Aaahh...

 ... a heartwarming illustration of porcine parenting from our favourite cartoonist Perry Taylor

La Résidence - THE French Property People

The Illuninati in East Oxford

By 1307, the Templars had invented modern banking, and effectively controlled the financial infrastructure of Europe. Many people, including Philip IV of France owed them an awful lot of money. Philip's solution to his personal credit crunch was to order the destruction of the entire order, and thousands of Templars perished (as you'll know if you've seen the film The Da Vinci Code) in a series of horrifying flashbacks. The overnight disappearance of Europe's entire fiscal infrastructure (and the ensuing chaos) have been put forward as an explanation for the extraordinary mystique which has since grown up around the Knights Templar.

Conspiracy theorists maintain that the architecture of present-day Cowley is rich in Templar-and-Masonic symbolism (let's not quibble.) The outlines of many of Cowley's rooftops closely resemble the Masons' pyramid-with-its-top-cut-off, and apparently, the entrances to Templar's Square shopping centre were covered, until a few years ago, by parapets that incorporated not only the truncated pyramid but also the all-seeing eye. You can find this symbol on the reverse of a one-dollar bill, where the unfinished pyramid symbolises the fact that the USA is a nation still in the process of being built. (Maybe when they've finally finished building it, they'll have time to turn their minds to human rights and the Geneva Convention? That would be nice.)

Meanwhile, back in Cowley, it seems that all this Masonic/Templar symbolism has been left by the Illuminati, the ultra-secret society intent on establishing a New World Order. Now, you may well ask, "If the Illuminati are so secretive, why would they leave big eye-catching symbols all over Cowley?" You might also ask, "If the Illuminati are intent on imposing a New World Order, haven't they got more pressing matters to address than decorating shopping centres in East Oxford?" And you may have a point. What is beyond doubt is that Templar's Square is Oxford's largest shopping centre and is probably the best place for all your shopping needs.

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Ye Trucke Festyval

The Domesday Book records the population of Cowley in 1086 as only 47. This surprisingly low figure may simply have been a careless monk's mis-scribe. Alternatively, it has been pointed out that the Domesday survey was carried out in July, when many Cowley inhabitants would have been away on holiday or possibly attending the Trucke Festyval in nearby Steventon.

Next up were the Knights Templar, who gave their name to Temple Cowley and Templar's Square shopping centre. The Knights Templar, you'll recall, were a twelfth century travel-courier-and-private-security outfit. Think Group Four meets Thomas Cook, or Securicor meets Saga. The First Crusade in 1096 had opened up the Holy Land to tourism, but many of the early sightseers failed to read the small print: "Pilgryms maye in facte be massacred by heathen before they reach their holidaye destination." The Knights Templar quickly spotted a market opportunity, and set up shop in Jerusalem in 1129, offering "Bespoke Pilgramage Solutions for the Discerning Penitent." By the end of the twelfth century, they had grown the Templar © brand to an impressive degree and had branches all over Europe, including at Temple Cowley.

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Nous ne regrettons rien

Edith Piaf - Non, je ne regrette rien (1961)

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Cuffa's Meadow

Mesolithic public transport in Cowley was frankly inadequate. The initial novelty of canoeing soon wore off when it became apparent that you could only go where the Thames went. Day trips to Abingdon remained popular, but Wheatley was out of the question. The inhabitants of Cowley would have to wait patiently for the Neolithic era in another 4,000 years for the wheel to be invented. Today, by contrast, you rarely have to wait more than five minutes for a bus.

Cowley kept very quiet during the Roman occupation. True, the Romans built the imaginatively-named "Roman Way"  from Dorchester to Bicester, but the inhabitants of Cowley largely stayed indoors. This may be because of the noise of construction traffic or because they were worried about the adverse effect the increased traffic would have on the value of their property.

It was the Anglo-Saxons who gave Cowley its name, which can mean either 'Cow-Meadow' or 'Cuffa's Meadow'. Cuffa also crops up in "Cuffa's Wood" so it's reasonable to assume that Cuffa was a local and therefore Cowley's first named inhabitant. (Not that the others didn't have names, you understand, that would have been highly impractical.) The word cuffa comes from the Old French coife, meaning 'hat', so it's reasonable also to assume that our Cuffa either had a conspicuous hat or possibly even owned a hat-making concern in Cowley. Either way, it paints a vivid picture of a sophisticated, colourful and fashion-conscious society living in Cowley twelve hundred years ago.

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Mesolithic Cowley

This week, we take a break from our romp through French history, to investigate the distant past of La Résidence's home town of Oxford....

It was cold in Cowley 10,000 years ago. Very cold. The sunny, carefree Paleolithic era, when they'd discovered fire and sat around together making stone tools, seemed like a distant memory. Now Cowley (and coincidentally, most of the Northern hemisphere) was covered by several metres of ice. Luckily for Cowley Man (and Woman) better times lay ahead and before they knew it, the Mesolithic Era had started.

The first thing they noticed was that they had flint tools and canoes. Living near the Thames, the canoes were a real bonus. And they took to flint-knapping like a hunter-gatherer to water. Later on, they discovered to their delight that they also had the bow and arrow and could finally throw away their old-fashioned atlatls (SO last ice-age.) (The atlatl is a hand-held spear-throwing device, and examples can still be seen in use in Cowley today, usually for throwing tennis balls for dogs.) To his (and her) discredit, however, Homo Cowleiensis was not nearly as tidy as his (or her) modern counterpart. Unwanted and broken flint tools were simply left lying around outside Tescos, where they remained until archaeologists tidied up the mess in the 1920s.

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Viens ici!

another cautionary cartoon from our favourite ex-pat Perry Taylor

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Esperanto speakers don't eat quiche

Paul Verlaine didn't eat quiche. He was a symbolist poet and drank Absinthe (see our Provence blog.) Paul was born in Metz in 1844, led a somewhat colourful life and wrote lots of hippy-trippy poems. The first line of 'Autumn Song' - 'The long sobs of Autumn's violins...' was broadcast to the Resistance in the build-up to D-Day. The second line '...wound my heart with monotonous langour' was the signal that invasion was imminent.

Also born in Metz was Raymond Schwartz, a full-time banker and part-time poet and novelist in the invented language of Esperanto. 'Esperanto' (in Esperanto) means 'one who hopes', and the hope was that the nations of the world could banish misunderstandings and strife if they all spoke the same language. Esperanto is still used today. William Shatner spoke it in the 1965 horror B-movie 'Incubus'. In 1967, Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa built a 400m² oil-rig-style platform in the Adriatic Sea and declared it an autonomous republic. Rosa was to be President and the language, Esperanto. The Italian government responded by hiring a small boat and sending two policemen and a tax inspector.

Ayatollah Khomeini urged Muslims to learn Esperanto to promote understanding between the faiths. He then discovered that the followers of the Bahá'í Faith had had the same idea, and banned it. Useful phrases in Esperanto include "o falis el la sranko" (something fell out of the cupboard) and " Homoj tiaj kiel mi ne konadas timon" (Men such as me know no fear.) Esperanto speakers don't eat quiche.

La Résidence - THE French Property People

The Quiche of Lorraine

The Cross of Lorraine has belonged to the region's heraldic arms for centuries. Local girl Joan of Arc adopted the cross as her emblem in the struggle against "ze feelthy Eenglish", who'd come to France in 1337 for an away match and refused to go home. Joan was born in the village of Domrémy in Lorraine. In 1429 Charles VII granted the village tax exemption in gratitude for Joan's victories. Domrémy's tax-haven status persisted until the Revolution, whereupon the Inland Revenue sent two bowler-hatted inspectors to demand 364 years' worth of tax arrears.

The Quiche of Lorraine is a different matter altogether. The word quiche is related to the German 'Kuchen', meaning cake, and the true Quiche Lorraine contains no cheese. If you find cheese in yours, then it's strictly a Quiche Vosgienne, and if you find onions, it's a Quiche Alsacienne. If you find Spam, send it back. Quiche got a bad name in Bruce Feirstein's 1982 book 'Real Men Don't Eat Quiche' (they eat Freedom Flans.) Real men might, conceivably, if they were really hungry, and if they had an impaired sense of smell, eat Lorraine's other delicacy, Andouille. Andouille is a sausage in which every part of the pig is used, except the grunt. The grunt, meanwhile, as well as the pig's entire gastrointestinal system, is used in the even-more-hardcore Andouillette. Come and have a go, Mr Feirstein, if you think you're hard.

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Le parking!

Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle (1958)

La Résidence - THE French Property People