Mme de Sevigny and the nuclear powered wine

In Britain when there is an accident at a power station, we re-name the power stations, in France they do things differently.

Last Christmas we got a lovely case of wine from Polly & James and last week we were drinking a bottle of it.  It was a very nice fruity, southern number called Grignan les Adhemar .  I was particularly taken with it, because many of Mme de Sevigny's letters were addressed to her beloved daughter Mme La Marquise de Grignan.  I don't recall whether Adhemar was part of her title, it does ring a bell, so perhaps it was.  The Grignans, rather unusually, did not live at Versailles in the great rookery with the rest of the French aristocracy.  They lived on their estates in Southern France, much toMme de S's distress.  I did not know they had vineyards, or whether this wine came from their estate, but I thought I would order some more, if it wasn't too expensive, and went online.

I soon found that Grignan les Adhemar was a bit too expensive for ordinary drinking - but then I saw that ASDA has it on offer - half price, so I promptly bought half a dozen, thinking if it was only terribly ordinaire it wouldn't be bad at that price.  Actually, it was very good and so I've just bought another half dozen bottles, a snip at £4.37!

Then I saw another Google entry about the wine and discovered that it was not a new wine, or an undiscovered zone - "they" had decided to rename the area called "Coteaux de Tricastin".  So actually I was just drinking good old C d T under another name.   Why had they changed the name?  Why the urgent need to re-brand a perfectly respectable wine area.   Tricastin - true, I hadn't seen any for ages... and why did that name ring such a bell?.

I suddenly recalled when we were on holiday in the Lot in 2008, reading in one of the local papers all about a power station accident which had resulted in an undiscovered leak in the waste system for some months.  This was all the more distressing since the power station (or centre nucleaire) was on a river, in the South, in a wine-growing and agricultural area (yes, that could be almost anywhere in southern France) but this power station was called Tricastin.  Suddenly one just never saw the wine any more.  A NY Times article in 2011 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/dining/26iht-wine26.html?_r=0) pointed out that Tricastin was not the only wine area affected, the power station was on the Rhone after all.  However, Tricastin was the only wine area that shared the power station name.   Sales crashed, and in 2011 the wine growers applied to change the name of their appellation (an appellation that had only existed since 1973 apparently) and after that, the rest was history.

I am assuming that all the wine has a geiger counter passed over it - and that the warm glow I feel when I drink it, doesn't owe too much to the plutonium.

And so, adiieu to Coteaux du Tricastin!  We shall not see its label again.

  

Bad things in 3s...

Several bad things have happened recently, so I want to know when they will stop.  The first one was the car failing its MoT test, since this is almost an annual event, it passed almost without comment, we sighed, and paid for it to be repaired (rust on the sill).   Then Finn got poor AS levels - which requires a re-think of the next year or so.  And I was ill - and continue to be.  So not all was hunky dory despite the very good news from Ireland (which is the topic of a post in another blog).  In fact it was all pretty shit, but I was coping - when the guest room ceiling collapsed.

We do not make an enormous amount out of AirBnB - but it does provide our "summer pocket money" i.e. enough so that we can go out and relax and drink and eat and enjoy ourselves at the many fabulous bars and restaurants of Ramsgate...now our most profitable room is out of use. Nevertheless, we still have someone coming tonight, for another room, and next week the other two rooms will be in use.  I thought of using Ned's room tonight, but the state of it was too much to bear.  Mark heroically cleared up the bulk of the plaster etc. but the whole place is such a mess!  I didn't get around to calling about the insurance, but I'm not sure if this sort of thing is covered by it.   Anyway, we will have to have it plastered and then have at least the ceiling decorated and we have also decided it is time to finally remove the reasonably disgusting carpet in there....we should be able to remove that fairly inexpensively I think.

Our house has had a lot of work and money lavished on it recently, but it continues to punish us!  And now we have the "haunted wardrobe" in our room - from which noises keep issuing.  There is nothing there - as far as I can tell, unless some entity has taken up residence in it (we had a haunted wardrobe in my childhood home which actually levitated once - yes, really.  No, I didn't - but 3 of my siblings did.  It was a 17thC French wardrobe, so no doubt it had plenty of history).   Last week the wardrobe door opened of its own accord, and then closed a little.  This wardrobe is a respectable Maples linen press c. 1920? Inlaid mahogany, and formerly owned by the Our Lady of Peace parochial house where it was used to store priestly vestments.   Clearly whatever spiritual protection it was under then has worn off after 12 years with us.

Bees and bonnets

My bonnet is fairly buzzing with bees at the moment - the most annoying one is the one that is disturbing me about my health...However there is a another one - I keep forgetting that this blog is not my diary, and I too frequently  allow myself to express personal frustrations here.  This has resulted on at least one occasion in a friendship being broken off, and I fear I may have done it again.  I am very sorry about this, but I doubt whether there is anything I can do, having previously blotted my copybook by having expressed my views on a topic too trenchantly.   I suppose I forget about other people's sensibilities, I expect greater resilience, which is clearly stupid of me.  My only defence I suppose, is that there is no criticism of others that I wouldn't make of myself.  Half the things that annoy me in others, are the classic projections: people who have the same bad habits as me, one's own "dark side" made uncomfortably visible, in Jungian terms.  It is difficult to bite one's lips and remain silent when one disagrees about something so as not to upset a friend, but when one manages it, it is clearly rather stupid to boast about it in one's blog.

Because the Google stats show an audience that is all over the world, I probably tend to forget that my most ardent and interested readership is probably in Ramsgate!  I managed a couple of years ago to stop writing about the LO, and clearly I should take a similar strategic decision to stop writing about Ramsgate... or perhaps just satisfy myself with telling you that we have an excellent Japanese restaurant here!

Cat days

I know they are called Dog Days because of the prominence of the Dog star in the night sky (presently I am too knackered to go out and admire Sirius, Lyra and Aquila and other summer stars), but when I see Bernard, our cat stretched out on the lawn, often on his back with his paws above his head, eyes closed, and just a glimpse of his tooth between his little black lips, I think cats are the real high summer animal.

I am having a jolly nice time just now.  Apart from a couple of mildly important domestic matters, I am largely free of any major tasks (I want to revise The Ash Grove, but that isn't urgent), so I have been seeing friends, which is always agreeable.  Actually, that isn't true - it can be exceptionally disagreeable to see a friend who has an idee fixe that one doesn't agree with - and I spent about 20 minutes this arvo remaining resolutely silent about a certain matter.  That aside, life has been very agreeable - I noticed today a Facebook post about "people interested in discussing political ideas" and realised that at present the last thing I want to do is discuss political ideas - maybe in September - but not now.   It's just over a year since I joined the LP and attended the first local SUTU meeting - I confess I haven't been doing much since the election, because I've been writing and it has been a blessed relief.

The writing has reached the unpleasant point where the euphoria of having finished the first draft has finished, and while feeling pleasantly undaunted by the prospect of revising and re-writing - one begins to wonder what will happen if it meets the same enthusiastic lack of interest the others have experienced, if it will ever get published, and all the fond hopes that one had had on completion of the work seem to be nothing but egotistical fantasy.  But this time I did feel I was beginning to get the hang of it all, the writing lark I mean.  It is far from being a work of "extraordinary genius" - it may be more commercial than literary - although I hope it has enough resonances to last a little longer than some of the books I've read recently.  I was introduced to the concept of "alterity" last night - or rather the word for it - I was aware of the idea, I just don't know what the current academic/theoretical names for things are.  Anyway, in literature it was described as being "magical realism lite" - which I rather liked.  I would hesitate to describe The Malice of Fairies as magical realism exactly. M has always snorted that there is too much "magical" stuff in my other works.  This is monstrously unfair - I wish it were so.

Anyway, on the whole I have been having a more interesting conversations than usual, and I have also been reading proper books: I just finished Station Eleven by Emily St John Mendel, and now I'm reading Half a Yellow Sun by Chimananda Og something - it's a slightly unusual Nigerian name which I didn't catch easily.  I am terribly tempted to just go and tear books out of the shelves and read them all day.  I wish I had an intellectual project to research - this often a good time of year to study something, but I don't.  So I will just continue this brief period of self-indulgence before the wrath of autumn falls on us.  That will be time enough to get started on something else - maybe time to start researching the non-fiction project.  It would make a nice change, and there is no real urge to write any more fiction at present - although I have plenty of ideas.