There are only a few days left for you to get ready to head off to Kinross to follow Robert The Bruce’s heart into battle under the auspices of a branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

I am myself preparing to head for Aubazine next week to play golf under the auspices of what I like to think is a slightly less weird organisation, The Senior Golfers of the Four Leagues. But I suppose that like beauty weirdness is all in the eye of the beholder. Some might think for example that there was a touch of weirdness about doing a little quiet research into the custom of kissing hands, which is what I was doing when I came across the SCA.

Some people came to look at the house the other day. They spent all of ten minutes looking round, asked me no questions and not many more of the estate agent's man who was with them. So I don't think they were bowled over.

Perhaps a modern property like this friend's house in La Châtre where I had dinner last night would be more to their taste. I last saw it when it was a shell and it's fascinating to see the finished article. It's quite a contrast to the standard issue new-build bungalows that spring up around here, not to mention old stone shacks like ours or what is soon to be Ewan's Georgian flat.

Over a few rainy days last week I found myself reading Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.

When I read the description on page 9 of penny loaves being distributed by the bereaved to the village on the day of a funeral I said wisely to my anthropologically knowledgeable self that yes I had come across this custom somewhere before. Then reading on page 16 of how George Pontifex had recast in modern idiom the advertising blurb for a religious book I wondered quite how that had the ring of familiarity. On reaching page 35 where Mr Allaby advises his five unmarried daughters that they should play at cards to decide which one of them should throw her cap at Theobald I had a strong suspicion that I must have read the book before.

For the life of me although I greeted each scene with warm familiarity as it appeared, I could not foretell what was going to happen, apart from having a vague presentiment that a prayer meeting would play a role. The prayer meeting duly took place on page 180 so there was no longer any room for doubt. I had read the book before.

This set me wondering what might be the minimum number of books that in the present state of my memory would provide me with an endlessly fresh reading experience if I were to read them repeatedly one after another. And further, at what point in time will my memory function be so reduced that one book will do?

There are tens of thousands of English speakers living in France so it’s not surprising that several publications exist to serve their needs. I picked up “Creuse News” the other day, never having seen it before.

It contained the usual mix of stories extolling the French way of life, stories complaining about the French way of life, articles on how to do x or y when living in France and lots of ads.

Most of the ads were unsurprising – builders, electricians, teachers of French, restaurants, installers of British TV, social events etc. But some did catch my eye: the Corner Shop providing all our favourite products (not yet run by an ethnic minority I noted); the English mobile hairdresser and nail technician; the traditional Scottish piper available for all special occasions; and to cap it all there was Bill aka Monsieur Fromage who takes coals to Newcastle in the form of British cheese to French markets.

“Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays où il existe 258 variétés de fromage?” said General de Gaulle. He must now be turning in his grave at the thought of the British making the country even more difficult to govern. Yet more so at the thought of Churchill having the last laugh.

A blog I dip into from time to time is Language Log. It's maintained by and is largely for professional linguists, so it's often above my head but this post about rubbish, seagulls and Edinburgh New Town with its plethora of comments is a gem to be enjoyed by one and all.

The good ship Caramel on which I sailed the ocean blue and the river brown has her own website which features, inter alia, descriptions of her voyages. I have been press-ganged into writing up the leg of the 2008-2010 voyage that I travelled. Having sweated over a hot computer these last few days to produce an account it is now finished hurray!

It will be loaded onto the site for all the world to read but since there are a couple of earlier legs of the voyage that have not yet been uploaded this may not happen very soon.

So to satisfy the public demand that I tell myself undoubtedly exists I have put a copy here.

Faithful readers of this blog will find some familiar material because I have naturally enough recycled some of the stuff I posted en route. But there is more than that and a few of the several hundred photos I took that I hope you will find interesting.

Boucané(e) on a French menu means smoked. I've wondered idly for years about the origin of this term (what's wrong with fumé after all?). Now thanks to the Rallye des Isles du Soleil I know the answer.

In their June newsletter which I was translating yesterday there was a little item about an outfit called Les Fréres de la Côte. So I did some research into it. It's a version of Just William's gang for grown-ups (sic) which celebrates and reproduces the culture (somewhat romanticized) of the original brothers who were a bunch of pirates hiding out around the Caribbean in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was founded in Chile in the 50s on the birthday of the world's most illustrious prat and has spread around the world.

In this description I discovered that the chaps who weren't busy stealing treasure and making sailors walk the plank were called buccaneers, which I always thought was a synonym for pirate but seems not to have been so originally. In this guise they grew cabbages and hunted wild animals. They smoked the meat from these animals and turned an honest piece of eight by exporting it.

Now the French for buccaneer is boucanier so that's obviously something to do with boucané(e) but which came first? Well it turns out that they were called boucaniers because they used a native grilling device called in the local lingo a boucan in smoking their meat. Hence boucané(e) = smoked.

I suppose I could have found this out years ago by turning to an etymological dictionary or two but then I would not have extended my pitifully limited knowledge of pirates.

I may extend it further by reading Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates but then again I may not.


This is the Brotherhood of the Coast's flag. The resemblance to the Jolly Roger is not coincidental.

Well I didn't recover my title on Sunday but I had a good day in the sunshine and met up with a number of golfing friends and won a bottle of wine the following day at the Dryades competition, alas without improving my handicap but it's early days.
This morning the cows are back in the field next door. How long will they take to chomp through the knee high grass? Probably not as long as Claire would have taken to clear the cut grass by the gable end had she stayed on.