French lessons with Laurelle and Jean

Posted on 29th May 2022 by 192.168.1.1

Travelling from Lyon to Marseille on a Saturday afternoon had been a delightful experience.

I had never travelled on a TGV before and sat in the top deck of a carriage watching the Provençal countryside pass by. The end of May and the cornfields seemed ready for harvest. Wondering why we seemed only to be rolling along through the Saturday afternoon sunshine, I opened the web page that was home to the train’s Wifi system. It included a live map that allowed you to track the progress of the train and showed the current speed. We were ‘rolling’ along at 296 kmh, 24 kmh short of the maximum operational speed of 320 kmh.

It had been such a delightful experience yesterday that I had looked forward to this morning’s return journey. The train was due to depart from Marseilles at 0810. Who would want to be catching a train to anywhere at such a time on a Sunday morning?

The queue for the train was rather longer than it had been yesterday. Looking at my ticket, I saw the seat was ‘bas’ rather than ‘haut’, the view would not be as good. I also noticed that it said ‘famille’, I wasn’t sure what this meant. When booking in March, I had just accepted whatever seats I had been allocated, travelling alone, what did it matter where I sat?

Finding seat No 38 in Carriage No 17 on the train which had the final destination of Mannheim in Germany, I found it was indeed a family seat. Beside me was a young mother with a baby, opposite her sat her husband, and opposite me sat Laurelle.

I struggled along in my schoolboy French until the mother revealed she had studied engineering at an English university, at which point I thought I could stop my destruction of the language . Laurelle, however, wanted to continue in French because Laurelle was six years old.

‘Apprends tu l’anglais?’ she asked me.

‘Mais, oui,’ her father laughed.

‘Je parle anglais,’ I replied, ‘Et toi?’

Laurelle was just beginning to learn English at school. It was refreshing to discover that she had not grown up on a diet of English language television.

Laurelle told me about her school and about her teacher, whom she liked. She told me that she liked living in Marseilles and asked me what Dublin was like.

She asked me my name, ‘Ian, I replied, ‘en francais, Jean.’ Thereafter she prefaced each question with, ‘Jean.’

‘Jean, quel age as-tu?’ She thought sixty-one was a very old age to be.

She told me about the red plastic Disney figure she carried with her. I had no clue to the name of the character in English, so would have had no chance of identifying it in French. She showed me her Disney colouring book and offered a lengthy explanation as to why she was colouring the tree trunks in one picture purple.  I muttered ‘oui’ at what seemed to be appropriate moments, hoping that I was not saying that I hoped her character would be eaten by a dragon or run over by a spaceship.

An alarming moment came. Laurelle’s mother had gone with the baby in one direction, her father then stood up and went in the other direction. I was riding in a train at one hundred and eighty miles per hour with a six year old French girl who greatly overrated my ability to understand what she was saying.

Then there came a realisation that this was probably one of the greatest achievements to which I might ever have aspired. Parents prepared to entrust their six year old daughter  to the supervision of ‘le professeur.’ (I love the way the French accord their teachers such a title). To be a complete stranger and to be thus trusted brought a smile.

Laurelle appeared not to notice the absence of her parents. She explained in detail the colour scheme she was going to use for one of the Disney pictures. There was to be a lot of ‘marron’, brown, I think. I wondered why there had not been more brown used for the trees.

We pulled into Lyon and went our separate ways. I wished them well as they walked towards the platform where a train bound for the Gare de Lyon in Paris stood waiting.

Never before in my life have I attempted to speak so much French. It was a lesson, if one were needed, that immersion is far more effective than classroom lessons

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A tradition of quackery

Posted on 27th May 2022 by 192.168.1.1

Do you get those emails offering you patent medicines at knockdown prices? The ones that offer you a cure to conditions you never had? And even conditions you could not possibly have?

Quackery is nothing new. The 19th Century was a great age for “patent cures”, few of which were efficacious in anything other than parting gullible people from their money, but maybe the problem lies not with the quacks, but with those persuaded the need a cure.

The opening page of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat is very funny. Published in 1889, it captures a sense of those who might be ready to spend money in the belief that such expenditure was a matter of vital necessity:

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

Lest such thinking be thought peculiar to the 19th Century, look at how many websites now deal with symptoms of every imaginable illness (and some unimaginable ones); look at how many are dedicated to providing ‘health care advice’ and how many offer ‘alternative’ remedies at discount prices.

Science does not come into it; there is a deep-rooted human need to feel ill and to believe that a remedy beyond the wit of doctors is available to whoever is ready to pay for it.

Three men in a boat went on a holiday – a bit of exercise, a well-known cure for many a malaise.

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The dangerous lives of thirteen year olds

Posted on 25th May 2022 by 192.168.1.1

The first year students are no longer new, but nor are they worldly-wise. They are reckless about their own safety and I have realised that my warnings fall on deaf ears. They give me a fist pump and a smile and go on their way. Death for them does not exist.

Of course, we knew about death.

It was the 1960s, the Second World War was only a generation previously. In our own small community, there were people whose sons and husbands and brothers had not come home. War deaths were not just among those who had died in the forces, the bombing of the milk factory in Somerton had added a list of civilians to the war memorial in the town square.

Within my family, Uncle Bill, a great uncle, was the first death I remember.

Uncle Bill drove a big black Humber car and brought Aunt Ella from their home at Hedge End in Southampton. Hedge End seemed a magical name for a place, it seemed like something from a story book. When Uncle Bill and Aunt Ella came to visit the farm, they always brought comics with them. The death of Uncle Bill seemed, to a small child, to threaten the supply of Jack and Jill and The Beano. What the death of Uncle Bill did not do was to suggest that death had anything to do with us.

Death was to do with wars or to do with older people who had lived a very long time.

The only exception to the rule, the only young person I knew who died, was Trudi, who lived next door to my grandmother. Trudi went on a school trip to France and fell from a bicycle suffering a head injury that was to prove fatal.

Yet there was a feeling that this was something that happened in another country, it wasn’t something that affected us.

There was a policeman who went around the schools telling stories of the danger of riding bicycles without lights, not having brakes that worked, and not observing the Highway Code, but he did not live in our village where cars were few and far between.

In plain terms, death was not part of our life. It existed, but it did not exist in a way that threatened us. We could ride our bicycles as recklessly as we chose, we could climb trees, we could go where we wanted, we could do as we liked. One day we would get old, but that day was so remote we didn’t need to think about it.

Watch a group of teenagers and you realize that there are ages in life when you are going to live forever.

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Clocks work

Posted on 23rd May 2022 by 192.168.1.1

Last week, I found a photograph of an old friend in his room in the student hall of residence in which he lived forty years ago.

On the shelf above his head was his alarm clock. It had an alarm bell so loud that it must have exceeded noise pollution guidelines and a tick that would keep awake all but the heaviest sleepers.

A ticking clock was a feature of my childhood.

When the house was quiet, the ticking of the clock was clearly audible. There would have been many quiet moments.

Television broadcasting hours were limited and there were only three channels to watch during those hours.

The idea of a television being a constant background noise would have seemed odd. Why would anyone switch on a television if they were not going to sit down to watch a specific programme?

The television page of the newspaper would have been scrutinised to decide if the set should be switched on, electricity was not for wasting.

There was a radiogram in the living room, with four wavebands. On the Long Wave, there was BBC Radio 2 at 1500 metres and on Medium Wave there was Radio 1 at 247 metres. Radio 3 and Radio 4 were somewhere on the Medium Wave, if anyone had chosen to listen to them, not something that happened frequently.

In teenage years, Radio Luxembourg would be found at 208 metres; its programmes rising and fading according to the climatic conditions. Pressing the Short Wave button allowed you to find strange stations, some were foreign language and meant nothing; others, like Radio Moscow, had programmes in English that were full of strange names and ideas.

There was an FM frequency, it was interesting sometimes because you could eavesdrop the conversations of the local police force: it was a lesson in how boring was the life of a country policeman.

In the majority of hours, when neither television nor radiogram were turned on, the house would be silent and there would just be the ticking of the clock.

There were three clocks in the house; one was part of the electric cooker in the kitchen; one was a metal alarm clock that rang very loudly if not switched off before the time for which it was set; one was the clock that did the ticking.

The ticking clock had brass numerals and brass hands mounted on a round wooden face. The clock was mounted on a wooden base and sat in the middle of the mantlepiece above the fireplace in the living room. It was the authoritative clock, the clock that provided the right time for leaving  the house, the clock that declared whether or not you were late home from wherever you had been and whatever you had been doing.

At a time when there are constant reminders of the time on every electronic device and when noise accompanies every moment, the gentle ticking represents a world of tranquility.

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Footballers are dishonest

Posted on 20th May 2022 by 192.168.1.1

Not all of them, not most of them, but certainly some of those who play football are dishonest and cannot but be aware that their intention is to deceive. They will endeavour to ensure a game goes their way, whatever the form of cheating that may be required.

In the rarefied atmosphere of the English Premier League, the opportunities for deception are limited, although even there players seem to fall over at a passing breath of air.

Outside of the world of live television cameras and video assistant referees, the chances of misleading the match officials are more abundant.

At matches at grounds where spectators can stand within touching distance of the players, the attempts at deception are much more noticeable.

Players will know that a ball has hit them, or may actually have kicked it themselves, but will insist that the ball has gone into touch off of an opponent. They will knowingly bring down an opposition player and insist they were not responsible. They will handle the ball and claim they did not do so. And time and again they will fall to the ground feigning serious injury, when all that has happened is that they have lost the ball.

Perhaps the problem lies with following two codes,  having a season ticket for a soccer team that plays at a level comparable with the National League in England and for a rugby team that includes thirteen of the Ireland team that overwhelmed England at Twickenham in March.

Anyone who has been at a match at a rugby match will know the relationships are different. At the conclusion there is an expectation that each of the players will shake hands with each of the others and that each team will applaud the other from the pitch.

Of course, there has always been a class difference between the participants in each of the sports, but the dishonesty seems more recent.

Maybe for some footballers it is a case of feeling a need to succeed at any cost, to prove they are dominant. Few of the lower league footballers will have the opportunities enjoyed by many of those who play on a rugby pitch.

However, there seems also a willingness to accept a post-truth culture, to think there is nothing wrong in knowingly telling lies. Political leaders who believe it acceptable to repeat assertions they know to be untrue seem to have had an influence that has permeated working class culture.

 

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