It survived our first move.  A good omen!  Hopefully it will be flowering again when moving to our permanent abode in October.

 We were there at the tail end of summer and the wine vintage was in full swing. The region of the Languedoc is one of the largest red wine growing areas in the world. Apart from those working in shops or businesses, everyone else, during vintage, all and sundry are into grape harvesting and wine making. No matter where we went or where we stopped, the streets and kerbs were red with the flow of must and wine. We were stepping in it.

 The local farmers were immediately selling the freshly made wine and for less than the cost of a bottle of milk. The larger the quantity, the cheaper the price was. We ended buying the red wine in a five litre plastic container for which one had to pay a deposit. The drinking of those five litres had to be done fairly quickly because as air entered the container, the wine would oxidize and spoil rapidly. We would soon adhere to the routine of buying fresh trout with stick bread from the local boulangerie, fry up garlic in some very excellent olive oil, barbeque the trout and with the dipping of the bread into the oil and garlic mixture eat the trout washed down with copious quantities of the cheap wine.

 The Languedoc area is the largest wine producing area in the world and this region alone produces more wine than the entire United States. During its frenzied vintage height, while we were there, our shoes and car tyres were red from the flooded roadside kerbs and guttering with the spoils of the wine making. I don’t know how, but during the couple of weeks of trout and red wine consumption I found enough sobriety reading a book found on the shelves in the dining room. It was George Perec’s; ‘Life, A User’s manual’. A  great story that involves a large jigsaw puzzle with people and their lives living in apartments forming the pieces of the jigsaw coming together bit by bit, a marvellous story

Why, of late, are people throwing rocks from overhead bridges at cars? A few have got killed that way. The government is now spending tens of millions putting metal mesh panelling several metres high and curving inwards to try prevent people hurling objects from bridges to cars being driven below them. In New South Wales at least, some of the mesh panels have native flowers impressed on them. I suppose in the hope that beautification of material, even as bland as mesh wire on overhead bridges, might deter rock throwers.

 There are now bridges over highways that are completely enmeshed with an all-round cage structure excluding the possibility of those Neanderthal creatures throwing anything at all. Where does this rock throwing urge come from and why? Some, with a bend to psycho babble, might argue it is men’s innate desire to go back to the cave. … Others might conclude that those that get up in the morning wanting to engage in rock throwing at cars would have to be diagnosed as being mentally unstable. With Australia’s poor record on mental health, it would not be at all surprising this to be the case. It mightn’t just be those rock throwers that are walking around in need of help.  Our jails often perform a duty belonging to mental health. In fact, many agree that our high rate of incarceration is due to those unfortunate enough to suffer from mental health problems ending up in jail. Those correctional institutions are lumbered with the extra role of a de-facto mental health institution as well as catering for genuine law breakers

The other habit for which no answer has popped up yet is the compulsion to scratch windows with sharp objects.   I presume many people must catch trains in the morning, not just with sandwiches in their briefcases, but also with Stanley knife, perhaps battery operated tools and routers, to put and engrave their weird messages on the windows. There is hardly a train that hasn’t had their windows scratched.  Even the top windows are given this treatment.  It means the vandal travellers are standing up on seats to do their work, or some might take stepladders as well. It is not just a single scratch in a moment of madness or a fleeting post relationship or failed marital flash-back, no, a continuous scratching backwards and forwards over and over again. The letter Z seems to dominate. Is it the literate joy of operators for the letter Z or is there some subliminal message that only the initiated understand? Again, analyst might well argue that this desire to leave messages has always been with us from the pre-historic scratchers of the Palaeolithic cave art of the South of France or the Egyptian Hieroglyphics’ of more recent times. Our own indigenous rock paintings are proof of people wishing to put feelings onto surfaces and make engravings or paintings.

The problem is that those trains will hardly be viewed in thousands of year’s time and one can only surmise, if no sense can be made of the messages now, how will it in anno 10510?

Almost all trains, even brand new ones, are damaged by those carving scratchers. It means there must be thousands of travellers engaged in this strange ritualistic social behaviour. Or, are we all close to being at the edge of suffering mental disorders? We pretend to be ‘normal’ and civilised but how close are we in being totally out of control? They certainly are out of control on our overhead bridges and suburban trains!

 We have seen the rioting and looting by people in countries suffering from enormous natural calamities such as earth quakes and tsunamis. In a relatively wealthy country such as Chile we saw TV footage of people fighting over cans of soft-drinks, carrying away radios and TV’s, items of clothing. Police and Army with guns at the ready were called in to restore order. In other words, people engaged in behaviour they would otherwise never engage in.  It is far easier to understand those people letting emotions get the better of them. Thousands of people lost their loved ones. Children, parents, friends, neighbours, all those gone in a flash. Hundreds of thousands are without home or shelter. Lives totally disrupted.

Here in the perennial stableness of Australia we do not have those natural calamities, oh well, the drought excluding, or a call back on some new priapism suffering cars, the cancellation of a cricket or footie match!

 I doubt though that drought stricken farmers have taken to hurling rocks or scratching train windows. We complain about public transport but at the same time thousands who use the public facility also damage them. Who does all that scratching and why?

 Is there despite this stableness and calm an undercurrent of terrible frustrations only a nano moment away from people close to the edge? Do they see hurling rocks or damaging properties as a way of getting contentedness or a fulfilling of lives otherwise lacking?  What goes on in those minds that open their Stanley knife and start scratching or slashing the windows and seats? Perhaps we ought to be tolerant and accept a behaviour that releases some stresses which would otherwise express itself in random dog strangling, bouts of faeces throwing, or worse, in homicide.

It is hard to put a reason for vandalising. I sometimes wonder if drugs might have something to do with behaviour that make people do certain things.  Are they having meth crystals melting away in their cavities somewhere?  Look at those sprayers on suburban fences and private property. Spray cans are now kept behind lock and key in shops and proof of age is required. Some of those spray paint pictures are nice, especially on endless boring and forgotten walls adjacent to railway lines.

Anyway, next time you are in the train it could well be you who can’t resist the urge to start scratching ZZDIOt Zr^) Za##mbod on the window.

Apropos; do women scratch windows or hurl rocks?

May 15, 2010 by gerard oosterman

We then flew to Marseille where we were hoping that the Citroen car we had pre-booked would be waiting for us. Unbelievably, it was waiting for us, brand spanking new, just rolled out of the factory and ours now for three weeks. It was a tiny car, more like a jacket that you put on but frugal to drive and had everything. We had heard rumours of the airports in France being surrounded by angry farmers, fighting the world of EU protection and tariffs and unfair trade advantages, but we thought that the Marseille airport would escape the fury. The farmers were organized though and Marseille farmers with trucks and tractors had surrounded us. The airport was in lock down mode, nothing would leave or enter. Who would be brave enough to face the wrath and break a French farmer’s strike? We sat in our car, no food and the prospect of having to stay in one of the hotels at the airport till the French farmers decided to quit, go home and eat. Surely for them to sit on the tractor or in the truck would become just as trying as passengers hanging around the arrival terminals. At least the passengers had the advantage of the food canteens, cafes and convenience of hotels and shops. While I was contemplating all the above pro’s and con’s I noticed a small table-top truck driving off in front of us and crossing a part of the tarmac. I, for hitherto unknown reason, decided to just follow this truck. We went up some kerbs and crossed airport entrances when we ended on a narrow dirt track. Still this truck was in front of us. All of a sudden we came onto the highway with a sign which said Montpellier.  The truck veered off and a hairy arm came out of the window and with a wave sped off in the opposite direction. This French farmer must have known we were foreigners; it was such a nice gesture. Vive La France!

The drive to Belarga and the stone cottage would have to be amongst the very best and fortuitous trips ever undertaken in my entire life. The idea of arriving at an airport under siege by angry French farmers is formidable enough to contemplate, but to escape this and then to drive (on the different side of the road) in a strange car and with a nervous disposition, all the way to the stone cottage without even once getting lost or going berserk, would have to rate as a triumph over any adversity experienced so far. Indeed, I had climbed the Mount Everest of foreign travel. The key to the house was exactly as I was promised by the Australian owner and the cottage was far better and bigger than expected. It was entirely built of stone with walls a metre thick. It had two stories above the lower ground floor which contained a huge storage and garage for the car. At the front of the first floor was a large stone flagged veranda with a kind of wood fire barbeque and generous wooden slatted seats. The top floor had a large bedroom with a high ceiling supported by hand hewn exposed timber rafters. It was all white washed except for the stone walls that had been raked and pointed in an adobe mixture of lime and clay. The exposed timber floor was bare but for a huge bed and a small wardrobe, the room was stark but very beautiful. The middle floor had two small bedrooms and bathroom. The ground floor had a small lounge room, the kitchen and large dining area and another bathroom.

Next morning, after consulting our map we were off to explore the immediate surroundings and the multitude of villages. For charm and getting a sense of history the French country side provides a never ending smorgasbord. It immediately transported me into a mode of; sell everything in Australia, forsake all the kids and friends, we are going to live here. The rapture of those three weeks is something that sustained me for years. Our friends in Australia must have got so tired of my descriptions of metre thick stone walls, sixteenth century houses like confetti, the Languedoc wineries and the boulangeries of Clermont L’Herault.  The one story that my kids are almost in despair about each time I relate it to new victims is, that after visiting so many small towns and villages, we happened to come upon Pezenas. This little town is an absolute example of French middle age architecture, so charming and so unrelentingly unnerving in its historical beauty one cannot find the words to do justice. We walked the cobblestone streets of the old part of Pezenas and came upon a square in which there was a sign pointing to an upper storey of an old historical building in which the famous playwright; Jean-Baptiste-Poquelin with the stage name’ Moliere ‘(1622-1673) was supposed to have lived. On the ground-floor was a barber shop whose owner proudly claimed that this was the very same barber shop where Moliere used to have his long tresses of hair and moustache trimmed. I had nothing to lose and had my hair cut there as well!

On our street and at the very end of it, facing the harbour was a small company called Harry West. They had been there for decades and specialised in sail making and other activities connected to boating and sailing. There was also a slipway where medium sized boats and yachts would be ‘slipped’ and de-fouled of barnacles and recoated with anti-fouling paints. They employed about thirty or forty people in its hay-day with perhaps 20 still employed when we were living there, just a bit higher up from them. Every morning and every afternoon we would watch those workers walking past our house to and from work. Our kids got to know some of them and were often allowed to enter the factory and see the workings of sail making in progress. There were many of those enterprises around Sydney’s harbour foreshores but their numbers were shrinking.

On the other side of Harry West at the end of the dead end street where we were living were a few acres of disused harbour foreshore land which had, through blissful neglect by its owners, become a children’s paradise. They called it ‘the Cane fields’. It had patches of very tall cane type grasses growing which was ideal for cubby houses and hiding places. By dinner time, all one had to do was stroll down and call out and soon kids heads would be popping up from between the reeds of cane. Once, coming back from a week’s camping down the coast, we noticed our house had been entered by someone, not immediately, but later on when going to bed, I shouted to my wife ‘ why did you take the doonah away?’ I didn’t, she said. All the kid’s beds were without doonahs as well. Yet, the glass jars filled with coins or anything else of value had not been taken, just only the doonahs. The police were called and scratched their heads, could not make anything out of it. These doonahs had been bought in Holland and made in Norway from 100% eider down. Expensive, but very warm in winter and yet not sweaty in summer, the ideal bed covers for insomniacs like me.  We could only think of someone in need of sleeping out rough or a vagrant that would just take bedding and yet not money. The first thing we did was search all the cubbies in the Cane fields, but even though we found bits and ends of blankets and rags, no doonahs. The mystery was never solved. How did the thief know we had those Norwegian doonahs? Was it a close friend or family member, who knows?

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=_M09AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99&dq=The+East-+Balmain+cane+fields&source=bl&ots=UF0D9_Gp4r&sig=46QqRAJ5JcJ69SK9TgC3V6hvXos&hl=en&ei=2HTZS-W2CJWekQWO1ezoDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CCcQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false

It was a few years later, when our kids had grown past ‘cubby’ house phases that new and young families with younger kids had moved into our street, that the advantage of the Cane fields was continued. But, not for long. It was noticed that dark suited men wearing sinister sun glasses had  driven down in BMW’s and been seen spreading maps out on rocks and pointing with a wave of their arms to the expansive water views, then shaking hands followed by demonic laughter. Was the end of the Cane fields in sight? It did not take long and the dreaded letter with Councils envelope arrived with plans for a sub-division of the Cane fields into numerous small blocks. Right in the middle would be a bitumen driveway with allotments on both sides. With no thoroughfare to exit elsewhere it meant extra traffic up and down a very narrow street. The land, apart from the bushes of cane and a profusion of weeds also had the remnants of a maritime past. There was a huge ship’s propeller and steel cabling, square timber logs, a heap of anchors and a mountain of metal cleats. The best part of the Cane fields was its magic smell of industrial harbour, the lovely bouquet of tarred ropes and at low tide the rusted bodies of mangled bows that  were still telling stories.

The objections by residents were many and very vocal. Some had access to media and soon the TV cameras began to roll. Of course, every possible angle was exploited and crying children were thrust in front telling how they played in the canes and mothers weeping about losing a valuable children’s park and playground. Indeed, the creative future of entire generation of youth would be risked if the subdivision would be allowed to go ahead. Then, at 7pm the commercial channels would be switched on to see whose child or mother would appear on Telly and phone calls made, ‘did you see me on TV?  Yes, ‘you were good’, ‘I am sure your protest will help stop the project.’ The protests grew louder but when the developer ceded the last ten metres along the water facing the harbour as public open space, Council approved.

Soon the bulldozers arrived and in a single hour, decades of magic and history in children’s adventures was growled and grunted away with the might of the dozer’s blade. A puff of blue diesel and that was it. The cane all ploughed and churned to death.