SAUSAGES, GREEN CHEESE AND THE BIG BANG

A simulated detection of the Higgs Boson particle

The moon, we learn, is made of green cheese - though what ‘green cheese’ might be is somehow never explained.  I suppose it is cheese that is green, but you never know.  Chinese seaweed is not seaweed at all but a kind of cabbage, or so they tell me, so green cheese might be a kind of rock.  But that aside what is everything else made of? 

When we stay at the Mill, down in the Auvergne,  it gets dark at night.  Proper dark.  Can’t see your hand in front of your face dark.  But look up and what you see are uncountable stars stretching in a dimly glowing carpet from one side of the heavens to the other.  Millions upon billions of tiny pricks of light. 

And in this vast uncountable universe what we can see is multiplied a million fold by what we can’t:  those stars in galaxies and nebulae that have travelled already too far and whose light no longer reaches us and whose presence can only be detected by radio beams.

Yet this vastness of stars and galaxies and planets and rocks represents less than one part in two- hundred-and-fifty of what is in the universe.  If, like the moon, everything we can see is made of green cheese, then that represents only what is left out upon the counter.  There remains a whole greater kitchen of comestibles locked away out of sight in cupboards and pantries.

Dark matter makes up three-quarters of the universe and dark energy a further quarter.  What are these two behemoths which take up whole store-cupboards of space?  Well, that is at least as good a question as the one about the green cheese, for no-one seems to know.  We know dark matter exists and roughly where it is, but we don’t yet know what it is. For all I know it may be made of green cheese too.  Or even blue, yellow or purple cheese.

The man who prompted these sudden reflections is Lyn Evans, who hails from just up the road in Aberdare in South Wales and is billed as the builder of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN just outside Geneva. Possibly you may have heard of the Large Hadron Collider or LHC for it has been much in the news.  It is a giant circular tunnel 27 kilometres long through which sub-atomic particles are accelerated with the aid of magnets to impossible speeds and then crashed into each other in the hope that they will break apart and so we shall be able to learn more about what you and I (and the green cheese) are made of.

Lyn Evans was giving the Anniversary Lecture at the Welsh Centre of International Affairs in Cardiff this week.  He spoke in a listed pseudo-Egyptian monstrosity of a building known as the Temple of Peace and Health that boasts some of the worst acoustics in the world.  Still, what he was saying was so fascinating that you could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium.

We are not made, he told us, of sugar and spice and all things nice, but of a whole family of creatures, fabulous as unicorns, fantastical as griffins with names like gluons, muons, quarks, hadrons, neutrons, photons, variously possessing mass, energy or electrical charge and sometimes none of these at all.  Out of such energised and vibrating soup come the paintings of Leonardo, the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Mozart.

One particle however is missing: the Higgs Boson particle. Like the dark matter (or perhaps the green cheese) we know - or we think we know - it exists and that without it all the gluons and muons and photons and quarks would simply fall apart.  It has been called the ‘God’ particle because without it there could be no matter or any living thing created. Yet like God himself no-one has yet found it.  The scientists have trod the path to Mount Olympus only to find Zeus and his tribe departed.

Hence the need to build this 27 kilometre tunnel and to collide hadrons in the hope that after the bang of the collisions scientists will be able to find Higgs Boson particles among the wreckage standing by the roadside, as it were, and scratching their heads.

What Lyn Evans will do then he didn’t say.  Presumably the things will be weighed and measured and then - because we have to return whence we started to the discussion of what the universe is made of - then the boffins can get to work again on how it all began: how exactly the Big Bang.....er....banged, all that time ago.

Rather disappointingly he didn’t touch on what happened before the Big Bang - which has always seemed to me the more important question.  Something surely must have been frying in the pan before ‘sizzle, sizzle, sizzle, one went ‘bang.’’   Was our Big Bang a unique event?  Oh dear - you’ve got me worried now.

CLAZZAKIN'S CARPET

Clazzakin's Carpet

Thanks to all the good folk who sent welcome and heartfelt wishes last week for my recovery. I am mended I am glad to say and no longer feel as though your man with the scythe is out there in the vicinity searching for my address.  I have given up reading articles on medical catastrophes and am back in the land of the hale and the hearty, though my knees, inexplicably,  have begun to hurt and I am sure a hypochondriac must be able to make something of that.

Despite those of you who urged me to abstain from whisky or aspirin, and certainly from both at the same time, I have to say that this combination seems about the most effective remedy known to medical science.  Of course, I don’t take much of either.  A glass, or at the very most two modest glasses,  of whisky and then with water and no more than a couple of dispersible aspirin - and the aspirin before the whisky - is all it needs to feel well again, for a few hours at least.

It doesn’t help however to find yourself as I did last weekend being invited to lunch and dinner parties on the same day by generous friends with restricted calendars when I didn’t feel like eating very much more than some light scrambled egg on toast.  Especially aggravating as well when I am trying to lose some of the pounds that I added on holiday before Christmas and the New Year put them back on again.  We have an invitation to spend New Year in France, which, if the past is anything to go by, will mean a splendid party of oysters and champagne and pretty much non stop eating from seven until eleven.

Over Christmas it will be my turn to provide the grub for family and various guests who won’t be content, either, with scrambled egg.  I’ve just been given what sounds a magnificent recipe for a soup called Pho by a blogging friend who lives in Seattle.  A beef broth with slices of beef and spiced up with ginger and cinnamon and chilies. Onions and other vegetables come into it too. I might well try it on them; I’m intrigued by the name ‘Pho.’

By Christmas, too, I hope to have finished and printed a children’s story that presently goes under the working title of Clazzakin’s Carpet.  It is a story about flying carpets and where they come from (Persia); and why they fly and what they carry on them when they do (Persian cats - obviously - but not Kings or Camels); and one little girl’s effort to make her grandmother’s carpet take to the air.

The story has been superbly illustrated by another blogging friend and I am now putting it together in the software offered by the people at BLURB, who will print the book and in colour too.  But the job of fitting illustrations and text together and assembling both within page borders; of getting the paragraphing and spacing correct is both tedious and time-consuming. It is work that must go on for every illustrated book that is ‘designed,’ but which few of us, I suspect, ever think about. Writing the story is infinitely easier and in future I think I shall stick to that.

Another friend emailed this week inviting me to a talk by a clerical gentleman who gives spiritual advice to various official bodies In Wales and whom I have met on other occasions. The talk -  or rather sermon for such it was - unfolded in the town's magnificently restored early nineteenth century Baptist Chapel into which previously I had never set foot.  A most beautiful building full of theatrical potential with its boxed pews and balconies.  ‘We are all migrants,’ he said soulfully, his hands clasped together, ‘though some of us are more recent than others.’  True enough, though whether the sentiment helps the price of eggs, I know not.

I don’t normally attend sermons in chapels (indeed, this was a lifetime first)  but such events are all part of life’s rich tapestry and my presence there might even have given me valuable Karma points in the event that my present feeling of well-being proves no more than a remission.  Pascal’s bet and all that.

Which French philosopher reminds me that last night I saw ‘Midnight in Paris’ - a most wonderful film about a young American in Paris with a nostalgia for the past. Nostalgia becomes reality when he travels in a 1920’s Peugeot ninety years back in time to meet Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Cole Porter and Gertrude Stein (among others). About as believable, of course, as flying carpets, but hugely enjoyable.  Philosophic too, and very funny.  I’ve always enjoyed Woody Allen.

GRIM REAPING

I have been pretty much ill all week with one of those sicknesses that come on so gradually so you don’t realise that you are ill at all, until you start to feel better.  I blame the aeroplane on which we flew back from Rodez after our visit to Le Moulin du Clout two weeks ago.  They are always full of bugs which incubate for a week or ten days before breaking out into something international.

I begin to know that I am ill when half way through my afternoon's work I feel a compelling urge to pour a glass of whisky and perhaps take a couple of aspirin for good measure.  That makes me feel better in the short and the long term but not in the medium term for the whisky (and aspirin too) ravage my febrile stomach and liver which is ‘le point faible’ of my anatomy and the place for which any bugs that may be circulating head directly and without passing ‘go.’

In this state therefore of more or less perpetual indigestion and general wretchedness, I happened a day or two ago to read an article on the cheerful subject of pancreatic cancer, much in the news recently as the slayer of poor Steve Jobs on the keyboard of one of whose beautiful products I am even now typing .

Apparently, if you get pancreatic cancer, there isn’t much that can be done and you had better start putting your affairs in order and not embark on any long books.  The trouble is that you don’t know that you’ve got it - because the symptoms aren’t obvious - until it has got too much of a hold for anything worthwhile to be done.  This is clear from the survival rates which haven’t improved at all over the years.  The good news is that it is a rare form of cancer and makes up only 3 per cent of all cancers. Statistics are on your side, even though they didn’t help Mr Jobs.

As it happens my dear Mother died of pancreatic cancer.  I was going to write ‘dear old,’ but she wasn’t old at all, being only 54 when she died.  According to the article this isn’t helpful to her offspring for the disease runs in families.  This constituted, said the article, one formal indicator that I, too, might succumb.  It then listed five further indicators: to my horror three of these five might well be said to apply to me.  Oh dear! 

Which is why, of course, if you are a hypochondriac like yours truly, you shouldn’t read about these things as you only end up depressing yourself.   Fortunately, while you can’t do anything about your family, most of the other warning indicators can be avoided or corrected by living and eating in a sensible way and in my case not eating foods and drinking liquids that irritate the nether regions, wonderful though the taste and effect of a glass or two of cold white wine may be on a summer’s day - though surely, I tell myself, one must be able to make the occasional exception - otherwise one simply gives up on life. 

In any case, I remind myself, what really did for Mama was not pancreatic cancer out of the blue but a cancer that just happened to be looking for a home and chose the pancreas faute de mieux.  For unhappy reasons, best known to herself, she developed in the later stages of her life a powerful addiction to alcohol, tobacco, strong coffee and Alka-Seltzer, together with a powerful resistance to exercise and looking after herself.   Living with a ferocious and belligerent Siamese cat called Ohio (one half of Baltimore and Ohio - she had an absurd tendency to name her cats after American Railroads) didn’t help either. 

Nor did the Grim Reaper have to wait too long on the doorstep. In fact she was sitting up in bed, quite merrily, smoking a cigarette only half an hour before she died, leaving me and most of her family half a day’s journey short of wishing her well. 

Still, in the midst of death we are in life, for it is confidently reported that young Theo has a sibling on the way.  Just as he was Topaz before he arrived, so the parcel in the post, as it were, has been called variously Peanut and Butterbean.  Maybe it will turn out to be twins, though I suspect in these days of acute medical advance that we should have known were that to be so.  Grandparents can’t obtain contraception against grandchildren, can they?  Or some other form of home protection and sanity insurance? 

APPLES AND TROUT

The Tumbrel - Pour Encourager Les Autres

I’ve been gardening and feel quite proud.  Yesterday I made six apple grafts taking cuttings that I had made from trees at the Mill and sticking them into stubs of branches on the apple trees here.  I watched a little video on YouTube that showed you how to do it.  Mind you, like so much else, seeing an expert cut, slice and bind with all the right tools and knowing exactly what he is doing, is one thing; doing it yourself without the correct equipment is another.  But still I have six grafts: five on apple trees and one on a pear for I had taken a quince cutting and read somewhere that pears are grown on quince root stocks - so why not vice versa?

Anyway the whole exercise was an experiment, a bit of fun.  I am not overly worried if they grow or not.  For good measure I brought home a quince sucker and that should grow and if it doesn’t produce quinces at some future date I had always graft pears on to it.

It has been so wet that I haven’t had a chance to get on with this grafting job and my cuttings have sat embedded respectively in an apple and a quince since leaving the Mill last Sunday.  At least one had expired, or maybe it was dead before I started; so when the sun came out yesterday I hurried outside to do the job.

Of course I had no suitable grafting goo with which you protect the graft after you have made it.  So I used the first thing that came to hand which was Polycell flexible and waterproof filler, specially for bathrooms.  Apart from being white rather than black it has exactly the same rubbery, gooey look of the stuff in the YouTube film.  It can’t be poisonous, can it? if you use it in bathrooms?  Anyway we shall see come the spring.

An Apple Graft - Perhaps Not a Good One

I blame Rosie for my enthusiasm, plus a restless desire to experiment inherited from long hours alone and unsupervised as a child.  I once tried making cider but found, as you do, that it is remarkably hard to extract juice from an apple unless you first cut it into small pieces, which is hard  unless you have some sort of mechanical device like a great stone wheel in a trough and a horse to pull it.

I must have been about twelve.  Cutting the apples with a knife was boring.  But then I had the wonderful idea of simply squashing the apples that had already fermented and gone brown of which there were a great many in the apple store. What I produced looked like rough cider in every way.  It even tasted like a species of cider.  But it was of course undrinkable, being acid to a degree.

Down in the Cantal they produce with their mountain of apples something that looks very similar to my effort - a muddy, grey, brown brew which tastes infinitely better than it looks and is served in plastic juice bottles at one euro a litre.  They give you a wrap of roasted chestnuts with it as well at no extra cost - chestnuts being another commodity of which nature has delivered an abundance.  The cider isn’t particularly alcoholic and at the little cider festival we attended the hardened drinkers at the bar were all drinking beer.  But you don’t want anything to make you legless when you are sitting out in the sun enjoying the scenery, do you.

The real trouble with going to France of course is that I put on weight at the rate of a quarter of a pound a day.  I have more appetite than at home and of course the food is better.  On this recent holiday I had the best trout I had ever tasted at a little hotel not far from Maurs.  Outside, in the sunshine, stood a tumbrel, looking as though it had just conveyed Marie Antoinette to the guillotine.  Inside the trout were cooking, or maybe even being caught for the hotel Patronne said she kept the fish in a pond. Certainly, they tasted fresher than daisies.  Whether they had been grilled, baked, or deep fried, I wasn’t sure, but anyway they came covered with garlic and cooked to perfection.

I asked the Patronne how she made the loose bones crumble and melt, but she wasn’t telling.  ‘It’s an old Auvergnat recipe.’ she said, smiling mysteriously.

Anyway, whatever she did I don’t think it involved apples.  If my grafts take we shall have here at least some of the dozen or more varieties of apple at the Mill.  And maybe even a Quince too.  We shall need to wait for spring for a result.

D'ARTAGNAN AND THE AUTUMN COLOURS

D'Artagnan's Birthplace near Lupiac (Gers)

'J'adore' said Caro waving her arms, 'les couleurs d'automne.'   We were sitting at table in her great and almost medieval hall, restored to great beauty and perfection and which doubles (or triples or quadruples) as kitchen, dining room, living room and study, all in one elegant space.

We had in fact just come in from the west facing balcony beyond which the sun had set far away over the misty hills leaving the sky filled with the same golden autumn colours as the leaves that tumbled all around.  Even the champagne seemed to take on an autumn hue.

Caro was by now stirring the most wonderful soup.  'It's a universal phrase', she said. 'Whenever you are in difficulty, or don't understand something, you can always reply - with suitable gestures - that you simply love the autumn colours.'  As always, I thought,  the phrase seems to lose something in translation.

Well, there we were. We had just arrived that very afternoon from the grey cloudiness of Britain into the warm autumn sunshine of the Cantal - somewhere, incidentally, that is a little larger than Norfolk but with only 149,000 people, despite having its own respectable ski resort at Le Lioran and being only a couple of fast hours driving from the Mediterranean.  Moreover, the Departemental capital, Aurilliac, even has more sun than Toulouse, according to the weather statistics.  Despite this, the Cantal ranks with the Creuse and the Lozère as one of the three most depopulated French Departements. 

And it was once English around six hundred years ago.  That anyway was the point I hesitantly put to Den who is Caro's other half. (The two of them together are a walking encyclopaedia).  In the boom years for the English Raj in France, after Henry V had done the business at Agincourt.

There's a castle just down the road - just a ruin now - that changed hands, amicably, too, according to Den, with one side marching out and the other side marching in.  But whether it was the French who were quitting or the English, Den didn't know.  For certainly it didn't remain English very long and in a few short years during the disastrous reign of the mad Henry VI all English France was lost (apart from Calais).  The hundred years war won, only promptly to be lost and the loss then triggering the Wars of the Roses.

What you learn from Shakespeare and Phillipa Gregory!  Whose latest fiction 'The Lady of the Rivers' is, to my mind, a great read, particularly if you have Wikipedia beside you.  The book is a fictional life of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Mother of Elizabeth Woodville ('The White Queen') and great-grand-mother of Henry VIII. 

For some reason Den and Caro advise me also to enter the realm of historical fiction, cutting my teeth, as it were, by translating Alexandre Dumas' novel, 'The Three Musketeers,'  which was last translated into English, apparently, 150 years ago and therefore needs reworking for our text speak age.   I have always counted this a wild project but something seems to be telling me it isn't.

You see we visited my other sister, during this stay, who also lives down in the Gers in south west France (where it is not so sunny as in the Cantal).  In fact it rained on only the second day we were there.

'I know,' Sarah said brightly. 'Why don't you go off and visit the D'Artagnan Museum, it's only ten minutes away in Lupiac.'  And so we did.

D'Artagnan must be one of the few people in history to be more famous for his fictional exploits than his real ones.  But yes, he was the Captain General of the King's Musketeers and he did arrest and guard the rogue Finance Minister, Nicolas Fouquet - who some think was the man behind, or rather inside, the Iron Mask, and he did die at the siege of Maastricht in course of a rather unnecessary bit of heroics.  And yes, he was born in a little manor house just outside Lupiac, though sadly this is now privately owned.

The Lupiac museum is in a chapel in the town and is full of film posters and book editions.  The audio commentary is a bit hit or miss, switching alarmingly from one subject to the next.  But still worth seeing on a wet afternoon.  I now have background should the translation ever get off the ground.

Nor was this the last time I met him. For it seems the man is ubiquitous. Opening the Spectator on returning home, I see a picture of Milla Jovovich dressed as Milady de Winter.  Yes, yet another remake of The Three Musketeers is out and showing at cinemas nationwide. This time it includes airships.  Deborah Ross' review is scathing: 'All for one, one for all, but, mostly, one to skip.'

I do wonder whether the world really needs a new translation, with or without airships.  'J'adore les couleurs d'automne,' as D"Artagnan might himself have said pensively.

HYDRAULIC EXPERIMENTS

A Happy Theo and Sand Castle Building Bucket

You know it is autumn, don’t you, when you come out of your front door, or through a garden gate, and blunder straight into a spider’s web.  It only seems to happen at this time of the year and both spiders and webs seem different to those you find at other times.  The webs are finer and only catch the light when it reflects obliquely off their gossamer threads  They look like proper spider’s webs too - as though designed in some Disney studio - and the spiders are brown and camouflaged, not black.

Our grandson Theo, now past two and a half, has a mortal fear not of spiders but of their webs and spots little threads here there and everywhere that have to be removed before he will venture anywhere near.  This can make progress around the garden - or even parts of the home - rather slow.

What he does like are the adventures of Shaun the Sheep, one of Aardman’s comic creations for children.  In one episode Shaun is dancing an Irish jig on top of a washing machine for a reason that need not detain us here. Theo is fascinated and has been attempting to emulate Shaun on top of the ottoman.  To encourage him I showed him a video clip of Riverdance.  Michael Flatley would be a revelation, I thought, and so much more agile than me.   Alas not so.  Young Theo prefers the plasticine sheep while I have become, unlikely as it may seem, a teacher of Irish dancing.  It must be my grandmother’s genes.

The Indian summer has been so beautiful that when I took Theo to the beach yesterday the atmosphere was quite Mediterranean.  The same dry wind, warm light, and featherdown softness to the air, not however set against the parched pines, sand dunes and purple hills of the south of France, but against a peculiarly British backdrop of grassy hills in a new flush of greenery and the magnificent autumn colours of oak and ash leaves.

The sun hangs low now, even in the afternoon, which makes it seem as though this were the evening and we would be shortly returning for a later supper rather than a five o’clock tea.  All most confusing.  Not that it bothered Theo who engaged himself in numerous hydraulic experiments around sandcastles and the power of the incoming tide. Unfortunately, they are lost to posterity for I left my camera at home.

Watching the waves crashing on the rocks and the tide racing up the channel I cannot help wondering why the powers that be stick turbines in the thin air on the tops of our moorlands, where from time to time they stand idle and becalmed and even when the wind is blowing don’t generate much electricity anyway.   Why not put the turbines in the sea? Obviously not the same turbines, but the tide in this channel is heavy and fierce and above all predictable. A few marine turbines could generate more renewable energy than all the white stalked monsters that disfigure our landscape. And, would do so invisibly, too.

The hot weather also means that we haven’t yet had a chance to experiment properly with the new heating system, kindly installed by British Gas recently.  In addition to the central heating we have an open fire in the sitting room which we have never used much because the room promptly fills with smoke.

When we were in Gascony last week my sister told me of the various stratagems she had employed to stop her big open kitchen fire from smoking.  The answer, it seemed, was to eschew grates and large logs and instead to build the fire directly on the floor. Our fireplace is a minnow compared to her great whale of a beast but the idea seemed worth trying and two friends invited for dinner provided a reasonable excuse to despatch the grate and light a fire directly against the fireback.  And yes, it worked.

The papers are full of the collapsing euro and how lucky we are not to have joined the single currency, but I am not sure if this isn’t a question of beams and motes.  Buying euros for our trip I couldn’t help noticing that the external value of sterling has declined by over 20 per cent since the euro’s launch, while our level of inflation is running at twice that of countries like France and Germany.  Personally I’d rather we were in the euro than out of it - it would make Gascony a lot cheaper for one thing -  but the indignity is that whereas once we would have been welcomed with open arms, now we should need a very long period indeed to get ourselves back to that position.  This doesn’t seem like making the right decision (to stay out) to me.

VISIT TO GASCONY

The House

When we stepped out on the tarmac at Toulouse, the heat almost knocked us backwards.  I had dressed as for a damp, autumnal weekend in Wales, my bag filled with warm clothing suddenly it seemed ‘de trop.’

A text arrived from my sister: she had, like some Carthaginian general, just ‘entered’ Toulouse and would arrive shortly.  I collected some euros from the dispenser - in my experience, the cheapest way of buying small amounts of currency - and sat down to wait.  The airport is thankfully well-air conditioned.

Soon we were bowling along country roads, west and south towards the afternoon sun and, as the roads became narrower and the turnings off more frequent, finally arrived at our destination, a journey of nearly 1000 miles accomplished between a late breakfast and an early tea.

Compare this with the mid-eighteenth century when Talleyrand was journeying from Perigord to Paris on the Bordeaux stage coach.  In his memoirs he says the journey took 17 days - but as this works out at a travelling speed of only 4 miles an hour - it seems unlikely.  No doubt it seemed like 17 days though; the EasyJet flight seemed like 17 hours at times.

The Upstairs Gallery running from the back of the house to the front

My sister lives in a French country house of infinite charm and beauty. But the house is a work in progress, indeed has been a work in progress for the last four hundred years. It has grown like topsy from a small farmhouse to resemble the enormous pile of the Mas Lunel, depicted in Rose Tremain’s novel ‘Trespass.’  And of course as soon as one bit is done up another bit falls down.

In the days when it was built people hadn’t heard of bathrooms. Even the Palace of Versailles wasn’t built with bathrooms and guests answered calls of nature in any convenient cupboard or landing.  With luck the servants might clean up.  So getting to the state rooms entailed the negotiation of what was in effect an indoor farmyard.

This being the twentieth century, my sister’s house of course does have a bathroom but the previous owner (who only used the house in the summer), built the bathroom in an annex on the far side of the barn through which - in an echo of Versailles - it is now necessary to traipse avoiding the detritus from pigeons above your head and ducks around your feet.

Lucky it wasn’t winter, I thought to myself, when the snow apparently blows in through the roof tiles and lies thick inside.  Still plans are afoot to change all this.  And if not, well, they say suffering is good for the soul.

But sitting outside in the September sunshine, with the poultry happily milling about, with four pigs in the wood (carefully named Ham, Pork, Bacon and Sausages, lest anyone become too fond of them) and a pair of cows in the meadow (named less carefully Daisy and Bubble though they too are destined for the freezer at some point), I feel only the warmth on my face and bucolic bliss hanging like the famous gardens of Babylon about me.

This is Gascony and Gascony is famous for being a place where you eat largely and well. The kitchen is big enough to take a table for twelve and we were nine when we sat down to lunch on Saturday, the guest of honour being a retired Brussels interpreter with a fund of amusing anecdotes about language.

The Kitchen

Later he told me there was a statue in the next village of Tossaint Louverture, the former Domincan slave who first led one of the few successful slave revolts in history and later became a general in Napoleon’s army.  We went to see it.  History oozes from the villages of France as from the pores of a wet sponge.

On our way there or perhaps to somewhere else, we met the old woman to whom my sister takes her excess of ducks, which breed in the Gascon sunshine with astonishing rapidity and nest in the trees.  She charges 2 euros a duck to do all the nasty work of killing, drawing, feathering etc and even has a little stun machine so that the duck doesn’t know what is happening until it finds itself full of sage and onion.

She asked me, in a broad midi-accent, whether ‘I was in France?’  I think she meant did I live in France, but for some reason I could only answer her literally.  So I told her I really didn’t know; it could be Bulgaria. 

It wasn’t very funny then - indeed it was incomprehensible, neither she nor my sister knew what I was talking about - and it seems even less funny still when written down.  Bear with me.

And then, hardly before we had arrived we were off again and whizzing home where, inevitably, it was pouring with rain.