humid, marked with plenty of downpours. The sticky weather is far from pleasant but all the same, a big improvement on the five months of miserable weather we had from January to May this year. In France, it’s even worse, as temperatures have soared and today, an orange alert for storms is in place for many départements across the country. Expect absolutely torrential downpours! A friend of mine had to drive the other day from western Brittany to north of Paris; the temperature was 35 degrees Centigrade and since his car has no air conditioning, it made for very unpleasant driving conditions.
Meanwhile, the temperature is likely to heat in another direction,too. Planet.fr is a French news website that has just run a photograph of a very pregnant Duchess of Cambridge lookalike showing someone very like Kate in the nude. However, it is quite tasteful and doesn’t show anything it shouldn’t, apart from what is portrayed as the royal bump. The photo looks like a good example of Photoshopping and was originally published in the Huffington Post but many inside and outside France will wonder if nothing is sacred any more.
Planet.fr is typical of a new generation of news websites that owe nothing to the newspaper business and take a far edgier approach to the news, taking risks and making comments that websites
allied to traditional newspapers simply won’t do. Here in Ireland, there’s an excellent digital only newspaper, journal.ie, that’s renowned for a similar approach. It enlivens its output with some exceptionally good photography and an offbeat approach. It has just run a piece about the best jokes about the new royal arrival; they are all in good taste, if not particularly funny. However, there
was one that made me laugh out loud. Buckingham Palace had put an announcement of the royal birth on an easel outside the palace but on the journal.ie website, this has been changed to read that the palace has just released the name of new royal baby: Dave. It takes a lot to make me laugh out loud at something I’ve read online, but this did the trick!
Sport is very much on everyone’s minds at the moment, especially with the Tour de France once again an English triumph. However, I was slightly staggered by something I saw on the Guardian website. The other day, it said that the last stage of the Tour de France was from Versailles to Paris and that it stretched for 133.5 km. How they managed that, I’m not quite sure, since Versailles is merely 15 km as the crow flies from central Paris. Given the Guardian’s old notoriety for typos, one wonders: surely this was shome mistake? Talking about mistakes in the media, when the Montreux
Jazz Festival in Switzerland was planning the publicity for this summer’s event, they inadvertently used a photograph of the Grégory boy without realising who it was. Grégory was the little boy who was murdered in the Vosges region of eastern France way back in 1984. The murder caused such outrage that even after all these years, it still has the power to shock in France and his family quickly
won an abject apology from the festival organisers in Montreux.
Still on sport, I see a delightful event is coming up in the next few days in Paris. It’s on Sunday, July 29th and it’s the fifth traversée de Paris. That rather pedestrian title doesn’t give any clue to what it’s all
about, a procession of 650 old vehicles, vintage and veteran cars (yes, there is a difference between the two!), buses, vans, lorries, tractors even motorcyles. This procession will make its way from the Chateau at Vincennes to the Observatory at Meudon. It starts at 8am on Sunday, French time, and will make its way through the place de la Concorde, past the Grand Palais and through the place des Invalides before reaching its destination at 12 noon. There are even limited seats available on a 1930s bus, for €5 each. Further details on the website:www.vincennesenanciennes.com
It would be very hard to get nostalgic for present day vehicles, all computer-designed, but as for the old style transport, well that’s a different matter entirely and one could even get interested in seeing old style buses. Still it’s an improvement on all the traffic jams currently being reported by Bison Futé, at the height of the holiday season. Last Friday afternoon, the péripherique motorway that encircles Paris was described as being almost one continuous tailback. In the current heat, that’s no fun at all, even if you do have air conditioning in your car.
But of course, you could also chill out on the beach in Paris. For the 12th time, the plage de Paris has been created on the banks of the Seine in the vicinity of the Ile St-Louis and the Ile de la Cité. Some 5,000 tonnes of sand has been dumped to create the illusion of a beach and besides all the deckchairs, lots of different activities aimed at holidaymakers of all ages, are in full swing, everything from
pétanque to beach volleyball with a music festival thrown in for good measure. The beach will be there until August 20th and this year, the idea has been extended to a second location, the Bassin de Villette on the north side of Paris. The only snag is that the road closures in Paris for the summer beaches mean long detours for motorists, but who in their right minds would want to be driving in Paris anyway?
Artificial beaches have also been put in places at many other places around the country, including
Amiens,Clermont-Ferrand, Dijon, Lille, Reims, Rouen and Toulouse. Bordeaux has its seasonal beach, too, but it’s pretty real, since it makes use of the banks of the Lac de Bordeaux. It’s interesting that so many of this year’s artificial beaches are in Alsace-Lorraine and just released statistics show that this fascinating region of France is the best place to go if you are looking for sunshine.
The picturesque, flower-bedecked town of Colmar, between Strasbourg and Mulhouse, and close to the River Rhine, has recorded 184 hours of sunshine this month, with another week of July still to come. This makes Colmar the sunniest place in the whole of France, for instance beating Cannes on the Cote d’Azur hands down; it has had a mere 148 hours of sunshine this month to date.
Still, some people aren’t able to enjoy the south coast sunshine this year. Jacques Chirac, the former French president, used to spend part of every summer at the villa in St-Tropez owned by a great friend of his, Francois Pinault, but not this year. His health means that Chirac has to stay at home in the Correze with his wife Bernadette. He’s too unwell to travel much these days and his public appearances get more and more infrequent. Yet when the current President, Francois Hollande, was in the Correze recently, he visited the Chiracs and found his predecessor alert and good company. During his time as president, Chirac did little that was ground-breaking or innovative, but the
country motored along, and compared to the present state of France, the Chirac era seems in retrospect almost like a vanished golden age. Chirac himself was known in France as “four minute Chirac”. He was notorious for his many swift seductions and he was so speedy that he was renowned for consummating his seduction, having a shower and making a quick exit all in four minutes flat!
One of the star political figures from another recent golden age in France, the Mitterand era, was Jack Lang, the culture minister. He was incredibly innovative and go-getting with two long periods in office between 1981 and 1992 and France’s present cultural patrimony owes much to his vision and energy; beyond a doubt, he was the country’s best culture minister since André Malraux in the late
1960s. Lang’s daughter, Valérie, has just died, from an unspecified long term illness, at the young age of 47. She had made a good career for herself, first as a comedienne, then as a film star and she was scheduled to play Phedre in Paris next January. Alas,it is not to be, a sad demise at a young age for someone so talented.
All of which brings me back to my first trip to France, back in pre-history, in 1958,when I was little more than a child. Knowing my sense of direction, I’m still amazed that I was then able to do so much on my own. Starting off from Birmingham, where we then lived, I took the train to London, made my way across London to Victoria to get the boat train to Paris, managed to navigate my way across Paris to the Gare de Lyon. One thing that sticks in my mind from those far-off times was the primitive public payphone system, where you had to use jetons to make a call.
It’s sometimes had to realise just how much mobile phone technology has changed people’s lives in the past 20 years. I can still remember seeing one of the first mobile phones to arrive in Ireland, the best part of 30 years ago. It was meant for car use, but the instrument itself was the size of a car battery!
That’s digressing! I did the 460 km journey from Paris to Lyon in 1958 by train, which in those days, took about seven hours. In more recent times, I’ve done the same journey by TGV in just two hours. I’ve vivid memories of Lyon then, a mere 15 years after the end of World War II; it looked a bleak and desolate city, a complete contrast to the present day Lyon. The city had barely awakened from that nightmare. But I remember vividly the cathedral, Notre Dame de Fourviere, the Tour Metallique, the funicular railways that run up and down the hill to the cathedral, and the riverside quays. Lyon is at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone rivers and the riverscapes alone are well worth seeing. These days, Lyon has a fine airport named after that great aviator and poet of World War II, Exupéry, while it has four Métro lines, six tramway lines, not to mention trolleybuses. These days, Lyon is hailed for its incredible gastronomic heritage, but in those far off days at the end of the 1950s, it hadn’t even been created!
The little village I stayed in during that trip was close to Macon, that great wine centre, and what struck me then and in retrospect, was how empty the village was of cars. People by and large just didn’t own cars in those days, so the village was an oasis of calm and quietness. But I remember very clearly going to the village cinema one night-few people had television in those days-and seeing a dramatic black and white newsreel of the assassination attempt on de Gaulle. It was the first of 31 assassination attempts on his life; in 1958, he had once again become the leader of France, firstly as
prime minister, then six months later, as president. It was a time of deep unease in France, with the Algerian war, not ended until four years later.
But in that small, very rural village, I was blessed with another discovery. The family I stayed with had no English at all. They were a rather large family, with a dozen of them sitting down to a lengthy dinner every night. It did wonders for my French - it was a case of sink or swim at the dinner table! By the end of my month’s sojourn, I had become fluent in French, to my own astonishment and those of my schoolfriends and it was the start of a lifelong affection for France and its people, yes even Parisians, whose haughty uncaring image is in my experience totally untrue. But you do need to speak at least some of their language!
Meanwhile back here in Ireland, the government promises that the next budget, in October, will be the last of the tough ones. Sounds like a lot of bullshit to me! Politicians’ promises are nearly always totally unbelievable. In the general election in Ireland in early 2011, the two parties that now make up the Coalition government in Dublin, made all sorts of grandiose promises that they have since been quite happy to bin, so much so that these no-one believes a word of promises they make. It’s rather like RTÉ, the State broadcaster in Ireland, which was recently forced to admit that a third of
its television schedules are repeats. In many cases, the programmes are repeats for the second, third and fourth times. The organisation itself is rapidly running
out of money as advertising spend with it continues to plummet and yet more
redundancies loom.One of these days,they are going to have to discover how to
run a television and radio network with virtually no staff at all!