Memory is a funny thing, and add nostalgia to the mix, then it is really odd. Since soon after I got my little holiday house in France, I’ve planned to plant a fig tree in the front garden. (Just got to paint the wall it will go against first…)
Why? Well I like figs, but they’re generally available in shops – I think the real reason is a sense of nostalgia.

Perhaps the first time I realized that you could grow your own food was visiting my grandmother’s garden in Sydney. She had a magnificent vegetable patch that covered virtually all of the quarter-acre block, but I don’t think it had made any impression on me before I taste a fig – my first I suspect – that she’d just picked from the tree.

In my memory it isn’t a very large fig tree, which since I was probably about five at the time means it must have been pretty small indeed, and it was covered with bird-netting (that was probably grandfather, he was big on bird netting, even though with this garden, and a holiday place stocked with scores of fruit trees, they had far more than they could eat or give away).

But it tasted great – and whenever I eat a fig I flash back to that moment. (Possibly because figs were, in my youth anyway, seldom sold in shops in Australia, so I didn’t eat many.)

Then I was thinking about the tree to shade the patio I’m now installing out the back. It’ll probably be a cherry, since that seems to be an appropriately luxuriant option, and they seem to do well here – mostly almost ripe now.

But suddenly from nowhere popped into my head “I’d love a mulberry tree”. Actually, I’ve never seen one around here, and I suspect that the winters might be too cold, but I realized why that produced warm and fuzzy feelings in me was, when I thought about it, another early memory. I must have been about seven, on our first family farm holiday (which involved staying with a family and participating in farm life).

I was off with the farm kids, about my age. We were all on ponies (they must have given me a very quiet one), and we rode up to a mulberry tree and started picking them. Of course they were soon out of reach, so the other kids started standing on their saddles to reach higher. So did I – then the inevitable happened, the pony walked out from under me, and I ended up sprawled on the rotting mulberries underneath.

I don’t know why this is a good memory – I undoubtedly got into deep trouble for the state of my yellow T-shirt (still remember that – how odd!), since I was supposed to never get mucky (and I think generally didn’t as a child, for lack of opportunity).

But as a result of that memory – possibly because it was a rare occasion when I was mixing with other kids on more or less common ground (they were used to visitors and probably under strict instructions to treat the visitors’ kids like their mates) — I come over all warm and fuzzy at the thought of mulberry trees.

* A very fine summary of the facts on teenage pregnancy. (One up to the blogosphere for quality of reporting.)

* How bad is the Australian environment getting? very bad.

* But some good news from the Arab world. The first ladies are getting together and cautiously, slowly, tackling some of the big women’s issues.

* In Australia, there’s finally been an attempt to wrest the over-medicalised birth process from the doctors. Predictably, they’re screaming.

* Ben Goldacre in his always delightful Bad Science column, does complete dissection of the claims of the value of drug seizures in Afghanistan.

* Sarah Vines in The Times notices how Labour men have turned on the women in the Cabinet. Oddly enough, I don’t recall any of them holding an important economic ministry, yet somehow Labour’s mess is now their fault.

* Some good news from Australia, where the grip of the car culture is, every slightly, being loosened. (CLose to my heart this one – when I think of how in my youth we’d drive for a pint of milk, even though the shops were a 10-minute walk away, I shudder.)

* Cheers for the Women’s Institute: its battle for decriminalisation of prostitution goes on.

* Then the environmental bad news: there’s fringe group running round saying global warming is due to water vapour (and not humans). Well it seems they’rte half-right – water vapour is an important factor, but it is going up because the temperature is going up due to carbon dioxide and other human emissions. And I don’t think it teaches us anything new, but this dramatic film of the fate of Greenland meltwater is powerful stuff.

I’ve been visiting the museums of Beaune, Burgundy, checking out the best medieval medical care available, and getting to grips with the production of white wine.

Practicing my French, to mixed effect.

And, reading some fine literary treatments of war.

It is possible to do this: when I looked at the bus/train timetable and saw the bus only took five minutes I figured it had to be. It took me about 25 minutes dragging a (lightish) suitcase. Walk straight out of Montchanin, turn first left tehre’s a sign), then left again at the roundabout, which puts you on to the new road down to the TGV station. It is mostly all lit, but given that there’s no pavement (footpath) it could be a touch hairy if you were doing this in the dark.

(It might prove necessary because the buses are very irregular.)

Just thought this info might come in handy for someone who’d otherwise have to do what I did – cross your fingers and take a punt…

I just found myself “shovelling” snow with a neighbour. I had a large garden fork which I was using to break up the snow/ice. He had a small broom to push it aside.

Don’t you just love how well prepared London is for, well, really any event at all…