Month: June 2018

That was a good diversion but I need a stocktake and I think I should finish it today.  OK, the list from where I’d gotten to before I hopped off for a ride was as follows.

1. Get French residency by Brexit date 29.iii.19.
2. Get on towards French citizenship and EU rights for nuclear family.
3. Political statement about Brexit particularly but perhaps more generally.
4. Pleasure of living a bit over half the year in France.
5. Particular pleasures, for now, of living in Aime2000.
6. Calmer life enabling me to finish (including some start and finish) work aspirations.
7. A better balanced life (hm, the way I wrote that last time around was diagnosably conflicted and incoherent.

So, how’s it going?

1. On course and at the moment I think that, though it’s going to be isolated a lot of the time, it’s really doable.
2. On the evidence of just two weeks I could see me extending this for five years and getting dual nationality/citizenship. Heaven knows what will have happened to UK and EU politics by then but I want to do this.
3. Well it’s a pretty weird protest isn’t it? And it meant I wasn’t in the thousands marching in London today as I would have been had I been home (yes, London and the UK is still “home” but, as when I used to spend half my week in Nottingham I think this will become “French home” or “Aime home” and London may become “London home”).  At times on the Pelerinage 2016 cycle ride that started this my blog was a chance to speak out about so much I had bottled when still employed by the NHS; it may not be brave, but I think something of a ruminating, but angrily, thread is the public part of this protest.  Onward!
4. Pleasure of living in France: tick!
5. Pleasure of living at 2000m in the French Alps: tick! Well, actually, those are a bit weird because this life up here is hardly ticking #4 though today was a glorious reminder of just what’s so good under #5: black redstart and wagtails immediately the wheels leave the building and clean air and country to revel in that very instant.  In London the pollution is horrible and I’d have to cycle further than my entire trip today before I hit real countryside. (Yes, I know London’s parks are wonderful and hooray for them, but it’s not the same.)  However, I think that I’ll need to think more about #4. I am getting solid doses of French TV, mostly just washing over me as a background noise.  When I come back in July I will start more seriously on my French and on reading and watching more about France (and Europe).
6. Obviously there’s no magic up here that makes work happen at super speed, and if I shoot off for a few hours cycling or spend time on ‘photos and blogging then I may end up with no more work time than I do in London.  However, I do think things are steadier: cautious and early tick!
7. OK.  I’m conflicted and ambivalent about this whole “work/life balance” thing but today was good. Very, very early and cautious tick!

Enough for now: recheck in August some time Chris.

 

Now that was good!  I did test the route to the left and the answer is that it will be not only meteorologically possible to meet up with my friends,  but it will be physiologically possible.  To be honest, I only went a short way over the saddle and into the head of the Champagny valley, it was clear there would be no further problems, just a lot of hard cycling back up, had I continued so this was only some 470m of net climb, the full round trip will be about 1,800m but I can spread it over an easy couple of hours out to meet them with this sort of net 470m up then about 1,400m down. Then some good hours with them and perhaps a couple of beers or some wine (strictly medical, for the anaesthesia) before reversing those figures over I would guess three to four hours.  I was out today for a bit under two hours but much of that was me stopping to take ‘photos.  Twice, for short distances, I decided that the combination of 14% or more upward gradient with very loose gravelly track meant that pushing Cerise was safer than cycling her but apart from those, and they were off the beaten track, playing around with rough tracks and a bit of grassland on the way back.  It’ll be fine in July.  (Actually, I’m tempting fate, now I’ve said that it’ll probably rain torentially or even snow, it does do that in July up here.)

I’ll see if I can pull some of the less disappointing ‘photos into something later but for now, here is what the garmin, which decided to behave, recorded.  (And this is where the zoomable image, courtesy of the WP Featherlight plugin really comes in useful if you want to get the detail.)

My route out is the top one, all but the very first bit was on road although by the point of going over the saddle (at about the little blip in the single track) the road was worse than anything in London: true dirt track and I was amused that the two cars I encountered were taking it much more gingerly than I was.  Where the two journeys split coming back I opted for something that was no longer road for much of the way, tractor track probably covers it.  This was really only the second bit of fairly real mountain biking I’ve ever done (one trip on a holiday in Greece some years ago was the only other). Cerise with her full suspension, ridiculously low bottom gear, treble chainring, pretty reasonable hydraulic disc brakes and her big and medium knobbly tyres is perfect for this.  OK, she and I are going to be friends and I think that may clinch her name somehow.

As the Garmin was behaving, here are some plots.

That vertical marker is a bit of an accident arising from my screen grabbing software and the garmin plot flirting with each other.  I’ll see if I can learn how to stop them doing that.

Yes, that’s pretty much was it felt like: a drop from here to Plagne Centre then a pretty steady climb to the ridge ten down a bit then back up a bit faster than I had done the last bit the other way, then a much faster descent the way I had come, then the decision to go the different route and another climb and delayed descent and a fairly level sweep round above Plagne Centre back to Aime2000.

Heart rate hit 161 maximum, like this.

And the speed plot underlines the stopping and starting (hm, typo I corrected there of “staring” was almost right!)

The sun was intense for much of the way but there was a period during which cloud covered it and I was glad to have opted for two thin layers, not one.  I was amused that this plot of the temperture the Garmin recorded caught that.

Peak at 27°C but down to 14°C in that period when the cloud came over.  Here, as I love graphs, are elevation, heart rate and speed showing rather clearly the drops in HR with the stops!

OK, enough data silliness.  It’s clearly time Cerise got to take a bow and for you to be properly introduced.  Cerise meet anyone out there reading this, anyone out there bemusedly reading this, meet Cerise.

YES!  The carpet in the corridor really is ghastly isn’t it?  Cerise’s colour scheme almost goes with it.  Hm.

Hm, that’s a better floor.  That’s her having a well earned rest.  NO!  I’m not so daft about bikes that she sleeps in the bunk bed.  And no again: we have separate bedrooms!

 

In two days I’ll be hopping on Cerise to belt down the mountain road hairpins and catch the train from Aime to bring this first pathfinding snippet of semigration to an end.  Oh, sorry, you don’t know Cerise, I never was very good at proper social introduction stuff.  She’s my semigration bike.  I’m not 100% sure that’s going to be her permanent name, I’m not 100% sure of her gender but leaning to female for reasons I’m utterly unable to explain.  Hey, who wants to be crassly binary and gender rigid these days?  Anyway, seeing her ‘photo the family said she was pink, hence the name and it’s sort of stuck for me despite the fact that she’s actually a slightly odd orange.  I’ll introduce you properly at some later date when I’m back up here and she and I know each other better.

I left the UK two weeks ago today and a lot has happened so it seems time for a stocktake and I think I should start by reminding myself why I’m here:

1. I am hoping to get French residency and that it will generalise to the young ones giving them a small protection against the restrictions Brexit puts on their options.  One way or another we’ll probably know about that around the end of March 2019 when there will either be a negotiated separation or, perhaps looking increasingly likely, a default exit with no agreements  … or even, but this seems to look increasingly politically unlikely, the UK has a rush of sanity and we don’t leave.
2. I am hoping that it will start something more solid for all of us in the nuclear family giving all full EU citizenship rights. I am increasingly clear that’s the secure thing to aim for and the only sensible route to that which seems fairly clear whatever happens with Brexit is for me to keep semigration going and do everything else necessary for French citizenship and hence full EU citizen rights … which would, barring some other tragic and radical political madness, involve five years semigrant residency and some other things.
3. Making a statement, a bizarre one maybe, of my personal, and my family’s shared, anger about Brexit and petty nationalisms of all sort.
4. Having the pleasure of living in France for over half the year.
5. At the moment, the particular pleasures of being over 2000m up in the northern French Alps.
6. Perhaps thereby having a less busy or mad life and achieving more of the work things I want to achieve before I pop my clogs.
7. Perhaps thereby having a less busy or mad life and, despite #6, having a more balanced and pleasurable life while I am still around (see #4 and #5 above particularly, but also #3 I think!)

OK. That’s quite a list.  But a quick visual diversion.

They’re both taken from the vast balcony area that our appartment shares with three others up here.  The one on the left was taken on the 11th in the evening and the one on the right, clearly not quite from the same point on the edge of the balcony and an hour ago.

At last, I have something I’ve wanted for a long time for this blog: you can click on those and get them full screen in a “gallery” or “lightbox” and can flick between the one and the other to get an even better, or at least bigger, sense of the huge change that’s happened in the 11 days between the two.

The snow is disappearing at an impressive rate with the run of blisteringly hot days we’ve had here, following the first radically cloud shrouded and pretty cold days I had.  Part of the reason for showing this is pragmatic: I now think that snow won’t prevent me cycling up and over the ridge in distance (on the extreme left of those ‘photos) to meet friends from Nottingham over in the Champagny valley.  The most direct route would be over a saddle just out of those shots to the left.#

 

 

That route would take me up that inverted Y (that’s from the 13th) which looked still skiable when I arrived. Now it’s a mix of snow, gravel and rock and at this rate it would probably be walkable in reasonable walking shoes by Monday.  That’s a pretty steep climb there so in fact I will be taking a longer route off the left and not visible from Aime2000 here but I’m sure that by the 18th of July, when we’re hoping to meet up, both routes will be clear for cycling, if challenging for the quads.

I’m sure of the meteorological feasibility of our meeting there now which I wasn’t a couple of days ago.  That does beg the question of the physiological feasibility, particularly given how little Cerise and I know each other and as most of the route (all if you follow Google’s recommendations) is off road.  Today or tomorrow, I may, hm, I think I must, make time to slog over either to the foot of that red run, or over, further, to the gentler blue round the back of the ridge.

Hm, here’s what Google maps makes of the cycling options.

Again, you should be able to click on that to see it in a bit more detail, or to go to it directly and be able to zoom around and have fun with it courtesy of Google: click here!

Hm.  I know what’s going to happen here, if I go back to the stocktake, or start working, I’m not going to do that and it’s beautiful out.  OK, stocktake 1(a) terminates here!

One of my plans for my semigrant life was to have a bike up here and one that could go off road fairly happily but wasn’t so heavy that I wouldn’t be able to cycle up from the valley.  I had been saying for a decade or so that the climb is the height of Snowdon so I was clear that any mountain bike had better not be too heavy.  Between the last two posts, on Monday before getting the taxi up here, I’d gone into Decathlon and opted for a full suspension mountain bike as it felt it would be much better for the off road and wasn’t much heavier than that “stiff tail” half suspension equivalent.  I ordered some other things and agreed that I’d be back yesterday.

So shortly after eight I set off to leg it down the mountain.  My garmin seems to have given up on me (very frustrating and I can’t say I recommend them as it has done this a number of times, now perhaps terminally and losing any data from yesterday).  This is Google to rescue.

I’ve amended one of Google’s suggested routes down to get a fairly accurate reflection of my actual route.  I like the map as it shows the ski lifts.  If you click here I  think you’ll get that map and can zoom in and pan around and switch it to satellite/aerial photo mode.

I’m intrigued to see that the stretch to Montalbert, the lowermost bit of the ski domain below me here was about half the total distance, both the horizontal distance and the vertical drop.  When I got back up here yesterday and before looking at the map again I would have said that it was only about a quarter of the trek.  I guess I was already getting tired by the time I got ther, also, from there on all tree and cloud cover had gone and it was roasting and hard on the feet as it was on metalled roads not footpaths and meadows.

Here’s the view of Aime2000 behind me probably 400m into the descent.

In the ski season to us that’s “golf”, a blue run down to the top of a number of other runs and a lift back up.  Looking the other way yesterday I had this:

Mont Blanc was poking through and that cloud beneath it looked bizarrely like “Starship Enterprise” (no, I’m not a trekkie!)

Well it really was a hard walk down: 1,485m of descent in 15.9km, i.e. 9.3% mean gradient.  Around halfway, by Montalbert, or talking with a lovely elderly lady in Longefoy who greeted me warmly and advised me to take a more scenic (though longer) route, I was telling myself that maybe one day I should do some of the camino on foot rather than on a bike.  By the bottom I was just putting one foot in front of the other, had blisters on my heels and ominous soreness in the little knee extensor muscle tensor fascia lata at the top of both thighs.  I guess I don’t walk much in my London life.  I was doubting whether I could do the cycle back up, let alone walk long distances again in my life!

I went straight back to the lovely Restaurant l’Atelier (see “The semigration has finally started: transition“) and had a lovely lunch with two beers, two coffees, and an alcoholic, ultracalorific pudding to both anaesthetise me, stimulate and fuel me and stifled thoughts that such a concoction was probably what led to Tom Simpson’s tragic death in the Tour de France in 1967.  (Actually, as was not unusual then, he had taken a lot more that you certainly wouldn’t get in the Restaurant l’Atelier, though not the designer drugs that blighted the noughties and earlier this decade even, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Tom_Simpson.)

I limped down to Decathlon, got the bike and other things I needed, and a few more things from the huge E.Leclerc hyperarket next door, and I was off on the long climb back very relieved to discover, as I’d hoped, that you don’t use tensor fascia lata cycling nor do you put any weight on your heels.

Some among you (what do I mean “you”? do I need a “you”, yes, I think I do but no pressure). OK, the hawkeyed, geekily knowledgeable, and probably also good at metric/imperial conversion, may have noticed that earlier I said “the height of Snowdon” and then “1,485m of descent” and may have smelled a rat.  (Hm, not sure about the metaphor there but I’m tired from all this: let it be Chris!)

Yes, Snowdon us officially 3,560ft (I had always had 3,300 in my head: more rats) and yes, that’s 1,085m and, rats, 1,485m is quite a lot more than that, nearly 50% more as you can see.  The taxi driver had said “1,400m” on Monday and a niggling feeling had set in then but, as there was no way I could shrink it, I’d put that out of mind.  Interestingly, I can’t get google to draw my cycle ride back up by asking for cycling routes as it creates a number of, to my mind rather implausible looking off road routes and there was no way I was trying that with a moderate weight on my back and the then state of my legs.  If I ask for a car route I do get it.

I was doing the blue route (must find that white one some time, might be an interesting challenge on the bike!)  Well, as you can imagine, it’s pretty much 1,485m as I had failed to find any way to shrink it.)  It only took me seven stints with rests in between!  The Garmin has finally deigned to wake up and collaborate though it’s completely lost the data from the walk down, it has got the first two stints of cycling up (it was on the second stop that it died: feeble, if I could keep going it most certainly should have).

I don’t suppose that’s readable but it shows I did only 3.67km before I had to stop, I’d climbed 231m, burned 260 calories of that lunch (it thinks) and all at a humiliating speed of 5.9kph (yes, that’s kph, not even mph).  It had taken me 37 minutes and you can see from the green elevation map that the climb had been pretty steady 6.3% gradient: that was going to get quite a lot worse higher up where the kilometre markers reeled off the distance, height and the gradient, which never dropped below 7% after that and topped out at a nasty 10%.  At that point it was already clear that it was going to be a long, slow afternoon!  However, I am intrigued when I look at the next bit of the garmin output where I’d reminded it it was supposed to be picking up heart rate.

So another very steady gradient, this time only 27 minutes in which time I’d covered a mere 2.34km, burned another 335 calories and only climbed another 199m but with an average gradient now of 8.5%.  It’s the heart rate that amuses me:

The blue is the speed and it lies, I didn’t really stop completely until the end but by the look of it at times I was moving so slowly that the garmin couldn’t tell the difference (I think that’s another garmin error actually, it shouldn’t be that insensitive).  The grey is temperature, still going up, and the red is my heart rate and there you can see that I took a little while to remember to stop the garmin recording. It peaks at 164bpm with a mean of 157bpm.  Hm. No wonder I was having to stop.  After that the garmin gave out but I did keep going though with at least four more stops, nearly a litre of orange juice, and a couple of glucose/fructose tablets to counter the burning off of available calories.

That’s a very tired but relieved me and the, as yet unnamed, bike in the lift that gets you into Aime2000.

So obsessional, so martyrish and sad, so what?! Good questions, fair points!

Well it really did reconnect me with doing my first pelerinage/camino about two years ago, and starting this blog.  I remember thinking on that ride “A cyclist [human] is a machine to convert food to distance” (partly to excuse how much nice food I was eating).  I have just gone back and looked at some of my blog posts from those early days and see how few were about the cycling and how many were more political or reflective.  That’s work, and work on myself, I hope to get back to more in my isolation up here. For now, I think I needed to mark yesterday as a key point in the semigration.  Now it’s not so much “have bike: can convert food to distance”, it’s “have bike: independent again; maybe do more thinking as well as some cycling around”.

Well it’s Thursday (14th July 2018 for the record) and I arrived up here on Monday.  Time for an assessment of things.  This was my first sight of Aime2000 from the taxi (50 Euros, though a lovely driver!) coming up from Aime.

(I am working on how to insert ‘photos of various sizes here: I will improve on this but no joy so far.)

I hope you can see something there and you’re probably wondering why such an obviously awful shot is doing here.  Well that zigzag slightly left of centre on the skyline is Aime2000.

That’s blown it up a bit.  I hope you agree it’s an iconic silhouette!  The driver dropped me off at the main entrance where we found these sad remnants from the skiing season, well, clearly from the Christmas end of the skiing season.  I think he was a bit worried that I might find the place a ghost time with everything as dead as those trees and I confess I was slightly rattled.  However, the first set of lifts were working and I and all my luggage were soon up from that level to the G deck that runs the full length of the enormous building.  Everything was silent and the usual lifts up from there to our level (L) weren’t working but I realised that they wouldn’t be, only the goods lift would be … and fortunately it was.  Lugging that lot up five floors would have been lethal.

So I made good use of that life up and down to the “cave” (cellar, actually just level D where we have a storage cupboard for our things to hide in when we’re subletting the appartment) and I moved what I needed from there and unpacked my luggage.

Whoops, rather an embarrassing ratio of alcohol and alcohol related things from the cave to the perishables I’d brought up from the valley!

I headed out to find the local Spar supermarket.  Closed.  Oops. Google maps assured me that the one another mile or so on and a few more hundred metres back up to on a level with Aime2000 would be open.  No. Actually it closed in April at the end of the ski season apparently and won’t open I think until the next ski season starts just before Christmas.  Oops, suddenly that fridge wasn’t looking so funny.  I legged it back down to the first Spar … aha, big relief, it opens at 16.30 until 19.30 (and 07.30 to 12.30).

On that first round trip everything was green but speckled with yellow patches.

Bird life included a full house I think of swifts (common or alpine?), swallows, house and sand martins (or are they crag martins?), wagtails, larks, goldfinches, choughs and something with a blue flash a bit bigger than a thrush that was keeping well away from me.  Hm, my continental/French ornithology is very rusty and must remember to take my binoculars even if going to Spar.

Me in the first lift with edibles (that backpack is full to the top!).

What was striking walking around was how much snow was still here from Easter and the ski season. This is meltwater pouring out of one of the conduits below Plagne Centre.  Yes the grey below me is the pebbly mess at the edge of the road by my feet but that dark mass is unmelted snow covered with grot.  That’s one of the places where the vital local snowploughs dump snow off the road in the snow season and you can see that it takes a lot of dirt and grot with it and as the huge mass of snow melts slowly as things warm up it looks like that.  A whole new experience for me: loads of black snow!

Here’s a more beautiful view from a bit further back up the road between Aime2000 and Plagne Centre (and the Spar that does open!)

You can just make out something on the rock ridge to the left that is the top of the telecabine lift up there and there are some visible constructions  on the relatively gently rising ridge to the right that are the top ends of ski lifts.  It looks to me as if there’s enough snow left in the red run that comes down the saddle between the two ridges for me to leg it up there with my skis and have probably 800m of run. It looks as if the top bits of the black run to right below those right hand constructions is also still thick with snow.

I’m sure the snow surface is completely impossible for skiing now but it looks as if its sufficient snow that might be hard to walk without snow shoes. Maybe some time next week I’ll dig mine out from the cave, sling them on my back and go up there to find out.  Not sure how far up there I’ll be able to get on the mountain bike so it’s a good few hours hike without wheels … but the bike is a story for tomorrow.

From that evening and about 30 minutes ago (18.15ish for the record) the clouds settled in.

In fact, for most of the last 48 hours not even that building below me was visible.

Why 18.15?  Because that’s when, writing this, I looked up and saw that Mont Blanc had finally become visible: the first time in four days.  I think that’s the longest I’ve ever been up here without being able to see it/him/her.  However, partly as I must get back to work and not go through the rigmarole involved in getting pictures off camera and ‘phone and up to the site.  A proper celebration of Mont Blanc here is for another day.  Meanwhile, I go back to work and continue acclimatising.

 

 

Today (Tuesday 12th of June 2018!) I woke up at 2000m and it seems about time I got another post up here to mark the event, it’s been a long time coming.

I arrived up here yesterday having had a lovely send off from J & S in St. Pancras before boarding the chunnel train for Paris. That went OK though I realised that I had really loaded myself up.  Things started to go a bit off piste with the transition from Paris Gare de Nord to Paris Gare de Lyon. Getting off the train was slow owning to the sheer pressure of people and all our luggage and although the connection only involves one intermediate stop, the train took for ever to come and I missed my booked departure by about five minutes.  SNCF were relentless despite it having been frankly impossible to have made the transition any quicker and hence, in my view, their booking error: it had to be a new ticket (ouch) and a three hour delay for the next train and a bus instead of a train for the last stage from Chambery to Aime. Their Email says that was down to meteorology and certainly neighbouring parts of France were having horrific storms with sufficient rain falling in an hour or so to cause severe flooding.  For amusement, here’s are some ‘photos which hardly convey the beauty of the Lac de Bourget that we shot past shortly before Chambery.

And here is quintessentially French railway architecture of the station in Aime.

I opted to stay the night in Aime which is the main village/town of the commune and over a 1000m below my destination.  The next morning I decided to stay two nights when I discovered that Decathlon, which I wanted to visit to get a pushbike for my stay here, is closed on Sundays.  So I stayed two nights in the lovely Hotel Palanbo.  J and I stayed there for a few nights back in summer 2003 when we made a flying (actually, driving) visit here and put the offer on the appartment I’m in now.  Lovely little hotel with wonderfully friendly and relaxed staff, great simple breakfast and excellent wifi/internet! Sunday was greyish with the sun mostly struggling to get through low cloud but, as well as trying to get as much done with the internet while I had it, I had time to find Decathlon but more aesthetically, to revisit the wonderful basilica church and the Tour Montmayeur: a 15th C defensive tower.

That’s the Tour Montmayeur poking up above the surrounding houses and now, a rather grey skip around the lovely basilica.

That’s approach to the west end also showing how much snow there is still on the high slopes.  That view shows that the priorities for the basilica were that it be defensible as well as a place of worship: not a lot of window or door as a proportion of the wall area.

Moving to my left, here’s the north face of the nave.  It’s called a basilica but I think the structure is a hybrid between simple basilica form and the cruciform standard that was largely to replace that.  Does the name here refer to the architectural form or something else, something about the status of the church within the Catholic hierarchy of the area?  I’d do some sleuthing but I am now on 3/4G internet only and need to ration myself very strictly until I can get a landline in and broadband.

I’m pretty sure that those have always been blind arcades, not windows at ground level.  There was a black redstart clearly nesting in a niche in the tower. I’ve always had an affection from them as I seem to remember a childhood book, whose name I’m not sure of now, started with the child at it’s centre, falling and I think breaking his arm climbing in bombed ruins in London shortly after WWII trying to get closer to a black redstart.  I’d never heard of them when I read the book but resonated with the risk taking, or really with the ambition that drove it.

Here’s the beautiful (to my mind) East end with its apse and two little chapels.

I’m a sucker for this sort of simple architecture.  My guts say the apse was added at least a hundred years after the nave and tower.  My fingers are itching to go sleuthing but I must resist!

Detail high on the tower.

Simple but still so effective with the light recessing of both the whole window and the arches.

Sunday evening I found the Restaurant l’Atelier (hm, Google has it as “L’atelier”, I’m sure the French would capitalise it differently, again, must resist more sleuthing!)  Wonderful small restaurant, two friendly blokes have been running it for four years now and, though I like the usual Savoie/Tarentaise food with its typical peasant stress on calories and on locally available protein (here beef and cheese), this was different.

Up here yesterday and today I’m in a very different world.  It’s stunning to me how much snow simply hasn’t melted from the end of the ski season at Easter.  This was the most they’ve had here for 30 years.  If I were mad enough I think I could get my skis and ski boots out from the cave (storage cupboard in the basement) and walk up about another 800m and I think I could have hundreds of metres of one of the high red runs to myself.  I suspect that the surface of the snow is horrible and I’m not tempted but when I’ve got the bike I will cycle up there to look at it.  From here it looks as if pretty much everything up on the highest point in the domaine would be skiable.

When the sun’s out it’s lovely, when it’s not, it’s pretty cold still and this internet rationing is a challenge but I’m here and the hermitic life adaptation had started.  More on that in the next day or two, then back to more about Malta if I can find the Mbytes that’ll need!

I’m writing this in Luca airport in Malta at the end of a fascinating, but not always easy, week.  I arrived last Wednesday so it’s been eight days I’ve been here.  (Aapparently the colloquial phrase for a week in Maltese/Malti is “eight days” or something invoking “eight”).  I knew there would be two days of work, and there are always two more that are largely lost to the travelling. So I’d left myself four more to have some time to just be a sightseer.  That was four times what I usually allow myself on my work trips and not infrequently I don’t allow myself any rubbernecking time.  I guess that is the first cage I’m thinking about sitting here: normally I feel that I’m too far behind with things I’ve said I’ll do for/with various people to justify the extra time (and perhaps there’s something about any extra costs too).

Malta is an amazing place, and I hope this won’t people off visiting, but it’s been a mixed experience for me and at times I’ve felt caged here.  Some of that was about discovering that I wouldn’t realistically be able to mix much work the rubbernecking in those four days.  That came about through my location: I had pretty much caged myself without intending to!

I had booked myself into an airBnB to keep costs down.  That was a first for me and I think my inexperience both with airBnB, and with the geography and facilities of Malta didn’t help.  I booked into a lovely looking place in Zebbug. (There should be a dot on top of that “g” but my software currently doesn’t have that.  I think it’s pronounced “Zebbuj”, with the stress on the “bb”.)  Zebbug, , is near the middle of the main island, Malta itself, and looked sufficiently near to where I’d be working, Attard, that if need be I thought I could walk there.  I’ve just rechecked and it really is only 4km.  However, my colleague warned me the roads were not fun for walking (and she rated them lethal for anyone daft enough to hire a pushbike … and the death of a cyclist the first day I was here did seem to support that).

She was right about the walking, certainly if one took the main road.  I hadn’t really taken in what 37° heat, coupled, perhaps oddly, with quite high humidity (the island is small and the Mediterranean has a lot of warm water with which to nearly saturate the air) and high dust levels mean.  They don’t make attractive walking conditions for sure, particularly not if you should turn up looking like a moderately respectable academic asking for input on the CORE-OM translation with no pay for the volunteers!

In fact Marija gave me lifts to and from Mount Carmel Hospital both days we worked there so that was no problem.  Driving isn’t always easy on the island so it probably did help that I had chosen a place near the hospital and not far off her own direct route.

So I found myself feeling a bit caged not able to walk far, nor cycle.  However, there were other caged feelings.  Starting with this within minutes of getting up the first morning in the airBnB.

I know that’s a terrible ‘photo, shot on my ‘phone, through a window in the house, with the sun blasting down onto the plastic sheet above the cage but that really is two adult barn owls.  Inside, in the kitchen there was also a budgie in a pretty small cage, about a quarter of the size of the one that contained my grandparents’ budgie when I was a very young kid, some 60 years ago. Back then I suspect caged birds were more common in homes in the UK.  It’s funny how much the sight of two beautiful barn owls in a cage hit me.  It’s been one of those moments when I realise how deep some beliefs go in my psyche, somehow in my body too.

It was a couple of days later before I mentioned this to my host, who is a lovely man. He tells me he lets them fly free from the roof of the house and that they come back.  He has had them both from very young (weeks/months old) and both are under two years old.  I believe him completely and that shakes some of my convictions that they simply shouldn’t be caged, but it doesn’t remove those feelings.  I’m sure he doesn’t let the budgie fly free, my guts say that it wouldn’t return, but I have no logic for that.

So I found myself reflecting on just how central some ideas about freedom sit in my “core construct system”.  The idea of the “core construct system” is from Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) and is about those beliefs so central to who I am that they’re hard to change, sometimes hard even to notice.  For sure, this isn’t about something I haven’t noticed: the last few years for me have been a very conscious process of revolt against feeling caged by bureaucracies of one sort or another. Since leaving the NHS and the cycle ride that started this blog, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting that my beliefs about allowing people to make their own decisions disabled me in the roles I’d come to occupy.  I’ve also been railing (reflecting doesn’t cover it!) about a culture that seems increasingly to trumpet about freedom while more and more restricting it, particularly for all but the wealthy or obscenely wealthy.

But back to last Thursday morning, those birds really hit me and ironically they sort of caged me.  The only place to work was a table downstairs near both the owls (in a light well behind a locked door from me) but near the budgie.  I desperately wanted to blog, and to do some work, but my room had a huge double bed with no real space for me to put the laptop on a surface and my legs under it.  I rapidly discovered that working with it on my lap, sitting on the bed was both uncomfortable after a while, and damn hot in an already very hot environment. Downstairs was the only option. However, I found I simply couldn’t stay down there: the not very strong, but inescapable smell of the birds, mostly of the budgie I’m sure, was nauseating to me.  I’m sure that was mainly some Pavlovian association of a disgust at their containment, with an admittedly not attractive, but not gross, smell.

The result is that this is my first blog post in a week in which I really hoped I’d do two or three and have had enough amazing sights and experiences, and felt connected to the reading I’d been doing about Malta, to have supported at least one post a day.  However, I couldn’t post from a laptop on my thighs, not when I’d used about 30 minutes in that position to do the main Email screening and quick replies that seem the minimum per day.

So here I am in Luca airport feeling released.  I fantasize that the feeling is the one those owls do when they spread their wings and fly above Zebbug.  I know that’s projective and crass anthropomorphism: who can know what the owls think or feel?   Clearly it can have little in common with my thinking about freedom.  Who am I too, to judge my host for his caged birds?  The frames that create meaning for us are always cultural and caged birds are common here.  I saw a good number of birds, all finches: chaffinches, bullfinches, goldfinches and greenfinches; being carried around in tiny cages, usually by men I would guess in the age range 45 to 70. At first I thought they were selling them but I think they were actually just taking them out for some freedom, of sorts.

The title here “Frames and cages” pays homage to Tony Ryle’s 1975 book “Frames and Cages: The Repertory Grid Approach to Human Understanding”.  Repertory grids, and personal construct theory, or personal construct psychology that I mentioned above, had a huge impact on me when I first discovered them, which would have been in 1980.  I met up with Tony, probably in 1986, and I did the analyses of grids that led to a paper with him (“Some meanings of body and self in eating-disordered and comparison subjects”) which came out in 1991.  I had the geeky skills to run the programme, INGRID, that was then hosted on the University of London mainframe, that crunched the grids, and the further geekiness to transfer the output to SPSS on the St. George’s Medical School minicomputer, to analyse the grids.  Maybe I should re-read the paper.  I’m not sure I’d like it but it was probably ahead the game back then.

Tony died, at 89, in 2016.  There are obituaries in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/15/anthony-ryle-obituary, with a lovely ‘photo of him; sadly, I don’t think I have any of my own) and on the ACAT (Association for Cognitive Analytic Therapy, a therapy Tony pretty much created by melding some psychoanalytic ideas and PCP), https://www.acat.me.uk/page/tonys+biography  . I’m shocked to find that the obituaries in the British Medical Journal (at https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6011.full) and even one on the ACAT site (https://www.acat.me.uk/reformulation.php?issue_id=52&article_id=502) are locked so that non-members can’t get to them.  I don’t think Tony would have approved of that, in fact, I’m pretty sure he’d agree with me that no self-respecting journal or membership organisation should be so desperate as to lock obituaries from public access.

There I go, railing about cages, paywalls and restrictions on freedom.  Hm, I think this theme is going to run and run here.  Enough for now.  For all there were challenges, I will post more about how much that is remarkable is here to see in Malta, and how much more that is almost unbelievable, is there in its history and prehistory.