Season's greetings

Our crêche of santons this year - the traditional provençal clay figures were given to us some 25 years ago by the twinning association in Die, a connection which led to our being in France

We have written a lot of cards, some real ones though more than usual this year have been electronic (thank you Jacquie Lawson!)  But otherwise we have begin an enjoyable round of tv watching with the box set of the 3rd series of The Crown pronounced, as our dear friend Francis often reminded us, 'the Cra-een', and so rhyming with Queen as it should!  we (Mary especially) had low expectations but we have been absorbed, I think it is fair to say, by the storylines and by very good acting.  Olivia Colman did a really great job as Her Maj, and many other actors were equally impressive.

There are some really interesting themes, including the story of Princess Alice mother of the Duke of Edinburgh, about whom we learnt only a couple of weeks ago through a Channel 5 documentary.  Coming at the end of a long period for us of reading about the history of the monarchy over the centuries we are very well aware that films like this are just stories.  Who knows how much of this or any story is 'true', but as Pilate asks 'what is truth'?  The versions of events here are plausible, and if we reflect on the current political scene we realise how difficult it is to rely on 'news'.  So parts of The Crown may distort actual events, and we shall never know, but some surprising parts have an unexpected interest - for instance, the sympathetic relationship between the Queen and Harold Wilson.

Incidentally, the documentary on 'the making' of the series was also revealing - the huge amount of research needed, the vast array of costumes and props and the mind-blowing attention to detail are all really impressive.  And this theme of detail is a link to my next subject, football.  Because a writer's  encyclopaedic knowledge of games, players and the internal workings of teams and leagues was as impressive and unimaginable to me as the detail of royal events and the stories that describe them.

As the Festive season approaches the regularity of top-flight football matches in England goes up too.  As a Liverpool fan I have just read Anthony Quinn's Klopp: my Liverpool romance - not really a biography, but an appreciative review, of Jürgen Klopp's path into the role of Manager of the club.  Like expectations of the royal story, mine of this book were not very high, but I've been impressed and interested to read the kind of sports book I'd never have expected to enjoy.  It is nicely written, an absorbing insight into the way football managers' lives work, and coming as it does at a moment when the team is stamping its authority on the premiership again, it gives me a bit of a warm glow.

Local papers often surprise me.  In England, we often read endless reports of flower shows and French papers are not altogether different, plenty of detail of local clubs and societies, and of local villains!  But tucked into most editions of Midi Libre are serious bits like this reminder of the dangerous lives of journalists, defended (as here) against arbitrary restrictions for doing their job and uncovering their version of truth.  What is truth, again?  Here in France the President has made his own headlines by apparently trying to restrict reporting of police brutality, legal restrictions on what may be filmed an so on.  The fine line is evidently a movable one too, so for us watching events and finding truth in, say, Armenia where a gruesome war in the enclave of Nagorno Karabakh has led to atrocities, suffering and abuses, is almost impossible.  As I've said before, we'd planned to go there and think of our friends and their families caught in a bleak midwinter there. All that on top of an awful pandemic situation in an area with very poor health services.  This article talks of the gulf - the fossé or ditch - between speech and action in the defence of liberty, and has a bleak link in imagery with the real muddy trenches and traps still being dug on real battlefields in a forlorn attempt to obstruct modern weapons like drones...

A change of tone with a cartoon, a star or two, and two of our own stars, the dogs

Tomorrow if the weather allows Jupiter and Saturn will appear in more or less the same place near the southwestern horizon - a 'Christmas Star' effect which we may miss because of cloud!  but they will seem close enough together in the early evening for the next week or so.  Maybe for the 'wise men' of old, this was their truth...