YES, BUT WHY REINDEER?

My good friend Frances, who hails from New York and often comments on this blog, regularly posts beautifully illustrated accounts of the great parades that march through that city.  These mark this national day, or that liberation or so and so's hard won rights.

In our little town this side of the Pond our parading is more limited. We don't have a Mardi Gras or a Carnival.  Britain lacks an independence day or a liberation day (never having been either dependent or liberated) and we probably think we have enough civil rights to be going along with.  Neither are we terribly diverse either ethnically or sexually or any other 'lly,' and in any case we are a pretty tolerant bunch; at least we like to think we are.

While our parading may thus be limited it isn't non-existent.  Each year at the end of November we hold the Reindeer Parade when Father Christmas, regaled in splendour in a four-wheeled sled, is pulled through the town by reindeer, showering, over all the children en route, largesse to be delivered on Christmas Eve via parental intervention, or so one hopes.  The scarlet gentleman is accompanied by a great flock of elves and pixies of varying ages and variously convincing appearance.  Brass bands of uncertain proficiency accompany the ensemble and the reindeer plod in a rather half-hearted manner from one end of the town to the other and back again, with everyone following in their wake.

The reindeer, in case you were wondering, are shipped all the way from Scotland at great expense and return to their farm after the event.  I don't know about you but I have always thought reindeer singularly unprepossessing animals.  They have a moth-eaten and downtrodden appearance, as if they know that their sole purpose in life is to be eaten by wolves.  Joie de vivre is a feeling quite unknown to them.

Moreover, they are actually much smaller than one imagines they should be and I think this lack of physicality must be a tremendous disappointment to children used to seeing cartoons of magnificent beasts the size of carthorses with noses flashing like a demented fire alarm.

Which makes me wonder who it was that decided that St Nicholas, or Santa Claus, should use these - of all creatures - as a propulsive force.  Horses would be much more energetic and, of course, considerably more visual.  Somehow I think the reindeer got the part without auditioning.

For instance, if you are beguiled by the thought of an animal from the cold snowy wastes, how about the moose?  With a little imagination you could visualise a gift-laden sled pulled through the sky by a giant moose whose antlers flapped like Dumbo's ears.  Indeed elephants might be even more majestic and you'd think,  now that the world's population had reach nine billion,  Santa could use some extra traction.  Or, to revert to the North Pole again and being ecological at the same time, a couple of polar bears would be most impressive with red scarves around their necks.

But Reindeer!  Well - fine for trudging through the snow and living on moss and providing hides for moccasins and tents - even acceptable for the occasional dish of stringy stew - but for racing across the heavens with names like Donner and Blitzen, surely not.  Reindeer are just not cut out for the part, I'm sorry.

Still, there we are.  Like it or not reindeer have cornered the Santa sled pulling market and are not about to be displaced, despite the generations of disappointed children whom I am absolutely sure would far prefer polar bears and elephants. (In fact left to themselves children would invent a far superior myth in which there were a whole family of Santas - one for each continent maybe - with superhero vehicles - why would you want a sled in Africa? - pulled by a whole zoological garden of different creatures).

Anyway we have digressed as we usually do.  The Reindeer came to Cowbridge last Sunday with Santa in tow and into the town flocked thousands upon thousands of people.  Cars were parked up to a mile out of town. In every roadway a steady stream of buggies, babies, Mums, Dads and excited children streamed down the hillsides into the valley bottom in the hope of seeing the reindeer and receiving a species of papal blessing from the man in the scarlet coat and a chance to remind him to bring the Nintendo rather than the X Box - if that wouldn't be too much of a bother - and please could an elf be sure to take out a pencil and write down the request to avoid bringing the wrong thing as happened last year which meant that Mummy and Daddy had to take Santa's present back to a shop and try to exchange it all at great expense.

Our little town houses about 5,000 souls.  Adding a further 25,000 and, what's more,  cramming them into the centre creates something that is a cross between a rugby scrum and the Black Hole of Calcutta. So, Frances, you will excuse me if I say I didn't attend this year's parade.  Instead I walked away from town and up to the Tump, there on a sunny morning to contemplate the Bristol Channel and the hills of Exmoor beyond.  I was quite alone with my visions of Moose and Elephants, Horses and Polar Bears and the parade they made in my mind was infinitely superior to the one below.

Then I had a very fine lunch in Loch Fyne's restaurant with theatre friends and forgot, thankfully, all about the reindeer, while the 25,000 and, we hope, their satisfied children, trudged up the hill back to their cars. 

(The picture showing Santa, a couple of bemused children, an Elf and an Elfette and, if you look very closely, a sprig of reindeer horn (I told you they were unprepossessing) is courtesy of the website of our very fine local paper, the Cowbridge Gem, which, if you Google it, will tell you all practical details about the parade and why it is counted such a success).

A BOBBLE FOR CHRISTMAS

A similar Bobble.  You'll have to imagine this in orange

We are a month away from Christmas.  I know this because various members of the family start whispering about whether you have any ideas about what ‘x’ would like to find in their stocking, which leads inevitably on to what you would like to find in your stocking.  I am hopeless at answering.  What I would really like is either ridiculously expensive or completely inappropriate, or probably both.  Otherwise my wants are small, at least in the present department.

Some people are instinctive present choosers.  Without a great deal of thought or effort they go into a shop and buy a present both useful and a surprise.  Probably inexpensive as well for which, I think, you should get bonus points.  Any fool can be a success at present buying if money is no object.

My eldest sister is one such person.  She once bought me a woollen bobble hat - she was living in Shetland at the time - and the hat, though improbably knitted in orange and brown, was clearly modelled on the hats worn by the local fishermen and fitted snugly around the ears.  It was crowned with a large orange bobble and I remember it also had a flap around the base which could be pulled down during a severe inclemency so that the hat would cover everything north of the mouth. 

That it then covered the eyes would not have mattered.  You can’t really see anything anyway in a Shetland gale; it is hard enough to stand up, all you can do is to cower against the elemental forces of nature. Anyway, your hat wouldn’t blow away.

Living then as I did in the docile atmosphere of the home counties I was still glad to own such a garment and wore it almost daily.  In that game you play if you can’t sleep, where you rank your chattels in order so that if ever your house catches fire you know what to take first, it found a high place.

The hat wore out, of course,  as all things do.  The first casualty was the bobble. Mind you, I wasn’t sorry for I thought the bobble an unnecessary frivolity, particularly when coloured orange.  I suppose it might have been useful had I been engulfed by an avalanche, but that wasn't likely in Essex.

Minus bobble, the hat went on for a very long time before finally succumbing to moths.  I have a new one now but this doesn’t quite match the practicality of the old hand-knitted version.  It is also a light grey, which, while a tad less disreputable, is an unfortunate colour in the event of an avalanche.

Someone else once gave me a pair of Timberland gloves, fleece lined on the inside, tough without ever being bulky and made of leather,  soft as a second skin.  The sort of gloves that pilots used in the days before cockpit heating and when the dress code called for sheepskin jackets.  They, too, were a most effective present and worn till they fell apart.

But to revert to the pilots a moment.  Now that I come to think of it, I have never seen a pilot wearing  insulated headgear.  Why? You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that a pilot in a very cold plane (I am talking of fifty, even a hundred years ago) might need to wear something warm as a bearskin?

Yet if I remember correctly from those early films such as the one of Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic with his plane covered in ice, he wore no headgear at all, or just perhaps a leather helmet.  I’m sure a bobble hat would have been useful.

When did Lindbergh fly from New York to Paris? Was it 1929? Or 1927? Or 1925?  It is the sort of question that might well have cropped up at the Great Annual Rotary Quiz that took place in the Town Hall here last Saturday and to which le tout Cowbridge turns out.  The questions this year were harder than last and were full of such silly forced-choice questions which do not suit my mental mechanics at all.  CADS - our drama society - usually put in two teams. Last year we came fourth.  This year we came tenth, equal with the other CADS team.  Actors don’t like forced choices, you see. 

Still the annual late November quiz reminds you that Christmas is on its way and to turn your attention to serious present buying.  If in doubt I can recommend a hand-knitted bobble hat from Shetland and a pair of soft Timberland gloves, regardless of whether you are buying for old or young, male or female, town or country mouse.  You may be thought an old miser but you will have the satisfaction of knowing that the object of your affection will be warm this winter and probably safe in an avalanche as well.

(The picture shows a Shetland type Bobble Hat made by Barbour, courtesy of Sadler and Co.  For those desperate to know Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in the Spirit of St Louis in 1927.)

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.