Hier le monde

It's a French day today: teaching it at school and talking to the French assistante in the staffroom, writing a Reunion story in my free periods, answering a request for captions for a New Caledonia piece in next week's Herald (I think). Oh, and a friend is going to Paris soon for the first time, and is naturally excited about that.

So, France? Reunion? Mauritius? Tahiti? Monaco? New Caledonia? Akaroa? There are so many French-speaking countries that I haven't been to: Vietnam, Switzerland, Belgium, the Seychelles, Vanuatu, Quebec... and that's not mentioning all of those in Africa, where I have yet to set foot. The French were all over Africa like a rash: the British were such busy colonists, you can forget that the Frogs were at it equally enthusiastically. But they were, and just as insensitively.

That was the nub of the New Caledonia story: that after years and years of being dispossessed and oppressed, the native Kanaks are gaining standing, pride and a future in the tourist industry. Naming the fabulously designed, yet curiously empty, Cultural Centre after the indigenous rights leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou (a brave man despite his girly name) was a start - but even better is their adoption in July of the Kanak Freedom Flag as the second official flag of New Caledonia, to fly in tandem with the Tricolour: the only country in the world to have two flags. Maybe one day, they'll all get along well enough to agree on one flag for everybody.

(Having said all that, I ought to mention that only this year was it agreed that the Tino Rangatiratanga flag should be allowed to be flown here on Waitingi Day.)

Bon appetit

Weka have been in the news recently. The Department of Conservation is planning a mass extermination of these cheeky little flightless native birds on two West Coast islands to protect the rare geckos, skinks and, yes, leeches that also live there. Apparently over the last 100 years the weka have become very inbred and, according to a bearded, weathered man who's familiar with them, and looks a tough old bird himself, he's seen some with eyes that are "frightening".
I often saw these birds in my youth, when I was tramping or away with my mother rock-hounding as in this photo when we were on the Coast to do a spot of gold-panning. (Yes, I found some colour, which I carefully strained into a handkerchief - and later blew my nose on.) They were always poking into things, playful and curious like lowland keas, and we filmed one once trying to abscond with a bright yellow towelling hat that was too big for the weka, which was the size of a small chicken, to lift off the ground, so it kept stepping on it and tripping over. How we laughed.

But it appears they're less common these days, and a man near Christchurch has been thinking laterally and wants to breed them for the table, on the premise that if people can make money from something, it will never be allowed to die out. Cynical, but true, no doubt.

He claims they taste (surprise!) better than chicken, and it made me think about all the less regular foods I've eaten. It's not a startling list compared to some people's, I'm sure: emu, ostrich, kangaroo, crocodile and camel are pretty ordinary these days, and I can buy most of them at the supermarket. I could buy goat at the supermarket too: I recently ate it for the first time in the Cook Islands (not India). In the wilds of Tasmania, I was embarrassed to find myself eating barbecued wallaby as a cute little baby one hopped past. In France and elsewhere (in Pagan, in Burma, at a back-street restaurant I was once asked, "You want meat? We have chicken or frog") I've had frogs' legs and snails, naturellement - the former ridiculous, nibbling bones like matchsticks (reminding me of Tom Hanks in 'Big' with the baby corn), the latter a - not unwelcome - let-down since all you can taste is the garlic butter they're prepared in.

In Maré, in New Caledonia's Loyalty Islands, I ate fruit bat and heartily regretted it: dark, gamey and rather tough; and also coconut crab, which looked unnervingly like a giant head louse, but tasted divine. And in Peru, of course, roast guinea pig, also regretted because it was chewy and unpleasant, and though in the restaurant in Cuzco it was presented jointed, I'd couldn't forget the cooked ones I'd already seen in Pisac: whole, shiny brown and looking unnervingly like a miniature Tyrannosaurus Rex. Yuk.

Hurr, hurr, hurr, hurrrrr*

So last night, when I gave the cats their supper, there was this on the back door mat - glistening, slimy and fully seven centimetres long. I regularly scoop drowned slugs like this out of the pond, but finding one in the house is rather rarer, thank goodness.

And it made me think about creepy crawlies I've come across in my travels, and realise that I've been uncommonly blessed because, despite both venturing up the Amazon and spending a lot of time in that Harrods of deadly insects, Australia, I've had very few incidents of the multi- (or in this case, no- ) legged kind.

Apart from the horrendous night in New Caledonia after which I wearily greeted the dawn with 47 mosquito bites on my face alone, there's been pretty much nothing to report. From my travels.

Now, when I spent a summer living in Australia, that was different. I'll pass over the brown snake living under the haystack where it was my job to go twice a day to get feed for the horses, because today's focus is invertebrates. Specifically, spiders.

In the living room of the homestead, hooked onto the curtain was the shed skin of a tarantula, kept as a kind of souvenir, like the polo trophies on the mantlepiece. This was disturbing to me, because my room was built on to the house as an afterthought, and each morning when I pushed open the screen door to go outside and into the main building, it broke a web that had been spun across my doorway by what I can only describe as a particularly ambitious spider. I never - thank goodness - laid eyes on this nocturnal beast, but it tells you all you need to know about the scale of the thing that as the strands reached breaking point, I could hear them snap.

Then there was the day that a visitor who briefly shared my room entered it ahead of me, shrieked "Tarantula!" and lunged at her bed with her booted feet. By the time I got inside, there was only a brown smear on the bedspread to show for the encounter - but my imagination filled the gap, and I didn't have a solid night's sleep for the rest of the summer.

And finally, there was the gully. Towards the end of my stay, I realised that spending every day in jeans as I exercised the horses, I was going to get home dazzlingly white. So I started wearing shorts when I rode (yes, the stirrup leathers can give your calves a nasty pinch, but you learn how to avoid that) - but still, there would be tan lines when I went to the beach back home. So then I rode in a bikini, which was rather pleasant as long as I kept moving faster than the flies.

One day I took a different route and found a gully between me and the way back to the stables. Tall, dead thistles were scattered along the bottom, but otherwise it seemed hazard-free, so I set off down the bank. It was only when we were halfway down and the horse had a fair amount of momentum going that I suddenly saw that between the 2-metre high thistles were swathes of spider webs like nets. It was too late to stop or turn, and all I could do was shut my eyes and shriek as Gidgeon took me down and through the thistles, the webs wrapping themselves around me on my bare skin almost from head to toe.

It was a nightmare. I'm shuddering now. I didn't see a spider that time either, but I didn't need to. It's the single most vivid image I've retained from the whole 10 weeks I stayed at Narrioota - and, remember, there were snakes.

So this slug is nothing. Except... it's too fat to have squeezed under the door, and I can only assume it muscled its way in through the cat-flap. It's a superslug.

* This is how a slug (possibly snail) sounds when it laughs, according to the story on the Junior Request Session on the radio on Sunday mornings in my youth. I have no idea what happened in the story, all I remember is the sound effect. I'm blaming the Red Fort.

Dah dah dah, dah dah dah-dah-dah-dah...

And it's been a beautiful, beautiful day: calm, cloudless, hot; excellent food, good company, successful presents; nothing worse on the news than a cardinal's broken leg, no advertisements on TV and no need to wish I had eaten or drunk less.

The only small black cloud has been the discovery that the boy next door was given an electric guitar for Christmas, so it was the opening bars of 'Smoke on the Water' over and over again even before breakfast. But let me not be glum on this lovely day: at least he won't be able to play it at the same time as his drums.

I've had Christmas in New Caledonia, where I sat on a beach and shared with fellow-student friends a deli-roast chicken with wine and a baguette; I've had one on a cattle station in South Australia where we dressed formally and then played parlour games; in Salzburg we ate Englischer Rostbif late on Christmas Eve after standing in the dark in a graveyard where people lit candles on the tombstones and a trumpet played 'Silent Night'; and I've had lots of Christmases in England, not one of them white, but all of them jolly because there was always a pub session before lunch.

The whole festival is without doubt made for cold weather, and is more special in England because it's undiluted by summer holidays; and this year in Herefordshire we would have got our white Christmas. But still, there's a lot to be said for being able to walk the dog after dinner through the Pony Club where the grass is full of clover, buttercups and vetch, down to the park where families are playing indulgent games of cricket with the small fry, through the playground where little girls are shrieking under the fountain, to the creek where Fudge can have a swim before panting back home to collapse in the shade.

Where I can listen again to dah dah dah, dah dah dah-dah-dah-dah...

Never too late to remember

Yes, it's two days since Remembrance Day, so the link is even more strained than usual, but we can overlook that.

It's interesting that not only has Anzac Day got bigger and bigger over the last 10 years or so, but now Remembrance Day is also an annual feature in the news here.

Visiting Gallipoli has become so mainstream that a new road put in to deal with the visitors destroyed part of what they go to see; but overall it's a heartening phenomenon and good to see.

I've visited a number of war cemeteries, the most impressive because of their size the ones in Normandy, like the American one above, on the cliff above Omaha Beach; and the less austere British one at Bayeux where there are roses by the crosses; and the understated German one outside the town behind a high hedge where low black crosses are grouped on the grass surrounding a huge mound. Then there's the one at Oxford, where my uncle is buried, killed on a training flight when his wings iced up - it was a long way to come from Dunedin to die in England's friendly fields. The youngest son, it was a terrible blow for the family; his medal and the letter from the king were framed and hung over my grandmother's bed.

And then there's the lovely peaceful one in near Tiendanite in New Caledonia - a NZ one, this, with the plaques set into the grass in a long curve leading to the memorial against a backdrop of the wild mountains.

In Australia the one at Adelaide River is unique in my experience for having personal messages included on the brass plaques - "He was my all. Mother" - which makes them even more moving; and in the National War Memorial at Canberra the long, long wall of names has poppies stuck under the edges where people have come on a pilgrimage.

What they all have in common is that they are lovingly cared-for: neat, clean, pretty and peaceful. They are places of respect, honour and remembrance, and always worth visiting.