Connaissances

Where do you draw the line...

2017-10-26T20:54:00.000+02:00

Slugs are gaining access to your kitchen and dying in remote corners behind the refrigerator. Please complete form A6 for further details. If you work for a government agency don't bother to apply.

A new shelf is required above the existing shelf. Further information is available online. Please enter the six digit security code. Remember to have your passport number ready.

How many people are residing in your property AND are also eligible to vote? If you have slugs resident in your property, please check the online documentation and have the appropriate identification guide ready. Remember, if your slugs are over 16 years of age, they may be able to vote.

You have two google accounts with the same contact telephone number. Do you want to keep your virtual life or your real life? Remember to have your passport number ready.

In your virtual life, someone lands in your front yard in the form of a spider. It doesn't bother you more than a slug entering your real life kitchen. However, it crosses your mind that this spider may have the right to vote.

What do you mean you don't have a virtual life?

You have a long discussion with the post-office assistant about your difficulties with e-bay. It's strange to have a conversation with a stranger that seems so real.

You toggle between tax, virtual life and e-bay, mixing in DVLA and e-mails for variety. It seems like a recipe. Maybe it's a recipe for disaster.

Please spare a few minutes of your time to fill in the following questionnaire. If online voting was provided in the next general election, would you be more likely to vote if: (a) the government told you it was more secure; (b) a cyber-security expert told you it was more secure, or (c) a slug told you it was more secure. Answers on a postcard please.

Are you registered to vote in your virtual world? If not, please refer to the online wiki.

Googling for slug avatars will help you to become one. Googling to become anything else will most likely not work. Why do you want to become a slug anyway?

One last word about the refrigerator. It's working. The news is not all bad.

Yesterday I went to Asda...

2017-10-18T02:18:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I went to Asda and threw a cloak of darkness around myself. I walked the aisles, checking prices and feeling the weight of various products. I lifted them to my cowled face and sniffed them, thinking simultaneously about their cost, the plastic wrappers, the labels, the processing, the transport. All things considered, this supermarket is more miraculous than my cloak of darkness. But I did not tell that to the check out girl. In any case she couldn't have seen me and was too busy to be concerned.

I could have walked out of there with a dozen products tucked under my arms, but that's not an allowed thing. Not even for cloak wearers, and even especially not for cloak wearers. To walk in your own darkness is an honour and a trial. To cease existing for a few minutes and sense the world all about you come into a focus so sharp that it burns your mind like a flame of magnesium.

The check out girl seemed as if she might be of Vietnamese origin. She greeted clients with an authoritative air and at the same time gave instructions to the young woman behind her. This woman might have been a manager in training. She wore a special uniform and she was gingerly peeking inside a large and well stocked cigarette cabinet which she had just slid open. It was the size of a bedroom wardrobe and stocked floor to ceiling.

I took my opportunity and crossed to the cabinet to pick up some of the packets and read their labels: "Smoking Kills"; "Smoking clogs the arteries and causes heart attacks and strokes"; "Smoking seriously harms you and others around you"; "Smoking when pregnant harms your baby"; "Smokers die younger". I lifted a packet into the air and watched it crumble into ash in my fingers. It burned so quickly and stealthily that I had to drop it and stamp it out. The shop assistants were somewhat startled to see the sudden flurry of raining ashes. I wondered why the warnings on the packets were now hidden away like guilty secrets. I pondered their invisibility and what it meant.

When I walked outside, I felt a surge of warm air greet me, though it was late in October. Brown and orange leaves danced gaily in their new found freedom and a plastic bag picked itself up and marched across the parking lot. It was warmer outside the supermarket than inside. The only hint of explanation was the sky to the west which was turbulent and had a tint of red as if it were a pail of milk soured by a few drops of blood.

I'm back...

2017-10-13T19:47:00.001+02:00

After a period of several years without any blogging activity, I've decided to begin writing again. The last few years have seen me very immersed in work, and I have lost the taste for blogging and writing in general. I've become quite unhappy about this situation and, finally, it has led to me giving up working. So I'm now, and for the time being, a full time writer: I expect writing to take up a large part of my life in the coming years, but for the moment I'm just starting out again, making a couple of tentative scratches...

Prior to getting more deeply involved in writing activities, I have to put my life in order after moving back from France to the UK at the end of September. There's a lot to be sorted out after fourteen years outside the UK on ex-pat assignments. And we are back in the house which we left 20 years ago which is a strange feeling, especially since some of our old neighbours are still living across the road and next door. One daughter is grown up and training as an opera singer. The other has her sights set on the stage and is still at home with us while she finishes her schooling.

We are perched in a little house on a major rail route from London to Cambridge. Trains go past constantly with a rumble or a whoosh. We don't mind them. Those are comforting noises to us: the chatter of the rails and the hoot of fast trains. And apart from this, I can tell you that it is a very nice feeling to put books on bookcases that are your own bookcases in your own house. Bookcases that nobody else can tell you to take those books off. And even though there are too few bookcases and too many books... I'm really happy.

Berry - La Bonheur

2013-10-26T17:43:00.002+02:00

Time for another beautiful song from Berry called La Bonheur (Happiness).

If you enjoy it, try listening as well to the song I posted some time ago here.

Lou Doillon - Questions and Answers

2013-05-12T01:34:00.000+02:00

Lou Doillon's web site.

The Map-Makers Colours

2013-01-08T00:17:00.000+01:00

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves' own conformation:
and Norway's hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colours?
- What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favourites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historian's are the map-makers colours.

'The Map' by Elizabeth Bishop

Mapped waters... can water be mapped... yes, as voids surrounded by land.

Water more quiet than the land is... seas may be wild, much more wild than the land, but ironically, in a mapped sense they are featureless, without topography, and therefore quiet.

Conformation - the sea conforms with the land, its waves break evenly on the coast, and currents navigate the coastline as sailors do. That conformity describes the ying and yang fit of sea to land, the masculine land and feminine sea nestling together.

Norway's hare runs south in agitation - Topography equates to noise, and thus a country such as Norway, mountainous and embayed with fjords, is noisy. More mountainous in the north, it frightens its own hare-like profile into running south...

Profiles investigate the sea - a country with the profile of a hare, or of a dog, a man or a woman. Or perhaps the profile of a face seen in the jagged outline of a cliff.

Can the countries pick their colours - no indeed not. The map is a way of defining the world and the map-maker the person who defines where the boundaries lie. The colours lying within those boundaries have particular meanings defined by the map-maker. The map-maker emerges as a symbol of power.

What suits the character - it's not clear... is it a suggestion? Yes. A whimsical but profound one.

North's as near as West - wherever we go North and West are constant. All places are equivalent in this sense. They have equal currency. This seems an argument against the previous imagery of the map-maker as a powerful arbiter.

More delicate than the historian's are the map-makers colours. - What are the historian's colours? I think that 'colours' here refers to the flags that indicates nationaility, with a military flavour... Compared to the colours of flags which are brash in their symbolism, the map-makers colours are indeed more delicate. They reflect the precarious and unstable nature of countries and borders as defined by the changing character of those states. In some ways these delicate colours contradict the bold and simple ones of flags, challenging those who stick their flags in a new region of the map, by that means trying to claim it.

Half a sec...

2013-01-01T23:32:00.002+01:00

We were gathered around the kitchen table as a family, playing a game called Articulate. The objective of the game is to describe as many words as possible to your team members before the 30 second timer runs out.

The words are printed on cards that you pull from a pack. It's a bit like Trivial Pursuits. The words fall into six categories: object, nature, action, world, person and random, so they are mainly proper nouns.

As my daughter was quite young, we were giving her a few hints to help things along. You will understand the need for this when I tell you that one of the words that came up was: "secretary bird".

At six years old, my daughter probably had little idea of what a secretarial job involved, let alone knowing about secretary birds.

I should have begun with defining this word as 'a flapping animal'. That might have made things simpler. Instead, I began by the secretary part...

"Every boss has one of these..." I said, optimistically.

She looked at me blankly. Seconds passed... She shook her head, time was running out.

I started to hint: "Okay, it's a sec... a sec..."

She looked up brightly. "A second wife?"

Digital Love - A One Woman Show by Rachael Støver

2012-12-31T21:29:00.003+01:00

I became a Binärpilot fan a while back. I like this little sketch by Rachael Støver that tells the story of her romance with the Norwegian musician who created Binarpilot. It's an interesting story and very much the product of our time.

No News...

2011-11-26T20:37:00.000+01:00

I walked with my daughters down to the fjord last weekend. It takes about half an hour. We had a fishing rod with us and tried to cross onto the pontoon from which we sometimes try to catch fish, but the ladder had been taken away for some reason. Next to us, sitting on the harbour wall, were two ladies looking out over the unruffled water towards a misty autumn view of rocky mountains and the distant waterside town of Tau. They seemed to be celebrating something, eating sandwiches and drinking a bottle of pink champagne.

I walked with the girls a bit further up the coast to where the shoreline has been built up so that there is less seaweed to tangle the fishing line. Like most of the coast around Stavanger, the rocks at the shore here have been rubbed smooth by glaciation and slip, like the humped backs of whales, into the sea. Beside us, on the railway line that runs along the coast, electric trains zipped past occasionally, grey and sleek.

At the point where the shore becomes suitable for fishing, we met two quite haggard looking men. They were both tall and thin, their faces creased and worn in a way that suggests a life of survival and hard labour. Their bicyles lay on the grass, very rough and weather beaten objects. I greeted them as I passed and they shyly said hello to us. We fished for a little while, casting the lure far out. But as always, we caught nothing. It was getting cold and so we did not stay long.

Passing the men again on our way home, we stopped to watch one of them gutting a fish he had caught. I think it may have been a wrasse, it was quite bright on the belly slightly orange and blue speckled. As he cut it open it made an unpleasant burping noise. In his bucket he had three more. When the other man caught a fish, he took it off the hook and dropped it into my daughter's net. My daughter looked at it, then shook her head. The man laughed and threw it back into the sea. We spoke a little with them. They were Polish, with only broken Norwegian and no English. I thought they were like a pair of boys that had grown old while fishing and playing outdoors on their bicycles together.

We walked back to where my wife was waiting to pick us up in the car. The two ladies were still there, huddled a little more closely in their fur-hooded parkas, the pink champagne nearly finished. The sky was also just beginning to turn pink, and they had not moved, despite the chill in the air.

The Flight of the Turtle: New Writing Scotland 29

2011-07-27T18:55:00.004+02:00

My prose poem "Renata Perry" has been published in: The Flight of the Turtle: New Writing Scotland 29 published by the ASLS.

There’s nothing pure about Renata Perry except the pure cries of abandon of Renata Perry nothing so pure as the pure abandon of Renata Perry under the pure blue skies of Italy that Renata Perry can see from her bed the balcony opposite all covered in aerials pointed at transmitters waiting for signals Renata Perry is lying down under the weight of an angel waiting for signals under pure blue skies Renata Perry signals her mouth is dry and asks if he’ll be an angel and fetch some water Renata Perry watches him stiffly the weighty angel going stiffly to the bathroom and everybody says you can drink the water it’s true it’s incredibly pure but Renata Perry stays true to herself and the wine...

(Renata Perry, extract)

Don't Say Fairytale

2011-04-29T17:48:00.010+02:00

Why do we go weak at the knee when royal couples marry? Why do we weep when doomed princesses die? Why do we love to despise the ugly stepmother? Why do we criticise the whole shennanigan and then turn out to watch?

Perhaps the Egyptians understood this better than we do ourselves. They knew their pharoahs were destined to join the panthaeon of the gods. The people of Egypt knew that their own destinies were intimately entwined with those of their own leaders. If a dynasty failed, a whole civilisation would come crashing to its knees. The story discontinued, the great sustaining myth brought to an end.

The British Royal Family is Eastenders on acid. It is so much more intimate. So much more real. The wounds are real wounds. The deaths are real deaths. The love is real love. The hatred real hatred. To watch it, at its most epic moments, sends shivers down our spines as if someone were walking over our own graves.

Today, as William and Kate walked down the aisle of Westminster Abbey, the commentator made a particular point of saying that this was not a fairytale. That, in view of historical events, William and Kate had only realistic expectations of their future together. And all the way through Horseguards and down the Mall, the word was never spoken. It became conspicuous by its absence. The commentary became anodine, pregnant with expectation of that one word.

Then at the end of the Mall, just outside Buckingham Palace, the veil finally slipped: the f-word was at last mentioned several times, almost in unison, by a chorus of commentators chanting the magical incantation. And why? Because the commentators saw the couple right in front of their commentary box. For the first time, they witnessed the magical spectacle with their own eyes. And no doubt the communal electricity was setting the hair of their necks on end.

What is a fairytale? It is a story. It is something not real. It is Peter Pan. It is Thumbelina. Something magical. Something that transcends time. A love affair with the gods. A myth. Fairytales never go away. We cling onto them. They are a promise of immortality. A promise that can lift certain individuals out of the drudgery of normality into another sphere of action over which they have little control. Their lives are no longer their own. Their destinies become controlled by the planets and the stars. "Did you see how the sun shone on them as they went into the church? And then again as they left?" said one spectator. Then she paused and considered, before pronouncing: "The sun shines on the righteous". Listen to those words. The sun shines on the righteous. The sun, over which we normally assume we have no control, shines on the righteous. And it really does...

From today, Kate Middleton is no longer herself. She is a fairytale princess. The hopes of William and Kate to just go on being themselves are over. Now the world is watching. The story has begun. The first act is finished. No, they will not come back onto the balcony for a second kiss. This is not tawdry show business. This is the real thing.

The Hill Behind the House No. 3

2011-02-04T20:40:00.000+01:00

I wanted to write so much more about the hill behind the house than I have written. Here is a day last June that I should have written about. Everything was yellow on that day. There were yellow flowers blooming in all the meadows, the evening sun was suffusing all the trees with yellow light, and someone had been out tying yellow strips of cloth on branches to make a course for orienteering along the forest tracks.

Now, deep in the heart of winter, when every morning on the way to work is black, and every evening on the way home is the same, I think about these summer days and long for them to be back. Last weekend, I walked with my daughter across the hill taking photographs of bare trees and the stalks of dried flowers. I got her to count how many types of tree she could identify. We saw about ten different varieties of pine and about the same number of deciduous types. Silver birch are the most common, and the most wintry looking.

As we turned towards home, the dusk started to fall. The darkness descends quickly at this time of year. At the foot of the far side of the hill, we examined the roots of two trees that had entwined about each other. One of the trees had been cut down, and we thought that rather sad. By the time we had got to the top of the hill, the trees were standing out in silhouette against the fading sky, looming above us. Then we watched the overhead lights along the path come on, glowing orange at first like coals, then slowly gleaming into phosphorecent brightness, as if someone had blown on them.

The Troll Hunter

2011-02-03T20:46:00.000+01:00

Launch of Upstairs at Duroc, Issue 12

2011-01-26T23:49:00.007+01:00

Time: 27 January 2011 · 19:00 - 22:00
Location: Berkeley Books of Paris, 8 rue Casimir Delavigne, Paris, France 75006

UPSTAIRS AT DUROC is pleased to announce the LAUNCH for its ISSUE 12

Come hear new work by

AMY HOLLOWELL, NINA KARACOSTA,
...ALICE NOTLEY, JONATHAN REGIER
and JOE ROSS.

AMY HOLLOWELL is the author of Peneloping: Episodes in the Day of She and Giacomettrics, and is a contributor to numerous publications in Europe & the US. A former editor of the Paris-based review Pharos, she is a journalist, translator & Zen Buddhist teacher.

NINA KARACOSTA’s work has appeared in Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry, Best of Stain Anthology, Surreal-zine and The Melancholy Dane. An actor/poet born in Greece, she moved to NYC in 1995 & to Paris in 2009, which she now considers home.

ALICE NOTLEY has published over 30 books of poetry, including most recently, Reason and Other Women; Grave of Light, New and Selected Poems 1970-2005; and In the Pines. With her sons, Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, Notley edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. She is also the author of a book of essays on poets and poetry, Coming After. Notley has received many prizes and awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, two NEA Grants & the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. Often considered an important figure in the New York School, Notley lives and writes in Paris.

JONATHAN REGIER’s first book of poetry, Three Years from Upstate, was published by Six Gallery Press (Pittsburgh, PA) in 2008. He’s now at work on a second book, as well as doing a PhD in the philosophy of science at Université Paris 7.

JOE ROSS is the author of 12 books of poetry. In 1997, he received an NEA Fellowship and moved from Washington, DC to San Diego, where he worked for that city’s Commission for Arts and Culture and, later, as Chief of Policy for elected officials. He was awarded the Gertrude Stein Poetry Award in 2003. In 2004, he and his wife moved to Paris, where their 2 children were born, and where he continues to publish while working as an educator.

Francois Hardy - J'Aurais Voulu

2011-01-23T23:46:00.002+01:00

Binärpilot Underground

2010-12-06T20:52:00.000+01:00

Here is a link to Binaerpilot's web site with loads of incredible downloadable tracks.

Northern Lights

2010-10-25T20:54:00.000+02:00

An Ecstasy of Crows

2010-10-21T11:23:00.000+02:00

Last year when we first moved to Norway, we witnessed many superb sunrises: pinky orange bruises that formed on the horizon above the distant grey mountains, often suffused through wispy, blow-away clouds.

This year, there have been many less of such sunrises - so, clearly the atmospheric chemistry has not been quite right. But this morning there was a nice one that beamed in through the kitchen window around 7.45 just as I was lifting the last spoonful of Fitness and Fruits to my mouth.

And it just got better and better. By the time I was on my way to work at 8.15, the display was at its zenith, or climax or whatever the best moment of a sunrise should be called. Crescendo maybe?

As I drove along the road which circuits the large lake called Mosvatnet, just outside Stavanger, crows were taking off from the trees around the lake like bunches of black confetti hurled by cheerful mourners. They swirled over the road in the way that leaves swirl in the wind, dipping down and then rising up in a chaotic yet vaguely coordinated dance.

Starlings are famous for the way they are able to create great undulating Mobius rings when they flock together en masse. Crows are less sublime, but their dawn riots, ragged and freeform, have their own poetry, more atuned to the wind that has flung them free of their perches and inspired directly by that blistering sky.

Tar

2010-09-21T21:35:00.000+02:00

Workers have been repairing the road outside for the past week. First they bulldozed away the sleeping policemen, then they chipped out the manhole covers like fossils from bedrock. Now, finally, they are laying the tarmac. Yesterday they upgraded one side of the road, today the other, starting their machinery at around six o'clock this morning.

Tonight, I jogged around the block, watching how the new black tarmac gleamed under an almost full moon. If it weren't for so many yellow porch lights, I think I might have been able to conjure a romantic vision from it.

Discovered earlier today, a set of footprints can now be seen on the grey slate steps in front of our house. They are permanent ones, printed in tar. Oddly enough, they are quite neat, rising in confident strides towards our front door before suddenly disappearing.

Stone Going Home Again

2010-09-12T01:14:00.004+02:00

I have four prose poems in "Stone Going Home Again: New Writing Scotland 28".

The big day fell on a Thursday and Thursday fell on Dawn Dwyer as she leant on the kitchen sideboard all of a clatter it fell the way a drawer of cutlery pulled out too far can fall except there was no cutlery there was no drawer there was just Dawn Dwyer by herself in the kitchen leant against the kitchen sideboard trying to resist Thursday falling on her trying to hold up Thursday as houses outside try to hold up their rooves and trees hold up their leaves and Dawn Dwyer was trying to leave and hold up her head she was trying to hold up her shoulders but Thursday was pushing down on her and disaster teetered like a drawer of cutlery a weight that was supported but to which point of being extended suddenly would fall...

(Dawn Dwyer, extract)

Clear Skies

2010-09-11T21:05:00.000+02:00

Perhaps once a year we get a day when the sky is completely empty of clouds. Usually when we look out of our window, we are very aware of the clouds, sitting like a lid on a saucepan. But sometimes when the lid comes off, there is an amazing feeling of buoyancy, as if one might just float away into space like a puff of steam.

Les Anglais

2010-07-23T00:18:00.006+02:00

The Stone of Scone:

A tub of butter:

We may not live in France any more, but we can still go back there on holiday. And yet we find it too hot now, simply sweltering compared to Norway.

On the way home from Toulouse, I was not too surprised to find that the easyjet flight back to Gatwick had been cancelled. We had made the mistake of waiting in another part of the airport for some time and then only going to the gate when it was due to open. If we had gone sooner, we might not have found ourselves at the back of the queue for "sorting out".

Based on previous bad experience with easyjet on pretty much every occasion I have flown with them, I had built a back up plan into our travel arrangements: my connecting flight would be caught after a 24 hour stop over in London. But it just wasn't enough. No flight to London available until 48 hours later. And a 24 hour wait to get back to Bristol.

In the heat of southern France we made frenzied calls to change the booking with the hire car company and found ourselves unwillingly competing with other irate passengers for flights, hotel and taxis. A quite pathetic spectacle really.

That night I lay awake all night (literally) in a horrible air conditioned room in a Toulouse hotel of the kind that: (1) has a contantly wheezing fan; (2) freezes your face while at the same time turning your bed into a toasted sandwich maker - too drafty to throw the covers off - (3) a small white box with no indication of how to turn off the power and just for good measure (4) a set of pillows, each one resembling in all possible ways the Stone of Scone.

The other reason I couldn't sleep was the worry of leaving my family in France with no more than an easyjet ticket for protection. I had to decide: would I get up at 4.30 a.m. and buy a BA ticket to make sure I got an early flight back to London and thereby make my connection, or would I lie in bed and go with the family to Bristol and then turn up to work in Norway 2 or 3 days late?

I got up at 4.30 a.m. and I got my ticket.

The family were okay.

No thanks to easyjet.

As I sat in Gatwick, waiting for my flight to Norway, having checked in painlessly with Norwegian airlines ticket scanning machine (a world apart from the easyjet savannah watering hole stampede we had survived on the way down to Toulouse), I watched the flight departures board fill up with all of easyjet's late flights and cancellations, including the same flight to Toulouse cancelled for a second day in a row.

As I watched, I began to get an angry feeling that easyjet had never had the intention of putting flights out to Toulouse on a regular basis. Instead, they had conned us into thinking that we might get a flight, but that in reality it was only sending flights out as a sort of rescue service for its own stranded passengers. Though only at its own convenience. So how long was it possible to stay waiting for a flight? According to the information we received in Toulouse, easyjet would guarantee that it wasn't more than a week. But what kind of people do you think you're ferrying around easyjet? Jobseekers?

But to get back to the lighter side... I forgot to mention that I was rather sick while this was going on. Luckily I had the foresight to sort myself out with Smecta and immodium. This is another aspect of France we don't miss: the business of constantly getting bugs or suffering from food gone off in the heat...

Anyway, I hadn't been able to eat for the previous 2 days and my wife had put some dinner she had made into four resealable plastic tubs that had once contained butter. While waiting in a rather bedraggled state for our easyjet flight next to the car hire counter, my wife had persuaded us to eat our cold dinner leftovers. So we all tucked in. It was a meal consisting of rather a lot of cold mashed potato. In my case it turned out to be a bad idea.

What was strange though, was the way all the people in the grindingly slow car hire queue were looking at us like we were some sort of green aliens. Were they looking at us oddly? Yes, they really were. And then we realised that to them, it just looked like we were a family sitting together eating President butter directly from the container. And what's more, we each had our own tub of it. Zut Alors! Les Anglais!

Despite Their Hypocrisy

2010-07-14T00:09:00.007+02:00

I'm just back from holiday in France where we have been in the Dordogne. It is one of my favourite places, having a great deal of history about it, some of that human history stretching very far back in time: the famous painted caves of Lascaux and elsewhere - and some of it more recent: the many medieval castles and the romanesque churches of Souilliac and Perigueux.

Because of the temperatures last week we spent a good part of the holiday trying to keep cool. One day we managed this by going to visit the romanesque church (formerly an abbey) in Souilliac. It's a very large church, more like a cathedral really, but very simple inside (as befits a monastery) and with some striking carved columns inside the large door of the nave. Many beasts of different kind have been carved rising up the columns, each one biting the one next to it and seemingly affirming the tooth-and-claw nature of existence.

I had spent the holiday reading Terry Jones' book about medieval occupations. It is entitled 'Medieval Lives'. I recommend it as a thought-provoking journey through the social landscape of the time. Jones is not an unbiased commentator and his personal take on the behaviour of those living in the past provides thought-provoking insights. He is particularly down on the idea of knightly chivalry and also well explains why he believes that monks became hypocritical in their behaviour. The riches of the church, he explains, came from the wealthy kings, barons and knights who paid the monks to pray for their souls after slaughtering the enemy in battle. For every dead man, someone would have to pray for 40 days - and as the lords didn't have the time to do it, they preferred to pay a monk to do their praying for them. A lot of people died (notably in the early days of the Norman Conquest) and therefore the number of abbeys that had to be built and housed with praying monks was large).

But the rub was, according to Jones, that the monks, who took their vows in order to lead a simple and pure life, instead inherited a world of conspicuous wealth boosted by all kinds of taxes on local populations. They overate and found ways to circumvent their vows of silence using a sign language that was known throughout Europe.

With these thoughts in my head, I sat in Soulliac abbey looking up at the beautifully pure proportions of the cupola and arches, the restrained windows up high which brought touches of colour into the muted yellows of the shaded interior.

We were alone in the building, keeping quiet as one generally does in a holy place, when two men, dressed as tourists, came into the church. They walked quickly down to the altar area and then one of them began singing Gregorian chants. He continued for several minutes, walking around like any normal tourist, but singing in what might have been Latin. He seemed to be testing the acoustics. Then, as quickly as they had come, both men left.

I have never seen anyone visit a church and behave in this way before, and found myself quite impressed by the man's presumption. My thirteen year old daughter, normally quite retiring, clearly felt the same way and was emboldened to go up to the altar area and try out her own voice.

My family were now alone in the cathedral as she sang to us, her lovely singing filling the vast echoey space. Her impromptu performance consisted of devotional songs which she had learnt this year before going on a choir tour in Belgium. The sound took on an immense physicality as it bounded out into the great amplifying chamber and reverberated back at varying intervals from the different enclaves of the church.

Those minutes of her singing are ones I will always remember. And here was also the other side of history. The other legacy of history that cannot be contained in arguments (however well justified) between the pages of a book. Which has to be gone out and looked for and touched and sung into being. At that moment I wanted to thank the monks and the chevaliers for what they had left behind, despite their hypocrisy.

Summer Nights

2010-06-20T21:13:00.000+02:00

Like altered consciousness
the clouds have different shapes at night

we wouldn't normally see
but here we do

because it is always light.

Snipp, snapp, snut, nu är sagan slut

2010-06-20T21:11:00.000+02:00

In Norway and Sweden one usually finishes children’s tales with the phrase “Snipp, snapp, snut, nu är sagan slut” - (Snipp, snapp, snut, now the story is ended).