Day 263 (Sunday)

Had a lovely lie in this morning after such a busy few social days and were very disappointed that it was cloudy again today. The forecast says that we could get some snow tomorrow – I can’t imagine it happening here but you never know. To think that we were sunbathing on Christmas day and now it might snow!  I found these photos of Nice in February 2005

I really hope it doesn’t happen but if it does I guess I’ll get some great photos.

I’ve been making some progress with the language, not much, but some and when I read Peter Mayle’s Toujours Provence I was slightly relieved when I read that Mayle finds French complicated and illogical; have a look at this…

I was constantly told that French is a supremely logical language. He goes on to say…

‘ I think that is a myth, invented by the French to bewilder foreigners. Where is the logic, for instance, in the genders given to proper names and nouns? Why is the Rhone masculine and the Durance feminine? They are both rivers and if they must have a sex, why can’t it be the same one? When I asked a Frenchman to explain this to me, he delivered a dissertation on sources, streams and floods, which according to him, answered the question conclusively and, of course, logically. Then he went on to the masculine ocean, the feminine sea, the masculine lake and the feminine puddle. Even the water must get confused. His speech did nothing to change my theory, which is that genders are there for no other reason than to make life difficult. They have been allocated in a whimsical and arbitrary fashion, sometimes with a cavalier disregard for the anatomical niceties. The French for vagina is vagin. Le vagin. Masculine. How can the puzzled student hope to apply logic to a language in which the vagina is masculine?