Notes from a Quarry

May drizzle

2008-05-26T20:36:25Z

Writing this at Lys. It feels very good to be able to write here again. I've become alarmingly dependent on technology, but the fact is that it's dead handy to be able to write in a legible and easily reproducible form. This little computer, which I just got last week - an eeepc laptop, running on linux - seems like it will be very nifty. It's the size of a hardback and weighs less than a kilo. I like its lack of pretension and the fact that it's so reliant on open source software. Also the fact that it was very inexpensive.

Today was a very sensuous day. It was gently raining for much of the time, and the air was very moist. The plants seemed to be bursting with life and growth. Tom was experimenting with diverting the flow from a leaky gutter to the underground cistern at the side of the house, that we use for watering the garden. He laid down some strips of metal to act as conduits for the water, and the rain falling on them made a lot of noise. Then there was the sound of the flowing water making its way down the conduits. There was something very hypnotic about all of this. You have to duck under the conduits now in order to get into the cellar, but this seems a good thing as well. The human path has to make way for the water path.

Later on, when this house is habitable, we want to do all kinds of funny experimental things with water in the garden, running it along bamboo pipes and into little pools and the like.

I'm finally beginning to feel that we could grow into this place. For a long time I was a bit worried that it was too big for us and we had taken on too much. It probably helps a lot that the baby is on the way. but even with the baby there'll only be three of us. We'll need lots of guests and lots of things going on here. If we end up doing half the things we want to do, such as keeping chickens and bees, obviously we'll have to team up with other people in order to keep it all going. Some of the neighbours seem like a good bet for this – they could look after the chickens while we're away and have a share of the eggs. Yesterday I saw a sign advertising donkeys for sale on the side of a truck and was sorely tempted, but it's probably a tad early to be thinking in those terms.

On Tuesday I'll have a scan and we'll most likely be able to start thinking of a proper name for the baby, since we'll know if it's a girl or a boy. I like the fact that he or she can probably hear Tom's voice now as well as my own. Yesterday we went to a free concert of quirky music by students from Lyon in one of the old churches at Cluny, and it was nice to think that the baby could probably hear that as well. Too bad he or she can't smell yet. The smells of things growing here are so intense at the moment. While I was weeding the onion patch I felt surrounded by the essence of onion.

The environment and the economy are a mess, there have been a couple of particularly nasty natural disasters in Asia recently and some totally avoidable food riots elsewhere in the world, yet I must admit that on a personal level, 2008 has been rather good to me so far. I even passed the driving test, finally, a few weeks ago. (I'm having almost as hard a time believing that as believing I'm pregnant, and keep forgetting to tell people about it – I think my subconscious is in denial. The idea that I could actually be in possession of a European driving license is giving me an identity crisis). In the event I had an inspector with a very droll manner who said things like “now let's go on the motorway, it will remind you of the US”. He spoke exaggeratedly clearly and didn't even bother asking me to do a manoeuvre. My driving teacher says he's the best of the bunch, he puts people at their ease, and none of the other driving inspectors like him.

The nightingale is still singing, but a lot less than before. Hopefully we'll be able to hear him again next year.

Eloquence

2008-05-14T20:26:55Z

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.

After we had listened to it several nights running and exclaimed over how distinctive its voice was, I looked nightingales up on the Internet. There were sound recordings of bird songs available to download, and so we were able to establish that this was indeed a nightingale.

We've never actually managed to see it though. It's always in one or other of the larger trees that surround the quarry, up high, and their leaves are fully out now so you can't see a thing. But at night its song is often the only sound you can hear, and it rings out very clearly in the general calm. Does the nightingale know this, I wonder? Is it aware that it's much more eloquent than any of the other birds, despite being rather small and, according to the pictures I've seen anyway, a little on the drab side?

On another subject - or possibly not, in a way - Nuala O'Faolain died last Friday. If you aren't Irish you may not have heard of her. She was a journalist and writer.

A couple of weeks ago, thanks to a tip from queenie, I listened to her extraordinary interview on Irish radio with Marian Finucane, in which she described her reaction on learning that she was terminally ill with lung cancer. (The interview begins about 8 minutes in).

I say the interview was extraordinary because most people would not speak like that in private, let alone in public, but in terms of Nuala O'Faolain's own work there was nothing unusual about it. She had always been very honest, wrenchingly so at times in fact, to the point of causing extreme discomfort. Like all interesting thinkers she forced you to see things in a different way.

As queenie pointed out, when you hear the interview you tend to focus on the things that resonate with you most on a personal level. What struck me particularly was that literature and the beauty of nature no longer meant anything to O'Faolain, but music still did, and she was very thankful for that. She was worried though that it too would begin to lose its magic and so she was limiting the amount of music she heard.

Among the regrets she had about her life was the time she had wasted on alcohol, and the fact that so much of the dynamic in her family was based on the consumption of alcohol.

She was glad that she had never had a child, because she felt that she would have been a terrible mother.

Some of the things she said also reminded me of one of the characters in War and Peace, Prince Andrei. While he's dying he becomes very aware of how alone he is and his interest in other people, and desire to see them, begins to wane.

However, it seemed as though O'Faolain's desire for contact with others hadn't died altogether. In her last few weeks she managed to spend a great deal of time re-visiting favourite places, including Paris and Madrid, with friends and family. Apparently she had also been hoping to give a second interview if she lived long enough, because she was concerned that the first one might provoke other cancer patients to despair.

About ten years ago, in California, I went to a talk that she gave about her memoir that had just been published. I had the impression that most of the people at the talk had never heard of her and were just there because they were interested in Ireland. But as soon as she appeared and started talking, I could see that they were completely mesmerized. The memoir - which I must get hold of again when I'm next in Ireland - was called "Are You Somebody?" because of her status as a kind of semi-celebrity in Ireland - the sort of person you would vaguely recognize in a shop but be unable to fully place - and because of the long struggle she had in the course of her life with under-confidence.

When I read her obituary I was astounded by the variety of things she had done - a scholarship to Oxford to do a PhD in English literature, a documentary series on Irish TV, reporting on the revolution in Iran, loads of other interesting stuff. This was all downplayed by her to the extent that I had never put the pieces together before, despite having read her memoir and many of her newspaper articles over the years.

She said in the interview that when you die, all the vast knowledge you've gained in your life dies with you. Obviously that's not entirely true. Among other things it depends on how eloquent you are in your lifetime, and how honest. So if by some chance you're able to see this Nuala, thank you.

Big surprise

2008-04-07T21:00:49Z

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.

Now all of a sudden it looks like it's happening after all. Perhaps it was the Burgundy wine, or the root vegetables. My doctor says that sometimes there are miracles in Cluny. I still don't quite dare become excited, even though I know I'm past the most dangerous stage of pregnancy now. I got so much into the habit of assuming it would never happen that it's taking a considerable mental adjustment to get used to the fact that it's happening, and I'm definitely not there yet. I've told a lot of people and on an intellectual level I'm certainly pleased, but I haven't made any real, tangible preparations yet. I can't see that happening until the summer.

In the meantime, all the ideas and plans about being a parent which I had carefully pushed into the furthest recesses of my mind and tried to ignore for the past few years are now slowly being dragged out and dusted off. To add to these ideas there's the challenge and interest of bringing up a child in France, something I hadn't anticipated when we first started trying to have a baby (at that point we were still in California). Thankfully, France seems like a child-friendly place - they certainly have a lot of incentives to encourage people to pop them out - and we know a lot of people with babies and small children who will be able to give us advice.

If there's one thing I've learnt from the long wait, it's that having a child is truly a privilege, however banal and everyday it might appear from the outside. I hope that's something I never allow myself to forget.

I love peach trees

2008-03-18T21:30:51Z

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.

Hot air

2008-03-17T18:29:42Z

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.

Will was one of the people involved with Cap and Share, a plan (or framework, or campaign, depending on what angle you're looking at it from) for dealing with climate change in an ethical way. He was the driving force behind the UK campaign to implement Cap and Share and put an enormous amount of time and energy into it. He went so far as to cycle from his home on the Welsh coast to Brussels on an electric bike last summer in order to promote Cap and Share at the EU.

At that point he already knew he had cancer - in fact he'd been diagnosed some years before and had been having bouts of treatment for it off and on. He and I had talked on the phone quite a bit and I finally got to meet him in January when I went to the meeting at Schumacher College.

At first impression it was obvious that he was very frail physically, but I tended to forget this as the weekend wore on because he had such amazing energy. He would facilitate talks and give summaries of discussions and was obviously very much on top of things. I also thought he was very modest and unassuming, playing down the amount of effort he'd made on things like the Cap and Share website.

I got to meet his wife, Lyn, as well as his sister and brother-in-law, who lived close to Schumacher. Lyn and I hit it off well. She told me that he was doing OK although the chemo was hard on him.

After we all went home from that meeting I got the odd e-mail from him as part of the wider Cap and Share mailing list, with suggestions about things to do next in the campaign. It seemed like everything was just carrying on as normal. But all of a sudden last week we heard that he had gone into hospital. Then Lyn sent out an e-mail this morning telling us that he had died.

What makes me angry is that he didn't live to see Cap and Share, or some similar idea, being implemented. It seems more and more likely that something along those lines will come into force sooner or later - it just makes so much sense intuitively. If and when it happens he'll deserve a great deal of the credit for getting it up and running. It's so sad that he won't be around to see that and to soak in the praise, which would surely be a good antidote for cancer. I also feel really bad for Lyn and their two teenage sons.

Anyway - I don't know yet if I passed or failed that driving test this time. If by some miracle I passed I'll have the dubious pleasure (as a privileged Northerner) of being able to make an even more wildly disproportional contribution to global warming in the years to come. It would certainly be nice to have something like Cap and Share in place to help redress the balance.

Will's work should count. If enough of us are willing to use our imaginations, then one day it will count.

Cluny election

2008-03-16T22:02:13Z

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.

Meanwhile the president of the tiny university here in Cluny announced that he was going to run as well, and he came up rather quickly with an impressive entourage. During the winter his faction took over a crafts shop on the main street and used it as an office for people to drop in. They also held a lot of public discussions and came up with some ideas that seem quite fun, such as having horse-drawn shuttles around the middle of town (there are a lot of horses hereabouts since there's a national stud at Cluny). Then they sent out a glossy leaflet to everyone in town listing all their ideas.

After a few days, we got another glossy leaflet, this time from the former colleague of the mayor. Amusingly, he seemed to have copied almost all the ideas of the other lot verbatim. And then a few days later, yet another leaflet arrived. This was from the former mayor, who had apparently decided he was so offended at his former colleague that he was going to run again after all. Again, there was a lot of copying of ideas although in his case it seemed a little half-hearted. His leaflet wasn't all that glossy either.

So last Sunday we had the first round of the elections. The newcomers came in first but didn't quite get enough votes to win outright (they lacked about 60 votes in a constituency of about 4000). About 350 people voted blank. The mayor came in last - he'd left it a bit late.

The newcomers then challenged the other remaining candidate to a debate and told the media about it, and put up posters all over town. However the other candidate promptly informed the media that he "hadn't been invited properly" (whatever that means) so he wasn't going to participate in the debate. Instead his entourage rented an exhibition space next to the tourist office (on the main street) and set up a meeting place which, again, bore an amusing similarity to that of the newcomers.

We'll know tomorrow what the results are. From what I hear it seems likely that the newcomers will win because the other lot managed to annoy the mayor so thoroughly that the people who voted for the mayor would rather vote for the newcomers than for them. I kind of hope the newcomers do win because they sound fun.

1989

2008-03-16T21:27:04Z

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.

The first half of the year was taken up with my last six months of secondary school, and the final school exams that you take in Ireland, the Leaving Cert. At that point I was going to a fairly relaxed mixed comprehensive school in south Dublin.

I cycled to school every day through the suburbs, going along the edge of the Stillorgan Shopping Centre and then across the dual carriageway and down the hill into Blackrock. In school, which was a nondescript 70s-era square building, I hung out at the edge of a pleasant group of girls who spent their lunch break sitting on a low stone wall just outside the school building and joking with passersby.

By that point I'd become quite resigned to the monotony of school. I even found myself enjoying the PE classes. The teacher was informative and treated us like adults, which seemed bizarre. However, I hated having to get up early in the morning. Another difficulty was that a boy in my year who I had a big crush on left abruptly in the springtime in order to do his Leaving Cert elsewhere.

I eventually ambled through the exams, in a rudderless kind of way, and did more-or-less OK - about a grade below my Inter Cert results in most subjects (during the Inter Cert I'd been at a school with rather higher academic standards). I certainly wasn't motivated to push myself to do well in the exams of my own accord, apart from music, which I loved.

On the last day of school we all dressed up in 70s clothes and played rounders with the teachers. I remember one of my classmates looking at the clothes I was wearing, which included a Chinese dressing-gown of my mother's, and saying "oh gross!" appreciatively. Nevertheless, when a group of classmates had a party in a garden near the school that afternoon, I was too shy to go - I just scuttled by on my way home. Someone even spotted me through the hedge and invited me in, and I mumbled something along the lines of "have to dash - see you!". I haven't seen her since.

Around that time, wwhyte and I went to one of the protests about Tiananmen Square at the Chinese Embassy in Ballsbridge, a silent one where everyone set on the ground and held white paper flowers. It was my first protest. I'm not sure that it had much effect, but the flowers were pretty.

I knew I'd got a place at Trinity College in Dublin studying music and philosophy, but I'd decided to follow nhw's example and take a year off between school and college. Back then this was more unusual than it is now. The only problem with this plan was that there was a huge chasm between what my parents thought I should do and what I thought I should do.

In June I'd gone to Cambridge with my parents and a German friend to attend nhw's graduation. After that, I ended up going to France and Germany for a couple of weeks, courtesy of my parents, and then heading back to Cambridge. nhw had been kind enough to fix up a place for me to stay there over the summer with some friends of his, and I was going to try and find a job. It so happened that wwhyte was in Cambridge that summer as well so I had a lot of moral support.

I loved staying at the friends' house in Cambridge. They were a middle-aged couple with four grown up children who came and went while I was there. The house was completely jammed with books and never tidy, and they had impromptu parties. The guests included people who had been imprisoned under the apartheid regime in South Africa.

I eventually found a job at a newsagent's that was owned by a Bangladeshi family. Since it was right in the middle of Cambridge it also sold a lot of souvenirs. Behind the counter there was a wonderfully tiny, creaky staircase that led down to a basement full of shadowy little rooms that were chock-full of merchandise. I'll never forget the smell of the room where the sweets were stored.

I started each day by helping unwrap the newspapers that had just been delivered, and then spent a lot of time scurrying around keeping up the stock of things like souvenir T-shirts. I also got to work one of those old-fashioned cash registers that hardly exists anymore. I remember a group of elderly American tourists milling around in the shop and one of them pointing to a postcard to Princess Diana and saying loudly "I still say she's beautiful". Working-class guys would pile in during their lunch-break and queue up to buy tabloids and chocolate bars. It took me a while to realize that they hated being told the price of those things while they bought them.

I really enjoyed the unpredictability of the encounters with people in the shop - it was near the middle of Cambridge and there was a lot of random foot traffic - which is probably part of the reason why I ended up spending a good few years later on working as a street vendor.

However, eventually the newsagent family found someone permanent and fired me (it was an under-the-table job). After some pondering, wwhyte and I spent an afternoon going around cafes and restaurants and asking if they needed a piano player. Amazingly, one place did need one. So for a short time I played things like Gershwin for them. I also got a part-time job waitressing at conferences at one of the colleges that was a little out of town. We were taught to balance plates along our arms. That work was stodgy and hard on the feet.

Since I was paying nothing for accommodation and very little for board, I was able to save up a little money and was looking for something to spend it on. nhw introduced me to his friend manjushra, who was planning on going inter-railing that September, and we arranged to go together.

We did the classic inter-rail thing of travelling by night and wandering around cities by day, with the result that I was completely knackered much of the time. But still it's a good memory, although I cringe when I think of my general immaturity and some of the things I said to manjushra that were distinctly unfair, particularly to do with the way we were spending money.

It was the only time I've ever been to Rome and I've never been back to Venice since. We had a truly odd adventure in Tuscany which I'll write about some other time. We also went to Vienna for a day and bought a very smelly cheese in a supermarket there which we hefted all around Vienna with us and then left behind on a bench in the station.

Then we went up to the north of Germany, by the coast where manjushra knew some hospitable people who put us up for a few days. She stayed on there and I went down to the Netherlands and visited the place where I had lived with my family ten years before, which was very strange. Everything had shrunk.

When I got back to Ireland, things were just beginning to heat up in Eastern Europe but it all seemed very unreal. I thought it was some kind of aberrant episode, like an epileptic fit.

My parents had a small party at the end of October for my birthday to which some family and a few friends were invited. The friends included mylescorcoran and inuitmonster. (I must have met accentmonkey sometime in the course of that year but I must admit I can't remember when. I also met artw during the summer in Cambridge but didn't get to know her until some time later). It was the first birthday I'd had in a long time where I felt truly glad to be getting older. I'd got a feeling of what it was like to be an adult and it certainly beat being a teenager.

As I mentioned above, earlier on I'd had some fairly grandiose notions of how I was going to spend my year off. Well, I actually ended up being really bold and daring and spending the remaining two months of 1989 in....wait for it....rural County Wexford. A distant relative who worked there as an accountant for farmers and other rural businesses, and a piano teacher, needed an assistant.

In fact this turned out to be more interesting than I'd expected, and it's an episode in my life I find myself thinking about surprisingly often - much more than, say, the au-pairing job I had the following year, or my time at Trinity. For one thing, I'd never really spent a concentrated amount of time in the country before. It took me a while to adjust to how slow and quiet everything seemed but eventually I began enjoying it. I was thrown back on my own resources a lot.

While my employer gave piano lessons in the diningroom I would sit by the fire in the livingroom and chat with the parents of the music pupils. One woman told me her life story in detail, which made a big impression on me.

I was terrible at the work, which required neatness and attention to detail, but my employer was patient. The house was very calm and I became good friends with my employer's disabled husband, who I had never really got to know properly before. I also got to take lots of walks in the beautiful winter fog. All of these things helped to firm up a notion that I'd had for some time: that I might enjoy living in the country.

At Christmas I went back to Dublin. It was my father's last Christmas - although none of us knew that at the time - so it's a bit sad that I don't remember more of it.

So all in all this was a very eventful year for me. I doubt that I'd have half as much to write about most other years of my life.

Chinese film festival

2008-02-24T22:03:17Z

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

The story of a Mongolian woman whose husband becomes disabled. She herds sheep in the desert. We see her spending her days collecting water from a spring with a donkey and herding the sheep on camelback. It's too much for one person to do alone.

So she and her husband decide they must divorce and she must remarry because it would be impossible otherwise for her to support their two children. This isn't an easy decision.

Once the divorce goes through, Tuya, who is attractive, has a number of suitors. But she stipulates that her disabled ex-husband must be able to continue living with them.

For a while it looks as though she will marry an old schoolmate who has become rich because of involvement in the oil business. So it seems as though she'll stop being a sheep herder and instead become a city person.

The oil man tries to get deal with the ex-husband by putting him in a home. There's a poignant scene where the ex-husband stares out the window at his family getting into the oil-man's car outside the home, one by one. Later on that night he tries to kill himself. The oil man is informed by phone but he doesn't tell Tuya. Luckily a neighbour manages to track her down and tell her.

She returns to their sheep farm and the same neighbour, who is in love with her, tries to dig a well for her. He doesn't succeed with the well but nonetheless, after some misunderstandings which are eventually resolved, they decide to marry. The ending is bittersweet because it's clear that although she and her neighbour like each other, the whole set-up is hard on everyone.

I was really stuck by how much Mongolia seemed to resemble the Rocky Mountain states of the US. There was the same "big sky country" feeling. Even though people were dressed in tribal clothes and there were camels as well as horses, and yurts, it still really reminded me of the Wild West. The way the people moved and their mannerisms seemed similar. Also the yurts made me think of the Navajo in Arizona, who also have round buildings and are herders.

I don't know how accurately the film depicted the life of ordinary Mongolians nowadays. It didn't try to hide details of modern life such as TVs (everyone seemed to have one) and cars (some people had one), so I imagine it was at least somewhat accurate. It certainly didn't idealise the working conditions of sheep herders. On the other hand you could see why that kind of life could be very attractive. Tuya's son, who was about ten I think, had a lot of freedom and initiative.

The story kept me interested all the way through and I loved seeing all the different places. I was just a bit dissatisfied with the ending since I wasn't sure how to interpret it. Tuya's new husband and her old one get into a fight at the wedding. She runs out of the building and hides in another one, and someone calls her back, but she ignores whoever it is and starts to cry. Does this mean the whole thing is an utter disaster? Or is it just a temporary blip? I'm sure it would make more sense to me if I understood Chinese. Anyway it was well worth seeing.

Summer Palace

I thought this would be an interesting film because it's about a student in Beijing during the time of the Tienanmen Square protests. Unfortunately it wasn't quite what I expected, though it would be great material for a parody.

The main character is a young woman from North-East China who gets a scholarship to Beijing University. We see her with her boyfriend in her home town, and we get a brief glimpse of her father, who runs a small shop. Then all of a sudden she's in Beijing, at the student residence, which is pulsing with other bright young things and blaring, tinny Western-sounding music. I think this may have been intended to seem very exciting.

She becomes friends with another young woman student, and then gets together with a guy who is considered very cool. Eventually they break up for arbitrary but (doubtless) highly painful reasons.

She writes in her diary a fair bit, and also spends a lot of time writhing around at the bottom of an empty swimming pool, looking haunted. I suppose we're meant to resonate with the musings of her poetic soul, but the problem for me was that there was no context whatsoever for her angst - we don't know anything at all about her family, or the political situation, or anything outside the narrow world of herself and her friends. We don't even know what they're studying. All we see is young people being neurotic at each other in a particularly insular kind of way.

Then the Tiananmen protests happen - the bit I was looking forward to - but they turn out to just be a kind of big party. No reason is given for them and no reason is given for their being broken up either. It all just sort of ends and the students all look a bit sad. Our heroine is whisked back to her home town by her ex-boyfriend.

Then the film starts jumping forward in time. The heroine's ex-boyfriend (the cool one) and her old friend from college go to Berlin and some of the time they're lovers. But her friend kills herself eventually, again for no apparent reason.

Meanwhile the heroine has been moving from city to city, doing professional work (exactly what it is we aren't told) and having various affairs, but all the while pining for the cool ex-boyfriend. He has been pining for her as well, and when he moves back to China he looks her up. We see him driving up to meet her in his SUV. They spend a bit of time together but it's clear that the spark has gone, and they go their separate ways.

The main characters' penchant for SUVs and other such status symbols didn't exactly endear me to them. But the thing that made the movie not only tedious but really mind-numbingly awful for me was the sex. There were about ten scenes in which the heroine had sex with one or other of her boyfriends. We see them panting together in a mechanical kind of way, and then, exactly two-thirds of the way through each of these scenes, some brooding, melancholy violin music kicks in. It got to the point where I was bracing myself in preparation for those violins, but no matter how hard I tried to prepare myself, I couldn't help wincing whenever they started.

Apparently the director has been banned from making movies in China for five years because the Chinese government is angry about this movie. I would have thought they would be pleased with it - it makes the Tiananmen protests seem whimsical and adolescent, with no real meaning. However I've read some reviews that suggest the government is actually angry about the sex. That would make more sense.

At the end we're given a summary of the characters' lives after the events of the movie. But I had a very hard time summoning up the energy to read this.

Manufactured Landscapes

This was a documentary about the work of the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, which focussed particularly on his work in China. Burtynsky takes photos of industry on many different levels. The film starts with a long pan through an immense factory. After going through the building row by row, we're given a view from one end of the factory towards the other. You can't even see where the far end is - it's out of sight.

We also see places where things are taken apart, such as a village where people smash up old computers on their doorsteps in order to try and recover the metals contained in their processing boards. One photo showed an old woman who, Burtynsky said, would have survived the Civil War and Mao, standing on her doorstep surrounded by computer debris. The groundwater of the town is contaminated with heavy metals.

We're shown mountains of coal waiting to be brought to China's power stations, and the Three Gorges Dam. Some of the workers there are questioned about what they think of the dam and answer "well, it's just a job for me," and "well, it's good for the country I suppose". We see people dismantling their own buildings in preparation for their being flooded.

The main thing that struck me from this film was the apparent lack of imagination shown by the Chinese government. While the scale of industrialisation there is very striking and obviously something new, the nature of the industrialisation seems to be a carbon copy of what happened in the US, Germany and Britain. The same tired old assumptions are being made about success and progress. Thus we see a young woman in her luxury apartment in Shianghai talking complacently about how the old quarters of the city are disappearing. Then a man from one of those old quarters describes how residents are intimidated into abandoning their wooden houses so that they can be demolished and replaced with concrete high-rises.

Not the most cheerful subject matter for a film, but it was very well-made.

Devon

2008-01-26T18:41:58Z

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.

I took the train to Paris and then Brittany, then the boat overnight from Roscoff to Plymouth. This actually worked out as the least expensive option, which was handy. I'm trying to avoid short-haul flights and have managed not to take any for the past year and a half (after having taken rather a lot over the previous year, while I was studying in Sweden). The channel tunnel would have been another option in this case, but by the time I booked my train tickets, the cheap ones within the UK (from London to Totnes) had all been snapped up.

The boat crossing was a bit rough, though not enough to make me miserable. There were very few people on board and I was the only person sleeping in a berth in my whole corridor, which made the experience rather eerie, especially since there was piped bossa nova music playing much of the time.

Plymouth is a strange place because the outer edge, along the sea, is old - some of it quite old, with crooked streets with names like "Pin Alley" - but then, if you walk inland a short distance, suddenly you're in a dream world of 1950s-era planning, with everything laid out firmly in a grid and tons of concrete. This is because the whole centre of town was destroyed in the war. There's a big circular swimming pool, open air, along the coast, that people apparently flocked to during the war whenever they needed a break from clearing rubble.

The 50s buildings aren't very beautiful but people do seem to use the pedestrianised central shopping area and the trees that were planted back when the buildings were built have had time to mature, so the effect isn't as bad as you might think. One thing that seemed a bit odd to me though, considering that Plymouth is an old port that still has a fair amount going on, was the lack of ethnic diversity. Almost everyone there was white.

I had what I'm coming to realise is my usual reaction whenever I find myself back in an Anglophone country. There's a period of euphoria at actually being able to understand everything I hear, and a strong urge to find secondhand bookshops and cafes that sell lattes (which haven't caught on in France at all).

I had some luck with the secondhand books in Totnes, which has an Oxfam bookshop. As with Cluny, the main street of Totnes is very old and narrow and many people would like to see it pedestrianised, but the local businesses are resistant. Lots of retired people live there, which has priced the housing out of the younger people's range. It's got a local currency that seems to be doing quite well, and was the first town in the UK to start up a Transition Towns programme in order to try and prepare for a more energy-lean future. A very pretty place in mellow, rolling countryside. I enjoyed walking along the river from the town to Schumacher College, even if I did manage to get lost along the way.

Snowdrops were already out in Devon. Before I left on my trip I'd been keeping a close eye on the parts of the garden at Lys that had snowdrops last year to see if they were sprouting, but hadn't seen any sign of them. However, while I was at Lys today I noticed that not only have they sprouted there now, they're beginning to flower. That's a bit sneaky and devious if you ask me.

Happy 2008

2008-01-13T15:22:10Z

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.

Since you're allowed to draw more than one kind of thing, I also threw in a few weapons such as a missile and a pistol - both easy - and an attempt at a rifle (or possibly machine gun) which was totally pathetic. It looked like a stick with a piece of string attached to it.

How is it that I can be so familiar with something and yet not be able to visualize its actual shape.

When I look at the four-year-old and the nine-year-old who live upstairs, and at the other children I know, I think that perhaps we're simply carrying on the long tradition of betraying the next generation, forcing them to carry the burden of our mistakes and violence. I realise of course that I'm not exactly the first person to think about this. It would be so nice though if I could be one of the last.

The companionship and the fire give me some hope that there's more to life than passing on the pain down the line, but I can't be sure.

In any case, I hope all my friends who read this, and any strangers also, find that 2008 is a better year than 2007.

Very cold here now

2007-12-18T22:03:08Z

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.

Heartbeat Detector

2007-12-10T22:12:55Z

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.

Illuminations

2007-12-08T20:54:17Z

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.

This is the middle of town. There's a magic tree currently hanging out there. You light a candle and make a wish.

There were big Shire horses pulling carriages around town, loaded up with local kids. Also a craft fair and lots of hot chestnuts being roasted.

A very enjoyable evening.

[Edit Dec 10 - those musicians have a website which is very nifty.

Auf der anderen Seite (the other side)

2007-11-30T19:23:24Z

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.

The story unwinds at a gentle pace which some people might find plodding, but I enjoyed its calmness. It revolves around three parents and their adult children. There's an elderly Turkish man and his son, who is a university lecturer, both of whom are living in Germany. There's a German mother, played with wonderfully subtle understatement by Hanna Schygulla. Her daughter is a student who befriends the final "child" of the story, a young Turkish political refugee whose mother is working as a prostitute in Bremen.

In the course of the story, two of these characters die unexpectedly (or at least, their deaths are unexpected as far as the other characters are concerned - the audience is warned about them beforehand). The others are left to try and figure out where to go from there.

The decisions the survivors eventually make are entirely believable, and to me also deeply heartening and inspiring. Akin said in an interview that he wanted to provide a different interpretation of death from Bergman's pessimism, and I think he succeeds.

Along the way he also raises a great many interesting questions about globalisation, same-sex relationships, Turkey and the EU, gender roles, prostitution, immigration and religious fundamentalism. And to top it all off, the film has lots of great music and features a poky little bookshop with overstuffed chairs and cats. So, well worth seeing.

(By the way, the English-language version is called The Edge Of Heaven. You can see a clip from it on You Tube here).

Unexpected visit

2007-11-28T18:49:59Z

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.

The dog can't have been hanging around our house for long, since Tom had been there less than twenty-four hours before and there was no sign of it at that point. But it seemed throughly dejected and was shivering, though whether it was with hunger, cold or fear I couldn't say. We could see that it had a collar on, and we tried to get close enough to take a look, but the dog kept managing to dodge us. It abandoned its warm nest and ran around the room, humbly but determinedly, and then eventually back down the stairs again.

We finally cornered it in one of the rooms on the ground floor, and I grabbed the collar. The dog straight away began quivering even harder.

Thankfully the collar had a phone number on it. While we read off the number, the dog drooped its head and tail miserably and stared at the floor.

We didn't have a mobile with us, so we went to our neighbours' house to ask to use their phone, but they weren't at home. Finally we found people at home at the third house we tried, and they called the owner for us.

So we drove the dog over to that house in our car with it quivering on my knee the whole time. The dog's owner said he would come and collect it from there. He had been out hunting with this dog apparently and it had wandered off. Frankly, it did not exactly seem like the most ferocious hunting-dog I had ever seen.

So we handed the shivering bundle over to the neighbour, who took it into his house.

I can't help wondering if we humans knew what we were doing when we bred creatures who are capable of being that abject?

Sun

2007-11-25T23:04:20Z

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]

Plaster

2007-11-23T09:38:31Z

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.

Cross-cultural communication is a delicately nuanced fragile flower

2007-11-17T13:39:42Z

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.

I laughed also, with what I hoped was just the right mixture of heartiness and wryness so that he'd think I knew what he was laughing about. I've spent a great deal of energy over the past year and a half working on that laugh and I'm happy to report that I may finally have made some progress with it.

When the guy had wiped his eyes I gestured grandly and with enormous panache at a duck carcass and said "Like that. Only a turkey," and he said "oh, you mean une dinde entière. It's a bit early for Christmas isn't it?", and I said "well, it's for Thanksgiving, like in America", and he said "you mean you really all sit around a table with a big turkey, just like in the movies?".

So now I'm going to feel self-consciously postmodern while I'm eating the turkey. Am I being American by doing this? Does it matter, for example, that I have a more-or-less Irish accent and only got an American passport the day before I moved away from the States?

It's not just me being odd either - the main instigator of this annual get-together is a guy who lived in America for some years but has spent much more of his life elsewhere. Even our American friends who live upstairs hang their laundry out the front balcony to dry, which seems suspiciously European to me.

These mixed identities can be confusing. Am I more American or Irish at this point? A little bit French as well, maybe?

Clearly I'm not the turkey, nor am I driving a car, either with or without a seatbelt.

In fact, now that I think about it, those things actually rank fairly high among all the things I'm thankful for - and as it happens there are quite a few of those.

Another attempt at blogging

2007-11-10T14:03:36Z

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!

Being back in Ireland felt different this time from any other time I've gone back. It really seemed like a hybrid between the US and here. There was a huge sense of hustle and bustle and a stupendous amount of traffic, particularly in Dublin. Shops were generally open all day. Certain things that I enjoyed in the US and that are impossible to find here, like hot milky chai and hummous, were easy to find in Ireland - even in Banbridge, which isn't exactly the kind of place I would associate with hot milky chai. People were less formal than here as a rule. There was also a fair amount of worry about things like health care and violent crime.

Of course, some of the difference might be because we live in a quiet, rural area here, and we spent much of our time in cities in Ireland. Still, I don't think that accounts for it all. When we were in Cahirsiveen on the Ring of Kerry we noticed a Slavic grocery store. There's nothing like that here in Cluny, and Cluny is at least three times as big as Cahirsiveen.

It was fantastic to catch up with old friends and family in Ireland. We couldn't live there right now though - housing would be far too expensive for us, unless you're somewhere in the back of beyond where you need a car to get around, or you're earning a professional salary. I must admit also that I'm really enjoying the stimulation of living in a country where another language is spoken - it's much more interesting than I thought it would be - and that makes me rather less eager to rush back to anywhere English-speaking.

I do miss the Irish ecology though, in particular the way the light changes so much, and I miss my friends there, both old and new. I'm very glad to be alive at a time when the Internet exists.

Vandana Shiva visits Vasteras

2005-11-12T13:03:07Z

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!

They presented her with cowdung at the WSSD in Johannesburg, and she seems very amused about the whole thing - there is of course a glorious irony in the fact that, to the Liberty Institute, cowdung is considered insulting, whereas to an organic farmer it's actually very valuable (Shiva has written an essay in praise of cowdung).

For those who haven't heard of her, she originally trained as a nuclear physicist, then veered away from that into theoretical physics after becoming concerned about the environmental risks of nuclear power, and is now promoting organic farming and campaigning against corporate agribusiness, in particular GMO agriculture. She is very skeptical of the World Bank/IMF/WTO's efficacy in reducing poverty and instead advocates local food production and fair trade.

We saw the documentary and also got the chance to ask her questions. The documentary focussed partly on the recent spate of suicides among Indian farmers, which was of course quite grim, but it also did a good job of showing the wonderful colours and sounds of India, and the vast variety of humanity there (parts of it were filmed in Mumbai, Karnataka and Kerala, areas which I'm fortunate enough to have visited ten years ago, and it brought back a lot of memories). At the Coca-Cola protests in Kerala, (in which local people undertook a very long sit-down strike to protest the actions of a nearby Coca-Cola plant which was using their groundwater), elephants dressed up in golden tassels were paraded up and down in front of the plant and groups of people sang "Water, water, water" into microphones, using those incredibly subtle Indian tonalities and somehow all managing to stay on the same note at the same time. Eventually they won and the plant had to close down. There has also been some success is preventing the patenting of various traditional Indian crops such as Basmati rice and the Neem tree. All in all it was quite a cheerful evening and it was nice to see how much interest the people of a small city in central Sweden took in sustainable agriculture.

My class

2005-10-23T21:31:30Z

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.)

From left to right are Meri from Finland, Josie from the Philippines, Pierre from Cameroon, Kozo from Japan, Henrik from Sweden, Chisom from Nigeria, George from Ghana, Albert from Cameroon, Lawrence from Nigeria, Asa from Sweden, Juan from Spain, Shimon from Ghana and Andy from Nigeria.

It's a bit hard to tell but Lawrence is holding a large, furry hat in his right hand. This picture was taken about a week ago and we only had our first frost here a couple of days ago. But all the Africans (also the many people from places like Thailand who are doing other courses in the college) were already bundled up in big thick coats and gloves about a month ago. Something tells me winter might not be the easiest time for them.

I've never really got to know anyone from West Africa before. One thing I find quite endearing, though a little overwhelming at times, is that all the Africans shake hands with everyone whenever they meet them. For most of them it's their first time out of Africa. They miss their families and they miss having people "around" all the time. From travelling in other tropical countries I think I know what they mean by this - the fact that a lot of interactions with family and friends goes on outdoors so there's a constant buzz of activity on the streets, even residential streets that would be much quieter elsewhere.

But still a couple of the Nigerians have told me that they want to stay on in Sweden after doing this degree if they can - they're fed up with the corruption in Nigeria and think they have a better chance of making a living here.

Finally another entry

2005-10-23T12:54:44Z

A few general impressions of Sweden:

Taking numbers I've never been anywhere where people were so orderly about queueing. Almost anywhere you go you take a number and sit down to wait. Why can't everyone do that? It's so great. I think I'll never be able to re-adjust to queueing the old-fashioned way.

Alcohol The whole Nordic attitude to alcohol is very puzzling to me, even though I'm not exactly a keen drinker myself. It's only available in special shops and has a high tax, though apparently that will be changing within the next six months or so. (A lot of people go to Estonia and Denmark for cheap alcohol now). You see clusters of middle-aged guys sitting on park benches, especially down by the river, drinking surreptitiously out of bottles in paper bags. They don't call much attention to themselves, and they aren't generally considered dangerous - my friend Josie from the Philippines, who is quite short and frail-looking, says she's never had any trouble from them - but drinking in public is technically illegal. One thing that strikes me is how many more people like that you see here than you see in France or Ireland. On the other hand, in the US there were far more people around in the cities who obviously had alcohol or drug problems.

Friendliness of people I had heard a lot about Swedish people being cold and reserved and some of the people in my class definitely think they are. It's true that when people here first meet you they aren't particularly effusive - sometimes they don't even smile, which can be a bit off-putting - but in general I've been surprised by how chatty people can be, and the couple of Swedish people I've got to be friends with have been a lot of fun once the difficult first meeting was over. The main problem for me hasn't really been that people are too reserved, but that I don't know enough Swedish to be able to get into a proper chat. The fact that my class is very international, and English-speaking, makes it harder to practise Swedish.

Landscape I'm astounded by how much open space there is here. When I first got to Sweden I landed at an airport about 100 km south of here and took the bus up, and the landscape had almost no houses - just woods, lakes and fields without fences (Sweden, famously, allows anyone to hike or cycle anywhere in the countryside and even to camp in the woods without permission). I hadn't expected to see so much open countryside but then I remembered that I was quite far from Stockholm and I assumed that there would be more sprawl in the area east of Västerås (between Västerås and Stockholm). But then when I went to Stockholm from Västerås a few weeks ago there were lakes, woods and fields almost all the way there. The suburbs only started about 10 km out of Stockholm. There are 9 million people in Sweden and they're almost all the the southern third or so of the country, which includes this area. If it seems empty around here, what must it be like further up?

Homage to August

2005-09-17T21:54:49Z

Well, this was all very nice while it lasted....

...but now it doesn't look like that around here anymore. The flowers are almost all gone and the air is getting crisp.

I had some trouble getting my camera and computer to talk to each other but now they seem to be OK again, so there'll be some more catching-up posts coming soon.

Brotherly love

2005-08-30T20:27:31Z

This is a runestone from about the eleventh century. The runes say something along the lines of "I put these stones up in memory of my brother, and some of them also show where the main road to the east goes". It's out in the country about seven kilometres from Västerås, and there's a modern road going along the same route as is marked out by the stones.

Around the runestone there's a whole series of stone circles and ovals, some of them supposed to represent ships, and also a big tumulus. They're a lot older than the runestone though - they might be two thousand years old. People held meetings in this area up until the end of the Middle Ages.

It's strange to think of the Vikings being so warlike since Sweden seems so peaceful now. Swedish people seem to have gone through a couple of phases of being imperialistic and then decided it wasn't worth it. Since the early nineteenth century they haven't fought any wars.

If you walk to the north you can find a trail going through some pretty woods, which are also full of graves, though they're hidden in the shadows and hard to spot. I took a lot of pictures of the wildflowers but will save them for another entry since I don't want to clog up the blog.

There was so much to see at this archaeological site that I didn't have time for everything. Apparently there's also a labyrinth close by. Hopefully I'll be able to get some pictures of that soon.

[Sept 17 edit - moved the photos to flickr]

First impressions of Sweden

2005-08-20T17:55:12Z

Hello everyone! I haven't been very good at keeping in touch lately but hope to make it up now by finally using this blog which I set up months ago.

The photo above was taken near where I'm living at the moment, in Västerås in Sweden (pronounced Vestaraus, “aus” as in “australia”). I got here last Sunday and will be here till mid-June, doing a master's in ecological economics. After that I'll be joining Tom in Burgundy, where we're buying a house with a little shop attached for selling photos. (We're also planning to meet up a few times in-between as well!)

I didn't intend the photo above to come out blurry but now I'm pleased that it did, because it brings across the rather dreamy atmosphere here in Sweden at the moment. The weather this week has been warm and breezy, and the whole population of Västerås, old and young, seems to be out and about on their bicycles.

I was very pleased to see that these are usually real working bicycles with big baskets in front. People really use them for shopping and so on, not just to look cool. You have to watch out if you're a pedestrian though, since you share the pavements with the bikes. People bowl along pretty fast and often chat away on mobile phones at the same time.

The air seems very light after Burgundy summer air (or Portland summer air for that matter). There are lots of wildflowers and small delicate trees like birches. There's quite a mixture of conifers and broadleaves.

Here's another picture of the river at Västerås. It feeds into a lake that reminds me very much of lakes in Finland. I saw some people fishing in it. The river is mostly left wild and there are a lot of wetlands on its banks, even in town. Apparently Swedish people are very proud of their clean rivers.

This is from the old part of town, near where the river meets the lake. I think some of these houses are 500 years old.

And here's the steeple of the church, which is from the 14th century.

Västerås has an odd mixture of old and new architecture. The old section has wonderful funky wooden buildings and little gardens with fruit trees squeezed in haphazardly, while the newer section mostly looks like a 60s-era urban renewal project. Lots of concrete and dingy-looking malls. One exception to this, though, is...

...the campus of the university I'm studying at, Mälardalen, which is very new - only about six years old - and one of only two in Europe to meet the ISO 14001 environmental standards. This photo doesn't really do it justice. I'll try and get some better ones. It has a lot of curvy lines and windows in odd places.

My course will be taught in English. There are about twelve master's courses offered in English and this week all the international master's students arrived and began settling in. We are a pretty diverse crowd.

The photos above are from a dinner that the Student's Union gave us all on Wednesday night. You can see that the candles are blue and yellow, from the Swedish flag. The meal was salmon with potatoes and salad, and ice cream with cloudberry sauce. Mmmm, quite good.

The people in the close up photo are from Pakistan, Mexico and China. There are also people from Thailand, Morocco, Venezuela, India, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Lithuania, Ukraine and Bangladesh, among other places. The people doing my course who I've met so far are from Nigeria and Japan. They all speak marvellous English with a marvellous range of accents. Almost everyone is younger than I am but so far that hasn't bothered me (well, not much!).

The coursework will start next week. This week we had classes about taking classes. A lot of the work we’ll be doing will be group-based, and apparently the Swedish like to decide things by consensus. So we had group dynamics classes in which we all had to practise making consensus decisions in small groups. This is preferable to democracy, I suppose, but it takes time! I’ll be interested to see how, or whether, this approach influences everyday life here.

Thanks for reading this far! Comments very welcome, of course. More soon.

[Sept 17 edit - moved the photos over to flickr so they aren't taking up our website space anymore]