The end of summer...

The summer is clinging on here - daytime temperatures over 30°, nights still a warm 20°, but we have just had a princely 11mm of rain - there have been floods in nearby hilly areas - so the garden is a little less brown.  Evening skies often amazing.  After family visits we still have friends to come, one from the UK this month, from the USA next.    Travel never gets easier - even without strikes and border holdups there are always unexpected hiccups - one friend stuck overnight in an airport hotel because of a technical glitch on their plane, another obliged to postpone her trip because her car would not start.

Our lives in the past few months have often focused on television sport - cycling with world championships gave us insights in extraordinary feats of balance and acrobatics on bmx, road races and cross-country in Scotland, as well as grand tours not all of which we can see on French tv (our UK satellite link has been hit-and-miss over the summer but I'll struggle with technology again soon to see if the atmospherics have lessened) and now the Rugby World Cup, given wall-to-wall coverage here in the host nation.  The matches in the pool stages have been a mixed bag with England struggling to reach levels of past glories, and Fiji triumphing brilliantly against un-mighty Australia.  That will take us well through October.

One other major activity is reading.  Mary's is often in French though she is now plunging back into Dickens, mine mostly in English, both of us often if not always using our Kindles (easier to hold in bed and less likely to cause damage if they slip out of a sleepy hand!).  Much of my interest is in non-fiction - I have just begun the government statistician Georgina Sturge's Bad data (which is more entertaining than Daniel Levitin's A field guide to lies and statistics which I began a year ago) but have not yet finished.  I have enjoyed Peter Hain's  A Pretoria boy which links with the experience of friends and family of South Africa, and the stories are chilling at times although like many politicians he can be a bit pedestrian and pompous.  It is a sobering story all the same - like the cold war, apartheid is a scarcely credible phase in world affairs seen from a few years afterwards, and the levels of inhuman cruelty in both defy belief.  I also went back in time to the 30s and a book I'd never read, George Orwell's The road to Wigan pier which is in one sense a social historical curiosity (designed as a policy wake-up call), but among other things it gives a graphic picture of the underground world of coal miners which must still be close to true today, beautifully written.

Ferdinand Mount is an author we've discovered via the London Review of  Books.  His Big Caesars and little Caesars is prompted by his distaste for Boris Johnson but looks at other usual suspects like Stalin and Hitler, and less usual ones like Harold Wilson with a lot of much older historical characters thrown in. 

Then it was our son Edward's interest in Mary's father's army experiences in Burma that led me to the very readable and detailed A war of empires by Robert Lyman, an excellent and thorough account of the often overlooked far eastern part of the second world war.  I've read a lot about the area of central Europe around Ukraine, Poland and Russia which is so much in the news, including some while ago the chilling Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder (whose Ukraine blog we listen to from time to time), and recently I have read Daniel Finkelstein's Hitler, Stalin, mum and dad which is an excellent and moving family memoir, and Bernard Wasserstein's A small town in Ukraine.  These touch on the lives of close friends whose families suffered in the Holocaust.  Another memoir I appreciated was Bernard Wasserstein's A small town in Ukraine which highlights the shifting national boundaries and harsh switchback between Nazi Germany and the USSR as it affected his family, and the gradually obliterated local roots .  I have also dipped into David Baddiel's Jews don't count.

On a lighter note, with local connections, I read Adam Thorpe's Notes from the Cevennes, entertaining and very well written too, about an Englishman living in the Hérault - a step up from Peter Mayle's popular French output.  Our musical interests were reflected in Stephen Hough's Enough: scenes from childhood which also touch on his identity as a gay man.

I also enjoy fiction, especially historical novels - I read Ken Follett's 4 books in the Kingsbridge series some time ago.  Like many such authors his research is excellent and his understanding of how mediaeval cathedrals were built led to his being asked to write the brief Notre Dame, non-fiction of course, around the recent fire and the rebuilding now going on.

For lighter relief I've discovered thrillers by A K Turner and her alter ego Anya Lipska (set in London and around, all with Polish aspects based on personal experience).  James Runcie (son of the ex-archbishop) uses his family Anglican experience (with hair-raising accounts of climbing over Cambridge colleges in the dark)  in the very entertaining Grantchester mysteries.  Gentle sleuthing with a human face.  Interestingly after the main sequence he wrote a prequel about his wartime soldiering in Italy which has its serious side.

One of our longstanding favourites as an author is Alexander McCall Smith.  We buy most of his main series (Mma Ramotswe, 44 Scotland Street and  Isabel Dalhousie) as paper books, but dip into other things like The exquisite art of getting even and Varg in love (straying into scandi-noir) on Kindles.  He just cannot stop writing, and I have not found a real duff yet.

Our twice-weekly conversation group, now a good mixture of Anglo-American and French/francophone people, combines a couple of hours on language and then another couple over apéros and lunch, rotating between a number of members' homes.  Between 10 and 20 people split into 2 or 3 groups, one of which is conversation in French and English (mixed) while the other, ours, reads French texts and translates them into English.  Our two texts for the past 6 months or more have been Graham Robb's Une histoire de Paris par ceux qui l'ont fait and La vie des français sous l'occupation by Henri Amouroux.  Robb is an Oxford academic who writes in English - his French wife is the translator.  He is more of a literary narrator than a dry historian but, like his book on (the whole of) France this is full of well-researched detail that tests one's powers of memory as you trace various stories in discusive detail.  Looking at French history led me to read more about the wartime period and, among other things, I read through Julian Jackson's France on trial which deals with the post-war trial of Marshal Pétain collaborationist leader of the French government under occupation.  He was a towering hero of the first world war in France, and mistakenly thought his country would be best served by getting in bed with the Nazis - De Gaulle in exile had different ideas.

This has turned into quite a long piece, but it has helped me to bring together a lot of this year's preoccupations chez moi/chez nous.  Enough for now!

The view from Marc & Flo's garden, another conversation venue, and some of my favourite birds