the election

This is the tally in Castelfranc for the first round of the presidential elections.  It was only around 7:15, just after closing and lovely Virginie, the postmistress and election worker, had just posted it on the Salle des Fêtes where people put their voix in the urnes.  It looks like Sarkozy's goose is cooked and that he was unable to suck support away from Marine Le Pen the extreme-right winger.  They both competed for who could be more anti-Muslim.  Sarko spent a lot of his 5 year term expelling illegal immigrants à l'américaine.  Le Pen, on the other hand, made much of her distaste for the EU, big government, and big business.  Melanchon was my favorite. He made no bones about calling for a new constitution largely to do away with the monarchical presidency and the Senate.  He spoke out strongly against austerity and the stranglehold the oligarchs and their tools in the European Central Bank.

He is right of course.  I believe those who predict that the pseudo-socialist Hollande will win and will be more rightwing than Sarko in terms of giving the 1% the austerity and destruction of the social welfare system or what's left of this stunning achievement of the post-War left.  If he causes the same Great Depression levels of unemployment here as in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and many other countries, there could be serious riots and something like civil war.  The only way he will be able to avoid it may be to leave the euro but that may require an awareness and sense of purpose that he probably lacks.

They sure do know how to run an election in this country.  The campaigns only went on for a month or so.  The national networks are stringently controlled on the number of minutes each candidate is allowed for campaigning.  Le Monde the newspaper of record circulated an extensive poll to each of the 10 or so candidates and then put up an interactive page where you could line up any single candidates positions against one or more other candidates.  Posters must be likewise tightly regulated.  The only candidate posters you see are the ones pasted over shreds of other posters from other elections, put up on identical stands in front of the polling places and only for about one week before voting.  Campaigning is illegal during the last day before the election.  The results are tabulated fast and accurately.  I haven't heard of attack ads.

The balding Hollande, the likely winner in the second round,  is utterly without glamour or even great hair.  He was photographed picking his nose.

the hoopoe

The other day we drove over to Caix where the Prince of Denmark has a nice little castle that we always ride past when biking up to Crayssac.  Today we turned off right before the castle to look at an example of a masonry gatepost at a very ordinary modern house.   Our gatepost contractor had told us this house belonged to a friend and he would call them to say we were going to be looking it over.

   

Ever since going on a bird walk in Gourdon a couple weeks ago, I've been carting along my excellent old Leitz binoculars with me everywhere I go and it really paid off this day.  The reddish bird that landed just at the gate turned out to be a HOOPOE!  The crappy photos we took aren't half as dreamlike as what I saw through the binox:  the long crest and the long beak joined into an impossible surreal headdress with two azure balls at the tips of the crest when it was folded up.   

I knew the name of this creature from the Aristophanes play, The Birds where a king, Tereus, has been turned into a hoopoe, a king of birds even though he is presented with his body feathers all molted off and ridiculed for his pretentiousness.  

Could this one have been the King of Denmark touring his royaume in disguise?  As if a bird he just flew off wordlessly so I guess I'll never know.

fixing the Juillac bridge

A couple weeks ago they closed the suspension bridge between Prayssac and Juillac for a few days for repairs.  La Depîche, the regional rag, duly wrote up everything the bridge guys said, how it wasn't really serious, no danger to the public at this time, can't be too safe.  "A slight anomalie" at the base of a cable.  I was out on a ride above Prayssac but detoured through over the Juillac bridge just to see the repair.

Leaving Prayssac, you coast down a hill past a landscape of beautifully organized cultivation:  walnut and fruit orchards aligned in rows and columns so perfect that the diagonals line up too.   The bridge crosses a stretch of strong, flat water about midway between the dam at Castelfranc upstream and Belaye downstream, free of the turbulence from above but not yet rendered comatose by the ecluse to come.  This gorgeous valley must have amazed each of the successive plunderers, Gauls, Celts, Romans, then the Vandals and the Wisigoths and eventually the English.  

The mathematical perfection of this bridge brings you right back up to maybe 1880.  There was probably a ferry here at first.  To build the bridge, they must have first set up the four columns, then established the  four heavy deep-set concrete stays, then run the cables from stay to column to column to stay.  Big spool of wire, the first strand carried by a boat from one shore to the other.  Back and forth until the formula was satisfied, then the whole mess of cable jammed together with a final, spiral sheath of wire.      

The repair seemed to consist in taking the strain off of the first part of one cable.  First 12 massive clamps were bolted around the cable to resist the top part of the huge steel splint.  The splint was tensioned like the old fashioned traction machines to make broken bones heal correctly.  Once tensioned, the compromised part of the cable can just relax.

field barns

Out in the vineyards and fields, here and there, stand small structures built of stone and seemingly used to store machinery or livestock.  I’m not talking about the rarer and more imaginative  gariotes, the stone igloos that perhaps often start out as just a pile of the bigger rocks farmers had to lug out of their fields if there was going to be any space to plant.  

The structures I’m talking about are didn’t just happen.  Maybe the field was far enough from home that the farmer stored tools and supplies.  Maybe he or laborers slept there at harvest time when they worked until dark.  Maybe it was a place to take shelter during these fierce, quick thundershowers they call giboulées.  Quite a few have an upper and lower story so perhaps they kept sheep or cows or horses.

They are often lost in the middle of a big field or else built right on a lane, to the left and the right, here and there like little hamlets. 

After the 1939-45 war,  most seem to be falling into disuse.  With a car or a truck, the distance between house and field no longer mattered.   You see these little barns in all states of decomposition.

  It starts with a little vine that soon becomes a full face beard.  Eventually you can almost hear nature chewing and actually digesting these barns.