More trouble came to the rail network in the south last Saturday evening. Two TGV trains got stranded, one at Carnoules, nearly 40 km from Toulon, the other in Toulon itself, when shots were fired at the overhead power lines on the tracks, cutting the current and bringing the trains to a halt and incarcerating 2,200 passengers inside the trains for several hours. Especially in summer weather, this can be particularly unpleasant. I always remember a train journey we did from La Rochelle in western France to Paris; it should have taken three hours, but after the train and all its systems broke down, it took seven very hot and uncomfortable hours to get to our destination.
There’s also trouble in the arts world, where about 250,000 part-time workers, whose pay is necessarily unpredictable, depend on extra State benefits and social security to keep going. The government, with its customary brilliance, wants to make cuts and as a result, these part-time and temporary workers are threatening to withdraw from the many big cultural events due to happen this summer. Among the events under threat of cancellation is the Avignon festival, now one of the largest arts festivals in the world. Up to now, the French state has always been very supportive of the arts, but even this can no longer be taken for granted.
While all this is going on, the news from the media industry just gets worse. In Provence, the Nice-Matin newspaper group is threatened with bankruptcy, while the left-wing Libération needs a cash injection of €14 million to keep going, while its journalists and its management seem as far apart as ever. Funnily enough, despite all the current woes of the newspaper business in France, most of the regional newspaper titles are still doing well. Just one of those cited as continuing to do well is the Télégramme de Brest, in north-west France, which still claims around 900,000 readers, a pretty impressive tally.
Second level students sitting the baccalauréat, or le bac, were particularly inconvenienced and great efforts were made to ensure that everyone got to their exams on time. The bac was one of Napoléon’s better ideas (he had even more bad ones!) and introduced it in 1808.Ever since, it’s been the main entry qualification for university in France. Meanwhile here in Ireland,the end of the Leaving Certificate exams for second level students have been proceeding with a bit more levity. Two night clubs, one in Ballybunion, Co Kerry, the other in Portmarnock, Co Dublin, hired a well-known English stripper called Chelsea Ferguson to perform at special performances for students who’ve just completed their exams.
Meanwhile, back in the bear garden of French politics, Jean-Luc Godard, the filmmaker, made some very controversial comments in an interview with Le Monde. He suggested it was high time that President Hollande nominated Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, as the prime minister. Vast numbers of people in France would now take such a suggestion seriously. Meanwhile the row between Marine and her father Jean-Marie, rumbles on; recently he made a disgusting joke about putting a comedian, Patrick Bruel, someone who has Jewish heritage, in the oven. Le Pen senior’s blog was taken down from the Front National website and father and daughter are no longer on speaking terms. Another poll, also in Le Parisien, found that 87 per cent of people questioned said that Le Pen senior was both racist and anti-semitic and that he should retire from politics. He’s now 87 years of age, but even that is no excuse.
All kinds of things, mostly the wrong sort, have been happening in the south of France. In Nice the other day, in a supermarket in the Ferber quartier, the results of a power cut meant that the doors of the supermarket stayed firmly shut, trapping all the customers inside for quarter of an hour. Also in Nice last Saturday morning, a 40 year old woman was outside a supermarket on the boulevard Gorbella, on the northside of Nice, when she tried to stop a thief snatching her bag. He stabbed her viciously with a knife, and as a result, the woman is now in a critical condition in hospital. The weather, too, in Provence has been making headlines, not unusual at all. The small town of Saint-Vallier-de-Thiey is a delightful place, population 3,200,only about 12 km from Grasse. The town has a strong megalithic tradition, going right back to megalithic times and it’s also the first stop on the Route Napoléon. Last Saturday afternoon, it made local headlines for all the wrong reasons, brought to a complete standstill by a violent shower of hailstones.
There’s also a health warning in place across 18 departments in the south. People are being warned to watch out for tiger mosquitos, which can cause some very severe reactions, sometimes even fatal. On the subject of sudden fatalities, it was sad to read of the passing of 59 year Antoine, the brother of Segolene Royale, the current Minister for Ecology, presidential candidate in 2007 and a former squeeze (one of many!) of the current President, Francois Hollande. Her brother Antoine lived in Belgium; she and her brother were two of the eight children in a family that had very strong military connections. Their father was a Lt Col in navy artillery, while their father’s father was a general de brigade.
Illness has also brought the decline in the number of GPs in France into sharp focus. It seems that since 2007,their numbers have fallen by 6.7 per cent. The Paris region has been worst hit by the disappearing doctors, while the working class district of Seine-St Denis, just north of Paris, is the worst off district anywhere in France, with one GP for every 1,500 inhabitants.
Down in southern central France, the Lozere region is near the Massif Central, south-east of the extinct volcanoes of the Auvergne. It’s a beautiful but harsh landscape, with high limestone plateaux and lots of river gorges. Robert Louis Stevenson immortalised the place by writing about his travels through the Lozere on his donkey. But right now, the people living in this lovely but isolated place have a more urgent problem; they only have 58 GPs to look after them. So last weekend, a group of 55 medical interns from Montpellier came to Lozere to sample the area’s gastrononic delights, including its Roquefort cheese, and its various other pleasures, in the hope that after qualifying, some may be persuaded to settle in the area and augent the list of GPs.
To add to all the current unpalatable news from France, strikes,bad weather and all the usual afflictions of summertime, including the murder of an escort woman in an hotel in Clichy, near Paris, one social media trend seems totally daft. On Facebook, it seems, young people are being encouraged to dive fully clothed into rivers or sea, or if they chicken out, to offer their companions dinner. Already, there’s been one fatality.
At least, on the international scene, there’s a little levity. As part of an arts festival in Krakow in Poland, a more than full sized statue of Lenin has been put up. The statue itself is all green but what’s unusual is that it shows Lenin taking a leak and the statue’s connection to the water system, means a never-ending stream. Many people find this a very amusing commentary on the 40 years of communism in Poland, now happily consigned to a fast receding memory.
And in Barcelona, they have so many tourists they want to start discouraging them. About seven million a year are coming to this Catalan city, which has a permanent population of 1.7 million. I was very amused by the typo in The Guardian, which asked whether Barcelona was losing its sole to a tourist stampede.
Here in Ireland, there’s a new tourism sight going on; in the Phoenix Park in Dublin, Europe’s largest urban park, it seems that the buggers are on the loose, with many men having sex in broad daylight, in full sight of all the tourists passing by. Whatever next! And still in Ireland, isn’t it about time that Marks & Spencer started treating its Irish workers like 21st century adults, instead of something akin to feudal slaves. Quite regularly, unfair dismissal cases come up where workers at the group have been sacked for what appear to be minor and rather trivial offences. Marks & Spencer is always so concerned about ethically sourcing its products-it should devote a little more effort to treating their workers as they should be treated. It all puts me off shopping there and I’m quite sure I’m not alone!