THIS BLOG IS NOW CLOSED. IT WAS A PHOTO BLOG OF ONE YEAR (2008) OF MY LIFE, MIXED WITH NEWS FROM BEYOND THE AUVERGNE THAT CAUGHT MY EYE. YOU CAN FOLLOW THE ODD TWITTER. NO MORE BLOGGING FOR ME.
IW: The holiday in The Shop, away from The Valley continues, as does the newsfast, as I suppose does the Olympics and war in Georgia.
The quarry is growing on me; it is tucked away from the main 'village'.
Today the weather is bad; so we will go and visit some friends.
As we drive out through the village, the shops are all open, and many, many people are out in the rain, shopping. They look very unhappy and very prosperous.
I tried to find connections between diverse information from around the world, to give the day's events a better sense of narrative. I called this 'information ebru'.
News is not news analysis, news analysis is not editorial, editorial is not commentary (columnists) and commentary is not views (contributors' views). All are differentiated accordingly.
The views, editorials and commentary quoted do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publisher of this blog.
Christoph Büchel's legal battle becomes fodder for his art. A major underlying theme for Büchel is what he called "the creative economy," the way that, in his view, museums - particularly American ones - seem to care less about the art than they do about their image, budget, attendance and expansionist visions as they become ever more a part of an entertainment culture.
The number of children who die worldwide each year before the age of 5 has dropped below 10 million for the first time in recorded history - compared with 20 million annually in 1960 - Unicef noted in a report last month, "Child Survival." Now the goal is to cut the death toll to 4 million by 2015.Think about that accomplishment: The lives of 10 million children saved each year, 100 million lives per decade.To put it another way, the late James P. Grant, a little-known American aid worker who headed Unicef from 1980 to 1995 and launched the child survival revolution with vaccinations and diarrhea treatments, probably saved more lives than were destroyed by Hitler, Mao and Stalin combined.Paul Virilio, the philosopher who revealed that speed is a phenomenon of modern life, said that quick movers will dominate slow movers.
It is nature's law that if something can go fast it will. If we can do something faster, we will. In fact, we are.The minimum wage in Britain will rise 3.8 percent to £5.73, or $11.34, an hour starting in October.
Reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding enterprise in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe in recent months, as word spreads of India's combination of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.
As late as 1980 the U.S. Agency for International Development was still devoting 25 percent of its official development assistance to the modernization of farming, but today it is just 1 percent. Nearly 30 percent of World Bank lending once went to agricultural modernization, but now it is just 8 percent.
In Tuscany's poorer areas, whole towns are becoming depopulated and thousands of acres of agricultural land falling into disuse. The trend is particularly severe in the hilly land surronding the Monte Amita.
One of her (Lane Crawford's Sarah Rutson) favorite accessories is invisible. Yu, a limited-edition perfume from Mane, costs $5,000 and "contains rare, sustainably harvested plant essences like Indonesian champak and Mysore sandalwood."
Undercover video taken at the Westland/Hallmark Meat of Chino, California, shows workers shocking, kicking and shoving debilitated cattle with forklifts, prompting the government to pull 143 million pounds, or 65 million kilograms, of the company's beef.
A survey released this year by Defra, the British environment agency, found that 80 percent of people were concerned about climate change, and three quarters would be prepared to change their behavior "in some way" to limit climate change.But not in the ways that count most: Only 5 percent of car drivers said that they had driven less because of environmental concerns. Only 10 percent of people who had flown in the past year said that they would fly less this year because of climate-change concerns.
The Iraq Interior Ministry has ordered the police to round up beggars, vagabonds and mentally disabled people from the streets of Baghdad to prevent them from being used by insurgents as suicide bombers, The Associated Press reported Tuesday, citing a ministry spokesman.
A new report issued by the World Health Organization offers the first comprehensive analysis of tobacco use and control efforts in 179 countries. It notes that tobacco will kill more people this year than tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria combined. It warns that unless governments do more to slow the epidemic, tobacco could kill a billion people by the end of the century, the vast majority in poor and middle-income countries.
I have grown used to the idea that nearly everything around me in nature happens unobserved and unrecorded. A snowy winter sometimes retains a transcript, but even those are rare. The bills of animal mortality are almost completely invisible otherwise. Who thrives, who dies, there is no accounting at all, only the fact of thriving and dying.
Banerjee estimates, conservatively, that $15 billion a year out of roughly $100 billion in annual development aid worldwide could be spent on programs that have been proven to work. Unfortunately, the actual figure is much closer to zero than to $15 billion.
The top supermarket chains in the European Union are potentially "abusing" their market clout to drive down prices to suppliers and should be investigated, the European Parliament said on Monday.
A small number of the largest supermarket chains including Tesco of Britain and Carrefour of France, were becoming "gatekeepers", controllling the access of farmers and other suppliers to consumers, the declaration said.
It said evidence from accross the 27 EU member countries suggested that big supermarkets were abusing their buying power to force down prices paid to suppliers to "unsustainable" levels and impose unfair conditions on them."
I want my children and students to learn about a past with causes and effects. I do not want to send them forth armed only with emotion and confusion. I want them equipped with a secure and serene identity that permits them to recognize cruelty, injustice and falsehood and gives them the strength and patience to study, tolerate and defend the identities of others. They should know the difference between what has happened to them and what has happened to others.
In Tanzania alone, malaria kills about 100,000 people a year.
Most people in Shanghai seem to want the glory that comes with showing off a real iPhone to friends."My friends envy me a lot," said Pang, the Web designer. "They say, 'Wow, you can get an iPhone.' "
England's enduring class system can be aptly summed up in two words: public school. Those who attend English public schools - in reality expensive private schools - inherit a kind of right to rule. They learn how to survive in a world no less riven by competition and cruelty than society itself. After graduating, they can forever recognize one another. Even those who rebel are shaped by the experience. To be an English public schoolboy - yes, most are still boys - is to belong to a caste.
“We recognize tolerance as a basic component of democracy,” he said. “God has not created all of us alike — we are different — human society is a pluralistic society. In the Koran, God is telling us that man is created to be free. So we are free to think, and think different. So the aim of democracy is to recognize the pluralistic nature of human society. The second item is tolerance, I have to tolerate my opponent. With tolerance comes compromise; without compromise democracy doesn’t exist.”
"I had no idea about kidney transplants, but when they made me lie down on the stretcher, I was terrified," he said. "I knew that these people meant to do evil to me. When I woke up a doctor said my kidney had been removed. He said I would be shot if I ever told anyone what happened."
"I miss Yugoslavia," said Toha, a 33-year old Slovene entrepeneur.."We didn't have anything," he said. "Neighbours baked each other cakes; we had a leader we trusted. I remember my mother crying when Tito died. I was only 5, but I knew the world was about to change."
In the last five months alone, the [Brazilain] government says, 1,250 square miles, or 320,000 hectares, were lost.
The world's total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the past 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, a projection that one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, said was resulting in a "relentless growth in livestock production."...
Though some 800 million people now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This is the case in spite of the inherent inefficiencies: About two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University.
Under the stewardship of Dow Kim and Thomas Maheras, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup built positions in subprime-related securities that led to $34 billion in write-downs last year. The debacle cost chief executives their jobs and brought two of the world's premier financial institutions to their knees.In any other industry, Kim and Maheras would be pariahs. But in the looking-glass world of Wall Street, they — and others like them — are hot properties. The two executives are well on their way to reviving their careers, even as global markets shudder at the prospect that Merrill and Citigroup may report further subprime losses in the coming months. Maheras, who left his job as co-president of Citigroup's investment bank this fall after being demoted, has had serious discussions with several investment banks, including Bear Stearns, about taking on a top management position, people who have been briefed on the situation said. And he has also been approached by investment firms willing to back him to the tune of $1 billion or more if he decides to start his own hedge fund, these people said. Kim, who until last spring was a co-president at Merrill Lynch with oversight of the firm's trading and market operations, has been crisscrossing the globe in recent months raising money for his new hedge fund, Diamond Lake Capital.
On his blog, JSMineSet, Sinclair has told his readers that as much as $450 trillion worth of derivatives could disintegrate, leading to a far greater, and in some ways unpredictable, calamity...While the views of Sinclair , a gold bug who expects the price of gold to go up to $1,650, up from about $870 now, might be taken with a grain of salt, other experts have also begun to warn of the dire consequences of the credit market collapse.
Poverty in Britain doubled under Thatcher, and this figure has become permanent under New Labor. The share of the wealth, excluding housing, enjoyed by the bottom half of the population has fallen from 12 percent in 1976 to just 1 percent now. Thirteen million people now live in relative poverty.
Social mobility has declined to pre-war levels.The least able children from the richest 20 percent of the population now overtake the most able children from the bottom 20 percent by the age of seven.
Nearly half of the richest group go on to get university degrees while only 10 percent of the poorest manage to graduate.
Across Europe, politicians try to be culturally sensitive to Muslim citizens, who total 16 million, or 3 percent, of the 495 million people in the 27-member European Union, according to Central Institute Islam-Archives in Germany. In France, one in 10 inhabitants is Muslim, the highest proportion in the EU.
The average German or Japanese uses little more than half the energy consumed by an average American. In Germany and Japan, per-capita emissions of carbon dioxide spewed by cars, power plants and other sources of energy are half those in the United States. In France, they are a third.
The average price of regular gasoline in the United States has shot up to a record $3.28 a gallon...In Britain, gas at the pump costs around $7.70 a gallon, of which about $4.90 is taxes. In France, taxes account for about $4.60 of the retail price of $7.50 a gallon. (25/03/08)
Soaring prices for rice, a staple for nearly half the world's population, are already causing hardship across the developing world, particularly for urban workers.
Naeem Akhtar has an improbable role in the Indian government's drive to revitalize Kashmir after 18 years of militant violence. His task: rebrand this heavily militarized Himalayan region as a global golfing destination.
In 2001, scrap metal sold for $77 a ton; at the end of 2004, it was $300 per ton, and today it's approaching $480. Behind the rise, say the analysts, is China's voracious demand for steel.
The Pet Inn Royal hotel will unpack and microwave every packet of food that the master has carefully prepared - a common practice in Japan, where it is considered déclassé to serve pet food to a pet."Customers may ask, for example, to sprinkle cheese on top of the cooked rice meal, prepare milk at certain temperatures or give dessert," said Chiyo Sakurai, general manager of the hotel.
"It's a principle of art," Gnedovsky said. "The worse the conditions, the better the art." He sighed. "Artists should be hungry."What then to make of Gnedovsky's design for the company's new seven-story theater, open since January on the banks of the Moscow River? Do its marble lobby, spectacular views and large hall that seats 450 pose an artistic hazard for the scrappy company?Not to worry, Gnedovsky said. Before he drew up the plans, he studied everything that was wrong with the old theater. Then he reproduced it in the new one.
Each month, more than half of [the Somali] government's revenue, mostly from port taxes, disappears - stolen by "our people," the prime minister said.That leaves Nur with about $18 million a year in government money to run a failed state of nine million of some of the world's neediest, most collectively traumatized people.
Could a drug store sell two identical tubes of toothpaste, and charge 50 cents more for one of them? Of course not.But, in effect, exactly that has been happening - repeatedly and mysteriously - in markets that set prices in the United States for corn, soybeans and wheat. And even economists who have been studying this phenomenon say they are at a loss to explain it.Whatever the reason, the price for a bushel of grain established in the public derivatives markets has been substantially higher than the price of the same bushel of the same grain at the same moment in the cash market.
In February, India's ambassador to Bahrain, Balkrishna Shetty, sought a minimum monthly wage of $265 for all unskilled Indian workers, who are paid $160 to $225 a month there.
More than half of the water in China - the world's fourth-largest economy after the United States, Japan and Germany - is unfit to drink. Last year, around 48 million people living there lacked sufficient drinking water.
A virus called infectious salmon anemia, or ISA, is killing millions of salmon destined for export to Japan, Europe and the United States. The spreading plague has sent shivers through Chile's third-largest industry.
"All these problems are related to an underlying lack of sanitary controls," said Felipe Cabello, a microbiologist at New York Medical College in Valhalla that has studied Chile's fishing industry. "Parasitic infections, viral infections, fungal infections are all disseminated when the fish are stressed and the centers are too close together.""It is simply not possible to produce fish on an industrial scale in a sustainable way," said Wolfram Heise, director of the marine conservation program at the Pumalin Project, a private conservation initiative in Chile. "You will never get it into ecological balance."
In October 2006, Dr. Claudia Henschke of Weill Cornell Medical College jolted the cancer world with a study saying that 80 percent of lung cancer deaths could be prevented through widespread use of CT scans.Small print at the end of the study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, noted that it had been financed in part by a little-known charity called the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection, Prevention & Treatment. But a review of tax records by The New York Times shows that the foundation was underwritten almost entirely by $3.6 million in grants from the parent company of the Liggett Group, maker of Liggett Select, Eve, Grand Prix, Quest and Pyramid cigarette brands.
In what is one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States, on average 90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter.Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont. Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.
If the world is going to sharply reduce the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by midcentury, then many businesses will have to go carbon neutral, bringing their net emissions of the greenhouse gas to zero.But some could go even further by removing more CO2 than they produce. Instead of carbon neutral, how about carbon negative?
Outside Nha Trang, the beach town and port where my cruise ship is due after Danang, the Ana Mandara Six Senses Spa offers what its Web site calls "the ultimate seclusion," because it is only accessible by boat. The cost for a two-story villa, the only kind of accommodation, is in the neighborhood of $800 a night. My guidebook describes it as a magical place where dirt tracks between buildings give the illusion of a jungle village. But, clearly, it's an ersatz jungle. It's not Vietnam.
Botswana, one of Africa's wealthiest countries per capita thanks to diamonds, tourism and sensible management, has enjoyed more than four decades of honest, practical government under three popular presidents. On Monday, Mogae will give way to Vice President Ian Khama.Guided by Mogae and two other democratic presidents, the small country has flourished and become the envy of all of Africa. Despite high HIV numbers, its hospitals and clinics provide retroviral drugs to all sufferers. Its schools and universities provide increasing numbers of local and neighboring peoples with instruction.Rule of law is observed and corruption hardly exists. Botswana's secret is high quality leadership, broad levels of political participation, and extensive accountability.
"The foreign tourists don't go to the theater as much," she [Faith Hope Consolo, a chairwoman of the retail leasing and sles division of the New York estate company Prudential Douglas Elliman] said. "Their No. 1 pastime is shopping."
That's the condition of the small nation. It's a defense for everyone in the globalized world.""I think the goal of Czech mystification is to show us that we live in a world continually mystifying to us - the politicians, the advertisers."
"I had a certain fear of exposing myself too much in my work for a long time," he [Patrick Stewart] said. "A lot of what performing to me had been was elaborate, and at times quite clever, concealment. Someone once said of acting that it is 'telling beautiful lies,' and well, it became just no longer satisfactory to work that way."
"I miss Yugoslavia," said Toha, a 33-year old Slovene entrepeneur.."We didn't have anything," he said. "Neighbours baked each other cakes; we had a leader we trusted. I remember my mother crying when Tito died. I was only 5, but I knew the world was about to change."
The world's total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the past 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, a projection that one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, said was resulting in a "relentless growth in livestock production."...
Though some 800 million people now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens.
[In 2002] Saleh hit on an idea that he hoped would satisfy both his American and Islamist partners: "al hiwar al fikri," or intellectual dialogue. This was an effort to inculcate the idea that Islam, properly understood, does not condone terrorism.
[Paola Antonelli of MoMa] also believes that the yearning for privacy - or Existenzmaximum, as she calls it - will be an increasingly important issue for designers in the future.
The mainstream music industry is coming to recognize a price for a digital song that might be good enough to compete with the underground exchange of tunes on the Internet: free.
The reader's suggestions included "Dipso, Fatso, Bingo, Asbo, Tesco"; "One Mighty Empire, Slightly Used"; "We Apologize for the Inconvenience"; and - the choice favoured by 20.9 percent of the readers - "No Motto, Please, We're British."
Eric Kastner, believed to have been Germany's last World War I veteran, died Jan. 1 in a nursing home in Cologne at the age of 107, his son, Peter Kastner, said.
Federal agents raided the Silk Roads Gallery in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the Bowers Museum in Santa Anna and Mingei International Museum in San Diego as part of a five-year investigation into the smuggling of looted antiquities from Thailand, Myanmar, China and Native American sites.
National Priorities Project, a research group that analyzes federal data, found that nearly 71 percent of army recruits graduated from high school in the 2007 budget year.The army's goal is 90 percent high school graduates, which it has not met since 2004.
Saudi Arabia supplies the United States with about 1.4 million barrels of crude oil a day, one-seventh of U.S. imports and second only to the 1.9 million barrels from Canada.
26,000 children still die every day from mostly preventable causes, Unicef noted. Four million infants die in their first month of life and up to half of these in their first day.
On his blog, JSMineSet, Sinclair has told his readers that as much as $450 trillion worth of derivatives could disintegrate, leading to a far greater, and in some ways unpredictable, calamity...
Poverty in Britain doubled under Thatcher, and this figure has become permanent under New Labor. The share of the wealth, excluding housing, enjoyed by the bottom half of the population has fallen from 12 percent in 1976 to just 1 percent now. Thirteen million people now live in relative poverty.
Social mobility has declined to pre-war levels.The least able children from the richest 20 percent of the population now overtake the most able children from the bottom 20 percent by the age of seven. Nearly half of the richest group go on to get university degrees while only 10 percent of the poorest manage to graduate.
Around 300,000 Afghan children cannot attend school because of violence in the country's other provinces, President Hamid Karzai told Parliament on its opening day Monday.The number of children unable to go to school is up by 50% from a year ago...
Iran has the second-largest natural gas reservoir in the world.
Earth's basic problem is that the Sun will gradually get larger and more luminous as it goes through life, according to widely held theories of stellar evolution. In its first 4.5 billion years, according to the models, the Sun has already grown about 40 percent brighter.Over the coming eons, life on Earth will become muggier and more uncomfortable and finally impossible.
Q.The world seems to be at some form of inflection point with a big shift in demand?
A. Jeroen van der Veer, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell: The basic drivers are pretty easy and they are two fold. You go from six billion people to nine billion people, basically, in 2050. This combination of many more people climbing the energy ladder, which is basically welfare for a lot of people who live in poverty, creates that enormous demand for energy.
None of the 23 countries whose economies are dominated by ... "the exceptional curse of oil" are democracies.
Gotz Aly is the author of "Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State" in which he argued that ordinary Germans supported the Nazi regime not because they were inherently anti-Semitic, or blinded by Hitler's charisma, but for the relatively mundane reason that the Reich's policies raised their standard of living.
The most telling statistic in the World Economic Forum's latest Global Competitiveness Report is that not a single Arab state made the top 25.
In a survey of 55 hospitals financed by a World Bank project in Orissa, investigators "observed problems in 93 percent of them...India is the bank's largest borrower with 75 active projects worth a total commitment of $15.2 billion.
In only 80 years, Kenya's population had jumped from 2.9 million to 37 million. Had America grown at the same rate since 1928, when it had 120 million people, it would now have 1.56 billion citizens.
Kenya belongs to a group of some 40 countries that have extremely high population growth - rates of increase that I call "demographic armament." In a typical nation of this group, every 1000 males aged 40-44 are succeeded by at least 2,500 boys aged 0 to 4. In Kenya there are 4,190 boys.
By contrast...Britain with just 677 boys between 0 and 4 replacing every 1,0000 males 40 to 44, in the category of "demographic capitulation."
Amongst the poorest 20 percent of the population, half are illiterate and barely 2 percent graduate from high school, according to [Indian] government data. By contrast, among the richest 20% of the population, nearly half are high school graduates and only 2 percent illiterate.
In a first, the majority of births in France last year were out of wedlock, the national statistics agency announced Tuesday..."What's led the rise in out-of-wedlock births is that a lifestyle that was once confined in Paris is now the norm even in rural areas. Marriage is no longer considered indispensable to form a family."
"What we need is a new narrative, a new 'we'. a multicolored, multicultural European identity," [Tariq Ramadan] said. "Immigration is a fact whether you like it or not. Europeans need to psychologically integrate that into their world view."
"Can you imagine Jesus ignoring the plight of the disenfranchised and downtrodden while going after the abortionist?" Scarborough wrote on the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com.
What do banks call it when a troubled borrower abandons her home, sending them the keys?
"Jingle mail."
The coastal stock of bottom-dwelling fish is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago. Already, scientists say, the sea's ecological balance has shifted as species lower on the food chain replace some above them.In Mauritania, lobsters vanished years ago. The catch of octopus - now the most valuable species - is four-fifths of what it should be. A 2002 study found that the most marketable fish off the coast of Senegal were close to collapse, essentially, sliding toward extinction."The sea is being emptied," said Moctar Ba, a consultant who formerly headed scientific research programs for Mauritania and West Africa. "The situation is very grave."
There are more than 2 million inmates in American prisons and jails, and some studies estimate that as many as 5 percent may be innocent.
An individual's life is itself a narrative with a beginning, a middle and at least the intimations of an end.
Sudan has seen war for all but 11 years since independence in 1956, with over two million dead; Somalia remains a failed state, too lawless for most aid agencies to work in; Congo's war has left five million dead; and northern Uganda was, until last year, ravaged by a millenarian cult known as the Lords Resistance Army, best known for mutilating villagers and abducting children as soldiers and sex slaves.
An annual income of $100,000 is enough for a comfortable life in Des Moines but barely enough to get by in New York City.
Eric Rognot, a longtime student of ice sheets at both poles for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said he hoped that the public and policymakers did not interpret the uncertainty in the 21st-century forecast as reason for complacency on the need to to limit risks by cutting emissions.Rignot recently proposed that unabated warming could result in three feet of global sea rise just from water flowing off Greenland, three feet from Antarctica and 18 inches as the remaining alpine glaciers shrivel away.
"We believe in a world where more than two billion people are entering the industrial age."
BHP Billiton's CEO, Marius Kloppers, speaking to analysts when unveiling his bid for mining titan Rio Tinto in November, 2007.
"Status Despair"....the feeling when, say, the owner of a puny Gulfstream private jet takes in the sight of Prince Alaweed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia barrelling down the the runway in his flying palace, the customized double-decker A380 he had ordered from Airbus.
Because the consumption stakes have been raised so high, more people in 2008 are likely to feel status despair, Evers said.
Some, particularly in developed countries, will divert from the consumption-as-status pattern and seek consumer gratification in new ways - by counting the number of views on their page on the photo-sharing site Flickr, for instance.
PUY-DE-DÔME, France: The world has turned, the markets have dropped, panic is in the air. I suppose.
Here, in our mountain home, we are sick with flu, first me, then my wife. The weather is closed in.
Down the mountain, at the hospital in town for my monthly treatment - because of a medical condition, they need to top up my gamma globulins every month - I sleep so deeply that two of my bottles are changed without Pascale, the nurse, stirring me.
When I awake, I have a roommate. The Auvergnat is old, frail. I am English and 42 years old. Normally I have a room to myself.
When I lived in Brussels, the day treatment ward was shiny and new - 16 reclining seats, facing each other. I used to take the same chair by the window, with its view of the power station.
If you shared the same treatment rhythm as someone, you could see their steady improvement, or more often their gradual decline. Four hours, once a month, watching the person opposite fade. Never did we speak.
Here they closed the maternity ward, but the hospital remains open; two beds a room, a view of the church and the hills above. And people speak to each other.
We strike up a conversation and I discover that my roommate shares the family name of one of the masons working at our house.
In these parts it is a common name. Despite this, he knows the mason, and his father and mother, and where he lives and how their families are related.
Monsieur Beal has had six operations in as many years. He used to weigh 86 kilograms, now he weighs just 48 kilograms, 106 pounds. He has had a kidney removed, and half his pancreas, if I hear him right, and more, too.
When I ask if I might take his picture he stands tall, like the soldier he was. He did his military service in the elite para commandos under the command of an infamous colonel.
Monsieur Beal did 26 combat drops in Algeria, mostly intercepting rebels on the Tunisian and Moroccan borders.
When not fighting, he was the colonel's driver: "It was like that. At base we were drivers or cooks, but when we jumped we were all the same."
The colonel? "He was a great man. For his 40th birthday, he gave the entire regiment leave and we drank so much beer, we purged our bodies of the desert through every orifice."
What happened to the colonel? "He was captured at Dien Bien Phu, but he escaped, pretending to collapse, while crossing a single file wooden bridge, into a crocodile filled river."
Monsieur Beal likes the English. His regiment was deployed from Algeria to Cyprus. They weren't told why until a few days before the operation, but it was for the drop on the bridges over the Suez Canal, south of Port Said.
"We had the easy bit, we French only had a couple of regiments to spare, everyone else was in Algeria.
"Resistance was low. The enemy soldiers weren't soldiers, just men conscripted at the last minute, without shoes, without rifles. A few nests of resistance, some pill-boxes, it was over very quickly. We found piles of abandoned helmets that could fill this room. The Israelis had destroyed the Egyptian Air Force; it was all done before we dropped.
"On sentry duty at the canal, the English guards never took out a pack of cigarettes without offering one of their fine smokes to us French - the French Army gave us straw to smoke. And the English always poured us hot tea, with milk, without asking. With Egyptian honey for sugar. They were good men."
In Cyprus, Monsieur Beal and his fellow soldiers were given a tour of a British warship. As they went down the gangplank afterwards, each of them were handed a cornet of frites - not a little thing, like an ice cream, but a great big bag, hot and steaming. They were the best frites he had ever eaten. He never forgot those frites.
The last poilu - the last French World War I infantryman - is dead. Now it is the men of Indochina and Algeria we shall speak of.
Why is the past always more interesting to me than the present? Why is the heard more rich than the read?
Twenty-six combat drops. Suez. The colonel.
The colonel is still alive. And so is Monsieur Beal, next to me in a hospital bed in the Auvergne.
Ian Walthew is the author of "A Place in My Country."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/17/opinion/edwalthew.php
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