The King’s Speech

We saw it last night, thankfully it was in English with French subtitles! In fact you could never successfully dub this film into a foreign language because so much of it centres around the halting speech rhythms of Colin Firth’s excellent performance. 

Because it won the Oscars and, of course, because it concerns royalty, it is creating a lot of interest here. I am still not used to the fascination that French people have for our royal family and I was certainly not expecting the size of the audience that turned up on a wet Sunday night.

The film is really a two-hander between Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, who plays Lionel Logue, the unqualified Australian speech therapist who worked with “Bertie”, King George VI, to overcome his stammer. Their relationship is far from straightforward and often very tense, his Australian informality clashing against the formality of an English royal.

I relished Helena Bonham Carter’s portrayal of the Queen Mother and especially her cut crystal 1930’s English accent. It was a very sympathetic portrait apart from her total rejection of Wallis Simpson. There was always an enormous gulf between them in real life, which was well conveyed by the film. At one point she was asked what hold Wallis Simpson had over “David” (King Edward VIII), her reply was that she had apparently learnt certain talents in an establishment in Shanghai. Only Helena Bonham Carter could have delivered this line with the necessary combination of restraint, elegance and distaste, leaving you in no doubt of her opinions.

There were throughout the film small understated touches of humour, which lightened the subject matter. I think you had to be English to get these because, even when they were well translated, few of the French audience seemed to understand them.

Apart from the brilliant performances why is it so successful? I think that, like Bishop Turini said about “Of Men and Gods” last week, “it's because it's such a human story". Any story of courage and persistence, which results in overcoming a personal handicap is inspiring.  Add the royal element and even Hollywood couldn’t resist it!

The final scene when George VI has to deliver a radio broadcast to the Nation and the Commonwealth announcing the start of World War II was gripping. You watched, sitting on the edge of your seat, while he struggled to speak without stammering.  It was painful and embarrassing at first, but finally very moving and triumphant. Colin Firth’s body language, after he had successfully completed this ordeal, convincingly but subtly conveyed his newly found confidence.

Definitely a film not to be missed!

Black Boxes

This is a true story recounted by a friend who was doing his French military service at a base in Germany. His name has been suppressed for obvious reasons, let’s call him Monsieur X.

When De Gaulle pulled out of Nato in 1966 the French military bases in Germany were equipped with American missiles. Even in those days the missiles contained IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) ”black boxes” whose role was to transmit and receive a code enabling friendly aircraft and installations to identify themselves. Needless to say these “black boxes” were highly secret and it was essential not to let them fall into enemy hands.

Very soon after De Gaulle’s announcement a convoy of American lorries, with motorcycle outriders, turned up at the base to collect their missiles, but the black boxes were considered too sensitive, from a security point of view, to be transported this way and they were removed before the missiles were loaded.

The technicians had to decide where to put the “black boxes” and looked for the nearest suitable storage location, which happened to be a caravan occupied by an officer who was away at the time. When he returned he was not impressed with having his caravan full of “black boxes” and ordered a low ranking soldier to move them. The soldier used his initiative, found a wheelbarrow and spent several hours going backwards and forwards, moving them to another location, which happened to be the base library.

After a few days the tidy minded librarian also wanted these foreign objects removed so that the organisation of the library could be restored to normal. Once more the soldier with the wheelbarrow was called and left to decide what to do. By now he had learnt that he needed to find a location where nobody would be bothered by these unwanted and troublesome objects and he happened to know of a disused toilet, which he thought would be ideal for the job. So once again he spent some time shuttling backwards and forwards with his wheelbarrow, moving them from the library to the disused toilet.

A few days later an American lorry, with an armed escort, arrived to collect the “black boxes”. Needless to say, nobody knew where they were and they took some time to find!  The seriousness with which the situation was viewed by the Americans was matched only by the embarassment and panic among the French officers!

Even though storing the Black Boxes in the secret location of the disused toilet probably represented a very effective form of security, the unfortunate French Base Commander, who knew nothing about it all, left within a day and was not seen again.

The new Base Commander was now in charge of a base with nothing to do. This was a problem because he had a budget to spend, and he didn’t want to risk losing it for the following year, so he called Monsieur X into his office, explained the situation and suggested that he should organise some cultural excursions for “Les Bons Soldats”.

Monsieur X couldn’t believe his luck but he was very resourceful. Until the budget ran out, he organised visits to Berlin, Vienna and other European cities for a coach-load of soldiers who stayed in good hotels and eat in good restaurants. He even booked tickets for the entertainment, although in Vienna there was some disagreement about whether to go to the State Opera or "Holiday on Ice"!

Moroccan Lamb with Preserved Lemon and Green Olives

Serves 6
1.2 kg of leg of lamb – weight after de-boning
1 large onion - finely chopped
6 cloves of garlic – finely chopped
5 cm piece of ginger- peeled and finely grated
1 large pinch of saffron – steeped in a 150ml of boiling water for 15 minutes
1 tablespoon (15ml) of caraway seeds
1 teaspoon (5ml) of paprika
¼ teaspoon of cayenne pepper
3 tablespoons tagine spice*
1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
1 preserved lemon - seeds removed, pulp removed and finely chopped, flesh cut into fine pieces
Zest of one fresh un-waxed lemon - very finely chopped
1 generous handful of green olives
1 bunch of fresh coriander - rinsed and shaken dry
1 generous glug of olive oil
½ litre of water
½ kg of medium grain cous cous (not the type that you cook in a sachet, it ends up too wet)

a moroccan tagine

This is really a tagine recipe but I don't have one, so I use a casserole instead!  Like many casserole dishes it benefits from an overnight marinade and then being partly cooked the day before you eat it. It allows the flavours to blend.

Prepare the lamb by removing any fat, skin etc and cutting it into chunks of about 5cm. Put the lamb, onion, garlic, ginger, and spices in a bowl and mix thoroughly until the meat is fully coated. Add the saffron liquid and stir again. Cover and marinade overnight in the fridge. Turn it two or three times before it is cooked to allow the flavours to be absorbed fully into the meat.

Using a heavy casserole dish on a low to medium heat, add some olive oil and lightly cook the lamb. Do this in batches and don’t burn the onion. A high heat will lose some of the flavours of the spices, you are not trying to sear the meat but to gently soften the onion. Add more oil and turn the pieces as necessary.  Put each batch to one side and then put it all back in the casserole when you have finished.

Add the preserved lemon and water. Bring to the boil on a low heat, cover the dish and then cook for one hour in a pre-heated oven (180 deg C). Stir after half an hour and check that there is sufficient liquid. Leave overnight at room temperature.

If there is a lot of fat from the lamb then remove some of it. If you have prepared it well this should not be the case, but it's more likely if you have substituted a shoulder of lamb.
Cut off the stalks of the coriander and tie them up with kitchen string like a bouquet garni. Finely chop the rest of the coriander and put it to one side. Add the zest of lemon, the olives and coriander stalks to the casserole. Bring to the boil slowly over a low heat.

Cover and simmer for 15 minutes, check that there is enough liquid and then add the chopped coriander, keeping a little back as a garnish. There should be quite a lot of sauce because the cous cous absorbs it rapidly, but it should not be too thin. Adjust the seasoning. Add black pepper to taste and salt if it is needed. The preserved lemon and olives give quite a lot of salt, so taste it first!

Continue to simmer for another 15 minutes. Remove the coriander stalks and garnish with chopped coriander. 

Serve with cous cous. I like to use separate dishes, even though it is not traditional, it allows you to keep it better if there is any leftover! 

This recipe is good enough to serve to sophisticated guests, but the choice of wine is a problem.  Like most spicy food, even if it is not very hot with chili or cayenne, it tends to fight with the flavours of the wine.  I chose a very full bodied and full flavoured expensive red Cahors but this is really more suited to red meats, duck or game.  Otherwise serve a crisp white or rosé.

* tagine spice is easily found here.  It contains cumin, powdered ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, ground coriander, dried garlic and dried parsley.  I use it for both lamb and chicken dishes.

Woe, Woe, a Thousand Times Woe!

A techie’s lament
No, not sermon on Revelations 9, but a lament for the pain that my sick computer is causing me.

It all started with the Windows 7 64 bit Service Pack 1 update in February (KB 976932). There was a hiccup and it didn’t install properly. I managed to go to an earlier System Restore Point, then switched off Kaspersky and downloaded it again. For a while all was OK, and then I started noticing that documents that I had left open were no longer open when I returned a while later. It took quite a long time to realize that the computer was crashing and restarting all on its own.

Eventually another Windows update failed and I tried to re-instate the computer to an earlier Restore Point. This time after several attempts it wiped all the previous Restore Points.
At that moment a depression settled over me which lasted several days in spite of the sunny, warm weather! Fortunately we also have a portable, but as Christiane will tell you; apart from her, my computer is my favourite companion!

I tried to do a repair install, but the fact that I had Service Pack 1 partly installed, and an OEM copy of the original Windows 7 software, meant that wasn’t possible. A series of emails to the manufacturer followed and attempts were made to use Advanced Safe Mode to get back to the” last known good configuration”. They all failed, but tests showed that there didn’t seem to be any hardware faults.

At least I could get into Safe Mode and copy all my data files and outlook.pst file onto an external hard disk.

Eventually the manufacturer said that I had to do a clean install and then re-install the drivers for the motherboard and the graphics card. Plucking up my reserves of courage and persistence I put the OEM Windows 7 64 bit disc in the computer and after a bit of juggling managed to install Windows.

Next I discovered that the motherboard support disk has a split in it, and the link that the manufacturers helpfully sent for the graphic card drivers doesn’t work! The graphics card driver disk worked, however, and Kaspersky 2011 is currently downloading a 111Mb newer version of the application. Curiously everything is running without having loaded any software for the motherboard, the drivers must be coming from somewhere else! After that I have a list of 15 or so programs to install, most of which will need online updates. This, of course, takes some time on my rural 512k ADSL connection but that allows me to write a blog, or a whole month of blogs, while I’m waiting!

This time I am really going to take back-ups seriously on both computers. With Windows 7 you can backup a full image of your system so that if something like this happens again, you re-format the disk and re-install the image. At least that’s the theory!  Otherwise I need to create an ISO image of my hard disk once I know it's up to date and stable!

You can buy a 2 terabyte external hard drive with USB 3.0 for about £90 delivered these days.  The same price that I paid for the 500Gb LaCie that I bought about 18 months ago! I might even look into NAS (network attached storage) but what I would also like, apart from a trouble free backup system, is a printer server that will work from the portable over the Wi-Fi network .........................!!

Naive or Cynical?

On Thursday 17th March, with the belated and reluctant support of the USA and the Arab League, the UN Security Council passed resolution 1973 authorising a no-fly zone over Libya and any military action necessary to protect civilians. Russia, China, Germany, Brazil and India abstained. Read the full text here.

Gaddafi immediately announced a cease fire, but his troops continued to attack civilians. On 19th March, after the absence of a cease-fire was verified, and a meeting of coalition leaders had been held in Paris, air strikes started and are rapidly degrading Gaddafi’s military capability. His tanks were forced to withdraw from Benghazi and a massacre of civilians there was avoided. His forces continue to attack civilians elsewhere.

As soon as the coalition forces had started to attack strategic targets in Libya, Gaddafi’s propaganda machine began to broadcast claims that (Gaddafi loyalist) civilians had been injured or killed and a clamour began amongst his friends, fellow Arabs and those with economic interests in Libya to stop the bombing. They seem to think that just enforcing a no-fly zone will stop the tanks and ground troops from killing civilians. They are either naive or highly cynical and playing to their own domestic constituencies, I suspect the latter.

I can understand why Russia and China are against the military action. In Chechnya and Tiananmen Square they have both killed their own citizens and they want to preserve the right to do so again without the risk of Western interference. Brazil and India are both so far away from Libya that these events must feel very remote and quite frankly I have no idea about their motivation in calling for the air strikes to stop.

Italy has economic interests in Libya, but I can’t understand why Germany is against the action. Would they really have preferred to stand by and watch a massacre take place on their television screens? Perhaps they are so guilty about their history that pacifists are dominant, or maybe the massacre of Libyans doesn’t count? I think they should take a long hard look at themselves and question their own motives. Taking an isolationist view is not facing up to Germany’s responsibilities as the most important and successful nation in the EU. *(see note below)

Meanwhile the tide of civil unrest continues to sweep through the Arab world, most recently in Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, but it is being resisted by the authorities.

In France there is a specific offence under which you can be prosecuted for not giving assistance to someone who is in danger. For most people here (apart from the National Front) this concept applies in Libya. I am glad that France and the UK, although weakened economically, are still sufficiently principled to uphold the human rights of others not to be massacred by their own governments.

I would like to see concerted attempts by the international community to prevent this wherever it takes place, not just in the area of influence of the European Union.

*Yesterday 24th March Bernard Guetta, who does an excellent daily piece on World Affairs for France Inter, was in Germany and he reported that 60% of Germans think that the coalition action in Libya is justified.  The decision to abstain was a political one which has back-fired on Angela Merkel and her coalition partners.  So my faith in shared european values has been restored!

Spring

On Thursday 17th I heard a cuckoo. Muscari and daffodils are flowering, and small fresh green leaves are appearing on the shrubs. Today on 19th March, I saw the first swallow of the year. One swallow doesn’t make a summer but it's certainly the start of spring!

Yesterday, whilst we were doing a 13km walk around St Michel de Bannieres, I told Christophe about the cuckoo and he asked if I had had money in my pocket at the time. He explained that if, when you hear the first cuckoo you have money in your pocket, then you are guaranteed prosperity for the whole year. Unfortunately I was in my dressing gown! He also said that he has two nightingales singing near his place, which is down in the valley. They haven't arrived here yet but I love the song of nightingales and there is usually a couple nearby. They sing day and night during the season, which lasts for about six weeks. At night they sound really loud because there is no other birdsong or man-made noise to compete with them.

I found these excellent videos by Paul Bunyard on Youtube. Congratulations Paul on the photography and sound recording!

A Brighter Outlook

What a difference a day can make! This morning the sun is shining and as I was standing outside on the terrace I heard a cuckoo, a UN resolution has just been passed authorising intervention in Libya and in Japan a nuclear disaster is looking marginally less likely.

Of course, while all this is good news there are still many questions to ask and decisions to take. I have not yet heard a clear statement of the objectives of the military intervention in Libya. Are we looking at George Bush Senior’s strategy of stopping short or George Bush Junior’s regime change? Is the new coalition hoping that Gaddafi is so weak that he will be abandoned by his close supporters and overthrown without the need for land troops, or will it be content just to have prevented a massacre in Benghazi? How do you continue to prevent Gaddafi from taking reprisals without ground troops? As well as military installations do you target high profile targets in Tripoli like the television station and Gaddafi’s palace? Do you provide the rebels with heavy weapons and training so that they can defend themselves?

When Nato intervened in Serbia they bombed government buildings and the television station in Belgrade. Before the two wars in Iraq, buildings in the centre of Baghdad were attacked and there were many civilian casualties. At the moment it’s not even obvious who‘s taking the lead in the intervention although it’s clear that France and the UK were the most vocal in calling for it to happen. I am glad that I don’t have the task of balancing all of the military, political and humanitarian issues involved in these decisions.

click to enlarge

In Japan the toll of dead and missing is steadily rising and at present it seems likely that more than 15,000 people have died. It is notable that in reacting to this disaster the Japanese nation as a whole has been remarkably stoic and dignified. In the West we tend to have lost sight of the extent of the tragedy whilst we have all been gripped by the prospect of a nuclear event on a scale greater than Chernobyl. I hope I am not being unduly optimistic, but fortunately this is now looking less likely.

I would like to express my profound sympathy for the people in Japan who have lost loved ones, family and friends. I can’t begin to imagine the grief that they must be feeling.

Gloomy News

It’s grey and we are in the clouds this morning. Normally the moisture would mean that we would lose our ADSL connection but yesterday someone came and found that a cover was missing from a box on a pole outside, and the insulation on the wires had failed, so after that was sorted we now have a better connection than ever before!

It’s difficult to find any other good news at present. After the horrific Tsunami that has killed so many people in Japan, the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant, is looking more and more like a catastrophe about to happen at any moment.

It also seems that the Arab spring flowering of democracy is coming to an end. Yesterday riot police cleared the roundabout in Pearl Square in Manama, Bahrain and Saudi troops are being held in reserve. The advance of Gaddafi’s troops on Benghazi, will almost certainly result in a massacre of the rebels and their supporters. Saddam did that in Iraq in 1992. By the time no fly zones were implemented he had taken his revenge and unless they are introduced within a day or two in Libya it will be too late.

Against such a dramatic and terrible background the only light relief is French domestic politics, after all however serious it becomes, unlike in 1789, no blood gets spilt. Today it’s more a battle of the opinion polls.

Marine Le Pen topped the polls ten days ago.  She is proving to be a very skilful politician and a strong asset for the National Front.  Her anti-European, isolationist, protectionist, anti-immigration message is resonating with French voters, whose first instinct is always to pull up the drawbridge and protect and conserve what they have.  It caused a panic on both the left and the traditional right for a few days, but it didn’t last long.  The polls that put her ahead didn’t include Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a candidate because he hasn’t announced that he is going to stand yet, but when he is included he easily tops them, so the result is more politically acceptable.  They still leave Sarkozy trailing miserably and several of our friends are waiting for Carla to pack her bags.  I think that he is harvesting the results of implying that he really agrees with National Front policies on immigration. After all, why support a pale imitation of the real thing?

Sarkozy (why does the BBC pronounce it Sar-ko-zeeee?) will never willingly stand down in favour of François Fillon, who would give DSK a much closer fight. Christiane thinks that his party will force him to do so, but I think that he is by instinct a street-fighter and he has the dirt on too many senior figures in the UMP, which he will use if he has to!
I suppose that you have to be rather warped and cynical to find light relief in French politics but that’s all there is at the moment!

Oh well back to BBC News 24, France 24 and CNN!

The Gnome Liberation Front

Mass Suicide of Gnomes
In September 1998 eleven garden gnomes were found hanging by their necks under a bridge at Briey in Eastern France.

An anonymous source for the Front de Liberation des Nains de Jardin FLNJ, in an emotional interview at the scene was quoted as follows, “I regret and deplore the needless loss of life but this tragic incident is indicative of the deep despair that most garden gnomes feel concerning their many years of oppression by humans! Garden Gnomes are forced to maintain smiling faces, whilst being looked down upon by everyone, and condemned to stay outdoors in all weathers. The humiliation systematically inflicted on them by their owner’s dogs is too terrible to be openly discussed”!

The FLNJ is a non-profit making organisation set up to promote the liberation of garden gnomes by removing them from their owner’s gardens.  The liberated gnomes are then examined by specialists and, if they are in a healthy condition, they are transported to suitable places and released, for example, in the forest, where they can live independent lives free from tyranny and oppression.

It is said by their gnome-owning opponents that the FLNJ and their associates steal the gnomes, but according to the members of the FJNJ it is the act of assembling as a group, entering the gardens at night, taking the gnomes, running away and finally giving them their liberty, which gives meaning and value to the shared experience and not the theft as such. In fact, some assert that the members of the FLNJ take care to put a note in the letter boxes of the owners of the gnomes explaining the aims of the group and informing them where their gnomes can be recovered.  Others deny this, pointing out that it would be returning the gnomes to a life of oppression.

This secret organisation was born in June 1996 at Alençon in the department of the Orne. The first group of the FLNJ stayed active until January 1997 when one of their members was prosecuted. Other groups have proliferated since then and it is claimed that, in this popularly supported underground movement, there are now about 1,700 members and that activists have liberated about 7,800 gnomes. Similar movements have now appeared in neighbouring countries like Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Italy, also in the USA and Canada.  The  liberation of garden gnomes has continued sporadically during the first decade of the 21st century with events reported in 2000, 2001, 2006 and 2008.

The most recent act of mass liberation,  which perhaps did not go fully to plan, was reported to the police on 2nd March 2011 when 71 gnomes were found sheltering in a shed in Alençon.

An un-named spokesperson for the shadowy Counter-FLNJ National Task Force said that since the gnomes are co-operating, and show no signs of attempting to escape, they have not been taken to a detention centre, as would normally be the case when “clandestins sans papiers” are discovered, but are helping the police with their enquiries. The latter are, however, progressing very slowly. The spokesperson denied that there was any truth in the rumour that the gnomes, inspired by recent events in the South and East of the Mediterranean, were meeting to prepare for an armed insurrection.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

The 4% Universe by Richard Panek
From our garden, on a clear moonless night, you can easily see the Milky Way as a broad arc across the sky. With a pair of binoculars thousands more stars are visible. For millennia mankind has gazed at the stars, but it was only in 1923 that Edwin Hubble confirmed that there were galaxies outside our own Milky Way.


Edwin Hubble

Hubble, in 1929, also confirmed by measuring the redshifts of other galaxies, and using Cepheid variables in these galaxies to determine their distance, that the more distant a galaxy is, the faster it is receding from us.

It has been known for a long time that a very large proportion of the stuff of the universe is invisible.  Fritz Zwicky in 1933 first observed that the visible matter in galaxies in the Coma cluster was not enough to account for the speed with which they were moving towards each other, that would require them to be four hundred times heavier! These highly significant facts were, however, generally set aside whilst astronomers got on with proving that Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was correct, to ever smaller margins of error, and physicists were doing the same with Quantum Mechanics, whilst also finding more and more sub-atomic particles.

Amongst academics in 1964, cosmology was almost a disreputable field of study, somewhat akin to metaphysics. At the time there was an absence of data and of theories leading to testable predictions. Meanwhile, in the fourth form at school, as 15 year olds, we had discovered relativity, which was creating quite a buzz. This was totally independent from anything our teachers were doing and they didn’t really want to talk about it!  A year later I was a supporter of Fred Hoyle’s Steady State Theory, which postulated a form of continuous creation of matter in interstellar space to drive the expansion of the universe.

The detection of cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang by Penzias and Wilson in 1965 put paid to the Steady State Theory.  When the news finally reached me at university a few years later I found it philosophically hard to accept. How could a whole universe just appear from a singularity?  If there was a Big Bang, surely an oscillating universe that contained enough mass to finally slow down, and start collapsing, before exploding yet again, was more intellectually satisfying, at least to an atheist like me.


Distant galaxies photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope - click to enlarge
Read more on NASA's Hubble mission pages

Eventually in the late sixties and early seventies astronomers and theorists came back to the question of Dark Matter and the associated ultimate fate of the universe. By looking for, and finding supernovae, in ever more distant galaxies, and applying corrections to the growth and decay of their measured brightness, the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z team were able to use them as a form of calibrated “Standard Candle” to determine their distance and plot it against their redshift. After many years of observations they were in a position to answer the question “were distant galaxies slowing down, maintaining a steady -just right- velocity, or even possibly speeding up?”

The story of this phase of scientific discovery is the subject of Richard Panek’s latest book “The 4% Universe”. He has interviewed the majority of the actors in this search and he tells the story by including many anecdotes and details in a colourful and lively account, which places you, the reader, at the centre of the action.  I wish, however, that he had included some diagrams.  A few equations would also have helped here and there, but it’s a very good read for an enthusiastic amateur like me.

Current research indicates that the universe is expanding at an increasingly greater rate, driven by the presence of 72.8% Dark Energy, which is enough to overcome the combined gravitational effect of 22.7% Dark Matter and 4.5% visible matter.  At present, nobody has a clue what Dark Energy and Dark Matter actually are, and I suspect that will still be true for many years to come. The many published speculative papers have not so far been confirmed or denied by experiment.  It is, it must be said, very difficult to devise a method of observing the unobservable, although some are being tried! They are briefly discussed in Richard Panek's book.


NGC 1300 a barred spiral galaxy - click to enlarge

In this video Patricia Burchat explains the evidence for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in plain language.



So if I was still around in a few billion year’s time, and I have avoided being assimilated by the Borg, I could look out from my refuge in the Alpha Quadrant, on the unfashionable Western Spiral Arm of the Milky Way, onto a sky containing many fewer distant galaxies than it does now!  I would probably also be using Dark Energy to power the infinite improbability drive of my interstellar cruiser as well as to cool my "synth-wine with white grape flavonols and polyphenols"!  Chardonnay of course!