Author: chrisadmin

Created 3.x.21

Back on Monday I was walking down to Plagne Centre to get some food for the week. The view above is about halfway there where the track, or the piste as it is in the ski season, turns a corner and you can see Plagne Centre below. A slope rises very sharply on the right hand side of the track, out of that image and as I’d come to the corner I had noticed for the first time that that steep slope had a number of small young conifers. I noticed them because they had a range of paler greens and almost yellow needles that were catching the sun ahead. I sort of half thought of stopping to try to take ‘photos of them but decided to leg it on.

That’s a bit of a story of my life up here. I think of that corner as “bird corner” as there are some mature conifers to the left of the track and above the slope on the right there’s a thicket of shrubs and smaller conifers and there’s often quite a bit of bird noise here and I know I’ve seen a number of species without identifying them properly. I suspect there are goldcrests or firecrests which are pretty special, there are also some warblers in summer I think and at least one thrush species which I don’t otherwise see up here. However, legging it up and down to the SPAR I don’t take binoculars or the camera and I guess I always feel I should be getting back to work. However, I have registered the little area as one a target for my “new life” when I get to that! What the “new life” thing means is that I will make enough time in the week to go out with binoculars and perhaps the camera but with time, enough of it to just sit still for as long as necessary to feel that I’ve started to understand what species, mainly birds but the odd marmot perhaps and perhaps also to get to identify the trees not just call them “conifers” and to recognise more of the flora and butterflies. So this is a “good corner”! (Click to get it full size.)

There were a couple of years (I think it was a couple, I’m not actually sure, when I used to spend hours with two mates on Saturdays and Sundays walking around the countryside near Leamington Spa where we lived. We each had our binoculars and Pete and Kim were generally more savvy about nature that me, I remember Pete was very good at identifying birds by ear and Kim was good at butterflies and moths but we were all three mainly there for the bird life. We were also all three good at going ages in total silence and at sitting and standing pretty still for good enough periods for things to stop avoiding us. I know that creating that sort of still, observant, time in my weeks would be good so the “new life”, as so often, has a bit of a return to an “older life”.

Anyway, I came up by the lower track partly to avoid the worst of the smell from the liberal donation of cow pats back up the upper track nearer Aime 2000. As I walked back up I mentally kicked myself for not having at least stopped and tried to take usable ‘photos of the little trees clinging to the very loose soil on the steep slope. I wanted to share them so I doubled back (finding a little path I didn’t know was there connecting the two tracks) and here you are.

They’re not great ‘photos but I think they do convey both the light colours of needles that had caught the low sun and my attention on the way down and I think they also give a sense of that slope. I was having to pick my footing very carefully on the slope: the soil seems only a very thin and friable inch at most and liable to slip away under you feet have you sliding ignominiously back down to the track. I felt amused and impressed by the tenacity of the little proto trees and wonder how many will survive.

Which brings me to the more grim punchline here. Yesterday I finally put the keyboard aside for 40 minutes and watched Climate change: Europe’s melting glaciers | DW Documentary. It has beautiful sequences of the Alps and, though none of Savoie (it’s by a German documentary company and is mostly in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Slovenia) they feel so familiar. However, the message is grim: that none of the glaciers are likely to be up here by the end of the century unless our politicians really do address CO2 and methane and climate change, unless we all force them to do that and change our ways of life. Perhaps it’s aridity, despite scary flash storms, and “forest” fires that will threaten these young trees more than the challenges of clinging onto, into, that slope. Do watch the video. The voice over is, to my ear, American but the young people who form the narrative theme are from many countries and it’s right they should be as, as Save the Children have just pointed out, it’s children and particularly children from poorer countries (not the ones creating the problem) who will suffer most from climate change. I was lucky to have my countryside in my young teens. What will future generations have?

An odd spin off, linking with a bit of my work at the moment: on the documentary you get to see the subtitles in what I think is Bahasa Indonesia. Climate change is a global issue.

Created 25.ix.21

It’s worth watching through three minutes and 35 seconds of the timelapse video for today to see this through a different lens.

I get along OK without alcohol on weekdays up here but this visit we’ve evolved a pattern of “sharing” drink at at least one point over the weekend partly because a lot of tough stuff has been happening around J and tnp and S and other friends back in the UK. I celebrated the switch from work to this by filling a glass of red wine and taking the three paces back to the keyboard I raised the glass around the compass to many people I work with happily around the world and to friends (mostly in UK but some of my work colleagues further afield have become great friends as well as great colleagues.

So, cheers and thanks to all. (Ouch, it’s 23:40 for goodness sake, hm, where did the last hour go? … OK, I have been working a bit later than usual as J is having a meal with friends and will check in later.)

This morning opened with a lot of haze in the air creating what photographers call “atmospheric perspective”: where you can see what’s further away and what’s nearer by the blurring and desaturation of colours the further away things are. Of course, overlap perspective up in the mountains mean you can be very wrong about how far away things are but never about what’s in front of what! However, this “atmospheric perspective” is a part of the glory of the views up here that I love. So let’s have that header image from this morning again. (As usual, click to get the full image.)

Looking a bit to the side got this.

And in between the air seemed clearer and Mont Blanc had one of its hats on.

An hour or so later the haze had burnt away by the rising sun and I took my morning coffee out onto the terrace and was lucky enough to coincide with a Golden Eagle circling around. It seemed hardly to move its wings at all but moved fast in wide circles, lovely to follow with binoculars but too far and too fast for any attempt to film it with the camera. It reminded me that walking back up from the shops on Monday I had heard a raptor cry and for a moment, breathing heavily up the slope, I thought how that sound is such a TV and film sound track cliché (I sometimes joke about doing a PhD on the use and abuse of bird calls and cries in film and TV). I looked up and there was one Golden Eagle flapping slowly and heading off towards the valley. I looked around and there were two more, not following the first, who was the one doing all the crying. That’s the second time recently I’ve seen three together so I assume it’s a parental couple and a first year young one. All three were flapping, slowly, seemingly heavily, but moving fast. The contrast with the one this morning in flight style was marked but I imagine that warmth this morning was creating a lot of lift so the same bird (species anyway) could fly equally fast seemingly with no effort at all. These are real joys for me up here.

Then it was back to work, not writing R code very well (it comes and goes!) meanwhile the day outside darkened and the idea of sunbathing while having lunch disappeared. However, at one point I looked round the monitor to catch a rainbow, so here it is. Happy hunting for the pot of gold, I think it’s near Plagne Village!

In many ways it’s been a very tough year, not to do with living up here, nor much, luckily for me/us, to do with cv-19. Sadly a lot of that has come on or worsened since June when I did come up here so this post is counting my blessings and thanking colleagues and friends.

[Stage direction: protagonist raises glass again, same glass, little reduced, and salutes the world solemnly looking utterly mad! NO bird cries should be added, it’s mad enough as it is.]

Created 19.ix.21

I could hear dripping as I woke up and sure enough everything above was snow coated with even a thin coat on the rails of the terrace and the slopes around us. Here were the views looking to out on “my” side of the terrace. As ever, click on them to get the full image.

And this was another of my amused juxtapositions of the snow covered peaks beyond the very Aime 2000 mix of concrete slaps and wooden railing.

Walking to the other side of the terrace was equally good:

An hour later the sun had burned the cloud cover away and the snow was melting fast. This is a sweep of images from both sides of the terrace.

And finally, with crummy stability and smoothness of panning and zoomin, you can have the sound of the cows browsing their way through the “button run” slope below me.

This, well the snow mainly, but the cows too in all their smelly, noisy indifference to things, is so much of why I’m here!

Created 4.ix.21

Quick update 6.ix.21 as I realise the title is playing on a very British/English bit of language meaning a run of luck or success.

Well, we’ve moved into the inter-season and it’s amusing to see things move from catering to summer tourisms into lots of work: repainting things, repairing things, continuing to get the huge new ski lift working. I liked this bit of machinery that has been repainted red from grey. It reminded me a bit of a dinosaur and of the way that paleontologists create impressions of whole monsters from bits. (As usual, click on these to see the full glory!)

I am trying hard to reflect on my chosen life of fairly radical seclusion and a lot of work. One thing that is hitting me is just how much reading the news depresses me. This has been getting worse over the last five years or so and I am seriously contemplating simply not reading any news now but I can’t really accept that as that would seem to move my positioning from hermitic to frankly escapist and cowardly. However, the bitter, angry despair I dive into reading so much is painful: Afghanistan, Texas (pretty much any of the USA), the UK Home Office (pretty much anything about the UK government), climate change (pretty much anything about greenwashing and the way our global economy and political systems seem determined to go on regardless). I liked two articles from the Guardian:
Republicans seethe with violence and lies. Texas is part of a bigger war they’re waging
Hilary Mantel: I am ashamed to live in nation that elected this government

Hilary Mantel’s position is exactly what originally drove me to “semigration” and to my continuing aspiration to end up with dual citizenship. Mine started with the Brexit vote and from what I see that marked a slide of the UK into the hatred, xenophobia and polarisation that seems to mark it now. I guess it’s complex with the changes particularly dramatic in England and perhaps Northern Ireland (I don’t read much about NI that fills me with hope) and something a bit less extreme in Wales and some real differences, even signs of hope in Scotland. However, all this seems to play into the current Tory party hands: they play things so that they use xenophobia towards anyone from outside the UK and between the countries of the UK so that they tighten their hold on power in a form of gerrymandering.

What can I do about any of this? Very, very little if anything and I can’t see that getting depressed about it helps anyone so what do I want? Well, that gets me to the purple patch: the thing that shores me up is the feeling that I work hard and not entirely unproductively.

I am working hard: I think my weekly hours are down a bit from the 70+ of the last few years but certainly still in the 50-70 range and I do want that to change. I am productive not just in volume of papers (CV here for anyone academic reading this). Simple paper counts are pretty silly so it’s more important to me that some of the papers are making arguments that I want to put out there between now and when I stop work (six, max seven years). I’ve had a lovely boost coming out of my excellent collaboration with Dr. Clara Paz: I’ve been appointed a visiting professor in her university: Universidad de Las Américas (UDLA) in Quito, Ecuador. At the same time the book that J and I have been working on for years really is nearing publication.

Is this a purple patch? No, not yet and I do know that my scales for these things are not normal and full of self-denigration. However, I really hope it is a trajectory that is hopeful. Meanwhile, some local purples I’ve been enjoying up here: everything is fringed and striped with patches of rosebay willowherb.

I’ve also been enjoying trying to get close ups of the thorny thistles with their purple crowns.

Onwards!

Created 28.viii.21

This is the weekend when the human transhumance switches: the end of the summer season and the last of the visitors leave and most of the cafes, restaurants and shops supporting them, and supported by them, close and most of their staff are not locals so they leave too. The last week has been very quiet which is normal for the last week of the summer season I think, and some of the restaurants have already shut. Well, l’harlequin, run by George and Monique, closed on the 18th. Mostly I eat my own very simple food here but I said goodbye to them with lunch (usual thing: click on that if you want the full glory of it!)

I ordered the wine (really splashing out) but the kir was free. The food is tartiflette: very much a Savoie staple of cheese sauce on potatoes with lardons and strips of reblochon cheese on the top. Very much food for hard working labourers. I confess I was too happily replete to work after that for several hours.

Yesterday I legged it down to Plagne Centre to get my last purchases from the fromagerie which shut in the evening. Also yesterday and today I’m stocking up from the SPAR up here in Aime 2000, buying a reserve of heavy or bulky things (loo roll!) that should mean I have less to carry up weekly from the SPAR in Plagne Centre which is the only shop for 2000 vertical metres from here from Monday.

The six weeks since I got here have been a bit mad with a series of disasters back in South London that J has had to cope with with a bit of support from S: it was as if the house and cat waited until I’d gone to throw a series of challenges to J to remind us both of our unusual geographical choices. Not just back in London, up here and in my virtually global work life there have been other challenges, not only the regular ones but also more than the usual run of unexpected ones. I think against the backdrop that August for much of the world is at least in part a holiday month, with the influx of visitors here, has all made this feel odd and a bit unreal. It feels as if this weekend is a pivot point and from next week all the usual and unusual challenges are going to be that more real, somehow there will be fewer distractions.

I tend to associate these real punctuation points with an aspiration that I’ll be more efficent and produtive as I move on. We’ll see! I’ll leave you with some recent images of my beloved mountains and clouds. You should be able to click on any one to get the full sized image (to the extent your browser allows) and you should be able to page through them if you want.

Just looked round the monitor and can’t see a thing for bright white cloud enveloping us! In case anyone reading this doesn’t know about my timelapse videos which show how the cloud drama up here plays through from sunrise to sunset (around 4 minutes in the videos and getting shorter as the days get shorter), the recent videos are here. I think dipping into one can be quite meditative. I’ve given them a very crude rating out of 5 so go for ratings below 4 if you want mindfulness. The full set, starting back in 2018 can be reached from here.

OK, to work: onwards!

Created 15.viii.21, tweaked 16.viii.21.

It’s August, it’s summer. Up here at a bit over 2,000m that can be pretty capricious but we’ve had a run of gloriously sunny days with lovely sunrises. These mornings I take my first coffee out onto the terrace and squat down with it. It’ll be somewhere between 07.00 and 08.30 I guess depending on what I’ve got done by the time the first coffee takes me and the amount of sun will be very different depending on that timing. The flagstones under the bum are cold as they are in the mornings all year round but the dark brown painted, wooden clad, wall behind my back will was already too hot to lean on without a t-shirt or something between me and it.

I was squatting there this morning, soaking up some sun, with my eyes closed against it. I was oscillating between pondering my day, task list etc. and something rather more “mindful” I supposed (it’s not my forte). Opening my eyes at some point I was squinting against the sun, still very low but awesome in its relatively little filtered intensity and for a moment or two I just soaked in the silhouettes of the brutalist concrete of Aime 2000 as it rises the other side of the terrace as it does behind me, and the mountains in the distance. I thought I should try to share!

I wondered about the word “squatting”: we own the apartment so I’m not technically squatting in that sense of the word. Perhaps more importantly, this coming Friday I hope a trip to the préfecture will clinch my acquisition of my “Carte de séjour” (or “Permis de séjour”, I’m not sure which is the official term), i.e. my initial, but renewable, right to remain. That feels even more important than ownership: being granted permission to stay as long as I want, whenever I can and want, despite Brexit, despite anything that might make the French state reluctant to have me!

So here I am. And here are more views from squatting, from bum on the flagstones level. I think my photography might improve if I got down and dirty more often! I think you should be able to click on the images and that should open them in “lightbox” mode enabling you to click through the full size images one by one (tiny right and left arrows to right and left of each image to select next or previous image).

Posted 30.vii.21.

Well, well. I learned from my mother this morning that today is the UN International day of Friendship, see https://www.un.org/en/observances/friendship-day. I also discovered the rather less idealistic wikipedia page: “Friendship Day (also International Friendship Day or Friend’s Day) is a day in several countries for celebrating friendship. It was initially promoted by the greeting cards’ industry,” Oh dear. Actually, there’s lots more there and the history doesn’t seem to be all as grimly commercial/capitalist as that opening suggested. How often are wikipedia pages not worth reading. Perhaps wikipedia is a glorious piece of international friendship in itself.

I did feel that in a world that seems to be to rushing rapidly backwards and towards national militarism, xenophobic hate and to politicians and the very wealthy fanning these trends for all they are worth, that international friendship is vital. So some lovely ‘photos offered from the Alps by an old cynic who has long called himself “romantically Welsh” (partly to sidestep the old National Front and more recent iterations of disgusting English nationalism), who now ticks “other” on UK forms asking about ethnicity and fills in “White European since Brexit”. I think I should complete the final stage on my journey to my “Carte de Séjour” (residence permit) on the 20th of August, it really looks as if, at last, I only have to turn up with the right bits of evidence to take the last step to getting my crucial piece of plastic. That’s a pretty petty and selfish bit of international friendship but that really is part of my determination to get this and be able to move between the UK and France as and when I want … and perhaps to move on and apply for dual citizenship. I do feel it as a small strike against nationalism and xenophobia.

More positively, I now work with people on a “gift relationship” basis in many countries, over the last two decades: Ecuador, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Estonia, France, Italy, Greece, Japan, Albania, Finland, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Korea, China, Pakistan, Wales, Scotland, Romania, Malta, Slovenia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands, Lithuania, Portugal, Colombia, Russia, Iceland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Turkey, Canada and yes, even the USA and England. (The order is pretty arbitrary and arguable, if you think I’ve omitted you, get in touch and accept my apologies.)

Hm, it’s not a bad list. It led to total overload from which I’m only slowly recovering but it’s been brilliant and hugely productive but that’s moving us from friendship to work. I’ve been incredibly lucky I guess. I worked hard on it, but now I look at it, it really has been international and mostly very friendly: thanks to all for that.

So now back to friendship: here is a a typical Chris selfie of me taken up here looking across the terrace at the glorious brutalist 1960 architecture that is Aime 2000 and to “Sue’s run” (OK, that’s not it’s local name but we’re being internationalist and friendly for today eh?) You should be able to click on this and get the full glory of it with a rather less selfie-ish width!

And, in the spirit of international and interspecies friendship, my very bouncy local wagtail (again you should be able to click on these and see the full image, or as much as your browser will give you, and you should be able to scroll through the shots):

[Posted 30.vii.21, header image of Mont Blanc 21.15 CEST, 28.vii.21 selfie 20.vii.21, wagtail 22.vii.21]

Started 18.vii.21, finished 19.vii.21.

As of a long travelling day on Monday I’m back up in my Alpine eyrie. I’m hoping to use this new phase for a bit of a realignment to make my days less dominated by work so I’ll keep this simple. Most of the week I was in the filling of a sandwich between mostly white cloud above and below and the filling was pretty damp and sometimes pouring rain so it was lovely to see Mont Blanc become visible for the first time last night and to have a roasting day of clear blue sky today until late afternoon. Today also brought the first parapente of my stay. Photos only from here on. Oh damn. I’ll have to go back to working out how to make them show as I’d like: never fixed that last year. Timelapse videos may restart in the next few days.

Early Friday evening the cloud finally lifted and parted enough for me to see Mont Blanc.

Yesterday (yes, this blog post was started with good intentions yesterday but not finished) was free of cloud locally with only wisps of cumulus in the valley and on the peaks in the distance. It was roasting and beautiful! Later in the day, though it remained pretty roasting around me in Aime2000, the cloud built up and provided the constantly changing views that I so love up here. Here’s a gallery of some images that I caught, click on any that interest you to see the full sized image and when you do you should see tiny arrows on the left or right of the image which you can click on to move to the previous or next image (respectively!)

Given that the week had been so free of sun, it’s not surprising that this was the day of the first parapente (paraglider).

OK. That’s it for today. No politics, no polemics, no pontificating, mostly just images! More to come and I will play around to see if I can find the best “gallery” system with which to share images. I know I will slip back to those three “P”s: politics, polemics and pontificating!