This huge monument was designed with maximum theatricality, but minimum attention to the practicalities. It contains lots of office space, which is practically unusable because it’s so cramped and the corridors are narrow and lit entirely by artificial light. The exterior of the building was covered in marble, which is now peeling off.
You could once get a high speed lift to the top, despite the fact that the lift kept breaking down. The view from the viewing gallery was astonishing, as we once found for ourselves, looking straight down the Champs-Elysées as far as the Tuileries Gardens. But that viewing gallery has been closed for the past four years, because the tower is so decrepit. Now, there are plans to spend €200 million renovating the building, but perhaps it might be better to pull it all down and start again.
More news of crumbling accommodation came the other day from the far south-east of France, close to Monaco and the Italian frontier. The small town of Sospel has about 3,500 people and dates back to Roman times. It’s rather a ramshackle place and the living accommodation for the families of gendarmes stationed in the town is exactly the same. It’s very rare for wives of gendarmes to come out publicly about the state of their living accommodation, but that’s precisely what they’ve just done in Sospel. They say that the accommodation is poorly maintained, full of leaks, with paintwork peeling off. To make matters worse, the money to pay for the fuel that’s needed is deducted from their husbands’ salaries and to add insult to injury, the State is charging them way above market prices. Another symbol of present day ramshackle France.
It’s no wonder that the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, said the other day that economic policies in the eurozone are unbalanced and need to be revamped to ensure growth. The French economy is still very sluggish, with manufacturing output continuing in freefall. But the problem with the eurozone is that the German government is totally inflexible, stuck in its recession inducing ways. Valls alluded to this German logjam, but of course, Angela Merkel and her government are convinced that they are 100 per cent in the right.
But then in many ways, the EU and the eurozone are totally useless. The reaction of the EU to the crisis is Gaza is typical-it hasn’t had a reaction at all, and has done nothing to either criticise what’s been happening there or prevent it happening again. No wonder that Lt General Michael Flynn, the outgoing head of the Defence Intelligence Agency in the US, said the other day that he doubted there would be peace in the Middle East in his lifetime. Even the fact that the Save the Children charity in the UK has just published the names and ages of the 373 children killed in the recent bombardments of Gaza probably won’t change matters. But at least the resignation of Baroness Warsi in the UK has opened debate on the subject in the Conservative Party there.
Everyone has just been commemorating the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, which in many ways, started because of the stupidities and bone headedness of many European leaders. The ceremony in Alsace last Sunday, where the French and German presidents joined together in regretting the past, was moving, commemorating the first French casualty of the war, Lance Corporal Jules-André Peugeot and the first German casualty, Sub Lt Albert Mayer. Equally moving was the commemoration at the end of last week by President Hollande of the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Jean Jaures, the French socialist leader. He was shot dead in a café in the 2nd arrondissement in Paris; he was the last great hope of preventing the start of World War I, as he had been trying to mobilise left wing opinion across Europe to have a European-wide strike against the war. The Radio 4 series,1914 Day by Day has been really interesting and the episode on August 4th,the day that Britain declared war on Germany, really brought the scenes in London to life. It was if the listener was really there-and that’s the essence of good radio.
Bringing the subject right up to date, I’ve been reading a book on Putin’s Russia, called Fragile Empire by Ben Judah. It’s such a depressing tale of endless corruption and croneyism, all combined with rank inefficiency under Putin’s dictatorial rule. One example among many gives an idea of what Russia is like. Civil servants working in the far east of Russia have a big time separation from their colleagues in Moscow, all of seven hours, yet the bosses in Moscow gaily expect their distant colleagues to work to their hours, Moscow time, instead of their own. It just shows, China has made incredible strides and probably within the next five to 10 years will overtake the US to become the biggest economy in the world. India is another vast nation that is well on the way to achieving super star status, yet Russia, despite its wealth of natural resources and its talent, has failed to do the same. Instead, all it seems interested in doing in provoking a major conflict with the west by invading eastern Ukraine.
However, one description I liked from the book concerns one of the public relations people working for Putin; he was described as an absolute natural for the job, since he has always had a penchant for telling half truths.
Meanwhile, in France, the dreary news goes on. In Paris, in police headquarters, around 51 kg of cocaine went missing the other day and by all accounts, its theft seems to have been an inside job. Also in Paris, early the other morning, a man was standing on a quayside in the 13th,peeing into the River Seine, when a gang came along and pushed him in. The unfortunate victim drowned.
In the small town of Dolomieu in south-east France, not far from Geneva, on Wednesday morning of last week, a young man in his early 30s who ran a newsagents and tobacco shop, was shot dead by a gang of three. All they escaped with was €200 in cash and a few cartons of cigarettes. Then on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice early last Sunday morning, a violent altercation ended up with one young man being stabbed to death and two more injured. The other day, in the countryside behind Nice, a teenage girl who was walking in the woods with her parents, was hit by lightning and killed. To add to all these tales of woe, comes news of the beach in Nice.
Apparently, so much of it has been washed away that it now shelves very steeply into the sea. This means that people going for a swim literally have to crawl out of the water on their hands and knees. All sorts of remedies have been proposed, such as ropes that people could use to haul themselves out of the sea. Even escalators have been proposed but that sounds real pie in the sky stuff! The weather too has been pretty bad and the olive trees in Provence have been shedding their crops at an unprecedented rate.
Traffic too has been bad. Last week, near Narbonne ,a huge area of scrubland caught fire and the resulting smoke created a vast traffic jam on the nearby motorway along the south coast. Sweden, too, has been having unprecedented forest fires, the biggest in living memory. The French sent some of the fire fighting planes they use to fight forest fires in the south of France, to Sweden to help. But it turned out that conditions there are so smokey, the French planes haven’t been able to take off.
There were also vast traffic jams last weekend, on what is known as crossover Saturday, when all the holiday traffic coming home meets the holiday traffic heading for the coastal resorts. Throughout France, well over 1,000 km of traffic jams were created. But hopefully, this month, vacationers will get better weather. Through July, unprecedented levels of rain fell. Just the other day in Strasbourg, I noticed that something like 80mm of rain fell in one single day. But while all this bad weather news has been going on, people can’t help but be captivated by all the photos at the moment of the large numbers of dolphins swimming in the sea off Normandy, often with Mont St Michel in the background.
But despite all this, there is some good news around! Air France is experimenting with a new luggage system in Paris which will mean that passengers will be able to check in both themselves and their luggage in central Paris and then head for Charles de Gaulle airport unencumbered by their baggage. If it works, it could be a useful idea. Also on the subject of air travel, there’s much talk of the 60 per cent stake in the airport at Nice-in my opinion one of the best in the world for the incredible views that arriving and departing passengers get-that at present is held by the government, being sold to the municipality in Nice. There’s also useful tourism news in Nice with the launch of a new visitor card that for a small fee enables tourists to visit all the museums and other tourist attractions as well as get free public transport in the Nice area. In Paris, tours led by homeless people, started a year ago, with the aim of helping those homeless people get back on their feet, and they’ve proved pretty popular with tourists.
However, this year has been a black year for aviation and on Wednesday morning, a small tourist plane crashed in Seine et Marne, not far from the city of Meaux, killing two people on board, although the other three survived. There was much talk the other day in Dublin of a supposed near miss at Dublin airport. About 6.40 am, an Aer Lingus plane was taking off for Heathrow, when it seems another plane was doing a go around prior to landing on the same runway. The Aer Lingus plane had to do an abrupt halt to its takeoff and apparently, passengers were in no danger. But the Irish edition of the Sun newspaper couldn’t resist poking fun at one of the passengers, former Irish justice minister Alan Shatter. The headline read: “Shatter myself”.
A Monaco personality has been making news. It turns out that Princess Charlene of Monaco can trace her ancestry back to the wealthy Fagan family in 16th century Dublin. Also in Monaco, the English language Riviera Radio seems to be doing well. It reports that its listenership figures this year are 10 per cent up on those last year ,just as it turns out that the BBC’s Radio 4 has lost half a million listeners compared with last year.
Violet Lebon was a well-known actress, who died in Cannes at the end of July; she was aged 103,the doyenne of French actresses.
Meanwhile, here in Ireland, a dog called Vimes had an incredible escape the other day. Her owner, a radio presenter, was away on holiday and her dog was staying with her parents. It was wandering on a cliff top near Kilkee in County Clare, in the west of Ireland, when it seems part of the cliff top gave way and the dog fell 100 metres into the sea. It was promptly rescued by the local inshore rescue crew and then gaily strolled off, totally uninjured after its amazing escape.
Let me end with a bizarre but apparently true story. It seems a man in a luxury hotel in Canada went into a cubicle in the unisex toilet to have a pee. He heard someone in the next cubicle doing what comes naturally, then all of a sudden, this second person let out an almighty fart that almost blew the roof off the place. The man who heard all this was so intrigued that he sneaked a glance from the slightly open door of his cubicle to see who was the author of this stupendous fart, when they exited their cubicle. It turned out to be radio and television star Gloria Hunniford, now well into her 70s,but still performing, in more ways than one!