MOOC Done

Walking today:     3.7km.   Walking MTD: 83.7km.      Walking YTD: 83.7km
Swimming today: 1.35km.  Swimming MTD: 9.05km. Swimming YTD: 9.05km



I finished the OpenLearn MOOC last night, to remind you it was called "In the Night Sky: Orion"

As the first time I've done any proper study for a long time it was a good place to start, a subject I'd covered at University and had an interest in since then. I probably knew about 50% of the course content and the rest comprised some new material and some updates of things I had learnt previously but have changed since (astro-physics is a fast-moving field).

There's no qualification or exams but there was an informal end of course test, I got 29 out of 30 (forgot what happens to a white dwarf at the end of its life - answers by email please).

The Orion Nebula - birthplace of stars

I've signed onto a couple more MOOCs starting later in the year; Cyber Security and Hadrian's Wall. That's quite a broad range of interests .....

How many men does it take to plant a tree?

Walking today: 3.8km

I've written before about the Amenagement Fonciere - the land re-organisation in the commune that aims to deal with the consequences of the Napoleonic succession laws - and the full report and proposals were published nearly three years ago. As well as reorganising land parcels (we bought a chaotic bundle of ten separate plots in 2009 including three that split the house and barn between different plots) it also allowed land owners to remove certain hedges and talus to make field sizes more logical and specified new voies rurales and new talus to be planted and created at the cost of the commune.

Understandably the farmers enthusiastically pulled down the hedgerows as soon as they were allowed to, the rural roads were installed by contractors last summer and the new planting was scheduled for last autumn.

We knew that a new talus was specified to be planted along the small stream line that runs across Dominique's field at the bottom of our land, the stream is about 30 metres from our boundary. A couple of weeks ago the contractors came to see me to check on access to the field, I re-directed them towards Dominique and a couple of days later a mini digger arrived and proceeded to dig a series of holes along the stream line - this took all day.

Then last week Dominique came to see me to say that the contractor had found it was difficult to plant in the specified position (unsurprisingly it seems the holes had filled up with water) and wanted to know if we would object if the planting was moved up to our boundary. Well yes, actually we would, the open view to the south across three fields was one of the things that attracted us to La Basse Cour and really we'd prefer it if the new planting wasn't done at all.

Yesterday I was working in the garden when I noticed a group of people in wellingtons peering into the holes. There were seven of them and I found Dominique afterwards to find out what had been going on. The men (they were all men) were the contractor, his foreman, the géometre who had managed the Amenagement, a representative from the water company, three members of the local council and Dominique - eight people.

Dominique said that they had realised that the planting was in a zone humide (a river catchment area for the lake where the local water supply is drawn from). How that was overlooked for 3 years after the plan was published I don't know, Dominique said it didn't prevent the planting but made it much more difficult and that alternative positions on his land, or maybe no talus at all had been discussed. I've partly modelled my developing Gallic shrug on Dominique's - the one he gave when I asked when the work would be done showed me how much more work I still have to do ;o)

So, how many men to plant a tree? Eight, but of course as we are in France the tree may not get planted at all.

Shock News Story - It's Winter

Walking Today:  3.7km

Where were you on 12th November last year?

Did you read the Daily Express on that day with it's unique take on weather science?

If you missed it the headline was:

POLAR VORTEX WARNING: Latest winter weather models show UK faces MONTHS of heavy snow

Well, maybe I missed something, perhaps I've missed the MONTHS of heavy snow ..... or maybe it's just another example of cheap shock-horror journalism and bad science.

When we bought La Basse Cour Nicolas, the sales agent, said "The climate's nice here, it never snows. Well, not often". 

So it was somehow appropriate that after the sale had gone through we had to battle through snow-covered Normandie on back roads (thanks only to the CRV's four-wheel drive) to collect the keys from Nicolas.

It snowed here in 2010, 2011 and 2012. The winters of 2012/3 and 2013/4 were wet and very wet respectively, Gérard put our roof on in temperatures of -8C in 2012 but said it was much, much worse in 1984 when he couldn't work for nearly three weeks - and if you've met Gérard you'll know what an anathema that would be to him.

In the summer it's lovely here but we do have winter weather. It catches out people who come here in the summer, love the area, buy a house and are shocked to find that, not only is there a winter here, almost everything shuts down and the locals disappear into their thick walled houses for whole weeks.

Fortunately we've had - and still have - too much work to do to be put off by a bit of weather. 

The cats however get increasingly difficult to find unless you know the warmest places (do cats have inbuilt Infra-Red detectors .... ?). So today when a murky morning gave way to a cold, wet and windy day Jess

and Pip 

headed for their favourite spots next to the Logburners.

From our Correspondants

Walking Today:     3.8km
Swimming Today: 1.25km

The blog post today is derived from recent correspondence (or at least emails) from readers and an update or two on previous posts.

It's been pointed out that talus (pronounced "Tal-oose" - at least around here) is a term for a medieval castle defence fortification. It's a sloping wall at the base of a castle curtain wall, similar in angle of course to the slope on our talus at the back of La Basse Cour. Maybe not a surprise as much of military defence architecture originated in France and was then transported to England by Guillaume Le Conquerant and his descendents or to southern Europe via the crusades.

The picture of the Moon I posted has taken on a life of its own in the Twittersphere via the #FLOrion15 hashtag of the MOOC I am taking. It's still being quoted, re-tweeted and favorited and was mentioned in the week four course email from Professor Grady, I've gained a few more followers too (still trying to work out who Lolo2003 is though .....).

Charlie is an elegant horse but he's now been moved from the field next to us - Pip has lost his friend and has unfortunately, on the rebound, taken to fighting other cats up trees.

And the chainsaw has responded to its busy January by breaking its brake band, so it is back at Mecadom (the mechanics) just two weeks after being serviced. Hmmmm When I took it in today there were two gendarme cars outside, there were three police inside investigating the theft of a Voiture Sans Permis (VSP) from the compound. For UK readers a VSP is one of those ridiculously small two cylinder, two seat cars, very slow "cars" that can be driven legally without a full driving licence. Can't think the thieves got very far or very fast in that!

A Treatise on the Noble Art of Coppicing

Walking today: 3.7km

Coppicing, the practice of cutting trees down to the ground every 5 - 20 years and harvesting them like a crop, is a very old technique. Some coppiced trees in ancient woodlands are thought to be many hundreds of years old as the process of coppicing keeps the tree young and means that they never die of old age.

The greenwood that Robin Hood knew was most probably managed by coppicing, often using a system called "Coppice and Standard" where isolated high trees are left to grow to maturity to be cut down for constructional timber.

The most usual trees to be coppiced are hazel, oak, chestnut and ash on a cycle from 7 to 15 years depending on the variety and the products required. Most of the trees around the boundary of La Basse Cour hadn't had much attention for a long time before we arrived. We've used professional climbing tree surgeons to tackle the big jobs but everything else has been "fait maison". 

The before picture - the large hazel in the middle is the key tree on this part of the talus

About half way through the work, there are six main stems left at this stage

A cold day, a pile of brash and Barbara in a swiss hat

More of the top growth for eventual burning for ash

Nearly finished - just three main stems left and the "stool" has been cut back to ground level

22 rings so this was a new shoot in 1993 - we were all much younger then ;o)

Final view - exceptionally we left three large poles on this hazel for future harvesting

And Pip came along to help with the work - well sort of

In earlier times the wood would have been used for fuel and the poles burnt for charcoal (a critical ingredient in metal smelting and founding), bark would have been used for tanning animal skins and the finer top growth bundled into faggots to be used as winter fuel by the poorest people.

All the hazels and some of the chestnut, cherry and oak we have are being coppiced; the largest timber has gone to be cut into firewood, we've cut nearly a hundred poles for gardening and construction use, there's a huge bundle of pea sticks for the peas and the rest of the fine growth - brash - has been burnt and we'll use the ash (which is high in potash) in the compost heap and on the garden. We could be even more efficient if we had a high-capacity chipper (expensive) to shred all the finer growth and this could then be used for burning (if we had a special boiler - also expensive ...).

Trees are a carbon-neutral energy source (the carbon liberated in the burning process was originally fixed by the tree from the atmosphere), we probably don't have enough woodland to be fully self-sufficient in wood for energy but the timber we've cut down this week will not probably get burnt until the winter of 2017-8 and next winter we have more major work planned on the remaining mature trees that haven't been worked on so that wood should take us through to 2020. By which time we'll be ready to start harvesting some of the wood from the trees we've coppiced this winter - the symmetry of this whole cycle really attracts me

Le Comptage des Oiseaux des Jardins - Garden Bird Survey 2015

In Brittany, as in the UK, this weekend has seen the 2015 Garden Bird survey being carried out. We took part this year (from the comfort of the barn behind the glass) and it was useful for us as we've had to learn a lot of vocabulary for French bird names.

So, here's our list from 17:00 - 18:00 today, in French and English:

French Name	Number Seen	English Name
Troglodyte Mignon	1	Wren
Sittelle Torchepot	2	Nuthatch
Mésonge Bleu	6	Blue Tit
Mésonge Charbonnier	5	Great Tit
Merle Noir	4	Blackbird
Pigeon Ramier	1	Pigeon
Rougegorge Familier	1	Robin
Pinson Des Arbres	2	Chaffinch
Verdier d'Europe	2	Greenfinch
Etourneau sensonnet	6	Starling
Moineau Domestique	1	House Sparrow

Breaking News

The daily paper with the largest circulation in France is not Le Monde, nor Le Figaro but Ouest France. Managing at the same time to report international news as well as local commune events (on the billboard in Noyal-Muzillac at present is bingo organised by the Basketball Club) it sometimes manages to transpose the sublime with the fairly odd.

So, on the day that Mario Draghi finally committed the ECB to implement Quantitative Easing, Ouest France didn't quite see that as the most important news item:

Well done Margriet!

Counting the Birds

Walking Today:     3.7km   Walking Month to Date:     65.0km Walking Year to Date:      65.0km
Swimming Today: 1.15km Swimming Month to Date: 6.45km  Swimming Tear to Date: 6.45km


This weekend is the Brittany Garden Bird Census (also in the UK through the RSPB). We will be counting all the avian visitors to the garden and recording them, it will be good for our French vocabulary too.

Jess has started her count early and has spent many hours in the recent cold weather sitting at the window watching the birds coming to the feeders:

Sunset Pictures

The thick cloud parted late this afternoon to give us a cold clear sunset. The moon was new yesterday and Venus is directly below it and very bright in the early evening sky:

The moon showed a clear view of the "Old Moon in the New Moon's Arms". The small bright crescent of the moon is reflecting the sunlight, the larger dimmer part of the moon is reflecting earthlight.

Timber tales

Walking today: 5.1km

Short of time tonight so just a few pictures of the renovated talus at the back of LBC for today:

Coppiced Hazel

One of the jobs is removing the ivy growth from around the mature trees

Clearing the brash

We found the remnants of an old stone wall - probably about a hundred years old

The north talus

A neighbour comes to look at our work

Walking today:       3.8km
Swimming today:   1.10km

We spent another day today working on the talus and finished the back boundary. The land falls down to our property and Dominique's field is on a level with our roof which means that sometimes when we have a strange feeling we're being watched we are - usually by a cow standing above our heads, which is a very strange feeling.

The field has a solitary inhabitant at the moment, Charlie the horse (actually he's not called Charlie, Nicole did tell me his name (twice) but it was something impenetrable in Breton so we call him Charlie). I got the feeling I was being watched this afternoon ....... and I was:

Charlie's a Breton breed of some sort, working horses with a strong stocky build. The president of the Morbihan branch of the Breton Horse Society keeps three in a stable on our walking route and we sometimes see him in the morning, he did once explain to me in some great detail the characteristics of the Breton breed but as it was late in the afternoon of one of Claudette's fetes the details escape me just now ....

Pip has a new best friend , he's spending a lot of time in Charlie's field at present, mouse hunting and just hanging out with a horse: 

Recensement

Walking today: 3.7km

We completed our recensement return while it was hammering down with rain on Sunday. It had been delivered - or actually the login and password to go online and complete the census - on Saturday.

The commune has appointed five agents to conduct the census and for me the interesting part was the letter that accompanied it:

"Completing the census is a civil gesture, of value to everyone"

and

"The figures obtained determine the contribution made by the State to each commune, the number of Councillors, the method of electing them and the number of pharmacies".

Interesting - I knew that Pharmacies were a "protected profession" but I didn't know the size of a commune determined whether a Pharmacy is provided.

The sharpest tool in the box

When I took my chainsaw training course the first thing we had to do was strip down, clean, reassemble and sharpen one of the trainer's saws. I'm pretty sure it was one they had been out using the day before and we were doing it to get it ready for the next day's work - but the principle was good. Since then I've been (pretty) fastidious about cleaning the saw each time I use it and even though it's noisy and harsh it's quite a sensitive machine and you do get to know when it's working properly. We've been clearing the back talus (field bank) over the past week, harvesting hazel and chestnut poles and coppicing the trees. The saw's been working beautifully and the bank now looks neat and cared for, this is the first time since we moved here that we've had time to do this and prior to that Dominique didn't think anything had been done for at least ten years.

It rained persistently today so I took the morning to strip down the saw and reward it with a deep clean, then I sharpened all the garden tools with the grinder - probably ten years since I did that as well.

All set for the Spring now, just need the weather.

Orion - At Last

One of the tasks on my MOOC (see Back to University post from earlier this month) was to take a photograph of ...... the Orion constellation. Simple? Not for me.

After a sequence of dodgy blurred over-exposed and under-exposed efforts on a clear night last week, and then  a series of nights when the sky remained stubbornly cloudy I finally had to admit defeat and read the camera manual. So, armed with the knowledge to set the ISO speed and the aperture - both set to automatic to satisfy the 98% of people who only ever use the programme setting - I got something that I'm half happy with:

A Flock Arrives

Walking today: 3.7km.    Walking Month to Date: 44.9km.    Walking Year to Date: 44.9km

Swimming today: 1.05km. Swimming Month to Date: 4.2km. Swimming Year to Date: 4.2km

One of the frequent sights in the fields around us are Little Egrets where they are often seen accompanying the cattle. 

Dominique, Vincent and Jerome are all keeping their cows inside at the moment in their élevages, so today the Egrets arrived on our field looking for food - all 15 of them.

Pip was transfixed:

Sunshine After The Rain

Walking today: 3.8km

Last night brought the first really strong winds of the year together with a lot of rain. Since Gérard fitted the new roof to the hanger and, most importantly, the new guttering system, the rain that used to wash off the roof onto the tarmac above the house has been ducted via Kevin's drain system and deposited way down the field. All this water together with its associated silt used to end up in the pond, now the pond still fills up to its overflow level but the tell-tale muddy stain at the inlet pipe is missing.

No major damage sustained in the wind but the tomato house which was scheduled to be taken down and disposed of has been taken down rather ahead of schedule.

The rain let off at lunchtime, we got our delayed walk in and - as often seems to happen here - the sunset was spectacular.

Mr Turner

Walking Today: 3.7km

I've written on the blog before about going to the cinema and hunting out Version Originale films. Our local little cinema in Questembert has two screens, is largely run by volunteers and shows a wide variety of films including at least one film in English in an afternoon showing every month with all tickets at a discount price. December's film was the brilliant "Pride" and was prefaced by a lovely speech in English and French by the chairwoman of the organising committee thanking everyone for coming in 2014 (actually it was our first visit) and saying that the programme would continue for 2015. All 17 members of the audience seemed to enjoy this!

January's film was Mike Leigh's remarkable "Mr Turner" with Timothy Spall in the title role. British readers may not know Tim Spall apart from his role as Barry the builder from Birmingham in "Auf Wiedersehn Pet":

But he's a great actor and made the role of JMW Turner his own. Highly recommended.

Lemon Marmalade

Walking today:     3.8km
Swimming today: 1.10 km

There are many books written about making preserves from fruit (jams and chutnies) and it's an old art to turn a glut today into a product that can be stored until next a time in the year when the fresh fruit is but a distant memory. I always wanted to grow fruit at La Basse Cour and our 2013 blackcurrant jam truly was something to die for.

Citrus is a bonus for us and so when we picked half the lemon tree and had 1.5kg of perfect lemons the issue of making a preserve came up.

Lemons are usually the supporting act in jams, being squeezed for their juice to be added to other fruits that don't have enough pectin to make a reliable set. We've frequently made marmalade with Seville oranges - they aren't usually available here although there are some rumours on AngloInfo that some have been spotted in BioCoop, our local organic store.

Barbara found a recipe online for Lemon Marmalade and so yesterday we produced a great batch of organic, Breton and beautifully coloured marmalade.

Flowers in January

Walking today:  3.7km

I heard an article on the BBC last weekend that the number of plant species found in flower in the UK on January 1 was over 300 compared to the normal 30 or so. This was presented as a consequence of the warm global temperatures in 2014.

Despite the very cold spell over New Year our camellia has started to flower, somehow the flowers have avoided the frost (which can turn all the flowers on a bush brown overnight) and the rain (which has the same effect). There's a certain mathematical perfection to the shape of the petals on this one, picked to celebrate Barbara's birthday:

Colours of Summer

I have a theory - that I may expand upon in a future blog post - that naturally coloured food is beneficial for your health.

If I'm correct our pumpkins - here being prepared for soup and roasting - MUST be good for you!

Paris from the viewpoint of a Brit in Paris

During the chaotic events of Friday in and around the French capital the BBC scrambled all their correspondants to maintain coverage of the fast moving situation. Christian Fraser did a sterling stint broadcasting in the rain from what looked like the outside of a Metro station and Hugh Schofield also appeared covering the events at Porte de Vincennes. Hugh has been based in Paris for 18 years and his reports are always ones that I listen to carefully, he has a good appreciation of the similarities and differences between the British and the French people.

If you are English but want to understand a bit of the background to the place that Charlie Hebdo plays in French society Hugh's piece on "From Our Own Correspondent" this morning is required listening: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04wrqh2

Full transcript follows:

'My first encounter with anarchic Charlie Hebdo'

By Hugh SchofieldBBC News, Paris

Charlie Hebdo: Instinctively part of the French mix

Continue reading the main story

Charlie Hebdo attack

• As it happened
• What we know
• Victims
• Suspects

I have a memory of the first time I read Charlie Hebdo.

It will have been sometime in the 1970s, and I was on a family camping holiday in the middle of France. How on earth it ended up in our possession I have no idea: my parents were certainly not the kind of people to read obscene political cartoons!

But I do remember what was in it.

There'd been some demos outside a nuclear plant that was being built and a protester had died in clashes with police. I have a clear recollection of the front page: the ultimate caricature of a brutish French riot-cop, a grinning bovine Uruk-Hai; and in his hand the blood-dripping head of a long-haired hippy.

A nerdy teenager at the time and distinctly damp behind the ears, I remember thinking: we don't get much of that back home! 

But it was vaguely stirring. What audacity! The image was so grotesquely exaggerated that you know the message lay deeper.

Cartoonist Jean "Cabu" Cabut was one of 12 people killed during the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices

They weren't just saying: we think the police are thugs. They were saying: we think the police are thugs; and to make our point, we are prepared to push to their limits any notion of taste, decency and accuracy. Why do we do it? Because we can. Because it's funny. Why not?

Conservatives types were shocked by Charlie Hebdo , and they were supposed to be.

In those days the main target - apart from the police - was the Catholic Church. I've seen defecating popes, nuns in sex orgies; nuns in sex orgies defecating on popes.

Charlie Hebdo drew on an anti-clerical tradition in France that goes way back in time, and at some point the Church quite sensibly gave up complaining. 

In my mind Charlie Hebdo merged with other childhood memories of France. Smelly loos at campsites; countryside that took your breath away; bosomy farmers' wives in patterned blue dresses; all that bucolic stuff and the chateaux - and then this blast of raw anarchy.

Instinctively I knew it was all part of the French mix.

'World has moved'

Quite possibly the artist who drew that totally over the top picture of the French riot-cop was the cartoonist Cabu.

That's another part of the mix - in France if you want to be taken seriously as an anarcho-agit-prop illustrator, get yourself a nom de plume. In the obituaries this week the cartoonists have all been designated by their nicknames - I don't think anyone cares what they are actually called.

Cabu was definitely around and drawing for Charie Hebdo back in the 1970s. He'd been around for ever. In his 80s he still dressed like he did half a century ago, and his mop of young hair over a humorous old man's face made him look like a cross between Ronnie Corbett and Elton John.

Anyway, Cabu's dead now. He was murdered. I'll say that again - he was murdered. He was murdered for drawing pictures.

Could Cabu possibly have imagined in his wildest nightmares, when he set out on his career taking on the establishment 60 years ago, that his last seconds on this earth would be that sudden noise at the door of the editorial meeting room; the incomprehension; the shouts; the shots.

And then they say "Which one's Cabu?" and the Islamist's Kalashnikov is pointing at your own head.

That's how far the world has moved. Back when Cabu started, it was police and the Pope. Now we have other things to worry about.

Mockery, not persecution

And if there is one thing that everyone in the West frets about, it's Islam; it's Islamism; it's our countries' relationship with Islam; and it's our fear of what the future holds in a world where Islam - once our neighbour, once our enemy, is now part of us.

Cabu and the others knew this, and their reaction was to say: well if you're part of us, then think like us, be like us. Understand that there is a difference between mockery and persecution; that words and pictures are only just that; and that part of the deal is that we rise above offence - yes even when its towards our religion.

Cabu would have been gratified by the outpouring of support on the streets of France these last dreadful few days.

But he would probably also have said: where were you all when we needed you? He and the others stuck their necks out for freedom. No-one else did. 

I miss the world of the anarchic 70s when the worst that could happen when you showed a copulating Christ figure was a letter in Le Figaro from outrance de Aix les Bains. Now you die.

Newsroom Centrale

Walking today: 3.7km;        Walking Month to date: 26.2km      Walking Year to date: 26.2km
Swimming today: 1.05km    Swimming Month to date: 2.05km  Swimming Year to date: 2.05 km


I think it was CNN who started the 24 hour rolling news concept in the eighties. I remember speaking to a captain in the Army after the first Gulf War who told me that the intelligence coming back from Baghdad during Operation Desert Shield was so poor that the senior Army staff spent most of their their time watching CNN reports to work out what was happening.

Of course "News" isn't a limitless resource and sometimes when I stumble across BBC News Channel or Sky News the content is pretty thin. Nevertheless there are times in rapidly breaking major stories when the coverage is compelling. So, the first indications on Radio 4's "Today" programme that the two suspects in the Charlie Hebdo attack had been engaged by the police sent me rushing to the satellite TV and channel 200 - BBC News HD. For the next few hours the coverage was by turns compelling, repetitive, slightly bizarre (how many kilometres of driving along rainy autoroutes can be shown under a "Live" banner ?) and thought-provoking.

At one stage I realised I had BBC on the TV, France 24 streaming in French on the PC plus Twitter and Le Monde Newspage on the two iPads. France 2 later picked up the story with live coverage and often the BBC were relaying with acknowledgement the France 2 coverage - oddly at one point they seemed to be several minutes ahead of the actual transmission they were acknowledging.

One of the great things the Internet has done is to lower the barriers to doing things and make them easier to do or join in with. News is a good example - a generation ago reporting news needed a camera team and reels of film or, at the least, a notebook, telephone line and printing press, today with a mobile phone and an Internet connection everyone can be a journalist. As now seems customary Twitter was breaking most of the news stories, there were over 20000 posts to the hashtag #Vincennes in one hour as the situation developed.

Lots of people are rushing in to predict what effect this will have on France and the French people and the inevitable hand-wringing over the radicalisation of young Muslims (which has been going on for a long time) has been further increased in the papers and on the broadcast media. The events of the last two days won't be forgotten for a long, long time here.

Et Je Suis Charlie

Walking Today: 3.8km

Back to University

Walking today: 3.7km

It's 32 years since I last studied in a University environment, graduating from the University of Southampton (not to be confused with the young upstart Southampton Solent University which was simply a College and not even a Polytechnic in my day) with a degree in Physics and Electronics.

I got a 2ii (a 2-2), this was at the time colloquially referred to as a "Sportsman's Degree" or a "Desmond"

- Sportsman as in if you had a life at Uni and played for a University first team you clearly hadn't had enough time to study enough

- Desmond as in Desmond Tutu (ie: a 2-2):

Although I toyed with the possibility of doing an MBA at one stage in my career (and I do have a current Library Card for Southampton University Library as part of my Alumni membership) I haven't been involved with University study since.

If you haven't heard of a MOOC (pronounced "Mook") let me introduce you to the concept of a Mass Open Online Course. Mass as in lots of people doing it, often over ten thousand, Open as in no formal entry requirements and anyone from anywhere in the world can do it, Online as in online - everything is delivered electronically and Course as in course.

On Monday I started my first MOOC offered by the The Open University, reigniting my teenage hobby of Astronomy by taking "In the Night Sky - Orion"

The view of Orion last night was good although the moon rather washed out the possibility of photography (the image above is from NASA .....). There's also a reasonably bright comet, Comet Lovejoy, in the region of Orion which adds some extra interest:

The course lasts for four weeks, the first week isn't too hard ....... so far.

Error Code 63

Walking today:  3.8km
Swimming today: 1.0km

Thanks to those of you who found the problem with the photographic images in the blog recently. In another life it would have been put down to an unfortunate case of the test process not being vigorous enough combined with a configuration management error. Of course, in this life it was all my mistake trying to swap to use the iPad to produce posts without checking the results back on the PC.

Good old fault code 63 as we used to record this kind of problem in the IT Helpdesk metrics.

That was a user fault caused by lack of knowledge ;o)

Blog is repaired now and available on: http://labassecourfrance.blogspot.fr/

Cordialement!

Meeting up with an Old Friend

Walking today: 3.7km

I was moving some timber at the back of the grange building today when I met up with an old friend:

Periodically we unearth a Salamander hiding under a stone or piece of wood, sightings are always in the same area between the stone grange building and the collapsed old wine store. Although I can't identify if this is the same one we've found every year or so over the last five years (the markings all look the same to me in every photo I have) there's a good chance it is as they have been known to live for 50 years in captivity and, apart from brief periods in the mating season, are essentially solitary creatures.

Salamanders are beautiful creatures with a remarkable place in folk mythology (they are called Fire Salamanders in French (Salamandre du Feu)) and were believed to live in flames due to the frequency with which they emerged from wood after it had been put onto a fire. The town crests of Sarlat-le-Canéda in the Dordogne and Le Havre contain Salamanders emerging from flames. They do not live in the UK and are at the edge of their range in Brittany - on past sightings it will be 2016 before we see her again and hopefully she'll have consumed a large quantity of slugs and snails by that point!

New Year, new policies (well, sort of)

In many countries the New Year is a time for political leaders to take stock and often announce new policies for the New Year. Of course in France it's the same but in a different way ....

New policies that came in this year include an additional 2c a litre on diesel (Gasoil), this is an ecotaxe to replace another ecotaxe that was one of M. Hollande's flagship policies when he was elected. The theory sounded good; periodically Paris and the Ile de France suffers from bad air pollution caused in part by emissions from diesel vehicles and a significant proportion of the pollution comes from freight vehicles. So ....... tax the freight vehicles depending on how many miles they travel and enforce it by a network of number plate recognition cameras. Great idea in Paris, not so very popular in distant parts of l'hexagone like Brittany where everything has to get transported in by road. So, over a weekend last summer In Brittany a few barricades and burning tyres went up, an Opération Escargot was mounted by the truckers on the roads and a tax office in Morlaix was burnt to the ground. By the Monday there was a new policy; the cameras would be mothballed and everyone would pay a charge on diesel fuel - still not popular in Bretagne but much more unpopular with the company who had installed the cameras who then sued the French Government for an estimated €1Bn euros.

And another flagship Hollande policy has gone south; the 75% top rate of tax on high earners has been axed. Unsurprisingly this led to high earners leaving France, most publicly Gérard Depardieu who at one stage was even offered Russian citizenship by Vladimir Putin. The real effect felt was when mobile high earners voted with their feet and moved to London and Frankfurt, the unintentional effect of this policy was to diminish M. Hollande's tax receipts at the same time boosting those of George Osborne and Angela Merkel.

At the halfway stage of his premiership Francois Hollande is the most unpopular President of the Fifth Republic (and probably the first, second third and fourth as well) with just 12% approval rating in November. Manual Valls seems to have steadied the government ship with some long-overdue pragmatism but the general prevailing pessimism of my French friends still seems well founded.

Another remarkable crop

Our lemon tree, which came with us from Fleet in 2010, nearly expired in the first winter when, despite layers of bubble wrap and sacking, the -8C frost got to it. It recovered from the roots after we'd nearly consigned it to the compost heap and has had a new home this year against the warm South facing wall of the barn.

It's responded by producing its biggest crop ever:

What a difference two days make

Walking today: 3.7km

When we arrived back at lunchtime on the 31st January we were having coldest spell for three years, it was -2C when we reached La Basse Cour. It had been -4C in Porcaro when we collected the cats - rather surprised at being taken from their centrally heated pens at the cattery and plunged into the cold outside temperatures.

The barn was a cool 13C on arrival but a combination of the underfloor heating and the two wood burners had the temperature up to normal in a remarkable 4 hours. I'll blog further on our heating arrangements in the future but so far it doesn't seem as if we'll be too uncomfortable even when the temperature gets down to -6C (as it had done the night before according to our neighbour Patrick, who's a farmer so he ought to know).

Today it's been sunny and 14C, I spent the afternoon sitting on the terrasse in the sun as I checked and tested our Christmas lights which we took down today. Very pleasant.

The sunset wasn't a spectacular one but this picture was taken at ten past six in the evening, slowly the evenings are beginning to lengthen - soon be summer again!