all happen again, if the US, the UK and France press ahead with their plans for limited military attacks on Syria.
There’s no doubting the morality of what they might do - no-one could possibly excuse what happened during the chemical attacks in the suburbs of Damascus last week - but the real
politik of the situation is entirely different. The Syrian regime is backed by Russia, China and Iran, three formidable foes, so who knows what an attack by the West might generate.
The consequences cannot be foreseen, if those three western nations press ahead with these very foolish plans. It could
well be the Suez fiasco of 1956 all over again, but on a much bigger scale. For months now, many experts on the Middle East, and not just the off-the-wall doomsday pundits that seem to swarm in the US at any hint of a disaster, have been warning that Syria could be the fuse that ignites World War III. To quote a word that has just made the online Oxford English Dictionary for the first
time, Syria could be the genesis for the mother and father of an omnishambles.
So on that sombre note, let's remember a special anniversary at the end of August, the liberation of Paris in 1944. On August 26th that year, General de Gaulle led the Free French forces in a joyous liberation march down the Champs-Elsyées. Two days previously, the liberation forces had
reached the Paris suburbs and on the 25th, both eastern and western parts of Paris had been liberated. Paris had surrendered to Nazi Germany on June 14, 1940, a month after the Wermacht had invaded France. The liberation was indeed a joyous moment after four years of Nazi occupation and as for de Gaulle himself, he went on to be a very striking and strident President, from 1958 to 1969. If you walk around Paris these days, you’ll often still see plaques set into walls that commemorate members of the resistance who had fallen during the liberation of the city. But it’s well to remember how long the Nazi tyranny lasted in comparison with the length of time since the US invaded Iraq on false premises.
If the attacks on Syria go ahead, we could be facing another interminable period of strife and upheaval, possibly something much worse.
Another and much more interesting anniversary took place at the end of this month; on August 26th, 1936, the BBC launched the world’s first television service, based at Alexandra Palace in London. It lasted until the outbreak of World War II, but in the short time in between, my uncle Basil, a great character indeed, had performed some of his jazz repetoire on the station. Good to know that somewhere in our family tree, we have a TV star hidden away!
Still, these days, one wonders just how useful the television revolution has been; I agree with a letter writer to today’s Irish Times who says that so much utter rubbish is being produced on Irish
television that people would be much better off if it all closed down. It would also prevent the powers-that-be feeding the populace so much electronic pap to keep them quiet and docile.
Not even the once mighty BBC is free from errors these days. The other day, I swear I heard a BBC announcer say that this August was the 34th anniversary of the assassination of Lord Louis
Mountbatten. If I heard the announcer correctly, he said that Mountbatten was killed at Warrenpoint in Co Down; that was totally untrue. He was killed off the Co Sligo coast in the West of Ireland, while on the same day, 18 British soldiers were killed in a bomb attack in Warrenpoint. Just recently, when I heard the BBC describing the bomb attack on the Air India plane that blew up over the
Atlantic in 1985, the plane was said to have come down in the Irish Sea. It didn’t; it came down in the Atlantic, off the coast of south-west Ireland. But then so much of the BBC’s output is questionable these days.
When you look for instance at the Radio 4 programme schedule, your initial reaction is that there’s plenty on, but when you fine tune it and listen to some of the programmes, you soon change your mind! The trouble with the BBC, as someone pointed out the other day, it that it is dominated by
people who come from a white middle class middle England background, just about the worse source you can imagine for creativity!
Still, the elite as always have their own troubles. In the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland last
week, a Spanish adventurer and TV star called Álvaro Bultó was killed when he was involved in a base jumping accident. He had a close liaison with the daughter of the King and Queen of Spain, themselves never far from trouble these days. And on a lighter note, did you see the recent photos of Prince Albert of Monaco in his bathing togs? He’s really developed a very unseemly and very
unhealthy paunch - there must be plenty of profits to eat in Monaco! But talking of elites, I loved the story about the teenager in Italy who wrote to the Pope. When the teenager was out one day recently, the phone rang and someone left a message on his voicemail to say he’d ring back again. And sure enough he did, for an eight minute call. "Pope here”, announced the caller - the new Pope does
seem a wonderful, down-to-earth kind of person.
Talking about eminent people in the entertainment business, I was reading a very interesting
piece the other day about the Greek singer Nana Mouskouri, who is now 78, more or less retired from singing and certainly retired from her duties as a Greek MEP. She’s lucky in that she and her husband live outside Greece, in Switzerland. But I remember when we went to a concert given by her in the National Concert Hall in Dublin. It was a wonderful concert, but utterly spoiled because some stupid woman who was sitting right in front of us had drenched herself in perfume that was as intoxicating as toilet cleaner. The smell wafted out over the auditorium, making quite a lot of people feel quite nauseous.
Mentioning public performances reminds me that one of the theatres in Dublin has a good show on at the moment, Cats, but when I found out about the price of tickets, they turned out to be €50 each. Add on taxi fares, drinks in the interval, etc, and you’re talking about €150 for a night out. That would almost add up to a year’s TV licence so that you can spend every evening of the year
watching absolute junk and mostly repeated junk at that on RTÉ!
So on to Paris! Last week, there were some really spectacular photos of a fire in the 7th, close to the Hotel des Invalides, not far from the Eiffel Tower. A hotel was being renovated and as so often happens in these situations, the whole place caught fire, sending up plumes of smoke that could be
seen all over the city. Still a good friend of mine was telling me the other day about their trip to France this month. Taking their car on the ferry from Ireland to France, an overnight journey in each direction, they drove all the way to Provence and back, just for a week’s stay there, but they had a wonderful time, remembered in a stack of bottles of wine nestled on their bookshelves. Who
couldn’t have a wonderful time in Provence, an enchanting part of France, especially away from the big cities on the coast.
One of the places in the South of France where the residents feel under siege is St Tropez. It’s home to Bernard Arnault, who runs LMVH, the world’s largest owner of luxury goods, with over 60 major brands to its name, everything from Christian Dior to Moet et Chandon champagne. Arnault is worth €21 billion and is the richest man in France and the 10th such person on the planet. But locals in St
Tropez fear that he wants to turn the town into a gigantic bazaar for LMVH brands, encouraging the super rich, who anchor their mega sized yachts offshore or else squeeze them into the harbour, to spend lavishly on his products.
If you go to St Tropez between June and August, it’s hell on earth, as the population of the town soars from its permanent level of 6,000 to 150,000 and prices go sky high accordingly. But if you go out of season - we visited one December - it is a wholly delightful place, with a small port area, fronted by lots of interesting restaurants. It has a fantastic market twice a week and you can visit nearby vineyards, as well as inspecting L’Annonciade, the local musuem, which has paintings and other art works by such artists as Matisse who fell under the spell of St Tropez, once an 18th century
shipbuilding town. The town of course is still famous for Brigitte Bardot, still resident there, but these days, devoted to a noble cause, animal welfare. The medieval hill village of Ramatuelle is only about 30 minutes drive away and it too is enchanting. But take my advice and don’t even think of going to see the place during the peak summer season. The Bakerloo underground line in London is
less packed at rush hour!
Back to Paris. A campaign is under way by the tourism board for Paris and the Ile de France to make what is often perceived as gruff service to tourists much more gracious. I’ve also been a little puzzled at the notion that people in the tourism industry in Paris are less than welcoming; true, there’s been the odd incident of standoffish behaviour or less than efficient service, but generally speaking, I’ve never had any complaints in Paris and have always found the inhabitants of the city perfectly easy to get on with! Perhaps I’m missing something! But it has to be said that sometimes, tourists themselves are to blame. A lot of American tourists just shout, or don’t say hello, and don’t know a word of French, and then they say that the French treat them rudely.
Another interesting trend about Paris. The Guardian ran an interesting feature the other day about
how some hotels in Paris are using their literary connections, very successfully, to market themselves. I take to heart what Marcel Proust once wrote, very tellingly: "The real voyage of discovery consists not of seeking new landscapes but of having new eyes”.
In the rather grubby 10th, near the Gare de l’Est, Le Marcel hotel makes the most of its namesake and
has named its rooms after the most famous characters that Proust created. In the next door 9th, Les Plumes hotel is devoted to literary lovers, George Sand and Alfred de Musset, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud and Juliette Drouet and Victor Hugo. The original literary hotel was of course L’Hotel, a posh hotel in the St Germain district, where Oscar Wilde died in 1900, having said that either he or the wallpaper had to go. The hotel is still very interesting, despite being gentrified so much. And of course I should mention our favourite hotel in Paris, the modest Quai Voltaire, opposite the Louvre, where not only Oscar Wilde but other creative characters such as Wagner, once stayed.
It’s all a long way from the story of something funny peculiar that happened to us in Luxembourg once. We had been in Germany for a while and travelled there by train only to find an unusual surprise when we went to check in at the hotel we had pre-booked some time previously, before we had left Dublin. When we walked into the hotel, we could see very clearly into the bar, which was adjacent to the lobby. On closer inspection- you always have to check out these things very
carefully! - I was amazed to see some very scantily dressed women, young and not so young, sitting at the bar. A careful recce revealed that the hotel was in fact one of the local brothels, no doubting servicing many of the personnel who work in the various EU offices in Luxembourg! In the best traditions of tabloid journalism, we made our excuses and left and soon found a modern hotel right
opposite the railway station. It had all the usual hotel facilities but after the previous establishment was so dull!
Still, we found Luxembourg city itself rather enchanting. Its old fortifications are a UNESCO
heritage site and the city is full of gorgeous gorges, as well as a splendid twice weekly market in the place Guillaume. The cathedral of Notre Dame was once a 17th century Jesuit church, while the 16th century ducal palace, where the royal family lives, is equally interesting. Certain parts of it are open to
visitors, but only until the beginning of September.
Outside the capital, we found the wine district along the banks of the Moselle very interesting and went to a vineyard in Remich for some delightful tasting of some Germanic-style wines. Then on a wet Sunday afternoon, we found ourselves having lunch is a very old hotel, full of character and characters, in the centre of the steel making town of Esch-sur-Alzette, in the south-west of Luxmebourg. We also satisfied our curiosity by taking a short stroll out of town and in France, with absolutely no sign anywhere of a frontier.
Luxembourg is a small country, with a population of just half a million, but despite being sandwiched between France, Germany and Belgium, it retains a strong identity. Parts of the country are very rural, like the forested Ardennes in the north and “Little Switzerland” around Mullerthal in the
east. French and German are the main languages, but there’s also the local dialect, Luxembourgish, although during our time there, we didn’t see or hear much evidence of it.
I would strongly recommend Luxembourg as a
delightful small place to enjoy a holiday,but do keep out of the brothels
posing as hotels!