Wednesday 27 June 2012

Je suis un sanglier !

Par Osiris et par Apis, non je n’ai pas été hypnotisée. Hier au travail, j’ai appris autour d’une tasse de thé que j’étais un sanglier.
Pour commencer il faut savoir une chose; dès que les premières jonquilles fleurissent et qu’il fait assez doux pour passer quelques heures d’affilée dehors je n’ai plus qu’une idée en tête : passer un maximum de temps dans mon jardin. Chaque année au mois de mars, les merles et moi nous retrouvons pour remuer la mousse et les feuilles mortes. Quand je n’y suis pas j’en parle continuellement. Ça pourrait devenir fatiguant pour mon entourage, mais heureusement pour lui, mon entourage se met automatiquement en veille dès que mon débit de parole devient trop important.
Hier, je racontais donc mes aventures extraordinaires à mes collègues et en particulier mes amitiés avec un rouge gorge qui vient toujours traîner dans les parages pour récupérer les vers de terre qui font surface quand je gratouille. Le week-end dernier, alors que j’arrachais des mètres de lierre avec toute mon énergie il gazouillait à un tout petit mètre de moi. J’aime bien cette relation, on est des copains de jardin. Parfois je lui dépose des vers de terre bien en évidence. Je me demande s’il réalise que c’est un cadeau, s’il apprécie le geste.
Enfin, j’avais cette belle vision romancée jusqu’à hier. Depuis, j’ai découvert qu’en Angleterre les sangliers ont été décimés au moyen âge et que l’espèce a depuis disparu de l’île. En fouillant la terre pour se nourrir, eux aussi exposent les vers dont se nourissent les rouges gorges qui avaient ainsi pris pour habitude de s’attacher aux sangliers. Leurs fournisseurs disparus, les rouges gorges ont dû se rabattre sur les humains, visiblement la deuxième espèce retourneuse de terre. Point de plaisante amitié ou de relation privilégiée; je me croyais unique à ses yeux, mais ne suis finalement qu’un commode substitut de sanglier.

Monday 25 June 2012

Moo.


A colleague and friend of mine told me once that cows make him suspicious. Steadily chewing day in and day out, staring into the far distance, it seems to him that they’re plotting. According to him, gazing and grazing is not it all there is to them. I don’t entirely disagree, but I don’t think they’re malicious. This is not where the answer lies.
A cow weights on average 1600 pounds or 725 kilogrammes. I am talking breed average, its weight can vary from 600 pounds (272 kilogrammes) for small breeds to 2500 pounds (1134 kilogrammes) for the larger ones. The chewing cow we’re staring at right now is a perfect average 1600 pounds cow.
Every day, it will have to eat about 2 to 2.5 percent of its body weight in dry matter. (Dry matter is what’s left of Midsummer common grass when the water has been taken out. Seeing the deluge that April has been, extracting dry matter must be a tough job.) So. Our cow Betsy needs an intake of 1600 x 2.5 % (Betsy’s no 2 percent cow. She enjoys her grass.), that is 40 lbs of dry matter. Every day. In springtime, grass is made of about 85% of water which leaves Betsy 15% of dry matter. She therefore needs to eat 267 pounds (121 kilogrammes) of fresh grass.  Every day.
That’s weight dealt with. How about time? A cow’s usual bite rate is of 65 bites per minute. Dry matter amount per bite varies between 0.4 and 0.5 grams. A tall and dense pasture should provide 0.5 grams per bite. As far as I can see from my bike at morning ‘kinda late‘ speed, I’d say Midsummer common grass looks pretty good. Besides, it’s not like Betsy and her friend are going to ever run out of it. There’s more than enough for the few of them but since it’s spring moist grass time I’ve decided a bite must provide 0.45 grams of dry matter per bite. Ok, so that’s 29.25 grams per minute, 1755 per hour. To get the 18 kilogrammes of dry matter she needs, Betsy needs to chew for about 10 hours and 20 minutes. Every day.
Now how about rumination time? Cows are ruminants, they eat in successive sessions. First they chew, and leave the grass (or grain or whatever) to rest for a while in their first stomach. There it gets softer and they can regurgitate what it then called ‘cud’ and chew on it again now that it has become easier. While she does so, Betsy can’t also be chewing fresh grass. I have to admit I struggled to find actual data about rumination time. Which maybe isn’t too bad because I’ve probably lost half of my readers already. Besides I happen to be rather lousy at calculations and have managed in the past to get a subtraction wrong between 2012 and 1992. Yes Sir. Frankly I cannot guarantee the accurateness of all the figures I’ve exposed, even though I tried really hard to get them right. I verified them against online data to make sure they made some sense and redid my math when I ended up with chewing times greater than 24 hours a day.
Anyway. It seems an average rumination time could be seven to ten hours a day. We won’t know precisely but Betsy does, which is the most important. When she starts the day, she knows that in order to survive she’s got one tedious task ahead: feeding for hours and hours. Have you ever faced a long boring task that implies repetitive actions? When I do and there’s nothing to keep me distracted, as I’m endeavouring to overcome the burden I tend to count. Only that much left. I do that distance in that much time, so in fifteen minutes I should have done such and such. By the time I get to this point that much will be achieved which mean that much percent of the overall tasks, therefore I’ve got to keep on going for that much more time.
Well Betsy (or any cow on this planet who’s got access to sufficient provision) does the same. Every. Single. Day. Of its life. All those annoying figures, dry matter, percentage of body weight, average humidity of the food, bite rate and so on they have to consider. So come on Matt, get a grip. There’s not plotting involved, the poors guys are merely counting their bored souls off.

Wednesday 20 June 2012

Comme dans un nuage.


Ce midi il faisait un sale temps d’automne, du genre qui fait grimacer au premier pas dehors. Tout était sombre, détrempé par une vilaine bruine et la lumière terne écrasait les reliefs. À la sortie du rond point la rue disparaissait dans le brouillard. Le temps semblait figé dans une allégorie de l’ennui le plus rébarbatif.
Je déteste la bruine. La bruine est une mièvrerie météorologique dont l’insignifiance n’a d’égal que sa perfidie. Elle se venge de son manque de grandeur par une ténacité maligne et finira toujours par vous arracher un frisson.
Derrière moi, un collègue a résumé ça en : «It’s like being in a cloud». C’est comme être dans un nuage. Ça m’a rappelé un souvenir…

1992, Saulxures-lès-Nancy, école Maurice Barrès. CM2, classe de Madame Kling. Pour un exercice, la maîtresse nous avait rassemblés en groupes de trois ou quatre et nous devions répondre ensemble à une question. Je me souviens avoir pris la direction du groupe, organisé la discussion et choisi les réponses à lire au tableau à la fin.
La question était quelque chose du genre : «Quel est le meilleur moyen de transport : l’avion ou le train ?». Je n’avais jamais pris l’avion mais le trouvais plus intéressant parce qu’on «pouvait toucher les nuages». Entre autres. J’ai oublié le reste de la réponse mais cette phrase est restée gravée dans ma mémoire, en laissant des marques suffisamment douloureuses pour ne pas se laisser oublier. En entendant les autres répondre, j’ai compris le but de l’exercice : comparer la vitesse ou la praticité, pour nous introduire à l’exercice de l’argumentation. Et moi… Moi j’avais joué les petits chefs comme une bonne première de la classe qui sait mieux que les autres, et avait imposé mon romantisme pitoyable et hors de propos. Personne ne m’en a rien dit je crois, ni la maîtresse ni les autres élèves, mais ma propre honte me donne encore envie de me cacher après plus de vingt ans.

Cette accablante sensation de ridicule m’aura cependant permis de me souvenir de ce que c’est qu’un nuage quand on a 10 ans. Une glace à l’italienne, une couette grande comme une maison, la douceur d’un chartreux, le câlin d’un chamallow. Le nuage d’un adulte c’est un horrible frisson humide, perçant, et teinté de déprime.
Je préfère la version bisounours, celle où on peut aussi y apercevoir la maison du père Noël un jour en Août sur la route des vacances.

Monday 18 June 2012

How to protect your socks integrity.

Rich, poor, young, old, male or female... at the end of the day we are simple human beings and face the same issues owing to our very nature. For instance, one of our socks will disappear some day. Always the one.
Since the first chimpanzees stood up, started to walk upright and decreed it would be much more convenient with socks on, one of them ultimately went missing. (Socks, that is. Not chimpanzees. Although they would happily tell you that every now and again one of them goes missing too. Chimpanzees that is. Socks wouldn’t talk would they ?)
Why should it be so? Well the answer is clear: gnomes. Gnomes are to us what pilot fishes are to sharks. Only they’re more of a nuisance, and we don’t have sharp teeth (minds neither in most cases). In the old times, it seems that gnomes used to help around the house at night, but not so much nowadays. They have always had a sock-thieving habit but since they used to be accommodating, this deficiency was regarded as a mandatory part of the bargain and has therefore always remained off the record. Today however, the subject has become a moot point and even a major argument in the last elections media campaign.
Admittedly, what gnomes eat in socks they evacuate as knitted scarves but who needs a scarf in summer? Besides, they happen to have a terribly old-fashioned taste in patterns.
No one knows how the whole thing started, yet it is a fact: gnomes have a one-sock addiction. They simply cannot resist it.
It is part of the gnomes belief that the second sock tastes of undernail scraps. None ever dared challenging the saying, so to be on the safe side they usually stick to the lore and make do with the first. It is very complex determining which of the two socks is the first. In order to assist gnomes in their afflictive choice-making process, several guides have been published. The two more commonly used are the traditional ‘First and foremost: the sacred art of picking’, and a recent publication, more successful within the new generation: ‘First come, first served: the 10-step guide to expert picking’.
Maybe you are a traditionalist and want to keep gnomes around for old times sake, the services they’ve done our nation, or because they are an endangered species. However, if you are tired of people staring at your ankles with a compassionate look in the morning underground, you may want to pay attention to the following advice.Be assured that locking up your underwear drawers won't work. Gnomes are astute creatures, meaning that you will need to show a lot of cunning if you want to deceive them.
You are most likely the proud owner of a few orphan socks already. Using a water-resistant pen, visibly label those socks as ‘1st’. Gnomes will be fooled and rush at them, thereby clearing your drawers of the unwanted goods. Once your stock has expired, label all of your socks as ‘2nd’. They will end up in such a distress that they will leave your house once and for all. Your socks integrity will be assured and fellow commuters shall now stare at your ankle in appreciative awe.