Author: chrisadmin

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.

I’ve been getting “GDPR …”, “confirm you want …” and “Updating our privacy policy” Emails for weeks in a swelling tide and I’ve been amused to see them slowly getting, in my not so humble, barrack room lawyer opinion, on average more and more well judged about what GDPR really requires.  I do now wonder whether the organisations that are still asking us to confirm that we want to receive things are tacitly admitting that they don’t know if all the Email addresses they hold were obtained with full consent, or if some know damn well that not all of them were.

It’s been a good opportunity to cancel quite a lot of them.  Sometimes that’s had a tinge of sadness when my unsubscribing has been because the Emails were from London galleries and I have to face up to the fact that most of the things they are telling me they’re showing will come and go while I’m up in my mountain eyrie.  Still, it’s been good to purge most of them.

Finally though, I had to face up to whether the data I have here is GPDR compliant and, as I’m sure I don’t have personal information on anyone, other than some IP addresses that get collected in the hit logging, I didn’t think that would take much but of course it meant putting up a privacy policy, putting that in the top menu of the site. Then I realised that I didn’t have a “contact me” form so I added that too, and, in the end it has taken a while.  Still, as I was doing the necessarily rather more complicated GPDR compliance work for CORE, some of it was pretty familiar and easy.

I guess I’m putting this here just to make anyone who follows this blog enough to have left comments or signed up for alerts pretty well 100% certain to have been given a pointer to the small print.  However, to illustrate things, I am adding a gull.

Now if you want, you can pull that jpeg file down, get the GPS data and work out exactly where s/he lives (if the sign in the background didn’t give it away anyway).  Do gulls have personal data protection rights?

And that brings me to link to a blog post that Emily, PhD student and much valued colleague in Roehampton has put up about GDPR. She has caught the anxiety she and so many researchers have been through over GDPR and how it impinged research data collection.  She’s also brought her usual gentle wit to things, much better than my feeble gulling!

 

About ten days ago I found myself in an excellent short research meeting in Roehampton University (UR).  There were four of us in the room and we’d agreed to meet because we had overlapping interests in researching the positive and the negative perceptions and experiences many bereaved people have of the deceased person being still present: “Experiences of Continuing Presence” (ECP) and “Continuing Bonds” (CB).

The four of us were a lecturer in UR who is German by birth but has lived in the UK for many years and I’m sure her children have British nationality, or a right to it.   The next was a student from the University of Aarhus in Denmark near the end of her PhD.  The third was a PhD student doing his PhD in Roehampton but from Galicia in Spain originally (from just south of my beloved Santiago de Compostella) but who did a Masters degree at Leiden University after his Masters training in Clinical Psychology in Spain (and a short but important spell working in Bolivia).  I was the fourth there: the only native Brit and heading off to the Alps because Brexit threatens such a precious and wonderful mixing of minds, of cultural, spiritual/religious and linguistic experience and expertise.

Our second meeting a week later was augmented by a Brit who isn’t semigrating but who, like every Brit in the academic world I’ve talked to about my semigration, is hugely supportive of what I’m doing and, like every colleague and collaborator I have, is completely committed to working with me by Email, Zoom, Skype if it’ll ever work reliably, and whatever other tools we need to do distance collaboration.

It’s a rum world at the moment and Brexit just gets to look more and more crazy with every news update we get on the process.

Just to amuse you, here are some recent ‘photos of Roehampton. I think technically these are of Southlands College.  The bit we were in, Whitelands, is separate from this but equally grand.

Students …

Approaching the wisteria tunnel.

Catching the tunnel at the right time of year.

This is Whitelands where we met, and recent.  I’ll come back to both the cat and the maypole in other posts!

 

Oh dear, I do struggle with, and side tracked by, technology.  With J and tnp I visited the Garden of Cosmic Speculation on Sunday.

I’ll try to write more about it but, though I’m not very pleased with my ‘phone ‘photos, it was a place that I thought told me emphatically: “now you really must sort out how to put up ‘photo galleries in your web pages!”  So I have tried.  It’s already gobbled several hours and I have only got less than a quarter of the ‘photos that I think might be worth putting up here, but because it’s taking so long, and stirring up so much frustration in various ways, I will pause here but with a link to the work in progress.  You can click through the ‘photos but this view seems not to show the labels I’d put on those ‘photos. Much still to learn.

[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”3″ gal_title=”Garden of cosmic speculation, May 2018″]

Oh dear, that gives a crazy picture of the gardens as those are the ‘photos I’m intending to have come up at the end of the gallery.  (It turns out to be much easier to build the gallery starting with the ‘photos on which you want to end and building forward: design error programmers!)  Anyway, that means they’re very much a niche sample of the speculations on offer there.  Ah well, onwards … later!

Hm.  I have been asked these questions rather a lot in the last few weeks.  I should stay in more!  No, that’s not the answer … and I doubt if a quick blog post on the topic will solve the problem either.

Why do I find it difficult to answer that question but also feel picqued and a bit irritated by follow up one (from people who know I helped create CORE: Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation)? I sometimes make evasive jokes about not yet watching day time TV or just say that I’m a lady of leisure now I’m clinically retired.  However, the reality is that I am, as I have been for much of the last three decades, probably working 60 to 70 hours a week.  You’d think that’d mean I could say what I do but I’ve been hopeless answering that.  I think I ought to do better.

Well it’s true that I continue to work on CORE.  I maintain the CORE System Trust web site (https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/) and answer questions that come to me/us through that.  Most weeks that’s not a lot of work though lately, through some very irritating and I think unforeseeable technical problems, the site has consumed a lot of time (and the problems still aren’t fixed) and some of the incoming questions have required several hours not just a matter of minutes to an hour to answer.

Though the site and the Emails are a job, my main work is undoubtedly still CORE or CORE related, and some weeks probably eats 60 hours or so. Most of that is around the fact that I decided nearly 20 years ago that getting our questionnaires translated into other languages fascinated me and was a worthy job of work.  Now I’ve coordinated 25 of the 26 translations of the CORE-OM and all the 9 to 10 translations of the YP-CORE (nearly there with the Arabic YP-CORE).  However, I’m guiltily, shamefully, persecuted by being overdue with much work related to many of those translations.  Those collaborations take me into challenges doing statistical and psychometric analyses if/when sufficient data are collected with the translations to make that possible and when my collaboration has me doing that work (I’m usually the one most qualified to do that).  They also involve a lot of Emails and coordination and sometimes a trip to the country involved to sit and listen to people discussing the differences between many independent forward translations. Another little challenge is making up nice PDFs for the measures.  If the language requires different male and female versions, and often a “M/F” version then there are 18 different PDFs to make up as we have five shortened forms of the CORE-OM for different purposes.  Doing that is challenging enough for languages that use the “latin” alphabet and no accents, but when you get into accents and letters that don’t exist in the English alphabet things get fun, and copying and pasting right to left languages into InDesign is a horror, at least at first, I’m just about on top of that now though.

That’s the top of CORE-OM in Icelandic with at least one letter that used to be in English but is long gone. This next is the top of the Arabic YP-CORE and it’s still draft as it’s now in qualitative field testing (huge thanks to Sulafa for that).  You wouldn’t believe how difficult Adobe have made it to achieve that right to left type.

I’m proud of CORE and the translations though I am guilty and ashamed to be behind by months to years with things and one embarrassment answering this question is about that historical mess and how slowly I am getting back on top of it.  The other frustration is that I do want to do more than CORE before I pop my clogs (for non-English speakers, that’s a typically British euphemism for dying!)  A post or two about those other developing bits of work and as yet unstarted aspirations in the next weeks.

I hope unpacking this helps me clarify things in my own head.  Ah well, enough for now: I must get back into the slag heaps of shame and pits of deadly despair and guilt and nudge some of the overdue stuff onwards and stop other little things starting to build into new backlogs.

I’m not doing very well with this blog am I?  No!  Ah well, let’s see if it improves.

You may be thinking “He hardly posts at all these days and now he can’t even spell ’emigrating’!”  But not so, as that sentence nicely proves, I can spell ’emigrating’. However, I’ve just invented the word “semigrating” to describe the process of going to live a little over half the year in another country.  I know the rich have been doing it for decades to avoid paying taxes but I’m doing it in hope of gaining French and EU residency (and probably to end up paying taxes in France not in the UK even if that’s more expensive, which we think it might be).

Yes, it’s all about this damn Brexit.  We have owned a ski apartment in the French Alps since 2004, we bought it then as a pension for J whose career hasn’t created a pension for her as well as my NHS one did.  It also meant we could afford to ski quite a bit more than we would have been able to which, as J is very good at it and loves it, and as I am very late coming to it but learning (still), was great.  It’s meant that both children learned to ski, and tnp (yes, that’s the name he chose to go by in this blog!) to snowboard and we all love it there, 2000m up with a view of Mont Blanc out of the window.

That’s that very view, back from 2004 and our first stay there.  Very unusually there’s not a wisp of cloud on Mont Blanc itself, usually it has a small hat or scarf of cloud all its own, rather as Gibralta often has.  Not so unusually, the valley is completely filled with low cloud.  It’s an odd feeling knowing that down there it may be a warm day but the sky will be completely cloud covered while up where we are the sun is blitzing down with no cloud at all.  (Though, as it was January, at 2000m it was probably well below zero … well, it needed to have been, it’s not going to be plausible as a ski area if it’s above zero much of the day at that time of year!)

I’m digressing because I love it there and love that view.  Anyway, the point of this blog post is tell anyone I haven’t yet told more personally, that I’m off to live at least half this pre-Brexit year, 30.iii.18 to 29.iii.19, up there, hoping to gain French and EU residency rights.

Nothing is certain given the madness of Brexit but, unless the negotiations savage this, it appears that if I own somewhere in France and spend more than half the year there, I should gain French and hence at least some EU residency rights and that they probably also extend to J and the children.  This seems particularly crucial for them as S had pretty much planned her future around developing her Spanish and French through working, and perhaps more studying, and tnp has skills that will find warmer and more opportunities within the EU than in the UK.

Above all, we all think Brexit is bonkers but fear that the Maybot and friends still cannot now bear to admit the folly of all this and plunge on.  It’s extraordinary watching all this with mounting evidence that the leave campaign’s manipulation of social media messages through what sounds to have been blatantly illegal use of personal data without consentmounts; equally suspicious evidence that they ruthlessly ignored the campaign funding law; and as official costings now put all the Brexit options on the table as losing the UK money.  Despite all this, they plunge on.  Never since the charge of the light brigade?  Into the contract of death rode the … wallies in charge.

Oops, it’s one thing to wander off theme with a glorious picture of Mont Blanc, that was just bile rising.  Down, down, back into the bowels bile, gall bladder do your work!  Back to the message.

Yes, I’m sorry if I’ve not managed to tell you personally and if it will make the slightest difference to your life but I’m semigrating.  From early June I will be off for three weeks, back via the SPR conference in Amsterdam and on to the EPCA conference in Edinburgh then back to the Alps until September.  Back then for a couple of weeks and back around Christmas but otherwise I shall be mostly up there or somewhere else in France (ironically, I can’t stay there in the ski season as we need to let the apartment and there are cheaper ways for me to be in France than foregoing that income!)

More on this in the next few weeks and I fondly imagine that I’ll blog much more while I’m up there, with more ‘photos of the views and my walks, as I will have few distractions at all while I’m there so I think blogging will be one way to stay in touch with the wider world.