The funny thing about holidays in the south of France is that while by now, they should be getting a huge inflow of tourists, from elsewhere in France and around the world, especially as French school terms have just finished, but it’s just not happening. The number of tourists currently arriving on the Cote d’Azur is described as being not much more than a trickle. The Juilletistes simply aren’t turning up, as they would normally do.
Meanwhile in Paris, they’re trying out a smoking ban at a playground in the 14th., as a prelude to banning smoking in all public parks in Paris. If they go ahead with that, it’s going to be as hard to implement that as it was the smoking ban in other public places. But it’s worth trying!
At least, it’s some kind of movement. Just the other day, the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, said that France is in a state of paralysis and that the country needs urgent reforms to get moving again. Whether it will happen during the lifetime of the present presidency is anyone’s guess-probably not. When President Hollande decided to have a big summit to try and stimulate job creation, the unions promptly refused to take part, because they consider Hollande far too pro-employer! The poor man can’t win, even with his jazzy new glasses. But at least the planned increases in the taxe de séjour that has to be paid on every hotel guest didn’t get very far-the idea was quickly scrapped.
Another protest has been busy happening on the Franco-Italian border, near Menton. Shopkeepers from that town, as well as from Ventimiglia, just the other side of the frontier, have been staging a protest against illegal immigrants selling cut price fruit. It seems that France being France, there’s always a protest going on somewhere!
However, despite all the gloom, another big theme park has just opened, this time in eastern France, near the border with Germany. This new park has been inspired by The Little Prince, written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. One of its features will be two balloons, tethered,that will take visitors up about 150 metres to see spectacular sights of the Vosges mountains. Three dimensional cinema will bring more sights to life and the park will even have live foxes and sheep, not together, I hope. The promoters plan to attract 150,000 visitors a year.
Another tourist spot is being feted, this time Toulouse in the south-west. The city has just been described by the Lonely Planet as one of 10 places in Europe that should be on travellers’ radar right now. It’s described as one of France’s most beautiful, historic and under-rated of cities, renowned for its pink stone architecture, fantastic churches, museums and restaurants. Toulouse also has all kinds of interesting festivals, like its summer music festival and the festival devoted to violets.
It isn’t all good news in France, of course. The other day, an 84 year old pensioner was swept away by flood waters at Saint-Palais in the Basque district. A group of pensioners is on hunger strike at Avenieres in the Isere, in the Rhone-Alpes region. They belong to the French Association for the Defence of Destitute Pensioners and they started their hunger strike on June 26th. Altogether, it’s estimated that around 1.5million pensioners in France live on less than €960 a month.
France has also been numbed by the murder of a school teacher at a primary school in Albi, near Toulouse, at the end of last week, by the mother of a pupil. The woman who carried out the stabbing appears to have been deranged. It was a very sad event, provoking much outpouring of grief and a huge turnout for the teacher’s funeral.
People travelling through the euro tunnel under the English Channel have also had to put up with some horrendous delays this week. Meanwhile, the report on the train crash at Brétigny-sur-Orge,just south of Paris, a year ago this month, has just been published. A train from the Gare d’Austerlitz to Limoges derailed in the station, killing seven people and injuring nearly 200 more. The report concluded it was an accident waiting to happen, because the level of disrepairs on the national rail network has reached a state never seen before. It’s all a shocking indictment on the current state of affairs in France. This coming Saturday, a memorial service for the victims will be held in the town where the crash happened and no-one will forget that it was all entirely preventable, if it hadn’t been for incredible bureaucratic incompetence.
At least on a lighter note, we can celebrate the fact that this month is the anniversary of the launch in Paris in 1946 of the bikini.
There’s also something very funny in Le Monde-a rare enough happening! The paper and its website have just had to publish a big correction, because they said that Brian Cowen, a former prime minister in Ireland, had been a member of the British comedy troupe, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. They had to admit that he wasn’t and never had been a member, but somehow it creates a perfect picture for many voters of Ireland’s political elite. It may not be true, but it’s certainly an hilarious fictitious image!
Here in Ireland, we’re starting to get over the absolute debacle over the five Garth Brooks concerts in Dublin that have now been cancelled, causing a loss to the Irish economy of as much as €250 million. The whole business has been an absolute fiasco. Sometimes, there’s a ridiculous dedication to the legal rules, when a little flexibility would have been in order. There was another example of this in Dublin recently, when a teenager started eating a meal that unknown to her contained peanuts, to which she was highly allergic. Her mother went round the corner to a pharmacist to try and get an ephinephrine injector, which would have immediately solved the problem, but the assistant in the pharmacist said that the injector could only be provided under prescription. A short time later, the teenager died.
Looking further ahead, we could be in for some bad weather. The weather experts say that we are building up to a recurrence of El Nino on the scale of what happened in 1997, causing much flooding and droughts around the world. Don’t say you haven’t been warned! In the meantime, the first six months of 2014 have turned out to have been the second warmest in France since 1900.
I also see that Gérard Depardieu has come up with another zany idea - he’s just opened a new French restaurant in Moscow. Meanwhile, in Switzerland, a contest has started to find a new Swiss national anthem. The current Swiss Psalm sounds a bit like the weather forecast set to music, so 208 entries have materialised in the four languages of Switzerland. It will all be decided on a TV show next year.
I must mention the programmes that Radio 3 in the UK is doing this week about the great 17th century Danish-German organist and composer Buxtehude. He laid much of the groundwork for the Bach family and Handel, but his own music is sublime and serene. For most of his career, he was the organist at St Mary’s church in Lubeck on the north German coast. That church, along with the cathedral in Lubeck and another church, were all destroyed during RAF bombing raids in 1942. What good these bombs did, I’m not at all sure, but German efficiency prevailed. Within 12 years of the second world war ending, St Mary’s had been rebuilt exactly as it had been before.
To close, I can’t but mention the most heart rending story of the week, about the elephant that was released from 50 years of captivity in India and taken to safe keeping in an elephant sanctuary, where he will be brought back to health. As soon as the elephant was safely aboard his rescuers’ lorry and instinctively realising that he was free at least, floods of tears poured down his face. A real life warming story!