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.