Comically Historical

The French have got a thing about comic books – bandes dessinées, as they are known in the adult world.  Go into any bookshop, and the busiest place will be the adult B.D section.  The (mostly male) customers may do more reading than buying, but there they will be, leafing through the pages for hours on end. These books are works of art: so much so that there are annual B.D. festivals, where aficionados gather to dissect and discuss the latest books and the classics. 

There are all types of these books.  Anything from flying ace war stories to the Wild West: improbably-chested heroines, muscular heroes, sci-fi, insects, dinosaurs, erotica: it’s all here, in glorious colour or black and white. You only have to think of Tin Tin (though he was Belgian so he doesn’t count). 

Well, there’s nothing new under the sun: the first cartoon story, in words and consecutive pictures, was the Bayeux Tapestry. 

Which isn’t tapestry at all, it’s embroidery.  No-one knows who made it, or commissioned it, or where it was supposed to hang. It may have decorated the Cathedral; it may have been in some lord’s castle. For now, it’s safely displayed, out of reach of bugs and humidity, in a converted seminary in Bayeux town. 

We dropped in to see it on the way back from England, and coincided with market day, which may or may not have had a bearing on the lack of car parking places.  We followed the signs, and found the place, and paid our entrance, knowing what we were going to see. 

Actually, we didn’t: nothing prepares you for the reality of this long band of linen, decorated in 3 or 4 colours, which tells the story of how Harold was a liar and a cheat and said first of all that he wasn’t after the throne, oh dear me no, whatever gave you that impression? And then he turned round and said, Surprise! I lied! So William gave him a poke in the eye to prove that liars never prosper. 

Rather like in TinTin, the English are depicted with wide moustaches. They’re the medieval equivalent of the baddies in black hats. 

The horses are wonderful, prancing, falling, hooves aloft and flailing: and pretty much as horses continued to be depicted until well into the 19^th century, with all four feet off the ground at once, bouncing across the scene at full stretch. 

The boats are open; you’d have thought the chain mail would rust in the salty air on the Channel crossing. The battles are rather clean – just lopped off limbs lying around bloodlessly. And there is Harold with an arrow in his eye (we’ve talked about boys playing with sharp objects before, some five hundred years earlier: they never listen). For some reason, people like to linger here for a better look, which is more than Harold was getting at the time. 

The audio guide that sounds rather like Edward Fox takes you through the whole thing at a brisk trot. ‘Here in Scene 4… Here in scene 8’, with no mention of the interesting things going on in scenes 5,6, and 7. You get the idea that a coachload of tourists is just about to burst in behind you, so you go with the flow as directed, until you arrive rather breathlessly at the end of the story. William wins, every time. 

But – and this may be because I’m English – I have to wonder: what if Harold had ducked? 

And one final thought: the Normans won at Hastings because they had the best archers. So what happened between then and the Battle of Crecy, when the feared English longbow triumphed?  Is that a case of being hoist with your own petard?  Or, as we say, what goes around comes around; and if you don’t listen to your mother, you’ve only yourself to blame.

©lms 2013

Reality Blog Award

I've been nominated for an award by the lovely Carol Bevitt, at carol-bevitt.blogspot.fr - which is how it appears on my screen, though she's not in .fr but in .uk - the mysteries of modern science.

To earn my award I have to answer some questions, so here goes:

If you could change one thing, what would it be?
What, only one? In this whole world? I'll start close to home.
I have an inordinate ability to put off writing when it's the one thing that gives me most satisfaction and pleasure: why do I do that? Perverse, I suppose. Like my ability to put off exercising when I know I need it for my health. Perverse again. So I think I'll just opt for changing my perversity!

On a national scale, the idiocy of the House of Commons where debate is rarely any more than a bunch of bragging kids blaming the other side for getting it wrong now, or historically, but never saying, 'Well, how about if we all just discussed this rationally and came to a joint conclusion?'

If you could repeat an age, what would it be?
Not sure I would: at any stage in life we are the sum of the years before, so if I went back to 25 or 35, I'd still be the same person. If you're asking when was I happiest, I don't know: what if that time hasn't come yet? Why go back, when I can go forwards?

If the question means, what would I do differently, the answer is nothing - how could I, being the person I was then, without the knowledge I have now? And even knowing what I now know, would I guarantee to get it right? No - I'm human, and the choices are always innumerable. You make the decisions you make at the time, given the information you have at the time.

What one thing really scares you?
Running out of money.

If you could be someone else for a day, who would it be?
Well that's the joy of being a writer (when not procrastinating perversely): I can be anyone I want to be, any time, any day, just by writing in another character's voice. I have a cast of thousands inside me, and I can think like them, and do what they need to do, and use their words, to my little heart's content.

Now I have to nominate someone else's blog for the award - I may add to this list later, but for now, my nomination goes to:
 www.mystripybook.com
©lms 2013

Innocents Abroad

Forty years ago, Brittany Ferries started ferrying people from Plymouth to Roscoff and back again. There was a demand in the far south-west of England for transport to France, without having to trek all the way across the country to the traditional Channel ports of Portsmouth, Folkestone, or Dover. 

At that time, we lived in Plymouth, and it was decided that a week in Brittany – also known as overseas – would be a jolly good idea. Mother’s experience of foreign travel was a weekend taster offered by the same ferry company, undertaken by her and Father, with no French between them beyond the words of ‘All the Nice Girls Aiment  un Matelot’, which I am not totally sure wasn’t an invention of Dad’s. 

This time, there would be two of us who, in theory, knew something about the language: my brother, being nearly three years my senior, (allegedly) knew more than I did, but I was game. I’d been to France before, on a geography trip undertaken in a minibus with our teacher and her husband, whose back gave out halfway up the Massif Central; he had to lie on the floor of the bus every night, and so was denied the thrill of sleeping in the snow in a leaky tent. 

It was a venture into the unknown.  That became clear on the boat. For some reason, the cabins had three berths each, and there were four of us: it was decided unilaterally that the fourth ticket, with which one of us would have to share a cabin with strangers, would go to the man of the party. So off he went, a blazered Englishman abroad, sure of his place in the grand scheme of things. 

Some squeals and a raised voice or two later, he was back. The berth was in a cabin currently occupied by two madames in a state of undress. Red-faced and horrified, he gave me to understand that it would be much better if I were to be their overnight travelling companion. The ladies and I didn’t exchange a single word on the whole crossing. 

We had one of those big, boxy Ford Cortinas, and we hadn’t realised how narrow the roads would be. In the Roscoff part of France, hedges were, and still are, lacking. There was tarmac, there was field, and it would be very easy to slip from one to the other, especially as we would be travelling on the wrong side of the road. 

It was a good thing that cars in France were small and the drivers agile (especially when making those Gallic gestures that say so much so economically.) 

On the stroke of twelve, shops not only closed, they pulled down their shutters in a most unfriendly fashion: the equivalent of waving two commercial fingers in your face, when you are a stranger in a strange land. We spent many a two-hour-long lunchtime traipsing round empty streets, not knowing quite what to do or where to go.  It was all so very alien. 

Language lessons at school hadn’t prepared us for the real Frenchness of a platter of fruits de mer in their original shell attire being demolished and consumed by two stout ladies, or an ordinary man in his worker blues tucking into a plate of oysters for lunch. At that time Vesta Curry and Chicken Chow Mein were exotic, but oysters were swallowed alive.  We were way out of our comfort zone. 

What’s more, men everywhere seemed to be peeing in public, most notably over the quayside at Morlaix. It just wasn’t done, in England. 

It’s curious to look back now, as we plan another crossing on Brittany Ferries with the same brother later this year. The boats are bigger, classier, cruisier: the food is French, and very good. The cabins are two or four berth, with en suite facilities including a shower. This is always the real start of the holiday, the beginning of the adventure, the sailing out onto the ocean wide.  

It’s only the English Channel, or La Manche, depending on which side you’re standing, but that stretch of water is the dividing line that makes France French, and Britain British. The architecture, the roads (not to mention the habit of driving on the wrong side), the people, the food, the closing or non-closing of shops have all developed in isolation because the sea stopped the blurring of boundaries. 

Wherever you start from, you are going abroad. You’re crossing into a foreign land, and a foreign culture. Even the money is still different. Forget school, and just open all your senses.  No matter how many times you make the trip, you’ve still got a lot to learn about what makes us different, and what makes us the same: and thankfully it isn’t the sameness that’s going to stick with you forever afterwards. 

Bon voyage!
 ©lms 2013

A Wasteful Business

Do you ever wonder about post-use plumbing? Do you ever spare a thought for the journey taken by your grey water? Do you just flush and forget? 

Well, I know exactly where everything goes, because we have a brand new drainage system. 

Rural France doesn’t have mains sewerage: parts of it are being connected up to locally centralised systems, but that costs money, and money is in short supply. However, the various drainage inspection bodies around the country go on looking into our domestic arrangements, and grading them like essays. Our last house had an adequate system – that’s the equivalent of a B-: good in parts, but needs editing. This house had an F: go away and start again. They charge you for the privilege of undergoing this mandatory inspection, and the cost varies according to the whim of the governing body: anything from 80€ to 300€. 

Nothing changes: there’s money in waste. Well into the 20^th century, there used to be a man who collected ‘night soil’ from a special container at the bottom of your garden, where you emptied the gazunders (the pot that goes under the bed), and he would take it away and turn it into usable compost matter. In earlier times, the liquid content would be collected by the lady of the house and, after 3 weeks or so in a pot in a little-visited corner of the yard, whilst no-one was looking, it would turn itself into ammonia. She would mix this with wood ash – lye – and strain it through straw, and soak the linens in it. She’d then go and beat the living daylights out of them in a stream, which was just one reason why you did not drink the water. 

Today, away from mains drainage, we have septic tanks. Ours is 3000litres: it lives in a deep hole, so that only the twin covers peep over the soil surface.  There are pipes going into it and out from it, as though it were the beating heart of the house and garden. Which, actually, it is: if your toilet or your drains are blocked, everything stops and panic ensues. You are only a flush away from domestic disaster. 

The upside of having this work done, by a man with a Big Digger, is that we now have a blank canvas of a garden. The tree roots are gone, the remains of a chicken run discovered and removed, and nothing left to mow. I took cuttings of the old roses that had been strangled by nettles and brambles, all of which have rooted (to my less-than-green-fingered amazement).  He Who Does Everything Around Here, who was dreaming of rows of onions and courgettes and beans and sundry edibles, is disappointed – these are not to be grown in the ground within 3 metres of the soakaway which runs under the place where the lawn used to be.  To fit into our garden this had to be done on four 15metre lengths, so accounts for a large area. But he’ll find a way: perhaps he could use some of those pieces of timber that lurk in the workshop for a raised bed? It’s a man thing, it seems, to collect wood at the end of some job, and then never use it in case it’s needed for something else. 

We now know that the old system didn’t have a proper soakaway, but that a large unexplained pipe ran across the courtyard and seems to have dumped the contents into the lane, within a couple of metres of a well. When we were being inspected, we never found this: but as we had to do an archaeological exploration to unearth one tank (500litres, not emptied in 16 years), and to discover that there wasn’t a tank at all for the other house, this isn’t surprising. Where would you dig? Now that the new pipes have been covered up, I’m not exactly sure where they are, and I only saw them yesterday. 

However, I know they’re there, doing the job they were created to do.  One day, some four years from now, we could stand and watch our past lives pass before our very eyes as the tank is emptied out (why do they use transparent pipes for that?); but for now, we can be secure in the knowledge that we’ve earned an A++ this time. 

Now we have to plan a new garden; but we won’t be making a big thing of the water feature.

©lms 2013

Matters Mechanical

My first car was a clapped-out Mini. It had lowered suspension and alloy wheels, and was a strange shade of orange. I made all my mistakes in that car, after passing my test and being officially allowed out on the roads to play with the other hooligans. (He Who Does Everything Around Here believes that I’m still a hooligan behind the wheel, but I beg to differ.) The good thing was that, being so small, I could mess up the parking and there would always be room around me, no matter what the angle (and I did leave a note for the owner of that car that wasn’t quite as far over as I thought). 

She served her purpose – she kept me out of the rain, carried my shopping, and did the school run. She changed my life. I called her Edna the Inebriate Mini, and I was very fond of her, right up until the day I was preparing her for an MOT. It seemed to me that if you presented a clean, well-cared-for looking car, it would do a lot better than an obvious heap of junk, so I washed her and polished her, and hoovered her out – and sucked up half the floor panel on the driver’s side. 

Edna had to go to a new home, where a young man learned to weld on her. I’m not sure what he did, but she ended up being called Barney, and came to a final stop nose-down in a ditch. 

I was reminded of this the other day when I read a story about two retired farmers (though that seems to be a contradiction in terms); brothers – you only had to look at the nose – who fifty years ago put their work horse out to pasture and bought a tractor. 

Fifty years ago means 1963. Carnaby Street, The Beatles, The Mini, the E-type Jaguar; and in this part of France, people farming with horsepower. 

Their new tractor was a revelation. They could do everything the horse had done, at twice the speed. They could use it for forestry, for ploughing, for harvesting. It revolutionised their lives: and they respected it, as they had their horse. After all, without it, and without the horse, they may as well be back in the Middle Ages. 

For fifty years that machine worked their farm, whatever the weather. It had no cab, so it was still fairly brutal work at times, in heat and rain and cold, but it provided the muscle, and they were grateful. 

So much so, that they have celebrated its half-centenary by giving it an overhaul. It’s been repainted, its engine sorted out, everything made to be just as it was when it left the factory – to the tune of some 20,000 euros. 

They wanted to give back something for all those years of loyal service. 

Our sheep-farming neighbour down south had to replace his ancient Czech Zetor tractor (bought in the distant past for 700 francs) that had carried his logs from woodland to farm and then to us, and all the feed for his sheep, and the million and one other things he had used it for (to the point where his doctor told him to get off and walk for the sake of his health. He climbed onto his daughter’s bicycle instead). He went for another old machine, because it would do what he wanted. He didn’t want to pay for a cab and a soft seat and suspension, or shiny green paint: he just wanted an engine to pull and carry. 

The value of a thing isn’t just in the monetary worth; it lies in its ability to do what you need it to do. When times are hard, maybe that’s something we should rediscover.  Forget built-in obsolescence: bring back the repair man and the spare parts stockist. A bad workman may blame his tools, but a good one will respect them.  If he respects them highly, maybe he’ll buy them a 50th birthday present.

©lms 2013