About films

There is no doubt that I have seen more films than I have read books.

I can account for about 750 films I have seen (yes, sadly I have attempted to list them), but there are countless more I have forgotten, so I must have watched well in excess of 1000 - a sobering thought.
It’s obvious why films consumed outnumber books: it’s much easier to watch a film than it is to read a book and it takes far less time. It usually requires no effort and is quite passive. Film watching is generally both undemanding and engrossing. In fact I find that at some level I enjoy most films I watch, or maybe that’s also because I’m fairly discriminating in choosing what to view.

The cinema is described in French as the Seventh Art; I’m not quite sure what the first six are, but it is quite appropriate as it is a distinctive medium in its own right.
The moving picture with sound is actually the art form which best gives an imitation of real life, hence its accessibility and immense popularity.
But of course films are not like real life at all, they are usually far more structured and have a soundtrack. That structuring often becomes more apparent as time goes by, some old films, though still compelling, seem quite stilted and artificial; indeed they appear to be the works of imagination and fiction that they really are. The shots that make up a good film are each carefully chosen to tell a story. Narrative is hugely important in films and those without it tend to be quite boring. Even if some arty critics may rave about them, feature films without a story are a disappointing affair.

Films are made to be seen in the cinema. There is something special about sitting in the large darkened room as part of an audience, usually discovering a work together for the first time. The image on the big silver screen and the loud sound usually mean, unless someone is rustling pop-corn next to you, that there is nothing to distract you from total involvement. It doesn’t matter how big your TV is, the desert scenes in “Lawrence of Arabia” are just not going to have the same impact in your living room.

And yet I must admit that I have probably seen only half of my notional thousand plus films actually in a cinema. They come round on TV and we buy or rent them on DVD these days.
Watching a film this way on the TV set is good for your cultural knowledge, as indeed is listening to a work of classical music on a CD rather than in a concert hall, or knowing a picture from an art-book rather than a gallery; but like them it is not quite the same and a somewhat diminished experience.

Over the last few years, not least because of the increasing availability of classic films on cheap DVDs I have nonetheless become interested in filling in the gaps in my cinematic knowledge and also revisiting films only half paid attention to when previously seen on the TV . Though here too, recent opportunities to see old favourites such as Fritz Lang’s “M” or the Marx Brothers’ “Night at the opera” on a proper screen at the Cinematek have revealed a new intensity to me. However, many of the acknowledged greats of the history of film can rarely be seen on the full screen now and were originally shown in cinemas long before I started to go to them.

Which gives me an opportunity to digress.
I cannot with hand on heart remember what the first film was I went to see at the cinema. I would have to ask my parents, though I suspect that Walt Disney cartoons would be a strong contender.
In Ilkley, the town where I spent most of my childhood, there were two cinemas: the Grove, reputed to be slightly more up-market, and the Essoldo. The Grove was pulled down to make way for a car-park, the Essoldo, after a period as a bingo hall, was demolished to make room for a supermarket. They were typical of their period: large theatres with stalls and a balcony (the worst place to sit was the stalls below the balcony edge, as you could be bombarded with discarded ice-cream tubs). They had fancy red curtains which were raised to reveal the screen.
I can still just remember when you used to get a B film and an A film, or at least an A film with shorts before it. Then there was the unseemly rush at the end to get out while the credits rolled so as to avoid having to stand for the national anthem. It was a sport and if you hadn’t quite made it to the back you still stopped and stood stock -still facing the screen as the drum roll came before the first chord. My parents used to deposit my brother and me at the Essoldo on Saturdays for a full afternoon of children’s special performance, with Tom and Jerry’s, films including child actors sponsored by the British Youth Film Foundation (or something like that) and Norman Wisdom’s which even then seemed ancient. It seemed like a real treat to us, but I now realize that it was a god-sent opportunity for my parents to be free of the kids for a few hours.
Later when we all went to the cinema together my family’s cult film was the start-studded American comedy “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” the script of which we had down pat from repeated viewing so it became the source of many catch-phrases.

Going to the cinema, unlike some other activities, is something I’ve never stopped doing throughout my life, admittedly with varying frequency. Clara sometimes says I’m not a keen cinema goer, but the truth is I like my entertainment live and tend to regard cinema as second best. I go to more concerts and theatre performances than films at the cinema: the present score ths year is 13 films to 18 live events; but I think that’s still quite a few films. My attitude is that since a film is an unchanging fixed artefact, it’s not urgent to see it and if I miss it at the cinema I can still see it later on TV, though I realize to lesser effect than in the cinema. I also don’t like to sit inside a dark room on a light summer evening so I tend to go more in the winter or when it’s wet. But when I do go to the cinema I definitely enjoy it.

Before the feature film, there used to be shorts and newsreels: believe it or not I remember, when I first arrived in Belgium, seeing a really naff Belgavox with the King on an official visit to the Congo watching semi-naked African tribal dancers. But now of course you only get trailers and adverts which you have to put up with if you want to get in early enough to have a decent seat that won’t give you neck-ache from having your nose up against the screen. While I’m a real sucker for the trailers which do indeed get me to go to see films I might otherwise not have considered, I tend to loathe the adverts, which, if you go with any frequency, you’ve almost certainly seen before, and appear to concentrate on pedalling fantasies no one could possibly believe about motor cars and alcoholic beverages. So it is something of a relief when the film actually starts.

In choosing what to go to see at the cinema, apart from being inspired or put off by trailers, I read reviews and listen to what friends think of what they’ve seen recently. I tend to choose a film on the basis of its director rather than who’s starring in it and have a penchant for films that give me an image of and insight into daily life in other countries (ie not USA), which is one reason I liked “Slumdog Millionaire”. I usually shy away from over-hyped, colossal-budget, action-packed Hollywood blockbusters, but some do turn out nonetheless to be worth seeing (most recently “Avatar”). I certainly have to admit that technically the Americans can’t be faulted whereas the Europeans can often be a little self-indulgent when it comes to their editing.
Being a linguist, I prefer to see films in their original language version. Living in Brussels is good for this; for as it is officially a bilingual city, nearly all films are shown in the original with French and Dutch subtitles. I had a curious experience in Talinn once watching the "Da Vinci Code" in English. There was a passage I didn't understand so I looked at the subtitles and had the choice between Estonian and Russian. After struggling with my schoolboy Russian for a moment to decypher the cyrillic, I realized the unknown language was actually Latin and my schoolboy Latin was at least as good.

From my initial comments it is clear that I could run a regular piece for “About being here” on films watched last year, but I’m not sure I will. In the end, most films are quite ephemeral and whilst entertaining the eye and ear for two hours actually leave little mark on the brain and so soon fade from memory. It is, therefore, a sure sign of some greater value if they do actually stick in your mind for any length of time, or indeed make you want to watch them again. A good film, like any good work of art, will bear repeated appreciation.

Films can be memorable for a variety of reasons.
There are those where the image of a certain scene has become an often quoted icon of cinema history.
There are those where the story is particularly compelling. Those that make you cry or laugh without fail every time. Those which in short are just beautifully made in terms of photography and timing, editing if you will, where every time you will notice some new detail carefully included to leave no loose ends.

So now is the time to list some of those films I have enjoyed re-watching, without making any claim for their constituting a definitive list of the best films ever; for having looked at various critics’ attempts at list-compiling in this area, I now realize this to be a most hazardous and utimately quite subjective enterprise. Indeed, in working my way through a composite list of critically acclaimed films (on the website “They Shoot Pictures Don’t They?”), I have made some great discoveries but also seen a fair few which I found disappointing and wondered why they were so highly thought of. There are three directors I find particularly over-rated in this respect, who won’t be on my list but I mention them as they are frequently represented by several films in critics’ “Top 100 films”: Godard for being utterly pretentious (while “A bout de souffle” is still quite fun, “le Mépris” is awful), Hitchcock for playing amusing but ultimately vacuous games (however well crafted “Vertigo” and “Psycho” are) and Chaplin, for not actually being funny, though admittedly occasionally moving.

So here are twenty-four, which I won’t comment on individually.

Amadeus (Forman,1984)
Amarcord (Fellini, 1973)
Annie Hall (Allen, 1977)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
Blade Runner (Scott, 1982)
The Blue Angel (von Sternberg, 1930)
Cabaret (Fosse, 1972)
Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942)
Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964)
The Graduate (Nichols,1967)
It's a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946)
Kes (Loach, 1969)
Ladri di biciclette (De Sica, 1948)
Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962)
M (Lang, 1931)
A Night at the Opera (Wood, 1933)
The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957)
Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs (Hand,1937)
Some Like it Hot (Wilder, 1959)
Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950)
The Third Man (Reed, 1949)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
West Side Story (Wise, 1961)

It’s too early yet to know whether I want to include them, but the two I have enjoyed most in the last three years are

Das Leben der anderen (von Donnersmarck, 2006)
Gran Torino (Eastwood, 2008)

You’ve probably seen most of these already, but if you haven’t I can warmly recommend them.

About the Euro

I feel quite attached to the euro, so it pains me that recently some people have been talking nonsense about it collapsing and disappearing.

I feel I have a personal stake in the euro in so far as I was there when it was launched. I worked as an interpreter in a lot of economic and financial meetings in the late 1990’s which were meticulously preparing for it. I remember Belgium passionately, and successfully, arguing its case for being let in even if its debt was way over the 60% threshold. I was there when the decisions were taken in May 1998 on membership and the exchange rates. The formal decisions had to be taken by the ministers of finance, for who I was working, in Council session. They were not best pleased that notwithstanding their careful preparation they (and we) were kept waiting hours while the heads of State and Government, as a matter of national pride, wrangled over who would be the first President of the new European Central Bank.

The single currency is one of the greatest achievements of the European Union. It is a bold endeavour. I remember one senior British government economist (typically) saying that it was a remarkable experiment and he was glad others were trying it to see whether it would work. The British Treasury at Gordon Brown’s request later undertook a vast twelve volume consideration of the possible advantages and disadvantages of UK’s joining and predictably reached no clear conclusion.

That is because in the end joining the euro is an act of faith. I use the word faith deliberately, as it is the essential nature of any currency that it is only worth what people are ready to believe it’s worth. We only accept bank notes, or these days numbers in bank accounts, as remuneration for goods provided and services rendered, because we believe other people will accept them in turn; without which the system breaks down and they are worthless. So whatever people seek to prove to you about the “fundamentals” of an economy behind a currency, if there is a crisis of confidence and a run on the banks, it’s of no use to you. Psychology is all important.
This is why I get cross about people deliberately talking down the euro (or any other currency) in order to provoke a climate of instability and therefore wild swings of fluctuation on the back of which speculators can make a killing and Joe Public lose his savings, when in fact there’s nothing seriously wrong with it.

Answer me this: the country with the biggest debt in the world is the United States of America; one of the states of the Union, and in fact the largest one economically, California is technically bankrupt and in cessation of payments - so is the dollar about to collapse and disppear ? No. So why should the euro disappear if one of the states in the euro area is near default ?

There is a problem with Greece: its deficit has been out of control for years as for decades people have become accustomed to milking a corrupt state. Incidentally I was also there when the decision was taken to let Greece join and I don’t remember any wild protests then about its debt being in excess of 100% of GDP (like Italy and Belgium who were already in). In retrospect, we now know that Greece only joined on the basis of having cooked the statistical books. However, ultimately that’s irrelevant, for although the decision to join is dressed up in economics it is essentially political. At the time the feeling was “the more the merrier”; if Greece joined that meant every one of the then 15 EU member states would be in, apart from the three who wanted out (UK, Denmark and Sweden).

Let’s get a sense of proportion here: Greece represents 2% of the GDP of the euro area (California accounts for 13% of US GDP). It’s a bit like discovering you have dry rot in 2% of your house. It doesn’t mean your house is about to fall down, but you will have to deal with it before it spreads.

The currency of any large country is an immoveable object, in the sense that it goes up and down in value, but it is here to stay. The idea that the US dollar might disappear is absurd as the USA is a large country. It beats me why some people say the euro is doomed; it is the chosen adopted currency of sixteen countries who together form the second most important currency zone in the world after the dollar. Given where we used to be, that is a great achievement of which others are jealous. The Americans don’t like to see the hegemony of the dollar challenged. No serious economist really believes the euro will disppear, but bad-mouthing it can stir up the “markets” to the advantage of a few speculators.

Nor will Greece ever leave the euro. There is no treaty provision for exit, the process is at one point in the texts described as “irreversible”. Anyway if Greece already cannot pay its debt denominated in euros, it would be insane for it to have a national currency worth even less.
So the euro is stuck with Greece, just as the dollar is stuck with California - but it’s strange how no one seems to make a big fuss about that.

The euro may well depreciate heavily. But what the hell ! Our goods priced in euros will become cheaper to the rest of the world, so we will export more: that means more jobs for Europeans. Conversely, we will import less from China. Who knows, as the euro goes down, the renmimbi may even appreciate to a level closer to its real value. Oil will become intolerably expensive so maybe we will finally do something about more efficient use of energy, which will be good news all round.

I am quite sanguine about the euro: I earn my money in euros and spend most of it in the euro area; what it is worth elsewhere in the world is largely irrelevant to me. Incidentally, that’s the same principle on which the US economy has always operated.

In the meantime the euro has made a huge difference to my private life. I live in a small country, Belgium and am soon over the border. To get around between say France, Germany, Italy and Spain I used to have a box full of different currencies which I periodically had to replenish, not any more. When I went out of Europe I first had to change my Belgian francs into something that would be accepted like US dollars or Deutschmarks, not any more.
I can now make cross-border bank payments and get money out of the wall in any euro area country free of charge using my Belgian bank account and card. I can also compare prices easily in a wide range of countries I visit. It’s all much simpler.

Of course, when the euro was introduced physically in 2002, there was a bit of a difficult learning process. You might not realize just how important a piece of mental furniture your anchor scale of monetary values is. It takes time to change it, but certainly 8 years down the road I now think in euros and have forgotten what the Belgian franc I was previously used to was worth.

The introduction of the euro, by the way, thanks to very careful preparation was incredibly successful with hardly any hitches in what was a monumental operation of physically introducing a new currency and withdrawing an old one.

Let me say a few words about the physical euro. The banknotes in their different sizes and colours are a whole lot prettier and more practical than dollars. The strange thing about the notes is the 500 euro which the Germans insisted on having to replace their 1000 DM. You never see them and no normal shop accepts them. Their only conceivable use is for large cash illegal transactions. It’s slightly odd that the EU elsewhere engaged in fighting money-laundering should have sanctioned them.
There was at the time a long debate about where the coin/note boudary should be. People belly-ached about 2 euros being worth a fair bit while seeming loose change. I think in the long run it was right to start the notes at 5. In the US despite a number of attempts they have not managed to replace the 1 dollar bill with coins; that strikes me as daft in the rich States, but I guess handy in dollarized economies like Cambodia. Notes used too frequently wear out quickly and have to be replaced more often than coins.

There are of course too many small euro cent coins, the 1c and 2c are a nuisance. They had to be introduced in order to allow exact conversion to two decimal places, but everything has long since been rounded up. The Finns thought they could get away without them, but they discovered that the first minted ones in the starter kits of small change had become expensive collector items, so they flooded the market with more. The coins coming in 16 different national sides are emminently collectable and it’s quite amusing to go through your pocket, turning over the coins from their common face to the national one to discover just how far they have travelled. The euro is nice to handle.

When the euro was introduced a lot of small ticket items you buy frequently like cups of coffee were rounded up quite considerably giving many the impression that the euro had provoked rapid inflation. However, big ticket items purchased less often didn’t change and even came down in price with the advent of easier cross-border price comparison provoking competition. Generally inflation in the euro area has been on the low side, though the subject of inflation differentials between euro members exercises macro-economists considerably. Again, different US states have different rates of inflation.

Macro-economists also worry about the “one size fits all” interest rate set by the European Central Bank. On the whole it’s probably done more good than bad as the large critical mass of the euro area which for a long time was free from speculative attack, unlike the previous currencies it succeeded, has allowed the interest rate to be relatively low facilitating more investment in many member economies.
Without the levers of exchange rate policy (competitive devaluation) and monetary policy ( changing the nterest rate to help the economy) at their disposal, euro members have to make their adjustments by using fiscal policy (increasing/decreasing government spending, taxation and borrowing) which is why the treaty says it is a matter of common concern and the Stability and Growth Pact is such a big deal. Very few countries have actually been respecting the SGP recently as it seems to have been designed for a crisis free age. Also the sanctions contemplated in it would be pretty counter-productive anyway. Since it’s all about peer pressure and everyone is misbehaving, there’s not much point in getting excited unless a member is way out of line, like Greece.

A final word on the absurdity of the recent debt crisis.

Has it escaped everyone’s attention that the very ratings agencies, Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s and co., who have been down-grading sovereign debt are the same people who triggered the financial crisis in the first place by giving triple A ratings to repackaged sub-prime mortgages ? Because of their worthless advice to greedy banks we found ourselves in a mega-financial crisis and had to bail out the banks with trillions of tax-payers’ money. And guess what, that now means countries are heavily in debt. So this seems like a good time for “the markets” whoever they are, but probably ultimately the speculative divisions of the same banks we bailed out, to be gunning for countries with large debts some of which are in the euro. So our currency goes down and taxpayers lose more money as the value of their savings goes down.

Why do we put up with this obscene nonsense ?

The term global governance is at present rather empty but we need it badly to protect the real economy that makes things and the people that work in it, spend and save, from the marauding parasitical might of big international finance, who are a law unto themselves and for whom it is again sadly “business as usual”.
Nothing has been learned, nothing has been done, only vast amounts of taxpayers’ money have been poured down a black hole (and presumably into a few fat cats’ pockets), while we have got ourselves heavily into debt for which apparently we are now to be punished by the same people we bailed out. Surely this has to stop.

In the meantime, don’t panic. The euro is going to stay and we will happily keep on spending it.

About A pî po’l bwè

I’d like to tell you about a strange chance meeting I had in November 1982.

I had been living in Brussels for two months doing my training at the Commission to be an interpreter. One of my senior trainers, Jean Zinc, had recommended that we get some fresh air and exercise during our weekends off, in particular by going to a place called the “Ardennes”. This turned out to be difficult to locate with any great geographical accuracy until I realized it was just the expression the Belgians vaguely use to designate the hilly and forested South of the country.
I had no car and knew no one else interested in hiking so I used the then quite extensive Belgian rail network to get down there, experimenting with different destinations. Armed with a map and a rucksack containing waterproofs and a picnic I would then walk by myself from one station to another. (This wouldn’t work so well now as many of the smaller halts have sadly since been discontinued.)

So it was on a Saturday morning in early November 1982 that I alighted from the train in Vielsalm. As I walked down the platform, I couldn’t help hearing the raucous voices and laughter of a noisy young crowd who had got off the train behind me and were following me. Curiosity got the better of me, so I turned my head to see the source of the commotion. Being discreetly English, however, I didn’t want to create the impression of stopping and staring, so I just kept on walking... SMACK right into a lamp-post. Needless to say the group found this hilarious and laughed even louder. Feeling, understandably, a little humiliated I strode ahead as if nothing had happened and marched out of the station... Only to be greeted by a long haired young man in hiking boots and a rucksack, who insisted on shaking my hand and introducing himself. As I was wondering if this was a quaint Ardennais custom, the group caught up with me and it became apparent that I had just been mistaken for one of its members. The situation was explained with much amusement and the leader of the group told me that they were from Liège and about to set off on a weekend’s hiking. If I had no partciular itinerary in mind and wanted to join them, I would be more than welcome. This invitation seemed like an excellent idea and so I became a member of the jolly crew.

They would be staying overnight in a hostel type of place and asked if I would join them for the whole weekend. I can’t remember what reason I had but I needed to return to Brussels that evening, so I declined. Before parting though, Philippe, the organizer took my address and said they would let me know when the next weekend hike would take place.

I had largely forgotten about it all when a few months later a letter duly arrived through the post, this was the pre-internet era after all, inviting me to a weekend in the Petite Suisse in Luxemburg.

It was a hot spring day when we reached Echternach and some free time was granted before our departure from the bus station, come to think of it they were probably mostly having a beer at a terrace. I decided I could really do with a pair of shorts so I went to buy one. Unfortunately when I returned to the meeting place the group had already left. I knew they were heading for the Petite Suisse, so I bought a map and set off in pursuit. Luckily I soon caught up with them and the accident-prone Englishman had another exploit to his name.

This was my first full weekend so I experienced for the first time the joys of communal cooking and rough and ready accommodation that are the hall-marks of this organization. It was just like being on one of my holiday camps for teenagers: I loved it. The evening was copiously lubricated with cheap Luxemburg Rivaner white wine. I recall that over dessert there was a spirited rendition of the French creole classic “Salade de fruits, tu plais à ta mère...” with percussion from assorted kitchen utensils.

In 1984 the organizers, Philippe and Claudine, known to all as Boudi and Codie, as it is the kind of group where nicknames thrive, started to do everything under their own auspices (instead of under a student travel organization, not least because participants were no longer students) and so they needed a name.
After much consideration and rejection of such epiphets as “la godasse qui pue” (the “stinking boot”), they decided on the poetical “A pî po’l bwè” which is Walloon for “à pied par le bois” or “on foot through the woods”.

A pî po’l bwè continued to have a spring and an autumn weekend outing until 1988 by when its members had begun to get married and start families. I was a regular till about 1987. In fact when I bumped into them or rather the lamp-post, it was only their second outing which makes me one of the core. There were also related cross country skiing weekends in the winter, when you used to get more snow in the Ardennes in the 1980s.

In 2006 as members’ children were now old enough to look after themselves at weekends, the group was relaunched. Someone must have asked “Whatever happened to that mad Englishman?” as one day in 2007 quite out of the blue I got an e-mail at work from Boudi who had managed to track me down. I couldn’t make it that autumn, but our friendship was resumed in spring 2008 on a weekend near Trier in Germany.

Some participants looked the same, others had aged more and I couldn’t remember all of their names, but the old camaraderie was soon in place. People now had respectable jobs and grown up children. Inevitably in a group that size, one much loved and very funny partcipant, Bura, had died of cancer.

Arrangements are now made by e-mail and payment by electronic bank transfer. Where we used to spill boisterously out of a train onto a deserted countryside platform, we now fill the car-park in front of the “gîte” with largish cars. Still when a group of twenty or so 50 to 55 year olds who used to muck about together in their 20’s get together again, it’s very rejuvenating and things are soon as they were. Now we don’t have to carry our sleeping bag and what we need for the night with us the whole weekend, the distances are a bit shorter and the cooking is a bit more sophisticated, but it’s still the same old spirit.

A weekend with A pî po’l bwè is two hikes of about 20 km, usually in the Ardennes or neigbouring Luxemburg, though recently we have been as far afield as the Rhine valley by the Lorelei. As we stride along (they tend to go at a fair lick, though do show sympathy for my now dodgy knees) the day is spent in conversation catching up with what’s been happening in people’s lives or ruminating on the problems of the world in general and Belgium in particular. Fairly early on in the day there will be the picnic break in a rural idyll (though last time we ended up in the middle of a village medieval festival one day). This tends to make the afternoon seem very long, so if at all possible, there will be stops for a beer at the terrace of hostelries. Codie will also provide us with historic and cultural background information on some of the places we pass through (she’s a teacher) though some members of the group merely take this as an excuse to make puns and disrespectful anachronistic remarks (they were once naughty boys at the back of the classroom).
We spend the night in between the hikes in rudimentary youth-camp/scout style accommodation for groups, where snoring in the dorm may be an issue. We have dinner at a big table for about 20 with plenty of food and drink prepared together, accompanied by loud conversation, jokes, catch-phrases and singing. In the morning there’s a big breakfast and enough supplies for each participant to prepare their own picnic sandwiches to taste. Then there’s a general clean-up before leaving.

It’s all a big laugh, where things that go wrong become the subject of jokes and folklore: such as serious mis-readings of the map like when we had to sprint across a dual carriageway, dishes that don’t work out as planned like the crème brûlée without an oven, or showers that turn out to belong to the local football team...
The whole proceedings are in the broadest of Liégeois accents with some set-piece command performance stories even in Walloon dialect, such as “dèl trôye vèrète” (about the farmer who has to take his sow to be covered) beautifully told by Michel who is nicknamed “Jésus”.
It is all deeply Belgian in the best sense.

Basically these weekends are the typical stuff of a big group outing of old friends and are a real break from our very different routines. Since it’s only twice a year and people can’t make them all it remains a special event. Recently we’ve also been blessed with some spectactularly fine weather.

A pî po’l bwè is a real tonic.