Herald daily freesheet in Dublin the other day. The contents, as follows, were quite startling: “I have worked in the city centre for 16 years and until now I thought I was unshockable. However, I came out of our offices at 5.30pm to be greeted by a gushing sound from the other side of the very narrow
street. The sight I saw was two ‘ladies’ squatting on the footpath peeing to their heart’s content, and handing a loo roll to each other. I didn’t know where to look. Shocked. Niamh Dalton”.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, another incident in Dublin was reported the other day. In one of the city’s Georgian streets, a woman stopped a passer-by and asked her to look after her
young child, while she squatted down on the steps of a Georgian house and let fly with a pee in full view of passers-by.
Rather sadly, this is what passes for ‘normal’ in present day Dublin and I guess it isn’t any different in other capital cities around Europe. Just shows what a crude world we live in, where any kind of behaviour is considered ‘acceptable’, as with Lady Gaga’s performance in the Gay Club in London last weekend. It’s hardly surprising codes of conduct have declined so much; we live in a truly Orwellian world, where words mean the opposite of what people think they mean. Political leaders here in Ireland have given renewed impetus to the concept of
Orwellspeak, by saying one thing and doing the complete opposite.
When the leaders of the two parties currently in coalition in Dublin were in opposition, they were full of empathy for the plight of pensioners. Indeed, the man who is currently prime minister, Enda Kenny (on one occasion, the New York Times couldn’t decide whether he was a man or a woman!)
said that he wanted to make Ireland a place in which people could grow old gracefully. Judging by the recent Budget 2014, it now seems as if his government wants to change that word ‘gracefully’ to ‘disgracefully’, after all the cuts that have hit vulnerable old people so badly.
The junior partner in the present Irish government is the Irish Labour Party, that has become so supportive of extreme right-wing policies that it’s now somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun or George W.Bush. Yesterday, another well-known local politician resigned from the party, saying that it seemed quite content to pass all the previously unpassable boundaries of social justice. Come the next general election and the chances are that the party will find itself totally and utterly redundant, wiped out of Irish political history. Not so long ago, a vibrant Green Party was also in a coalition government and performing generally useful works, but after the 2011 general election, was totally destroyed. And these days, if anyone is looking for the Green Party, it just doesn’t exist any
longer as a viable political force. Labour, it seems, is hellbent on going the same route to self-destruction.
On a more positive note, I was looking again at a photograph taken in 1838. It was a daguerrotype taken in the boulevard du Temple, which is still there, in the 3rd., close to the place des Vosges. The exposure time was about 10 minutes,so even though there was a lot of horse-drawn and pedestrian traffic when the photograph was taken, none of it showed up in the final photo. But at a street corner, a man stopped to get his boots shone and he and the man who was cleaning his boots stood still long
enough to appear in the photo. This is the first known photo with people in it and it is also recognised as the first photo to appear of Paris. It's fascinating stuff, but one thing it shows so clearly is just how scruffy and rundown Paris looked in those days, getting on for 200 years ago.
I was also fascinated by an anniversary mentioned on Radio 4 the other day. October 24, 1264, was the day that Chartes cathedral was consecrated. It’s the pinnacle of Gothic architecture and what makes it even more impressive is that in 1194, most of the building was destroyed in a fire. It
took 30 years to rebuild and the results have stood to this day. If they were doing reconstruction on this scale now, you’d never get the builders out, let alone after 30 years! The crypt in the cathedral is the largest in France and the cathedral itself has 172 stained glass windows. If you climb to the top of
the north tower and steeple, over 100 metres high, there are lovely views over the town and surrounding countryside.
It’s well worth taking an express train from the station at Montparnasse in Paris; the journey covers
90km. We’ve done that trip and the magnificence of the cathedral repays many times over the effort of the journey. Chartres itself is a lovely town, much less spoiled than somewhere like Versailles. The old town in Chartres covers about 60 hectares and you can wander around the many streets that date back to the Middle Ages. The town is also amply blessed with museums, so no shortage of things to do, and if the weather is fine, you can hire a pedalo or canoe on the River Eure, close to the cathedral and town centre.
Going on the river only in calm weather is the sensible thing to do. This week, among the many
casualties of the great storm that ripped across southern Britain, northern France, through the Low Countries, into Germany and Scandinavia, was an unfortunate woman who was standing on the cliffs at Belle-Ile in Britanny and was blown off those cliffs by the hurricane force winds.
There have been some near misses, too. The other day, a postal freight plane was taking off from Roissy, laden with thousands of parcels, when a propellor fell off. It tore a hole in the fuselage before falling to earth, but fortunately, the crew managed to make an emergency landing without any
injuries.
Talking of transport, the latest addition to the TGV network has been announced. A high speed line is going to be built between Bordeaux and Toulouse and is due to open for service in 2024. At that stage, the journey time from Paris to Toulouse will be three hours and 10 minutes, an hour
faster than at present. There’s also talk of building a high speed line to connect south-western France and the north-west of Spain, with the first section going from Bordeaux to Dax, but at this earlier stage, there is so much opposition, the project seems a little less viable. Still, it’s amazing that
France has built such an impressive high speed rail network in not much more than a couple of decades, while the amount of ifs and buts that are plaguing the attempts to build England’s first high speed rail links are astonishing. It’s not just France, but other European countries, such as Italy, Spain and Germany, all of which have managed to create high speed train travel in a fraction of the time it’s taking in England.
I noticed another way, too, this week in which mainland Europe is far ahead of GB.A referendum is
coming up in Switzerland very shortly and if it’s passed,it will set a minimum
income for every Swiss citizen living in Switzerland equivalent to €2,000 a
month.It’ s all very commendable and all a far cry from the social divisive and
imbecilic ‘bedroom tax’,that seems one of the main highlights of the current
coalition government in London.
It’s hardly surprising, having said all that, that Marks & Spencer is upping the ante in its return to the
French market, despite France’s economic doldrums. The group has just opened two more stores in Paris, one close to the Eiffel tower, the other in the Aéroville shopping centre near Roissy. M & S returned to France two years ago and now has four stores open. It’s also linking up with Relay, a French chain of newsagents and convenience stores to present the M & S offerings at other
outlets in the Paris area, such as stations and airports.
Meanwhile, the winter of discontent for Président Hollande just gets full of yet more dissatisfaction. A very recent opinion poll shows that more than 70 per cent of French people think there are too many
taxes, while 80 per cent believe Hollande’s economic policies are misguided. These days, more than a quarter of all French undergraduates have one ambition in mind, to emigrate, figures that are far higher for graduates with very marketable qualifications, as in IT. Just watch out for the rise and rise of the Front National - next year, it looks like delivering some serious shocks to the dysfunctional and archaic political establishment in France.
Still, we can’t end without some funny stuff. A news website in Dublin, journal.ie, is great for publishing material many other media outlets won’t touch, including all its funnies. This week, courtesy of the Redundant Proofreaders Society on Facebook, it published visuals of 10 signs in
Ireland that could have been improved with a little proofreading. One fast food outlet in Dublin advertised ‘the best cooked breastfast in Dublin’, while a supermarket sign in its Cuisine de France bakery section read: "please use thongs or gloves provided”. The mind boggles!