At least it’s an improvement on the awful floods over the past few days in the south of France. In the town of La Londe-Les-Maures in the Var, several people died in some of the worst flooding since 1999.
Over in south-west France, not far from Perpignan, a 73 year old man died from a heart attack when he tried to get his car through a flood at Rivesaltes. And at Argeles-sur-Mer, on the coast in this part of France, the town has been devastated by floods over the past few days. In Nice,it turns out that this year has been the wettest year the capital of Provence has ever seen.
But despite the atrocious weather, there has been cheery news from France. Robert Marchand is a retired firefighter from the Seine et Marne department east of Paris. He’s just had his 103rd birthday and to celebrate, he did a 10 km climb on his bike up the route that bears his name in the Ardéche mountain range. It is quite a climb since in 10km, the road climbs 450 metres, but it was no bother at all to Robert.
Then over in the town of Rochefort in Charente-Maritime in western France, a lot of effort has gone into making a promotional video for the town, over the past couple of months. In the final cut, it’s the mayor, Hervé Blanche, who steals the show. As a result of his energetic dancing in the video, he’s now known as the ‘hip hop mayor’ and the video is a big hit on YouTube.
In Paris, work is about to start on a hugely ambitious Métro scheme called the Grand Paris Express, which with automated trains, will link Charles de Gaulle airport, Le Bourget airfield with all its industries and Orly airport. The line will run for 75 km and will link most of the western suburbs in Paris. The cost is enormous, about €22 billion. Work is due to start next year and most of it should be completed in about five years’ time.
Whether the return of Sarkozy to the presidency of the centre right UMP party is a good or bad thing depends on your political viewpoint. As a result, he could be running for president in 2017, or else he could be in jail. One thing’s for sure, he is certain to stir much debate. But he doesn’t attract quite the same level of derision as former British prime minister, Tony Blair. His current Christmas card, featuring himself and his wife Cherie, has attracted widespread comment, all very adverse.
But amid the concerns about austerity and unemployment in France, members of the lower house in the French parliament voted the other day for French recognition of the state of Palestine, a very important symbolic gesture. The vote was 339 in favour, 151 against. Also on the political front, the Sivens dam project in south-west France, which has created huge controversy among environmental activitists after one of their number was killed by a police grenade, has fallen foul of the European Commission.
It has now alleged that France has broken EU environmental law in the way it has constructed the dam.
France being France, there are always protests going on. The latest have been in Seine-St-Denis, a working class area just north of Paris, where the other day, elected representatives did a photoshoot in their underwear as a protest against all the austerity programmes in France. Another protest, last week, saw farmers invade the area around the Eiffel Tower in Paris and it resulted in the unusual sight of the tower being surrounded by flocks of sheep. There was also a devastating outbreak of fire yesterday in a warehouse in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of northern France; about 100 tonnes of food and merchandise that had been destined by a charity for 15,000 poor people over Christmas, went up in flames. It also seems that another fire earlier this year was the result of carelessness. The famous Glasgow School of Art went up in flames in May of this year and it turns out it was started by a student who was preparing a work for presentation. This involved spraying highly inflammable foam on the artwork, but the heat of the projector set fire to the foam. The fire spread rapidly and measures that should have been put in place to guard against fire had never been installed.
But on a brighter note, Christmas markets in many parts of France are opening this coming Saturday. In Provence, a staggering total of 22 are opening for the rest of December, including at Marseilles, Menton, Nice and St-Tropez. They’ll all have a lovely atmosphere and plenty of great gift ideas. Strasbourg is another place with a fantastic Christmas market. It also seems as if the black truffle season is going to be exceptionally good this season.
It is harvested in the village of Aups in the Var and the quantity and quality this year are excellent. Mind you, it costs around €400 a kilo, so it’s a rather expensive delicacy. And if all this talk of Christmas makes one head for something healthy, then the Thermes Marins in Monte Carlo have just reopened after extensive refurbishment. One art collector, however, won’t be in a good mood this Christmas.
The Italian collector owned a 13th century Chinese scroll. He had been giving a talk about it in Paris towards the end of last month and when he’d finished the presentation, took a Geneva-bound TGV from Paris. He got off the train at Bellegarde-sur-Valserine, the last stop before Geneva, but as soon as he got on the platform, he realised he’d left the scroll on the train. The train started to move off, so there was nothing he could do and despite all his appeals since, he hasn’t heard a word about his missing scroll, which is worth €1 million.
There’s also more news on the sex front. In October, a giant pop art tree shaped like a butt plug was put up in the place de la Vendome in Paris, then promptly deflated. But apparently, this news event has stimulated a lot more men and women into trying this particular sex toy. One Parisian wholesaler of sex toys says that before October, he used to sell about 50 butt plus a month, but since then, he has sold over 1,000. Demand has what you might say, shot up, helped by a feature in L’Express magazine, which showed people how to use butt plugs! And now comes news of a retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris of works by the American pop artist Jeff Koons, who was once married, in the early 1990s to La Cicciolina, the Italian porn star, who later went all sedate and became an MP. His most famous art work, Made in Heaven, depicting a couple having sex, will be on show at the Pompidou. Koons (59) is noted for having produced the most expensive piece of modern art ever, his Balloon Dog work, which sold last year for $58.4 million.
Last week, a 23,000 year old statue of a woman was unearthed during an archaeological dig at Amiens in northern France. It dates from the Paleolithic era and it seems that the woman depicted in the statue has huge breasts and a very big bottom. So Kim Kardashian, with her enormous bottom, helpfully bared for a slavering world audience recently, is doing nothing new at all! Another rare find came to light last week in a library at St Omer in northern France, a Shakesperian folio containing all his plays and printed in 1623,just seven years after he died. It’s one of only 230 such folios and how it managed to survive for some 200 years in the library at St Omer with no-one noticing it remains to be explained.
Meanwhile, on the wider political front, as the UK general election approaches ever closer, it remains to be seen whether all the lavish promises made to Scotland to encourage people vote no in the recent referendum will ever come to fruition. Or will they be like so many verbal political promises, not worth the paper they’re written on? While there’s been much talk recently of the UK leaving the EU, it hasn’t stimulated any debate in this part of Ireland. Suppose the UK does leave the EU, that would leave this part of Ireland in a very isolated spot, yet this topic has engendered little if any discussion.
While the present government in Dublin has done an admirable job in reviving the Irish economy, it’s been at the cost of much social cohesion. There’s been a raft of broken promises and a litany of bungling, as with the introduction of water charges, so that people have become very cynical. Comments on social media are universally derisory, with the government being described as spineless, cowardly and good for nothing. Ireland is still shouldering 42 per cent of Europe’s bank debt and despite many promises, nothing has materialised to alleviate the situation. One Irish clairvoyant has even predicted that an air mishap will cause the next general election in Ireland, sooner than anyone thinks.
Meantime, the horrors go on. In Belgium, the headlines screamed the other day “le corps de Béatrice retrouve sans vie”. Béatrice Berlaimont had left her mother’s house at Arlon in Belgium last month to go to school and just disappeared, until her body was found the other day. She appears to have been murdered. Today, an appalling suicide in France has just come to light. The body of a 57 year old woman was found in her house in a village near Mélun in eastern France on Monday. It seems that the women suffered from incredible loneliness and had shut herself in her freezer.
Christmas may be a time for family joy, but it’s also a time of utterly ridiculous spending and a time of great tragedies. Where’s our modern Shakespeare? And we do have something lovely to look forward to next year; the National Portrait Gallery in London is staging an exhibition of photographs of the actress Audrey Hepburn, who died just over 20 years ago, from July to October next year.