Thanks to those who commented on my last entry. I was really touched.

I haven't had the time or mental space to post since then. But spring has come here now, finally. The baby has taken to bopping around in my abdomen, particularly in the evenings. A very strange feeling.

A nightingale has arrived back at the quarry at Lys. Last year the nightingale - I'm assuming it's the same one - began singing in April and stopped sometime in June. I had never heard a nightingale before then. ( Read more... )

Well, I reckon it's about time I blogged about the fact that I'm pregnant. The main reason I haven't mentioned it before is that I still don't really believe it, even though I'm almost fifteen weeks along now. We had been trying to have a baby since 2001 without success and had long since given up hope. There was nothing wrong with either of us as far as the doctors could tell, it just wasn't happening. This turned out to be much more difficult to deal with than I'd expected - it was a type of bereavement that was just as intense as the "normal" kind, and a lot harder to talk about. ( Read more... )

I took these at Lys this afternoon. Freezing cold day but you'd never guess it from the photos. We planted the peach that's flowering last year. It feels so good to have fruit trees again.

The porch which you can see in the background has a door with several missing glass panes, and last year a family of swallows seized the opportunity to make their nest inside the house. Although we enjoyed their company, their poop took a lot of cleaning up, so this year we're planning on repairing the glass before they arrive.



I'm not usually much into pink but I just can't resist these.

I'd thought that today I would write something about my fourth attempt at getting a European driving license. I'd assumed I'd have a good whinge about the arbitrariness of the driving test procedure in France (uncannily similar to that of Ireland), and my own irrational but nonetheless deep-rooted conviction that the European driving test is a crucial rite of passage.

However I've been distracted pretty thoroughly by the death of Will Howard. ( Read more... )

Today in Cluny there was the second round of local elections in order to decide who will be the next mayor, who comes complete with an entourage of 25 or so people. This has turned out to be an interesting enough election that everyone seems to be talking about it.

The same people have been in power here for 18 years or so. A few months ago the mayor announced that he was no longer running, whereupon one of his colleagues said he would run instead. However this new candidate got into a big row - I'm not sure what about - with some of the other colleagues of the mayor and so there was a dramatic split and lots of consternation. ( Read more... )

sammywol gave me this year to write about for a "Where was I?" year.

I've tried to keep this entry short but found it impossible. There were just too many new things happening that year, as for the first time since the age of four I was liberated - albeit only temporarily - from the educational system. ( Read more... )

To celebrate the Chinese New Year, the Cluny cinema has a Chinese film festival every February. The films are always recent ones and there's a mixture of dramas and documentaries. Here's what I thought of three of them (spoilers included):

( Tuya's Wedding )

( Summer Palace )

( Manufactured Landscapes )

Back from a week away, with the last weekend spent at the Schumacher College in Devon, attending a big Feasta meeting. I felt thoroughly spoilt there, staying in a beautiful place with all kinds of wonderful old trees in the grounds, eating superb vegetarian food, making use of the excellent library and meditation room. It was the sort of place where there's always plenty of tea and coffee that you can help yourself to, and then you can sit on comfortable chairs in a big circle and chat with people from all over the world, while munching on chewy biscuits. ( Read more... )

On New Year's Eve, our friends who live upstairs came down and we all sat around the fire here and drew pictures of things that we want to disappear in 2008, and burnt them in the fire. The pictures ranged from a creature that catches people to Lyme's disease to war, with a certain US president featuring more than once.

I decided that I wanted the things that are burning to disappear - or, to be more precise, the things that are contributing to global warming. It was quite easy to draw an SUV and a Humvee, and I was very proud of my factory spewing smoke into the atmosphere. The airplane wasn't too bad, and there was also one of those scaffold things for oil wells that looked vaguely realistic. But I stumbled badly when trying to draw an oil pump. I've seen them a thousand times and yet can't visualize them properly at all. ( Read more... )

We stopped in Lys on Monday, on our way up to Dijon, and the water in the electric kettle that we have there, about four or five inches deep, was frozen solid.

On Monday we also went to visit the Abbey of Fontenay, a well-preserved Cistercian abbey from the twelfth century. It had a big forge which was very advanced for its time, making clever use of the stream nearby.

It also had a bakery and the monks sold their bread and wine to the dukes of Burgundy. The dukes kept their hunting dogs at the abbey. You could still see their kennels, and the kennel of the monks' own guard dog, which had a hole in it for the dog to stick its head through.

I had a good thick hat and coat on but had made the mistake of only wearing one pair of thin trousers, and I was so obsessed with being cold that I could barely take in the assorted wonders at the monastery. The thing that stuck most in my mind was the fact that the monks only had one properly heated room. Admittedly it had two fireplaces and was quite small, so if you went in there when the fires were lit you probably could have got warm. Also, if the right doors were left open in the abbey, the fires were able to provide a small amount of heating for the huge dormitory and common room.

Still, it struck me as pushing frugality a bit too far to be huddling around in the monastery in the dead of winter, reading your scriptures or doing whatever chores you were supposed to be doing. I can definitely relate to trying to be frugal, but I guess I have my limits, and being too cold when there's really no need to be too cold is definitely one of them.

We went to see La Question Humaine (Heartbeat Detector) yesterday evening. It was quite striking in some ways, I thought, though also hard to follow in parts. There was no hint of redemption in it - everyone was trapped in a corporate nightmare, an emotionally arid world, and it ends with the main character having a breakdown. No sign of hope there. Although I agree with the premise that putting profits above human wellbeing is a very bad idea, and I thought the story was well-presented, I'm more interested in looking for ways out of the mess we're in.

This evening was one of those evenings that makes me feel very lucky to live in Cluny. It was the night of the Illuminations, which means that as night falls, a troupe of musicians in medieval costumes, playing medieval music, makes it way through town, followed by hordes of children carrying big candles. Every so often the music stops abruptly and everyone shouts "Joie! Lumière!"

I tried to take a picture of the musicians but kept having problems with my camera and then being swamped by the crowd. Well, here's a picture of the crowd, at least. ( Read more... )

The cinema in Cluny is having a week of Middle Eastern movies, and it started off with this one, made by a Turkish-German director called Fatih Amin who is in his mid-thirties. A strong start.

The two sides that are referred to in the film's title could be the German and Turkish cultures, but they could just as well be the older and younger generations of people in families, regardless of culture or background. Or they could be life and death, for that matter. ( Read more... )

When we went to the quarry house on Monday, we found it closed up as usual, but sitting to the right of the front door was a small, pale brown, humble-looking dog.

Tom said "oh, there's a dog here!" and we ambled gently towards it. It instantly turned tail and ran up the outside stairs. It had very short legs and couldn't run very efficiently, but it seemed to know what it was doing.

The door to the upstairs has a big hole in it - this house really is a wreck - and the dog went straight through the hole and inside. When we opened the door and had a look for it, we found that it had made a little nest for itself in some of our old clothes. It looked across the room at us with big brown soulful eyes. ( Read more... )

We just signed a contract with a company called Evasol, and within six months or so, the building on the left in the picture will have solar voltaic panels on it. They'll generate about 2200 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.

The French approach to promoting solar electricity seems to be modeled on the German Refit scheme - people with solar panels are able to sell their power to the grid at a decent price which is guaranteed for twenty years. Judging by what's happened in Germany, this seems like a good way to spread new technology rapidly - though there are drawbacks to this approach, particularly if the technology in question is immature.

In any case, we've been telling ourselves and everyone else for long enough that we want to do this, and we're quite excited about it. We'll get about half the money we're investing in it back in grants, and then we'll get a cheque every year from the electricity company. The whole thing should pay for itself within ten years or so. The fact that we're selling to the grid also eliminates the need for batteries.

Now if Sarkozy would just get beyond nuclear.....


[Nov 26 edit - got the picture to load]

Quick-set plaster is like ice cream in reverse. You start off with pure slush and after five minutes it's become tractable, though still a little mushy. Then after another five minutes it's almost rock solid.

During that timespan you try to get it to do whatever it is you want it to do - in my case today, shoving it into the cracks between the old wooden boards in the ceiling of the gallery.

Above the boards somebody a long time ago put a thick layer of lime, and then tiles. The lime was probably good and solid for a while, but now it's turned back into powder and anytime one of the children upstairs runs through their front room, powdery stuff falls down onto our heads.

I don't mean to complain about this - the plastering is actually pleasant work when taken in small doses, particularly as I can listen to KPFA radio as I do so.

It seems magical to work with powder that eventually goes solid when you add water to it rather than getting more liquidy. There's something very satisfying about breaking the residual solid chunks off the spatula when you're getting ready to mix the next batch. How can they come off so cleanly and neatly when a few minutes before they were clingy, whiny, subservient sludge?

I imagine the cycle of solidified things in our house turning back into powder and then needing to be solidified again will continue indefinitely. I can picture people doing the same thing as I just did in, say, a century's time, in this house. That's assuming that Cluny is still a habitable place at that point, of course.

Getting ready for a big Thanksgiving meal tonight. This is not something generally done in France, but we have a few American friends here who enjoy having a pot luck at Thanksgiving, and this year it will be at our place. I'm not usually a big meat-eater but I'll make the odd exception for this kind of thing.

So I ordered a free-range turkey at the local supermarket earlier this week. I asked for what I thought was a whole turkey at the deli counter - "un dinde entier" - and the guy behind the counter fell around laughing and said "you mean, like, driving a car? With a seatbelt?" and then fell around laughing again.

( Read more... )

I'm sitting in our gallery in Cluny, watching people go by outside. They're mostly locals at this time of year. Since I got back from our trip to Ireland and the UK last month I decided to try to become an active blogger again - and also a more active commenter on other peoples' blogs. So here goes. We'll see how long I stick with it!
( Read more... )

Very inspiring evening last night. Vandana Shiva made a detour here from a visit to Stockholm, together with the two filmmakers who recently made a Swedish documentary about her called "Bullshit", named after an award she was given by a group called the Liberty Institute, who claim that she is a "mouthpiece of western eco-imperialism" - interesting charge considering she's Indian!

( Read more... )

The woman with the papers, Asa, is our teacher for the course that we're just finishing up. We have a big long exam on Tuesday (five hours! And we're allowed to bring food to eat, but it's not allowed to be noisy food.)

( Read more... )