Bears of very little brain!
I set out this morning from Montpellier several pounds heavier, having spent a delightful afternoon and evening in Lyon with my dear friends Paul and Michelle. An early train dropped me at nine o'clock, and four hours of easy, mainly urban, walking brought me to Fabregues.
This paragraph is for Francophones and Francophiles. As the train stopped at Nimes I happened to check the weather on my phone. The local weather station appeared as "Nisme". This looks to me like an archaic spelling before the "s" became a circumflex, in the manner of "hostel" to "hotel" or "fenestra" to "fenetre". (Unfortunately, I can't put the circumflexes where they should be.) How interesting, I thought. But has this archaic spelling survived alongside the current one?
As I left the city, I was touched by the number of people came out on their balcony to watch me go. 
Walking along the verge I saw some spurge, a green plant that is very familiar to me.
Spurge is a variety of euphorbia, which the deer on Mayne Island, where we have a cabin, don't eat. Consequently, in its various manifestations, it is planted everywhere. Almost everything else, including various deer-resistant plants bought off-island, is consumed by our deer.
The Spurge on the Verge
Along the verge
I saw some spurge
And had the urge
To sing a dirge.
Were the deer to splurge
Upon this spurge,
They would feel a surge,
Indeed a purge,
And then regurge
Upon the verge.
And all would merge
To sing this dirge.
I am staying tonight at the delightful Hotel Pinede, which I mention for the benefit of other pilgrims who may pass this way, about one a week according to the proprietor who is obviously hoping for more. Room and breakfast is 50€, but the room is huge, with shower and toilet. The hotel was formerly a grand old house occupied by German officers during the war, while its owner, the father of the proprietor, spent five years in a prison camp. I saw him, the father, quite literally bent double, being helped around by his son. I hope I'm not kept awake by ghastly ghostly German drinking songs. I already have Carmina Burana in my head after our recent concert.
I am writing this under a spreading horse chestnut tree in a huge garden out the back of the house.
Throughout my flight from Montreal to Paris, my overhead light flashed on and off, and so did my neighbour's. It took me a while to work out why. It was the result of a design flaw in the Boeing 700-300 ER which Air Canada is now using on this flight. A little act of stupidity on somebody's part! The plane was well equipped with the latest touch-screen TVs, etc., but the bank of controls, which included the switch for the overhead light, was on the top of the armrest, right where I put my elbow.
This little blunder pales in comparison to the problem currently faced by the SNCF here in France. Their newly designed trains are too big for the stations. Someone didn't measure twice and cut once!
And back home in Victoria, BC, why didn't someone think of asking whether the municipality of Esquimalt would accept a sewage plant before designing a system around it and flushing $150 million down the toilet?
I should point out, for the benefit of those readers from foreign parts, that our fine city is currently undergoing a sewage controversy. To our shame, we are perhaps the only city in North America which discharges its sewage into the sea.
And the only reason we are doing anything about it is the scatological persistence of a local hero, Mr. Floatie, who dressed himself up as a Turd and positioned himself in front of the Legislative Building for days on end until the the provincial government was embarrassed into decreeing that the city must clean up its act. Interestingly, a sizeable percentage of the population, including some prominent scientists, still maintain that the turbulence of the sea is the most effective way of dealing with our sewage. Try telling that to all the other cities along the Salish Sea who have proper treatment plants.
Incidentally, our fine city of Victoria is also known as Disfunction by the Sea because of the inability of its individual municipalities, and even the people within those municipalities, ever to agree on anything.
I have encountered many examples of stupidity in my life, but perhaps the greatest was the sinuous median strip along the four-lane highway, two lanes each way, which joins Perth, Western Australia, with the port of Fremantle. Even in the early sixties the traffic was heavy, and as there was no room for bus bays. Whenever a bus stopped to pick up passengers, the cars in the curb lane would come to a standstill. So a city engineer decided to solve the problem. Why not have the two lanes wind around the bus stop? The City constructed a median strip along the middle of the road, parallel to the curb, except when it came to a bus stop. There, the strip moved outward, allowing the two lanes to curve around the stop. Then when a bus was picking up passengers it wouldn't block the traffic.
But what about the two lanes on the other side? Traffic in the centre lane was forced to move to the curb lane whenever the median strip curved around a bus stop on the other side, and during the rush hours it was blocked altogether. What madness! Of course, within a few months the median strip was torn up to be replaced by the conventional middle-of-the-road barrier seen everywhere else in the world.
You don't believe this story, do you, and 50 years later I find it hard to fathom myself. Last night I searched for confirmation on the web, without success. Perhaps the incident received an Orwellian cleansing and every news report has been expunged. Can any of my Aussie readers find any references to it?
I am on a roll here and had I world enough and time I would tell you about other stupidities such as the two kilometres of track in Winnipeg, complete with "railway" stations, where buses play trains and cut five minutes off their schedule. Or the little roundabouts which replaced perfectly adequate four-way stop signs, leaving it impossible for any thing larger than a Fiat 500 to make a left turn.
Lord, what fools these mortals be.
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