cristofol.org

Anglo-French

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 16:56:06 +0100

A reprint from an article in the London Review of Books:

What a spalage! Link to heading

John Gallagher Link to heading

3142 words

‘La Langue anglaise n’existe pas’: C’est du français mal prononcé by Bernard Cerquiglini. Gallimard, 175 pp., €8, March 2024, 978 2 07 305661 0

Picture the scene : it’s a few years after the Norman Conquest, and a man goes out to shoot deer in the New Forest. He’s breaking the law, as the right to hunt here is reserved to the Crown. The man is caught, and arrested – not by his own countrymen, but by ‘a group of armed jabbering foreigners’. Our hapless English hunter is forced to take a crash course in a strange language. First, he learns the word ‘prisun’; soon after, he’ll hear the words ‘foreste’, ‘rent’, ‘justise’. Uneasy in an occupied land, he will find language turned against him, his homely Saxon terms elbowed out by the language (and brute power) of a new Norman elite.

Aviation

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 18:33:10 +0100

I’d like to share a quote with you from Andreas Malm’s ‘How to blow up a pipeline’, p.86:

If you want to emit as much CO2 as possible, there is no faster way than to go on a flying binge. That also comes close to the definition of being rich today. One single flight from London to Edinburgh emits more CO2 than the average Somalian does in a year; from London to New York, more than the Nigerian and the Nepalese; from London to Perth, more than the Peruvian and the Egyptian, the Kenyan and the Indian. There are fifty-six countries in the world with annual per capita emissions lower than the emissions from one individual flying once between London and New York. These figures work on conservative estimates of the impact of aviation. Who spews this fire from the skies? Even in such a flying-prone country as England, 1 per cent of residents took a fifth of all overseas flights in 2018; 10 per cent took half and 48 per cent none. But the super-rich prefer their very own planes, or renting one from Warren Buffett, whose fleet of luxury dragons cruise the skies to predictable effect. The private jets operating in the US alone generate as much CO2 as half of Burundi does in a year.

Hello world

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 19:02:52 +0100

Hello world. Thank you for your patience while I slowly construct the contents of this web.

I mused a while ago on Bluesky over the idea that it may be more interesting to create the digital structures which furnish the form on which content such as this presents itself rather than the creation of the content itself. To this, I think I can now say, I present my commitment to degrowth communism. Degrowth communism is not a digital structure, neither in fact is it digital content, but of the two it has to be closer to the latter.

Projects

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 16:43:20 +0100

This web is a project, both its form as software creation and connectivity and its content.

Contact

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 16:43:14 +0100

Drop me a line on any of the social media links on the front page.

About

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 16:42:58 +0100

Cristòfol isn’t my name, but it would be if I’d been born where I’ve been living for the last thirty years. Tòfol is the diminutive of Cristòfol—in English the diminutive of the equivalent name would be the first syllable rather than the last two.

Degrowth communism is my response to what the United Nations calls the ‘triple planetary crisis’ of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. I’ve recently heard degrowth communism called climate Maoism—these both signify the coercive decommissioning of fossil fuel capitalism, and with this the coercive decommissioning of capitalism itself.