Long goodbyes

As I write we have just enjoyed a brief visit from our son and daughter-in-law from the UK - they have busy lives and we are very pleased when they can spare the time to visit us.  Now we are planning a family get-together in Normandy at Easter, and looking forward to a visit from Judi from the USA in the summer.

We are often reminded of our advancing age and infirmities, and of course we try to remain positive.  In any case we realise how much better off we still are than many friends and family members with illnesses and helath problems.  And we have lost valued friends here this year, including Clive Almond who was HM Ambassador to the Congo in the 80s and 90s.  Clive was the latest of our friends here whom we through the conversation group which has existed in various guises since we joine it in 2007.  An inevitable conseqence of aging is that many good friends now live on only in memory.

Our reading in French recently has been about French history, much of it around the German occupation in the second world war (we have just finished the book  La vie des français sous l'occupation by Henri Amouroux), so our minds have often been on the old soldier Philippe Pétain.  He had acquired the status of national hero in the first world war, and then set up the Nazi-tolerated national government in France, based in the spa town on Vichy in North-west France.  We have a lovely set of clay figures (santons) given to us by our Die twinning partners, a crib scene we set our every year (to which, as you can see some spurious extras have been added) and reading Neil Acherson's account of Pétain's trial (he was convicted of treason after the war but reprieved by de Gaulle) I was intrigued to read that in one village  at least "families at Christmas decorate their crib with santons – figurines of the Holy Family, the three kings, the shepherds, an angel. But the old man was holding out an extra santon. It was a tiny statuette of Marshal Pétain. He is leaning on a stick, wearing his immaculate marshal’s uniform with the Verdun medal. His eyes are a childish blue, his hair and moustache snowy white: a perfect grandfather for the ‘enfant Jésus’ and perhaps for a certain French generation. Had he not promised them in 1940, in their hour of bewilderment, ‘the gift of my person’?

Quite a few families in the village added a little marshal to their crib, that first Christmas after France’s surrender to Nazi Germany. It had always been a conservative place: royalist against the Republic, deeply Catholic, defensive of its Provençal language and customs, patriotic to the last drop of blood (and today it votes pretty solidly for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National). But by 1943, things looked very different. Hitler was losing the war. The Germans had occupied Vichy France as well as the north, and Pétain, its head of state, had done nothing to stop them. The Resistance (once dismissed as feckless Red troublemakers) was growing much stronger, and the hunting down of ‘collaborators’ seemed just round the corner. That Christmas, the last before the Liberation, the Holy Family had no little china marshals to protect them."

as Epiphany approaches the wise me join the others around the manger - theatre in miniature

Our conversation groups continue - twice a week now, in members' homes.  We have made good friends in this way over many years.  We were delighted that Sophie and Brayton, now back home in Chicago, have finally overcome bureaucracy and taken the next step towards French residency.  They have a lovely old home in Uzès.

Understanding the earlier history around the French Revolution is a more complex business. Not just one revolution but several with gaps of monarchy etc. in between  Hilary Mantel has written a long and excellent book A place of greater safety, a novel set in the  revolutionary Paris of the late 18th century, which I have not yet finished, but this passage struck me "ALL DAY, and far into the night, traffic rumbled through narrow and insufficient streets. Carriages flattened him against walls. The escutcheons and achievements of their owners glowed in coarse heraldic tints; velvet-nosed horses set their feet daintily into the city filth. Inside, their owners leaned back with distant eyes. On the bridges and at the intersections coaches and drays and vegetable carts jostled and locked their wheels. Footmen in livery hung from the backs of carriages to exchange insults with coalmen and out-of-town bakers. The problems raised by accidents were solved rapidly, in cash, according to the accepted tariff for arms, legs and fatalities, and under the indifferent eyes of the police. On the Pont-Neuf the public letter-writers had their booths, and traders set out their goods on the ground and on ramshackle stalls. He sorted through some baskets of books, secondhand: a sentimental romance, some Ariosto, a crisp and unread book published in Edinburgh, The Chains of Slavery by Jean-Paul Marat... Dogs ran in packs, scavenging around the market. Every second person he met, it seemed, was a builder’s labourer, covered in plaster dust. The city was tearing itself up by the roots. In some districts they were levelling whole streets and starting again. Small crowds gathered to watch the more tricky and spectacular operations. The labourers were seasonal workers, and poor. There was a bonus if they finished ahead of schedule, and so they worked at a dangerous pace, the air heavy with their curses and the sweat rolling down their scrawny backs.".  She was a fine writer.

My other recent reading has included, for the 3rd time, the vast panoply of Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo books.  She had a boundless eye for historical detail, and her characters are wrapped in a swathe of historical detail across all of Surope and parts of Africa and Asia too.  I always end up realising how narrow our British view of history is, and that includes a very English focus excluding the Scottish perspective she excels in.  I need to start hunting out other series to follow on with.

On top of the Trump re-election, British politics and legal processes are in the eye of a reactionary storm which cannot be teased away from American populism, prompted by Musk and Trump. The silly ‘oh yes it is, oh no it isn’t’ dialogue distracts from serious thought and concerns. Three things are on my mind - the ongoing scandal of the Pelicot story in France, the growing uncertainty over Lucy Letby’s guilt, and this old and well-dealt with history of child abuse which has little to do with racial stereotypes and a lot to do with male perversion. A Pelicot cartoon

A couple of recent Private Eye cartoons

I have become a great fan of photographer Andy Rouse whose photos of my favourite animal, the tiger are here

Another Andy Rouse photo (reminds you of the Tiger one in the gallery)

One of Mary's favourite animals is the kingfisher (which she says she keep just missing while others spot them) - here is a video which is beautiful and amazing

We have just paid 9€ for delivery of a late Christmas card enclosing some photocopied crosswords!!  Life is full of surprises...  And final thoughts for this post: