But what really got me was when he told me what his father had told him decades ago: only believe a little of what you hear and only believe about half of what you see. That old received wisdom couldn’t be more appropriate for the current crises we are living through, especially Greece. Believe little of what the so- called leaders tell you!
In the meantime, one of the year’s big sporting events is about to get under way, the Tour de France. It starts this Saturday in Utrecht in the Netherlands, despite police there threatening to go on strike. After the Grand Départ in the Netherlands, it will go through Belgium and into France, where it will traverse 26 departments. The 21 stages of this year’ s race cover a total of 3, 360 km, finishing on the Champs- Elysées on July 26th. The Alpes de Huez hairpin bends in the French Alps, threatened by a huge landslide, are just one of the many challenges en route.
There are lots of other big events about to start in France, like the Avignon Festival, which opens on Saturday and runs up until the 25th. It has a vast range of artistic events, with a fringe festival festival running alongside. It’s all rather like Edinburgh in August, except that Avignon will be markedly warmer. From next Monday until August 1, a big festival will be under way in the lovely medieval city of Carcassone, where on of the highlights will be veteran crooner Johnny Hallyday.
In Paris, plans are under way to do a big makeover on the Gare du Nord, the first point of entry for many visitors to the French capital. It has been rundown and grubby for many years, while the immediate district around the station is notorious for its street gangs and prostitutes. At the other end of the Channel Tunnel link is St Pancras station in London, which is an upmarket departure point. But the Gare du Nord actually has five times as much passenger traffic as the London station, with more than 700, 000 people a day using the place. Now, the €1 billion makeover plan will be massively remodelled and will even have a restaurant called the Train Blanc ( as opposed to Le Train Bleu in the Gare de Lyon) , which will be run by a Michelin- starred chef, Thierry Marx. It’ s also planned to redesign the approaches to the station, which have caused massive traffic jams in the area for decades. The really big challenge is that all this reconstruction will go on while the station remains open for business.
On the subject of travel, it seems that Air France could shed as many as 3, 000 jobs, as it slims down to cope with its worsening financial situation. Cue more strike action, as if there enough under way at the moment in the transport sector. The taxi drivers protests the other day against UberPOP turned decidedly nasty and as usual in these situations, the official response was restriction in favour of the status quo. But quite apart from Air France itself, air traffic controllers and ferry workers at Calais seem destined to create a lot more mayhem during the course of the summer.
But there was one piece of good news from Air France the other day. Shortly after one of its flights left Nice airport bound for Paris, a male passenger suffered cardiac arrest. A steward intervened very promptly and saved the man’ s life. The plane then made an emergency stop at Lyon, so the passenger could be taken to hospital. Yet, despite all the delays, the plane arrived in Paris only just over an hour late.
Another big development seems set to go ahead in Paris, the planned Tour Triangle in the 15th. , which will rise to 42 floors, a kind of glass pyramid. It’s the first time for nearly 40 years since the last skyscraper was built in Paris, the Tour Montparnasse. That skyscraper is as ugly as hell, but it has perhaps the best viewing spot in Paris, on its rooftop, a much less crowded alternative to the Eiffel Tower.
Down in the south, more mayhem the other night. In the town of Le Muy in the Var, at the end of last week, a drive- by shooting left several teenagers injured. Then a couple of nights later, local teenagers ran riot protesting against the inaction of the police. The rioting teenagers created much destruction in the town and several people were stabbed. Also in the south of France, a Frenchman in his 60s was killed in a bull run in the small town of Sainte- Maurice- de- Cazevieille, which is 70 km north of Montpellier. It’ s one of a number of small towns in the south where bull running takes place, but is much less publicised than the bull running in Spain. On this particular occasion, the man, who was standing outside the safety barrier, was gored by a bull.
Then there was the tragic bungee jump from a crane in the small town of Audincthun in the Pas de Calais department, right up in the north- east of France, close to the Belgian border. A man and a woman decided to do a bungee jump from the crane but about 15 metres above ground level, the fastening systems on their equipment failed. The woman was killed in her fall to the ground, while the man was badly injured.
Also in the south, three year old Léa Baba from Provence is still fighting for her life. She had a 10 hour heart operation at the beginning of last week to try and cure the many heart defects with which she had been born. For the first two or three days after the operation, her condition was stable, but by the end of the week, it had deteriorated considerably and the young child was fighting for her life.
Something else that happened the weekend before last in Provence was really astonishing. A mud race was staged in Nice but as a result over 1, 000 people fell ill, many of them seriously, with gastro- enteritis type symptoms. It seems that bacteria in the mud were to blame. Seems daft to have taken part in the whole event in the first place!
Cannes has also been in the news for the wrong reasons. The Cannes Lions festival has been taking place for the advertising and marketing industries, but for a Google executive from London, it all went tragically wrong when he was killed by a taxi. Then earlier this week, at 04. 00 hrs on Monday morning to be precise, two robbers broke into the Art du Pain bakery in the rue Jean- Jaures in Cannes, sprayed tear gas in the face of the owner of the bakery and stole €10, 000 in cash from the safe.
The deaths of two figures once in the limelight also made news this week. Charles Pasqua, the son of a Corsican family who had settled in Grasse, was a hardline interior minister in the 1980s, very controversial at the time. He has just died at the age of 88. Then came the death earlier this week of Alain de Greef, at the age of 68. He was once the director of programming at Canal+, the television channel that 20 years ago started to set a lot of new boundaries in French television.
In the meantime, le canicule is back in the news as France suffers from an extreme heatwave. The temperature forecast today for Paris is 40 degrees C; the city is absolutely unbearable in very hot weather and even though the temperature reading will be 40, it will seem a good 10 degrees hotter than that. Other places around the country are getting similar temperatures, such as Bordeaux, where the reading is set to soar to 41.
Fears over more terrorist attacks in France underscore much public anxiety as to what might happen next,after the latest incident last Friday at the Air Products factory near Lyon. At Le Lavandou in Provence, it has always been customary to have open air Mass every Sunday during the summer, but this time round, the mayor has decided to cancel the event, because of fear of attack. Even though only about 300 people used to attend, it was still part of the traditional summer season in the town.
No wonder that the other day, a photographer taking snaps in St Tropez swears that when he looked at the shots he had taken of a passing jet aircraft, he saw what looked like a UFO emerging from close to the sun. He says that it was about 1, 000 metres up and ridicules any suggestions that it could have been anything but a UFO.
There was also a lovely story of the one that got away, the three year old heifer in the Rhone area that was on the way to the abattoir last week, when sensing what was about to happen, made a run for it. The end of the story was that the owner decided to sell the animal for €5, 500 to an animal charity, so that the beast is now going to live out its days contentedly.
Here in Dublin yesterday, the weather was playing strange tricks, producing lenticular clouds that look like flying saucers. When I was driving along a high stretch of road, from where there are good views across the city, the clouds formed amazing shapes. It looked just as if the city was backed by the Alps, complete with swathes of snow, formed by white clouds. All very strange.
A death that was announced officially In Ireland on Monday has caused much regret. Liam ó Murchú was a television presenter of much renown; at one stage he was also deputy director- general of RTÉ. But what he was best known for was his bilingual programming, in both English and Irish, very popular and also award winning.
I got to know him quite well; he was a lovely person, a fantastic conversation creator, someone you could talk to for hours on all manner of subjects, as I did on occasion. At the end of such conversations, one always felt full of joy and exuberance.
On the international front, apart from the various terrorist attacks last Friday, the big story continues to be Greece. One small event in Paris created much news interest. A male model called Jera Diac was taking part in a fashion show for the spring and summer of next year, when he suddenly held up a placard with the slogan “Kill Angela Merkel” . Everyone at the show was quite rightly aghast at all this, but it’ s symptomatic of the current febrile state of affairs in the EU, over the Greek debt crisis.
The German government has contributed much to the Greek debacle, with its short- sighted, legalistic and unimaginative approach to the Greek problem. Neither have other institutions such as the IMF been any more helpful. In many ways, their approach has had a whiff of fascism, which is hardly surprising, since the foundations of the EU itself were laid in Germany during the Nazi era. The Guardian made very good comparison between the 101 st anniversary last Sunday of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, in Sarajevo. As The Guardian pointed out, in its aftermath, European diplomats said it was a small event that could easily be contained. Yet six weeks later, Europe was at war. The Guardian drew distinct comparisons with this and the current situation in Greece.
It’s very difficult not to have lots of sympathy for everyone in Greece. On our only visit there, one of the places we went to a couple of times was the island of Aegina, 55 km from Athens, about an hour on the hydrofoil from Piraeus. On one visit to Aegina, a lovely elderly man took us for a trip round the island on his pony and trap, showing us all the wonderful blossom filled landscapes. It was idyllic and we had a wonderful tour guide. In Athens itself, one night after dinner in the Hotel Grande Bretagne, just round the corner from thje Greek Parliament and Syntagma Square,we got into conversation with one of the concierges. He was very polite and formal- he had thought we were from England, but when we told him we were from Dublin, he erupted with joy, gave us a brief run down on the Irish battle for independence and then announced that one of his heroes was De Valera.
One of the striking omissions from the coverage of present events in Greece is any mention of the very disreputable involvement of Britain in Greece’s affairs during the civil war in Greece that followed the end of World War II. Britain behaved very dishonourably on that occasion, and while Greeks remember it vividly, try finding some mention of it in the UK media!
So many of the players in the Greek crisis have behaved ineptly that one story I read the other day could possibly produce a better outcome. It seems that the development of artificial intelligence is close to the point where it will have caught up with human intelligence in terms of thought processes, including intuitive thinking. Perhaps after the mess that the EU, the ECB and the IMF have made of the Greek situation, artificial inteliigence might provide some better solutions! No wonder that in France, Marine Le Pen of the National Front has a new nickname. She’ s being called Madame Frexit, as the Front National favours a French exit from the EU and the eurozone.