It was built at a time when English aristocrats and other wealthy visitors from England were the main visitors to Nice; in the late 18th century, the English seemed to own the Riviera. That’s not the case these days, when Russian oligarchs are far more numerous. But the anniversary hasn’t been let slip past and at the Villa Masséna in Nice, there’ s a big exhibition on showing two centuries of development in Nice. Other locations in Nice are showing other aspects of the city’s advances. Nice had hoped that the Promenade des Anglais would be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site this summer, but that wasn’t to be.
As for the Promenade these days, the pedestrian walkway is still there, but the traffic lanes are always busy, to and from the airport. The section of the Promenade reserved for traffic is more like a motorway these days!
Another, more modest, transport development is on the way in Toulouse, where a third metro line is being planned. The exact route will be revealed at the end of the year but the new Toulouse Aerospace Express line will be between 20 and 25 km long and is expected to carry about 200,000 passengers a year.
A transport anniversary is also being marked this month, since it’ s 60 years since the world’ s highest cable car system was opened, the télephérique on the Aiguille du Midi in the Mont Blanc massif. It was a remarkable achievement for the time; last year, new cabins were installed on the route.
Another achievement of bygone days was marked in Paris the other day, when a 72 metres long wooden raft reached Paris after a 267 km journey from central France. In the 16th century, giant rafts like these first started to be used to float vast quantities of wood into Paris, to fuel the domestic fireplaces of the city. For the best part of four centuries, about a million cubic metres of wood was taken annually by river raft to Paris, but of course it’ s a custom that has long since vanished into antiquity.
In Dublin, the other day, I saw another memento of transport history, this time a Pontiac Parisienne, a classic car in the American tradition, with a vast engine space and boot. The name of Paris had been invoked for the car, but otherwise, it was a thoroughly American car; its construction was quite brief, since it was only built in the US between 1986 and 1989.
Paris on the other hand has seen the launch of a brand new app for tourists, by the Paris Chamber of Commerce. It’s aimed at tourists with little or no French and contains an interactive map. It’s available in three versions, English, Arabic and Mandarin.
In the 10th arrondissement, around the Canal Saint- Martin, an almighty row has broken out, with many critics complaining that the bourgeois bohemians who live there want to create a zone of exclusivity from which fun loving young people will be excluded. During these fine summer nights, as many as 3, 000 young people gather by the canal banks and there are often scenes of drunken disorder. All this means as well a big increase in litter, on the canal banks and in the canal itself. One resident said that the whole area had become little more than a gigantic dustbin, but the posh left- wing middle classes who live in the area are being accused of being small minded, determined to drive young people from the district.
But perhaps you’ d be better off living well outside Paris. A recent survey of smaller towns and cities across France has found that Grasse in Provence is the best middle ranking town to live in, anywhere in France, surpassing even such delightful places as Albi. There’ s also lots of interesting historical material about Grasse on the Nice Matin website, where a gallery of photographs has lots of images of Grasse as it was 100 years ago.
Someone else who’ s ruffled a few feathers is Marie de Villepin, the 29 year old daughter of Dominique de Villepin, the poetry- writing prime minister between 2005 and 2007. She’s posed topless for Lui, the French men’s magazine. The cover photo shows her topless, holding an electric guitar and standing on a boat crossing the Hudson River in New York. Marie is very matter- of- fact about the whole episode; she says she’ s quite happy for people to look at her bare breasts and backside and then move on to do something else more constructive.
There’ s also been news about the police in France, who can now, under certain conditions, sport a beard or even tattoos, all a long way from the traditional image of gendarmes. But for some, pretending to be police is obviously more profitable. Gangs of thieves dressed as police have been plaguing the motorway between Paris and Normandy, as well as the main motorway in Provence, always in the middle of the night, and getting away with substantial hauls from the cars they are stopping.
But one woman motorist who was stopped the other day near Toulouse found herself on the wrong side of the law. The real police stopped her to check her licence and when the driver stepped out of her car, a policewoman noticed the driver was wearing flipflops. A whole lot of new driving regulations came into force on July 1 and under these, the surprised driver was fined €90. As she said herself, the fine could have bought her a new pair of shoes.
Somewhere that tourists are busy avoiding is the town of Ventimiglia, just on the Italian side of the frontier with France, a short distance away from Menton. In normal times, Ventimiglia is quite an interesting town but these days, it’s packed with migrants who’ve managed to cross the Mediterranean from Africa and the Middle East. They’ve travelled through Italy, hoping to get into France, but the French authorities are blocking their passage. The end result is that hundreds of migrants are crammed into Ventimiglia and can’ t get any further.
One of the great film stars of recent decades has just died, Omar Sharif, who died in hospital from a cardiac arrest at the end of last week, aged 83. Born in Alexandria to Greek parents, he was a noted actor in Egypt before he gained world wide fame in Laurence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago. But the price he paid for fame was high; he divorced his Egyptian wife and spent rootless years living in hotels in Paris and elsewhere, spending much of his time playing cards. Probably in about a week’s time, many people will have forgotten all about who Omar Sharif was. In this online age, memory cycles get shorter and shorter. It’ s remarkable that someone like the American musician, Jim Morrison, who died way back in 1971, is still so venerated at his tomb in Pere Lachaise in Paris.
A much more recently deceased musician has just been honoured in the town of Cahors in south- west France. Johnny Winters was a blues star who was very attached to the town. Last year, he gave his last performance there, dying a few days later. Now a street in the centre of Cahors, close to the town hall, has been named after him: Allée Johnny Winters.
The usual catastrophes have been taking place- where would we be without them? In the south of France, the forests are tinder dry thanks to the very high temperatures and the effects of the Mistral. This means that forests are at extreme risk from forest fires and motorists are being discouraged from going near forest areas. Another fire happened just before 3 am on Monday morning, when a well- known beach restaurant at Narbonne, in south- west France, went up in flames. Then yesterday, two huge tanks at a petrochemical complex near the airport in Marseilles went on fire. Since the tanks are 500 metres apart, it would have been impossible for the fire to have spread from one tank to the other and there’ s strong suspicion that they were set on fire deliberately.
It’ s hardly surprising, given the recent surge in temperatures, that large parts of France are now in the grip of a water shortage. Water rationing is now the order of the day in 30 departments.
Another kind of accident happened the other day in Caen in Normandy, during a wedding party. An ancient cannon, that had come from a ship, was being used to give the party a good send-off, but unfortunately, when it was being fired, it blew up, leaving two of the people at the party very seriously injured. In Provence last week, the 11 year son of a Danish family on holiday in the area, drowned when he fell off his pedalo. Also in the south, two women were bitten by fiddleback spiders, one in Languedoc- Roussillon, the other in Hérault. This particular spider is native to America but has become much more common in France in recent years. It’ s only a centimetre and a half long but it packs a vicious bite full of venom - sounds like a Tory MP in full flight - that can cause necrosis of the skin.
Then a farm worker near Nice had a nasty accident the other day. He was tending vineyards in the hills surrounding Nice when his tractor overturned several times, trapping him underneath. He was rescued but suffered two broken legs in the accidents. And talking of Nice, the old Saint-Roch hospital there has just closed down in favour of the brand new Pasteur 2 hospital. Staff and outsiders at the old hospital staged a farewell party there the other night and the end result was that they all got so drunk they trashed the place, causing thousands of euros worth of damage.
A French entrepreneur, Géraldine Lerch Thuillier has created quite a stir by telling everyone why she, her husband and four children are quitting France next months and relocating to Montreal. She’ s been trying to get a tourism project off the ground in Provence, but has been frustrated by so much red tape that she’ s had enough. She says all the bureaucracy in France is driving creative people from the country; France prevents success is her message. Her Facebook comments attracted so much attention that the story was picked up by the mainstream media.
Yesterday was of course Bastille Day with all the usual military pomp and ceremony, as well as a truly spectacular firework display at the Eiffel Tower. But while all that marked the assault on the Bastille in 1789, the start of the French revolution, another anniversary in France got much less coverage. On July 10, 1985, secret agents working for the French foreign intelligence services blew up the Rainbow Warrior boat in Auckland harbour in New Zealand. The Greenpeace boat was on its way to protest against French nuclear tests at Moruroa. But if the Rainbow Warrior episode is swept under the carpet in France, it certainly isn’t in New Zealand, where mention of the attack still draws angry diatribes against the French.
The main news of course in recent days has been Greece and the plans for its third bailout. Many comparisons have been made with the old USSR. One newspaper commentator in Ireland said that the old Soviet Union put down rebellious natives with tanks, whereas the modern EU does the same by using banks. The Guardian in London said that the euro family was nothing more than a bunch of loan shark conglomerates with very little regard for democracy. Many of the fundamental principles that underline the EU and the eurozone were destroyed by last weekend’ s carry- on and Germany has come in for particular criticism.
One poster that’ s become popular in Athens shows Wolfgang Schauble, the hawkish German finance minister. The caption reads: “ Nazi war criminal wanted, dead or alive”. Schauble was the victim of an assassination attempt in 1990 that has left him in a wheelchair. As a result of all the Greek drama at the weekend, the hashtag #ThisIsACoup,created on Sunday night by a physics teacher in Barcelona, Sandro Maccarrone, has swept the world, but the ignomy and hardship being suffered by Greece seems no nearer resolution.
The Pope was quite right in his speech in South America last week when he said that excessive capitalism was the “dung of the devil”. He must have had the eurozone and its approach to Greece in mind. He also slated organisations like the International Monetary Fund for their neo- colonialist approach to many developing countries. The Pope has certainly developed a commendable reputation for telling it like it is.
Back here at the ranch in Ireland, the introduction of the new postcode system has created lots of controversy. Some are saying it will be the new Irish Water style fiasco. Ireland has become the last country in Europe to adopt postcodes. But at least taxpayers won’ t have to pay bills emanating from the new postcode system, unlike the bills from Irish Water. It turns out that when it sent out its first set of bills close on three months ago, less than half of those who had registered actually paid them. This is one controversy that just won’ t go away, especially with a general election on the way. Taking into account all the people who haven’ t registered for Irish Water, this means that only about 35 per cent of households are paying for their water. Will the other 65 per cent be chased for the debts just in time for the election?
While all this has been going on, another row has erupted just across the border. Narrow Water Castle, on the Co Down- and Northern Ireland side- of Carlingford Lough, has been in the Hall family since the 1670s. The place has been temporarily rented by Bliss Ireland, which is organising an erotic festival there between August 7 and 10. The organisers have promised no public nudity or shagging ( what a shame! ), but Sir William Hall, of the family that owns the castle, says that the festival will be an occasion of lewdness and lasciviousness. Hardly surprising, with all the publicity, that the festival is already booked out.
What the North of Ireland needs is plenty more of the same, a good dose of multiple shaggings, to help cure the place of its narrow minded prudery and its bizarre insistence on knowing everyone’ s religion. It’d all be a lot of fun and might do the place some good!