One of the earliest Christmas markets gets under way in the Alsace region in three weeks time, when the all-embracing Christmas fair opens at Colmar on November 21 and runs until the end of December. By the end of November, a whole spate of similar markets will be in place across France, especially in Alsace.
Earlier than that, in fact starting at the end of this week, there’s a gigantic contemporary art market being staged in the place de la Bastille in Paris, until next Monday. Also in Paris, but towards the end of November, the independent wine growers of France are having a big fair at the Porte de Versailles, from November 27 until December 1, with liberal wine tastings. Africolor, the African music festival, will be taking place in most parts of Paris from November 15 until December 31.
There’ll be more drink on offer in Normandy, with Le Sap village in the Orne department of Normandy holding its annual cider festival on November 8 and 9. Also in this part of France, Étaples will be doing its annual herring festival, on these same dates, when herring will be cooked in every way imaginable, and of course plenty of wine.
Down in Monaco, a new cultural institute is opening, dedicated to the painter Francis Bacon, who was born in Dublin but lived much of his life in London. The man behind the project is a property developer called Majid Boustany, who has been a lifelong admirer of Bacon. This is the first such institute dedicated to Bacon, although the total mess that was his studio has been recreated in Dublin.
Much more solemn occasions will be coming up as well, All Souls Day on November 1 and then Armistice Day on November 11. Another big day in France is November 20, when this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau wine is released. It’s always a time of great celebration, but personally, there’s always a note of sadness to the event. I always remember that back in 1984, a small plane carrying a party of Dublin journalists to the Beaujolais Nouveau events crashed near Eastbourne in Sussex. One of them I knew particularly well and admired for his constant cheek towards the establishment, John Feeney. Whether it was the big cats in the Catholic church or the big cheeses in politics, he was always ready to cock a snook at them and disparage them, demolishing their conceits with a healthy dose of humour. What’s even more amazing, is that he had a column in one of the Dublin evening papers and he was given more or less free rein! It wouldn’t happen now - he’d have to write about the latest inane goings on in showbiz or else about some twit on twitter, without offending any potential advertisers.
A solemn event took place this week, the funeral of Christophe de Margeries, the former head of Total, the giant French oil company, who was killed when the company jet crashed at an airport in Moscow on Monday evening of last week. Posthumously, he has been given France’s highest honour, the Legion d’Honneur. His funeral took place at St Suplice in Paris on Monday morning, attended by President Hollande and prime minister Manuel Valls and other dignitaries such as the Emir of Qatar.
In1998,Christophe de Margeries and his family had bought a seaside holiday home at Saint Pair sur mer, close to Granville on the west Normandy coast, and it was in the local cemetery there that he was laid to rest yesterday. It’s a tragic story, of one of the captains of French industry cut short in his prime, but by Wednesday of last week, the two new bosses at Total had been named. Life has to move on.
On a more agreeable note, the route of the 2015 Tour de France was announced last week. It will start in Utrecht in the Netherlands and go through Belgium and north-east France before moving to south-west France. Next year, the race won’t go through Provence, except for a 161 km section from Dignes to Pra-Loup. Digne itself is so high up that I always remember that we were staying there, the high altitude combined with the wine had quite a knockout effect! But next year, the second last stage of the race will be up the Alpes d’Huez, which have no less than 21 hairpin bends; this particular route has often been used before on the Tour and it’s really spectacular.
Another race is returning to the south of France next year, the Bol d’Or motor cycle race, a legend among motor cycle fans. It’ll be staged at the Castellet circuit in the Var, where it hasn’t been seen since 1999 and is expected to attract 60,000 spectactors.
Demonstrations continue as usual in France. In Lille last Thursday night, riot police fought running battles with English soccer supporters, but since then, a much more serious situation has developed down in the south-west. Construction is under way at a dam site at Sivens in the Tarn, not far from Toulouse. Green Party and ecology supporters are vehemently opposed to the dam and last Saturday, when a big demo took place at the site, a young man was killed by a grenade.
It’s turned out that the grenade came from the police and naturally all hell has broken loose. More than a dozen demos are planned across France in the coming days in such cities as Paris, Nantes and Rennes, for as one of the protesting politicians explained, on ne construit un barrage sur un cadavre. In Italy too, vast demonstrations have been taking place against government austerity moves.
France has another very strange protest movement going on, with people dressed as clowns turning up all over the place and often turning quite violent. In Besancon in eastern France the other day, a young student was injured by a group of clowns. How and why people are dressing up as clowns, and violent ones at that, is very odd and no-one seems to have a plausible explanation.
It’s just seven years since the end of the Chirac presidency and his time in high office now looks like some remote and unlikely golden age. Gilles Carrez, the head of the financial commission at the Assemblée Nationale, is suspected of being involved in fraud, while robberies continue unabated against Saudis in Paris. The other day, a Saudi man working at his country’s embassy in Paris was finishing lunch in an upmarket restaurant in the 16th. As he prepared to leave, he noticed that his bag had disappeared, complete with €15,000 in cash.
While robberies of Saudis in Paris continue unabated, so too does the rise in unemployment, which in September, hit a record of 3.43 million. At least the pilot of a tourist plane had a lucky escape a few days ago. Last Friday, at about 18.00 hours local time, the engine failed and he managed to put the plane down on a motorway in the Ain department, between Geneva and Lyon, escaping unhurt in the process. Another politician was similarly lucky. The other day, when Marine Le Pen went shopping in a pharmacy in Yvelines, just west of Paris, two young men were lying in wait and started pelting her car with stones. The car suffered slight damage but the Front National leader and her chauffeur were uninjured. But Fleur Pellerin, the culture minister, is coming in for a pasting on Twitter, because she has just admitted she hasn’t had time to read a novel for the past two years and hasn’t even read any of the works by France’s latest Nobel prize for litrerature winner, Patrick Modiano.
As for President Hollande, his woes continue unabated. The other day, he was accosted by two Femen demonstrators protesting that he didn’t support the feminist cause. Le Figaro had a hilarious photo of Hollande coming face to face with one of the bare breasted protesters and he wasn’t batting an eyelid. I suppose he was just glad that it wasn’t Valérie Trierweiler protesting in similar fashion!
Meanwhile renowned French popular singer Mireille Mathieu is celebrating close on 50 years in showbiz, with a series of concerts at the Olympia in Paris. Born in Avignon, when she was starting her career in the mid-1960s,she was often seen as a young successor to Edith Piaf. She’s still popular in Russia and this week, the infamous photo of her taken in Moscow many years ago resurfaced. She is seen accompanying Putin and Gadaffi, the former leader of Libya, who it turned out, had a penchant for raping young women and then having them murdered.
There was also damning news about the French health service this week, when the case emerged of a Frenchwoman who went to the university hospital in Bordeaux for an abortion three years ago. Afterwards, she felt very unwell, went back to hospital and was promptly sent home again. It turned out that she was developing septicemia and by the time she was given antibiotics, it was too late for them to act. As a result, her feet were amputated, as well as one of her hands and one of her forearms.
The health service in Ireland isn’t much better. It turns out that a 71 year old Tamil refugee was leaving the A & E department in a regional hospital, when he fell and had a bad fracture that eventually led to his death. It turned out that two doctors were aware of what had happened, but wouldn’t go and help the man because they were on their lunch break and therefore not on call.
If you need a laugh after all that news, take your cue from Radio 4. Last week, it was running a series of talks by a vicar called Rev Twaddle. It’s be hard to think of a better name for a cleric!
Here in Ireland, the mass revolt against the water charges is well under way and monster demos at towns and cities across the country are planned on Saturday. The present government in Dublin has done a good enough job on reviving the economy, but in the process, has started a real people’s revolution, with the new water charges, and it’s hard now to see the government producing any solution to the problem that is going to dissipate public anger. A general election is little more than a year away.
One other hot topic in Ireland has failed to become just that. The world price of oil has dropped by over a quarter in the past few months, but at the pumps, prices have only gone done by a few cents. The public complacency over this is absolutely astonishing, while in Britain, petrol prices are set to go down to around £1 a gallon, a big drop.
A bad car crash here in Ireland last Thursday night saw a totally innocent woman killed when her car was rammed by a car with a gang of drunken suspected thieves crashed into it. It turned out later that most of the gang in the car had been out on bail, yet another example of the lack of commonsense practicality in the Irish judicial system. Yet after the recent case of the Irish jeweller killed in Victoria, Australia, by a criminal who had something like 200 previous convictions, yet was freely roaming around, the Australian justice system seems infinitely more rickety.
But you don’t have to go to Australia for sheer crass stupidity. Marks & Spencer in Ireland really takes the biscuit; recently, a woman who worked at one of their stores in Dublin was sacked for taking a cup of coffee at work and not paying the €2 for it. She lost her employment appeals tribunal case and has since been unable to find more work, despite a previously exemplary record at M& S. What M&S did in the case was similar to what happened in 19th century Ireland, where people who stole a loaf of bread could find themselves transported to Australia as convicts. M & S is always full of its green and ecological convictions, yet when it comes to staff/management relations, it seems to live in another age. Personally speaking, partly because of the way its staff are treated, I never shop in M& S unless absolutely necessary.