Chewing the fat

Aigues Mortes, one of our favourite local places, a nice aerial view

 For a long time we had been wary of saturated fats - such as palm oil - in food.  Apart from clogging arteries, planting oil palms ruins tropical forests.  Gradually you see less palm oil on labels, but the visit of our friend Juliet alerted us to another ubiquitous oil passing under the radar - rapeseed, known here in France as colza.  It may not clog arteries but it can have adverse effects on the digestion etc. of people sensitive to it.  And once we started to look at labels, it turns up in a load of places you would not expect.  Our favourite example is in preserved olives!!  Neither of us luckily suffers adverse effects, but we now realise you need to be wary.

We are coming to the end of our welcome procession of visitors - Judi, Alex and their friends depart on their onward travels this weekend having confirmed the good quality of the nearby gîte where they are staying.  Travel is never straightforward - yesterday on a short excursion to Arles they had a tyre blowout in their hire car and had to spend time getting it fixed.

At our age life is always surrounded by absences and memories - neither shadows nor ghosts, but rather warm memories of those who are no longer alive.  Some were close friends or family, but others have touched our lives in various ways, like Jacky Riou whom we first encountered as the proprietor of a hotel long-closed in the town centre, but then until very recently as the chef at La Terrasse where we often ate, especially if we knew he was on duty!

satirising Marine Le Pen but the figure could just as well be Georgia Meloni 

Our hearts sink at the rising tide of populist right-wing politics in Europe, and having recently caught up with Andrea Camilleri's fictional detective Salvo Montalbano based in Sicily, who frequently stumbles (literally and  metaphorically) across migrants washed up from the island of Lampedusa, off the coast of  Tunisia we are reminded often of the sorry lives of many refugees.  I was asked recently how one could distinguish between economic migrants and others - to me human need is paramount, and the intervention of 'smugglers' clouds the water.  As we see in the UK and in Europe, politics is ever ready to redefine 'deserving'; in the absence of safe secure routes people who feel desperate will choose dangerous ones.  And climate change drives even more people to desperation.   I am deeply grateful that our own free choice to migrate has been well-supported, but I can also see how political change could change our feelings of security.

a sculpture symbolising the plight of  refugees in the Mediterranean

One excellent book I have begun to read is by Georgina Sturge, a former government statistician.  The book is Bad Data: How Governments, Politicians and the Rest of Us Get Misled by Numbers   and one example she quotes is the Cobra effect: "as the British government in India in the late nineteenth century learnt, offering a literal reward for people to catch and cull poisonous cobras led to a new enterprise of cobra-farming. Farmers would bring them in by the wheelbarrow-load to claim the money – but at the same time cobras now posed a greater threat to the public in their greater numbers. Such an unintended shift in behaviour in response to incentives is called, after this unfortunate episode, the Cobra Effect.". Watch out for snakes, in the grass of otherwise! Another example - "In nineteenth-century China, European palaeontologists would pay the locals for every dinosaur bone or fossil they brought them. As a result, people started smashing bones into smaller pieces to reap greater rewards. No one said they had to be whole or in the same state as found."

Another passing visit recently was from Christine and Jean-Michel Jacob (this is his sculpture on our hall wall) just retired from their wine business in Burgundy and on their way to a deserved break in Spain. We shall miss their wonderful wines but hope to see them en passant from time to time.

A final view of Aigues Mortes in the sunshine