Briefing for a descent into Fat Cow Ravine

The last month has seen me frittering away my life at work and fending of various bureaucratic assaults and now it has got cold. Minus five last night. I know this because I am a particularly sad individual who has a weather station. Also, I was foolish enough to get up at seven this morning thinking I could get some work done. Nope! Back in bed by eight and 'kin cold to boot. Better hurry up and get the house finished before the snow comes...


Putting all that behind me and a bacon butty or two after twas time to go walkabout. I haven't been out for a while on a long stroll so thermos in hand I decided to enter into the Ravine de Grosse Vache. Yes it does exist and very jolly too. Descending from 900 metres to the Allier river is a rewarding experience at this time of year :


Actually, there was not a fat cow in sight; she'd obviously been sold off for a few beans which would explain the long climb out of the valley. A lovely place and a bit of an escape from EU subventions and power crazed peasants with mighty earth moving equipment. Fortunately, it is not all noise and bleedin' progress...


Above - a perfect example of post-industrial intermediate technology for when the oil runs out - The all new Phillips concrete trough and basin washing machine. All we need to do now is bring back bonded labour...

Seasons? What seasons...

Yeah, I know that I have used this title somewhere before. Summer must have ended even before it began - June seemed like autumn and July and August just fell into a grey and drizzly hole. Well, despite a day or two when the temperature peaked at 35°C. So, who's complaining?



The only reason I've go time to write this this morning is that I am bent double rather like a paper clip. I would like to think this is what happens when trying to imitate a French truffle sow, but as one will note from the photos they be not truffles but girolles. Now, there was a time when I wouldn't have known a girolle from a pink marshmallow, but today I do and have lived to consume a large plate of them. Delicious, far more so than other typically French things such as oysters and snails - both of which taste like snot and so are heavily "perfumed" with garlic and the like. Why ruin good garlic?


Yes, I am a culinary philistine - which I always thought was one who ate stamps! I'll eat anything except if it comes from McDo or resembles slime. To this end I am grateful for the "boucané" (look it up) which, with an aubergine, a heap of massale and a couple of garden chillies livened up a boring Sunday and a bad back. The bad back? Trying to renovate the house before winter sets in - or rather before it gets that cold that I need heat...

Save the planet!

So, whilst all you trendy young things were out saving the planet and rockin' with AL Gore, I was doing my bit for Mother Earth by not doing anything in particular. There is a divine natural paradox - a sustainable system is one that is static - well, in evolutionary terms, something that is perpetually evolving is not static and, therefore not sustainable. An example would be the Khoi San of the great and bushy Kalahari desert. Hunted to near extinction by their "brothers" of every other colour and complexion they have lived for eons in the Kalahari and lived in what can only be described as symbiosis with all other living and organic things that are found there. We, cannot do that. For us there is no golden age, no going back. We are all too fat and greedy and if one thinks that going to a concert will bring redemption and change the world one is terribly mistaken. Geldoff didn't save Ethiopia, Archer couldn't save the Kurds, poverty has not been made history and Al Gore is not going to save the planet. As I have plaintively bleated before, it is not about saving the planet, but about saving a spoilt and bloated part of humanity.

The Khoi-San could be an example to us all, but and it is a big BUT we are content to follow examples more relevant to our own sense of sustainability. A couple of klicks away from the Khoi-San is the great Makgadikgadi salt pans - an old lake bed which was once larger than the now lake Victoria. Whilst "we" were bopping to reduce emissions the BBC were getting into trouble by driving fast and silly cars across the pans and leaving their own marks in the great book of global awareness. This is important because after all the noise and litter from a few concerts has faded away the tyre tracks left in the soda ash will be there for a while longer. Drive, sorry walk, across to the Namib desert just a bit to the East and you will find ox cart tracks amongst others that have been there for well over a century. Voila! The tracks of our follies are left on the Earth long after the tracks of our sad apologies and crocodile tears of awareness.

Seems to some of you that this is just a bitter and jealous old man who is just whining because he wasn't invited to Wembley of Tokyo or what. True. But what was i doing to save the planet?

I was at a rock concert of course!

Great sky spider of summer

Well, it took a while but eventually summer arrived and the great sky spider descended on a sunbeam - Sheeeeeeet! Who writes this stuff?

Two spiders

With all this wet and unseasonal weather at least one has the chance to get out and about in wellies and look at the shape shifting sky. I like skies. Skies are proof - amongst everything else in the known universe - that gods and/or goddesses come in groups, or, at least, pairs. Nothing like a bit of dualism before breakfast and after a night with Heraclitus. Let's admit that monotheism is a bit boring and far too one sided. What we need in religion is more tension and less strife. There can be no harmony in monoface, monastic, monosyllabic, monoglot, monotheism - even if they pretend to be dualists by proposing the devil or shaitan, the West or the East as the other face of their reality.

Where does all this drivel come from? Well, the sky. We've been having a few storms lately and wanting to get out to take the air meant that one is, naturally, caught up in one or two. When the rain is not too heavy, sneak out an eye and then a lens and see what a wonderful dance the impression of dualism makes on the retina, or two.

Rumour has it that there are two great spiders continually at play above our heads. One weaves webs of light and the other webs of cloud and rain. There is no war; this is a weaving of the chain of being, a harmony of tensions - the resulting dance beauty for the eye and grace for the soul...

... and if we are but flies playing around the shit of human endeavour our escape is to be caught in the web of becoming, devoured by the great sky spiders freeing our souls to fall as rain or sunlight. Either that or just get wet...

Cold

I did not expect that living in the centre and down a bit of France would be tropical but this mantis is indeed suffering. OK April was the hottest since my gran was conceived in a cane field, but May was the wettest with only 88% of expected sunshine (whatever that may mean) and June is...

...June is not. This morning it was 2.4°C and there be frost on the hay! Fortunately, my tomatoes and the sacred chillies are safe in their walled enclave. Meanwhile I am keeping my socks on. Meanwhile again and the other side of the Alps people are taking theirs off...

...such are the mysteries of weather.

Some things such as, cloud cover, rain and the cold cannot, however, stop Nature and whilst i'm a'grumbil' and a moanin' cousins of the mantis have been enjoying there short lives whilst the rest of us bemoan our long lives...


The air is fresh - respire

PS MR Anony mouse who didn't like the rant on the French presidential election should have read the rest of the dribble coz' no me not like Royale who i believe is a vacuous old bourgeois, but that doesn't mean I like Sarko - read the blog and no I am not a boring chair ridden university prof - I just would like to be. Alas i am only boring and bleuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrkkk! Besides, I did suggest that one go and read that misogynist Proudhon but if you prefer English anarch go read Godwin; if not make it all up yourself and write a blog...

carbon upsetting

I've been thinking globally. So, the Queen gets back from the States and her trip is to be carbon offsetted - nice to see the jet-set getting off-set. As a head of state she certainly has her responsibilities - the latest being the war in Iraq; funny how she never mentioned it on her trip to the States. Perhaps, in the next few months we will see the emergence of a plan for moral offsetting. This will be a karmic plan to save the moral planet and all those poor countries can become rich by accepting the moral burden of the foreign policies of the rich and decadent. Oh! Of course they are already doing that and paying for it in terms of lives lost and ruined.

The Christian community have been doing the equivalent for years and the rich have been forever buying their way into the kingdom of heaven - Kingdom? Presumably the Queen has a free pass...

Meanwhile the Chinese authorities are complaining that their people are not respecting the one child per family rule. The whole world should have a one child rule - save the planet! Bollocks, it is not about saving the planet. It never was about saving the planet. The Planet, as in Great Mother Earth doesn't care, it is amoral. Did no one read James Lovelock? The planet will exist in some state long after we have all gone. It is all about saving humanity - or more pointedly a predominantly white middle class male version of what humanity and the planet is. The Earth is our sandpit and we have chosen to crap in the sandpit because we don't want to share it with anyone or anything else.

Less people means less consumption and less pollution - obviously this is not good capitalism, but capitalism is an idea not a forest or a species on the verge of extinction. People are carbon based life forms maybe it is "we" that should be offset?

Some while back the authorities in Singapore were worried that the "educated" were not reproducing as they, realistically, saw it as a silly thing to do, or want to do. Various measures were introduced to encourage those with a university education and above to copulate in order to raise the intelligence of the nation. Thus, revealing Nature's fiendish plot and the double edged sword of population control. If one is intelligent one doesn't procreate and, therefore, population is controlled. If one does procreate without limits the lowest common denominator kicks in and we drown in the world of our own stupidity. Add to this a world economic system that encourages stupidity beyond consumption and you can guess the results.

What I really wanted to get back to was my original thought for this morning - Just who is going to carbon offset the Iraq war and the next one and the next one...

Reading all this you would be forgiven for thinking that I live in a tree, eat leaves and think that the bicycle is the work of the devil. What, is he a hypocrite? More of that latter.