Tag Archives: heat

Accident in Orange

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ONE EASTER DURING the late 1990s, we drove to Provence in the south of France. There, we hired a lovely rural cottage (a ‘gîte rural’) located on the edge of a village next to an orchard of trees overladen with ripe cherries. That year, there was a heatwave in the south of France, daytime temperatures reaching and staying at 37 degrees Celsius. We were pleased that our Saab saloon car had built-in air-conditioning and that our gite had a large garden and a shady terrace.

Roman amphitheatre, Orange, France

Despite the high daytime temperatures, we managed to do plenty of sight-seeing. One day, we decided to explore the delights of the city of Orange, which was not far from our gite. The city is rich in Roman remains including a magnificent open-air theatre with steps, on which the audience perched, arranged in a circle.

In the 12th century, Orange and its surroundings became a principality within the Holy Roman Empire. In 1554, William the Silent, Count of Nassau, who had possessions in the Netherlands and became a Protestant, inherited the title ‘Prince of Orange’. The Principality of Orange was incorporated into what became the House of Orange-Nassau, whose royal family continues to rule the Netherlands today. One member of the family became King William III of England in 1689. Orange remained a Dutch possession more or less continuously until the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, under whose terms it was ceded to France.

So much history and clambering around the Roman ruins made us ready for lunch. We had no idea which restaurant to choose in the centre of Orange. My wife had the bright idea of entering one of the local shops, a shoe store, to ask where its workers went to eat their midday meal. They told us about a small restaurant around the corner. This busy eatery had a name which brought to mind associations with the American Wild West, ‘Le Buffalo West’, or something similar. It was a good recommendation and the food it served was excellent quality, reasonably priced French fare.

After a decent meal, we drove to a parking plot near a Roman triumphal arch. To enter the parking area, one had to drive below an arch designed to keep out large vehicles, and then down a steep ramp. Unfortunately, I turned the steering well before the car was fully off the ramp. We became grounded on a large concrete rock. The engine cut-out. I could not restart it. The car was well and truly stuck on the rock. Some people nearby saw our plight and told us that there was a repair garage a few yards away. We walked there.

The garage people sent out a team with a tow truck. Sadly, the truck was too high to pass beneath the height-restricting arch. Seeing the problem, three garage employees set to work with spades to dig around the rock on which our Saab was marooned. After at least an hour and a half’s hard toil in the baking afternoon heat, they removed the boulder and thus freed the car. Then, they pushed it beneath the arch so that it could be attached to the towing truck.

Raised on a ramp, it was easy to see where the rock had ruptured the Saab’s fuel line. It did not take the engineers long to replace the fractured section. Luckily, little other damage was visible beneath our car. Finally, we were ready to leave. It was with some anticipation that I asked to settle the bill. Imagining how expensive this labour-intensive episode would have been in the UK, I was expecting a bill of at least £300. So, I was not surprised when I was asked for about 300 French Francs. Then, a moment later, I could not believe my luck. A quick calculation  had revealed that I was being asked not for £300, but for the Franc equivalent of about one tenth of this amount.

We returned to our gite, highly relieved that the car was back in service so quickly. That evening, as the sun set, we sat outdoors and enjoyed glasses of the local rosé wine whilst the charcoal on our barbecue began to reach the glowing stage that is best for grilling the meat that we had bought in one of the local markets.

The Saab remained in use for several more years but, to the surprise of our local dealer who serviced it annually, it began developing ominous cracks in its chassis. It was providential that these did not develop immediately after my driving misjudgement in that car park in Orange.

A year has passed

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EXACTLY A YEAR AGO, at the end of November 2019, we were staying at the Tollygunge Club in south Calcutta. Every morning after breakfast, I would set out for a morning walk on the golf course as the air temperature began to climb rapidly towards 30 degrees Celsius. Being careful to avoid the golfers and their shots, I wandered away from the club buildings towards the far reaches of the luxuriant course. On my way, I passed the numerous obese dogs that hang around the club waiting for careless human snack eaters to drop bits of food. Further on, apart from the occasional players, I greeted the white egrets, which hastened away as I approached them. Then, as the club buildings grew smaller as I walked away from them, I often came across the jackals that sun themselves on the bunkers and putting greens. As I aimed my camera towards them, they would look at me suspiciously before slinking slowly into the clumps of bushes and shrubs dotted about in the grounds. Some mornings, I watched horses being taken for exercise and every morning I encountered people, both slender and not so sleek, either running or walking, usually viewing the screens on their mobile telephones. That was a year ago. And after leaving Calcutta, we told our friends and family there that we were sure to be back again in a year’s time.

It is said that one should not count one’s chickens before they hatch. Little did we know back then in Calcutta that a year later at the end of November 2020 we would not be in Calcutta in the Indian winter warmth, but in Bushy Park (near Twickenham) on a misty morning when the air temperature was about 3 degrees Celsius. We had visited Bushy Park about a month or so earlier in bright sunshine when the large carpark was almost full of cars. Today, on the last day of November, the carpark was less than a quarter full and the mist almost hid the tops of the tallest trees. The damp air felt bitterly cold, a feeling enhanced by the gloomy grey sky overhead that became visible as the mist dispersed.

Despite the greyness and cool air and our frozen hands, we enjoyed a brief walk in the Woodland Gardens, which are surrounded by a fence to stop the entry of the local wildlife, not jackals as in Calcutta but numerous deer, formerly the prey of the aristocratic hunters of yesteryear. A stream winds through the woodland area, widening sometimes to become like a pond. No egrets here, but plenty of ducks, gulls, and a few Egyptian Geese. Nor were there any golfers with their caddies and trolleys. Instead, there were plenty of parents, mostly younger than us, with their infants in buggies, and also some grandparents. Instead of being able to retire to the Shamiana bar, after the walk, for a coffee or, more likely in Calcutta, a tea,  we headed for a small window in the otherwise closed Bushy Park Pheasantry Café to buy hot drinks to take away. The wooden tables and chairs under the trees nearby were, as a notice put it: “Out of Bounds”, just as Calcutta is for us now, because of the blasted covid19 pandemic.

Methods are being employed to attempt to reduce the spread of the virus both here in the UK and in India. Much emphasis is put on trying to minimise association with other people. We try to do this as much as possible, but this does not stop us from getting out and about.  In contrast, many of our friends and family in India have been far more cautious than many in the UK, hardly leaving their home for weeks and months on end. I am not at all sure that we could manage to remain inside our flat for so long especially if the weather here was as warm and sunny as it is in India. We wrap up warmly and venture out into the cold whenever possible and that has helped to keep us feeling sane during this frightening plague. As a Norwegian said on BBC Radio 4 some weeks ago:

“There is no such thing as bad weather. There is just bad clothing.”

Melting moments

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IN THE EARLY 1990s, I was invited to a wedding in central Italy. Although I could have flown or driven to Italy, I decided to travel by train and ferry (the Channel Tunnel had not yet been opened for use). In my bachelor days, I was not a careful packer. I used to stuff my clothes and other belongings into a rucksack in a disorderly way. I was puzzled about what to do with my smart suit that I planned to wear at the marriage ceremony. I was concerned that it would become badly creased whilst stuffed in my rucksack. I consulted one of my female colleagues at the dental practice in Kent, where I was working at the time. She gave me some useful advice that did not include asking the hotel to iron it for me.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

On my way to Italy I stopped for a few days to visit some good friends who lived in Basel in Switzerland. They lived near to the terminus of a tram line that ran from the French Border, close to my friends’ flat, across the Swiss city to the German border. Although they no longer live in Basel, we now have other friends who live at the end of the same tram line, but close to the German border. Getting back to the early 1990s, I spent an enjoyable time in Basel. Before leaving, I bought an immoderate number of large bars of Swiss chocolate. My rather unhealthy plan was to take this chocolate to Italy and then after the wedding festivities were over, I would spend many happy hours eating obscene amounts of Swiss chocolate on the train while travelling back to the French coast. It seemed like a splendid plan at the time.

I arrived at the hotel in the Italian city where the wedding was to take place. As I was not yet trained to hang my clothes in wardrobes, I left my full rucksack on the floor for the duration of my stay.  Following my colleague’s advice, I extracted my creased jacket and trousers from my ruck sack, put them on hangers, and hung them in the room’s attached bathroom. Following the instructions I had been given in Kent, I turned on the hot water and closed the bathroom door so that the bathroom filled with steam from the hot water, and then I went out for some hours. On my return, the suit looked respectable enough to wear after its steaming.

The wedding festivities stretched enjoyably over three days. On each day, I attended meals in restaurants and the marriage ceremony in a municipal office. We all ate well and drunk fine Italian wines. As the saying goes, ‘a good time was had by all’.

At the end of my stay, I crammed everything into the rucksack lying on the floor of the hotel room, and then made my way to the city’s station. I boarded a train heading north through Italy towards Switzerland and then Paris, where I had to travel between the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord, from where trains to Calais departed.

As my train headed across the plain of the River Po south of Milan, I began to feel the urge to make inroads into my stash of Swiss chocolate bars, which at that moment I treasured as if they were bars of gold. I opened my rucksack in which they had been stored while I was staying in the hotel in Italy, my heart sunk, and I was filled with gloom. No, they had not been stolen. Far worse, they were still there but completely and utterly inedible. Each bar of chocolate had melted and then re-solidified. However, when they had been in a molten state, they had been distorted in such a way that the silver foil in which they had been wrapped by the manufacturers had become intimately intermingled with the chocolate. After it had cooled down and solidified, all of my chocolates were welded to the silver foil in such a way that it was impossible to separate what was potentially edible from the inedible distorted strata of foil running through the chocolate. What had happened, you might well wonder. Well, there had not been a heatwave during my stay in the Italian city. What I had not realised when I was staying in the hotel was that my hotel room had under floor heating and it was this that had been warming my rucksack filled with chocolate that had been lying on the warm floor for several days.

Looking back on this after so many years, it was probably a good thing that I had not been able to consume a huge amount of chocolate all in one binge, but this is not what went through my mind at the time.

Getting to grips in the kitchen

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Just in case you have not got one in your kitchen, here is an implement that is extensively used in Indian kitchens and tea stalls.

The sandasi (pronounced roughly like ‘sun-er-see’ said fast), which is is also known as a pakad (from the verb ‘to hold’ in Hindustani) or a chimta (from the verb ‘to pinch’ in Hindustani), is essentially a pair of sturdy hinged metal (stainless steel) tongs. The handles of the implement are several times as long as the gripping elements. This means that quite heavy things may be lifted with the beaks of the tongs without any risk of them slipping out of their grip.

The sandasi’s long handles also mean that the user’s hands can be kept at a safe distance from the hot cooking vessels that are lifted with this pair of tongs. For example, the tea maker can lift and manipulate with ease the huge pots containing several litres of a bubbling, boiling mixture of milk, tea, and spices. 

I find the sandasi very useful for gripping the edges of large casseroles when I am stirring hot food like stews or curries.

Cooking tongs are, of course, available in countries other than India, but the sturdy construction and long handles of the sandasis have much to reccommend them.

The first fly

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Fly on wood

 

The first fly of this year flew into my room just after the short warm spell we had in London over the Easter weekend. It was not the first fly that I have seen this year because the first couple of months of this year I spent in India. However, the fly in question, which arrived in late April, was the first fly that has tried to annoy me in London.

Although its buzzing and endless fly-passes can become annoying, there is another sensation that seeing and hearing the insect evokes in me. It reminds me of summer, a season I love. So, despite it annoying me, seeing this first plump fly also makes me joyful and gives me the feeling that warm, long bright days are not far off in London.