Author: chrisadmin

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.

Is he really a match for her though?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?!

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!

Created 16/12/19

I hope this doesn’t just end up as a bit of pretentious drivel! Oh but it might! I think it’s something I’ve been puzzling for some weeks now. It could get as hugely pretentious as “what is it all about?” or just “why bother?” but today it was triggered by an article in the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/16/ceu-classes-move-to-vienna-orban-hungary-ousts-university

And it really goes back to something I wrote in this blog over two years ago:

https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/canaries-clean-air-and-freedom/

That was partly about going to a small rally in London protesting against the threats to the Central European University (CEU) in Hungary. Sadly the Guardian article confirms that Orbán’s political power base has succeeded in forcing the CEU out of Hungary (apparently a small research remnant remains but the main teaching has shifted to Vienna). This is the first time “in decades” according to the article, that a university has been forced out of a European country. I wonder how many decades? Where was the last? In an “iron curtain” country before the fall of the wall? In Nazi Germany?

I was a bit shocked to go back and re-read my blog post from back then (3/5/17). It’s not well written: over-complicated and unclear, however, I guess the passion about academic and general freedoms was there and some humour, if you accept my variants on that idea. The same struggle to make time to blog when behind with work was there, exactly as I feel now.

Has this got anything to do with icicles? Perhaps only to me but there should be a nice little one at the head of the post. That’s to the right of my main window here, at the other side I currently have three icicles: two small ones like that one on the right, and a huge one! The huge one is over a week old now and I’ve watched it grow and reshape day by day and it’s been my very simple thermometer: if it’s dripping then the air temperature is above zero, if it isn’t, then the air temperature is below zero. OK, it’s a pretty limited thermometer but I suspect it’s really pretty valid and sensitive around that zero point. Better than just a thermometer, it’s also been gentle entertainment: it’s mostly grown, day on day, but it’s reshaped far more than I would have imagined. It’s now between five feet and two metres in length and must weigh a bit. I think if this were the ski season the gardiens would have bene round looking for monsters like that on the other side of the window as this thing could certainly kill if it fell eleven stories. However, it’s on the safe side of the window: it would take an amazing wind to get it to clear the balcony of the apartment below (and there’s no-one there currently).

It’s also picqued my curiosity and got me thinking more about how it is that icicles can be branched, how they can be rippled, how they get air bubbles inside them. I love all that fairly idle ruminating and I know it’s trivial but it’s also a privilege I have up here. I can just think, or I can if I get my head up from the keyboard enough. For me there’s a funny sort of thinking that is just aesthetic appreciation: I think these icicles are pretty pleasant to look at. Perhaps beautiful is too strong but they’re good! Another bit is geeky: I love thinking about the physics of how they form and shape themselves. I rather like it that, to be honest, I really don’t think I have a clue why the big one is so rugous (ooh, now there’s a lovely medicalese word for ribbed and wrinkled!) I think I have started to understand how they can fork but I really don’t understand the bubbles inside the big one.

This is an incredible luxury to have grown up allowed to wonder, allowed to trust yourself to look and not perhaps always see what you expected to see, and then to trust yourself to think more, to reach for others (OK, “others” is generally wikipedia, or DuckDuckGo) and speculate more. Mine are pretty petty musings but I think it matters that I can have them. I do worry that we seem to be living in an era in which much is done to discourage people from free thinking, and perhaps particularly from the sort of free thinking that wants “true insights” to come from the thinking. Orbán doesn’t want this, Putin doesn’t want this, Trump doesn’t want this, I’m sorry but I’m not sure how many UK politicians I think really want much of this. I’m really sorry, but I’m not sure how many UK academics really want this. Perhaps that’s unfair but I’m not the only one worrying that the climate that allows them to want and pursue that is being eroded. Another Guardian link:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/nov/13/were-at-breaking-point-will-uk-scientists-big-ideas-survive-brexit

OK. Enough, I’m lucky. And here are my icicles. As ever, click on them to get into a lightbox presentation that allows you see them in full size and scroll through them.

Created 5.xi.19

I do want to keep things, and particularly reasonable ‘photos of the amazing views, coming up here but it’s been a long work day and I’m tired and, without sitting down and thinking for a little while, I don’t really have anything to say other than that the light changed dramatically through the day and the views were glorious much of the time. So I’m just going to put up a collection of today’s ‘photos without even any captions. I hope they give someone as much pleasure as raising my eyes from the screen from time to time gave me! I think the point about the changing light will be self-explanatory. The snow on some is falling snow: none were shot through glass.