Zeltus

After receiving a number of e-mails from a variety of people offering more information and details on the DICE Trials at Portland Bill in 1975, including a few corrections. But I’m quite pleased they were just a few corrections – my memory is still in pretty good nick then!

Anyway, I’ve edited my original web-page to include a few amendments and a couple of, I hope, interesting downloads. I found them interesting anyway.

Well, cellar rather than belfry, in our case. I only go into our cellars in our French house once or twice a year – mostly to either shut off and drain the water pipes or else to open them up again.

So it was a pleasant surprise when entering our first cellar to find a small clutch of Pipistrelle bats dozing the daylight hours away. I guess it must have been a really good year for wildlife generally here in the glorious Dordogne.

We often see them in the evening hours as our garden is essentially surrounded by out-buildings and what with the garden lighting, insects are attracted in and have difficulty getting out – and the bats know this all too well. I’m pretty certain we get the odd grey-coloured Daubenton’s bat and we certainly see some larger bats – but they fly so fast it’s hard to identify them. These Pipistrelles roosting like this make the job of identification much easier!

They seemed quite unalarmed at my presence and even the flash on the camera left them completely unfazed. Nevertheless, I tried not to take too many liberties and left them in peace as soon as I got my shot.

Unfortunately, entering our second cellar was a less fun experience. A pipe had sprung a leak, God knows when, and it was our side of the meter – so we have to pay for whatever water leaked away. It’s not that serious – we have the cheapest water in the Dordogne AND it’s spring water to boot. Fortunately, plumbing, like electrickery, holds no fears for me and it was soon fixed. I guess the higher pressure caused when the street piping was renewed in the summer sought out the weak points.

Despite all the clever-clever Colour Studios and Colour pickers out there, I always have trouble deciding what colours to use in any particular theme. It never used to be this bad – Web-safe colours were the norm (all 216 of ‘em!) and before that, UNIX X11 windowing systems relied on a simple flat file called "rgb.txt" – which is still distributed with modern Linux distros today.

So I figured that if I looked for I would find a .css file of these X11 colours, ready for me to pick’n'choose some well-known favourites such as cadetblue or indianred. I am used to cut’n'pasting rather than using fancy IDEs, so although I do use Dreamweaver, I certainly don’t use all of it’s cleverer functions – one day maybe.

But a search failed to find any such file. It’s not surprising on reflection, as it really is of limited use – a .css file that size would simply slow the whole page load process down to a crawl – something Internet Explorer users already seem to find tolerable but us Firefox, Chrome, Opera and yes, Safari users certainly don’t.

Anyway, to cut a not-very-long story to a really-short story, I grabbed hold of a copy of an rgb.txt file and a few swift typically-arcane commands in vi, my favourite UNIX editor, I ended up with a humungous .css file containing all the X11 colours as simple class entries for both color: and background-color: properties.

And here it is…

As is ever the case, I did have some trouble with IE8 – it simply didn’t want to display the .css content the way I wanted to display it. So although the production of the file was a matter of minutes at most, I probably took over two hours to produce the page describing it! That’s the way the Microsoft biscuit crumbles I guess.

Anyway, I want to return to font handling now – the world has changed since my last post on this…

Technorati Tags: colours, css, rgb, rgb.txt, X11

The rain has brought out the salamanders in the forests. Yet another reminder as to why we own a house in France! Not native to the UK, they are slightly startling when first seen by us Brits. The ones around here are bright yellow and spotted, although there is a fair amount of variation around Europe (everything from pure black, to bars rather than spots and orange rather than yellow) Quite common (everything is here, it seems) they are not that often seen because they prefer to be mobile during the dusk and night time

Regrettably, the best chance of seeing one is probably when a car has run it over – like frogs and toads, they don’t hurry across nice warm tarmac.

I didn’t try to handle the one I spotted – nor did I let the dogs eat it! Their warning colours are there for a reason – the skin exudes a toxic substance that I prefer not to get on me. Although I am pretty confident that they are not that poisonous that they can’t be handled briefly. But why disturb the creature any more than I have to? I found mine by brushing the ground litter away with a stick – something I always do in the hope of finding some edible mushrooms – alas, after all this time, I never have. But the salamander was a much appreciated consolation prize.

Like the picture of the dormouse, I “borrowed” this photo from Google Images. I am ashamed to say I failed to carry a camera around with me yesterday – s’always the way, the one day you need a tool, it’s not to hand.

After far too long a break, I have found something I felt worth the effort of posting. One of the delights of owning property here in rural France is that we are surrounded with wildlife that back in the UK, is rarely, if ever seen. A young Hoopoe visits our garden most days for an evening meal, Buzzards abound, bats are all over the sky of an evening and even at the smaller scale of things, European stick insects and Praying Mantis’ are to be found if one looks carefully enough.

Of course, we also get less welcome visitors – particularly at harvest time, when mice are evicted from their field nests and come looking to us for a new home. Mostly field mice, rather more rarely, harvest mice and one memorable occasion, when a whole family of pygmy shrews moved in. In general, I use live traps when I can (that is, when we’re here) and simply move the critters I catch to the outskirts of the village and release them in a hedgerow. The incredibly aggressive but completely harmless pygmy shrews were very vocal in their disapproval of me evicting them but it’s that or the old-fashioned spring trap and rodent heaven as the alternative. I have resorted to killing traps on rare occasions – we have felt under siege once or twice and felt we needed to get rid of the uninvited guests asap. Fortunately, last night it was one of the live traps that did it’s job and this is what turned up in it.

I didn’t immediately recognise the beast – about the size of a gerbil and with a furry tail – well, that alone meant it wasn’t a mouse. I was rather confused as if the tail had been quite bushy, then I would have instantly have thought “Dormouse!” – but the Common Dormouse, Muscardinus avellanarius, is an attractive gingery brown colour and the Edible Dormouse, or (Glis glis) is a bit larger and more silvery-grey in colour. Whereas my specimen had a very attractive coat in grey, white and black. A quick look thru’ my books soon identified it as Eliomys quercinus, the Garden Dormouse, very common in the south of Europe and generally completely harmless. Not that commonly seen as they don’t often come into houses and they are nocturnal. The only problem that might occur is that they are communal creatures and tend to be quite noisy. So I’ve set a few more traps to see if we have more of them resident. I released this one as per normal but if we do have a glut, then I’m afraid the spring traps will be the next line of defence. Thankfully, it’s not a family of Glis glis – they can be a real nuisance, noisy, overly plentiful and quite happy to chew thru’ cables, wood pipes – anything really.

I’m afraid I had to steal this picture off’ve images.google.com. I didn’t see much value in trying to keep the animal until the next day simply to take a photograph of it. So I released it as soon as possible.

Technorati Tags: dormice, dormouse, edible, france, glis glis, harvest, mice, mouse

Our Wedding Photograph Album was pretty much the first HTML I ever wrote. And it certainly looked a bit frayed and tatty at the edges, what with the advent of Flash and mature Javascript technologies now in full use by, well, pretty much everyone.

It’s now coming up to ten years (yes, really, ten years!) since the happy day, So I have taken the opportunity to update the style of the album, to pretty much, more-or-less, match the style of my main “Zeltus” web-pages.

This is probably the last photo set I shall host directly – in future, all my albums will be hosted on Flickr.

Here’s hoping the reminder of the album’s existence, with it’s nice shiney new skin, will bring back happy memories for all of those who were there.

Technorati Tags: cameracraft, cornwall, falmouth, wedding

Today is St. Hilary’s Day. A long, long time ago he was a Bishop of Poitiers, not far up the road from here and he wrote some theological works considered to be quite important by those who care about such things.

Some posh Universities and Colleges name one of their teaching sessions Hilary Term, almost certainly because the start of the session is more or less somewhere around St. Hilary’s Day. You probably have to be posh and privileged for this to matter to you.

More interestingly, today is supposed to be the coldest day of the year.

On a down to earth level, this is patently untrue for this year but if it at least marks the turning of the tide and from here on in Spring beckons, then that’s fine by me. It’s the first day this year I’ve been able to get out of the house and potter about in the workshop and garden a bit.

Technorati Tags: coldest, foklore, hilary, spring

Summer gave way all to easily to Autumn and whilst it was a superb season while it lasted, Autumn is now gently allowing Winter to creep in. Time to start preparing to move out until the warm weather returns in Spring.

The leaves on the trees, after the best display we’ve ever seen, are now dropping rapidly, and it is time to pollard our Poplar trees.

The French are very enthusiastic about the practice of pollarding. And generally I am happy to believe they know what they are doing and follow their example. This decorative pollarding does mean that an otherwise large tree is kept to a reasonable garden size. The French leave a finger on each stump and I blithely follow their lead. I’ve no idea what it achieves but I would hazard a guess it’s to encourage the tree to sprout new growth as soon as possible in the Spring.

The newly pollarded trees look very bare and sorry for themselves. Not at all a pretty result. But in the Spring, they’ll all come good and look very attractive throughout the Summer.

Before coming across this form of pollarding, my understanding of the word was to describe a large mature Elm or Oak that had been completely decapitated in it’s youth as a source of a decent stave, long, long ago and had survived the experience by growing ever more lustily.

Indeed, many of the large, mature trees seen today (or rather, where Elms are concerned, the pictures of large mature trees ) quite probably underwent this treatment. Yet most of us think this is the normal and natural shape of a mature tree. Does anybody still remember the Umbrella Tree, near the bottom of Salford road on the hill up to Cranfield? A magnificent example that like so many, succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease in the 70’s, it was a classic mature pollard.

Finally, despite their love of the practice, the French appear to have no special name for it. They at best make use of the verb tailler – “to prune”. Sometimes, French is a romantic, expressive language. And at other times, it is quite earthy and plain – there seems to be very little middle ground.

This also highlights one of the benefits of the English language – very little of it is English, it’s all been stolen from other languages. And is all the richer for it. The French attempt to protect their language from external influence is, of course, a fool’s errand.

Technorati Tags: autumn, elm, oak, pollard, prune, tailler, winter

Today is Armistice Day, when, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the First World War ended.

It is a public holiday here in France, which is a jolly decent idea. At 11 o’clock – or some time around then – the French are not noted for their timekeeping skills! – D The Maire, attended by all the local Veterans, a bunch of ex-pats, a pleasingly large number of children and other inhabitants of this commune, congregate around the war memorial, just outside our house, and hold a short dedication. One of the children made a short speech, explaining why it is important that this ceremony is relevant and must be continued.

One particularly poignant part of the proceedings is when the Maire, as he does every year, read out the names of all the dead commemorated on the memorial, and at each name we responded “Mort pour France”. That’ll make sure no-one forgets the names of the fallen.

As ever, clicking on the photos throws up a larger, more detailed one.

Of course, my family has it’s own names to commemorate – I recommend a visit to the Roll of Honour. This site is a really good way to encourage both Remembrance and the upkeep and maintenance of all war memorials.

The Maire emphasised that this was not a purely French ceremony. It commemorates all those who fell in all wars. And as such, he thanked us all, les étrangers in particular, for attending. We British do tend to stand out a bit as we all wear our Poppies. The French flower of Remembrance is the Bleuet, or Cornflower. It’s a bit of a shame that they don’t utilise it’s beauty more but simply have a basic stylised motif on an old-fashioned sticky lapel flag.

The event ends with everyone moving to the Mairie, for Pineau (umm, French sherry, for want of a better description) and Kir, so that everyone can meet and greet each other. All in all, a dignified, simple and expressive ceremony that makes exactly the right impression.

If memory serves my right, until the Falklands War, the Act of Remembrance in the UK was rather muted – there was certainly no nationwide two minute silence, T.V. coverage tended to be limited to the laying of wreathes ceremony at the Cenotaph. The general malaise regarding this event was surely best summed up when that twerp Michael Foot turned up at the Cenotaph wearing a brown tweed jacket. Nowadays, most people in the UK seem to make an honest and genuine effort to honour the sacrifices made by the Forces in all wars and engagements. And quite rightly too. I do however have a few qualms about how early Poppies are appearing on lapels, especially on the lapels of politicians and media personalities. I’d like to think it’s a truly respectful statement but the cynic in me wonders if there is not a touch of “I wear mine longer than you, I’m therefore more righteous” creeping in to the whole business. I hope I am wrong.

Technorati Tags: armistice, bleuet, ceremony, lovesey, parker, poppy, remembrance, war

The train was quite crowded, so the U.S. Marine walked the entire length looking for a seat, but the only seat left was taken by a Poodle owned by a well-dressed, middle-aged French woman.

The war-weary Marine asked, “Ma’am, may I have that seat?”

The French woman just sniffed and said to no one in particular, “Americans are so rude. My little Fifi is using that seat.”

The Marine walked the entire train again, but the only seat left was under that dog. “Please, ma’am. May I sit down? I’m very tired.”

She snorted, “Not only are you Americans rude, you are also arrogant!”

This time the Marine didn’t say a word, he just picked up the little dog, tossed it out the train window, and sat down.

The woman shrieked, “Someone must defend my honour! Put this American in his place!”

An English gentleman sitting nearby spoke up…

“Sir, you Americans often seem to have a penchant for doing the wrong thing. You hold the fork in the wrong hand. You drive your cars on the wrong side of the road. And now, sir, you’ve thrown the wrong bitch out the window.”

Technorati Tags: humor, humour