Just to remind myself that autumn actually happened...

It's true that I really picked the wrong moment to hibernate -- here I am, getting back into things in order to complain about the winter, while the human was off doing his best to enjoy the great outdoors before coming home to let me out of my sleeping bag and turn the heating on.
Things I missed include:

An apple and sweet onion festival -- which also seems to have included red wine and chestnuts -- in company with some of the old friends who first set me on the path of chronicling the eccentricities of humans;

and a trip (via Westward Ho!, no less) to a notorious pirate lair, convenient for the observation of Shetland ponies employed by the National Trust for mowing and fertilisation purposes, and the sort of meta-signage that offers visitors the best means of dpriving visitors of the opportinuty of actually falling off the ends of the Earth.

Score one for heliocentrism, methinks.

Of velocipedes and boopotamy

I have been much neglecting my writings lately, sadly, as there has been much to do keeping the human on the straight and narrow. This became urgent three weeks ago when he decided to embark with an intrepid colleague on an autumn jaunt along the Canal du Nivernais, braving rain and pinot noir in pursuit of the Burgundinian sublime.

Sweet showers rightly belong in April -- it must have been the humans' decision to put up for the night in a pilgrims' residence that led both rain and gravitation to make the experience as authentic as possible. Complain they might, but Romanesque basilicae are designed to be built on top of hills that are intended to be walked up, in the dark and if possible on one's knees.

Sunday lunch of wild boar stew and complimentary pâté sounds tempting -- sorry Fidel! -- but it was quite a relief to have a weekend to myself in a nice warm kitchen. Greetings from canalside cows notwithstanding, I think I got the better end of the deal.

SPÉCIAL POUVOIR D'ACHAT : pour 10kg de livres envoyés, La Poste vous offre le sac en toile...

*free mail sack for every 10kg of books posted!


Reste plus que 30kg à arriver - l'humain commence à s'inquiéter pour ses livres ; moi je veux savoir combien de sacs!

Ça roule à gauche aux antipodes !

Bonjour à tous, ne vous inquietez pas : je suis enfin arrivé. M'exprimer dans la langue de Descartes doit signifier, je crois, que je suis encore loin de me remettre du décalage horaire...

Faudrait dire que les aixois comme les parisiens, de naissance et (surtout pour les aixois) d'adoption, m'ont bien aidé à remettre la montre sur GMT+10 dans les jours avant mon départ. Photos de vos nombreux baisers à suivre bientôt, c'est promis.

Me voilà donc sur la terrasse chez les parents de mon esclave-humain, en train de prendre le soleil sur une jolie râpe-fromage hollandaise :

L'humain a vu bon d'aller faire du bateau au lieu de travailler hier. Comme il y avait un bel orage d'été j'ai préféré rester au sec dans ma nouvelle petite maison--merci Annelies!

Et pour vous convaincre que je suis vraiment parti aux antipodes, me voilà au volant (bon, sur le levier des vitesses, mais vous voyez l'idée) de la Toyota familiale :


Volant à droite mais on roule à gauche ... moyen de tirer par les cheveux l'observation que les Australiens ont enfin signé Kyoto, vont apparemment s'excuser formellement auprès des peuples aborigènes à l'ouverture du Parlement la semaine prochaine, mais qui se font un point d'honneur d'être la nation au monde la plus gaspillatrice en eau et en énergie ?

The milk of canine kindness, or How to appear classy while drinking Catalan champagne from the bottle in the freezing cold

Romulus and Remus have turned up rather a lot in the last couple of weeks, from Christmas spent in Aquae Sextiae with excursions to Massilia, and thence for a few days via the Viae Aurelia and Domitia through the province of Gallia Narbonensis and on to Matritum.

I seem to recall them being invoked during the audioguide tour to the Arena in Nemausus, whose French commentary for some reason invoked Seneca and whose English commentary made do with much tut-tutting about how it was the wicked Christians who gave gladiator fighting a bad name. Go the lions, I say!

But I digress.

The photograph jogged hazy memories of catching up on New Year's Eve in Tarraco, in a province whose preferred language only seems to require a moderate amount of good cheer and gesticulation for reasonable intercomprehension with the southern Gauls.

I maintain (though I fear the humans I was chaperoning may not) that sharing a drink with one's fellow creatures is always a worthwhile activity regardless of the consequences the next morning. Happy new year to you all, fellow drinkers of Cava just in time for midnight in front of the clock tower!

Was it not Lady Macbeth who lacked the milk of human kindness?

And was it not Romulus and Remus who accepted the offer of a drink from an unsung she-wolf, and went on to found Rome?

There's a lesson for you somewhere there, humans. I'm sticking by the medicine of my old mate Alcofribas.

Behold the hipposphinx!

The year is ending, the human is soon to drag me back to the antipodes, and I've finally taken advantage of having guests for a few days to visit the Iles de Frioul, off Marseille. All in all an appropriate context for an appointment with destiny...

My human consorts were for some reason terribly excited by a local detective novel whose final showdown occurs during a whiskey-filled picnic on the same island; I should never have let them visit most of the bars where its early stages are played out.

So excited were they that I had to beg them to photograph me in front of what I hold to be conclusive proof of the antique dignity of my race: the Hipposphinx.

Just wait, humans, until its slow thighs get moving, and you get caught in a gaze as blank and pitiless as the Provençal sun...a rough beast indeed!

For once, I concede, Yeats may have been right.

Haloof or human?

The following photo, snapped by she whose travels make me green with envy, and whose cooking posts inspire hunger and jealousy in equal measure, should be evidence enough that hippos are social creatures. Dangerous at times, yes, especially to foolish bipeds, but we are civilised beings that like nothing better than bathing in congregation.

It will be of little surprise, then, that the human was far more amused than I by a recent encounter at the inexpensive and commodious HI hostel in Casablanca, site of the Hassan II Mosque, the world's second-largest. He kept talking about trying to find a certain Signor Ferrari, but in the end had to settle for being driven from the station in a bright red Fiat Uno.

Anyway, despite his pitiful efforts at speaking Arabic (a practice that he justified by claiming that he was hiding behind someone else's colonial past by speaking French), some visitors from Fes were kind enough to invite him to share their dinner. He was reluctant to join them at first--too busy reading Huysmans' A Rebours, I ask you!--and so had to be gently reminded that sharing meals was simply part of being human, whereas eating alone and keeping to oneself was to be a Haloof--a hippopotamus!

Not once did the (h)aloof human speak up in my defence, even though he's far less sociable than I am. My only revenge was that he ended up having a cold shower, but he'll get his come-uppance one of these days.

I point him, and all ungrateful humans, in the direction of horrible haloof Howard, whose final ingnominy was to refuse to concede to the inevitable until every last vote had been counted.

Pre-travel comfort food

Well I'm not looking forward to being wrapped up in my pink and white striped sock and stuffed into a bag to catch a train tomorrow (assuming it's running, that is), but at least the human has decided to feed me before doing so.

Cooking directions are as follows:

1 packet merguez sausages (4 for the meal, the remaining 2 for sandwiches to eat on the train)
an onion
150g or so green lentils
2 tomatoes
salt, herbs, stock cubes etc to taste.

Prick the raw merguez all over, fry on very low heat in a heavy saucepan until fat renders. Then remove three sausages, and cut remaining three into 1 inch pieces. Add chopped onion, cook till soft, add lentils. Cook for a few minutes, then add chopped tomatoes, water, remaining ingredients. Cook until a stew-like texture is achieved.

Fry the remaining three merguez to complete cooking (NB: black on the outside, frozen on the inside). Periodically pour fat from frying pan into lentil mixture, weather depending. Reserve two to slice for sandwiches (wrap in paper towel, god these things are fatty!) and serve remaining cooked sausage on top of stew.

Garnish with pickled vegetables left by nonconformist party guest!

Autumn gloat

The above picture is basically gratuitous, simply reflecting my success on Sunday in inducing some humans to drive me to the Gorges de Verdon in the mellifluously-named département of the Alpes de Haute-Provence, to which the French have inexplicably (superstitiously?) attributed the number four. Had we walked the other side of the gorge, in département 83 (the Var), I'm not sure I could have fitted enough adverbs into an English sentence.

There is much, it must be said, for autumn scenery, very much lacking in my adopted homeland where nature remains red, yellow and brown for most of the year. As I mentioned in a previous post, the season also matches my colour scheme, and that is important.

Much as I may technically be a river horse, more closely related to whales and cetaceans than to terrestrial even-toed ungulates such as Fidel the Pig (Where is Fidel?!), I spent most of the day in the comfort of an overcoat pocket eating hazelnut chocolate. Yes humans, that was me, though I did enjoy listening to you all argue over who ate the last piece!

It wasn't so much the cold that put me off swimming as the warning signs with elaborate pictographs warning of dire consequences for swimmers of someone suddenly opened the spill gates of the nearby hydroelectric dam. A few more years and there will be no more snowmelt and nice warm rivers to wallow in year round...