If he had lived, January 8th would have been the 79th birthday of Elvis Presley. By my reckoning, he was one of the best entertainers the US has ever produced, who had a ground breaking effect on pop music. Even today, all his hits seem as fresh as they were when they were first minted.
There are other anniveraries on January 8th, as well, of course. In 1989, a British Midland plane while attempting an emergency landing at East Midlands Airport in the UK, landed instead on the side of a motorway. About half the people on the flight were killed, close to 50 fatalities in all. I always remember that some years afterwards, when I was interviewing the head of a large business in Northern Ireland, she told me that both her parents had been on that plane and that both had been killed, a truly traumatic event for her and the rest of her family. Going back 10 years before that, on that date in 1979, an oil tanker caught fire and exploded in Bantry Bay in south-west Ireland, killing 49 of the crew.
On a more eccentric and contemporary note, there have been many reports of the UFO spotted last July by the captain of an Airbus A320 that was flying about 30 km west of Heathrow. He saw a large shining object, shining brilliantly in the sun, and moving very fast, apparently heading straight for his aircraft. Air traffic control reported no radar sightings, so explanations like a weather balloon have been ruled out. All very strange, yet it hasn’t exactly been over-reported in the UK media. But then the UK mainstream media, as with its counterparts in the rest of the world, is often brilliant at not reporting what’s going on? How many accounts have you seen over the last few days of the record heatwave in Argentina?
But talking of UFO, the latest reports of what the French call OVNIs comes from Bremen in northern Germany, where a strange object appeared on radar about 18h00 the other night. Air traffic in the region was disrupted. It was also spotted by witnesses on the ground. Something similar was seen in the skies over Zwickau in Saxony in eastern Germany on Sunday night, but this one turns out to have been either a weather balloon or a drone. Goodness knows what’s going to happen when Amazon gets going with parcel deliveries by drone!
Meanwhile, the weather over the past week or so has been appalling, not just in Ireland, but in much of western Europe. Here in Ireland, storms and huge waves have caused a lot of damage in the west and south of Ireland; off the north-west coast of Ireland, waves seven and more metres high are attracting surfers from around the world. In France, Brittany has been suffering very badly from storms and floods, while down in Biarritz, huge waves have been riding in. They really were enormous. A man and a woman decided to swim in them, extremely foolish in the circumstances; the man was rescued but the woman was washed out to sea and lost. Typical of the current times, people want to video or photograph everything and everyone and crowds on the beach at Biarritz seemed more preoccupied filming the woman in difficulties than knowing whether there was any hope of survival. At Nice airport last Saturday, the incessant rain and low cloud had a very disruptive effect on flights. The bad weather has extended right down to the Atlantic coast of Portugal, where some spectacular waves hit the coast close to the northern city of Porto.
Meanwhile, back in France, the website of the US publication, Newsweek, has been causing a stir with its article entitled La Chute de France, or the Fall of France. The staid Le Monde said that the piece,written by a British journalist living in Paris was riddled with inaccuracies, a plentitude of factual errors. One piece I read quoted George W.Bush as having said once that the French had no word for enterpreneur; this piece pointed out that the French have no word for cliché and that this Newsweek piece was crammed full of them.
At least, there was one sign the other day that all is not wrong in the French economy, but I always distrust the effects of property bubbles. One can be seen in the Pigalle district of Paris, a notorious red light district, where according to the BBC, the number of hostess bars has fallen from 84 to just a handful during the past five years. The whole district has become very fashionable for young, well-off people, so much so that over the past five years, property prices in Pigalle have risen by 25 per cent. The inevitable result is that Pigalle is going to end up totally sanitised. In the old days, much of Pigalle was just downright sleazy but I must admit I’d prefer it that way that a place that’s been stripped of any character or characters.
The same kind of iniquitous effect of property speculation can be seen somewhere else, too, Alexandria in Egypt. Once, this city had a vibrant cultural life and until the fall of the Mubarak regime a couple of years ago, the regulations for preserving historic buildings were reasonably well adhered too. Now, however, Egypt is in such chaos that it’s left the field open for property developers. One property that seems like to be demolished to make way for a block of flats is the villa where Laurence Durrell lived during the second world war and where he wrote some of his greatest masterpieces. All that of course counts for nothing where property speculation is concerned!
Be that as it may, there are lots of reports flying around that the French president, M.Hollande, whose presidency is in danger of foundering, is about to have a significant rethink on his economic policies, cutting public spending and reducing personal taxes and taxes for businesses, in a bid to get the economy moving.
Meanwhile, the hard-pressed French public is deriving a great deal of amusement from a series of photos and videos showing President Hollande trying to shake hands with a succession of foreign dignitaries. In nearly every case, he manages to miss by a mile!
No wonder that former president Sarkozy said the other day that he expects the municipal elections in March to create considerable political commotion in France. It’s symptomatic of the French economy that the other day, workers at the apparently doomed Goodyear tyre plant in Amiens held the production director and the head of human resources captive (they’ve since been released) because of very real fears that all 1,100 workers at the plant could soon lose their jobs.
On the subject of the economy, I see some dire facts about the state of the French cinema. The country still has 5,502 cinemas, but far fewer people are going to them. During 2013, there were 192.8 million admissions, a 5.3 per cent drop on 2012, bringing in the lowest figures since 2009. All this has its effect of course on film production. It’s telling that the other day, The Irish Times ran a very comprehensive list of all the new releases between now and the end of the year; virtually all the films listed are American and French-made films barely featured.
While all this is going on, the French Interior Minister, Manuel Valls, is making waves in the French media for all the wrong reasons. He took a ride on the Paris Métro on New Year’s Eve and seemed to find it amusing that the system is plagued by pickpockets. It’s a serious problem, certainly no laughing matter, and it all shows just how desperately the present French government is out of touch.
So time for some more predictions! Steen Jakobsen is the chief economist with a leading European bank,the Saxo bank,and he has made a set of predictions for 2014.
He believes that the EU will try to impose a tax of between five and 10 per cent on all bank deposits in the Eurozone of more than €100,000. He also believes that after the elections for the European parliament in May, extreme right wing MEPs will ally with anti-EU MEPS to form the leading group in the parliament, thus paralysing its work. He also believes that Germany is about to go into recession.
More predictions come from a highly respected Cambridge professor called Margaret Macmillan. She says that current political conditions are very similar to the situation that led up to the outbreak of the first world war. Then, the Balkans were the tinder that started the fire;now,she believes that conditions in the Middle East are similarly delicate. She says that on the eve of the 100th anniverary of the start of the first world war, we should reflect on our vulnerability to human error, sudden catastrophe and sheer accident. Just look at what happened to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, last week, a sheer accident.
Meanwhile, just to cheer us up, the Wall Street Journal reports from authoritative sources that the Pentagon is preparing war plans against China, just in case.
Back here in Ireland, I was very saddened to hear of the death of an old friend in the newspaper business, Catherine Rynne. In 1960s Ireland, she was a star feature writer on the Evening Press newspaper in Dublin. In those days, it was selling 200,000 copies a night, but of course it is long since vanished. In fact, Dublin doesn’t have an evening paper any more. The last one, the Evening Herald, was turned into a morning paper not long ago, so that the only true evening paper in Ireland is the Evening Echo in Cork, which sells a mere 15,000 copies a night. Even the Belfast Telegraph, once a mighty evening paper, is now an all day newspaper.
There have also been many shenanigans here over the Limerick City of Culture 2014. The city has loads of culture and history, but a right mess was made of organising everything. For starters, the government just decided on Limerick and didn’t allow any other city to make a bid. Then the whole process was put together so quickly there was no time for an open competition to find the ceo. With some top level resignations, amid many calls of croneyism, efforts to salvage the whole programme are ongoing. The entire episode has been a shambles, a sad reflection on how the inside golden circle can do things if left to their own devices.
But of course croneyism isn’t confined to Ireland. In Britain, in the New Year’s Honours list, prime minister David Cameron’s hairdresser found himself the proud recipient of an MBE. And if that doessn’t smack of croneyism, I don’t know what does! All I’m waiting for now is a Radio 4 special on the BBC. They’ve been plugging their Brain of Britain contest. I’m just a little surprised they haven’t managed to call it “Brian of Britain”! Talking about the BBC, I tuned in to a Radio 4 programme the other day about Elizabeth David and it was pathetic.
Elizabeth David was the first of the celebrity chefs, way back in the 1950s, and it was she, who in a dreary post-war Britain, introduced people to the delights of French cuisine. It was a real eye opener for many people, but the programme fell far short of capturing those delights.
At least, a good news story to end on. The other day, the Italian naval services managed to rescue 823 migrants from the sea off Sicily. They had come from Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan and other countries, all looking for a better life in Europe. One young girl who was rescued had brought her grey and white cat from Egypt with her and both the girl and her cat were saved. It’s as good a story as the photo story today about the Pope,pictured with a lamb around his neck,a wholly delightful sight!