Green walnuts, black hands

It's the green-walnut season at Gamone.

The hard fruit, with their reptilian skin, are impregnated with a clear bitter liquid. If you start to gather these fruit without using rubber gloves, you're in for a nasty surprise. This is a photo of my left hand taken a week ago, when I started to pick green walnuts:

And here's another photo, taken this morning:

As you can see, it's worse and worse! I refrained deliberately from wearing gloves because I needed to peel the walnuts, and it's not easy to perform this operation with rubber gloves. Furthermore, I had to stick a metal spike through each walnut, both vertically and horizontally. Here's a saucepan full of peeled and spiked walnuts, soaking in water, after a couple of days in the sun:

On the Internet, there are all kinds of tales about, say, such-and-such a young couple who had spent an afternoon gathering green walnuts just a few days before their marriage... and they turned up at the church looking as if they'd just been using their bare hands to assemble a greasy old automobile engine. You see, once the walnuts have tattooed your hands in shiny black, there's no way of getting your hands back to normal. You simply have to live with your affliction until it wears off, about a fortnight later.

Funnily, though, various individuals on the Internet offer all kinds of remedies (all of which turn out to be totally false) for eliminating instantly the black stains. Common suggestions are bleach (a solution of sodium hypochlorite or hydrogen peroxide) and lemon juice. Somebody said that common cooking oils would get rid of the stains, and there was even a woman who said that the miracle product was toothpaste.

Now, why have I been gathering green walnuts? Well, as I explained in a blog post two months ago [display], I'm experimenting with a Greek Cypriot recipe for fresh walnuts preserved in sweet syrup. The precise description of this product (both in English and in French) is quite complicated, as I would have to mention the fact that the walnuts were picked when they were green and soft, whereas they soon turn black, and that the preservation process involves lots of boiling in syrup. Then I should maybe explain that the little brown blobs floating around in the dark syrup between the black walnuts are roasted almonds and cloves. For the moment, I think I'll refer to this product, from now on, simply as sweet walnuts (noix sucrées in French).

I'm currently preparing a second batch. Ten days ago, the walnuts in the first experimental batch were smaller and softer, and I spiked them first and started to soak them in the sun before peeling them.

Today, I conclude that it's preferable to peel the green walnuts from the very start. One of the aspects of the Greek Cypriot recipe that worried me a little, when I first saw it, was their advice to soak the walnuts, in the central phase of the preparation, in a quicklime solution. After all, quicklime is a most noxious chemical product, and the idea of using it during foodstuff processing appeared to me as somewhat weird.

In reality, this phase of the operations turned out to be unimpressive. Soon after the quicklime (in a cloth bag) is placed in a basin of water holding the walnuts, the calcium oxide is transformed rapidly into harmless calcium hydroxide, with a certain effervescent emission of heat (which I did not try to observe at close range). And it's a fact that the walnuts had a nice look and feel after this quicklime treatment.

From that point on, the processing consisted of boiling the walnuts, many times, in a dense solution of sugar, with a little lemon juice. I also assembled a few extra ingredients: almonds, cinnamon and cloves.

First, I roasted the white almonds in the oven for about 10 minutes. Then I added these ingredients to the walnuts in their syrup, and boiled up everything once again... until the syrup got thick. Fortunately, I have a powerful gas range for high-temperature cooking of this kind.

The big stainless steel cooking vessel is perfect for boiling the syrup and walnuts. Finally, I filled 10 jars with walnuts, covered them with syrup, and piled them up inside the sterilizer. Incidentally, I had taken advantage of a moment when the syrup was still cool to eat a walnut, both to verify that the product tasted fine (it certainly did), and also to verify that it wouldn't make me ill (it didn't, of course).

I filled up the sterilizer to the brim with water, placed the thermometer inside, and brought it to boiling point on the gas range.

The sterilization process necessitated what seemed to be an amazingly long period of intense boiling: 2 hours! All that remains, now, is to label the 10 jars. Then I'll carry out a tasting, with friends, as soon as possible. Between now and then, I need to learn how to cook some kind of Mediterranean honey-based pastry, to accompany my sweet walnuts.

Dilettante historians

As a young man in Sydney (in the years preceding my arrival in Paris in 1962), I often used to run into an English expatriate literary critic named Charles Higham [1931-2012], who had arrived in Australia in 1953. The news had got around that Higham was the offspring of a knighted British MP who had made a fortune in advertising. Apart from that, the young journalist from the Mother Country had the reputation of being a poet... which sounded good in our rough-and-ready Aussie ears.

— original photo Gene Maggio/The New York Times

In 1963, the Aussie press magnate Frank Packer sent Higham to California with a mission to send back interviews with celebrities, which were to appear in Sydney's The Bulletin under the title of "Charles Higham's Hollywood". Wow! This was a Women's Weekly challenge. Within a decade or so, Higham had become a successful pop biographer, specializing in the life stories of Hollywood personalities such as Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Lucille Ball and Howard Hughes. In 1988, he tackled a steamy subject: the US-born femme fatale Wallis Simpson [1896-1986] whose romantic affair with the king Edward VIII [1894-1972] had led to the latter's abdication.

Here's the publisher's blurb for a 2005 reedition of this inflammatory biography:

The romance of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor has been called the greatest love story of the twentieth century. However with the first edition of this biography in 1988, highly acclaimed author Charles Higham used explosive secret intelligence files to reveal a far darker side to their forty-year relationship. Now the author has re-visited and updated his international bestseller, resulting in a fascinating, and at times shocking exposé of Wallis Simpson. New and disturbing revelations have come to light, adding to the now classic story of an illegitimate child from Baltimore who rose to become the mistress of the king of England and brought about his abdication. Wallis gained control of the Monarch through sexual techniques learned in China, but risked losing everything through a reckless, long-term affair with William Bullitt, US Ambassador to France. Newly released FBI files demonstrate, as no other source has done, the extent of the Duchess’s espionage activities and how she conspired against Britain in the interest of Hitler. This is an intimate and extraordinary account of the woman who very nearly became the Queen of England.

Higham's presentation of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is conspiracy-theory writing of a Californian kind, but not necessarily authentic history... in spite of the allusion to recently-released FBI files. Concerning the latter, it's clear that FBI agents could hardly be thought of as credible authorities concerning the murky background to Nazi events in the Old World. These agents could do little more than note down rumors that floated their way. Consequently, Higham's presentation of FBI impressions of the "secret lives" of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor deserves to be thought of as no more than poorly-written historical fiction.

Yesterday evening, on French TV, I watched a recent French documentary—presented by a bright fellow named Franck Ferrand—that sets out to demonstrate that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were traitors working for Hitler.

In the short list of books upon which the program had been constructed, Ferrand included the Higham biography... but without mentioning the fact that the author was by no means a reputable historian. Worse still, Ferrand and his three acolytes placed a lot of trust in a notorious book by Martin Allen, Hidden Agenda: How the Duke of Windsor Betrayed the Allies, published in 2002.

Martin Allen claims that the former King Edward VIII provided the Nazis with military secrets, deliberately, which were exploited to the detriment of the Allies, including France and the UK. In other words, the author is accusing explicitly the Duke of Windsor of treason. The author claims that the British government was aware that King Edward VIII was a potential pro-German traitor, and that the supposed love affair between their king and the US divorcee Wallis Simpson was simply a convenient pretext for getting rid of him, by obliging him to abdicate. Martin Allen says that the UK then used the Duke of Windsor, exiled in France, to send back information on the state of French defence installations. According to Martin Allen, Edward also sent a copy of this precious data to his friend Adolf Hitler, using as intermediary a millionaire Franco-American businessman named Charles Bedaux [1886-1944] in whose fairy-tale castle in the Val de Loire, Candé, the Windsors had been betrothed on 3 June 1937.

The following delightful image clip from the News Review magazine dated 16 September 1937 shows the Windsor and Bedaux couples bedecked, no doubt for fun, in Teutonic gear:

Martin Allen's book evokes a dubious handwritten letter in German from Edward to Hitler, which the author apparently found in his father's papers, sent to him allegedly by the stoic recluse of Spandau, the Hitlerian architect Albert Speer [1905-1981].

The only problem with Martin Allen's devastating accusations is that they are no doubt based upon fake documents introduced amazingly into the National Archives, as outlined here. Everybody has known for ages that British royalty is issued from a Germanic dynasty known as Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. But the dilettante historians of French TV were surely a little too eager to suggest that our royals (already overburdened with minor faults of all kinds, as in any big family) might have been traitors, worthy of facing a firing squad.

Our American "ally"

In my Antipodes blog, I've often expressed my consternation concerning Australia's failure to protect her citizen Julian Assange.

Besides, this disgusting subservience on the part of the land where both Assange and I happened to be born has meant that I would be ashamed, these days, to imagine ever setting foot once again on that unfriendly soil, polluted by ages of unpleasant "politics". In spite of all the blood spilt stupidly in Europe, I prefer to remain here (maybe I have no other alternative), since many of us Europeans do seem to believe in liberty, equality and fraternity... not just egotism and fake "mateship".

Today, there's another endangered whistle-blower, pursued relentlessly by the ugly police of Uncle Sam: the US citizen Edward Snowden.

— photo Reuters, Bobby Yip

It's enlightening to observe that, while the Australian nation wouldn't of course lift a little finger to protect this individual on the run (contrary to our legendary Robin Hood mentality, once expressed in the case of fleeing bushrangers), the Australian citizen Assange has been doing so, as best he can.

Meanwhile, we Europeans are totally shocked to learn that the supposedly nice black guy Barack Obama has apparently been treating us Europeans as if we were second-class citizens of the world, because he has been spying upon us, night and day.

— drawing by Hammer, Austria

Whenever we Europeans have been crying out ceaselessly for the above-mentioned great human principles of universal liberty, equality and fraternity, Obama has apparently preferred to think of us as untrustworthy foreigners.

— drawing by Schot, Netherlands

Mickey's ears say "Hear, hear..." in all the languages of Europe. And we Europeans must reply emphatically to big-eared Obama that a so-called friendly ally shouldn't treat us that way. Meanwhile, we must also do everything that's imaginable to save the soldier Snowden...

Ghosts in the greenery

Fitzroy is suspicious of every zone of greenery that might conceal hidden foes such as lizards.

Whenever his senses detect the presence of such an enemy, Fitzroy generally adopts the spectacular technique of pouncing, which means jumping into the air and landing on the target like a bomb. But it's easy for an observer to understand that this method of attack is not necessarily efficient. On the one hand, there's no certainty that Fitzroy's targeting mechanisms are sufficiently well-coordinated to enable him to land at the right spot at the right time. On the other hand, the prey has a few life-saving milliseconds in which to escape from the descending black shadow of the dog. So, these lovely jumps into the bushes rarely result in the effective capture of a foe. But maybe they were never designed to do so. It's quite possible that Fitzroy pounces into the greenery simply because it's a nice summer feeling, for an energetic dog, to pounce into the greenery, on the slimsiest of pretexts.

Dad drinks

After an evening of heavy drinking up on the Gold Coast, an Australian fellow decided wisely that it would not be a good idea to attempt to drive his automobile. So, he asked his 7-year-old son—who had probably been drowsing on the back seat of the car, waiting for his dad—to take the wheel. At 3 o'clock in the morning, police stopped the vehicle after noticing that it was being driven slowly without headlights. Needless to say, they were surprised to discover a child at the wheel, and his drunken father in the passenger seat.

I reckon the kid should receive some kind of award for simultaneously obeying and taking care of his dad. I've always been moved by the little boy in this famous photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson [1908-2004]:

The child's vaguely supercilious expression—looking down his nose as if to say "We've all got a job to do, and I do mine well"—suggests that he's immensely happy and proud to be bringing home an appreciable quantity of precious nectar for his dad... who was probably already too inebriated to make the journey to the local wine shop. And I love the fleeting regard of the cute little girl in the background, who seems to be exclaiming to herself: "Wow, what a dutiful kid!"

Riverside mud

From time to time in my blog, I've mentioned Noah and his celebrated ark: for example, in posts entitled Childhood myths [display] and Beware of flooding [display]. As we all know, God used the great deluge as a weapon of destruction to wipe out millions of undesirable creatures... whom he himself had created.

Now, if that's not downright schizophrenia, it's certainly sick behavior, even coming from a divinity. Besides, in the countless colorful depictions of the landscape after the flood, why don't we see piles of drowned sinners, their bodies bloated by days spent swirling around in the salty floodwaters?

In 1858, many centuries after the fortunate encounter between Noah and his homicidal god, young Bernadette Soubirous met up with the Virgin Mary in the south-western French town of Lourdes. Talking of corpses, the mummified form of Bernadette, her face hidden behind a wax imprint, has become a kitsch tourist attraction in a convent in the town of Nevers, in central France, where Bernadette spent the final years of her short life.

Click here for morbid details about the series of exhumations that culminated in the decision to display the corpse in a gold and crystal coffin. Meanwhile, a disastrous deluge has just hit the town of Lourdes.

                           — photo Sud Ouest, Thierry Suire

The swollen river Gave inundated the celebrated grotto where the peasant girl had once talked to the vision of a visitor, giving rise to an incredible bubble of heavenly hot air.

An observer might well wonder if God is really on Bernadette's side. More precisely: On whose side is the river? In the case of Noah, we were left with an implausible but attractive legend, which still obsesses countless individuals throughout the world. In the case of the sickly child Bernadette (afflicted with psychiatric disorders), alas, all we seem to be left with is mud. We are reminded of the mud that the crazy child rubbed over her face and attempted to eat at the height of her trance.

In my blog post of 20 August 2012 entitled A little knowledge [display], I applied the famous criterion of David Hume (for the analysis of strange happenings) to the case of Bernadette. Today, in any case, it's frightening to see what the Church was capable of doing—and is still capable of doing—with the phantasies of a poor simple-minded 14-year-old child. To call a spade a spade, it's clear that certain ecclesiastical authorities have always been infatuated—in one way or another, but often with far-reaching consequences—by the enticing mysteries of children.

FRENCH MEDIA REACTIONS: The front page of the Charlie Hebdo weekly evoked a fabulously "foamy evening" for horny ecclesiastics at Lourdes.

Hay for next winter

I don't usually purchase hay for the donkeys at this time of the year. But my neighbor Jackie took advantage of the fact that farmers are currently cutting their grass and transforming it into blocks of hay. He ordered a big supply, which was delivered yesterday. But there was more than enough for Jackie's animals, so I was happy to buy the surplus of 30 blocks.

I'm storing it in a corner of the house (just behind my carport), and I plan to distribute small quantities only when there's snow on the slopes. Otherwise, if the donkeys have free access to such fodder, they simply set up residence alongside the bale of hay, and nibble away at it night and day... which is not a good situation. Donkeys tend to overeat constantly. For example, at this time of the year, my two donkeys are frankly far overweight. At the height of winter, they need to be encouraged to wander around, turning up the snow, searching for tasty wet weeds.

Random roses

On the rose pergola, there's a lot of intermingling between adjacent varieties. Here's a view from the south of the left-hand side of the pergola:

The small bright red roses are Chevy Chase. The bushes growing on the left are Madame Alfred Carrière, and you see a few specimens of these white roses at the top of the photo. But the pink roses on the left belong to Albertine stalks that have burrowed through from the opposite side of the pergola. On the other side of the red Chevy Chase, the small pale pink Paul Transon blossoms are in their right place.

In one of the plots, close to the earth, there's an elegant specimen of Paul Bocuse, all on its own.

Alongside, but high in the air, there are several Queen Elizabeth specimens:

Here's a superb solitary Limoux, with a few Manou Meilland in the background:

I've forgotten the identity of the following vigorous bush of clumps of white roses, which used to grow on an embankment behind the house:

The following, too, is an unidentified bush that I transplanted from behind the house:

As I've often said, one thing is certain: Gamone is an ideal territory for roses.

Straight lines

People who live in the vicinity of cliffs and mountains soon discover the powerful beauty of straight lines, which determine the trajectories of both light and sound. Early every morning, when I wander up the road with Fitzroy for our habitual 20-minute excursion (giving the dog an opportunity to do his poo, generally on the neighbor's territory), there's a surprising moment when Fitzroy suddenly halts, gazes down into the valley, and acts for half-a-minute as if he were expecting a motor vehicle to appear on the scene. The explanation is simple, although the abundant foliage tends to conceal the facts. Over a short section of our itinerary (no more than a few meters), a straight line connects us to the main road down alongside the Bourne. And if, by chance, a vehicle happens to be moving along the road at that moment, then we can hear the sound of it quite clearly, creating the impression that this vehicle might indeed be heading up the road towards Gamone. Funnily, Fitzroy seems to have realized by now that the ghost vehicle, whose presence he has sensed, is only an illusion, and that there's no point in lying flat alongside the road to await its arrival. But he stills gets tricked for a few seconds, whenever our arrival at that spot coincides with the passage of a vehicle down in the valley. I don't know what kinds of principles of mathematics and physics float around in Fitzroy's mind, but I feel that he has mastered the problem from a pragmatic viewpoint.

Euclid

Straight lines were invented, as it were, by Euclid, who flourished in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I, some three centuries before the start of the Christian era. In Euclidean geometry, the very first axiom postulates that a straight line can be drawn from any point to any other point. But the universe seems to have mastered the question of straight lines well before Euclid started to think about them... although we now know that a so-called straight line is a simplified version of more generalized entities called geodesics, which play a fundamental role in general relativity.

Einstein

In our villages, towns and cities, straight lines are relatively recent artificial constructions. In the beginning, most village lanes had lots of bends in them, like creeks and rivers. In Paris, the civic planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann [1809-1891] spent a colossal amount of public money in the creation of straight avenues, ostensibly so that troops would find it easier (if need be) to handle throngs of rioters. And even today, many Parisians speak of this self-proclaimed "Baron" as if he had committed an unforgivable sin in straightening and widening the thoroughfares of the city.

Haussmann

Personally, I'm horrified by the Euclidean linear layouts of cities in the New World, particularly when the streets are numbered and labeled as north, south, east or west. On the contrary, I'm always awed to discover, on late summer evenings, that the setting Sun has succeeded in finding a linear itinerary through the slopes above Pont-en-Royans enabling our faithful star to illuminate the limestone cliffs of the Cournouze, for a few fleeting minutes, with a warm reddish glow. Euclid imagined that all straight lines are basically of the same nature. As for me, I prefer those of Choranche to those, say, of Manhattan. And, if we were to think of Euclid's straight line as an abstract archaic god (why not?), we might say that its temple is Stonehenge.

Language miracle in Australia

In Mark 16:14-18, we must imagine that Jesus has already been raised from the dead, and he is giving an amazing short pep talk to some of his followers, who appear to be far from convinced that it's real.

Still later he appeared to the eleven while they were at table, and reproached them for their incredulity and dullness, because they had not believed those who had seen him after he was raised from the dead. Then he said to them: "Go to every part of the world, and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Those who believe it and receive baptism will be saved; those who do not believe will be condemned. Faith will bring with it these miracles: believers will drive out demons in my name and speak in strange tongues; if they handle snakes or drink any deadly poison, they will come to no harm; and the sick on whom they lay their hands will recover." So after talking with them the Lord Jesus was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God.

I've always imagined Jesus seated alongside his father, looking down upon earthly happenings, and asking sarcastically: "Dad, do you think the silly bastards will really believe that crap about deadly snakes and poison?"

I've heard that certain believers in the USA have got around to snake acts... but their numbers are diminishing. As for the bit about speaking in strange tongues, it's designated by a weird technical term: glossolalia. And I have the impression that there might be a spectacular case of this miraculous happening down in Tasmania. Click here to read this true story. An aspect of this tale that amuses me is the idea that ordinary Aussies would indeed be capable of recognizing a French accent. And it's so funny to gather, reading between the lines, that the last thing in the world that the unlucky Tasmanian lady desires is to be mistaken for a bloody frog. Meanwhile, it would be a good idea to examine her hands to see if there are traces of stigmata.

Yellow submarine

You've got to admire the marketing flair of the fellow who had the brilliant idea of setting up a fleet of yellow amphibious vehicles (converted army equipment), in the Beatles city of Liverpool, known as duckmarines.

Click here to see the Royals themselves taking a trip around the Liverpool docks in one of these vessels. Now, it's important to understand that these amphibious vehicles are nevertheless not meant to operate as submarines. That's to say, in normal circumstances, they should never descend below the surface of the water. But that appears to happen at times, as you can see here. And, when one of these vessels goes down, as has happened twice in the last few months, passengers have no more than a few seconds to get out of the metallic carcass and start swimming to safety. Imagine the consequences for the kingdom if an accident of this kind had taken place when the royals were aboard!

On the other hand, a jolly rollicking new song could have been obtained simply by changing slightly the original lyrics:

They all drowned in a yellow duckmarine...

We might imagine Elizabeth and her husband going down in Titanic style if the royal yacht (which no longer exists) were to spring a leak... along with their son Charles and his wife, too, if possible. Truly, a drowning accident in a duckmarine in the Liverpool docks just doesn't sound noble enough. But it would appear retrospectively that the world was just a hair's breadth away from such a great front-page story for the British tabloids.

Green lizards in my garden

Twenty minutes ago, I noticed a couple of superb green lizards approaching one of my garden plots.

[Click to enlarge]

Maybe they're surprised to discover that familiar weeds have disappeared. When they scrambled into the vegetation in this garden plot at the foot of the stairs, I went down cautiously to see if I could get a closer look at them. No problem. They didn't appear to be particularly upset by my presence with a camera, just a couple of meters in front of them.

They're beautiful creatures, known as western green lizards [Lacerta bilineata]. The bigger of the two specimens in my garden, with a blue throat, is a male. The female is much smaller and more slender. They eat insects, and live for some 15 years. Now that I know they're inhabiting my garden, I'll make sure they're not hanging around in a plot where I'm working. They're not venomous, but will apparently try to inflict a bite upon a foe, and it's said that such a bite is quite painful. Above all, I must make a point of keeping Fitzroy out of the garden, because he would instantly declare war on these attractive reptiles.

NOTE: Australian readers of my blog might look upon these creatures as small goannas. Needless to say, I'm incapable of examining their respective genealogies, but I would imagine that the two families differ most considerably in their eating habits. Even a small goanna (some are no bigger than my green lizards) is prepared to consume birds' eggs, frogs, smaller snakes and lizards, small rodents, etc, whereas the green lizards of Western Europe would find it unthinkable to eat such stuff.

Gamone garden

After many hours of manual labor down on my hands and knees, I've finally removed most of the weeds from the garden at Gamone. Here's a global view from the southern end:

[Click to enlarge]

In the lower left-hand corner, you can see a piece of the geotextile product that I intend to lay down in all the alleys between the elements of the garden: its 8 square plots and the rose pergola. Once this geotextile covering is in place, held down by metallic staples, I plan to cover it with a thick layer of beige limestone gravel. That's the only feasible solution to prevent the annual growth of weeds. Funnily enough, the weeds that reappear abundantly in the hard earth of the alleys are more obnoxious (hard to remove) than the relatively few specimens that dare to sprout in the soft soil of the plots. Here's a view of the area in front of the house as seen by somebody coming in off the road:

As you can see, the actual garden lies a couple of meters lower than the level of the house and front "lawn". Here's a view of the pergola as you approach it from the northern end:

In the upper right-hand corner of that photo, you have a glimpse of the stairs that I built a few years ago, and the above-mentioned piece of geotextile. The following photo provides a view of the four northern plots, dominated for the moment by the luxurious Don Quichotte blossoms:

And the following photo provides a symmetrical view of the four southern plots:

As you can see, the Princess Margaret peonies are in danger of collapsing under their own weight, and I've attached them by a string to a wooden pole. I don't know how serious peony growers handle this kind of problem...