bureaucracy. Alain Lambert, who is head of the government’s consultative
commission on the evaluation of norms, has said that France is so tied up in red tape that the country is in danger of being paralysed. At least, we’ve now got an official analysis of the situation, but whether it will ever be translated into reform is another matter entirely.
It’s now been revealed that France has 400,000 petty rules and regulations covering almost every aspect of life. If your child goes to kindergarten and has an egg for lunch, then there’s a strict rule for that - they can only have half an egg. If you have a box for the post at the front of your house, there are precise rules for
how it can be placed - it can’t stick out too much. And so it goes on and on, very wearying and often utterly ridiculous. Much as I love France and everything French, I wouldn’t dream of actually living there and having to put up with this utterly overwhelming and often pointless bureaucracy. Not only is France infected with this modern disease of having rules for everything in life, but the rot is insidious throughout the EU; it couldn’t run without vast amounts of red tape and the people in charge of the EU have learned their lesson well from the French. You can’t of course go to the other extreme and have a free for all; there has to be a reasonable amount of regulation -and redress- for the
ordinary citizen, but not on the scale it’s practised in France, where red tape threatens to tangle up the country entirely.
Which brings me to the free flowing documentary on Radio 4 the other day about Juliette
Gréco, the singer and performer who for so long has epitomised the bohemian way of life in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district of Paris. She was born in 1927, which makes her 86; she was born in Montpellier in the south-west of France but quickly made her mark in Paris after the Second World War. From 1950 almost up to the present, she has had an extraordinary amount of albums and songs. One of her most famous songs came out in 1967, called Déshabillez-moi (Undress Me), which she sang in her characteristically sultry style and which featured in the Radio 4 programme. Amazingly, her most recent album came out just two years ago. If anyone sums up the lifestyle of the famous residents of the Left Bank, she does and what a tradition it is, the essence of café life in the
artistic quarter of Paris.
But if you want a counterpoint to all this, an intriguing new book by Siobhan Wall has just been published by Frances Lincoln (£12.99), which details all kinds of quiet places to enjoy in Paris, from
hotels and restaurants and cafés, art galleries to libraries. One of the intriguing places she mentions is the Musée de la Vie Romantique in the rue Chaptal in the 9th., close to Pigalle, which gives great insights into the lives of 19th century literary figures.
Back here at home in Ireland, it’s the usual story of cock-ups and near misses. A typical story comes
from the Central Bank of Ireland, which has just issued a €10 coin commemorating James Joyce. The coin has a brief quotation from Ulysses, but whoever created the coin managed to include a word that wasn’t in the original text. The coins were selling for €46 each and all the publicity for the mistake helped ensure the whole lot sold out in double quick time. No doubt in time they will become
collectors’ items. Stephen Joyce, the grandson of the great writer, has described the creation of this coin as a great insult to the memory of his grandfather. But sadly, this slovenliness is all too typical of so many areas of present day life in Ireland, when persuading people to do what they say they are going to do can quite often prove problematic.
It’s no wonder that a recent opinion poll in the Sunday Independent newspaper in Dublin found that 75 per cent of the people questioned thought the present coalition government in Ireland was
doing a bad job and only 17 per cent were prepared to commend it. These are the kind of ratings that the government and president in France are getting, where the Hollande regime seems to be in freefall. Just when you think things can’t get worse, along comes yet another blunder. It’s got to the stage where every week, there’s news of yet another calamity, despite all those rules and regulations that are supposed to make life in France totally antiseptic and hazard-free.
Still, I suppose that if you wanted to get away from all this present day madness, one good place to go would be the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, just off the coast of Newfoundland in eastern Canada. They’ve long fascinated me; they are all that’s left of the once mighty French empire in North America.
There are eight islands in all, but only two are inhabited. The present population is just under
6,000,but even though it’s such a small outpost of France, the islanders are proud of their French heritage and speak French much more in the metropolitan style rather than in a Canadian idiom. The rain-swept islands have long been dependent on fishing; other attempts at diversification haven’t been very successful.
During the prohibition era in the US, the islands became “warehouse” for whisky brought in from Canada and then smuggled into the US. When prohibition ended in the US in 1933, it brought economic ruin to the islands as they lost so much of their daily revenue. But somehow, the islanders have managed to keep going, with the help of generous subsidies from Paris. In 1999, the islands got a brand new airport, which is big enough to allow planes flying directly from France to land there. For tourists, the islands are a marvellous example of unspoiled wildlife, a virgin landscape and environment, so remote from what passes for civilisation they are an utter revelation. Yet the
population is so small that on the two inhabited islands, street names are rarely used; people’s real names and their nicknames are all you need to find whoever you are looking for.
Yes, these wonderful islands are a terrific retreat from the modern world, yet have all the
facilities people need, including an impressive array of restaurants - nearly all authentically French, a sufficient recommendation for me!
Retreating from the modern world is a great idea and another slant on this theme came in an intriguing piece recently in the Guardian by Swiss writer Rolf Dobelli. He argued that people shouldn’t become news junkies. In a typical year, a person would read something like 12,000 news items from a whole variety of online sources, yet questioned Dobelli, how many would actually be relevant to the everyday life of the person reading them?
He also condemned present day news coverage for its superficiality, since it gives readers no insights into the wider movements of social, economic and other trends. In other words, since readers are
encouraged to concentrate on the smaller picture, they miss out entirely on the big picture of what’s really happening in the world. He makes more significant accusations, too, that this fixation with instant news soundbites does to the brain what junk food laden with sugar, fat and salt does to the body. Dobelli, who practices what he preaches and abstains from this daily fix of instant news, says
the deluge of news leads to fear and aggression and what is even worse,kills
off creativity.Now you know what the world is in such a bad state-it’s run by
news junkies!