chrisadmin - Doing, and moving on from, my 2016 cycling camino

Social distance … what’s worth …?

Created 5/5/20

I seem to be a bit differently blocked about posting things lately. Some of that is just that I seem to have been working rather harder/longer than usual and some of that increase in work came from the cv-19 pandemic and a wish to be doing something useful in the face of such horror and sadness. But another element has been trying to understand a bit more about this “isolation/social distance” issue. Suddenly much of the world has been forced, more or less reluctantly, into degrees of social distance that aren’t normal for them. With discussion with my family, but pretty actively opted for myself, I’ve chosen to react by just starting living up here about two months earlier than planned and I only leg it to the shop once a week. That’s not a huge change from how I’ve lived about half the year for the last two years. So I’m in a social distanced place that I’ve actively sought out for myself for a while but I’m now socially distanced from, isolated from, most of the world who are suddenly also much more socially distanced than is their norm.

I’m sure that the social distancing edicts in most countries have been wise. A sad bit of that is that we can’t trust a huge proportion of the population to do sensible things if those sensible things go against their habits or wishes. I’m sure they will have been “worth it” in deferred deaths and some mitigation of terrible pressures on health services and perhaps social care services. It seems wonderfully clear that they have brought out so much that is good in many people. They also seem to me to have revealed some of the very worst of the people in power in many countries and the speculations about whether not cv-19 is an escaped bioweapon remind us that most of the world is either at war or poised to fight. In the early months of this there was a phase when I dived back into my early career “community medicine” (now “public health”) time (mostly 1983-84 if anyone wants that time perspective on this solipsistic stuff) and I spent hours every day trying to digest the emerging numbers and modelling. I stopped that a month or so ago partly because I had taken up trying to do things that might be useful to therapists having to work online but I know that part of that shift was away from the raw numbers and all the individual and familial, collective, social horror they index. It wasn’t just that the overwhelming majority of this is impinging on people I don’t know, I was concerned about the impact on family, particularly parents who I’m very lucky to still have alive either side of 90 years old and I was starting to learn of friends of friends, friends and relatives of colleagues and then colleagues and family members themselves having had the virus. (So far, no deaths even at those removes in the people I know.) There was something indecent about thinking of human horror in numbers but there always is, take cv-19 away and it’s often more the deaths and maiming we humans do to each other that I try to process in numbers from the latest news. Cv-19 wipes most of that out of the news but there’s always “social distancing” of a psychological kind rather than a physical kind in these numberings.

OK, Chris, follow that thread for a moment, maybe it matters. Well, my Email contacts collection has 5,146 people in it. Let’s say I sort of “know” or “have interacted with to a point that I can probably remember something of” say 5,500 people and if there are 7.8 billion people in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population) then I have some personal capacity to think of 7.05*10^-7, i.e. about 0.00007% of the world’s population. OK, is that a distancing that we all share (I don’t count having 3 million twitter or other “follower” as knowing them). I guess since the 16th Century at the latest (perhaps earlier for the Chinese?) we have been faced with both that our world is huge compared to what we know of it, and that it’s a finite sphere (oblate spheroid!) The physical area we can “know” and the proportion of living humanity we can “know” are both tiny compared to the area and numbers out there. I guess I that sociologically, psychologically, we’re making slow progress (if any) in processing this constructively and tend to collapse into “localisms” and too often into fighting to deaths over these localisms.

A true pandemic, something completely non-human it itself: a tiny accretion of genetic material and protein that only reproduces in and through “higher”, much more complex, lifeforms has suddenly challenged our other great defence against our diminutive and distanced/scattered states: hugely inflated ideas of our omniscience and omnipotence. We have the nuclear weapons to render our planet uninhabitable (certainly to our “higher” lifeforms, we have remarkable abilities to intervene in many illnesses and traumata and we can measure gravity waves and date the big bang but we’re watching this cv-19 thing kill and all we can do for now is retreat into social distancing and do what we can to adjust and cope.

I’m clear that saying that I have some personal connectedness with say 0.00007% of the world’s population, perhaps indirect connectedness with 0.0007% if I allow that each person I “know” might tell me about up to ten other people that I’m not setting a value on that. I think you could “know” a far higher proportion or perhaps just get through your life only relating to a tiny handful of people but if you relate to them well and don’t create a dangerous “us and them” around your niche then you have lived a life as worth living as anyone who can say they related well and didn’t hurt others with “us and them”. (I’m a bit sceptical about true hermits and anchorites but I guess the ones we know of have impacted on many.)

So I started this about “… what’s worth …?” and I meant to take that to “What’s worth doing?” and “What’s worth saying?”. I know that something that has been stopping me blogging much has been a rather despairing question “What’s worth saying?” (and a feeling that I was better with my current “doing”). This blog, as opposed to my equally stuck work blogs, is about trying to stay in touch with people who matter to me when I can’t Email them individually (without stopping my “doing”!) I guess it’s worth saying/writing.

I’ll stop with two experiments in timelapse other than my regular “all daylight hours” ones (timelapse-videos). These are using my camera instead of an old ‘phone, and choosing just one view to follow for a time. They were both six second intervals and they’re 25fps video so speeded up 150x I suppose. I’ve got a very interesting social distance I guess.

3/5/20 16:35 across the valley

I love that soft but scarred bluff which I imagine was a lava flow long ago and I like they way the clouds scud over it and throw everything into alternating light and dark. And here’s my noble neighbour (to the right of the view!)

3/5/20 18:57 Rognais to Mont Blanc

I’ve not got on top of all the challenges of using yet another amazing open source tool, ffmpeg in this case, to convert many separate images to video yet but I’ll chew away at this!

Life in strange times

Created 27.iv.20, click here to register to get updated when new posts, images and pages appear on the site.

Well these are strange and, for very many, horrible, times. I’m pretty lucky up here, this morning I raised my gaze from the screen to look out, my attention caught by a movement and there was a golden eagle being mobbed first by one of the local alpine choughs and then by two. I grabbed my binoculars and dashed out onto the terrace and for minutes they spiralled above until the eagle I think eventually gave up and disappeared into cumulus really quite high above me. At that point I realised how fast they had been moving both horizontally and vertically, the eagle doing it with very little wing movement while the choughs, little over half the size, flapped more obviously and short in out clearly trying to hit the eagle’s tail and wings while escaping that huge beak. I don’t get that for entertainment in London! I don’t think I’d have got any usable ‘photos had I grabbed the camera rather than the binoculars: it was happening so fast and probably needed a longer lens than the upper end of the “superzoom” I have. Sorry! However, this was a view a couple of hours earlier this morning. I think if you click on it you get the full sized image.

I guess that’s about a sixth of what I see as I look up. That’s the first time in the last seven weeks that there’s been that carpet of low cloud down in the valley. Most days I think the early sun has actually been too strong, and the air down there too dry for that though over a whole year it’s a frequent pattern. So the aesthetics up here are stunning. When I arrived the snow on the terrace was chest high and I wouldn’t have been able to get out there with binoculars the first few days as the snow was less than a foot from the windows, door and walls. As the sun blasted down, day after day, the snow receded. The first week created enough space to squeeze out of the door and this auto-excavation. I think some rather more impressive artefacts are being revealed from high Norwegian passes as climate change excavates them. This was not quite in that league.

As the snow receded the sun really was hot so I did a bit of engineering.

I don’t want to give the impression that it’s been all birdwatching and sunbathing up here. There have been some minutes of the first and, OK, a few hours, enough for me to have lost my pasty pallor and started to tan, but mostly I’ve been working.

Coronavirus, SARS-CV-19, whatever other terms and acronyms one uses, has been a savage backdrop. The work providing online CORE forms has continued: if you go to the ResearchGate page and look at the project log that gives some history of that and https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/parse_logs3.html shows that the forms are being downloaded and I’ve become involved in supporting an impressive “psychological first aid” project in Ecuador and, this last weekend, an exploration of views of CV-19 in Greece and all the usual work continues.

But I’m safe and well, my family seem safe and brave too but so many have not been so lucky and we’re clearly starting to see ugly sides of political and economic reactions. We’ve a long way to go: stay as safe and resilient as you can. I’ll finish with Mont Blanc in the sunrise this morning. Another that may be worth clicking to get the full image.

Mont Blanc catching the early light this morning

Click here if you want to get Email alerts for new posts, pages and images on the site.

I fled Toulouse for the Alps

Created 13.iv.20.

It was a month ago tomorrow, how the month has flashed past.

I left Toulouse, relieved to get away from a misdescribed airBnB (when it says you have the place to yourself you don’t expect to share with four others … but I was too tired after a 24 hour journey there by coach to complain). I realised that my eyrie, which we let out in the ski season, wasn’t rented that week and I was due to rendezvous with my family up here the following week so I decided to go a week early.

I was relieved to leave the airBnB really but also a bit sad to miss very friendly co-habitants: we were from the UK (me!), Côte d’Ivoire, France (from North Africa childhood) and Albania and communication was much in sign language but hugely friendly: thanks friends.

In the then growing grip of cv-19, and with SNCF still technically subject to strike action, I wasn’t sure if the trip back to my Alpine eyrie would work. My cab driver in the early hours in Toulouse turned out to be a lovely music teacher who gave me a free French lesson, one of the best cab drives I’ve had: thanks Monsieur!

That left me outside the rather grand train station: Toulouse-Matabiau. Wikipedia tells me it was built between 1903 and 1905 and that its 26 coats of arms mark the 26 destinations that the then CF de midi sereved. As ever, click on the gallery to see better images.

I particularly liked this with the emerging engine giving a sense of how the trains looked at the time. I like the slightly surreal juxtapositioning of the train, the other hardware (is that a hand and foot powered point shifting lever) against the foliage, cubism was still a way away but no dull perspectival view this!

The last stage of the journey back up to Aime2000 was in the little local bus and to my surprise it was almost full: the first time in the day when I felt I was in any danger of catching cv-19. About a quarter of the passengers were in a group who had clearly been imbibing happily all day and sang (not badly but loudly) all the way up the hairpins. That was with the exception of one member in the seat diagonally in front of me who reclined his seat, which turned out to go down almost horizontally, pinning me to the window while he promptly went to sleep. Thanks mate!

The following morning I slept in and when I finally had coffee in me and looked around the lifts weren’t moving. That was the first time I realised that I’d made it up here just as the French closed all ski domaines and started to implement their lockdown. With the family we had to accept that there would be no skiing together and we decided that I should probably stay up here and build up my “French days” and be very safe while they battened down in the UK.

So I’ve been here, working hard (CV-19 and online measures: boy has that been much more work than I’d anticipated). I’ve resuscitated my timelapse videos (but don’t bother with the boring ones, things probably improving now as clouds are back) and just tried to understand what’s happening to the world. I’ll close with some views from up here from the last few weeks: thanks mountains!

Bad art? Le capitole de Toulouse

Created 3/3/20, images from 28/2/20. Apologies about the awful formatting of the embedded galleries of images, as ever, click on them to get the full glory of the images.

Oh dear, I didn’t take any general ‘photos on Friday, I was trying to get the details in all their grandiose and glorious awfulness. OK, so “Le Capitole de Toulouse” is a late 19th century building around much earlier roots and the main civic building. I had learned around the time I first went into it, with only smartphone camera, that my sister, a charismatic teacher of history of art, had found herself in an interesting discussion of whether there can be bad art with a Taiwanese colleague. I’m no art historian or expert on art but I think the answer is that there can be great art and I believe the art in the capitole in Toulouse is, for me, quintessential bad art. Well, those were in the inner courtyard. As ever, click to get full size images.

What is it about those, are they chimeras on each side of the smirking man? Women’s heads on dogs bodies? And surely not to scale. Like something that Mel Brooks and Marty Feldman might have done in the best spirit of Young Frankenstein?

As you go into the main show you go up a grand set of stairs (I’m sorry, “grand” may get overused here). The first face you meet is the face at the top of this post and perhaps that’s a warning. Here’s more from that staircase.

Is that man punting in the nude? What is going on here? Are the ladies looking heavenwards with the same question? Oh, how could I have forgotten? Just before the staircase on the left this chap (banished bishop of Toulouse?) who caught something of how I might have felt coming back past him having done the full tour …

At the top of stairs there’s a young male and female of the species on either side of the door into the first room.

Oh what gloriously tragic langour .. and lovely sandals

Is he really a match for her though?

Whoops, have we jumped centuries and allusions?

Then we go through into the first room where I think bad art is reaching towards its zenith … Those of a delicate disposition may want not to click on these … but we’re not, quite, at the worst yet.

Oh but you ain’t seen anything yet. I’ve almost skipped the second room as it’s, well, not quite such bad art: massive, rather pointilliste, contempory yet allegorical of the (next) artist’s family and important locals of the time like the rather impressive Auguste Marie Joseph Jean Léon Jaurès, yes, he of the university.

No, I haven’t quite skipped it, high up above the truly huge canvasses on the walls was one of heroes who spent much of his adult life in Toulouse: Pierre de Fermat.

Salute a truly great amateur mathematician … high and tiny up around the cornice

As the wikipedia entry tells us, Fermat bought a political position in the town, oh, and the right to add that “de” to his name. His “Fermat’s last theorem” must be one of the bits of maths to have achieved almost Hollywood level fame. Surely a blockbuster featuring his life and that of Andrew Wiles is soon to get started again pending the replacement of the last producer. (Ooops, we’ll come back to that.)

No, the huge gallery, apparently created by a man called Pujol by knocking through three existing rooms isn’t a simple case of putting it a couple of RSJs to take the load, oh no, dig this ceiling.

Is it just me or is a sort of theme about gender and garb emerging? And what’s going on with the lion? Is that old Britannia taking a stabbing from French aesthetic genius?

Here’s some of the art on the walls, some is Pujol again but not all.

They are rather different genre’s aren’t they? But I think they all still hit my “bad art” button. And there’s that theme again I think.

OK, I am sure you knew Fermat was coming back.

Fermat was ‘ere … and he did set the scene for differential calculus

So you remember that rather sombre looking head of Fermat earlier … fluent in six languages, lawyer and local politico … and amateur mathematician. What could go wrong if you wanted to celebrate him properly, not just tuck him away near the ceiling where only idiots like me are likely to see him but give him a bit more of a splash in the grand hall? This …

You got it: let’s pretty much recycle that bust we have of him and add, well, let’s imagine he had students, well of course he would wouldn’t he? What, they’d only have been male? Oh come on, we’ve got to make bucks here, sell the movie of the city. She’d have come for, well does it matter whether it was mathematical or legal training, she’d have needed a quill. What do you mean she looks a bit odd clad only in a rather natty chignon? Son, you’re still not listening, we’re making history here, not messing around with details.

Let’s hope all these artists and commissioners were sublimating/displacing their lusts for power and … well, to my mind deeply bizarre ideas about relationships between men and women into their … bad art rather than abusing their models and too many other women around them (and yes, as far as I could see they were all men). Let’s not forget there was that one man punting in the nude.

Aargh! I rest my case, there is such a thing as bad art and it was hitting some pretty grand heights in Toulouse at the end of the 19th Century and creeping just into the 20th.

Walking to the Garonne … and down memory lane

Created 29/2/20

I had a bit of time off yesterday afternoon: a post to come about that, but otherwise I’ve been working pretty hard here in my new airBnB hermit’s hole in Toulouse. I finished my last contributions to a paper I’ve been writing with Clara and some of her students a bit before lunch and felt exhausted. I knew I still owed lots of work to many projects and people but also knew that I would be an idiot not to take a break and a walk. So I decided to walk out to the Garonne. That’s the pretty large river that runs through the heart of Toulouse off to the Atlantic.

It was a grey day and a few raindrops fell at the end of the walk (literally a few: quite a odd feeling) but it was a great decision. I found myself on a footpath along a side channel of the river at first and the first memory trip was back to I guess around 13 to 15 years old when I spent at least some hours most weekends birdwatching with two friends from school around Leamington Spa where I lived from 11 to 18. There was the slightly mushy ground underfoot, the river (OK, the Leam is a stream compared to the Garonne) and there was a smell of wet vegetation, I think a sharp smell of nettles mostly. It took me back to something that had been precious in those teen years, for all it was just normal to me back then. Walking through countryside with varied habitats and diverse bird life. That’s something I would like to do in my retirement in France if ever get there and I’m not sure I’d been in simple, damp, not terribly attractive, marked but not much used, paths in the way I was today since those teenage weekends. The ornithological highlights were a couple of cormorants in flight but I didn’t have binoculars nor did I just stand and wait for a good while anywhere. There would have been much more around.

Then I came (past an odd collection of deserted tents and debris: a former refugee hideout?) to the main river and could see people in sculls and I was straight to a later, and perhaps an early, reconnection. The main one was to my first year at University when I tried my hand at rowing and ended up in the Queens’ College first VIII and loved the experience. The earlier association, which has only struck me now, was that for a short time within that birdwatching phase I also kayaked in the Leamington canoe club and loved that too … until I drank too much horrible Leam water failing to learn to roll a kayak and panicking!

Oh boy, I’d love to end up living somewhere where I could go back to kayaking and rowing, or sculling. (Oh, rowing needs and even number of you as you only have one oar, sculling can be done on your own as you have two oars, actually, blades, one in each hand.) I was impressed by the gender and age mix of scullers and rowers. I was never any good in a single scull: they capsize incredibly easily unless you really get the knack of being pretty perfectly symmetrical and of holding your balance if waves or wind are perturbing things supposing you have managed basic symmetry. I’d love to go back to trying again though, and I did get to manage rolling a kayak on a family holiday a few years back, even managed to get the trick of doing it without a paddle so kayaking again would be great too! (I don’t ask much do it?!)

I’m playing around putting up short galleries capitalising on having set the camera to burst off five shots at a time, bracketing exposure (hence the varying light in each).

[If you’re not much into this rowing/sculling lark, jump to the end now!]

I mostly rowed in an eight but did go out in a pair a few times and found it nearly as hard as a single scull. That’s much, much harder than it looks!

They’re not smooth or perfectly together but I’m impressed! This younger pair sculling reminded me where I’d be starting off (assuming I could find someone willing to scull with me!)

Oh dear, that brought back so many things the coaches shouted at me back then: not keeping in synch with the stroke (doh!), overreaching, shoulders hunching up, digging (when you go too deep into the water, often because the boat is over to one side or because you didn’t get the blade face nicely vertical at the catch … if the boat wasn’t to one side when someone digs, it soon will be!) They seemed to be having fun and reminded me that these craft move quite fast even if you’re not putting that much effort through effectively. These are actually much nicer boats than I ever used.

Now this chap was pretty smooth.

That’s way beyond anything I ever achieved and he could make that scull move at a real lick. Blades like that were just coming in when I rowed (1975/6) but I never used them. (I guess if I’m being enviously hypercritical, he is hunching his shoulders forward a bit in the return!)

And just to show single sculling well isn’t just for boys:

This lass was definitely not in that league and I think, I hope, was quite amused to find someone pointing a camera at her.

If I’d turned my head that much and for that long I’d have wobbled terribly. I now remember that the worst challenge was that you had to look over your shoulder to see where you were going!

Oh yes, I remember that too: practising your arms and coordination while keeping your legs fixed out straight and not using the slides. It was fascinating how the power you could deliver dropped to a fraction of what it was with legs and the slides. A bit like swimming full front crawl versus practising your leg action while holding a float with your hands. (Oh yes, I did swim a lot for a while as a young teenager, this is memory lane session.) Now for another young pair.

This club is really doing well getting people on the river.

Finally, another impressive pair from the (also impressive) huge flood defence walls this side of the river at this point as it passes through the town.

In these smaller boats timing is crucial but there isn’t the extraordinary challenge of trying to get eight people doing something exactly together that there is in an eight (doh again!) We were a very successful eight but on enthusiasm and some brute strength rather than any skill, only two of us had rowed before. I remember the only time we hit the catch together. The catch is the crucial moment when you have dropped the blade in the water and it’s just covered and you slam the leg power on, the arms come a fraction later as they’ll just waste leg power if your arms are bent at that first moment. I guess in ten weeks or so rowing in that first eight we really only had that millisecond precision of all hitting the catch together, and well, once. It was a bizarre experience as the noise wasn’t “crump” (that’s a lovely noise, as opposed to “slush” when you’re really out), it was “crack” and “crack” as in pistol shot … and the whole boat seemed to leap forward. We were in training not racing and we literally never managed it again!

A few years later, when I’d moved on to clinical training in London, I went to watch the “head of the river” race which then was some 150 or so (I think) eights rowing the reverse of the famous “Boat race” route. The crews are set off some time, 15 seconds perhaps, after one another with the winner from the previous year going first and working backwards. We had seen perhaps 80 boats go under our bridge and they were pretty clearly going down to my old boat’s level of skill and timing. Then a boat seemed to be simply shooting past others and as it came beneath us it was awe inspring: “crack”, “crack”, “crack” some 34 times a minute. It turned out that it was the UK olympic/world squad who hadn’t entered the previous year and were entered in some convenience placing. I’ve been lucky enough to watch some very, very good swimmers at Crystal Palace, and once to be on badminton courts as the UK squad came alongside us to train. There’s something incredible about truly good athletes that close!

Enough (“much too much” I hear many of you cry!) I’ll sign off with some art.

Walking round with my camera

Created 23/2/20

Oh dear, ten weeks have passed since I last posted anything here and I’m long released from my vow of silence about the UK election. I’m not ready to think aloud about that yet. (I wonder, will there be an adverb “onweb” in years to come? As in “not ready to think onweb about that yet”. I think what I do in my blogging, particularly this personal one, is to think onweb, a sort of musing.)

Oh dear, oh dear, is that even an adverb? It seems to me it modifies a verb but I went through school when grammar went out of fashion. Christopher, there’s a difference between musing and rambling hopelessly: get a grip man!

I’ve really disliked some of my posts that I came to re-read for some reason, maybe that contributed to the lack of posts here. Ah well, onwards.

I’m in Toulouse now (https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/french/ gives a cross-link to my work life and part of reason I’m here). I thought I should find the university campus before I officially start tomorrow, so I wandered off from my airBnB with my camera this afternoon. Boy did some money go into the campus architecture and relatively recently: brutalism is alive and well, reborn in Toulouse.

I confess I have a real leaning to brutalist concrete. I love the South Bank though I know many hate it. Anyway, before we get to the concrete, and surely for my and your amusement, I got a fly past… (sorry about the terrible positioning on the thumbnails, double click as usual to get the full experience!)

We don’t see those over South London. I see I should call it “Beluga” not “Guppy” and I think they’re right: it is very like a beluga. Is it aerial brutalism?

I don’t seem to be remembering how to handle these galleries well, or perhaps the plugin is malfunctioning (aren’t the joys of IT boundless?) I also need some sleep so for now I’ll just put up some of the views I took. If you don’t like reborn brutalism, or my rather quirky viewpoints, look away now! … or rather, just don’t double click and jump the gallery.

I think one of those buildings looks more like part of the German “Atlantic wall” fortifications than part of a university so even I, with my fondness for stark concrete architecture, wonder about that.

Signing off with a selfie. A collision between a Giacometti sculpture and a conveyor belt stuck in concrete?

Houston, we may not be back for Xmas

Created 15.xii.19

OK, it should probably say “Tulse Hill” not Houston but even more is lost in translation then. I was feeling pretty OK early this morning, the view in front of me was sensational.

View ahead morning 15.xii.19 — View out the window ahead of me this morning

I knew that my train booking for tomorrow had been cancelled because of the French train (and other) strikes but I was still thinking that it wasn’t going to be too much of a pain as I would be able to rebook for Tuesday or Wednesday. Then the reality hit as I searched: no trains at all Tuesday (as they’re showing a mixture of “cancelled” and “fully booked” and as I know they’re showing “fully booked” for some cancelled trains, I don’t know whether this is strike affecting Tuesday directly, shifted load booking things out, or down to trains ending up in the wrong places. The earliest available train that was leaving later than 06.33 wasn’t until Thursday but strikes, I think, are only giving 48 hours notice so presumably I could book that and loose it. Oh, and it was nearly three times the price of the booking I had for tomorrow.

Mont Blanc above cloud 15.xii.19 — Mont Blanc never has to find transport

I thought I’d be able to cope with a very long coach trip. NO! Nothing!! J said she found a very cheap coach from Aime overnight to Paris on Friday, but she and I are supposed to be working together on the book in Calais by Thursday … and Paris isn’t Calais.

Ouch. I have to be out of here, at least for quite a few hours, on Tuesday as the blitz cleaning happens then to get the apartment ready for the season lettings starting on Saturday. The agency really don’t want me back in and it will involve lugging my packed belongings out while the cleaning happens and skulking in La Terrasse with intermittent coffees and then unmaking the bed and remaking it for me … and inverse when I get out.

Planes are against my (limited) green stance. Even if I weren’t pretty determined not to go that way, I’ve got a lot to transport so at least two pieces of hold luggage … and the challenges of getting to an airport with connections. OK, I thought, I don’t much enjoy driving but I’ve got a clean licence, I can probably get to somewhere where I could hire a car. Car hire search: only allowed if I took two days. OK, we’ve had a lot of snow up here but I don’t think it will be so bad below that it would take two days (hm, one year we did have to give up and pull into a hotel just north of Annecy going back and another year we only made it to town about 150km this side of Calais coming here, and got the last room in the place). But 500 Euros?! (No, that was for the smallest category car, not a limo.) Plus petrol, pluse péage tolls, ouch, suddenly the train even at new rates, looks cheap.

Ho hum. In the end, after several hours wasted over here and probably at least another wasted back at mission control in Tulse Hill we have a plan! I am booked, expensively, on a train leaving a 06.33 on Wednesday and will go down to Aime and spend the night in a hotel there to be sure of being able to walk to the train and not risk missing it. I won’t book the hotel until Tuesday morning though in case the train vanishes.

Even if it doesn’t will the connection from Lyon be working? Will the RER be running to get me from Gare de Lyon to Gare du Nord for the Paris crossing? If not, will cabs be gridlocked? Will the train to Calais run?!

Across the valley 15.xii.19 — I do love the fissured mass of those slopes across the valley.

The views have been sensational today with the snow over there showing up the complexity of those broad slopes (as the evening sun sometimes does). The skiing looked lovely but I didn’t gawp out of the window much as I seemed to spend hours packing and cramming things in the cave (no, it’s not a real cellar, it our large locked cupboard down on level D where each apartment has one.) I guess you have to take the rough with the smooth!

A three week vow of silence about UK politics

Created 13.xii.19

I don’t want to fan flames of anger and despair in me so, though bitterly tempted, I’m not going to write about UK politics for at least three weeks (that’s 4.i.20!) I am sure this will help me think more constructively than I would. However, I encourage you to click on Monster Crash – Brexit Halloween with Jacob Rees-Mogg and the Ghost Tories. I find it helps, a bit.

Sing for shelter

Created 10.xii.19

Not about me, nor the French Alps for a change. Go to “A place to call home” on the English National Opera site. It’s their collaboration with Shelter and with choirs including of London homeless people to create a Christmas single to raise money for the charity. Sir Bryn Terfel (Welsh icons, what’s not like?), Lesley Garrett, Alice Coote and the ENO chorus and orchestra … and J … which is how I know about it. She loved being in the creation of it and the huge community collaboration.

Play it on spotify (not that easy to find there: hunt around for “A place to call home” or “Sing for Shelter”, ENO and “English National Opera” didn’t get it for me but I seemed to find it in the end.

I’ll quote from the ENO page, I can’t see them seeing it as copyright theft. Aha, they have the correct spotify link:
The single is available now from all major digital retailers, including Spotify, Amazon Music, Deezer, Google Store, YouTube Music and more. All proceeds from the single will go to supporting Shelter’s work over this winter period, fighting homelessness and helping families get back to living in safe housing with ongoing support.

Go and read their page and Alice Coote talking about her brother’s 22 years of homelessness.

Go and buy it! You who tweet, tweet it; you who don’t spread the word through all your less tweety modes: you know it’s a good cause.

Marks in the snow

Created 24/11/2019

I’m kicking myself a bit today (Sunday) as I didn’t get out into the sun and snow that persisted from Wednesday (https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/just-going-out-for-some-milk/) through Thursday and Friday and would have been lovely. I was slogging through the usual backlog/overload of work and told myself I’d mark the weekend by getting out then … but of course yesterday was grey, threatening to rain and a bit above zero so it really wouldn’t have been that much out there, today the same and of course I’m failing to shift all the things I need to so I won’t get out and will content myself with a few minutes to create a silly little post about the marks in the snow I saw on my trek for the milk on Wednesday. I do take some rather sad pleasure from the different imprints of the different modes of transport but the last one was the real pièce de résistance. Hang in here until you get to that one but let’s start with downhill skis.

Downhill ski trails above Plagne Centre 20.xi.19

Actually, I think the mostly straight track up the middle is someone with skins or trekking skis going uphill but the waggly ones are the sheer pleasure of cutting some of the first trails downward before the season starts. Here’s how the caterpillar tracks and plough of the piste basher cut across the piste (and some downhill tracks) while it flattened one of the routes between Aime2000 and Plagne Centre

“My” skier’s track between the pistes 20.xi.19

Here’s the track left by “my” skier cutting from the big slalom piste to cross my uphill slog on the smaller piste in that last image. I hadn’t noticed at the time how he has let his right ski pole skim its own trail alongside his ski trails.

OK, snowboard track going back in to Aime2000 which is leaning rather ominously because of the wide angle and fact that I’m looking down at it for a change.

Self-protrait with snowboard track 20.xi.19

And now for another travel-on-snow option: French style lightweight snowshoes.

That was on pretty hard snow made up of a light fall on top of snow that had been pistebashed. This next is what makes snowshoes good: in my walking boots I’d have sunk into that soft snow towards my knees whereas the snowshoe traveller only sinks in an inch or so. (I did take a few steps to see if I could follow those imprints but even where the person had compacted things a bit I was sinking in and would have had cold, wet ankles and feet by the time I’d crossed that bit of snow.) Oh, yes, the distortion of Aime2000 really is extreme there. It’s a bizarre building in many ways but its verticals are vertical I promise you!

Talking of my boots, this was me meeting my own tracks as I slogged back up.

This is an example of what happens where dark material is exposed to the really quite hot sun that was beating down.

But the l pièce de résistance.

Avian touchdown and take off again? 20.xi.19

I hope that’s visible on whatever device anyone is reading this. I think that’s the imprint of an Alpine Chough coming in to land on the side of the trail between Aime2000 and Plagne Centre but I think s/he takes off again immediately leaving those wing pinion marks at the bottom. I think those are marks of tail feathers at the top in a “whoops, came in a bit low on the port side there didn’t I?” landing. I wonder what caused the decision not to stay, or even the decision to land there at all? Would have been quite a good vantage point but nothing to eat just there I’d say. A metaphor for lives?!! Aarrgh, give over boy and get on with things!