dead, and they did not mind.

They did not hinder Fyokla from saying in Nikolay's presence that when Nikolay died her husband Denis would get exemption--to return home from the army. And Marya, far from fearing death, regretted that it was so slow in coming, and was glad when her children died.

Above all, they were afraid of catching cold, and so put on thick clothes even in the summer and warmed themselves at the stove. Granny was fond of being doctored, and often went to the hospital, where she used to say she was not seventy, but fifty-eight; she supposed that if the doctor knew her real age he would not treat her, but would say it was time she died instead of taking medicine.

Anton Chekhov – Peasants (1897)

Russia has produced so much talent and to this outsider at least, seemingly wasted under the thumbs of mass murderers and autocratic wastrels. Why I don’t know, but we still need talent like Chekhov's.

There is one problem with him though. When I finally put aside my Kindle and looked around at modern entertainers and celebrities...

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Energy Policy: Reductio Ad Absurdum

It is hard to know where begin a post on UK energy policy just now, though I feel vaguely obliged to try. Last week there were flurries of straws in the wind, adding up to what ought to be unavoidable recognition of the failure of the programme initiated by Ed Miliband when in power as Energy Secretary. His predecessor, John Hutton, was considerably more realistic but Miliband adopted a fantasy green agenda - arguably, part of Gordon Brown's overall scorched-earth strategy which I wrote about at the time - and with very few modifications the coalition swallowed it whole.

Now we have an updated forecast of reserve capacity which shows we can easily be up the proverbial creek by 2015 - no news to anyone reading C@W, I realise - and Ofgem scurrying for short-term fixes. Cue hysteria in the mainstream media (save for a curious silence in the Guardian).

The government and regulators will, of course, succeed in preventing large-scale black-outs, and probably even rolling brown-outs, although there could well be the odd isolated incident. How will they do this ? By throwing money at the problem, of course, because no politician will ever allow the lights to go out. Switching off large industrial customers, revving up diesel generators, paying the owners of mothballed gas-fired power plants to re-commission them, prolonging the lives of old nukes a bit - it isn't even very difficult. But it is far more expensive than it should be, and we shall all pay for it.

Perhaps - just perhaps - someone will also quietly finish off DECC's mad green + nuke agenda: because that is what all this ad-hoccery amounts to. The real problems are going to happen 2015-2020, when both Cameron and Miliband both hope to be holding the reins.

So we might hope for a bit of belated realistic policy-making from now on. They seem to have got the bit between their teeth on shale gas - (which, by the way, will bring forth the most astonishing amount of green fury). Some reckon that Ed Davey has lost faith in EDF's ability to come up with the nuclear goods, and not before time: EDF have given enough compelling evidence of their uselessness. Michael Fallon, the new safe-pair-of-hands energy minister (actually, minister for just about everything, it seems) seems pretty robust and clear-sighted. But he bullshits like the worst of them, and it's worth a few minutes to watch him in action against Andrew Neil (second item in this programme) - who asked a bunch of the right questions but allowed himself too easily to be fobbed off with Fallon's confident sophistry and bluster

It would be fun to fisk the whole interview but, sorry, I just don't have the time. Or energy. Sorry.


This post first appeared on the Capitalists@Work blog


All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

In one picture: what the banks have done to us since the 1980s

Source: Charles Hugh Smith

 

Another corker from independent thinker Charles Hugh Smith today. The graph above shows how the "boom" of the Eighties was a phoney, as were the "recoveries" from the lows of 2003 and 2009. (The latter Nineties I see as partly "real" because of efficiencies and consumer demand created by dramatically increasing computer power and the international and cross-class spread of electronic communication systems.)

 

To me, this demonstrates that it's not a Left versus Right thing; it's about the unholy alliance of bankers and politicians who trade wealth and political power among themselves. In the UK, the British Conservative Party is just as much to blame as the supposed socialists (who oversaw a further deterioration in manufacturing and working-class employment).

 

The question is, can we have preventive reform soon or must we wait for full-scale disaster to force it?

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London in 1927 - in colour

London in 1927 from Tim Sparke on Vimeo.