The 57 year old woman had worked for the Auchan supermarket for the past 15 years and was in the habit of forgetting to scan prices, or else reducing prices dramatically, for less well off customers. Earlier this month, she was finally caught, when bosses nabbed her in the middle of selling a €500 computer to a customer for a mere €10. 49. She has been suspended and apart from legal penalties that she faces, she is also likely to lose her job.
Meanwhile, a report from the OECD says that the rich are merely getting richer and that one of the countries where this trend is most noticeable, despite an allegedly socialist government, is France.
Down in Marseille, a marketing stunt by a drug gang caused considerable uproar. It launched a carte de fidelité, in other words, a loyalty card similar to those used in many supermarkets, to reward loyal customers. The card even gave the hours that dealers are in business, from 11am until midnight daily. While people can see the funny side of this, the reality is that Marseille suffers from the sheer scale of organised drug dealing in the city. Also in the south of France, police in Cannes discovered that a Serbian couple were stealing on a grand scale. They recovered a huge haul of haute couture clothes, all stolen from shops and boutiques in Cannes, which has become a notorious spot for criminal activity. The couple even had a de- beeper, which prevented security alarms going off when they left shops with goods that had been stolen rather than paid for.
To the west of Paris, another big scam has been going on in recent weeks. Criminals wearing false police uniforms have been carrying out a spate of carjackings, targetting expensive cars and vans and making off with considerable hauls of goods and cash. Also in Paris, last Friday, staff at the Eiffel Tower went on strike last Friday morning in protest at the sheer numbers of pickpockets in action in and around the tower. The workers at the Eiffel Tower claim that the authorities are failing to make inroads into the problem, yet those self-same authorities claim that crimes against tourists are actually declining in the rest of Paris.
Someone who committed a crime last Thursday in the west of France but didn’t get away with it was a man who phoned a bomb threat against an Air France departure from the airport at Bordeaux. His girl friend was due to take the flight, but got held up in traffic, so he issued the bomb threat to stop the plane taking off. The police soon caught up with him and he could face severe penalties, up to two years in prison as well as a fine of €30, 000.
Air France is also in the news again, for an entirely different region. It has a lot of pilots based at regional hubs around France, but wants to centralise them all in Paris. In the case of the airport at Nice, Air France has 200 pilots stationed there, but now, they and their families are faced with uprooting their homes in Provence in order to move to Paris and like all the other families affected by this move, they are far from happy. Another strike in the offing?
Also on the subject of the aviation industry, I note that the first Caravelle jet rolled off the production line in France exactly 60 years ago, on May 27, 1955. It was the French forerunner of the Airbus, but by the 1980s, had become obsolete. Caravelles were retired from service in Europe at the end of the 1990s and the last one to be sold was bought by a Congolese air freight company in 2005. Caravelles were widely used by Air Inter, the old regional airline that was absorbed into Air France in 1997. One of the striking features of Caravelles was that passengers boarded through steps that led up into the belly of the aircraft, rather than through entrance doors towards the front of the aircraft. I did at least one flight on a Caravelle and apart from the unusual method of boarding, travel in it was just the same as with any other kind of jet aircraft.
In another part of the travel industry, trouble is also brewing- no surprise there. A new report on the inter- city and night rail services in France recommends that many of them should be closed down because they are loss making. A total of 325 inter- city trains connect over 300 destinations daily in France and there are also many long distance night trains. But the mere suggestion that many of them should be scrapped has caused public outrage. One of the problems of the French rail network is that while so much money has been poured into TGV services, regional train services have been starved of resources. Nearly two years ago, an express train from Paris to Limoges crashed at Bretigny- sur- Orge, 20 km south of Paris, killing half- a- dozen passengers. That crash happened because of lack of investment in railway infrastructure; if the rail lines at the spot had been properly maintained, that crash, in July, 2013, wouldn’t have happened.
At the end of last week, a fairly substantial earthquake shook parts of Kent in south- east England, mainly in the Canterbury, Margate and Whitstable area. It was recorded at 4. 2 on the Richter scale, so it didn’t cause any damage. I was amused at how chauvinistic the London papers were, as usual. They went into all the details of the earthquake and the often amusing reaction of local people affected by it, but completely failed to mention that it was also felt across the English Channel, in the Pas de Calais region.
Paris was gripped by a frightful murder case the other day. In the working class 20th arrondissement, close to the Pere Lachaise cemetery, a 30 year pregnant woman was found dead with her throat cut; she had been murdered with an electric sander. Her husband was found alive, but critically injured and it turned out that the couple had a long history of conjugal violence. Down in the Grasse area of Provence, a baker has been arrested for trying to murder his former partner at Saint- Lauren- du- Var with a rolling pin. The unfortunate woman is now recovering in hospital.
The Cannes film festival ended last weekend, notorious as usual for the wardrobe malfunctions of some of the stars. French actress Sophie Marceau, 48, let slip and showed a tantalising glimpse of nipple as well as her knickers, but this was nothing compared to what happened at the 2005 Cannes festival, when a strap on her dress came undone and she revealed, quelle horreur, an entire bare breast. A French film director, Jacques Audiard, made a film about refugees from post civil war Sri Lanka fleeing to France. The film, Dheepan, won the top prize, the Palme d’ Or, much to everyone’s surprise. A film shot in Ireland, The Lobster, described as a dystopian comedy, won the jury prize. The film stars Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz and was filmed on location in Dublin and County Kerry. But the Cannes results didn’t please the representatives of the Italian film industry, who complained that the jury at Cannes was totally biased in favour of French productions.
An interesting restoration story has emerged from Paris. The chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, which dates back to the mid- 13th century, has just emerged from a seven year restoration project. The chapel, which is close to Notre Dame, is famed for its stained glass windows, which were cleaned by laser. At the same time, the outside of the windows were given coatings of clear glass to protect them from traffic fumes. The chapel was visited by Hitler, in June, 1940, during his only visit to Paris.
A very positive legislative change has just been voted into law in France. Supermarkets can now no longer dump unwanted food; now they have to dispose of such food to charities, or else send it for use as animal feed or in energy generation. In France, each person is estimated to throw away up to 30kg of food a year, worth up to €20 billion. It’ s a shocking waste and now campaigners are urging the excellent French move to be turned into a worldwide template. At the same time, school children in France are now to have lessons in preventing food waste.
Also in the French legislature, some feminists are urging the government to scrap the constitutional term the droits de l’ homme in favour of droits humains. They say that talking about the rights of man makes women invisible and want the term replaced by the more inclusive modern phrase that is already in use in French- speaking Canada and in Switzerland.
In another political move, this time a local one, Pierre Aschieri has been elected mayor in the town of Mouans- Sartoux in Provence. He has taken over from his 78 year old father André, who retired recently on grounds of ill health, after 41 years in the job.
I was sad to read that the renowned Egyptian actor, Omar Sharif, who is now 83, appears to be suffering from Alzheimer’ s; he now spends much of his time living in hotels in Egypt. He is still regarded as the Arab world’ s biggest film star even though it’ s reported he has given up film making because he can no longer remember his lines. I remember the time vividly, over 20 years ago, when we were having an outdoor lunch on the terrace of a restaurant in the Tuileries in Paris. Much laughter was coming from the adjoining table and when I turned to see who was having so much fun over lunch, there was a whole group of people, with Omar Sharif holding court. A sad decline.
Another gastronomic revolution took place in Paris over the past few days, when the Taste of Paris food festival opened, at the Grand Palais, across the river from the Eiffel Tower. Some of the country’s best known chefs served up delicious fare for up to 15, 000 visitors, around 900 at each sitting. Top line chefs had initially been reluctant to take part in such a mass catering event; the same food festival is already popular in other cities such as London, Sydney and Dubai, but French chefs took a lot of persuading before they finally agreed to take part.
Finally in matters French, I see that actor Gerard Depardieu seems to have gone totally off his rocker. In his latest outburst, he says that he would be perfectly happy to die for Russia, but not for his native France. He has a record of saying the most outlandish things, that no- one in France takes much notice of, putting much of the blame on his fondness for products from his own vineyards. In the past, he has been reported as drinking up to 12 bottles of wine a day, so clearly, this is the booze talking.
On the international front, it looks as if the sirens of doom have finally caught up with Greece and that the country will run out of cash in the next few days. If it makes a rapid exit from the eurozone, the repercussions of that could be serious, the first fatal flaw in the construction of the single European currency. While the present left- wing government in Athens may be difficult to deal with, the powers-that- be in the EU aren’t exactly making an inspired effort to sort out the problems in Greece.
Also on the international front, an Italian priest was arrested the other day along with seven other men, accused of having sex with Roma children as young as 13 in the empty carriages of a train parked in an out- of- the- way spot in the Stazione Termini in Rome. Men aged up to 80 were reported as having paid as little as €10 for sex with Roma teenagers. The whole situation only came to light when men were seen heading for platform 29 when no trains were due there and it also turned out that the parish priest was also busy, in his spare time, writing pornographic novels under an assumed name.
But at least there was one bit of good news from Rome this week, specifically the Vatican, when the Pope admitted he hadn’t watched TV for the past 25 years. Lucky Pope; he has set a good example.
Here in Ireland, there’ s a clear sign that the country is pulling out of a recession; sloppy service is back on the menu, with many firms and tradespeople serving up really poor quality service, now that they can start to pick and choose from customers once more. I noticed that recently with a dental services chain whose service has become much worse. It used to be owned locally, but the owners sold out last year to a UK dental chain. Since then, their service seems to have got progressively worse. The same thing will probably happen now that Aer Lingus is going to be sold to the UK- based IAG group. All sorts of lavish promises have been made; I wonder how many of them will turn out to be fool’ s gold?
In another depressing return to old news in Ireland, in a by election the other day for a seat in the Irish Parliament, the Dáil, a Fianna Fáil member was elected. This was the same party that pushed the country into near bankruptcy and made so many bad decisions that brought on the great depression that started in 2007 and 2008. Now, they’ve made a big by-election comeback. These particular voters seem to have learned nothing and forgotten everything.
In yet another depressing sight, the Royal Dublin Society is busy advertising a cosmetics and gift fair for the Christmas market. Now that we are hopefully coming into proper summer weather, who on earth wants to be reminded of Christmas?
By far the saddest story of the past week was the fate of US mathematician John Nash, 86, and his 82 year old wife, Alicia. He was regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and was awarded a Nobel prize for economics in 1994. He also had to overcome many mental health problems. He and his wife were returning from a trip to Norway and on the last leg of their journey home; he had been awarded his latest and as it turned out, his last award. They were in a taxi on the New Jersey turnpike last Saturday afternoon when the taxi crashed. They weren’t wearing seatbelts and were thrown out onto the road and killed.