Practice, Exercise. Cahiers, Jotters. Camp, Class.

Practice, Exercise. Cahiers, Jotters. Camp, Class.

What's around. Does this make this salvagepunk? Does this make this?

Imagineer a rummage.

Dusty floorboards are wooden. All kinds of everything here, every kind of all things there. It's hot. You open doors, as far as the stiff squeak over swollen boards permits. You poke in, around. There's no knowing what there is or why. No wherefore.

Someone says there are notebooks, and there are, in a box, in a suitcase so small it must be of another century, on shelves. You take some and you look.

Only imagineer. They're mostly blue. Or no, they're mostly covered in a blue paper but the jotters are often blue too, or kind of peach, or sand, and they're dusty. Some are labelled. Their label function is activated. The labels name and assign topicality say geometry, say composition, say algebra. The names--there are two--are French names, one typical of each typical gender of French pupils, say, in the mid 50's (meaning a time before, meaning they would be in their 80's if they are around). The names don't read Arnaud and Marianne Gilbert,but they could have done, and we're imagineering here, right? Solet's say AG and MG.

It's a slow pace. Tha i cho teth. Cait a bheil an t'uisge? The swallows or swift circle round and they flap a lot and when they turn they glide a little, like they're catching. Maybe they're catching flies. Close your mouth and. Schtum. Surface. The skink or salamader sticks to the crack of the board it measures out but in a catch leap it's on the concrete step and away.

The jotters fill with ink, with words, with mathematical formulae, with words that form grammatically correct sentences, in French, or sometimes Spanish, once maybe English. The ink is from fountain pens and there are blotting papers here, no there, inserted between pages, sometimes. The black penned exercises Arnaud and Marianne completed can be draft, or more finished work. And there's the red of correction. Plat. Nuance. Mediocre. 6 sur 20.

Imagineering the jotters is a privilege, an indication, an entitlement, an ethical challenge, a find, an archive for tomorrow (should there be a tomorrow).

Exercise, Test.

Is there something in the air, the fresh breath of Pyreneean breeze that keeps? Brushes with dust but preserves the ink and the paper and the Plat and the Nuance? Question 2 (History): How and where did the jotters keep these 70, for it's 70, years?

Here are some of the jotters. Imagineered. Some are not jotters:

1. It's a pink one, with a blue cover. We use to cover our schoolbooks with brown paper, parcel paper. It's for a class called Lecture expliqué, Reading explained, or really something like Literary study I guess. The first task is to identify which of La Bruyere's observations in chapter 5 are applicable to contemporary society. Contemporary! Imagine! Contemporary to the 50's, the decade of Ross's fast cars and clean bodies. I first wrote dead bodies (then, mouche on my shorts, heat, exhaustion) then wondered which of them are applicable to now, if any, if any more now. The second point is well made. "La B nous fait observer qu'il faut bien se tenir lorsqu'on est chez quelqu'un ou bien réuni chez soi et non faire comme Théodocte(?) qui veut tout avaler devant les autres." Yeah, mind your manners, when in company. That's applicable. The teacher's direct, and less impressed. For some reason their red ink twice writes the word "haine" around here. That's just weird, really. Loose leaves at the back of this jotter are typical: some Spanish to French translations, and the hand-typed sheets with the originals. Did the teacher type them all? For all the class? Or was there a stenographer? I seem to remember some dark blue sheet that duplicated typing. There are also some notes about the different prices of sending packets to different places. Well, that's the first jotter.

2. Most pages are blank. It's a "semainier", a way to work the week? On the back page, AG, perhaps, writes: "1. de l'ame au paysage. 2e. du paysage a lame. 3eme. en pensées." What's that all about then, eh? Soul lands. In thought. What was AG imagineering?

3. On loose leaves between the pages of the third jotter, AG's essays test the stance of time. There's a "foire", as alive and as menacing as we remember 50's fairgrounds to be from our collective movies. The prof's not impressed with this. "Lourde". "Pauvre". And there's a composition about an old wall. AG selects the stone walls of the old mill in the village, the one we walked by on the first day here. Now it sits by the side of the stream, well painted, closed off, interpreted. The mill works on display and cleared of weeds. Among the facts to discover you learn that operations ceased in the early 1950's. So AG's mill was already old, monument, history, though only just. He describes the exterior, less polished then, but also the interior, for it seems you could still go in, and look around, and around, and see a decomposing log, some plantlife, birds and "Messieurs les rats". AG attends to heritage in the making, and does so with concern for keeping in mind people he or his parents could have known, describing how the mill has been left "pour faire remémorer" those who worked there, "pour ne pas les oublier". At the back of this jotter there's a sketch, one of the few found in the selection sampled. The rough cartoon shows a portrait of 'Antoin le dur', and you wonder if he was maybe one of the reasons the fairground was so menacing. Or if he's there for other reasons altogether.

4. is a printed 'Devoir de vacances', a pamphlet to fill August days, and many more besides. This one has been filled in as belonging to MG, but otherwise isn't written on. Probably not to be written on.

5. is Arithmatic, one of many that use the squared paper for numbers as well as letters.

6. The brand of jotter AG used for his ''Brouillon de Français" (rough notes?) has a swallow on the cover. Or swift, I guess.

Among the drafts it contains is an essay about happiness, or more of a draft of an essay, an "essai", as the finished version crops up elsewhere for correction. The draft indicates the topic was along the lines of Reasons to be Cheerful, part kid thankfulness. And AG loves his granite village--just being here "dans notre granite maison, modernisée et agréable" is what makes him happy. Happy kid in granite house on 11 May 1956, with all mod cons. What cons had they been sold? We know the family had a car, several by the sound of it, maybe a fridge for the summer days of roasting? Maybe that dead bodies washing machine? What about a phone or if not how did the family firm take its bookings? A radio, sure that's a given, but a black and white television. No coronations there to market. The later composition has more of a focus on health and happiness, sliding into the not taking forgranted mantra. Fast cars, clean bodies, healthy minds.

Jotters 7-22 continue in the same vein. Geometry (MG); English (MG) with a short story about lying in bed - how did that get past the fast bodies censors?; Grammaire espagnole; Geometry/Physics/Algebra each with a tab; a messy Maths brouillon; a brown jotter left blank but marked for Spanish and containing a snail doodle on the blotter - un escargot Espagnol. Geography; Cours de vacances (perhaps where the devoir pamphlet found form; a red spiral notebook. And in among the jotters there are the other papers of the 1950's village family. Here's an A3 advert for Mazda headlights. There a knitwear pattern with the smiling model families to aspire to, yes, in their cardigans indeed. Still a thing by 70's Scotland as our own mother clicked the needles too, conjuring versions of the quasi-royal families in the colour photos for our own schooldays, our own covered jotters, filled with our own drafts, essays, numbers, letters, doodles, and, later, the corrections and assessments they required. 24 and 25 carry on the classes: Geometry and History. In among them there's a postcard from Hyeres--there were French holidays. 

Let's end with 23. This is Geography and the jotter tracks a well organised tour de monde starting in the Americas, detailing continents and countries there and onwards, their economies and histories, their relative world standings measured, classified and assimilated, from here in this village. Contemporaneous imagineering. Look, here's the Congo, not far off Tintin's Congo at this time. Let's see... "Le Congo est une des plus belles réussites des Européens en Afrique". Yep, that'll be the one. And as for the rivers, "Tous ces fleuves ont peu d'importance (sauf le Nil). Ils sont trop irrégulier, ils ont trop de boucles, ils ont trop de chuttes (navigation impossible).

There's a 'billet d'absence' tucked between the pages here, so GA maybe missed some of the instruction, though was present enough to hear what's important, and what's not, in the contemporary world of a 50's French village.