Una, Sile, Martin Lyes and Colm.
(Number 5 took the picture)

And we got another excellent commendation in Tripadvisor here
This time all the way from America.

Thanks to the brilliant work by Martine at Medialogue and of my highly skilled daughter Caitríona my web site for Le Presbytère is now both in English and in French.

To observe this miracle at first hand go to www.lepresbytere.net and then click on the little Français on the top right hand corner.

This will bring you here

Incredible/Incroyable !

This is a bit of a cheat really as these two I have previously blogged.

A few nights ago I was relating my favourite mis-translations and quoted the name of a sports footwear shop in Nimes which I had spotted some time ago.
It was called The Athlete’s Foot.
I did a little light googling last night and discovered it still exists here

My other full time favourite was in the church in Medina Sidonia in Andalusia where they had translated the caption under a picture of Santa Rita as, wait for it, Father Christmas Rita.

I have been annoying various language experts for years on the origin of the word (words?) Tory Top.
As far as I am concerned it was the only word I knew for the pine cone, it was the word used by my mother when she painted them silver for Christmas, it is even the name of a road in Ballyphehane in Cork which must have had a grove of pine trees at one stage.
I have met blank walls all the way.
I have established that the Tory bit comes from the Irish toraidh or pursued which went on to mean an outlaw, or renegade and from there by various routes to something wild or savage or any member of the British Conservative Party.
(I joke not)

It was just by actually looking at one when walking in the Haute Languedoc forests recently that the penny suddenly dropped.
Pine cones are remarkably like spinning tops in shape and the name surely comes from that conceit; that they were wild or savage spinning tops.
Simple.
And staring me in the face all the time.

Way back in the very early seventies, it might even have been the very late sixties I first heard about the group Dr Strangely Strange.
They were a seriously hippy, Trinity/Newtown school group of musicians who were reckoned to be Irelands answer to the uber cool Incredible String Band.

Now it just so happened that I had an intro to this group as a Cork friend, Mary Mac was going out with Ivan Pawle one of the band.
Through them I met their manager Stephen Pearce, the potter, and as I was based in Dublin, Steve would get me to help out when the group did gigs there.
I became a sort of unofficial groupie/roadie.
Another of their groupies at that time was a guitarist called Gary Moore and if he was good they would let him play on some of their gigs (they were that cool)

The bit of unofficial roadying meant of course that I got free into the concerts and Steve would mostly get me to sit at the console by the mikes just to turn off switches if anyone started getting electrocuted.
There was another fan,a black guy about my age who also helped out and so the two of us would regularly meet when the Stranglies did a gig.
We became casual buddies.

In the fullness of time Strangelies wound up (not before they had made two LPs)
Mary and Ivan married (in the arts club in TCD) in 1970, I was at the wedding, and Tim Booth, another Strangely played at Sile and my wedding in 1973.

It was probably in the middle Seventies when I was walking down Grafton with a young nephew when I spotted the young fellow who used to sit at the console with me during the Strangely’s concerts.
We stopped and did the usual ‘Long time no see thing’ stuff and went on our way.
I suddenly noticed that my nephew had gone quite pink.
“How in the name of God ” he said “Do you know Phil Lynnot !”

I had no idea.

The reason I am suddenly remembering all this is that I had two visitors from the past stay with me last week.
Ivan and Mary Pawle, now suppliers of Organic Wines to Irish restaurants were down in the Languedoc sorting out their wine list last week and they stayed with me overnight.
We hadn’t met since their wedding forty years ago.
And they came bearing gifts, two digitally remastered CDs of theirs.
I played “Kip of the Serenes” yesterday and am glad to report that I am still word perfect.

Just outside the city of Beziers the Canal de Midi has to make a steep descent.
This is done by a stairway of seven locks, know as les Neufs Ecluses (there used to be nine)
This series of locks has become quite a feature of life here and we often spend a few hours watching barges ascend and descend through these locks, admiring all the time the skill of their builder Paul Ricquet who put the whole thing together over two hundred years ago.

Part of the fascination is the amateurism of the canal boat drivers, usually people who have hired the boats for a few days and are often English.
Early this summer happened the incident which I will now tell.

I was sitting, with Síle, on a bench on the bank at the bottom of the locks as an ascent started and several boats started to file into the bottom lock to start their long climb up the stairway.
A large boat, manned by half a dozen middle aged ladies and gents of the British persuasion were the last to try and fit in but were turned away by the lock keeper who reckoned the lock was too full to contain them.
Disappointed, they then decided to do something strange.
Instead of reversing back and mooring they decided to turn their barge in the canal.
Their barge was in fact just about exactly the same length as the width of the canal
and so, shortly , the inevitable happened, and the became wedged laterally across the Canal de Midi.

The man at the wheel then performed heroic actions with his engine, sending up clouds of steam and burning lots of engine oil but to no avail.
Then the decision was made and very shamefaced , (the barge now had become the attraction of the locks) five of the party, men and women, scrambled down from the back of the barge on the dry land.
Then the man at the tiller tied a rope on to the bow of the boat and, after throwing it into the water several times, one of the women went on board and carried it back to the team on the bank.
I was now beginning to enjoy this very much, and Síle had started to nudge me hard as my guffaws were becoming audible.

The shore team now lined themselves along the rope rather like a tug of war team and while the skipper continued to rev the engine heroically, they proceeded to try and dislodge the barge from its transverse position.
They weren’t enjoying any obvious success.
The boat remained in the same position.
Then the captain had a eureka moment and with a shout of joy he found a bit of equipment which he had not seen before.
Triumphantly he pulled this lever and the boat just as suddenly started to turn , but unfortunately in the opposite direction of the tug of war team, and with such power that they were all dragged several yards on their tummies , protesting loudly towards the canal..

At that moment my screams of mirth were attracting as much attention as the plight of the bargees and so Madame grabbed me firmly by the elbow and steered me, weeping and weak, towards the car.
To the best of my knowledge none of the team were actually deposited in the water but they were all left in a tangled heap on the bank while the skipper, unaware of their condition gazed around in triumph at , what he saw as his successful solving of the problem..

I know I have been very remiss about filling in my blog of late.
Truth is (again) we have been much too busy.
Lovely people staying but no time to report.
At the end of this week we get a small sos.
I’ll talk to you then.

I wrote the piece below in 2005 around the 12th of March.

Next year sees the 20th anniversary, I wonder what time will hurl at me then.

March 11th 2005
The Ides of March

Today is the 11th of March .It is not the Ides of March.
In March the Ides, for some reason best known to the Romans, falls on the 15th.
My youngest daughter, Deirdre, sent me a text message this morning saying “Beware the Ides of March” .
She sent it because she knows me well, and knows this is the sort of thing that will have me running to dictionaries and Shakespeare anthologies in a positive lather of enjoyment finding out as much as possible about said Ides and everything to do with it.(As indeed I just did)

In fact I , unlike Julius Caesar , do not fear the 15th of March. The day I fear is tomorrow, the 12th of March, and thereby (as you have probably just guessed) hangs a tale.

A couple of years ago, on March 12th 2001 to be precise, the same daughter Deirdre asked me to pick her up in school early and bring her out to the hospital where she had an appointment to get her dental brace checked. I duly left her out at the hospital at the appropriate time and decided to wait for her in the car and listen to the radio until she finished.
It was a sunny spring day and as I sat in the stuffy car I felt a headache coming on. Not a particularly bad one but a stinger none the less.
What amazed me then, was that my body started to panic. It was almost as if I was observing what was happening from outside myself. My heart started to pound, I came out in a cold sweat, I started to shake, to gasp for breath, all the symptoms of a panic attack , something I had experienced once before.

Fortunately while my body was having this attack my brain was still feeling calm. This told me that I was sitting in the sun, in a car with the windows up, I should get out and get some air.
I did and immediately began to calm down, and the headache started to fade.

After a while Deirdre came back and I started to drive her home.
On the way I started to tell her about my strange headache/panic attack.
“How long is it now since your Brain Haemorrhage “ she said. I started to think,” well it was about this time of the year…..”
Then I nearly had a second attack but, this time it would have been justified.
The 12th of March is the day before my birthday, not a day I would ever mistake for another.
It had been on the 12th of March 1991 when I had had the haemorrhage.

What’s more it had been at about 3.00 in the afternoon, as it had been when I had been waiting in the hospital car park.

That meant that it had been exactly 10 years ago to the year, day and hour since I had had the haemorrhage which had seen me rushed to hospital to Cork by ambulance, and, from which it had taken me about 5 years to recover completely.
Could it possibly be that some strange time clock in my body had recognised this macabre anniversary and was telling me about it?
As I said I had only once before experienced an attack like the one I had just had in the car. That had happened a few weeks after the initial haemorrhage when I had my first headache since the attack and it had been spookily similar to the one I had just had in the car.
I guessed at that time that my body , rather than my mind, was deciding that I was going to have another bleed and had gone into panic mode. On that occasion also, a walk in the fresh air had calmed me down and got rid of the headache.

It does make you wonder though . Have we got a separate body memory of past traumas? Does this body clock recognise the Gregorian calendar and British Standard Time ? Or was it all just a strange coincidence?

For my part I’m just not sure ,but, I still beware of tomorrow;
the 12th of March.