#family – Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy

When does the constant climactic chaos convince the conservative pols that this shit is real? I was reading an interesting post by the Ruffian Ian Leslie where he made the following point using an old quote from G.K Chesterton: “…the world was dividing into Conservatives and Progressives: “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” The divide I think that is most apparent now is those who accept that the climate is fucked, and we need to do something about it, and those who don’t think we need to change anything. Either you think it’s an ongoing catastrophe, and we must do something, everything, to stop it getting worse, or you think it’s just more liberal, woke, green garbage, and you are not going to do a thing to change your gas guzzling, methane spewing lifestyle. That we continue to pump oil, burn coal and let methane vent into the atmosphere without limit is a mistake. There is no debate on the science of the climate crisis, outside of certain tin-hat wearing conspiracy groups. There have been and continue to be massive misinformation campaigns on behalf of the fossil fuel-committed, but you would think at some point even the hard core petrol heads have to accept that the consequences of extreme weather are getting in the way of them having fun.

The French endured their worst nightmares this week with the return of Nelson. Not happy with the mass destruction of Bonaparte’s navy over 200 years ago this week, Tempête Nelson ravaged the French coast. Record wind speeds of 187 kmh hit the Finisterre peninsula, followed by flooding and rain across most of the rest of France other than the very south. To the east of Lyon in the Alps 150kmh winds kept resorts closed for two days and on the peak of Chamrousse near Grenoble 200kmh gusts were recorded. This is not normal. Lyon was an odd twilight world on Friday night, t-shirt warm with crazy cold intermittent gusts and lit up by pre-thunderstorm yellow tones. The streets around the apartment are more Kiev-chic than France suburban as they are torn up, piles of concrete, pipes and barriers everywhere. The sewers and electrical conduits are all being replaced around Rue Garibaldi. This is a superb piece of joined up thinking that the French excel at; the reason they are doing this upgrade all at once is that they are taking half of the roadways on Garibaldi, Felix Faure and other major routes and planting trees. Lyon is planting 56,000 trees this winter, part of the national ‘Canopy Plan’ which targets 30% of urban surface areas to be tree covered by planting 3 million trees. They will create major gardens and tree lined pedestrian and bike paths completely separated from the cars. Having done all that work, they want to avoid then disturbing the roots and digging them up to upgrade someone’s fiber, so first steps, get the pipework done. The city has its own incredible Tree Charter which covers every aspect of the incorporation of trees as a critical element of the city’s landscape from choosing the right trees, diversity of trees for various uses, pollen issues, creating tree surgeon and maintenance skilled jobs, it’s here in French but just skim it to get a sense of how thoroughly thought through this approach is. The key benefit is that the trees reduce the temperature by 4-5 degrees C and have been shown in some situations in Lyon to drop it by 10C in mid-summer. So instead of causing more carbon by allowing A/C systems to proliferate, the window-mounted A/C typical of a New York apartment block are banned and Lyon is instead going to use trees, and lots of terraces and cold beer.

Today is Easter Sunday, so I thought I would give you a break from yet another pious rich woman getting a sainthood and would share some French Easter traditions. Every pâtisserie and chocolatier is chockablock with chocolate Easter baskets and chocolate animals full of treats and little eggs. Unlike in the UK or the US, the animal of choice is not the rabbit. The French quite correctly from a physiological perspective prefer the Chicken as the animal to bear the chocolate eggs. So chocolate chickens, chocolate frogs, chocolate shrimp, chocolate hippos, even lots of chocolate fish but not many bunnykins in sight. So if the Easter Rabbit is not delivering the Easter eggs, who is? Well of course here in France the Bells are. Bells? This is a deeply Catholic tradition. From Maundy Thursday until Easter Sunday, the church bells are stilled. To explain the absence of the bells ringing, they decided to tell the children the bells were going to Rome and the Pope would bless them before their return. Then Easter Saturday night and Sunday morning the bells ring again, bringing treats back from Rome and hey presto chocolate fish, eggs, chickens, hippos are strewn around. In eastern France, to replace the bells “gone to Rome” during Holy Week, children rang rattles in the streets to announce services. The altar boys got a starring role in those 3 days too, as they would announce the services several times during the day. The first time they shouted: ‘Réveillez-vous’ “Wake up”. The second time: ‘Préparez vous!’ “Get ready.” The third: “Hurry up”, ‘Dépêchez-vous’. We woke up, got ourselves ready, and then hurried over to La Garibaldine to line up in the rain and secure a chocolate chicken.

We also celebrated Easter on Friday night over on the banks of the Saone in the old town at Grive. The narrow streets gave us some protection from the gusts, and the chalk board menu of small dishes never disappoints. We had not been for a while, so every dish was new to us. Small plates work great for a couple or as we were 3, but for 4 they can be a pain as no dish comes with more than 3 items and if you order 2 plates it’s still odd with 6 items for 4 people. The veggie dishes were superb, white asparagus is just in season, and you cannot go wrong with roast celeriac. The pulled pork on a bed of roast mashed parsnip was a winner too. There were 3 fish dishes, monk fish wrapped in cabbage and confit of cod on a squid ink sauce as well as bulots with miso mayo. Bulots are sea snails, they are rarely seen on a menu in England and never in the US but the French rightly love them, as do I. Less chewy than clams but more substantial than mussels they are often served as part of a large seafood platter, the ‘Sélection de Fruits De Mer’ served up on a stand at coastal sea-food places in Province and the Cote L’Atlantique. For the squeamish, pulling them from the shell can be off-putting, but they were served here already shelled. Monday is Poisson d’Avril but that is a fish tale for another day.

If you would prefer to receive this via Substack you can subscribe here 🙂

In a period of 4 years from 2012 to 2016 I shared 138 photos of home made meals, 156 restaurant dishes, 38 bottles of wine, 389 pictures of variously blurred musicians in flagrante, as in caught in the act of making music and other records of my newly divorced life in San Francisco. Pictures of my increasingly more and more adult children and the new love of my life annotate that period. As all hip and connected San Franciscans I shared, liked and upvoted my way across Darth Zuckerburg’s Empire. And then I realized what Facebook (and YouTube) were quietly doing to democracy with Brexit and the equally vexatious election of the Mango Mussolini, and they continue to this day to support and succor Russian bot armies.

I have shared innumerable pictures at an exhibition, family snaps, shots of gardens and sunsets. More recently pictures of immense Charolais bulls in their bucolic majesty. My parents shared pictures with their friends but they fell in love with slides, family holiday pictures changed from. being Kodachrome rectangles and became tiny white bordered dark squares only revealing their contents when held up to the light. Slides, stored in plastic cases until put into the projector carousel and proudly presented in a darkened room. Slides, where you took a small 3×3 picture and blew it up to cover the living room wall or another bit of 70’s essential man-cave material, the standing screen. My father, the engineer and former instrument maker built his own projector and my mother the former seamstress made the screen from white vinyl material. They were not the most slick polished equivalent articles but they were functional in a good old ‘Heath Robinson’ way and the magic of the slide show allowed our family to group, to gather, share, like and upvote on our most recent holiday.

Slides were superseded by dirt cheap duplicate sets of 4″x6″ prints and Super 8 was soon replaced by video, its main advantage being you didn’t need the lumbering and precarious screen, you just plugged the camera into the ubiquitous TV. I never got the bug to be constantly filming your young child’s every action so happily avoided serially following another temporary technology. Then the I-phone arrived and the world changed.

We share. It’s a human activity. Before any technology we shared stories, gossiped about our friends, family and foes. The various forms of the captured image, from daguerreotype to the black and white photos that annotated much of the twentieth century, derive our sense of much of the major events. History is evidenced and embroidered by these images. Staged family portraits of families in their Sunday best were one of the proofs of rising wealth, proof positive that perhaps we were succeeding as much as we were working 60 hours a week underground digging coal to do so.

Putting a camera in everyone’s hands we can lay firmly at the feet of Steve Job and within 10 years he had ruined the experience of going to any art museum or major tourist attraction. I suppose I cannot hold him directly responsible for the selfie-stick, nor for those sweet examples of humankind who insist on using their pad devices the sizes of small trays as cameras in the Uffizi. This was followed shortly after by the diminution of music concerts to being a room full of people holding up their phones to record the act on stage, while blocking the person behind them’s view of the stage. I sure we all enjoy the frisson of schadenfreude whenever we hear of yet another unfortunate falling to their death in some scenic spot while straining too far for that ultimate selfie. Social media is obviously the cement that has embedded the action of recording every event of our lives by a photo. On an individual basis they capture the moment in a way that we hopes fixes the emotion, bottles the essence of the dish, meal, restaurant, holiday, honeymoon or other point of punctuation to quotidian life, even though we know that one sense truly cannot capture the others.

If I look through Apple’s Photos app retrospectively, using what they ironically call Recents, which in my case starts in 2009, by using the scrolling bar it’s a fast forward replay of my life over the last 12 years. I have been grabbing at the moments flying by, capturing what impresses me or inspires me, fixing reminders of wines or beers or dishes I want to revisit. I have my screensaver set to that folder and I often walk back into my office to see the random kaleidoscope of those images and the memory comes back. A sweaty dark club illuminated by stage lights and blurs with guitars, works of art squatting in the bright light of a gallery, faces beaming full of love, cartoon like still life of golden stone against green fields under blue skies. As much as I shun social media I understand the place that Instagram occupies in the hearts of people and as much as I abhor Meta people gonna share.