Beaujolais 22
March 2002
Dear Friends
I have now stopped a dizzy round of travelling and entertaining long enough to be able to sit down and write to you again although tomorrow I will be leaving for the South of France to spend a few days with Oliver and Kristyl in their Summer home. Life is a real treadmill when you are retired!
South Africa was truly wonderful but I won't bore you with too much detail on my visit, I will just describe a particular highlight, my visit to the Kariega Game reserve near Grahamstown.

On Safari

I have to say that the idea of the modern Safari park even without guns has never really appealed to me as they seem to cater either for some macho 'gladiatorial' instinct that says "maybe we will be lucky enough to see a lion tear of the head of some hapless beast" and " a rhinoceros charged our little truck at least five times." Or a trainspotting instinct that says "maybe we will see the lesser horny backed toad". The Kairiega park offers a sort of 'caring' alternative as it has only very few predators just a few jackals and leopards that enables visitors to stay in individual huts near to a central restaurant etc and to be able to wonder at will along various well marked trails encountering animals on route. The trails can involve steep descents through fairly thick jungle and are graded according to degree of difficulty. Normally when trails are more or less difficult I always choose one suitable for pregnant women and the mutilated of the war as the French so delicately put it. In fact my friends Andreas and Heidi will tell you that in New Zealand I was actually passed on the simplest route by a woman pushing a pram. But for once I chose a respectable 4-hour route with a medium degree of difficulty and accomplished it in more or less the allotted time. This was despite a new found fear that I have never suffered from which requires a slight digression to explain. A few days earlier I visited a snake house or viperium in Durban and as there were very few visitors the official guide had me more or less to himself. He had obviously been to the "horror school of guiding" and took great relish in describing the particular forms of death that the various poisonous snakes could cause. We spent a long time looking at the puff adder that he described as one of the most common snakes in South Africa. Unlike other snakes, which slither off at the slightest sound and so are not encountered very often the puff adder is lazy and moves away only slowly if at all. This snake is equipped with immense fangs and the guide told me that in fact the trauma from the bite itself is probably more dangerous than the venom and that when bitten human legs swell up to three times their normal size and on occasion burst! His advice was that if bitten it would be better to find a good surgeon than worry too much about the arrival of a good serum. His other favourite pet was the green mamba that lurks in trees camouflaged by the leaves as its body is a pale green in colour and which attacks unwary travellers that disturb it by brushing against the leaves. So now you understand my predicament, I walked along the jungle trails that appeared to me littered with puff adders and brushing against the lower branches of trees harbouring green mambas. Have any of you tried stumbling through jungle desperately trying to look downward and upward at the same time?

Cruising down the river
The other attraction of the reserve was a four-hour cruise down a river where a wealth of bird life could be seen including the fish eagle. The trip itself was wonderful and it was amazing to see fish eagles diving from immense heights making use of the sun to judge the position of their prey and emerging from the water with large fish. As usual the weather was excellent and I was enjoying travelling slowly along until I realised with horror that my fellow passengers were all 'twitchers'. For those of you who do not know twitchers are some of the most dangerous bores in the universe. They have a fanatical desire to observe and photograph rare birds and will travel anywhere in the world at short notice simply to confirm a reported sighting. Now I know that they can be looked upon in a similar fashion to all fanatical collectors including I have to admit 'record collectors', but they really are the Taliban of the collecting world. In addition this particular group were upper class twitchers obviously from Tunbridge Wells or Windsor carrying cases of champagne and making a racket greater than any flock of birds with their truly torturous pronunciation of vowels. They excitedly shrieked out the names of birds that they observed to each other throughout the journey each name becoming more preposterous. When someone shouted, "look a red collared bouvet" I became deeply suspicious, birds have necks but not collars and my French dictionary tells me that a bouvet is a grooving plane. I realised that one could quite happily invent names for mythical birds and I toyed with the idea of joining in the spirit of the thing by spotting in turn, the 'upper class twit', 'the hunch-backed slut' and the "lying blair" but couldn't face the feverish grabbing of binoculars and cameras that this would cause

Sartorial Elegance

Long term friends will tell you that I have never been exactly a fashionable dresser which could be charitably construed as my refusal to be manipulated by the forces of Monopoly Capitalism and the advertising industry or less charitably as a simple lack of good taste. Sociologists tell us that fashion is a badge of membership of a group and involves a deep-seated desire for a sense of community and a need to belong. However now that I am a lapsed Sociologist at best I can cheerfully own up to the belief that we stumble into styles of clothes hairstyles etc entirely by chance and then try to live up to the image that we have unwittingly created. So for example I cut of my beard in the late 1960's when I realised that I was in danger of becoming a pacifist. Recently siren tempters in the guise of my friend George and my daughter Leila have lured me into the idea that wearing track suits can be a pleasurable activity and Leila actually bought me a track suit for Christmas which forced the issue. Now I have always associated track suits with three categories of person
1. Hearty athletes going for a run and then having a shower before breakfast. A phenomenon I encountered in an old neighbour of mine for the first time though I am pleased to say that he has seen sense nowadays. So I am unlikely to want to adopt this life-style.
2. Psychopaths, who wear tracksuits, shave their heads, wear a single earring, drive battered transit vans and keep vicious dogs. This has appeal only in my deepest moments of 'Blair despair'.
3. 'Couch potatoes' who lead their lives mainly horizontally on a couch in front of the television surrounded by empty beer bottles. I have to say that 2 and 3 are by no means mutually exclusive. Now 3 has immense appeal for me these days although wine bottles would have to be substituted for the beer and this is the real reason why I have studiously avoided track suits.
So now that I am the owner of a tracksuit I have to wear it sparingly. Every two weeks or so I get up, don my tracksuit, resolve to stay in all day and pad through to the TV room where my couch which seems to have grown enormously in size beckons me. Of course I have to suppress my Protestant upbringing and the immense feelings of guilt that such a simple pleasure creates but I do recommend it in moderation. Leila arrived to stay with me for a week and gave me a present of Abercrombie and Fitch jeans which she claims are very trendy. The legs are by my standards very baggy so in the light of the thesis that I have just advanced expect hip-hop to come to the Beaujolais very soon.

The Tour de Bourgogne

Two years ago I was able to go to wine tasting week in the Burgundy organised for the wine trade for the wine and professionals of all types who earn their living from wine. At that time I think I wrote that this was an experience that could only occur for me once in a lifetime Fortunately my prediction was wrong and I was able to go once again this year due to the efforts of Vijay Magan in South Africa and a great wine grower in Meursault Martin Priere. Once again they conspired to produce an accreditation for me to be there which reads: -.

Afrique Du Sud
Paul Hebden
Wine Syndicate
Directeur
Importeur ou Distributeur

This simple badge enabled me to taste some of the 1999 and 2000 wines for six days in most of the regions of the Burgundy and to attend banquets in Beaune and Meursault where many vintage wines were on offer. In one day I went to tastings in Clos Vougeot, Gevrey-Chambertin, Vosne-Romanee, Chambol en Musigny and Beaune. Now I know that most of you are probably bored to death with wine enthusiasts but undaunted I must try to convey some of the pleasures of scent and taste that I experienced. Of course it is every bit as difficult to write about the pleasures of wine as it is to write about the pleasures of music and a good music critic once wrote, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture. "However like most things in life things begin to make sense when one resorts to binary oppositions and the distinction between the world of the profane and the world of the sacred seems to be the most apposite. Frankly the business of wine tasting exemplifies the profane, as it takes place often in dark crowded cellars with a jostling throng of tasters sipping wine, often contorting their faces into amazing shapes and then spitting liquids into large spittoons usually shaped like barrels. The more competitive members of the trade have turned spitting into an art form. I envied those able to release a powerful jet of wine from a great distance which disappears cleanly into the spittoon. Even more remarkable is the ability to spit the wine in a gentle but graceful arc into the receptacle. The vast majority myself included hover over the spittoon desperately trying to prevent the messy flow which emerges from our mouths from splashing onto our shoes or worse still into the glasses of passing tasters. The good news is that beautiful women and handsome men often spit badly. The moment of the sacred occurs with the first scent of the wine and continues with the taste of the first sip. These wines are unlike anything that I have previously tasted one white wine in particular Corton Charlemagne made me feel both that I had never had a really good white wine and that the return to the real world of everyday white wine would be like the experience of going to bed with Nigella Lawson and waking up with Estelle Morris. I am now able to say a twice in a lifetime experience and begin to dare to think that there might be a third in the future.

Beaujolais 21

Winter
January 2002
I returned to France after a family Christmas in London in time for New Year, which I spent quietly but very enjoyably with the Monier family in Lyon. When I came back to Ste Paule the cold was really terrible and the temperature has been below zero for the whole morning for about 12 days now. The difficulty is that the house takes about 5 days to become decently warm again after the heating has been turned down low. So it was back to some miserable days wearing two or three sweaters and my woolly hat and swathing myself in duvets. The mornings have also been amazingly beautiful. Although there has been little snow all the trees and hedges are covered in a crystalline white until the afternoon and long icicles hang from the eves of the houses. All human life seems to have disappeared and once again the village is just as deserted as it was when I first arrived in the area 2 years ago and the windows of the houses are firmly shuttered all day. The deep silence of the night has extended into the days especially when thick mists suddenly descend to add to the cold, whiteness and quiet. In these circumstances a drive to the supermarket or vegetable markets becomes a mini adventure. I turn my car heater as high as possible and revel in the warmth and the music blasts out from my car radio. I am on a mission to understand Hip Hop yet again and to try to develop some critical faculty as I am embarrassed to be so ignorant of probably the most creative force in popular music at the moment. But it is music totally at odds with the environment and everything I see before me. Can you imagine the residents of Lambert le Bas referring to it as the 'Hood'. Last week I was faced with a dilemma when a deer ran across the road right in front of my car. The roads were too icy for a sharp stop and as usual there was a steep drop down a hill at the side of the road. Somehow with a mixture of steering brakes and instinct I managed to both avoid the deer and stay on the road. But it was a combination of hazards that learning to drive in London hardly prepared me for.

The Euro Cometh

On the 1st January in the year 2002 the Angel of the Lord descended on Europe and changed all the currency to the Euro. The British advised by the new priestly class the 'Euro-sceptics' put a sign £ on every door post and the Angel of the Lord passed them by. None of the terrible things forecast by the 'Euro-sceptics' occurred, there were no plagues or famine, the rivers did not run with blood and even in France it did not rain frogs. The French people seem to have accepted the change with amazing grace and to enjoy the general puzzlement on the part of both buyers and sellers, which takes place with every transaction. As a well seasoned traveller of course currency conversion poses no problem for me just a little mental arithmetic is required. So suppose I want to decide between two different varieties of fish for my dinner Cod and Monkfish I need to work out whether my increase in 'marginal satisfaction' (remember I was an economist) from buying monkfish which I prefer to cod outweighs the additional cost of the monkfish. I stand at the fish counter in the Supermarket. I want to buy 350gms

The Monkfish costs 13.29 E a kilo so I multiply by 35 and divide by 100 to find the cost of 350 gms It comes to 4.615 E to find the cost in francs we simply multiply this by 6.56 and get 30.27 francs. Although I pretend that I don't do it I surreptitiously convert this to Sterling by dividing by 10.5 which comes to £2.88

The Cod Cost 9.67 E a kilo so once again I multiply by 35 and divide by 100 to find the cost of 350 gms. It comes to 3.38 E I multiply this by 6.56 to find the cost in Francs, which is 22.17 Francs. Dividing by 10.5 I get a cost in Sterling of £2.11. I am now ready to make a decision so you can see there is no problem.
Though I can't understand why such a large queue has formed behind me at the counter and why people are shouting words at me in French that I haven't come across yet and why is this little old lady attacking me with her umbrella?

Wrecking Old French Customs Les Galettes de Roi

The Feast of the Kings (Epiphany, January 6) is celebrated during the entire month of January here in France. After New Year’s Eve (le Reveillon) and New Year’s Day (le Jour de l’An), the Bakeries begin to fill up with galettes de rois, cakes for the Kings. These traditional concoctions each hold a small gift baked right into the cake. In olden days, the prize was a fève, a large, flat bean Nowadays the surprise is usually a ceramic figurine, increasingly to please the children. The person who discovers the prize in their piece of cake is crowned King (le roi) or Queen(la reine) and gets to wear the paper crown that comes with the cake.
The traditional French galette du roi is a very fine pastry (mille-feuilles) filled with almond cream paste (frangipane}
According to my usual impeccable research the tradition is a representation of the gifts that the Kings brought to the infant
Jesus (the story of the Magi. But much more interesting from my point of view (as I generally prefer paganism to christianity) is that this feast that continues all through January also celebrates the new year with the fertile ground (the cake) and the seed within, (the prize) which will bring good fortune and good planting for the spring to come. I knew that the French would have to bring terroir into things somewhere! The month of February is called fèvrier in French which is probably derived from the bean the feve.
I have spent numerous feast of kings celebration with Chantal's family and this year was no exception. As usual the family ate a huge lunch and then served the cakes with the coffee when I sat bloated in my chair unable to contemplate another morsel of food. Now I have always lived in fear of discovering the figurine in my portion of cake, as I am totally allergic to wearing paper hats as I regard the custom as a ruse to make me look a total idiot. But for some crazy reason I tempted fate and decided to hold forth on the fact that in all the years of eating Galettes and Brioche I had never once found a figure in my portion which must be a French plot against the Anglais. Just at that moment I felt something hard and solid slip down my throat and realised that I had swallowed a figure. My problem then was should I make an announcement or be a coward and allow the kids to continue searching the cakes for a non-existent prize. I did the decent thing and confessed and so a new family story will be told each new year 'remember when the Anglais swallowed the prize'. Funny how customs arise isn't it.

I am hoping to leave for South Africa on 27th January to get warm and try to overcome the various colds that I have had since arriving back in France. As usual I will always be able to check my Emails and hope to hear from you both before I leave and during my holiday. Best Wishes Paul

Beaujolais 20
November 2001
Highway

As I mentioned in Beaujolais 19 modern plumbing is arriving in Ste Paule and indeed all the surrounding region and many kilometres of road are being ripped up to make way for the pipes. It is well known that the English believe that it is good for the maintenance of roads to take them up regularly so the installation of electricity, gas, water etc is always carried out on separate occasions giving the asphalt chance to breathe each time it is taken up. The French are carrying out the work here with military precision and taking the opportunity to deal with both the plumbing and the problem of hillsides by the road where loose rocks are becoming dangerous and widening roads where appropriate. This creates a volume of work roughly equivalent to the re-building of Kabul but I am told the task should be ended in six months. British Civil Servants would probably marvel at the mysteries of the Gallic mind, as I have no doubt that they would allocate the task to a company with three Irish employees. Of course there are delays in travelling around the local countryside but the roads are largely kept open with an efficient system of portable traffic lights controlling single lane traffic. One vital part of British road works is missing from the French equation. Would you believe that there are no cones to be seen!! For the benefit of French readers I should explain that cones are large orange conical shaped plastic objects placed in the road as powerful talismans to propitiate the Gods and thus ensure that the roads will be well repaired and repairers kept safe in the process. To achieve maximum effect they have to be placed in the roads at least a year before work commences. Of course the cones cause massive delays and bottlenecks but English drivers accept these with typical good humour .In addition to their use in specific projects cones are scattered randomly through-out the Motorways. Now the death rate on the roads in France is twice as high as Britain which has a population of similar size and as the French know very well that they are the best drivers in the world the only possible explanation is lack of cones.

Cold

It is very very cold in Ste Paule this year. Each morning my car has become an ice cube that has to be patiently chipped away before I am able to travel. My central heating responded gallantly to the occasion by making a series of horrible noises and then stopping dead. Now I have to explain that when one rents a property in France it is the responsibility of the tenant to organize a contract with a local artisan for the maintenance of the heating system. Otherwise he/she becomes responsible if the system breaks down due to lack of maintenance and the insurers then refuse to accept any liability. Of course I treated the whole process with typical irresponsibility as I reasoned that as the heating system was brand new what could go wrong? Five breakdowns in two years later I am not so sure that I made the right decision. I am still a bit ahead financially as only one of the breakdowns was directly attributable to my negligence for which I had to pay 900fcs as my contract would have cost me 2700fcs by now I am in profit. But it is the fear that I now have in the middle of the night that the system is going to explode costing me thousands of francs and scattering debris throughout the region causing several large scale fires and me with no insurance. In addition the horror and scorn with which my French friends treat my irresponsibility has caused a rethink. I imagine that people as I walk down the street are whispering "there goes the crazy Englishman without a contract". Fortunately my friend Solange my guarantor in renting the house has 'held my hand' throughout the crisis and made me determined to mend my ways. My three days without heating was hell even though I wore just about everything I could possibly put on I felt like Scott of the Antarctic. I have always resolutely refused to wear a hat even in the coldest weather reasoning that looking like a nerd was too big a price to pay for possible warmth. Friends have often told me that it is important to wear a hat as 65% of body heat is lost through the top of the head. However I tended to believe the English comedian who said that it couldn't possible be true for if we lost 65% of bodily heat that way we could walk around naked as long as we wore a hat! Incidentally while we are on the subject of percentages I read that 57% our genetic make up is identical to that of a cabbage, now I can understand that immediately say in relation to Prince Charles or members of the New Labour Party but I am surprised that it is a fact of the human condition. After two days of frozen misery I succumbed and bought a Nike woolen hat which suprisingly did make me feel considerably warmer so much so that I am considering wearing it day and night. Of course I look terrible and as I will never agree to have a photograph taken I have to find a way of conveying to you what I look like. These are the candidates
(a) Badly Drawn Boy a talented singer songwriter whose trademarks are a ubiquitous and appalling wooly hat which supposedly signifies his roots in some god forsaken northern town and a dreadful drunken stage act that makes Liam Gallagher look like Britney Spears in comparison.
(b) A Serial Killer in the Bronx
(c) The last one takes some explaining. As my French is still awful I usually have to make do with anything in English on Satellite TV and I have to confess that on occasion I have watched some of the genre of films that I detest the most 'caring films'. I recently had to endure Philadelphia which for those of you that don't know is a film starring Tom Hanks about a high powered lawyer who is dismissed from his law firm for having contracted Aids and the subsequent trial regarding his allegation of wrongful dismissal. As I cannot stand the revulsion brought about by a 'caring Hollywood' and a simplistic posing of the issues with a thick sauce of glutinous sentiment I usually take refuge in things incidental to the main action. Tom Hanks in the early part of the movie wears his corporate suit, but as soon as he 'comes out' as an Aids victim he starts to adopt an appearance de rigueur for aids victims. He goes about unshaven in a tracksuit and wearing an unspeakable Moroccan style hat.
So there you have it, in my wooly hat I look like a cretinous pop star, a Bronx serial killer or Tom Hanks with Aids. Of course I choose the serial killer every time.
My misery in the cold finally came to an end when I virtually hi-jacked a passing heating fuel tanker and asked for a fuel delivery mentioning in passing that that my heating had broken down. The oil seller found a blocked fuel pipe within minutes and put it right with the sort of flourish that those who have technical ability use to display what degenerates those of us without such skills are. My delivery bill was 400fcs less than that of my usual oil merchant and I am warm again.

Beaujolais Primeur
Last Weekend was the celebration of Beaujolais Nouveau or Primeur in my region. Of course the Beaujolais Nouveau event occurs in Britain as well, but it is little more than a gimmick to increase sales on the part of the wine importers with stupid races to see who gets to try the new wine first. Here of course the weekend is also about trying to sell as much as possible but it is carried out in an atmosphere of real charm and tradition. My neighbors came to fetch me at 5.30pm on Saturday and we were off to visit by the end of the evening perhaps15 caves. I still drive terribly carefully around the Beaujolais as those of you who have visited me will remember the sheer drops to the valley below if one makes a mistake. The locals drive around as though they were on a motorway at breakneck speeds and I began to wonder how good the driver would be by the end of the evening after numerous caves! Amazingly there was huge variation in the tastes of the new wines even from Domaines directly adjacent to each other. I asked if this was due to variations in technique and machinery but of course the locals would have none of this. It was all a consequence they said of differences in the terroir that I still believe is a part real - part mystical explanation..
In addition to tasting not only the new wines but also wines from previous years for comparison we ate large quantities of pig products whose fat content I suppose helps to prevent the onset of drunkenness. I am always amazed at the wondrous varieties of gourmet quality food that can be produced from a pig in this region. Maybe I should devote some time to collecting recipes rather like collecting folk songs. I could then publish a book called "103 things to do with a dead pig" it could be 104 but the 104th recipe is so disgusting that I would have to omit it to protect the delicate sensibilities of English readers. At some caves when we entered the people inside said something like "Here comes the Ste Paule crowd". As our group contains not only an Anglais but a Corsican as well as suppose we are a particularly louche group. I feel indescribably proud at being accepted as a Ste Paulian on these occasions which says a lot about my change in priorities in recent years. Six hours after leaving home I returned remarkably sober (I think) after another hair raising drive through the hills. The big issue coming up is that all my neighbors hunt and are sure to ask me to join them soon to go after the local wild boar (sangliers) about which I have mixed feelings.
As a confirmed meat eater I have no real moral revulsion against hunting as long as you eat what you kill, which certainly rules out fox hunting and quite a lot of fishing.
On the other hand there seems to be a justifiable dislike on the part of a sizable proportion of the French population including many of my friends here at the macho behavior and callous disregard for the rights of other users of the countryside by hunters so I will have to think deeply. Perhaps I will stick to gathering mushrooms and chestnuts but at this time of the year there is unfortunately nothing to eat but animals which is hardly my fault! Best Wishes Paul

Beaujolais 19
October 2001
I will be visiting Britain, mainly to see my mother, Kieran and Leila for most of October so I thought that I would take the opportunity to write to you all before going The Summer has been strange and unpredictable due to the extremes of weather that we have had. The vendage is taking place at the moment and I imagine that the growers will be relieved when the crop is in as one of the hazards at this time of the year is giant hailstones, which can wreck the grapes on the vines. As the only thing we have not experienced this summer is a plague of locusts and showers of blood that there is always a distinct possibility of new horrors to come.

Back to School

One of the sad things in France is that one always knows two or three weeks in advance that the Summer is almost at an end because the Supermarkets start to clear vast expanses of shelf space. This is to accommodate the huge amount of paper, binders, plastic folders and pens, paints etc that are deemed essential for children's education in the forthcoming year. Schools in France do not supply this material but give lists to parents of what to buy. This gives the Supermarkets an annual financial bonanza as of course parents that want to do their best for their children would never buy the bare minimum. So we have an annual spectacle of anxious parents often with two or three children in tow pushing a huge trolley packed with paper and plastic. Some scientists have claimed that a team of monkeys working on typewriters given sufficient time would produce the whole of the works of Shakespeare and in similar vein the French work on the assumption that educational success is linked to the volume of paper that the child owns. French children also receive large glossy well-produced books on each subject for their courses. So a pitiful sight early in the mornings is to see small children staggering to school with bags of books plastic and paper like urchins at the time of Dickens or water bearers in the Third World.
In Britain education is handled in a very different way. Like all of the other services the Blair government is rapidly replacing real education with virtual education. The most important thing is to believe that education is taking place rather than have it actually take place. So a fiction is created that children do not have to buy all of their materials, as the State via the schools will provide them. As the Schools have no money for books and materials little or none are distributed. It is a heart- rending experience to visit a British school at early morning assembly when a book is ceremoniously torn up and each child given a page. Fortunately this does not create too much of a problem as many of our children are now so illiterate that they would have as much use for a book or a piece of paper as say a team of monkeys would have for typewriters. In this spirit of replacing real social services with imaginary ones the government is looking into the possibility of producing hologram teachers, doctors and nurses. This is essential as Britain has now plundered all the doctors nurses and teachers of the poor countries and cannot find sufficient lunatics willing to endure the life of a teacher in modern Britain. This is such a successful a move that Blair is also replacing ministers of education with androids. Has anyone noticed that the earlier Frankenstein's monster model of David Blunkett has been replaced by the twittering vacuity of the C3Po model Estelle Morris?




The Long Goodbye

Whilst on the subject of Supermarkets I have to report my miserable failure to integrate successfully into an aspect of French small town culture. Now without doubt Supermarkets are the jewel in the French crown, they make Sainsburys look like a Boot Fair. However when they are located in or near small French towns old habits born out of a history of village stores prevail. Customers and cashiers are actually pleasant towards each other they even speak and smile and exchange conversations
When I was in a Supermarket the other day the woman in front of me actually knew the cashier and showed her photographs of children in her family. I began to feel the old familiar English 'trolley rage" rising within me. "Come on you old bat " I muttered under my breath "get a move on". Having showed her photographs the woman began the laborious task of paying for the contents of her trolley. Now it is a custom or even a ritual in France never to have any money, credit cards or cheques ready when one approaches the till. In fact most French people treat the act of paying as though it was something they never expected to have to do. This has an important sociological function as the rich have the opportunity to display and rummage through wallets full of credit cards 10cms thick or using the new favored method having credit cards in a plastic strip that reaches the floor! Thus the status hierarchy is ensured. Now the woman in front of me being poor wanted to pay with cash. Of course her purse was buried deep in a huge bag that looked like the carpet bag carried by Mary Poppins and like that bag it contained a positive cornucopia of useless objects which she placed around her shopping. She finally found her purse and of course the amount she had to pay was something like 43frs 53 centimes. This gave her the opportunity to try to produce the exact amount by placing the coins from her purse in little piles. After 10 minutes of this without success she realized that she would need a 50Fr note. This entailed starting a search of her clothing and mercifully she finally found a crumpled note and paid. However now that her business transaction was over she felt free to commence her conversation with the cashier once again. At this point I was ready to wrestle her to the ground and kick her in the ribs. Now I had nowhere to go and nothing special to do, I came to this country to enjoy peace and solitude and escape the London rat-race but engrained in me forever is this lurking Mr Hyde within my friendly Dr Jeckyl exterior.

Exotic Beasts and the Country Kitchen

The bizarre weather conditions of periods of extreme heat followed by tropical deluges have affected the local flora and fauna. The other evening I was working at my computer when I saw a huge green insect staring down gravely at me from the top of my screen. It looked like a member of the mantis family it was lime green in color and moved incredibly slowly. Now there are many of these insects in the garden often among my vegetables but I have never seen one anything like this size. As Lyon is surrounded be Nuclear reactors it makes one think! The creature fell off the computer and moved slowly around the concrete below for about half an hour until I took pity on it and carried it out to the garden in a tea towel - of course I wouldn't do this for a cat. The area around Ste Paule is thick with blackberry bushes and I imagined making huge quantities of Black Berry jam. My last visitors George, Eva and Isabella worked heroically alongside me suffering a multitude of cuts, scratches and nettle bites to bring in the harvest but unfortunately the blackberries here belong to a species which never seem to ripen into big luscious fruit and remain stubbornly hard even when black. I tried to make jam from them and produced four jars of a solid substance impossible to chew and with no taste. In desperation I emptied the four jars back into the pan, cooked them for ages and then laboriously sieved the solid mass until I extracted a thick juice that I bottled. I now had half a jar of jam instead of four but you have to believe me, this is the greatest blackberry jam the world has ever known, the platonic essence of jam which I will allow future visitors to taste a thimble full at a time. By the way the marrow-like plant in my garden continues to grow. It still bears only one large and malevolent looking fruit although it has a multitude of tendrils snaking across the grass covered with lots of flowers but no fruit. It looks like a giant octopus and I think it is trying to reach the house!!!

Old Age

In France anyone over 60 years of age is entitled to buy a senior pass for use on the trains. With the exception of certain trains at very busy times the card allows me to travel at 50% of the normal price and as the card costs less that 300Fcs this is a great bargain. I can go to Paris for about 160fcs for instance. But when I received my Carte Senior I felt a sudden sense of panic as this was bureaucratic proof of my increasingly venerable age. It is all very well to be old if you live in Blair's newspeak world of "valued senior citizens" but not in my world of gritty realism populated by boring old gits on death row. Best Wishes Paul

Beaujolais 18
August 2001
At Last I have been able to put my mind to the task of writing again after a strong period of Summer lethargy in which the days go by in a blur of sun, music and rather too much wine. Australia and the Far East seem a distant memory as I quickly re-adjusted to life here.

Various Plagues

If you remember in my last letter I mentioned the planting of my courgettes. I omitted to tell you that for some reason I chose to grow 5 plants to use up the ground made available by major reductions in the haricot crop this year. For my English readers I should say that a single plant takes over a great deal of territory with huge leaves and beautiful saffron yellow flowers. When the courgettes appeared I took a few small ones each day adequate for my needs. Then suddenly we had 3 days of storms and almost continuous rain followed by a couple of days in which the garden was too muddy and wet to approach. After the five days I returned to take a few courgettes for lunch. I was greeted by a scene reminiscent of the gigantic pods in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". Monstrous courgettes lay all over the place and it took me three trips to carry them indoors. Now there are definite limits I discovered to the amount of packages of frozen ratatouille that a freezer compartment will hold so I embarked on the usual web search downloading sufficient recipes for the daunting task of making and eating with a degree of enjoyment, one courgette main meal a day! I more or less succeeded and have only two 2-kilo courgettes left to eat so suggestions are invited from you for the most exotic recipes possible to make them palatable. My tomatoes and green peppers are doing well the aubergines are a disaster and I have one other courgette like plant that has produced droves of flowers but only one fruit which is growing alarmingly, it could be a melon or a pumpkin or a mobile home!
This summer has been strange and rather disappointing with a lot of rain for this region punctuated by very hot days often more than 30 degrees centigrade. In addition to making the garden go berserk it has had big effects on the insect population. Fortunately I have not seen any monster spiders or beetles the biggest insects around are a variety of millipede or Leila for one would probably never visit again. However the volume of small insects has increased dramatically, including unfortunately mosquitoes. About a week ago when Kieran, Sam, Chantal, Christian and Ingrid were visiting a large number of flying ants appeared surrounding any lights in clouds and starting to cover the walls inside the house. The French told me that there was no problem as they would all be dead within hours but would any of you like to wake up to a million dead ants on your floor? My solution was to start using a vacuum cleaner on the walls at 1.00am that believe it or not creates a sense of immense satisfaction.
Perhaps there is a little of the mass murderer in all of us. Since that night the swarms have returned periodically in far greater numbers only to be met with my redoubtable Hoover "come on ants make my day". No doubt when I empty my cleaner I will have a kilo block of dead flying ants - does anyone have any recipes?

The Cuisine Program
Satellite TV has recently introduced a new 24-hour service of cooking programs, which of course I immediately became addicted to. All the British TV chefs are featured though in different and often alarming formats.
(a) Ainsly is lucky enough to be allowed to speak his gibberish with French Subtitles as I presume no one could do the dubbing.
(b) Jamie Oliver is dubbed in French even to the extent of the French speaker struggling to reproduce the extraordinary sounds that our Naked Chef punctuates his speech with. I still haven't managed to catch how the French translate pukka but I will let you know. You will be pleased to hear that dubbed in French Jaime's wife appears to be even more the harridan that we believe her to be.
(c) Poor Rick Stein has his Fish cooking program shown with him speaking in English and overdubbed! in French. This produces an insane commentary on what is going on, a babble of voices which I am not sure that either the French or English can make any sense of. This was gloriously heightened on a recent edition on Stein in Australia when he interviewed Australian chefs and we had English French and Australian spoken simultaneously.
French cooking programs are an unmitigated disaster because they exhibit all the failings of French television that I mentioned in my Australian letter. Once again the notion that television is mainly a visual medium rather than a new mode of presenting talk is ignored.
Early British cookery shows worked on the basis that if you wanted to show a chef at work what was needed was an idiot who would ask the chef the questions that the public were assumed to have and then to have each step explained to him by the chef in the most patronising manner. This continues to be the main format of French shows though there are two even more irritating variants. The first is simply a group of persons sitting around a table talking about food. They are always a mixture of "experts", "humorists" "personalities" and pretty girls who presumably are sleeping with the producer. There are two main functions of the show the first is to fill the air with words however trite as just as 'nature abhors a vacuum' so French conversationalists 'abhor a silence'. The second is to satisfy the delight the French seem to take in creating 'cheesy sets' especially for afternoon TV shows. Usually our talkers sit in a mock kitchen with plastic fittings and piles of food and fruit piled up around them. On the table are glasses full of liquid, which is supposedly, wine but as none of the participants ever take a drink from them they could equally be poisoned chalices.
The newest variant I have seen seems to be the French flagship cookery program. Here a major French chef is invited to demonstrate his skills to the sort of group of people who sit round the table in the other program. Often just as the chef is about to do something that many of the viewing audience would presumably love to learn to do the camera switches to the group who continue an idiot conversation whilst the chef is off camera. The finale to the program involves the "personalities" joining the chef to 'help' with the cooking. This enables them to simultaneously play the role of 'personality' and 'idiots' requiring instruction. The babble of conversation rises to a crescendo and the cooking becomes chaotic and impossible to make sense of the whole thing is like some mad scene from Alice in Wonderland.
My point in all this is that I think television is often at its best when the camera is simply pointed at an artist whether he or she is a musician, a pictorial artist a cook or
whatever. The artist should determine whether some sparse commentary or explanation is required but the basic premise is that watching an artist at work is inherently interesting and informative. In these days of 'instant cooking' which has created the success of British cooking programs it is surely important to see some of the great traditional French chefs at work. My quarrel with French cooking shows is that they are able to attract some of the greatest chefs in the world but instead of allowing them to demonstrate their great skills they place them in a mindless and ultimately humiliating context.

Musical omnipotence

While Kieran was here he installed two further programs on my computer Cool Edit and Cdex. Now although I have no more technical expertise than the rest of you out there I want to try to explain what it is now possible for me to do in the way of expanding my music collection. I am now able to transfer all my favorite tracks from
my vinyl collection and turn them into huge Wav files on the hard disk of the computer. Then I can change the Wav files into MP3 files which are liked zipped files and therefore take up much less space than Wav files. Using another program Autograbber I can also turn CD tracks into MP3 tracks. Finally using my CD burner I can download any files from my computer onto discs either to play in the car as Audio files or to leave them in MP3 format for storage - as a single CD holds at least 100 tracks. My computer is connected to my stereo system so I can play anything I want in my home from MP3's on the computer and I have programs that help me produce play lists or choose tracks at random. Once the computer was started at my last party, the music was supplied untouched by human hand for the rest of the evening. Finally via the Internet I can download tracks from anywhere in the world in MP3 format. I used to do this via the "Napster" system, but now Napster has joined the great Mult-national capitalist conspiracy and intends to charge for its services in the future. I now work with two much better programs "Morpheous" and "Audiogalaxy" though I do still wear my "Napster" T-Shirts as I am too mean to dispose of them. Some of you possibly believe the lies that programs like this seriously damage the music industry as its PR men would have us believe. In truth they are largely used by mad 'Geeks' like myself who have contributed generously to the record industry all our lives and are mainly interested in finding old favorites and impossibly rare tracks which we would never have purchased anyway. If there is any real threat to the record industry it comes from CD burners not file sharing programs. But as the record companies are members of conglomerates which manufacture CD burners and blank CD's for recording there is unlikely to be much fuss let alone court cases regarding CD burners. I have bored you with all this detail to let you know that I still take the same delight in making compilation records for friends and that many of you will benefit eventually from this technical maze. The only qualification I make is to ask you not to rush to your cupboards to dig out your old vinyl records covered in scratches, marmalade and cat hairs in equal proportion and hope that I will happily turn them into pristine high quality CD's for you. Turning vinyl tracks into CD's is a boring and arduous task and worth doing only if you have kept you vinyl in great condition over the years!

Acceptance at last

Three or four weeks ago I was invited to a fete to celebrate the relationship between the small Hameau (hamlet) in which I live Lambert Le Bas and its larger neighbor on the hill Lambert le Haut. Apparently the two hamlets had not got together for a mutual celebration for 3 years. Originally I intended to go with Chantal as my personal Translator to avoid the embarrassments that I suffered on previous occasions (see my earlier letters) when trying to enter Ste Paule society but in the event she had to work and was unable to come with me. Now although my closest neighbors have recently been very friendly towards me and happily came to my birthday party I am worried about clinging to them on every local occasion and thus spoiling their pleasure mainly because of my appalling French. I therefore decided to go to the fete only if they actually called for me with the clear expectation that I would want to go with them. I cowered behind my door in my party clothes until the very last minute when fortunately the whole family arrived to collect me. When we arrived at the huge barn where the party was to be held I discovered that everything has changed from the time of my miserable winter experiences. Everyone was incredibly friendly which gave me the courage to try to speak French more freely if not recklessly. The usual unbelievable quantity of alcohol was on offer and of course I am sure that my French improves in direct proportion to the amount I drink, though perhaps the villagers might disagree. In addition I met the first people from the village who speak English as they worked in California as cooks as they named their pleasures as food and Country music I have no doubt that we will meet again. In the afternoon I discovered that I was playing for the Lambert Le Bas team in a game of Petanque against Lambert Le Haut and I am pleased to tell you that we smashed Lambert Le Haut and won. I was certainly not the best player on our side but I was far from being the worst. The best players arrive with their own heavy steel balls in flashy containers and some of the balls have initials on them instead of the usual markings for identification. Now there are two main styles of playing petanque here if you are not one of the experts. There is the macho way favored by the young which means to take every opportunity to scatter the opponents balls over the countryside with as much force as possible. This looks marvelous when achieved but success is rare for the non expert and the downside is that if one misses there is no hope at all of scoring any points. Then there is the wimps way used by women, children and fat elderly Englishmen which involves releasing the ball with little force and allowing it to trickle up slowly to the target ball. As the ground is always very uneven and rough the danger is that your ball comes to a pathetic stop miles from the target, but there is usually a possibility of getting into the points area .So there you have it I got quite a few points by playing a devious sneaky English game which might well have turned the match in our favor. The following day I was invited to my neighbors cave/bar to celebrate our victory and admire the cup we won by drinking copious amounts of Pastis. I now I finally feel a member of the community, metaphorically and literally "my cup runneth over".

Beaujolais and Australia

May 2001
Dear Friends

Summer has finally come to Ste Paule and I am having a reprise of last year's pleasures and traumas. My tomatoes, aubergines and courgettes are all in place in the garden thanks to the efforts of Christian Monier once again. I really am a fake regarding the hard work as he basically does it all. We get over the embarrassments of my ineptitude by each calling the other patron. Fortunately he actually made a mistake this year putting two courgette plants in with the aubergines with two big sticks for them to climb destroying the myth of his invincibility. We will have to uproot them soon before the villagers tell stories about the crazy Anglais trying to teach courgettes to climb. The swallows are nesting in my cellars once again and this year I will sit up with the young ones when they are learning to fly with a shotgun across my knee inviting any cats to 'make my day'. The wasps are back looking for likely places to nest and I dash around the garden with my trusty can of spray, blasting them every time they settle. The cat has gone, I have not seen it since my return from Asia so I have no doubt that it is finally where it deserves to be in cat hell which I envisage to be full of huge birds and mice that like to torture cats although they do not require them for food. Finally I have had my belated birthday party and for the first time some of the villagers have entered my castle. All my neighbour's family came plus some Corsicans that live nearby which I hope has lead to further progress in my ambitions to enter Ste Paule's society at last. I invited more than 30 people in all and offered a ludicrously complicated Thai meal so when I looked at the mountain of ingredients in my kitchen it reminded me of the film Babettes Feast. I had a wonderful time at my party everyone came that I invited and I have not enjoyed a birthday so much in years. People here still dance and I was able to introduce the French to the delights of Mirium Makeba's "Patapata" and the Velvelette's "Needle in a Haystack" The following day I left for Britain as my mother has a number of problems that had to be sorted out. I stayed in Hull until 19th May and then left for London until 31st May. Of course the election was in full swing on Britain and I was faced with the horrendous choice between seeing "new labour" losing a mass of seats wiping the smirk of Tony Blair's face finally or watching the Conservative ground into the dirt once and for all. The Liberal Democrats are the only party to fight a clean non-racist campaign and offer the electorate some re-distribution of wealth so after 40 years of voting labour I finally have to support them. The only pleasure that I had in London apart from visiting and staying with old friends was to be able to go to live gigs. I saw Stacey Earle. Rodney Crowell (who played a marvellous set having dropped all his old Nashville trappings) and Kieran Hebden who managed to prove that an exciting and danceable set could be played on just a lap top computer provided it contains programs, which allow improvisation. I promised an account of my holidays in Australia and although it now seems so long ago in the past these were some of my feelings about the trip.

Australia
I suppose the first thing to say is that the country in so vast that even after 7 weeks there I came away feeling that I had seen barely anything, rather like putting a toe in the Pacific Ocean. In particular I made no real forays into the bush so my experience of Australia is confined to the coastal cities, their suburbs and small holiday resorts
near the sea. I started out in Perth that has a feeling of being twinned with its Scottish namesake because of its quiet air of Conservatism. I enjoyed walking along its main streets, as unlike many modern cities worldwide chain stores have no entirely taken them over. Some of you will know that I only like cities which offer a sizeable "sleazy area" involving bars, music, record and bookshops, 'Adult entertainments' etc. The streets of Perth start off all Gap and Gucci but end in friendly low level wooden fronted junk and charity shops, which offer the only kind of shopping that I enjoy. Incidentally some Australian junk shops use a terrible euphemism for second hand goods by referring to them as "well loved" books or clothes or whatever. Yuck!
Would anyone want to buy a pair of my well loved pants or someone's well loved copy of 'American Psycho'? However some of the charity bookshops can be applauded for sorting out the books helpfully on the shelves and creating no nonsense categories such as "Women's Romance Books" and "Men's Action Books" which might be copied in the libraries of Europe. Perth offers one amazing public service, which should be offered throughout the world. There are two bus services 'Blue Cat' and 'Red Cat' one of which runs East West and the other North South in continuous loops. When you arrive at a bus stop an electronic indicator tells you how many minutes you will have to wait for a bus and the average waiting time is 8 minutes. The service is absolutely free! For a European it is an amazing experience to feel free to walk anywhere but on feeling tired or in a hurry to just take a free bus with no substantial wait and get off anywhere one chooses on the loops. This cuts through all the cant of European governments with their endless pledges to really do something to improve public transport and to stop cars with three empty seats clogging up the inner cities. In this respect my experience in Perth was a revelation. The great thing to see near Perth is 'Wave Rock' which is a freak of nature created around 2700 million years ago. It is a rock more than 100metres long and 40 metres high which has been worn away to form a concave structure and which has been streaked in a variety of colours by water carried mineral deposits. The whole thing particularly from a distance looks like a gigantic wave. The area around the rock was my only real sense of being in the outback and this feeling was heightened by the owners of a small store and information place gravely handing out leaflets to us with pictures of Australia's alarmingly large collection of poisonous snakes and spiders.
My next stop was Sydney, which is a wonderful lively, and vibrant city packed with amazing restaurants, which by European standards are incredibly cheap. Musically Sydney is still dominated by 'hard rock' which is to be heard even in the boutiques which in most countries are now taken over by sleazy MTV sounds. The groups offered at the big concert venues were Deep Purple, Kiss and Alice Cooper, which I suppose, dominate the geriatric section in the American Grammy Awards these days. I stayed in a wonderful area called Kings Cross, which again is like its London namesake for the volume of prostitutes on the streets late at night. By night the streets are packed with people enjoying themselves admittedly often in obnoxious ways but violence does not seem too prominent and I always felt safe. There seem to be a fairly enlightened attitude to the problem of Aids and one sees many vans in the area offering help such as 'needle exchange'.
Melbourne is very different from Sydney. At the risk of offending my new Sydney friends I have to say that I found it far more beautiful than Sydney. It's main area is a large rectangle bounded by the main civic buildings and parks and containing within it most of the main shops restaurants and commercial buildings. The main mode of transport is a very effective tram system that radiates out from the rectangular town centre as far as the coastal beaches. Sydney tends to sprawl more and it's dispersed centre and hills make it a rather exhausting city to manage in the heat. The tempo of life feels more 'laid back' in Melbourne than Sydney which seems to be reflected in a wider variety of music to be heard in an interesting small club scene although there are some regrettable vestiges of well heeled hippie culture in the club area.
The main attraction for me in Brisbane was its ferry boat transport system with large comfortable power boats and on particularly hot days I spent a great deal of time just riding the ferry along the length of the river.
Overall for those in employment the quality of life in Australia seems to be very good. Having such a great climate and endless empty beaches is of course a cliché about life in Australia, but even allowing for the fact that Australians on average earn considerably less than their European counterparts they enjoy other advantages. Buying an attractive and interesting house is always a possibility partly because of relatively cheap land prices, and designing and building or having built your dream house still a real option in Australia. The cities of Australia are packed with restaurants, one area of Sydney Newtown must have a hundred and every countries' cuisine is represented. It is possible to eat well for less than £3 and very well for about £5 so eating out seems to be a way of life for Australians and not a special event as it often is in Europe though I am thinking particularly of the UK. Two things struck me very forcibly about Australia one is that Australia really feels like a multi-racial/multi-cultural society in a way that Britain never does and perhaps even more surprising is that many Australians clearly see their future as part of Asia. This is bad news for Britain's hoards of Anti-Europeans who harbour some belief that in the long run Britain will renounce Europe and join with the old white dominions, Australia, Canada, New Zealand in some glorious return to the past. Of course bigotry on the part of white Australians and within different cultures continues to exist and there are crypto-fascist groups trying to limit the number of Asians in the country, but none the less there does seem to be a general degree of tolerance, which was confirmed for me by some newly acquired South African friends living in Australia and they ought to know! Paradoxically this apparent willingness on the part of Australians to embrace the new world order is paralleled by pockets of incredible 'Englishness' in the suburbs and outback of Australia. I stayed at one memorable small hotel where a notice on the wall said "breakfast will be served from 7-745am" and in the dining room another notice said "children will remain seated at all times". These notices transported me back to seaside holidays of my childhood when it poured with rain and the guest houses served horrible food and were presided over by nasty witch like landladies who terrified both children and parents alike. It was often the case that newly arrived visitors were handed a list of rules which included information like, the outside door will be locked at 10pm and baths could not be taken without prior agreement.
The Australians are coming to the end of a distressing "Thatcherite" government, which has sought to destroy some fundamental Australian values, such "fair goes" which has ensured a basic decency and a kind of fundamentalist socialism for me in Australian society. Fortunately the right wing government seems to be on its way out but the Australian Labour Party is showing distressing 'New Labour' clone signs denouncing the iniquities of some of the things that the Conservative Government has done without actually pledging to change them.
Finally the Sociologist in me has taken over and I want to sum up some of my impressions of my many travels in the last few years in relation to theories of Globalisation. For non jargon ridden friends I mean by Globalisation the theory that the move to a fully fledged International Stage in the development of Capitalism and the consequent decline in Nation State Capitalism plus the demise of Socialism suggests that a new World Capitalist economy is developing which will produce a similarity in economic development, trade and desire for particular consumer goods and services throughout the globe. In parallel with this the Globalisation of the means of information and entertainment through the mass media will ensue a further trend to homogenisation of Culture in the World. The extent to which this will in fact mean American Culture is still in debate. The crudest way of putting the whole thesis is that in the future everyone will wear Nikes and everyone will watch "Friends" and "Allie McBeal" (pretty depressing stuff)! Of course the French have been in the vanguard of trying to prevent these in-roads into their culture but with little success partly because they try to ban the relentless pressure of American culture on the life of their youth by fixing quotas of the amount of French music to be heard in popular music on the radio. However as there is little effort to propagate French popular culture at Town and city level in France (the number of venues for popular music in Lyon is a disgrace) they are bound to fail.
But I think that the general thesis of Globalisation is at fault by as usual not focussing sufficiently on the question of social class both at the global and national levels.
First the vast majority of the world's population experiences globalisation only in a particularly brutal way. Decisions made in International Corporate boardrooms may well decide whether they vast majority of the world's people are employed or unemployed or indeed live or die but they are not generally aware of this and certainly do not benefit in any of the supposed pleasures of globalisation. As for the rest of the world's population they too experience the effects of globalisation filtered through their class position within the nation state. I want to emphasise this by taking a look at the life style of the new International managerial classes that I have been able to observe predominantly at play within America, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and Europe within the last few years. They do seem to share a communality of tastes, in food, consumer goods clothes and entertainments which marks them out as a global 'class' of sorts. I have taken a particularly lively interest in the question of tastes in food and in a way the new trendy Australian restaurants seem to epitomise the tendency for the development of an International kind of 'Esperanto' food for the new middle classes world-wide. Consider the obligatory ingredients, which have appeared now on menus throughout the world for some time. Sun dried tomatoes, extra extra extra virgin olive oil (so virgin that it has not even experienced foreplay), Coriander, Basil, Lemon Grass, Lime Leaves, Balsamic vinegar.etc. This year in Australia and other countries the additions are partly dried tomatoes (coyly called 'Blush' tomatoes in Britain) Dried and partly dried red peppers Truffle oil, Holy Thai Basil and coriander stalks and roots rather than leaves. Next year it will probably be the soil that the coriander grew in that dominates menus. In Australia I particularly liked the emphasis on Feta cheese which is now so international that it is produced in many countries of the world including Australia. Of course in the restaurants for the trendy the Feta should ideally have been scraped off the walls of a cave in Crete that very morning or even weirder should be 'Persian Feta'. Just consider the idea of a Feta produced by a country that no longer exists - not wicked terrorist Ayatollah Iranian Feta but 'Persian Feta' (which probably sells well in America also). In Australia these feasts are often accompanied by the very overused words 'Gourmet' and 'Funky'. I was amused to see Gourmet candles on sale but rather revolted by the idea of eating "funky Thai Noodles". Am I the last person on Earth to remember the derivation of the word 'Funky'? I did not try the Guano Sauce offered at some Australian restaurants partly because I dimly remembered that Guano was a name for bat droppings but I did wonder if the palates of the international jet set had now become so jaded that they had resorted to eating bat shit! In short menus in many Australian restaurants had an incredible similarity to those in the other parts of the world and they tended to be frequented by exactly the same people. If this is Globalisation then it is a rather miserable empirical set of findings for such a grand concept.
I am now back in France Summer has really arrived, my tomatoes and courgettes are in flower the contents of my fridge freezer were destroyed by a storm which tripped my electricity supply safely switch while I was away but I basically feel once more at peace with the world. Best Wishes Paul

Beaujolais
Singapore and Thailand March 2001
As I have nothing much to offer regarding life in Ste Paule as I have been away so long on holiday I thought you might be interested in my adventures in Singapore Thailand and Australia but if you find travelogues boring I won't be hurt if you switch off now. Having been a Sociologist I will feel free to make huge generalisations on the basis of incredibly little evidence based largely on a mixture of intuition and empathy so I hope that in particular my new found Australian friends don't disagree to vehemently with some of my observations.

Singapore and Thailand

Although I started the holiday in Singapore and ended it in Thailand I feel that it is worth talking about them together to make comparisons where possible. I approached Singapore with some trepidation having heard poor accounts of it from European Tourists who usually describe it as a concrete jungle with very repressive government prepared to fine or imprison its citizens for the smallest infringement of the law. Particularly with regards to litter offences and health offences such as spitting, a society which has really established 'Zero tolerance'. Overall I was immensely impressed with the city. All cities which have chosen to establish the business district in a concentrated area by using skyscrapers which require a fast an efficient means to get workers to the area have created an area of concrete jungle within their precincts, the Australian cities do not really differ in that respect. Probably Chicago is the only city that I have ever seen which has somehow managed to create real beauty from its business complex. The problem for Singapore is that it lacks the space to ameliorate it sufficiently with green spaces and parks as it has a large population and little space. Modern Singapore was created in less than 50 years and its progress is breathtaking considering that it has virtually no resources other than an industrious and now highly skilled workforce. People are well dressed and there are little or no visible signs of poverty. The flow of uniformed children from the schools and suited or shirt sleeved students from the colleges should give the West a lot to worry about as Singapore is clearly a very advanced electronic society. Its shops are packed with computer hardware and software and there are cheap cyber cafes everywhere often full of students collectively engaged in homework. The gap between that and the "Internet in every school" promise of Tony Blair seems laughable. The incredible cleanliness everywhere is enjoyable after the litter and filth of London and Paris despite the means by which it is achieved. As far as I can tell there seems to be a degree of racial harmony given that the problem of knitting together a society with a 70% Chinese population and substantial Indian and Malaysian minorities once seemed intractable. One of the interesting facets of this particularly for a tourist is that the three 'ethnic groups' have well-established areas, cultural enclaves of restaurants, temples and markets. I stayed in a hotel in Chinatown that I really enjoyed, particularly at night. I wrote to some of you at the time about some of the things that I particularly liked but it doesn't hurt to repeat them. Without doubt the most favoured restaurants in the night were the porridge houses which served a huge bowl of soupy rice boiled down to a paste-like consistency redolent of school meals of the past flavoured with different meats fish and vegetables. Of particular interest was 'frog porridge" and some of the most successful restaurants proclaimed themselves to be "frog porridge houses". Other items on the menu other items such as chilli frog and fried entrails I left till next time. I had a marvellous image of re-working the Monty Python Sketch where the English Restaurant offers spam, spam ,spam and chips into a Singapore version which offers frog, frog,frog and chips. Of course I rapidly became a devotee although I found the experience a bit daunting as I sucked and piled little bones! on a side plate like the other customers. Opposite my hotel was an unlikely dance place proclaiming itself a Country and Western bar and offering Line Dancing lessons, I will probably always regret now going to enjoy the site of hundreds of Chinese gravely line dancing.
The buses that are packed to capacity at peak hours try to alleviate the passenger
boredom with television. I watched a bizarre program about a boy teaching two lizards to hang simultaneously from his tongue - something that London Transport might well be interested in. Overall I suppose the people of Singapore are the Capitalists dream as they seem to divide their day equally into working, eating and shopping, I have no idea when they sleep. I departed from Singapore in rather a spectacular and disastrous way because as I left the hotel lifting my heavy trolley -suitcase down the steps. I slipped and fell over the bonnet of a car knocking all the air out of my body to the point where I was more of less unconscious. I came round while being lifted by about 6 Chinese and to add to the drama as I landed on the car I had set off its burglar alarm helping along the noise and confusion! I have no doubt that stories about the fat Englishmen are still told in the Frog Houses of Chinatown. You will be pleased to hear that the influence of Tony Blair our beloved leader is now world-wide as the headline in the English edition of the Singapore newspaper read "End Croneyism in Government".

If Singapore generally gets a bad press from Tourists, stories of holidays in Thailand are usually ecstatic. Most accounts are from modern day 'hippies' enjoying the beaches and Sun of the South or taking the long 'trails' through Malaysia, Thailand Laos and Vietnam. I am usually sceptical of their views because of the well-known Hippie policy to 'hear no evil'/'speak no evil' when their needs to 'chill out' and enjoy are met.
My arrival in Bangkok was not exactly reassuring. I had been used to airport shuttles in Australia dropping me off at the steps of welcoming hotels whatever the time. I arrived in Bangkok at about midnight after having made an Internet booking for my hotel. I had chosen an interesting sounding place, which boasted of being actually in the heart of one of Bangkok's biggest markets. When the Shuttle driver dropped me in an empty road with no sign of any hotel I began to wonder whether my choice had been a good one. I knew from a very rudimentary map I had with me that I must be less than 2kms from the hotel but I had no idea in which direction. After walking for about 10 minutes to find any signs of life I found a small café and asked the owner for directions. He told me that he would call a Tuk Tuk a vehicle with which I was to become very intimate with in the next few days. A Tuk Tuk is a sort of taxi powered by something like a motor cycle. The small ones can take only one person, though as many as 8 people cram into a large one. I had two problems with my Tuk Tuk when it arrived. It was definitely a one-seater so I had to balance my suitcase half on my knee and half on the chassis as I was determined to leave hands free to hang on. In addition my driver was determined to take me on a midnight tour of Bangkok at break-neck speed as the hotel was obviously far too close to justify a decent fare. After about 20 minutes drive we actually passed the little café once more and arrived at the hotel about 400 metres further! The great irony is that the driver asked for a fare about half of what I expected to pay in the first place. When I awoke the following morning to the sheer cacophony of a big market I realised how impossible it would have been for me to find it unaided. Once I got used to the sheer anarchy of Bangkok after the regimented Singapore I began to really enjoy it. My first tourist stop at the instigation of a Thai businessman who even paid my fare to a Tuk Tuk driver to take me there was to visit the Temple of the Lucky Buddha which is apparently rarely open. The businessman thought it immensely propitious that I should arrive in Thailand on the day that the temple was open. When I got there only a group of novice monks in their saffron robes rather bizarrely playing on the Internet and one supplicant were present. The Supplicant turned out to be a shopkeeper who had made a small fortune after praying to the Lucky Buddha the previous year and was planning to pray for several hours this time. I am still waiting for my pay off as the NASDAQ index has only risen slightly since then.
I encountered an unusual hazard at night in Bangkok. Perhaps my women friends will remember youthful holidays in Mediterranean when after being pinched or groped a lot by ardent admirers they would pick up any boring man (often me) to keep the natives at bay. I experienced a gender reversal in that a fat elderly European travelling alone was like a magnet to every prostitute and pimp on the streets. I have to say that the girls were incredibly beautiful when offering me an instant heart attack but I declined and began to wish I had a woman companion and be left in peace.
I then travelled North by train to Lop Buri in search of Culture and ancient Thailand. Just leaving Bangkok by train was a revelation as it meant passing through shanty towns of the desperately poor which had sprung up by the railway line and which were every bit as bad as those I have seen in South Africa. The worse aspect seemed to be waterways passing through the huts which were obviously terribly polluted open sewers, a medical disaster waiting to happen. This pattern was repeated in all the admittedly small portion of Thailand that I saw, scenes of incredible beauty in the countryside punctuated by terrible litter and pollution in every place with a reasonably large number of inhabitants. Lop Buri turned out to be a wonderful town with large area of temples and palaces dating from 13th Century just standing by the roadside. I was very lucky to go there seeing that the girl in the tourist office in Bangkok spoke little English and was only really able to inform me that it was her 'home town'. I did ask whether there is anything old there and as she said yes so I decided to take a chance. The town is also known as monkey town as the centre in particular is packed with monkeys just moving along the street or in the trees. I was told that they have made an interesting Darwinian adaptation in the sense that if their survival rate increases or the food stock falls they take trains to other parts of the country, though no doubt any scientists among you will probably tell me that this can't be so.
I then took a train to Ayuttaya the old capital of Thailand and once again packed with wonderful antiquities but also a range of temples built in the last two or three hundred years in every style. It was here that I was really able to explore the wonders of Thai food, as every major street is packed with stalls selling food day and night with no recognisable distinction between breakfast lunch and dinner. I was overwhelmed by the choice of fruits and vegetables many of which I had never seen and the incredible subtlety of the mixtures of both spices and herbs used in cooking, I wonder if any cuisine of the world can really match Thai food at its best. Remarkably I thought I had tasted the best Thai food of my life in Australia but this turned out to be only a taste of the range on offer in Thailand.
Two days before leaving Ayuttaya I had my final encounter with a Tuk Tuk and also the opportunity to start and finish my holiday with an accident. I boarded my Tuk Tuk driven by a young man with his girl friend. Almost immediately the driver swerved to avoid another vehicle and hit the kerb. I was thrown out of my seat and hit my head on an iron bar holding the sun canopy in place. Blood started pouring down my face as cut heads even if the accident is not severe always seems to produce copious amounts of blood. Then a row broke out between the driver and the girl who finally walked off in a fury. She was either blamed him for the accident or I think more likely wanted him to take me to a hospital. He was obviously terrified having damaged a European but our interests coincided as the last thing I wanted was to go to a hospital and possibly get embroiled with Thai bureaucrats or police. I was shouting "hotel" "hotel" at him as I knew I could get medical care there if I was unable to stop the bleeding. He on the other hand stopped every 100metres to talk to people while the blood continued to seep from under my hat and I began to realise that he was asking people for advice. By then I was shouting "get me to the Hotel you bastard" or words to that effect and he finally got me there. I looked terrible, covered in blood but the bleeding had finally stopped. So I have no doubt that the citizens of Ayuttaya also tell stories about a fat Englishman covered in blood shouting at some poor Tuk Tuk driver. I have to say that on balance that I too am ecstatic about Thailand it is at once one of the most 'alien' places that I have visited and the most beautiful and it is true that its people are genuinely welcoming and uncorrupted by waves of Tourists.
But of course I have reservations about the terrible poverty and pollution to be seen there. In addition there are just as many military and police uniforms to be seen everywhere as in Singapore and it is worth remembering that Thai executions for offences such as having possession of certain weight of drugs (which is all the proof needed that you are a dealer in both Singapore and Thailand) are public.
To compare Singapore and Thailand offers some interesting questions regarding rigidly regimented societies and the social benefits that clearly can accrue and more anarchic societies that offer greater freedoms but at the expense of lack of organisation and a chaotic economy.

As this piece has gone on forever, obviously "Australia" will have to follow at a later date. Best Wishes Paul

Beaujolais 17
January 2001
As I have spent the last two months either in the UK for Christmas or lying in bed or on my couch with the worst attack of flu (grippe) that I have ever had this edition of the Beaujolais letter may seem a bizarre. For those of you that do not know I just attempted too much for someone of my venerable age this Christmas. The main problem was the amount of driving I had to do -over 3000kms on packed motorways in the UK and in bad weather conditions in France. The consequence was that I was left tired and weak and a perfect target for whatever virus hit me. I don't know whether it was an English virus or a French one but as the Eurotunnel car train broke down in mid tunnel for an hour on my way back I have decided that it was lurking about between the two countries cheerfully zapping French and English with a fine indifference. Amazingly I did manage to have a good New Years Eve party in my home provided by Christian, Ingrid, Nicholas, Alexia and Chantal before I succumbed.

The Cat
When Chantal returned to France just before Christmas she left some things in my house and her family helped unload. Some of the younger members let the cat into the house and alas the citadel has been breached. We have a new game now where the cat hurls itself against a half open door in a frantic attempt to re-enter the house. On the rare occasion when my defences break down she runs around the house to no particular purpose. Her main strategy is to wait until I arrive at my door laden with plastic bags and wine bottles from the Supermarket, turning the key in the door with bags held in my teeth etc. She then launches a sudden fierce Kamikaze attack throwing all caution to the wind and pushes past me. This cat is malevolent, she is now fat and sleek but her face becomes more evil by the day and she glares at me with mad eyes.

Television French and American

Given my illness I have probably watched more hours of TV per day than at any time in my life at the risk of my sanity. French terrestrial TV is as terrible as ever. The French still seem to enjoy the so-called 'spectacular' for Prime Time watching. This consists largely of ageing pop stars and comedians whipping up huge audiences into a frenzy of adulation and usually ends with a medley of rock and roll hits from the 50's sung by geriatrics on stage and morons in the audience. For those of you that remember it’s a bit like the old "Saturday Night Live" on British TV but with the sort of budget required to make an American blockbuster movie. In mid afternoon there are sometimes scaled down variety shows that are supposed to be taking place in a bar or café but done with a minuscule budget. These are gloriously tacky much more enjoyable that the evening extravaganzas.
The main reason for the sheer awfulness of French TV is I think that the French have totally misunderstood the nature of the medium. The fact that television is primarily visual and concerned with the presentation of images has largely been forgotten in a country still pre-occupied with the spoken word. The vast majority of French TV time consists of people talking, chatting, arguing with or interviewing each other. Fortunately the ubiquitous hand held microphone is now rapidly disappearing but the bad news is that the microphone pinned to a shirt front is seen only as a means to talk on the move as well as standing still, thus increasing the sheer volume of babble!!


As I am still 'linguistically challenged' with regards to French even though I am studying hard I still have to rely largely on Satellite version original TV programmes for my main entertainment. This consists of American movies and sitcoms some of which such as the Sopranos, NYPD Blue etc are even enjoyable. I now have about ten American movies a day to choose from and for the first time am able to experience the full range of the American cinema output for the last five years, good, bad, indifferent and terrible including films that never even made to the cinema but went straight to video.
With typical American ingenuity the genres of films have been scaled down to amazingly few.
The first category consists of 'caring films'. These are about how families cope or fail to cope with the death/dying of pets, children or old people. Incurable diseases especially cancer are obviously a huge box-office favourite and if brain degeneration occurs turning the patient into a lunatic or vegetable so much the better. Needless to say, these are the only types of films that I cannot watch.
By far the biggest category of American films involve both children and animals neither of which have any place in the cinema as far as I am concerned. Films about children in America are always about the socialisation and in particular getting the love quotient exactly right. Apparently if you are over protective and love your children too much they become gay, impotent or wimps or indeed all three. On the other had if you give too little love your children become rich but cold and unhappy and/or psychotic killers. Imagine the horrors of American parenthood carefully calculating the amount of lurrrve to dole out each day like medicine.
The next category consists of teen films, which are usually about college life. These involve a heroine who is usually genuinely ugly but whom the makers of the film try to persuade us is really beautiful when seen in a different light. Our heroine tries desperately to "find herself", achieve a sense of identity and become lurrved by her fellow students. This is difficult as the other girls are always 'rich bitches' and the boys are muscular morons. Success is achieved when the girl is seen as loved by all and becomes queen of the prom which is the end of term dance. See the film "Carrie" for an interesting variation on this theme.
A good idea has been to combine the genre of college/teen movies with that of horror movies so that college students get hacked to pieces by maniacs who were inadequately loved by their parents. This shows both the American flair for economy and the fact that film makers hate their "teen" creations every bit as much as the rest of us.
The last genre is my preferred category that consists of films portraying mindless gratuitous violence with no redeeming moral virtue. After all I found Mad Max 2 too sentimental and moralistic! I devour such films totally indiscriminately and the majority of my viewing time through my illness has been taken up with such material.
So if the psychologists are right and one watches such material in order to achieve a harmless release of a deep inner rage then Tony Blair has a great deal to answer for!
The great virtue of Satellite TV is its presentation of popular music. There are marvellous documentaries on musicians and genres of music and no nonsense straightforward presentations of complete concerts. Satellite TV is not subject to the





same time constraints as terrestrial TV so it is possible to see up to three hours on a particular topic. I watched a three-hour documentary on Lou Reed recently, which had lots of live Velvet Underground material that I had never seen. Two weeks ago I saw a brilliant Jane Birkin Concert which took place in 1987. With my usual manic enthusiasm, I made a video of the concert, bought the CD, downloaded additional tracks from Napster and downloaded the lyrics as material for my French improvement lessons. The point about Jane Birkin is that here we have a 'singer' able to move herself and her audience to tears and huge enthusiasm entirely by artifice. She has no singing ability whatever. She misses her top notes by a fortnight, produces a weird vibrato when trying to sustain a note and gulps down air like an Olympic swimmer on the turn in the middle of a phrase. Compare her with Whitney Houston, one of my current pet hates. A recent record of hers produced a wonderful two-word review by a critic "Vacuous Virtuosity". She has all the technical ability in the world
and produces little worth hearing. An old Canadian friend of mine watching a display of amazing technical ability on the part of a guitarist with me at a concert many years ago growled "it ain't how you play its what you play that counts" which has been my precept in judging music ever since. But that still leaves me with a problem. How would I describe Jane Birkin's performance in two words as obviously "profound incompetence" does not work. I look forward to suggestions from my readers.

A Fete (fate) worse than death

Yesterday Monday was big day in the Ste Paule calendar. It is known as les Vincents as it is the Saints day of St Vincent and like most celebrations in the village has to do with giving thanks for the Vendage and subsequent production of wine. The main organiser came to my house and personally invited me to the celebrations and I felt that at last I was in - a recognised resident. In addition Chantal agreed to come with me who I expected would help to break the ice and sort out the usual language barriers. The main events consisted of Mass at the local church followed by drinks in the village hall then lunch and dinner in the evening. I thought that lunch and dinner would be too much to manage so I booked For Chantal and I to go to the dinner in the evening. My neighbour also I assured me that the evening session was the think to go to with good food and lots of drinking and singing, I even intended to go to the mass in the morning chancing that the walls would not fall down if I attended a religious ceremony. In the event Chantal was ill on the day with bad laryngitis and unable come to the village with me. I did not risk the church on my own but turned up to join the congregation after the ceremony to go to the village hall for drinks. I was greeted with classic Ste Paule indifference/veiled hostility by the large group. I recognised only one person a neighbour who drinks sometimes with my next door neighbour but he is the person I like least in the area - he looks like Benny Hill and lives with his mother if you get my meaning. After a brief handshake he rather pointedly failed to introduce me to any one else in the group.At this point I began to feel like the central character in "the Wickerman" ( I know that Melita will be sure to get my meaning). It was the same when I went to the hall for drinks. The person who invited me for the day made an effort to involve me in the proceedings but he was too busy organising things and pouring drinks. The wine on offer was local white and rose served with wonderful brioche. The white is not too bad but the rose is






truly awful and it seemed rather bizarre for the villagers to spend the morning in church thanking God for giving them such terrible wine. I knew instinctively that anyone who deigned to speak to me would ask my opinion of the rose, which of course happened. An old lady informed me that the white wine was not very good but that the rose was excellent. Finally the wife of my neighbour arrived whom I like more and more each time we meet. She was friendly and saw that I badly needed company and tried to introduce me to more people.
After the morning experience I rather dreaded the dinner at night imagining myself seated with a group of people who looked at me with immense suspicion with the unspoken question in their eyes "who are you, why are you here". But I decided I must brave it. Of course I made the error of arriving far too early, dinner at 8.00pm
clearly has no meaning in local time. So I stood miserably by the wall whilst more and more people arrived. There is an expression in English, which used for a girl at a dance whom no one asks to dance, she is described as a wallflower and perhaps it is my role to be the Ste Paule wallflower. Finally it was time to eat and everyone was being seated by the organisers. I told them that I was waiting for my neighbours who had still not appeared. At the very last minute when everyone was seated but me my woman neighbour and her cousin appeared realised my plight and invited me to sit with them and other members of the family that I vaguely remembered from the vendage celebrations. My neighbour's husband was unable to come apparently due to pressure of work. From then on things improved massively and the members of the family immediately became increasingly friendly as the wine flowed. The food was excellent but I really enjoyed the singing and dancing that followed.
But first I need to explain the role of the DJ at one of these village events. The first thing to realist is that the average DJ has about as much technical equipment as the Pink Floyd. In addition to the obvious turntables and amplifier stacks he has video equipment, an enormous video screen and state of the art karaoke gear. He not only plays records put shows videos, projects lyrics onto the screen and uses the Karaoke equipment to lead the singing personally. At its peak the show is truly multi-media and I had great pleasure imagining Kieran in his role of DJ coping with all this.
The big screen video does help to create a sense of really being in a club or at a gig especially when the performer is worth hearing. The singing at the table with linked arms etc was very enjoyable because it does not seem to descend to the kind of nationalistic fervour that you get with German beer cellar singing for example. The number, that got the crowd dancing and raving most of all, was very oddly Kalinka played by the Russian Army Ensemble. Finally the DJ started playing the obligatory rock and roll session which as usual in France seemed to clear the floor rather than fill it. I danced with the cousin and them reverted to my usual role of dancing with the wives of absent. drunken or lazy husbands which was often my role in England so nothing really changes. The traditionalists present during the celebrations for the whole day wore wooden sabots and sported wine tasting cups hung round their necks so in my continuing efforts to enter Ste Paule society perhaps someone can tell me where to buy Sabots and a cup! Love Paul

Beaujolais 16
October 2000
The Cat

Some of you have asked me speculate about the kittens produced by 'the cat'. I think that is rather unwise as I have witnessed on two occasions what happens to unwanted kittens in this area and it is not pretty - to paraphrase the philosopher Hobbes "life was nasty brutish and short"!
The cat and I continue our unusual relationship, she still continues to sleep on my porch though less regularly and when ever I go to do a bit of cleaning up or gardening in the court she comes and commences her usual habit of sashaying around me and occasionally rubbing against my legs though she has given up howling . This is surprising as I offer her nothing in the way of either affection or food and my disdain is palpable.
Now politically I have always though of cats as pure Thatcherite. They are ruthlessly individualistic and selfish, they never give anything for nothing and they are brutal and sadistic in their dealings with those they think of as inferiors, birds, small mammals and most humans. Dogs on the other hand are pure 'New Labour' Blairites. They are willing to accept any degree of injustice and suffer interminable bullshit from their masters in the forlorn hope of a better future. The question to be answered is whether I have a Blairite cat or a cat so strongly Thatcherite that she hangs around endlessly seeking revenge for her rejection!

The garden

I picked my final crop of semi-ripened cherry tomatoes on 26th of November which must be some kind of record. I was thinking of applying to the local church to declare a miracle if production had continued into December. In addition I also took 2 and a half Kilos or unripe green tomatoes and after some thought and a kitchen like a laboratory yesterday I have six jars of pungent spiced Indian pickle. I have been rethinking the appearance of the court for next year and have decided to have considerably more flowers in both the 'Heidi garden' and the 'Helen garden' and will start to purchase plants and quality soil in the near future.

Some Thoughts and Images of Marrakech

A fascinating note on my hotel room wall says "After more than two nights stay guests will be offered up to 25% discount depending on nationality."
Now I imagine that the actual tariff is organised as follows

French-They have always exploited us but we still love them and share their culture 25%
Japanese- they are all right but they don't need the money -15%
Americans- now everyone shares their culture -15%
English and Germans - no one really likes them -5%
Swiss - Everyone hates them -1%
Israelis - You must be joking +300%





A large very fat Moroccan lady comes and sits next to me on a park bench. She smiles angelically at me and then proceeds to urinate copiously under her voluminous skirts. A huge puddle forms at her feet and I have to move my feet rapidly before they are engulfed.

A small pony lies presumably dying on the floor of the Souk his two youthful owners are completely distraught and cry. They look very poor and this must be an incalculable economic loss for them. The cart from which the pony has been unhitched bears an impossible load of bales of concentrated wool perhaps 3-4 metres in height and I suppose the heart of the pony just gave way under the strain

It is night and the usual huge crowds gather in the central square for food, and entertainment. All manners of scribes, soothsayers, prophets, fortune tellers and magicians ply their trades. Some of them draw enormous crowds with vivid theatrical performances. Many of the audience give money in exchange for things like pieces of paper with a few symbols on them None of them ask the obvious question that a nasty old rationalist like me would be tempted to ask "if you have such amazing powers, why are you doing this for a living?"

There is a plot in the Western world organised by the chemical and advertising industries to encourage us to wipe out all smells in our environment other than those created by the industry. The form that this takes in the kitchen is particularly dangerous as it involves attempting to wipe out all germs and bacteria when there is little or no long-term research on the consequences of such an action for our immunity from various diseases. One of the main agents of this war on bacteria is ever-stronger form of bleach. 'Javel' is the generic term for bleach in France and corresponds roughly to Domestos in Britain. In French supermarkets the shelves are piled high with masses of Javel based products and the smell of Javel is all pervasive in many kitchens. When I last visited the dentist here he told me proudly that he was using an injection of Javel to kill the disease in my tooth!
The other aspect of the mission of the industry is to destroy all traces of the smell of human beings in the bathroom and bedroom. Antiperspirants, deodorants, perfumes, shampoos, soaps shower gels offer us a sickly perfumed sweetness. Perhaps some of you like me will go to inordinate lengths to avoid the perfume and soap counters in department stores as the scent makes me feel physically ill.
So there we have it the only legitimate smells in our society soon will be those of a sanitised and bacteria free kitchen and a heavily perfumed Bathroom /bedroom
Javel or Bordel!
I say this because one of the most fascinating aspects of Marrakech for me was the rediscovery of a sense of smell - an olfactory orgy. Wood smoke perfumes, herbs, spices all sorts of food cooking are all pervasive and contribute to the sense of excitement in the night air. Of course there are truly disgusting smells such as those emanating the tannery and the meat market but this is taken care of by elderly ladies who offer for a small fee large sprigs of mint for Westerners to hold under their noses so that their delicate sensibilities are not offended.





Ho Ho Ho It's Christmas

I have developed some bad habits in France, one of which is to become an avid reader of supermarket advertising material. I suppose this is partly a reaction to the fact that one does get genuine special offers in French supermarkets with real reductions in price, which I know will be barely credible for my English readers. I know this to be the case and have a ton and a half of toilet rolls to prove it. Some thick catalogues advertising Christmas toys from two of the major supermarket chains Leclerc and Auchan arrived with my post recently and I have read them with some interest. I was staggered to discover that none of the discussions regarding sexism and the role of toys in the fixing of boys and girls in gender roles which has taken place world-wide
for the last thirty years has had any impact whatsoever on the biggest sellers of toys - supermarkets. Both catalogues offer a section for the very young when apparently some degree of 'uni-sex' is allowed but after that toys are ruthlessly divided into those for girls and those for boys.
In the Auchan catalogue the "girls" section opens of course with three pages of 'Barbie' the uncrowned queen of sexism. Then we get no less than 10 pages devoted to dolls, prams and pushchairs, 2 pages on toy kitchen utensils, vacuum cleaners cookers etc and finally one page that seems to offer games with some career opportunities "fashion designers" and "beauty salon worker". The section closes with a page entitled "secret de filles" where electronic diaries are on offer - the only piece of technology needed by girls apparently.
The boy's section "Le Monde Des Garcons" commences of course with 'Action Man' the uncrowned King of sexism. This is followed by 17 pages of all sorts of exciting toys. Construction kits of all types, scientific instruments, mountains of technology electronic toys etc. No less that 7 pages are devoted to cars of all types which I suppose will clarify who will be the main driver in the future family! To be fair there are sections, which are aimed at both, sexes, those having to do with games and sports, artistic creation and importantly computers.
The Leclerc catalogue follows roughly the same pattern. Girls are offered 7 pages of dolls prams and pushchairs followed by three in the kitchen. Then we get 5 pages of 'Barbie' and 'Barbie' look alikes such as 'Cindy' and finally two pages of "beauty kits" for both dolls and humans.
The boys section commences admirably with a page on toy farms - though can we expect to have no women farmers in the future? Then follows 14 pages of cars, electronics construction kits 'Action Men' etc. Once again games, sports and music are seen as common areas of interest though computers are not included in the catalogue at all. If we look more carefully at the 'common areas of interest ' more subtle pressures are at work, In the Leclerc catalogue the "jeux artistiques" are portrayed as being played by girls while active and competitive games such as table football, snooker and all sports are portrayed as played by boys. In the Auchan catalogue this does not occur but only because there are no representation of children of either sex anywhere in the book
The organisation of toys in catalogue are repeated in supermarket displays where toys are divided along differed aisles labelled Filles and Garcons. It is worth thinking about that girls are not seen as having any career other than mother and housewife which of course is merely an ideology that has little correspondence with reality in the modern world.
I have notes what the Americans call an important gap in the market. None of the toys deal with the important question of how girls get all these babies in the first place to push around in their push chairs. They do not relate to what we might call "from Barbie to baby". Perhaps the solution is to have new sets of toys featuring Barbie and Action Man together though I am sure that Action man is far to Buddy Buddy homo-erotic to provide the proper role model in this case. Girls could have material on "how to pleasure you man to stop him going off with his secretary" while boys could get instruction on "seduction and foreplay - are they the same as 8pints of lager".

More seriously fifty years ago I remember that my sister received various role-playing games as Christmas presents. Even then she was offered the admittedly limited career possibilities of nurse, bus conductress, shop keeper, post office owner etc Fifty years later Auchan sees the woman of the future as only beautician or fashion designer.
This is my last Beaujolais before Christmas. Happy Christmas I will be in London from 10th December. Love Paul

Beaujolais 15
September 2000

Vendage

In September the most important time of the year occurred for all the grape growers and wine makers in the Beaujolais, the harvesting (vendage), pressing
And vinification of the grapes to produce a cheap and cheerful Beaujolais to serve a diminishing but still enormous world market initially as Beaujolais Nouveau and then continuous sale of Beaujolais Village of variable quality. In the Bourgogne this is the time of nail biting intensity as poor weather even in the final days before harvesting can ruin a smaller but much more valuable crop. The Pinot Noir grapes of the there even with generally good weather only just ripen sufficiently to make the
complicated and temperamental wine of the region. But in the Beaujolais with the hardy and less temperamental Gamay grape the only real disaster that can strike is the dreaded grelons (enormous hailstones that often accompany the severe storms that can occur during August and September). The other problem today seems to be a difficulty in attracting sufficient young workers to actually pick the crop. In the past hordes of spotty young English people came to pick the grapes, lured by tales of the money, great food, wine, sun and sex, which awaited them. Nowadays young people are either too lazy and or rich enough to accept the low wages on offer and the sex and sun is more certain on the holiday islands of Spain. Nonetheless at the height of the picking a steady stream of tractors, cars and vans passed my door ferrying the young workers to vineyards.
The end of the picking and the start of the pressing involved many parties and celebrations as the Beaujolais people are fortunately bon-viveurs or as the English delicately put it would use any excuse for a piss up!! I was invited by my neighbours to go with them to the pressings particularly to taste the paradis (the juice coming from the first pressing of the grapes). At six in the evening my neighbour arrived in a 1954 Citroen Deux Chevaux as his hobby is to restore old cars and we therefore arrived in some style at the cellars. Beaujolais wine is made differently from other wines in that the fermentation starts to take place when the grapes are still whole whilst other wines are made by pressing the grapes before fermentation. It is this process in the Beaujolais that produces a wine, which is fairly sweet, instantly acceptable to the palate and can be drinkable within a couple of months. When we visited the first cellar we saw a very traditional old press manned by only three persons, one man inside a huge hopper feeding the grapes into a large vacuum pipe, one man by the press holding the vacuum pipe as it disgorged the grapes into the press and a third distributing the grapes evenly in the press with a large rake. All three were clad only in shorts and wellingtons as the temperature in the room was very hot and they sweated so copiously into the grapes that at times it seemed as though equal parts of sweat and grape juice were being produced - think about that as you savour you next glass of wine! A flood of juice emerged from the bottom of the press , which looked and tasted like blood when handed to me and other spectators in glasses and I






was assured is deceptive as although one thinks of it as merely grape juice it is already powerfully alcoholic. We visited a number of presses in the night and it was interesting to see the difference between the traditionalists who have not changed their techniques all and the younger winemakers who are obviously learning the lessons of changing winemaking techniques throughout the world and trying to produce a better and wider variety of wines. Throughout the night we were also offered older wines as well, so I finally arrived home some hours later inebriated and feeling a still greater degree of acceptance by the local people


The Cat
Those of you who visited me this summer will remember the small but increasing saga of a small black cat, which appeared one day. The precise date is the subject of some acrimony between Ingrid Chantal and myself but it soon established itself and slept each night on my porch spending the day in the court making 'feed me' noises and executing that cat movement of constantly rubbing itself against my ankles which means either I love you or feed me you bastard or I'll trip you up, according to whether you like cats or not. Now I dislike cats notwithstanding the distinction I made between bourgeois cats and proletarian cats in an earlier letter. But I assure my cat lover friends that it is not hatred, more a gentle sort of antipathy. However the cat appeared to get progressively thinner and I was faced with the moral dilemma of whether to feed it or have die of starvation on my porch one night. To add to the difficulty I will be away in mid-winter on holiday for a long period and I reasoned that if I did take on the task of supplying food now the supply would suddenly stop in freezing whether which was not a good deal for the cat. I adopted a typically liberal
cowardly solution deciding to give the cat sufficient food to gain strength to seek a more caring owner but not enough for the cat to decide that I was either kind enough or idiotic enough to be a good deal. This plan failed miserably when Leila and her friends arrived this Summer and cheerfully fed the cat whenever they felt like it and also gave it lots of affection. When they left I developed a new resolve to push the cat to new carers whatever the emotional cost and I steadfastly refused to feed it once more. However it continued to sleep on my porch at night and torment me in the court during the day. Then to my horror I realised that it was very pregnant and judging by the size of the bulge full of kittens and as I was soon to leave for Britain for some weeks a new scenario presented itself. I imagined arriving back to France to find
Either, a mother and 5 kittens starved to death on my porch or, a mother and five kittens happily playing in my court and together demanding food like a Greek chorus. I talked to the neighbours who said that in fact the cat belonged to the owners of a house just to the rear of mine and that they would mention my problem to them but I was not reassured.











The Dark Continent
I have been planning to return to Britain for some time to sell my English car, to visit Leila for her birthday and to see her University flat in Liverpool, and to visit my mother and as many friends as possible. I left in the last week in September but decided to visit my friends Martin and Annie in Bretagne en route. As I neared their home near the beautiful old town of Dinan the weather became poorer although I had left the Beaujolais that morning in bright sunshine and I reflected that Bretagne in some ways is a sort of anteroom to Britain on occasion offering a taste of the sort of horrible weather to come. Martin and Annie have a number of beautiful Gites which they rent out as holiday homes for guests who are usually English and those taking a late Summer holiday were exposed to a downpour of rain. However they did not seem to mind at all, after all they were British, this was the sort of holiday they understood which is why they did not venture further South in the first place. They happily splashed about clad in raincoats and wellington