The Cloud Fisherman Euch Pêqueux d'Nuées

E veteris nova: new things come from old ones. One morning 2 years ago, I woke up and I could all of a sudden speak a language which is called Picard. Picard was born around 400 AD in today’s Northern France and South-Eastern Belgium and it has been spoken over there for centuries. It was born out of a mixture between the popular kind of Latin spoken by the Roman army soldiers who had settled there and the Germanic language spoken by the then new invaders, the Francs. Can you imagine my surprise when I realized that!! Actually, when I was a kid, I had noticed that my grand parents used to speak a very funny language. It was not standard French for sure and most people held it as a bad version of French, especially the people from France’s capital, Paris. This bad French they were speaking was in fact very good Picard. I had put it in some part of my brain and had forgotten it. Then I went on to study in Paris where I learned to speak “good French” and then later on in the US where I learned to speak “good English”. Since that morning 2 years ago, I have been speaking, reading, dreaming, even breathing in Picard. Through the Facebook and Twitter links below, you can see for yourself what Picard looks like. I now write poems and short stories in Picard. As we say in Picard, “euj cros qu’j’a queut su m’tiête”! ( I think I fell on my head!). But it feels real good! Since I was reborn a Picard, I have also changed my career and life goals. Indeed, I have quit my job as a successful manager in a big international corporation to become a cloud fisherman. For your info, there are 2 kinds of dreamers in my Picard universe. You first have the “moon fisherman” whose aim it is to try and catch the moon’s reflected image on puddles, after the rain. No need to say that they never succeed but this is precisely the whole point of it!! Then you have the “cloud fisherman”. It may look similar but it is not at all the same. The cloud fisherman aims at catching clouds to turn them into soft wool and bath bubbles!! He doesn’t succeed either but also never stops trying because trying is where the fun is. By the way, as a seasoned cloud fisherman, I can tell U the best way to catch a cloud is from the top of a pyramid. Hence the pix featured here which was taken in Wissant, France of a pyramid-like WWII German blockhouse left on the beach. You can clearly see that if you go to the top of the blockhouse and raise your arm, you can catch one cloud or two.