Kicking your way around London

Some people say about the UK that is home of football. There is such an enthusiasm and passion about that little piece of rubber that it is difficult to argue (even if other nations have open their own door to that sport). World Freestyle Football Champion, Andrew Henderson, takes us through the streets of London like never before. After all, there may be other ways to coming home, to coming home... Football's coming home!


Love Your Journey from Wallop Creative on Vimeo.

Tour de Force

Wheels of good fortune.

Every July a bunch of (sport) addicts jump on their bicycle and tour one of the largest countries in mainland Europe, France. Crazy. They do that in the hottest month of the year., under a harsh sunshine. Crazier. And, to boot, they dress up in multicolour lycras and get cheered up by Satanists, Bull-heads, Lunatics, Chickens... Craziest.

The Tour de France is clearly a frenzy, embraced by the masses. It is truly a popular phenomenon in my home country and beyond. In fact there is a French idiom that describes a crazy person as someone who has "a little bike in her head" (avoir un petit velo dans la tete). But no matter how mad you think it is to embark in such a physical performance, you may want to reassess your referential schemes with the following video.

A bike in the head.

Martyn Ashton takes the £10k carbon road bike used by Team Sky's Bradley Wiggins & Mark Cavendish for a ride with a difference. With a plan to push the limits of road biking as far as his lycra legs would dare, Martyn looked to get his ultimate ride out of the awesome Pinarello Dogma 2. This bike won the 2012 Tour de France - surely it deserves a Road Bike Party!

Shot in various locations around the UK and featuring music from 'Sound of Guns'. Road Bike Party captures some of the toughest stunts ever pulled on a carbon road bike:



To read further:

• Ride on the edge of difference, more bike stunts from Scotland
• Downhill or down ill, an article about the possibilities to ski in the London Tube!
• Now this is a downturn, a new way to consider defenestration for failing tycoons from the City
• Thinking out of the box, and the beach, or how beach sports can also find a new expression in Urban environments.

Big mountains through a viewfinder

I have already mentioned Sebastien Montaz and his picturesque work on this blog. This mountain guy has just invested time in a massive photo shoot to create a giant 3.15 Gigapixel picture by stitching 297 high resolution photos together. This picture includes every peak from the Argentière glacier near Chamonix... You can start navigating that picture below, but clicking through this link will allow you to be pin-pointed to a few "details" a la Where is Wally? A pair of skiers here, a climber there... Explore!

In memoriam

We walk down the street, our street. It's finally spring time in London. Cherry blossoms are paving the way, the sky is blue, and we have smiles on our faces. We walk down our street and suddenly feel something is off. There is a grey cloud over our block. The always-opened convenience store has its shutter down. Our smiles are fading away as we see people congregating in front. The regulars who usually dash in and out of the premise are for once staying tight, pausing, discussing. The eyes are reddened. Something has happened. This afternoon, Rana, the shop tenant, passed away.

Assimilation.

When we moved to the UK we wondered if one day we would feel at home in this country. 7 years later, we have definitely started to blend in. We pour a dash of milk in our tea; we find Victorian terrace houses spacious; we got to terms with unscrewing the cap of a decent bottle of wine; we even roast meat on Sundays... And yet, I know that we will never be (or want to be) fully British. But despite that everlasting cultural gap, something happened Sunday: we felt part of the community, sharing the communal sorrow of the family and the regulars who used the shop. We are said to leave in one of the London's villages, and it certainly feels so in this dark day.

For years, we affectionately referred to Rana as "the little gentleman", "the husband of the little lady"... For most of our family members and friends who came home and visited the shop, he will only be remembered as such. Rana was a figure of the neighbourhood with his grey beard, his turban, and his strong voice. We were seeing him almost everyday but it took us years to learn his name. And it was only last week that we dared asking his wife the right spelling and his surname, in order to send him some properly spelled wishing well.

Whether Rana was a good husband, a good father, a good business man, a good man... we cannot tell. Not that we had doubts, to be clear, but it is just a sheer lack of knowledge as we only had just a few glimpses here and there of his life outside the shop. It is also that a community, tight proximity with strangers.

Farewell.

Nevertheless we are sad, full of sorrow to lose of good neighbour, a pillar of the community. I will remember his clear eyes through his glasses looking at me and my son, distilling some parental wisdom. I will remember him slipping some treats in my little one's pocket behind my back with a wink and a shhhhh... I will remember his "goodbye little man" in his unmatched accent. I will remember a welcoming man who made us feel at home on this block, on this street, on this street, on our street. Rest in peace.

But why?

Credit photo: Caro Willis via Flickr

Precision questioning: the joy of parenthood.

As you may know, I am the lucky dad of a 3-year old boy. At that age, after the so-called Terrible 2's, it is supposed to be a delight to raise a child: as he is old enough to interact and understand, but still sufficiently young to avoid demonstrating rebellious attitudes. On paper, the ideal. but what this paper's small prints hide from you is that there is still some maintenance to that presumably well-oiled machine. And the keyword is "why?".

Kids want to make sense of their surroundings, of the words, of the people, of philosophical topics and astronomical phenomenons, of the weather, of the behaviour and social conventions... Each of these items is like an endless Russian doll: you start by answering a first seemingly easy question, and it triggers another one, that will raise another one, and another one... After the twentieth interrogations your rational adult brain is no longer able to get the thread of thoughts that led you to answer "why clouds are white?" whilst the conversation started on "what was a can opener?"!

Along the process, you try your best to provide answers that make sense, and keep you on the glorious altar your child puts you on. You are the source of truth. You are a well of wisdom. You are the equal to Aesop, Plato, Homer, Nietzsche, Kant... At least in their eyes, and you certainly don't want to contradict them (it feels so good). But frankly, sometimes their questioning skills are such that you reach the end of your knowledge, and most likely the end of your patience. And suddenly the answer gets less elaborate: "why is the..." he says, "because it's like that!" you interrupt.

Educational non-sense.

If children ask a ton of questions, my personal burden tallies to two tons... That is the curse of raising a bi-cultural kid. Two cultures, two languages, twice the fun. You not only need to handle the Why's but also the Pourquoi's. He clearly dissociates both cultures, so he naturally wants to make sense of twice more things but, to paraphrase Dr. Zeus' Oh, The Places You'll Go!, "sometimes they won't, because they don't".

Let's take the example of this famous nursery rhyme:

Hey diddle diddle,
The Cat and the fiddle,
The Cow jumped over the moon,
The little Dog laughed to see such fun,
And the Dish ran away with the Spoon

You have to reckon that such a infantine text, beyond the rhetorical rhymes is a gold mine for questioning children. How can a cow jump over the moon? Why is the dish running? Why our do plates do not run? Why a fiddle? Why? Why? WHYYYYY?

As a French, I have been educated with La Fontaine's fables and have learned that there is often a moral to what seems to be a light hearted text. So I looked hard at the text trying to find some sense myself from these lines. And since I could not, I started to check between the lines.

A long time ago, Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales opened my eyes to the hidden Freudian messages interwoven in Grimm's stories. So as my son was half asleep in his bed, I sat behind his bed, put a pipe in my mouth, and started to say "hmm, hmm...". Diddle? An alteration to Dildo, a phallic symbol? Maybe. The cat? Ok, that is the female symbol, that is straight forward. The cow over the moon? A sexist reference to the providing mother, and the happiness of breast-feeding? Well... I was clearly on the wrong path, and was glad that this thought process had only occurred in my brain and not verbalised to the now fast-asleep child. That would have pushed me down the altar for good.

To regain my pride, I looked at other cultural references and even cryptology. To no avail. Were these lines an acrostic, like The Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamond song? No luck. In the end, I resolved myself to conclude that it may just be one of the famous British non-sense. That was not totally fulfilling an outcome, but quite handy. I could indeed blame my host culture for teaching non-sense to generations of future Eton graduates. Because of course on the other side of the Channel, obviously, we are way better. Aren't we?

Absurdity united

My mind is filled with French songs gathered during my own childhood, but frankly my Why-years are so far behind that I have not questioned or even listed to their lyrics for a very long time. But doing so, it revealed that absurdity was a shared value in nursery times:

Maman, les petits bateaux
French lyrics	English translation
Maman, les petits bateaux	Mum, do small boats
Ont-ils des jambes?	Have legs?
Mais oui mon gros beta	Of course, you silly,
S'ils n'en avaient pas,	If they hadn't,
Ils ne marcheraient pas!	They couldn't walk!

Not only is the child almost bullied by his mother, but seriously what does that song mean? Why would a mother assert that boats are legged? Why? Why? I was suddenly regressing to my 3rd year on Earth. And my convictions collapsed.

If our childhood is nothing but nonsense, how are we supposed to build our psyche? Maybe our children are right in questioning us... After all, the French idiom says that the "truth comes out of children's mouth". So from now on, I give my little one an even greater attention when he turns back to me with his interrogations. I am more patient with the real Plato of the household.

Finding the line, your line.

These days I feel somehow melancholic, missing the mountains and their exhilarating outdoor life that goes with (and probably a tiny tad of the childhood years during which I experienced it last). I am seeing myself slowly drifting in a complacent urban life.

"Metro. Boulot. Dodo." as the French triptych summarises it: Tube, Work, Sleep... Nothing to get too excited about you have to admit. But I am convinced that there is, deep beneath the greyed out city routine, some lines that take you right back to who you truly are, to where your roots are...

I loved the poem and how fellow Mountain Dweller, Sebastien Montaz-Rosset, visualised it. Enjoy the weight of the words and the lightness of the images.

Revelation, a Visual Poem. from sebastien montaz-rosset on Vimeo.

The Saturday Shot #29: winter lock-down

There was no real choice this weekend but to choose a snowy reference as my Saturday Shot. The UK is under a snowstorm that started on Friday and has lasted so far the whole weekend, disrupting the whole public transportation system, stranding flights... No record yet of a 12-hour trip in Eurostar due to snow flakes on the rails so far, but I would not be surprised that such an announcement will soon hit the news. After all, although this country is clearly used to the tempered climate which by definition includes warm summers and cold winters, it seems that every snow fall is a revelation and a surprise to the transport authorities. As if it was totally uncommon to see snow in winter. I mean, we do not leave in Bamako for cryst(al) sake!

As you can tell, I am disappointed by that weather, which may be surprising for the regular reader of these lines, as a few weeks back I declared my love for the winter wonders... In fact what really upsets me is not the snowfall itself, it is the irony of the situation. I am stuck in the UK, with a plane grounded due to "adverse weather" as British Airways puts it... whilst it should have flown me to Switzerland for a weekend of ski indulgence! Comical, ironic... Frustrating!

Anyway, there is a silver lining to any cloud, no matter how dark and snowy. Mine was the fabulous time I was able to spend with my little one making snowmen, snowball fights, etc. in white London parks. A decent compensation. I will thus leave you with a nice quote on love and snow from Canadian poet Margaret Atwood, and some pictures about the greatness of that weather from my portfolio...

"The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love." Margaret Atwood (1939-)

And some frozen shots:

Olympic enlightenment for 2013

It is that time of the year when one looks forward with good resolutions, and backward with wisdom, a sense of fulfilment, or possibly a tad of shame because that same person realises that this year's resolutions looks a little bit too similar to last year's... When I personally look back at 2012, two events stand out: my son's first badge of honour as a 2-year old skier (he just grabbed a couple more by the way), and the Olympics in London.

I will not dwell on the earlier as paternal pride is self-explanatory, let alone for a mountain dweller... But I wanted to come backs on the Olympics, from a different angle than the one I originally adopted at their completion. This time around I want to look at two of their most iconic symbols: the rings and the flame.

Circles of excellence.

If the Olympic flag with its interlocked rings is a universal iconography, I was amazed that many ignore its symbol. Five rings, five colours, represent the five continents interwoven in unison and parity. Oceania is obviously blue, the old industrial Europe was granted the coal-like black, the Americas were attributed the red, sun-drenched Africa is yellow and Asia green.

Stretching that basic concept, graphic designer Gustavo Sousa worked from statistical data to produce a series of infographics that followed the same legend. It was soon to be realised that Baron de Coubertin's idea of five egalitarian continents is not viable outside the sport fields.

For instance:

Source: Fubiz, more of these infographics here

Unity in a melting pot.

The Olympic flame travels from Greece and comes to light up a cauldron in a spectacular manner and to burn through the fortnight as a testament of the passion that unites the participants. People usually recall the torch or potentially how it was lit. In Barcelona for instance, an archer shot an arrow to ignite the furnace. In Grenoble, back in 1968, a microphone was stuck on the chest of the Olympian who ran up an endless flight of stairs with the torch in hand, letting everyone hear his heartbeat pounding at a tremendous pace... But who actually remembers the cauldron. No one. Once the games are over cities are left with a metal disc that is prone to catch the rain and rust... But not London's.

Thomas Heatherwick was given a simple mandate: make it static... He ignored the brief and went back to the symbol to create a memorable cauldron that actually meant something. 204 copper petals, one for each competing nation, were gathered along the opening ceremony on long pipes before being lit up, and at the climax of the night, each individual flame converged to create a single, united fire.

image source: LOCOG

I like that design because it is memorable, beautiful and more importantly meaningful. The medium becomes the message...

With that last thought on people differences and the ability to bring them together in unison, I very much look forward to 2013 for further enlightenment. Happy new year to you, reader of these lines. 

City of light(s)

Paris was originally nicknamed The City of Light because it was the European epicentre of enlightenment in the 18th century. Later on, from 1828, Paris began lighting the Champs-Elysées with gas lamps. It was the first city in Europe to do so, and so earned more broadly the nickname "La Ville-Lumière" or The City of Light.

This stop-motion video is a great showcase of that later definition with a scenic tour of the French capital by night and through the lens of its day and night glows... Enjoy!


PARIS, THE CITY OF LIGHT (FULL LENGTH HD VERSION) from Trak on Vimeo.

Massive destruction cheeses

I recently wrote about the different perspective of the US and France on the military through the prism of children toys, but we could talk at length about the ambiguous relationship to weapons of that martial nation. The recent Oregon shootings, combined to the subsequent debate on the validity of the contemporary US Constitution second amendment interpretation highlights that at least/at last there is a realisation that something is not right... Such a debate is healthy and so are the interesting partisan campaign for the different parties. Loved that one, wonder why!

Continent hoping

Around the globe.

I have shared already the adventures around the globe of Seattle-originated jigger Matt. He seems to have a converted some followers to the why-travel-like-everyone-with-a-cheap-camera-around-your-neck-when-you-can-do-more-stupid-things philosophy. Let me indeed introduce you to another fantasist traveller, Sam, who has decided to go continent hoping... Literally.

 

Backflipping Around The World from SamTheCobra on Vimeo.

 

Around me, myself and I.

During a 107-day summer tour, he was able to backpack and backflip around the world. That body-spinning arguably led him to reflect about himself, as if going around the world, around his own centre of gravity allowed him to give a new spin to his life...

After all, French poet Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560) had it nailed down in the 16th century when he came up with the prose: "Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has made a fine voyage, or has won the Golden Fleece, and then returns, experienced and knowledgeable, to spend the rest of his life among his family!".

So what to think about Sam? Arguably one need a goal in life, whatever it is. He found his path, a gimmick, and turned it into a video. It is nicely edited, exotic at times, and it makes your own head spin, not only because of the somersaults but also because of the tons of memories his wanderings recall in the mind of other travellers (like me for instance). Yet, as eluded to in the introduction this is just another variation of what was a brilliant idea by Matt Harding and his Where the hell is Matt? franchise. So nice, but just nice.


To read further:

• Around the world in 80 seconds, a stop-motion video (check out the painstaking exercise of the globe manual animation)
• Walk around the Loch, walk around the world or how Robert Carlisle makes you travel beyond Scotland
• Rock around the world the original adventures of Matt the backpacking dancer

The Saturday Shot #28: at my finger tips

Tick, tock, tick, tock... Captain Hook may be scared of that repetitive sound, but I am personally delighted. Each iteration is another second that gets us closer to my annual highlight. Although a couple years back I could have cursed that frozen water which stranded me twice in twelve months in France and the US, the white powder has since regained its place in my heart. I was in Seattle last week for what was the second anniversary of my crazy flight back home, my heart skipped a beat when I heard of snowfalls in Europe. An ambiguous mixture of anxiety and anticipation. But since the UK was spared for now, the earlier gave easily way to the positivity.

However Some say that positivism is always a tiny step away from lunacy. I think that this video speak for it. Best watch in full screen mode...

GoPro HD: Avalanche Cliff Jump with Matthias Giraud from GoPro on Vimeo.

So let's conclude this weekly post with a philosophical touch. As a way to reassure myself that my fixation on snow flakes is nothing but enlightenment:

"The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself." Lao Tzu (6th Century BC)

Assimilation?

It is now blatantly obvious that the regularity of my posts have reduced. There are many reasons to that situation, amongst which the delightful arrival of a little one, three years ago, who has since been playing a growing part in my daily workload. But that is not all.

Walking in the valley.

In fact, I started that blog with the conviction that as a foreigner in an alien country I would find tons of topics to talk about. That I would be able to endlessly dissert on the cultural disparities between my referential scheme and the civilisation I was now living in. And it has indeed been for years a great source of inspiration.

But I reckon that nowadays I am less and less surprised by the Brits. It is maybe what people call assimilation: I have blended in, with my British-born son playing the mixologist role by naturally seeding insights on an on-going basis. It feels that I am no longer looking at this society from the outside, or from up there as I say in the above description... I am now in the valley, amongst the passer-by's down here. For god sake, I had to roast some beef on Sunday last week, that sums it all!

But don't get me wrong though, I am still not citizen of her royal majesty and have no intention to become one at this point of time. There are still many of these French/British paradoxes that remain true to who I am. I am still puzzled by some idioms and in turn my French sometimes catch my friends off-guard.

And yet something has changed.

Euro pudding.

In fact, I watched this week one of my favourite movies, Cedric Klappish's L'auberge Espagnole (i.e. Pot Luck or Euro Pudding). For anyone who has lived an Erasmus-like experience, the one-year adventures of a French economy graduate student in a Barcelonan multicultural flat-share will resonate.

But Cedric Klappish and I share more than a first name. Many of his lines in his filmography find a positive echo in my own life. I quoted him in my wedding ceremony for instance. And there was a sentence in L'Auberge Espagnole which really encapsulate how I probably feel today. Loosely translated that would sound like:

When you arrive in a city, you see streets in perspective. Lines of meaningless buildings. Everything is unknown, virgin territory. Here we are. And later we will have walked these streets. We will have reached the vanishing point. We will have gotten to know the buildings. We will have lived stories with people. When we will have lived in that city, walked this street ten, twenty, a thousand times... At that point of time the city will be yours, because we will have lived it.

L’auberge espagnole, Xavier.

The Saturday Shot #27: let it fall.

It is this time of the year yet again! If autumn is usually synonymous of doom, gloom, spleen... For me it is an Ideal. Autumn first of all is a brilliant subject for photography. I loved walking the Japanese back-country a few years ago to capture its reddening. I like clicking around the parks in Paris or elsewhere to snap as the ground blends with the remainder of the canopy. More recently I have started enjoying sharing with my little one the exhilarating feeling to kick dead leaves around (a shared pleasure I can testify).

But one more reason for enjoying fall as our friends from the other side of the Atlantic refer to it... is that it precedes Winter! This year, more than ever, I have been looking forward to the first snow flake. Dreams of deep snow-covered slopes have been haunting me. Ski magazines have materialised on my bed-side table. Internet session history have logged more and more time on sites like this one or this one... I have always been impatient. This year will not be an exception.

And to conclude with another appropriate quote from my home country:

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower".  Albert Camus (1913-1960)

The Saturday shot #26: an American Bear

This week, I wanted to share a picture shot during my recent holidays in the US, whilst visiting a Build-a-Bear outlet. I was indeed surprised by the cultural insight that this child shop could give on the American culture. After all, myths and beliefs are fostered in our early age, some say even before. So what struck me was that if, in swinging London your little ones can choose to dress up their cuddly toys in mini Mel C or a furry Sid Vicious, in the US the choice offered gravitated around Marines, Troopers and GIs gears. No wonder the belliquous mindset of the nation may be in, if childhood models are defined by military forces... Don't get me wrong I am not challenging that soldiers can be heroes, but I would always think of armed intervention as a necessary evil rather than a good thing. This beliefs again may come from my own culture and referential scheme. This reminds me indeed of this speech by former French Prime minister Dominique de Villepin back in February 2003 when addressing the UN security council on France's position with regards to initiating a war in Iraq:

This message comes to you today from an old country, France, from a continent like mine, Europe, that has known wars, occupation and barbarity. A country that does not forget and knows everything it owes to the freedom-fighters who came from America and elsewhere. And yet has never ceased to stand upright in the face of history and before mankind. Faithful to its values, it wishes resolutely to act with all the members of the international community. It believes in our ability to build together a better world.