A 78 year lady, Cécilie Masson, whose family owns the only hotel and restaurant on the island, explained the other day why the islanders prefer to keep natural time. She says that it’s much better to live in harmony with the sun, rather than by artificially set time. She was born on the island but during her life, she has travelled all over the world; for her, Molene with natural time is the best place to be.
Now comes news of a rare literary find of a rather unusual kind. When the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille in 1785, not long before the French revolution, he wrote a fictional work called The 120 Days of Sodom. It took him 37 days to write the text of his novel on a 12 metre long parchment. In the work, he describes the carry-on of four French libertines, aged between 45 and 60; sodomy was the least of their pursuits and in time, the novel gained a world class status for its kinky sex and worse. But for the past 25 years, the parchment, which was rescued during the storming of the Bastille in the French revolution from the cell previously occupied by the depraved Marquis, has been locked in a legal limbo. It was caught up in an intense legal battle over its ownership, but that dispute has now been resolved.
A private collector called Gérard Lheritier has paid €7 million for the manuscript; he happens to own the private museum of letters and manuscripts in Paris. The museum, which was set up in 2004, is now located at 222, boulevard Saint-Germain in the 7th. It has an astonishing collection of letters and manuscripts, 136,000 in all. Among the innumerable items of interest is the ceasefire signed by Eisenhower at the end of the war in Europe, on May 7,1945. Now, the manuscript penned so long ago by the Marquis de Sade has joined the collection and it will be on public view in September.
Now we have a new French government, the smallest since 1958,and including Segolene Royale, who was the unsuccessful contender in the 2007 French presidential election. The new prime minister, Manuel Valls, has promised less tax and more labour reform, but whether he and his team can get President Hollande out of his deep electoral decline, is anyone’s guess. But at least, Paris continues to have a socialist mayor, Anne Hildalgo.
Also in Paris, Michelin has created a very unusual outdoor map in the Luxembourg Gardens. It measures 16 by 9 metres and shows the battlefields of the First World War, in time for the 100th anniversary of its start. By the looks of it, we’ll be having a real live war in commemoration, this time in Ukraine.
Down south, another anniversary, rather more glorious, is being commemorated, the 50th anniversary of the opening by André Malraux, a very renowned culture minister, of the Fondation Maeght. It’s near St Paul de Vence and was started by Marguerite and Aimé Maeght; it has since become a shrine to modern and contemporary art, attracting about 200,000 visitors a year. The big exhibition on there at the moment is dedicated to the art and architecture of Josep Lluís Sert and it runs to June 9. Many people could be forgiven for asking: who he?
Just this past Monday evening, the whole Provencal region got a shaking, when an earthquake measuring five on the Richter scale was felt. Its epicentre was near Barcelonette in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, but it caused no injuries and did little damage. A family shake-up is happening in the Correze, where Bernadette Chirac revealed the other day that not alone has she to cope with the deteriorating health of her husband Jacques, but the fact that one of their daughters, Claude, has barred them from seeing their grandson, Martin.
But more of the usual French carry-on will happen this coming weekend. As a protest against a proposed 80 kph speed limit on national and departmental roads, a massive traffic go-slow is planned. Motoring and motor cycle organisations representing 40 million road users are totally against this proposed speed limit, so the weekend protests promise to be sizeable.
I was very amused by a recent April Fool’s joke perpetrated by the French Connexion, an online and print publication in English, for expats living in France. It announced that a new green tax was going to be imposed on the sales of all plants, trees and flowers. The bigger the plant or the taller the tree, the more tax would be levied, so that stallholders in innumerable markets up and down the country would have to work out a whole new complicated system of taxes every time they sold an item. It all sounded so convincing, just the kind of thing French bureaucrats would dream up, but fortunately, it was all a joke-for now!
I also got an unexpected laugh the other day from a local freesheet here in Dublin. Usually, freesheets are hardly worth bothering with, but flicking through this one, I noticed they had a feature on holidays in Paris, recommending a particular Parisien landmark to visitors, the Eiffle Tower! Get an eyeful of this typo!
Internationally, all kinds of queer news is coming to the fore, as with the opening last weekend of a cemetery for lesbians in Berlin. Once anyone has reached that stage, it seems rather pointless, to say the least, as to whether they will be buried in a lesbian or non-lesbian cemetery. But one international anniversary has just passed and no-one seems to have noticed.
It’s the 100th anniversary of the coming into effect of the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France, two countries that had once been at loggerheads or worse for hundreds of years. These days, many people from Britain love to holiday there or better still go and live there, while for many French people, especially those with an entrepreneurial streak, London is shangri-la.
Also on the international front, I read a blistering newspaper feature in the Western Morning News in Plymouth, all about the effects of the bedroom tax. A lady in that city called Valerie Johnson, who is on disability benefit, described in detail just how this new tax had wrecked her family’s life, because she has been forced to move to a smaller house. She couldn’t bring herself to call David Cameron, the British pm, by name, so throughout the interview, she referred to him simply as “numbnuts”. A graphic description and it was followed up by a piece in The Guardian by Hugh Muir, in which he said that the Tories are simply unshackling themselves from the flesh and blood repercussions of their decisions. The Tories, as ever, are a generally unlovely and unloving lot, but then the alternative doesn’t look any more competent.
And talking about strange goings-on, it was strange to see so little comment about the chief financial officer of Tesco deciding to step down from his job just days before the next set of annual results are released. Could the lack of comment be anything to do with the fact that so many newspapers/websites in both Ireland and Britain are heavily dependent on advertising from Tesco? Don’t believe everything you read, or rather don’t read in the media! It just shows, the other day, I bought a well-known Irish daily and also a Sunday paper, neither of which I’d normally purchase. It was nothing at all to do with their journalism being good, bad or indifferent - they had some good discount coupons for Aldi and Lidl, which seemed a much more compelling reason to buy them!
At this point, I can’t resist quoting one of the worst advertising lines in Ireland at the moment. Most current advertising is either banal or boring, usually a combination, and it’s quite rare to get advertising that is genuinely informative. But a current ad for a brand of Irish ham announces: I ham therefore I ham. When advertisers get into philosophical musings, it’s really cringe making!
Here in Ireland, a well-known political activist was interviewed in The Irish Times and he made the point that the political class in Ireland is totally corrupt. He didn’t mention that this vice is inextricably connected with another, incompetence. Here in Dublin, the city has some 4,000 homeless people living mostly on the streets, while nationally, 100,000 families are looking for a home. A recent survey found that nationally, 600,000 people weren’t getting enough food to eat daily, because they can’t afford it. And the response of the political class to all this? Turn over and have a bit more of a lie-in.
On Sunday, I noticed some television outside broadcast trucks from the BBC in Belfast on the road near where we live in Dublin. It turned out they had been covering the annual Irish Film and Television Awards, shown on RTÉ television and what a fiasco the whole night was. Social media has been abuzz all week with it. Guests at the event couldn’t stop chattering all through the presentations, so viewers at home couldn’t hear. One irate blogger to The Irish Times said it sounded like a tiddly wink match at a busy pub on a Friday night. The actual quality of the production was slated, poor camera work, etc, and the end result was so dire that the station had to cancel the repeat showing planned for the following afternoon.
I couldn’t help being moved by one heartbreaking story in Dublin very recently. A 15 year old Dublin girl called Triona Priestley had been suffering from cystic fibrosis all her life. She and her family knew the end was near and she had one last wish, to hear her favourite singer Ed Sheeran on the phone. Her favourite song was his rendition of Little Bird. Family and friends mounted a campaign on social media to try and persuade him and he phoned her while she lay in bed at a children’s hospital in Dublin. Her final wish had come true, but before he had finished the conversation with her, she fell asleep and soon afterwards, died.
In another very sad story this week, a 35 year old Chinese woman called Yao Webster was killed. She worked in a Dublin city centre post office and was on her way to work last Monday morning when she bent down to tie her shoelaces. At that very moment, a tram and a car collided nearby and the car was thrown across the street, pinning the Chinese woman against a wall and killing her instantly. She left an Irish husband and a two year old daughter. Yao hadn’t been in China to see her parents for 10 years but had booked a trip for the near future so that they could meet up with their only daughter again and meet their grandchild for the first time. As Nigella Lawson, the TV chef, said the other day, it’s not just people but events that can throw life upside down.