what we've got

I can see the mountain Le Grand Piton from my desk, every day as I work and now as I write. In the short time we’ve been here, I’ve wanted to walk it, having seen it so often. This weekend, we did.

Like many good walks, it started with a drive to a car park by a church. We left the car in Beaumont, about ten minutes away from home, and started up the steepish path, clearly able to see the tower at the top which was our destination.

And so the walk began. It was very good weather, with a bit of a breeze to keep cool. The directions from our guidebook were very easy to follow and there were very few people around. About an hour or so away, we stopped for a break, where we could see up close and personal what we’d only looked upon from a distance usually.

Two paths diverged in the wood and we, we took the one… with the red rock (it had a big splog of paint on it), which meant we were on the right track. It was the more difficult option of the two according to the guidebook, but it had better views.

The low-resolution, ham-fisted video doesn’t really do this justice, nor does it capture the scale of the view before us – and the peace in which we found ourselves, so distant from the teeming life below. Still – onwards and upwards – we’re not at the top yet. Shortly after, we reached a high spot, which I thought then was the top, and which offered views of the pre-Alps all around.

And now to the best bit of every walk we do – lunch. We had packed lunch as is normal, and we planned to eat when we arrived at the summit. I wondered if Jennie had found a good spot?

And that’s where this story ends. Now, as I write, I’m looking at Le Grand Piton, the very mountain we climbed, and it feels good to imagine myself at its summit, looking down over Geneva, and France, and our home, even this office.

A coda

I realise that posting these videos is more or less like showing someone your holiday snaps or home videos. Sorry about that. But despite my explanation, I can hear you ask: why did I climb the mountain? For that, we need to turn to William Shatner and in doing so, I hope rescue this post from mediocrity. Happy viewing, climbers. (Thanks to Andrew for the video recommendation).

On Friday morning before the day started I had a coffee with Jennie, in the roof garden to the World Health Organisation’s building in Geneva where she works. It was a lovely sunny day and unusually clear, so there are some good views around Geneva and the surrounding mountains.

I planned on taking some photos, but ended up doing some impromptu video instead. The quality isn’t great – it’s taken with an Ixus 80 pocket camera – but I think it does the job. Next time I’ll take the Canon XM2 up there and the tripod – but there’s no replacement for my terrible narration and faltering voice. That we’ll just have to put up with.

Most mornings I wake up and say the same thing, which you might generously call a mantra to start the day. In a former life in the UK, I would say (normally to my wife Jennie, where it made barely a little more sense, but sometimes to myself) upon throwing back the bedsheets:

I’m going to have a shower, you absolutely shower. I’m off to work to keep you in the manner to which you’ve become accustomed.

Day in, day out, the script remained the same. Nowadays, since the move to France, I have changed my tune a little. Now I’m more likely to say:

Another day in paradise. What’s the weather like, Jen? Sunny?

And most often it is sunny. But the price we pay for il fait du soleil are storms, violent ones, ones you’d remember for ages, ones you’d bring up in conversation months or even years later. Every silver lining literally has a cloud – in this case, a big angry one, full of thunder.

And so as we went to bed last week we expected the storm to come, as it does, and light the night sky, and crackle and fizz overhead and then pass, and then become calm. When the thunder woke us up at around 2.30, the sky was ominously filling with light. Clouds flickered endlessly in an almost seamless trail of light all over the sky. When sensible, I unplugged all the sensitive electrical equipment and returned to bed.

I dozed for about ten minutes then BOOM! an explosion jolted us awake, its sharp crack infinitely nearer than the thunder. Knowing we’d been hit, but not where, we ran about the dark house – the fuses had blown – with an unsteady torch, trying to find the source of the smell of sulphur.

It wasn’t until light that we saw the chimney had been struck, and that shards of debris lay on the grass and in the drive. We’re more or less the tallest house on this road so there was no surprise we had been hit.

Lightning strikes

If you look carefully you can see the large slab left sitting on the roof, and the tiles that have been uprooted by it. That night the water seeped in, moistening the plaster, dripping into the comble (can’t help smiling when I write that word, it’s like a Womble, but with more emphasis on meaning ‘loft’ or ‘attic’ space). It doesn’t look much in this photo, but for the record, being hit by lightning isn’t fun.

In the morning, as tiredness washed over me and I dozed, I imagined that the strike had affected me some way – like the bite of Spiderman’s arachnid, or countless other SuperHeroes subject to radiation, venom, or the madman’s experiment – perhaps I, too, would now have hero powers? Maybe I can fly, or, seemingly more prosaically, have great insight or understanding?

But I had none of these things. I was, and am, just Phil Greaney – with a broken chimney.

Updike wrote enough to know better

I admire Martin Amis’ candid review of John Updike’s final collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears. Amis celebrates Updike’s influence by himself writing well, with the clear-eyed and unsentimental insight that Updike brought to many of his novels and short stories.

Accordingly, Amis doesn’t flinch from the notion that Updike had lost some of his powers in this final collection, his last following his death earlier this year. At the beginning of the review Amis suggests a reading test, to see if one can spot the error of Updike’s ways:

The following wedge of prose has two things wrong with it: one big thing and one little thing – one infelicity and one howler. Read it with attention. If you can spot both, then you have what is called a literary ear.

Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and socialised all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land.

The minor flaw is the proximity of prior and prime. This gives us a dissonant rime riche on the first syllable; and the two words, besides, are etymological half-siblings, and should never be left alone together without many intercessionary chaperones. And the major flaw? The first sentence ends with the words “his land”; and so, with a resonant clunk, does the second. Mere quibbles, some may say. But we are addressing ourselves to John Updike, who was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov – who, in his turn, was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Joyce.

Leaving aside the improbability of confirming a ‘literary ear’ based upon a single short reading, Amis is wrong when describing the repeated phrase ‘his land’ as a ‘major flaw’. It’s my view that Updike almost certainly intended the repetition in order to reinforce the complex notion of what it meant for Craig Martin to own ‘his land’. Even from this short extract we feel the land, once owned by others and now owned by Craig Martin, has in turn began owning him: the repetition is a nag that persists despite him ignoring it. More broadly, reconnecting with ‘his land’ is a longing made desperate by the emphasis that repetition brings, an arrow aimed wide at how things ought to be. It’s too rich in meaning to be left to error.

The use of repetition in literature in general, and the American short story in particular, was likely well known to Updike. Ernest Hemingway pioneered its use within his richly multi-valent, minimalist prose. The beginning of ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ shows the extent to which Hemingway would adapt repetition to create meaning beyond his seemingly innocent prose style (full text here):

The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.

There are several words repeated, in one case within a single sentence: ‘baggage’, variations of ‘burnt’, ‘the ground’ and so on. The overall effect is created through a thickening of the overlapping but discontinuous phrases, a weaving of the strands of repetition into a rope that tightens into a knot as the passage ends: the town of Seney had been ‘burned off the ground’.

Hemingway’s story was first published in 1925, yet it’s lessons have not been forgotten. Within this context, and alongside my tentative groping towards its potentially rich effect in the story, Updike’s vice seems more a virtue.

(Picture credit: from SapphireBlue’s Flickr photostream)

One of the (happily few) disappointments of living in France is the difficulty and expense of buying an English newspaper. In time, I hope to read Le Monde and perhaps even Le Figaro. But until then, I’m happy to be reliant on ‘journaux anglais’ – a phrase I know well because I’ve said it in many tabacs in both France and Switzerland to little avail.

We live a little out of town, so the local tabac doesn’t sell an English language newspaper. We could go into Geneva, where several shops sell them – but not as many as you’d think, since the Swiss enjoy a Sunday free from shopping, and even smaller shops close. And it’s the weekend newspapers I miss most. I’ve used the web for news, and WRS (World Radio Switzerland) is in English, and both have served me well. Accepting that I wouldn’t have something to read in the garden away from a computer, I thought I’d try the digital editions offered by The Times and The Guardian.

Both use a more or less identical engine for the main functionality of the paper, provided by NewspaperDirect.inc. You can turn pages, zoom, copy articles, email them, all the things you would expect in a front end that does its best to approximate the real thing. What’s striking is the difference that the format makes. Sure, you could get more or less the same content via an RSS feed or through the newspaper website. But seeing the news in high-res spread across a large-ish screen is very satisfying and it’s one of the reasons I’ll subscribe.

The Times e-edition front page

The right-hand navigation panel gives useful previews of pages and means you can navigate the paper quickly. If it all looks a bit busy, you can minimise the clutter and just look at the pages. I found moving within the page a bit difficult and the mouse movements counter-intuitive. It just takes getting used to and others might find it suits them. You can open an article and read it in a non-newspaper box, which looks more like the website and undermines the illusion a bit. There’s lots of other things you can do with an electronic newspaper, too – like search, or just look at the pictures.

Where The Guardian group’s Digital Edition adds further value (The Times call it their e-paper) is the ability to share content through a variety of social networking tools. Articles can be saved to Delicious, shared on Facebook or blogged and so on. The latter function has it for me: it makes sharing the content much easier, something that I hope will prompt a some sharing on this humble blog. It is illustrative, I think, of The Guardian Group’s growing embrace of the web, although the sticky subject of how old media will survive or not is still unresolved.

The Guardian Digital Edition frontpage with share icons

Both are relative cheap services, too. You can pay a whopping 7.50CHF (Swiss Francs) for a bonafide paper copy, which is about £4 for a Sunday paper that’s sometimes incomplete, with often the best supplements are missing (meaning it lacks the heft of a Sunday paper and therefore one of its most attractive qualities). It will cost only £4.99 a month for The Observer; £3.99 for a month’s worth of The Sunday Times. I guess the extra pound pays for all that social networking goodness. Both have mobile-friendly editions, so you can use your mobile device for the odd read although like many things the screen might be too small for prolonged reading. You can also download if you plan to be offline.

Despite this, I’d really like to see some of the excellent multi-media material we find on both news websites (and especially The Guardian’s) integrated into the editions. Although you can listen to the Guardian’s stories (a function I’ve been unable to get to work), in an ideal world both could follow the example of ‘electric!’, a rich media publication from Virgin Media, which uses the Ceros engine. Superb interaction, although quite unlike a conventional newspaper reading experience and appealing to different markets, a hybird which incorporates existing audio/video from the sites seems possible (from this distance). The image below offers video playback embedded in the publication, and there’s audio too. Try ‘electric!’, you might like it, if not the name.

electric! is a rich media publication from Virgin Media, powered by Ceros

So, I’ll have to compromise: I won’t be able to shape a paper copy to my whim, read it in the garden or at the cafe. Lamenting this, in the never ending pursuit for that elusive hardcopy,  I ventured out to the Swiss / French border near Perly following a rumour that they sold English newspapers. Success of sorts: I did find a single copy of the Sunday Mail. It may still be there for all I know: there are standards.