Late one night, he had picked up three people in their mid-20s, who were not only drunk out of their minds but totally stoned as well. One was a man, two were women. After the taxi had gone a short distance, a row broke out and evidently, the taxi driver ordered the three out of his car. A short while later, a passing police patrol found the taxi stopped, with the driver lying on the ground. He had been savagely attacked by one of the women using a stiletto heel to stab him. The taxi driver died a short time later from cardiac arrest. The police picked up the three passengers who will no doubt face serious charges, although no doubt if they are well connected enough and sufficiently wealthy, they’ll probably get off.
Altogether, it’s a shocking indictment of the present state of violence in a fast fracturing French society and it’s ironic that it should happen in one of the most upmarket districts of Paris, which is normally quite reserved in the way everyone goes about their business.
Something similar also happened in the south last week. In the small village of Aubignosc in the Alpes de Haute Provence, three men broke into a house and tied up a 45 year old man, his wife and their 15 year old sold. The husband later died from the blows he received.
It’s almost as if the Almighty has something in for France. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The most usual evidence of heavenly displeasure comes with the weather. This year has seen some really exceptional weather, usually very bad, and more so in the south. At the end of last week, tremendous storms in the Herault region in the south-west left a trail of floods and devastation. In the small inland spa town of Lamalou-les-Bains, about 90 km west of Montpellier, four people were killed by the sudden floods, including three at a camp site. There, a 60 year old man who was trying to rescue a woman from drowning, saw his wife and daughter being swept away by the floods.
Not too far away, in the Gard, in the town of Ales, there was also serious flooding. I’ve never been to the former mining towns in the north-east of France, so I can’t speak from personal experience, but I have been to Ales in the south, once a mining and metal working town and the most God forsaken place you could imagine, without a scintilla of redemption. The night we stayed there and thank God it was only one night, we found a cosy little b and b near the town centre. The curtains were drawn all day because of the intense heat, so inside, day looked like night. Just off our room was the bathroom, with the loo high up on a dais, so much so that just for a little while, we could imagine we were the king and queen of...you fill in the dots! But back to the present, Ales has been badly flooded. The storms also brought TGV traffic on the rail line from Nice to Toulon to a halt, just outside Toulon.
Not far away from Ales is a small village called Saint-Julien-les-Rosiers, equally badly flooded. The local aviary was almost destroyed and 1,500 birds were drowned. But 6,000 pheasants and partridges managed to escape and are now fending for themselves. The owner of the aviary, Philippe Bastide, is distraught, because every day that the birds are free, the more accustomed they become to the wild and the less likely they are to return. Normally,he sells these birds for €10.50 each.
Talking of birds, there’s a rather disgusting campaign going on, run by some leading chefs from Gascony in the south-west, to have a day free when everyone can shoot songbirds to their hearts’ content. This hasn’t been possible for over a decade now and rightly so. I always remember that just before former president Mitterand died in 1996, his last meal was of an ortolan songbird, marinated in Armagnac. The tradition was that that this dish was consumed with a napkin over the head of the diner, some say to better enjoy the aromas,while others said this was a mark of shame. While Mitterand was a highly duplicitous president, he did leave many good works behind, such as the new national library in Paris, but the last meal he ate put me off him for good.
Still, on a brighter note, France came well out of a UN report published last week, which said that online government services in France are more efficient than anywhere else in Europe, despite the country being notorious for its red tape. But the downside of France is that it has the third highest tax levels in Europe, after Denmark and Belgium. Job security is also much rarer in France than it used to be. Compared with 30 years ago, employers now are five times more likely to use short term contracts and agency personnel, while under 25s are the least likely of any age group to find permanent work.
It’s no wonder, in the best French tradition, that last Saturday, farmers protesting in Morlaix in western Brittany, aggrieved by falling standards of living, set fire to the local tax office and the local social insurance office. Meanwhile, the strike by Air France pilots continues, as a protest against the airline’s plans to set up a low cost carrier based in Portugal. On the subject of aviation, it has also been revealed that no explanation has been found for the crash of the Air Algérie plane in Mali last July, which killed all 116 on board, including 54 French nationals. This crash remains as mysterious as those of the two Malaysian Airlines flights this year.
In yet another example of the French malaise, it was revealed that motorists in France are really paying the price for using the country’s tolled motorways. A government report said that profit levels are unjustified, with the companies running the motorways making up to 24 per cent profits. The cynics have also had a field day with the news that Sarkozy is returning to politics and hopes to be re-elected president of the centre right UMP party and perhaps even campaign in the presidential campaign coming up in 2017.
One change that’s coming to Paris is a city hall campaign to stop people putting lovelocks on the city’s bridges. So far this year, 7,500 kilos of love locks have had to be removed. Now, on the bridge most infested with them, the Pont des Arts, railings have been replaced by see-through panels on which it is impossible to fix lovelocks. So far, the scheme has worked well and the plans are to extend it to all the other bridges afflicted by the love lock problem, a craze that started way back in 2008.
And there was a cosy little story from the Cote d’Azur last week, when a young singer in Nice, who had recorded his version of the U2 song, With or Without You, threw a copy of the recording he had made, over the wall of the summer residence of Bono and his family in Eze. A few days later, Bono walked into the restaurant in Nice owned by the parents of the singer, Cyril Auklair, on the rue Vernie, met up with the singer and sat down and had a chat with him. Sounds a good way to keep the fans happy!
Last weekend in the Journées des Patrimoine across the country, people were able to visit all kinds of places normally not on view, such as France’s first nuclear reactor at Fontenay-aux-Roses near Paris. It started up in 1948 and was closed down in 1977. Also near Paris, people were able to visit the Ferme Mazier at Aubervilliers, which once supplied Paris with most of its cabbage, beetroots, carrots and other vegetables. In Paris itself, people were able to go up to the top of the great clock that stands guard at the Gare de Lyon. The top part of the clock is 67 metres above ground, so the views are quite spectacular.
People were also able to see the insides of the forbidding La Santé prison, the only one in Paris. It’s closed at the moment, pending a massive renovation job. I always found it ironic that the Irish writer Samuel Beckett and his French wife Suzanne, had their apartment just metres away from La Santé. Was it a subconscious wish on his part to be so near a place of such gloom and misery?
Another event coming up soon should produce many cultural goodies, the Festival automne en Normandy, which runs from November 12 until December 9 and promises many lively cultural and historical events.
On the international front, the Scottish independence debate is done and dusted, at least for the moment. No-one for a moment thinks it’s going to go away, short term or long term. And all the promises made to ‘No’ voters by the political leaders at Westminster have all the sincerity of a whore’s kiss. In six months’ time, no doubt Scottish nationalists will be saying ‘told you so’.
Also in the UK, the furore over Tesco’s finances has been really something. The Independent newspaper in London did a very amusing mock-up graphic on its website. The headline read: ‘Tesco’s porkies’ over a nice photo of succulent pork sausages. Underneath, the caption read: ‘Every fiddle helps’. Not surprisingly, the graphic didn’t stay in place very long.
Here in Ireland, I’m saddened by the death of someone I knew who was a remarkable storyteller. Peter Jankovsky was German, and his stories of when he was a small boy growing up in Berlin at the tail end of World War II and immediately afterwards, were rivetting. I often met him in the RTÉ radio studios in Dublin; his stories for radio were absolutely compelling and they often ended with equally compelling twists to them. Peter wrote, did photography and a thousand other things in between his day job at the Goethe Institute in Dublin. He was a really decent, caring and honest person to know and he will be much missed.
That’s one of the best things about Ireland; you can get into instant conversations with anyone and everyone, from every level of society and this informality is picked up by the many non-nationals living in Ireland. It’s all a far cry from France, where most people are very reluctant to engage in conversation with random strangers.
All of which brings me to my concluding item for this week. No-one seems to have noticed much outside Germany, but the Alternative fur Deutschland party is making great headway and is now at 10 per cent in the national opinion polls. It wants Germany to abandon the euro and revert to the Deutsch mark, just as Marine Le Pen of the Front National in France want to return to the franc. She is riding even higher in the polls, 26 per cent at the moment. We could be in for some interesting times, interesting for all the wrong reasons!