Spain again

What a satisfying sight outside the Cultural Centre of Lleida - a huge poster for the Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet's concert there. So huge that it reminded me of the monolith in 2001, A Space Odyssey. Fame at last. We're still working on the fortune.

Lleida is the Catalan name for what used to be known as Lérida, two hours' drive inland from Barcelona. Driving from France takes you over the Pyrenees and takes rather longer. The route follows the river Garonne upstream, which steadily diminishes from a mighty watercourse in Toulouse down to a little mountain tiddler at Vielha in the Spanish Pyrenees.

The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner

Listening to the slow movement of Bruckner's 2nd symphony in the car yesterday, I found the rhythms strangely unsettling and tried to work out why (it's less dangerous than talking on a mobile phone while driving, just).

It turns out to be an extended passage of twos against threes against fives. And slow enough for it all to tell. A disturbing genius. Disturbed too, if Ken Russell's Bruckner film is to be trusted, which of course it isn't.

Image from the splendid Variations website at the University of Indiana, which has a large collection of online scores.

Goosey

The cathedral church of Saint-Benoît in Castres is justly less well known than the rival Sainte-Cécile in Albi. Saint-Benoît was conceived on a grand scale in the 16th and 17th centuries. Unfortunately the building funds ran out, so it is rather shorter than originally intended. Despite its prominent city centre location, the building is largely ignored. There is a large net suspended from the ceiling to catch falling debris. The ornate baroque decoration and bright Christmas crib are not quite enough to dispel a somewhat cheerless atmosphere.

In a moment of distraction during the massed flute class Christmas concert this afternoon, I spotted a fine statue of a bishop with a fat goose at his feet, looking adoringly up at him. A goose? Possibly the bishop is meant to be Saint Martin, associated with the geese eaten at Christmas. But a more convincing candidate, after a little searching on Google, is Saint Ludger or Liudger of Utrecht. Here he is on the coat of arms of Coesfeld in Germany, with his goose. And here (pictured), again with goose, on a monument in Germany. I must go back to Saint-Benoît and take a picture of our man in Castres.

Why Castres? St Ludger never came anywhere near here. He appears to have some connection with the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, so maybe it's connected with that, since Castres is on one of the pilgrim routes. Or maybe it's just an affection for geese in this land of foie gras.

All that jazz

Talk to a classical musician about modes and he will think you mean ancient church stuff that died out four hundred years ago. But, as I've been discovering in my jazz class, modes are alive and well and swinging. D minor? You'll need a Dorian scale starting on D. Or how about a Lydian scale (major scale with sharpened fourth), or a Mixolydian (major scale with flattened seventh)? Or even the exotic Locrian (all the white notes of the piano, played from B to B, starting with a semitone)?

Jazz improvising is heavily based around scales of all sorts, chosen according to the current chord and its context. The church modes are just the start of the story. There's the pentatonic scale (think of it as the black notes of the piano). The blues scale (pentatonic but with a telling extra note). The diminished scale of alternating tones and semitones, independently discovered by Messiaen who called them 'modes of limited transposition'. Or the baffling diminished whole tone scale (a major scale with every note flattened apart from the tonic).

And then discovering how to use them. For example, if you want to, you can use a single blues scale throughout a twelve bar blues. For example, the B flat blues scale of Bb, Db, Eb, F, Ab, Bb will fit (more or less) with any of the three chords Bb, Eb, F major. And the diminished whole-tone scale comes into its own on the dominant of a II - V - I minor key progression. It doesn't look as though it should work, but it does.

Improvising is harder than it seems.

God bless you, ma'am

A strict security embargo imposed by Granada TV prevents me from writing anything about my exploits at the weekend. So instead, here's an amusing story from the newspaper I read on the journey home.

National Anthem 'could be anti-Scots'
Lord Goldsmith, leading a citizenship review for Gordon Brown, said that "some of it is not actually that inclusive". He's referring to verse six, which gleefully refers to crushing rebellious Scots.

Actually, it's even juicier than that. The National Anthem used to ask God to scatter Britain's enemies and "Frustrate their Popish tricks", until George V asked for the words to be changed. Now the tricks are merely knavish.

Of course, national anthems do tend to be nationalistic. France's Marseillaise is an orgy of violence from beginning to end, with blood flowing in furrows and tigers ripping up their mothers.

Shiver my timbers

The hot summer of 2003 was kind to capricornes (q.v.), which laid lots of eggs. Some of them in our attic. The larvae have been chomping at our beams and the wood treatment man came this morning to inspect the damage. Nothing too serious, thankfully, but we're going to get him to come in to cut back the flaky surface, insert injection nozzles, and then pump high-pressure poison in there to knock them out.

Every type of beam (poutre) has a different name in French, most of which I have immediately forgotten. The whole construction is the ossature, literally a skeleton. The main vertical beam is a poinçon, which confusingly is also the name for the metal tool which he used to poke at the holes in the wood.

We also went to look in our dépendance, where a little pile of sawdust regularly appears on the floor. His diagnosis was that this was caused not by insects but by loirs nesting in the roof. Dormice. Apparently they don't cause damage.

Dear diary

It's been a busy few days.

Saturday 10
Played as lute and theorbo soloist for La Saltarelle in their historic dance show at the Théâtre de Castres.

Sunday 11
Flew to England, rehearsed with Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet.

Monday 12
Filming with Granada at Sutton House in Hackney for University Challenge: The Professionals as part of the Lute Society team.

Tuesday 13
Fetched newly acquired oboe from restorers and visited the museum of archaeology and anthropology, the human-era sister museum of the Sedgwick earth sciences museum.

Wednesday 14
Flew back to France.

Thursday 15
Gaillac Primeur drinks hosted by mayor of Castres.

Friday 16
Reception for Accueil des Villes Françaises to welcome new arrivals to Castres (the same event that we ourselves were welcomed at two years ago).

Saturday 17
Dinner at chateâu

Sunday 18
Might go to piano recital at théâtre but might just stay at home instead...

An ancient university

In Cambridge earlier this week, I enjoyed a visit to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, which I never actually went to while I was studying there. It's like a smaller version of the Natural History Museum but with the distinct advantage that I was the only visitor.

At the heart of the collection are 1.5 million fossils, mostly collected in the late Victorian period and still bearing Victorian labels. Chalk, clay and cliffs yielded huge numbers of fossils of every sort of life form: sea urchins, fish, sponges, molluscs, ferns. And bigger stuff: the hippopotamus skull shown here was excavated in the chalk pits at Barrington in Cambridge. This was the evidence that dramatically changed nineteenth-century minds about the origins and development of life and the earth itself, and which showed that climate change is nothing new.

There's also a very fine minerals gallery, with lucid and non-patronising labelling explaining the crystallography of the specimens.

Commercialisation has started to reach this part of the University in the form of a gift shop. But it hasn't got very far. They don't publish a guide book to the collection. Instead, for the grand total of £7.50, I bought some very pretty samples of:
Quartz
Amethyst
Iron Pyrites
Fossilised Nautiloid
Peacock Ore
Agate slice
Haematite
Obsidian
Fluorite

Fortunately Easyjet has a more generous luggage allowance than Ryanair.

I didn't know that

Who would have imagined that Arnold Schoenberg attended a dinner hosted by Harpo Marx in Hollywood? (or even that Harpo Marx hosted dinners, come to that?). This snippet from a review in this week's Economist, on the strength of which I've just ordered a copy of Alex Ross's new book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Ross's aim is to provide a history of the 20th century through its music, not just a history of the music itself. An interesting distinction. And, according to the review, he succeeds magnificently. I look forward to finding out for myself once the slow boat from the US arrives (the book's not published in the UK until March 2008). Amazon US is probably cheaper anyway, even with shipping costs, because of the weak dollar.

Maybe Schoenberg composed Harpo's shipboard piano solo in A Night at the Opera (starting at 7:30 in this YouTube clip) ...

Stop Press

There's a nice long article, with pictures, about me and Lowri in the latest issue of Classical Music magazine. I used to work with journalist Andrew Stewart at Askonas Holt, and he decided that our French adventure would make an interesting piece. See what you think.
Page 1
Page 2

Not just witches and pumpkins

Half of the road outside the main city cemetery in Castres has been temporarily redesignated as a parking area. The reason? The strong French tradition of visiting family graves at Toussaint, All Saints' Day, on 1 November. Dozens of chysanthemum stalls have set up shop outside the cemetery gates. The town council has even set up a system of voiturettes, basically golf buggies, to transport visitors within the cemetery. (But only from 9-12 and 14-17 heures: even here, the two-hour lunch break must be respected). Halloween is present in France but rather more muted than in England, let alone the United States. And a good thing too.

Shameful

I notice that I haven't posted anything since 12 September. That's, er, more than a month ago. My fans (slight exaggeration here) have been clamouring for more. What happened? I think I'll just fall back on "Never apologise, never explain."

Actually life has been quite busy. First I was away teaching and playing a concert on the Lute Society's residential course in the Yorkshire Dales, then Lowri was away for 10 days playing chamber music at Prussia Cove in Cornwall (see pics on her blog), then I was off for nearly two weeks on Sambuca's grand concert tour of England and Wales, covering all the corners from East Grinstead to Huddersfield to Cardiff. A lot of driving. Back home now and practising for the next events - Monteverdi's Orfeo in the Aude and an early dance theatre production with La Saltarelle in Castres.

Out in the open air today with Fearnley, who hauled me along to a favourite VTT site (off-road biking...). My twenty-something-year-old three-speeder wasn't really up to the job but we had fun skidding down slopes and avoiding ruts. (Ah! that's the word for a 'rigolle'. Better than ditch or furrow).

I had a bit of fun last week doing the 'selection interviews' for University Challenge - The Professionals at the ITV Centre in London. Following which, our Lute Society Team has been chosen as one of the 10 teams to take part, fighting off stiff competition from The Antiques Roadshow and 78 other hopefuls. So I'm going to be on the telly! Filming is in Manchester on 1 and 2 December.

Éducation, éducation, éducation

For the rentrée last week, President Sarkozy has issued a thirty-page Lettre aux Éducateurs. Addressed to all teachers - and indeed parents - it sets out, in stirring and inspiring language, why everything is wrong with the current school system and how it all needs to change. Expect a winter of discontent and strikes.

More cute animals

Right now, what is a "tatou" in French?
It's not a tattoo - that's a 'tatouage'.
It's not the star of Amélie and of the da Vinci Code - she's Audrey Tautou.
Here's a clue.
Of course. It's an armadillo.

And a 'piano crapaud'? It's the less than respectful word for a baby grand piano like ours. A toad piano, indeed....

After being bitten by a radioactive spider, young Peter Parker...

Alright, I know it's not long since the last weird wildlife picture, but this one is truly scary. All your phobias rolled into one. And only ten feet away from the swimming pool.

Update: Thanks to the magic of the internet, I have identified this beast as a female - i.e. big - Argiope bruennichi. All the web :-) pages about it seem to be in French, so I guess it is a local resident.

3,000 years before Obélix

We all went yesterday for lunch with some friends who have a house in a very empty part of the Sidobre. In the afternoon we went walking to see a newly-discovered menhir, dug up by neighbours of theirs a few months ago. The carving is a simple stylised human representation, life-size, with belt, legs and collar. It was probably done about 5,000 years ago. These carved menhirs are a local feature in and around the Sidobre, and there is a museum in Rodez which has a fine collection of them.

Our friends think they may have found another buried menhir in the woods a couple of hundred yards from their house. The shape certainly looks promising. The children lent a hand with the excavation.

Fitou

Back yesterday from playing a solo recital in Fitou, which is near the Mediterranean coast between Narbonne and Perpignan. Fitou is wine country, and boasts four separate Appellations. The white wine harvest has just finished and the red is about to begin. It's rocky and dry around there, very different from the Tarn only 100 miles away. There were cactus growing wild outside the Chapelle where I was playing.

The Chapelle is a pretty little place, tiny in fact, whitewashed inside and now used for exhibitions and occasional concerts. I played a mixed concert for lute, baroque guitar and classical guitar, which I always enjoy doing, although practising three different instruments for one concert can be a challenge.

I took a bit of a risk programming Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal, a big work for classical guitar, at the end of what was otherwise an early music programme, and was pleased that it went down really well. Nocturnal is based on a song by John Dowland from 1597, Come Heavy Sleep, and I like that connection between old and new. I'm playing a mini-recital for the Lute Society later this month, at their residential weekend course in Yorkshire, so I'm planning to do the same for them and hope that they appreciate it!

I met some interesting characters there, including an American artist who divides his year between his places in France, New York and Hawaii. Lovely man, and very knowledgeable about music. My host was a friendly Scottish potter who ran a restaurant in Fitou for twenty years.

Tread carefully

I've had a request for more postings about weird wildlife. With pleasure. This splendid giant capricorn beetle (Cerambyx cerdo) appeared on our terrace last week. Its body length was 4.5 cm, not including the antennae. That's a big bug: think of a stag beetle and double it. They live on large oak trees, which makes sense because we have quite a few of those in the garden.

When one of them popped up in Wales last year, it was headline news in The Times. Apparently they have been extinct in Britain for 300 years.

The COQ blazes onto MySpace

Quel thrill! With a little help from Lowri's brother Ian, who is visiting at the moment, I have set up a MySpace page for the one and only Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet. Check out the audio, video, reviews and suchlike at www.myspace.com/chuckerbutty and become one of our first Friends.

Next project will be a page for Sambuca. Which is far from being the one and only, as I discover to my dismay when I search for Sambuca on MySpace music, but I don't think there's much risk of confusion between the real Sambuca (mine, of course) and the Hip Hop version in New York or the funk one in Sydney.

Star of wonder

We were sitting out on the terrace this evening when we saw a bright star moving through the sky. Surely not Christmas, we thought. It turned out to be the international space station. It'll be appearing again at around the same time for the next few evenings. Check the precise time, because it only appears for a couple of minutes.

Unexpected hitch

An invoice has arrived from Dell, claiming that the new memory was delivered on 3 August, but no sign of the memory itself. I phone Dell, who say they will chase the delivery company. Meanwhile I have an increasingly agitated end user to placate, who wants to get on with using his Expensive Software. I am going to England today for a week, which won't help.

We've had a houseful of people this week and actually used our disco for the first time. The strobe light with ultra violet background work extremely well, though only for a few seconds before someone howls for them to be turned off.

What the owl brought

Not one but two copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows arrived last week, sent by some kind English friends who visited recently. A wise move to avoid serious conflict. All three children (me too) have now read it, and Fearnley is half way through for the second time. I can reveal that it ends happily ever after.

Meanwhile, I agreed to buy some Expensive Software for Fearnley's birthday. Imagine the dismay when we placed the order and the estimated delivery date came up as 25 October. In fact the package arrived two days ago. Imagine the dismay when it refused to install itself because our computer doesn't have enough memory. On to the Dell website to order some more. Imagine the dismay.... no, stop it. It WILL work once the new memory arrives.

Unaccompanied Minor

8 a.m. and I'm just finishing off my second breakfast. The first was at 4 a.m., since when I've been to Toulouse airport to drop off Philomena for her first ever solo flight as an Unaccompanied Minor. She should be in the air now, enjoying her second breakfast en route to Gatwick where she will be met by her friend Natalie and mother. The whole Unaccompanied Minor business is bristling with formalities, paperwork and identifications. Lowri got very frustrated during the long hours on the phone to BA setting up the booking, and more than once suspected that they were making up the procedure as they went along. Still. It's worked, and at least BA do offer an Unaccompanied Minor service, unlike Ryanair.

Lots of travelling at the moment. Fearnley's friend Simon (another Unaccompanied Minor) came out to visit us last week, Lowri is in Dartington this week, I came back from England a few days ago, going again in 10 days' time.

Fakebook

I'm having fun with Facebook. The Lute Society group that I set up on it about 10 days ago is already up to 27 members. (27 down, 700 to go ... but lute enthusiasts are not necessarily the standard Facebook demographic).

I do wonder about authenticity though. Comment on this issue has largely been about the risk of identity theft. Sharing your date and place of birth, pet's name, or first school with the world at large encourages the world at large to come swooping in and clean out your bank account. Possibly.

But are people who they say they are? The 12 people registered as J.S. Bach, the 16 Ludwig van Beethovens, and the lone Elvis Presley are easily denounced as impostors. More difficult are the semi-famous. The moderately famous tenor Ian Bostridge is up there, complete with photo and 36 friends. Is it really him, or has some crazed fan (they do exist) set up an Ian Bostridge homage account? So is the rather more famous conductor Simon Rattle (West Midlands). Among his 42 friends are Ludwig Beethoven, Leonard Bernstein, Johannes Brahms, Edward Elgar, and a few other illustrious but dead composers. Probably a fake, then.

It's tempting to set up an illustrious alter ego and see how far I could get with building that person's 'social network' for myself. And then empty their bank account, of course.

Fame and fortune beckon

The COQ sampler CD has been reviewed in Lute News issue 82, July 2007. They like it....


The Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet , www.seaviewmusic.co.uk

Just occasionally a reviewer is given something so weird it's wonderful. One of this lot is our own Peter Martin (who presumably reckoned if Lute News wouldn't review it then no-one would!). Another appears from the photograph to be Kenneth Clarke, but maybe that's wishful thinking. Authentic repertoire for such an ensemble being thin on the ground, the quartet have drawn widely, from 18th, 19th and traditional 20th century sources. We open with Offenbach's can-can, played as near to straight as it can be in the circumstances. An Andean piece has three ocarinas and a charango (vegetarians look away now: it's a sort of mandolin with an armadillo shell for a bowl) together with some odd shrieks. A fade-out extract of the finale to Beethoven's First Symphony might well have made the old boy glad he went deaf. The nearest we get to Lutesoc standard repertoire is 'Ungaresca' - the lowing sound of four fat cowhorns. A Bulgarian piece with guitar goes at a hell of a lick. 'Pizzicato Polka' offers 'the sound of the Viennese plucked ocarina' (meriting a Zen round of applause, everybody's one hand clapping?). The longest piece is the finale. The Hallelujah Chorus on crumhorn, melodica and ocarina.

What can I possibly say? The playing is highly virtuosic. Humour in music is notoriously hard to pull off - though the word means 'joke', when did you last giggle at a Brahms Scherzo? Here it works brilliantly, and doesn't go on too long. The whole disc takes less than 10 minutes. My only regret is that the sleeve photograph shows and text refers to them playing Schubert on four rubber trout, but that's not on the record. Get hold of it, and give a copy to someone you like very much.

Meic Goodyear

Summer music

The audience settles down for our concert last Thursday in Vénès, about 20 minutes drive from home. We were playing at La Baïlesse, a lovely 18th century maison de ma...
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...ître (found it! French accents on English keyboards...) owned by British friends of ours, who organised a splendid soirée musicale with food and drink and wandering round the grounds.

We're repeating the same concert tonight in Castres. Open air. Fortunately the weather today is calm and warm, after three days of fierce wind.

We will rock you

We were invited to a barbecue yesterday at the country house of some friends about five miles away. Fabulous place set in an estate of 300 hectares of woodlands, which makes our patch look rather modest. It's in the Sidobre and is littered with huge granite boulders. They even have their own Rocher Tremblant deep in the woods: a delicately balanced 500-ton boulder which moves gently up and down if you push it. Magic.

The Sidobre is one of the world's top granite producers, although it has been hard hit by Chinese competition. The top product is gravestones, 150,000 a year of them. The granite business has been boosted by the recent craze for tram systems, which need miles of rock solid bedding for the rails.

Fun with computers

The children have been hard at work with their blogs. See the links on the right of this page for progress so far.

Lowri and I have joined Facebook. How many "friends" do you have? Lowri is ahead - so far.

I unwisely introduced the children to the Monty Python Spam sketch, which is now receiving repeated YouTube viewings. Did you know that the Japanese for Spam is スパム ?

On a more gentle note, someone has kindly posted some episodes of Tales of the Riverbank from 1960. This one finishes with the animals in a high-risk car run. I hope the actors all survived. The guitar music was an early inspiration. (And as for Pinky and Perky...)

In the shade

This shameful object on the left, known as a store in French, is shortly to be replaced. I went with Philomena and Herne to the stores shop (this is getting confusing) and we chose this cheerful bright blue pattern for the new one. It should be installed before the end of July.

The folding stuff

The folding theorbo is now a reality. Prompted by the sad tale of a Ryanair calamity, lutemaker David van Edwards set about designing an instrument which could be dismounted for travel and easily reassembled at the other end. It's a brilliant piece of work, and the casemaker's contribution is pretty impressive too.

Read the full story on David's site, illustrated with an excellent set of pictures of the new instrument, as well as one of the shameful Ryanair case smash which started it all off.

The instrument plus case costs £6,500. Unfortunately you still have to buy a seat for it, but at least you can be sure it will fit - airline seats were not designed with theorbos in mind...

Emissions

Lowri is returning to the UK on Tuesday for a couple of days, her fourth visit in just over a month. In these carbon-conscious days one can feel a bit guilty about flying.

But not very. Not when there is a UK government agency called Visit Britain whose purpose is to encourage as many people as possible to do just that. Visit Britain is proud that 2006 was a record year, with 32.1 million overseas visitors, with 2007 set to increase by a further 4%. Ten times as many as in 1964.

I will be interested to see the results of the carbon footprint consultancy for the 2012 London Olympics, if they're ever published. That will involve an impressive amount of flying. I'm not convinced about the urban regeneration effects of the Olympics either. We walked round the 1992 Barcelona Olympics site when we went there last month. It looked sad and empty and the stadium was covered in scaffolding. To judge from the DCMS press release, I don't think Tessa Jowell and Sebastian Coe were shown that bit when they went on their fact-finding mission to Barcelona last November.

More pesky predictions

"'Nicolas Sarkozy heads for a huge parliamentary majority ... The UMP's share of parliamentary seats is likely to rise from 359 to 405-445, out of 577."

So said The Economist on 16 June, the day before the second-round elections. The actual result? A mere 313 seats for the UMP. Still an absolute majority, but miles below the prediction.

What went wrong? Possibly the new government's plans to increase VAT by 5%, notably missing from the presidential campaign. Even calling it 'social VAT' doesn't seem to have helped. Or maybe people just lie to polling agencies.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future". Nice one. But who said it? 'That great baseball-playing philosopher, Yogi Berra', according to The Economist a couple of weeks ago.

Just a moment though - here's the latest issue of The Economist, attributing it this time to Sam Goldwyn.

I always thought it originated from Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist. At least it would have had some relevance to his work with quantum mechanics.

It turns out that the quote has been attributed to at least a couple of dozen people. See
http://www.larry.denenberg.com/predictions.html

I'm confident that more claimants will keep popping up.

Ecole - collège - lycée

The end of the school year approaches. Now that language isn't so much of an issue, the children need more challenge to keep them stimulated, so we've decided to change schools next year. We've spoken to a lot of parents and Barral is widely agreed to be the best school in Castres, so we're going for that.

Barral is a private school, but fortunately these are much cheaper in France than in England. Fees for the Collège are €460 a year, plus lunches. Contrast this with Whitgift, back in Croydon, whose website states that 'the tuition fees for the academic year 2007/08 will not be more than £12,412'. About 40 times as much. The difference is possible because Barral, although a private school, operates 'under contract' to the state, which pays for the teachers' salaries. This means that public and private schooling are much more integrated in France than in the UK, and makes possible genuine competition between them.

Not that Fearnley's current headmaster would accept this. He was most miffed when we went in April to tell him that Fearnley would be changing school next year. He clearly detests the private sector on ideological grounds and refused to countenance the idea that any other school might be better than his. When Philomena's class (final year of primary school) went to visit Fearnley's current school recently, he told them that children at Barral all smoke and fight in the streets. And he's still miffed: there was a meeting of the class council this week, and the student reps told Fearnley with great excitement the following morning that the headmaster had blown his top about Fearnley's leaving. Seems fatally blinkered to me - he would do better to accept that competition exists, and to confront it by sharpening up his own act.

Barral is a Catholic school. Religious schooling seems to be a main reason for the existence of the private sector, since religious education is expressly prohibited in state schools, a consequence of the separation of church and state introduced in 1905. Surprising that the state still pays the bulk of the costs of religious schools, then, but I'm not going to complain.

Road rage

In yesterday's issue of Mon Quotidien, our children's daily newspaper:

"Depuis peu, des buses attaquent des cyclistes sur les routes du Berry. L'un d'eux a été hospitalisé après avoir été renversé par un de ces rapaces."

Rapacious buses attacking cyclists? Sounds rather alarming. As it turns out, they are buzzards rather than public service vehicles. Still rather alarming, though.

Up North

We were invited to a picnic last night at the Camping de Gourjade. Twenty primary-school footballers from Wakefield and their families have descended on Castres and the organiser, our friend Brigitte, was looking for some moral support.

Castres has been twinned with Wakefield for the last fifty years. Both were important textile towns, and the scheme used to be commercially important. No more; but it's still good for school exchanges and for developing Castres' fledgling tourist business.

Herne, wearing his Beckham shirt, happily joined in a foot volleyball game with Owen, Gerrard, Ronaldo and other replica stars. Ronaldo went off to play cricket after a while.

My lot were intrigued by the visitors' strong Yorkshire accent. The lady from the Mairie confessed herself totally baffled by it.

Old and new

But one good thing about the new car is that it has a CD player which actually works. A great chance to listen to all those lute CDs which have been sitting on my shelves. So, I've been listening to
Paul O'Dette playing Kapsberger
Rolf Lislevand playing Bach
Jacob Heringman playing Holborne
Hopkinson Smith playing de Visée
Michael Niessen and David van Ooijen playing Terzi
Paul O'Dette (again) playing Francesco da Milano
Taro Takeuchi playing baroque guitar
Andrea Damiani playing Galilei
Nigel North playing Varietie of Lute Lessons

and there's plenty more to go. In fact there's a dazzling quantity of lute CDs being released now, far more than I can keep up with. It's very gratifying.

I can only listen to them when I'm alone in the car. With the children it's more likely to be Skyrock or Radio NRJ.

On the blink

There is some French vocabulary that I would rather not have to learn.

Les clignotants on the car stopped working yesterday, so I've been into the garage to get them fixed. Le warning was still working fine, so the technician quickly diagnosed that it was simply the commutateur that needed replacing.

While I was out, I went to the swimming pool shop and bought a new flotteur for the robot and a new panier for the prefiltre since both the old ones were cracked. When I came to fit the panier I discovered that the vanne for the skimmer outlet pipe has failed and no longer closes properly, so I got very wet before bringing it back under control. Rather like Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Apples and pears

We're not going to get many cherries this year. They were all bumped off by a mighty hailstorm in the middle of the night a couple of weeks ago. Fearnley's friend Tom has kept some of the hailstones in his freezer. They were as big as ice cubes.

Lowri's parents came from England to visit last week, and we went with her dad to the nursery to buy some fruit trees. We stuffed the car with a Granny Smith, a Royal Gala, a Louise Bonne, a Beurré Hardy, and an Agen. Dig dig dig dig dig.

Hot air

The Figaro website reported yesterday that the US was blocking a common declaration by the G8 countries about climate change, ahead of the G8 summit meeting next month. Not much doubt who the villains are: "La lutte contre l’effet de serre se heurte toujours à l’opposition frontale de l’administration Bush."

Greenpeace, who launched the story by leaking a US negotiators' document, are even more scathing: "The Bush administration once again proves with this intervention that they both ignore the global scientific consensus and the rapidly rising concern in the US on climate change."

However, the Financial Times explains: "Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, would like the summit to agree limits on carbon emissions but the US says climate change should be tackled with technology-based solutions rather than mandatory emissions targets and accuses Berlin of ignoring its stance."

That's better. It acknowledges that the US is not simply a climate change denier (surreal images of stockings spring to mind), but does have a different approach to tackling what it agrees is a serious issue.

Helpfully, Greenpeace have published the leaked document. It's quite illuminating. The US position on climate change displays more of a scientist's caution than a politician's certainty (para 41). All quantitative targets have been struck out. As well as technology, there's an emphasis on economic structures, indicating more faith in market-based solutions.

As a bonus, the US language is clearer. We will...

• "support a clear and predictable policy framework to stimulate global development, commercialization, deployment and access to technologies" [original]

• "support policies to stimulate development, commercialization, and diffusion of new technologies" [US redraft]

But I think I know what really upset Greenpeace. It's paragraph 63a, where the US has added "and nuclear" onto a worthy list of clean fuels (winds, solar etc).

Reptiland

The weather is hotting up and the reptiles are out and about. The photographer didn't want to get too close to the intertwined snakes.

The peninsula

I've not had a lot of computer time recently (here's the reason - highly recommended), so my blog is lagging behind a bit. Anyway, this is a picture of the beautiful village where I played a concert last weekend. Ambialet lies on the river Tarn, some miles upstream from Albi.

Confusingly, there seem to be two rivers in the picture (click it to see a bigger version) but actually they are both the Tarn. Between them is a narrow rocky strip that the river can't get over, so it goes on a loop of two or three miles before coming back within fifty yards of where it started. Have a look at the aerial photo on Géoportail to get the full effect. So Ambialet and its 11th century church are almost on an island (indeed, it's called a presqu'île in French).

Pictures of Spain

Absolutely Fabius

We got home from Barcelona last night (the whole family, two Chuckerbutty concerts, pictures to follow) to find that it was all over and that Sarkozy had won. Want to know what the next five years will bring? Read it here.

There were lots of politicians and campaigners on the television with not much to say but nonetheless saying it at great length. Laurent Fabius, a former socialist prime minister, had an ingenious line: It's dangerous to have too much power concentrated in the hands of one person, so the voters must give the socialists a strong result in next month's parliamentary elections to ensure a proper democratic counterbalance to the president. I wonder if he would have proposed the same argument if Ségolène Royal had won. By the way, it was Fabius who, when Royal announced that she was running for president, asked "But who will take care of the children?"

La gloire

We all snuggled down on the sofa on Wednesday evening with our coca-cola and giant tubs of popcorn to watch this week's big feature, the grand presidential debate between Sarko and Ségo. Two and a half hours - what a slog. Curious, reading the many comments the next day, how people see what they want to see. A blistering performance by a powerful Royal, with Sarkozy cowering in the corner. Or a flailing rant by Royal, short on detail, with Sarkozy calm and in clear command. The two moderators, France's finest apparently, kept quiet apart from occasional clock-watching. Where was Paxman?

And where was the rest of the world, for that matter? In one of the rare moments when these would-be world leaders lifted their heads up from French domestic issues, Ségo advocated boycotting the 2008 Beijing Olympics (in China) to deal with the Darfur crisis (in Africa). Sarko ruled out ever allowing Turkey into the EU on the grounds that it isn't in Europe.

Strangely enough, the British Labour government seems to support the right-wing Sarkozy rather than the Parti Socialiste's Royal. So would I if I had a vote. We'll find out what happens on Sunday evening.

The power of machines

The man from the quarry kindly drove his lorry up and down the drive, tipping out the gravel as he went, and saving me hours of hard labour. Still quite a lot of shovelling and raking, even so, but it's done now and looking very smart. The car is happier too.

The children always enjoy playing with new technology. This tandem requires a rare level of co-operation.

The electric cello visited us for a couple of days along with its owner John. It sounds like four rubber bands without the headphones, but superb with them on.

Give me strength

It looks perfectly harmless, doesn't it. This is the thing that our front gates bolt into. However, over the years, the drive has eroded around it and it now stands five inches proud of ground level. That's too high for the new car, which is a low-slung model with slimline tyres and an exhaust pipe that hangs just above the ground. So everyone has to get out of the car before going up the final short slope into the drive.

Well, we're all fed up with that. So I have been to visit the Carrières de La Montagne Noire and ordered some gravel to be delivered on Monday. Only a small lorry-load, but it will still weigh 11 tons, so I am bracing myself for an awful lot of shovelling and raking before we have the perfect drive (and a happy car).

Nature study

The wildlife has been putting on a good show for us today. At lunchtime we watched a pair of nesting jays hopping in and out of a split oak tree near the house. Then a splendid pair of green woodpeckers. All of this capped by the hoopoe, a spectacular bird with a swept-back crest on its head. Our bird book says "Migrateur transsaharien, c'est avec plaisir que l'on redécouvre la Huppe au début de chaque printemps". So, welcome back from Africa.

Yesterday we found a confused baby red squirrel in the dining room. It scampered off to safety when we opened the kitchen door.

Randonnée

A couple more wayside crosses, snapped on my long walk with Herne this morning. It took longer than we had planned because part of the route, although marked on the map, was officially closed. We took it anyway and climbed over fallen trees and crossed bridges with missing planks.

Our walk started and ended near the Chapeau de Napoléon, one of the massive granite boulders strewn around the Sidobre.

Spring is definitely here

Easter Sunday out in the garden, clearing and planting. Thunder this afternoon but the rain didn't last. Back outside after supper for an easter egg hunt.

Crucifixus

I try to listen to one of the Bach Passions each Good Friday. Two years ago I heard a magnificent St Matthew Passion live in Cadogan Hall in London, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. I didn't manage it yesterday, because I was teaching a lute student who had done me the honour of driving two hours to get here, but this afternoon I sat down to listen to Gardiner's recording of the St John Passion.

The St John Passion has a lute in it for all of two minutes (the arioso Betrachte meine Seel'). The lute writing is puzzling because it has quite a few chromatic bass notes in it, which don't work on a normal baroque lute. I posted a message to the internet lute list about it, and got a couple of helpful replies from people who have found ingenious ways of retuning their bass strings for the purpose. And they usually play continuo for various other numbers, so the conductor can get more than two minutes use out of them.

France is officially a secular state but there are still plenty of religious symbols on display in town squares and at road junctions. There's a fine crucifix in the centre of our village, La Caulié. And just outside our back gate, on the adjoining farm, there' s a large granite cross, now surrounded by tractors and bags of fertiliser.

That hat

Remember Michael Murray's hat from a few weeks ago? Here's the original model, as worn by a big chief in Hawaii in the early 19th century, which I caught sight of in the Musée du Quai Branly at the weekend.