Of Cats and Men

Bold has been added to the following post to cater for A.D.D and sneaky speed reading.

“What do you think is the essential difference between men and women?

-Madame, I cannot conceive”

Ah yes, I forget who said that. Probably one of the great masters of wit: Rowan Atkinson*; David Lange*, or Andrew Finlay perhaps. Hannah insists that "it’s not that funny", but my standards have lowered considerably over the last couple of years. I find myself giggling at just about anything. Slowly, I make my way into the ranks of the nerdy or elderly who are found grinning and muttering to themselves in a forgotten corner. What’s more, I’ve been running around with some kind of chest infection, causing me to cough and splutter like a creepy old emphysemic drunkard. Uncle Sam, here I come.

Katy is almost ready to burst, but the baby is awaiting the arrival of its grandmother- Joanne- to get the proceedings under way. Granny Jo (neither boxer nor blues artist, despite the catchy name) is arriving mid-way through the week and will be welcomed by Huzzah!s and Hurrah!s- simply because she is one who inspires such jubilation. Katy and Jean-Michel’s neighbours, a British couple, are lending us their house while mum is here. The catch is that we will have to look after the pool during the times we are not swimming in it. Oh the hardship!

Cats- are a delightful alternative to children. Hannah is crazy about them and I’m beginning to understand why. They are like little furry drunks- alternating between the over-energetic chasing of inanimate objects to curling up in complete comatose after scoffing down a bowl of food from the packet. Slothful, greedy and yet noble and hygienic; entertaining both indoors and outdoors; low maintenance; conveying an illusion of love and even replaceable!

I cannot but admire the brutally honest and self-satisfying relationship between cat and human-

HUMAN- I want to pat the cat, I find its purr relaxing. I feel wanted.

CAT- I want to be caressed, fed and then have a snooze. I feel safe. I feel excited.

HUMAN- The cat is now bothering me. I put the cat outside.

A wonderfully-weaved interaction.

This is not new to you of course, but it is to me. My daddy always told me that cats were lazy and useless and my only experience of them growing up was of burying the ones that had suffered under the jaws of our faithful German Shepherd Max.

Max had been viciously attacked by a wild cat as a puppy and later in life dealt with his fears by always striking first. But let us not judge his killer-instinct too readily. Max confronted his deepest phobias head-on, and for that he must be commended. Below is a summary of the usual sequence of events.

Cat runs through garden, Mad-Max attacks, 9 year-old Sam gets a shovel, digs a cat sized hole, and buries all evidence before distraught neighbours start asking questions. Sunday lunch continues.

Speaking of lunch, I may have mislead you in earlier posts into thinking that we always stop for a big three course meal everyday but this was, in fact, only true of our first week. We actually stay up in the orchard and have a simple picnic under the cherry trees. Rugby has also changed. Last weekend’s game was all class. Nice pitch, stadium and crowd. Relatively free flowing game which we won 20-17. The ugly side showed its head off the field this time- the opposition filed a complaint after the match, saying that our captain had played the game despite a suspension and they stripped the victory and away from us. It’s all a bit political and nasty. They’ll go before the rugby federation and my team will win but it’ll mean there will have been no final. Blablabla, anyway it looks like the season’s over.

News from the fields- I have been getting an earful from my new orchard companions: French Radio hosts, David Pawson, Podcasts and now even Audiobooks. Audiobooks! Who would have thought! Classics read by BBC-Granddad-Attenborough types, neatly fitting onto Hannah’s miniature ipod. Oh! The well of information available to aural learners! Prune away my lad, and learn the secrets once confined to dusty books. Prune and laugh at the ramblings of the learned academics, as they breathlessly share their lifework in little one-hour slots. Prune and consider that without pruning you would never take time out to listen. Oh, how delightful! I cannot conceive, but I can multitask.

She can conceive AND multitask... *respect*

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*Atkinson: http://www.moviesoundclips.net/tv1/blackadder2/pencil.wav

Lange: was hosting a reception at Vogel House for the Chinese politician Hu Yao Bang when the lights went out. Lange immediately asked all the guests to raise their hands because "many hands make light work." The audience complied, and to their amazement the lights immediately came back on. Lange was invited to visit China.

Source: Dominion, 23 March 1992, p. 6.

Time Travel

“Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive”
Stephen Fry

Little Iceland farts in the face of Europe*, causing planes to be grounded and passengers stranded. This of course has raised a number of issues, but for the traveller it brings about a worthwhile reassessment of the way we travel and INDEED its purpose. The excerpt below, whilst written before the volcanic eruption, does just that. Replace the word ‘vacation’ with ‘holiday’ and I think you’ll find you identify with what the writer is saying.

"Look! A total plane eclipse!"

Feeling stagnant and in search of adventure, Slate contributor Seth Stevenson and his girlfriend (and trusty navigatrix), Rebecca, put their jobs on hold, ditched their possessions, and set out to circumnavigate the globe without stepping into an aircraft. They soon found themselves riding on cargo freighters, trains, ferries, buses, bicycles, one high-speed catamaran, and several rickshaws. Excerpts from Stevenson's book about the voyage, Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World.

'Fifty years ago, an American tourist on vacation might well have taken a ship to get to Europe. Fifty years before that, it was not unusual to ride in a stagecoach. For someone growing up in the first half of the twentieth century—watching the automobile and the airplane evolve into everyday conveniences—it must have seemed that humankind's advances in the field of transport were only just getting started.
But then, sometime around the mid-1960s, the progress stopped. Air travel had its golden age in that era, and since then flying really hasn't improved. With notable exceptions like the now-defunct Concorde, the jets never got much faster. Meanwhile, they did get a whole lot less comfortable, as airlines crammed in more seats and cut out the amenities.
Whatever romance may have existed up there in the clouds, once upon a time, it's long gone now. These days, the experience is relentlessly drab. Still, there's no puzzle as to why people continue to fly. Airplanes equal convenience. They get us places faster—orders of magnitude faster.
I wouldn't want to deny people the option of flight. At the same time, I think it's fair to acknowledge that progress comes with tradeoffs. Yes, we've gained convenience. But along the way we've deprived ourselves of some extremely wonderful things. The starry skies of an Atlantic Ocean crossing. The bleak beauty of an old Russian train chugging its way through Siberia. The jaunty freedom of a road trip with a carful of friends.
And there's no going back. Along with the ability to cross an ocean or a continent in six hours comes a societal expectation that you'll do so. Your two weeks of summer vacation time are predicated on the assumption that you'll fly to Italy for your honeymoon—not take a full week to float there, look around for an hour, and then take another week to float back.
As a result, when people think about travel these days they think purely of destinations. They barely give a nod to the actual ... traveling. The problem with this isn't just that we lose out on the pleasures of trains, ships, bicycles, and all those other terrific modes of rationally paced, ground-level transport. I think we also dim our experience of the destinations themselves. We've forgotten the benefit of surface travel: It forces you to feel, deep in your bones, the distance you've covered; and it gradually eases you into a new context that exists not just outside your body, but also inside your head. (It eliminates travel sicknesses, too: Rebecca and I never once got ill as we moved slowly and steadily between clusters of regional bacteria.)
Teleporting from airport to airport doesn't allow for the same kind of spiritual transformation you undergo whenever you make an overland trip. When you take a seven-day vacation bookended by flights, I would in fact argue that your soul never completely leaves home. You've experienced it, I'm sure: Your airplane has landed in Quito, but your heart and mind are still stuck back in Boston. The sudden, radical change in your surroundings sparks a glitch in your processor. You know you're physically standing in Ecuador, yet the sensation is more like watching a really immersive television documentary about Ecuador. And then, at last, when you begin to feel whole again, your feet firmly planted in the foreign soil (no longer some hollow seedcase that's been dropped, weightless, into an alien world), it's time to teleport straight back to the comfortable familiarity of home.
I acknowledge that for most of us, it's no longer feasible to take an ocean liner to South America on our summer holiday. But that doesn't mean we wouldn't have a better, richer experience if we did. So my advice to you is this: The next time you want to travel—I mean really travel, not just take a vacation—please consider getting wherever you want to go without taking a plane.
I promise you will look at that globe on the shelf in your study in a whole new light. You will run your finger along the curve of the sphere and think: I know what this distance feels like. What this ocean looks like. What it means to trace the surface of this earth'.

http://www.slate.com/id/2249547/
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*Only in French but very good- http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xd0gy0_les-islandais-sont-des-casse-couill_fun?start=38

Saint Auban

Crouch. Touch. Pause. Engage. Collapse. Fight!

------PART UN----- [If you don’t care for rugby go straight to PART DEUX]

Played in my first grassroots French rugby game yesterday. It had the start-stop quality of a gridiron match, with lengthy enough pauses to insert multiple add-breaks while the medics rushed onto the field to tend to broken noses and lesions. 3 red cards, 2 yellow. Fists flying. Rugby a la Provencal- an alternative approach to the game where one lets out one’s passions whenever one feels so inclined. During the second fight I gazed pensively into the distance, then, noticing a team-mate being kicked on the ground, intervened with the meekness of an enlightened monk. “Come on guys, this isn’t rugby”, said I, with a gentle wave of the hand (see picture). They seemed happy to stop. Then again they’d been at it for 5 minutes flat.

Look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osFwccQGPjA . Different game but it’ll give you an idea.

My team-mates seemed embarrassed that I’d had to witness this barbarism. Apparently, this is a very traditional approach to the game in the region that is slowly dying. I felt like a naive coloniser in far-away lands, with natives apologizing for eating my men. They were all very curious when I told them about the NZRFU and disciplinary hearings, bans and suspensions. I guess they could all identify with these processes, being so used to dispensing justice themselves.

The game was dull, with the young ref constantly blowing on his whistle, dispensing cards and having talks to the captains and their herds of winging wing-men. It became impossible to get into any rhythm. Nevertheless, rugby is rugby and there were some nice pieces of play. I was at centre and surrounded by some pretty good players, so the times we had the ball in hand were happy times. It feels great to be running around without any injuries and I’m thankful to God for that!

Next week we move on to the finals. Near the end they start to play in neutral territory with actual officials, so it should be better quality from now on.

------ PART DEUX-------

Hannah and I have been sleeping in a cosy little caravan in JM and KT’s backyard. We repaired the Plexiglas windows, got it all cleaned up and Hannah sewed new satin blue curtains for it, giving it a royal feel. The nights are getting warmer which is bonus.

The weather has been stunning and has made pruning a jolly time. I’ve been making myself listen to French radio talk-shows whilst pruning and underlining new words in the newspapers in the evenings. I’m always frustrated at having to explain concepts for which I don’t know the name, or translating from English, so I’m rolling up my sleeves and trying to be a bit more adventurous in the language acquisition department. Hannah is like a sponge and picks up new phrases in a flash but is also feeling all the downfalls of being immersed in a foreign tongue. It’s sometimes tiring, sometimes fun, sometimes alienating... Language is a strange thing. But it feels like as long as we’re together nothing can touch us. Our love is a haven. I’m so glad I’m with her. She really is la crème de la crème. Ooh and it’s our first wedding anniversary on the 2^nd of May so we’ll go off to some exotic location some weekend soon.

Katy made some nice home-made hot-cross buns for Easter. Huzzah!

Loving the Lingo

À propos, do you ever get déjà-vu?

Ulysses, father of Maui (pictured), curls up in a ball and licks his genitals. This is his favourite pass-time. Jean-Michel tells me that he once so indulged in this canine activity that his pink piece of pork inflated like a balloon and refused to retract, leaving poor Ulysses to wander around dragging the thing between his legs. Jean-Michel eventually tamed the animal’s beast by soaking it in ice.

Watching Ulysses with awe, amusement and disgust, I am drawn back to the times I had to read self-indulgent pieces of academic writing prescribed by the University. I recall having to endure (usually after a good sleep-in) authors of PhDs babbling on about everyday subjects in an obscure manner, boring me to bits by polluting simple concepts with pompous pointlessness. One of the most laughable ways they did this was by inserting unnecessary French words (in italics) into perfectly ordinary sentences.

Here is a text of French words within our repertoire- a montage designed to reveal that our knowledge vis-à-vis the French language is greater than we think.

Jean is engaged in a tête-à-tête with a femme fatale in the kind of negligee produced by the great minds of haute-couture. They organised this rendez-vous when they met at the crèche. He could smell her enticing eau de toilette and detected a great joie de vivre in her. They ordered à la carte. After sipping their soup du jour with bourgeois etiquette, they moved on to crème brûlée. During their conversation, she made several faux pas and gaffes that revealed to him that her act was just a façade.

“I’m the crème de la crème of my agency”, she stated with nonchalance.

“You say this like it’s a fait accompli. I thought you’d only just started working there”.

She drew on the last of her cigarette and pressed it into the ashtray.

“Touché... But I hope to be great one day.” She glanced at him coldly. “What do you do Jean?”

He thought for a moment then stood and declared boisterously: “I’m French! This is my raison d'être. Vive la France!” The rest of the clientele burst into applause at this display of patriotism. A lone trumpet sounded in the distance.

“That is so cliché”, she sneered.

This was the coup de grace for Jean. This woman was a fraud and showed no respect.

“I’m leaving”, he spat. “Bon appétit”.

And so on and so forth. Dreadful stuff. Especially when words like façade (/fassad/) are pronounced /fakeid/. French kids use English for the opposite purpose of sounding cool and ‘with it’. Why not, I guess. Let’s cross-pollinate our languages.

--------------------------

In other news!
We have been pruning cherry trees on a daily basis- apart from the odd insane weather variation.

March is a month of odd climate. We've gone from snow to rain and sun on a couple of mornings. While we prune, the cold wind will howl through the valley then quieten to a warm breeze. In the early morning we walk leisurely on the frozen ground and later are wading our way through sticky clay. Jean-Michel, Hannah and a British chap named Andrew (pictured) are a jolly bunch of companions to work with. Field work is both wearisome and (strangely) intelectually stimulating- giving one time to meditate on whatever subject.

Beware of switching off, dear friend, as you prune cherry trees. The secateurs are pneumatically pressured and will slice your fingers clean off if you do not pay attention. A brief clench on the trigger will cut straight through just about anything. Exciting. Dangerous. This is our life.

Katy (here tending to the goats) is about 5 weeks away from the due date for the birth of our little niece or nephew. She's glowing, as per usual, and has an incredible knack for meeting people and forming friendships. This has been choice for us as we've been able to meet her friends and practice our French with them, as well as eat their food. Huzzah!

We've been going to indoor rock-climbing and will hopefully soon hit some of the nice cliffs around here. I just started going to rugby, and though the level is low it should be fun.
Ok, enough for now. Please send us news!
Toodleloo.