Strange boy not just obvious choice for cheesy wotsits

One of the great joys of headline-writing is the fitting together of completely unrelated subjects in a handful of words.

Curiously, hyper-bizarre artist H.R.Giger of Alien fame and gruyère cheese are intimately related: The Swiss Herr Giger owns the medieval Château St. Germain in the 400-year-old historic, walled village of Gruyères. And that is where in Hols 3 - Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, we found the H.R. Giger Museum. It's as odd a juxtaposition as you're likely to find anywhere but perhaps it does say something quite perceptive about Switzerland.

There is a huge paradox between the impossibly green and fertile uplands where the cute cows and perfect pine trees all queue up to audition for a Heidi movie, and the mountains themselves which are as dizzyingly spectacular and dangerous as any in the world.

While this leaves me still puzzled by what makes Switzerland tick, it makes sense of how a country that during its 200 hundred years of peace invented the cuckoo clock, also produced the nightmare world of H.R.Giger.

I can't pretend that the guy's really my cup of tea but I can't go to any country without wanting to see its top class pictures. The other hot contender in Switzerland is the huge Paul Klee museum in Bern but it was too far to go in the time we had available.

Apparently yer man Giger has suffered night terrors all his life and obviously it shows. His work seems to be at once futuristic and sci-fi while also being a throwback to the medieval art of gargoyles and gothic horror. His official label is bio-mechanical, which covers a great deal of violence and deeply peculiar sexuality; a very strange boy indeed.

The man is undeniably a highly skilled draftsman; he could certainly teach the pickled shark types a trick or two. He obviously has the means to say something even if you wouldn't give the result to your auntie for Christmas. Or maybe you would, if you've ever been arrested for possession of an offensive aunt. Your relatives, you're stuck with . . .

Girlfriend Claire is pictured in the distinctly vertebral atmosphere of the official Giger bar next to the museum. The coffee's safe enough but I'm not so sure about the local talent. Reminds me of that old gag about Brains S.A., beloved beer of Cardiff: They don't call it Skull Attack for nothing.

The modern gruyère cheese creamery is at a reassuringly safe distance from the old village. This is just as well. Imagine all those Alien exploding guts getting mixed up with their adverts for cheesy wotsits? Not exactly comfort food. I must admit that I never got any further with any of the Alien films than the famous John Hurt scene. I couldn't stomach it . . .

*The author would like to apologise for the use of gut-wrenchingly awful puns in the creation of this Oscar-winning blog entry.

We shall fight them sur les plages . . . and all that

I spent a good bit of last week listening to a gigantic documentary about Winston Churchill. The intriguing thing is that I heard it on French radio; to be precise chez nos amis de France Culture, who devoted no less than 15 hours over five mornings to the subject.

While I haven't suddenly become Alf Garnett's stunt double, I couldn't help being both touched and impressed by this French take on the 70th anniversary of the battles of France and Britain; all served up with extreme lashings of Elgar at every slightest break, pause or excuse. I'm a great fan of top class cowpat music myself but Dash it, sir! There are limits . . .

It's not the first time that I've found FC making a better job of English history than we do it ourselves. When you compare this with the bigoted and childish rubbish that the Sunday Times put out a couple of weeks back about De Gaulle's wartime broadcasts from London under a headline about "General Bignose", it's positively embarrassing. If Harold Evans had a grave, he'd be doing about 10,000 rpm right now.

The French would seem still to have a lot of time for Churchill, possibly more than we do . . . This may have something to do with the fact that he apparently visited France more than 300 times, even before 1939, and thus has a fair reputation as a francophile.

It may also be because he made a good few broadcasts to the beleaguered French, actually in French; fascinating archive material which I didn't previously know existed. And possibly because Churchill seems to have got on fairly well with De Gaulle, until he was forced to side with Roosevelt who, for whatever reason, couldn't stand Le Général at any price.

After all, Churchill couldn't exactly afford to fall out with the guys who were going to pay for the invasion of Europe. And it has to be said that even the French seem to have found Le Général a bit of a pain at times in his latter day capacity as Le Président.

Actually possession of a sense of humour seems to have been the biggest obvious difference between our heroic wartime twosome. As far as I can make out, De Gaulle had none whatever whilst any number of reasonably well-informed English people can still roll out a brace of Churchill's best gags 45 years after his death.

Ever in the spirit of fair play, FC even used the one about Churchill's state funeral arrangements, which somewhat macabrely, were allegedly discussed with him while he was still alive.

It had been decided that the funeral train should arrive at Paddington. Officials then discussed whether De Gaulle, who had presumably got up various nez anglais as usual, should be invited.

"Of course he should be invited," said Churchill: "But the train should come to Waterloo!" Like all the best apocryphal stories, if it isn't true, then it ought to be . . .

We all came down to Montreux, On the Lake Geneva

shoreline, all right . . . which as any fule kno, especially if he's an ageing headbanger like me, is the first line of Smoke on the Water. For Hols 2, I have decided, possibly in an orgy of pure self-indulgence, to go for a bit of unashamed anorakismo. The town in the pic is indeed Montreux and the pinky building on the left is the present day casino, built to replace the gambling house that burned down in the song.

The pic was actually taken from the top floor of Château Chillon, which is a very nice proper castle with a roof and furnishings, some epic prisoner tales and graffiti by Lord Byron. Yer actual mad, bad and dangerous-to-know George thought the place really rocked, even to the extent of penning a walloping great epic about it that I can't pretend to have read.

It's well worth visiting, especially if your partner is humming that Durh, Durh, Durhhh! riff and has just subsided into his second childhood. Anything to take your mind off all that bluesrock-assisted dementia.

But it has to be said that Deep Purple's Machine Head album remains a very classy piece of work to this day and it was all made in Montreux. It was totally essential vinyl (that sort of round, black, warpable, scratchable, nickable, extremely expensive, plastic stuff) for any self-respecting 13-year-old in 1974.

This meant that you had grown out of teenybopperdom and when you consider that this included bands like The Wombles it all brings a whole new meaning to words like exorcism, deliverance and lucky escape. Shaving, spots, fags, booze and possibly sex were only just around the corner.

Of course, this was only boys' stuff. The girls all listened to soul and later on disco. Remember all that dancing in a circle with all the handbags in the middle? In terms of asking for a bop, it would have been slightly easier to torpedo the Graf Spee . . .

Later on, in the decades that music forgot, plenished with the horrors of the New Romantics, Boy Bands and other nameless serial drivel, I too came deeply to love classic soul music. I just don't know whether that many of the girls ever really came round to the idea of The Purps.

Imagine though, our distress back in 1976 when Deep Purple broke up. Wot? No more Purple? You have to remember that this was a musically dire year; slightly less interesting than a vow of silence. On reflection, I'd have gone for the silence. Then punk broke out. It had no choice.

But it all has a happy ending. Thirty-four years later The Purps are still in business. They've played in SW France every year for at least the last four and I even finally got to see them in Carcassonne. They're still pretty damn good.

And what of Claude Nobs, the somewhat eccentrically-named hero of Montreux, whose lone mugshot lurks among the plethora of pix of our five beloved hairy English musos inside the original Machine Head gatefold sleeve?

Funky Claude, of course, is the guy in the song who rescued various kids from the burning casino and then spent the next two weeks trying to find other places for the band to record, amid a hale of complaints from conservative Swiss persons who weren't quite ready to enter the wonderful world of very loud rock music.

Perhaps for Claude, the water still smokes . . .

It had to happen - Death by Push-bikers - Hols 1

You may have gathered from the headline that girlfriend Claire and I have departed Fa for a day or two in pastures new beyond the bumpish and grindette abnormality of Languid Oc Roussillon.

Having lightly lampooned our velo-istic colleagues of Le Tour de France in my last missive, I suppose it is only rough or poetic justice that I should have been plagued by cyclists ever since; much as one might be lightly hassled by a rogue school of kamikaze killer whales.

This has caused me to consider what might be the collective noun for cyclists and concluded that it ought to be a deathwishness.

Skipping the first day of our adventure because motorways are boring, I take up the tale in the Vaucluse, western Provence, somewhere the other side of Avignon.

The day started benignly enough in the agreeable chambre d'hote we'd found sleeping quietly at the end of a tree-tunnelled chemin outside the village of Bedoin.

I had been driving but a few minutes when it struck me that there seemed to be an awful lot of push-bikers about. Have you ever noticed while driving that you always meet a P-biker at some divinely-ordained moment of maximum danger and inconvenience?

Even if you're driving on one of those infinitely long, straight vanishing point-type roads, you will always pass the cyclist at the unexpected chicane with bonus demon potholes, exactly as the apocalyptic posse of 38-tonne wagons comes winging its way to hell in the opposite direction.

This will always happen even if the lorries have been in sight for the last two miles, and whether you speed up, slow down or even stop to lurk knowingly beneath your Harry Potter-type Invisibility Cloak.

Our general intention was to wander through the Vaucluse into the French Alps eventually ending up in Switzerland. If you are not conversant with the word col, then I had better explain right now as it's geographically impossible to follow this route without going over a remarkably large number of them.

I seem to remember that there was some mythical Scots geezer called Col of The Cows, but in this case col means a mountain pass. There are a few twee things near Fa called cols . . . that go up to a thousand feet or so, but these are for drivers still in possession of a nappy.

The ones we're talking about here have multiple precipices, awesome hairpin bends and positive orgies of suicidal cyclists. While actually trying quite hard not to kill any of them, I missed our turning towards Briançon and ended up right on the top of Mont Ventoux (top pic). As you can see, it looks like a desert the wrong way up, and at an impressive 6,200 feet is way over my vertigo limit . . .

Having thus been reduced to a gibbering wreck, I gallantly let girlfriend Claire drive the even bigger cols, being a Pyrenean mountain girl and all that. Just as well, because ironically we ended up a day or so later on the very same Col du Galibier that features in the vintage Tour de France pic (see last post).

This gentle slope, ha-ha, weighs in at a mere 8,586 feet while Le Grand Galibier itself manages 10,491 feet, or a maximum 5 Sets of Ruined Underwear Rating. I was already, shall we say apprehensive, when I took pic 2 though Claire still seems cheerful enough.

Probably the most entertaining aspect of vertigo is approaching a hairpin bend where the only visible scenery on the outside edge is a large quantity of unaccompanied sky, unspoilt by crash barriers. It's then that the absolute certainty cuts in that the dear old Kangoo is going to take off into several thousand feet of not a lot.

The fact that the old girl's shockers and anti-roll bars are a bit shot at the mo adds most effectively to the feeling of Designer Sadism by Renault . . . You do this about a dozen times going up Col du Galibier and repeat the exercise, lest we should forget, on the way down.

There's about a one in two chance of extra fun meeting a cyclist at each of the really hairy bits. Thanks to the route's legendary status as a Tour de France stage, every wannabee TDF hero just has to give it a go. I have pictured an uphill nutcase; these are probably more of a nuisance when you're desperately trying to jockey your vehicle, slipping the clutch in first gear, though the really crazy ones zooming down are probably more alarming.

Mind you, looking back to the vintage pic, I see that the road was merely a flattish pile of rock in those days so I suppose we had it soft. If the last pic doesn't look especially exciting it's probably because I had the camera upside down or something . . .

Wheels within wheels - Tour de France comes to Fa

Well there you have it; Le Tour de France, even as I write, is somewhere on its way to Fa. This, of course, is the way it should be.

The race will inevitably end on Les Champs Elysées à Paris, but this is a small and insignificant event compared to the honour of being allowed to cycle through the Centre of the Known Universe, AKA Fa.

On Sunday July 18, all will start bright and early in readiness for the Great Day. The attendants of La Reine Marie du Cafédefa each have their part to play; there will be feasting, music and much rejoicing.

We thought of inviting La Reine Margot, as played by the delectable Isabelle Adjani, but such vast quantities of blood and guts would be unseemly on so gracious an occasion.

Dave the Underdog is already polishing his wittiest and most apposite syllogisms, Mollie the Dog is practising sulking and an enthusiastic relay team is on hand to track down all the Neefy Eepees and insert them in the dish-washer.

So you can teach an old dog new tricks. Incidentally girlfriend Claire tells me that the French for the usual version of this idiom is Ce n'est pas à un vieux singe qu'on apprend à faire des grimaces. Or: You can't teach an old monkey to make faces, which all adds to the colour of the moment.

Fa, in fact, has a long and distinguished association with the Tour. I draw your attention to the picture of Fa's own Tour de France hero Vincente Jean-Baptiste Fauré, helping to tow one of the official cars, somewhere in the Alps in 1934. A deeply modest man, Fauré won the Tour several times, led an important Résistance group during the war and retired to Fa to chop wood and look after his dear old mum, expiring with elaborate civic honours in 1971.

Fauré, one should note in passing, is a common surname in these parts; celebrated French composer, Gabriel Fauré, came from Pamiers only a couple of hours away in the neighbouring Ariège. It's mildly disconcerting to see businesses over there with names like Kevin Fauré Fruit Mart (Get yor luvly requiems 'ere . . .) or Barry Fauré Voitures d'Occasion (secondhand motors).

I must admit that I'm having to bluff this piece, as my sole technical knowledge of cycling is the chapter of Paddington Bear where he wins a fastest downhill prize in the TDF owing to his tricycle having no brakes.

Sadly I don't suppose that you could imagine such a story today, even for children, with it all being so professional. I did look up a bit of early TDF history; the second tour in 1904 or thereabouts seems to have been the best one. They tried having night stages and everyone cheated like mad in the dark when the judges couldn't see them. One guy even put his bike on the train. Great fun.

That of course was in the era when the Tour actually went all the way round France. At some stage the organisers realised that this was physically impossible even by using unfeasibly large quantities of dangerous drugs. So they toned the whole thing down a bit; which is a pity. As a profoundly unsporty person, I nonetheless do love the magnificence of the world's great sporting spectacles; especially the fundamentally barmy ones.

Fa, of course, is not without its sense of occasion. In the second picture, you will see what may seem to you like a perfectly ordinary gutter. It is, of course the Fa 2010 Tour de France Memorial Gutter, laid with the utmost care and despatch, only in the last few days.

Said gutter used to be one of those traditional French death traps, much too deep and carefully covered with amorphous fragments of cast-iron grating, so that you could trip and break certainly a leg and possibly your neck without even trying. The prospect of hundreds of the world's top cyclists all going arse over tip in the middle of Fa was presumably too much for Monsieur le Maire to bear . . .

It's a pleasant spin-off of the Tour that we always get a nice piece of new road out of it. The Tour always has to come out of the bottom end of the Pyrenees somewhere so it usually passes quite close by. This year they've resurfaced a goodly chunk of tarmac down by Intermarché.

I suppose this is the moment to own up to a certain quantity of lies and deception. It is with the utmost embarrassment that your faithful correspondent has to admit that, due to a truly gross cock-up on the forward planning front, he can't actually be here on Sunday thus dipping out on the biggest story of the year . . .

PS: I also invented Vincente Jean-Baptiste Fauré in the interests of local colour. The real cyclist is Spain's Federico Ezquerra pictured between Le Télégraphe et Le Galibier in the Alps and it actually was 1934. Of course, he ought to have come from Fa and it's not my fault that he didn't.

Heard 'em through the grapevine, sultry snores of Fa

Ah! A timeless scene that is forever rural France. A 2CV van lurks beneath the spreading limes and vines; geriatric masonry crumbles gently to itself, and not a soul stirs of a Sunday afternoon in sleepy Fa.

This is not entirely surprising as the summer heat finally hit us this last week with all the refinement and elegance of a well-aimed sledge hammer.

Summer has been a remarkably long time coming this year and even now it tends to sulk; sultry and stormy as a stroppy teenager.

It's odd really, we don't usually get this super (not) overcast and slimy heat, so redolent of a moderately crap August in Ongle-terry. What has happened to our lovely blue skies, we ask ourselves.

It has not been a weekend for action; it's the most we can do to struggle over to the Cafédefa, sink a few beers or cokes or coffees, read the paper, and swap a few lines of languid gossip, before wandering gently back home to collapse under the ventilator fans, like extras pegged out to die in a Sam Peckinpah gore-fest.

At least the bloody Guardian turned up for a change. Lately I've taken to reading Le Monde as my official weekend Grauniad stunt double. It's very good for my French and saves me the need to prod the newsagent with pointed sticks and other instruments of violence and destruction.

I don't suppose he understands any better than I do, how or why the less-than-mercurial conduit of information from Farringdon Road suffers such acute periodic bouts of constipation, especially here in deepest Languedoc.

But probably it's a small matter in the general scheme of things. Les grandes vacances sont enfin arrivées: The schools are out. Days to sleep and nights to party (in between thunderstorms and unaccustomed bouts of belting rain).

Unfamiliar faces arrive in our village, French, English and any number of other nationalities; 'Tis the grockel season, moi deare . . . Very pleasant but all a bit strange: We'll get over it.

Vide grenier trauma - Poubelle turns in own grave

Got your poubelles at the ready? No? Well it's your own fault that your home is about to be inundated with total crap (ref dear old G. Ratner). This because it's the vide grenier season, when all and sundry in virtually every village en l'haute vallée and far beyond, both in kilometres and all reason, "empty their attics". Or as they say en Angleterre: 'Ave a car boot sale.

You may become arrested by trop de veng, trop de soleil and great overloadings of general picture-skewness as in this leafy, tranquil scene at agreeable Arques of a peaceful Sunday morning. Actually it's trop de vin but I'm rashly trying to imitate our local impenetrable brogue (veng demeng peng etcetera). In all such words, the non-existent G at the end, for non-existentialists, is sounded out fully.

Be afraid, be very afraid. All those innocent faces of the young, not so young and the positively antediluvian, lined up behind their cute assortments of artefacts are mad, bad and dangerous to know.

If you succumb to these sirens, you will return home, wiser, sadder, much skinter and driving an exhausted vehicle in dire need of new springs, clutch and back axle. Such will be its burden. In total crap terms, the average VG can definitely give Ratner, G. a run for his argent. The Chief Anti-tat Meister, Monsieur Eugène Poubelle himself would be struck dumb by horror, could he but see us now.

There are ways to avoid buying overwhelming quantities of other people's rubbish. One of them is to try selling it instead. Personally I'm not convinced by this, observing that most merde de VG remains unsold at the end of the day. My own grenier is two floors up and the last thing I would ever want to have to do is to cart all my tat back up there again.

I sometimes give stuff to the stand for the village school. They get the sous if they sell it but under no circumstances will any of my merde come back to me again . . . I have disowned it forever. More beguiling is the idea of perception: They're not trash, they're . . . treasures. Don't believe a word of it, I say.

It's certainly more effective to specialise in some particular form of tat. I have personally narrowed myself down to Tintin hardbacks in French and in pristine condition; large blue plates and cast iron trivets because new ones cost a fortune and I've got a glass dining room table top.

Actually wanting these items means that you will never see them at a vide grenier ever again and you will become totally tat-proof. Except . . . just now and then you do find a genuine and irresistible bargain: Aside from a copy of Waiting for Godot in the original French for a mere 50 centimes, I found four decent matching pint beer glasses for €3 the lot at Arques.

So why pint glasses? I always try to avoid virulent English ex-pat syndrome as I find it a real pain, but none of us can ever completely deny where we come from, and nor should we try to: You can't change the fact of who you are.

And we all have little things that remind us of our roots. For me it's PG Tips, Cooper's Oxford Marmalade, Branston pickle and an unshakeable gut feeling that beer always tastes nicer in pints. After all, I believe that the Danes still drink beer in a measure that has been illegal since 1695 so I figure these little things must matter somehow.

But here we are, always still in SW France, so let us remind ourselves with the choicest idiom that has come my way in a long time via girlfriend Claire: Il a le cul bordé de nouilles, which literally means: His arse is edged in noodles. No-one has a clue where it comes from but the French say it as we would say: He lives a charmed life. Perhaps we do . . .