With politicians busy canvassing for next week’s European parliament elections, I couldn’t help but notice a sign outside a house in a better off area of south Dublin. It reads: “To all politicians, canvassers, liars, cheats and thieves, this is private tax-paid property”.
Rather sadder comments came at about the same time from a piece in the same newspaper, The Irish Times, about 82 year Omar Sharif, once a darling of the silver screen. The reason for doing the interview was that he was coming over to Dublin to launch the Dublin Arabic Film Festival. Omar comes from a wealthy family and was brought up in some style in Egypt. But rather sadly, whereas 82 year Dervla Murphy was very positive in her interview, the negativity just oozed out of Omar Sharif.
The interviewer, Lara Marlowe, said that Omar Sharif was being shipwrecked by old age, egocentricity and a failing memory. Luckily, Catherine Mareska has been his personal assistant for over 40 years and still is and she fills in for all the bad gaps in his memory. She said, quite rightly, that when people are superstars, they have 10,000 hangers-on, but that when the lights go out, they are alone. Omar Sharif is now living in a luxury hotel on the right bank in Paris and he says that not only does he not have any friends in Paris, but that he doesn’t read any more, so that all he does is simply sit around. I have the most vivid memories of an outdoor lunch we had in Paris over 20 years ago, at a restaurant in the Tuileries garden. It was a joyous, vinous occasion, and when we glanced around to see who else was there enjoying lunch, who should be sitting a couple of tables away, but Omar Sharif and a bevy of friends. They were all having an uproarious time, but that was then and this is now.
Something else that isn’t quite right in Paris at the moment is Le Monde, the newspaper and website. Long regarded as the most elite of national newspapers in a country that’s not known for reading national newspapers, Le Monde has always struck a suitably lofty tone. But internal dissension conveys a different view of the paper. A total of seven senior editorial managers have just resigned because they are so dissatisfied with the way the paper is being run. Add to Le Monde’s woes those of Libération, the left wing daily, and that means a sense of unease at two of France’s top papers.
More unease, too, at a recent happening in Nice, which seems keen to displace Marseilles as the crime ‘capital’ of the south. Just recently,77 year old Helene Pastor, a Monaco property heiress and a close friend of the royal family in the principality, was in Nice to see her brother, head of a firm that makes electric cars, who was in hospital recovering from a heart attack. As she arrived at the hospital, a gang, thought to be related to the Italian mafia, shot up her car, leaving Ms Pastor badly injured. She is now recovering in hospital, but her 64 year old chauffer, Mohamed Darwich, died in hospital last weekend, after being badly injured in the shoot-out.
However, there are some positive things happening. The League 2 football club, Clermont Foot 63,has just appointed a female coach, Helene Costa. It’s so unusual to have a woman working at this level in football that the appointment is to be welcomed. Perhaps one of these days, we’ll have a whole lot of female managers making the game even more interesting!
I was also reading the other day about the sheer scope of waterways in France, ideal for holidays. France has 8,500 km of waterways, as well as 500 ports, harbours and marinas. Many people live on boats moored on the River Seine in the Paris area as well as on the canals. In short, the whole maritime heritage in France is well respected and the canals and rivers can make for some great holidays. I was also taken by the points made about the Paris Métro by John Lichfield in the London Independent. He says that while the Métro is becoming much cleaner, more efficient and much less smelly and that travellers using it are even becoming more considerate, one constant remains. The Métro remains one of the few rail systems in the world still using the traditional sized cardboard ticket pioneered by a British stationmaster all of 172 years ago.
I was also interested to read the other day that work is under way on building a substantial museum for the life and work of Charlie Chaplin, at Corsier-sur-Vevey in Switzerland. People forget how controversial and unpleasant a figure Chaplin was in his day, but that’s not to detract from the magnificence of his film work, which will be duly commemorated in this new museum.
A present day celebrity is also set to make a stir. Carla Bruni, wife of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, has recorded, in Paris, a three part radio series called with great originality, Postcards from Paris. She will be recalling the great days of the Chansons Francaises, Charles Trenet, Edith Piaf and a whole gang of other equally memorable warblers. The series starts next Wednesday, May 21st.,on BBC Radio 2 at 10pm.
In the meantime, on the subject of radio, I love listening to Radio Heimatmelodie, or Homeland Melody, in Germany and Radio Niederosterreich in Austria. Both stations have an endless supply of folk and contemporary music from both countries and it makes for easy background listening. On the subject of going from bad to wurst musicwise (I’m thinking of Eurovision!), brings me to the subject of how Ireland is being run. Government policies and applications here in Ireland tend to be rather loose, as loose in fact as the elastic in a whore’s knickers.
There’s a major housing crisis here, especially in Dublin, but as usual, the government doesn’t even seem aware of the problem, let alone have any solutions. When confronted with a social problem, it reacts with all the vigour and turn of speed of a constipated elephant. It’s the same with the justice system, where victims often get scant recognition, and the policing system, where huge amounts of corruption have now been revealed. I was struck by all the deficiencies of the justice system when reading about the case concerning two people involved in the assault of a 20 year old university student in a town in the Irish Midlands, at the end of 2011.The young man was so badly assaulted that he fell and hit his head. He died soon afterwards. A third person involved in the assault had previously been given a derisory prison sentence while this week, the other two involved got mere community service. I happen to know the father of the brilliant young man killed. The young man’s father is Joe Dolan, who owns the Bush Hotel in Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim and Joe and his wife Rose gave out in dignified style this week about the considerable shortcomings of the justice systems for its victims. Will anything change? I doubt it.
The justice system and the police are two fundamental pillars of society, any society, yet somehow, despite all the shortcomings in Ireland, life seems to carry on regardless. The other day, when the Giro d’Italia was in town, a huge car bomb was discovered in the car park of a local luxury hotel. No doubt it was going to be used to deadly effect, until someone gave the police a tipoff and it was defused. If the bomb had gone off, while the cycle race was in full swing, think of the mayhem it could have caused, making the bomb at the Boston marathon last year seem minor by comparison.
And just to end on a really serious note. For the first time, France is no longer the world’s top win consuming nation. That honour has just passed to the US, which last year consumed 2.9 billion litres of wine. In France, the total was 2.8 billion litres. Yet the average French person consumes just over a bottle of wine a week, six times the amount drunk by the average American. In France, Italy and Spain, traditional wine drinking habits are changing significantly, especially among young people, who are much less interested in wine. Out of these recent wine consumption statistics, one was rather amusing-the world’s top per capita wine consumption rate is to be found in the Vatican no less!
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