Lemonade and Spirits
2 - 4, July, Ian
Saturday was our "leaving Corsica" day so we
walked our bags down to the port to wait for the fast ferry (the NGV, or Navire
de Grande Vitesse) that would take us to Nice. As the name implies, this was a
much faster boat than the one we arrived on, with the crossing to Nice taking
three hours instead of the 12 hour overnight crossing from Marseille on the way
over. As we watched from the the harbour little planes run by the fire service
were swooping down to the sea, where they scoop up water and fly it over to drop
on inland fires. Apparently there have been some big fires in recent days
caused by the hot weather, as there were when we last stayed in Ile Rousse. I'd
like to have taken a photo for you but it was too hazy. A large squadron of
fire fighters from the mainland alighted (if that's a good word to use) from the
incoming ferry, presumably to help out their island
colleagues.
In the evening Stephanie picked us up at the hotel and took us to the old town in Nice, where we met with Reynald. We had socca (pancake made with chick peas that's a local speciality) and beer at a cool outdoor place and then kicked around taking in the sights. Nice, it turns out, has its own dialect (Nissette?), which they're trying to keep alive. Like Corse, it sounds intermediate between French and Italian; also as in Corsica, the signs are all dual language, although without the bullet holes. Another local fact that interested me is that in Nice the window shutters are distinctive. They're just like regular louvered shutters except that they have panels in them that hinge upwards so that you can have more ventilation even while the shutters are closed; this seems like such a good idea that I can't see why it's particular to Nice. If I made shutters I'd put in these panels now that I've seen them. They're everywhere in Nice and the utility of the panels is evidenced by the fact that many people have them open.
Reynald made us dinner at his place, which is about 20 minutes west of Nice off the road that heads out to Isola. Having seen Zoe and me pack energy bars for lunch Stephanie and Reynald decided that we needed an educative experience in French cuisine. Accordingly, they served up foie gras, frogs legs and snails, stuffed veal and tarte tatin; this was accompanied by muscadet (after an aperitif of pastis), claret and eau-de-vie. It was all delicious and without doubt, our best meal of our trip so far. (Several other meals were memorable for the setting but at even the finest meals the food has been memorable only in parts - the soup at Ota, the starters at both La Maison Bleue and Palais de Fes, the warthog at Chobe.) As Heidi writes in her newsletter - which she was keen to update with a Nice entry after I'd already posted it on line - she really liked the frogs legs, while the snails were a big hit with Zoe. And we all had fun. Here's the chef:
This was the perfect way to end our time in France, though perhaps a less perfect way to prepare for a day of transatlantic travel. Again, we had to route through Gatwick and transfer to Heathrow. This was made bearable - enjoyable actually - by our friend Mark, who again turned up to help us, this time also with Annette and the boys: we loved seeing them all.
I had only the lowest of expectations of Heathrow, though it still managed to disappoint them. I couldn't get a blank spiral-bound notebook or a Laika CD, neither of which surprised me, or any of the books that I was after, which did. I really wanted pretty much any novel that I hadn't read by John Updike (three bookstores, not one Updike book) or Philip Roth (two novels in Books etc, both of which I'd read). I also wanted to read a book that only ran to two or three hundred pages - sometimes it's nice to enjoy something Lite N Easy! In the end I managed to find two longer books that I wanted to read, but not just yet. The first is Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux, which was recommended by Steve/Gill and separately by a friend of Pam who is very knowledgeable on Africa who generously replied to my request for suggestions re Africa books. The second book is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoir Living to Tell the Tale. So my reading is in increasing disjunction with our travelling: in Corsica I finished The Scramble for Africa and read The Beak of the Finch (excellent Galapagos material); only a part of our Ladies Detective reading is being done in Botswana, where the books are set; and I expect that I'll finish the GGM book long before we head to South America. Now that it's happened this way I like the dissonance that comes from the (literal) dislocation: it prettily smudges the edges of our travels.
I started Dark Star Safari, which is about Theroux's journey from Cairo to Cape Town, on the way to Boston. The Cairo he writes about has so many close similarities to Fes that I have the sense that I can picture what he's describing alongside his description, thus revealing to me something about Theroux. What it reveals, at least in the first three chapters, is a grumpy old guy who sees cartoon characters instead of people: the Egyptians and his fellow travellers are equally two dimensional. Theroux also seems very white, if that makes sense to you. But then the handful of books about/set in Africa that I've read have almost all been by whites: Kapuscinski (The Shadow of the Sun etc), Packenham (The Scramble for Africa), McCall Smith (No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series), van der Post (The Lost World of the Kalahari etc), JDF Jones (who showed in Storyteller that van der Post is full of crap), Mackintosh Smith (Travels with a Tangerine), Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians), even the guy who wrote Culture Shock: Morocco! which I read just before we left. The only exceptions I can think of are Amin Maalouf, who I think is from one of the Arabic countries north of the Sahara and all of whose novels are wonderful, Nelson Mandela for his autobiography, and the author of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, whose name I can't recall.
But for all of his apparent shortcomings Theroux seems to be an excellent writer - very funny, very evocative - and I'm loving the book.
I've been thinking about the phenomenon of caricaturing the locals: it's something I really should try to understand this year and I think I'm making progress. I raised a pile of questions before about the phenomenon of being Moroccan, for example, if you recall. Let me try to explain what I'm thinking now using Americans as the case in point. When I think of Americans in general it's not so nice (and the same is true of thinking of the English in general, or the French). For example, I read in The Beak of the Finch that about half of all Americans believe that the universe was created intact by God within the last few thousand years. About half!! Would you come here knowing that? And every day they poison themselves and their children with absurdly large portions of dubious food substitutes. (And if you're English I bet you do too. Do you remember John Gummer, the then Health Minister, smarmily beaming to camera while his daughter chowed down a fast food burger? He got criticized for the one in a gazillion chance that she might contract v-CJD yet no-one mentioned that there was a one in one chance that she would ingest health-threatening toxins such as corn syrup.) On the drive up through Maine we saw some of these generalised Americans at the diner where we stopped for brunch. To be honest, after coming from Africa, Fes and Corsica they did all look spookily over-fed, as though a room full of normal people had been stealthily inflated. Is it any wonder that programmes such as Buffy feature story lines that play on our anxieties about being killed by evil people who are poisoning our food?
Americans are also renowned for their straightforwardness and pragmatism, allegedly at the cost of sophistication. This is why they're supposed to be good in business: they energetically focus on success criteria and getting what needs to be done done. As someone said recently of Sandra Day O'Connor, the (regretably) retiring Supreme Court judge, she keeps taking lemons and making lemonade. (The shifty French, by contrast, take apples and suspiciously conjure up tarte tatin.)
However, I spend much of my life mixing with individual Americans and I don't see the stereotypes in the people. They are physically diverse and I never notice whether they are fat or thin. They don't reach for the crucifix if I mention something pertaining to evolution. My American friends share a sophisticated sense of humour and get irony. Most of them don't call for civilian populations in distant countries to be rained on by the bombs that terrify them at home. They even know the names of these countries and, apparently unlike 89% of their compatriots, they have passports.
The partial truth is that my American friends, mixing as they do with aliens like me, are not entirely typical of the whole American nation. The wider, more explanatory truth is to do with the nature of statistics. There are getting on for 300 million Americans and I mix meaningfully with maybe 30. And here's my point: the little community known well to me does not have any type of fractal isomorphism with the population at the large scale. The nature of the small group is defined by individuals; the nation's nature is a characterised by the statistical distributions, or rather by differences between these distributions and the equivalent distributions of other nations. When I walk into a busy diner (which is another set that's unlikely to match the whole population), even if there are only a hundred people there it's the characteristics of these distributions that I see first - the differences between these 100 people and equivalent groups of French or Moroccans. When I meet one American his or her weight never rises to consciousness: when I meet 100 their average weight, being conspicuously different from other the African or European average, does register.
Similarly with "world view" characteristics. If I meet one American, even a Christian, and discuss God and Darwin I'm likely to find a nuanced and subtle set of views, messily hedged with ambiguity and inconsistency. However, when the poll results come in this is all lost in binary mappings and I can see a statistical pattern of the whole that loses all individual flavour but is meaningfully different from the same polls results elsewhere. Both are interesting but in completely different, barely overlapping ways. And even if my individuals have down-the-line stereotypical views they turn out to be much less important to their lives and our relationship than innumerable other things. To transpose briefly to another country, this is why when we're in Africa the macro landscape features the mind-boggling HIV rates very prominently, while in the mundane (micro) experience of everyday life our interactions with the people we chat to and those we scan at the mall the HIV thing is usually out of mind.
You've seen all of those pictures that illustrate the impossibility of perceiving two images (foreground/background, box sinks into the page/box rises out of the page, rabbit/duck) simultaneously. Similarly, it's hard for us to hold the register of individuals and that of the nation in mind at the same time without confusing them. So we have to work hard to keep open enough light and space for the particularity of individuals under the blanket cover of statistical patterns and, after three chapters, that's what Theroux doesn't seem to be doing well enough. (But it is still a great book...)
Boston is a lovely airport to fly into in all sorts of ways, though I suspect that we didn't have many fellow Anglo's flying in with us to celebrate Independence Day. We picked up our car at the airport, and driving along the freeways at more than the proper speed in our white SUV with tinted windows in back I felt a little like OJ. Actually we took a wrong turning and got a little lost. Cruising around between Boston and Cambridge where I've spent a lot of time in the distant past I kept thinking uncertainly that I knew where I was: Is that the road that leads to where Rob Mauceri used to live? Are we coming up to Harvard now? Is that the road where I went to a party and had too much tequila? We eventually called out of the window to a cab driver who led us to the right part of the city, and once I was by the park I knew that we were approaching the old Cheers bar (even though I've never watched the show) and the State building with the gold cupola, and then we were at our hotel. It was perfect: two comfy double beds, lots of space, free fast wifi, excellent location. (Thanks, Kate!) The rate was good, too, although the room rate might pale into insignificance compared to the tips (guy welcomes us from the car - $5; guy takes the bags to the room - $5; breakfast - cost + $3 per head + 16% + $5; guy takes Paula's bags outside even after being told she doesn't want help - $2; guy gives us the car keys back - $5 on top of the $36 valet parking charge). These days I'm totally cool to all of this: it's just the local way of flowing some money down the wealth gradient between rich people (like me) and less rich people who need it. In Africa we had a pretty constant tipping thing going, though it was much less formal (in NY I'm afraid the teamsters will be round if I leave too little). In Morocco we never tried too hard to win at the negotiation game. In Europe we have a rich taxonomy of taxes (though in England, although we manage to tax up the cost of petrol by a factor of more than 10 we aren't as sharp at the Dick Turpin trick of blocking the road and not letting you pass unless you pay money). Anyhow it's karma: money should and will get moved around and you just have to embrace the local way of doing it.
We left Boston early the next day and decided that we should spend a whole day here on the way back if we can.
The drive up to Maine was beautiful. From Portland we took the coastal highway and saw neither a house that wasn't beautifully maintained in New England clapper-board style nor a vista that wasn't stunningly scenic. The whole thing was only spoiled by some guy slamming into the back of us while we were stationary, waiting for someone ahead to turn. It was all very civilised. Nice people who were genuinely concerned stopped by to see that we were okay. The driver was penitent and admitted fault to the police guy. The cop knew the perp and didn't bother measuring the skid tracks, which would have proved that he was speeding. The car hire company agreed to replace the car that day with no paperwork. No one was hurt, nothing was lost. But I was still pretty shaken. We detoured via Bangor ("International") airport to get the new Envoy, this time in gold, and I was glad to arrive finally at our cabin.
I'll write more about it and include a snap in a future entry. For now I can report that it's a cabin by a lovely large lake, and yesterday the merry July 4 crowds were boating all over it. It's cosy rather than luxurious and we like it. Unthinkingly, I was assuming that in north America we'd have every convenience: CNN, wifi that sort of thing. In fact we haven't got a phone signal for miles around, there isn't a kettle, the tiny TV only gets one channel (ABC) and we really can't drink the water (it's pumped from the lake). All in all, it's in many ways more "backward" than anywhere we've been. And maybe better for it. You try finding out what you can about Otis if you want to see what I mean.
On the way back from Bangor the girls were asking me about people who reported seeing ghosts and I told them that in my experience such people were disturbed. Well I was disturbed. Last night, after half listening while I was fixing dinner to a re-run (on my Mac) of an episode of Buffy featuring David Lynch-style dream sequences, I had a nightmare. I was loyally trying to help someone escape a murder wrap. The dream ended when the person boasted of being the first person to saw someone in two while they were alive. After I awoke I saw two white figures at the bedside: a woman holding a child. Then it was an older child standing alone; I thought it must be Zoe coming down to us. I mentioned to Paula that Zoe was there, then the child vanished. Friday the 13th came to mind. (So this is where the adjective "spooked" comes from...)
In the morning I told Paula what I'd seen (aren't I the best for not telling her in the dark of the night?!) and it made the whole episode cathartic, the ghost benign, making me feel good. As I felt this, it reminded me of the scene in the third Harry Potter film, which I watched on the plane on the way over, in which, from a location similar to ours here, he summons the stag petronus. Of course I don't believe it was really a ghost (though I learned today that there is something of a ghost scene here in Maine).
Anyhow, today is Heidi's birthday (8) and it's a very happy day anyway...
Finally, I have to tell you that Michael Adams got trounced 6.5 - 0.5 by Hydra, a truly astonishing margin. The only precedent I can think of is when Bobby Fischer six-loved two top grandmasters before beating the strong and drawish ex-world champion Tigran Petrosian on his way to becoming world champ himself. In his column in The Telegraph David Norwood was getting all I, Robot about the Hydra win. I'm not disturbed by it in the same way: it's just the case that we humans are currently getting better at chess programming much faster than we're improving at chess. The computers are still metal boxes, not real robots, and we'll need a whole revolution in materials science (for bodies but especially for brains) before this changes, and I'm not aware that this is on the horizon.
In the evening Stephanie picked us up at the hotel and took us to the old town in Nice, where we met with Reynald. We had socca (pancake made with chick peas that's a local speciality) and beer at a cool outdoor place and then kicked around taking in the sights. Nice, it turns out, has its own dialect (Nissette?), which they're trying to keep alive. Like Corse, it sounds intermediate between French and Italian; also as in Corsica, the signs are all dual language, although without the bullet holes. Another local fact that interested me is that in Nice the window shutters are distinctive. They're just like regular louvered shutters except that they have panels in them that hinge upwards so that you can have more ventilation even while the shutters are closed; this seems like such a good idea that I can't see why it's particular to Nice. If I made shutters I'd put in these panels now that I've seen them. They're everywhere in Nice and the utility of the panels is evidenced by the fact that many people have them open.
Reynald made us dinner at his place, which is about 20 minutes west of Nice off the road that heads out to Isola. Having seen Zoe and me pack energy bars for lunch Stephanie and Reynald decided that we needed an educative experience in French cuisine. Accordingly, they served up foie gras, frogs legs and snails, stuffed veal and tarte tatin; this was accompanied by muscadet (after an aperitif of pastis), claret and eau-de-vie. It was all delicious and without doubt, our best meal of our trip so far. (Several other meals were memorable for the setting but at even the finest meals the food has been memorable only in parts - the soup at Ota, the starters at both La Maison Bleue and Palais de Fes, the warthog at Chobe.) As Heidi writes in her newsletter - which she was keen to update with a Nice entry after I'd already posted it on line - she really liked the frogs legs, while the snails were a big hit with Zoe. And we all had fun. Here's the chef:
This was the perfect way to end our time in France, though perhaps a less perfect way to prepare for a day of transatlantic travel. Again, we had to route through Gatwick and transfer to Heathrow. This was made bearable - enjoyable actually - by our friend Mark, who again turned up to help us, this time also with Annette and the boys: we loved seeing them all.
I had only the lowest of expectations of Heathrow, though it still managed to disappoint them. I couldn't get a blank spiral-bound notebook or a Laika CD, neither of which surprised me, or any of the books that I was after, which did. I really wanted pretty much any novel that I hadn't read by John Updike (three bookstores, not one Updike book) or Philip Roth (two novels in Books etc, both of which I'd read). I also wanted to read a book that only ran to two or three hundred pages - sometimes it's nice to enjoy something Lite N Easy! In the end I managed to find two longer books that I wanted to read, but not just yet. The first is Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux, which was recommended by Steve/Gill and separately by a friend of Pam who is very knowledgeable on Africa who generously replied to my request for suggestions re Africa books. The second book is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoir Living to Tell the Tale. So my reading is in increasing disjunction with our travelling: in Corsica I finished The Scramble for Africa and read The Beak of the Finch (excellent Galapagos material); only a part of our Ladies Detective reading is being done in Botswana, where the books are set; and I expect that I'll finish the GGM book long before we head to South America. Now that it's happened this way I like the dissonance that comes from the (literal) dislocation: it prettily smudges the edges of our travels.
I started Dark Star Safari, which is about Theroux's journey from Cairo to Cape Town, on the way to Boston. The Cairo he writes about has so many close similarities to Fes that I have the sense that I can picture what he's describing alongside his description, thus revealing to me something about Theroux. What it reveals, at least in the first three chapters, is a grumpy old guy who sees cartoon characters instead of people: the Egyptians and his fellow travellers are equally two dimensional. Theroux also seems very white, if that makes sense to you. But then the handful of books about/set in Africa that I've read have almost all been by whites: Kapuscinski (The Shadow of the Sun etc), Packenham (The Scramble for Africa), McCall Smith (No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series), van der Post (The Lost World of the Kalahari etc), JDF Jones (who showed in Storyteller that van der Post is full of crap), Mackintosh Smith (Travels with a Tangerine), Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians), even the guy who wrote Culture Shock: Morocco! which I read just before we left. The only exceptions I can think of are Amin Maalouf, who I think is from one of the Arabic countries north of the Sahara and all of whose novels are wonderful, Nelson Mandela for his autobiography, and the author of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, whose name I can't recall.
But for all of his apparent shortcomings Theroux seems to be an excellent writer - very funny, very evocative - and I'm loving the book.
I've been thinking about the phenomenon of caricaturing the locals: it's something I really should try to understand this year and I think I'm making progress. I raised a pile of questions before about the phenomenon of being Moroccan, for example, if you recall. Let me try to explain what I'm thinking now using Americans as the case in point. When I think of Americans in general it's not so nice (and the same is true of thinking of the English in general, or the French). For example, I read in The Beak of the Finch that about half of all Americans believe that the universe was created intact by God within the last few thousand years. About half!! Would you come here knowing that? And every day they poison themselves and their children with absurdly large portions of dubious food substitutes. (And if you're English I bet you do too. Do you remember John Gummer, the then Health Minister, smarmily beaming to camera while his daughter chowed down a fast food burger? He got criticized for the one in a gazillion chance that she might contract v-CJD yet no-one mentioned that there was a one in one chance that she would ingest health-threatening toxins such as corn syrup.) On the drive up through Maine we saw some of these generalised Americans at the diner where we stopped for brunch. To be honest, after coming from Africa, Fes and Corsica they did all look spookily over-fed, as though a room full of normal people had been stealthily inflated. Is it any wonder that programmes such as Buffy feature story lines that play on our anxieties about being killed by evil people who are poisoning our food?
Americans are also renowned for their straightforwardness and pragmatism, allegedly at the cost of sophistication. This is why they're supposed to be good in business: they energetically focus on success criteria and getting what needs to be done done. As someone said recently of Sandra Day O'Connor, the (regretably) retiring Supreme Court judge, she keeps taking lemons and making lemonade. (The shifty French, by contrast, take apples and suspiciously conjure up tarte tatin.)
However, I spend much of my life mixing with individual Americans and I don't see the stereotypes in the people. They are physically diverse and I never notice whether they are fat or thin. They don't reach for the crucifix if I mention something pertaining to evolution. My American friends share a sophisticated sense of humour and get irony. Most of them don't call for civilian populations in distant countries to be rained on by the bombs that terrify them at home. They even know the names of these countries and, apparently unlike 89% of their compatriots, they have passports.
The partial truth is that my American friends, mixing as they do with aliens like me, are not entirely typical of the whole American nation. The wider, more explanatory truth is to do with the nature of statistics. There are getting on for 300 million Americans and I mix meaningfully with maybe 30. And here's my point: the little community known well to me does not have any type of fractal isomorphism with the population at the large scale. The nature of the small group is defined by individuals; the nation's nature is a characterised by the statistical distributions, or rather by differences between these distributions and the equivalent distributions of other nations. When I walk into a busy diner (which is another set that's unlikely to match the whole population), even if there are only a hundred people there it's the characteristics of these distributions that I see first - the differences between these 100 people and equivalent groups of French or Moroccans. When I meet one American his or her weight never rises to consciousness: when I meet 100 their average weight, being conspicuously different from other the African or European average, does register.
Similarly with "world view" characteristics. If I meet one American, even a Christian, and discuss God and Darwin I'm likely to find a nuanced and subtle set of views, messily hedged with ambiguity and inconsistency. However, when the poll results come in this is all lost in binary mappings and I can see a statistical pattern of the whole that loses all individual flavour but is meaningfully different from the same polls results elsewhere. Both are interesting but in completely different, barely overlapping ways. And even if my individuals have down-the-line stereotypical views they turn out to be much less important to their lives and our relationship than innumerable other things. To transpose briefly to another country, this is why when we're in Africa the macro landscape features the mind-boggling HIV rates very prominently, while in the mundane (micro) experience of everyday life our interactions with the people we chat to and those we scan at the mall the HIV thing is usually out of mind.
You've seen all of those pictures that illustrate the impossibility of perceiving two images (foreground/background, box sinks into the page/box rises out of the page, rabbit/duck) simultaneously. Similarly, it's hard for us to hold the register of individuals and that of the nation in mind at the same time without confusing them. So we have to work hard to keep open enough light and space for the particularity of individuals under the blanket cover of statistical patterns and, after three chapters, that's what Theroux doesn't seem to be doing well enough. (But it is still a great book...)
Boston is a lovely airport to fly into in all sorts of ways, though I suspect that we didn't have many fellow Anglo's flying in with us to celebrate Independence Day. We picked up our car at the airport, and driving along the freeways at more than the proper speed in our white SUV with tinted windows in back I felt a little like OJ. Actually we took a wrong turning and got a little lost. Cruising around between Boston and Cambridge where I've spent a lot of time in the distant past I kept thinking uncertainly that I knew where I was: Is that the road that leads to where Rob Mauceri used to live? Are we coming up to Harvard now? Is that the road where I went to a party and had too much tequila? We eventually called out of the window to a cab driver who led us to the right part of the city, and once I was by the park I knew that we were approaching the old Cheers bar (even though I've never watched the show) and the State building with the gold cupola, and then we were at our hotel. It was perfect: two comfy double beds, lots of space, free fast wifi, excellent location. (Thanks, Kate!) The rate was good, too, although the room rate might pale into insignificance compared to the tips (guy welcomes us from the car - $5; guy takes the bags to the room - $5; breakfast - cost + $3 per head + 16% + $5; guy takes Paula's bags outside even after being told she doesn't want help - $2; guy gives us the car keys back - $5 on top of the $36 valet parking charge). These days I'm totally cool to all of this: it's just the local way of flowing some money down the wealth gradient between rich people (like me) and less rich people who need it. In Africa we had a pretty constant tipping thing going, though it was much less formal (in NY I'm afraid the teamsters will be round if I leave too little). In Morocco we never tried too hard to win at the negotiation game. In Europe we have a rich taxonomy of taxes (though in England, although we manage to tax up the cost of petrol by a factor of more than 10 we aren't as sharp at the Dick Turpin trick of blocking the road and not letting you pass unless you pay money). Anyhow it's karma: money should and will get moved around and you just have to embrace the local way of doing it.
We left Boston early the next day and decided that we should spend a whole day here on the way back if we can.
The drive up to Maine was beautiful. From Portland we took the coastal highway and saw neither a house that wasn't beautifully maintained in New England clapper-board style nor a vista that wasn't stunningly scenic. The whole thing was only spoiled by some guy slamming into the back of us while we were stationary, waiting for someone ahead to turn. It was all very civilised. Nice people who were genuinely concerned stopped by to see that we were okay. The driver was penitent and admitted fault to the police guy. The cop knew the perp and didn't bother measuring the skid tracks, which would have proved that he was speeding. The car hire company agreed to replace the car that day with no paperwork. No one was hurt, nothing was lost. But I was still pretty shaken. We detoured via Bangor ("International") airport to get the new Envoy, this time in gold, and I was glad to arrive finally at our cabin.
I'll write more about it and include a snap in a future entry. For now I can report that it's a cabin by a lovely large lake, and yesterday the merry July 4 crowds were boating all over it. It's cosy rather than luxurious and we like it. Unthinkingly, I was assuming that in north America we'd have every convenience: CNN, wifi that sort of thing. In fact we haven't got a phone signal for miles around, there isn't a kettle, the tiny TV only gets one channel (ABC) and we really can't drink the water (it's pumped from the lake). All in all, it's in many ways more "backward" than anywhere we've been. And maybe better for it. You try finding out what you can about Otis if you want to see what I mean.
On the way back from Bangor the girls were asking me about people who reported seeing ghosts and I told them that in my experience such people were disturbed. Well I was disturbed. Last night, after half listening while I was fixing dinner to a re-run (on my Mac) of an episode of Buffy featuring David Lynch-style dream sequences, I had a nightmare. I was loyally trying to help someone escape a murder wrap. The dream ended when the person boasted of being the first person to saw someone in two while they were alive. After I awoke I saw two white figures at the bedside: a woman holding a child. Then it was an older child standing alone; I thought it must be Zoe coming down to us. I mentioned to Paula that Zoe was there, then the child vanished. Friday the 13th came to mind. (So this is where the adjective "spooked" comes from...)
In the morning I told Paula what I'd seen (aren't I the best for not telling her in the dark of the night?!) and it made the whole episode cathartic, the ghost benign, making me feel good. As I felt this, it reminded me of the scene in the third Harry Potter film, which I watched on the plane on the way over, in which, from a location similar to ours here, he summons the stag petronus. Of course I don't believe it was really a ghost (though I learned today that there is something of a ghost scene here in Maine).
Anyhow, today is Heidi's birthday (8) and it's a very happy day anyway...
Finally, I have to tell you that Michael Adams got trounced 6.5 - 0.5 by Hydra, a truly astonishing margin. The only precedent I can think of is when Bobby Fischer six-loved two top grandmasters before beating the strong and drawish ex-world champion Tigran Petrosian on his way to becoming world champ himself. In his column in The Telegraph David Norwood was getting all I, Robot about the Hydra win. I'm not disturbed by it in the same way: it's just the case that we humans are currently getting better at chess programming much faster than we're improving at chess. The computers are still metal boxes, not real robots, and we'll need a whole revolution in materials science (for bodies but especially for brains) before this changes, and I'm not aware that this is on the horizon.
Posted: Thu - July 7, 2005 at 06:22 AM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM