Guilty As Charged.

Tags

book hoarding, Japanese words, not ironing, reading, tsundoko

I discovered a vital new word this week on Book Group Online – tsundoko – which is a Japanese word to describe buying books and letting them pile up unread on the floor, on nightstands, or as in my case double stacked in a bookcase.  I think it’s quite normal, it’s saving one, or several, or more than several for later just in case you feeel like reading it.

Definitely tsundoko – I bought these in October and most of them are still there on top of the kitchen cook-book cabinet.

There’s even a Tsundoko list on Goodreads; I have to admit I haven’t read or even tsundokoed The Last of the Mohicans or Contact by Carl Sagan which are numbers 1 and 2 on the list, but I have read Vanity Fair, Dracula, The Three Musketeers, The King Must Die which are all high up on the list and practically knew Dune, number 4, off by heart as a teenager because I’d read it so many times.  Which all goes to show that one person’s tsundoko is another’s essential reading.

Japanese is full of useful words – Nito-onna describes a woman who is so dedicated to her career that she has no time to iron and dresses only in knitted tops.  I wonder if it also includes non-career women who just don’t want to iron.   A bakku-shan is a woman who looks pretty from the back but not from the front,  Komorebi is the sort of scattered, dappled light effect that happens when sunlight shines in through tree leaves and Amagami is to pretend-bite someone.  This might be more useful in football matches than the real thing, perhaps.

There’s about to be more tsundoko in this household as it’s the Phoenix Euro Book Sale next week, 18,000 second books in English for a euro.  I know I don’t need any more books but there’s always room for a few more…

 

A New Way of Traffic Calming?

Tags

Cadillac, road signs, traffic calming

Our local town Cadillac is a medieval bastide, a walled town, with a grid of narrow little streets that would always have been a tight squeeze for carts to pass each other, let alone two white vans.  In fact it’s always worked pretty well, most of the streets are one way and even on market day people tend to park on just one side of the street so the traffic keeps moving.

Someone on the council appears to have decided that a little re-organisation is necessary, possibly to allow better access to a small car park behind the post office.  Only so far it hasn’t quite turned out as intended…

This road used to be one way down the hill;

And there is a sign right at the top indicating that this part has two-way traffic:

Fine.  Except that 15 metres down the road there is a small one way street coming from the church and opposite that there’s this:

I think that’s supposed to say that this is a one way street, though the sign underneath seems to indicate minds haven’t been firmly made up on the subject yet.  And if any luckless drivers happen to look to the right, they’ll see this:

This new system appears to operating brilliantly.  Everyone seems to have a different interpretation of what the signs mean and are simply doing whatever suits them (no change there, then), but they’re doing it really slowly.

They’ve already removed most of the road markings in Cadillac in an effort to get drivers to slow down but whoever hit on making the road signs so incomprehensible that everyone is too confused to speed is an absolute genius.

I wonder when it’ll spread to other French towns.

Heath and Safety (not) French style.

Tags

health and safety, Pyrenees

Last week my OH and I headed off towards Perpignan, which neither of us had been to before, for a bit of exploring.  We had lunch in a delightful little town on the edge of the Pyrenees – I have no idea what it’s called because it was on the edge of the map on two pages of our French road atlas, the atlas had kind ly overwritten it with ‘See Page …’ in both places.  Afterwards we’d decided to do a leisurely drive through the Pyrenees via the scenic route, a wise choice since we met a ‘Route barré’ sign about 20 minutes out of ‘See Page…’  and discovered that they don’t seem to sign deviation signs in the Pyrenees.

The sun was out, the scenery was stunning and there weren’t any caravans so that was OK.  Presently, after we’d been around and up several mountains, the OH went, ‘Just look at that!’

That was the Chateau de Peyrepertuse, a Cathar castle perched high on the spine of a mountain.  Very high indeed.  The OH got vertigo in the car park and announced he couldn’t go any further.

To be fair the drop in front of where the car was parked was similar to the drop from the castle above.  I left the OH to take pictures while I walked up to the castle, which a sign said would take about 15 minutes.

Peyrepertuse was never a place for softies, the men who lived in it didn’t bother with anything like roads leading up to the main gate.  Instead you got there by a mule track that went around the back of the mountain, probably much like the path that visitors take now, only easier to navigate.  Mules aren’t that stupid.

The present path is about one mule wide, is made of uneven rocks and earth, goes up and down, has the mountain on one side and on the other – let’s put it this way, there are several places where is you tripped you’d find yourself doing a vertical hundred metres in under ten seconds.  There are no rails, no posts, nothing to help you apart from some bushes which were occasionally very necessary.

This was one of the really easy parts

It was quite slippery too.

The castle itself was fascinating but had its – ahem, interesting moments.  I was following la sens de la visite, came out of the keep and was presented with this to get back down to ground level:

I stopped worrying about looking stupid and descended on my bottom.

The French attitude to places like this is that you should look after yourself.  I suppose it works, I doubt anyone has actually fallen over the edge at Peyrepertuse.  Otherwise  I’m sure there would be the odd warning notice with a bit more than the existing one that states the path is unsuitable for pushchairs and the castle is closed during summer storms because of the risk of lightning strikes.

However it is apparently OK for small children and the infirm.  There is a handicappé entrance.  I kid you not.  It’s a ramp which avoids two wooden steps up to the gift shop and ticket office.  Sadly due to his vertigo, the OH, who has a gammy leg, was still in the car park so we weren’t able to put it to the test and see if they’d have sold him an entrance ticket.

It was getting late so I turned down the chance of climbing up to the Chateau du Queribus

it actually had quite a reasonable gravelled path leading up to it but I’d had enough of drops by then.

Of course we didn’t know what was awaiting us at our chambre d’hotes.

We didn’t get off to a good start.  It had an electric gate, no bell and Madame had switched her mobile off.  Luckily someone living in one of the mobile homes scattered over the property (certainly not visible in the brochure) arrived and let us in.  Madame emerged, full of apologies.

‘Is your husband all right with stairs?’ asked Madame’s daughter, who’d noticed he has a limp.

‘Perfectly,’ I said breezily.

‘Good,’ she said, ‘because you’re up there-‘

‘We did have a rail along the outside but it broke,’  she added cheerfully.  What she didn’t say was the rail on the other side was also cracked and wobbled atrociously if you put any weight on it.

We made it to our room and found it had this-

directly opposite the bed.  The curtain didn’t have an opaque lining either so you had to use the facilities without turning the light on; otherwise whoever was lying on the bed, reading a book, got to see a lot more than they wanted.

We’d thought about having one of those flying loos when we were doing up the house but the OH, who is 6’2″ and not fat but built on a Viking scale, said that he’d always be worried about whether it could bear his weight properly.  This one was set so high up the wall that when I discreetly left him alone after breakfast his feet didn’t touch the ground properly.

There was a general systems failure.

If Madame and the rest of her family hadn’t been so utterly charming we’d have felt justifiied in slapping warnings all over Tripadvisor and the like, but they were delightful and it would be just mean.  So I suppose there’ll be other visitors experiencing the delights of that staircase after an excellent fish dinner and half a bottle of wine… at least it’ll give them more to talk about than when they stayed in a Mercure with a fully functioing lift