The Abyss

Just a short blog, I hope, on The Abyss, James Cameron's blockbuster that I happened to catch on the telly this evening.

If you haven't seen it, it's a film that certainly repays viewing, and it's never an effort to watch, as I often find with films these days. It is full of suspense but also strangely and rewardingly uplifting (excuse the pun, if you've seen it) at the end.

The subject matter is one that interests me greatly, since I work in the oil industry, as do the characters in the film. These good, hearty guys and gals are pitted against another groups of toughies, the military.

The difference between these two types is that the drillers show emotional strength, resilience if you like, while the Navy Seals show gung-ho toughness laced with psychosis and paranoia. If you're interested in how the world views offshore oil workers, have a read of this excellent essay.

I was fascinated by the dive routines in the film which seemed almost plausible but slightly unlikely, or even completely unlikely in the case of the dive to 2.5 miles down in a suit in which you breath oxygen-rich liquid like a fish. Don't worry says the Navy Seal, it's perfectly normal to collapse like that when you first start doing it. Yes, and for quite a long time afterwards I should think. Like, forever.

And also, how are you going to topple off the continental shelf and fall two miles vertically downwards then find what you were looking for exactly where you happen to stop. Geologically and physically, it's completely implausible, especially considering how he was bounced around on the way down. It was like Alice in Wonderland down the rabbit hole. (She has a lot to answer for!) Mind you, those characters he met two miles down were a bit unlikely as well, but it didn't seem to matter too much.

Strangely, I spent the whole of my childhood thinking about becoming a soldier, wondering about what regiment I would be in etc. I had books and books on tanks, guns, the history of the second world war etc. I read comics like 'The Victor' (it never occurred to me that there must also be 'A Vanquished'), and then there was 'Warlord', a slightly more cold war version of the military genre featuring spies as well. Yes, I was dead interested in all that.

I didn't know it, but I was growing up among the shock waves of the Second World War. In 1975, when I was ten years old, the Second World War seemed like ancient history. Now, another thirty years on, I realise how close it was.

I finally grew out of this interest in blood-letting at the age of seventeen when I rang my local territorial unit to see if I could join. I was surprised at the frosty reception on the other end of the telephone (there were no mobiles in those days) when I squeaked that I was interested in joining up. A voice simply said: "Name, Address?'. I gave them and then the telephone went dead.

The next day I received a flimsy brown envelope through the mailbox containing an even flimsier pamphlet. On it were the famous emblem of a winged dagger and the legend: "So you want to join the SAS?"

I never, ever thought of joining the army again.

It was a lucky escape. My years in university showed me how deluded I was in thinking I could handle that sort of thing, even as a Sapper, for example. But it was interesting to see, in this film, my 'possible' past pitted against my 'possible' present. All complete fantasy of course, but nonetheless, my fantasy.

Cold Porridge

Well, if you managed to get to the end of my last two blogs, you're doing better than my wife who, after getting halfway through, gave up. Then she said: can't you write something shorter, like that blog you wrote about peculiar plugs in French sinks?

I must admit that after writing my first 65 blogs, that blog about French plugs was the first one to get a comment posted from a blog reader, so she may have a point. It was actually my intention to keep the blogs short, pithy and poetic up until a few weeks ago, but then ideas started taking over again and the blogs got longer and longer.

So here, at the risk of sounding like a metrosexual, is a short blog about the diet that I started today. The idea for this diet came from my Mum who sent me a little book explaining something called the 'GI diet' after she lost a lot of weight, at the same time inflicting the diet on my Dad, who had no need to lose weight in the first place and who now looks rather too thin.

The GI diet is not the 'General Infantry' diet or even the 'General Indigestion' diet but something called the 'Glycaemic Index' diet. The glycaemic index, apparently, is a scale used to measure the speed at which glucose is absorbed from food in the intestine into the blood stream. High GI food such as sugar and chocolate release glucose quickly and cause insulin to be released into the body. Constantly eating high GI food raises the level of insulin production and creates a sort of dependence on the insulin 'hit'. The excess insulin triggers the body to convert glucose into fat and you start to expand.

Low GI foods such as porridge, fruit and vegetables release glucose slowly and in a more stable way. If you eat them regularly throughout the day, they stop you feeling hungry, only low levels of insulin are produced and cells are encouraged to give up their fat, making you shrink. Starts to sound like Alice in Wonderland, doesn't it?

The key thing, according to Mum, is to eat porridge for breakfast. Being Scottish, I am quite happy to eat porridge for breakfast, but the idea of eating porridge on a diet is a bit counter-intuitive I must admit.

Once, my father told me a story about a Scottish friend from his student days who, when his university grant ran out through excessive drinking and eating of curries, bought a large sack of porridge oats with which he made pots and pots of porridge that he poured into the bottom draw of the wardrobe in his bedroom. The porridge, being porridge, set in the draw to an enormous hard lump measuring, I suppose, three feet by two feet by six inches deep. From this lump he proceeded to cut slices whenever he felt hungry for the rest of the year.

Nowadays, of course, he could have taken the lump of porridge into his local Arts Council office and got a grant to make a bigger lump of porridge that filled the whole house and would eventually be set on a plinth in Trafalgar Square, but that's another story.

When I heard this tale about porridge in draws it seemed to me a fairly extraordinary and desperate measure in order to survive, but I later learnt that this practice was actually commonplace in Scotland. In fact, among the crofters who lived in blackhouses (so-called because the smoke rises from a fire in the middle of the room and coats the straw ceiling in a layer of soot that helps keep the rain out) it was actually the norm.

And now, what's more, I discover that this is a healthy lifestyle!

So, living and learning, what I've decided to do is to cook twice the usual amount of porridge for breakfast every day and put half of it in a bowl in the fridge. That way when I get home from work in the evening, near fainting and ravenous for a snack, instead of eating half a packet of jaffa biscuits I can just get a plate of cold porridge out of the fridge and eat that instead. Brilliant eh?

And there is a photo of this evening's bowl of cold porridge at the top of the page. I'll let you know if I get scurvy.

Full Circle

We have just returned from a week's holiday in the Department of Dordogne region, previously called Perigord. It is the third time we have made this trip since we came to France, and for good reason. It is, firstly, a very picturesque and largely unspoilt region of rolling hills, wide rivers and steep valley gorges cut into limestone. The hills are an attractive patchwork of dense woodland and small fields. To the British, it is an idyllic place, the golden-coloured limestone recalling Cotswold villages of Oxfordshire now unattainable after the house price rises in the UK during the last ten years. This helps to explain why the British have been purchasing houses in this region like crazy, to the extent that some people now refer to it as Dordogneshire.

The second reason for interest in the Dordogne, is its history. The place is studded with beautiful Chateaux, often perched on top of formidable defensive positions. Many of the Chateaux have interesting Medieval histories dating back to the period when England's Edward I was making inroads into the French territory of Perigord from his base in Aquitaine. Edward's legacy to the region includes the many bastide towns built on a formal design of defensive walls containing roads intersecting at 90 degrees around a central market square.

Another reason for Dordogne's popularity is the renowned culinary delights including truffles, cepes, foie gras and other poultry products. The towns of Perigreux and Sarlat are the culinary capitals, becoming rich from the trade in these desirable treats. Foie gras goose liver pate still sells at around £20 for a pound jar, even though the market seems somewhat flooded with the stuff.

The final major reason, and for me the most attractive, is the fabulous caves that can be visited, some of which are geological wonders, others of which contain the rare artistic vestiges of Palaeolithic man in the form of cave paintings. The most famous attraction is the Lascaux cave. The first time I remember seeing pictures of this cave was in a free weekly supplement of the Sunday Times called "One Million Years of Art", published in the 1970s. I remember cherishing this supplement that appeared week by week and built up into a thick pile of the most striking images I had ever encountered. The design was very simple: rows of pictures with a minimum of explanation underneath, something like an auctioneers catalogue. The reason for the simplicity, scope, boldness of choice and unconventionality of this publication was that it was, as I later found out, put together by Bruce Chatwin. The details are in the excellent biography of Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare.

I hardly need to describe Lascaux, as its paintings of horses and bisons running a stampede along the walls of the cave are well known. What can be added, however, is that the animal forms are inspired by the rock onto which they are painted. The paintings are not 2-dimensional, but 3-dimensional. The paintings are bringing to dynamic life the static rock forms that are already there. They are encouraging the rock to live. The cave painters, using ochre paints made from iron ore would have used lamps that burned animal fat and whose unsteady flames would have thrown dancing shadows that accentuated the form of the rock.

In his book "Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age", Richard Rudgley describes caves such as Lascaux as "natural cathedrals, distant ancestors of the passage-graves and burial mounds of the Neolithic period". He admits that the mythology surrounding such places is hazy which is why he uses the analogy of modern Autralian aboriginal myths to explain, for example, the origin of the reddend iron ore that makes ochre, thought by aborigines to be the dried blood of a mythic giant kangaroo. The same iron stains seep down into the rocks of the Dordogne, as if blood had been spilt across the surface of the land. Rudgley also points out that the paintings of Lascaux were probably not rare during the Palaeolithic, it is just that they were well preserved in this region where caves are abundant and many have remained forgotten by man ever since they were originally painted.

The other kind of cave we have visited in this region and in areas close by such as the Cevennes, are those where the excavation of enormous caverns and the formation of extraordinary curtains of stalactites and rock formations have created natural wonders. It is likely that Paleolithic man was familiar with some of these features, but unlikely that they ever saw the three great 'natural cathedrals' of the south-east: the Gouffre de Padirac, the Gouffre de Proumeyssac and the Aven Armand. These three caves all have very high, cavernous ceilings and are lined with thousands of stalactites which the guide will explain to you look like 'organ pipes' or stalagtites which the guide will say are known as 'the madonna and child' or 'the crucifixion'. When I type cathedral+cave into the Google search engine, I get 696,000 hits. Isn't it time somebody started asking why cathedrals look like caves, rather than always saying that caves look like cathedrals?

These caves, like Lascaux, were only discovered as recently as the twentieth century by the boom in speleological investigation that occurred in the first part of the century. By that time, Darwin had won his arguments on the evolution of man and modern life was starting to batter at the doors of the established church. People had started to wonder what was really down there, under the ground.

The gouffres were difficult to get into because they were accessed by a hole on the surface of the limestone plateau. People had known about these holes for as many centuries as they had been disposing of rubbish down them. All they knew was that they went down a long way. Vapours sometimes arose from the holes, leading to local myths that the devil was living down there, myths no doubt encouraged by the church. Satan, for example, is said to have emerged from the Gouffre de Padirac and bartered for souls with St. Martin. Eventually, in each case, some intrepid character got a rope and went down with a candle only to discover, not the devil, but a natural wonderland. And when the rubbish piles were analysed, hordes of coins and human skeletons were discovered among the rest of the ossuary trash, stuff that human guilt and misdemeanour had dumped there.

As I have already mentioned, the painted caves of the Dordogne region are probably some of the earliest spiritual sanctuaries that have been documented, around 30,000 B.C. They preceded the Neolithic tumulus burial mounds and, later, the burial of the Egyptian Pharoahs in underground caverns such as those found in the Valley of the Kings. The Acropolis itself, according to David Craig, in his book 'Landmarks' is founded on a rock containing caves used by cults of earth worship. Thus, a relationship with the earth (through exploration and use of caves) and fulfillment of the spiritual instinct are already well established by the time Chritianity comes along.

The early Christian church was outlawed by the Romans until 313 B.C. The act of conversion was therefore a secretive one. In the 1st century AD, a cave-dwelling life was not unusual in the Mediterranean region where the cimate was hot and caves provided a cool retreat from the sun. They were also secretive places where radical religious leaders could hide away.

On Malta, for example, according to legend, the first place to have been used as a chapel was the cavern where St Paul was kept as a prisoner following his shipwreck on the island in A.D. 60. Today it is known as St Paul’s Grotto in the town of Rabat. Whatever the tradition, the area was used for Christian burials and rituals by the 3rd century A.D. The importance of this grotto to the catholic church can be evidenced by the visit there of Pope John-Paul in 1990.

The book "The Cave of John the Baptist" by Shimon Gibson describes the archaeological evidence that a cave found near Jerusalem contains a large ritual bathing pool which he claims was used by Christians for baptism during the first century AD. He relates these activities to events described in the Gospels. The cave is found in the village where John the Baptist is said to have been born, and shows what he calls unmistakable signs of ritual use in the first century AD. Also in the cave is said to be the earliest ever Christian art, depicting John the Baptist as well as the three crosses of the crucifixion.

Early Christian builders adapted structures that had long been used in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, that of a basilican hall, consisting of a nave flanked by lower aisles and terminated by an apse. This developed into a more centralised structure, often cruciform in shape. In so doing, a single plain room was turned into a central area with annexes running off it. These annexes in turn often have small chapels running off them. To me, that is about as cave like as formal architecture can get, all bar the labyrinthine palace of King Minos on Crete. It is strong contrast, for example, to the well lit and open structures of many Muslim mosques.

In the cathedral of St. Front in Perigueux last week I walked into a small chapel dedicated to St. Jacques (symbol: a Pecten shell) situated off the main aisle. Passing through a passage in a 2m thick wall, it was exactly like stepping into a small cave. To me, the sombre and intricate structure of many medieval cathedrals reflects a conscious or unconscious desire on the part of their builders to recreate the same natural cavernous structures used for worship since time immemorial. For me, it is organ pipes that look like stalactites, not the other way around. This use of natural form in architecture is equally applicable in terms of the plant and animal forms that often cover cathedrals. It is simply a part of the artistic process which took up and adapted what was there before, in the same way that the church calender was adapted from pre-existing pagan events.

In the Dordogne, the three "natural cathedrals" that I mentioned earlier are now major tourist attractions receiving several hundred thousand visitors a year between them. I'm not sure how this compares to the cathedral of Lourdes, but nonetheless, it is pretty impressive. I am pleased that these natural geological structures, so recently discovered, are now proving a good match for the structures built by man. These caves, which took tens of millions of years to form rather than the few hundred years in which cathedrals are built, are eloquent witnesess to the mystery of deep geological time. For me they relocate that sense of wonderment back to where it should be, which is towards the earth on which we all depend. In a sense we have come full circle, returning to the point where the cave painters of Lascaux began.

Bastille Day, or Why Soldiers are like Oil Reservoirs

I have now been in France for just over two years. I arrived here in June 2003 and so was able to view the Bastille Day events of that year. There are two sides to Bastille Day. One of them is the celebration of the storming of the Bastille and the founding of the French Republic. The other is the celebration of the military strength of France in the form of a parade down the Champs Elysee with an inspection of the troops by the president in the Place de la Concorde,

In 2003, the first time I watched the parade, I found it rather upsetting because it brought home to me the terrifying reality of the attacks going on in Iraq at around that time. Suddenly, the aerial bombing of Iraq was not just a little TV screen showing flashes on a night time scene over the rooftops of Baghdad, accompanied by distant thuds. Instead, I felt for myself the physical tremors made by squadrons of low flying jets going through my body and the terrifying roar of six or seven jet engines bursting over a narrow street.

In 2004, I wanted to take my family to see the same event, but I had forgotten how early in the morning it starts. You really have to be on the Champs Elysee by 9 a.m. which means, in the case of my family, getting up at 7 a.m. A not very likely start to a public holiday! When we did eventually get in to central Paris around 10.30, we weren't allowed to get out of the Metro as all the stops near the Champs Elysee had been shut as a security measure. When we did eventually find our way there, all we saw were some horse guards being pursued by a street cleaning lorry picking up horse droppings and a roller-skating policeman taking advantage of empty boulevards to do fancy foot manouevers at high speed.

Before I went to the event this year, I asked a few of my colleagues if they were going, thinking they would be, but got a rather surprising response: "Oh, that. No, I'm not going. In fact, I've never watched it." I started to get the impression that there wasn't much interest among the French. I suppose familiarity breeds contempt. My thoughts were somewhat confirmed when we arrived (on time) to watch the parade today and found ourselves surrounded by: Canadian, Japanese and American tourists. The French themselves seemed to be in a minority, and one of them wanted me to take pictures of his son as he marched past. So, perhaps only 30 or 40 % of the crowd were there for purely patriotic reasons.

This year, as we stood there in the hot sunshine, watching the soldiers in front of us surreptitiously passing bottles of water around to try and avoid succumbing to the combined effects of heavy boots and heavy rifles, I noticed how neatly the cohorts of soldiers were arranged. Not only did the soldiers stand in rows with the tallest in the front row and the shortest in the back, but also, within each row, they were arranged so that the tallest soldiers were on the right hand side and the shorter were on the left. This meant that each squad of soldiers had been perfectly sorted according to height. They marched in squads which were twelve men wide by ten men deep (they were not all men I hasten to add).

In the military, discipline is considered the most important component. The physical manifestation of discipline is order. Thus these squads, perfectly arranged and marching in time, represented a perfectly disciplined army. Such order can also be easily represented in the abstract in a 3D computer modelling program. Imagine the soldiers are a sort of fishing net and each soldier is a knot in that net. In computer jargon, the knots are called nodes (noeud in French = knot in English). Each node now has three sets of data. The first set of data is the soldier's "i, j" position in the net where i = row number and j = column number. The second set of data is the soldier's geographic "x, y, z" coordinate where x = latitude of soldier on the Champs Elysee, y = longitude of soldier on the Chanps Elysee and z = elevation of the Champs Elysee above mean sea level. The third set of data is the height of the soldier. Viewing this data with the computer 3D modelling program, we would not worry about viewing the height data as arab numerals since all these numbers would be difficult to comprehend. Instead we would apply a rainbow colour scale with tall soldiers in red and short soldiers at the other end of the rainbow scale in indigo. If we now viewed the 'net' (or 'grid' as it is usually referred to in the computer speak) we would see a rainbow stretching from one corner of the rectangular grid to the other: a nice neat arrangement of data.

Now that all the information is digital, it is also possible to view the data as a distribution function. Assuming an element of randomness in the original selection of the soldiers from their unit, we would no doubt discover a Gaussian or normal distribution of the soldiers' heights since that is the distribution that normally applies to naturally occurring populations where most of the variation is confined to the two tails of the population (very tall or very short soldiers in the first and last row and the rest more or less the same height in the rows in between). We could also add other data to each node of the grid: age of the soldier, weight of the soldier, fitness level of the soldier, firing accuracy of the soldier. With all this data, we could start to build up a detailed model of the properties of this squad of soldiers and their likely effectiveness in battle, not just as a qualititative feeling, but as a quantitative model.

The grid made up by the marching soldiers (who could just as easily be imagined marching into battle) is little different from the grid of rock properties that reservoir geologists create when they are trying to describe the 3D distribution of reservoir rock properties inside the earth. The geographic coordinates are exactly comparable, but instead of height, a geologist might map rock porosity (how much fluid, either oil, water or gas, can be held in the rock), or rock permeability (how easily the fluid can flow through the rock). When the geologist has finished creating the model, which is termed the static model, it is handed to a reservoir engineer who takes the grid of properties and simulates the flow of fluids through the rock in order to see how much oil, gas and water will be produced from the reservoir. This model is called the dynamic model.

The advance of an injected water front used to sweep oil through a reservoir towards producing wells is little different to the sweep of an advancing military force through a defended position. The algorithms used by military planners to model battlefield simulations that predict the likely outcome of a conflict are not very different to those used by reservoir engineers trying to predict the ultimate recovery factor of a reservoir. The battlefield simulator is likely to have as much interest in an individual soldier as a reservoir engineer has in any particular node of his reservoir model. You can get an idea of the range and breath of the computer simulation industry, a multi-billion dollar affair here.

My French fellow-bystander, to whom, this evening, I sent a high resolution photo of the cohort in which his son was marching, should remind himself, as he zooms in to try and find the face of his son amongst all the other faces, that although his son's face looks different to him, to the generals and the presidents, all the faces are exactly the same.

Irony

I love writing this blog. Each evening, when I leave the office and get on the train, my brain is whirring away and I latch on to some idea and think, yes, that'll do nicely for the blog.

This evening, walking through the Metro, I set eyes on an attractive blonde woman wearing a black tee-shirt. It had a message emblazoned across the chest and as she walked towards me I had to look quite closely at her to read it. I'm quite keen on messages on tee-shirts, and I really wanted to know what this one said. I guess she noticed because she gave me a sulky sort of look. But then, if you wear messages on your chest, I guess you have to expect that kind of thing. Actually, the message was in French, so I imagine I had to look a bit longer than most people in order to read and understand it...

The tee-shirt said simply: "Parlez doucement, je suis blonde".

If you don't speak French, that means: "Speak slowly, I'm blonde."

That brought me up with a bit of a jolt.

Irony? On a tee-shirt? Things are moving on. Then I thought: Is that irony? What is irony? I think I know what irony is, but if someone asked me to define it exactly, I would have a bit of difficulty to give a good definition. I know irony is a bit like sarcasm, but then it's not exactly sarcasm, or we would call it sarcasm.

Was this tee-shirt sarcastic? Well, I don't think so. Actually, sarcasm is something that can only really be put across in a verbal way, by the manner in which one speaks. That's why you have to write: "he said, in a sarcastic voice" after any quotation that is supposed to be sarcastic.

As I thought about the word 'irony', I remembered a specific instance in which someone had referred to my poetry as 'ironic'. This was a long time ago, and I am sure the person had meant it in a complimentary way, but I was never quite sure what he had meant by his comment. I had not knowingly set out to write things that were ironic, and certainly not sarcastic.

I also had, in the back of my mind, a sort of dim conscience of all postmodern art as residing under a large label with the word 'IRONIC' written on it, and that the word 'irony' was being used by those who wished to dismiss postmodern art, as in: "Oh, I hate that stuff, it's all so tediously ironic." In this usage, I imagine we can consider that the word 'irony' can be replaced by 'knowing' or 'clever-clever' and that the critic is instead hankering after something 'passionate' and 'real'. A bit of romance.

When I got home, I went and looked in the dictionary. My thick Collins Dictionary has three definitons for 'irony':

1. The humorous or mildly sarcastic use of words to imply the opposite of what they normally mean.

2. An instance of this, used to draw attention to some incongruity or irrationality.

3. Incongruity between what is expected to be and what actually is, or a situation or result showing such incongruity.

Where 'incongruity' means 'the state or quality of being incongruous', and where 'incongruous' means:

1. Incompatible with what is suitable.

2. Inappropriate

3. Containing disparate or discordant elements or parts.

At which point, I started to wish I'd got interested in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity instead...

Fortunately, my daughter looked up from her dinner and, although she is only eight, spouted a stunning ironic statement. My wife had just said to her: "If you don't eat your dinner nicely, you'll have to go and sit at the baby table." To which she replied, in a rather po-faced voice: " Yes, and I suppose that would be really awful."

What she was actually saying was: "I don't care what you think about the way I'm eating and I don't care if you make me go and sit at the baby table if that's the worst you can do." But, of course, she had found a much more elegant way of saying it, which was with an ironic humour aimed at both charming and disarming my wife. She was also drawing attention to the fact that she was old enough to know that sitting at the big table was really not such a privilige as we had once led her to believe at the age of say, five years old.

After dinner I sat down and picked up a paper. Turning to the arts section, my eyes immediately alighted on a statement linking postmodernism and irony. I guess that's the way things are when you start thinking about a certain subject: observations just start piling up. It makes you wonder, if you had the right questions to ask, might you be able to solve the mysteries of the universe in an single afternoon? Which reminds me of something else written by Claude Levi-Strauss: "the scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions."

Here's the quote from The Sunday Times newspaper. It is the first sentence from an article written by Richard Brooks about the Venice Biennale art show:

"There may be chandeliers studded with tampons and palazzo walls smeared with excrement, but for all the postmodern ironic posturing, the contemporary art world's biggest beano has impeccable Establishment credentials."

You just know that the article is going to be a load of codswallop when you read that, don't you? And it is. There isn't a single word in the article about the actual art on show at this international event, instead it is a pile of claptrap about the rich and famous who attend and the partying that goes on. This, in a section of the paper that labels itself "culture". If the British believe that this is "culture", they should be ashamed.

Here, "postmodern ironic posturing" is used in a dismissive sense about a type of art the writer clearly doesn't like. From his description, it does not seem surprising that he doesn't like it. Tampons, after all have unpleasant associations (for some) and excrement certainly does. We know he doesn't like the art, because he doesn't even bother to waste any words on it. For him, it is just 'crap about crap'. However, he then turns the sentence around and says the show has "impeccable Establishment credentials". Which establishment are we talking about here then? Well, he goes on to say, the show was first opened in 1895 by King Umberto I and the Italians may since have lost their royalty but, urmmm...

Yes? Go on. What Establishment are you actually referring to? Actually, are the Establishment the 'rich white trash' as you so nicely refer to them? So, it's postmodern ironic crap supported by rich white trash, is it? And that makes it okay? Well, of course it does. Hasn't it always been like that? Say no more.

Hopefully, you get my drift. There is really no sense in this (feeble) critique or art of why "ironic posturing" can itself be considered a criticism. I would say that, on the face of it, there is not much that is ironic about a chandelier with tampons stuck on it. Incongruous, yes. Ironic, no, I don't think so. Ah, hang on a mo. Tampons eh? These tampons are supposed to look like candles, aren't they? I see, so we look at the chandlier and think, "oh, that's pretty", and then suddenly we realise that they're not candles but tampons. Now, that's incongruous, maybe even a bit ironic, if I could work out why it was humorous. But why didn't the writer explain what he meant? After all, most chandeliers are now electric. Perhaps someone would have found the idea of candles replaced by tampons interesting. Perhaps it would have meant something to someone...

And excrement smeared on Palazzo walls? No, that's not ironic is it? That's hardy even incongruous. Excrement must get smeared on Palazzo walls all the time. Certainly on Palazzo pavements...

Ah, maybe that's what is incongruous about it: the excrement should have been smeared on the pavement and in fact it's smeared on the wall. Ah, you say, now you're the one being sarcastic Taupe. And yes, I am. But what I am content about is showing that people who dismiss postmodernism as ironic probably couldn't define irony very well either and are not really bothering to think about whether the art in question is actually ironic or not. And on the other hand, considering my daughter's witty response to my wife, and that black tee-shirt (which certainly was an effective use of irony) there is a lot of life left in the art of irony yet.

As to whether my own poems are ironic, I'll think about that some other time.

Cubist poetry

After writing about Georges Braque the other day, I started wondering what the equivalent of cubism would be in terms of poetry. I guess in order to think about that I'll have to try and define what cubism entailed for Picasso and Braque when they started experimenting with it in the period of 1907-1913. I see two phases in the construction of a cubist painting. The first phase involves:

(1) representation of landscapes or objects as groups of geometrical forms.

(2) use of a limited variety of colours.

Both of these steps result in a simplification of the objects being painted. The use of a limited palette necessarily reduces the depth of the painting. The second phase involves:

(3) transformation of simplified objects into broken, intersecting planes.

(4) introduction of letters, fragments of words and muscial notes.

(5) application of sand, sawdust or pieces of woods that give the painting relief, making it more like an object.

These steps create the illusion of something more complex. They are deliberate confusions of the original object being painted. They can also increase the depth of the painting.

Cubism is therefore a two-step process of transformation: first the simplification of objects into geometrical shapes, then breakage of these shapes into more complex, illusionistic arrangements. It is this second step which allows the painter to analyse the simplified object from different points of view, for example, to incorporate a full-face view with a profile view in the same picture of a head. Depth is first of all taken away by limited use of colour, then it is returned by other means.

Cubism is in fact a sort of protest about the limitations of realistic painting. It emphasises the fact that although a realistic picture is accurate, we have only to take a step sideways and the picture is no longer a correct representation. It reminds us of the moment when we notice the profile of a person who seems beautiful to us. Then we wait with baited breath for the moment when the person will turn towards us and allow us to see the full-face view. The two views are not necessarily aligned. When the head turns, we may be in for a disappointment, or a pleasant surprise.

How would this two-step process be carried out in poetry? First, the process of simplification:

(1) Rendering of complex experience in simplified terms. For example:

The road wound this way and that as they travelled in the car through the autumnal forest, red and yellow leaves flashing in the sunlight as they fluttered down through the branches.

would be simplified to:

The car through the forest winding, they saw the red, the yellow leaves flutter down, flash sunlight.

(2) Reduction of language to a more primitive, flattened state. For example:

The car the forest winding, they saw the leaves red yellow sunlight flashing.

The next phase is the illusionistic process in which the simplified text is built up into a transformed experience. Possible analogies for the introduction of words, notes etc. into pictures might be the reverse process of introducing images into poems. This is what Guillaume Apollinaire did in his book 'Calligrammes' where poems were written in the shape of a pocket watch for example. Apollinaire was a friend of the Parisian Cubists and in 1913 wrote a book on cubism in art. It is perhaps therefore not surprising that he thought of using this technique in his first calligramme poems composed in 1914.

A possible analogy for broken, intersecting planes might be the fracturing and repetition of parts of the sentence in a way that will given the impression of one experience overlying another. Below, I have taken the earlier simplified sentence and amplified/composed it by repetition and rearrangement:

Through them the winding car, the forest
flashing over. In reddened sunlight fluttering
leaves. It stays there, everything they saw:
the wind, the car, the forest flashing, over.

I've broken the sentence up into poetic phrases now, because I've also started to think about the rhythm of the words. What I have done is try to arrange the words in new ways in order to create new meanings and ambiguities. I have also reused words to try and create natural rhythms. The phrases now suggest different view points. Some observations are from the driver's perspective, others are from a narrator's perspective.

It is still possible to make out roughly what is going on, but each sentence is ambiguous. In making rearrangements, I have also found new images (e.g. the forest flashing over the car) which are, I think, more powerful than the original description.

Playing around with the grammar has also suggested to me an overall meaning to the poem which gives the fact of their seeing an added significance. They see the forest, but they can't take it with them. This might suggest that they are driving too fast to really capture and reflect on their impressions.

French Particularities No. 3: Fresh Bread

The fact that in France you can get really fresh bread is fairly well known. Fresh bread really is a way of life in France. The image of a French man with a baguette under one arm and a newspaper under the other is both a cliché and an everyday reality. If you move to France and want to fit in, going to the boulangerie every morning and buying a baguette is as good a way as any to start. Some pensioner friends of ours who moved to a village in France a year ago do exactly this, but the husband also puts on his black Frenchman's beret as well.

It is absolutely sure that French people like fresh bread, the fresher the better. The picture above shows the typical Sunday queue outside a boulangerie (bakery) near Paris. But it's the same story everywhere. Houses located next to baker's shops are usually more expensive than others, or so a friend told me. Walking into a boulangerie, you will normally be assailed by choice: there is the classic baguette, a thin loaf about a metre long; the ficelle is a shorter and thinner bagette; the bâtard is a short fat baguette; the pain de campagne is similar to an English style loaf. All of these styles of bread can normally be bought in white flour or wholemeal versions. There are also breads flavoured with onion, cheese, olives, raisins or chocolate. And then there are brioches which are yellow, sweet, spongey breads that children like.

Unlike English bread which generally arrives from Slough ready-sliced in a plastic bag with a sell-by date on it two weeks hence, French bread from the Boulangerie is freshly baked, often still hot. The shop assistant will slice it for you, if you ask nicely, in front of your eyes, in a special machine. It does not have a lot of preservatives in it, if any, so it is normally best to eat it within a few hours of sale. Feeding a two-day old baguette to a duck will almost certainly kill it, if you manage to break a piece off that is.

Braque's Grave

While in Normandy, we went to see the place where Georges Braque is buried, in the graveyard of Varengeville church, overlooking the chalk cliffs near Dieppe. It is a strange grave, very large and designed something like a kingsize bed with a great bird flapping across the headboard.

The fact that Braque lived in Varengeville means that he was probably well off. Today, it is a hideaway for millionaires, and must have been such even fifty years ago. We went to visit a Lutyens house in the village which was owned by a Swiss banker. Trying to find out how much he earned for his paintings at that time, on the Abebooks web site I found an autographed letter signed "G Braque" for sale at £975. It is a letter of receipt written to the Swedish collector Monsieur Olsen, in French, and sent from Varengeville sur Mer, 6 October 1935: "I acknowledge receipt of your cheque for 8000 Fr. Your letter has given pleasure and I am very happy to have another picture in Sweden. I hope with you that the future will be favourable for us. I think that this time the exchange rate has worked out well." With a cheque enclosed for 8000 Francs in 1935 (about 3000 Euros at today's prices, roughly £2000), I bet that letter really did give him pleasure. I wonder what that picture is worth today? Millions probably.

Braque's work is rather austere. I have read that he learnt to paint by helping his father, who was a house decorator. There is a kind of sense in that. Who else but a house decorator would think of making a painting that can be seen from several perspectives at the same time? And I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. When you look at a sculpture, you are supposed to walk around it, realising the way the sculpture changes according to your changing perspective. What else does a house decorator do but wander around a room, checking his work from different angles?

What Braque tried to do was to reproduce this process of looking at a 3D thing (a room or a violin for example) from different angles and then reproduce it in a 2D realisation. What he, and Picasso, discovered was that this gave the simple objects they painted a dynamism and patterned rhythm that was very original. The austere character of these pictures was also very much in keeping with an age of industrialisation, although I don't think that was particularly at the forefront of Braque or Picasso's thoughts. It wasn't long, however, before the futurists took the ideas of the cubists and linked them more forcefully to the developments of the machine age. The first world war, however, soon put an end to that train of thought.

French Particularities No. 2: Plug retractors

Through all my childhood and young adult life in the UK, I cannot remember ever using anything other than a rubber plug on the end of a chain for stopping the water from running out of the bath or sink. However, I suppose about ten or maybe fifteen years ago, I first encountered one of those strange devices: a plug retractor. These devices are now ubiquitous in new build homes in the UK. Frankly, I hate these contraptions. As far as I am concerned, there are four types: (1) broken; (2) impossible to find; (3) stuck, or (4) leaky.

Judging by the designs I have encountered in various French hotel bathrooms, plug retractors have a long history in France and are taken very seriously. Why, I can't imagine. What is wrong with pulling on a chain? The only possible reason I can think of is that you might catch the chain by accident and some water escapes. Big deal. On the other hand, a sink with a really elaborate plug design, now that says something about you...

The designs are normally very elaborate and cranky. They often involve a significant elaboration of the sink or tub as well as a plug mechanism. The photo above, taken in a Normandy hotel last week, shows how the design of the ceramic sink is closely tied to the placement of the plug retractor, creating a formidable hole down which to drop your toothbrush when arriving home after a glass too many of burgundy.

Dead lines

One of the things you have to get used to in industry is working to a fixed time frame. Someone makes a decision that the work will take two weeks, and then you have to do it to the best of your ability in that time. It's completely different to the world of the academic where the research continues until a solution is found, or until the money runs out...

It's also different to the world of the poet (most poets?) who will work on a poem for years until it finally finds a satisfying resolution. Although the lines of a poem typically run on one after another, there may be years separating them. I tend to think that when a poem is published, it no longer belongs to the poet and is no longer his/hers to tamper with. When poets break the rule of tampering with published poems, they are generally chided, and normally rightly.

Stephen Spender is a notorious example of a poet who did this. In his 'Collected Poems' published in 1985, he made endless minor changes to a body of work which had already been famous for fifty years. Some of the changes seemed to be senseless:

"When he lived, tall factory hooters never summoned him
Nor did restaurant plate-glass doors revolve to wave him in"

from 'Ultima Ratio Regum' was changed to:

"When he lived, tall factory hooters never summoned him
Nor did restaurant plate-glass windows revolve to let him in"

Not only is 'windows' a poorer metrical fit for this line, but it also makes little sense.

Spender also updated the openings of 'classic' poems, such as 'Polar Exploration':

"Our single purpose was to walk through snow
With faces swung to their prodigious North
Like compass needles. As clerks in whited banks
Leave bird-claw pen-prints columned on white paper,
On snow we added footprints."

Was changed to:

"Our single purpose was to walk through snow:
As clerks in whited banks with bird-claw pens
Leave tracks columned on paper,
To snow we added footprints."

In the updated version it seems he was trying to simplify the metaphor built around walking through snow by uniting the first line with the fourth and fifth. However, he failed to see that the strength in these lines lay in the tension between 'faces swung to their prodigious north' which give the sense of 'purpose', as opposed to the scratching 'bird-claw pen-prints' which serve to undermine it.

Other poems had their titles changed. The famous poem 'Rough' which starts:

"My parents kept me from children who were rough"

has its title changed to 'My Parents'. I think this is a weak title for a poem, but also, it shifts the emphasis of the poem, concerned with Spender's difficulty in connecting with the rough kids he admired, towards his parents. Instead of being a poem of reflection, it becomes a poem of blame.

There are lots of other examples. It seems he was concerned with expressing himself more clearly, but the result is that the poems became more prosaic, the spontaneity was written out. I guess, even in poetry, a time limit can sometimes be useful.

Cheap Watches and Fractured Reality

If you have a cheap watch like mine you will see that it gives only an approximation of the time. The hand which tells the seconds does not move at a constant rate but jumps from second to second, resting in between each jump. In fact, it spends more time resting than it does in moving. Therefore when it moves, it is moving at about three or four times the rate that the second hand on an expensive, mechanical watch would move at.

In fact, to come back to my earlier blogs on catastrophism and gradualism, we see that in these two versions of time as told by a cheap and an expensive watch, what can seem very similar from a superficial glance, is in fact very different in detail. The expensive watch personifies the world of gradual change. The cheap watch illustrates a world of stasis, punctuated by sudden 'catch-up' events.

I suspect our perception of the world is a bit like this cheap watch. Consciousness is not a continuous stream of knowing but a series of fractured moments in which our brains constantly readjust to new stimuli. The brain glosses over this fractured nature by handling most of this refocussing unconsciously. However, if we concentrate on this process while walking down the street, for example, we find it is possible to become aware of these constant readjustments, but that this new consciousness of what the brain is doing is extremely debilitating and causes us to become unfocussed on our surroundings. We soon trip up.

Maintaining a Constant State of Unpreparedness

At just past 5 o'clock today, a storm of biblical proportions swelled over Paris. The sky, which was not due to darken for about five hours, turned black while thunder and lightening cracked outside, reverberating through the tall building where I work and making my computer screen tremble.

When I left the office to go for a drink with an Indonesian friend who is leaving Paris, we found that the subterranean concourse where we were going to have ' une petite seize' (une petite seize-cent-soixante-quatre, also known as a glass of Kronenbourg) had been flooded by the sudden downpour of rain that emanated from said cloud.

All the barmen were hurriedly stacking chairs that they had pulled away from the encroaching floodwaters, men with oversize mops were sweeping back and forth through the little lake that had formed underneath the central skylight and the rows of electric lights set in the stainless steel ceiling were flashing on and off in fancy formation, whether manually or of their own accord, I don't know. Outside each of the cafes situated in the four corners of the concourse, young execs whiled away they early evening in idle chatter, watching the late workers navigate dry spaces.

I reflected on the fact that if the building had been built more soundly, all this activity wouldn't be necessary. But who would want to be without this spontaneous chaos, this creative turmoil? Better not to waste time preparing for every eventuality. Better to lack one layer of protective skin and be ready to appreciate the consequences.

My Indonesian friend told me he wanted to go back to nature, to live in the countryside and maybe buy a farm. But he would have to be careful, he said. Indonesia has no state welfare system so he would have to make sure he had saved enough money. The only trouble was, in the country, he would stand out as a rich person, even though he was not really that rich. Security would be the problem. He would become a target for criminals, for mafia types. He looked sad.

He asked me if I would come to Indonesia one day. I said I didn't know. What would it be like to work there? Ah, he said, you might like it, but your wife would be a stranger, living among strangers, and outside the strangers she lived with, would only be other strangers.

And the climate, what is it like? I asked. Oh, it is very wet. One moment it is raining here, the next moment over there. I thought of Claude Levi-Strauss' description of the January rains in Sao Paulo that I had read on the train to work: "the rain does not 'come', it is engendered by the surrounding humidity, as if the universally permeating vapour had materialised into beads of water which fall thick and fast yet seem to be retarded by their affinity with the steamy atmosphere through which they are passing. The rain does not descend in vertical or oblique lines, as in Europe: it is more like a pale flickering, made up of a multitude of tiny globules of water pouring down through a moist atmosphere, a kind of cascade of clear tapioca soup."

Catastrophists vs Gradualists

Some people get the difficult jobs to do in life. One of these was JK who died of cancer a few years ago. I knew him in several embodiments. The first of these was as Head of my university geology department. This department was, at that time, the largest and, possibly, the best department of geology in the UK. As such, JK was considered the right man to head up a government body from where he presided over a review of geology departments throughout Britain. This review resulted in the closure of several small departments and the reinforcement of some other larger ones. Thus, JK was unpopular in some camps, and grudgingly accepted in others. There is no doubt about the difficulty of that job, a point which is perhaps obliquely alluded to in his obituary as 'his insistence at playing Napoleon' whenever he partook in his favourite leisure activity, which was war gaming . Essentially a hatchet man wielding an axe over every department in the country, forcing acquaintances and colleagues to justify their existence in terms of documented research and teaching results, or otherwise get the chop.

My own view of JK is coloured by the fact that, at the end my first year studies, he called me into his office and dragged me over the coals regarding my exam results. I later found out that my palaeontology paper had not been added into the total, and therefore my failure was nowhere near as bad as he considered it. From one point of view, the experience was extremely humiliating. He made me squirm with embarassment at my failure. On the other hand, it made me pull my finger out like nothing else and was probably the main reason for my getting a good result at the end of my degree. Despite this positive interpretation, however, I still continued to dislike him.

Thus, the difficulty. To do a job that few would have wanted and, never mind the results, to be disliked on all sides forever afterwards. I ask myself how someone could continue like that? What would be the motivating factors? I guess he had to be tough. When I was at Liverpool University, three professors took it in turn to be head of department. All extremely intelligent men, none of them could bear to hold the reins of power for long. It required something more than intelligence. It required a cold, administrative heart.

My last encounter with JK was about fifteen years ago, when I was a student at Liverpool University, I went to hear him speak on the subject of climate change. It was at a time when the evidence for climate change as a real, quantifiable effect was starting to be taken seriously. My conclusion from listening to his talk was that he had taken on the role of trying to damp down the flames surrounding the subject.

His view of climate change was one of cautioning against over-reading the effects of short-term changes and considering the changes that had occurred in the geological past. As geologists, he suggested, we would be more likely to view the observed effects of climate change and place them in the context of a geological history that had been constantly changing throughout the past. As such, these changes would seem not so much an 'extraordinary' evidence of climatic variation as a continuation of 'ordinary' fluctuation around a geological norm.

I took against these arguments as soon as I heard them. Why? Because the average geologist is ill-adapted to understanding the effects of short term catastrophic change. Most of the time, we live in a world of gradual change. Seasons come and go, tides ebb and flow, sea levels change at the rate of a few centimetres a decade. This view of a gradually changing world colours our view of the geological past. It is only the once in a lifetime event of a tsunami or a major volcanic eruption which wakes us up to a different view of the world as a place of catastrophe and hence of a geological record that records the rare abnormal event rather than the day-to-day.

Philosophically, there has always been a debate between catastrophists and gradualists. JK, by advising caution in the light of a changing past, was facing up against a view of extraordinary and catastrophic climate change as predicted not by rocks but by the evidence of temperature change in ice cores, water samples and ozone gases. Not the stuff of geology at all. What were the reasons or the necessity for him expounding his views? After all, as a born administrator, JK was ever a man of necessity. I think he was there to pacify the environmental instincts of geologists. Geologists can be key witnesses in environmental matters such as the disposal of nuclear waste for example (on which JK also had his say), and I think he wanted to help geologists to help themselves to forget what effect their own actions might be having on the climate. That's only an interpretation of course.

Somebody who never forgot the influence of JK was DA who was one of the major proponents of a new catastrophism in geology that arose, notably, from the documentation of bolide impacts such as the K-T boundary event. In his book about Catastrophism he made sideswipes at a government that had closed the geology department of which he was Head. JK, whom I observed behaving as a gradualist, was, in effect, DA's catastrophic nemesis.

A review of DA's book on catastrophism says: 'these days, we all seem to be catastrophists of some kind or another'. Here the 'we' are geologists. The reviewer makes this statement because the evidence of the palaeontological record points decisively to the influence of a series of large bolide impacts on major extinction events at different periods of geological time. You can read about it in the book 'Extinction' by the distinguished palaeontologist David M. Raup. So, will we all face extinction by ignoring the facts of climate change or bolide impact? Well, as Raup says at the end of his book, based on study of the whole of the palaeontological record: "Widespread species are difficult to kill."

Dog Days

Well, we're only halfway through June and already the temperature in Paris is pretty unsufferable. It looks like it may be another long hot summer. Today we were at a potluck picnic in the Parc Monceau, along with half of Paris. The Parc is quite intimate and surrounded on all side by large Haussman-style apartments as you can see in the photo.

We sat under the shade of a large plane tree, but had to keep shuffling our rugs, plates and bottles of wine sideways as the sun moved around in the sky. It felt a bit like picnicking on a large sundial. Odd how, when the sun is hot like that, one only has to move a few feet into the shade and it makes a world of difference.

Do You have Frogs' Legs?

For some reason my wife decided to try cooking frogs' legs this evening. She bought them frozen in a large bag marked 'Cuisses des Grenouilles' and proceeded to fry them. I swore that I wouldn't eat any but in the end felt I had to have a bite out of pure scientific inquisitiveness. They have a dull bland taste, not at all pleasant. On consulting a colleague at work, I was told that they are normally served smothered in garlic.

If the slipper fits...

We are sensitive to our shoes. I imagine everyone could take their shoes out of the closet and line the different pairs up in order of increasing comfort. I know I could. My line would start at one end with the pair of shoes that I once bought in America when I found that I had forgotten my best brogues and had to stand up presenting all day long at a conference. Those shoes still have dried blood inside the lining. I don't know why I keep them. I'll never wear them again. I wouldn't want anyone else to wear them either. That would be mean.

Surprisingly, the shoes at the other end of the line are not sloppy fabric shoes. Those shoes are only good for the beach. They do not hold up to a day's walking around town. Rather, it would be a strong leather deck shoe, something with a grip on the sole, a reasonably light shoe, a shoe that doesn't get too warm.

I started thinking about this because, yesterday, I got a pair of shoes back from the cobbler that I had asked him to renovate. They were a traditional style of shoe that had lasted no time at all. I used to go for a lap around the block at lunchtime when I lived in Scotland and within no time, the granite chips in the pavement had worn out the leather soles. I put them away and forgot about them. Then, the other day I found them again and I saw there was nothing wrong with them that couldn't be put right, and since shoes are expensive here in Paris, I got the cobbler to fix them.

'Cobbler' is a bit of an old fashioned word. Now the the person who mends shoes has a desk in the supermarket, just near the checkout. Not like the cobbler my father used when I was young who had a pokey little shop lined, like an odour archive, with different pairs of shoes awaiting collection. A bit like the wizard's wand shop in the Harry Potter movies. Twenty years ago, shoes were an item that never wore out. When your feet stopped growing, you got a final pair of shoes, and it was a bit like getting your second set of teeth. If you brushed and polished them every day, they would last for ever. These days cobblers know that the shoes will not keep coming back. They have to supplement their living with other activities, like cutting keys or making car number plates. Even taking in dry cleaning.

The shoes, when they came back, were almost like new. I suddenly felt taller in the firmly stuck on soles. The heels clicked pleasantly. Even the upper had received a quick polish, though not enough to quite remove the patina of neglect I had given them through the years. Even so, when I put them on, they gave me back something I had lost. They went better with my trousers. They were anonymous. They didn't cry out to be looked at. For now they could keep a secret. A very important secret: this man doesn't brush his shoes.

Geology as Metaphor

I've never really regretted my decision to train as a geologist, even though I'm very interested in literature and poetry as well. Geology is a fascinating and very broad subject about which very few people are properly educated. If they were, they would appreciate much more about the world around them: the way that geology controls landscape and flora, the soil in your garden, the coastlines, the buildings around us, Any real appreciation of nature must begin with geology. I spent the first part of my career as a geologist, about twelve years, just studying or doing research. This was a long period of learning, just visiting places where rocks stuck out of the ground and looking, describing, photographing, tapping with my hammer. What I discovered then, I now put into practice as a geologist.

Like most geologists, I have a good sense of the four-dimensionality of the world. I can envision the three-dimensional nature of the earth, and then add the fourth dimension, which is time. To do this, I have to clearly separate my observations from my interpretations. My observations represent the three-dimensional, static picture of the earth. My interpretations provide the historical, dynamic interpretation: for example, these layers of rock over here were produced by sudden chaotic deposition, while this erosive scar over there is where a slope collapsed to create the chaotic mass of sediment. Geology is a sort of puzzle game in which features of the earth are seen to be nested inside each other like elements of a Russian doll. Once we understand how one fits inside another, we are able to understand the chain of influences and earth surface processes which produced them.

An extra layer of complexity, rather intriguing, resides in the dynamic interface between the present influence of geology on our lives and its past historical record. Here is a quote from Claude Levi-Strauss' 'Tristes Tropiques' that helps to explain: "I count among my most precious memories... a hike along the flank of a limestone plateau in Languedoc to determine the line of contact between two geological strata. It was something quite different from a walk or a simple exploration of space. It was a quest, which would have seemed incoherent to some unitiated observer, but which I look upon as the very image of knowldege, with the difficulties it involves and the delights it affords. Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos which leaves one free to choose the meaning one wants to give it. But over and above agricultural considerations, geographical irregularities and the various accidents of history and prehistory, the most majestic meaning of all is surely that which precedes, commands and, to a large extent explains the others. A pale blurred line, or an almost imperceptible difference in the shape and consistency of rock fragments, are evidence of the fact that two oceans once succeeded each other where, today, I can see nothing but barren soil... When the miracle occurs, as it sometimes does; when, on one side and the other of the hidden crack, there are suddenly to be found cheek-by-jowl two green plants of hidden species, each of which has chosen the most favourable soil; and when at the same time two ammonites with unevenly intricate involutions can be glimpsed in the rocks, thus testifying in their own way to a gap of several tens of thousands of years suddenly space and time become one: the living diversity of the moment juxtaposes and perpetuates the ages. Thought and emotion move into a new dimension where every drop of sweat, every muscular movement, every gasp of breath becomes symbolic of a past history, the development of which is reproduced in my body, at the same time as my thought embraces its significance. I feel myself to be steeped in a more dense intelligibility, within which centuries and distances answer each other and speak with one and the same voice."

This passionate exposition of the the special character of geology science is immediately followed by the drawing of a comparison: "When I became acquainted with Freud's theories, I quite naturally looked upon them as the application, to the individual human being, of a method the basic pattern of which is represented by geology." To put it simply, Levi-Strauss saw that the psychologist was trying to make the same journey as the geologist through the chaotic landscape of a mind, trying to find the underlying historical development and perhaps discover where some key change had occured, or to use the metaphor that Levi-Strauss intends, 'where one ocean succeeded another'.

This evening I attended the launch of a magazine of poetry and literature called "Upstairs at Duroc" at WICE. There was a reading of poetry by several authors and then, afterwards, I got into a conversation about geology with one of the poets. I was explaining why geology interested me and she immediately latched onto what I was saying about the erosion of sediment from one place and its deposition in another as a metaphor for the way life and death continues, displaced from one place and flourishing in another, referring to her recent experiences in Sumatra where she had witnessed some of the results of the Christmas tsunami. The erosion and deposition metaphor might equally apply to the distribution of wealth, accumulating in one place while being denuded from another. I told her about the debate between the uniformitarians or gradualists and the catastrophists. How the experience of seeking the tsunami had modified my views about geology by showing me the devastation that a single event occurring once every hundred years can produce. Such catastrophic events events can surely wipe out the last hundred years of steady, gradual sediment deposition, completely modifying the nature of the geological record. She, in turn told me about Hawaii, where she sometimes lives, and where she takes pictures of lava in which she sees the representations of strange creatures and beings. Hawaiians who look at her work say to her: "So, you can see them too." In fact, no great surprise there. Humans have always been sensitive to interpreting rocks in other ways. There is something about the wild and ragged character of rocks that asks to be interpreted, and hence another major aspect of the influence of geology: on the imagination.

We talked about the tsunami tragedy and how the human instinct is to seek to blame something. I mentioned this feeling only recently in the blog about my friend who fell into The Loire river. In Sumatra, according to this poet's experiences, religion asks for people to accept it as the will of Allah. On the other hand, there is also a widespread sentiment that seeks to demonise those who died as 'bad' people who deserved what was coming to them and perhaps this relates to what I wrote in my blog about the Loire, that at some level we have to blame the victims themselves, simply out of a psychological need to settle blame and find peace.

Crepuscule 1

We were sitting out in the garden this evening having dinner. Some bread, cheese and pate with a glass of port, just as my wife and I used to do when we were students.

It was very pleasant, the sky a luminous greyey-blue colour with high cirrus cloud like thinly teased cotton wool. A blackbird sat at the top of the pine tree singing its heart out and dozens of swifts went spinning and chasing back and forth over the house, screaming as they chased the hapless insects that had decided to go out for an evening waltz.

Suddenly, there was a great roar in the sky and when we looked up we saw a jet plane emerge straight out of the chimney pot at one end of our house. We watched it fly low over the tiled roof, glittering in the evening sunlight, then, plop, it dived down the other chimney pot and there was silence.

Poet and Prime Minister

Reading a French paper this evening, I encountered one of those "What do they think about us?" articles originally printed in the Spanish newspaper 'El Mundo' and translated into French. The author, apparently Spanish judging by the name, does a hatchet job on the new French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin under the heading: "Yet another Frenchman who thinks he is Napoléon!". To do justice to this article, I'll have to translate some of it again, this time into English.

"The press says that Villepin is the lapdog of Chirac, which is partly true. He is faithful, disciplined and a bit of a snob. He displays a prefabricated elegance and a metrosexual coquettry. He has thrived in the shadow of an organised power structure, has never presented himself for election and knows neither the ghettos of Marseille or the suburbs of Lille. His universe consists of Parisian salons, the world of the Guermantes. He plays tennis well and his hobby, like Churchill, is figurative painting. He is also a mediocre poet and a prolific writer of prose that is antiquated, lyrical and pompous. These texts are charged with metaphors and saturated with paradoxes. No, Villepin is not a modest man. He has that French narcissism mocked by Glucksmann and aspires to grandeur as much as, if not more, than Chirac."

A "metrosexual" is a term normally applied to French men in their twenties who are more interested in making themselves look beautiful than in finding a girlfriend. Apparently, they spend all their money on visiting beauty parlours and buying clothes. I have yet to meet one. As to the question: "Are metrosexuals homosexual or heterosexual?" in fact, that doesn't really matter "as they only love themselves." However, the implication in this article is that Villepin is a bit of a pansy (as well as a snob). That impression is reinforced by reference to the Guermantes characters from À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, by Marcel Proust. How does the writer know Villepin has never been to Marseille or Lille? So is he a bad poet because his work is charged with metaphors?. Think carefully before you reply. And how about paradoxes?. How outmoded can it possibly be to say that one thing is like another? Rather, it is at the heart of literary inspiration and imagination. How does the writer know he is a 'mediocre' poet? Is he narcissistic because he writes poetry, or because he plays tennis?

I react very badly to this article. I find it outrageous to attack a man's character simply because he writes, whether it is poetry, history or reflections on the society around him. In the case of Villepin, he writes in all three styles. I have never read any of Villepin's writing, but I intend to. And after reading this article I can say that I am glad to be working in and for a country where poetry and literature are treated seriously. Where, if a politician poses with a shelf of poetry books behind him (as I saw recently on the poster for our local conservative candidate) he is considered as a thinker rather than as effete.

For if we say that a politician should not be allowed to make his feelings felt in poetry, then we are essentially saying that poetry should know its place. But poetry is not like that. If poetry finds you, then you are a poet. You may be a 'mediocre' poet, but you are still a poet. And if you are a poet, you will know yourself and the world around you all the better for that.

Guignol

Just off the Champs Elysee, between the Avenues Matignon and Gabriel is a little park. It is not the prettiest park and attracts an odd host of characters on a saturday afternoon. There are, firstly, the dull-eyed tourists trooping along the Champs Elysee, kicking up dust. Then, under the plane trees, a coin and stamp market is taking place and a few old men with piles of phone cards wrapped in rubber bands or with heaps of rusty coins in tins have taken up position on benches, prepared to do some business. There are also drop outs and drug users hanging around. As we step off Avenue Matignon into the park, I see a young man with a shaved head sticking a needle into his arm while a friend holds his can of beer for him. And then, finally, there are children and their parents, following the sound of a bell ringing somewhere in the park.

The bell ringer is a tall, thin man, wearing shabby, off-black shirt and jeans and a battered bowler hat. His hair is striking: grey, well-combed, straight, and descending to his collar in a thick mass. His face is weathered, good humoured, cheeky. He is taking the money at the front of house of the Marionettes des Champs-Elysee, billed in Pariscope as being "à Paris depuis 1818, ce théâtre joué de vive voix offre un spectacle issu de la commedia del arte dans la pure tradition des guignols", a write-up which made it sound like rather a professional operation.

We paid, told the man we were English, and said we hoped the children would understand a word or two. Oh yes, he said. You just need to know 'non', 'oui', 'à la droite', 'à la gauche'. He smiled and we passed by a patched velvet curtain hanging between two poles into a small gravel clearing surrounded by bushes. On one side was a large painted box with a velvet curtain which was the theatre, and on the other side, under cover, a little auditorium with benches that could have sat about forty people at most. The two front rows of benches were already full with French children of around four or five chanting Guig-nol! Guig-nol!

We sat down, and as it was just past four, the man in the bowler hat reappeared and pointed to a straw basket propped on the back of a horse. Help youself to an apple he said. Then he disappeared around the back of the box. For a few moments there was silence, and then a large 'quack' issued from inside. The children giggled. Silence. Then another 'quack'. The children giggled louder this time, full of expectation. There was some shuffling, a painful coughing, and then the characters started popping up on stage. All of them had bright red cheeks and somewhat battered heads where they kep running into things with a large crash. There was Mrs Guignol in town, Mr Guignol and cheeky Baby Guignol being brave in the forest, a Gendarme who arrests Baby Guignol and is beaten to death by Mr Guignol with a large stick and a mouse who runs on and off stage at lightning speed while Baby Guignol tries to catch it in a box. All of the characters arms constantly wave up and down and they slap them on the stage with a smart 'clack' when they want to make a point or attract attention. It is a brilliant and fast moving act.

We all loved it and were sad that the show lasted only twenty minutes. At the end the puppetmaster reappeared and took a bow. The children all ran over and grabbed an apple. They were wet from the rain and my daughter rubbed hers on my trousers to dry it. The puppetmaster told her it was already clean then, turning to us, he said: "hygienism and fascism, they go together." He put two fingers said by side to show that they were bedfellows. "1933, hygienism and fascism!" he said again. I asked him how long he had been running the theatre for. "Thirty years", he said, "since 1968", and he gave me a meaningful look. I understood that he meant the student riots of 1968. "Before that", he said, "I was a history teacher. Now I see it is more important to be close to the children like this."

The Loire

Western France has three major rivers, the Loire in the North and the Garonne and Dordogne in the South. The Garonne is slightly larger than the Dordogne and both flow into the Gironde estuary, a confusing state of affairs if ever there was one.

The character of the Loire and the Dordogne rivers is rather different. The Loire flows across a generally flat landscape and is sourced from low hills so that it carries only sand. The middle reaches of the Loire were flooded three times in the 19th Century with 1500 km² under 1 or 2 meters water. If a disaster of this scale happened today, it would seriously affect around 300,000 inhabitants of the Loire Valley and create damages of an estimated 6 billions Euros. The Dordogne, on the other hand, is sourced from the mountainous Massif Central and so is full of neat, nicely rounded pebbles and cobbles. It is a smaller river than the Loire and does not pose much of a flooding hazard.

Both rivers have this much in common: they have châteaux built at regular intervals along their lengths. The châteaux of the Loire are renowned. They were once the homes of Rennaissance Kings and Queens and they are grand showpieces. The châteaux of the Dordogne are rather more serious in character, such as Castelnaud, a stronghold on an eyrie perch which was occupied by English invaders until it was eventually lost following a seige during the hundred years war of the 15th century.

We visited both rivers last year, canoeing down the Dordogne whose course is neatly cut into a steep sided valley and tramping our way across the dried out bed of the Loire, a river whose character is distinctly flashy, changing dramatically and quickly depending on the rainfall.

Some twenty years ago now, the mother of a boy from my school was unwell and undergoing hospital treatment. My mother offered that the boy come and live with us for a few weeks. He was a quiet boy, we probably played games of monopoly together or else watched TV.

A few years later, he went to France to visit a French penpal. They were having a picnic beside the Loire and, somehow or other, he fell in and was quickly swept away to his death. It took a long while to recover his body. I have thought about this often and have struggled to make sense of it. Death by Nature seem to offer only questions. God is in charge of Nature. Why did God let this happen? That was the question asked all over the world after the Christmas tsunami. With Nature there is no one to blame except God. Nobody can be found guilty except God.

And perhaps also, more uncomfortably, less consolingly, the victim themselves are also guilty. Those who have strayed too close to the jaws of Nature. It is us they hurt by their thoughtlessness. We who have to suffer their loss. The flood subsides, the river dwindles back into a narrow ribbon, sidling along among the chateaus packed with tourists. We walk across the wide sand flats on either side of it. Look at it: hardly a river at all. An innocent trickle.

A New Broom

When I began writing this blog I did not have the intention of detailing the political intrigues of France. The system remains quite obscure to me as I try to decipher newspaper articles outlining the various goings-on and conflicts between parties and between individual politicians. However, at least I now know what the various party acronyms stand for and that when a statement is said to come from 'Matignon' it means it was the Prime Minister's annoucement and that when it comes from 'Elysee' it was the President who uttered forth. There is, however, an interesting social conflict going on in France at the moment and it has a lot to do with what has been happening in the UK. French commentators are constantly looking across 'La Manche' to the UK and jealously noting the low rates of unemployment and economic growth displayed by the UK.

The fact of a president and a prime minister governing side-by-side is a first complication. The President and the Prime Minister do not have to be of the same political party. When they are not of the same party, this is referred to as cohabitation. At the moment France has Jacques Chirac as President with a mandate of five years until 2007. During his period in office the President is almost untouchable with immunity from prosecution against any crimes he may have committed in his earlier political career. Chirac is a conservative, two times former prime minister when with the UMP conservatives. As President he is the leading political force in the country and he is able to select a prime minister who will carry out his agenda.

On Tuesday, with the resounding defeat of the European Constitution still ringing in his ears, the president decided to take a new broom to the current cabinet of governement. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, former Prime Minister, leaves office somewhat under a cloud. He will be remembered for his government's introduction of laws to decentralise power to the regions, reforms on pensions and on healthcare to keep the Secu (National health service) away from the black hole towards which it has been edging. His poor management of the results of the Canicule heat wave in 2003, however, marked the start of his unpopularity with the public, which was impounded by the bungled efforts to enforce a day of work on a public holiday (Le Lundi de pentecote).

His successor will be Dominique de Villepin, to whom has been ascribed the job of tackling unemployment which remains very high in France. Villepin is a rather suave character with a mane of white hair. He is referred to as the last of Chirac's faithful supporters, someone who will continue with the current policy of remaining faithful to the 'social pact', that is to say, not adopting an 'ultraliberal' stance based on the anglo-saxon model. This makes both him and the President the declared enemy of Nicolas Sarkozy, a self-made man who does not belong to the political aristocracy and who's power base now includes the jobs of Minister for the Interior (responsible for all policing), president of the UMP and of the council for the Paris region, an unprecedent power base for the most ambitious man in France. Sarkozy is seen by many as France's answer to Tony Blair. The difference is, he issues from the right.

Stop the EU, France wants to get off

The kitsch doll-like child with stars in her eyes, symbol of the conservative UMP's 'Yes' campaign, will be weeping tonight. Exit polls put the 'No' vote at 55%. France has rejected the European constitution which it sees as being too complex to understand and too liberal from the point of view of economic development.
President Jacques Chirac has put himself in the firing line in defending the 'Yes' vote, from televised TV debates with the youth of France to personal addresses to the Nation. Now Jean-Marie Le Pen is demanding that he resign in light of this result. Will the promised chaos that the conservatives predicted ensue?

Oui ou Non?

The temporary poster boards are out to encourage the populace to vote as their political masters would wish in tomorrow's European Constitution vote. It leads to odd political bedfellows. 'Oui' say the Greens and the UMP conservatives. 'Non' say the far left and the far right.

Les Coquelicots

We took Great Uncle Louis and the rest of the oldies to see Monet's garden at Giverny today. Driving through the French countryside west of Paris, we came upon this little corner of a foreign field that is forever Nature's.

Monet's garden is very popular, full of tourists of every stripe. The flower beds are a blaze of colour, beds of irises laid out in swathes like flags.

There is something very suspect about gardens. In gardens man tries to reproduce and improve nature. Gardens tend to be a perfectly civilised Utopia where the poets (the weeds) are kept out.

Just look at those poppies and cornflowers struggling for survival on the edge of an enormous field of wheat. Did you ever see anything so beautiful?

Great Uncle Louis

Great Uncle Louis is staying with us at the moment. He brings news of England where a plague among the toads is causing them to explode. He finds them on the lawn next to the little pond in his garden.

I asked him if it was something wrong with their digestive systems? No, he said, he thought the gas was being trapped beneath their skins. Last year it was the frogs, this year the toads...

Conundrum

This is a piece of Bismuth that I bought from a market stall on Sunday. The man I bought it from told me he thought it came from Mexico, but on returning home, I found out that crystals like this are very rare in nature. This has certainly been grown in a laboratory. My wife did say that she saw the man smiling to himself as I bought it.

These are "hopper" crystals that form due to the disparity of growth rates between the crystal edges and the crystal faces. You see square shapes in this direction, but if you look end on you realise that it is a trigonal crystal, with a barbed, arrow-head appearance. It also has a bluish metallic lustre which is not that apparent in the photo. The way that the threefold and fourfold symmetry is resolved is the most fascinating thing about it, like a solidified Escher conundrum.

Tristes Tropiques

I am currently reading 'Tristes Tropiques' by Claude Levi-Strauss. He says at the beginning of the book that he hates travelling and explorers. At about page 40 he explains why. He compares travel writers to spice traders who used to risk their lives to bring back peppercorns that courtiers of Henry IV of France would carry in little boxes and eat like sweets. He says: "the olfactory surprises they provided, since they were exquisitely hot on the tongue, added a new range of sense experience to a civilisation which had never suspected its own insipidity. We might say, then, that, through a twofold reversal, from these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books and travellers tales."

He goes on to say: "intentionally, or unintentionally, these modern seasonings are falsified. Not, of course, because they are of a purely psychological nature, but because, however honest the narrator may be, he cannot - since this is no longer possible - supply them in a genuine form. For us to be willing to accept them, memories have to be sorted and sifted; through a degree of manipulation which, in the most sincere writers, take place below the level of consciousness, actual experience is replaced by stereotypes.

Junk and Utter Junk

Before we left the UK to come to Paris, we had a pile of stuff that, under normal circumstances, we might have kept, but which we couldn't justify packing up into crates and carrying all the way to France with us. We decided to flog it at a car boot sale, something we had never done before.

It was a rather depressing event. A huge number of people selling off their belongings in the drizzling rain, a sort of post-apocalyptic air to the whole affair. My wife seemed to enjoy it however, and came away with 100 pounds of extra pocket money. When I told a French colleague what we had been doing, he was aghast. "You sold all your junk?" he exclaimed, "that's terrible. In France we leave things we don't need outside our houses for people who need it more than us."

And that is indeed what happens. On Friday evening, worn out chairs, battered suitcases, broken lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners and orange fur-effect cushions all end up under the shadey plane trees along the avenues. In the twilight, old cars appear, their boots popping open with junk hanging out the back. A West African man with his two children helping, a boy and a little girl in a dress, hop around the piles of stuff, looking for items of value. Slowly the worth is sifted out of the heap and the remaining junk spreads out sadly over the sidewalk, waiting for Saturday's rubbish lorry to arrive.

Keep taking the pills

Three hundred french surgeons went on a four day strike today to protest against the government back down on promised pay increases, part of which should serve to cover the increasing cost of insurance against patient claims due to increasingly strict legislation againts medical error. Doctors currently pay around £10,000 per year on insurance alone.

The twist in this story is that the doctors have decided to take the Eurostar to Kent in England in order to carry out their strike. There are two reasons for this: firstly, they are worried that their strike will be broken if they stay in France (presumably by the sight of desperate patients begging to have their tumours operated), and secondly, they believe that coming to Britain with its long waiting lists will remind French politicians and voters how bad things can get if they don't fund the health service properly!!

France is well known for its high level of support for health. The French government spends about 50% more on health per head of population than the UK. The result is that you rarely have to wait long when you turn up at a French hospital. I had this experience recently when a suspected appendicitis of my daughter was dismissed (by urine tests, X-rays and physio check) in only a couple of hours, much to our relief.

The French are well known medicine junkies, taking many more pills and medicaments than any other country in the world. While the average Brit stays as far from the doctor as possible, the French visit at every possibility and feel cheated if they do not walk away with a little rattling carton of something or other. The origin of this phenomenon, as reported in this fascinating article from the San Francisco chronicle, is the government's control of 80% of all pharmaceutical prices which keeps prices low and puts the emphasis on volume sales, turning the population into medicine junkies through advertising and drug reps pressurising doctors to prescribe. The only beneficiary of this malady are a number of charity organisations who consider it worthwhile to collect unused medicines for resorting and export to poor countries.

Good Things About France No. 3: Service with a Smile

A while ago we took the car into a garage and asked them about a clicking noise that we could hear under the car. The mechanic took the car for a spin, raised it on the lift and took a wheel off to check the bearings, cleaned it and put it back together again. That should be okay now, he said. How much? We asked. No charge, he quickly said. When we drove off, we found he had indeed fixed the problem.

Then, last week, my wife broke the arm on her glasses. She took them in to the optician. He looked them over, then took them into his workshop and quickly fixed them. How much? She asked. No charge, he said.

This is a wonderful aspect of France. The idea that people will do work for a complete stranger, even a foreigner who doesn't speak French that well, completely gratis. It suggests a certain level of respect still existing between everyone in the community and an unwillingness to let monetary values take precedence over human decency. Bravo!

Top Cheese

We visited the annual cheese fair in the Normandy town of Pont L'Évêque today. There are a number of different soft Normandy cheeses (including Camembert and pungent Livarot) but my favourite is the creamy Pont L'Évêque cheese.

Cheese ain't that good for your waist line, as two years living in France demonstrates, but it tastes damn good when bought on site and eaten with freshly baked bread. You can spot a Pont L'Évêque cheese a mile off because it's square, as the prizes in the photo demonstrate.

Pays d'Auge

Following the French model of using up as much holiday as you possibly can in May, we have been away on holiday again, this time in Normandy. This is a picture of a little village in the Pays d'Auge of Normandy. It looks like a piece of England doesn't it? Visiting this region reminded me of a great bande desinée (comic book) I read a while back by Posy Simmons called 'Gemma Bovery'. It is a satire on everything that can go wrong when an English couple buy a cottage in Normandy. The husband goes native, the wife falls for the son of the local comte and the neighbour lusts after her from a distance. And it's all constructed along the lines of Flaubert's 'Emma Bovary'. A great read

Chinese Chickens

A trip to the Chinese restaurant brings three pleasures apart from the food: the hot white flannels to clean your fingers and face at the end of the meal, the peace when the children run away to look at the goldfish at the far end of the restaurant while we drink our short coffees, and these little Chinese chickens made of glass, offered to the children in a little decordated box as a parting gift.

I could go on about the Chinese diaspora in Paris, the millions of Chinese living in France, the boom in Chinese business, the annual Chinese festivals that have become a feature of the Paris calender, but I won't. Somehow, these little chickens say it all.

Wearing White

Summer is still with us... this morning the frantic activity of nature continued with a flood of ants underneath our kitchen door. I spent half an hour or so mopping them up and then puffed some white ant powder around. They haven't come back. Why they come in doors when the weather is so nice I do not know. Perhaps they can smell the baguette crumbs on the floor...

In the evening we went out to drinks at the house of a French couple. Well, half French. In fact, the wife is Russian. Her mother was there, shortish with short purplish hair. She was looking after the baby and making herslef scarce. She doesn't speak any French. The couple had laid out a much bigger spread of food than we had anticipated. The French rarely invite you round to dinner on a 'first date'. This seems to be too formal. Instead, they ask you for an aperitif at 6 pm from which you should try to extract yourself by 8.30pm. Foreseeing this, we had arranged to go for a meal afterwards with the other friends who were there. When we left, it seemed to be rather too soon, but that's life. I talked to the French husband about his large DVD collection, trying to get some more hints on good French comedys. He pointed out: 'Le Corniaud' and 'La Chevre' starring Depardieu. Never heard of either of these before.

The restaurant in the evening was very nice. A seafood place called L'Ocean. The waiter was friendly. Like a lot of French waiters, ours seemed to have done time in a French restaurant in London, where he had picked up some English, but apparently not very much. Anyway, he was a happy sort of chap which made the meal that much more pleasurable. As we sat talking, I noticed that quite a few of the French people walking by outside were wearing pure white clothes. Sometimes even complete outfits in figure-hugging, spotless, impractical white. Now that must be a sign of summer...

POSTSCRIPT 18th May 2005

French music producer Eddie Barclay was buried today. A well known "misogynist" he was married eight times and loved to be surrounded by young women. He was also known for his parties where everyone was obliged to wear white. He was buried by his friends (Johnny Hallyday, Carlos, Eddy Mitchell, Robert Hossein) all rigged out in white suits. Perhaps this goes part way to explaining the mystique of wearing white in France.