Her recent book, Merci pour ce Moment, has so far sold close to 0.5 million copies, netting the author very nearly €1.5 million. There’s much talk at the moment of the book being translated into English, which should add substantially to sales. It’s all turned out to be a nice little earner for Valérie, making her wealthier than the President. His declared wealth is a mere €1.17million, so dear Valérie has well and truly settled the score.
But fame has its downside. Last Saturday, when Valérie Trierweiler was walking with an African friend through the Barbes African quarter in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, so many people wanted to take selfies with her that she had to take refuge in a fashion shop. She was duly rescued from her predicament by the gendarmes.
Air France has now settled its pilots’ strike, which cost it about €200 million, as well as its plans to set up its planned European low cost airline in Portugal. But the damage to Air France may well be long lasting. People I’ve been talking to recently have said they wouldn’t dream of flying Air France again and neither do they want to transit through Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, because they find the attitudes of people working there so offputting. Michael O’Leary, the hard talking, hard hitting chief executive of Ryanair, couldn’t resist having a go at Air France, either. He said that it wasn’t at all surprising to see that Ryanair is the fastest growing airline in Europe, with competitors like Air France.
Another firm that rather stupidly got itself into hot water was the supermarket chain Auchan. It produced a sales brochure for a black plastic toy gun. Not alone did it look remarkably like an AK 47 assault rifle, but the brochure featured a crescent moon and a star symbols associated with Islam. Apologies all round, but why didn’t some dimwit spot all this at the proofing stage?
I’m glad to see that Brigitte Bardot managed to celebrate her 80th birthday in suitably decorous style, with just two or three of her friends, her third husband, Bernard d’Ormale, a supporter of the Front National, and her beloved animals. Even though she lives close to St Tropez, she hadn’t visited the port area for a decade, until she went there the other day to do a photoshoot with the crew of the eco-trimarin named after her. It belongs to the marine conservation charity, Sea Shepherds, of which she is a great supporter.
I was also very amused to read of her antics 50 years ago when she was a famous film star. Apparently, she was filming at studios just outside London and was suitably dressed for the part in just a dressing gown, with cover up patches on her private parts. Then in a moment of sheer exuberance, in front of all the cast and crew, she joyously threw off her dressing gown and peeled off the patches, so that everyone could see her as nature intended. It was quite a sight for the astonished people in the film studios! I’m sure it took them a long time to recover from such a magnificent and unexpected sight!
About the time that all this was happening, a wonderful pop record was being created, Unchained Melody by the Righteous Brothers. It came out in 1965 and I just happened to hear it again the other day and the DJ who introduced it said it was one of the best pop songs ever written.
That was then, but these days, more upheavals are on the way in France. Firstly, and hardly surprisingly, more bad weather has hit. The Hérault region of south-west France has had yet more storms and ruinous floods a mere fortnight after the last ones. The River Lez flows through the city of Montpellier and it’s the main river in Hérault. It has now burst its banks and the flooding in Montpellier is devastating. Whole swathes of the city are under a couple of metres of water and the tramway system has been suspended. Someone who posted a photo of the floods in the centre of Montpellier on Twitter, merely said:”c’est la mer”.
On Monday, Montpellier had 30 cm of rain, or 47 per cent of its average annual rainfall, in just six hours. Many people on Monday night ended up sleeping in either the main railway station or at the airport. The surrounding hinterland, covering 60 communes, has been declared an area of natural catastrophe, although fortunately, so far, there have been no fatalities, despite all the damage, running in to many millions of euros.
More upheaval too in French politics. The Socialists and their allies have lost their overall majority in the French senate. To make matters worse, the Front National now has two senators elected, one from Marseilles, the other from Fréjus, the first time the party has ever got into the senate. As Marine Le Pen of the Front National, said: “The senate has always been a rather sleepy chamber, so now we’re a breath of fresh air”.
Around 13 million people in France still smoke, but the government has brought in its latest round of legislation against smoking. For starters, the traditional cigarette packs, like Gitanes, with its image of a gypsy, something that characterised everything French for so many people for so long, have been banned. The state has also banned smoking in cars with young children, while the use of e cigarettes has been banned in certain public places. Ironically, even though many people will be slightly nostalgic at the disappearance of brand packaging like that for Gitanes and Gauloises, numerous French people now prefer to smoke American cigarettes instead, brands like Marlborough. When I came back from my first trip to France, tout seul, at the tender age of 15, I brought home several packs of Gauloises, which I proceeded to smoke in rapid succession. It was a nauseating experience and put me off smoking for life!
The nanny state also caught up with a man living in Locquirec in Finistere in Brittany. For years, the view of the sea from his house had been blocked by a big lump of very ancient and rare granite. He had tried before to demolish it, without success, so he was busy having another go at demolishing the offending rock the other day, when the authorities caught up with him and put a stop to all the work.
Digging of another kind is about to start in Nice, where a new tramline is being built through the port area. The excavators are also hard at work on the Plaine de Var, for the new tramline between the Allianz Riviera and the €37million Les Moulins development. Nice has also been setting the headlines in another respect, too. It’s getting a 3D café with vintage decor that will feature furniture and fittings that have all been 3D printed. It’s the first such café in France. Recently, a shop that sells nothing but 3D printed stock opened in Antibes. At this rate, it can’t be too long before factories become redundant!
These days, it’s perfectly possible to produce very large items by 3D printing, even houses are prefectly practical. It could be a solution to the very serious housing crisis here in the Dublin area, one that the government seems intent on ignoring in the hope it will merely vanish, but typically, no-one in authority has thought sufficiently outside the box to consider producing new homes by 3D printing.
And amid all these futuristic developments, the unemployment rate in France managed to come down by 11,000 in August, the first decline in unemployment numbers since last October. And the mayor of the ninth arrondissement in Paris, Delphine Burkli, has started something useful. She has begun a campaign to get the legendary roofs of Paris recognised as a UNESCO heritage site. The banks of the River Seine already have similar recognition from UNESCO, although they haven’t seen what floats down the Seine between those legendary banks!
A date that has just gone past is a rather unusual anniversary in France. September 23 is the busiest day of the year for the country’s maternity wards. The same phenomenon is recorded every year and it isn’t even an exclusively French happening - many other countries find exactly the same. And a lot of it is down to the downing of plenty of Champagne in the days immediately after New Year, all of which makes the French the top baby makers in Europe, after the Irish. But of course, now the French government is going to spoil the party. It’s planning big decreases in key areas of benefit for families, which if put into effect, will make having children an unaffordable luxury.
No wonder there’s such resistance to change. Monday of this week saw lots of pharmacies closed and their workers out on strike, involved in mass demonstrations in such cities as Paris and Nice. Other health professionals, too, like doctors and dentists, notaries and lawyers, are also up in arms, on the same issue, the government plans to deregulate the professions, including all those essential to people’s health and well-being.
There’s the smell of revolt in the air, too, in the private sector. The 186 remaining workers at the Swedish-owned Electrolux vacuum cleaner factory at Revin, in the north-east of France, near the Belgian border, have been making so little progress with management in negotiating their future payouts, especially if the factory closes down, that apparently, some workers have threatened to blow up the place.
More disturbing news of the serious underlying social unrest in France has just come from Ivry-sur-Seine, just outside Paris. It turns out that at the beginning of August, a 76 year old woman complained to a group of youths hanging round outside her house about all the noise they were making. It seems that in recent times, here as in many other parts of France, there’s been a huge increase in the numbers of unemployed young people. In this case, four of the youths responded to the woman’s request for less noise by raping her brutally, then ransacking her house. So far, one of the offenders has been caught, but the police are still looking for the other three.
On a sad note, too, France has been in mourning for someone seen as a citizen hero, Hervé Gourdel, the mountain guide killed by an extremist Islamic group in Algeria, where most people are as shocked as those in France. Hervé was born in Nice and for the past 30 years, he worked as a guide during the summer months at St Martin Vésubie. He had also been a mentor to climbers in many other countries. Married with two grownup children, he was seen as very much a middle aged Frenchman who should have been idolised because of his love of outdoor sports, travel and absorbing other cultures. Instead, he was killed in the most brutal way possible and the flags flew at half mast all over France.
Other international news makes equally grim reading. In the Crimea, taken over by Russia, earlier this year, the Tatars are being heavily persecuted. This was all forecast at the time of the Russian annexation of this part of Ukraine, but now that it is happening, where are all the international media outlets and where is all the international concern? It’s the same here in Ireland; when you hope that the media generally is going to follow up on a worthwhile story, they don’t. The other day, a major international medical report concluded that Ireland has the worst care for diabetic sufferers of any country in western Europe. That’s a shocking indictment, but apart from some brief reporting the day the report was published, since then, it has just sunk without trace. Needless to remark, not a peep out of the government run health services.
At least, the good citizens of Hong Kong are protesting in strength. They’ve been told that sure, they can all elect the new chief executive of the former British colony in 2017,but there’s a catch. All the candidates will have to toe the party line in Beijing. The end result has been the so-called umbrella revolution in Hong Kong, with tens of thousands of people out on the streets protesting. This has been a highly responsible protest movement, cleaning up any mess that might have been made, and some demonstrators even being nice to the police who doused them with tear gas and pepper spray last weekend. It seems an unstoppable popular people’s protest movement and it’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here. The Chinese government can’t be seen to give in and neither can they use brute force to supress the revolt. Interesting times lie ahead in Hong Kong!
There’ll probably be more protest votes, too, at the end of next week in both Ireland and England. Both countries have by-elections then, two in each country, and such is the popular mood in both, that in Ireland, pro-government candidates are likely to suffer heavy defeats, while in England, it’s quite likely that UKIP will be the beneficiary in both by-elections. What does the government there expect? With the next general election in the UK coming up fast, it seems that the best the Tories could produce at their annual conference this week was a pledge to slash benefits for the worst off in society. It was all so dreary and uninspiring that it was almost as if the Tories have a subconscious wish to lose the next election.
To end on a lighter and hopefully, more useful note, today is the day that the city of Paris is launching a new smartphone app for hailing a taxi. In Paris, they can be surprisingly elusive, just when you want one the most, so a lot of people are waiting with great anticipation to see if this new app will make life any easier.