But on the dark side, this summer has seen a big rise in the number of burglaries in St Tropez, highlighted the other day when a wealthy tourist had a $50,000 watch snatched off his wrist by a couple of thieves who disappeared with it at high speed. The local police are stepping up street patrols, but it may be too late. Such is Saint Trop’s reputation now for thefts that this summer has seen quite a drop in the numbers of super rich tourists.
On the subject of money, a good offer couldn’t keep Nicolas Sarkozy pinned to the Var on his holidays, where he’s been staying at his wife’s parents’ estate. He was offered €100,000 to speak at a conference in Brazzaville in central Africa and needless to remark, the temptation proved too great to resist.
Also on the subject of money, I see that Monaco is now confirmed as having more millionaires per head of population than anywhere else;29.21 per cent of its population are officially millionaires, with Zurich taking second place and Geneva third place. Trying to get into Monaco at the moment isn’t easy; on Monday, there was a two hour queue in a vast traffic jam as summer holiday motorists tried to get into the principality. Last weekend, France had something like 600 km of traffic jams at any given time during the day. If anyone does manage to get into Monaco, there’s an added attraction, open air cinema in the evenings at the moment, on the roof of the Parking des Pecheurs. Provided the weather’s good, it sounds a good way of spending the evening!
Just along the coast from Monaco, there’s news of a different kind, in Antibes. There, a shop has just opened that sells nothing except items made by 3D printers, or else copies of items, also created on 3D printers. At the rate 3D printing technology is developing, factories could one day be redundant!
Meanwhile in Paris, the official opening date for the new look Picasso museum has been set at October 25, the 133rd anniversary of the great painter’s birth in Spain. The makeover of the museum has been subject to many cost overruns and horrendous delays and disputes, but this opening date is apparently set in stone. Also in Paris, some of the great museums and galleries like the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, as well as the palace at Versailles are set to open seven days a week, to counter the effects of subsidy cuts. For many years, public galleries and similar places in France have stuck rigidly to the idea of closing at least one day a week, so this new move is positively revolutionary.
Also in Paris, the latest luxury hotel opens this Friday, the Majestic, now known as the Peninsula, in the 16th.,close to the Arc de Triomphe. It opened in 1908 and closed as an hotel in 1937. Proust and Joyce met there in 1922 and it seems they didn’t get on at all well; Joyce obviously thought Proust was a terrible snob. In a taxi afterwards, Joyce insisted on smoking, which didn’t do Proust’s asthma any good.
After it closed as an hotel, the building was put to various official uses, including as the location for the Vietnam peace talks between 1969 and 1973. The new owners have spent something like €900 million, between buying the building and doing what looks like a splendid restoration. Now there’s also talk that the old Elysée Hotel on the Champs-Elysée, currently the French hq of HSBC bank, will be sold and turned into a luxury hotel. Paris is currently short of such luxury hotel space, as both the Crillon and the Ritz are currently closed for renovations.
On a rather more grizzly note, there’s much concern about the number of rats in the Tuileries gardens by the Louvre. It seems that some tourists are just dumping their food litter in the gardens. In Paris as a whole, it’s said that there are two rats for every one person. Obviously,in the Tuileries, they are much more numerous than that. Rats are even being blamed for the bad train crash near Pau in south-west France a fortnight ago; it seems they had been nibbling through the signalling cables and putting them out of sync.
Talking of transport, July 25 was the anniversary of the horrific Concorde crash at Roissy in 2000. When the plane was taking off, it struck some metal left on the runway that caused a puncture in a fuel tank. The way in which the plane caught fire and then crashed was absolutely horrific. Concorde was great fun to travel on and it was a big shame that supersonic air travel came to such an abrupt end.
On the subject of flying, I see Ryanair is having to repay state aid it got to the tune of €9.6 million as an inducement to use three small regional airports in France, Angouleme, Pau and Nimes. I also see that there was consternation among passengers on an Air France flight from Strasbourg to Paris the other day. It seems that Marine Le Pen of the Front National and her family entourage were on the flight and were treated by Air France staff in a truly presidential manner. Perhaps they know something the rest of us don’t! And on the subject of the latest air crash, that of the Air Algérie jet that came down in Mali last week, there was lots of online chatter about the fact that one of the passengers was Mariela, the daughter of Raoul Castro, the Cuban president. Except that she soon piped up to say that she was alive and well in Havana.
Changing from air travel to rail travel, the latest scandal in SNCF involves its latest generation wagons; it turns out that at least 14 tunnels are too low for the wagons to go through them! SNCF seems to be making a habit of getting its measurements wrong. But at least there’s a positive development from Eurostar. From May 1 next year, you’ll be able to take a Eurostar train direct from London to Marseilles, which will be a 6hr 15 min journey, with stops in Lyon and Avignon.
At the end of last week, in Lorraine in north-eastern France, there was an horrific car crash, when a heavy truck veered onto the wrong side of the road, hit a car and killed two women in the car and three of their children. That happened on Friday about 8am as they were all going on vacation and 24 hours later, the boyfriend of one of the women who was killed - he was also father of one of the children killed - committed suicide. It turned out that the driver of the truck had been overdosing on cocaine beforehand. It was a tragic story but what is even more incredible is that most of the French media, docile at the best of times, simply didn’t bother reporting the story.
The weather too in much of France has been abysmal this summer, with lots of rain and floods, but there’s been so much bad weather you could forgive the media for being blasé. It has been the same in Switzerland. The other day, in the Upper Emmental region of the canton of Berne, absolute deluges of mud and rain created havoc. The French economy is as bad as its weather. The other day, in the presence of President Hollande, Pierre Gattaz,the head of the employer’s group, MEDEF, said that the situation in France’s economy is catastrophic, with no investment and no recruitment going on.
But at least, Mont St Michel is going back to becoming an island. A 760 metre long pedestrian bridge opened the other day, linking the mainland with the island. Should you really want to have some great fun, the best place at the moment is not in France but here in Ireland, where the Galway races, a big annual event, are currently on. The festivities and the drink taken are legendary and two groups do well out of it, the bookies and the hookers. So many of the latter turn up to take in staggering amounts of money that it’s like their annual convention in Ireland!
And on that perverse note, I’ll sign off for this week! But before I go, I can’t help but mention what happened the other day at Bessbrook in south Armagh, just inside Northern Ireland. Bessbrook was once a small mill town, then a military base and its population is mostly loyalist. The other day, someone put up an Irish tricolour on the island in the middle of Bessbrook pond. One local extreme loyalist decided to take the law into his own hands when nothing was done to remove the flag. So this pensioner started swimming out to the island, with the aim of taking down the tricolour and hoisting the Union Jack, but half way across, he drowned. It’s all black comedy of the worst kind, totally bizarre!