Who is Online

We have 395 guests and no members online

Aix-en-Provence

Here we are in Aix-en-Provence, the town of Cezanne. And they actually have some of his work here.

Aix, by comparison to other towns we have visited, seems rather boring but we have been here for just a few hours. There is a Cezanne exhibition at one of the galleries that we will check out tomorrow.

The the greatest interest this afternoon was driving by the back roads across classic French countryside.

We have programmed the car direction finding person 'madam butterfly' to avoid main roads. It's a Citroen C4 diesel with built-in navigation. Madam butterfly is not always accurate and makes some really silly suggestions like: 'When possible do a U-turn' when travelling down a one way street in the correct direction.

But she can be criticised without chucking the map out of the window or screaming back. 

 

Aix-en-Provence Aix-en-Provence2
Aix-en-Provence3 Aix-en-Provence4
 

Aix-en-Provence

 

 

Oh dear, the hotel room is good with its own kitchen and consequently we had a nice breakfast from ingredients purchased at the supermarket yesterday.  But Aix hasn’t improved.  Maybe it’s the weather. 

It’s a University town and there are lots of young people of student age about.  Our hotel has quite high security with steel shutters and we are given to understand that this is necessary.  The car is locked away in the car park in the basement. We’re here for a couple of days.  We’ve looked in at the cathedral and walked all around the town wondering what the fuss is about.  There is a Cezanne trail that we followed through the old town but we haven’t been to see the quarry where he worked or other such destinations.

The Cezanne exhibition turned out to be very popular despite a high ticket price.  Wendy was holding our tickets and some woman demanded to see mine and got frustrated that I couldn't respond in French.  The exhibition was worthwhile particularly as it was pouring down outside.  It included some nice Cezanne watercolours and an interesting Van Gough as well as Renoir, Modigliani and Soutine. It was from the private collection of the American Henry Pearlman and is certainly impressive in the hands of an individual collector but it wasn't really a proper Cezanne exhibition with representative works from different periods and media.  There was none of his heavy impasto, for example.

We had imagined that Aix would be a good base for exploring some small villages in the region and set-out one morning in the car.  Unfortunately most of those in our local guide are small working towns of no particular merit.  The people are generally quite poor and the longed for café or cute restaurant generally turned out to be a run-down 'greasy spoon' patronised by two or three old men and a dog - literally.

 

Around Aix Around Aix2
Around Aix3 Around Aix4
 

Towns around Aix

 

 

But a couple had some picturesque elements.  We needed a better, more selective, guide with just the best one or two, not the one we have from the tourist office in Aix with some twenty or thirty ordinary little regional villages all vying for the tourist Euro with an overblown write-up.

 

 

No comments

Travel

Istanbul

 

 

Or coming down to earth...

 

When I was a boy, Turkey was mysterious and exotic place to me. They were not Christians there; they ate strange food; and wore strange clothes. There was something called a ‘bazaar’ where white women were kidnapped and sold into white slavery. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, or was it Errol Flynn, got into all sorts of trouble there with blood thirsty men with curved swords. There was a song on the radio that reminded me over and over again that ‘It’s Istanbul not Constantinople Now’, sung by The Four Lads, possibly the first ‘boy band’.

 

Read more: Istanbul

Fiction, Recollections & News

More on 'herd immunity'

 

 

In my paper Love in the time of Coronavirus I suggested that an option for managing Covid-19 was to sequester the vulnerable in isolation and allow the remainder of the population to achieve 'Natural Herd Immunity'.

Both the UK and Sweden announced that this was the strategy they preferred although the UK was soon equivocal.

The other option I suggested was isolation of every case with comprehensive contact tracing and testing; supported by closed borders to all but essential travellers and strict quarantine.   

New Zealand; South Korea; Taiwan; Vietnam and, with reservations, Australia opted for this course - along with several other countries, including China - accepting the economic and social costs involved in saving tens of thousands of lives as the lesser of two evils.  

Yet this is a gamble as these populations will remain totally vulnerable until a vaccine is available and distributed to sufficient people to confer 'Herd Immunity'.

In the event, every country in which the virus has taken hold has been obliged to implement some degree of social distancing to manage the number of deaths and has thus suffered the corresponding economic costs of jobs lost or suspended; rents unpaid; incomes lost; and as yet unquantified psychological injury.

Read more: More on 'herd immunity'

Opinions and Philosophy

Issues Arising from the Greenhouse Hypothesis

This paper was first written in 1990 - nearly 30 years ago - yet little has changed.

Except of course, that a lot of politicians and bureaucrats have put in a lot of air miles and stayed in some excellent hotels in interesting places around the world like Kyoto, Amsterdam and Cancun. 

In the interim technology has come to our aid.  Wind turbines, dismissed here, have become larger and much more economic as have PV solar panels.  Renewable energy options are discussed in more detail elsewhere on this website.

 


 

Climate Change

Issues Arising from the Greenhouse Hypothesis

 

Climate change has wide ranging implications for the World, ranging from its impacts on agriculture (through drought, floods, water availability, land degradation and carbon credits) mining (by limiting markets for coal and minerals processing) manufacturing and transport (through energy costs) to property damage resulting from storms.  The issues are complex, ranging from disputes about the impact of human activities on global warming, to arguments about what should be done and the consequences of the various actions proposed.  The following paper explores some of the issues and their potential impact.

 

Read more: Issues Arising from the Greenhouse Hypothesis

Terms of Use

Terms of Use                                                                    Copyright