Now that we’re well into the pre-Christmas season-only another week to go, fortunately! – the seasonal markets are in full swing and once again, Strasbourg has come out on top for having the best Christmas market in France. But in the French Alps, tourist chiefs and hoteliers are concerned that the lack of snow is going to be very damaging to the Christmas and New Year ski-ing season. By the latest reckoning, only 40 out of France’s 200 ski stations are open; the rest are closed because there just isn’t enough snow to go round.
Another place to avoid like the plague, according to a Daily Express columnist, Jennifer Selway, is La Coupole restaurant, the famed establishment on the left bank in Paris. She and her daughter were there recently for a meal and found the service so off-putting and so rude that they simply walked out and tried to find an alternative restaurant that would be more customer friendly. Selway concluded that despite the faults of restaurants in Britain, they win hands down over Parisian restaurants when it comes to treating customers properly.
You’ll find a whole raft of the best restaurants and hotels, as well as a smattering of top shops in the latest edition of Taschen’s Guide to Paris. It’s an extraordinarily sumptuous book, with many fine contemporary photos, yet is priced very reasonably at €35. But if you’re going on the piss in France, don’t go to Orléans, because the city authorities there are starting to charge people who get drunk in public. The fine for a drunken reveller in public is €120 and if a doctor has to be called, there’s an extra €120. It seems that every year in the city, between 250 and 300 drunks are apprehended by the local gendarmes.
That part of western France had a bad air crash last week. A military jet on a training exercise crashed on a home for handicapped people in the village of Rochecorban, just outside Tours. The two crew on the plane ejected and escaped unhurt, but one handicapped man was killed and several people were injured, one seriously. Several nearby houses were set on fire.
Talking of flying, after the news last week that Toulouse airport is going to be partially privatised, comes news that Lyon airport is going to suffer a similar fate. There’s also news at the moment that the French government is going to break up the long standing monopoly held by SNCF, the State railway company. After many years, long distance buses will be allowed to operate in France, competing with the trains on price. Down in Cannes, SNCF has finally opened its new €38 million railway station, long in the offing, even though it’s not totally completed yet. It aims to offer every last comfort to rail travellers and it’s hoped that the number of people getting on and off trains in Cannes will zoom from the present 3.8 million a year to six million annually.
At least being on a train this week beat driving on the péripherique, the motorway that encircles Paris. On Tuesday morning this week, a burst pipe in a tunnel in the 15th arrondissement of south-west Paris closed the motorway and created horrendous traffic jams.
After all this talk of transport comes news that at long last, widespread opening on Sundays by shops across the country, not just in Paris, may become a reality before long. In this respect, France is years behind many other European countries. Here in Ireland, stores and supermarkets often open on Sundays, and this has been the practice for many years now. It seems only sensible, as for many people, Sundays is often the only convenient day for shopping.
But back in France, the latest group to take to the streets are academics and students at the country’s universities, who say that all the cutbacks in State funding to universities means that many are literally falling apart at the seams. In another positive political move the other day, the French Senate has now joined the lower house of parliament in backing France’s recognition of the State of Palestine. It now looks as if tomorrow, the European parliament is going to follow suit.
A couple of stories came up with interesting legal ramifications. In Arras, in north-eastern France, the other day a 48 year woman was convicted of sexually harrassing two plumbers who came to fix her central heating. She was sentenced to a year in prison, sentence suspended, and she revealed in court that she had been an alcoholic at the time, but had now reformed her ways. There was also an amusing revelation from the makers of the popular French TV show, Les Guignols, in which political leaders are depicted as puppets. They revealed that one year, they got their supply of hash for use during the Cannes film festival past the police checks by stuffing it in the head of the Jacques Chirac puppet they had brought with them. In France, hash is usually known as ‘ shit’, so it was no surprise when the Journal du Dimanche revealed last Sunday that there was “un kilo et demi de shit dans la tete a Chirac”. The report didn’t say what was normally inside Chirac’s head when he was president!
Closer magazine, notorious for blowing the gaffe on the President’s love life, has now done the same with a man called Florian Phillipot, a close advisor to Marine Le Pen of the Front National. It recently posted photos claiming to show that Phillipot has a male partner, no doubt a source of scandal to many Front National supporters with their traditionalist views. In the meantime, a former mayor of La-Faute-sur-Mer in the Vendée has been jailed for four years. In 2010,horrendous floods in the town killed 29 residents and the mayor was accused of concealing the risks of flooding in the town, so that developers could clean up with all their new apartment building. The woman in charge of planning was sent to prison for two years and fined €75,000 while her son, who should have been monitoring the seawall on the night of the big storm, but wasn’t, was sent to prison for 18 months. Rather sadly, this was an all too familiar tale of corruption and incompetence.
But at least Francois Hollande won’t have to worry after he’s eventually ejected from the Elysée Palace; it’s been revealed that he’ll get a monthly pension of €15,000,the same amount that many pensioners in France live on for a whole year. Nothing like a bit of Socialist equality! No wonder, given the mess that the French economy is in, that one of the rating agencies, Fitch, has lowered its ratings for France from AA+ to AA. It also turns out that France is now the second highest taxed country in the world, after Denmark, with an astonishing 45 per cent of GDP accounted for by taxes.
Someone else who retired recently has bit of a smell to cope with. Lindsay Owen-Jones was the British guy who was the ceo of L’Oréal until he retired a couple of years ago. He has an upmarket apartment in the Alpine resort of Albertville but he and his neighbours have been plagued by a chip van that is habitually stationed right under their windows, bringing the smell of chips wafting upwards. A serious legal battle has now been joined with the woman who owns the chip van.
But amid all the current national and international gloom, the French president is still providing a cheap laugh. Following the recent photo of him dressed in a central Asian fur coat and hat, during a recent visit to Kazakhstan, that picture has now been photoshopped to show Hollande in a variety of guises, including as a court jester and a viking pirate.
In an unexpected development on the international front, the Russian economy is going into freefall, with the rouble collapsing by the day against the US dollar. Western sanctions are to blame for some of the collapse, but the main reason is that the world price of oil has halved in recent months. The effects on the Russian economy are likely to be dire, yet the Russian president, Putin, so gung-ho over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, appears to have no answers at all for the predicament that the Russian people are now in. He may be a good military strategist, but he’s not so hot on the economic front, as the Russian economy faces collapse.
The Daily Telegraph in London, profoundly euro sceptic, had an interesting article the other day by one of its top columnists, Peter Oborne. He said that the eurozone is headed for disaster, having ruined the lives of tens of millions of people, yet the same political class remains in power. They have as much legitimacy, he said, as that of the ancien regime in France while the revolution was being plotted. But of course you’ll find little or no mention of all this in the media in the eurozone countries. It’s hardly surprising that both Belgium and Italy have just had very disruptive national strikes, against the current austerity.
In an upmarket area of Zurich the other night, about 200 left wing radicals brought a reign of terror, setting fire to cars and breaking shop windows. There was general mayhem as the radicals protested the life of the uber rich. Yet guess how much of this was reported in the European media? One of the big German banks, the Saxo bank, in its financial forecast for next year is having a great time predicting calamity for Europe. Its experts say that if an Icelandic volcano, Bardarbunga, erupts, it will change weather patterns across Europe so drastically that there’ll be a dire effect on crops. It points out that food shortages created the conditions for the French revolution at the end of the 18th century and reckons the same could happen all over again. What odds for European revolution in 2015?
But at least in Monaco, they now have two new royal babies. Princess Charlene, married to Prince Albert, has just given birth to twins, Gabriela and Jacques. The deferential media hasn’t given much coverage to how his illegitimate offpsring are doing. There was also fascinating news in the past few days about veteran Poruguese film maker Manoel de Oliveira, who has just finished his latest film production, The Old Man of Belem, a reflection on Portuguese history. Nothing remarkable about that, you might say, except that Manoel began his career in
the film industry in 1927 and is now 106 years of age. Also recently, he received the French Legion d’Honneur.
Back at the ranch here in Ireland, the protestors are in full swing. One newspaper letter writer the other day pointed out that children are going to school hungry, people are sleeping rough and pensioners are being abused in care homes. A whole host of ills affect the less well off and as the letter writer concluded “Happy Christmas from Enda Kenny and his Government”.
A recent water charge protestor in Ireland was much more blunt. His placard, seen on RTÉ television, read: “I’ve given up sex. The government fucks me every day”. Complaints abound about a whole host of social ills, towards which the government seems impervious. Many charities say the present legislation in the rented property market is hopelessly outdated and unfit for purpose, yet the government seems unwilling and unable to do anything to halt the present crisis, hardly surprising since the main government party, Fine Gael, has long been in the pockets and the pay of the property industry. The government, it seems, can waste millions upon millions of euro trying to bring in a system to charge people for water, but when literary magazines, part of the backbone of Irish culture, look for subsidies measures in pittances to keep doing, it’s no dice.
In another way too, Ireland is being ruined, by the wind farm industry. An 80 year old lady called Grace Pym has spent the past 25 years restoring a castle in the Irish midlands. It’s now an upmarket guesthouse but many of the international visitors who come to stay vow never to return, because the surrounding rural countryside has been ruined by windfarms. It’s a bit like what the government is planning to do in celebration of the centenary of the Easter Rising in 1916, and which on present evidence, looks like something concocted by Disneyland.
No wonder that a current joke has become so popular. It goes something like this. A woman buys a new car and is given instructions on how to use its automated music system. All you have to do is say the word of your favourite singer or song and the system will play it. The woman then has a near collision with another car that cuts across her. She shouts out “Fecking eejit”. The voice on the automated music system pipes up: “Which member of the government do you want?”
To end on a positive note: five years ago, St Mel’s cathedral in Longford was burned down after a fault in its central heating system. Now after a €30 million restoration, the cathedral has been completely restored and it’s a sight to behold, bringing hope to many. And the good news is that the cathedral now has a proper fire prevention system.