Winter in Montreal

It is biting cold outside, minus 19 degrees Celsius. And yet I like winter here. When I think of the days of grey, humid blahness in England, I'm grateful that even though my hand nearly froze when I tried to take a picture at lunchtime today, there's still so much sun outside that my office feels like a greenhouse. A huge expanse of bright blue sky fills my windows and I can almost believe it's going to be 25 degrees when I get out tonight :). And it's only three months until spring... or something like that.

what if...

·night·morning,
·red sun smothered·by volutes of civilisation's breath,·
·a couple is trapped·in a green park·
·fleeing the prison in their minds.·
·breathing is beautiful,·
·even when the oxygen suffocates you.·
·blue sky has to mean· somewhere someone is happy.·
· and what if ·with every second we die,·
·we discover we want more,·and at sixty suddenly rue
·the fears that kept us·from living the core
yearnings in each of our cells,·
·when the only trouble we had·
·was being too young?·

Written in August 2004

A whiff

There's a curious blend of mustiness and floor polish that I smelled once in Montreal that flung me right back into my Cambridge college. At work, when they replaced the carpet, the glue, over-powering, sent me back everyday to when at 4 years old, I came from school to my grandparents house and raced upstairs to where the workers were placing the flooring. Then I would come face to face with an infinite expanse of black, pungent glue waiting for the vinyl tiles to be irreversibly stuck on it... The acrid sweet whiff in the street will always remind me of Montreal. Our smell memories are the ones that are most likely to take us unawares.

I remember the smell of the spent hand-flare shells. By some freak of chemistry they smelled exactly like cumin. It was intoxicating. I sniffed the plastic shells and immediately Pondicherry came to life in my mind, (..). The experience was very strong, nearly a hallucination. From a single smell a whole town arose. (Now when I smell cumin, I see the Pacific Ocean.)

- Yann Martel, Life of Pi-

Bark, esclave libéré…

A French quote from the author of "Le Petit Prince", and an English translation too! This paragraph also reminds me of the librarian in The Shawshank Redemption.

« Il erra devant les échoppes juives, regarda la mer, songea qu’il pouvait marcher à son gré dans n’importe quelle direction, qu’il était libre…Mais cette liberté lui parut amère : elle lui découvrait surtout à quel point il manquait de liens avec le monde. » (…)
« Il possédait, puisqu’il était libre, les biens essentiels, le droit de se faire aimer, de marcher vers le nord ou le sud et de gagner son pain par son travail. À quoi bon cet argent… Alors qu’il éprouvait, comme on éprouve une faim profonde, le besoin d’être un homme parmi les hommes, lié aux hommes. (…) Il était libre, mais infiniment, jusqu’à ne plus se sentir peser sur terre. Il lui manquait ce poids des relations humaines qui entrave la marche, ces larmes, ces adieux, ces reproches, ces joies, tout ce qu’un homme caresse ou déchire chaque fois qu’il ébauche un geste, ces mille liens qui l’attachent aux autres, et le rendent lourd. Mais sur Bark pesaient déjà mille espérances. »

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes-

And the translation:
Bark, freed slave

"He idled in front of the Jewish shops, stared at the sea, repeated to himself that he could walk as he pleased in any direction, that he was free. But this freedom had in it a taste of bitterness; what he learned from it with most intensity was that he had no ties with the world." (...)
"He was free, and therefore he possessed the essential of wealth-the right to the love of Berber girls, to go north or south as he pleased, to earn his bread by his toil. What good was this money when the thing for which he was famished was to be a man in the family of men, bound by ties to other men? (...) He was free, but too infinitely free; not striding upon the earth but floating above it. He felt the lack in him of that weight of human relations that trammels a man's progress ; tears, farewells, reproaches, joys-all those things that a man caresses or rips apart each time he sketches a gesture; those thousand ties that bind him to others and lend density to his being. But already Bark was in ballast of a thousand hopes."

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, translated from French by Louis Galientere.

My favourite cook

My favourite cook-writer is Nigel Slater. I first encountered his work in Cambridge, in a tiny supplement they gave out with The Guardian. I loved his 'I'm-sitting-in-your-kitchen' writing and his obvious love of tasteful, very simple food.

Here's a sample:

"Brussel sprouts have never grabbed me. I find their flavour coarse and difficult to marry with other ingredients. Retrieved from boiling water 1 minute too soon and they are hard as bullets, 1 minute too late and they are little balls of pungent yellow slush. They also smell disgusting.
But Brussel sprouts can be good. The trick is to keep them well away from boiling water."

- Nigel Slater, Real Fast Food-

He goes on to explain how you can make those sprouts palatable. Here's a link to a few of his recipes. The content is as much fun as the style!

House of the Flying Saucers...

I watched "House of the Flying Daggers" last week-end. This film is by Zhang Yi Mou, the same guy who made "Hero". I had high expectations before I went because I'd heard such great reviews. The film stars the beautiful Zhang Zi Yi and the pictures had looked astonishing. That much was true. The pictures and colours are vivid, and gorgeous.

But the film lacked soul.

I haven't been used to martial arts films from Hong Kong, so I watch those films with new eyes. Still, the difference between those beautiful objets d'art and Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is clear to me. I was moved by the story in Lee's film, and it possessed a grace absent from the two others by Zhang Yi Mou.

The art of seeing

Like falling suddenly in love, this can happen if you become so captivated by the first impressions of your favourite subject matter that you photograph only its surface appearance. After photographing it again and again in the same way, and seeing the same results, you become bored and may drop it altogether, just like a surface familiarity only destroys many human relationships.

-Freeman Patterson, Photography and the Art of Seeing-

Mauritius this year

This article from a Mauritian daily sums up the challenges of the coming year for Mauritius: "A Glimpse of 2005".

The geography of it all

Beyond the compassion that I feel for the victims of the December 26 tsunami, I have also been fascinated by the geographical event. Scientists have been waiting for this for years. Can you imagine that the movement of those plates actually happened while we were witnesses to it? In the geological timespan, that's pretty historical! Here are some links to some (francophone) websites with great explanations of geological phenomenons and interesting maps.

- Notre planète, un site sur la géographie et ses divers domaines.
- La Terre, un autre site d'explications
- Une carte en temps réel des séismes sur la planète/ a real-time map of earthquakes on the planet.

Maybe the only way I can deal with this is to try and understand why Nature had to unleash its force there and then.

Tsunami effect at home

This is a link describing the effects of the earthquake in Mauritius and Rodrigues. I hadn't realised the effects had been that clear. It's very far from the disastrous consequences in the countries that were really hit. No one died in Mauritius or Rodrigues.

We used to only consider cyclones, and one long-dormant volcano as potential threats. That's going to change now.