What, no writing? Monday singing rehearsals.

Capestangchurch
The Bishop of Narbonne was jealous.

I don’t get much serious writing done on Mondays. I don’t get much writing done at all. I might find a few minutes to write a short post on here, then it’s warming up the old vocal chords (and I do really mean old ) before it’s off toward the hills and rehearsals in Capestang.

The wind blows fit to knock you off your feet as you turn the corner around the church to walk to rehearsals. To the right of this picture, you can see where the building stops. Like the church was suddenly chopped. In fact, that’s exactly what happened in the 13th century. Some contributing factors may have been to do with the Plague and/or the change in the course of the river, but there’s also the story that says the Bishop in Narbonne sent out his spies to see what was happening in Capestang and when he discovered the completed church would have been bigger than his own seat, he used the money for something else.

musicnotes
the language of music

I love these old stories. Even the smallest villages here have stories to tell. I love to hear about them, read about them. Sometimes, I might be inspired to write a new story based on what I’ve discovered. But I can’t get into that today because it’s Monday. Monday is singing. There’s no serious writing today. Serious singing instead. We’re rehearsing Carmina Burana for performances in May. O, Fortuna, velut Luna statu variabilis . . .

Singing is so vital. I can’t imagine a life without music. When I take Mondays off, away from writing, I know I’m gonna come back Tuesdays all fired up and ready to go again.

no writing
Choir of Capestang

14 story Tweets on St Patrick’s Day

4leafclover
The luck of the Irish

Today I tweeted a story. 14 Tweets and that was it. I thought maybe I could call on the luck of the Irish today and get my Tweets in without too many interruptions.

See, I’m still a bit of a newbie on Twitter. I’m still learning about hash tags and how to use them over there. Also, I have a tenuous claim to call upon said Irish phenomenon re: good luck. I have the Irish grandfather. Yes, really. I’ve banged on here on my website re: my maiden name Micklefield and some possible interesting South African connections with that name in the Capetown area, but I have neglected to mention the name of the other side of my family. So, here it is.

O'Driscollarms
O’Driscolls were born to travel
crockofgold
waiting for me at the end of a rainbow?

My mother’s maiden name was O’Driscoll. So, today, on St Patrick’s Day, I call upon my ancestors to bestow upon me and my little 14 Tweet story the legs to reach the world and bring me a crock of gold.

I wish!

If you didn’t catch the 14 Tweet story on Twitter – here it is

14 Tweet story

When he got up, he didn’t notice anything different. She looked as if she was still asleep.

He had work to do. First, the sink to bleach; he liked the smell of it and she never did it properly. Then, his phone calls.

He made coffee. Went outdoors. The day was set fine. He’d be able to get those seedlings planted out.

He smiled, having the day to himself with no interference. Retirement meant doing exactly as he pleased. He’d earned the right.

At twelve, he began to feel hungry. He wondered, briefly, what she was planning for lunch, but there was still no sign of her.

He looked in the fridge and grabbed a crabstick. It wouldn’t spoil his appetite for later. There was no sound from the bedroom.

His stomach rumbled as he opened the bedroom door. He called her name. Her face was pale and still. Grey and unattractive.

He thought about the greyness of her. There was no wonder he hadn’t wanted to kiss any of it for years.

He made tea and enjoyed rearranging the caddies and repositioning cups in better places in the cupboard on the wall.

He spent the afternoon lining up plant pots. He finished the crabsticks. He thought her selfish not making him refreshment.

At seven, when he wanted his dinner, he realized she was dead. Brain haemorrhage, the doctor said. Ah well, he thought.

How could he have known she was dead? Why would any man make it part of his morning ritual to check if his partner was alive?

She’d done it on purpose, of course. To make him look bad.

Ah, well. Now she’d got everything she wanted. She’d always told him she felt she was dying inside.

THE END

(If you enjoyed this – please click the Twitter button at the bottom of the page and Re-Tweet this page. Thank you. I’ll share the crock of gold. Yeah, right!)

 

 

24 hours without internet. The joys of living in France

24hours
A whole day!

 

Twenty four hours without the internet. 24 whole hours!

The Gollum Boy (see earlier post ) began pacing as soon as he got home from school. What? No internet? How could anybody DO THIS TO HIM? Didn’t they know he had an appointment with Syndicate on YouTube?

He had to resort to the X-Box WITHOUT KiNECT. Saints preserve us! Saint Louise, actually on the fifteenth of March. Saint Louise of the Daughters of Charity, the ones who used to wear those huge starched cornettes on their heads that made them look like seagulls. Her saint’s day is the fifteenth of March. It says so on my calendar.

Not the Ides of March! Oh, Blimey, I’ve just realized. We lost our phone and internet connection on the Ides of March. It must have been an omen. Well, we live along the Via Domitia, don’cha know. Julius Caesar passed this way on his way to Spain. You can hear the ghostly legions tramping by in their skirts and sandals. No, that’s Gollum Boy, tramping by on his way to raid the fridge. He has a face like a wet weekend and his eyes are like slits. (He’s still very grey, by the way, but he has had a wash.)

So, what can one do when all the connections are down? One could go for a walk. One could read a few chapters. One could learn a new recipe. One could watch a movie on TV. One could go for a walk. One could read a few chapters. One could . . .

bitingnails
Oh, No!

I‘VE LOST MY INTERNET CONNECTION! WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?

The truth is, we’ve all got so used to having these connections at our fingertips, we take them for granted. And, I believe, we allow them too much say in our lives.

One of the joys of living in a small French village is that, from time to time, we are thrust into a past when such household commodities didn’t exist. In any case, what use would winegrowers and their fieldworkers have had for such things? Their days were already full of working to earn a living. Now, the winegrowers’ grandchildren have laptops and X boxes and Playstations and tablets and smartphones and none of them want to follow grandpa into viticulture. No. They want to be the next Syndicate. The next #1 Solo Gamer.

But they can’t all be number 1, can they? At some point, they’ll have to start paying their way. Give unto Caesar etc. We’ve let this internet stuff take over our lives. Its marching through our homes and families like the legions of the Roman Empire.

Well, we all know what happened to that, don’t we?

The trouble is, how will I keep up with Twitter and Facebook and Linkedin and my website when the Internet Empire collapses?

Not so cabbage-looking this morning! New widget appears

Languedoc cross
Languedoc cross

 

 

Ahem! Is that a new widget in your sidebar, Celia?

What, that old thing?

Well, it wasn’t there yesterday.

Oh, it’s just something I found lying around.

Exactly where did you find it lying around?

On Google, darling.

You mean, not actually on WordPress?

Not at first. I did try to find a new widget on the ‘search for new plug-ins’ thingummy, but it didn’t matter how I worded my query, I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

You just wanted to add pictures to the sidebar I take it?

That’s right. I tried writing ‘add pictures to the sidebar’, and ‘sidebar photo widget’ and any number of combinations of all manner of prompts, but it took Google to understand what I was asking for. And do you know what happened next?

No. Go on!

Google redirected me back to WordPress and found me this page. http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/image-widget/ It’s called IMAGE WIDGET support.

No!

Languedoc
The five regions of Languedoc

Yes. Oh, yes. After I’d done it once, I liked it so much I had to do it again.

You’ve got a strange look in your eyes, Celia.

Widget-lust, darling. I think I’ve got it bad.

Blogging? Blogging? Give me a break

This is me.cabbageGreen as. Thought I’d got it sorted, did I? Knew all about blogging, did I? Getting all smug over the SEO stuff and plug-ins and talking like I know what I’m talking about? Wake up, girl. Sorry, that should be: Wake up, GRANDMA! You don’t know the half of it. There are people out there who’ve known this stuff since they were in primary school. There are kids could laugh you into the middle of next week. There are TODDLERS, dammit, who know more computer-speak than you do.  Kids who were blogging before they’d learned how to help with the washing up. There are generations of whizz-kids out there who have known this stuff since they were in nappies. ( Are they still called whizz-kids? Probably not)

See how out of touch I am? See what a numpty? Here’s another picture of me looking green.

cabbageface
green as grass AND cabbage-looking

 

That’s me told, then. That’s me wrung out and hung out to dry. So, while you’re up there, Grandma, remember this: there is ALWAYS something new to learn.

If you joined an evening class and went to learn how to, let’s say, build a rabbit hutch, you’d expect to come across unfamiliar terminology, never having built anything in your life before. Never having held a saw or a hammer or bashed in a nail with one end of it. But at least you’d know what a hammer was. You’d know what all the relevant tools were called and what they looked like as well as the job you were expected to do with them.

I’ve heard of chicken wire – I think I’d know where to go buy some.  I don’t know how to chicletize my website. WTF? I thought chicklets were what you gave the kids to eat when you were too tired to cook. I don’t KNOW what a feedburner is, so what’s the point in telling me to use one? I wouldn’t know one if it was hanging out my arse. I know what a log burner is. Will that help?

But, as I already said, there are people out there who’ve been au fait with all this stuff since before the dawn of the century. How did I ever think I’d be able to get up to speed with it in a matter of weeks? It’s true what they say about ignorance. It’s bliss!

Hanami comes to Languedoc with many trees in blossom

They do it properly in Japan. People welcome tree blossom. They pack picnics and take the whole family out to sit beneath burgeoning cherries and plum trees. They really make a point of going out especially to see the blossom.

Here, in Languedoc, we have beautiful flowering trees. First, you get the almonds. They can flower any time from late January onwards. They’re about past their best now, but for several weeks they’ve powdered the lanes through the vineyards with their baby pink set against cobalt winter skies.

Then comes Mimosa. You can smell it as soon as you step outside. A photo of my neighbour’s old tree is one of the random headings I use on my website pages. (All the headers are adapted from my own photographs.)

Mimosa
February mimosa in full bloom

 

 

Just outside my gate, there’s a small square full of flowering cherry. You simply HAVE to take notice of them. If you don’t, you’ll miss the display. The Tramontane will get up, blowing over the Pyrenees, bringing with it sharp blasts of icy air from still snow-covered peaks.

 

canigou
The highest peak of the Pyrenees visible from where I live

By the time the Tramontane has rushed over the top of these peaks, it stabs you like ice-cold daggers. It blows in threes, the locals tell you. If the wind goes into a fourth day, you can guarantee there’ll be six.

 

vineflood
inundations can flood the vines

Or the Marin will blow you a hooley from the Mediterranean and there will be mist and more rain than you thought the sky could hold.  At the end of it, there’ll be no blossom left to admire.

Flowering cherry
Baby pink blossom

Beautiful things are often fleeting, so I’m glad I made the small effort of standing outside my garden gate to take this picture while the blossom is at its best.

Blogging for life?

Two months I’ve been at it now. Two months I’ve been blogging and learning what I should be blogging about. Two months’ worth of discovering there’s a whole new language out there that I never knew existed.

codebehind
the code behind the image

Hiding behind all our embedded pictures and behind all our carefully planned text, there’s a parallel world of symbols and things that look like runes. They know what they’re supposed to be doing. I still don’t. I’ve learned some rudimentary tricks to put borders around my pictures. Then I learned how to change the colour of said borders. And I was thrilled! I was so thrilled I made myself a crib sheet with the hash numbers of colours I’d probably use most often. And, get this, I didn’t know where my hash sign was. (I’m on a second-hand Mac) I had to Google to find out. Then I had to write it down on a post-it and stick that up where I could see it until the information lodged in my memory.

forsterquote1
how much time would Forster have spent blogging?

This is how utterly green I was when I started out. Two months ago. Just two months ago. I’ve added plug-ins to my site. I’ve learned something about Search Engine Optimization and H tags. As well as all of this, I’ve got myself on Twitter and Linkedin and I’m learning how to Stumbleupon with the best of them. Did I mention it was only two months ago?

It isn’t the life I planned.

Teenage Gollums

We have a teenage Gollum boy in the house. That is to say, we have a teenage boy who lives upstairs. We hardly ever see him. He appears at meal times and hovers like ectoplasm, usually in doorways. He is very grey. If 50 Shades of it wasn’t a sex-romp novel, our teenage person who lives upstairs would be the epitome of 50 shades of grey. His face is grey. His hands are grey. The back of his neck is a shade of grey you wouldn’t believe.

This is because he never sees daylight. Like Gollum. Outdoors is an alien concept for teenage Gollums. Why would they ever need to venture into fresh air? Everything they need is, literally, at their fingertips.

IN my teenage years, I read E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops.

themachinestops
E.M.Forster’s chilling vision of the future

First published in 1909, The Machine Stops paints a chilling vision of the role of technology in people’s lives. It’s one of those stories I’ve never forgotten. In this case, it isn’t the characters I remember; it’s the imagery Forster weaves into the plot and setting. The story is a stark warning against humans placing too much reliance on the machines that serve them.

E.M.Forster has his characters living alone in beehive cell-like conditions. They have video/audio connections and everything is at their fingertips, at the flick of a switch or a push of a button. They have lost their teeth and hair because they don’t need them any more. If you haven’t read it, it’s available for free as a download.

And so, Forster’s remarkable prophecy in 1909, regarding the role of technology in our lives brings me back to our teenage Gollum who lives upstairs in his own cell-like conditions. He hardly moves from the one position, hunched over his ‘precious’, his tapering fingers tapping away in the dark.

He’ll probably never read Forster. It’s so sad . . .

gollum

Social networking. Everywhere and nowhere baby?

social networking by Jeff Beck
everywhere and nowhere baby?

 

In the days before Social Networking, this is how we used to listen to music. It was another life. We behaved like a different species from kids today. We invited friends round to listen to music. Generally, kids walked to one another’s houses in those days. We actually got out there on our own two feet and put bodily effort into social networking.

You might get a bag of chips from the corner shop and Mrs Wilkinson might offer you some bread and butter to make a chip buttie. Yes, really. It’s not SO long since. That’s what social networking amounted to when I was growing up.

Who could have foreseen the changes that have come about in less than half the time it takes to turn into a grandma? Now kids are in contact with each other all the time, without ever having to touch each other.

Lyrics to Hi Ho Silver Lining :
You’re everywhere and nowhere, baby
That’s where you’re at
Going down a bumpy hillside
In your hippy hat

Flying across the country
And getting fat
Saying everything is groovy
When your tyres are flat . . . .

Yep, Jeff Beck. That about sums it up. You have to be everywhere today. Kids have to be connected by all and every electronic means. There’s a new word apparently in the dictionary: nomophobia. It means fear of not being connected, not having a mobile phone.

You have to have presence. And it’s not just the kids. You have to be on this network and that one, not forgetting the ones over there. You must post regularly so people will become aware of you and you must always have interesting things to say, until you are a celebrity and then it doesn’t much matter what you say as people will hang on to every word of it anyway.

Darlings, you can spend all your time keeping up with all this social networking malarkey and NEVER do any bloody writing.

Isn’t a silver lining supposed to be a good thing?

I’ve discovered Oneword. Get over there.

Brilliant, this Oneword website. What a way to begin your day. Sixty seconds to write whatever comes into your head. It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t even make sense. You just write. You throw away all your inhibitions and write. You fly by the seat of your pants for sixty seconds and the freedom of it is exhilarating.

Now, we know you ought not try to write a novel this way. We know where pantsing gets us. It gets us lost. That’s where it gets us. In the wilderness, a little voice crying Help me, I’m lost.

onewordgo
go there

But, oh, the joy of flying by them for 60 seconds.Prompted by just Oneword.

write from the heart