Talking about the Eiffel Tower, police in Paris have seized 60 tonnes of miniature sized Eiffel Towers that were destined for sale on the black market, taking sales from authorised vendors and depriving the state of the tax from the sales. These days, you can get fake everything, even Hermes scarves. On one occasion in Paris, we were walking along the quays in central Paris when a shifty looking guy, who turned out to be Italian, approached us and asked us if we’d like a load of coats! His nearby car was adjacent, full of them. At first glance they seemed to be reasonable quality but it was immediately obvious that these were fakes and that for some reason or other, he wanted rid of them, no matter how much he lost on the transactions. We immediately sniffed something highly suspicious about the whole matter, made our excuses and beat a very hasty retreat!
Elsewhere on the weather front, down in south-west France over the last few days, there have
been a spate of drownings, as people on beaches in the Herault region have ignored warnings about not going swimming in the sea. Ferocious winds have whipped up the normally calm Mediterranean into a frenzy. In central France, violent hailstorms the other day did a huge amount of damage to the
impending grape harvest in a prestigious part of the Burgundy wine region, one of the most important wine areas of France, after Bordeaux. In the area close to Beaune, several key wine growing villages such as Pommard and Volnay, have had crops virtually wiped out by torrential downpours and hail showers. In some cases, several years work put in by wine growers was wiped out in literally an hour or so. Lots of the Burgundy region wasn’t touched by this bad weather, but some of the most prestigious wines will suffer badly this year. Exactly the same thing happened last year, so for some growers, it’s bad news two years in a row.
One more fascinating, weather-related story from France was all about Mont Saint-Michel. The island, with its eighth century abbey, has been connected to the mainland by a causeway, which was built in 1879.Just the other day, during an exceptionally high tide, the island was cut off from the mainland for a mere 20 minutes, the first time this has happened in 134 years. The island is an intriguing place, but best seen either very early in the morning or very late at night; especially at this time of year, when it’s absolutely jam packed with tourists. We once spent a night there in one of the
hotels on the island and waking up in the middle of the night, when all was total silence, and seeing the sea stretching away to the mainland, was indeed memorable.
Another disaster of a totally different kind was remembered the other day - July 25th was the 13th anniversary of the Concorde crash at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. When the plane was taking
off, it hit a metal part on the runway that punctured a fuel tank, leading to a fuel spill. Within seconds, the plane was a dramatic sight, still taking off, but enveloped in a blanket of flames. That one crash effectively spelled the end of Concorde.
We made one trip on Concorde, from Dublin to Paris, and such was its top speed, twice the speed of sound, that in order to reach its full speed, it had to fly out across the Atlantic. We were a good way to New York before the plane turned and headed towards its destination. At its maximum speed and altitude, far above earth and most of the atmosphere, the views of inner space were quite incredible. Our flight souvenirs include an inflight cartoon of my wife and I done when we were both fairly intoxicated with Champagne - fortunately the cartoonist wasn’t in the same state! I always remember
that one of our fellow passengers was a young dj called Gerry Ryan; he went on to become one of the top presenters on RTÉ. He was found dead in his Dublin apartment just over three years ago; drink and drugs had done their worst.
Another trip that comes to mind, from far longer ago, was the time I went to Rome to see the Olympic Games in 1960. Once at the Olympics was plenty for me - I’ve never had the slightest urge to ever attend another Olympic Games! But the best part of that trip was getting there. I took an overnight train from Paris to Rome and as dawn was breaking, the train was just past Ventimiglia, the first town in Italy past the Cote d’Azur. The line goes through the Italian Riviera, mostly very close to the sea, so sitting in the dining car having an early breakfast and watching the sun come up, was a literally dazzling experience. I’d never seen sunlight that strong before and even after all those years, that experience is imprinted indelibly on my mind. Quite incredible, totally intoxicating!
Talking about waste reminds me of the scandalous amount of taxpapers’ money that was spent building a charity website for Carla Bruni–Sarkozy when her husband was still President of France. Between 2011 and 2012, some €410,000 was spent on building the website, a job that could have been done for a mere €4,000 and the end result was complete chaos. La Cour de Comptes, which looks into public finances in France, investigated the case recently and hardly surprisingly, a petition has been started calling on Carla Bruni-Sarkozy to repay the state money, ie taxpayers’ money, that was used to create the shambolic website.
Another well-known public figure who’s under renewed fire is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former CEO of the IMF. He’s being charged with pimping, over what has become known in France as the Affaire du Carlton, after the luxury hotel in Lille where he and various other well-known business figures attended sex orgies alongside various prostitutes, all the while proclaiming their entire innocence. But then what is the IMF all about but international financial pimping on a grand scale?
With all the bad news around these days, I wasn’t a bit surprised to hear the other day about the wealthy man who lives in the 17th arrondissement of Paris where a lot of other very wealthy people live. This particular gentleman has an aversion to two things, newspapers and television. He neither reads the former nor looks at the latter! Funnily enough these days, digital only news websites can be a lot more edgy, unconventional and informative than many websites that are derived from newspaper content. Here in Ireland, I’m thinking of the excellent journal.ie website and in France, the equally iconoclastic planet. fr website. These days, so many newspapers are getting so jaded; even
the i newspaper, which used to be almost essential reading, is these days becoming jaded and predictable, a fatal combination for any newspaper.
All of which brings me to the Code de Travail, the 3,200 page long manifesto that governs employment in France, everything from the classification of jobs to getting rid of staff. If a firm in France takes on an extra worker, the cost of all the extras, such as national insurance, will be almost the same as the amount paid in salary. Making people redundant is very expensive, so firms are
reluctant to take on extra people, even in good times, which is most certainly not the present state of affairs. A good example of how industrial sectors have been decimated in France comes from the textile industry. Three decades ago, over a million people in France worked in this sector but such is the cost of doing business in France that these days, employment totals in textiles are a mere
tenth of that figure. In fact, French firms are said to have the lowest profit margins of anywhere in the EU. Whether that situation is ever going to change is a good question indeed!
Having said all that, there’s a brilliant example from Ireland of how state-sponsored austerity can be utterly stupid and self-defeating. The general hospital in Letterkenny in Co Donegal in the
north-west of Ireland is on a hillside, with lots of housing further up the hillside at the back of the hospital. It turns out that drains and gullies around the hospital hadn’t been cleaned out for many months, because of budgetary cutbacks. Then last weekend, an enormous storm hit Letterkenny and water poured off the hillside into the hospital. It was badly flooded and since the water was
badly contaminated with sewage, the hospital itself has been badly compromised and put out of action. Repairing all the damage is going to cost millions of euros and the hospital is going to be out of action for months. If the drains and gullies had been cleared, at minimal cost, the excess storm water would simply have run off! But doing something as simple as that is just too straightforward
in these times of state sponsored austerity!
However, one public personality who has been in the news is well off; Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first
female president, has an enviable track record in promoting humans rights, these days, on behalf of the UN. I have a great legal source here in Dublin, who’s invariably right, and what he says is usually so explosive and so spot on that it’s never mentioned in the mainstream media. He’s a good, accurate source and he was telling me recently, with some glee, that Mary Robinson, now that she is
nearing 70, has no less than five pensions from all the different places where she’s worked over the years, including the Irish Senate and the Irish Presidency. Nice work if you can get it!
I was reading recently about an astrologer in the US, full of dire warnings, as these people usually
are. After all, it’s how they make their money. This astrologer predicted that if the Pope continues doing what he was doing in Brazil recently, dispensing with his security, sooner rather than later, someone is going to take a fatal pot shot at him. St Malachy was a 12th century Irish saint, a one time Archbishop of Armagh. He wrote a whole series of prophecies about future Popes, work that wasn’t
discovered until about 500 years after his death. Many of his Papal predictions were remarkably accurate and he predicted that the current Pope will be the last, as well as signalling the end not only of Rome the city but Roman Catholicism itself. But back to that American astrologer; he said something even more significant, that he thinks that the spirit of another Hitler is in the cosmos, waiting to manifest itself. Goodness knows, the conditions are perfect, especially in many parts of southern Europe, thanks to the crisis created by the euro, for a new Hitler to emerge.
One future source of much conflict could be the Senkaku islands, as the Japanese call them, and the
Diaoya islands, as the Chinese name them. China claims most of the South China Sea and its islands, which not just annoys Japan but other nations, too, including the Philippines and Vietnam. The situation with the Senkaku/Diapoya islands is becoming so serious that the Chinese Army has designed a computer game that lets players fight Japan for the islands. Yet the situation is hardly mentioned in the media in this part of the world!
There’s even a claim going round in the US at the moment that the US is making plans for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on China. A friend of mine here in Dublin said something rather
astonishing the other day. We were talking about weather around the world and I mentioned how much hotter it has been in New York than even the hottest parts of Europe. "New York", he scoffed, "I can’t stand the place and besides, it’s yesterday’s town". At the rate the Chinese are advancing he may well be right!
Still, amid all the gloom and doom, lets wrap up with a quick look at some of the delightful happenings around France over the next few weeks, when the country is awash with festivals. At the same time, Paris will be so deserted by so many of its inhabitants that this is the best time of year to
visit the City of Light.
In the village of Sare in the French Basque country, from August 6th to 20th, there’s a great Basque festival recreating many of the old customs of the region. In Beziers, in Languedoc-Roussillon, from August 14th to 18th, the Feria de Beziers will draw a million visitors to the town, to see such events as the traditional Corridas in the arena. The Recontres Musicales in Vezelay in Burgundy from August 22nd to 25th will bring in some of the best European ensembles to perform sacred music
in the town’s unique basilica. Then form August 23rd to 27th, the Russian Art Festival in Cannes will celebrate the innumerable facets of Russian culture and the innumerable cultural links between France and Russia.
With so many spectacular festivities planned throughout France during August, it will be a great month to be on the road-but please, let there be no more hailstorms,deluges of rain, violent gusts of wind or lightening around the Eiffel Tower.