orality and story in English
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A Tale of Voluntary Servitude
Let's play Follow the Leader. I have had this Tale of Voluntary of Servitude available in various versions for a while. Maybe in this age of leaders and influencers its time has come. Follow the Leader is an imitation game for children : everyone lines up behind a leader and imitates whatever the leader does ; if you can't do what the leader does, you're out ; when there's only one person left, that person becomes the leader and the game starts again. Want to be a leader or a follower?
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A story to give you the shivers
I’m a weatherman. I work for the television as a matter of fact. Here's a story of something that happened to me. A story to give you the shivers. Last night's forecast said : "After today's glorious sunshine and record-breaking temperatures, the National Weather Centre announces extreme cold for tomorrow with heavy snowfalls all over the country." Hard to believe? Well, just take a look at the story.
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France Paraguay – Golden Goal 1998
This Saturday, July 4th at 11 pm, following a series of impressive victories in the group stages, France plays Paraguay for a place in the last 8 of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It is not the first time that the two teams have met at this stage of the competition. It also happened 28 years ago during the 1998 World Cup which would make les Bleus world champions for the first time. I can still remember the winning goal very clearly. Laurent Blanc, who wasn't necessarily a player who scored goals, hit home the winner when nothing else had worked. I still carry the sense of the perfect timing…
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Come on baby, do the Locomotion
Doesn't everybody want to do the locomotion? Little Eva pointed us towards something essential when she sang The Locomotion, that classic song by Goffin & King from 1962. And she was right. Whether you're a driver or a passenger, we all love to feel that movement from where we are to where we want to be, as long as we do it nice and easy and don't lose control, with a little bit of rhythm and a lot of soul. But sometimes we do lose control. Fortunately, the driver is there to help with a reassuring announcement.
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Danzarin and the Search for the Perfect Partner
Her name was Danzarin, a tango dancer. She was looking for the perfect partner in her own special way. She had seen Julián before.
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Roots laid bare on the limestone plateau of Leucate
Since 2025, the trees in the Aude region of France have paid a high price for extreme weather and climate events. The other day, we followed an unexplored track on the plateau of Leucate in order to leave the main road where everyone else was walking. The path was easy to follow until we came upon an obstacle in the form of an uprooted tree lying stretched out on its side as if it had fallen into a deep sleep, thrown down by Storm Nils on 12 February 2026. More than two months later, none had dared awaken the sleeping giant.
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The undertaker’s friend
This piece first came to life as a spontaneous oral story when talking casually with friends about how narrative could just come out of the air. The man and the horse walking together were suddenly there and I followed them to the bridge. Later I realised it was an echo of an anecdote I'd forgotten from my mother's family who raised horses in County Cork on her father's side, and I wrote it down.
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The story of a speech disorchestrated
The prospect of speaking in public leaves nobody indifferent. There's no such thing as a perfect speech, we all know that. But we also know that accepting to stand up and speak means that anything can happen - for better or for worse. It makes you think, doesn't it? After all, our voice is us, it's our identity. For all these reasons, I have chosen to write about a recent experience I had speaking in public in front of quite a large audience where I completely lost my thread. For a brief instant I stammered, I stuttered and I spluttered. But I survived and, above all, I decided to take…
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Eye-awful wildfire in France
I was at the beach in Leucate for a family afternoon when at around 4pm the sky began to change colour. Darker and darker, first taking the heat off the sun but in the space of less than an hour then stealing the light. It reminded me of a solar eclipse. People were still at the beach but the sky was no longer blue.
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Going against the flow : faces in the crowd
Crowds can make us feel safe and give us a sense of belonging, but they can also make us feel uncomfortable and leave us dreaming of a space of our own. The same can be said of life online, where the invitation to click or share to show our approval or dispproval as one of the crowd is so difficult to resist. But how do we percieve somebody who breaks free from a crowd of whatever sort and takes their own path? A street photo by Alejandro Diez invites us to explore precisely that question.
