Discovering the Downside, Sort Of: The Strikes (yarn supplies fortunately unaffected)

You may have heard that they've been having some social unrest here in France, with oil refineries shut down and long lines at gas stations and so forth, and periodic "days of action" with work stoppages ("la grève") across a large range of industries.  More power to them; but I admit I felt kind of anxious on finding out that train  strikes of unpredictable duration and severity were planned for the very three-week period when C and I were booked to attend conferences in Strasbourg and Frankfort and Paris, and in addition I was expecting my sister "Susanna"* to visit from the States and travel around with me for about ten days.  For a while it seemed likely that civil society might break down on the scale of May 1968, with riots and economic paralysis and serious instability lasting for months.  Oooops.

What actually happened was pretty mild by comparison, although coping with the travel arrangements was a bit of a nightmare: you never knew until the evening before your scheduled train trip whether the scheduled train would actually be running that day, and how or whether you were going to get to your intended destination if it wasn't.  So we had to make some adjustments to the original plans; for instance, Susanna ended up never making it down to our village in the Dordogne at all, but met up with me in nearby (okay, not all that nearby) Bordeaux, and we rendezvoused with C in Strasbourg.  Fortunately, I decided to go to Bordeaux on the same day that Susanna flew in, because it would have been hard to get out of the village on the succeeding days due to train cancellations.  In fact, the trains were canceled on the day I traveled too, but at least there were a few buses laid on to replace them, and I managed to figure out which bus I could get and scramble a few clothes and my laptop into an attache case in time to get down to the station.

While waiting for the bus I was fairly pessimistic about my chances of success, since I wasn't entirely sure whether the bus schedule might change unexpectedly or where it was supposed to stop or whether I was supposed to have a ticket for it (we have no actual train or bus station in our village, just a whistle-stop location along the train tracks, so like the inhabitants of the famed village of Chelm, if we want to leave town we have to go to another town to get our ticket for departure.  In practice, we just buy our tickets from the train conductor en route, when the train's not on strike).  But in fact it couldn't have been simpler: I stood by the side of the road next to the train "station", and a few minutes after the scheduled time a bus pulled up and stopped, and I hopped up to the driver and said "Est-ce que ce car va à Bordeaux St-Jean?", and it was, so off we went.

It took about four hours on the bus to complete the trip that the train makes in less than two and a half hours (hence the remark about Bordeaux not being all that nearby), since the roads in the countryside are narrow and winding and not very conducive to fast traffic.  Not that I'm complaining, mind you: there I was rolling through picturesque village squares and harvest fields with the golden October afternoon light on the golden Perigord limestone, looking at swans on little rivers and flowers in little gardens, and enjoying being on a bus again.  And when we finally got to Bordeaux, there was no way to buy a ticket for the ride I'd just completed and nobody to collect it if I did buy it, so hey, free bus ride.


I must say that all the French train personnel I encountered seemed invariably patient, helpful and friendly in all the turmoil of travel during la grève, which may not exactly match up with our expectations or recollections of French train personnel in other circumstances, but I calls 'em like I sees 'em.  The major syndicats or labor unions that were organizing the strikes seemed to be doing their best to inconvenience the government without pissing off the people too much, and the friendly attitudes helped with that.  As far as I can tell, the French in general were fairly sympathetic to the strikers in the first place, since almost everybody is upset about the proposed (and now enacted) reforms to the universal pension plan that inspired the strikes.   The administration points out that the pension plan is underfunded so there have to be some adjustments somewhere to balance the budget so it makes sense to raise the retirement age.  The syndicats respond that the average French worker is unemployed by the time they get to retirement age anyway (unemployment levels hit the oldest workers and the youngest workers hardest in France), so raising the retirement age just means for most people more years with no earnings, and they should balance the budget some other way.  Disagreement -> impasse -> la grève.   The collective action seems to have dwindled back down to normal at this point, though; many people are still seriously disgruntled but nobody's doing much about it.  For now. 




* Note: All pseudonyms in this blog (with the exception of the unimaginatively named "C" and "Y") were selected by the individuals whose names they conceal, so if you want to know why they're called that, you'll have to ask them.

Paleolithic Implements

Spending a few months living and working with a colleague (C) and her family in a small-town vacation home in the south of France has basically no downside.  Well, okay, we are a bit isolated from the center of things, and it takes a few hours by train to get to anything resembling a big city.  But we have quite a good supermarket and a semiweekly farmers' market with lots of local specialties, so we get by just fine.  Especially considering that local specialties here in the Perigord-Noir region include pate de foie gras and truffles and cheeses and mushrooms and chestnuts and walnuts and grapes and figs and apples and tomatoes and pretty much any other kind of temperate-zone fruit or vegetable you can think of, many of which we can just pick up off the roadside trees and bushes when we go out for a hike.  With picturesque medieval buildings and breathtaking views over the valley of the Dordogne and fresh French bakery breads and our own little fruit orchard, what's not to love?

Of course, some people might object to the bones, pelts and flints all over the house, but that's not a bug, it's a feature.  The reason we're here in this gorgeous back-of-beyond village in the first place is that it's smack in the center of an unusual region characterized by karst topography resulting from the dissolution of layers of carbonate rock, which is geologist-speak for the fact that the whole area is as riddled with holes as a Swiss cheese.  The immense number of caves made the region a very desirable residence for various populations of early humans (in fact, looking at some of the natural caves and so-called "troglodytes" or caves enhanced with walls and stonework by human inhabitants in historical times, I wonder whether this area might have had a higher population density in the days of some of the cave-dwellers than it does now!). 

Consequently, the place is a magnet for paleoanthropologists who study early humans and their activities, including my colleague's husband Y.  Studying the activities of early humans naturally involves reconstructing the activities of early humans, which can be a bit far removed from the activities of contemporary humans, but often turns out to be surprisingly handy or just plain cool.  There may not be much of a career future for professional flint knappers nowadays, but when you're out for a hike and happen to need a cutting edge for some purpose, it's remarkable how convenient it can be to have someone in the group who's able to spot a good piece of flint by the side of the trail and shear off a flake of it with a hammerstone (and those flint flakes are pretty darn sharp even before they're professionally knapped).

But today's culture of technical specialization means that even many skilled modern flint knappers don't know much about sewing, which is how I got recruited into the Neanderthal Craft Club.   It turns out that raw deerskin is comparatively easy to sew (although it was a bit painful while I was doing my first project, a deerskin thimble, but now that I've got the thimble it's much better).  For lack of the proper tools I've been sewing the skins with a steel crewel needle and waxed dental floss, but I've been promised my own stash of sinew and a bone needle with sharpening flint as soon as Y finds a good piece of sandstone to grind it.  I've also been promised an authentically prehistorically-crafted fossilized mammoth bone crochet hook (size G), which I feel confident will automatically make me the coolest person at the January Meetings Knitting Circle even if somebody is successfully proving the Riemann hypothesis in the same room at the same time.

And in fact, I'm finding out that there are things modern needleworkers can learn from the Neanderthal Craft Club, besides how to make things out of untanned deerskin.  For example, I was losing my temper yesterday evening over the absence of a fabric marking pen or tailor's chalk or any other substance  that would let me make visible but removable and non-damaging marks on knit fabric to trace with chain stitch embroidery (T-shirt baby quilt project, pix may follow).  Even if I knew where to get a  marking pen or tailor's chalk in a French village, I wouldn't know the French word to ask for it.  Tonight,  though, it occurred to me that the red ochre (hydrated iron oxide pigment, found all over the place in the form of dirt) that the early humans used in lots of their paintings seems to show up pretty well on a lot of surfaces.  And although Y tends to leave a trail of the stuff wherever he goes, it generally seems to wash off with little trouble.  So I borrowed a chunk of ochre from Y's toolbox, mixed it with water to form a sludgy liquid the way I've seen Y do it, and applied it to the fabric with a pointed stick to trace my embroidery lines.  What do you know: it works great.

(10 November: Corrected post title.)