The union representing hotel and restaurant workers says that 85 per cent of restaurants already use frozen or vacuum packed food, which they simply reheat, rather than going to the bother of making a dish from scratch in their own kitchens. However, there’s a telling anecdote doing the rounds at the moment of a chef from a well-known restaurant in France going to a rival restaurant on his night off and ordering a Boeuf Bourguignon. It tasted so good that the chef investigated a little further and found that it had been prepared in advance and tasted much better than anything he could make in his own restaurant. He then decided to follow suit in his own restaurant.
But the new regulations exempt raw ingredients that have been frozen or vacuum packed. A food critic in Le Monde, J.P.Gene, scoffed at the idea of eating a so-called home made meal that had been made from pre-frozen ingredients. So will the new scheme make any difference? Opinions in the restaurant business are very mixed.
In the meantime, while the traditional style of cooking in French restaurants has largely gone missing, so too have lots of items in the Elysée Palace. The Cours de Comptes, which audits the state finances, says that lots of art works and pieces of furniture have gone missing from the presidential palace and no-one knows where they have gone.
It has also emerged that one of President Hollande’s former mistresses, Valérie
Trierweiler, who was only in the Elysée Palace for a short while, has cost hard-pressed French taxpayers a whopping €481,000 for her time in residence in the palace.
Some elements of the French media have been busy speculating that the president is to marry his latest squeeze on August 12.They have been convinced that Hollande is going to make an honest woman of actress Julie Gayet, despite the fact that at 42, she is 18 years younger than M.Hollande. As for the man himself, he’s busy denying all these stories.
But at least something good has come out of the palace. Fabienne Terrale-Calmes, the 34 year old schoolteacher murdered in Albi recently has been made a posthumous Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur, while her two children have been made wards of the nation.
More trouble on the Métro. It turns out that a whole lot of new escalators installed in 2006/7 have broken down so much since that they all have to be replaced. Some of the more recent escalators will also have to be replaced, since they are one metre wide, when they should have been 90 cm. There was also a big shootout on the Métro last Saturday. A thief robbed a dealer in rare coins of €100,000 worth of coins; he was chased by police into the nearby Métro station of Grands Boulevards in the 2nd arrondissement. A shootout took place in a crowded train, but miraculously, no-one was hurt, except for the robber, who got a minor wound in the arm and was promptly arrested.
The anniversary of the first Métro line opening has just passed. It took place on July 19,1900,just in time for the great exposition in Paris. That line ran from Porte Maillot in the west of Paris to the Porte de Vincennes in the east; in those far-off days, they managed to get all their measurements exactly right!
News about accidents have dominated news in the French media over the past few days. Last week, at Herblay near Paris, a woman who was parked on a camping site for tourists was busy cleaning her car when her young son, who was sitting in the driver’s seat, managed to set free the brake. The car ran down an incline into a camper van in front of it. The unfortunate woman was killed, although not before she had managed to push another child, who had been with her, to safety. Then there was a serious train crash the other day near Pau in the south-west, when a TGV collided with a regional train. Fortunately, there were no fatalities, but about 40 people were injured, some seriously. It turns out that more railway incompetence, involving a signal, was to blame. Then just yesterday, a minibus and a heavy lorry collided near Troyes ,just south of Paris, killing four young children and two of their adult minders. It’s thought that the driver of the minibus may have dozed off and driven the minibus onto the wrong side of the road.
Then this morning, a big fire, of unknown origin, broke out in the Gare d’Austerlitz in southern Paris, bringing all rail traffic there to a halt for the day.
Down south, the weather has been very strange, with lots of storms - shared with much of the rest of France and Swizterland. Last Monday afternoon, in a two hour period, 377 lightning strikes were recorded in the Alpes-Maritime, while at the same time, prodigious amounts of hail fell inland from Nice. Near Gap early in the morning on July 14, a 3.5 magnitude earthquake was felt. Over the past three months, thousands of micro quakes have been felt in this area, too small for most people to notice, and only a handful have been more than three in intensity.
The suburbs of Marseilles are plagued with wild boars, which roam around at night in search of food. Hundreds of them live in the Calanques national park, between Cassis and Marseilles, but they obviously reckon that the big city is a good place for grub. If it’s not wild boars, it’s jellyfish. The sea all along the Cote d’Azur is full of jellyfish, which can cause very nasty stings.
At least in Monaco, there’s some good news. The principality’s Internet speed has doubled from 30 to 60 Mb per second, which I’m sure will be very useful. And then in the cathedral in Monaco ville, free organ recitals are being held every Sunday afternoon into August, with performances by top organists from France, Switzerland and Canada.
It also looks as if the troubled Nice Matin media group is going to be saved. It has been under threat of going under, but now it looks as if four serious investors are going to take on the group and keep it going. There’s also a new film with a Riviera setting about to be released, the Agrelet Affair. It’s about how Maurice Agrelet allegedly murdered his then girlgfriend, Agnes Le Roux, one of the richest heiresses on the Riviera, in 1977.He has consistently denied being responsible. The film is directed by André Techiné and has a star-studded cast, including Catherine Deneuve.
An artistic event that has just taken place, at the Avignon festival, has certainly created a stir. A performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VI lasted a staggering 18 hours, running from 10am one morning until 4am the following morning, with five intervals. But everyone in the 600 strong audience stuck with it, right to the end!
Meanwhile back in Paris, Paris Plage is in action ,the beaches along the Seine, which stay in place for a month, with the help of 5,000 tonnes of sand, 50 palm trees and 500 deckchairs. The idea began in 2002 and in 2008,was extended to the Bassin de la Villette in the 19th.This year, the Tunnel de Tuileries, near the Louvre, has been turned into an art gallery complete with a pop-up library, while in the Bassin de la Villette, you can fly across on a zip line.
Meanwhile, the dreadful events in Gaza have prompted many protests in France and elsewhere in Europe. Last Saturday afternoon, a pro-Palestinian protest in the suburb of Sarcelles, just north of Paris, was banned. The protesters went ahead anyway and a lot of damage was caused, including several Jewish shops set on fire. The area is known as Little Jerusalem because so many Jewish people live there. There’s another big demo planned for Paris today and then a monster protest on Saturday, on the place de la République, mirroring a huge protest in London on the same day. After Israel and the US, the world’s third largest Jewish population lives in France, 500,000 strong and it looks as if some serious social unrest is going to be created as a result of Gaza.
The onslaught in Gaza has created another problem-media websites and social networks in France have been absolutely deluged with anti-Israeli comments and most of them have been so virulent that moderators have been working flat out to delete them. The reaction to Gaza has been strange; opposition across Europe is very strong, but in the Islamic world, it seems to have been very muted. Turkey is one of the few countries to have taken a strong stand, declaring three days of national mourning. Meanwhile,a former Front National candidate, Anne-Sophie Leclerc, has been sentenced to nine months in prison for creating Facebook images that compared the black juistice minister, Christiane Taubira, with a monkey.
One place the former FN woman won’t be doing time is the Santé prison in the 14th.It has long been regarded as one of the most notorious prisons in France, besides being one of the most deficient. It has just closed for refurbishment and isn’t due to reopen until 2019.Media reports didn’t mention the famous writer who lived for years in its shadow, Samuel Beckett, together with his wife, Suzanne. The setting seemed somehow very appropriate for the great Irish writer.
The world of course has held its breath for a week now over the crash in eastern Ukraine of flight MH17.Some of the disinformation about it is breathtaking. There have even been many suggestions that it wasn’t the work of pro-Russian rebels at all, that it was the handiwork of Ukraine and its US ally to create a pretext for starting a war with Russia. There have even been suggestions that flight MH17 was in fact the Malaysian Airlines flight that mysteriously disappeared back in March. Just like 9/11, the theories and counter-theories abound. But it does pose a serious dilemma for the French government. Two huge warships, for carrying helicopters, are being built at the St Nazaire shipyard in north-west France, for the Russians, at a cost of €1.2 billion. The first ship is due to be launched in October. President Hollande says there’s no way that the order is going to be cancelled, which is going to cause a lot of trouble with many other western countries, including the US.
I know it’s 100 years after the event, but most people forget that one of the main reasons why the first world war started was because of the alliance between France and Tsarist Russia. Maybe Gérard Dépardieu, the renowned French actor, has the right idea. He recently said he was going to start a de luxe restaurant in Moscow; now, he wants to add to that by opening an organic vodka distillery in the Russian capital.
Also on the international news front this week, one of the biggest banks in Portugal is in trouble, the Banco de Spirito Santo. Its holding company is now to be put into liquidation-more shocks ahead for the euro? And in California, they reckon that the next really big earthquake is overdue. A Hollywood blockbuster called simply San Andreas, a reference to the faultline that’s three hours north of Los Angeles, is due to be released next year. Perhaps the publicity will imitate real life!
Here in Ireland, all the politicians are on a two month paid summer break. All kinds of problems demand attention, like the huge rise in homelessless, but as usual, the official response is a spot of hand sitting, in other words, do nothing for long enough and the problem will go away. The government has just appointed a minister for the Irish speaking areas of Ireland; the only trouble is he can’t string two words of Irish together and for the first time ever, the head of this particular government department will have to get all official documents translated into English!
The present government made so many promises when it came to power in 2011 and has kept so few of them. Three years ago, the prime minster Enda Kenny, said that he wanted to make Ireland the best country in the world to grow old in. The reality is that many services and supports for older people have been cut ruthlessly, making a total mockery of Kenny’s now totally useless pledge. But all western leaders these days have as much bite as latter day Neville Chamberlains-a useless, toothless lot. It’s no wonder that some of the wackier alternative news websites in the US are busy predicting that World War III will start next month. Will Tesco give Clubcard points?
I must end with the news of the idyllic valley in the Ticino Italian speaking canton of southern Switzerland. The Valle Buvona stretches for 12 km and has 12 hamlets. But it is so mountainous that only 1.5 per cent of the valley’s 124 sq km is habitable. In the 1950s,the residents decided not to allow electricity in the valley, so if anyone wants power these days, they have to depend on generators or solar power. Nearly all of the houses in the valley are now used only as summer residences; only a handful of people live there all year round. But it sounds a wonderfully idyllic place.
We’ve fond memories of the Italian part of Switzerland and places like Locarno and Lugano. It’s a delightful part of Swizterland and just like being in Italy, without the endemic inefficiencies that are found just across the border.