Anglican diocese of Grafton

In the mid-1950s, when I was a teenager in Grafton and an active member of the Anglican community attached to Christ Church Cathedral, I would never have imagined that, one day, from my home in the mountains of south-east France, I would be reading the following solemn statement published by an archdeacon of the Grafton diocese:

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Click here to see a shocking page of their website, against a background of jacaranda blossoms, on which the diocese includes a link to a 31-page document, created in 2004, bearing the sad title: Protocol for Dealing with Complaints of Sexual Abuse.

I made allusions to Grafton’s unpleasant history in this domain in my blog post of 16 June 2013 entitled In the shadow of Grafton's cathedral [display].

Today, I have no desire to wade through the sordid tales and events that have been unfolding in Sydney’s ongoing Royal Commission into child abuse. But, for readers who might like to follow up these stories, I include here a list of links to relevant Australian media accounts.

• Anglican Church official Pat Comben quizzed in Royal Commission over response to child sex abuse at North Coast Children's Home [link]

• Cleric quits over abuse handling [link]

• Abuse claim priest has quit [link]

• Anglican directory of clergy a 'stud book' [link]

• Brutal assaults at a NSW orphanage [link]

• Church to audit child sex abuse settlement [link]

• Church dissent over abuse approach [link]

• Abuse diocese puts community first [link]

• Smiling bishop Keith Slater failed victims of sex abuse in their hour of need [link]

• I'm not sure I'm still a Christian, Anglican priest Pat Comben says [link]

• Bishop ignored child sex charges [link]

One of the articles contains the following sentence:

The protestant community in Grafton seems close. One could well imagine the conversations at the "dinner parties with a bit of red wine" that Pat Comben, former diocesan registrar, touched on in his evidence to the commission.

That allusion annoys me in the sense that it gives the impression that Grafton Anglicans were in the habit, in a mildly inebriated state, of passing around fragments of sordid information at private dinner parties. That vision of events is far removed from my memories of Arthur Edward Warr, Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, dropping around for weekly chess evenings with my paternal grandfather, with tea and biscuits served up by my grandmother. But I have to admit that, as a boy in Grafton over half a century ago, I had no contacts whatsoever with what might have been thought of as the upper-crust Anglican community of the city.

These days, as a confirmed atheist who looks upon all present-day religions with the utmost disgust, I'm quite delighted to observe that an organization such as the Anglican Church appears to be coming apart at the seams... but I'm immensely sickened by the case of those countless kids who were handled as sexual objects by vile males who were supposed to be the children's guardians.

POST SCRIPTUM: Many former residents of Grafton are aware, I believe, that their “city” has been going slowly down the drain, in countless ways, over several decades. Today, as a symbol of that civic and economic decay, the local mayor and his councillors don’t even talk of Grafton any more. They ramble on stupidly as if they were living in a vague place known as “the Valley”. Be that as it may, I have the impression that the reputation of Grafton is likely to suffer indelibly as a consequence of the ongoing Royal Commission. We can no doubt think of those links in the above blog post as nails in Grafton’s coffin.

Rotten luck

Maybe God exists, and He cares for all of us, even those amongst us who happen to be sinners… and criminals. But there are times when everyday crooks are likely to be so dismayed by their amazing rotten luck that they might be forgiven for wondering whether the Creator is indeed making an effort to protect them. Worse still, these run-of-the-mill lawbreakers, whose only preoccupation consists of trying constantly to earn a dishonest penny, might even be led astray into atheism of the worst kind…

Consider, for example, this item of news from rural France. Etampes is an ancient and charming small town to the south of Paris, midway between Chartres and Fontainebleau, which has often been used as a setting for movies.

As an enthusiast of pumpkin scones [click here to see my blog post on this subject], I’m impressed by the beauty of a famous red pumpkin variety that bears the name of this town.

Surrounded by such celebrated places as Paris, Orléans and Chartres, Etampes has always found it hard to shine in the domain of historical celebrity. In other words, it’s a quiet town, where nothing much ever happens these days. There’s not even an autoroute or a high-speed train line in the vicinity of the town, whose residents must get fed up with constant allusions to Etampes as a “gateway” into the Ile-de-France region surrounding Paris.

All in all, it’s the kind of environment in which low-level robbers might hope to earn a modest living, without taking too many risks. In any case, that was the intention of two naive delinquents who used a pistol, late last Wednesday evening, to hold up a young couple who happened to strolling through the wintry streets of the sleepy town. What could be more straightforward, more normal?

Now, to understand the rest of this trivial story (which nevertheless made its way into all the French media), you have to know that the outskirts of Etampes were chosen as an ideal site to set up the training school of the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group [GIGN = Groupe d'intervention de la gendarmerie nationale], the elite special-operations squad of the French Armed Forces, trained to perform counter-terrorist and hostage-retrieval missions throughout the world.

And sometimes, of an evening, both male and female members of this army unit are likely to don civilian clothes and go for a walk through the deserted streets of Etampes. Well, the future robbery victims chosen by the above-mentioned delinquents happened to be a pair of GIGN trainees (a young guy and a girl)… who noticed instantly that the pistol pointed at them by one of the would-be robbers wasn’t equipped with a charger. Now, that was indeed a silly omission, particularly when you happen to be holding up two members of the GIGN, in the hope of getting hold of their cash. Things happened so quickly that the pistol-wielder didn’t know what had hit him. His unarmed mate escaped, but was rapidly cornered by local police.

Normally, when residents of Etampes happen to get a glimpse of these GIGN guys engaged in training activities, they’re easily recognized, because they look something like this:

But how can an unskilled everyday delinquent be expected to recognize GIGN personnel when the crime-fighters don’t even go to the trouble of wearing their distinctive gear? Indeed, if GIGN members are allowed to roam around the quiet streets of Etampes of an evening dressed in civilian clothes, they must be considered as a potentially grave danger for unwitting robbers and miscellaneous delinquents... and there should be a law against situations of this kind.

Vegetal ball

My maternal grandmother, Mary Jane Kennedy [1888-1966], used to tell me about her first doll, when she was a little girl up on her father’s bush property on the banks of the Clarence at Riverstone (Seelands), above Grafton. Her Irish mother, Mary Eliza Cranston [1858-1926], had used a short stout bone from a steer to fashion a doll for her daughter. It must have been a rather primitive creation, with a painted face and rag clothes, but my future grandmother was enchanted by her “little bone doll” (as she put it). Whenever my grandmother told us this story, she insisted above all on the idea that a loving mother, with a little bit of imagination, was capable of performing acts of magic in the eyes of her offspring.

My Fitzroy receives lots of bones every time I buy minced lamb at the supermarket, when the butcher supplies me with a big bag of tasty odds and ends for my dear dog. As for toys, he invented one for himself this morning: a round pumpkin or squash (I don’t know which) that he found in the weeds on the edge of my vegetable garden.

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Fitzroy knows that his vegetal ball can roll. In a nutshell, my dog has reinvented the wheel. His ball seems to have a mind of its own.

So, he has to keep an eye on it, unless it suddenly decides to roll away and hide in the bushes.

Once it escapes, by rolling down onto the road, Fitzroy has to run to keep up with his vegetal ball.

Fortunately, because of its color, the vegetal ball is easy to see in the icy greyness of Gamone.

Furthermore, although you wouldn’t describe it as edible, the vegetal ball emits a subtle effusion when you happen to sink your teeth into its skin. All in all, it’s an excellent toy... invented by Fitzroy.

Helico visit

In the early hours of the morning, when your house is lost in autumnal mists, and everything around you is so quiet and motionless that the landscape and its creatures (including humans) seem to have gone into hibernation, there’s nothing better than the low-altitude flight of a helicopter over your roof to jolt you back into reality.

I recognized immediately the blue aircraft used by electricity engineers to verify that recent snow has not brought down branches over their landlines. They swooped down low over Gamone to get a close look at the various lines, then they disappeared up over the slopes on the other side of Gamone Creek. Their visit lasted no more than half a minute: a short lapse of time during which Fitzroy and I—and no doubt the donkeys too—wondered whether we might be under air attack by the forces of a hostile village. Thankfully, our visitors did not stay for long. Helico fuel is expensive, and this is not the right time of the year for sightseeing.

Construction of wood shed

In my previous blog post, entitled Wood shed finished [display], I stated proudly that the structure was “sturdily-built”. Prudent, I had preferred to wait until the entire construction process was terminated successfully before showing how I had gone about building the shed. It would have been so embarrassing to have described my building work, only to be followed by a dramatic image of a pile of wood and tiles beneath a mound of snow on the lower slopes beneath my house. But I really don't believe we're likely to be faced with such a situation.

In this blog post, I intend to present a few images, taken at the start of October, that highlight some of the more difficult phases of the construction process. As explained on 8 September 2013 in Getting ready for the cold season [display], I started out by bolting a metallic base onto each of the six hefty pieces of timber to be used as upright posts.

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For each post, I then dug a hole 50cm x 50cm x 50cm and placed the post in the hole in such a way that its lower edge was more-or-less at ground level. To hold a post upright, I surrounded it by a couple of chestnut fencing stakes, and used struts of timber held in place by steel clamps to secure the post while I adjusted its verticality. Throughout the entire construction process, I made constant use of my precious collection of steel clamps (which have gathered rust through being left outside in all kinds of weather).

Once each of the six upright posts was surrounded by a block of concrete, my friend Serge Bellier used a simple hand-saw to level off the posts at the top. Then I was faced with the question of how to raise the heavy horizontal beams. The following photo shows you the makeshift system I invented for this task:

Placing a beam on the foreground posts was a slightly more difficult operation, since these post are considerably taller than the posts on the valley side. The following photo shows my enhancement of the block-and-tackle solution to deal with this increased height:

As you can see, the main difference is that the ladder had to be held in place by chains to prevent it from toppling over. The next photo shows the last of the four big beams being raised to the top of its supporting posts:

Here’s a closeup view of the block-and-tackle system at the top of the ladder:

It goes without saying that, when carrying out such operations, I was wearing a hard hat at all times, and never positioned at any moment beneath the beam being raised. Once the beams were resting on top of the posts, I used an assortment of nails to fix them in place.

The remaining phases of the construction process were quite straightforward: installing rafters, corner stays, and finally the tiles. I didn’t bother to take photos of these activities, because they weren’t particularly photogenic. Concerning the final result, I’m particularly pleased with the system of corner stays (there are probably more technical terms for these various pieces of timber) that keeps the structure perfectly rigid.

It was a matter of creating a set of triangles covering every point at which the global structure might be capable of shifting under the weight of the tiles and snow.

Wood shed finished

Except for a few details (such as screwing on the final side tiles, aligning and protecting the protruding rafters, and paintwork), my wood shed is finished and operational.

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The piles at the rear are composed mainly of wood that Gérard Magnat delivered in September [click here for my blog post with a photo of that pile of firewood], whereas the front pile is some of the extremely dry wood that the Barraquand firm in St-Laurent-en-Royans delivered a few weeks ago.

The structure is sturdily-built, and unlikely to collapse under the weight of snow. As you can see in the following photo, there’s an appropriate system of braces beneath the roof. Besides, I’ve systematically used timber of dimensions somewhat larger than what you could get away with.

The position of the wood shed is ideal in that firewood can be delivered just alongside it, and it’s not too far away from my front door. Meanwhile, there’s also a large stock of dry firewood inside my cellar: enough to keep the house heated until well after Xmas.

For the moment, I haven't yet got around to lighting up my new wood stove, because it hasn't really been cold enough, and the fireplace is perfect for watching TV of an evening (often with Fitzroy dozing on my knees).

Say cheese... with an echo

For several years, my favorite cheese has been Ossau-Iraty, produced from unpasteurized ewe’s milk in the Béarn and Pays basque region of south-west France. In 2011, at an international cheese fair in England, a cheese of this variety was awarded the prize of the World’s Best Unpasteurized Cheese.

Even in France, this product is not nearly as well-known as celebrated cheeses such as Roquefort, Brie, Cantal, St-Marcellin, Comté, Gruyère, etc. Maybe the double-barrelled name is a minor stumbling-block, in that it’s slightly complicated, and many French people wouldn’t feel comfortable trying to pronounce it. At the supermarket, I’ve got into the habit of simply asking for Ossau… and the cheese lady knows immediately what I mean.

Well, that’s going to have to change, because the producers of this cheese have launched a TV campaign designed to demonstrate how the name of their product should be pronounced. And the least that can be said is that this is likely to give rise to a lot of decibels in French supermarkets. In fact, the next time I intend to request a slice of Ossau-Iraty, I should probably think about taking along a megaphone, combined with an electronic echo box.

I’ve noticed, too, that the various demonstrations of cries of “Ossau-Iraty” in the valleys are all performed by young women. I believe that this reflects the fact that barefoot nymphs used to work as shepherdesses in the valleys where this cheese is produced.

Meanwhile, the males of the villages were busy making cheese… and playing Basque pelota.