Christmas Day in the evening

The rather jaded stage. But it's been a perfectly good one, as it usually is.

Quiet, of course. We've got the card sending, and commensurate receiving, down to about half what it once was (I don't quite know how, only a few people on the list have actually departed this life), but, lazy and phone averse as I am, I actually picked up the device and made a couple of calls, and received a couple more and felt happy to connect with the people on the other end in all cases.

In my somewhat frenzied bonfire of the vanities back on the summer, I threw out all of our Christmas decorations (except maybe I kept a small painted bell K sent us one year, if so but I can't remember where I put it). This is something I find I don't regret at all, we didn't have many but they had become a rather scruffy and slightly disheartening obligation. I strung up the cards we did receive, and bought a bundle of pretty red hand made candles when in England, we roasted a pintade and various stuffing-type things, including the the last packet of chipolatas from the freezer, and there was still a Christmas pud in the cupboard from last year, and we were festive enough.

I got a pair of socks for Tom finished in time, and best of all, it being Elfie's first Christmas with us, she was made much of, with very classy new piece of kit, a Julius K9 Powerharness in silver, no less. Nothing but the best for our girl:

We've always had a harness for her for walking and travelling; we brought an SPA one, with their logo on it, back with her from the refuge. It was quite well-designed but I always felt it gave her rather too much of the look of a charity child.

The legend 'best friend' was an optional extra, you can order velcro-on labels to go over the brand ones, they glow in the dark. We had to choose from a list, so we went for that on one side, and 'treat monster' on the other:

She also had a juicy bone, which I imagine was her preferred present, though she seemed happy to go out in the harness.

Happy Christmas all.

Return of the stuff monster

This is what our beautifully cleared, cleaned, repainted and re-staired hallway looked like a few days ago, and a short time after I took the photos of it in a previous post. The man from le pressing, the dry cleaners, dropped off all the clothes, bedding, soft furnishings, carpets that he had taken away two days after the fire, cramming it all astonishingly into a small van, and then doing so again to bring it back again.

There were things I had quite forgotten about, clothes which were lying around the bedroom or else on the clothes airer on the landing, a car seat cover I must have washed, humongous amounts of spare bedding stored in the spare rooms that bore the brunt of the smoke damage. There were many things, such as our winter jackets that were hanging in the hall, and the light, sleeveless many-pocketed walking waistcoats, which we had rather missed, especially as the chillier weather drew on. 

Yet I haven't been able to rejoice in the return of this stuff as much as I expected. It wasn't just the work of sorting it out, that is more or less done now. It was the sense of the weight and clutter of stuff descending on us again; I'd got used to managing with less. The new parquet looks rather nice without rugs on it. Do we really need all that spare bedding for the luxury of changing our own coverings as we fancy with the seasons, and the maybe once yearly visits of friends and family? Should I decide once and for all I am never going to wear that shade of red again and get rid of that jacket or not? How many old fleecy blankets does Elfie really need? Even wrapping up for colder walks in our comparatively mild Brittany climate seems to be adequately served by fleeces and sweaters covered with waterproofs and topped with scarves, gloves and other knitwear accessories, rather than such a selection of padded and weatherproof overcoats.

The purging energy that enabled us to cull our belongings so ruthlessly through our itinerant summer seems to have rather deserted us, indecision is taking hold, perhaps too with the recognition that what with the inevitable costs the insurance didn't cover, exchange rate fluctuations (' and fluc you Europeans too!*') financial uncertainty on both micro and macro levels, we won't be able afford to ditch everything and start again, even if that were a good thing to do. The Bonfire of the Vanities is rather guttering out, I fear.

The main cause of inhibition, though, is the absolutely beautiful job they've made of it. According to their claims, without noxious solvents and in an ecologically friendly way, they have returned our textiles to us in such immaculate, crisp, pristine condition, it nigh breaks my heart to get any of it out of the wrappers and get it all dirty and crumpled and hairy again. Even an old waterproof, bought at Milletts in the UK at least twenty-five years ago, which we have both worn for every kind of rough work - exterior painting, cement mixing, compost shifting, tree surgery...  has come back sleek and folded and, gosh yes, it was blue wasn't it?! (It is also the only waterproof with a zip that never stuck, broke or split up from the bottom in that annoying way, so it deserves to be kept).

I feel somehow unworthy of all this newly emerged freshness, and that I should perhaps save it for another stage of life. So while it has been sorted and stored, and a certain amount successfully culled, much of it is staying in its plastic for now.

*  the Japanese lady and the bank teller, if you must know. I heard it in New Zealand as 'Europeans' rather than 'white people', and prefer it thus. Pace anyone who might be offended.

Bonfire of the vanities: losing my marbles

The marbles I bought for the blue room. Because they were pretty, cheap, fun, whimsical, throwaway trinkets and knickknacks.  From time to time I would slosh them about in soapy water, dry them and rearrange them in different glass and ceramic receptacles.  

When the time came to sort through stuff, it seemed to me that to treasure and hoard them and feel obliged to carry them through life would be a mistake and somehow against the spirit of marbles. I needed to part with them. I asked Iso if the Princeling, now nine years old, cared for marbles. I knew French kids still often played and treasured les billes.

Indeed he did, she said, and they were the only toys they were allowed to take into school.

I took a plain piece of the cotton fabric pieces that HHB had sent me, knitted a length of i-cord, and made a drawstring bag for them, and passed them on.

'He could lose them, you know,'  Tom warned 'playing marbles is basically gambling.'

'They're beautiful, like jewels!' Iso, Princeling's mum exclaimed, when I gave them to her to give to him, 'I might have to keep them, not let him have them...'

That was a couple of months ago. Today we received a hand made card, with rainbows and kisses painted on it, and a careful message in English, in French cursive script, thanking me for the marbles and also for the jumper I knitted for his birthday - It's all hot. I love it* - a kind of gansey type thing which I didn't photograph before giving it to him, but it's this pattern, in a rather sober, grown-up, grey-green wool/alpaca blend which I hope isn't too drab, he's a chap who likes colour. I don't know if Iso had kept the marbles until his birthday, and I don't know if he will take them to school and be prepared to risk them all at one turn of pitch and toss. I rather hope so, if he wants to, and that they won't be too much of a treasure and a source of gratitude, obligation and anxiety, and that he'll romp and play in the jumper, dirty it, hole it and scuff it up until he grows out of it.


*chaud being both hot and warm, he has always tended to think in French and translate, so 'is it yours?' was expressed as ' is it at you?' a literal translation of 'est-ce que c'est à toi?'

Blackened - before

I didn't take many photos of the fire damage, or keep many of those I did take. But here is one of the cupboard under the stairs, where it originated, before the cleaners had done much clearing of it.

It can be seen how the front of the cupboard bore the brunt of it, and you can make out the polystyrene wine racks at the back, from which we salvaged the contents successfully, and also the parfait jars of sloe gin and the already decanted bottles, to the right, and behind them a cellophane wrapped box of PG Tips tea bags, all of which were OK, and the sea grass shopping basket also was fine after a bit of time outside to blow the smell off it. The powdery mess and wrappers in the foreground were mostly the residue of Tom's late lamented curry spices.

Below is another view of the site of the fire, after everything had been cleaned up but not redecorated, the underside of the rebuilt staircase; you can also see into the blue room behind it from which the the wallpaper had been stripped and the furniture pushed to the edges so that the floating parquet floor could be relaid (it sustained little damage but enough round the doorway, caused mostly by water and some heat, to make it necessary to replace the lot). The actual fire damage on the wall itself is more evident.

The scorch marks, smoke blackening, molten plastic drips and holes from where the shelving and electrical installation had been removed, made some interesting shapes and patterns in sombre monochrome. Before it was covered up, I made some abstract studies.

Today, the last of the painters and decorators finished and left, they've been very good. Tomorrow I'll take and post some photos of what it looks now, and of the staircase in its entirety.

Bonfire of the vanities, the blog roll - and some have detachment thrust upon them.

It would appear the cosmos is seeking to teach me yet more lessons in detachment. I logged on this morning to find that my sidebar blog list feed thingy, which had served me well in keeping up with almost all of my blogging friends and acquaintances for many a long year, had completely disappeared. I was thrown into a flat spin, quite discombobulated - or should that be discomblogulated?

An odd thing about this was that just yesterday I was indulging in a characteristically whimsical exchange in a comment thread with Robbie (Roderick Robinson) about visiting defunct blogs, of friends and contacts who have disappeared either from actual life or from the blogosphere, and how poignant it was scanning the list to the bottom - I had it set to display the most recent twenty-five blogs to post, but the 'view all' function showed over sixty, many of which had not been updated for several years. I said:

And that's only a sample of all the 'trépassés' whose blogs languish there. At one time I might have cleared them out as link-rot but now I can't quite bring myself to, it feels like a kind of betrayal. There are also many who update quite regularly but I seldom visit them any more, again, it would seem disloyal to delete, and I like to know they're still there. 

Despite the fact I should really be concentrating on getting on with our final move back into our own house which we are just now undertaking and other things, I could not rest until I had  gone onto Blogger help, where I received the very inexpert 'expert reply', did I mean the blog archive? And that I could always add it again. Of course I could, but the information, the URLs of all the blogs on the list, was lost, and just relying on my 'meat' memory to recall what was on it would not really be adequate. Oh, and they told me to back up from time to time, horses and stable doors and all that.

After a bit, however, a more helpful non-expert (this has happened to a number of people and seems to be something to do with an 'it-ain't-broke-but-we'll-bugger-about-pretending-to-fix-it-anyway' change to the search box widget which has spilled over into the links list) suggested searching out a cached copy of the blog and getting the html from there. I had no idea how to do this but found out about the first bit and quickly copied all the URLs into a notepad thingy, so I've saved the data if Blogger can't fix it.

But this would leave me with the question, what do I keep on the roll and what do I let go? While the redundant links were just sitting there, I could just leave them and not make any decision. If it came to putting them all back, do I just shunt them over, or should I have a cull and a clean out? In digital microcosm, it's the same as the stuff in the house really. How much should sentiment stop you from getting rid of the unnecessary?

~

As I say (do I use that collocation too much?), it's not as though I don't have other things to be doing. We are officially out of here - the gite - tomorrow. The electrician took it to the wire (!) and finished the wiring and putting all the stuff he'd bashed up back together this afternoon, I had thought we might sleep there tonight but I've bottled out, though I have made the bed up. Tom's been working flat out to get all sorts of jobs finished there and being upbeat and brave and energetic and I know I'm in danger of giving into being fearful and difficult and tedious. Getting back and getting on with it has simply got to be done and at least there's plenty of clear and present work to be busy with; it won't be so bad once we've been there a day or two, the gite has been getting a bit cramped and boring really, though we've appreciate much about being here, and in Hénon. And the house really is beginning to look very fine, especially the new light oak staircase, the beauty of which we can just stand and gaze at. Even the new fuse box is rather lovely in its well-labelled order, and the rest of the repairs and re-painting should be done in the next month or so, ready for it to be put on the market and for us to leave it for good, as is the plan.

Then Tom yesterday started getting weird black floaters and the odd flash in his eyes, which have been giving him some trouble with blurring and tiredness all summer, so that was my cue finally to get on to the clinic where he had his cataract ops done pronto; the ophthalmologist there had a look and said he was not in fact suffering a detached retina (more detachment!) but would need some minor corrective laser surgery next week. 

(Turns out he's just posted about this, he wasn't just doing on-line sudoku after all,  and we've both employed the same lame pun. Not altogether surprising).

Bonfire of the Vanities - books

Avus's recent post about discarding books, and his daughter hhb's helping with some of the difficulties of this by re-homing them on beautiful new bookshelves, and how e-book reading has come to fill a different role in his reading life, and encouraged him to explore different writers, struck some chords. We've got rid of a great number of books this summer; it hasn't always been easy, but it has been thought-provoking and generally fairly liberating. Detachment again.

I've come to the conclusion there's rather a lot of precious nonsense talked about Books. I've probably talked quite a bit of it myself at one time or another, and may well be about to again.

Dale said lately one of the things he's had to let go of is his own idea of himself as a well-read person. I too used to consider myself so, and enjoyed the epithet as a compliment sometimes, but lately I've come to mistrust it. I'm aware also that, what with blogging at one time, and browsing around on the internet generally, or knitting, or walking the dog, or watching fairly lightweight telly for the sake of companionship with Tom (and more knitting time) or whatever other interest I might currently be following, and also with my own loss, with age, of patience and staying power for reading matter, I'm no longer a great reader. I have a reasonable catalogue of stuff read and remembered, and I'm glad of it, but it's not such an essential part of who I am now.

I've also come to see that owning and having read a large number of books does not, in itself, make you a serious and cultured person anyway, any more than travel necessarily broadens the mind. I have one older acquaintance, who hauls her battered old library around with her from one move to the next, sometimes adding haphazardly to it, priding herself on never throwing one out and cramming them into smaller and smaller accommodation so her living space is so cluttered you want to scream (she has a hoarding problem anyway). She is, frankly, shallow, casually prejudiced and not very clever (with friends like me...), in spite of how well-read she appears to be, and in spite of the pretentious way in which she says 'Oh but I couldn't be without my books!' or expresses disdain for e-readers because 'There is simply nothing like turning the pages of a real book!' On the other hand, our young sculptor friend, for example, who has too much energy and need to be doing to bother much with reading, is no less deep-minded and cultured for all that, far from it.

E-readers can be cover for those who don't want to give away the less than edifying nature of their reading tastes (50 shades etc) but they are also a good antidote to books as vanity. It's gratifying to be seen to have a lot of books, showing off your taste in reading, books do furnish a room, look at me, I'm a reading person! etc etc. But who knows what you've got on your Kindle, could be Proust, could be Mills and Boon, a slim grey electronic device can't brag or pose - despite the ridiculously overambitious stuff most of us collect on them, because hey, it's out of copyright and free! (Or nearly) Edmund Burke anyone? The Complete Henry James for just two quid? Michelet, in French? What's your bit of pretentious Kindle vanity? But at least your only mostly pretending to yourself.

There are many things, though, I'm really pleased to have on Kindle, and which, like Avus, it's encouraged me to read when I might not otherwise have done, since I don't have to find shelf room for them; the Patrick O'Brian canon, which I'm working my way through in fits and starts - I know it's time to get the next one when I find myself struggling with something else and thinking 'why am I reading this when I could be reading about Aubrey and Maturin? - are so much nicer to have stored electronically, always to hand, than taking up a whole great shelf of physical space in a bookcase. I weakened with one, baulking at paying the e-book price when I could get a second hand copy for a penny plus postage - and now I regret it, the lone scruffy paperback - even with the beautiful Geoff Hunt cover painting - floating about when it should be in the set with the others on the device.

It is true that some types of book don't really work on the e-reader: poetry isn't great (line lengths etc), though I do read some there, or a lot of non-fiction or reference, anything with pictures, obviously, anything in fact you need to dip into, move back and forth in, get your fingers in amongst the pages of, browse randomly. Indeed, it's best for more traditional fiction with a fairly linear narrative, I find, even some modern novels with unconventional structures which you need to shuffle about in can be better in good old codex form, though the search function on the e-reader can be handy too, and the built in dictionaries are great, even help me to read a bit of French there.

Yet to make too much on the whole cult of the 'real' book as object is only a short step from the vulgarity (far be it from me to be judgemental...) of Reader's Digest, and their upmarket doppelganger the Folio Society*, 'luxury' 'collectable' 'sumptuously bound and presented' editions, all tooled and hefty, supposedly there to look good and decorate one's shelves, to satisfy, again, some kind of vanity,. It should be the text itself that counts, not the vehicle for it.

Mistake me not, I do recognise the beauty of a truly well-made book, and many old books are lovely objects, I'm as much of an admirer as the next person of sturdy cloth bindings, good creamy paper that doesn't yellow, nice old fonts and printer's flowers and all that. Even a good quality paperback can be a very pleasant thing, but books aren't treasures any more, they are cheap, disposable and don't last. Nothing wrong with that, but dragging them round as a badge of our superiority, or like a trail of scruffy, lame old wrinkled retainers who've seen better days but there's some perceived sense of mutual obligation between them and us is, I think, a mistake. I looked at my old paperback novels I've kept from as far back as the seventies and eighties, and saw that they are simply no longer of any real practical use; the spines threaten to crack and lose pages, the paper is yellowed and brittle, the print looks cramped and uninviting. In the generally unlikely event of my wanting to revisit and reread them, I'd be far better off getting them as e-books, which mostly should be possible.

For that's another thing. Books that were deeply, life-changingly important to me in my twenties, say, simply no longer are. Sorry, but Doris Lessing seems more and more to me a profoundly humourless, self-important writer, whose take on feminism was downbeat and discouraging to say the least, her attitudes to sex depressingly heteronormative (I got that from our grand-daughter, good eh?) to the point of Lawrentian, and to mental illness surely often unhelpful, and whose later vision of the destiny and purpose of humankind was almost laughably wrong and a little too close for comfort to Erich von Daniken. To the dechetterie with her!

Even the shelf of chunky out-of-copyright Wordsworth Classics, which Tom got me the Christmas before we came to France, and which I worked through in the first hard, hard early days here - Vanity Fair, Great Expectations, Villette, The Riddle of the Sands, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc fond though I am of the memory, can go. They are easier to read as e-books, available for free, and the memories are not dependent on their physical presence, which goes, of course, for so much of the stuff to which we shackle ourselves for sentimental reasons.

That said, there are many books I've not been able to part with. I was barely able to get rid of any of the poetry, even the ones I don't much care for I find I have a mawkish attachment to, almost a sense of responsibility - who will take them in, no one will want them, where will they shelter oh where will they sleep? It doesn't help that there's nowhere really to send second hand books with any certainty they could be found and appreciated by anyone; Emmaus does have an English language section, and a lot went there, but they're overwhelmed with books anyway, I gather. The dechetterie has started a book drop, from which they are distributed to schools and libraries, and they said they accepted English language too. But this concern for their afterlife, as Tom pointed out, is a distraction, we need to simply leave them at on the doorstep and forget them. Still, there are those whose connections with people,times and places are simply too important to let them go; detachment's one thing, ripping your heart out is not required.

A Paris food blogger I follow, living in very restricted space so frequent decluttering is essential, photographs her books for the memory or the record when she turns them out. We considered this but didn't do it, it threatened to hamper the action, and we didn't really see the point. One of my knitting buddies told of how her son-in-law has used old books as insulation in his roof, visible, I think, but not really accessible. Tom says that's one way to have very erudite mice.


* here I must plead guilty to having fallen for the Folio Society con once,a long time ago, long before the internet, when we were actually quite starved of reading matter in English, a state which seems incredible now. They were offering some good reference books as bait, a Brewer's Phrase and Fable I still have and like to keep in book form, and some other things. But the overpriced and overweight 'Stones of Venice'  in its stupid box has gone and good riddance.