Over on My London Your London I’ve a review of the Union Theatre’s fine production of Stars in the Morning Sky, a translation of Alexander Galin’s account of a group of prostitutes forced out of Moscow in 1980 in the pre-Olympics “clean-up”. It is the first in a series of productions with female directors as part of the theatre’s anniversary celebrations – that this requires still special arrangements is, well, depressing…
I just put a very muddy pair of jeans into the washing machine. This explains how they got that way…
I am writing this in a guardpost on the mur de le pest. Part of a ring of fortifications built to keep the plague out of the bulk of France in the 18th century, after it broke out in Marseilles. The guardroom is still totally watertight; it’s 2m thick at the base, the walls really rock solid but without cement – only plaster on the inside to block the wind.
That’s handy, since it is raining quite heavily outside. But even the ancient chimney, just a hole in the corner of the roof now since it has lost its hood, is letting in barely a drop, so well designed is it, and though it looks like it still draws, since the local youths obviously use this as a den, and the old fireplace as a cooker.
The walls rise straight to about six foot then it looks like there was a second story of wood and a door to directly access that from the ‘clean’ side of the wall. The floor level entrance door may have opened out into a vestibule area after the first wall gate, reached by a mere goat track from the plague side. There’s a ruined building on the other side, perhaps half the size of this.
At the floor level the walls start to curve inward, at first gently, then more rapidly and large flat stones about 4ocm wide and of varying lengths fill the gap. The builders made life easy on one side by using the natural rock – although chipped into neat straight lines, to reach almost to the first floor.
I suppose these are all national monuments now, but you could make quite a nice little holiday home out of this living: quarters on the ground floor, sleeping upstairs – fine for all but the depths of winter.
How I got here – well there lies a tale … it is what I think of my “mad dogs and Englishwomen†day of my holiday – usually have one, where I have mad plans that I make happen somehow or another.
So having read a guide to the region around Avignon I decided that I’d like to visit the plague wall, built in 1720. The guide suggested started out from Langes. So I got to the tourist office to ask about buses. Much head-scratching ensues. Only one bus a day goes to and from Langes, and the “to†has already gone. I finally get them to hand me the timetable; and work out for myself a route.
read more
No, I’m not about to start a debate about the nature of history – just to note that the History Carnival No 48 is now up on Aardvarchaeology, a part of the science blogs empire – but it is still the great collection of posts we know and love. The emperor Caligula is looking absolutely fab.
Fascinating piece in Le Monde yesterday (not online) about finding chimpanzee “tools” that are more than 4,000 years old.
Before this study, chimpanzees were first observed using stone tools in the 19th century. Now, thanks to this new archaeological find, tool use by chimpanzees has been pushed back thousands of years. The authors suggest this type of tool use could have originated with our common ancestor, instead of arising independently among hominins and chimpanzees or through imitation of humans by chimpanzees.
John Hawks finds the study solid, which is good enough for me.
I found a comment in the Le Monde article by the inevitable critic of the study curious. Helene Roche, from CNRS at Nanterre, was quoted as saying “Pourquoi minimiser l’apport de l’homme.” (Why minimise the contribution of humans?)
Why is it that people have to try so hard to say we aren’t animals – are totally separate from the world from which we emerged?
Booking tickets on the SCNF site you have the option of printing them yourself, much handier than wrestling with a credit card at the station. But all I had to hand was bright green paper. So what’s the odds: on the way down to Avignon no problems – although the guard couldn’t find the picture page in my passport.
On the way back I get a lecture about how these are only supposed to be printed on white paper. I refrained from asking him where that was written …
This was my first-class splashout – a whole extra 10 euros, but really, for larger seats, it wasn’t worth even that small supplement – snooty people (had a mobile phone row), and no extras like free tea or coffee. I’ll be going second class next time.
(Okay – I may have gone mad with the camera – this may be a little more detail of ancient Glanum (near Avignon) than most people want: feel free to stop at any time…)
But to start with the killer pic … of the restored imperial temple:
You’ve seen the grand mausoleum and triumphal arch, which was really the back end of town, now you walk up the hill over olive groves that must cover the main residential quarters (the whole town covers almost 99 acres) to the entrance to the archaeological site. You are directed up the hill, the sharply angled limestone spur for a grand view over the city and up to the pass — cut now for the modern road — that gave this location its importance for many years on the trade route to Marseilles.
(That back of the head belongs to a very pleasant man from Marseilles with whom I had a chat that went beyond the usual “are you here on holiday?†to a discussion of the conundrums of the site, including the area that looks very like a theatre but apparently is associated with an aqueduct. And the fact that the “house of Cornelius Sulla†is dated as Gallo-Greek, but the name suggests otherwise. He explained that the Romans had a pretty big place even before the army turned up.)
About